It’s amazing how many times I’ve been involved in a drunken conversation about this and argued over the facts of how it was made - is it under the sea bed or sitting on top of it? Or is it floating half way down like giant industrial seaweed?! Who bloody knows? Some things are just better to argue about than to google for the real facts.

In French it is Le tunnel sous la Manche… Yes – the French version doesn’t quite have the same ring (now there’s a first!) as the English pet name for that beast of engineering, The Chunnel.

I’ve been through the Channel Tunnel more than once. Yep, there AND back. At least I assume that’s the case but I can’t really remember the ‘back’ having been drunk on all that good French wine (see picture).

Anyway, I did google it, just (obviously the French name for the chunnel is not something I just happened to know) – I didn’t read much of the boring (or should I say ‘boreing’ ahem) stuff about building it, but here’s what I have found out: There have been three fires; no one has died. At least not in Chunnel fires – a dozen refugees have died trying to sneak into the UK via the Chunnel jumping onto moving trains from bridges, tampering with railway equipment and the like.
One thing I did read about building it was that both England and France had machines on either side drilling the tunnel and whilst England's ones were called dull things like ‘1A’ and ‘2B’ the French gave their machines sexy lady names like Brigitte and Virginie…
Somehow I think men’s names may have been more appropriate for drilling machines…

Yep, this (image) is what England would have meant before it was England as we know it, in say 800-1150 AD when it was the Anglo Saxons running about being Germanic instead of you lot, running around being English.

Jeez, I sound like a regular pro-fes-sor here, don't I? - notice I made the URL path deliberately vague (uh, if you're actually clicked on the post, not just the home page I mean), to try and deter people who actually have an authority on the matter from stumbling, in disgust, on my musings on their particular area of historical expertise...

So I'm on pretty shaky ground here, in particular because the aforementioned words (Wessex, Sussex, etc.) are conjoinulated from very early English words, but words that, for all intents and purposes, are conjoinulations nonetheless.

You see...
Wessex = West Saxon
Sussex = South Saxon
Essex = (I don't really need to tell you, do I?) East Saxon
OK, so they kinda turned 'sax' into 'sex' and dropped the 'on', but you get the idea.

So, I little history lesson? (again - thanks vague URL path)
The Anglo Saxons lived in the South and East of Britain. Not sure whether they came in and kicked some Celtic ass (though you can pretty much guarantee they did), the squabbles are over whether they totally kicked the Celts asses, or whether they integrated with them somewhat.

Supposedly they cruised in from northern Europe (German/Scandinavianish areas) around 400-600 AD, but this whole 'Wessex' business didn't get off the ground til like, 870ish AD, with good old Alfred the Great (he was the guy that burnt those cakes, right?)

So the Anglo saxons pretty much did their thing until they, in turn, got their asses kicked by the Normans (itself a bit of a conjoinulation - comes from 'Northmen' - they were from Northern France), which I believe happened in 1066.

Ah...have I missed anything... "Hell yes!" I hear you say?
Yeah, well. Check out my tags.

Lichtenstein is so damn cool. This is 'Blam' from 1962.
I was totally awed seeing his stuff for real in Amsterdam a couple of years back. So big and bold and dreamy and gorgeous.

Thought the 'Blam!' and Lichtenstein in general, were kind of appropriate for the hyperbolic words I have in mind today.
Funny, silly, explosive words like 'Fantabulous!' and 'Ubertastic!'. Words that seem doubly so if you can take two with similar meanings like Fantastic and Fabulous, such recognisable sounds and smoosh em.

There's 'Ginormous' which just seems to make so much sense to my ears.

But how about 'Bodacious' - the boldly audacious Bill and Ted may or may not have said it first.
Or was it the Ninja Turtles?
Neither, according to Michael Quinion, who reckons it's been around in various forms since at least 1832 and probably originates in the fabulous (not sure I can go so far as to say fantabulous - even fabulous may be stretching it a bit) West Country.

(I'm a little confused about the breast bit though).

Calexico. They are one of my most favouritist bands. It’s something about big horns (brass instruments I mean) playing in that wicked mariachi style that really gives me the chills.
Then those deserty, tumbleweedy lyrics that really make me wanna go jump on horseback and ride a long, long way off into the sunset or something.
No actually, that’s bullshit – it makes me wanna shake my booty and howl like a hyena.

Besides this, Calexico is in fact a super, super conjoinulation – apart from being a well cool band, it is the name of a town Southern US of A that borders on California and Mexico, hence the Cal-exico. Hooray for America (don’t hear me saying that too often)…

BUT, and here’s where it gets just totally awesome, it seems that the USA has a whole plethora of geographically conjoinulated gems…Yep there are dozens of these border towns that have some very silly names, the result of conjoinulating the two states on the border of which they sit, and I'm very excited about it.

Here are 5 of my favourites:

Florala, Alabama (Florida and Alabama) – Sounds kinda girly, like flowers – 'tho I’m guessing that it’s anything but, being in the deep south.

Kenova, West Virginia (Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia) – Triple smooshy goodness.

Texarkana, Texas and Texarkana, Arkansas (Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana) – I’m not sure whether Texarkana and Texarkana are the same place or not. (actually I could do a whole section on Texas ones, there's loads.)

Ucolo, Utah (Utah and Colorado) – sounds a bit like some sort of nasty stomach bug, as in “I’ll be back at work and in top form just as soon as I get over this wretched Ucolo and can stop running to the loo every 5 minutes.” (no offense to my Ucolan readers, of which I’m sure I have many... ah, no, actually… let me see, no, apparently I have none, so, up yours UCOLO!)

Kanorado, Kansas (Kansas and Colorado) - I dunno, I just like the way this one flows.

And a nice Canadian one:
Alsask, Saskatchewan, (Alberta and Saskatchewan) – sounds like something an Inuit would call their kid “Alsask! Quick! Lace up your mukluks it’s time for you to perform your fighting-a-polar-bear-to-the-death rite of passage.”

Speaking of placenames - let’s not forget England’s very own ‘Oxbridge’ Universities (Oxford and Cambridge are posh enough to smoosh together into one steaming great pile of poshness apparently.)

I can't really begin this proper without giving credit where it's due - A long weekend spent in Somerset; Human pyramids, Elizabethan folly rooms, cider and the birth of many a dreadful conjoinulation...

It's great when reasonably large group of cabin fevered friends put heads together and play with the English language for a few days, until it becomes almost obsessive - It's like when you're on holiday and you decide to pretend to be Baz and Shirl, a really annoying couple from Australia; after a few hours, it becomes virtually impossible to drop the accents and the personas. Salt songs are another good example (sorry, getting a bit obscure there, but those in the know will appreciate the reference).

Anyway, I learnt a lot of new conjoinulations - I mean, not just ones we made up there and then, I'm talking well established conjoinulations, completely absorbed into vernacular. From[e] many of these I build future posts.

...since I first set foot on old Blighty.
I couldn't let that wee milestone go un-noted.
En-ger-land!