The Imaginary Reviewer’s Tour of England continues with some Tourist Attractions

A lot of tourists go to England for the history, and culture. They marvel at how clever those mediaeval people were when they built their castles so close to where the train stations would be, and buy all sorts of things with an extra ‘e’ on the end, like ‘ye olde corkscrewe’ and ‘ye olde amusinge postcarde’.

But England has a lot of other things for tourists, and in my recent trip (which actually lasted less than a week, but somehow managed, TARDIS-like, to house several weeks’ worth of activities), I went to visit them.

One of the rides at England's most popular amusement parks, Funville

Firstly, Suffer Gardens in Shuffleborough is a brand new amusement park based around the concept of pain and physical anguish. As such, it’s not a whole lot of fun. I queued for six hours to go on their most popular ride, “The Uncomfortablator”, pressed against other tourists and families with screaming children and idiots who can’t keep their hotdog condiments on themselves. It turned out at the end that the queue was the ride. Avoid.

According to the pamphlet given to me when I entered, The Twitter Museum in Gaviscon-upon-Cretin is a wonderful love-letter to the latest social media craze. But then, I noticed, it’s a love-letter in building form. And a love-letter without any perfume sprayed to it. Or embarrassing hearts drawn on it. Gosh, this is nothing like a love-letter, it’s a bloody museum! What an awful pamphlet. The Twitter Museum gets no stars because its pamphlet is misleading. Next.

A Boy Who Looks Like Harry Potter is the biggest draw for tourists in Shirehamptonshire since the World’s Biggest Cloud exhibition was called off due to the cloud going missing. The boy stands on a plinth, dressed as the eponymous character, and visitors have to pay ten pounds (about sixteen hundred groats) to get within four feet of him and take a picture. I’ll admit, he does look a lot like the character, but when I saw him he didn’t look very well. And his constant complaining to the crowds about “needing the toilet” and having not eaten “in weeks” did ruin the image for me. No points from this reviewer!

Finally, the Hedgehog Acrobatic Troupe have their home in Strathcarnage. With hedgehog trapeze artists, hedgehog high-wire acts and balancing-on-lots-of-chairs-routine hedgehogs, their twice-daily shows are billed as “fun for some of the family”. I will say that I had a fun, enjoyable time watching all the flying spiky rodent things, but you should think twice before sitting in the first twelve rows. I counted more than eleven fatalities from errant animals flying into the crowd, and many children’s faces were punctured like brain-filled water balloons. Tragic.

Pour encore d’information sur l’Angleterre, consultez un map ou un livre. Je pense que la Grande Bretagne est un pays joli avec les pommes frites et un tranche de biftek. Si vous voulez, manger beaucoup de fromage commes le Francais! Et joyeux Bastille Day. Pamplemousse!

The New Collins Dictionary is out!

Just as the day is always followed by night, the release of a new updated Collins dictionary is always – inevitably! - followed by controversy. While the outcries that have come after recent publications have not matched the riots and uproar that occurred during 1976 (when the dictionary ruled that ‘cactus’ was no longer a word and that the past participle of ‘run’ was ‘graven’) there have always been a few out-of-joint noses whenever Collins go to press.

This year will certainly be no different. The Imaginary Review has got its grubby little hands on an advance copy and linguists everywhere are going to be affected by the contents. In fact, anyone who uses the English language on a regular basis will certainly need to pay heed.

One of the major changes to the English dictionary is the removal of the word ‘Because’. The reasoning behind this remains mysterious; we asked a Collins representative why they had deemed the word unnecessary, and they replied that they ‘didn’t need to explain themselves’. Our own guess at why this word is no longer part of the English language is due to the fact that people have stopped trying to explain and excuse things, they just pass the buck on to someone else. The lack of the word ‘because’ will certainly make things much more difficult for people to explain events.

A new word that the people at Collins have introduced is ‘Crotny’. It is an adjective that refers to the unpleasant feeling one gets when a commercial break arrives in a TV program and it only seems like two minutes since the last. Other additions include ‘flad’ - an attractive female who is often mistaken for a ladyboy – and ‘yopling’, an activity that requires as-yet uninvented equipment.

Collins 2008 has some interesting new prescriptions. ‘Terse’ can no longer be translated into Spanish, and not before time if you ask me. ‘Shower’ and ‘Hovercraft’ have now swapped definitions, a move that will probably cause more problems in Dover than anywhere else. ‘Buffoon’ now has the added definition, ‘a small area of carpet infested with estate agents’.

While the people at Collins claim to have the best interests of the English language at heart, it is somewhat unclear as to how their new dictionary will achieve any advancement for the language or its speakers. Removing ‘because’ from usage will certainly lessen the depth and clarity that English has. Furthermore, the novel new idea of ‘sin-binning’ some words for various perceived penalties is not without its drawbacks; what good can come of banning the words ‘hedgehog’, ‘alimony’ and ‘gumption’ for two years?

On the plus side, however, the book has some good new touches, including the inclusion of page numbers that advance upwards from ‘one’, and also some vouchers for reduced entry into various attractions. But these benefits are outweighed by some questionable decisions in the content.

The 2008 Collins Dictionary is out now, priced a few quid. If you want one with a thesaurus, you must provide a video of you kicking a Spaniard in the shins.