I'm sorning this morning

So having declared that you can make pretty much any noun work as a verb, I discovered a fairly extreme case in point in this morning's post.

If you declare that your car is off the road, you make a Statutory Off Road Notification, or SORN. The DVLA has very happily turned this - or at least the abbreviation - into a verb. So you can now walk into your friendly local post office and ask to sorn your car. The notice you receive from DVLA suggests that you 'Relicense [and thank you for spelling this correctly] or SORN online or by phone'. It's interesting that they keep the capitals.

Anyway, it has led me to suggest a small modification to my own rule. If you were to spell the abbreviation out in full, DVLA would be suggesting that you Statutory Off Road Notification online. And obviously that nominalisation there, already having been catapulted from the land of verb to the kingdom of noun, ain't going to be too happy to make a return trip. So perhaps nominalisations should be excused games, having once performed grammatical backflips.

More reasons to love The Onion

As if we needed more reason to love them.

1 - Gratuitous mentions of monsters. Monsters are pretty much my favourite thing. I'm particularly fond of using the word as a verb, which is more grist to my theory that you can use pretty much any noun in English as a verb and people will know what you mean – eg 'can I window your diary'? It's only a matter of time before that catches on.

2 - Naming of hurricanes. I was talking to someone just the other day about hurricane names and how we wouldn't be too alarmed if Hurricane Tim was threatening our shores - and dang it if they haven't written a whole essay on the subject.

3 - Anyone who sells t-shirts with the slogan 'I Appreciate The Muppets On A Much Deeper Level Than You' deserves plentiful oodles of love and devotion. I'll even forgive them their capitalisation.

The iTunes corpus

I can't live without music. More importantly, I can't write without it. It feeds me. An iPod is a thousand muses in your pocket. When working on a vibrant, energetic tone of voice, I have a specific playlist full of bouncy, hollertastic toons that leave me wanting to headbut things, drive too fast and scribble like a weasel. It's difficult to write upbeat with downbeat accompaniment.

While working on my last blog (about how some formal terms may be widely understood), I remembered that Substitute (one of those terms) by The Who is on my kneebouncing inyerface playlist. And some dedicated iPod stroking reveals more difficult-but-familiar terms. A quick trawl throws up Substitute for love by Madonna too. Another five minutes brings up delusions, apologies (quick! change it to sorry!), severance, sensuality, frustrations, crystalline, consequence, distractions, evolution, inertia, constellation, indigenous and lucidity.

The word formation is phenomenal. Beetlebum, anyone? Bodyrock? Cloudbusting? Hyperballad? Karmacoma? Sinsuality? Wearchest? Hooverphonic? There are Greek affixes in there, for goodness' sake. There are references to scentific theory (My selfish gene), sideways swipes at Shakespeare (Midsummer night's dreamin') and even - whisper who dares - Latin (Deus ibi est by Isobel Campbell, even if she does have a strange way of pronouncing 'est').

Juicy juxtapositions form a rich seam. Moonlight and mescaline, Morphine and chocolate, Goldfish and paracetamol, Coffee and TV.... perhaps I should rank them by active ingredient. I haven't even touched on the close-snipped poetry of some titles - Deep honey, Crawling with idiot, Indigenous syringes. And these are just the titles.*

I've chosen popular-ish artists from a middlebrow collection - I'm sure it would be easy to create a far more esoteric list. But I don't think I've ever seen an article exclaiming at the complexity of song titles or the literacy issues inherent in visiting HMV. Admittedly iTunes and Amazon - bless their hearts - help us out with a typo-spotting 'Did you really mean 'Argtyk Mynkkies'?' feature, which suggests that enough mis-spellings occur to warrant attention. And I know that you don't have to understand where Bohemia is or what a Rhapsody might be to appreciate the song. But it does show that our 'language environment' is liberally peppered with these complex terms and enigmatic metaphors. iTunes is only one example; every day we may use a 'percolator', make a 'connection', pay a 'congestion' charge or pick up a 'prescription' without breaking a Latin-phobic sweat.

I'm hardly suggesting trying out terms in iTunes before replacing them with simpler versions. Only that our (my) gut instinct to plain English any polysyllabically miscreant word can be tempered sometimes. Maybe. Carefully. A bit. But don't quote me.

*An honourable mention, by the way, when discussing song (and band) titles, has to go to 'If I had £1 for every stale song title I'd be 30 short of getting out of this mess' by Get cape. Wear cape. Fly.