Pound for pound, it’s the thinnest word in the English language, but just writing it has revealed a significant problem that I hadn’t foreseen: namely that it looks like the Roman for three, or perhaps one of the trigrams of the Bagua – the one representing Heaven and the sky.
It’s a well worn anecdote that the film The Madness of King George had to be renamed from Alan Bennett’s original play title The Madness of George III to avoid the possibility of American audiences mistaking it for a sequel. For me it was the addition of the word ‘king’ that really made the difference, having sat through the entire play thinking it was called The Madness of George ill. Cos he was, if I remember rightly.
So, what’s the time?
It’s time to get ill.
And what’s the time?
It’s time to get ill.
Beastie Boys fans will immediately recognise this prophetic statement from the last track on their debut album Licensed to Ill. (No, not Licensed to 3, Licensed to ill. Damn your sans-serif Is. No, not ‘is’, ‘i’s.)
Why did I ever choose this word?
I know. Because only this morning I woke up feeling like, to quote Withnail, “a pig shat in my head”. All my desire to live had drained away leaving a painful stabbing sensation just behind my right eye. Up until recently this was a feeling I had only ever experienced when watching Piers Morgan trying to interview a spokesman from the American gun lobby, in which he shot himself in the foot (alas not literally) so abysmally that I almost rushed out and bought a gun myself. Well, you’ve got to protect yourself against these presenters.
Recently, though, I’ve found that drinking a small glass of wine or beer in the evening leaves me utterly bereft the morning after, like I’ve had five pints and a kebab; whereas having five pints and a kebab leaves me feeling right as rain. There might be a scientific reason for this, like the way your hair becomes self-cleaning if you don’t wash it for long enough, but for me it just confirms what my Grandma used to say: “If a job’s worth doing it’s worth doing well.”
The point is, though, that the Beasties were right: it is indeed time to get ill. Everyone’s coming down with stuff. Come October, all those microbes that have spent the summer basking harmlessly in dappled pools of sunlight and copulating in the cosy corners of rusting water tanks come dancing sylph-like on the evening breeze and take up residence in any convenient nook of the human anatomy that comes their way. So begins the winter cycle of spinning heads and running noses that we sometimes call Christmas.
Like Yuletide, the word ill comes from an Old Norse word, illr, meaning ‘morally evil’. So it was used in the sense of “ill-feeling”, rather than “I can’t do PE cos I’m ill”. Presumably the Norse liked PE. Why they felt the need to stick an r on the end of illr, though, is anyone’s guess. Probably to make it clear they weren’t saying three. It wasn’t until the 15th century that we used ill to mean sick. Or until the 1980s that we used it to mean the opposite of sick. Until, that is, we started using sick to mean the opposite of sick. And then ill meant sick again, only in a completely different context.
For example, I used to play football with a Chelsea fan (that’s probably enough description for you), who startled me once during a bit of pre-match banter by announcing with complete sincerity that, “That Natural History Museum is sick, man!” He’d taken his kids there and liked it. So I wrote to the museum and suggested they use the quote in their publicity, but for some reason they’ve elected not to do so.
Talk about stuck in the past.
For such a meagre word, ill causes an inordinate number of problems. Here’s another one. I don’t know about you but whenever I text the word I’ll my phone tries to change it to ill. And if I try to text ill, guess what, I get I’ll. I have the same problem with we’ll and well. It’s a bit like the five pints and a kebab thing: contrary.
Anyway, just to clear up any lingering confusion, this week’s word is ill.
No, not I’ll…
