Susie Dent On the Wonders of the English Language (Part 1)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Leila Ismail. Our guest on the podcast today is the genius of Countdown's dictionary corner, Susie Dent.

She was live on stage on the 30th of September 2024 at Kiln Theatre in London to talk about her debut crime novel, Guilty by Definition, which is a glorious celebration of the English Dictionary. Joining her to discuss it all was critic, journalist and co-host of Graham Norton's book club, Alex Clarke.

Thank you so much.

lovely to be here with Susie. We're not any of those people. We're not Keir Starmer. We're not Meriby. We're not Nick Cave. We're so much better. They don't know what cram basil means. I will just start by saying that as we were sort of doing our getting ready and making sure these worked and all the things that you have to do before you welcome the lovely, lovely audience in, we were both doing that slightly...

middle-aged thing of kind of talking about lighting states and eyes and that kind of stuff and I was saying I just it doesn't go great I've got cataracts poor me uh and Susie transformed that really self-pitying lament by explaining where cataracts come from and I was like well this I now feel better that I've got this great word happening to me

Well, it's just a lovely metaphor. That's all. It's not nice to have to... I think you better say. Now, I've queued you up to say... Well, you know, cataract is a sort of waterfall or it can be a portcullis that kind of comes down as well. And that's the whole idea behind the cataracts of the eye is it is a little bit like this grating slowly coming down and obscuring your vision. But I just think that's quite beautiful. And...

However horrible the affliction is. It's made me feel better about it. It's just a very nice idea behind the naming of it. It's made me feel better. Good. Thank you very much. You're one up to you before we even start. You're winning. We're so pleased to be here. We're going to talk for a little while. Susie's going to read a little bit from Guilty by Definition, her first work of fiction. Obviously, she has written...

an awful lot of books yes you sound like Jimmy Carr I have I have he would say too many books well I wouldn't say that and that's very rude of Jimmy Carr no but that's that's his job this is on the comedy countdown for those of you who he's not just arbitrarily rude to me but his openings on the show are always yeah just a big dig at my books and how they're a form of euthanasia or something similar

You've not seen this? You haven't seen this? Jealous of your sales. Of course. I would say. Of course. I mean, you really have written a lot of books and they kind of vary. You take all sorts of aspects of language. You write for all ages, you know, books like an emotional dictionary, real words for how you feel from angst to zwodder. Zwodder. Just,

Just tell me, Swada. Well, I suspect some of our audience might be feeling this a little bit now because it's warm and it's dark. And Swada is essentially a drowsy, quite enjoyable state of slumberousness. Just when you're kind of half waking up or half going to sleep, sort of, and you're nice and warm. That kind of thing. It's not quite as though you're buffering or it's not that state. It's quite often associated with the dog days of summer where you just go into a state of torpor.

But I think, you know, darkness and warmth will do the same thing. But it's quite a lovely word. It's from Somerset. Okay, we're completely not going to spend the whole evening doing this. But now I need to know about dog days. Why are they dog days? Dog days. The dog day after noon. Then we're getting on to business, I promise. Yes. So dog day afternoons, nothing to do with dogs finding shade on stifling summer days. And everything to do with Sirius, the dog star, that rises with the sun at the hottest time of the year in our hemisphere.

So it's all about Sirius the Dog Star, part of the big constellation. Right, now we are going to get to business. But I think we're going to come back to all sorts of words. When we invite you in to questions, please ask Susie. I haven't actually cleared this with her, but I'm saying it anyway. Ask her anything. Yes. Words or crime or books, whatever you like. Now, I'm going to ask you the most obvious question. You've written all these books and now you've written a novel. Why? Yes. Why?

Two reasons, really. The first is a slightly touching, emotional one, I suppose, is that my dad always, always wanted me to write fiction ever since I won a short story competition at school.

with the cheesiest, cheesiest story. It wasn't cheesy, actually. It was breathless. It was about someone being pursued through a wood, and it was called Pursuit. Anyway, he was very proud of it. It got into the magazine, and he said, he always said, I think you should try your hand at fiction. So I had that kind of running away. I've had a screenplay that I've been writing on and off for years that no one else has ever seen, and probably never will.

involving a character called Lexi, which is a little bit obvious, I suppose. But it would have stayed there. I'd never really properly thought about writing fiction, and it was all down to my editor. She became my editor, approaching me and saying, I think you should write a book set in the 1930s in Oxford, and I think it would be the most brilliant crime novel ever.

And I thought, yeah, that's a lovely idea. It was a bit like being asked to be on Countdown, where I said no quite a few times. And so I thought, not for me. But she put together this wonderful PowerPoint, which had... Essentially, she got people in the office to write a quote of the book that hadn't yet written, saying, I loved this. I've always wanted to read a book by Susie Doe. And it was...

it wasn't quite as, that makes it sound very trivial, but it was really brilliantly done. It's that kind of wild visualisation technique, isn't it? It was. It was total manifesting and it just convinced me that actually maybe there was something in this, but I knew I,

couldn't set it in the past because I didn't really know enough about that period and I wanted it to be something that I was comfortable with and we'll get to the content a little bit later but she really was so persuasive in the most wonderful way and she was so joyful and optimistic about it that she won me over.

And then from there, she had obviously said crime, but the 1930s. Yes. Why crime? I mean, you could have decided to write all sorts of fiction, as we know there are many, many types and genre. Why crime? Well, I think that was the sticking point for me because I thought this isn't really... Even though I love crime and grew up with Agatha Christie, so many of us did...

It didn't seem like a natural choice to me. And it was that that started ticking over in my brain. And I thought, you know, I'm partly a word detective. So I'm a lexicographer, but also an etymologist, I suppose. And that is someone who's digging for evidence of words, looking for clues, following footprints. And I thought, that's so like a crime detective, albeit with very different stakes, obviously. And I liked that parallel very much. And then I also thought about...

The darker side of Oxford, the city that you and I both know, and I live there now. And most people tend to think of it as somewhere very sunlit and bright and beautiful. But it has got its darker sides as well, like any big city. And also the darker side of language, you know, the human motivations, right?

behind the words that we produce and sometimes the quite surprisingly dark histories of them so all of this kind of came together and I thought actually crime is a really good fit for all of these and it's not a conventional I would say crime thriller it's different in that there is very quite a heavy linguistic aspect I suppose which I'm sure we'll talk about but

It was my twist on that genre, I suppose. And it's also, I mean, it's a cold case, we should say. And we're going to be incredibly careful about spoilers, really careful. But the things that we can say about it are that it is set in Oxford. It is a group of lexicographers with one central character, really, but all the characters come to life. And it is a...

creepy, puzzly sort of mystery in which Oxford also, as we've said, plays this huge part. But I'm going to level with you completely. I read a lot of crime. I love thrillers. And I love all kinds of thrillers. And I did think, perhaps because you're off the telly,

yes that it would be a bit more of a romp okay that there would be a little bit not to say that there isn't darkness in a richmond richard osmond novel and i admire those enormously too but there would be a more sort of light comic feel and i know somebody said to you in an interview recently well you decided to write cozy and you immediately said oh no i

It's not cosy and it really isn't. Okay, that's good. It's a book that's filled with sadness and this, I promise, is a recommendation.

So just, as far as you go, no spoilers, obviously, but just outline the sort of where we are in this book, what it's about. Yes. So one of, I hope it was the best piece of advice I had, was write about what you know. Because that's always the fear, you know, it's such a cliche, the blank bit of paper at the beginning, but it really is, it's a real thing. And so they said just write,

focus on a world that you know and get the first draft down because everything is in the editor, which turned out to be very true. So when they said write about what you know, I just thought, well, I definitely want to bring language into this, so why don't I base it in a fictional dictionary department? It's called the Clarendon English Dictionary and it involves a group of lexicographers led by the senior editor called Martha Thornhill.

who has been living in Berlin for quite a few years and has only recently taken up the job there. And there is Alex Munro, who is a sassy, quite savvy 50-year-old woman who...

Blunt But always Also very supportive And understanding I would say And super stylish Super stylish Yes Very very stylish I don't know why I identified with her so much I think it's wishful She's always coming in From her lunch break With a fantastic carrier bag Yes So we love her Yes Which gets them all wondering And

There is another editor called Safi who is very young and she loves dialect. So dialect is her thing. Each of the editors has a sort of area of expertise. That's Safi. She's endlessly curious, endlessly energetic and lives...

with a whole group of housemates who also kind of come into the story a little bit. There is Simon who is in his, I don't know how to say how old Simon is. I think he's in his late 40s, early 50s, I would say. Wears a violently patterned Hawaiian shirt sometimes.

is slightly resentful because he's never quite found the fame that he should have done. He wrote a book that has forever remained in the shadows of someone called Jonathan Overton, who is a consultant editor and he is Mr. Glam. So he has made it onto TV. He's made it onto endless radio series because his big thing is Shakespeare.

He is a Shakespearean scholar who is in charge of the Shakespearean content within the Clarendon English Dictionary and is variously likeable and dislikable, I would say, at different points of the story. Have I mentioned them all now? Well, we get... There's various other people. Various other people come along. Yes. Including Martha's father. Gabriel, yeah. Including a police officer. Yeah.

But I suppose... I haven't even mentioned the letters. Sorry. I suppose this is what we come to. We come then to the sort of process of it. Yes.

So much struck me here. One, we are in a kind of a missing person, a cold case story. How do we get to the truth of something that happened many, many years ago, the disappearance of Martha's sister, who was also a lexicographer or certainly an academic, you know, coming up academic. Yes.

But we also get so into the procedure of making a dictionary, and this was fascinating. I'm so glad, because that's what I really wanted to lift the lid on, how dictionaries are made. I'm so often asked, you know, how do I get a word into the dictionary? Who decides? So we kind of...

we get glimpses of the editorial process, how long it takes to do one particular entry, you know, what the sources are. I mean, in their editorial meeting, they're talking about, you know, watching The Wire and getting, and The Simpsons and getting new evidence for their, what they call their citations from there.

So that's really, I'm really glad that you got that because I really wanted to. I was completely, because there's also all the kind of technical vocabulary, you know, slips of paper and all this, you know, really fascinating. Yes. But it's, it's,

really interesting too because we do think of it in terms of getting new words into the dictionary yeah but a lot is about refining and perhaps sometimes even changing definitions of words that are entirely familiar first use of a word for example first use of the word yes that's quite key to the story uh so people tend to think of uh well first of all they think there's only one oxford english dictionary but actually there are lots of

of Oxford dictionaries. The one we use on Countdown is the current English dictionary, so it's got very modern words in there that may or may not stick around. The Oxford English dictionary is, I always call it the mother of all dictionaries because it is an extraordinary piece of work. It is a historical dictionary, but it is still being edited and new words are going in all the time.

So it tracks the journey of a word right from the first record that we can find to date through to its current meaning. But you can see it shifts in meaning over time. And some of them are quite remarkable, how much they've morphed since they were first used. So I talk about some of those in the book.

And crucially, with the Oxford English Dictionary, once a word goes in, it never comes out. So the selection criteria are a little bit stricter, I would say. But it is a living testament of not just language in the past, but the language now and of the future as well. And it's a huge project. Lots of people still working on it. And that also means if nothing ever comes out, it's only ever going to get bigger. Yes, and it's now almost certainly going to stay online only.

So for those of us who have a 20-volume print edition, it's unlikely to be reprinted, I would say, in any kind of new form. Because, as you say, it's ever-expanding and the online space is infinite, thankfully. So, yeah, I think it will now be digital. And I have to say I use the online version every single day. I don't resort to my paper copy anymore.

which feels quite sad, but I still find magic on the screen. So in many ways, that's not changed. Exactly, because the magic is in the words. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

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The other aspect of that, and this is just a very momentarily of the sort of plot, as it were, of the book. But one of the things that you show us too is how many people outside are involved in the creation of the dictionary. And every day we see this team going through their kind of postbag, their email inbox. And I guess one of the things that that

may remind us of is that when dictionaries came into the modern era they were sort of group and voluntary efforts a lot of them they were kind of crowdfunding

crowdsourcing before we knew that that was what it was called absolutely um and if anyone's ever interested in the history of the oed and the people who contributed to it actually there's a brilliant book written by sarah ogilvie called the dictionary people um and some of the people who were collecting from right across the world the world you know records of particular um words in their usage they were extraordinary individuals i mean i think everyone's heard that there was um uh

a convicted murderer who was one of the main correspondents to the OED, who was at Broadmoor Hospital. A brilliant book written, called The Surgeon of Crowthorne, about it. But lots and lots of other really very colourful individuals. And they were often submitting their evidence on these slips of paper that would then get incorporated into...

the proper sort of evidence, if you like, for the dictionary. And there is a slips room and an archive. And that is how dictionaries were made. So when James Murray, who was the first editor of the OED, he had a house on the Banbury Road. And he had to have his own postbox.

installed there, which is still there, because he would get thousands and thousands of letters every single day. He was doing it all in his shed, wasn't he? It was a scriptorium, he called it, but it was a shed. A scriptorium, sorry. And they had newspaper on their laps to keep them warm. Yeah, I mean, they were an incredible bunch of people.

And all the volunteers are incredible. And we still have an army of readers who are looking constantly to see if they can find earlier evidence of a word than the OED currently has. And it can be from something like...

big hair day or plowman's lunch to um a shakespearean word for example and it's one of the things in the book is is um where the question whether shakespeare was the great neologizer whether he was the great inventor or whether in fact he was still brilliantly absorbing the words around him and giving them voice so that's one of the things i explore

Well, you mentioned this team and it kind of interested me too because when you think of sort of golden age crime fiction and a lot of subsequent fiction, we are used to the brilliant individual, the Sherlock Holmes or the Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, occasionally with a sidekick.

But it struck me that in lots of more contemporary pieces of crime fiction that people love, yours is now the latest. We do have these teams. We have them in the Thursday Murder Club. We have them in something like Slow Horses, Mick Herron's book. And it's partly to do with people in...

closed kind of environments, isn't it? And so now the dictionary that these lexicographers are working at is a bureaucracy and a hierarchy with all that that entails. I think you're going to read a little bit that...

shows us all those characters and then we might talk about the dynamics as they develop yes now i am we were talking about this alex night off stage because she was listening to the audible version with a brilliant um actor louise braley and um she's like proper she's been in sherlock and everything i can't do different different voices so you have to bear with me um but yes

Okay, this kind of leads on from what we were talking about with every editor having their own particular area of expertise. Martha's team all had their preferences. Alex had a predilection for fears, folklore and the supernatural. She might have been a goth in her youth, Martha thought, as she considered her across the room. Alex was in her 50s and effortlessly elegant with a marked fondness for dark colours that seemed to suit her intellectual love of the shadows.

Safi had a passion for regional words which she would throw into conversation whenever possible. A one-woman popularisation society. That day, this is why I chose this by the way, that day had begun with her gleefully announcing that the politician on the front page of the Times was positively cram-bazzled, explaining, glancing rather too directly at Simon Martha had thought, that it was an old Yorkshire word for looking prematurely aged from excess drinking.

Then again, Safi had added, she was a little too familiar with Crapulence, the hungover companion to Cranbazelment herself.

Simon was keen on the senses, taste, smells, colours. He'd published a book on the language of taste some years ago and Martha reminded herself to read it. She knew he'd applied for her job and that it must have been galling to be passed over for her woman in her early 30s. He'd been friendly and welcoming enough when she arrived but his eyes rarely warmed when they spoke. It

"'It would be politic to be able to praise his work, "'particularly as reviewers and book buyers had largely ignored it. "'It was now sitting on the shelves of their shared office "'among leather-bound historical lexicons and glossaries. "'Ah, here's one,' Alex said, unfolding one of her allocated queries. "'Is there a word for the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth?'

Well, it's there, Martha asked, assuming Alex wanted to tell them. There is. Arachibacterophobia. Someone made it up in the 80s, if I remember rightly. It may even have been one of our lot. It's a clumsy Greek joke of a word, really. Alex turned to her computer and pursed her lips, scattered across the internet on various medical sites. Not in the dictionary, though, obviously.

Oh, I didn't realise that this was coming up. They worked on In Silence for a while. Safi had handed Martha a query about the first use of fuckwit, written in a spidery hand on incongruously elegant stationery. The correspondent had found a record from the 1940s, some 20 years before the CED's earliest findings to date. Antidatings like these were always betwittering, and Martha put it to one side for verification and sharing.

For all that she chose her own swearing moments carefully, she found tracing taboos and profanities fascinating. They were part of a shifting scale of squeamishness over the centuries, a rebellious lexicon that was largely spoken and rarely printed until the 20th century. She consequently had to go digging for its vocabulary herself in transcriptions of trials, scribbled marginalia, and letters or diaries never intended to be shared with the world at large.

Searching for them made her feel like an archaeologist smothered in linguistic mud, not a curator admiring the preserved artefacts of language that had been cleaned and smoothed by propriety. Thank you so much. I just can't resist, really. APPLAUSE

I shouldn't be doing this. It's an abuse of privilege of sitting up here, but I'm going to do it anyway because I am here and I can. I thought of something I wish there was a word for yesterday. Can I ask you about it? Yes, there probably won't be. You know those kind of feelings when people say there must be a German word for? Yes, yes. My thing is...

When there's something perhaps about contemporary life that really irritates you and you just sort of inveigh against it in your head, you think, why do they do that? That's so annoying. And then you perhaps see, I don't know, say for example, a right-wing commentator writing a column about how annoying it is. And then you have to totally get behind it because you think, well, if you don't like it, I'm going to now have to like it.

Is there a word for that? Oh, okay. So you flip because... You flip because someone awful likes the thing that's irritated you. That is such a good question. And you think, I don't want to be... No, I'm not going to get really cross about... Actually, what it was, was the tiny plastic caps on bottles that you can't now fully... Oh, I know. Drive me nuts. But I read someone saying, isn't it disgusting? And I thought, right, I love them now. I think they're great. Are they not...

There is some rationale for this, isn't there? Don't fall off and then cause more litter. Precisely. But they are a bit irritating. Yeah, I guess what it shows is we should not be drinking from plastic bottles. It does show that. But I have to like them now because someone I don't like doesn't like them. But you try and drink and then they get in your mouth. It's all wrong. To my point, is there a word for this? No. Not that I know of. I don't know if there is. But I totally get that. I mean...

There's usual flip-flopping and that kind of thing. But I can't... I wish I could think of a great German word for it. I'm going to try to think of one. Write it on a slip and send it to you and see if I can sneak it in the dictionary. This is part of the problem, is that everyone wants to get into the dictionary, which is part of the team's problem. But the other problem that they have, and we'll just talk now for a little bit about what happens in the book. Again, no spoilers. They start to get extremely...

Extremely mysterious and complex letters. Yeah. Martha appears to be the primary target, but certainly not the only one. Just explain a bit more about that. That's true. So, yeah, so the first letter that comes is, it talks about, it calls the lexicographers the secretaries of English. And basically it's saying, I am entrusting you with...

this task but we don't know what the task is um and i wanted to include that quite early on because i love the etymology of secretary because um they that secretaries were secretaries they were keepers of secrets so when we have a secretary um you know one of those bureaus they were they were there to bureaus not bureaus they were there to keep um secret documents etc and um and the first secretaries were indeed you know sort of

privy keepers, really. So I wanted to introduce the idea of I'm going to entrust you with something that I need your help with. But the letters are, as you say, incredibly complex and as each successive one comes, and there are a few, they each seem to follow a particular model that is needed to be identified before the letter can be decoded. And some of the letters are a little bit clunky.

They are, they're not sort of effortlessly brilliant at all. And some of those flaws are actually quite important as well. Let's just say that. So there's different lenses that each letter need to be looked through in order to be able to decode it. And the team, I think, resent them, but also love the chase at the same time. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.

So let's do this.

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