Anyway, its origins are interesting. Meaning ‘to fall over or fail at some venture’, come a cropper is first recorded in the mid-nineteenth century. It is a figurative elaboration of the eighteenth-century phrase neck and crop, which referred to falling off a horse.

A horse’s rear end was – it maybe even still is – called the croup, from the Old Norse krupp for a protuberance (giving us at least one sense of the word crop). There is also a crupper, the strap on a horse’s harness that passes back from the saddle under the tail. A small whip used in horse riding is called a crop, but the origins of this don’t seem to be related.

Essentially, if you went neck and crop, you were off the whole horse, as in…

The startish beast took fright, and flop
The mad-brain’d rider tumbled, neck and crop!

So if you come a cropper, you’ve fallen off your metaphorical horse and you’d better get straight back on and either shut your stable door before it bolts or lead it to water and try to make it drink.

There are many blogs on the subject. But what could be more interesting than the rude words section of a dictionary of British slang (ask any schoolchild)?! Written by a Scotsman living in the US, The Septics Companion Insults section is a good read, full of solid words like bollocks, plonker and arse. (Thanks to @lynneguist on Twitter for the link.) Other, non-rude, dictionary entries include gubbins, palava and yonks. I would add: pranny – a silly idiot, in a friendly way, cf numpty.

Our wonderful words wank and wanker are included, but not in the Insults section for some reason. And the very straightforward definition (“one who masturbates”) just doesn’t cut it for me. It’s so much more than that: a very offensive insult spat out with derision, disbelief at someone’s idiocy, a description of something’s uselessness. And it comes with an optional hand gesture!

I admit, it is one of my favourite swear words. But it’s so hard to describe the very essence and multiple personality of the word, it’s no wonder speakers of other Englishes can come a cropper* when trying to use it.

*there’s a possible future blog post in this phrase, I think!

“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the picture of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then – the glory – so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.”

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Such style is commonly used online. Even newspaper web articles are formatted this way. For on-screen text, this seems like the right thing to do. Websites are not usually read in a linear way – our eyes dart all over the screen, hang on clear heading, and text is often skimmed for sense – so giving each thought its own space makes it easier for the reader to find the right information.

Also, the web was not built by literary types. I doubt many web developers care much about how text is presented. (The difference between an en dash and a hyphen has certainly passed them by; I have previously had trouble using the en dash for online content as it doesn’t display properly once coded for a website.) Writing this piece on the WordPress user interface, I can’t even find a way to do a first line indent.

Starting a new paragraph signifies a new idea in the text, a progression of what’s been written in the previous paragraphs. It is large punctuation for the whole prose. In a piece of text, paragraphs are like the beads on a necklace – separate but linked. Indents, or even pilcrows if you want to be very retro, separate the ideas, but the thread is not broken.

So for printed text, showing a new paragraph with a first line indent is better – more aesthetically pleasing and more economical with space. I write so often for on-screen purposes that I’d forgotten about the indent. It seemed almost old fashioned, not the modern way: like the double space after a full stop. I tried it on the last job I did and it just looked wrong. But it works so much better in some instances – in future I’ll stop isolating my paragraphs and will be bringing back the indent!

In my last employment at NHSU (the ‘university’ for health and social care, now defunct), I came across many many abbreviations. The public sector is particularly riddled with such shortenings, for committees, programmes, policies and what have you. For instance, from the health/learning sector, IAG: Information, Advice and Guidance, KSF: Knowledge and Skills Framework; the Department of Health itself is the DH not, unfortunately, DoH. These are known as TLA (three-letter acronyms).

Yet these kind of abbreviations are not acronyms but initialisms.

Acronym n. A word formed from or based on the initial letters or syllables or other words.

The main point is that the initials have to form a pronouncable word, as in Scuba – self-contained underwater breathing apparatus – and radar – radio detection and ranging. So modern abbreviations inspired by restricted character limits in text and Twitter – LMAO: Laughed My Arse Off, IMHO: In My Humble Opinion and HNY: Happy New Year, a new one I discovered a few weeks ago – aren’t acronyms but initialisms.

But abbreviating sentiments to initials is nothing new. Here’s a good acronym I found in my research (from businessballs.com):

CHIP: Come Home I’m Pregnant
An acronym gem from the Second World War, and potentially applicable today for husbands on prolonged residential training courses, drilling rigs and overseas work assignments – see also ITALY, HOLLAND, SWALK, BURMA, EGYPT and NORWICH.

A bookshop has dropped the apostrophe from its name.

I must admit, I hadn’t particularly noticed whether it was there or not. But now they’ve got themselves some publicity by changing their branding from the grammatically correct Waterstone’s to the “more versatile and practical” Waterstones.

Upset about the change, the Apostrophe Protection Society said “It’s just plain wrong…[it's] slapdash with English.” (Incidentally, this organisation/one man crusade may understand punctation, but it has no idea about design – the website is hideous.)

On BBC Radio FiveLive at lunchtime, I heard a spokeswoman from the Queen’s English Society similarly condemning the change. She (rightly) said that punctuation and grammar were all about effective communication, which rather contradicted her rising anger.

Waterstones’ decision is about better communication. It’s about branding and marketing; how the word looks, and what people associate with that brand. The sense hasn’t really changed.

When I buy a pair of Clarks shoes or go to Boots, I’m not confused because the name is a plural not a possessive. I imagine Sainsbury’s have kept their apostrophe because it makes the ubiquitous supermarket feel more like a local shop, not because they’re grammar pedants.

So the little superscript mark won’t die out – it’s far too useful. I am slightly concerned, however, that the predictive text on my phone didn’t even contain the word ‘apostrophe’…

A feature in last week’s Big Issue included in its introduction: “madness in the shopping isles”. I’ve heard these islands are a popular destination on Saturdays and before Christmas, but I’m not sure exactly where they are (somewhere near the Silly Aisles?!).

My wonderful film club colleague made a classic error last week. She wrote that the venue for our film screening was formally – stiff and official – called Cafe Euro, rather than formerly.

Both these instances are examples of homophones: words that sound the same but have different meanings and are often spelled differently. Most commonly misused are possibly they’re/their/there and two/to/too.

I’m not sure how these peculiarities would fit in with The English Spelling Society‘s campaign for spelling reform. How can these be standardised to make them easier to spell? I think they’re words people just have to learn, and sometimes they’ll get them wrong, but that’s OK – for me, it’s gently amusing, not the end of the world.

Indignitaries: Armies of people whose lives have become so dormant they can be emobilised (summoned online) to take retrospective offence, normally on behalf of someone else, at pretty much anything that happens or is said on the BBC.

Fiscalamity: As in “we’re heading for a fiscalamity”, the final words from Mervyn King’s emotional speech on the day in 2012 when the money finally runs out and the Bank of England is forced to auction off all national treasures. North Korea snaps up Lady Thatcher, Dame Judi Dench is bought by China, but, at the 11th hour, David Attenborough is found to be covered by the Antarctic treaty and made available to everyone for peaceful and scientific purposes.

On Twitter recently, someone used the new abbreviation HNY (ie happy new year); I can’t decide if that’s brilliance prompted by the restricted character limit and a valid addition to the modern lexicon of initialisms, or just damn lazy.

Nevertheless, these instances are evidence of the rich texture and variety of English, and add to its existing two million or so words (depending on how you count: David Crystal‘s illuminating book The English Language – crimbo present, cheers bro! – gives no definite answers).

It certainly makes me glad that our language is still playful, flexible and growing, so here’s to a wordy 2012!

So turn on your fairy lights to chase away the gloom, ’tis indeed midwinter…

…which brings me on to songs of the season!

This is the first verse of In The Bleak Midwinter, a nineteenth-century hymn, written back when the seasons were predictable:

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Brr! But if you don’t know the words to a Christmas carol, just make them up! Here’s the correct first verse of We Three Kings of Orient Are:

We three kings of Orient are
Bearing gifts, we traverse afar.
Field and fountain, moor and mountain,
Following yonder star.

I like this. Nice alliteration in the third line. However, here are the more creative options:

We three kings of Leicester Square
Selling ladies underwear
So fantastic, no elastic
Only tuppence a pair.

or

We three Kings of Orient are,
One in a taxi, one in a car,
One on a scooter, tooting his hooter,
Following yonder star.

Altogether now…oh-oh. Sing and be merry!

I’d love to know what is defined as ‘unparliamentary language’.

In the end, it wasn’t as rowdy as all that. The Guardian reported today, however, that “two rightwing backbenchers were openly rude about the Liberal Democrats; Philip Davies describing them as ‘lickspittles’.” (Ooh…nasty!) But this, it seems, is an acceptable term in parliamentary debate:

lickspittle n. a sycophant, a toady, an obsequious flatterer (arse-kisser may be the unparliamentary alternative).

I don’t pay enough attention to what happens in Westminster, but maybe they use these kind of words all the time. I wouldn’t be surprised if some parliamentary aide is tasked with producing a list of archaic and inoffensive insults that MPs can use to harangue each other.