LARPERS AND SHROOMERS. The language report. By Susie Dent. 165pp. Oxford University Press. £9.99 (US $16.95). 0 19 861012 2
Susie Dent is the "resident dictionary expert" on the Channel 4 game show Countdown; she does not claim to be a lexicographer. According to the acknowledgements in Larpers and Shroomers, however, she has consulted with Oxford University Press's resident English experts to compile this stocking-filler. So I would like to be able say that she at least fulfils Johnson's self-deprecating definition of lexicographer -that is, a harmless drudge. But the harmlessness of the drudgery is not beyond doubt. This book claims to be "the perfect gift for everyone who loves words". In fact, the blithe airiness with which Dent conducts her survey of recent English usage should disturb anyone who "loves words", or at least has a care for their abuse.
This might seem a strong reaction to a book that -despite its grand subtitle, recalling Christopher Ricks's and Leonard Michaels's considerably more substantial State of the Language volumes -has no great pretensions to authority or longevity. The front-cover cartoon of a wizard-robed "larper" (a "Live Action Role Player") and a long-haired "shroomer" (a person who takes hallucinogenic mushrooms) makes as much clear. Like any number of recent advertisements featuring lovable eccentrics liberated -by personal loan or broadband subscription -to indulge their neuroses in peace, Larpers and Shroomers proposes a whimsical world in which everyone is free to coin their own English.
So, the linguistic developments that interest Dent most are lifestyle ones: txt messaging, etc. Her "word of the year" however -promoted in the media as the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year, although not yet in its word list - is a term unlikely to apply to the lifestyles of many of her readership:
"chav".
The ideal, impossible lexicographer defines impartially. Dent audibly attempts impartiality in her definition of "chav", but she equally audibly fudges it: "a group of people pejoratively described as delinquents and members of an underclass". It is not clear from any of the cited usage that "chav" is a plural noun (that, apparently, would be "chavsters"). It is rather a singular noun or an adjective, referring to a member or attribute of "Britains (sic) peasant underclass", as Dent's source -the not-very-funny website chavscum.co.uk -tautologically puts it.
Other definitions are cited, from the Sunday Telegraph ("the non-respectable working classes") and by Thatcherite synonym with "council", "another popular term of class- related insult". Dent's own definition equivocates: "chav" refers to people "pejoratively described" by someone else. She ought to have called the word itself a "pejorative". That, however, would spoil the fun of a neologism which strikes a blow for complacent, underclass- fearing people everywhere. Impartiality here becomes irresponsibility. Dent acknowledges that "the label has caused alarm in liberal circles who see it as a resurgence of class prejudice", and that its root appears to be the Romany word "chavi", meaning "child". In other words, it is a fugitive mutation of the playground taunt "gyppo". But she briskly passes on from such pedantry those sour-puss "liberal circles", with their educated views -to conclude that this ironically racist and classist monosyllable is simply "a colourful illustration of language change".
"Colourful" is Dent's favourite, non-committal adjective ("striking" is another).
It implies tolerance of diversity, a rainbow world in which everything that "evolves" is good. Unfortunately, evolution is a cruel process, and the vocabulary under discussion is frequently the product of division and aggression. So, an example of the "colour and vibrancy" of business jargon is a "Jonestown defence", a takeover bid resistance tactic which is delicately supposed to resemble the mass suicide of an American cult in 1978. In the same list, "vice investing" putting one's money into "alcohol, tobacco and arms manufacturing" -is said to be the "financial opposite of ethical investing", not the ethical opposite. Elsewhere, the lexicography grows wilfully colour blind: "prison-whites" are defined as "trainers which are kept in pristine, white, condition and favoured particularly by rap stars and their followers".
