Whine Rooney

At the Euro 2004 Championships, the sports journalists used to take the piss out of Sven-Goran Eriksson's accent.

Before each press conference, they would disseminate 'bingo cards'. Each had a well-used phrase from the Swede's hackneyed and accented vocabulary on it.

Some would get 'My bee, my bee not', Sven's favourite answer when asked if a particular player would be in the first eleven for the next game.

The winning bingo card was invariably the 'Whine Rooney' card, which wasn't surprising given Rooney's central role for England in that tournament.

Tonight, Rooney finally lived up to Sven's mispronunciation. The despicable underperformer had the shocking audacity to berate the England fans who booed his misfiring team on camera. Here's the footage if you missed it:



This pulchritudinally challenged, ill-educated chav has been made a multi-millionaire by the very people he attacked. Without them, he'd be stacking shelves in Toxteth or drawing the dole.

They paid thousands of pounds to travel to South Africa to support their country in the World Cup. They have every right to boo a performance as abject and pathetic as England's was against the Algerians.

Rather than mouthing off like a lout, he should be on his knees apologising to them profusely. They made him what he is. He owes them, not the other way around.

Blogs CAN make a difference!

I stand corrected.

I have been languishing under the delusion that blogs were a time-killing online goof, something that people slightly too intelligent for Bebo read and post in between checking their email compulsively and viewing hilarious clips on Youtube during the quiet times at work.

For sure, there is the odd blog in America or someplace that breaks news about political scandals. Or there's the occasional one by some British chick talking about her sex life or living in France, who got to turn her blog into a book.

But basically, apart from these rare and well-known exceptions, it seemed to me that blogs don't really make an enormous impact in the world. I can see their potential, the benefits of the medium and the format. But at this point in time, they're below the tipping point where they might genuinely be said to make a difference.

Generally, most blogs seem to be about people's private crazy thoughts or their cats, or their crazy thoughts about their cats. And they're about as Earth-shatteringly relevant as most people's crazy thoughts about cats might be expected to be - ie not remotely relevant or important at all.

Certainly not something you might describe as making a difference to this world.

Boy, was I wrong.

One English blogger has just made history in this regard. It appears as if his blog about pop twiglets Girls Aloud may have been instrumental in helping to prevent the kidnap, rape, murder, torture and mutilation of the band members.

Well done, that blogger.

What? Oh, the blog was his sick fantasy about murdering the girls in the band and he was the would-be killer that his blog brought to police attention?

Well, it still makes a difference in my book. Carry on with the crazy thoughts, people. Just make sure to keeping blogging about them too. The future of slutty pop music could depend on it.

Words that English is missing

Did you ever invent your own word?

I did.

English is a very adaptable language. It has in previous times incorporated large chunks of classical Greek, Latin, French, Germanic Saxon, Celtic and other languages into its lexicon.

This adaptibility may well be why, alongside British and American imperialism, that English is well on its way to becoming the first genuinely global language.

But there are still concepts in existence that English is lacking words for.

One great example is the joy of witnessing someone else's pain. Only the Germans could have identified the need for such a word, and they did. They call it 'schadenfreude'. And English has gleefully borrowed it.

But there are still many concepts missing a word to define them. So when we were young, we used to create our own.

These weren't dialect terms, or even, God forbid, Ulster-Scots. These were words that me and my mates made up when we were young to explain concepts that just don't have an official word in English.

One was SKRINGELY. Anything that makes you feel so uncomfortable that you have to move around slightly is skringely. Like when your parents sit you down to tell you the facts of life, or when a really ugly chick asks you out. Looking at gross pictures of stuff in science class could be skringely for the more squeamish. Listening to the blow-by-blow account of your gay mate's love life is also generally pretty skringely too.

A cognate term to skringely is SCRINKLE. You scrinkle about in bed on hot, sweaty, muggy nights. You scrinkle when an insect lands on your back and you jerk about trying to get rid of it. Scrinkling is any jerky movement aimed at providing comfort.

One great word we used that I reckon the English language needs to adopt is the verb TO BABOON. This describes an action regularly seen among the knackers, chavs, spides and scumbags of the world.

If you've ever seen baboons in the wild or in zoos, having a drink or some food, they're constantly spinning their heads back and forth over their shoulders suspiciously, for fear that they might get attacked from behind by another baboon.

It's exactly the same with scumbags. If you ever watch a bunch of street corner kids, hanging around of an evening, they constantly baboon. Heads jerk back and forth, scanning the territory for anyone they don't want to encounter, like parents, police or parole officers.

But possibly the best word we ever coined was actually a resurrection of an older English hunting term. Our modern word 'scum' comes directly from an antiquated word for fox excrement, which was called scomb.

From this came the hunting term scomber or scumber, which mean to NOT step in fox excrement. The reason you don't want to do this when hunting is because the dogs follow the smell of the fox poo, and they start thinking that you're the fox.

But it dawned on us that a word for narrowly avoiding ending up in the shit is something with many more uses outside of the narrow world of fox hunting. So we adopted the verb TO SCUMBER as having that wider meaning.

You could be shagging some young one in her parents' house when the front door goes. If you quickly manage to get your kit on and get out the window before angry daddy storms the bedroom, then you've successfully scumbered out of a potentially dangerous situation.

You've scumbered again when you screw up at work but someone else cops the blame, or you manage to get things sorted before the boss finds out. There are a myriad of potential uses of the verb to scumber, limited only by the amount of shit that human beings nearly find themselves in, but end up avoiding by a hair's breadth.

Those were some of our words, and I still find myself using them, much to the bemusement of those who listen to me.

And I haven't stopped making up words for things that lack their own terms in English. Most recently, I coined Asbopop.

Did any of you interweb people ever invent some words of your own which fill a hole in the English language?

Let's hear them!

The capital of East Ireland

This BBC radio 3 debate was only recently drawn to my attention. It dates from December 2006, prior to Liverpool's assumption of the European City of Culture title. But it has possibly more relevance now.

The question posed is fiendishly simple: Is Liverpool really an English city?

Or is it actually the primary outpost of Irish cultures (Gaelic and Dissenter) in Britain, some sort of proto-capital of a notional East Ireland?

Or is it better seen as a city state, a one-time global port now irreparably independent in spirit with a greater regional than national sense of identity?

Or perhaps like Hong Kong or Cape Town, Liverpool is really just the nearest of the many obscure outposts of the Empire to London, a post-colonial entity struggling to shrug off the post-imperial hangover?

There's no doubt that the city suffers disproportionately from negative stereotyping and slurs from the rest of the nation it purports to be part of. And there's no doubt that the denizens of Scouseland love to assert their separateness in a wide range of ways.

So, is Liverpool really an English city? Best listen and find out what the locals think.

Welcome to Jamestown

2007 is a real year for anniversaries. One of the most important is that it will be 400 years next month since the settling of Jamestown by English settlers.

Where's Jamestown, you may ask? Good question, as it's not on any contemporary maps anymore. It was the original settlement of the English in what we now call America.

Forget that fake origin myth about the Pilgrim Fathers. The original settlement was at Jamestown, though it didn't last very long.

In December 1606, over 100 settlers from London sailed from London under orders from James 1st (or the 6th, depending on whether you talk to the English or the Scots) to find gold and a westerly route to the trade centres of the Orient.

Yup, like all imperial adventures, it was a moneygrab, nothing more or less.

They settled Jamestown island in Virginia and almost immediately began fighting the actual inhabitants of the land, the Algonquin indians. Nice way to make friends in a new country. But there was no talk of multiculturalism or assimilation in those days.

By 1609, two-thirds of the population had starved to death. But the colony limped along for another ten years, until it was saved by the importation of, you guessed it, black slaves.

In 1622, the highly pissed-off local population took the battle to the colonists and killed 300 of them. King James was so annoyed he took the land into crown ownership.

The site remained of token importance as the location of Virginia's legislature until 1698, when the statehouse burned down. Within fifty years, it was buried below ground, the abortive first foothold of England on North American soil forgotten.

But its legacy obviously remains. Other English came, eradicated the natives and claimed the land. America became white, anglo-saxon and protestant, Wasp in other words.

Built on the back of black slave labour and continual immigration, not to mention genocide of the native inhabitants, the United States has good claim to be one of the least justifiable regimes on earth, from the very point of its origin to today.

On some level, Americans know this. Hence the continual desire of so many to hyphenate their nationality. They're not Americans, they're Irish-Americans, Latino-Americans, African-Americans.

In fact, the United States is so excited about celebrating its abortive birthplace that they've got luminaries like Bruce Hornsby and Chaka Khan to play at the celebratory event! Talk about ancient history!

On the other hand, the Brits are tremendously excited to resurrect memories of a time when they utilised theft and genocide to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of the world.

The current occupier of James' throne, good old Betty Saxe-Coburg Gotha, will be making a rare trip to the site of Jamestown next month not to commemorate the atrocities commited by the English at the site, but to 'celebrate' them.

What's to celebrate? English imperialism? Indigenous genocide? England doesn't lose habits easily. They're still involved in both activities today, in locations as diverse as Ireland and Iraq.

As Bruce Hornsby might sing, 'Some things will never change.'