Keys Corner

This year a new un-word has been doing the rounds in German Christmas advertising: X-mas.

Now, given that the Germans like polluting their language with all sorts of English words and phrases, many of which get used to mean something different to what an unsuspecting native English speaker would expect, I am actually surprised that Xmas hasn’t caught on more quickly. But it’s one thing to have semi-literate advertising copy writers mangle both English and German, it’s quite another when a normally literate editor at the Süddeutsche Zeitung does it.

Liebe Süddeutsche Zeitung, X-mas ist ein Unwort. Es gibt es nicht. Wirklich.

I am half way through reading Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. What a story – this is a real page-turner. It is the story of his life after breaking out of a Australian prison and fleeing to India – here’s a summary from the man himself:

I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison. When I escaped from that prison, over the front wall, between two gun-towers, I became my country’s most wanted man.

Luck ran with me and flew with me across the world to India, where I set up and ran a free clinic in a crowded Bombay slum. I joined the Bombay mafia, and worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler, and a counterfeiter. I was chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed, and starved. I went to war. I ran into the enemy guns. And when those wilderness years of hunted exile came to an end, when I changed my life, when I stopped running onto the knives and started running into the light of love instead, I wrote the novel, Shantaram, that was based on my wild and wicked life.

Recommended!

Now is the time to buy English literary classics – Penguin Books are 70 years old and they are selling 70 titles at historic prices (£1.50 a book, or £105 for all 70 in a boxed set).

If you’re looking for something good to read, the Man Booker Prize for Fiction longlist published today is supposed to one of the strongest since the prize was founded in 1969. Previous winners include The Life of Pi (2002) and Vernon God Little (2003).

David Rothenberg discovered that birds responded to his playing the clarinet by singing back. Visit his website to hear samples of “duets” played between David and the birds, and also to find out more about both birdsong and what human componists have done using birdsong for inspiration. There is plenty to keep you occupied on the website, but if you want to follow up in more detail, David has also published a book and a CD on the same subject. Details are on the web site. If you happen to live in the USA, he is currently touring both the west coast and the east coast.

The BBC and the Oxford English Dictionary are trying to track down the first use and origin of some 50 words or phrases which have crept into the English langauge without the OED having noticed at the time. So, if you can produce evidence, which can be irrefutably dated, of where to bonk, codswollop, the Old Bill, a ploughman’s lunch or any of the other 46 terms here came from, get in touch with the BBC.

If you are looking for a book reviews or an idea what to read next, take a look at The Modern Word. And if you haven’t read it yet, we both really liked The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which is reviewed by TMW much more lucidly that I ever could.

Ruth and I both tried this spelling test in the Guardian. I confess, we both got 13 out of 23. Any of our friends or readers who can beat that – without cheating?

The following are real words, but when do you use which one?

affect/effect
compliment/complement
loose/lose
principal/principle
reign/rein

Well, if you’re not sure, you’re in good company according to the Guardian!