Vol I, No 2
Women, Wife-men, and Sexist Bias
Roger W. Wescott, Professor of Linguistics, Drew University
The professional meetings I attend no longer have chairmen. They now have chairpersons, because the term chair_men_ is held to be discriminatory against women.
But I wonder how many female persons realize that the form wo_men_ is equally invidious, at least in etymological terms. For Modern English _woman_ comes, by way of Middle English _wimman_, from Old English _wīfman_, which literally meant “wife-man.” And most feminists insist not only that one need not be a man to be a person but also that one need not be a wife to be feminine.
So, for those female persons who do not care to be referred to either as wives or as men, a new designation is needed. Any suggestions?
While pondering this terminological lacuna, those of either sex who are interested in word origins may be intrigued to know that the pre-Germanic sources of both the two words wife and man remain etymological puzzles.
There are, however, several reconstructed Proto-Indo-European roots from which English wife and man can be derived without patent violation of known phonological, morphological, or semantic laws of probability. For wife, there are seven such roots, which, though homonymous, were presumably distinct in meaning and in usage. They are:
| root | meaning of root | meaning of derived noun | related English derivative |
|---|---|---|---|
| *wey- 1 | ‘turn’, ‘twist’ | (a) ‘weaver’, ‘spinner’ (b) ‘hip-swiveler’ (c) ‘flickle person’ |
(a,b) wire (G), (c) vibrate (I) |
| *wey- 2 | ‘drip’, ‘flow’ | ‘menstruator’ | ooze (G) , virus (I) |
| *wey- 3 | ‘grow,’ ‘sprout’ | ‘gestator’ | (only wife itself: G) |
| *wey- 4 | ‘magic,’ ‘sorcery’ | ‘witch’ | witch (G) |
| *wey- 5 | ‘fault,’ ‘defect’ | ‘weaker sex’ | vice (I) |
| *wey- 6 | ‘strong,’ ‘vigorous’ | ‘person of stamina’ | vim (I) |
| *wey- 7 | ‘wither,’ ‘wrinkle’ | ‘one who (both blooms and) ages rapidly’ | wizen (G) |
For man, there are three plausible root sources, as follows:
| root | meaning of root | meaning of derived noun | related English derivative |
|---|---|---|---|
| *men- | ‘think’ | ‘reasoner’ | mind (G), mental (I) |
| *man- | ‘hand’ | ‘manipulator’ | manual (I) |
| *mon- | ‘man’ | ‘human being’ | man (G) |
G means “coming into English by way of Germanic (Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse).”
I means “coming into English by way of Italic (Latin or French).”
Binomials and Trinomials
Paul M. Lloyd, Professor of Romance Languages, University of Pennsylvania
Roger Wescott’s note on what he calls “word chains” in English recalls two earlier studies: Richard D. Abraham, “Fixed Order of Coordinates. A Study in Comparative Lexicography,” Modern Language Journal, 34 (1950), 276-87, and Yakov Malkiel, “Studies in Irreversible Binomials,” Lingua, 8 (1959), 113-60. Wescott’s note concerns itself only with idiomatic groups of three words or wordlike elements, but I believe such chains are an extension of what Malkiel calls binomials, or two-word groups.
Some of these groups involve a repetition of the same initial consonant (s):
| bag and baggage | from rags to riches | sixes and sevens |
| bed and board | hale and hearty | spic and span |
| betwixt and between | house and home | stem to stern |
| birds and bees | kit and caboodle | sticks and stones |
| black and blue | kith and kin | stress and strain |
| born and bred | life and limb | tattered and torn |
| brain and brawn | live and learn | thick and thin |
| dribs and drabs | might and main | tit for tat |
| facts and figures | now or never | to have and hold |
| fair and/or foul | part and parcel | to hem and haw |
| few and far between | pen and pencil | to rant and rave |
| first and foremost | pots and pans | to toss and turn |
| fish or fowl | rack and ruin | tried and true |
| forgive and forget | rhyme or reason | vim and vigor |
| friend or foe | safe and sound | wild and woolly |
| from pillar to post | shot and shell | zip and zest |
Other groups involve no phonetic elements linking them but rather some kind of semantic link:
| back and forth | fuss and bother | needle and thread |
| beck and call | give and take | nip and tuck |
| bits and pieces | hail and farewell | nook and cranny |
| cat and mouse | hammer and tongs | on land and (on) sea |
| cock and bull | hard and fast | open and shut |
| cut and dried | head and shoulders | p’s and q’s |
| cuts and bruises | hither and yon | pins and needles |
| each and every | if and when | rack and pinion |
| fast and loose | ins and outs | skin and bones |
| fathers and sons | jot and tittle | spit and polish |
| fine and dandy | ladies and gentlemen | straight and narrow |
| fits and starts | leaps and bounds | stuff and nonsense |
| flesh and blood | lock and key | to and fro |
| for better or (for) worse | man and wife | true and false |
| free and easy | men and women | up (s) and down (s) |
| from hand to mouth | mortar and pestle | ways and means |
Some groups involve rhyming:
| fair and square | highways and byways | hither and thither |
| high and dry | wheel and deal |
Some involve rhyming and no conjunction:
| boogie-woogie | niminy-piminy | razzle-dazzle |
| namby-pamby | pell-mell | willy-nilly |
Probably many more binomials can be presented by others. I just wish to add a few trinomials:
| bell, book, and candle | rag, tag and bobtail |
| calm, cool, and collected | red, white, and blue |
| fair, fat, and forty | signed, sealed, and delivered |
| high, wide, and handsome | tall, dark, and handsome |
| lock, stock, and barrel | vim, vigor, and vitality |
| man, woman, and child | way, shape, or manner |
Letters {Louis T. Milic}
I was happy to see your elegantly printed publication. …I think the kind of popularizing intention you have badly needs some development since the layman can scarcely read the table of contents of any current journal devoted to language, and language happens to be an enthusiasm of many people.
—Professor Louis T. Milic, The Cleveland State University
ETYMOLOGICA OBSCURA: GOETZ VON BERLICHINGEN!
Robert A. Fowkes, New York University
Eric P. Hamp’s interesting remarks on Pygmalion in the admirable first number of VERBATIM (to which long, successful, and non-pedantic life!) provoke many reactions in several directions.
The euphemistic suggestion of the once “indecent” bloody by means of the title of the work (on which the film was based, in which the deliciously forbidden not bloody likely occurred) brings to mind the classic example in German literature, Goetz von Berlichingen. The mere utterance of the title of that play of Goethe’s has long been the equivalent of a rhetorical invitation to commit an unsavory act. In Act III, the protagonist, finding himself in a situation reminiscent of the famous incident in the Battle of the Bulge, is ordered to surrender. In the printed versions of the play, Goetz replies, Er [a certain captain] kann mich–. We must assume that the actor filled in the blanks with the proper number of improper words. Readers have sometimes wondered why the accusative mich is used, and not mir, since modern versions of the invitation begin with du kannst mir, utilizing a sort of ethical dative with unethical intent. But Goethe made use of the autobiography of the crusty old hero, and in that work Goetz himself writes, in nonstandard German, er solte mich hinden lecken. Little did the doughty warrior realize that his name would one day, via a title, come to mean, “Kiss my–.”
Once I was buying a few copies of the play for a class, and the New York bookseller, obviously amused, shouted to his assistant in the rear of the store, “Goetz von Berlichingen !” The reaction was one of feigned indignation mingled with high hilarity. But when I added, “Six copies,” and the message was relayed, “Sechsmal!,” the merriment reached such proportions that it looked as if business would cease for the day.
It is likely that Gen. MacAuliffe’s reply, “Nuts!,” in the Battle of the Bulge, is entirely apocryphal. If so, the alleged translation by a perplexed interpreter, “Nuesse!” is doubly so. And a “corrected” version, “Quatsch, Mensch!,” while closer, would still be fictitious. But what a marvelous opportunity it would have been for “Goetz von Berlichingen”!
Eric Hamp writes from Aberystwyth, Wales, which reminds me of several related circumstances involving the quondam tabu. (I am permitted to say quondam, I imagine, in view of all the Latin headings in the periodical–plus a modicum of Greek–with its Latin title). A pleasantly shocking use of the word in its “Welsh” guise blydi occurred in the widely read novel William Jones by the late T. Rowland Hughes (Gwasg Aberystwyth–Aberystwyth Press–1944). William Jones tired of his wife’s vituperation and cold chips, utters the daring line, “Cadw dy blydi chips!” (‘Keep your bloody chips!') and shortly thereafter leaves home forever. Perhaps the lax state of “morals” in wartime made it possible to print such a word as blydi. When, however, a few years later the Welsh BBC began to present a radio series based on the novel and the word blydi came over the (hitherto unsullied?) air waves, puritanical protests succeeded in banning any further episodes of the story.
The quasi-infixal usage in abso-Pygmalion-lutely quoted by Eric Hamp reminds us of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan Thomas, where we read, “ ‘The chap I know says you can always tell a cuckoo from Bridgend, it goes: “Cuckbloodyoo! cuckbloodyoo!”’ ‘Cuckbloodyoo !’ echoed the arch,” with, of course, overtones and undertones that one would expect in Dylan Thomas.
I recall childish games in which children perpetrated similar formations, with, however, no euphemistic or tabu implications for the most part. I heard in those remote days such monstrosities as Pennsyl-now-vania, Phila-now-delphia, inter-now-national but the possibilities were limited. A similar device is exploited in some comic strips and cartoons where I have seen, “You’re too inde-blank-pendent.” And I have heard utterances like inde-fornicating-pendent, or unbowdlerized equivalents.
Not quite the same, but still bearing a certain resemblance to the abso-Pygmalion-lutely type, is the expression number-hucking-one which came into use in Korea during the Korean War, with the approximate meaning, ‘Tops; A-One.’ This, however, reflects several things irrelevant to the present discussion, including the structure of the Korean numeral system, an idiomatic superlative, a special phonetic situation, possibly a Japanese adstratum, plus mild treachery on the part of G.I.’s.
The word bloody itself seems eminently qualified to be included under the heading ETYMOLOGICA OBSCURA, for I do not believe that it has been explained. It was tabu in our house, and when we asked our parents why, we were given no explanation. Since blasted was another tabu word, we thought there must be something especially bad about words beginning with B (like bad itself?), and it is possible to compile quite a list (bastard, bugger, etc.). But then we thought of Bible, Baptist, better, best and realized we were on a false track.
Certainly the “By Our Lady” explanation is unlikely as the origin of bloody. And claims that God’s blood is the source seem equally wide of the mark. If bloody hot, bloody sick, bloody good remind us of compounds in German with blut–(blutjung, blutsauer, blutwenig, etc.), an investigation of these German words shows that some have a word blutt (Low German equivalent of bloss ‘mere’), others contain Blut; and none involve ?_blutig_ ‘bloody’ by itself in any sense resembling the “expletive.” It is even conceivable that the _bloody_ in _bloody warm_ is different in origin from that in _bloody fool_. Possibly the word belongs to that group never to be explained because the “special circumstances” mentioned by Hamp have been forgotten. If they prove to be retrievable by some as yet unforeseen method, the word will obviously shed its obscurity. It is, at any rate, tantalizing.
Letters {Martin Fincun}
Judging from the quality of Sidney I. Landau’s review [“sexual intercourse in American College Dictionaries,” VERBATIM I, 1], this letter should be addressed to Mr. Urdung and the address should be Peyton Place.
I contracted to get a publication for word lovers. Instead, we get a shocking, sophisticated, non-functional complaint about unsatisfactory definitions of “fuck.”
So I am asking you to fuck off. Do not send us any more of your letters. Return our money immediately.
—Martin Fincun, Fincun Court Reporters, Cleveland, Ohio
cc: Essex Conn. Police Dept. with page 4 & 5 of subject
publication
U.S. Postal Service, Washington, D.C. with page 4 & 5
of subject publication
Reviews: BRITISH SELF-TAUGHT: WITH COMMENTS IN AMERICAN
Norman W. Schur, Macmillan, 1974
Norman Schur, Esquire, is an American attorney who divides his time between England and America; I am an American lexicographer who divides his time between England and America. Norman Schur loves England and Briticisms; I love England and Briticisms. Norman Schur has compiled a dictionary of Briticisms; I have not compiled such a dictionary but have the advantage over Mr. Schur, for I am reviewing it. On my passport, under Occupation, it says “Lexicographer.”
First, let me say that this is a smashing book, strictly first rate; top-hole! Though written in entertaining style, its amusement stems from the frequent incongruities inherent in the subject-matter and not from any supercilious flippancy on the part of the compiler. This book should prove the definitive successor to all the silly articles that occasionally crop up in the Sunday supplements and in the airline magazines. Schur is a serious compiler and his definitions are always to the point; where he deemed it appropriate, he added information that is sometimes cultural, sometimes etymological, sometimes laconically editorial, always interesting.
Thirty-odd pages of Introductory Notes provide essential guidelines not only to the use of the dictionary but to the differences between British and American English at the semantic, phonetic, morphological, and cultural levels. I must admit that trying to do one’s homework in a subject for which adequate documentation is so sorely lacking is a difficult task, and we must be grateful to Mr. Schur for having acted as researcher, compiler, and editor all in one. There is a great deal of fascinating material here that anyone interested in the (American/British) England language should have at his fingertips. Here are a few examples:
| ENGLISH | AMERICAN |
|---|---|
| cooker | stove |
Cooker is the normal English word for stove. An Englishman would hardly ever say electric stove, but gas stove is heard. The generic term for this kitchen appliance in England is, however,cooker.
| ENGLISH | AMERICAN |
|---|---|
| one-eyed village | one-horse town |
Also known in American as a whistle stop.
| ENGLISH | AMERICAN |
|---|---|
| turnabout | reversible |
Applied to overcoats.
| ENGLISH | AMERICAN |
|---|---|
| waving base | observation deck |
At an airport. The English expression implies much livelier activity than just looking. At Scottish airports they call it by the rather stuffy term spectator’s terrace.
| ENGLISH | AMERICAN |
|---|---|
| Wren, n. (col.) | Wave |
A member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS). in praise of these patriotic ladies: “Up with the lark and to bed with the wren.”
My questions are based on a close examination of A to D and some spot checking elsewhere, from E to (as they say) Zed. I think that Schur has included some entries that are not exclusively Briticisms: Balaclava (helmet), bandy-legged, bill (‘small machete’), brimstone (‘sulfur’), budgerigar, canterbury (‘magazine rack’), clue (in “I haven’t a clue”), compositor (‘typesetter’), coomb or cwm, cos (kind of lettuce), distemper (painting with a size base), doyen, loofah, ring the changes, tantalus. On the other hand, I found entries, which I would consider common Briticisms, missing: aerial (Brits never say ‘antenna’ except for insects), arse (for ‘ass’ or ‘bottom’), back bacon (something like Canadian bacon), bottle or rigging screw (for turn-buckle: I didn’t want to get into nautical terminology, but, since Schur has bag …), icing sugar (for confectioner’s sugar), coffee sugar, come a cropper, Demerara sugar, down printing, drone (spiv is in), duvet, film (‘movie’),? five honours (four honours is in), moving stairway, multi-storey, rooms (‘a surgeon’s offices’), singlet, starter (‘appetizer’), streaky (the kind of bacon sold in the U.S.), twit (‘a silly person; dumbbell’), Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all, zebra crossing (‘pedestrian crossing’), pelican crossing (Pe (destrian) Li(ght) Con (trolled) Crossing), and Belisha beacon.
Other matters: I think accumulator is reserved for ‘storage battery’; ‘battery’ is used for dry cells. Why not gloss as soon as say knife as ‘before you could say “Jack Robinson” ‘? At bags I!, I am more familiar with ‘Dibs on…!’ than with ‘I dibsy!’ It would have been useful to comment that balls, although used colloquially, is not considered vulgar.
Bangers are called that everywhere they are eaten, not just at agricultural shows.
The comment about BBC English is no longer true since the BBC started employing people who don’t necessarily speak RP.
Under beat up, it would be less far-fetched to recall the beaters who flush grouse, pheasant, partridge, quail, and other game birds than the Africans who rouse beasts for white hunters. My informants know beat up only in the sense of ‘give a thrashing to,’ and are more likely to use knock up in this sense.
Beggar, I think, is a euphemism for ‘bugger.’
The description at biscuit is a noble effort, but the matter may never be straightened out! Jacobs, an English company, markets “Cream Crackers” that are neither firecrackers nor explosive bonbons. Sorry, no suggestions from this quarter.
A broadsheet is also called a ‘broadside’ in America– picturesque, eh?
Browned off needs a usage label.
B.S.T. stands for British Summer (not Standard) Time; G.M.T. is not in. It’s very confusing since the U.S. went on Daylight Saving for two years starting last November.
At bugger off (and elsewhere, e.g., take your finger out, for which I have a citation for its public use by Prince Philip), I cannot agree with Schur’s “delicacy”–or should I be blaming his editor at Macmillan?
The definition of bump-start is fine, but I use jump-start, given as the American equivalent, to mean a start using jumper cables from another car’s battery to start a car whose battery is dead. As a Briticism, jump-start means to get an engine started by engaging the clutch while the car is rolling after a push.
‘Give a hoot’ might have been a more felicitous equivalent for care a ninepin than ‘give a damn,’ which is stronger.
Carry on is well handled as it is, but its use in the context of ‘You, first,’ when offering to hold a door for someone, is missing, and ‘keep going,’ fine for other contexts, doesn’t quite cover it.
A chesterfield isn’t just any kind of sofa.
A cinema is a ‘movie house,’ not ‘movies.’ A movie is usually called a film (not in).
At cock, something might have been said about Americans’ mincing, wincing use of the word. Englishmen mocking this squeamishness have been heard to refer to ‘roostertails’ for preprandial spirits, ‘pet roosters’ for petcocks.
A conker is a horse chestnut, whence conkers, the children’s game.
Get your knickers in a twist means to ‘make a muddle of because of utter confusion,’ not to ‘make a great fuss.’
And nick, in addition to the sense given, means to ‘steal’ and to ‘arrest.’
All that would seem either to detract from the praise given Mr. Schur’s book earlier in this review or, if mitigated, to leave you with the notion that, despite our criticism, we like it because it’s the only game in town. But I have two replies to that: first, I confess to having indulged in the usual game of carping at dictionaries; second, because the matters I have found to comment on here occupy a few lines, while Mr. Schur’s book occupies almost 500 pages. In short, it contains a huge amount of extremely valuable information on a subject that is too often treated frivolously and facetiously by writers who know far less about language than does Mr. Schur.
I, for one, welcome him to the depleted ranks of lexicographers. I welcome his book as an important work of scholarship and integrity.
Review: MRS. BYRNE’S DICTIONARY of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words
Josefa Heifetz Byrne, University Books, Inc., 1974
Containing about 6000 entries, this book is no bargain. Although it does list unusual, obscure, and preposterous words, it also lists many that are not (clyster, cloaca, clabber, clonic, claqueur, cimmerian, cicada, chrestomathy, cidevant, cist, clerihew, clepsydra—all words known to the average literate person). Some are inaccurately or poorly defined: “churriguerism…grossly ornamental architecture” instead of “the practice of designing grossly ornamental architecture”; “pleonastic…pertaining to oral or written repetitiousness”; “tribadism…mutual genital fondling between lesbians.” Inconsistencies and nonparallelisms abound: cisatlantic is in but not cisalpine; tramontane but not cismontane; poikilothermal but not homoiothermal. Some words are not properly English at all, appearing to be nonce borrowings: jadu, jama, jambee, jamdani, jami, jampan, jararacussu, jasey, Jataka, jauk, jenna, jeziah, jheel, jhool, jicara,…ka, kaaba, kaama, kabaya, kaberu, kaffiyeh, kaha.
Mr. Byrne, in the Editor’s Introduction, writes, “Incredible as it may seem, every entry in this book, even the most ludicrous, has been accepted as a formal or legitimate word by at least one major dictionary. The dignity that goes with endorsement by lexicographers of trusted sobriety…etc.” I am sorry to say that both Mr. and Mrs. Byrne have misconstrued the function–nay, the duty–of the lexicographer, who neither accepts nor rejects but, with scholarly aplomb, merely records.
In short, it is difficult to work up much enthusiasm for this book: I predict for it a long life on the warehouse shelves of the remainder booksellers.
Review: STRICTLY SPEAKING
Edwin Newman, Bobbs-Merrill, 1974
Linguists, especially lexicographers, are bound by a scholarly oath to describe–neither to prescribe nor pro-scribe–language, and their mission is to record, in as scientific and as unbiased a manner as possible, their observations on language and on how and why it functions. However, as a linguist and lexicographer, I must confess publicly to a form of schizophrenia that I believe afflicts many of my colleagues as well, but to which they might not admit very readily. The schism occurs between what I do about language, professionally, and what I feel about language, emotionally. I think I can be objective about utterances like he don’t, I know who you mean, ain’t that great, and real good as “typical of a particular linguistic level and/or dialect”; but I cannot bring myself to use them nor do I condone my children’s use of them, for I consider them marks of poor education and poor style. I am a linguistic snob.
The stimulus for this confession is the subject book of this review, for, from the advance publicity for Newman’s book, I expected to be raising a supercilious eyebrow (there’s an etymological redundancy for you!) at someone’s rantings about the unfortunate yet ineluctable fact that “They don’t speak English the way they used to!” My professional hackles rise; my emotions find solace in a kindred soul. However–I was misled. Not by the book itself, which doesn’t appear to have been read by the publicity department, but by the publisher’s advance publicity, which describes a book somewhat different from the one published. Strictly Speaking is an interesting, often hilarious, unevenly organized collection of chapters in which Newman vents his spleen on the written and oral journalism of the day. In general, he is right; he is correct more often than not. But on occasion he slips, as on the subject of convince to (as in It may be impossible to convince many people to stop smoking):
You may convince that. You may convince of. You may not convince to.
The object of convince may be a noun (I convinced him) or a noun phrase, usually (when not in passive constructions) found as a complementary object of a person or pronoun: I convinced him [that he ought to go], where the complement is in brackets; I convinced him of [his right to remain], where the of is the particle used, idiomatically, with convince; I convinced him [to go with me], where the complementary noun clause happens to be an infinitive, to go. Nothing could be more idiomatic, proper English. Never content to rely on myself as a sole informant, I checked about a bit (Merriam-Webster III, OED and Supplements, Fowler, Horwill, Evans, White, Alford, Hodgson, etc.), yet could find not a single syllable on convince, let alone convince to. Even The American Heritage Dictionary, with its stable of proscriptive literati, went no further than The Random House Dictionary, which merely observed that convince is “often fol. by of.” Maybe we ought to convince Newman to write “I shall not contrive imaginary rules for English style and syntax” on the blackboard 500 times.
There are other inconsistencies in the book. For instance, Newman doesn’t seem to be able to remember how many years he spent as drama reviewer for NBC, five (pp. 10, 103) or six (p. 50). He offers some amusing, if snide comments about the wire services’ love for middle initials, then lists himself as Edwin H. Newman on the copyright page, though elsewhere he appears as just Edwin Newman. He uses “and/or,” which surprises me, he misdefines lordosis, and he allows, “he anchored” to appear in the jacket blurb about his NBC activities (that is, not about his sailing activities). Other objections; Newman’s beating of a dead horse with his (now untimely) profuse comments on Nixon; the final chapter, in which the author records what he considers as some of his own best puns. Somewhere from the dim past I recall my father’s exhortation to “Let others praise thee, not thine own self.”
The book does not fulfill the promise of its rather good, earlier chapters: it starts with a bang but ends with a whimper (or, considering the subject matter of the final chapter, a groan).
All this sounds very unfriendly and damning. Nonetheless, the book is really very amusing–even downright sidesplitting in places–and, if the reader can overlook its shortcomings, he will find it a very entertaining collection, with commentary, of the foibles of those responsible for communicating to us (badly) the (bad) news of the day.
Review: THE ASTONISHMENT OF WORDS
Victor Proetz, University of Texas Press, 1971
In the late 1940’s, I was a member of a clandestine clique devoted to the translation–the literal translation, that is–of popular American songs into foreign languages. The results, as you can imagine, were often hilarious: renditions like “Ich werde dich wirden in einem Taxi, Honig,” started The Darktown Strutters Ball, treated elsewhere, in another version, as “Je vais dancer hors de mes souliers,/ Quand on joue le bal de gâteau gelée….” It wasn’t until years later that I discovered that the songs we thought were romantic or humorous in English were actually rendered in other languages in often utterly ludicrous contexts. Exactly Like You came up in German as: “Weil ich dich so Lieb hab’/ Will ich Garnichts viel/ Rauchts mir nur zu schenken/ Ein Automobil!” At this point I cannot even remember whether Nature Boy’s real or fanciful words in French are the following: “Y avait un gars/Un gars qui était tout bizarre. On dit qu’il marchait ci et là,/ Haut et bas,/Même en Calcutta./ Un peu farouche,/Et grande de bouche,/Il mangeait des anchois….” Well, you get the idea.
Now Alistair Reid comes along with an anthology gleaned from Victor Proetz’s collection of memorable translations, but most of these are serious ones. At least you may take as serious this translation of Yankee Doodle Dandy:
Ein Yankee Bursch ist fix und schlankUnd niemals überfett, Herr,
Und wo Gelag und Tanz und Gang,
Wie’n Katz so flink und nett, Herr!
Yankee, acht der Küste gut,
Yankee doodle dandy,
Drehn und Prahlen nichts dir thut,
Yankee doodle dandy!
Proetz, who died in 1960, was by profession an architect; yet he pursued his hobby of collecting ungainly, unseemly, and entertaining translations like a professional linguist. His amusing comments abound in this book: in failing to find Irving Berlin’s Over There! in German translation, he wrote: “…on second thought, it would have to be changed to ‘Over Here’!”
Among the pop stuff are nestled gems from Blake, Brooke, E. B. and Robert Browning, Burns (can you imagine To A Mouse in German?), Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Abenteuer im Wunderland in which the Cheshire Cat becomes “die Grinse-Katze,” or, if you prefer the French version, simply “le Chat”; and wait till you read “Jabberwocky” in French and German!), Chaucer, Coleridge, Dickens, Dickinson, and others. All in all, this is a very worthwhile book even on the surface, often belying its understated scholarship but never really answering the question of what all those Japanese and Russian whalers say when they want to shout “Thar She Blows!”
Review: BUZZWORDS: A Guide to the Language of Leadership
Robert Kirk Mueller, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1974
Buzzwords could be called “How to Lie with Language,” but I suppose that is too redundant a title to have made the grade. Mueller ought to know about such matters: a top executive of Arthur D. Little, a former officer of Monsanto Chemical, he has been exposed to the nether reaches of business jargon and the nadir of expressivity that refuses to call a spade a shovel.
Many such terms bombard the English language continually: some are stopped at the barriers of honesty and common sense; many invade the lexicon like novae, only (like novae) to subside in brilliance and originality to be replaced by others. Slang yields the largest harvest for this verbal canonical fodder, but the pseudo-intelligentsia and the illiterati provide their own creations. There would be no point in condemning the practice: after all, as scholars, we are supposed to be observers of the scene, not (necessarily) part of it. But the mind and one’s sense of taste for language are frequently strained by language habits that appear to be contagious. One of my least favorites is the use of -person as a suffix to indicate that the speaker (or writer) exhibits no sex prejudice. Chairperson, salesperson, anchorperson and other compounds of that ilk are sheer nonsense. I consider myself devoid of any sex prejudice and think that people that use such terms are probably “protesting too much.” At least, that’s often the case.
Often, neologisms are coined by the semi-educated who are oblivious of the existence of a word in the language. Identities abound in the jargon (construct/construction; consumerist/consumer; disaggregate/divide or break down) and it is often the person lacking in Sprachgefühl who will insist on a novel coinage. On the other hand, there are those who want to be modern (or mod), chic, and in and who can demonstrate their being on the qui vive only by introducing new ways of saying the same old things. Some are quite resourceful–I admire the metaphoric coinage (even eyeball for ‘examine, look at’; software for ‘computer programs’ opposed to hardware for ‘computer equipment’; and interface for ‘the area where two systems, etc., meet’) more than the lexical, especially the fanciful (e.g., inflaccounting, infrastructure, obscurate).
These terms and hundreds of others are documented and defined in Mueller’s book. Most are not in any dictionaries and, should be recorded, opinions notwithstanding. Six short essays (chapters) dealing with various aspects of the development of buzzwords precede the glossary. Mueller is really a wired in white hat for the verbal model he has provided. As long as we continue to be bombarded by phrases like B.O. and biological stain, and meaningless expressions like “It’s the real thing–Coke is!” and “The Pepsi generation,” we shall need a Mueller to record and interpret what’s going on.
Letters {F. G. Cassidy}
Prof. Bolinger’s amusing divagations on darn, durn, damn and their tribe [VERBATIM I, 1, 1-2] leave me somewhat agape (and that’s not Greek for a love-feast). If his “guesstymology” of darn, etc. derived from down “is a coincidence,” says he, “It is too good to be true.” By that logic the only true coincidences are bad ones! Could he possibly have meant that it’s too good a coincidence not to be true?
The claimed coincidence is that down was in use as an intensifier before darn, etc., that darn is an r-ful repronunciation and spelling of down, and that darned (and presumably darnation, though he does not mention it) got the suffix by “a kind of secondary synonymy” from association with damned (and presumably damnation). Thus darn was not in origin a minced form of damn but a pronunciation variant of down which later got into “shady company.”
What is his evidence? He depends indirectly on Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary, which dates down as an “intensitive” earliest from north Lincolnshire in 1877 in the phrases reäl doon good hand and a doon ohd woman (‘thoroughly old woman’), in which down, clearly adverbial, would translate into Standard English as downright (OED sense A2)–better than as damned. (In other words, Wright was downright right to list it where he does.)
Prof. Bolinger might have backed Wright up with evidence from Wentworth’s American Dialect Dictionary, where real doon is echoed in an 1893 quotation from Mississippi, That is real down nice, “Used by uncultivated whites”; and a closely similar use is to be seen in a 1938 quotation from southeast Arkansas, That’s just hard-down meanness. Proof that down as an intensive did cross the Atlantic and hangs on in dialect use.
Further backing for Wright might have been found in OED down, a., sense 4, labeled Obs., which takes the intensive sense (at least as an adjective meaning down-right) back to 1617 in Fletcher’s rather poetic down-denials. The latest OED quotation, square-bracketed (why?), is from Galt, 1830: down nonsense. This last certainly comes closest to darn nonsense as we say it today, though still quite a distance from damn (ed) nonsense.
Meantime, OED takes darn, darnation, darned (as ‘perversions of damn, damnation, damned') back to 1837-1840 in the phrases darned fools, and darn it all, and to 1844 in I’ll be darned, both of which connect syntactically far better with damn and damned than with down. (No evidence in Wright or elsewhere for ?_down it all, ?\I’ll be downed, ?\a downed fool_. The missing link.) _OED_ labels these “Chiefly _U.S._”–and indeed _DAE_ documents them back to 1789 _darn_ adv., 1808 _darn_ v., 1825 _darnation_ n., c1815 _darned_ a., 1806 _darned_ adv. The 1789 quotation is from Webster, who takes _darn_ as in _darn sweet_ to be descended from the older word _dern_, originally meaning ‘secret,’ and later ‘dark, dismal, dire.’ In a note preceding the quotation, Craigie (or one of his staff) accepts this! It has been a hardy perennial of etymology.
However, Burchfield’s OED Supplement Vol. 1 A-G has now definitively knocked it out, one may hope, with a quotation antedating that from Webster: 1781 Pennsylvania Jrnl. 20 June, “In New England prophane swearing is so far from polite as to be criminal, and many use substitutions such as darn it, for d–n it.” Bolinger, at least, has wasted no dalliance on this.
What is the upshot? Certainly there were two forms, down and darn, both with intensive senses, but there the coincidence ends. Down was English, fell from literary use, developed no other forms, and though brought to America had scanty use here. Darn was chiefly, perhaps in origin, American, as were probably darned and darnation (see DAE), parallels to damn, damned, damnation. That darn could be from down, while not impossible, is certainly implausible. Darn had no need of down. A dying down could have been overrun by a lively, growing darn, but this does not even qualify as an example of reinforcement. Meantime there is the positive contemporary statement of the 1781 quotation from the Philadelphia Journal.
I wish I could claim to have exploded Prof. Bolinger’s “etymological landmine,” but the bang is too inconsequential. Still, darn it, it is mine….
F. G. Cassidy, University of Wisconsin
Letters {Archibald A. Hill}
Dwight Bolinger’s amusing comment on “Darn, Durn, Doon, Damn,” [VERBATIM I, 1, 1-2], is certainly right in connecting the ‘comfit-maker’s oath’ darn with down (as in ‘right down splendid’) and in describing the /-r-/ sound as intrusive. I believe, however, that there is a different route of derivation which is at least possible, and which involves different chronology. Either in Late Middle English or Early Modern English, the vowel in the ending of damned was lost, giving the pronunciation in which there is a sequence /-md/, as in Modern English. The Modern English sequence is subject to assimilation at least in rapid pronunciation where consciousness of the separateness of the past ending is lost. Such an assimilation, giving nasal and consonant of the same point of articulation, would give the sequence /-nd/. This is the assimilation which gives the modern word ant, from Middle English forms with /-mt/. The result of the assimilation in damned would then be a hypothetical form ?/ænd/, with the same vowel as that in ant. It is true that I do not have documentation for this assimilated form, but I believe that later history makes the assumption that it did indeed exist at least possible.
In a study on “Early Loss of r,” (PMLA 1940) I found many examples of forms in which an r-sound was lost before such consonants as n. An example is lan with the vowel of ant, for learn. Such forms, were however, generally corrected by restoration of the r-sound, with varying developments, giving variants such as the MnE learn, and its dialect equivalent, larn. Such forms are examples of regression, which could occasionally be a little too correct, producing r-pronunciations in words where the r is not historic. Such a form is the modern parsnip, explainable by the assumption that if parcel is more elegant than passel, parsnip must be more elegant than the historic pasnip. I should then derive both darn and durn from the hypothetical ?_dan_. There is, of course a later and general loss of all post-vocalic _r_’s in many dialects, which would give a form which can be approximately rendered _dahn_. It is this form which can be confused with _down_, since in slurred speech the glide which occurs in _down_ can also give rise to something very like -_ah_-. There is only one other thing to add to this history of the comfit-maker’s oath. In his novel, _Maid in Waiting_, Galsworthy introduces an American character who speaks in a dialect most strange and barbarous. One of his least believable expressions is ‘God-darned,’ which euphemizes the relatively harmless second half, but leaves the name of the deity undisguised.
Archibald A. Hill, University of Texas at Austin
Letters {Charles F. Netzow}
Professor Wescott’s “Word Chains” [VERBATIM Vol. I, No. 1] describes abba, dabba, doo as being derived from a comic war-whoop, and cheery, beery, bee as originating from a song refrain.
It is my belief that the Abba-Dabba Honeymoon song is the source, it in turn taking its name from the city of Abu-Dhabi, and the cheery, beery, bee from the title of the song Ciribiribin. Whether John “Dizzie” Gillespie deserves credit for oobie, doobie, doo instead of simply the “song refrain” accreditation shown may be debatable; in any case, the evidence suggests Wescott’s musical background is quite light.
Despite these complaints and despite grave misgivings about Landau’s reason for his choice of topic I think VERBATIM is off to a highly promising beginning. Here I refer to content as well as typography, layout, design and paper.
Charles F. Netzow<, Milwaukee, Wis.
Letters {Mrs. K. M. Brown}
While making the delightful discovery in VERBATIM [Vol. I, No. 1, “Word Chains”] that there are other linguistics fanatics of my ilk, I recalled a word chain to add to your examples: sweet, simple and girlish.
This phrase, usually preceded by “too,” was used by daughters objecting to mother’s choice of “suitable” dresses.
Mrs. K. M. Brown, Woodcliff Lake, N.J.
Letters {Otto F. Reiss}
On page 3 of VERBATIM [Vol. I, No. 1] (which a friend lent me) you mention high, wide and handsome. Permit me a comment. This phrase is more than a popular cliche. It describes the manner in which a well-trained horse moves its forelegs.
Good wishes for your new publication.
Otto F. Reiss, Publisher & Editor Art and Archaeology Newsletter
Professor Wescott replies:
I’d like to thank Messrs. Richard Abraham, Richard Donati, Charles Netzow, and Otto Reiss as well as the various personal friends and professional colleagues who responded to my article “Word Chains” VERBATIM (I, 1, 3).
Apologies are due to all of them, because, in my zeal to comply with the Editor’s well-taken suggestion that authors avoid excessively technical language, I oversimplified my definition and description of word chains. In addition to what I did write, I should also have stated that what sets word chains apart from alliterative sequences like fair, fat and forty or rhyming sequences like screwed, blued, and tattooed (a favorite with my respondents!) is the fact that their first and third components do not share sounds. Word chains–at least as I define them–resemble metal chains in that their first and third links are not directly connected. Instead, they are indirectly connected by means of the second link, which exhibits one kind of sound connection with the first link and a different kind of sound connection with the second. Typically, links one and two are connected by rhyme, and links two and three by alliteration. In schematic terms, a typical word chain has the pattern AB-CB-CD, where A and C represent initial consonants but B and D represent stressed vowels optionally followed by final consonants, consonant clusters, or stressless syllables.
In concrete terms, the following sequences (not cited in VERBATIM) are canonical word chains:
_itchy-kitchy-coo_ _higglety-pigglety-pop_wine, dine, and dance raid, trade, and travel
walk-and-talk tours logical dodgical death
Near canonical word chains deviate from canonical ones in that they invert the order of rhyme and alliteration, putting alliteration first and yielding the schematic pattern AB-AC-DC. Two examples (likewise uncited in VERBATIM) are these:
_Big Bow Wow_ _grunt, groan, and moan_
Still more deviant patterns involve the use of sound-repetitions other than rhyme or alliteration or exceed the normal limit of three stressed forms. Although I could cite some new examples of these too, I would prefer to await word from my respondents before elaborating further. I’m still keen on getting genuine word chains from some source besides myself!
Letters {Warren E. Preece}
VERBATIM is very nicely done indeed. I enjoyed almost everything in it and hope that it will have the long, useful, and hopefully sprightly life that it so obviously deserves.
The problem of words is, of course, particularly acute for those of us who work on publications like the Britannica which are based somehow on the erroneous (because clearly illogical) assumption that simply because people speak the same language, they understand the same language. I look forward to future issues of VERBATIM.
—Warren E. Preece, The General Editor, The Encyclopaedia Britannica
Letters {Wendy Thompson}
Somehow this is not at all what I expected. I would appreciate your sending my money back….
—Wendy Thompson, Ravenna, N.Y.
Review: WORDS AND THEIR MASTERS
Israel Shenker, Doubleday, 1974
I must admit that reading Israel Shenker’s articles in The N.Y. Times these past years did not fill me with glee, for I always thought them somewhat superficial. Whether or not they have been reedited for publication in this collection, I cannot say, but I resoundingly announce my complete volte-face: these are excellent. Although the professional linguist’s writings (as in VERBATIM) will reflect his own opinions, hypotheses, and so forth, the reporter must suppress his own opinions in favor of those of his interviewees. Shenker is expert at the technique; he writes sympathetically, intelligently, articulately, and good-humoredly about a subject that clearly fascinates him– language–and about the people engaged in its study and artistic pursuit.
There are 67 pieces in this volume of which 24 deal with language directly, sometimes in its various guises as communication. Included among these are articles on American English, British English, dictionaries, style, children’s speech, and onomastics. Each is associated with an interview with a practitioner in the field–Allen Walker Read, Robert W. Burchfield, Frederic G. Cassidy, Roman Jakobson, Noam Chomsky; each examines a different facet of language.
The other 43 articles are entirely relevant, as well. It is engaging to read about Perelman, Nabokov, Van Doren, Singer, E. B. White, Flanner, Hellman, Ionesco, Beckett, and others who are so deeply involved in the artistic applications of a subject treated by linguists with such scientific aplomb. Even Groucho is there, and rightly so, for if his punning isn’t the ultimate art, much of Groucho’s humor can be traced to his extraordinary ability to expose common occurrences and situations by singling out their more ludicrous characteristics and, in doing so, to make us see– via language—the foibles of our behavior.
Although we can recommend Words and Their Masters as a gift for any occasion, we urge that you be selfish—at least this once—and get a copy for yourself: it will be a rewarding indulgence.