So far as I am aware, the first man to publicly voice the opinion that an arcane pattern lay behind the distribution of what we have come to call ‘carpals’ and ‘tarsals’ was also the earliest reported fatality. This was in May. Without wishing to speculate as to whether a Secret Society lay behind the various outbreaks, Professor Dietlef Auerbach demonstrated that, if temporal and spatial axes were superimposed, and if one allowed that a reasonably sizeable incident had gone unnoticed the previous week somewhere in the vicinity of Canterbury, then at the 95% confidence level the events approximated to a Second Order LeChatelier Distribution. The correlation was imperfect, he held, only insofar as the cities of the United Kingdom were discretely rather than continuously distributed. Furthermore, one had to disregard such temporal viscissitudes as the unusual absence of leap year and the changeover to Summer-time.

No-one at this stage paid any great heed to his demonstration, in part because the ‘Panorama’ transmission on which it was aired clashed with a major sports fixture, in part because the public has a justifiable disregard for statistical analysis. Indeed, the Professor’s binomial model got only a passing mention in his ‘Times’ obituary - he died within the week, having mistaken a ‘High Voltage’ sign at the University laboratory in which he was visiting Professor Emeritus for a capuccino machine. It has been suggested, quite plausibly, that ‘b’-carpal corruption may have been responsable for the Professor’s oversight.

Four days after this, Kent police unearthed sufficient evidence to suggest that there had indeed been a counterfeit ring at work in Canterbury. It is true that, thanks to the mathematical penchant of the Sergeant on duty, vigilence in regard to this possibility had been stepped up following the ‘Panorama’ demonstration. Nevertheless, Sergeant Kelly considered the Canterbury find to be singular and satisfactory in equal measure. He informed his superiors, and made so bold as to predict that a major incident was due to occur within the fortnight in the Greater Manchester area. The superiors advised him in no uncertain terms to keep any such metaphysical speculation to himself. In addition to the likelehood of spreading needless panic among the public, there was the risk of inviting any number of cranks and eccentrics, of which Manchester could boast as many as any city in the realm, to attempt to mount just such an incident so as to coincide with that which had been predicted.

Nevertheless, in the course of the public briefing that followed the disclosure of the Canterbury circle, Chief Inspector Miles Wiseacre of New Scotland Yard, formerly of Greenwich, went on to point out that as far as the local Kent Constabulary could ascertain, the assumed period at which the felons had begun to operate was consistent with the dates predicted by Auerbach’s LeChatelier Distribution model. At last the press had a fact to sink their teeth into. The Home Office, spurred on by the unexpected level of media interest which followed Wiseacre’s press-conference, now began to take some notice: the Chief Inspector was given a brief to follow up the line of enquiry which assumed that there was some as yet undefined connection between the sundry incidents, the earliest of which had in fact occurred on his old Grenwich beat. A letter signed by the Home Secretary himself assured him the fullest co-operation of all of Her Majesty’s Constabularies.

The Chief Inspector’s first step was to have all of the evidence to hand centralised, so that a comparative analysis might be effected. Various bags were gathered up throughout the kingdom over the course of the next few days and dispatched post haste to the Metropolis. Once each piece had been laboriously documented and labeled, it was handed over to one of three Forensics teams that had been put at Wiseacre’s disposal. When the relevant forensic team had finished dusting the evidence for prints and analysing by spectroscopy the make-up and possible origin of each term, they passed it with equal care on to Inspector McDubhgall of Semantics. His job, more invidious than that of his forensic colleagues, was to assess the purpose, the positioning, and the possible hazards associated with each of the counterfeit words. In one off-the-cuff remark, he likened his task to the problem of reconstructing the complete skeleton of a dinosaur from a mere handful of meta-tarsals. The metaphor was widely reported. The word ‘tarsal’ gained common currency, initially to describe all the constituent terms of the counterfeit language.

McDubhgall was nothing if not meticulous. After ten days exhaustive analysis the various semantics teams submitted to him their prelimenory findings, and he drew up a schema so as to help classify by genre the counterfeit words. Curiously, at this stage, no distinction was made between ‘oral’ and ‘written’ incidents. Perhaps McDubhgall considered that he had already too much on his plate to complicate the prelimenary taxonomy of word with the form in which it was transmitted. To begin with, then, he distinguished between what he rather unimaginatively termed Type I and Type II exhibits. One of his colleagues suggested, perhaps jokingly, that as the label ‘tarsal’ was already in the public domain, it might be used to designate the former, while the label ‘carpal’ might then be used to designate the latter. McDubhgall, a humourless man, went on with his exegisis as though nothing had been proposed. Nevertheless, the classification stuck.

Miles Wiseacre followed McDubhgall in suggesting a main division, and two further sub-divisions, of the language that has come to be known variously as ‘contervoc’, ‘skaz’ (in the Westcountry) and ‘merz’ (in Scotland), according to the following schema: Type I words, or ‘tarsals’ (he readily adopted the term) consisted entirely of neologisms. McDubhgall’s initial taxonomy made a further distinction between ‘a’-tarsals, which substituded for existing words {barbak for jam, indegar for both feather and to alight} and ‘b’-tarsals, which interpolated into the syntagmatic order of the sentence but without replacing existing words. These latter, all of which were entirely lacking in vowels, numbered (so far as he could tell) only four. Of these, the ‘b’-tarsal bgrrgl was particularly virulent, and displayed a penchant for proliferating in such a way as to split both the infinitive and the ‘inseparable’ phrasal verb. {The widely reported incidence of ‘bgrrgl bgrrgl’ which had so undermined the efficacy of the Bishop of Durham’s Easter address was, at the time, still fresh in everyone’s minds}.

Type II words, or ‘carpals’, Wiseacre considered to be particularly insidious. In this he overruled McDubhgall, who it must be said remained remarkably naïve in regard to their possible hazards. Once more, a sub-division refined the taxonomy. ‘A’-carpals were words which had been corrupted in such a way that, although generally recognisable, they duplicated no existing signifier (thus tambl for table, rumiddently for rudimentary). These, although rather innocuous in themselves, displayed a high level of infectiousness. It was not unknown for an entire text to lose the tenth part of its content to ‘a-carpal transmogrification’ upon exposure to a single term. However, it was the ‘b’-carpal which, according to the Chief Inspector, posed the greatest risk to the public order. A b-carpal was a corruption of an existing term in such a way that it became indistinguishable from a second term, itself already in the language. One might cite as an instance of this the mortification of the radio presenter who had spoken of the recent meeting between the Prime Minister and Her Travesty, the Queen.

At this juncture, Wiseacre drew from his pocket a facsimile which he had received from a senior officer working in MI6, an expert in semiotics who was identified only by the codename ‘Marjoram’. He cited the following warning:

"Perhaps the nefarious nature of this sort of corruption is not immediately obvious to those not grounded in structuralist linguistics, and who see in the emergence of ‘contervoc’ nothing but a source of innocent fun. But the implications that attach to the emergence of subversive terms within the language, for a social fabric exclusively reliant upon the distance between its constinuent signifiers, is enormous. Once these distances have been dislocated, comprehension itself becomes less certain. One might even go so far as to imagine scenarios in which the basis of Law and Order has been so radically undermined that rational government ceases to function."

If at the time the analysis seemed alarmist, the excessively technical nature of Marjarom’s vocabulary prevented the public fom paying too much heed. Nevertheless, facts on the ground were already beginning to suggest that there was far more at stake than the semantic hegemony of an arcane set of Oxford Dons.

On the fourteenth of June, shortly before Inspector McDubhgall’s prelimenory report, modified to a degree by Wiseacre’s gloss, was due for submission, a train derailed at Clapham Junction when it failed to stop at a red signal. On the same day the police in Manchester intercepted four large boxes, supposedly of Irish origin, filled with an elemetary grammar of an unknown and unspecified language. Several of the illustrative examples contained known ‘tarsals’. The police were immediately put on high alert. Since to this date there had not been a single incident of either carpal or tarsal contamination in the Republic of Ireland, subterfuge was suspected. A prelimonary report was hastilly drawn up.

Each of the four batches of books had been bound in the fly-jacket of an otherwise innocent work: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake; O’Brien’s Third Policeman; Beckett’s Watt. With regard to the selection of covers, the Chief Inspector of the Greater Manchester Constabulary, a Scotsman named Hamilton, commented that:

‘It is to be presumed that there is some code in operation behind this apparently random selection of titles which must in some way aid in their clandestine distribution. A number of officers from Semantics, in co-operation with the English Department of Manchester University, are at present pursuing this line of enquiry. We have, furthermore, already contacted Inspector McDubhgall of Scotland Yard, who I understand has a certain expertise in such affairs. In the meantime, we would urge the public to remain vigilent and to treat with extreme caution any suspicious looking book.’

For those that were party to the prediction that an incident was due to occur in the Greater Manchester area, the presence of the clandestine literature was disquieting. No less disturbing, however, was the coincidence between the discovery of an arcane treatise on the grammar of contervoc and the train derailment.

In the wake of the Manchester find, conspiracy theories, not all of which were implausible, began to circulate. After all, it was argued, while random corruptions, interpolations and neologisms were a part of any living language, the nature of which was to evolve rather than petrify, the presence of a clandestine grammar suggested an agenda and, perhaps more sinisterly, the presence of a perpatrator. To date, most of the incidents had occurred in discrete clusters, differing in duration and in the ratio of carpal to tarsal infection. There was also the distinction that while in the West and North, the majority of incidents reported had been oral, the Southeast was almost exclusively affected by literary contamination. In the face of so uncertain an enemy and of official procrastination, it was not unnatural therefore for the citizenry to assume certain Civic responsibilities pertaining to the defence of the language. In those urban centres which had Conservative councils, lexical defense groups (or LDG’s) were formed, while in Hull, a man with thick-glasses who was seen loitering near a bookshop "with intent" was set upon by an concerned mob and badly frightened.

The initial response of the authorities to the various outbreaks of semantic contamination had been that each could, if isolated, be contained. In hindsight their confidence was not merely naïve, it was irresponsable. The inadequacy of the measures became apparent over the August bank-holiday weekend, when it became clear that a concerted attack on the language was being perpetrated on three separate fronts. Over the course of this single weekend, the following changes were reported: in Scotland the words both for ‘flight’ and ‘acclaim’ were simultaneously replaced by the ‘b’-carpal ‘handbag’, while ‘bank’ became universally corrupted on the following day to ‘bnooke’; in Essex there was a virulent outbreak of the ‘b’-tarsal ‘pfwnng’, disarticulating up to one-third of the place-names and resulting in huge and enduring traffic delays, while in Kent the polarity of batteries was abruptly reversed. Perhaps most worrying, owing to an abberation in collective nouns in the Westcountry, on the Monday morning, carbourettors began to interpolate themselves into Butchers’ window-displays, while turnstiles disappeared completely from the countryside.

The public began to grow alarmed. While a number of noisy and relatively toothless sub-committees were formed at the County and District levels, an emergency bill was rushed through both Houses of Parliament, with the full support of the opposition, which allowed inter alia for the appeal to foreign governments. It was indeed precisely this provision which bore first fruit. It seemed that the late Professor Karayenko of the University of Kiev had been working on a process which could be used to decontaminate texts which had undergone ‘a’ and ‘b’ carpal contamination. While the rather intricate process had only thus far been tried out on Cyrillic texts and in laboratory conditions, there was every reason to believe that the technique might readily be adapted for use on the Roman alphabet. A team of scientists flew at once to the Ukraine with a cross-sample of texts at various levels of infection. Happily, within the fortnight they were able to report the first successful restoration of an original by what is now commonly termed the ‘Kiev Textual Restitution’ (‘KTR’) process. Of course, the number of man-hours involved has proven prohibitive. Nevertheless, it was, for instance, using this procedure that the Lindusfarne Gospel was restored, and a refined KTR technique has, indeed, been used to decontaminate the present piece of text. Karayenko, a former army medic, was posthumously reburied with full military honours in Lvov.

At much the same time, Chief Inspector Wiseacre announced that Scotland Yard, in co-operation with both the FBI and Interpol, were now in a position to identify a main suspect. Certainly the same hand appeared to be behind both the Clapham derailment and the so-called Duddsbury Outrage. The figure was now named as the Reverend Eli Jawapani, natural of Kingston, Jamaica, though resident in the United Kingdom since 1988. He was co-founder of the ‘Church of the Cofraternity of the Good Thief’, but whether or not this church was implicated in the subversive semantic crusade remained an open question. A monetary reward was offered to any member of the public who could assist the police in locating the man for whom, lamentably, no photofit was forthcoming. It seemed that his face was eminently forgetable, even to those former sect-members who, being described by the police as digruntled, might be expected to identify certain salient characteristics of the man.

But the country remained surprisingly indifferent to this first appeal, despite a mounting disquiet as to the effects of the counterfeit language. Then, in September, an anonymous letter was delivered to Scotland Yard. This added a single distinguishing feature which might, it was hoped, aid in the description. The police anticipated an early detention which would restore a level of calm to the country. Unforseeably, the effect was entirely the opposite, and in the confusion the chances of a successful arrest receeded. For panic struck the public when the detail was added to the name: the Reverend had been blind since birth.

A national hunt for the suspect began. Rumours flew, denunciations clogged the networks. Countless dozens of blind men, not all of them reverends, not all of them ‘ethnic’, were detained for questioning. But perversely, amid all this vigilance, the incidents of verbal contamination grew more frequent, not less. During Her Christmas speech, the Queen for the first time gave voice to the fear that had already gained currency through the agency of the Press, which quoted liberally and with little regard for accuracy from agent ‘Marjoram’ : it was evident, from the geographic specificity of the infection patterns, that whoever was behind this insidious attack upon the language had, for his or her goal, the linguistic dismemberment of the United Kingdom! Thus it was becoming overarchingly difficult for a car-owner of Buckinghamshire to talk meaningfully to an Insurance salesman from the Mersey. Words such as ‘yield’ and ‘neutral’, spoken by a Ulsterman, had precisely the opposite meaning when spoken by a native of Surrey. And in the Westcountry, whole categories of nouns were either unclaimed or enjoying the semantic kinship of terms to which they were eminently unsuited: ‘humidity’ was found to be out gambolling with the ungulates, while the four cardinal directions had been increased to five with the interpolation of ‘jejune’.

By February the situation had reached such a pass that foreign governments felt they could no longer rely on the geography and discretion of Britannia in order to safeguard their respective dictions. Anglophone countries, justifiably concerned for their own semantic integrity, were the first to introduce a range of measures which were aimed at reducing exposure to dubious terms. Restrictions were placed not merely on the importation of items one might suspect - best-sellers, radio broadcasts, the Royal Mail - but on such innocuous items as football chants and chocolate-bar wrappers. Touring musicians and Westend actors alike were questioned as to the semantic integrity of their work, and there was even the report of a stag party from Birmingham undergoing the indignity of an oral examination upon arrival at Dun Laoghaire ferry terminal in Ireland.

But if Her Majesty’s Government was relatively understanding of the measures adopted throughout the Anglophone world, they were outraged to find the French even more draconian in their restrictions. As the Foreign Secretary insisted to his French counterpart, an international panel of experts working under the aegis of the WTO had discovered no evidence whatsoever that the cross-contamination of languages was feasible. Indeed, the possibility that a carpal or tarsal might somehow jump the linguistic gulf that separated English from Continental languages was rated, and this by a Sorbonne study, at less than 5%. What made matters more acrimonious yet was that the sudden appearance of the a-tarsals ‘blinguer’ and ‘châtoeufs’ in the Paris suburbs, used to justify the ban, had been exposed as incidents of scare-mongering by agents provocateurs of the Language Police. Nevertheless, the French authorities remained adamant: Défence d’anglais! The Italians and Greeks followed suit.

With economic in addition to semantic disaster looming, the authorities assumed a second batch of emergency powers. The Army was mobilised, and with their intervention dreadful sights have become a commonplace in newspaper photo and television screen: semantic checkpoints restrict inter-county movements, billboards and shop-signs are reduced by law to a reliance upon pictograph rather than word; plainclothes policemen eavesdrop conversations so as to nip new tarsals in the bud; and saddest of all, perhaps, innumerable piles of books smoulder throughout the countryside in mute autos da fe. Indeed, it is not uncommon today to find libraries and bookshops whose shelves are entirely denuded of any but the meanest publication, and newspapers too have become subject to the most stringent spellchecks before they are allowed to circulate. Many tabloids have gone under.

For by now, regional variations have become so acute that one can no longer dismiss as fantasy the theory that the United Kingdom is being deliberately and systematically disarticulated. The core language itself, destabilised by the intrusion of so many foreign and senseless terms, has begun to show signs of strain. To the Southeast of a line running from Exeter to Lincoln there is a noticeable scarcity of adjective, while to the Northwest adjectives have begun to proliferate at such a rate that there is a danger they might swamp the very nouns that they purport to distinguish. With regard to conjunctions, however, the very opposite is true, and indeed much of Scotland has had to endure long periods without a single one, the population relying instead on grunts and glottal stops so as to co-ordinate their sentences. And in Ulster, an indicative verbform can scarcely be articulated before it is found to have transformed into a conditional.

To an extent, if the scenario of social calamity predicted by agent ‘Marjoram’ has not quite been borne out, one would like to attribute this to a certain stoicism in the British character. What other nation would survive the erosion of taxonomy, so that an airline pilot is classified as a grazing quadruped and pig-iron production falls under the remit of the Department of Health? What other legal system could cope with a semantic aberration that sees ‘trouser’ as the opposite of ‘felony’, and the word ‘arraign’ transformed into the ‘a’-tarsal ‘bleam’? Could any other mercantile system cope with the profusion of ‘b’-tarsals which makes hazardous the attempt to count beyond thirteen? And if a handful of larger countries have managed to surmount the difficulty of several time zones, what marvellous invention has allowed the people of Britain to continue to co-ordinate their timetables, when not only the names, but even the number of days of the week frequently fail to match up.

But what of the future, for as is well known, the situation is without precedent? Chief Inspector Wiseacre, in a speech so corrupt with neologism and so extended by ‘b’-tarsal intrusion that several interpretations are extant, has suggested a laissez faire approach, since it has been demonstrated that most carpals are of limited duration, while the incidence of new tarsal contamination has already reached a plateau and may therefore be expected presently to decline. A second, related plan is based around a system of local focii in which clusters of linguistically pure diction might by cultivated and gradually reintroduced into the populace. This scheme counts on the support of a number of leading academics, many, curiously enough, with a background in biology.

Notwithstanding the evidence that suggests a law of ‘natural decline’, however, an influential government think-tank with links to both the OECD and NATO has advocated a far more radical surgery, that which has come to be called the ‘tabula rasa’ approach. This would entail the systematic silencing of all speech and the placing of writing in quarantine for a period of not less than forty days, after which time transplants of uncontaminated language would be introduced from the United States. Or ‘re-introduced’, for after all, as advocates of this last approach have pointed out, the language spoken on the other side of the Atlantic is itself, historically, a transplant, and as such has as much claim to be called English as that which it would ostensibly replace.

The most recent opinion polls suggest that this last schema will be adopted.