Feel the ooh

We need a new word.

I’m always coining new words, or at least words I imagine to be new. Occasionally it transpires someone else got there first, like the time I was briefly triumphant at inventing ‘frasmotic’ before realising I’d nicked it from an episode of Blackadder.

But there are a few I’m claiming as my own: clumsybundle, flummock, accideliberate. They might never make their way into the general lexicon, but they make me happy.

The new and specific word we need will denote overwhelming wonder, dread and incomprehension. Perhaps it will convey something of what early man must have felt when confronted with a solar eclipse or a cataclysmic thunderstorm, manifestations of an all-powerful and by turns benevolent and vengeful God. It might be a short word, but not clipped or peremptory, rather representing in its sound something akin to open-mouthed amazement.

Some of you will already be saying that we have such a word, and it is ‘awe’. And you’ll be absolutely right. But we can’t use ‘awe’ any more. Not now that its connected adjective, ‘awesome’, means merely ‘quite good’.

‘How was your toast?’

‘Awesome.’

No. No it wasn’t.

I’m aware, by the way, that this is an an easy and petty complaint, the petulant kvetching of an old grump. This subject (like so many) has been expertly dealt with by John Finnemore in this sketch, and I duly stand skewered.

Language evolves, and common usage brings fresh meaning to old words. I get that. I embrace it, even. There was a time when I bridled at the portmanteau ‘chillax’. Then I realised I could use it to make my 13-year-old son shrivel up and die of embarrassment, and now I use it all the time. But now that ‘awe’ has gone, let’s find something to replace it. While we’re thinking about what kind of word might serve, I’m going to use ‘ooh’ as a placeholder.

Ooh has been on my mind since our half-term visit to Jodrell Bank, a place that rendered us constantly oohstruck. As always when contemplating anything concerning the impossible vastness of space, my whole being, at first stimulated, soon began to glaze over at the sheer weight of mammoth and unmemorisable statistics. Umpty-thrillion light years to this place; thrumpty-gazillion light years to that other place; if you laid all the football pitches and all the buses in Wales and Belgium next to Nelson’s column with John Noakes at the top, you’d need zumpty-megadillion of them to walk to the moon.

Douglas Adams was right: space is big.

I’ve got my head round this bigliness. Enough, anyway, to be relatively comfortable with the knowledge of our own insignificance, the tininess of our existence in the grand scheme of things. It’s freeing, this knowledge, if you allow it to be, releasing the psyche from existential angst and diverting it towards more mundane matters, such as ‘who invented fig rolls, and what did they have against figs?’

But once I’ve wrapped my head round that bigliness, I then have to do more cranial contortions to get to grips with the smallitude of other things, that quantum stuff that apparently if you think you understand it you definitely don’t. These ideas are so entrenched now, thanks to the popularising work of Professor Brian Hair and his ilk, that it’s easy to take them for granted. When I occasionally succumb to such scientific complacency, I take a look at The Scale of the Universe and quickly find myself filled with ooh again.

But on this occasion it wasn’t the bigliness of space that I found so ooh-inspiring. Nor was it even the delicious playfulness of standing by a parabolic reflector and hearing my son whisper into its twin 30-odd yards away, his voice appearing in my head as if he were standing next to me – a well-established acoustical trick, but great fun to try out anyway.

No, it was the Lovell telescope itself that had me quietly oohing. The structure of it, the intricacy of its latticed metalwork, the impression it gives of being some sort of gut-churning fairground ride or an impossibly expensive scaled-up executive desktop toy. Throw in the jackdaws that nest within its structure and a robin’s song miraculously amplified by the individual acoustic of the space underneath it, and you have, for me at least, the embodiment of ooh.

Never mind that this thing has been adapted to accommodate the latest astronomical technology for over 60 years; nor that it can register an alien fart in the Stingray Nebula. It’s just a beautiful thing. Even stripped of its functionality I would find it fascinating, worth the admission price on its own.

But wait, there’s more.

Wander away from the telescope, through the grounds, and you might stumble, as we did, on a beekeeping demonstration. Queens and workers and drones and all sorts of insanely interesting stuff, almost all of which no sooner entered my head than left it again. But there was a chiffchaff singing nearby, and the smoke they use to calm the bees down smells nice, so it was all good.

And I was struck by this juxtaposition – the telescope, just visible through a gap in the trees quarter of a mile away, quietly exploring the furthest reaches of the known universe, and the bees, doing their miraculous thing in a little universe of their own. All part of the same thing, a reminder to look, to explore, to feel the ooh.

We really do need a better word.