What do you call a show about words that leaves you speechless? A contradiction? An oxymoron? Or simply RobWords Live?
Whatever the answer, Rob Watts has found a way to make etymology entertaining, education hilarious and the English language even more eccentric than it already is.
I should declare an interest: I am one of the nearly one million subscribers to RobWords on YouTube. But even with a head start on the homework, I wasn’t prepared for quite how much fun his linguistic deep dive would be when transferred from screen to stage.
Rob describes himself as a relative newcomer to live performance. He may be new to the stage, but he’s certainly no novice when it comes to holding an audience. His years behind the microphone as a BBC news presenter in Salford – and his subsequent career as a television anchor for Deutsche Welle in his adopted Berlin – have clearly given him the broadcast bug. On stage, that translates into an easy, conversational style that feels less like being lectured and more like being let in on a very funny secret.
And then there is the audience.
Rob plays with us almost as much as he plays with words. Questions, reactions and shared discoveries become part of the performance, and his professed stage inexperience seems almost perversely to work in his favour. There is no sense of a performer rigidly following a script; instead, he seems genuinely curious about what the room will give him. The result is an infectious rapport – conversational, conspiratorial and occasionally delightfully chaotic.
The subject matter is a linguistic smorgasbord: silent letters, borrowed and purloined words, homophones, contranyms, portmanteaus and etymological enigmas. English, we discover, is less a language than a linguistic lucky dip – assembled from whatever other languages happened to be lying around.
I laughed out loud at the cornucopia of conundrums and convoluted derivations, while simultaneously wondering how on earth we ended up spelling things the way we do.
RobWords Live proves that words have histories, histories have jokes, and etymology can be seriously entertaining.
It is, quite simply, a wordy good time – and I don’t think that’s putting it too lightly. Translate yourself down to Venue 17 – Stage Three at Assembly George Square at 8.10pm, every night until 16 August.
