Alex Horne: Wordwatching ADVANCE TICKET DEAL

0	KETTERING: Arts Centre, St Andrew's Church
P	Saturday 11th September, 2010
N	8:00pm

KETTERING: Arts Centre, St Andrew's Church

Saturday 11th September, 2010

8:00pm

Event information

Can one man deliberately invent a successful new word? Is it possible to break into the dictionary? What is a pratdigger?

On January 25th 2006, comedian and wordsmith Alex Horne celebrated his TKDay – his 10,000th day alive – and decided to mark the event by doing something truly remarkable. Already a successful joke-writer, Alex wanted to take the next logical step, he wanted to devise his own word. He wanted to create a brand new verbal concept and successfully implant it in the English language.

In 1791, a Dublin theatre owner called James Daly proved it was possible. After a colleague had wagered he couldn’t come up with a word that would catch on by the end of that weekend, Daly hired a group of street urchins to write “quiz” – a previously unknown sequence of letters – on the walls around the Irish city. Within 24 hours the word was common currency. People didn’t know what it meant so presumed it was some sort of test.

Could Alex replicate this feat (bearing in mind that story is almost certainly untrue)?

Nowadays, verbal gardening isn’t so easy. Urchins are harder to find, more expensive to hire and most walls are already caked in their graffiti. But after much careful planning, daring stunts and almost a thousand days of sneaky verbal trickery, Alex is making progress. His new words have appeared in nearly all the national newspapers, on Sky News, the Daily Politics Show and in an interview with George Alagiah witnessed by 250 million people on BBC World. Even TKDay (noun: one’s 10,000th day, a major turning point in one’s life) is beginning to catch on.

Come and see him spread the word further in his most ambitious show yet, a multi-media neologistic bonanza tracking the highs and lows of this secret linguistic campaign.