Ordering Adjectives with Author Mark Forsyth

Rob Bell:
Hello, and welcome to Sketchplanations The Podcast, inviting you to listen in on our chats, inspired by the collection of sketches at sketchplanations.com that notice the world around us to help fuel your own great conversations.

I'm engineer and broadcaster Rob Bell, and joining me as always is designer and creator of Sketchplanations, Jono Hey.

And our special guest on this episode is the award-winning and best-selling author, journalist, linguophile, etymologist and general wordsmith extraordinaire Mark Forsyth.

What Mark doesn't know, and I might add, brilliantly communicate through his books, articles and talks about words and the English language simply isn't worth knowing.

Mark, hello, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

Mark Forsyth:
Hello, thank you so much for having me on.

I love the sketches.

Rob Bell:
They are good.

I gave you a relatively brief introduction there, Mark, because I feel that your expertise and passion for words and language will become very clear to our listeners as we get onto a few bits in the podcast.

But would you say that that was accurate, that you are a lover of language and the English language specifically?

Mark Forsyth:
Yes.

I love the English language.

I've written three books on it.

But I think in a way, I realized actually, it's funny when you're writing and going through your career and your life and all that sort of stuff, you sometimes realize in retrospect what it is you're interested in.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Mark Forsyth:
This can happen in all sorts of different ways.

I had a friend who had a particular type of girl he was into, this back in our 20s, and on the fifth very thin blonde girl that he was going out with, I said to him, oh yeah, she's exactly your type.

He said, I don't have a type, I don't.

He said, yes, you do.

I had to explain to him.

And there's a certain thing I realized, what I'm really interested in is stuff that we're very familiar with in a way, but we've never properly looked at these aspects of life.

So languages, one of them, because we all, I mean, all of us are native English speakers, we never think about the language, we never stop and say, isn't it odd that mucking in is completely different to mucking about, which is completely different to mucking around and mucking out a stable, and we're, you know, getting on with somebody, it's different from getting off with somebody, and they're not mutually exclusive.

And we don't stop and think about this stuff.

And it was the same because I did another book, after my three books in English Language, I did a book on the history of Christmas traditions, because we all think at Christmas that it's completely normal to put a dead tree in the corner of our living room and then convince our children that a fat Turkish saint from the third century AD is going to come down the chimney.

And all these strange things we do at Christmas, and we don't stop and think about.

And then I wrote a book about the history of drunkenness, because drunk drinking is again, I have a glass of wine in my hand, this podcast being recorded at 8.30.

Rob Bell:
In the evening, I must add to that.

Mark Forsyth:
Yes.

Oh, yes, in the evening.

But drinking is something we don't think about, which is something we do, almost all societies on earth, for most of human history, have done it.

But we don't stop and think, which interests me.

Rob Bell:
And you studied English at Oxford, is that right?

And is that where your love affair with language started, or had that shown itself already?

And hence, that's why you went to go and study?

Mark Forsyth:
I think it has shown itself already.

I've loved language and poetry since I was a tiny little boy.

I sometimes joke I've got my godfather gave me a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary for a christening present.

And yeah, I've never recovered.

Rob Bell:
So he's to blame.

I get you.

Mark Forsyth:
Yeah.

Rob Bell:
Your talks and your books and your articles are always informative, Mark.

We're always very entertaining as well, I find.

Do you get a kick out of giving people that, oh, wow, I never knew that kind of moment?

Mark Forsyth:
Yeah, I love that.

I love that feeling of making people go, and especially on something which they feel they know, and just getting that little moment of recognition where people go, oh, of course, just explaining to people that a fan, in the sense of a Taylor Swift fan or an Arsenal fan, is just short for the word fanatic.

There we go.

It's just a shortening, and then you go, oh, obviously, it's got nothing to do with an air fan, the thing to keep you cool in the summer.

It's just a fanatic, a fan of it.

Yeah, and that lived those little moments when everything suddenly gels and makes sense, are beautiful and beautiful to see that emerge on people's faces.

Jono Hey:
Mark, not to digress too far, but we were actually listening as a family of 11 and 13-year-old boys to the Etymologicon in the car, which I think you read, and since then, they haven't been able to talk about the word avocado to save after that.

Can you say really quickly what that is all about?

Mark Forsyth:
That comes from the Nahuatl or Aztec word for testicle, because the Aztecs thought that this fruit, the avocado, looked like a great big gonad, and so that's why it's called avocado, and you should remember that.

Next time you're eating either just eating a plain avocado, which may give you pause for thought, but next time you're eating a smashed avocado, you've got to realize that this is some sort of very, very radical feminist statement.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, so we can't have an avocado with a straight face in the house anymore, thanks to you.

It's brilliant.

You can look at something a whole new way.

Mark Forsyth:
And there's another one like that in the Etymological, of realizing that your mate is somebody you share your meat with.

It's in origin, the same word, meeting and mating between people.

And then similarly, your companion is somebody you share your bread with, French word for bread, and the Latin is pan, panus.

Yeah, so it's, yeah, your companion is just your bread sharer.

Rob Bell:
Do you see what I mean, listeners, about not needing a big introduction, because Mark knows his stuff and that passion for the language is so, so clear.

Well, Mark, let's not beat about the bush.

And I'm almost certain that you could tell me where that phrase originates from as well.

You have a new book out, Rhyme and Reason, or to give its full title, Rhyme and Reason, A short history of Poetry and People for people who don't usually read poetry.

Mark Forsyth:
Yes.

Rob Bell:
This is your eighth book, is that right?

Mark Forsyth:
Yes, I think it's my eighth.

I keep having to add them up and count one, two, three, four, five.

Eight, yes.

Rob Bell:
Can you explain to Alice briefly what the book's about?

Mark Forsyth:
It's about poetry and the history of English poetry.

And in that sense, it wouldn't be that interesting or new or anything like that.

But what I wanted to do is I think everyone reads poetry the wrong way.

And the thing about most histories of poetry is it's a series of great men, basically a series of biographies of great men who wrote great poems, and you should appreciate them.

And if you don't appreciate them, you're an idiot because everyone proper appreciates poetry.

And so it's just a biography of the age of Shakespeare, the age of Milton, the age of Alexander Pope, the age of Wordsworth, that sort of thing.

So with a lot about their lives, a tiny bit about their poetry, and nothing about who read it or why.

And the thing about all the poetry that's come down to us as the great poetry is people at the time, people enjoyed it.

People have enjoyed it for centuries, and people read it for pleasure, not because they were forced to in school, not because they were writing an essay about it, but because they really liked it.

So I thought what I wanted to do, because I love poetry and I just enjoy it.

I don't appreciate poetry, because appreciation is something you do for stuff you don't really like.

Yeah, you'll never say, I really appreciated that meal you cooked.

I'm by.

Yeah, appreciation is, and analysis is another thing we don't do for stuff we like, the stuff we enjoy, we don't analyze that much.

So I thought it would be good and fun and really interesting to write a book about.

The readers of poetry and what they start from the other end.

So start from the year is 1610, you're a fashionable young man in London, you've got a big hat with a feather in it, you've got a sword and you've got a chapbook, which is what fashionable young men carried around with them to note stuff down, especially poetry, because poetry was stuff they liked, they stuff they shared, they liked dirty poetry, they liked elaborate poetry with strange jokes in it and stuff like that.

You've got to see these poems as fun things which were being shared by racy, fashionable, rich young men in the capital usually.

That was the fun of it.

Once you can bring people around and say, if you were a reader of poetry in the 1900 or whatever, then this is who you were, this is what you were looking for, and this is why Wordsworth actually was really enjoyable or whoever it happened to be.

So I've done that from medieval times all through to the 20th century.

And what was it like to read a Tudor love sonnet?

If you were a Tudor girl, you expected to get a love sonnet from or you hoped to get a love sonnet from the chap you liked.

And then when you read it, you didn't analyze it, you didn't write an essay on it, you didn't try and dissect the imagery.

You're going, wow, Tommy wrote me a sonnet and you're looking at it like that.

Rob Bell:
And that's not necessarily how we see poetry today.

Is that the kind of outcome of what you write?

Mark Forsyth:
The way we see poetry today is the outcome of a schooling educational system, which was set up in the 1920s or 30s.

And it's observable that as that system of education, poetry being something taught in school, something you write essays on, something you get examined on, has grown over the last 100 years.

The popularity of poetry has absolutely plummeted.

Poetry used to be something people was really, really popular.

People, everybody read it.

These days, everybody loves Jane Austen.

We have a constant film adaptations.

People love Jane Austen.

And nobody reads Lord Byron anymore.

But Lord Byron, who wrote poems, he sold more books in a single afternoon than Jane Austen sold in her lifetime.

In an afternoon.

Pride and Prejudice was a best-selling novel for its time.

It sold very well.

Over the first decade, it was out.

It sold 3,000 copies.

That's good sales figures for a novel.

Yes.

But Byron sold 10,000 copies in an afternoon.

That's where the poem The Course came out.

The afternoon, 10,000 copies.

Novels were just nowhere near.

Poetry was far more enjoyable.

People were crazy for it.

Rob Bell:
So what's replaced that now in modern society?

Do you feel, Mark?

Mark Forsyth:
Poetry has been in different places at different times, but largely, I think it's moved over to pop songs and pop lyrics for that kind of thing.

But the thing about pop lyrics is I spent a lot of time trying to be very careful.

Carefully say this in sort of the last second, last chapter of the book is pop lyrics are wonderful.

And I think they're great, but they are different from poetry.

Prose can be wonderful, poetry can be wonderful, pop lyrics can be wonderful.

But the thing about poetry is that it doesn't, pop lyrics require a melody to make them wonderful, but they're written to have a melody.

So I think the lyrics to Yesterday by the Beatles are wonderful.

But if you try and just recite them without singing them, they suddenly sound terrible and weak and lame.

And you go, yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.

Now it looks as though, and it's awful.

They're beautiful, beautiful lyrics when sung to that melody.

They were originally sung to that melody.

And it's the same goes for Taylor Swift, because this funny thing, people still have this residual appreciation for poetry.

They say, this stuff is so good, it's poetry.

It's not, it's a beautiful song lyrics or it's beautiful prose.

But poetry is something different.

It's run, runs in verse, it often has a rhyme.

It's a different thing, which is meant to have its own internal music to it.

Rob Bell:
So let's pause our chat on poetry and rhyme and reason there.

But we will come back to it, Mark, because I know there's a whole treasure trove of fascinations that you've written about in in Rhyme and Reason on poetry.

And I want to get into that in more detail.

But as this is the Sketchplanations podcast, we'd love to kick off by getting into an element of English syntax that you wrote about in your third book.

I think it was the element of eloquent that inspired Jono to do a sketch.

And that is on how to order adjectives correct.

And it is an intriguing little sketch, Jono, that I absolutely love because it makes me laugh because when you look at it and you read it, it's a very strange situation.

It makes sense.

But you look at it, I don't...

Jono Hey:
What?

What is this?

Rob Bell:
You should be able to see the sketch as the artwork for this episode.

And I will include a link to it in this episode show notes as well, because it is well worth a proper look up at sketchplanations.com whilst we're talking about this.

Jono, do you want to talk to us a bit about the sketch first?

And was it Mark's book that first alerted you to the fact that this was a thing?

Jono Hey:
Do you know what?

I first learned about this from an article that you wrote, I think of the BBC.

And it was exactly that kind of thing that we started with, which was things that you know, that you don't know, that you know.

And what I think is so fascinating about this one is that you see, you call it like a grammar syntax rule, just then or something, it is, but it isn't, in the sense that nobody knows it.

And yet we all do it.

And that's what I think is so fascinating about this one.

So this one, I tried to think of a sentence or a scenario which used all of this crazy order of adjectives, which is that we almost always put adjectives in a particular order.

So the first one is about opinion, then it's size, then it's how old it is, then it's the shape, then it's the colour, the origin, material, purpose.

And so the sketch has this terrific giant old circular grey Scottish stone throwing toy, which obviously is a ridiculous thing to be doing in the first place.

But if you were to mix up all the order of the words there, you very quickly find that it doesn't sound at all like English or it doesn't make sense, or it means something quite different.

And yet we can just do this ourselves since we're 10 years old, and we just speak it naturally in English.

And that's what Mark alerted me to in this article, which then led me to his book and then to all sorts of other ones, which I've also sketched, thanks to the inspiration from Mark.

Rob Bell:
So then Mark, is it a rule?

Is it a habit?

Is it just observation?

Mark Forsyth:
The way you realise it's a rule is if you try and mess it up.

If you say, a circular, terrific toy, that just sounds wrong.

It's a terrific, circular toy.

Or if you say, a stone, old toy, that wouldn't work.

It was interesting.

Somebody pointed out to me today.

I said I was going on this podcast and we would be discussing the order of adjectives and she was asking where sexuality went and I didn't know.

And I spent five minutes trying to test sentences to see.

Rob Bell:
I'm coming back to our terrific, giant old circular, grey Scottish stone throwing toy here.

And well, exactly.

Mark Forsyth:
But if it were terrific, giant, gay man, or if it was an old, gay man or more, this is the problem is, can you do a round lesbian woman or a lesbian round?

Well, I think it's going to be a round lesbian woman.

Or should be where does sexuality drop in color?

I think it's between color and I think it's between color and origin.

It would be a gay French man.

Jono Hey:
As opposed to a French gay man.

Yes, that sounds, doesn't sound right.

Rob Bell:
But it would be, yes, a white, gay French man.

I'm sorry, for example.

Mark Forsyth:
Well, there's also a question just to bring all the modern politics in.

If you say a black man, is that color or origin that we are talking about within this context?

And the color and origin are next to each other.

So I was trying to work out, yes, is it a white, gay man or a dead man?

Yes.

This is the sort of thing people get very angry about on Twitter and people get canceled for and get threats.

But I was just, I never thought about this question.

Yeah, bring them on.

I never thought about this question.

So I don't know where it goes, but I spent a good five minutes making up the strange sentences because there's also material.

So can you say a gay concrete man or a concrete gay man?

Rob Bell:
I'm loving the fact that we are adding to this ordering now.

Yeah, I think I concur with your suggestion between color and origin.

Mark Forsyth:
I think so, but I mean, that's just from making up utterly ridiculous sentences about bisexuals who are made of cotton.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, fine.

But like you say, you have to play with this rule in order to determine.

And if it is a rule, and how is that rule formed?

Mark Forsyth:
And the fun thing is to play with this, to try and see if you can break the order anywhere at all.

And it's very, very hard to do.

And it just sounds very, very wrong to an English speaker, which is beautiful.

I saw somebody on the internet refer to it as being, it's like you can sing the source code for the English language.

But it's wrong that nobody knows it.

We don't know it.

Native English speakers don't know it.

But foreigners, people who had to learn English as a foreign language, they've all seen this chart loads of times because they get tested on it.

This is, yeah, this is the very, very annoying, boring, like why do the English speakers have this stupid rule?

And yeah, why do I have to memorize it?

Rob Bell:
They do.

Mark Forsyth:
They have to memorize these things.

Rob Bell:
I was wondering about that because it dawned on me that it is the kind of thing that somebody learning English as a second language might not always get right.

And so then that would indicate to us as native English speakers that, oh, that English probably isn't their first language.

Even if they had the most English accent, just little nuances like that would be very obvious to us.

We might not know why.

But I didn't know that that is something that is taught within English.

Mark Forsyth:
Some, yes, some other languages have their own orders of adjectives.

Some of them are very similar.

But yeah, lots of people have to learn this.

And it's one of the drug-free bits of learning English.

Like I was referring earlier, I think, to Ronan, you were chatting, I can't remember if it was before you recorded, to phrasal verbs, which is things like breaking up with somebody is different from breaking into a house or breaking out of jail.

And then the phrasal verbs, which we all just know, very, very intuitive, are the hardest, most annoying thing to learn if you're a foreigner trying to learn in English, as you have to learn that doing up a house is, they don't have any meaning.

To do up a house should be to perform the house in the direction of the sky.

You see what I mean?

Whereas doing somebody down, or doing in somebody, doing in somebody is killing them.

And there are so many just random prepositions you can put on the end of a verb to change its meaning.

And yeah, these have to be memorized.

It is very, very boring.

Rob Bell:
I was looking at it now, and there isn't even an acronym there, is there?

O, opinion size, O, S, A, S, no, there isn't.

So Jono and I both speak a bit of French, Mark, and I started looking at it into French, because I don't remember being taught anything like this in French, in terms of an order of adjectives.

But apparently, there is.

And in French, there's an interesting element where certain adjectives or categories of adjectives come before the noun, and certain come after it as well.

And I didn't know this, but apparently, there's something called the Bags Rule.

So beauty, age, goodness, and size come before the noun, typically in that order.

And I think just because I have spent quite a lot of time in France speaking with French people, I think it is intuitive for me that I would know that something was wrong, but I wouldn't know why, or I'd know if I'd got it wrong or not.

Mark Forsyth:
I don't know that's just because I speak a bit of French as well.

I don't know if that's because we've been going for so long, but it'd be, wait, would it be un grand table vert for a big green table?

Yes, for the vert coming after that.

Rob Bell:
Color, shape, material come after.

Mark Forsyth:
After the grand before.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, there you go.

Do we just, no, but I don't remember.

Did you remember learning that as part of a grammar?

Mark Forsyth:
No, I don't, but I was always very bad at learning.

The thing is we complain when we learn, especially if we learn Spanish or even more, especially Latin, how to memorize those verb tables.

It's like, why do you have to do this?

But we have our own troublesome bits in English, which we just never think about.

Rob Bell:
Well, let's talk about that.

Are there other rules or patterns similar to this ordering of adjectives in English that we naturally just tend to without consciously learning them?

Mark Forsyth:
Well, the classic is about reduplication, which is, bells always go ding-dong, I-O, rather than going dong-ding, and clocks go tick-tock, they don't go tock-tick.

Rob Bell:
I-O again, yeah, okay.

Mark Forsyth:
There's the pitter-patter of tiny feet, but never the patter-pitter of tiny feet, and bish-bash-bosh is the full three one, is I-A-O, and it's always I-A-O in some form.

Rob Bell:
Splish-splash-splosh as well on there, yeah, okay.

Mark Forsyth:
Splish-splash-splosh, yeah, splash-splosh-splish is just wrong, and it goes down to like King Kong or Kit-Kat or, yeah, trade names, character names.

It's always got to be I-A-O.

Rob Bell:
Just coming back to the ordering, the adjectives, is there a theory behind why or is there a theory or history that we know why it is ordered in that way?

Mark Forsyth:
No, I don't think there's any history, any, yeah, any knowledge of how this came about.

It just slowly did.

And same goes with the Blountary Duplication, which weirdly enough appears in all sorts of different languages in the same order as our own I-A-O, Bish-Bash-Bosh, Ding-Dang-Dong.

Rob Bell:
I'm just making those sounds.

Jono Hey:
You're trying to frame change.

Mark Forsyth:
People have theories that it's due to the shape of the mouth or something in Proto-Ideo-European, but no one knows.

Jono Hey:
Somebody did say to me that it was easier to, that I-A and O is like moving sounds from the front of your mouth to the back of your mouth, but it sort of feels intuitive to me if I do zig-zag-zog, but I don't know if that is actually the case.

Now, who knows why?

Mark Forsyth:
Is that the why or is that a retrospective explanation that makes it all seem good and simple?

Linguists get into very heated academic debates about this.

I'm not going to claim I have an answer at all other than say no one knows really.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Well, so Jono, Ablaut reduplication you have a sketch on, is that right?

Jono Hey:
I did do Ablaut reduplication because I think you also covered that in the other article, which was another fascinating things you do right, but you don't know why you do them right and you didn't know that you did do them right as a native speaker.

So yeah, sort of revealing something about it.

Other than that, I've done a few other examples that I've learned from the Elements of Eloquence, which I've just really enjoyed and actually our 13-year-old was really enjoying as well.

What inspired me to reach out, I recently covered Chiasmus, which you've done all sorts of interesting talks about how people have brilliant turns of phrases and speeches which somehow grab us for some peculiar reason, but we don't need to go too far into those.

There's plenty we can come back there.

Rob Bell:
Well, we've mentioned it.

Should we touch on Chiasmus briefly, what it is?

Mark Forsyth:
Yeah, I mean, Chiasmus is when you have two phrases that reverse the order.

Best in the example, T for Two and Two for Tea is an old jazz song.

A more modern song will be Snoop Dogg's With My Money on My Mind and My Mind on My Money.

Or there's loads in JFK's inauguration speech, Ask Not What Your Country Can Do for You, But What You Can Do for Your Country.

Mankind Must Put an End to War.

War Put an End to Mankind.

Once you start seeing these lined up together, you realize there's a pattern forming.

Rob Bell:
And that is much more of a conscious effort to include those in speech.

I imagine that than what we've been talking about about reduplication and ordering of adjectives.

Mark Forsyth:
Chiasmus tends to be a very sort of artificial and obviously artificial one way you put that all together.

Jono Hey:
My aunt used to teach classics and so I had lots of fun conversations with her about language.

I sent her a copy of your book actually and when I did the Chiasmus sketch, she pointed out I think that it's called Chiasmus because chi is the letter X.

And so is this right?

So if you were to take the clauses and you write clause A, clause B and then you put them on top of each other, they're clause B, clause A, it makes a letter X, which is why it was Chiasmus.

Mark Forsyth:
Oh, I did not know that.

You told me in etymology I didn't know.

Jono Hey:
No way, no way.

Well, I mean, it was my aunt who pointed that out, which I thought was brilliant.

So yeah, it's all fun things in language.

Mark Forsyth:
There's a thing called a cutthroat compound.

I call it cutthroat compound.

Many other people call it cutthroat compound.

It's terribly simple, really.

I really like them.

If you drink beer, you're a beer drinker.

And if you wear a shirt, you're a shirt wearer.

And if you meet, you're a meat eater and so on and so forth.

The way we form that is noun, verb, uh, so beer drinker, mine drinker, water.

Yeah.

Um, but between about 1600 year, 1600 year, 1800, they would often form it the other way around of going verb noun.

So, um, somebody who picks pockets wasn't called a pocket picker.

They were called a pick pocket.

If you say what I mean, somebody cuts throats, wasn't called a throat cutter.

They were called a cut throat.

And somebody who, um, well, a thing that scares crows wasn't called a crow scurrer.

It was called a scarecrow.

And similarly, if you lick spittle, you're a lick spittle, not a spittle licker.

And, uh, there's telltale.

Loads of these survive in the language.

They were all formed in that 200 year period.

But, you know, telltale, um, a daredevil, a know nothing, a spitfire, um, escape grace.

Uh, there's a lovely old term, a catch fart, for somebody who follows their boss around, as it were, catching their farts.

And then one of my favorites is a swashbuckler, because people often get that one wrong.

They think that you are, um, uh, buckling your swash.

Whereas in fact, a swashbuckler is somebody who swashes, waves around his shield, which is also called a buckler.

So a swashbuckler is somebody swashing their buckler.

Rob Bell:
Let's come back to Rhyme and Reason, Mark.

Your new book about poetry, as you described earlier for us, and the history of poetry, but then how it was within society.

And we started talking about Lord Byron earlier and about the poets themselves, which as you explained, there are lots of books of the history of these poets, and then they have biographies and all about them.

So let's flip it back.

How were these poets seen by society?

Because in my mind, we're talking about Taylor Swift and the Beatles earlier.

Were they the rock stars of the day?

If their art or their output was enjoyed by the masses for entertainment?

Mark Forsyth:
Sometimes they were.

I was deliberately, the whole way through the book, I was trying not to talk about the poets at all.

Because a lot of the time, people didn't know who wrote this poem or who wrote this play, if we're talking about the first plays of the Tudor period.

People just liked the poem.

And in a lot of ways, it's...

I mean, the analogy is to music films today.

People don't usually know who the screenwriter of a film is, of the film they go and see.

You go and see a Tom Cruise movie or Clint Eastwood movie.

You don't know.

Sometimes you go and see a movie because the director.

You don't know who wrote the line.

And you very, very rarely care.

And indeed, the lines are often, you think of them as being the line belonging to an actor.

I'll Be Back is an Arnold Schwarzenegger line.

We'll always have Paris is a Humphrey Bogart line.

These aren't lines that belong to, yeah, you know, are you feeling lucky?

Punk is a Clint Eastwood line.

None of these lines were written by the actor.

They were spoken by the actor.

But we don't think of it like that.

We just don't care who wrote them.

And it's the same with most pop songs.

Now, sometimes you have singer-songwriters like the Beatles, we all know who that is.

But much of the time, you don't know the name of the guy who wrote the song.

Even if you love the song, you might have listened to it loads and loads of times, but you have to go to the liner notes to find out who it is, unless it's the singer themselves.

You probably do know the composer if you're an industry figure.

An analogy I should take up in the book is, in terms of who's had the most number ones of all songwriters in history in the American Billboard Hot 100 chart.

The top guy is Paul McCartney.

Third place is John Lennon.

Second place is Max Martin.

Now most people, I think, on the street have not heard of Max Martin.

You two?

Do you know who that is?

Jono Hey:
I don't know who that is.

Mark Forsyth:
You know the song Hit Me Baby One More Time?

Jono Hey:
Okay.

Yes.

Mark Forsyth:
Which he wrote and you probably know the song Backstreet's Back, which he wrote and indeed half the number ones of the 21st century were written by Max Martin.

But no one knows Max Martin's name.

Nobody cares.

We like the song.

So Hit Me Baby One More Time is a Britney Spears song.

And that satisfies us.

We don't know.

I mean, similarly, I'm just with Shakespeare.

People never went to see a Shakespeare play in the 1590s.

You went to see a Richard Burbage play because Richard Burbage was the star.

He was the actor.

You went to see a Richard Burbage and the Kingsman performing at the Globe.

You didn't.

Who was Shakespeare?

He was on the liner notes.

If you were rich, you could buy a copy of the play's script, which cost the equivalent of about £8,100 in today's money, so you probably didn't.

Expensive merch, and that would have his name on it.

But most people didn't know who Shakespeare was, and they didn't care.

Richard Burbage was Hamlet, and Richard Burbage was Othello.

That's who you went to see.

You went to see the star.

Those were his lines.

Rob Bell:
So would that have been the same with poetry, then?

That this poetry was written, but then it would be performed?

Or because if people were buying poetry in book form, then surely that would be the author's name would be there?

Mark Forsyth:
This changes slowly over time, so it would vary massively.

In terms of Chaucer, Chaucer's guy who would have read out his poem for elite, rich royal audiences, they would have cared about his name, thought they would have liked the poem or not, and he would have read them out and then been asked to leave.

Rob Bell:
And when is Chaucer?

When are we talking?

Mark Forsyth:
So that's 14th century, medieval.

If you get to the 16th century, you've got lots of people writing.

A lot of stuff we still learn in school today is people writing poems for each other.

So people wrote, a man was expected to write a love sonnet to a girl.

If you want to get a girl, she expects a love sonnet in the same way that these days, roughly speaking, it still remains the case that you want to get a girl, you ask her out on a date, you take her for a nice meal, and you pick up the tab at the end of the first date.

These are things that a chap was meant to do.

But if you get through to the plays of the end of the 16th century where you've got Shakespeare and Marlowe and all those people, no one cared about the name of the playwright, then you got to the period of lots of people, like I was saying, fashionable young men in London passing poems around and just sort of copying them out, at which point you sort of sometimes knew that it was probably written by a friend of a friend of a friend because these weren't being printed, they're just being passed around.

You get to the restoration and absolutely nobody, almost nobody cared who wrote what.

Loads of stuff is just published anonymously, collected up, knocked out, you have all these broadside ballads, nobody knows who wrote them.

They were sold at public occasions like executions and other fun stuff like that.

Then in the 18th century, you get into, you start getting this more into knowing names and the star poets, so Alexander Pope becomes a star to some extent, and then you get to get to Byron, he's the first superstar, and he was so massive as a celebrity that the poems were almost, I mean, he was famous as a poet, but the poems were almost just a part of the huge Lord Byron brand, which was international news because his private life was international news because everybody was obsessed with it.

And when you read Lord Byron, it was very, very like the new Taylor Swift album today, everyone read it to try and find out what was going on in his marriage, in his private life, you're trying to decode it in the way.

Same thing that happens when a new Taylor Swift album drops, and all the Swifties go mad trying to work out which song refers to who.

I know this really was international.

I was going through, I had fun going through American local newspapers, reporting on Lord Byron's life, which was front page news in local.

So I think there was a city in South Carolina I picked up at random, Charlotte, South Carolina, and their local paper, you have the adverts which are things like $500 reward for this man who shot another man in cold blood and rode off into the sunset.

And then main news item, the front page, the big news item is Lord Byron's marriage in crisis.

New poem has dropped.

And then they print the whole of the new poem, which is so 50 lines long.

And then all the gossip from London on, like Lord Byron's father in law has said, can the family be left alone?

And yes.

And but there's maybe the poem refers to this other woman and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Exactly as you would have for Taylor Swift.

Yes.

I found the distance on Google Maps, I think was exactly 3000 miles away.

I mean, maybe misremembering that.

Yes, local newspaper where you still got adverts offering rewards for escaped slaves and people being shot in shootouts.

And yeah, all they cared about was Byron and his new poem.

Jono Hey:
I was struck a few times actually as I was reading the book, how much was actually in the papers.

And if I think about that now, the idea that a paper would publish full long poems for people to read, it sounds crazy.

Yet throughout the book, there's examples of full poems appearing in newspapers across the country and the US.

So I guess to me, I suppose that showed a little bit of the, just how different it was seen then, that it was mainstream, everybody would want to read this.

Mark Forsyth:
Yeah, hugely popular mainstream stuff.

And it was a vital part of society.

When you go past Byron, you get into the Victorian times, where if you, in a Victorian dinner party, if I had you over for dinner in 1850 or you had me over for dinner in 1850, then after dinner, there's no TV or anything.

So we all have to do a little party piece.

You have to sing a song, play the piano.

If you can juggle, you can juggle.

But the basic one everyone does is you recite a poem.

And so you've got to have a poem to recite.

It's got to be five to ten minutes long, which is a long thing to remember.

But yeah, but this is a social necessity.

This is you've got to have one which is new.

People know you've got to keep changing your poems if you want to be invited to dinner parties anymore.

And you're going to have to look through some, pick one which suits you.

You don't want to be a poem which doesn't suit your character.

You may be using this to impress the girl who's at the dinner party.

She's probably going to have to recite a poem which is going to make her look good.

And so everyone had these poems which they would recite.

And this is what got you invited to places.

Rob Bell:
It feels like we're talking about the higher echelons of society.

Was that always the case where poetry was being enjoyed?

Mark Forsyth:
No, because actually, it's exactly in the Victorian period.

You go down, you've got the musical comes along, which the Victorian musical, which is the entertainment for the masses.

It's basically a cheap theatre you go to.

Rob Bell:
The East End of London, for example, in this city.

Mark Forsyth:
You had them all around Britain, though you have one.

Every city had several musicals.

It was a big thing, and it would be a bunch of acts.

You would have maybe a performing dog or a juggler or a dancer, and things like that, a variety show.

But usually, the big act was the guy reciting the poems.

They were getting exactly the same thing that the middle and upper classes were getting around the family half after dinner.

They would get that from a professional actor in the musicals, and they often got the very, very good actors.

Because oddly enough, because it will be a one-man show, if you see what I mean, all the money comes to you.

Whereas if you're in a play in the West End, a posh play in the West End, then that's going to be divided amongst 15 people in the cast and the set designer and so on and so forth.

Whereas a one-man show could make you a lot of money.

So they would go out there and they would recite the Tennyson, they would recite the Browning, they would recite the old Shakespeare stuff.

And then there was stuff which was written specifically for musicals.

And it was a huge seller.

And that continued right the way through to the 1920s.

Rob Bell:
And you know, Ellie, when you're talking about people sharing these poems or excerpts from poems or lines from poems that would become, I mean, I hate, I'm trying to put it in modern language.

I don't want to use it.

I'm going to say almost viral.

Would certain parts of poems kind of go viral?

Mark Forsyth:
Oh, absolutely.

They could, yes.

Rob Bell:
That could cross classes that a line or a part of a poem could become very, very popular and very much recited and repeated.

Mark Forsyth:
It would depend on the time and the place.

I mean, the viral thing is more when I went back to when I was talking about the, like, fashionable young men in London in the year 1610, and they are, they have poems and which are usually kind of raunchy and a little, and often very topical.

And if you've got a raunchy topical poem, then other people want to copy it out, and then it gets copied out.

And it's like, like a very slow version of Twitter running today, of how many copies has this got.

And so, John Donne's on going to, to his mistress on going to bed, which is, Tony, if you know, he's got the famous lines, license my roving hands and let them go before behind, between, above, below, oh, my America, my newfound land, my kingdom's safest when with one man manned, and my mind of precious stones, my empory, how blessed am I in this discovery.

That one went viral in so far as they got just copied way more than everybody else's poems and, and it's, it's, it's shooting round and, and becoming a big thing like that.

Other times, it would be a different thing.

I have Victorian poetry would get published and republished in magazines, newspapers often without permission and yeah, that's, oh yeah, that goes on all through the 19th century.

Going viral, it's, it's sort of, that's an on-off thing throughout, throughout the history of poetry, but you can't sort of say it always went viral, it never went viral, it changes too much as time goes on.

Rob Bell:
That's very interesting.

Jono Hey:
Can I jump in and you also have, perhaps to link it back to these ordering adjectives bit, quite a bit about, I guess, the sort of hidden rhythm of English, because obviously poetry has rhythm and there was a term I remember as a kid, because my parents evidently had to learn it at school when they had to learn Latin, was this funny word called the iambic pentameter.

You actually talk about this and variations of this quite a lot, and also some interesting things about the rhythms of language.

I was wondering if you could share a little bit about those rhythms that you discuss in the book.

Mark Forsyth:
Yeah, so every word in the English language has a stress on one or more syllables, but not next to each other.

So you can sort of see this if you say sentences like, the soldier will desert in the desert.

Now, desert and desert are different words.

And we think about it, what is the difference?

We desert in desert, desert the stresses on the second syllable, desert the stresses on the first.

And it's exactly the same if I say, I object to this object, object the verb, stress on the second object, stress on the first.

I present you with this present, the rebel will rebel.

But the thing is that every word has a stress somewhere.

And what you can do is arrange the words into an order, so the stresses start to form a rhythm.

So you get, shall I compare the two of summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer's lease hath all too short a date.

And it's that rhythm that's assignment pentameter, which is five to tums in a row, ta dum, ta dum, ta dum, ta dum, ta dum.

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.

And the Ion-Bake Pentameter is the central rhythm of English poetry, and it's what Shakespeare wrote in Milton Wordsworth, half the great poems ever written in English are in that rhythm and all variations on it.

I spend a lot of time in the book going on about small variations, how it came about and these sorts of things.

But there are other rhythms, so you can have ones that, instead of going to tum, to tum, to tum, to tum, to tum, to tum, to tum, to tum, to tum.

So, it was the night before Christmas and all through the house, the creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

Or that's a children's one, but you can do that for adult ones.

So, Byron, we were talking about, he wrote a poem which starts, The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, and his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold, and the sheen of his spears were like stars on the sea, where the blue wave does, sorry, run out of breath, when the blue wave falls slightly on de Galilee.

So, that's anapis, going to tum, to tum, to tum, and you can do it with, there's another one, tum, to tum, to tum, to tum, to tum, to tum, yes, in charge of the light brigade by a friend or tennis, and goes guns to the left of them, guns to the right of them, into the valley of the 600, and so on and so forth.

So it's all about those rhythms, getting those rhythms going, and therefore just making reading more pleasurable.

And this is one of the funny things.

For so long, for so many centuries, poetry was considered nicer to read than prose, because it had a rhythm.

And prose doesn't have a rhythm.

So why wouldn't you want it at a rhythm and a rhyme?

And you've got everything.

Jono Hey:
Will Barron You had a fascinating fact in the book about, I think it was the top-selling recent author in Britain.

Mark Forsyth:
So I heard this story about Julie Donaldson from a publisher, and I didn't know whether it was true, but I researched it, so I got in touch with Julie Donaldson.

And I heard that when she wrote her books, the Gruffalo is best famous, but there are so many, that she would give the book to her husband to read aloud, and he wasn't allowed to practice at all.

He just had to go through and read the whole thing straight off.

And if he stumbled over the rhythm, he got the rhythm wrong at any point, she would take it away and rewrite it because she was writing for parents, usually tired parents who are trying to read something out to their children.

And so it has to be absolutely natural, that rhythm there, it has to suggest itself and it has to come out.

And all those Julia Donaldson books, they do, they come out so brilliantly with a lovely...

And they work absolutely perfectly.

So I got in touch with her and she confirmed that that was how she did.

And interestingly, Julia Donaldson is the most successful author in the history of Britain.

She's...

Now international sales, she's beaten by JK.

Rowling.

But within this country, Julia Donaldson has outsold JK.

Rowling.

She has certainly outsold Jeffrey Archer and all those other people that we might think of as being massive.

So if you want to really sell today, then you should be writing in the verse, because that's where the really, really big sales are, even today.

Rob Bell:
When we're talking about iambic pentameter, is that right?

Mark Forsyth:
Yes.

Yeah.

Rob Bell:
It strikes me that sometimes punchlines in comedy have a rhythm to it, or really effective punchlines in comedy can have a kind of rhythm to it.

And it just lands so much better on an audience, I find.

Mark Forsyth:
Because iambic pentameters actually happen all the time quite naturally.

English is a naturally iambic language.

If you couldn't understand what that's saying, it's a funny thing, because people often don't understand anything about rhythm, but if you talk about Italians, people go, because most of us don't speak Italian, people go, oh yeah, their language goes, da-da-di-di, ba-bo, da-da-da, da-di, ba-do, da-da.

It's a strong, especially southern Italian, it's a strongly rhythmic language.

But we are the same.

We just can't hear ourselves doing it.

We are talking like that in this funny, ta-tum, ta-tum, ta-tum, ta-tum, ta-tum.

I didn't get a wink of sleep all night.

It's an iambic pentameter.

Yeah.

Rob Bell:
Great.

Mark Forsyth:
I'd like a burger and a can of coke.

That's an iambic pentameter.

These are, it's how English wants to be.

And very often is, by accident, half the stuff you said today will have been iambic pentameters.

Rob Bell:
I am fascinated by this.

I talk from living.

And I was not aware that probably the majority of what I end up saying on TV is in iambic pentameter.

Mark Forsyth:
What I end up saying on TV.

There, right there.

Of what I end up saying on TV.

Iambic pentameter.

Rob Bell:
So good.

I'm going to really enjoy being aware of that now.

Jono Hey:
Well, you might not know that Rob's done all sorts of documentaries, a lot of engineering and a lot of history, including ones on London bridges.

You had a great rhythmic example of some London bridges in the past.

Rob Bell:
Oh yeah.

Mark Forsyth:
So English is a rhythmic language, but we also, we try and keep the beat in English.

We really do.

And you may not think you're trying to keep the beat, you are.

So a quick way of looking at that is to look at three London bridges.

Or number one, Westminster Bridge.

And if you just say that naturally, Westminster Bridge.

Then you say it really quite fast, at tum, tum, tum, tum.

Whereas if you say London Bridge, it will be a little bit slower, London Bridge.

And if you say Barnes Bridge, Barnes Bridge is something which the English language really hates, it's two stressed syllables right next to each other, because English wants to be iambic all the time.

So when you say Barnes Bridge, people always slow down and they'll make that baaaaaarns sound.

And now you can test this out by just going Barnes Bridge, London Bridge, Westminster Bridge, Barnes Bridge, London Bridge, Westminster Bridge, and your stressed syllables there are coming out in absolute rhythm, but you just speed up the other syllables in order to fit it in, if you see what I mean.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, so the minster of Westminster becomes very secondary, very almost swallowed behind the Westminster Bridge.

Mark Forsyth:
Westminster Bridge.

Yeah, and that's the reason that when I was talking about the I make pentameter, which is sort of very stately, you know, shall I compare the two of summer's day.

And when you get into, it was the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

It all speeds up because we're trying to keep that beat and you're therefore putting in two soft syllables between each stressed syllable and the same with the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold in his cohort.

So, yeah, you speed up for those ones.

Rob Bell:
To keep that rhythm.

Mark Forsyth:
To keep that rhythm.

And we are all natural rhythm keepers.

English is a very rhythmic language.

You're talking like this all the time.

We are all rapping in a sense.

Rob Bell:
We're all Snoop Dogg.

Did Limericks come under the same banner as poetry?

Mark Forsyth:
Yeah, I've got a whole chapter on the Limericks.

Rob Bell:
Okay, great.

Oh, brilliant.

Because I find them very funny.

What makes Limericks funny apart from a bit of rudeness in there, a bit of obscenity?

Mark Forsyth:
Limericks start in the 1820s in London.

Actually, Limerick is a good one to explain verse on again, which is the beat is, ta-tum-ta-ta-tum-ta-ta-tum-ta, ta-tum-ta-ta-ta-tum-ta, ta-tum-ta-ta-tum, ta-tum-ta-ta-tum, ta-tum-ta-ta-tum-ta-tum-ta.

So you can do a Limerick without a rhyme, which is fun.

There was a young man from Dundee who was stung on the leg by a wasp.

When asked, does it hurt?

He replied, yes, it does.

I'm so glad it wasn't to horn it.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Mark Forsyth:
And that's recognisably a Limerick.

It's got all of the rhythm.

It's just got none of the rhyme.

Rob Bell:
Ah, it's very good.

Mark Forsyth:
A lot of the early Limericks are really not very funny.

They always tend to end up rhyming the first line and the last line.

Jono Hey:
With the same word.

Yeah.

Mark Forsyth:
Yeah.

Completely defeats it.

There's one by Edward Lear which goes, There was an old man with a beard who said it is just as I feared.

Two ducks and a wren, a lark and a hen have all made their nest in my beard.

And that to us is just a terrible disappointment.

Rob Bell:
But you will walk away a little bit embarrassed by that one.

Yeah.

Mark Forsyth:
Limericks got popular late 19th century and people started getting really, really inventive with them.

And unfortunately, all my favorite limericks are utterly obscene to the point when I couldn't possibly recite any here.

But there are, I must know, a non obscene limerick.

I can't think of one like that.

Rob Bell:
But it is Tuesday evening, Mark.

So, you know, we'll forgive you that.

Jono Hey:
I distinctly remember when I was 11 going around a friend's house and the dad surprised everybody by saying, there was a young man from Devizes who had balls of two different sizes.

One was small, no good at all, and the other was big and won prizes.

I still remember that to this day, but partly because it sort of shocked everybody at the time, but it was also a brilliant rhyme.

Rob, you asked what makes it funny.

And I thought actually, Mark, you put your finger on that a bit in the book when I was reading it, which was some of what's fun about the limericks is they just fit together because they rhyme.

And so the comparisons become kind of ridiculous.

And I think one of the ones you started was there was a man from Tobago who was eating sago.

And he's only eating sago because he was from Tobago.

Mark Forsyth:
Yes, it's because rhyme is fate.

And that makes everything so absurd.

That's my theory on it.

It's that everything that happens to the young lady from Ealing only happens to her because she's from Ealing and therefore it has to involve a ceiling and so on and so forth.

There was a young lady from Wantage of whom the town clerk took advantage, said the borough surveyor, you'll just have to pay her.

It seems he filtered her frontage.

Jono Hey:
It's all because she happens to come from Wantage.

Mark Forsyth:
Yes, that's how it all works.

And that's so absurd, we find it funny.

Rob Bell:
Yes, yes, yes.

Desperately trying to think of a place that doesn't matter.

Yeah, it doesn't matter.

Mark Forsyth:
Nantucket is usually the one which-

Rob Bell:
That's it.

Mark Forsyth:
But the whole game with the Nantucket limerick is not to use the obvious, right?

Rob Bell:
It's the old switcheroonie at the end.

Mark Forsyth:
Yes, exactly.

It's got to involve a bucket just when you think it wouldn't.

Rob Bell:
Yes.

Yeah, very good, very good.

Listen, Mark, I'm very conscious of time.

Jono, is there anything that we've not touched on that you'd love to ask Mark before we round off?

Jono Hey:
I think it's one final thing.

I read most of the book at night in bed when I needed to be quiet.

And then I read some of the book when I was just by myself and nobody else was around.

And then I started reading some of the poems aloud.

And I found that it was completely different and it was quite fun.

And I thought about it, you mentioned Julia Donaldson, that those are probably the last times that I read poems out loud.

And it made me think that it was so much more interesting.

It made me want to read and dare I say even think about writing any poetry.

I would never have considered that before this book and perhaps even before I actually sat there and read some out loud.

Mark Forsyth:
Poetry needs to be read aloud.

It really wants to be read aloud because it's all about that rhythm and that tum-ta-dum-tum-tum.

It should be read aloud and it should not be turned into long boring essays for GCSE.

Rob Bell:
Mark, is there anything we've not talked about that you think our listeners ought to know either about poetry or English language generally?

Mark Forsyth:
Only the poetry is wonderful and fun and enjoyable.

And the reason that people read it and enjoyed it and loved it for 500 years was because it's enjoyable.

And it's only in the last 100 years that it's been ruined for everybody by their school days usually.

Rob Bell:
Well, Mark, I'm so thankful for opening my eyes up to that as well, because I think I've been intimidated by poetry, is probably the right word, since my school days and just feeling that it's probably not for me, but I look upon it differently now.

Mark Forsyth:
Yeah, people do get intimidated and I just want to clear that away.

Because there's nothing to be intimidated.

There aren't secret meanings in most poems, which is what you're taught at school, or yes, there's some secret political agenda, or something like that.

If a poem looks like it's about a pretty rose, it's probably about a pretty rose.

That's it.

Rob Bell:
And enjoy it for that.

Mark Forsyth:
Yes.

Rob Bell:
Well, Mark, it remains with us to thank you once again for joining us on the Podcast.

It's been the wonderfully insightful and enjoyable conversation that I hoped it would be.

Mark Forsyth:
Thank you very much for having me on.

Rob Bell:
Listen, you can find Mark's latest book, Rhyme and Reason, in all good independent bookshops.

Go and ask for it in there.

And I'm sure they'll be more than happy to provide.

Or you can, of course, order it online.

And I will include a link to it in the show notes to make that as easy as possible for you.

Mark, where else can people follow your work?

Mark Forsyth:
There's my blog, The Inky Fool, and I'm on Twitter and I think I'm on Instagram and I'm probably on Facebook.

Rob Bell:
I'll link to them all.

I'll find them.

Mark Forsyth:
Fantastic.

Jono Hey:
Thank you.

Can I just say, if it's not clear, I really enjoyed the latest book because there's loads of fascinating things and it changed my view of poetry completely.

And, of course, given all the things that have come up in this conversation, you can tell that all of the other books I've read by Mark have been brilliant and fascinating and even fun enough that our kids will listen to them in the car.

And we talked about avocados already, but yeah, endless things like that, that you can amuse your friends with, and have the party trick to talk about when you're standing around the hearth in Victorian dinner parties.

Rob Bell:
Mark, thank you so much again, and all the very, very best with the book.

Mark Forsyth:
Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Rob Bell:
And as we close out another episode of Sketchplanations, the Podcast, I'll leave you with the thought that:

With Rhyme and Reason, all shall be revealed.

Go well, stay well.

Goodbye.

That was my poor attempt at iambic pentameter at the end.

All music on this podcast series is provided by the very talented Franc Cinelli.

And you can find many more tracks at franccinelli.com.