I've just had my bluff called. Not, perhaps in the way you think. No one's (yet) exposed the utterly threadbare nature of my claims to political wisdom, nor have they (at the time of writing) exploded my shallow, flimsy, frankly bogus, credentials to practise any sort of journalism. That'll have to wait for my next outing on Radio Four.

No, my bluff has been called in the classic sense - the sense in which Coren père, the great Arthur Marshall, the pinkly luminous Frank Muir and the nordically coquettish Sandi Toksvig would understand it. My definition has been exposed.

I grew up with Frank and Arthur on Call My Bluff. My idea of cutting loose as a young man was staying up to watch them wrestle over whether obsony was a disease of sheep, a Welsh ziggurat or a catch-all term for spreads and preserves, (it's the last of the three as it happens). And the delight I felt at watching Call My Bluff as a boy has grown into a passionate, still unassuaged, longing to appear on the show itself one day.

But while that dream may never now be fulfilled, my bluff has been called in another way. Instead of inventing bogus definitions, or cloaking real ones in a display of diversionary verbiage, I have become a definition myself. In the most embarrassing fashion.

Gove has been outed. My name, which I had always thought was a clumsy Saxon rendering of the poetically Gaelic gobh (pron. goff) has been exposed as something far more prosaic. According to the full, unexpurgated, Oxford English Dictionary, the lexicographer's cut version of the great language treasury, Gove is no mere translation from the Celtic but an English word in its own right. A verb in fact. Meaning to stare stupidly.

I owe this stunning, humbling, insight to a BBC feature about an American author, Ammon Shea, who has just spent the last year reading the entire OED for fun. An exercise most people would find as appetising as eating soil for sustenance but which evokes in me feelings of deep, inchoate, longing and envy.

Or would have done, if it hadn't been for the fact that, according to the BBC, of the favoured words culled by this American author from his year-long immersion in the OED, Gove tops the list. If you don't believe me, visit the BBC's news website and type in Ammon Shea's name.

There is something, apparently, about the monosyllabic simplicity of this word, and something about the compact elegance of four plain letters meaning to stare stupidly that caught his imagination. And as a result of sharing this information with the world's second most popular news website (after the Times's own) Mr Ammon Shea has not only called my bluff, he's blown my cover and colonised my brand. I all I can do is Gove into the middle distance and wonder if Ammon is a little-used Mercian dialect word meaning destroyer of dreams.

Coren's greatest hits

Thinking of Alan Coren, the viceroy of Call My Bluff in its late high imperial phase, inevitably reminds me of one of the greatest pleasures I had as this newspaper's comment editor - receiving Alan's copy.

I say receiving because the Coren column, uniquely among contributions to the paper, never, never ever, required editing. My task as the nominal editor of the page on which Alan's words appeared was like Joseph's after the Immaculate Conception, simply to stand and watch in wonder while something wondrous was delivered.

But while Alan made it blissfully easy for anyone to be his editor I got to appreciate just how much the grace of his writing owed to hard, continuous slog on his part. He would agonise about subject matter, he would rehearse concepts over and over again, as he searched for the perfect intro, the faint rasp and whiff of a Silk Cut being lit would percolate down the phone. And then, just hours later, a column as precision-engineered in every particular as a Maserati would glide into my inbox.

Now, thanks to Giles and Vicky Coren, a single volume of Alan's best work (a concept a bit like an EP of Lennon and Macartney's greatest hits) is being published by Canongate under the title Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks. I cannot imagine there could be a thinking adult who would not have their life enhanced by owning a copy.

All the rage

What is the defining emotion of our time? Fear, many might say, but I think rage may be closer to the mark. Reading and listening to reactions to the bad economic news the overwhelming sense is of anger looking for an outlet. On the roads I find drivers more assertive, aggressive and pugnacious than ever. In queues for morning coffee or on the Tube, the classic phlegmatic Brit has been replaced by a commuter primed to go off at any second. I hope I am wrong, but I sense deep currents driving emotions to new heights. A wave is swelling, and I fear to contemplate the damage when it makes landfall.

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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