The Second Book of General Ignorance (32 page)

According to Robert Burns, it wasn’t him.

Robert Burns (1759–96) never claimed to have written the song ‘Auld Lang Syne’. ‘I took it down from an old man’s singing,’ he wrote in 1793, in a note accompanying the lyric. He sent it to James Johnson, the editor of the
Scottish Musical
Museum
(an anthology of traditional Scottish songs) stating that it was ‘an olden song’ that had never been written down. In fact, Burns was wrong about that – versions of it had been in print several times, including one as recently as 1770.

‘Auld Lang Syne’ originated in an anonymous fifteenth-century poem that went under various names in various different versions such as: ‘Auld Kindries Foryett’, ‘Old Longsyne’ and finally, in 1724, ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

Pretty conclusive, you might think – but the song’s
authorship remains a hot topic among Burns scholars. Only Burns’s first verse and chorus bear much similarity to the song’s previous incarnations. Some say he claimed the song was a traditional one to give his work extra credibility amongst antiquarians. Others argue that, whether the story of the old man was true or not, Burns had taken a traditional source, as in several other of his most famous poems (such as
My love is
like a red, red rose
) and remoulded it into something stronger and more affecting than the original.

If you thought ‘Rabbie Burns’ wrote ‘Auld Lang Syne’, you’d be doubly wrong. Burns never signed his name ‘Rabbie’ or ‘Robbie’ (or, indeed, ‘Bobbie’ Burns, as some North Americans insist on calling him). His signatures included ‘Robert’, ‘Robin’, ‘Rab’ – and, on at least one occasion, ‘Spunkie’.

Another piece of Burns-related pedantry you might want to bear in mind for New Year’s Eve is this: the last line of the chorus isn’t ‘For
the sake of
Auld Lang Syne’. Since ‘auld lang syne’ already means ‘old times’ sake’, this is tautologous (from Greek
tautos
, ‘the same’, and
logos
, ‘word’). In Scots, ‘for the sake of Auld Lang Syne’ is the nonsensical ‘for the sake of old time’s sake’.

The two extra notes in the line – which is what makes people feel they need to add ‘the sake of’’ – should be dealt with by singing two extra notes for each of ‘for’ and ‘old’. Try singing ‘For-or oh-old la-ang syne’ next Hogmanay and be ready with the explanation. And say we sent you.

‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse’ is one of the best-known lines in English literature, but the real Richard III never uttered them. His last words are among the few things about the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 that were accurately recorded. They were ‘Treason, Treason, Treason!’ It was the last time an English king died in battle and it ended
the Wars of the Roses in which two branches of the Plantagenet family – the Yorkists and the Lancastrians – effectively snuffed one another out, leading to the founding of a new ruling dynasty, the Tudors.

The last Lancastrian king was Henry VI. When his son Edward was killed at the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471, the Yorkists resumed power under Edward IV – followed by his son Edward V, then Edward IV’s brother Richard III.

As a Lancastrian with a tenuous claim to the throne, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, had spent much his life in exile. His arrival at the Welsh port of Milford Haven in August 1485 was at the urging of older exiled Lancastrians like John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who sensed a chance of turning the tide in their favour with a new candidate for king. When Henry reached Bosworth in Leicestershire he had fewer than 1,000 Englishmen in his army. Most of his troops were French mercenaries or Welshmen. He’d never fought in a battle before, so he left the strategy to his generals.

What he was good at was marketing. After he’d won, he set about rewriting history, painting Bosworth Field as a contest between good and evil: the young idealistic moderniser versus a bitter, misshapen representative of a corrupt regime. This was so successful that definite facts about the battle are scarce. We don’t even know where it was fought. In 2009 archaeological evidence suggested it was probably 2 miles south of the present official site. What we do know is that Richard became detached from his army and was surrounded by Henry’s Welsh bodyguards. His supposed allies, Thomas Stanley, Earl of Derby, and his brother Sir William Stanley, chose this moment to switch sides. Hence the king’s cry of: ‘Treason, Treason, Treason!’ as he was skewered by a Welsh poleaxe. Even Henry’s official historian was impressed: ‘King Richard, alone, was killed fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies.’

Richard, at thirty-two, was only four years older than Henry. The idea that he was a hunchback came from John Rouse’s
Historia Regius Angliae
(1491), which merely said he had ‘uneven shoulders’. He was certainly short but, according to contemporaries, he was good-looking with a strong, sporting physique. He wore heavy armour: an impossible feat for someone with a misshapen back.

Shakespeare was a playwright, not a historian. One of his main sources was the Tudor grandee, Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), who described Richard as ‘ill featured of limbs, crook backed, hard favored of visage, malicious, wrathful, envious, from before his birth ever forward’. By no means everyone has bought into this enduring Tudor propaganda. As early as 1813 a plaque appeared at Bosworth putting the alternative version: ‘Near this spot, on August 22nd 1485, King Richard III fell fighting gallantly in defence of his realm & his crown against the usurper Henry Tudor.’

The ‘i before e except after c’ rule was abolished in 2009.

The old mnemonic was taught to British schoolchildren for generations, but
Support for Spelling
, a teaching aid published in 2009 as part of the British government’s National Primary Strategy, now advises: ‘The “i before e” rule is not worth teaching. It applies only to words in which the ‘ie’ or ‘ei’ stand for a clear ‘ee’ sound, so it is easier to learn the specific words.’

In fact, even with ‘ee’ sounds, there are still plenty of exceptions owing to the proliferation of foreign words in English. Caf
fei
ne,
wei
rd and Ma
dei
ra all break the rule in one direction;
spe
cie
s, con
cie
rge and ha
cie
nda in the other. Judging solely by the list of official Scrabble words, it turns out that the ‘i before e except after c’ rule is twenty-one times more likely to be wrong than right. No wonder the government dropped it.

English spelling is hellishly complicated. Many people, particularly in America, have tried to simplify it. In 1768, Benjamin Franklin published a phonetic
alfabet
containing all the familiar letters except c, j, q, w, x and y, and adding six new letters for specific sounds.

Melville Dewey (1851–1931), the inventor of the Dewey Decimal library system, changed the spelling of his Christian name to Melvil and toyed with adapting his surname to Dui. Late in life, he founded a health club in Florida where he put his spelling reforms into action. At one dinner in 1927 the menu featured
Hadok
,
Poted Beef with Noodles
and
Parsli & Masht
Potato with Letis
.

George Bernard Shaw was another passionate advocate of spelling reform, leaving money in his will for a competition to create an easier system. The most extreme example of the way English doesn’t always sound the way it’s written (although Shaw himself never used it) is the made-up word
ghoti.

In theory, this could be pronounced ‘fish’, using ‘gh’ as in rough, ‘o’ as in women, and ‘ti’ as in mention.

In the USA Mark Twain helped draft the Simplified Spelling Board’s list of 300 recommended changes, which was accepted in principle by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 but rejected by Congress. Nevertheless, many of the simpler spellings did catch on, such as color, defense, mold and sulfate. Others like
profest
(professed),
mixt
(mixed) and
altho
didn’t make the cut.

In the UK the Spelling Reform Bill passed its second reading by 65 votes to 53 in 1953 but, after opposition from the House of Lords, it was withdrawn with assurances from the Minister of Education that research would be undertaken into the impacts and benefits of such a change.

The research confirmed the fundamental problem with all new language systems: that, unless they are adopted wholesale, by everyone at once, they lead to more confusion than clarity. The Spelling Reform Bill, like the ‘i before e’ rule, was relegated to the mists of history.

Admittedly, it looks like fifty-eight, but there are actually only fifty-one. Both
ll
and
ch
count as single letters in Welsh – along with
dd
,
ff
,
ng
,
ph
,
rh
and
th
. They’re called digraphs: two consonants joined together to form a single sound.

Not that it matters, as only tourists (and tourist brochures) call it Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll-llantysiliogogogoch. The village on the island of Anglesey, famous for having the longest officially recognised place name in the UK, is known locally as Llanfair. There are a lot of Llanfairs in Wales (it means ‘church of St Mary’), so it’s sometimes called Llanfairpwll or Llanfair PG, to distinguish it from the others.

Signposts opt for Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, while the Ordnance Survey map prefers Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll. Even the full name is seen with several variants of spelling, and sometimes with a hyphen between
drobwll
and
llan
. The English translation of the full name is: ‘The church of St Mary in the
hollow of white hazel trees near the rapid whirlpool by St Tysilio’s of the red cave.’

When the first railway station on Anglesey was opened at Llanfair, local businessmen looked for a way to turn the unremarkable former fishing village into a tourist destination and came up with the idea of creating the longest station sign in Britain, made up of the existing names of the village, a nearby hamlet and a local whirlpool.

The local council adopted the imaginary place name, jokingly known as ‘The Englishman’s Cure for Lockjaw’, in 1860. It was a hugely successful publicity stunt. A century and a half later, visitors still come to be photographed beside the station sign and to buy elongated souvenir platform-tickets. The village website also has the world’s longest domain name. Llanfair PG has one other claim to immortality: it’s the home of the first British branch of the Women’s Institute (a Canadian invention), which opened in 1915.

Llanfair PG’s full name is the longest in Europe, but the world record is held by the official name for Bangkok. This begins
Krung-Thep-Mahanakhon …
and stretches for 167 characters. In second place is a hill in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, which comes in three lengths of 85, 92 and 105 characters. The most involved of these is:
Taumata-whakatangihanga-koauau
-o-Tamatea-haumai-tawhiti-ure-haea-turi-pukaka-piki-maunga-horo
nuku-pokai-whenua-ki-tana-tahu.
Translated from the Maori it means, ‘The hill of the flute playing by Tamatea to his beloved (he who was blown hither from afar, had a slit penis, grazed his knees climbing mountains, fell on the earth and encircled the land). Understandably, the locals just call it Taumata.

England’s longest place name is only eighteen letters long. Blakehopeburnhaugh (pronounced
Black-op-bun-or
) in Northumberland combines elements of Middle English (
blake
, ‘black’), Old English (
hope
, ‘valley’,
burn
, ‘stream’) and Old Norse (
haugh
, ‘flat riverside land’).