Vol II, No 3 [December 1975]
You Know What
Allen Walker Read, Emeritus Professor of English, Columbia University
In one of his most perceptive essays, Otto Jespersen in 1929 explored the notion of “veiled language.” He noted that “round-about expressions” were to be found in the popular speech of many nations, and he felt that they are “of interest to students of linguistic psychology as characteristic of one type of the popular mind.” Students of language have long known that taboo presents many problems, not the least of which is that taboo ought to be self-defeating. If a word is never spoken, it should die out in a generation; no doubt many words have been so lost. But taboo is usually only partial—perhaps it exists to be broken. In most cultures there are individuals who play the role of rogue; and it may even be conventional to arrange occasions on which it is expected that that the taboos will be broken.
There is a form of partial taboo that has had considerable vogue in English for the past twenty or thirty years. I refer to the substitution formula “You know what,” “You know who,” “You know where,” etc. The veiling of the subject is here very thin indeed; in fact, it serves to draw attention to the subject in an ostentatious way. The notion of ostentatious taboo has not, I believe, been pointed out in the literature, and this sophisticated development in a complicated culture deserves to be documented. Such ostentatious taboo is usually accomplished by well-known paralinguistic features—qualifiers such as smirking, the arched eyebrow, a slyness of manner.
In surveying the areas of reference to which this formula has been applied, I will draw upon a collection of contexts chiefly from newspapers and magazines of the past twenty years. We naturally expect the areas of reference to be those in which there is an ambivalence of attitude in our culture; therefore we will dip into the fields of politics, social issues, scatology, sex, etc., and come finally even to theology.
Tensions with Russia have accounted for some examples. One musician who sympathized with Russia acknowledged: “I have actually slipped in a couple of bars of You-Know-Who’s national anthem."1 John O’Donnell expressed his delight that “we’re going to arm German panzer divisions for you-know-what."2 The word Red was avoided in the report that laws are being drafted “to protect Americans from exposure to unavoidable infra-you-know-what-rays."3 Another journalist made reference to “the DAR (Daughters of You-Know-What)."4
Certain disputed social issues have given rise to the formula. The dislike of socialized medicine among many doctors has led to the statement that “adequate medical care for all' is merely “a euphemism for you know what."5 Intermarriage of the races was referred to in the following report: “Having whites go to school with ‘Chinese and other races’… would inevitably accomplish you-know-what."6 The furor over cigarettes led to another example: when an actor with athletic habits was interviewed, the journalist reported: " ‘I lift weights on the terrace…,’ he said lighting up a you-know-what."7 Similarly concerning an alcoholic drink, a man was seen in Central Park “toting a thermos bottle of we-can-guess-what."8 A reporter acknowledged: “I went right to the press club bar to do you-know-what to my sorrow."9 A theater used you know what to refer to fairies in describing Sir James Barrie’s play, Peter Pan; he said that Peter Pan “came down to the footlights and begged the audience to show its belief in the you-know-whats by its applause."10
Sometimes a much-discussed public figure becomes a “you know who.” Thus of the pianist Liberace: a boy was annoyed because “so many of the girls thought you-know-who was positively drooly."11 In the feud between Walter Winchell and Bennett Cerf, Winchell refused to mention Cerf’s name but said, “That reminds us of Youknowwho."12 Former President Truman has often had the “you know who” treatment. In praising a famous pianist, George Jessel said, “I hope I’m not treading on the toes of you know who”13; an opponent spoke of “you-know-who’s fumbling weakness”14; and the next nomination, it was said, “will go to you know whom."15 An attack on civil liberties in 1958 drew the headline, “Shades of You Know Who” (evidently McCarthy).16 Senator Edward Kennedy has been called “the brother of you-know-who”17; and as the presidential campaign of 1964 unfolded it was reported of Richard Nixon: “He admitted that quite a few people were stopping him in the street and telling him that the strongest candidate would be you-know-who."18
On occasion you know what has been a substitute for the word hell. Some clothing manufacturers complained that cheesecake publicity “is raising you-know-what with their business."19 A radio reporter cried out to Truman, “Harry, give ‘em you know what!"20 And when a fire roared through a Chicago theater, the reporter said, “The flames…suddenly got hot as you know where."21
Various unpleasant matters have come to be transmuted into you know what. Among children a beating was thus described: “Don’t you move or you’ll get you-know-what."22 A catastrophe of trapeze performers at a circus was referred to by Brooks Atkinson in these words: “Everything they do has to be completely perfect or—you know what!"23 The formula can refer to a family secret or a skeleton in the closet, for in a sketch in The New Yorker a character called out, “You come up here or I’ll tell you-know-what."24 An after-birth of some unspecified animal was referred to by a London reporter as “gentleman’s cream containing you-know-what."25 A skunk was similarly treated; on the radio a bit of repartee went: “Oh, Dagwood! Only an s-k-you-know-what would act like that!"26 The recruiting literature for the Marine Corps school on Parris Island says that the DI (drill instructor) becomes the recruit’s “mother, father, and friend”; but a Marine is reported to have responded: “If that guy is my mother and father, well I’m a son of you-know-what."27
The formula you know what has turned up with special frequency in reference to the latrine. It was a well-known saying in the British Army, “If he fell down the you-know-what he’d come up with a bunch of roses."28 In the bomb shelters of London during the blitz the formula appeared: “‘Twasn’t the company I minded.’ Mother bent over confidentially. ‘It was the you-know-what’—a nod towards a boarded-off section at the farther end of the cellar."29 The comedies of family life on the London stage frequently contained relatives who were “colliding on their trips to the you-know-where."30 The children of Philadelphia were criticized for being “likely to announce at the most inopportune time that they must leave the table for you know what."31 In an English story a character was admonished, “If you hear footsteps and a loud purple laugh go and hide yourself in the you-know-what."32 The wife of Billy Rose was reported as saying “that a wife shouldn’t let a husband out of her sight and that she’ll go with him everywhere except you know where."33
Our formula also has included references to parts of the body and the bodily functions. The actress Barbara Stanwyck wrote down her own statement: “When Bob bends over to pet the pooch, I’m going to let him have it, but good. You know where."34 Concerning girdles, one radio station played rhumba records in order “to help women get into their you-know-what."35 In a recent glossary of Royal Air Force terms, the entry ablution stationery (for toilet paper) was listed with the explanation, “for you-know-what !"36 A famous arbiter of taste spoke of a movement of the bowels in these words: “He couldn’t do you know what without lavages."37 A laxative was figuratively referred to by the editor of the New York Post when he said that the Taft-Hartley Act is “in need of a good dose of you-know-what.” 38
The area of sex is especially filled with you know whats, because of the ambivalent attitudes that prevail in our society. An honest person must admit to the enjoyment of sex, and yet the conventions require a veiling of this enjoyment. It has been maintained that the alleged guilt or shame that attaches to sexuality really is a device for enhancing its pleasure; if so, the ostentatious formula you know what functions well in its double purpose of concealing and revealing at the same time.
The you know what can be used to refer to a mistress. Thus a Hollywood producer was described as “accompanied by a blond secretary two heads taller, who is really his you-know-what."39 According to a sketch in The New Yorker, a prissy woman described a shocking sight as follows: “A painted I-won’t-say-what, standing there just as the Lord made her, with only a little bit of shift to cover places I won’t mention."40 According to a review of a movie, “Miss Loren in this one is a you-know-what with heart of gold."41 When John Ford’s tragedy of 1633 was produced in Greenwich Village, it was referred to in one newspaper as ‘Tis Pity She’s a Youknowwhat.42
The reference is sometimes to sexual intercourse. Evelyn Waugh, in an autobiographical account, set down the speech of a ship’s captain concerning one of the passengers: “He’s probably in someone else’s cabin with one of my female passengers doing you know what."43 A journalist in reporting a convention of the Daughters of the American Revolution quoted their resolution against mixed marriages and commented: “I guess the DAR is not so much for segregating the colored as it is against doing you-know-what with them."44 A theater critic spoke of Mae West as “always inviting men to cum up and you know what."45 Gypsy Rose Lee found the formula useful when she stated: “I’m a woman who looks ahead, honey. So I’ve saved the rhinestone for my navel and the little piece of adhesive tape to wear you-know-where."46 In the offices of The New Yorker, abortion was similarly referred to—upon mention of a “double-spoon curette, an instrument used in, as Ross might put it, you know what."47
The exuberant daughters of the Mitford family made use of you know what. Jessica Mitford has told the following incident concerning the family’s visit to Constantinople:
There we were conducted through the palace, where one of the “sights” was the last remaining eunuch, a tiny, wizened old man with a face like a dried-up apple and a high squeaky, grumbly voice. That night Muv told me to summon Boud and Debo to the cabin; there was something very serious she wanted to discuss with us. From her stonily solemn face and tone of voice, I could only assume that she had heard bad news from home— perhaps a death in the family—and my heart pounded with real fear as I went in search of the others. When we were assembled, Muv announced in her very gravest tones: “Now, children, YOU ARE NOT TO MENTION THAT EUNUCH AT DINNER.” We howled and screamed with laughter, and, although we would not have dared actually to disobey, kept referring all through dinner to the “you know what” with knowing looks and suppressed mirth.48
We come finally to the ultimate context of you know what, in which it refers to God. Alan W. Watts has written as follows: “The great mythological traditions suggest that …the universe is a vast game of hide-and-seek in which You-Know-Who gets lost as the Many and found as the One."49 As this seriously attempts the difficult feat of welding contradictions into one formulation, it is in the best tradition of mystical writing.
Thus you know what runs a full gamut, from triviality to profundity. The formula is one of the resources of language in the surmounting of taboo; it permits the speaker at the same time both to say and not say.
This article is a slightly modified version of a paper given at the Ninth Annual National Conference on Linguistics, sponsored by the Linguistic Circle of New York, on March 14, 1964. It was originally published in Language: Journal of the Linguistic Society of America, April 1964; it was reprinted in Etc.: A Review of General Semantics, September 1964.
INTER ALIA: II.2.1
At the time this issue went to press, two readers had contributed translations of the Latin phrase puzzlers we published in VERBATIM II, 2: Malo, Malo, Malo, Malo:
‘I would rather be in an apple tree Than a bad man in adversity.’
Pater mea in silvam lupus filium est: ‘Father, run into the forest; a wolf is eating your son!’ [Credits to Lester E. Rothstein, Charles Speck, and Maxwell Nurnberg (who also provided the information that Joseph Addison is believed to be the translator/originator of the couplet and that an aria, “Malo, Malo, Malo, Malo,” was written for the role of Miles in Benjamin Britten’s opera Turn of the Screw).]
“Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip flew home to London by way of Anchorage, after a six-day visit to Japan that brought out the largest crowds ever attracted by a foreign visitor here. NHK, the semipublic national television network, was still getting complaints for fading out the Queen’s voice and substituting Japanese during her many toasts and speeches. One irate caller said, according to the network, ‘How dare you deprive us of our one chance to hear the Queen’s English?’ " [from “Notes on People,” The N.Y. Times, May 13, 1975]
Talking Turkey
Robert A. Fowkes, Professor of Germanic Languages New York University
In naming foods, dances, products, diseases, and other phenomena of exotic origin—or allegedly so—languages often seem to go divergent or contradictory ways. Sometimes there is chauvinistic shifting of fancied blame, as when certain diseases are named for a given nationality in one country, and for another in another. The “French pox” is obviously going to be called something else in France; and while an Englishman takes “French leave” in going AWOL, his French counterpart sneaks away in “English file” or the like.
The walnut (like German Walnuss, Middle High German wälhisch nuz, Not So High German, walnot, Old English wealh-hnutu, Old Norse walhnot) is a “Welsh nut” = “Gaulish nut,” but the Welsh call it cneuen ffrengig or “French nut” (Old French had nois gauge, the equivalent of Latin nux gallica or “Gaulish nut” —and the confounding of French and Gaulish/Gallic is notorious).
A similar state of affairs is encountered when we look at words for turkey in various languages. It comes as a slight jolt—to those easily jolted—to learn that the Turkish word for our American fowl is hindi, although the jolt is cushioned somewhat if we are fortified with a smattering of ignorance in a few other languages and recall that Yiddish has indík, which is itself reminiscent of words in Slavic languages, e.g. Polish indyk, Russian indyúk (and indyúshka for ‘turkey hen,’ cf. Czech indianka, Serbian indijun, etc.).
In French the Indic appellative is slightly disguised by the dropping of coq from coq d’Inde, yielding dinde, with the still more disguised augmentative dindon. And, although the most common Italian word for turkey is tacchino (a derivative of tacco, apparently, but which tacco?), there is a synonymous gallo d’India, matching several of the examples above, as well as Breton yar-Indez ‘hen of India’ and kilhogIndez ( = Fr. coq d’Inde) ‘cock of India.’ Armenian hndkahav (Western Armenian hntgahav) also means ‘India hen.’
Welsh, betrayed by English, has twrci. Irish has turcaí, from the same source, but also cearc fhrancach ‘French hen,’ and Gaelic has eun-Frángach ‘French bird.’
Dutch and Scandinavian (with certain loan relationships) have other intriguing forms betokening an Indic (or even Dravidian) background: Dutch kalkoen, Danish kalkunsk hane/kalkunsk henne ‘turkey cock/hen,’ Norwegian kalkun, Swedish kalkontupp ‘turkey cock,’ kalkonhöna ‘turkey hen,' and Icelandic has kalkúna, kalkúnskur hani, which must be very cold turkey indeed.
German had kalekutisch hun (16th century), preceded by indianisch han a few years earlier, both ultimately ousted (in the standard language, not in all the dialects) by Truthahn (in which trut- may be connected with a verbal root meaning ‘puff up, strut, etc.'). One might think that indianisch meant ‘West Indian’ or ‘Amerindian,’ and the misnomer would be no worse than that applied to the ‘Indians’ themselves. But kalkun, kalekutisch hun and the rest show that no western designation is involved, since that whole battery of names is based on Kalikati, the city of Calicut on the Malabar coast of SW India. (The word calico is also derived from that city name—which, by the way, has nothing much to do with Calcutta, which is some 1300 miles to the northeast as the turkey struts). In Hindi, Kolikodu and, more pertinently, in Malayalam, Kozhikode ‘Calicut’ = something like ‘Rooster Fortress,’ and there is a legend, vaguely reminiscent of the Dido story, according to which a local chieftain (the zamorin) is allowed possession of as much land as the area in which a cock’s crow can be heard (by whom isn’t clear). This onomastic tale hardly sheds much light, however, on the actual process of transfer of the name from one fowl to another. One Hindi word for turkey is, interestingly enough, peru, which not only shows a realization that the bird came from this hemisphere but may also imply a possible trans-Pacific “passage to India.”
Turkey has also been applied to more than one bird. An old rhyme says,
Turkeys heresy hops and beer
Came into England all in one year.
There has been speculation as to what year that was. It was surely in the sixteenth century, perhaps as early as 1527, but there is no reason to go into problems of dating. (Beer was obviously made in England long before that time, but not the kind brewed with hops). The turkeys must have been guinea fowls, for that was the early meaning of turkey. The guinea hen, a native of Africa, was introduced into Europe from the Levant, through provinces of the Turkish Empire. For a while the same term was applied to both the guinea hen and our turkey. When the two birds were finally disentangled, the inappropriate name was kept for the American bird. If it is true that turkey referred to routes of importation (even though with application to the wrong creature), we are reminded to a slight degree of the various names given the Gypsies, who have been called Bohemians, presumably because they passed through Bohemia, and Gypsies because somebody thought they came from Egypt; the Flamenco designation may also refer to an alleged sojourn in Flanders, although this is debatable. Hindi would actually have been a better name for them, since they started from India on their long peregrination ages ago.
None of this explains why the American bird does not have a native name in the land of its origin. But it is hard to think of birds that do have native names here (unlike raccoon, opossum, skunk, and chipmunk, which bear Indian names, however altered they may be). There obviously was a native name once—or numerous ones—for the Indians are said to have partly tamed the turkey in pre-Columbian times. To complicate the matter even further, there are at least two different birds, it seems, to which the name turkey is applied in this hemisphere, which may be an instance of more truth than poultry—but most likely vice versa.
Letters {Ted Bear}
I must agree with reader Frank B. Moorman [VERBATIM II, 1, 3], who says that radio is doing bewildering things to the language. I just heard an announcer in a commercial say, “The Colonel has ribs at participating locations”!
—Ted Bear, Historian, Air Force Flight Ctr. Edwards, California
Letters {Harry Sharp}
No, no, no, no, no! Smerdyakov is not related to merde. Merde would have no real relevance to his character. Smerdyakov conveys to Russians precisely what his name should—cmept, meaning ‘death.’ After all, he is the murderer. I disclaim any etymological expertise, but it appears to me that the Russian word and the English smart, to suffer pain, are cognate, and that both go back to a relation with Latin mort(is). Whether merde has a similar cognate I leave to the experts in coprolalia.
—Harry Sharp, Encyclopaedia Britannica
Conjugal Oddities
Axel Hornos, Pittsford, New York
In “Family Words in English” [VERBATIM I, 4], Professor Allen Walker Read wrote entertainingly about words that have had their currency within family limits in Britain and the United States.
For some time, members of my family have been playing a word game of a peculiar sort. Although three Romance languages are involved, I believe this subject should be of interest to readers of VERBATIM because of the light it throws on a neglected aspect of comparative linguistics.
The game—we call it Conjugal Oddities—consists of pairing nouns of identical spelling that look like their own masculine and femine forms (identifiable in Spanish and Italian from their endings in, respectively, -o and -a), but that are otherwise entirely unrelated. Some Spanish examples follow, with their translations:
plato ‘dish’ / plata ‘silver’
cigarro ‘cigar’ / cigarra ‘cicada’
foco ‘focus’ / foca ‘seal’
arrobo ‘rapture’ / arroba ‘a weight’
Pinocho ‘Pinocchio’ / pinocha ‘pine needle’
dicho ‘saying’ / dicha ‘happiness’
tumba ‘tumble’ / tumba ‘tomb’
libro ‘book’ / libra ‘pound’
pértigo ‘carriage’ / pértiga ‘pole’
The less common masculine -e and -on endings are also well represented:
velete ‘thin veil’ / veleta ‘weathercock’
tirón ‘a pull’ / tirona ‘seine’
tizón ‘brand’ / tizona ‘sword’
volante ‘flywheel’ / volanta ‘carriage’
Unlike the examples recorded by Professor Read—in most cases fanciful creations not to be found in any dictionary—Conjugal Oddities consist solely of current Spanish nouns. Furthermore, none of the terms involved has its own opposite gender; thus foco ‘focus’ has no feminine of its own, rodilla ‘knee’ has no masculine, and so on, a fact that adds piquancy to the game. So far we have collected several dozen of these pairs, and thorough research would no doubt yield many more.
Although the majority of masculine nouns in Italian end in -o and the feminine in -a, just as in Spanish, we found relatively few Conjugal Oddities in that language.
Some examples:
fiato ‘breath’ / fiata [obsolete] ‘time’
filo ‘thread’ / fila ‘row’
lamio ‘dead’ / lamia ‘witch’
latte ‘milk’ / latta ‘tin plate’
One reason for this scarcity may be that often two apparently unrelated Italian nouns reveal, on closer examination, an unsuspected kinship that disqualifies them. For instance, purgo ‘tank for rinsing wash’ / purga ‘cathartic.’
French presents a different problem. Whereas in Spanish and Italian one need change only the last letter of most masculine nouns into an -a to obtain their feminine equivalents, in French the change often requires the addition—or the substitution—of several letters: blanc/blanche; maître/maîtresse; chauffeur/chauffeuse; puceau/pucelle; baveux/baveuse. In this connection it can be safely stated that the greater the variance in endings of the genders relative to each other, the lesser the chance of encountering unrelated pairs. Hence, the dearth of French Conjugal Oddities. Nevertheless, French is flexible enough to assure the hunter of paired, unrelated nouns such interesting finds as: jaquet ‘jacksnipe’ / jaquette ‘jacket’; mépris ‘contempt’ /méprise ‘mistake’; culot ‘bottom’ / culotte ‘breeches’; picot ‘splinter’ / picote ‘smallpox’; minet ‘kitten’ / minette ‘hop trefoil.’
Morphological changes stemming from different cultural backgrounds have given rise to the curious diversity we find today in Spanish, Italian, and French paired, unrelated nouns. It would be most enlightening to learn whether other language groups have their own Conjugal Oddities.
EX CATHEDRA: They Don’t Write English Like They Used To
We have used these pages in the past to lament—not with the nostalgia endemic among literate people that “the language is deteriorating,” but almost the exact opposite—that modern purists who execrate change of any kind in usage, style, and vocabulary lack the imagination to look forward and, facing astern, weep for civilization because the English of their forebears surpassed that of their contemporaries. Our attitude on that subject should not be confused with our point of view on the matter of the present situation in education, which too often abdicates the responsibility for teaching junior and senior high school students the rudiments (at least) of English grammar, syntax, and style.
We recall with painful clarity the punishing tutelage of what we should now characterize as “dedicated” (but then thought of as “cruel”) teachers who force-fed us with English grammar in much the same way the pâté-mad citizens of Strassbourg practice the gavage on their geese. Painful though it was, the approach seemed to have had little effect on our liver (though it did make us somewhat choleric), but it did succeed in enlarging our brain. We were not then (Heaven knows!) in sympathy with the techniques of teaching English by the diagraming of sentences, for we still regard that as an unproductive and confusing method; but the laborious grinding out of weekly themes, answers to essay questions on exams (even the history teachers graded us on our English), and the equally laborious task undertaken by the teachers in reading and correcting and commenting on our papers made good grammar second nature to us. We do not have to devote much thought today, either in speaking or in writing, to such elementary problems as who/whom, agreement of pronoun with antecedent or of verb form with subject, and so on, leaving us free to worry about selection of les mots justes, syntax, and other matters of style. Like everyone, though, we acknowledge occasional slips, to wit, the use of a plural verb with kudos in the September “Ex Cathedra.” [Corrected in this edition.—Ed.]
There is no doubt that good or even passable English adequate for most writing purposes can be taught to most students; but the deplorable condition in which we find modern education militates against that goal at the grade-school level, when it can be instilled almost painlessly or least painfully. Perhaps the difficulty stems from a change that took place during the 1940s—at least in the New York City school system, though we believe that the change rapidly raced through all the school systems of the country. It used to be called “age promotion,” though the “educationists,” whose vocabulary is riddled with jargon, have probably coined a new term for it by now, the older one being too descriptively clear. It seems that before “age promotion,” students who failed to pass their examinations at the end of the school year (or, in some cases, semester) were simply left back to do the term over again. It was discovered, though, that in cases where an especially disoriented student was not promoted for several years, he might reach the age of 15 and still be in the second grade. Such students became serious discliplinary problems and, suffering the ignominy of being forced to associate with children half their age, not only lost all motivation and interest but contaminated the effective education of their classmates. All they had to do was to survive till their 16th birthday, beyond which they would no longer be required, by law, to attend school. Chiefly for sociopsychological reasons, it was decided to promote by age rather than by scholastic proficiency or attainment: in other words, no matter how poorly a student might do—for whatever reason, including having a substandard, unsympathetic, or unempathic teacher—when he was 10, he was in the fourth grade, 11, the fifth, and so on.
Although the alternative—placing such students in special remedial classes—might have been contemplated and even done in some cases, to the best of our knowledge it was not practiced, at least not widely enough to be of any significance.
As time went by, a kind of Gresham’s Law began to take effect: poor students were driving good students out of circulation. The result was that after only a few years, the high-school teacher of English, who was supposed to be teaching Macbeth and Hamlet and Julius Caesar, was faced by students whose ability to write an articulate essay was doubtful and whose reading ability was questionable. It didn’t take long before these students reached college, where the same conditions prevailed. In the mid-1950s, when we were teaching a course in remedial English at New York University, several students each semester were actually doctoral candidates whose dissertations had been rejected because they had been written in unacceptable English! It was less surprising to us that they were writing poor English than that their work had been rejected on those grounds, not because we had so little faith in the ability of our colleagues in the graduate schools to be able to discern poor writing, but because we were loath to admit that professors in fields outside the humanities really gave a damn about how something was written as long as it was interpretable. Having been away from that milieu for more than 15 years now, we are less than sanguine that the standards have remained the same.
Once let slip, standards are hard to re-establish. Yet, we know that the criticism and social pressures are strong. Some may find it encouraging, as reported in a special section on education in The N.Y. Times [Sunday, May 4, 1975], that English can be taught to college students with some measure of success. But we regard it as appalling that the issue need arise at all. Professor Mina Shaughnessy was quoted in that article as having said, “There’s no reason why these [college] students cannot learn what their teachers learned.”
But, we protest, when the history of education shows us that calculus and other subjects once considered unintelligible to any but the post-graduate specialist can be taught in secondary schools, why is English, which is the basic means of expression for all of us, regardless of specialty, moving in the opposite direction? Why, in the short space of about 30 years, has the teaching of such rudimentary knowledge been transferred from the grammar school to the university?
The blame for so-called functional illiteracy in this country lies not with the students but with the teachers and with the school systems. —Editor
INTER ALIA: II.2.
The WTIC Program Guide for July 1975 contained the following urgent message:
DO IT TODAY! RENEW YOUR SUBSCRIPTION TO THE WTIC-FM PROGRAM GUIDE. GET YOUR RENEWAL IN THE MAIL NOW TO AVOID UN-INTERUPTED [sic] DELIVERY FOR ANOTHER YEAR OF LISTENING TO SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND’S CLASSICAL MUSIC STATION.
Reviews: THE RANDOM HOUSE COLLEGE DICTIONARY
Revised Edition, Edited by Jess Stein, Random House, 1975.
Having been the editor in chief of the original of this dictionary, we struggled with our conscience on the subject of whether or not it was proper to write this review. On the grounds that it is unlikely that a better-qualified reviewer could be found who is as familiar with the work as we are, we declared an armistice.
Dictionaries are easy to criticize adversely: any reviewer who knows his onions can peel off one papery layer after another and find sufficient cause to weep. At the very outset, we were dismayed to discover the first blow to our ego: our name had been removed from the title page, though we found it on the Staff list, buried in the front matter. Our original Preface remains. It should be pointed out that the Revised Edition is touted as containing 170,000 entries, or about 10,000 more than the original—an addition of some 7%—hardly enough to warrant the removal of the name of the person responsible for 93%! As we proceeded with our examination of the book, however, we weren’t so certain that the deletion hadn’t been a merciful one.
In his “Preface to the Revised Edition,” Jess Stein mentions eight new entries; it seemed fair to assume that those entries, if not truly representative of the Revision, were at least presented as “showcase” entries: otherwise, why single them out? So we looked them all up, with the following somewhat mixed results:
Watergate 1. an illegal break-in at Democratic party headquarters in Washington, D.C., during the presidential campaign of 1972, allegedly by Republican campaign employees for political espionage and sabotage.2. any political activity that is grossly illegal or unethical, usually involving unfair tactics, concealed contributions, special-interest deals, and abuse of governmental trust for partisan advantage, [from the name of the building in which the break-in occurred]
Definition
massage parlor a commercial establishment most often for the massage of males by masseuses, who are sometimes allegedly also engaged in illegal sexual activities.
Let’s face it: legitimate places of business where a man can get a massage are not called massage parlors. Also, there’s that “allegedly” again, which the editors will leap to defend on the grounds that dictionary definitions might otherwise be construed as libelous. Not if the definition reads, more accurately, “a commercial establishment ostensibly for the massage of men [why males?] by masseuses but usually for the practice of illegal sexual activities.”
Curiously, streak is defined as “to engage in the fad of streaking.” It is curious because dictionaries place definitions under gerunds only when the gerund is far, far more frequent than the verb, which we do not believe to be the case with streak/streaking. The definition is:
streaking (esp. among college students) a prank or fad of dashing briefly in the nude across a campus, street, etc., in public view.
Based on personal knowledge, we can attest that “(esp. among college students)” is not in keeping with the facts. The style is poor: either one writes “a prank or fad consisting of dashing…” or “the prank or fad of dashing…,” but not a mixture of the two. Also since “dashing” carries the connotation of “briefly,” the combination is tautological. And lastly, “in or through a crowded public place, as across a street, through a restaurant, etc.” would, we think, have been better. Let’s go on:
designated hitter Baseball. a hitter selected prior to the start of the game to bat for the starting pitcher and all subsequent pitchers without otherwise affecting the status of the pitchers in the game. Abbr.: dh
Baseball is one of our weakest points, which makes us at once suspicious of the phrase “prior to the start of the game,” chosen in (obvious) preference to “before a game,” which also takes care of the question of why “the game” instead of “a game,” when the latter is more in keeping with the Dictionary’s style? And what can “the starting pitcher and all subsequent pitchers” mean? The pitchers of both teams resort to the same designated hitter? And what does the “otherwise” accomplish except except to confuse? Our version: “a pinch hitter selected before a game to hit in place of his team’s pitchers.”
eight-track a magnetic-tape cartridge, esp. one carrying eight parallel tracks of prerecorded sound or music.
Is this really a noun? If it is an inherent characteristic of eight-track cartridges to contain tapes with eight tracks on them (which one would assume), then what in Heaven’s name is the “esp.” doing there? If the tape has only four tracks or six, the cartridge would hardly be called an “eight-track.” And, worse than that, the chief distinction between a cartridge and a cassette is simply ignored, namely that the former contains a looped tape that will play continuously unless turned off while the latter must be flipped over or rewound for continued play.
job bank U.S. a computerized data file for matching unemployed workers with appropriate job openings in a local or regional labor market, usually operated by government employment services.
Our only serious objection to this rather verbose definition is that the adjective form of government (unless you are using Nounspeak) is governmental.
OPEC Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Not a very useful entry without identification of its members. Members are given for SEATO and NATO.
launder Slang. to disguise the source of (money, esp. illegal campaign funds or profits from criminal activities), esp. by routing it abroad through a foreign bank.
We think that conceal would be more accurate than disguise, we don’t like the two “esp.” usages, and a better word, which we cannot think of right now, could be used in place of “routing.”
stonewall 1. U.S. Informal. to block, stall, or resist, esp. intentionally.
We are very bored with the use of “esp.,” which begins to emerge in every definition and raises not a few suspicions as to the definers’ abilities to be specific. Moreover, since “block, stall, or resist” carry in them the implication of intention, the last two words are de trop.
So much for the showcase entries. Turning now to other new terms, we marked a few in the Sunday New York Times of October 26, 1975, which we think have been in the language long enough to have been picked up by the RHCD editors and researchers. Yet, the following were not in at all:
LED [light-emitting diode] (neither is in)
East African Economic Community pointelle
sacrament of the sick (formerly last rites)
Then we checked some others that occurred to us and were found to be absent from the RHCD:
plumber (Watergate sense)
disk pack (computer sense)
floppy disk (computer sense)
COM [computer output microform]
CREEP [Committee to _Re-E_lect the _P_resident]
stagflation
SoHo [a district in New York City South of _Ho_uston]
Also, Solzhenitsyn, whom I would look up mainly to see how his name is spelled, is misspelled Solzhenitysn.
If Chiang Kai-shek, who died in April 1975, is listed as dead, then why haven’t the following entries been updated?:
Faisal—no death date; died March 1975. Bulganin—no death date; died February 1975. Huxley—no death date; died February 1975. Wodehouse—no death date; died February 1975. Bush, Vannevar—no death date; died June 1974. de Seversky, Alexander—no death date; died August 1974. Peron—no death date; died July 1974. Leakey, Louis S.—no death date; died October 1972. Armstrong, Louis—no death date; died July 1971. O’Boyle, Patrick—no longer bishop of Washington, D.C.
And why is Willy Brandt still listed as Chancellor of West Germany when he resigned on May 6, 1974?
We could go on, and on, and on. But to what avail? The war is still on in Vietnam; Sadat doesn’t exist; neither does Giscard d’Estaing or (perhaps mercifully) Idi Amin. The definitions of Moog synthesizer and of Wankel engine need serious revision; women’s lib and women’s liberation are not syllabified correctly.
In short, although The Random House College Dictionary might have been a superior work of lexicography (and we weren’t the only ones to say so), its reputation has been compromised by the appearance of the Revised Edition, which leaves much to be desired—namely, an accurate Revised Edition of the RHCD.
Reviews: WORDS AND WAYS OF AMERICAN ENGLISH
Thomas Pyles, Random House, 1952
Reviews: AMERICAN ENGLISH
Albert H. Marckwardt, Oxford University Press, 1958
These books were published after Mencken’s The American Language: Supplement II (1948) and before the one-volume abridgment of Mencken, with annotations and new material by Raven I. McDavid, Jr. (1963). They could, and still can, serve as readable and relatively short surveys of American English that whet the reader’s appetite for more and lead him on to Mencken or to studies of particular topics, although neither author encumbers his book with footnotes. Regrettably, neither provides a bibliography. Although both Pyles and Marckwardt acknowledge debts to Mencken’s work and include material and illustrative examples found there, they have also each contributed original matter in their books which has been incorporated into McDavid’s abridgment; and they brought to their undertakings different perspectives and tones.
Pyles aims “to provide for the lay reader a brief yet adequate treatment of the English language as it has been and is spoken and written by Americans.” In doing so, he emphasizes far more than Marckwardt the desire of Americans for authorities to tell us how we should use our language and our consequent linguistic insecurity. “Linguistic Nationalism and the Schoolmaster” provides the background in eighteenth-century prescriptive grammar for the establishment of the linguistic authoritarianism of the schoolteacher, in America, and in the following chapter, “Noah Webster, Man and Symbol,” Pyles describes the accomplishments and the faults—primarily, and with irony, the latter—of one who “was largely responsible for the dissemination in this country of an attitude toward language which prevails to this day, even among the rank and file of our people.” The last chapter, “Purity by Prescription,” is devoted to a final attack on “our respect for linguistic authoritarianism.” From today’s perspective, Pyles enlists too wholeheartedly and surely at too great a length in the structuralists’ war against schoolmarmism, vehemently supporting (and citing) Robert Hall’s Leave Your Language Alone! (1950—now retitled Linguistics and Your Language). I do not mean that the war was won, but rather than it has cooled and that linguists’ tactics and rhetoric have changed since Pyles wrote. In this respect, therefore, his book seems dated.
In contrast, Marckwardt explicitly refuses to propagandize for reform in English education. He doubts that prescriptivism has had the stifling effect on American English that others claim but does call for replacement of prescriptivism by “a faith in intuition, by dependence upon the established, unconsciously known patterns of the language,” which are to be developed “by giving attention to the broader aspects of structure and the evolving tendencies of the language.” Marckwardt does pay more attention than Pyles to the structure of the language, particularly to its syntax, but his main aim is to trace “the close interaction of linguistic and cultural factors in the growth of American English.”
In his second chapter Marckwardt discusses more fully than Pyles the language background of the colonists, emphasizing the dialectal diversity in Elizabethan England and the fact that only five per cent of the population spoke London English, which was becoming Standard. He also points out and illustrates the “highly variable and complex” nature of Elizabethan English pronunciation and grammar. He sees these elements as explaining some of the subsequent divergences between American and British English.
Both Pyles and Marckwardt provide very readable sections, replete with examples, of the colonists’ adaptations of native English words to their new environment, and both deal very well with borrowings from other languages, including Indian languages, French, Spanish, Dutch, German, and scattered lesser donors. Marckwardt is more inclined than Pyles to trace the subsequent development of some of these borrowings, using such linguistic terminology as functional shift, clipping, back-formation, etc. Inevitably, some comments are dated; Pyles' statement that pizza and ravioli are among borrowings from Italian seldom encountered outside Italian restaurants and seldom by those not of Italian descent is no more and no less amusing than Marckwardt’s comment that taco and frijole “are better known along the Mexican border than elsewhere.” Although both mention a few African and Yiddish borrowings, a new book on American English similar to these would, I think, have to direct more attention to the importance of Black English and Yiddish to American English today.
Pyles and Marckwardt both write entertainingly of the rodomontade of the frontier and the verbal delicacy of the drawing room in nineteenth-century America. In discussing American additions to the English vocabulary, the authors must of course be selective. Marckwardt emphasizes the word-forming processes involved and finds that the American fondness for compounding has “the earmarks of an indigenous style,” particularly the elliptical (rather than self-explanatory) compound: rat race, ghost town, disk jockey, soap opera, etc. The proliferation of nominal compounds (which David McNeill has investigated particularly in the technical vocabulary of space exploration) is foreshadowed by Marckwardt’s citation from a menu: Butter Cream Frosted Devil’s Food Pecan Layer Cake. Pyles discusses such words as stogy, gerrymander, filibuster, bunkum, sundae, blizzard, ballyhoo, and “the most famous of all Americanisms, O.K.” (his discussion of its origin must be supplemented by Allen Walker Read’s later reports (1963), summarized in the one-volume Mencken).
In their discussions of regional dialects, Marckwardt and Pyles support Hans Kurath’s distinguishing of three major dialect areas, Northern, Midland, and Southern, in his Word Geography of the Eastern United States, but tend to emphasize different causes for the origins of the dialects. Pyles focuses on Kurath’s finding a preponderance of colonists from southeastern England, including London, in the New England and Virginia colonies and suggests a preponderance of colonists from the north and west of England in the Midland area, bringing with them, of course, their home dialects. Marckwardt, however, suggests dialectally mixed settlements gradually arriving at local compromises on those everyday terms for which the dialects differed. Like Kurath, he sees a large number of local dialects developing and gradually being transformed into regional dialects during the nineteenth century under the influence of improved transportation, migration, and regionally important cities. Kurath seems to hold the two views in balance. As dialects were carried westward from the East Coast through migration, so too were place names. Marckwardt devotes a short chapter to naming practices in America and their relationship to our culture— a topic not touched upon by Pyles.
Throughout their books, the authors frequently compare American and British English. Noting, for example, the British reduction or loss of the penultimate syllable in the group of words including dictionary, secretary, necessary, Pyles attributes American retention of the syllable to the pattern of the spelling bee, fostered by Noah Webster, whereby each syllable was spelled and pronounced separately; but Marckwardt finds the explanation unconvincing because the pattern did not lead to distortions of traditional pronunciations generally—we have not come to pronounce the -plan- of explanation with the vowel of pan. Both point out that British English retains only got as the past participle of get, in contrast to American English got and gotten. Pyles denounces prescriptions against gotten and believes that “there must be many fairly cultured circles in America where ‘I wish I could have got here sooner’ would seem somewhat questionable usage.” Marckwardt, on the other hand, discusses the “very precise distinction” Americans make between got and gotten in such a context as “We’ve—ten thousand dollars for laboratory equipment” and explores further the historical development of the “have got(ten)” constructions. In these instances and in others that could be cited, Marckwardt displays a broader perspective on the whole structure of the language and the interrelationships of its subsystems than does Pyles, who by comparison often seems too wordoriented.
Pyles' Words and Ways of American English is the more argumentative, more colorful, more entertainingly written book. Marckwardt’s American English is more dispassionate and objective, has a broader perspective on language, and is more solidly based in linguistic terminology and description—qualities that may be of use in comprehending current developments in American English and relating them to its history and to American culture.
Kenneth A. Robb Bowling Green State University
Letters {Donald R. Morris}
John F. Gummere [“Clicks Are Very Common,” VERBATIM II, 2, 5] makes a delightful comment, although in claiming eight clicks for English and thus an inferiority to “Hottentot,” he is somewhat wide of the mark. To begin with, there are no longer any Hottentots, and the language they spoke is for all practical purposes dead. The original inhabitants of southern Africa (insofar as Homo Sapiens is concerned), were the Bushmen, who spoke and speak languages of the Khoisan group, in which tongue clicks appear. The Hottentots arrived in the area about a millennium ago; their language was distinct from the Bushmen languages, although it is included in the Khoisan group, and such click sounds as it featured were probably acquired by contact.
Europeans arrived at the Cape in 1652, contributing to an almost immediate erosion of Hottentot culture; in the 1770s, smallpox completed the job that contact with the Europeans had begun. At about the same time, the Bantu began to drift into southern Africa from the north.
“Bantu” is a linguistic rather than an ethnic term: it was coined in the 1850s by a philologist, Wilhelm Bleek, to characterize those peoples south of the Sahara speaking a group of related languages featuring prefixial concords, that is, a system in which the prefix is inflected to indicate grammatical case and number rather than, as in most western European languages, the suffix. For example, in many of these languages the root word for ‘man’ is Ntu. ‘Single man’ is umuNtu and ‘people’ is abaNtu, whence Bantu for the people as a whole and munt, the vulgar European term for a black in South Africa.
Although all these languages are closely related, only the groups known as the Eastern Nguni Bantu use tongue clicks. These groups are found east of the Drakensberg range along the Indian Ocean, north of, in, and south of Natal, and they acquired their clicks the same way the Hottentots did, by practicing exogamy (marriage outside the clan): they kidnapped Bushmen women, who passed on a large store of household words with clicks in them to their children. The two best known languages featuring the clicks are Zulu and Xhosa, which are mutually intelligible. The inland Bantu languages, such as Sesotho, do not have clicks.
There are only three clicks:
-
Dental: (Mr. Gummere’s “tsk-tsk,” “tut-tut,” and “tchtch.") Official Zulu orthography uses a c for the dental click, since c can always be replaced by s or k (and ch can be spelled tsh).
-
Lateral: (Mr. Gummere’s “exhortation” or “wolf” click.) Zulu uses x for this, since x can always be replaced by ks.
-
Palato-alveolar: (Mr. Gummere missed this one.) It is formed by placing the tongue against the hard palate and drawing it back and down; in simpler times, it was used by children to imitate the sound of a gun or of a cork coming out of a bottle. It is sometimes rendered “Cluck!” in English. The Zulus use a q for it, since one can always replace q with kw.
The clicks are normally unvoiced, unaspirated, and nonnasal. If voiced, they are preceded by a g, if aspirated they are followed by an h, and if nasalized they are preceded by an n. This leads to odd-looking spellings (isaNgqu, iQwa), but it is all perfectly clear to the Zulus. The exact pronunciation is best learned from a native speaker.
That leaves what Mr. Gummere calls “the click of osculation,” which is no click at all but an imploded b. (One draws the breath in rather than aspirating while pronouncing b.) Imploded b is a distinct sound in the Eastern Nguni languages, as well as many others, and, if it is available in the type font, Cyrillic " " is used for it; if not, b is used for the imploded b and bh for our aspirated English b. The word Bantu itself features an imploded b: try saying it while drawing in on the b instead of aspirating— it is an entirely different word from Bhantu.
English, in short, does use tongue clicks—two of them (doubled dental and doubled lateral) form true words in that they have universally understood semantic content, although we have no convenient conventions for spelling them. Zulu would spell “tsk-tsk” cece (which is, in fact, the word for ‘wedding or engagement party’) and would spell our “wolf” click xexe. That doesn’t happen to be a word in Zulu, although xoxo means ‘frog.’ A motorcycle, incidentally, is isiQhuqhuqhu—note the onomatopoeia in the tripled, aspirated palato-alveolar click.
—Donald R. Morris, The Houston POST
ETYMOLOGICA OBSCURA: Is vital statistics veddy British?
Dictionaries are often accused of copying from one another. If proof were needed that this is not always so, at least in the case of American dictionaries, one has only to look up a term like vital statistics for its more recent and frequently used informal sense.
Vital statistics is entered as a cross-reference to measurements (
However, the secondary sense of vital statistics is invariably given in British dictionaries: the Concise Oxford (1974 printing) as well as the Pocket (1969) and even the Little (1969), Penguin (1965), and every other British dictionary, big and small, that I can lay my hands on. Even the Canadian Gage Senior Dictionary (1967) enters the new sense, though not its American counterpart.
The apparent reluctance of American dictionaries in this particular case seems very enigmatic, as if vital statistics were some Briticism more British even than kerb, petrol, or pram, which you will find routinely entered in all the American dictionaries. Apart from the question of copying, is this just another instance of citation collectors' overlooking the obvious? In this particular case even Merriam nods. My own file (by no means comparable to Merriam’s !) has just three cites for vital statistics and only one of them seems to extend the original sense recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary:
Mr. Stout said Mr. Ciurlini never authorized him to turn back odometers, and did not know he had done so. He agreed it was the custom of the trade to have the seller fill in the ‘vital statistics’ of a car. Judge Drukarsh adjourned the trial to July 5 in Scarborough, to set a date for continuance. [From the Toronto Globe & Mail, June 22, 1973, p. 53]
I hope I have not labored the obvious, Reactions from VERBATIM readers, I thought, might be enlightening. [Thomas M. Paikeday Mississauga, Ontario]
Letters {Constant Rider}
To Donald Sears' remarks [VERBATIM, I, 4] let me add a few on the Mexican linguistic phenomenon that our family calls “Spanglish.” Unlike Ameritalian, Spanglish does not consist simply in such usages as “motel,” “club,” or “camping,” which by this time have literally become part of an international travelers' lingo—although Mexican Spanish, like Italian, has incorporated many English words and uses them, frequently, in preference to the Spanish equivalent.
Spanglish is Something Else. It’s a whole new thing. Take a word like keks—as in a breakfast menu announcing hot keks. At dinnertime, the menu might—in fact, invariably will—feature bistek (or you can buy it at the butcher’s; I myself have never been able to figure out the difference between bistek and filete at the butcher’s, since they look suspiciously like the same cut and both, presumably, derive originally from the same beeflike animal—whence also derives the ubiquitous hamburguesa). The more withit restaurants may offer roles (in place of the Mexican bolillos). For dessert, you may order pay. A word that baffled us for a long time was donas—those heavily sugared, fried cakes in the shape of a lifesaver that you can buy, as in the U.S., either fresh and hot at the baker’s or, packaged in cellophane, at the grocer’s. While at the grocer’s, you can also pick up a carton of yus.
Along with food, the biggest arena for the new vocabulary, and one where it flourishes, is sports. This isn’t surprising, since these are probably the two most international activities (next to sex, which doesn’t, after all, require an extensive vocabulary) in today’s world. In any language, golf is golf, and it’s entirely logical that miniature golf, in Mexico, is golfito, but the sports pages of the big Mexico City dailies furnish a goldmine for the Spanglish seeker. They veritably bristle with accounts of beisbol, futbol (our soccer), even volibol. Tenis, anyone? In futbol, there are gols. Beisbol is full of rons and jits, of course, and the squeeze-pley or even los pley-offs don’t present insurmountable hurdles; but somehow nothing ever looks right, to a norteamericano, about a jonrón. Even after you realize that a ron is a ‘run,’ there’s something deep inside that resists recognizing that jon is ‘home.’ That perverse Spanish pronunciation of the j (as in jits) brings you up short, every time. (And where did that n for m come from, anyway?)
As the discerning reader has already noticed, the secret of Spanglish lies in the fact that the word, originally English, is spelled so as to approximate its English pronunciation by a Spanish speaker. If a native Spanish speaker were to come without warning or previous experience on the word “cakes,” for example, he would have no option but to give it two syllables (as in roles), the first with the a of father, the second with the e of mess—producing a sound that has no meaning in either English or Spanish. Keks solves the problem.
Outside of the two major areas of food and sports, the Spanglish vocabulary tends to be spotty. You can buy a sueter when the weather turns chilly, or some champu to wash your hair; if your inclinations are political, you can attend a mitín and listen to speeches by, or about, the lider.
One of my own favorite adjectives, which doesn’t really fulfill the criteria of the splanguage, is folklorico. This word, made respectable by the existence of the internationally famous Ballet Folklorico de Mexico, is creeping into more secular usages: “Should I wear my pantssuit, or something more folklorico?”
In San Miguel de Allende, as renowned for its long-lived expatriate colony as for its spectacularly beautiful scenery and delightful climate, the resident Americans put out a directory among themselves, so that they will be able to find each other. Its name, in impeccable Spanglish, is ?_Juardé?_
Need a drink? How about some Escotch?
—Constant Rider, St. Louis, Mo.
Reviews: BREWER’S DICTIONARY OF PHRASE & FABLE
revised by Ivor H. Evans, Harper & Row, 1970
Can you believe that there is one book, readily available and, in successive editions, in print since 1870, that gives the answers to such a wide diversity of questions as:
Which infantry division of the U.S. Army was (unofficially) known as the “Thunderbolt Division”?
Which edition of the Bible is known as the “sin on” Bible, and why?
What is the legendary source of gossamer?
What were the Isthmian Games?
What is the origin of the name Rotten Row, in London?
What does the expression like a curate’s egg mean, and what is its origin?
What is the difference between Cupid’s golden arrow and Cupid’s leaden arrow?
Who was/is the King of Misrule?
What have the following in common: Cleopatra’s needle, forlorn hope, guinea pigs, Jerusalem artichokes, meerschaum, mother-of-pearl, ventriloquism, and worm-wood?
If you are not familiar with Brewer’s Dictionary, you may never find the answers. To have been fortunate enough to have grown up with this fascinating book at hand— though with a first, not the recent (1970) edition—to have enjoyed its usefulness and the many hours of amusement, entertainment, and fascination it has afforded we count among such blessings as to be healthy (which we are), wealthy (which we aren’t), and wise (which we may yet become). This is the sort of book one can take home to mother—and to father and everyone else who might be there; one never tires of it; it is, like the Bible, the hermit’s vademecum. From the Scarlet Letter (A) through the Amyclean Silence, from Hull, Hell, and Halifax through the Swan with Two Necks, from the Runcible Spoon to The Zwickau Prophets, this engaging work captures and captivates the reader.
Brewer was originally a British book, and it still is, notwithstanding the efforts of the present editor, Ivor H. Evans, to include representative American collocations and cultural tidbits. Yet, because many of the entries refer to world literature and to divers mythologies and cultures, one is not especially aware of Americans' being slighted. British spellings are used, but they offer no interference whatsoever either to the flow of information or to the pleasure derived from its acquisition.
For here is history, literature, romance, language—the miscellany, the flotsam and jetsam of civilization, neatly packaged and in alphabetical order. How to describe a book that is not a dictionary yet gives (occasional) pronunciations, meanings, and etymologies; not an encylopedia, yet offers information in the form of brief articles; not an almanac, yet lists events and phenomena? It can be described only as “Brewer,” with all the implications and inferences that name conveys to and evokes from the initiated. Once you pick it up, you’ll never want to put it down.
“Thunderbolt” is an unofficial nickname—another is “Golden Talon”—of the 17th Airborne Infantry Division.
In the first Bible printed in Ireland (dated 1716), John v, 14, reads: “sin on more,” instead of “sin no more.”
Gossamer, according to legend, is the raveling of the Virgin Mary’s winding-sheet.
The Greek Isthmian Games, so called because they took place on the isthmus of Corinth, were held every alternate spring, the second and fourth of each Olympiad.
Rotten Row is said to be a corruption of OFr route le roi or route du roi, because it was on the route from Westminster to the royal forests. Another theory is that it comes from rotteran ‘to muster,’ for it is where the soldiers mustered.
A cartoon in Punch, or The London Charivari, showed a nervous young curate who has been served with a spoiled egg at his bishop’s breakfast table. Terrified to say that the egg is bad, he stammers, “Parts of it are excellent!” Like a curate’s egg has become a common British expression meaning ‘good in parts.’
Cupid’s golden arrow is virtuous love [Shak.: Midsummer Night’s Dream, I, i]; Cupid’s leaden arrow is sensual passion [Ovid: Apollo and Daphne.]
The King of Misrule was the name given to the Master of the Revels at Cristmastide in medieval England.
All are misnomers: Cleopatra’s needle was erected by Thotmes III about 1500 B.C.; forlorn hope is a folk etymology of Dutch verloren hoop, lit. ‘lost troop’ [cf. Fr enfants perdus]; guinea pigs are rodents native to South America, being neither pigs nor from Guinea; Jerusalem artichokes do not come from Jerusalem, the misnomer being a corruption of It girasole ‘sunflower’; meerschaum, lit. Ger ‘seafoam,’ was so named because it was found on the seashore: seafoam, as far as is known, does not petrify; mother-of-pearl is made from the shells of some bivalves, notably those of the pearl oyster, but it has nothing to do with the natural or artificial cultivation of pearls; ventriloquism has nothing to do with speaking [Lat loqui] from the stomach [Lat ventri-]; wormwood, said to be so called because, according to legend, it sprang up in the track of the Serpent as it writhed along the ground when driven from Paradise, is an aromatic herb, having no connection with either worms or wood.
Reviews: THE UNIVERSAL DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Henry Cecil Wyld, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1932
I like three-dimensional dictionaries, although I am not sure that the metaphor is entirely apt. I am happiest with a dictionary that gives some view of the history of a word, as well as a surmise of its pre-history. Moreover, the “definition” (hardly ever that in reality!) must take into account the fact that the meaning of a word is not a point but an area, and that areas overlap. Still, many limitations are imposed on lexicographers, and it is unfair to assail them for omitting information they may have wanted to include.
I do not like dictionaries that send me on a wild goose chase from word A to word B (or beyond) and then back to the starting-point, as wise as I was before. One Wyld goose chase (not typical, fortunately) begins, ominously enough, with castor oil. We read: “so called for supposed relation with castoreum. See prec.” We obey and see “prec.” But the preceding entry says: “See castor (I).” Well, that’s on the same page; hence the effort demanded is not excessive. We learn that this castor is the “genus of rodent animals which includes the beaver family,” which is as meager assistance as one could find. It is, however, also a “pungent, oily substance obtained from the beaver, used in medicine and perfumery; castoreum,” a bit of a lexicographical run, even for castor oil, and not easily swallowed.
On the other hand, I do enjoy those cross-references that show me intriguing interlocking relationships of words. Starting with hearken, Wyld leads us to hark, hear, and acoustic, thence by side paths to simple, plicate, duplicate, pleach, plait, ply, plash, dual, two, twin, twig, bi-, di-, and the trip is not over yet. En route, one must observe with caution little signs and abbreviations (fr., cp., for) and minor subtleties of punctuation. Wyld’s introduction warns that it is not yet possible to make etymology instantly accessible to those lacking training in it. But he adds that an effort by the “general reader” to understand its principles can prove enormously rewarding. His claim that “such knowledge opens up new worlds of thought and speculation,” seems overly sanguine. This reviewer, after working for over 25 years on a Welsh etymological dictionary, now wonders whether any “scientific” etymology is possible at all, despite Wyld’s claim for it as a highly developed science.
It is often hard for dictionaries to avoid taking on some of the functions of encyclopedias. Yet, in a unilingual dictionary of my own language, I am not likely to look up cat or book or knife to find their “meanings,” and attempts to describe or define them are gratuitous or ludicrous. Some graphic representation might suffice instead. One comfort in Wyld is the absence of silly descriptions of flora and fauna of the “any of” type (“any of a number of round-bottomed worm-eaters”). But sometimes even he does not escape: “any one of the small birds belonging to the family Paridae, allied to the nuthatch.” A glance at the entry on that staunch ally is quite unproductive, and we are nearly driven to the booby hatch, which is not found, although booby trap is, and treated with a frivolity possible only in an age that had not yet achieved certain extreme refinements in killing.
There are times when we have questions about pronunciation, including accentuation, and we need to have a clear, consistent system to indicate those phonic features. The printed word, granted, can do this to only a limited extent. Maybe some sort of recording is needed to convey such information. Even then, the hearer would doubtless disagree with what he heard. What sacred power decrees the unique accuracy of the sounds heard? “Received English” is a term, hardly an explanation. Who will make me accept bíhimou&thgr; as the pronunciation of behemoth? A preliminary note (not by Prof. Wyld himself) says that when two possible pronunciations are indicated, the reader can choose the one sounding most “natural” to him. This attributes to the speaker the kind of mayvendom assumed by some contemporary linguists to reside in every speaker. What does the reader do if he rejects both? (It is hardly necessary to point to the inadequacy of referring to the vowel “as in awe, caught,” etc.). And is not a severe blow dealt to the self-righteousness of those of us who say [kil] for kiln, when Wyld gives [kiln] only?
One can also dispute the definitions proffered; avid students of monster lore will feel that Wyld’s concept of the behemoth is severely limited, despite scriptural reference. That his attempt to define terms like eisteddfod fails—like that to indicate its pronunciation—is only to be expected. When he defines kiss, he relies on what looks like limited experience that never attained the rapture of a quadrilabial plosive. But the definition, like the experience, seems to be his own.
Space prohibits Wyld from giving the vast sweep of chronological sequence of attestation of the OED, but his examples, while not documented, are of considerable practical use in illustrating semantic shades.
Various writings since the appearance of the book render Wyld’s etymology of iron rusty, for which he is obviously not to be blamed. Perhaps one could do better in etymologizing shanty. One is out of luck if seeking help with the contradictory tympani or Tzigany, and the story of lemming is perhaps told backwards. He could have gone further with sinew, without straining, and the stories of snow, yoga, sloe, Welsh, and many more are curtailed.
The treatment of apricot, though derived, is ample, and the albatross story is well told in small scope. Algorism gives the gist of an interesting word history but perpetuates the myth of “Arabic” numerals, which are, of course, Indic, despite subsequent transmission.
Some regrettable terminology gives us a mild jolt: Low Latin and non-Aryan are infelicitous, and “an Aryanspeaking race” almost inexcusable. The same warped attitude is evinced elsewhere (cf. Ugrian, Gurkha, race). That some examples contain expressions that are hilarious to Americans is perhaps irrelevant; cf., however: “The long climb knocked me up.” Coincidentally the “biblical” sense of to know is on the facing page (with curious limitation to “a man;” cf., for refutation, Luke 1.34). Honi soit qui mal y pense.
Wyld’s dictionary suits me, despite its relative antiquity (greater than its chronological age). There is a satisfying balance of the exasperating and the enjoyable. There are enough things to find fault with, but just as many to take delight in. The malicious example, “What occurred did not transpire” will be relished by all us pedants, as will the entry aggravate. It’s too bad that connive did not follow the same tack. One can, though, feast on a wealth of lore in this book, with its refreshing breath of the nineteenth century, when things were less complicated but knowledge often deep. Subsequent schools of linguistics have only slightly altered the lexical story.
One perplexing question remains: What is the meaning of universal in the title? The aim stated by Wyld was to give a picture of “English usage at the present time, both literary and colloquial.” Does that not sound like something less than universal? One thinks of “Miss Universe.”
_—Robert A. Fowkes, New York University
REVIEWS: THE GREAT AMERICAN BLOW-UP: Puffery in Advertising and Selling
Ivan L. Preston, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1975
“By legal definition, puffery is advertising or other sales representations which praise the item to be sold with subjective opinions, superlatives, or exaggerations, vaguely and generally, stating no specific facts.” [p. 17]
While we cannot be enamored of the grammar of this quotation from Blow-Up (and it is fairly typical of the style of the book), we must admit that the content is redeeming. As readers of VERBATIM already know, we are deeply interested in the Languages of Persuasion and Deception: when Blow-Up is not dealing with their language, it is dealing with Persuasion and Deception themselves. Starting in the Middle Ages, Preston, who is a professor of consumerism at the University of Wisconsin, traces the history of commercial flummery from caveat emptor to modern consumerism (caveat vendor?), and, while his style may leave something to be desired, he has produced an utterly fascinating book that describes the workings of advertising, and the law (as represented by the FTC, the FDA, and their several judiciary functionaries), as well as the machinations of unscrupulous sellers. Sellerist, a word we had not previously encountered, is contrasted with consumerist, both being adjectives.
Because Blow-Up deals so heavily with legal matters, a substantial portion of it concerns itself with language: a case involving the distinction between remedy and relief centers on the advertised claim by the manufacturer that a patent medication is “for quick relief from the itching of eczema, blotches, pimples, athlete’s foot, scales, rashes, and other externally caused skin eruptions.” The FTC (in 1942) issued a Cease and Desist Order contending that the product was represented as a remedy,
“notwithstanding its use only of the word ‘relief.’ The potential for deception was presumed to lie in the common confusion between a relief, which merely alleviates symptoms, and a remedy, which alleviates their cause. [The manufacturer rejoined that the ad] referred to relief only from the itching of eczema, etc., and not to actual relief….” [p. 140]
Although the Appeals Court agreed that
“there is merit in…[the] contention that this and similar statements, when carefully scrutinized, may thus be construed,…the weakness of this position lies in the fact that such representations are made to the public, who, we assume, are not, as a whole, experts in grammatical construction. Their education in parsing a sentence has either been neglected or forgotten. We agree with the Commission that this statement is deceptive.”
Isn’t it nice to know that Big Brother is looking after you? In addition to the quibble we might make about “been either” instead of “either been,” we fail to see that the discernment of the distinction between remedy for eczema, etc. and relief from itching of eczema, etc. has anything to do with grammatical construction or with sentence parsing, but that, too, is probably a quibble.
This example is only one of the hundreds that abound in Blow-Up, some of them going back to problems with horses and carts and with magic bezar-stones in what appears to have been a contentious, if merry, Olde Engelonde. Today, though, any home carpenter who has tried to design a bookcase with “12-inch boards” that actually measure 11¼ inches (and seem to be getting smaller every day) will find a soul-mate in Professor Preston [p. 229]. And purchasers of 9-inch pies that measure only 7¾ inches will find little consolation in the revelation that “industry practice includes the rim of the pan in determining the stated size”! Add purchasers of McDonald’s “quarter-pounder,” found to weigh 3⅞ ounces (average), but in that case, McDonald’s, claiming raw weight instead of cooked, lost the battle and was directed to specify “precooked weight one-quarter pound.”
Amply documented by footnotes in an Appendix, where they distract least from the reading of the text, Blow-Up is an extremely readable account of the history of consumerism in America, and a most interesting aspect of the book is that it deals with linguistic fraud (i.e., the language used in describing a product) rather than short measures and machines that don’t work. In many respects it is a most readable, worthwhile book; it’s only a pity that the author’s analytical perception of what is reprehensible in the language of others fails to extend to an appreciation of his own.
Reviews: THE D.C. DIALECT: How To Master the Language of Washington in Ten Easy Lessons
Paul Morgan and Sue Scott, Washington Mews Books, 1975
This is supposed to be an amusing book, the Preface suggesting that the reader “have fun with ‘The D.C. Dialect.’ " Trying to be witty, the authors propose to give us “ten easy lessons” on how to succeed in being impersonal in our speech, obscure, pompous, evasive, repetitious, awkward, incorrect, faddish, serious, and unintelligible. But Morgan and Scott’s attempted humorous treatment of the language of Washington, D.C., officialdom, especially the language of Watergate, turns out in the end not to be so funny after all. I am not persuaded that jestingly giving us lessons on how effectively to use evasive, pompous, and faddish language is rhetorically the best way to combat the language of deception which came to us from Nixon and his subordinates.
Each chapter begins with a short “satiric” comment about the type of speech being considered in that section. The chapter on “BE OBSCURE,” for instance, begins: “Always speak in riddles. Obscurity is the stock-in-trade of the D.C. Dialect, since Washington officials must never say what they mean in language anyone can understand. Only peasants do that…. It profiteth officials little if their listeners understand them…. Therefore, they load their speech with words and phrases that are obscure, useless, and vague. Go and do likewise, and you will soon reap the rewards you so richly deserve.” (p. 18) The rest of the chapter basically consists of examples of “obscure” discourse from Haldeman, Mitchell, Dean, Ehrlichman, et al. The authors end the chapter by telling the reader to study the following quote from General Haig “and know that when you can create obscurity like this, you have arrived: ‘I want to say this very carefully and very precisely, but certainly, certainly any foreign leader, whether he be friend or potential foe, must in a period of turmoil here at home make his calculations without the unity, the permanency, the strength and resilience of this government in a way that had to take consideration of this tape issue into mind.’ " (p. 24)
The chief contribution of this book is not in its being witty but in the compilation of the types of phrases and sentences which have flourished on the Washington scene. The authors, however, do not cite the sources of their quotations and we are thus left without information as to where the “D.C. Dialect” excerpts originally appeared. A simple, unobtrusive footnoting system would have taken care of this problem.
While I read this attempted “fun” treatment of political and legal evasiveness and pomposity, I also was exposed to the numerous clichés Morgan and Scott seem to favor. Perhaps we need a follow-up book titled Cliché Dialect, using The D.C. Dialect as the basis for the study. In gathering materials for their book, Morgan and Scott declare: “We’ve gathered examples of DCD from all the important people in Washington, past and present, from the Watergate hearings to press releases to public speeches to the White House Transcripts to public trials. We’ve left no stone unturned.” (p. 8). In reference to the officials' overuse of the word “matter,” the authors tell us that “John Dean takes the cake when it comes to using the word.” (p. 21) As for obscure sentences, “If William Faulkner were alive today, he would surely be green with envy of such complex sentence structure!” (p. 24); “If Mr. Laird had stuck conscientiously to DCD, even in his private memos, this bit of truth would never have seen the light of day.” (p. 41). We are told to “think of the rewards that await your mastering of DCD, and you will find renewed strength to speak awkwardly as possible.” (p. 56). and later that “government officials are nothing if not abreast of the times, and you must be too.” (p. 76). “Mixed metaphors,” Morgan and Scott assert, “have the authority of arresting and holding the listener’s attention, a power that plain old common or garden variety metaphors often lack.” (p. 117).
Speaking of metaphors, two of my favorites by Morgan and Scott (not by Dean, Haldeman, Nixon, or Mitchell) are “When you have exhausted all other techniques of evasive language and you are pinned to the wall with a direct question you don’t want to answer, just throw logic and common sense to the wind.” (p. 44), and “It is hard to imagine what could have spawned this amazing picture.” (p. 90). Having had us throw logic and common sense to the wind while we are pinned to the wall, and having had us spawn an amazing picture, Morgan and Scott go on to sardonically quote Henry Peterson: “I’m not a whore. I walked through a minefield and came out clean.” (p. 119).
I leave it to the reader to decide which is a more difficult task: to walk through a minefield and not come out a whore or to throw logic to the wind while pinned to the wall. Come to think of it, this is a funny book.
—Haig Bosmajian, University of Washington
Reviews: JACK AND JILL: A Study in Our Christian Names
Ernest Weekley, John Murray, 1939. (Republished by Gale Research Co., Detroit, 1974)
Jill shall have her Jack, and Jack shall have his Jill, or so it has been since the 15th century when Jack and Jill replaced Jerkin and Gillian as common proper names for lad and lass or boy and girl. Jack, of course, came directly from French Jacques, ultimately from Hebrew through Latin. Jill’s immediate predecessor was Gillian, a popular form of Juliana, and, to be sure, connotative of a flirt, or wench, or worse. The old proverb, “A good Jack makes a good Jill,” however, is probably harmless enough to appear in a family paper.
The popularity of the coupled names has been enhanced by a series of chapbooks printed in the early 19th century that extended the strange first stanza, which we all know, to as many as fifteen. The content of these borders on nonsense, with rhythm and heavy rime the main features. The illustrations seem a trifle strange for children’s viewing. In one, Jill’s bare bottom is plainly visible while her mother paddled her, but children, especially girls, I have read and been told, were probably accustomed to such handling during the time.
Other theories concerning the origin of the names Jack and Jill need not detain us, for Professor Weekley was only tangentially concerned with them except to capitalize on the widespread knowledge of the two names among a ready-made audience that had been saturated with English nursery rimes. He used “Jack and Jill” as a title to a chapter in his Words and Names (London, 1932), itself an entertaining piece of scholarly fluff that still is a valuable philological study. Later, he expanded the chapter into the present text, which retains the title of the chapter but is conceived and developed along much different lines. To encapsulate, I will say only that Weekley attempted to survey, in a limited printed space, the origin of names that we still go by. He succeeded indifferently, but surely with enjoyment, given the circumstances of a personal life that touches in emotional dimensions the passionate relationship of his wife with his former student, D.H. Lawrence, for he says, “My excuse [in writing Jack and Jill] is that the leisure of retirement craves for some innocent amusement and that none appeals to me so much as the hunting down of words and names.” The use of a sporting image common among Englishmen should not go unnoticed.
Weekley had a mass of material upon which to draw, and did so freely. In an informal style, he provided details on names from Old English, Greek, Latin, the Old Testament, the Puritan tradition, and, with my apologies, the Siamese-twin syndrome, or -headed calf monstrosities. In fact, Weekley recognized the bestowal of names according to the taste and fancy of parents, who visit some terrible sounds (“names”) on their children. He devoted a chapter, “Cruelty to Children,” to such names. A cleric is on record as giving the names of Cain and Abel to twins. In this chapter, Weekley gave many examples from C.W. Bardsley, Puritan Nomenclature (London, 1897), where are recorded and documented such “Christian” names as Abericusgentylis, Amalasiontha, Always, Christian Ethiopia, Church-reform, Die-well, Flie-fornication, and If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned, to cite only a bare few of the thousands on record. Latter-day names are almost as bad, as documented on any society page of any newspaper. Perhaps the state should, in its infinite wisdom, bestow all names on the newborn!
A chapter on “Fancy Names” turns up such doozies as Douce (once a pretty name, now otherwise), Onyx, Topazia, Parthenope, and Decimus Ultimus (“tenth child”). A special category includes vegetable or flora names, such as the still prevalent Rose, Hazel, Heather, Ivy, Lavender, Myrtle, and Olive (probably influenced by the masculine, Oliver). I doubt that anyone is named Thistle now, but it is a part of the national emblem of Scotland, “Nemo me impune lacessit.” Names from months are not often given, except for April, May, and June. Occasionally, a Julia may have been born in July.
Weekley had the ability to summarize without omitting essentials, an uncommon expertise. He could also show the face of English prejudice when comparing his “superior” speech with that of at least some Americans. He quotes with literary glee an article from an obscure Canadian journal that published a note on “husband-calling contests” held in Kansas: “One has to hear a Kansas farmer’s wife called for her Earl or Elmer to appreciate the depths to which a so-called Christian name can sink.” Surely, a Kansas Ji-ull can call her Jaa-uuck from the field if she feels the need, Weekley nothwithstanding. In the end, and in the destiny of nations, if “Jack shall have Jill; / Nought shall go ill.”
Kelsie B. Harder, The State University College, Potsdam, New York
INTER ALIA: II.2.
" ‘In this book, Niven is the bemused commentator and observer of Hollywood’s golden age…’ Putnam editor John Dodds told PW….” [from Publishers Weekly, April 28, 1975] From our recollection of The Moon’s a Balloon, David Niven knows the difference between amused and bemused.
Reviews: AN ALMANAC OF WORDS AT PLAY by
Willard R. Espy, Clarkson N. Potter
We cannot bear to roast a book
Nor brutally attack it.
We lay it gently in our lap
And dust its little jacket.
—Keith Preston, Almanac, 29 November
You will know the King and Queen have arrived
when you hear a twenty-one-sun galoot.
—Jerry Lawrence, Almanac, 6 February
“We’ve taken over the government,”
the general cooed.
—Roy Bongartz, Almanac, 2 February
Had enough? We doubt it. Willard Espy, erstwhile Reader’s Digest editor turned ghost writer, radio interviewer, and public relations man, has mined a wealth of linguistic gems and, in the Almanac, has provided them with a Tiffany setting. In the face of such wit, it is bootless to try to be a clever reviewer. For here are one-liners, anecdotes, poems, games, puzzles—a playful gallimaufry arranged in almanac style to titillate you day by day for a year: then you can start in afresh.
Merciful the arrangement, for too much of a good thing, not properly organized, can become cloying. Merciful, too, are the Glossary (for words like rhopalic) and the appendix of solutions and answers. It is a pity that young people are not exposed to so informative and entertaining a text as this to whet their appetites for the study of language.
Letters {Norman W. Schur}
[We received a large number of letters concerning Professor Roger W. Wescott’s definition of mortgagee in “Do Conferees Photograph Well?” VERBATIM II, 2, 1. Typical among them is the following:]
…A mortgagee is not who has mortgaged his assets nor one whose assets have been mortgaged. Such a person is the mortgagor, which has an -or at the end and, moreover, ought to have an e between the g and the o to make it sound right. A mortgagee is ‘one to whom property is mortgaged.’ When you buy a house and get a bank mortgage, you are the mortgagor and the bank is the mortgagee.
As correctly used, the -ee, in mortgagee (like the -ee in referee) indicates that degree of relative passivity which is conferred upon an indirect object. In both cases, the -ee is added to a noun that would have a dative ending in a highly inflected language. Incidentally, referee has no such active equivalent as mortgagee: there ain’t no such animal as a ?_referor_; the one who does the referring is the _referrer_, with the accent on the second syllable.
—Norman W. Schur, Weston, Connecticut
Professor Wescott replies:
[Those who have written about mortgagee] are quite right. Ironically, though, my error only serves to strengthen my point: that if the mortgage-holder can be designated by an -ee suffixed term, then -ee is (increasingly) far from being a purely passive marker.
—Roger W. Wescott, Drew University
INTER ALIA: II.2.3: PERTAMANIA
Pertamina 866 UNPlz—————————-753-7873
In the 1974 Manhattan Yellow Pages, under “Governments—Foreign—Representatives,” nestled between Paraguay and Peru, is Pertamania, with offices at 866 UN Plaza, phone 753-7873. [The documentation is provided lest you think we’re pulling your leg.] As some of our readers may know, we are the editor of an almanac that has appeared under a number of aliases (The New York Times Encyclopedic Almanac, The Official Associated Press Almanac, and, newly christened this year, The CBS News Almanac). Hence, the appearance of a new country created a stir in our offices. Of course, we have become somewhat jaded, it is true, with new nations popping up almost everywhere; but we have been (so to speak) tracking these other developments, and we felt chagrined at a new country’s completely unannounced arrival. We phoned. An intercepting operator advised that the number had been changed. We smelled C.I.A. and other (possibly nefarious) mischief. We tried the new number; a pleasant and all-but-incomprehensible young lady, asked where Pertamania is, replied it is in Jakarta. Aha! an undocumented enclave! Pressing further, however, we discovered that the correct name [but see the illustration] is Pertamina and that it is a company, not a country, in Indonesia.
Somehow, we never become inured to the distress of discovering our own shortcomings, but in this instance, we were comforted.
Letters {Roger W. Wescott}
I was troubled by Professor Cornelius Crowley’s “The Celtic Element in English” [VERBATIM II, 2, 9], which I thought contained more than a permissible number of errors and half-truths. To be specific:
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Scots English Mac- ‘son of’ is not derived from Gaulish mapo ‘son’ but from Gaelic mac, although both forms are from Proto-Celtic ?_ma(k)kwos_ ‘son.’
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English Druid is not derived from Old Celtic ?_derwos_ ‘true’ but from Gallo-Latin _Druid_- ‘Celtic priest,’ which, in turn, probably comes from Proto-Celtic ?_dru-wid_- ‘treeseer.’ It is true that, at the Proto-Indo-European level, both ?_deru_- and ?_dru_- may be variants of a root ?_der_-, meaning ‘strong’ or the like, but it is as bizarre to call either derivative form ancestral to the other as to call an older sister “ancestral” to a younger.
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In the cases of bard and bushel, Crowley derives the English forms from Old Irish “through” Old Celtic in the former case and Gaulish in the latter. Here, there are two problems. First, it is hardly possible for any form to reach English from one foreign language by way of a second which is older than the first. And second, it is improbable that all the English words listed by Crowley as having come from Irish or Gaulish actually did so. In most cases, they must have come from Old Brythonic (the poorly attested language ancestral to Welsh, Cornish, and Breton). Since it was Britain that the Anglo-Saxons invaded, rather than Gaul or Ireland, any other assumption would be farfetched.
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In the cases of bodkin, carpenter, Druid, vassal, and Cornwall, Crowley confuses bases with words when he derives the English forms from Gaelic biodach, Old Celtic ?_carpentos_, Old Celtic ?_derwos_, Old Celtic [?]_vassos_, and Old Celtic ?_kornovjos_, respectively. If we took him literally, the English forms ought to be ?_boddock_, ?_carpent_, ?_derrow_, ?_vass_, and ?_cornowy_ instead of what they are. In each case, stem enlargement—of predominantly non-Celtic origin—has taken place, with the result that, in at least four of these cases, the resultant words are of mixed (Celtic and non-Celtic) origin.
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When he writes some of his Old Celtic words with v and others with w, Crowley implies that these are two separate phonemes, when in fact they are one. The same is true of his Old Celtic c and k.
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A clue to Crowley’s thinking may be found in his use of the term “corruption” to characterize the descent of the English place-name Devonshire from the Latinized tribal name Dumnonii. Quite apart from the fact that few linguists now countenance the employment of such loaded words to describe sound change, I think that it is an open question which of the two forms in more “corrupt.” For Devon does not in fact come from Dumno-. Rather, both are derived from Proto-Celtic *dubno- ‘world.’ And, as regards labial obstruents, it may be English which is the lesser corruptor, since it retains the obstruency which Britan-no-Latin converted to nasality.
—Roger W. Wescott, Drew University
Letters {Charles A. VanPatten}
There is a curious exception to the fact that the ending -ón in Spanish is an augmentative suffix [vide VERBATIM I, 3, 5]. The word for ‘rat’ in Spanish is rata. (There is no masculine form as rato has an entirely different meaning). However, the rat’s tiny cousin, the mouse, is ratón. So here the -ón is used in a diminutive rather than an augmentative sense.
—Charles A. VanPatten, New York City
Internet Archive copy of this issue
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Bill Mauldin, in the Reporter, June 23, 1953, p. 35/3. ↩︎
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Quoted from the New York Daily News in the New York Post, March 31, 1948, p. 69/3. ↩︎
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New Republic, August 4, 1947, p. 6/2. ↩︎
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Joseph Barry, in the New York Post, June 27, 1960, p. 24/1. ↩︎
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New Leader, June 3, 1950, p. 9/2. ↩︎
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New York Post, June 13, 1947, p. 4/4. ↩︎
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Jay Carr, ibid., January 26, 1964, p. 14/3. ↩︎
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Ibid., June 28, 1949, p. 4. ↩︎
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Laurence Barrett, in the New York Herald Tribune, March 31, 1964, p. 10/3. ↩︎
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Vernon Rice, in the New York Post, May 1, 1950, p. 34/2. Also derivative from Peter Pan was an example by G.B. Stern in her reminiscences, Another Part of the Forest (New York, 1941), p. 34: " ‘I do think after that, you ought to give me you-know-what you wouldn’t promise.’ You-know-what was what Wendy woodle-somely called a Thimble.” ↩︎
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D. Russell of Azusa, California, in Collier’s, October 15, 1954, p. 16/3. ↩︎
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Winchell, in the New York Daily Mirror, June 10, 1946, p. 10/4. ↩︎
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L. Lyons, in the New York Post, November 18, 1946, p. 28/4. ↩︎
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Sam Boal, ibid., August 23, 1947, p. 10/1. ↩︎
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Frank Kingdon, ibid., March 21, 1950, p. 12/4. ↩︎
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Ibid., April 9, 1958, Mag. sect., p. 5/1. ↩︎
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Max Lerner, ibid., June 12, 1962, p. 53/3. ↩︎
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Ibid., January 12, 1964, p. 28/2. ↩︎
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Ibid., February 5, 1950, p. 3/1. ↩︎
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Quoted by Jack Costello, on Station KYW (NBC), October 29, 1948, at 12:55 a.m. This citation, along with two others, was kindly given me by Dr. Harold Wentworth. ↩︎
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F.C. Othman, in the Chicago Sun, April 8, 1942, p. 15/1. ↩︎
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Kitty Barne, Visitors from London, (London, 1940), p. 182. ↩︎
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New York Times, April 16, 1950, II, p. 1/1. ↩︎
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Patricia Collinge, in the New Yorker, March 15, 1947, p. 29/2. ↩︎
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London Sunday Pictorial, July 12, 1959, p. 15/5. ↩︎
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Station KYW (NBC), November 3, 1948, at 8:01 p.m. ↩︎
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Stan Opotowsky, in the New York Post, May 1, 1956, p. 4/3. ↩︎
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London Reveille, November 25, 1955, p. 19/3. ↩︎
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Jane Nicholson, Shelter (New York, 1941), p. 175. ↩︎
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Philip Hope-Wallace, Time and Tide, August 14, 1954, p. 1080/1. ↩︎
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Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, October 15, 1948, p. 41. ↩︎
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Gilbert Hackforth-Jones, in Britannia and Eve, July, 1948, p. 56/2. ↩︎
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Earl Wilson, New York Post, May 25, 1956, p. 16/3. ↩︎
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Ibid., May 31, 1946, p. 39/2. ↩︎
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Paul Denis, ibid., March 5, 1948, p. 70/2. ↩︎
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L. Hunt, in Men Only, January, 1958, p. 63. ↩︎
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Nancy Mitford, The Blessing (New York, 1951), p. 118. Cf. also John Wain, The Contenders (London, 1958), p. 193: “I also felt dirty and tired, not having had a wash since the long drive down with Robert scaring the what’s-it out of me.” ↩︎
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New York Post, August 24, 1948, p. 25/1. ↩︎
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J. Foster, in the New Masses, January 18, 1944, p. 31/1. Furthermore, ibid.: “The you-know-what is always couched in pad and pencil pose ready to take down as potential dialog all words casually dropped by the wondrous playwright.” ↩︎
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James R. Parker, in the New Yorker, June 16, 1945, p. 20/2. ↩︎
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Judith Crist, in the New York Herald Tribune, March 18, 1964, p. 17/4. ↩︎
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Earl Wilson, in the New York Post, January 6, 1959, p. 16/4. ↩︎
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The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (New York, 1957), p. 160. Cf. a conversation overheard on a bus in New York City, January 13, 1962, concerning the film Les Liaisons Dangereuses: “She thought it was about you know what, but it isn’t!” (Laughter from the others.) ↩︎
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William V. Shannon, in the New York Post, April 20, 1958, Mag. sect., p. 7/3. ↩︎
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Vernon Rice, ibid., February 4, 1949, p. 43/1. ↩︎
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Quoted by Earl Wilson, ibid., November 8, 1943, p. 24/1. ↩︎
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James Thurber, The Years with Ross (New York, 1959), p. 49. ↩︎
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Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels (London, 1960), p. 88. ↩︎
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Leaflet of the publisher George Braziller, Inc., describing Watts’s book, The Two Hands of God (New York, 1963). ↩︎