The Book Club: An Unexpectedly Essential Guide to Language

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

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Summary

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Ben Schott. The author of the world- (or downstairs-loo-) conquering Schott’s Original Miscellany returns with Schott’s Significa, a deeply reported and constantly surprising book in which he uses the private languages of various communities – from gondoliers to graffiti writers and from Swifties to sommeliers – as a way of understanding their worlds. Ben tells me about how the project came together, how he was inspired by the folklorists Iona and Peter Opie pinning the butterfly of playground games – and why doing the shoe-leather reporting yields results that you could never get from Google or ChatGPT.

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0:44.0	Thank you. to claim this offer now. Terms apply. Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.
0:47.2	I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.
0:49.4	And my guest this week is Ben Schott, who many listeners will remember as the author of Scott's original
0:55.9	Muccellany, a world-conquering gift book that appeared in every stocking for many years.
1:03.3	He's back with what promises to be even more world-conquering, a book called Schott's Significa
1:08.2	and unexpectedly essential guide to language in which Ben looks at all the sort of idioms and idelects and private collections of slang of a very eclectic selection of communities.
1:20.9	Ben, can you tell me what's the origin of this book? I know some of it appeared piecemeal of journalism, didn't it?
1:26.8	So about 12 years ago, my wife comes back from a party in Manhattan, and she's wearing a big
1:32.9	badge with the letters F-O-J-B on it. And I'm like, ha, any particular reason, any significance of
1:40.2	F-O-J-B, it seems, you know, odd. It turns out it stands for Friends of Jimmy Bradley.
1:46.4	Jimmy Bradley is an amazing restaurateur in New York. He had one of my favorite restaurants
1:50.9	called the Red Cat, and F-O-J-B was one of the codes he put into his reservation system.
1:55.9	So your name popped up with F-O-J-B, and that means you got a glass of champagne, or
1:59.9	you got a good table,
2:06.1	or they sent out some dessert. And this got me thinking, huh, I bet there are other codes that other restaurateurs use. I wonder if there are. I wonder if they'll talk to me. And I wonder
	...

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