… because now there’s eleven. As we approach 2011, I’ve been thinking about this number and its rise in fortunes since the 1984 rockumentary This is Spinal Tap. The character Nigel Tufnell described how his amp was better than the rest because it didn’t just go up to ten on the dial, it went up to eleven, ‘one louder’. This joke has since been used as a metaphor for outdoing yourself, or going one better. It’s always been used in musical forums and the BBC earns brownie points for also having the volume control on its digital iPlayer go up to eleven. But I’ve also seen this used recently in other contexts, when discussing President Obama for example (and dog nutrition, of all things!). This metaphor evidently has staying power, so look out for pun-heavy articles in the new year along the lines of ‘Turn it up to eleven in 2011!’. I’m also going to stick my neck out and predict that eleven will start to be used as an adjective in 2011, such as: ‘He’s soooo eleven!’ or ‘My new bike is totally eleven!’

Hmm, well, you never know!

One of my favourite quotes is by Virginia Woolf: ‘Language is wine upon the lips’ she said to her husband Leonard one evening, over a bottle of Blue Nun. What a lovely sentiment. Profound, enigmatic, erotic. Note what she did not say. She did not say: ‘Language is Dr Pepper upon the lips.’ Woolf made the connection specifically between the grape and the gob, fine language and fine wine. You know what? I think she was onto something. It forms part of my Grand Theory of Wine. Let me explain.

Wine has numerous consumer benefits: it loosens the tongue, relaxes the mind, facilitates intelligent conversation. In vino veritas, in tropicanas sanitas, as I always say. I lived in Italy for a bit and while I was there, I embraced the grape, boy did I embrace the grape, sheesh. My partner and I sampled as many wines as we could, recording our impressions on photocopied tasting sheets. Our quest took commitment, a robust and determined liver, an endless supply of cheese, olives and Ibuprofen. For nearly three years we swirled, sniffed, swished and swallowed. My fella, a thoughtful man, would give measured, precise descriptions dutifully using the adjectives provided on the sheet. The bouquet was ‘pleasant’, viscosity: ‘normal’, fruit aroma: ‘positive’, general appeal: ‘attractive’, acidity: ‘refreshing’, taste: ‘herbaceous’, overall balance: ‘good’.

My tasting notes, on the other hand, consisted of things like this:

Smells like hay bales soaked in petrol.
Cloying and gluey and chewy …  it’s like a blackcurrant Pritt Stick!
Sour apples rotting in a composter.
Rowntree’s strawberry-flavoured jelly cubes … a Marks and Spencer’s summer fruit pudding … it’s a fruity fiasco alright!
Wowzers, this baby has got some LEGS!
Colour reminds me of when I had that kidney infection … Sickly, like sucking a Pear Drop. I hate Pear Drops.

My point here is that describing wine is a combination of the pseudo-scientific and the subjective. It’s the subjective part that offers the most scope for fun. After all, when you describe a wine, you are attempting to convey a series of highly individualistic taste impressions. Wine is the only beverage that allows you to wax lyrical in this way; its colours, aromas and tastes can evoke vivid associations and memories. You just don’t get that with Dr Pepper. Of course, you could argue that much wine-talk is pompous guff. And you’d be right. But I want to celebrate, not denigrate the language of wine. It’s a fascinating semantic field, with vocabulary borrowed from anatomy, personality, food, textiles. Think about it: wine can have body, legs and a nose, backbone, guts. It can be lean, supple, robust, muscular, cheeky, aggressive, spineless, forward, honest, dumb, complex, clumsy, chalky, chewy, buttery, earthy, meaty, gamey, leathery, smooth, rich, elegant, refined, rough …  Most startling of all, wine can be grapey.

Wine critics have a reputation for being obnoxious elitists, self-aggrandizing snobs, flaunting their mastery of the language of wine, but without allowing you in. There is one notable exception, Internet Phenomenon and King of Wine, Gary Vaynerchuk. If you haven’t heard of him, then you are in for a treat!

The man is amazing! He’s like the Quentin Tarantino of wine. Did you catch what he said, towards the end? No, not that line about nosing a dead deer, that was a bit weird … No, this bit:

One thing you will see …  is that I love words and when I get stuck to them, I’m gonna be on them all day so I’m definitely going to be using the same words over and over.

Gary: thank you! You clearly support my Grand Theory of Wine, which is basically this: if you love wine, ipso facto you love words. Wine lovers are always word lovers. Oenophilia = logophilia. Seriously, think of all the hardcore wine drinkers you know. I bet they are a garrulous lot, always holding forth on some topic or another, full of opinions, puns only they find amusing, recounting Scrabble scores, doing crosswords … You just don’t get that calibre of person with Dr Pepper drinkers. Don’t you agree?

That somebody might find raising funds difficult in these problematic financial times is certainly not beyond belief. That they might say, describing their plight, that ‘Getting the financing was beyond difficult’ may be more surprising.

We’re used to things being beyond recognition, beyond a doubt/beyond reasonable doubt, beyond a joke, beyond expectations or beyond our wildest dreams. We know things can be beyond control, beyond reach, or beyond repair. We can find ourselves beyond words or even beyond sleep.

Beyond is used to suggest that something is ‘outside the limits or possibilities’, physical (beyond the horizon, beyond the main road) or otherwise. Quite a few of the common uses given above are fixed or idiomatic expressions. In go beyond and related phrases, beyond is used to suggest ‘going past limits, going further/deeper’ or ‘surpassing something’, and beyond itself may be used in this way too, as in such titles or headlines as: beyond smoking, beyond the classroom, even beyond sustainability.

As these examples show, and according to the Macmillan Dictionary and other dictionaries, it is typically followed by a noun or noun phrase.

But now, as well as beyond difficult, we hear: beyond cool, beyond crazy, beyond extreme, beyond alarming, beyond boring, beyond outrageous, beyond awful, beyond sophisticated and many more, as in this experience must have been beyond terrifying. In these examples, beyond is being used to intensify adjectives, with a sense loosely similar to more than or worse/better than, and reflects the ‘more than (usual)’ sense of the phrase above and beyond (though this is used before nouns and noun phrases). It is so far less common in written material, though of course it appears in the kind of informal writing that can be found on the web. It is used in promotional and marketing material: ‘Beyond Extreme’ is the name of a company offering adventure sports; ‘Beyond Retro’ is a company offering vintage clothing.

In extending its modifying range to a different word class, the behaviour of beyond is reminiscent of the change in use of the adverb so, which moved from intensifying adjectives, and adverbs, as in so awful, so quickly, to emphasising nouns and noun phrases, as in so last year, so not what I like.

Why is it that journalists seem to think that they are allowed the greatest licence when using the English language? Why do they not feel bound by the same linguistic restraints as the rest of us? Often they make up brand new words to describe something in a way they feel that no existing word can. Recently, on BBC Radio 4 News, I heard a three-pronged problem facing the prime minister referred to as a ‘trilemma’.

At times they slough off the bonds of redundancy in language. Yesterday morning I heard another journo refer to an issue that was on all of our collective consciences. I’m sure this was meant to be on our collective conscience. Perhaps he was being paid by the word. They’ve even freed themselves from the chains of understanding parts of speech. During a recent report, a journalist claimed “This terrible, wide-spread crisis – whatever synonym you want to use to describe it”. Surely she meant to say adjective as terrible and wide-spread certainly aren’t synonyms.

The credit crunch seems to have given rise to even more sloppy language. Just today I listened to a commentary on the financial report issued by Marks & Spencer. The journalist said that it was “a lot less bad than was expected under the circumstances.”

There also appears to be a resurgence of the (mis)use of two comparatives. A lot has a connotation of value or amount whereas less has the opposite meaning. I can’t find an exact term for this other than to describe it as a paradoxical phrase. Although, in grammar, comparative forms of words can be ‘terms’ or ‘phrases’. So it’s perhaps more accurate to identify it as the misuse of ‘two comparative forms’.

Time Magazine Online has a headline that reads “Is the Economy Starting to Recover? Or Just Less Bad?”. The only thing ‘less bad’ is that they managed not to put a lot in front of it.

Scarcely a day goes by without Robert Peston, the BBC Business Editor, telling us of yet another eye-watering sum of money being allocated by government to a failing bank, or an eye-watering loss sustained by a major corporation.

Here he is on his blog on 5th January this year:
And we can be fairly confident that they remain on course to meet much reduced expectations for their profits this year (a bit over £600m in the case of Marks & Spencer, down from £1.1bn last year, or an eye-watering drop of around 45%).

And on 13th February:
What generated the colossal loss at HBOS was, to a large extent, eye-watering charges of £7bn on corporate loans that have gone bad – in part reflecting the recession we’re in.

And again on 11th March:
And that would generate an eye-watering loss for the Bank of £30bn.

The expression has been around for a good long time now. In 1999, the website dine-online.co.uk noted that in a restaurant being reviewed “[t]he wine list ranges from £14 for the house white to an eye-watering £120 for a bottle of Chateau Talbot, St Julien 1982″ and in December 2003, the Guardian warned that “Britain’s commuters will face ‘eye-watering’ increases in fares across the national rail network next month” (note the fact that the journalist put quotes around it).

Strangely, the adjective eye-watering occurs in hardly any dictionaries. It’s not in OED, which lists only the noun, undefined, along with a few other verbal nouns (eye-casting, eye-devouring, eye-gouging, eye-watering).  Luckily, the adjective is in MEDO, with this definition: an eyewatering amount is extremely high or large, and much higher or larger than you  would expect.

There are a number of adjectives formed like this, referring to parts of the body and what they do, or what you do to them. So, while the price tag of the Chateau Talbot might be eye-watering, the prospect of sipping a glass is mouth-watering. Sad stories are heart-rending, sudden shocks are heart-stopping; frightening tales are spine-tingling, spine-chilling or even hair-raising. A tense finish to a sports encounter is nail-biting. And a truly embarrassing moment can only be described as toe-curling. Of course, all of these are metaphorical uses – your heart does not literally rend at the end of a very sad movie, and your hair isn’t really raised by something that frightens you.

But sometimes there are more literal meanings involved. In 2005, Lawrence Booth was describing a one-day international cricket match between England and Australia live on the Internet. At one stage he wrote: “Gough stays on, despite leaking an eye-watering 31 runs from his first three overs.” So far, so metaphorical. But a short while later, he observes:  “Harmison roars in and hits Lee in a particularly eye-watering part of the body. Even Harmison winces”. Anyone who has ever played cricket will sympathise with Lee. The very thought is enough to bring tears to your eyes.