A Kevin who uses his nous

Take last Tuesday, thermometer edging below freezing. We arrived at the Central Station at 10.20pm, noted with familiar foreboding that the train was delayed until 23.49 and adjourned, no less familiarly, to the pub.

At 11.25pm we returned. The last train had vanished from the screen, the station was deserted. Finally we found a chap pushing broom, like him in King of the Road, who insisted that the last train had left at 11.05 - exactly on revised schedule.

"Nonsense," we said, "we looked at three different screens." Brush-off averted, he radioed his gaffer. The gaffer was called Kevin; he said he'd come down.

Kevin was brilliant, customer care personified. The 22.43 was so late it had been rescheduled to terminate at Newcastle, he said. The relief train to Darlington, York and Doncaster was the one which had left about 20 minutes late. "It's the computer," he sympathised, "it can't differentiate between these things."

Headed for York, two women on the original train were also stranded at Newcastle, having paid just £15 apiece - a newspaper promotion - for day returns to Glasgow.

Kevin organised a complimentary taxi for us all, met the women on the platform, gently assured them it wasn't their fault (though probably, in truth, it was.) The taxi fare through Scotch Corner to York was around £150.

GNER is presently running an advertising campaign to the effect that, technology notwithstanding, their greatest assets are their people - "we don't programme our staff, we encourage them to use their initiative."

Quite right, too. Thanks heavens for the Kevins.

SO why did Kevins get such a bad name - a synonym for nerd, almost - in the 1990s?

Could it have been after the hapless gerbil who roomed with Roland Rat? Or the dozy ha'porth who twice married Little Miss Misery in Coronation Street? Or one or two other Kevins who most of us have encountered.

John Briggs in Darlington suggests that the Kevins' comeuppance might originate from a Rik Mayall character called Kevin Turvey, variously billed as "the quintessential Brummie bore" and "exquisitely banal."

Mayall's Kevin, he adds, was "a visual nightmare of suburban bad taste."

Other suggestions welcomed, as always. We may be talking Turvey again next week.

ANOTHER improbably vacant situation, Alan Macnab in Sedgefield spots Doncaster Council's ad for a hedgerow research officer - temporary for 12 months but expected to beat around every bush in the borough, to liaise with the biodiversity action partnership and "to work independently with a range of historical and geographical data in an investigative manner". Alan supposes that now it's out, everyone will want one. A growth industry, no doubt.

DISCUSSING onomatopoeia - "sound effect" words, like plodge - last week's column wondered if it were the only word in common English usage with four successive vowels.

Uncommon as ever, Gadfly readers offered several possibilities but none, until Alan Archbold's late arrival, saw the one that was staring us in the face.

Doug Arnold in Belmont, Durham, proposed pharmacopoeia - "pharmacological reference works" - John Briggs offered prosopopoeia ("personification") and Bill Morrison in Middleton One Row, near Darlington, suggested palaeoanthropology, the study of ancient people.

Bill also claimed that the roseate spoonbill is known as the aiaiai, which may be taken with a spoonful of anything you fancy, while the Oxford Dictionary also disqualifies by omission Doug Arnold's cooeeing - "an attention grabbing formula" and Paddy Burton's euouae, which his dad swears is in Chambers.

Alan Archbold, in Sunderland, also invites words with all the vowels in alphabetical order - arsenious, abstemious, facetious - before proposing his vowel play masterword, and without so much as a diphthong to join it along life's road.

Queueing. Why on earth were we all waiting for that?

Up to the oxters as usual, we mention "plodge" because, north of the Tees, that's the lyrical word for a paddle in the sea. South of the river, apparently, it's a splodge.

Vic Word, co-ordinator of the Lower Tees Dialect Group, confirms that it is so - and that to the north, a bit of wood in the finger is called a "spelk" while in Middlesbrough and similarly southerly places it's a "spell".

Only recently, indeed, he was asked to arbitrate in a dispute between a couple - both born and raised in the Boro - one of whom thought it a spelk and the other a spell. By way of etymological investigation of which Messrs Funk and Wagnall would themselves have been proud, he discovered that she'd attended the Roman Catholic grammar school in Hartlepool and thus been fetched up properly.

Vic, Redcar lad, also recalls his 1960s days at teacher training college in Staffordshire, when a fellow trainee from Sunderland announced that she had a spelk in her finger.

"I'd been to Sunderland many times and considered myself bilingual but the rest of the group were still baffled when I announced that it was a spell. All I'd done was translate from one dialect to another."

What she meant, of course, was a splinter. The splinter movement, alas, seems to be gaining the upper hand.

TWIN set, brother Dave has come up with the word (Gadfly, March 10) to describe a sentence in which the second clause of a sentence is a syntactical stranger to the first. It's called anacoluthia and last Thursday's Daily Mail had an example in inch high letters: "Aged just six, Mandy's mother told her she was so fat...."

VIA a friend in America, meanwhile, Chris Willsden in Darlington sends some essential additions for the 2004 workplace vocabulary. They include:

Blame storming - "sitting around in a group discussing why a deadline was missed or project failed, and who was responsible."

Assmosis: "The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up the boss, rather than working hard."

Mouse potato: "the on-line answer to the couch."

...and finally back to Alan Archbold, who invites anagrams of famous names - like Clint Eastwood ("Old West Action") or Spiro Agnew - "Grow a ...." You get the picture, anyway.

Readers may care to suggest others, but without guarantee of publicity. Last night we were again due to catch the last train from Newcastle.

Like the unfortunate Captain Oates, we may be gone some time.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/

news/gadfly.html

Published: ??/??/2003