Susie Dent tells Chris Evans about her all-time favourite phrase

Virgin Radio

26 Sep 2023, 13:53

When Susie Dent joined the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with cinch to talk about her new book, Interesting Stories about Curious Words: From Stealing Thunder to Red Herrings, she chatted about some of her favourite words and phrases.

The Countdown’s star's book comes out this Thursday, 28th September, and in it she explores the stories of sweet Fanny Adams and Jack the Lad, and looks into how circles become vicious and who first chanced their arm.

The queen of Dictionary Corner told Chris: “I've done so many origins of words, and some of them are quite random. And some of them are very well known. And it was just really nice to bring them all together.”

When talking about the “stealing thunder” of the book’s title, Susie said: “That’s my all-time favourite.” 

She explained: “It's so rare for a lexicographer to find the exact moment that a word or phrase was born. And this is an exception. So it was February 5th, 1709. It was this playwright critic called John Dennis. He'd written a really boring play, but he had one thing in his production that was amazing, which is he’d perfected this machine that made the sound of thunder. But still, his play closed. He went along to the next performance, which was of the Scottish Play, and was enjoying it by all accounts and then heard, booming out from the stage, the sound of his own thunder-making machine, and he stood up and he shouted ‘Damn them, they will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder’.”

Speaking about the origins of other popular phrases, she said: “Licking something into shape… that’s because, and even Shakespeare believed this too, that bear cubs are born as furry blobs, and they need to be licked into bear shape by their mums. It's just so gorgeous.”

Susie - who also presents the podcast, Something Rhymes With Purple, with Gyles Brandreth - continued: “There are so many stories where just one person in history changed something by accident. So I always loved the fact that we should be fneezing rather than sneezing. There was an F before sneeze but someone misread it. Freezing is so much more evocative of a sneeze, I think.”

The linguist and lexicographer - who has another book out on Thursday 5th October: Roots of Happiness: 100 Words for Joy and Hope - spoke to Chris about different eras of language, saying: “I love Victorian slang, because it's such a sort of hotchpotch of things. So, on the one hand, the Victorians were famously quite squeamish… and they wouldn't say words like 'trousers', because trousers housed the unthinkable and people couldn't mention that word. So they came up with ‘inexpressibles’ and ‘unmentionables’ and ‘sit-upons’ and ‘round-me-houses’ and all sorts of weird side-steps. But then they had real fun as well. So they called sausages ‘bags of mystery’, because you didn't know what was in them, or eggs were ‘cackle farts’, and just stuff like that." 

Talking more about Interesting Stories about Curious Words, Susie told Chris: “Squelchy, farty things are everywhere in English, and kids always love this. So the word feisty, for example, was first applied to a little windy lapdog that nobody particularly liked and was a bit yappy. And to fizzle meant to break wind quietly.”

When Chris said he would be keeping her new book in his downstairs loo, Susie concluded: “I'm going to finish with ‘bumf’. This is a book of bumf, and bumf is from bumfodder, meaning loo roll. It was military slang. Don't use it as bumfodder!”

Susie also opened up to Chris about about having a carcinoma removed, after presenter Rachel Horne spoke about her own recent experience. Read about it here.

Interesting Stories About Curious Words is out this Thursday 28th September. Roots Of Happiness is out on Thursday 5th October.

For more great interviews listen to  The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with cinch weekdays from 6:30am on Virgin Radio, or catch up on-demand here.