Colin Baker once said that it was part of Doctor Who’s job to send children scurrying off to their dictionaries when the Doctor uses a word they don’t understand. And even though he was being a bit sesquipedalian about it, and if a child had taken his advice they would have missed half the episode he was in (and he wasn’t in that many), he was also right. Because over six years, ITV’s answer to Doctor Who – The Tomorrow People – only managed to teach me three words, all beginning with the letter T: telepathy, telekinesis and teleportation. Doctor Who, on the other hand, is still expanding my vocabulary in new and exciting ways today.
Bohemian – One of the many words I learned from Terrance Dicks, who would use it to describe the Fourth Doctor in every Target novelisation he ever wrote. According to Dicks, the Doctor wore ‘vaguely Bohemian looking garments’; I spent most of my formative years believing that the word meant ‘badly fitting’.
Dalekanium – The material from which the perfidious Daleks are made and which is impervious to absolutely nothing.
Entropy – Everybody is going to die. Slowly.
Hiatus – An enforced break and not a paid holiday where you sit around on your backside doing nothing for eighteen months.
Homunculus – A homicidal robot with the brain of a pig. This is not exactly correct but it sounds more like what something called a homunculus ought to be than the definition you’ll find in the dictionary.
Isomorphic – This has nothing to do with energy drinks. The word explains why the only person who can fly the Doctor’s TARDIS is the Doctor. (See James Bond’s gun in Skyfall for a blatant rip-off of this idea.)
Megabyte Modem – back in 1986, this was a genuine sci-fi term for a futuristically fast internet connection. These days we all have megabyte modems, apart from the perfidious customer complaints department of British Telecom, apparently.
Penultimate – I learned this word not from Doctor Who, but from the BBC continuity announcers who would regularly use it when they were introducing the third part of a four-part story. It was a word I came to dislike: the penultimate episode was usually the dullest one.
Perfidious – Deceitful and untrustworthy. I frequently utilised perfidious in school essays to impress the reader and I am still using it today. QED.
Radiophonic – Electronic music that sounds odd and/or disturbing and has been composed in a BBC basement with no windows. See also: Tangerine Dream (page 61).
Robophobia – An inexplicable fear of killer robots.
Serendipity – Doctor Who’s excuse for a plot riddled with coincidences.
Timey-wimey – Doctor Who’s excuse for a plot that has long since stopped making sense.
Whovian – Please refer to this book’s glossary (page 259).