There are around a million words in the English language and journalist Kel Richards, who has spent 30 years studying the language, says he still comes across words he is unfamiliar with.
Have a Go News readers may well have heard Kel’s dulcet tones in his regular segment on 6PR’s Night Shift with Tod Johnston on Tuesdays from 9.20pm.
Based in Sydney, Kel also has a one-hour talk-back program, The Word Clinic, which runs each week on radio stations along the east coast. People call in and ask questions about language and the meaning of words.
Listeners often have him stumped.
“If something that I’ve never looked at before comes up, I just have to say, ‘can I have that question on notice please?’ and jot it in my little notebook and go away and do research and come back with the answer next week,” Kel says.
His obsession with the English language goes back 30 years.
“I was working for an ABC network called News Radio and it was a funny setup. We had one small studio and in order to change shifts, to get people out of chairs and into chairs, they needed little one-minute breaks. There were no commercial breaks, of course, being ABC Radio. So I invented a one-minute daily radio program called Wordwatch, in which I talked about words and language, things in the news, the stories behind words and so on.
“It went down extremely well. The public loved it.”
Much of the material Kel prepared for radio was then published in book form, with three or four books all together.
“That started me researching and thinking about language and I haven’t stopped for the past 30 years.”
Over that period of time Kel says you can’t help but become a bit of an expert.
“I’m only a journalist, I’m not a linguist or anyone like that, but I’m a journalist who specialises in language.”
Kel says he was interested in language from an early age.
“When I started doing this 38 years ago, I looked at my bookshelves,I had all of these dictionaries and books about words and language so it has obviously been a fascination for a long time. It is for quite a few journalists because words are the tools we work with and getting to know those tools and using them properly and finding better tools to work with is important for journalists. It matters for all of us in our trade.
I was always intensely aware of language and intensely interested in language and starting to broadcast about it, write about it, simply sharpened that up and make me get really disciplined about it.”
And, of course, language evolves with new words and phrases while others fade into obscurity.
“I have a saying which I’ve rattled off more than once. The English language is a river, not a lake. It is moving and changing all the time. It’s not a dead language like Latin, it’s a living language. So that means bits of the language get forgotten and drift off behind us and new bits are coming towards us all the time. People are coining new expressions all the time. I mean, we talk about taking a selfie these days, but until we had mobile phones, there was no need for the word.
“When technology changes, the language changes. And by the way, selfie was coined in Australia. It’s one of our words. We are very inventive language people in Australia.”
Kel believes his own exposure to so much of the English language has also left him richer for it.
“One of the things you aim to do as a journalist, is to aim for clarity. And I think I’ve got better at being clear, better at keeping a sentence shorter, a statement shorter, making the language more concrete, so that what I’m trying to explain is crisp and clear for the listener, on radio in particular.
“On radio you only get one chance. After you’ve said a sentence, it’s come and gone. They can’t go back and say, hey, what was that all about, and check it again. You’ve only got one chance to get the idea right. Clarity is a really big deal and if anything has changed it’s been this constant push to make my language and the way I explain language clearer and clearer.
“As for new words, when I come across a new word that I like, I will seize upon it and use it if I possibly can. So, the other day I just found the expression faceplant, the verb to faceplant. It’s a fairly new American expression. When someone falls flat on their face they say: oh, he’s face-planted.
“It’s a really vivid little bit of Americanism and I think, oh that’s nice, how can I work that into my language?”
Kel is engaged in campaigns to try to defend the English language and the Australian dialect of the English language.
“The language is being corrupted. I get lots and lots of emails, particularly from older people, who are really annoyed at words that are coined that they didn’t know when they were younger.”
At the Olympic Games – that somebody has medalled or we reckon that they’ll do well in this race to medal.
“It’s a noun that’s been turned into a verb. At one level you can’t complain because English has been turning nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns for a thousand years; Shakespeare did it. On the other hand, it’s really a verb that we didn’t learn and it’s fairly irritating.
“Oh, and now they don’t just medal, now they podium.
“So, things like those kinds of changes bother people and the misuse of words will bother people. They are irritated when begs the question aggravate is misused and they come to me and say, Kel, can’t you tell these people to get it right?
“With spoken English, mispronunciations really, really irritate older people.
“People who say, ‘nucular’, instead of nuclear. It makes the fingernails curl up. I mean, why on earth do they do it? You don’t need to. I’ve explained to some of my listeners on occasions, I once worked with a good newsreader who kept saying ‘nucular’ so I sat down with him and carefully drilled him in pronouncing it properly, then he went on the air to read a bulletin and said, ‘nucular’ again. I’ve got a feeling these people can’t help themselves.”
Find out more about Kel’s words at www.ozwords.com.au.
