Alan Coren RIP

Alan Coren, who has just died after a long illness, was one of the finest comic writers of the past 40 years. He was very, very funny. That’s rare. I'd known him since he became editor of Punch in 1978. He was an inspiring editor, and good company. And he wasn't just a great comic writer: he was also a great broadcaster. I have seldom come across anybody who could think as quickly on his feet. As with all funny men, of course, he wasn't kidding when he joked -- his jokes were serious -- and he was especially serious about an England that has been vanishing these past 20 or thirty years. His last piece in The Spectator was an enthusiastic review of Griff Rhys Jones's autobiography, an evocation of suburban values, a sort of Tizer with Rosie, as Alan described it.

Alan hated the word suburban, though. The word he liked (perhaps because he coined it) was 'peripolitan', and he was furious that the Oxford English Dictionary did not recognise it. He described his frustration in the review:  

“Were you to look up the word ‘peripolitan’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, you would not find it. Though the thing weighs three tons and preens itself on containing every word jotted in English since the language first dragged itself out of the primordial alphabet soup, peripolitan is not there. 

This irritates me no end, because I coined it, 20 years ago. I have, furthermore, deployed it at every subsequent opportunity, often in bold or italic the better to catch the lexicographic eye; but whenever I ring the OED to ask them when it’s going in, some snooty philological time-server tells me that they already have a perfectly good word to describe those who live on the edge of cities: they are suburban. But suburban is not a perfectly good word, it is a perfectly rotten word, it degrades the environs I cherish into something woefully less than urban; it is a sneer, a snub, a smirk behind the metropolitan hand. How does the OED put it? ‘Having the inferior manners, the narrowness of view, etcetera, attributed to residents in suburbs.’
Go here to read the whole thing.