By Hook Or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English. David Crystal
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it count in the total – so, for instance, if your domain name ends in .com, that would be four characters, leaving you with sixty-three. In fact, someone has already registered Llanfair’s full name with an additional five letters in it, making up the sixty-three. The extra five letters are uchaf, which means ‘higher’ in Welsh. It would be like saying ‘Upper Llanfair…’– like Upper Slaughter in the Cotswolds.
Actually, technically, the full Llanfair name has only fifty-one letters, as the double-l counts as a single letter in Welsh. But Internet software usually assumes that all languages work like English.
You can’t beat the ingenuity of the people of Llanfairpwll, though you can try. Years later, another Welsh town, further south, in Cardiganshire, decided to do the same thing, and thought up a sixty-six-letter name. It never caught on. A country can only get away with this kind of creative name-building once.
There’s a joke told about an American tourist who bought a postcard in Llanfairpwll, and stopped for a coffee at the nearby Little Chef. She studied the full name on the card intently, then asked the waitress, ‘Can you tell me how to pronounce the place we’re in?’ And the waitress said, slowly and distinctly: ‘Lit – tle Chef.’
English doesn’t go in for long place-names. Indeed, the language as a whole doesn’t go in for long words. I know there are competitions to find ‘the longest word in English’, and the winners always earn a place in the Guinness Book of Records. But that makes the point, really. Long words are the exceptions, so they fascinate us. Even quite young kids play with them. I learned to say antidisestablishmentarianism when I was nine. I still don’t know what it means. There’s no special interest in long words in Greenland Eskimo, where most of the words are lengthy.
Nobody knows what the longest word in English really is, anyway. That would be a scientific term – probably one of the terms in chemistry for some unbelievably complex molecule. No scientist would ever say it, of course. So when people hold competitions, there is usually a rider – the ‘longest word in an English dictionary’. Which is also a cheat. Dictionaries don’t always agree. If it’s the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), it would be the forty-five-letter
pneumonoultramictoscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
sometimes spelled with a k instead of its last c. It is a lung disease caused by breathing in particles of siliceous volcanic dust. It is another cheat. It was coined in 1935 by Everett Smith, the president of the US National Puzzlers’ League, purely for the purpose of making sure he had found the longest word.
You can look for the longest word for ever, and not reach agreement about it. Does supercalifragilisticexpialidocious from Mary Poppins count? Or is that excluded because it is a nonsense word? I don’t know.
Llanfairpwll may be recognized as having the longest place-name in the UK, but it isn’t the longest one in English. There are lakes in the USA, named in American Indian languages, which are much longer. And there is the eighty-five-letter monster in New Zealand, coming from Maori. But there’s nothing to match it in the UK. The nearest is the eighteen-letter Blakehopeburnhaugh, a hamlet in the Redesdale Forest in Northumberland. The name is a combination of four words of Old English origin – ‘black’ + ‘valley’ + ‘stream’ + ‘area of flat riverside land’. I think it’s the longest. I haven’t found anywhere longer with Anglo-Saxon (as opposed to Celtic) origins – yet.
If you go there – as a linguist would, just to see – you might notice a sign to Cottonshopeburnfoot, half a mile up the valley, and think to yourself, wait a minute, that’s got nineteen letters. But spaces and hyphens aren’t usually allowed to count, when you’re searching for long place-names. It has to be a single word. And on the Ordnance Survey map this place is written Cottonshopeburn Foot.
You could cheat, of course, and let hyphens in. Then you will find Stratton-on-the-Fosse in Somerset, Winchester-on-the-Severn in Maryland, and a host of others. I don’t know what the longest hyphenated place-name is in England. Someone will probably write and tell me. I’d like to know. It would be another piece fitted into the jigsaw puzzle of facts that make up the English language.
The valley of Redesdale is an interesting place. It has for centuries been an important route from England into Scotland. Today it contains the A68, winding its way towards Jedburgh and Edinburgh. Spectacular scenery, well worth a leisurely drive. The road crosses the border six miles to the north-west of Carter Bar.
Carter Bar was the scene of one of the last battles fought between the English and the Scots – the so-called Redeswire Fray. A fray is a ‘fight’. It’s a shortened version of the word affray. Neither word is used much now, except in legal contexts. But it may be getting a new lease of life. It is the name of a UK rock band as well as of a fantasy comic- book by Joss Whedon, the creator of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The fight was in 1575. The Warden of the English Marches had an argument with the Keeper of Liddesdale, and it escalated into a violent confrontation. Several men were killed. The English had the worst of it. The irony is that the meeting took place on a day of truce, and both men had been employed to keep the peace on their own side of the border.
I knew my Scottish farmer was local when he said ‘Llanfairpwll’. Only locals say that. Moreover, he said the Welsh ‘double-l’ very accurately. He had obviously lived here long enough to master it. But that didn’t make sense. How could he have lived here so long and yet kept his Scottish accent so strong?
‘How long have you been in Anglesey, then?’ I asked him.
‘I came here in ’65.’
I did a swift calculation. That’s forty years.
‘And where did you grow up?’
‘Near Galashiels.’
I’d been there. It’s just a few miles north of Jedburgh. On a road off the A68.
‘How come you’ve not lost your accent?’
‘I reckon I was too old to change. I was in me forties when I got here.’
In his forties. How old was this man!
He was right. An accent would be thoroughly established by then, and it would take a huge change in circumstances to shift it. Accents exist to express your identity. They tell people where you are from. And they get established very early in life. Children have them by the age of three. New accents come easily during childhood and into the teenage years. When a family moves from one part of the country to another, it’s invariably the children who pick up the new accent first.
But no accent is immune from its surroundings. And, indeed, in the old farmer’s voice I could hear the occasional Welsh lilt. I wanted to hear more of it. So I asked him about his stick.
‘I always thought shepherds had crooks,’ I said.
‘Ay,’ he said, ‘that’s true, but I haven’t meself for quite a while.’
He paused. ‘Did ye know that there are different kinds of crooks?’
He said the word with a long oo, asin croon.
I had to confess I didn’t. My definition of crook would be a stick with one end bent into a hooked sort of shape. I was vague about why. The linguist in me suggested a link with by hook or by crook, but I couldn’t immediately think of a good reason why this phrase should have come into existence.
The next five minutes was a tutorial on crooks. I hadn’t realised crook-making was such a precise craft. And I hadn’t realised that classic crooks have hooks at both ends, one larger than the other. One end is large enough to catch hold of a sheep’s neck; the other end is smaller, for catching hold of the hind foot. He called it a ‘leg cleek’. I heard it as ‘clayk’, and only established the spelling when I looked it up later. Not an everyday word. It took me three dictionaries