Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Me and the zheena pitted the rasoodocks at the weekend against those of oomny ptitsas and malchicks, one of whom was named Alex and it got me thinking about the droogs Pete, Georgie, Dim and Alex. Remember?

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.....Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point of view of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till's guts. But, as they say, money isn't everything..."

A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

If you?re interested in language, Anthony Burgess is on your bookshelves, right? His ability to inflect words with so many shades of meaning makes every aspect of his writing intriguing. Take Alex, the main character in his disturbing book, A Clockwork Orange. Obviously, the hero needed a noble name and Alexander ("leader of men") the Great suggested itself straight away. But given that Burgess was a Joycean, other linguistic considerations were involved, too. Two spring to mind: "a lex(icon)", a vocabulary of his own, "a lex", a law (unto himself) because, as readers of the book know, Alex speaks a teenage argot called Nadsat and he does not shy away from crime. Brilliant, eh?

And the title, A Clockwork Orange? Well, there is a Cockney expression "as queer as a clockwork orange" (neither rhyming slang nor an allusion to homosexuality, by the way), which describes something that is normal on the surface, but unnatural inside. Burgess readers have also pointed to the Malay "orang" meaning "man" (orang-utan = hairy man). As we learn, his clockwork orange, Alex, is human on the surface, but is no such thing inside.

Appy polly loggies, my brothers, because I'd like you to put on your otchkies now and take a look at the choodessny Nadsat Dictionary. Dobby words here. Lots of bits of Russian, French, English, Dutch and Malay to viddy.

Diarist of the day: Simone de Beauvoir, 4 February 1947

"During the night, New York was covered with snow. Central Park is transformed. The children have cast aside their roller skates and taken up skis; they rush boldly down the tiny hillocks. Men remain bareheaded, but many of the young people stick fur puffs over their ears fixed to a half-circle of plastic that sits on their hair like a ribbon -- it's hideous."