The Book of the Year Read online

  It’s been a rock and roll year for Jeremy: Paul Weller sent him a copy of his new album, while Grace Chatto from the electronic band Clean Bandit had her T-shirt blurred out by the BBC because it was Corbyn branded, breaching BBC election campaign impartiality rules. When asked by the Financial Times what his ‘summer soundtrack’ would be, Corbyn named Clean Bandit (along with The Farm’s ‘All Together Now’ and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s symphonies). He’s not entirely au fait with pop culture though. When he attended the Durham Miners’ Gala and ‘YMCA’ was played over the loudspeakers, it became apparent that he didn’t know the moves. He tried to dance along and make hand gestures, like those around him, but failed to spell out the letters Y, M, C or A.

  A Cornish artist started making Jeremy Corbyn garden gnomes. They sold out so fast that the artist said he planned to put the next batch in a superhero costume.

  When Corbyn first heard the ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’ song (at Prenton Park, the home of former UKIP leader Paul Nuttall’s former team, Tranmere Rovers), he thought the audience were booing him.

  COSTUMES▶

  For a priest dressed as Hugh Hefner, see Carnivals; for schoolboys dressed as schoolgirls, see Heatwaves; for a runner as a phone box, see Marathon, London; for a Prime Minister as a hiker, see May, Theresa; for teddy bears as soldiers, see Noriega, Manuel; for a White House Chief Strategist as Napoleon, see Paintings; for a student as Darth Vader, see Schools; for a White House Press Secretary as the Easter Bunny, see Spicer, Sean; for an owner as a punter, see Swearing; for a punchbag as the President, see Unpopular; for a person as a crayon, see Yellow; and for a shaman dressed as a Sasquatch, see Zoology, Crypto-.

  COVFEFE▶

  On 31 May, we all woke up and smelled the Covfefe.

  In May, Donald Trump tweeted the (non-)sentence ‘Despite the constant negative press covfefe’, and then retired to bed, presumably unaware that this unusual combination of letters had sent Twitter into meltdown. ‘Covfefe’ quickly became the number-one trending word worldwide, and the post was retweeted 127,000 times, three times more than Trump’s tweet announcing Mike Pence as his running mate.

  Entrepreneurs jumped on the word. A man called Per Holknekt registered Covfefe with the Swedish Patent Office soon after Trump’s tweet, and got exclusive commercial rights to the term across Europe; while in America Covfefe.com was bought by a printing company who proceeded to sell T-shirts, hoodies and mugs with the word on them. Scrabble-like app ‘Words with Friends’ added ‘covfefe’ to its list of acceptable words in the game, and a number of people snapped up COVFEFE driving plates (but not in Montana, where it was deemed an illegal combination of letters due to its political nature).

  Even Hillary Clinton joined in. She responded to a tweet by Donald Trump that read ‘Crooked Hillary Clinton now blames everybody but herself, refuses to say she was a terrible candidate’ with ‘People in covfefe houses shouldn’t throw covfefe.’

  One Democratic legislator went so far as to introduce the Covfefe Act, which would preserve Donald Trump’s tweets as presidential records. Covfefe in this case stands for ‘Communications Over Various Feeds Electronically For Engagement’.

  ‘Fefe’ is actually a word – in Samoan. Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson, a Samoan journalist, wrote that Samoan has no letter ‘c’, so there’s no ‘cov’, but there is ‘ko’, which means ‘pregnant’. ‘Fefe’ is an expression of fear, so ‘ko fefe’ would be ‘pregnant but afraid about it’.

  COWS▶

  India announced that all elderly cows should be sent to retirement homes.

  Cows are so sacred to Hindus that this year the Indian government banned selling cattle for slaughter (although the courts later suspended the ban, as selling elderly cattle for slaughter is a big part of the rural economy). Not only that, but India’s home ministry announced it wanted every region to set up a cow retirement home, and the government announced plans for all 190,000,000 cows in the country to get an ID number for their protection. (India’s largest state, Rajasthan, charges 10 per cent extra stamp duty when people buy homes, just to pay for elderly cows’ dotage.) Tensions have run so high that vigilante groups have attacked and even killed people suspected of eating beef.

  Elsewhere in India, the state of Uttar Pradesh launched an ambulance service for sacred cows, the Cattle Healing Mobile Van Service, and a cricket tournament gave the winning team a cow each as their prize. One of the players, Raju Rabari, said he and his colleagues were delighted to receive the cows.

  In Switzerland, 12 cows died after mysteriously throwing themselves off a cliff. A 13th cow also fell but survived, possibly because it landed on the others. One farmer said, ‘One or two cows falling off, that’s possible. Thirteen, that’s a new and incomprehensible phenomenon.’

  A scientific review by a German university found no evidence that homeopathy works on cows. And in America, a (somewhat disputed) survey of 1,000 adults found that 48 per cent didn’t know where chocolate milk comes from. Seven per cent thought it only came from brown cows.

  DATING, ANIMAL▶

  For ‘looking for love’ in Dorset, see Penguins; for ‘would like to meet’ in the Netherlands, see Orangutans; and for a rhino with a GSOH see Tinder.

  DEBTS▶

  Cuba offered to pay off its outstanding Cold War debt in rum.

  Cuba owes the Czech Republic £220 million, but it’s a bit short of cash, so offered to pay instead with various commodities, including some of its famous rums. That would amount to about 116,000 tonnes of the spirit. Unfortunately, the citizens of the Czech Republic drink so little rum that if the whole debt were to be serviced in this way, it would take the population 138 years to get through it.

  The Czech deputy finance minister, Lenka Dupakova, politely said that it was ‘an interesting option’. The Czech finance ministry was less keen, arguing that ‘at least part of the debt should be dealt in cash’. They also pointed out that the rums on offer were rather obscure ones and that they would require an advertising budget to shift them. An alternative Cuban plan – to pay the debt in pharmaceutical drugs – didn’t go down too well either. Cuban drugs don’t have EU certification.

  This is not the first time that the Czech Republic has been offered payment in kind rather than in cash. Back in 2010, North Korea offered to pay some of its £8 million debt to the Czechs by sending them 20 tonnes of ginseng – again far more than the Czechs could get through. The then deputy finance minister, Thomas Zidek, said, ‘We have been trying to convince them to send, for instance, a shipment of zinc.’

  A ‘granny gang’ of elderly Chinese women who intimidated people into paying debts were imprisoned for up to 11 years. Their tactics included swearing, spitting, and stripping off their own clothes or those of other people. One said she had joined because ‘I had nothing to do … also, a key point is that we were given free meals.’

  DENMARK▶

  Denmark was supplanted as the happiest country in the world by Norway, and was very happy for the new champions.

  ‘Good for them,’ said Meik Wiking of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, ‘I don’t think Denmark has a monopoly on happiness.’ But why are Danes so happy? It could be that for the fifth consecutive year Denmark has been named the least corrupt country in the world by Transparency International; or maybe it’s because it was crowned the best place in Europe to do business by a survey from the business interest group EuCham; or it just might be due to another poll it tops – in 2017, Danes were found to shop for sex toys more regularly than anyone else.

  Police in Denmark told a group of fun-runners that, because the event they were running crossed the Danish–German border, they would have to carry passports or other valid travel documents with them as they ran.

  DICKHEADS▶

  Brisbane launched a ‘Don’t Be a Dickhead’ campaign to cut down on antisocial behaviour.

  The slogan was displayed on posters and billboards all over Queensland’s Fortitude Valley. Simon Turner, one of the men
behind the state-sponsored initiative, said, ‘Dickhead is a term that means your behaviour is unacceptable. You’re either a decent bloke or you’re a dickhead.’

  While this campaign was running, 18-year-old Queensland banana farm worker Lee De Paauw tried to impress a girl by jumping into a river after drinking ‘about 10 cups of goon’ (boxed wine), only to be immediately mauled by a three-metre crocodile. He managed to fight it off but failed to win over 24-year-old Sophie Paterson from Somerset, who said, ‘Being attacked by animals doesn’t really do it for me’ and ‘I’d have to be quite twisted to be impressed by that.’ Eventually she said she’d go and see a film with him, if her schedule allowed.

  Speaking from his hospital bed, Mr De Paauw described his actions as ‘stupidity’, adding, ‘I don’t want that crocodile harmed … I want it to have a happy life.’ When Jason Costigan, an Australian MP, was asked if something could have been done to avoid such an incident occurring, he replied, ‘We can’t legislate to protect dickheads.’

  In January, Twitter users searching for the term ‘dickhead’ were directed to Donald Trump’s profile, thanks to the website’s powerful search algorithm, which directs viewers towards results other people have searched for. Other searches which suggested Trump – before they mysteriously disappeared – included ‘racist’, ‘asshole’ and ‘tiny hands’.

  DICTIONARIES▶

  ‘Kodak moment’ was finally accepted as a phrase in the English language by Oxford Dictionaries, five years after the Kodak company went bust.

  It was one of 300 words added by Oxford, alongside ‘aquafaba’ (chickpea water used in vegan cooking), ‘sausage party’ (an event in which the majority of participants are male), and ‘craptacular’ (remarkably poor or disappointing).

  Merriam-Webster, meanwhile, announced that ‘sheeple’ had made it into its dictionary – it means people who tend metaphorically to follow the flock. Merriam-Webster cited those who buy Apple products to illustrate how the word might be used, though it could have reasonably cited itself, as the word has been in the Oxford English Dictionary since 2008 and in Macmillan’s Dictionary since 2003.

  America’s Drug Enforcement Administration published a dictionary of slang drug terms this year, designed for police who find the hundreds of slang terms used by drug users confusing. Words included:

  Whiffle Dust: Amphetamines

  Bernie’s Flakes: Cocaine

  Aunt Hazel: Heroin

  Smoochy Woochy Poochy: Cannabis

  And the International Anthony Burgess Foundation uncovered a hitherto unknown dictionary of slang that was started by the author of A Clockwork Orange. Unfortunately, he never got beyond the letter B, and some of his definitions perhaps lack the rigour to be found in most dictionaries. His entries included:

  Abfab: Obsolescent abbreviation of absolutely fabulous, used by Australian teenagers or ‘bodgies’.

  Abyssinia: I’ll be seeing you. A valediction that started during the Italo-Abyssinian war. Obsolete, but so Joyceanly satisfying that it is sometimes hard to resist.

  Arse: I need not define.

  A Liverpool English dictionary was published covering more than 2,000 Scouse words and phrases. They included ‘bumstarver’ (a short jacket), ‘egg-shell blond’ (a bald man) and ‘desert wellies’ (sandals).

  DINOSAURS▶

  The largest dinosaur footprints ever discovered were found in Western Australia. They were as long as Marc Bolan, the lead singer of T. Rex.

  The 1.7-metre prints belonged to herbivores that lived about 150 million years ago and stood 5.5 metres tall at the hip, which, as one palaeontologist clarified, is ‘enormous’. Locals in the region have long known about the prints. In Aboriginal lore, they belong to Marala, a giant emu-man who travelled the realm, dispensing laws to the people.

  Back in the UK, the country’s most famous dinosaur, Dippy, is going on tour. The diplodocus plaster cast, the Natural History Museum’s most famous attraction, will visit eight venues between 2018 and 2020, having spent a year being dismantled, polished, vacuumed and upgraded. While travelling between venues he will be flat-packed, with each body part carefully labelled so that it ends up back in the right place.

  In other dinosaur skeleton news, a head was reunited with its body almost a century after they were torn apart. Palaeontologists at the University of Alberta studied the decapitated skeleton of a corythosaurus, excavated in 1992, and found that it was a perfect match for a skull on display in their museum. The skull had been discovered in 1920 at a time when ‘headhunting’ was popular among dinosaur hunters: they often took the more exciting skulls, tail spines and claws for their collections, and abandoned the rest.

  One clue that led scientists to believe the two parts belonged together was that newspaper fragments found at the site where the skeleton was unearthed dated back to the same year that the skull was taken. It wasn’t uncommon then for palaeontologists to wrap their finds in newspaper.

  Palaeontologists also concluded this year that Tyrannosaurus rex was partial to a bit of pre-coital nose-rubbing. An analysis of a particularly well-preserved tyrannosaurid skull revealed that the snout was covered in enough nerve endings to make it as sensitive as human fingertips. Authors of a study in the journal Scientific Reports speculated that this may have played a crucial role in T. rex foreplay, as the dinosaurs would have rubbed their faces together before sex.

  The largest creature ever to walk the earth, a dinosaur whose 100-million-year-old fossil was found in 2012, was finally named. Its genus is Patagotitan, named after Patagonia, where it was found, and titan, the Ancient Greek word for ‘giant’. The species name of the 76-tonne creature is mayorum, which is (coincidentally) an anagram of ‘your mam’.

  DISCOVERIES▶

  Science made great leaps forward this year, but sadly we only have space to record the most vital findings. And so, in no particular order, scientists have discovered:

  Why shoelaces untie themselves; that eating yogurt can cure depression in mice; why water splashes when it lands; that dogs’ favourite music genre is reggae; that chimpanzees have no interest in music at all; that elephants poo six times faster than dogs; that humans’ oldest known ancestor didn’t have an anus; why pandas are black and white; why LSD trips take so long; that ants navigate by the sun, and rescue their wounded; that bees can be taught to play football; beetles that disguise themselves as ants’ bottoms; why bird eggs are egg-shaped; a parasite that controls fish from inside their eyeballs; a new continent just off the coast of New Zealand; a new organ in your body; 467 million hectares of previously unreported forest; 3.6 million more Adélie penguins than they thought existed; that Tyrannosaurus rex had no lips; a 2,600-year-old demand to ‘send wine’ inscribed on a shard of pottery; a shrimp whose claw makes a noise so loud that it can kill other fish; the only species of crab known to spend its whole life in trees; that male great tits build their homes next to birds with similar personalities to their own; an extinct ancient turkey the size of a kangaroo; the first new antibiotic since 1987; five new species of truffle, one of which has been named after Oreos because of its sweet smell; 12 new types of cloud; a worm that eats plastic; that people who swear more are more honest than those who don’t; that being ‘liked’ on Facebook doesn’t make you happier; that Internet withdrawal increases blood pressure; a meat-eating sponge; why pugs have flat faces; and that 98 per cent of British people think they’re in the nicest 50 per cent.

  DIVORCE▶

  A Palestinian judge banned divorce applications during Ramadan on the grounds that we all make bad decisions when we’re hungry.

  The judge, who is head of the Palestinian Islamic sharia court system, said he based his decision on previous years’ experiences. His point was borne out earlier this year when newspapers in Jordan reported that a hungry husband divorced his wife in a restaurant because each time he wanted to eat something, she made him wait until she’d taken a photo of it for Snapchat.

  The Chinese government is also c
urrently trying to deal with high divorce rates, most notably in the village of Jiangbei, where the government wanted to demolish 160 homes. It offered to compensate residents with new houses, but the couples living there realised that if they were divorced they would qualify for a new house each, rather than one between them. This prompted a mass divorce. Technically the regulations stipulate that couples should have been divorced for at least five years to qualify for the scheme, but one law firm in the area convinced residents that they can overcome that detail, and cases are ongoing.

  In America, Alex Jones, the founder of controversial alt-right website Infowars, attempted (unsuccessfully) to win a court case against his wife for the custody of his three children by trying to prove to a divorce court that his on-screen persona wasn’t the real him. His attorney said that to judge him on his on-air persona would be like judging Jack Nicholson on the basis of his performance as the Joker in Batman and that he was simply playing the role of an angry Obama-hating conspiracy theorist who wants to break Alec Baldwin’s neck.*

  His case was not helped, however, by the fact that he was unable to remember basic details about his children’s day-to-day life. Nor did telling the judge that the reason he’d forgotten was that he had just had a big bowl of chilli for lunch.

  An American couple got divorced, and blamed President Trump. Lynn and David Aronberg married in 2015, but a statement from Lynn’s firm said that Lynn is a ‘supporter of President Donald Trump’, while David is a Democrat.

  DOGS, HOT▶

  For airborne, see Drones; for puffy, see Inventions; for bony, see Recalls; and for metaphorical, see Tunnels.