Sticks and stones

I had not been aware that Collins, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their first English dictionary, have been conducting a poll to find out which word it is that the British public would most like to see added. But the consultation period has now ended and the people have spoken, or at least uttered some sort of noise which might, in a kindly light, be viewed as the rudiments of language.

These sort of polls do tend to reveal worrying trends in our taste and judgement - Oasis as best band ever, The Lord of the Rings as best book, Boris Johnson for Major of London, anyone to win Big Brother rather than being shot immediately upon exiting the house - but on this occasion we have exceeded all expectations and come up with a 'winner' which frankly brings into question our long-held status as smartest species on the planet. Forget dolphins and bonobos: I think we're down to the level of earwigs or possibly some of the more intellectual varieties of moss.

For our winner is - and lacking the technological nous to embed some of drum roll into the text, I present without ceremony - 'meh'.

Meh. Meh? Meh! (No, it would seem punctuation doesn't make it any more palatable.) For the love of Jesus Christ and his tiny singing elves... could we not have come up with a word which isn't amongst the principal vocabulary of most farmyard animals?

Of all the glorious archaisms and neologisms which we might have chosen, we pick a word which the French, with their staunchly protectionist Académie française, don't even feel the need to coin. They just shrug, in that glorious Gallic fashion which brooks no debate, whether it be in relation to concerns about nuclear testing or the lack of a vegetarian option.

I'm not going to offer my own suggestions. Aside from the futility of it, I'm sure there are quite enough examples on this blog of wilful obscurantism in matters grandiloquent, of words lurking undisturbed in our linguistic backwaters. Instead, I shall be writing to the Secretary of State for Culture, or whatever nebulous department into which concern for our aesthetic well-being has been subsumed, recommending that the English language be confiscated from the British public until they have demonstrated themselves responsible enough to use it without tearing the entire fabric of our historic cultural milieu into tiny monosyllabic pieces.

All correspondence on this matter will therefore now be conducted solely in Latin, Aramaic or some sort of system involving flags.