Vol II, No 2 [September 1975]

Mrs. Johnson can prepare mashed potatoes as fluffy and delicious as any of my acquaintance.

The women included their husbands and children in their potluck suppers.

In Germany a person cannot slaughter any animal unless rendered unconscious first.

There was a tea party for the children, and after they were tucked in bed a banquet for the parents.

The summary of information contains totals of the numbers of students broken down by sex, marital status, and age.

Even more astonishing was our saving the lives of little babies who formerly died from sheer ignorance.

I can’t blame you for wanting to go outside and sit on your ten-minute break.

At the age of eleven my father took me to the south.

For those of you who have small children and don’t know it we have a nursery downstairs.

He spent his early life on the back of a horse with a pipe in his mouth. —Noami Russell, Herald House Independence, Missouri

[Yes. A Couple of our favorites are: Plunging 1,000 feet into the gorge, we saw Yosemite Falls. Breaking into the window of the girls’ dorm the dean of men surprised two members of the football team. When a small boy, a girl is of little interest. —Ed.]

Letters {Harry Nuessle}

In re “Phonatics” [VERBATIM I, 4]—over 40 years ago the following was introduced into our high school Latin II class. Regretfully, the teacher was not amused:

Viva VERBATIM!

_—Harry Nuessle, Bernards High School, Bernardsville, New Jersey

[That reminds us of some grammar-school macaronics. Can any of our readers provide a translation of either (or both) of the following?: Malo, Malo, Malo, Malo. Pater mea in silvam; lupus filium est. —Ed.]

Reviews: THE EMBEDDING

Ian Watson, Scribners

The Embedding by Ian Watson is a book in which three extraordinary tales are woven into one novel by means of a linguistic theme. Linguist Chris Sole is a researcher at a hospital in an English village where, it is rumored, children are taught “bad language.” In fact, the hospital’s work with brain damaged children provides a cover for the secret experimentation that Sole and other linguists, logicians, and psychologists are engaged in.

Captives in controlled, surrealistic environments, groups of orphan children under the influence of a drug described as “a unique lever for the improving brain performance… a sort of…superintelligencer,” are spoken to in an embedded language. “The speech computer had taken apart [the voices of the experimenters] and put them together again. Otherwise their words wouldn’t have flowed naturally. Sole couldn’t have framed the sentences he heard his own recorded voice saying, without a great deal of hesitation. They were English sentences, yet so unEnglish. It was the arrangement of those strings of words that caused the confusion. The words themselves were simple enough…. Yet organized as no kids’ talk before, so that adults couldn’t for the life of them follow it without a printout of the speech with a maze of brackets breaking it up to re-establish patterns the mind was used to processing.”

At the same time as Sole’s experimentation is going on in England, his friend and colleague Pierre, has discovered a curiously analogical situation in Brazil. The Xemahoa, a tribe of Indians in the Amazon, are on the verge of extinction as their land is slowly flooded as the result of the building of a dam. What is linguistically and sociologically interesting and unique about the Xemahoa is their “two-tier” language. Under the influence of a certain drug, the Bruxo, a leader of the tribe, becomes able to speak an embedded form of the Xemahoa language. And under the influence of the same drug, the male members of the tribe are able to understand the embedded language. “ ‘This embedded speech keeps the soul of the tribe, their myths, secret…. The daily vernacular (Xemahoa A) passes through an extremely sophisticated recoding process, which breaks down the linear features of normal language and returns the Xemahoa people to the space-time unity which we other human beings have blinded ourselves to.’ ” Hence, Xemahoa B is to Xemahoa A as the language Chris Sole speaks to his children is to English.

Into the world at this moment enter the Sp’thra, an extra-terrestrial people whose interest in earth is largely linguistic. Sole is elected to speak to the one alien who leaves the ship. The aliens, in Sole’s words, are “exploring the syntax of reality.” “The rules of reality can only be understood,” the alien explains, “by superimposing the widest range of languages from different worlds upon one another. There is the one and only key to This-Reality.”

In return for information valuable to earth, the alien wants six “working brains competent in six linguistically diverse languages,” by which he means living brains sans bodies. One of the “working brains” absolutely essential to the aliens is that of the Xemahoa Bruxo.

From this point on, a sequence of depressingly inevitable failures occur. The United States and the Soviet Union acting in unison function as shamefully as each might suspect the other of functioning alone. In Brazil, the drug which has enlarged the intellectual capabilities of its users now destroys grotesquely. And in England, Chris Sole returns to his children to find them bursting—almost literally—from the effects of the embedded language, the only one they have ever known, and the drug they have been given to help them master it.

What we can never know is what the aliens might have accomplished if they had been able to continue their experiments. Perhaps they, too, would have been doomed in some analogous way.

It would seem a shame for readers who are not drawn to the science fiction genre to elect not to read so fine a book and one so appealing to linguists.

—Syrell Rogovin Leahy, Old Tappan, New Jersey

Reviews: LANGUAGE AND PUBLIC POLICY

Edited by Hugh Rank, NCTE Committee on Public Double-Speak, National Council of Teachers of English, 1974

Complaints about the “corruption” of language must have begun with the Tower of Babel, or even earlier, if what Dante has Adam say (Paradiso 26. 124-126) is right: “The language which I spoke was wholly extinct before Nimrod’s people were busy on their unfinishable task.” Linguists have, in general, been inclined to pooh-pooh such complaints, since their attention is normally focused only on the slow, almost imperceptible shift in sound, form, function, or meaning which takes generations to complete. Linguists are also often inclined to regard all linguistic systems as essentially equal in merit; and they distinguish sharply between a linguistic system and the use made of it.

The general public, however, is not aware of either the nature of linguistic systems (including their own) or gradual linguistic change. They usually think of language as consisting only of words, and of words as made up of letters. An ordinary naive speaker is aware of only one kind of language-change: a relatively sudden innovation in the spelling or the meaning of a word, or the introduction of a new word. Since, both in and out of school, he has been taught to believe in the fixed, absolute meaning of words, he considers any change to be for the worse, a “corruption” of the “true” meaning or use of language. Protests of this kind concerning the semantic field of government and public life are associated especially with George Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language,” which has been widely quoted and anthologized.

The writers represented in this anthology are concerned almost wholly with this superficial kind of “corruption.” A brief introduction by its editor (pp. xi-xvi) is followed by three main sections: “Watergate as watershed” (pp. 1-38), “In and out of the classroom” (pp. 39-142), and “A call to action and some responses” (pp. 143-188). A fourth section, “The NCTE Committee on Public Doublespeak” (pp. 189-213), deals with the establishment of this committee. Each of these sections contains a number of articles, ranging from three to fifteen pages, dealing with the use of words by politicians and advertisers. The volume concludes with an article by the editor, “Conclusion: The Teacher-heal-thyself myth” (pp. 215-224) and “Public doublespeak: a personal reading list” chosen by Rank (pp. 235-248).

For many centuries, it has been customary to train school-children to identify efforts at deliberate use of ordinary words in unusual senses for the purpose of deceiving hearers or readers (“semantic wrenching,” as I have termed it). Such wrenching has undoubtedly become more common than earlier, especially in modern advertising and in propaganda related to controversial social issues. Thus, for instance, any effort to relieve working mothers of the burden of bearing unwanted children is termed “genocide”; a police guard’s calm refusal to allow rioting parents to enter a school is met with shouts of “police brutality!” Whether politicians are any more given to such intentional distortions than were their predecessors, we may doubt—but there are more politicians than formerly, and their channels of communications are more numerous and extensive.

There could, therefore, be no a priori objection to another book aimed at teaching students semantic wrenching objectively, and to identify and counter it, no matter from what direction it comes. This book cannot, however, be recommended for such a purpose. It is heavily slanted politically, with a great preponderance of leftist-leaning authors. The only clearly identifiable non-political writers are S. I. Hayakawa in his “General Semantics: where is it now?” (pp. 150-156) and Jean Stafford with her “Plight of the American language” (pp. 91-99). A disaproportionate number of the articles deal with the Watergate affair: 42 pages (about 17% of the total) are wholly devoted to it, and most of the rest bring it in to a greater or lesser extent. This is an excessive proportion to assign to what is bound to diminish in importance, retrospectively, as the decades pass. Most of the writers are strongly partisan, especially in their obsessive, implacable hostility to ex-President Nixon. (They nearly succeeded in converting me from a Nixon-despiser to a Nixon-pitier, merely by the violence and irrationality of their attacks.)

Most of the writers take a holier-than-thou stance, setting themselves up, at least implicitly, as knights in shining armor, breaking a lance for honesty and uprightness in the use of language. This self-righteousness is especially evident in such articles as D. L. Bolinger’s “Truth is a linguistic question” (pp. 161-175). As in other instances, however, most of these defenders of “truth” are quite ready to do plenty of semantic wrenching themselves, when it suits their purposes. Richard Ohman, in the resolution on “public lying” presented to the NCTE in 1971 and passed by them, did not hesitate to use inhumane (which normally refers to unkind treatment of animals) with reference to language (p. 191); he is echoed in Rank’s comment on Sydney Harris' “Watergate forked tongues” (p. 16) and elsewhere. Emotionally loaded metaphors abound, as when Richard Gambino states “Critical meanings are barred from the beginning in a form of conceptual contraception” (p. 20). When it suits their book, however, the same writers can be wholly literalistic, as in Gambino’s objection to the use of develop in the sense of ‘bring to light’ (p. 21). It’s all a question of whose semantics are gored.

Confusion among style, usage, and language is almost universal in these articles. The only author to make a clear distinction in this matter is Hayakawa (not surprising, since he and Bolinger are the only authors with any extensive competence in linguistics). Many of the writers combine their emotionalism with regard to semantic wrenching (but only of the kind they dislike) with an old-fashioned, Miss-Fidditch-type purism, exemplified at its worst in Jean Stafford’s narrow, uninformed belief in the degeneration of our language. On occasion, though, the sensitive reader is taken aback by such inelegant, stylistically jarring terms as antsy (p. 89), bullshit (p. 190), or crap (pp. xv, 89).

Clearly, Rank’s statement (p. xv) “there is no orthodoxy presented here” is false. Almost the entire book is pervaded by a politically slanted leftist orthodoxy. It cannot be recommended to anyone who wishes to learn or teach an objective, unbiased approach to the analysis of semantics or of the use of language. On the contrary, it should be held up for what it is, a prize example of bias and distortion—political propaganda masquerading under the false colors of a search for honesty and truth.

—Robert A. Hall, Jr., Cornell University

Reviews: A DESK-BOOK OF ERRORS IN ENGLISH

Frank H. Vizetelly, revised edition 1920, republished by Gale Research Co., 1974

If you want to know how clothing fashions have changed in the last half century, place some ads of the early 1920’s beside some ads of today. If you want to know how styles of popular music have changed, play a record of Rudy Vallee’s and follow it with one of Mick Jagger’s. And if you want to know how language has changed, examine this 1920 handbook by the late editor of the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary.

The most conspicuous changes are in the area of slang, but that is to be expected; most slang terms have a half-life of no more than about five years, though some endure for centuries. It is not surprising therefore to learn that daisy was a “slang intensive” meaning ‘charming,’ that dippy was an “extreme vulgarism” for ‘mentally unbalanced,” that to be jiggered was a “minced oath,” that nifty was a vulgarism for ‘stylish,’ that pipe-off was a vulgarism for ‘take in at a glance,’ that sass was a vulgar term for ‘impertinence,” that sirree Bob was a vulgar and silly intensive of affirmation and that skidoo was recent slang for ‘get out.’ None of those slang terms are current today, but enough others have come out of the soil and the pavements to replace them.

Changes in word meanings and usage may be less conspicuous, but they are more important. In these areas Vizetelly does not always seem to be a man of his word. His word, as it appears in the introduction to this handbook, goes as follows:

Usage has made our language what it is; grammatical rules strive to limit it to what it ought to be. In many instances usage has supplanted grammatical rules…. It is to the people, not to the purists that one must look for the enriching of our mother tongue.

Most authorities would subscribe to that declaration. But it raises two questions. The first is, Who are “the people”? Are they the saleswomen, the filling station attendants, the taxi drivers, the coal miners, the rock musicians or who? The second question is, Who are “the purists”? At the extreme right wing of this group are a few the like of Ambrose Bierce (if there are any the like of him), who in his introduction to “Write It Right” (which probably should have been entitled “Write by Rite”) declared: “Few words have more than one literal and serviceable meaning, however many metaphorical, derivative, relative or even unrelated meanings lexicographers may think it worth while to gather from all sorts and conditions of men, with which to bloat their absurd and misleading dictionaries.” Vizetelly certainly does not fall into Bierce’s class, yet this book, written a decade later than Bierce’s, bears some similarities of approach.

As an example, both writers asserted firmly that demean meant ‘to behave’ and did not mean ‘to debase or degrade.’ Obviously, “the people” were at work on that one because the ‘degrade’ meaning today not only is fully acceptable but also is far more often used than the ‘behave’ meaning. As another example, both writers condemned pants for pantaloons as vulgar, but, vulgar or no, “the people” have changed to pants and changed the language.

Vizetelly was correct in saying that in many instances usage has supplanted grammatical rules and not a few of the entries in his 1920 book, viewed in the light of 1975 acceptability, ironically bear out his statement. The phrase all of them, said he in one entry, is an example of common carelessness because of signifies from and when one subtracts a quantity from an entire number one cannot refer to that number as still existing. Logical as that may be, no one thinks twice today about saying all of them. In another entry he terms at best an erroneous form for at the best, but that judgment has now been reversed. And here, in paraphrase, are a few more of Vizetelly’s condemnations that have become passé: mad used for angry is a colloquialism not in vogue among persons who use refined diction; make is often used incorrectly for earn, as in “How much does he make a week?”; over is sometimes improperly used for across, as in “go over the bridge” instead of across it; patrons should not be used for customers; quit is sometimes incorrectly substituted for cease; raise for an increase in salary should be avoided, and sideways should not be used for sidewise.

Vizetelly’s book has a plenitude of sound advice on English that is still up to date, yet because of the number of outmoded guides and prohibitions it is hardly a suitable text to put in the hands of today’s students. They would find a great deal of it puzzling and much of it superfluous. The puzzlement would lie in the type of entries already cited here. The superfluity would lie in a host of entries advising the reader to “discriminate carefully between these words”—such words as berth and birth, always and all ways, base and bass, ceiling and sealing, celery and salary, cereal and serial. Who needs dozens of entries like that?

In effect, Vizetelly emerges from this book as an almost paradoxical figure. What he practices here is in large part pedantic purism, but what he preaches in the book and preached elsewhere is restrained liberalism.

“If virility of language is to be preserved,” he wrote in 1931, “we must continue to embrace the best that there is in speech. The caldron of usage is the refining pot into which all words must go for purification. There they may bob up and down, as the mass seethes or simmers, or even boil over and out of the pot, to become outcasts of the linguistic family.”

—Theodore M. Bernstein, Consulting Editor, The New York Times

Letters {Alfred Connor Bowman}

I am familiar with the phenomenon which Professor Fowkes refers to as the Irish Bull, but I think this is a misnomer. I would associate this weirdity rather with Bronx/Brooklyn Jewish tradition—perhaps because most of them I have heard came to me through a head janitor of that extraction who always had one when he caught me working late in my office on Governor’s Island. My favorites include:

—Alfred Connor Bowman, Hermosa Beach, California

Letters {Helene Shomer}

I am the delighted recipient of my first VERBATIM issue and was immediately entranced with the “Irish Bulls” article [II, 1].

I am impelled and emboldened to forward some “Jewish Bulls”—very kosher—coming from H. Leopold Spitalny, who was associated with Toscanini during the NBC Symphony years, authenticated by Kolman Smit, a violinist in that orchestra.

[Noting an absence] Who’s sitting in the empty chair? [Restoring a deletion] Erase it back in! [After a less than perfect interpretation] If Schubert [Mozart, Beethoven, etc.] were alive, he would turn over in his grave!

—Helene Shomer, River Edge, New Jersey

Letters {Victor H. Borsodi}

In connection with the article, “Irish Bulls…” [VERBATIM II, 1], you may find of interest the following excerpt from a letter to Father John O’Connor from G.K. Chesterton, ca. 1904 (Chesterton seldom dated letters), regarding Mrs. Chesterton’s health. Father O’Connor was later Monsignor O’Connor and Privy Chamberlain to Pope Pius XI.

The two may be just a bit too much for her and I want to be with her every night for a few days—there’s an Irish bull for you! One of the mysteries of Marriage (which must be a sacrament and an extraordinary one) is that a man like me can yet become at certain instances indispensable.

There is no further mention of “Irish bull” in that letter, and I have never seen it in any of Chesterton’s other works. —Victor H. Borsodi, New York, N.Y.

Letters {Ruby S. Jung}

Irish bulls are certainly not confined to Ireland. In the 1972 Pelican Classics edition of St. Augustine’s City of God, Book XI, Chapter 1, Augustine speaks of the “impious and arrogant gods who are deprived of His changeless light which is shed upon all alike.”

But maybe that’s not a bull at all, but a hippopotamus. —Ruby S. Jung, Carbondale, Illinois

Letters {Norman R. Shapiro}

A few remarks about three eye-catching items in the most recent number of VERBATIM (I, 4).

Concerning Donald A. Sears’ article “Ameritalian,” I would certainly not contest his thesis that English (or Anglo-American) is spreading its tentacles the length and breadth of The Boot, and especially in Tuscany. But he may be going overboard a little in insisting that it is doing so at the expense of French, when, ironically, French itself may be partially to blame. (One of his examples, by the way—frigo—is probably not from the English at all; though if it is, it may, conceivably, be a direct borrowing of the French frigo, short for frigorifique. More likely, however, it is just a native abbreviation of the perfectly good Italian noun frigorifero.) French influence may be largely responsible for spreading, if not necessarily introducing, such Anglo-Americanisms as club, leader, standard, sexy, cocktail, relax, pullover, etc., all with greater or lesser histories as chic Franglais. Even after-shave and déodorant are preferred by many an up-to-date Frenchman to the native aprés-rasage and désodorisant. So, too, the profusion of -ing nouns (touring, dancing, camping, et al.), all of which enjoy special prestige in modern French. The French are so addicted to this feature of English grammar, in fact, that they have even invented a few -ing nouns of their own (e.g., le footing ‘hiking’), and have modified others into curious existence (e.g., le living ‘livingroom,’ le shampooing ‘shampoo’). French could be as responsible as English for introducing lo stereo into Italian—N.B. the definite article: lo, not il, at least not in Tuscany!—though there’s really no reason to attribute it to any external source at all. Stereo- is not an uncommon prefix in technical Italian. As for WC versus toilette, the former Briticism is, and has long been, a favorite euphemism in French, pronounced in a variety of ways (thanks to the ambiguity of the letter w), ranging from the concise vécé to the more elegant ouatére-closette. By now, in fact, it is almost pan-European.

In short, while Anglo-American is indisputably leaving its mark on modern Italian, let’s not forget to credit (or condemn) French for at least a share in the process.

The second item that caught my eye was the delightful folk etymology suggested by Graham S. Mitchell, attributing ballbuster to the Yiddish baleboosteh. It certainly wouldn’t be the only Yiddish contribution to the American language, as any schlemiel familiar with Mencken and others will attest. But a few opposing arguments do present themselves. First of all, a ballbuster isn’t necessarily a woman (Freud notwithstanding), or even, necessarily, a human being. Nor need it originally have been so. Went-worth and Flexner (Dictionary of American Slang, T.Y. Crowell, 1967) list the nonpersonal meaning first (‘A job, task, activity, or goal that is extremely difficult to accomplish’), and derive the personal meaning from it (‘The person who assigns, demands, or supervises such arduous tasks’). I’ve often heard my students apply the term to an exam, for instance, or to any crushing problem of the moment. Furthermore, the syntactic variant to bust my (his, your, etc.) balls is particularly common, and implies no female agency: e.g., I had to bust my balls to get a C minus! (I’m not sure what the co-eds say—even the most liberated, verbally and otherwise.) Of course, this doesn’t have to invalidate the baleboosteh hypothesis ipso facto— it’s a case of chicken versus egg—but it casts at least a shadow of doubt. More telling, perhaps, is the fact that the expression in question, like the figurative phenomenon it denotes, is hardly restricted to English. More or less exact equivalents are found in the slang of many other languages, old and new. Didn’t Catullus call Lesbia an ilia rumpens (XI, 20)? (Literally, a ‘groin-buster,’ but the implication is clear.) French has its casse-couilles; Italian, its rompecoglioni; Spanish, its rompebolas, rompehuevos (and probably several more, depending on the regional variety typical of the Hispanic world); German, its Hodenbrecher (more “elegant” than the soldier-slang Eierschleifer); Dutch, its ballenbreker; Hebrew, its shovair beitzim; Modern Greek, its spastarchidis. And it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to hear pilkrompanto on the lips of an outraged Esperantist.

But what tends to discredit the hypothesis the most, I think, is the fact that baleboosteh, in Yiddish, is almost exclusively a laudatory term. A baleboosteh, to echo Mr. Mitchell’s closing words, “just gets things done, like any good manager.” Even more, though, she is generally admired for this talent. To quote Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish (McGraw-Hill, 1968): “To call a woman ‘a real baleboosteh’ is to bestow high praise indeed: It means the honoree is a splendid cook, baker, laundress, and, above all, keeps so immaculate a home that ‘you can eat off the floor…’ ” (p. 30). Which is not to deny the possible connotation of ‘a bossy woman,’ which Rosten himself admits (although relegating it to the last of eight shades of meaning). Uriel Weinreich, on the other hand, in his authoritative English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary (McGraw-Hill, 1968), gives no pejorative meaning whatever.

In any event, no doubt many a real baleboosteh has also been a real ballbuster in her own right. But the hypothesis of an etymological link, while it tickles my linguistic funny-bone, has to leave me unconvinced.

The third eye-catcher was Arnold M. Zwicky’s bilingual redundancy game. I’m sure it will attract many additions. Mount Fujiyama calls to mind any number of geographical examples. Among them: Mount Kilimanjaro (Swahili, kilima ‘mountain’), Mount Mauna Loa (Hawaiian, mauna ‘mountain’), the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range (Spanish, sierra ‘mountain range’), the Río Grande River (Spanish, río ‘river’), the Guadalquivir River (Arabic, guad ‘river’), The Alhambra (Arabic, al ‘the’), etc. You should also probably receive dozens of letters suggesting the grand-daddy of them all, the hoi polloi, though somehow this doesn’t offend me too much. I suppose it’s already become such a cliché that the correct form (without either the the or the hoi) would sound almost sillier than the redundancy. But a similar barbarism, bordering on the vulgar, never fails to jar me: “a, b, c, d… ‘and et cetera’ ” And I scrupulously avoid restaurants whose menus boast a “daily soup(e) du jour”! —Norman R. Shapiro, Wesleyan University

Letters {Frieda Arki}

I’d be happy to see a column in VERBATIM devoted to new and current expressions in the American language which for some reason seldom seem to reach the periodic dictionaries of American slang.

The words and expressions I’m thinking of surface from all corners of our society—some are institutionalese, where full professor on tenure can and do admit to having cathected a particular event, or intuited something. From the mean streets come some of the best: to ralph up ‘to vomit’; to flake ‘walk’; blow someone away ‘shoot someone’; waste someone ‘kill him’; grossed out ‘nauseated (at something).’

I’ll bet everyone reading this has a few at his elbow ready to send you.

—Frieda Arkin, New York, New York

Letters {Edwin H. Hammock}

I … enjoyed the delightful piece by Mrs. Gilman [VERBATIM II, 1] …concerning the accent and pronunciation of New Englanders. I want to call attention to the fact that court reporters are perhaps the only people in the world who deal with spoken language which must be reduced to writing and punctuated without the privilege of changing, editing, correcting; the possible exception is that we may interrupt (with due embarrassment) and clarify a misstatement.

I once had the challenge of a judge of a state court who said, “Federal courts usually grant motions such as this quite readily, but state courts are prone to grant them, so your motion is overruled.”

Sometimes we get consolation from the dictionary— irregardless is now duly in print—but nobody has yet pointed out just how to punctuate a sentence like this:

“The economic principles of a political party—quote, unquote—are apt to be made on the run.”

-Edwin H. Hammock, Columbus, Ohio

Letters {W. H. Rawlings}

My Random House Unabridged (1971) does not include the verb to barberchair. This term came up in a casual conversation with a man who has had some experience in forestry in Montana. We were discussing a recent accident here in which a large tree being cut down fell in the opposite direction from that intended, demolishing a house.

My friend explained that the fellers of the tree had apparently not taken into account the possibility that the tree had grown with a spiral and that the cutting had released the tension in the tree trunk, causing it to barber-chair, or ‘twist around.’

I suppose the word comes under the heading of trade jargon or cant and may be listed in a glossary of trade terms, but I thought it of interest.

-W. H. Rawlings, West Vancouver, B.C.

Letters {Sophie W.S. Brown}

Having collected names for years, I was, like M. Jourdain, astonished to learn the term for what I’d been doing all along: onomastics. Herewith, a few names from my list:

Are there any fanciers of homographic-heterosemantic phonoglosses? These have pleased me:

age ago cave dare date eat ire mare miles sit sum time vale

—Sophie W.S. Brown, Woodcliff Lake, N.J.

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