Vol III, No 2 [September 1976]

Grammar: The Terms Betray the Bias

Donald A. Sears
California State University, Fullerton

Those of us over fifty have learned our grammar several times over, struggling each time with shifting terminology. From the Latin-based grammar of Wooley with its nominatives, genitives, and accusatives through the dos and don’ts of early Hodges (The Harbrace Handbook), we boxed ourselves into the structural approaches of the fifties, and drew Calder-like mobiles of branching trees as we pursued Chomsky’s transformational logic. With an occasional wistful glance at the traditionalist Longs (The System of English Grammar), we confounded ourselves in Fillmore’s cases and Lamb’s stratifications. For the changes have been rapid; and to our confusion, each new school of grammar has developed its own taxonomy. With each development we have been asked to learn a fresh array of terms, always with the claim of greater “scientific” precision.

Closer examination of these terms, however, reveals less science than poetry, less precision than metaphor, less innovation than acceptance of the latest intellectual fad. To each age, its dominant world view; with each shift, a compulsion to substitute new terms in the old disciplines, be they of history, criticism, science, or in this case language study. The following is an initial attempt to bring order to taxonomic chaos, to suggest categories in the development of grammatical terminology.

1. THE NORMATIVE

Now two centuries old is the familiar terminology that started in the eighteenth century, grounded in its belief in universal norms and raised by the moral nineteenth century to overtones of ethical values. Compounds were labeled impure and improper when their morphemes were drawn from more than one language. Suffixes were accused of tainting; words contaminated one another. Paradigms were found to be defective in Modern English. And semantic change was analyzed in terms of amelioration and pejoration, elevation and degradation. Grammar itself was right or wrong. To mishandle the semicolon was to stray from the paths of rectitude and commit a comma fault. From religion itself came terms such as hierarchy, canonical forms, and relics. But a new breeze of Darwinian evolution was in the air even as the normative terms were pouring forth.

2. THE EVOLUTIONARY

While the great debate of religion versus evolution echoed among scholars, the normative terms of grammar with their religious moralism were under attack by the new. Words were now seen as native or alien; they became naturalized and domesticated, underwent diffusion and migration. In the process of acclimatization, they became conditioned by environment. The results might be a mutation or adaptation.

As the age wore on, Darwinian terms broadened into biomedical terminology applied as metaphor to language. The pedigree theory traced the family tree and branches of the Indo-European languages. We read of word-crossing, linking, and liaison. Some suggestive verbs became known as copulative; nouns and pronouns might be epicene; constructions might be pregnant. Words were studied root and stem, and were caught in acts of nesting and symbiosis. Some were found to undergo semantic rejuvenation. But biological determinism was going down before physical determinism and a new fad of naming was a-borning.

3. THE PHYSICAL SCIENTIFIC

The drive to make linguistics scientific flooded the literature with jawbreaking terms derived with new affixes of -ival, -eme, and allo- (adjectivals, phonemes and morphemes, allomorphs and allosemes). The search for natural “laws” identified centrifugal and centripetal forces. “Root” was replaced with element and nucleus, leading to residue forms and residual phonemes. Amalgams and agglomerations were identified from components, constituents, and segments. Diachronic versus synchronic approaches vied with endocentric versus exocentric to confound the neophyte. From geology came terms like drift, matrix and embedding, attrition, and petrification. Gradually, however, some newer sciences–closer in subject matter to linguistics –were emerging.

4. THE COMMUNICATIONIST

From the Bell Telephone Laboratory came communication theory, from MIT came cybernetics, and from IBM the application of mathematics to computer science. The linguists snuffed the change of air and spoke of sets and subsets, of encoding and decoding messages, of code switching and feedback, of frame and base, of senders and receivers and semantic noise. Language now was seen in terms of input to generate an output. The efficiency of the code could be measured in terms of its productivity.

What the next intellectual wave will contain of scientific detritus and terms to torment the tyro the eighties will tell. We can at least be sure that future linguists will continue to respond to the trends, to lend their discipline the aura of scientific exactitude by adapting and adopting the latest fashion. Happily for those of us more humanistically inclined, there are still those linguists who have drawn their metaphors from general fields. From music come allegro and lento forms; from industry, constructions, sentence-building, and modification; from banking, borrowing and loan words. More generally still, consonants may be broad or slender; and vowels, dark or light. Words may be full or empty, and morphemes appear as bound or free. Words may be telescoped, clipped, or coined; some remain as stumps, stand forlorn, get packed into a portmanteau.

We await the next development whether it come from rocketry and outer space (boosters? capsules? orbits?) or oceanography (the deeps? submerged?) or environmental science (ecology? semantic smog?)–whatever. Come it will, as future linguists proclaim their newness with borrowed metaphors of the trendiest intellectual development of the future. Their terms will betray their bias.

EPISTOLA {Harry Oster}

It distresses me to note [II, 3] your contributors so flagrantly ignoring the existence of Portuguese as one of the major Romance Languages. Indeed, statistically it is the second most widely-spoken Romance tongue, preceded only by Spanish and in front of French and Italian by tens of millions of speakers.

Although it bears a superficial resemblance to Spanish, Portuguese is really quite a different language with grammar, cadence, and tonal quality all its own.

In “Talking Turkey,” Professor Fowkes credits Hindi for geographying our “turkey” as “perū.” The proper Portuguese word for that succulent bird is “peru”; it should not require immense research to trace the word back beyond the Hindi Curtain to the Portuguese sailors and merchants who, in the 15th and 16th centuries dropped seeds of their language and culture around the globe.

And in “Conjugal Oddities,” Axel Hornos has shortchange himself and family by confining his fascinating game to Spanish, French, and Italian. Had he window-shopped Portuguese, he would have discovered such gems as:

meia ‘stocking’/meio ‘half’

pá ‘shovel’/ pó ‘dust’/ páo ‘bread’/ pé ‘foot’

leite ‘milk’/ leito ‘bed’ (of a river, road)

pia ‘sink’/ pio ‘chirp’/ piáo ‘top’ (toy)

doca ‘dock’/ doce ‘candy’

lixa ‘sandpaper’/ lixo ‘rubbish’

máo ‘hand’/ mau ‘evil’

I am not a professional student of language but simply (to quote the advertisement which originally enticed me into subscribing to VERBATIM) someone who “loves words.” And so I find it especially gratifying that the Portuguese-speaking world does not load pejorative connotations into their word for amateur. Their single word amador means both ‘non-professional’ and ‘lover.’ [Harry Oster, São Paulo, Brazil]

Esrever Hsilgne

Robert A. Fowkes
New York University

Long before the hucksters told us that Serutan spelled backwards was “nature’s”–implying apparently that the product was the opposite of natural–I acquired the habit, or psychological affliction, of reading words and signs backwards. It was an attendant phenomenon on another puerile stunt, that of reading a page upside down. Before the age of ten I could do this almost as fast as reading right side up. I was a slow reader. Possibly the only practical value that subsequently accrued from this aberration from normal human behavior was an ability to handle with relative facility scripts reading from right to left.

It was fascinating to me to imagine a meaning to Gnikoms On!, and I pictured to myself some sort of gas mask or anti-emphysematic device to be put over our juvenile faces. Exactly what kind of pots lluf pots were, escaped me. One day, as I waited for a bus to take me to school and to the tender mercies of a ferocious substitute, Miss Luke, which was clearly in the days before the substitute was at the mercies of the pupils, I read her name and title on the approaching Loohcs Sub. Much later came the realization that the opposite of University is, approximately, it is revenue, something that various deans have been telling me for years, while assuming the alumni to be in mula.

A store in a town where I lived as a child was called Garton’s, and since I once bought a handkerchief there in an emergency, snotrag seemed an appropriate reversal of the name. A Chinese neighbor in the same town once ordered klim in the grocery store, and I assumed with childish delight that he was saying milk backwards, until he added, “extra heavy.” Years later a dried milk product was actually called Klim.

That pornographic danger could lurk in simple names of products was obvious when Tums read alphabackwardly as Smut. That animal is the reverse of lamina struck me while I was doing a crossword puzzle, a blow from which I soon recovered. Long before commercial diaper services tended to fundamental infantile needs I perceived that a diaper was repaid, but I was not exactly sure how, or to whom.

Our neighbors' tough son Dennis seemed to merit the backward condemnation sinned, but his rather pious sister seemed to have difficulty in reading resist. Why a decal should be laced or a dessert tressed; why a peek should keep, or the dew be wed–not wet?–or Camus become sumac, or a gnat have a reverse tang, or a tuba abut, or a trap be a part, was no clearer than the room on a moor, or Emil in lime, or grub in a burg (possibly a hamburg: grub mah!). A keel could spring a leak, but hardly a leek. Were some kinfolk named Klofnik? Fidelio is oiled if–if what? If the singers are in good voice? A reward could come backwards out of a drawer, and an Yliad was a distorted daily epic. Did we retap the pater as a source of supplemental allowance?

Many fragments of reverse English look as if they could or should mean something: dradnats for standard (reminiscent of a mangled dreadnought?), red now for wonder (ex-fascist, perhaps), Kroy wen (cry when it hurts?) for New York, yawbus (not mine!) for subway, set a ropave for evaporates, rewolf for a flower, torrac for a backward carrot. The state turns into a plural in reverse French, while united is almost detained in the same language, and muni-mula, whatever that is, is forthcoming– or backcoming, from aluminum.

A non-existent New York University student named Duarf finished second in the race for some class office one year; he was a not too backward fraud, as were those who had entered his name. Sreknoy for Yonkers suggests a new and imminent horror (Schreckneu-Neuschreck? I have often read the street sign Yonkers Ave. as Eva Sreknoy, imagining vaguely some frightening Valkyrie).

The devil lived, but waxed livid when called divil; but evil is not live, and denim is not mined. Aborigines may possibly back out of a place called Senigiroba, why not?

But radar, kayak, gag, poop, peep, and noon are on a frustratingly complete level of palindromicity, not a city in which this reverse English thrives.

A Roman schoolboy supposedly read the Latin name of his city (of course Latin; what else?–well, maybe some antecedent of Latin) backwards and thus rendered affably effable the ineffable name amor: Roma.

The title Erewhon baffled me in high school, for I didn’t get “nowhere” reading the utopian designation backwards (despite Leumas Reltub’s possible justification in treating wh as a unit, and despite later temptation to render Geritol as Low Tiger, or English as shingle).

In school we used to try the reverse trick on our own names (for, unfortunately, I was not alone in the madness). We cheated in one respect: we retained the order of first and last names. Thus, the procedure that produced gnikoms on was not followed (the product would have been, rather *on gnikoms presumably an exhortation to a team of some extraterrestrial origin). Nevertheless, Trebor Sekwof looked and sounded like a conceivable reverse of Robert Fowkes; schoolmates branded it an improvement, in fact. Mij Snave even worked for Jim Evans, as did Dranreb Efeeko, more or less, for Bernard O’Keefe, or Ekim Navillus for Mike Sullivan. But Ztirf Ztluhcs did wretchedly for Fritz Schultz, while Nan Tibbit had a rough time indeed in shifting into reverse. >

Well, even the Forverts is read rikverts.

But shun Dylan’s Llareggub; it’s imperative.

I am interested in enlarging my collection of English words in which a hyphen is necessary to distinguish one word from another, otherwise identically spelled. I solicit help to expand the following list:

dis-ease re-creation draw-er

pray-er re-present re-form

I would be particularly interested in forms without re- or -er and in forms that are less likely to be assimilation followed by back-formation. [Gene Chase, Asst. Prof. of Mathematics, Messiah College, Grantham, Pennsylvania 17027]

Duo for Voice & Percussion

We were discussing Alfred Noyes.
Howells said he’d never heard the sound
But volunteer’d: “Once I heard Saul Bellow
I didn’t mind hearing Ezra Pound.”

—E. O. Staley, Maplewood, New Jersey

Tom Sawyer Whitewashed

Nancy LaRoche
Hartford, Connecticut

How wonderful to be weaned on the likes of The Wind in the Willows, I thought, as I scanned the pages of a large, library anthology of children’s literature, chock full of nursery rhymes, fairy tales, excerpts from the “classics.” There he was again, the incorrigible Toad, tricking his would-be reformers, evading the Law which forever tries to restrain his natural, lovable recklessness.

But it was primarily Grahame’s language that gave me pause–the delight in words, their marvelous creative and evocative power, the music and magic in the lines that lure the child into his fictional world. The genius of Grahame lies in his refusal to talk down to his audience, to adapt his style and diction to the “limited” verbal world of children. Rather he stretches their linguistic horizons; part of the fascinating new world to which they are introduced and to which they respond is an awareness of new sounds and words, a sensitivity to the how of expression. Little does it matter that the structural patterns are often unfamiliar and the words themselves likely to trip the tongue, not to mention the understanding, of many an adult– wonted, paroxysm, habiliments, squandering, contemptuously, languid, artful. But mood and meaning are clear to the child, who drinks in all his vessel can hold, all the while being subtly affected by the excess mysterious verbal waters swirling and splashing about him.

I’m getting carried away with words myself, I know. As I was saying, I was riffling the pages of a children’s anthology when I was seized with these musings. I next happened upon a passage from Tom Sawyer–the whitewashing episode, of course. It had been carefully whitewashed itself, apparently in preparation for oral reading by a teacher or librarian or whoever else might be engaged in introducing children to the delights of literature. (It seems unlikely that a parent would have been responsible for the excisions and substitutions I found.)

I studied the perversions of the text, attempting to discover a motivation or method in the madness. It appears to me that this is what happened to Poor Tom. (Parentheses indicate excisions, italics substitutions.)

Unfamiliar words or words deemed difficult had been omitted entirely or replaced by “simpler” ones: the (locust) trees; a Delectable Land, dreamy, (reposeful) restful, and inviting; he passed his brush along the topmost (plank) part; he went (tranquilly) to work; Tom (contemplated the boy) thought a bit; the (balmy) summer air. In not one instance cited here, nor in the many instances not cited, would the original wording have prevented a young listener from grasping the idea.

What was evidently considered “improper” English and some regionalisms were also cut: Jim never got back with a bucket of water (under) in less than an hour; Ben Rogers (hove) came in sight. Similar treatment was given allusions or other references to the unfamiliar. The listeners were deprived of seeing and hearing Ben Rogers “personate” a steamboat. And “Tom planned the slaughter of more innocents” becomes “of more innocent boys,” while “part of a jew’s harp” is verbally purloined from his catalogue of worldly wealth by this contemporary Bowdler.

The last excision, however, may have been motivated instead by whatever led this custodian of children to shield them from all references to race or slavery: (White, mulatto, and Negro) boys and girls gathered round the town pump; soon the (free) boys would come tripping along. And in this version a young Black boy addresses a White boy by his name only–the deferential, respectful “Marse” is abandoned for the naked “Tom.”

Passages that do not advance plot or contain dialogue but rather describe moods and attitudes or present ideas are blocked out completely: (There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young the music issued at the lips); (A deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit); (Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden). The famous distinction between work–“whatever a body is obliged to do”–and play–“whatever a body is not obliged to do”–was prevented by pencil from falling on the ears of the young listeners, many of whom were probably at work that very moment.

This horror story ends with the most unkindest cuts of all–those apparently made for “moral” purposes. While others worked and Tom watched, he “had a nice, good, (idle) time.” Evidently idleness and goodness are mutually exclusive terms for the sacred snipper. Tom’s essentially immoral behavior must not be reinforced. So the youthful audience subjected to this truncated version is left with Aunt Polly’s admonition that she’ll “tan him” if Tom stays out too long at play and doesn’t return for more assigned chores. They are deprived of Twain’s beautifully ironic ending to the incident: Aunt Polly rewards Tom for his labors by bestowing upon him a choice apple while he at the same time, in the current vernacular, manages to “rip off” a doughnut as well.

“I know the taste of the watermelon which has been honestly come by, and I know the taste of the watermelon which has been acquired by art. Both taste good, but the experienced know which tastes best,” said Twain. And those kids would be among the experienced. Wouldn’t they love the apple and the doughnut and the delicious payment for work not done? Wouldn’t we all? But they mustn’t be allowed to savor, even vicariously, the delights of stolen and unearned pleasure. And they mustn’t be allowed to see authority successfully and unknowingly thwarted!

Well, I may be making much ado about nothing or a mountain out of a molehill (depending on your respective literary and metaphorical lights). But I don’t think so. True, this is an isolated instance whose circumstances are unknown. My inferences are pure conjecture.

Yet no matter the agent of or reason for Tom Sawyer’s mutilation, its validity as a symptom of the sickness that afflicts too many young readers remains. Uncomfortable with the unfamiliar, if not openly hostile to it, they rebel at extending the boundaries of their linguistic and literary worlds. They are ignorant of the fact that to do so is to expand the horizons of their real world. This hacked-up version of Tom Sawyer illustrates their unformed tastes to perfection–no “hard” words, no unfamiliar references, no descriptive passages, no controversial subjects. And were Tom’s theft and deceit of Aunt Polly included, not a few would feel compelled to sit in judgment on him, their assessment of his moral guilt or innocence constituting their sole, supreme response to the work.

Who is robbing them of the richness that is language, that is literature? The culprit is the mentality that takes the locust from the trees, the balmy from the air; that reduces reality to fact and action, destroying mood and meditation; that erases the unpleasant past of our “peculiar institution” rather than seizing upon it as part of our present; that fears and hence censors the foibles and faults of humanity.

Gullah: A Historical Note and Quiz

Sterling Eisiminger
Clemson University

Thomas Pyles called it the great exception to the homogenity of American speech. But while Gullah has long recognized as a difficult dialect, its origins have been disputed. Prior to the work of Lorenzo D. Turner, a Negro linguist familiar with the West African languages, who spent over twenty years researching the origins of Gullah, scholars mistakenly assumed during the first forty years of this century that the dialect was illiterate English acquired and modified by black slaves who lost their native tongue and learned a second language from their white overseers. Turner’s painstaking fieldwork has shown that over six thousand words (four fifths are personal names) in Gullah are of African origin. The parent tongues include some thirty West African languages among which are Efik, Hausa, Wolof, Malinka, Kongo, Yoruba, and Ibo which are spoken in countries in and between Senegal and Angola. (The term Gullah itself is either a shortened form of Angola or a form of Gola, the name of a tribe in Liberia.)

Turner notes that because of the relatively low duty charged for African slaves and the African reputation for meekness (as opposed to West Indian slaves), some 100,000 Africans were brought to the tidewater regions and sea islands of South Carolina, Georgia, and Northeastern Florida between 1708 and 1808; although import was illegal after that, many were still brought in. Isolated historically and geographically, the Gullah blacks retained much of their African linguistic inheritance, and probably through the interplay of black and white children, as Mitford Mathews suggests, some Africanisms such as voodoo, juke, jazz, bango, samba, tote, buckra, cooter, okra, gumbo, and chigger crept into English. Of course, the slaves adopted and altered many modern and obsolescent English terms too, including: watermillion ‘watermelon,’ drap ‘drop,’ gwine ‘going,’ larn ‘learn,’ sarpint ‘serpent,’ pizen ‘poison,’ and puppus ‘purpose.’ Employing an African intonation and featuring an absence of inflection (e replaces he, she, and it), this amalgam or pidgin called Gullah is spoken today with a rapid, crackling, musical delivery by perhaps 250,000 people.

The literary uses of Gullah have been modest. In the early nineteenth century at least three white literary artists, Caroline Gilman, Edgar Allan Poe, and William Gilmore Simms, made varying use of the Gullah culture. After the Civil War and well into the twentieth century, local colorists made somewhat wider use of the dialect. These writers include Joel Chandler Harris, who is better known for his use of up-country dialect, Ambrose E. Gonzales, who compiled an extensive glossary of Gullah in his collection of Gullah tales The Black Boarder, and Dubose Heyward, author of Porgy.

The following matching quiz has been compiled from the terms collected by Ambrose Gonzales, Lorenzo Turner, Ann Haskell, Reed Smith, and myself. Try to match the standard English term on the right with the appropriate Gullah equivalent on the left.

Answers: 1B, 2A, 3C, 4E, 5D, 6L, 7I, 8M, 9F, 10H, 11J, 12K, 13G, 14U, 15T, 16N, 17P, 18S, 19Q, 20R, 21O.

Addenda

The language of the eastern mountain regions of the US–the Appalachian region–has a number of interesting colloquialisms. Ary and nary (or airy and nairy) are used quite naturally and unaffectedly by persons native to this region to mean ‘any’ and ‘not any,’ or ‘none.’ They tend to use these colloquial expressions, in preference to the more generally used terms, as emphatics. (I suspect that there is a linguistic rule here. The older term is preferred when the intent is quite serious, when the emotions are deeply involved, when ingrained values and standards are at stake. Notice the use of Biblical–really Elizabethan– language in matters of religion.)

The word gravel, which in General American is a collective noun, has here both a singular and plural form. For example, He picked up a handful of gravels and threw a gravel against the window to wake Tom up.

Molasses is frequently used as a plural, particularly by the less educated: These molasses was made in Cade’s Cove.

Lens is sometimes used as if it were plural. Both lens of my safety glasses were so scratched up they had to give me new ones.

I ran into a colloquial term, old around here, but new to me, just the other day by eavesdropping on one end of a conversation on the phone between Johnny Loy and Greg Mansfield, both of whom work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory where I, too, am employed. Johnny is the general factotum who sees to it that the plumbing works, the doors open and close, the lights burn, and so on, in Buildings 4500N, 4501, and 4505. Johnny is a myth and tradition in his own time. There is a genre called Johnny Loy stories around here. These stories go back to the very birth of atomic energy.

Greg is a very scholarly fellow, a translator of six or seven languages in the Information & Reports Division (Library). Greg comes from up northeast, somewhere.

Johnny is strictly local, of mountain heritage.

As I eavesdropped on one end of the conversation, it became apparent that the talk was about a pretty little secretary who was getting married to a craftsman at the Lab. I didn’t know either of them, but apparently both Johnny and Greg did.

Johnny said into the phone, “Greg, I feel awful sorry for that little girl. I feel real sorry for her. Greg, that son-of-a-bitch is a bank-walker if I ever saw one. I saw him once in the old change-room in 3950, and the son-of-a-bitch is a real bank-walker, if I ever saw one.”

Apparently, Greg, on the unheard end of the line, wondered, as I did, what a “bank-walker” might be.

“Why, Greg,” said Johnny, “you remember when we were kids, and we went down to the swimming hole to skinny-dip; boys built like you and me, we got our clothes off and got in the water as quick as we could, to avoid embarrassment. But up on the bank was that bank-walker, striding around and showing off. He usually didn’t have much brains, and usually he was skinny and knock-kneed– or bowlegged–and he generally didn’t have much to be proud of, but he had something to brag about, and he bragged about it by bank-walking.” [—W.M. Woods, Oak Ridge, Tennessee]

OBITER DICTA

From time to time, we are moved to comment on the questionable literacy of “educated” people, but no one, as far as we know, has yet offered any comment on professionals' use of their own language. We find it just as disconcerting to read a menu on which words are misspelled as we should to learn that our doctor doesn’t know how to spell penicillin, pneumothorectomy, or staphylococcus. To be sure, there are fields in which the professional or trade jargon is mainly oral, but the restaurant business isn’t one of them, notwithstanding the nature of the business.

A restaurant in Essex, Connecticut, offers a dish trimmed with “Mandarian” oranges; the same place lists a “roast beef sandwich with au jus,” and, when we queried the waitress for an explanation, it was explained that “the au jus is on the side.” Another restaurant, in nearby Ivoryton, offers the hybrid dish, “medalions de veal.”

While we’re on the subject of restaurants, readers may be interested to learn of a (very good) homestyle restaurant in Chester, Connecticut, called Otto’s Restaurant. Several years ago, Otto sold the place, and the new owner’s name is Walter. Not wishing to change the name of the restaurant (“good will” being worth $1.00), the new owner now has a large sign outside that reads: “OTTO’S RESTAURANT–Otto’s Name Is Walter.” [—LU]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: THE INTERPRETATION OF LANGUAGE. VOLUME II: UNDERSTANDING THE UNCONSCIOUS MEANING OF LANGUAGE

by Theodore Thass-Thienemann, Jason Aronson, Inc., 1968

Once, following dominant fads, I conceived of linguistics as something approaching an exact science. Once I believed that etymology held the key to vast stretches of language change. Then, while giving a seminar report on Plato’s Kratylos, with its optimistic implication that the etymon would lead us to the “real meaning” of a word, I exclaimed, with a flash of insight, “He obviously didn’t mean it! This is satire!” Whether that insight (of 40 years ago) was genuine or spurious, the cynicism engendered remains. Paradoxically, my fascination with etymology has never waned.

The present volume1 I confess to not having read volume I, which doubtless disqualifies me as a reviewer, although this is evidently a complete and separate work in itself. with its curious sub-title (who or what is “unconscious”?) shows a similar fascination with etymology and is also reminiscent of the idea espoused– or rejected–by Plato, that etymology gets us to the “real” meanings. The author favors the word properly: Old English an-lic ‘only’ “properly” meant ‘one-body’; Hungarian lóhere ‘shamrock’ “properly” means ‘horse testicle,’ etc. Present-day meanings are evidently “improper.” Sometimes, however, the author overlooks earlier meanings himself. In treating the “polarization (not a freezing process) of milk and meat” (pp. 38-39) he apparently equates meat with animal flesh. But the biblical passage quoted (Hebrews 5.13-14) has _stereà troph\etilde_ ‘solid food,’ which could be vegetarian, and the polarization is not milk vs. meat but liquid vs. solid.

Sarko-phágos “flesh-eater” for ‘coffin,’ traditionally explained (as early as Pliny, and before) as referring to the limestone that consumed the corpse, is regarded as meaning rather the return into the “swallowing womb” of the mother (Terra Mater), pp. 39; 303. This would, granted, shed light on Job 1.21: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb and naked shall I return thither.” That “returning thither” had me worried a bit as a boy in Sunday School, where a mass of terrifying lore was dispensed. (I also shared Nicodemus' bewilderment at the admonition, “Ye must be born again.”) If we say that the return is to Mother Earth, the riddle is at least half-solved. One recalls Faust’s, “The Mothers! Mothers! It sounds so strange.”2 Goethe, Faust, Part II, line 6217: Die Mütter! Mütter!’s klingt so wunderlich. Recent semantic developments make mother sound still stranger.

Highly alarming is the assertion that education, Latin educatio (like the German calque Erziehung) was not “originally” (“properly”?) a drawing-out (of the best in a pupil? from barbarism to cultivation?) but has a more sinister reference to cattle-breeding and denotes castration, cf. “From Castration to Education” (pp. 114-117). The word wanton, we are told, indicates the opposite of this baneful educated state, meaning “not pulled out,” therefore intact in vital respects and gloriously lewd; ignorance was indeed bliss.

The author’s theory states that language (= vocabulary) has been transformed by repressive anxiety over three “focal points of organic existence”. (p. 11): the beginning (birth), the end (death), and the act of creating new life (sexual union). Three main sections of the book partially reflect that division, with considerable overlapping and interpenetration: “Separation and Reunification” (13-42); “Oedipus–Identity and Knowledge” (43-117); and “The Return–Childhood Lost” (119-226). There follow addenda, notes, bibliography, and indexes (with Old English curiously put under “Index of Foreign Words”).

Thass-Thienemann bases his interpretation on child psychiatry, developmental psychology, and dream interpretation. He explores subconscious verbal fantasies by following the “long, wide way of language” (p. 1). He tells us that modern English bears messages sent in a remote past (to whom?); there is a hint that post-hypnotic suggestion is actualized in the fantasies of the disturbed. If so, this must be by the remotest of controls, even cutting across ancestral lines. It seems that only a population of “ethnic purity” from very ancient times until the present could assure the kind of message-transmittal assumed here. The author is, admittedly, aware that language is not handed on through the genes, but he does call ancient speakers “our ancestors.” Would not “predecessors” be better? What about speakers of English (perhaps monoglots) whose ancestors were Ugrian or Basque or what-not? Furthermore, are we now sending messages to distant generations in the future? What are we trying to tell them? Despite this carping criticism, there is something intriguing in the contemplation of the long course of language transmission and the obvious connection (via breath and psyche) with remote predecessors, whether relatives or not.

The book abounds with fascinating lore and is really engrossing reading. I have more confidence in the psychological portions, about which I know little–hence the childlike trust–than in those bordering on linguistics. I would disagree with some etymologies, which are usually not the author’s own, but admit that even “false” etymology plays a role throughout the ages. There are more than a few errors of detail; some words are assigned to the wrong language (Irish, Sanskrit); others are nonexistent, although they no doubt were found in the author’s sources. He cannot know all the languages cited, hence the room for error of evaluation. Transcriptions are sometimes unfortunate (for Sanskrit, Hebrew, Gothic), but these too follow others (although the absence of diacritics may be an original feature). Linguistic works cited are, while substantial, mostly old.

The author evidently became enamored of the term “phonemic” at some time. But his use of the term violates the phonemic principle. Whether the “phoneme is dead” or is alive and well, it has meant to those using it a significant unit within the sound-system of one language; it is thus meaningless to apply it across language boundaries as does our author (pp. 34, 35, 91, 101, 108 et passim).

Once or twice he is surely pulling our leg(s). The sons of Austrian and Hungarian nobles, we are told, were called, like the eldest son of the King of France, dauphin. Schoolbooks were prepared ad usum delphini ‘for the use of the dolphin (dauphin).’ This is compared by the author (p. 16) with English “school of fish.” One needs to head for the Elephant and Castle for a strong drink.

Most of the disagreements above are petty in nature –not all. Even errors in detail and terminology will not vitiate a valid central thesis. But one or two implications are hard to accept. For example: vocabulary change is best observable in aberrations of the disturbed; their speech reflects more accurately an ancient stage than does the speech of the “normal” speakers. The afflicted are in the favored position of being able to make profound revelations of a broad cultural nature, sometimes approaching the universal (this contrasts with Freud’s treatment of speech aberrations as an individual phenomenon). In his rational moments, the patient apparently has no such magic touch with pristine language. How, though, can he recapture an ancient semantic level when there are no intermediate steps? Men darf zayn meschugeh? Perhaps it helps.

The volume appears to be extremely useful (with observation of the necessary caveats) for those concerned with language, folklore, comparative literature, Biblical studies, etc., in addition to the author’s own major field. It would also perhaps prove fruitful to us in languages and linguistics to turn to some of the publications in the bibliography that are no doubt important sources hitherto overlooked by most of us.

—Robert A. Fowkes, New York University

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: THE GUINNESS BOOK OF NAMES

Leslie Dunkling, Guinness Superlatives Limited, 1974

No book in onomastics comparable to this one has been published in the United States. Frankly, it is doubtful that a publisher here would have accepted it. Perhaps only in England, where the professional and the amateur faculties of an author can still tie the subtle knot that associates sensibility, can the disrhythmic quidnunc, the gouty antiquarian, or the purely innocent be granted space. Although the text qualifies as an astounding success, it contributes little that is substantially new to a specialist. In that way it is like a one-volume edition of Mencken’s The American Language–compendious, encyclopedic, stylistically distinctive, and informed. Sounds impossible and slightly tipsy!

The book is truly attractive in format and layout, with relevant photographs and illustrations throughout. For instance, a photograph of the musical scores of “Louise,” “Michelle,” and “Tip Toe Through the Tulips” is used to point up the associational influences that may cause parents to name their child because of the current popularity of a song. Tulip is, of course, the name given by the singer Tiny Tim to his daughter. Dunkling coins nameograph as the descriptive term for identifiable sketches of famous persons, such as Washington, Lincoln, or Churchill. A free-style drawing of Charlie Chaplin illustrates Chaplin. The book jacket, a montage of pictures, shows a cut of the upper half of a nubile girl wearing a Princeton University T-shirt, the mainmast of the sailing vessel Cutty Sark, a birth registration sheet for 1883, a geological survey map of the island of Hawaii, a platter of cheese wedges (brands named), cheesecake (Miss England of 1970 reigning in near-undress), the Drunken Duck, and rogues' gallery shot of Leslie Dunkling, full-face and right profile, No. 1199062. The jacket exudes a sprouting sensuality that must not go unnoticed.

With this falderol out of the way, we can slip between the covers. Dunkling has the audacity to title the first two chapters, “What’s In a Name?” This dampens the enthusiasm of anyone knowledgeable with the name game. Yet, both short chapters are carried off with a flamboyance not seen in any books on names that I know. He even quotes the “infamous” lines from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at the very beginning, a commencement hardly promising. It is here, however, that we are confronted with a critical mind. The passage is worth quoting:

Juliet’s beautiful speech, which in context is a passionate plea for what is known to be a lost cause, is often misinterpreted. Juliet does not believe what she says even as she says it, and Shakespeare certainly did not believe it. He gives quite a different answer to his own question many times in his plays and poems. With his usual genius, however, he makes Juliet ask herself a timeless question which has an infinity of answers. The innumerable sub-editors who have echoed the question at the head of a thousand columns simply acknowledge the fact. We must also acknowledge it, and attempt to find some answers.

In control here is a brash and daring commentator who uses a trite approach to introduce something quite serious and important.

After this comes a short, too short, glossary of name terms, and then sections on a name’s meaning, origin, and density. The highly complicated concept of the “name-print” theory is described enough to make us wish he had developed it further. According to this, all of us have “an onomastic finger-print”; that is, we react in personal ways to names on a list, something that will reveal both our general and our specialized knowledge. It is a kind of name association test, only more limited, though probably no less revealing. Other sections include commentary on duplication and transfer, names as vocabulary, personal name substitutes, modifiers, love names, hate names, and the psychological problem of “one’s own good name.”

He classifies names in “at least four ways”: By their linguistic status; by their formal characteristics; by type of origin; and by the nomenclature to which they belong. In each section, the author subtly and unpretentiously inserts linguistic and psychological interpretations. Names are discussed synchronically and diachronically; for instance, Belcher probably had the ameliorative meaning of “pretty face,” from bel chiere, but its English form and present meaning can leave the owner “sadly exposed.” He is especially concerned with his own name, a concern that extends to all of us who have “strange” names. Schoolboys taunted him with “Does dung cling?” Some persons insist on hearing Dumpling, either through actually being hard-of-hear-ing or through maliciousness. The name is easily derived through analyses of sound changes in English dialects that connect surnames like Dunkley with place names of Dinkling and Dinckly in Lancashire. Such commentaries permeate the text.

In a sense, the book is an introduction to both the theory and practice of names and naming. No extensive treatment of any category of names occurs, although the encapsulating is so sophisticated as to obviate any necessity to list examples for the sake of listing or proliferating. The categories, then, are not exhaustive, but they indeed cover major areas and types: Names of pubs, houses, streets, trades, magazines, flowers, ships, apples, railways, lorries, on to “No End of Names.” With some casting around, we could find omissions, one notably being names in sports, except for a mention of names of racehorses. So encompassing is the coverage that Dunkling’s supposition that we may have more names in our vocabulary than we do “ordinary language” must be taken seriously.

Mr. Dunkling has produced a book that deserves shelf space anywhere that good books are found and reading time by anyone who pretends to fluency in English. If the owner’s reading ability is skewered to the bell bottom, then the book can serve well as a coffee-table adornment, a martini-klatsch conversation piece, or for a roach pinchout. It is a breezy, salty, and substantial book from across the sea.

—Kelsie B. Harder, The State University College at Potsdam, New York

To Cave

The word cave is listed only as a noun in Webster’s, but I have long known it as a verb. To cave or to go caving primarily means ‘to explore a cave.’ Ah, to go caving! And whoever goes is a caver.

Now oddly enough, I do find the words spelunker, n. and spelunk v.i. in Webster’s. I have been a caver for more than twenty years, and I have known a thousand, two thousand cavers. Never, ever, have I heard anyone speak of himself as a “spelunker,” and the thought that someone might be about to spelunk is droll. I have on occasion known cavers to use the words in print to insult somebody.

Cavers go caving, but there are some very nice things that caves themselves do that most noncavers do not know about, although they instantly understand when they hear. Caves go or they pinch out. Going cave is a cave or cave passage that gives no indication of pinching out. Such cave is virgin cave. It is a big thrill to explore virgin cave. And to find big cave is a special treat. Live cave shows a lot of promise; dead cave does not. In a cave, cavers look for cave, searching for those small holes that may lead to wonders. I think that is about all. I’m all caved out. Now I wish you all could listen to a record of “The Caving Mother Blues.”

—Red Watson, Cave Research Foundation, University City, Missouri

Trite ‘n’ True

There is a special version of the linguistic binomials that fascinates me which is found in the area of advertising. I can remember when, in the not-too-distant past, products advertised for sale were rather simply and directly named. One readily understood what was meant by Old Dutch Cleanser or Dutch Masters, by Ry-Krisp or Rice Crispies, by Quaker State Oil or Quaker’s Rolled Oats.

Not so these days when product designations tend toward slogans, aphorisms and expository phrases. Hard as Nails, True to Life, Hour after Hour and Twice as Nice– all in the cosmetic field–are examples of this genre.

One specific trend currently is what might be termed the double-barreled or conjunctional approach. This is not an entirely new phenomenon, as witness such venerable commodities as Sea & Ski (rhyme), Spic ‘n Span (tradition) and Head & Shoulders (geography).

What is so alarming is the overkill that is being practiced. For instance, Shake ‘n Bake are seasoned bread crumbs, Break ‘n Bake are pizzas, and Bake & Take are reusable aluminum pans. Thick ‘n Creamy, Cool ‘n Creamy, and Warm ‘n Creamy, refer, respectively, to salad dressing, pudding, and a beauty cream warmer.

In the next-to-Godliness category we find Soft ‘n Clean, Groom and Clean, and Squirt-N-Kleen, the last an oral hygiene device. Covering the moisture spectrum pretty well are such items as Wash and Care, Spray ‘n Wash, Wash ‘n Dri, Tote ‘n Dry, and Soft & Dri, mostly in the “beautifying” business.

There are Bathe ‘n Glow (baby lotion), Mop & Glo (floor cleaner), Sweet ‘n Low (artificial sweetener) and Punch ‘n Gro (garden product). There are Gloss ‘n Toss, Toss ‘n Serve, Brown N Serve, Stir N Serv, Mix ‘n Drink, Heat ‘n Eat, Whip & Chill, Wipe ‘n Dipe, Cut ‘n Clean, Kleen ‘n Shine; Stretch ‘n Seal and Scratch & Sniff (the last a notebook). Then, too, we must remember: Lean & Lively, Long & Silky, Silk ‘n Hold and Silk ‘n Silver. Finally, let us not forget Tuf ‘n Ready and Crisp ‘n Tender; Spray ‘n Wash and Spray N Vac; Thick & Frosty and Fit & Frosty; Rich ‘n Easy, Nice & Easy, Nice ‘n Soft and Soft ‘n Pretty… and So-on ‘n So-forth.

As you can see, the list is Long ‘n Endless. However, the outlook isn’t as bleak as it appears. Fashions in advertising, like fashions in clothes, change quickly and we shall soon be on a New ‘n Different kick. —Harry Cimring, Hollywood, California

EPISTOLA {Martha (Patsy) White}

In addition to “A Bicentennial Pair: George & Patsy” [III, 1], there was a “Tom & Patsy”—The Jeffersons. Both Mrs. Jefferson and the daughter were Marthas, called Patsy.

And further, I too am Martha, and have been called Patsy all my life. [Martha (Patsy) White, San Rafael, California]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: KEYWORDS, A Vocabulary of Culture and Society

Raymond Williams, Oxford University Press, 1976

We assume that one of the highest compliments to be paid a book is an expression of envy at not having been the author of it. Unhesitatingly, unabashedly, we submit that we regret not having written this book. In all honesty, though, we must add that we regret, too, being incapable of having written so lucid yet so erudite a descriptive analysis of semantic change taking place in that odd place described as being before our very eyes, under our very noses.

The author has selected 155 English words (like aesthetic, alienation, art, behaviour, bourgeois, bureaucracy, capitalism, career, … creative… culture… democracy…, equality…, family, etc.) that he considers to be key words in modern culture. Through detailed discussion of their etymologies, their cognates, their synonyms and antonyms, and their general historical and contemporary behavior, he traces the development of each from its purely formal origin through its semantic development as illustrated by the political, philosophical, and critical writings in which it has been employed. The discussions vary in length from less than a page to several pages, and each carries a list of cross references (at the end) to related Keywords in the book. Monolingual lexicographers are traditionally accused of carrying on some sort of verbal incest because they attempt to define the words of a language using the words of the language itself. If not precisely incestuous, it must be acknowledged that the practice of monolingual lexicography is, indeed, an exercise in circularity, unlike bilingual or multilingual lexicography, which, at least, offers the salve of being able to use a metalanguage. Williams sidesteps this problem rather neatly: by virtue of dealing with so few words, he can, in effect, use the rest of the language as a metalanguage and no circularity is apparent.

Though admittedly a small niggle, it might be necessary to point out that nothing would be gained from arguing that some of these Keywords ought to be replaced by other Keywords of our own choosing; but that would prove a bootless argument, indeed, for we should soon become mired in the philosophical questions of Williams’ choices rather than in the genuine enjoyment and admiration of his treatment of those he has selected. No one can gainsay the importance of these 155: at worst, he can but lament that there aren’t 1550 or 15,500 or 155,000 treated in like manner.

For here is what lexicography is all about.

Witness these cuttings, presented entirely out of context: >

Equality has been in regular use in English since [early 15th Cent.], from … [OF] équalité … [L] aequalitatem, … r[oot] w[ord] [L] aequus-level, even, just.

[Medium] … Media became widely used when broadcasting as well as the press had become important in COMMUNICATIONS (q.v.); it was then the necessary general word. MASS (q.v.) media, media people, media agencies, media studies followed.

[Liberal] … But liberal as a pejorative term has also been widely used by socialists and especially Marxists. This use shares the conservative sense of lack of rigour and of weak and sentimental beliefs. Thus far it is interpreted by liberals as a familiar complaint….

[Literature] … Where Johnson had used literature in the sense of being highly literate in his Life of Milton, in his Life of Cowley he wrote, in the newly objective sense: ‘an author whose pregnancy of imagination and elegance of language have deservedly set him high in the ranks of literature.’

As can be seen from even this small sample, it is almost impossible to deal with language without encountering controversy, and we do not mean to imply, in our earnest recommendation of this book, that the reader will necessarily agree with all of the views expressed. Yet, views cogently expressed are in short supply this season, and especially in the cheaper (albeit impermanent) paperback edition, this book can be guaranteed to engender thought and stimulate discussion. It is required reading for all who moan that we don’t use English the way we used to.

If we allowed ourselves a niggle, above, perhaps we may be permitted a quibble here: the typographic style gets a bit cumbersome at times. For instance, once a cross reference to another entry has been indicated by setting a given word in small capitals, it is unnecessary to supply the redundant ‘(q.v.)’ following. The editors would have done better to have followed OED (or VERBATIM) style. As far as the style of the writing goes, the author would have been well advised to have avoided such phrases as “— is a complex word” and “— is a difficult word,” one of which appears in almost every entry. Neither is required for the formulaic approach to his subject, which he has managed to avoid without sacrificing a measure of useful uniformity among the entries. [—LU]

Proverbially Speaking

Don’t minimize the man who maxim-izes.
—A. S. Flaumenhaft, Lawrence, New York

ETYMOLOGICA OBSCURA: hermaphrodite to bulldagger

Etymologically the most interesting word in the English language is probably dike, referring to a lesbian, with all its variations such as Diesel-dike ‘a fat lesbian who walks like a Mack truck,’ etc. What is so interesting and unusual about dike is that all the intermediate forms of this term, from its etymological original, which is hermaphrodite, to its most evolved derivative, bulldagger, are all in simultaneous existence at the present time and have been at least since the 1930s; and I have at one time or another heard them all in actual use: hermaphrodite, morphodite, morphodike, dike, diker, bull-diked, and bulldagger. The “bull-” element in these last two of course refers to largeness or maleness. —G. Legman, France

Ahless Havad

Where did the ahs in Havad go?
Who managed this sly maneuver?
Some Irish Yankees put one each
On the ends of Chiner and Cuber.

—E. O. Staley, Maplewood, New Jersey

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: PLACENAMES OF GEORGIA, Essays of John H. Goff

Edited by Francis Lee Utley and Marion R. Hemperley, University of Georgia Press, 1975

John Goff had as many trades as fingers: he was a scholar, teacher, dean, economist, transportation director for TVA, consultant for TVA in Alabama and for Bonneville Power Company in Oregon, chief economist and director of research for FDR’s Transportation Board of Investigation and research, writer, and self-appointed inspector of Georgia placenames. During the last 17 years of his life, Goff made hundreds of observations on Georgia placenames, but he published most of these in the Georgia Mineral Newletter. Marion R. Hemperley of the Georgia Surveyor General Department and Francis Lee Utley, late of the Ohio State University, have edited 135 of these essays to give both the general reader and the specialist in onomastics a thoroughly delightful volume. This book is a handsome, entertaining, and informative collection–a significant contribution to the study of linguistics, history, geography, and folklore which are the domain of place-name study.

Like Thoreau, Goff was no theorist. He loved a meandering road, and, because he was not on another man’s errand, the inspector took the time to go his own way. He began his work tracing the course of the Old Federal Road in North Georgia; in the years that followed, he studied the names of creeks and crossroads–and all the terrain and settlements in between–with the same loving attention that Thoreau gave to the ice, woods, and chickadees around Concord.

As a result, Goff’s work has the effect of a sprawling epic catalogue of Georgia placenames, more than 1500 of which are indexed by the editors. The range of his scholarship and the deftness of his intuition, however, are bound in an engaging prose style that makes a reader grateful to be shet for a while of the orthodox taxonomist: >

No Business Creek is one of those distinctive names of Georgia and for a long time the writer thought it was the only such moniker in the country until he found a North Business Creek listed in Henry Gannett’s Gazetteer of Virginia. This discovery led to some searching which turned up a second No Business Creek in Morgan County, Alabama, northwest of Hartselle. This find in turn raised a question about Gannett’s North Business Creek; perhaps he had made a slip by interpreting No as No., an abbreviation for north. Apparently there was such an error, because a reliable Virginia map disclosed that the correct designation is No Business and not North Business Creek. Further study may show the name is also employed in other sections. But be that as it may, usage of the expression in such widely separated areas as Virginia, Georgia, and Alabama implies that old-timers were generally familiar with the appelation. (p. 150)

Gopher Town, or “Go’ Town” as the place is sometimes called, is a crossroads on Georgia 39, below Donalsonville in central Seminole County. According to a good informant, the name was derived from the fact that an enormous gopher was once killed in the vicinity and its dried shell hung over the door of the community store. The term gopher in this case does not refer to any of the various species of western rodents, but to a burrowing land turtle (Xerobates polyphemus), which can be found on the lower Coastal plain. The creatures are sometimes caught and their flesh used as food. (p. 128)

The exact site of the town of Eastertoy is not known but most likely it centered about present Dillard, which is located on a fine rise that overlooks the beautiful bottoms along Betty Creek and the Little Tennessee. Old people around Dillard used to say that they had always heard that Indians were living at the site when the first white people arrived to take up properties they had won in land lotteries. Further evidence that the place was at Dillard can be found in the fact that Mud Creek which is also known as Estatoah, or as Estatoah Falls Creek, enters the right side of the Little Tennessee on the northeast side of Dillard. (p. 279)

It might be of interest to add that the crossroads at Plains of Dura was the intersecting point for two early traces. One of these routes, Bond’s Trail, led southward from old Traveller’s Rest, below Montezuma on Flint River via Ellaville, Quebec (on Georgia 153 in Schley County), Concord Crossroads, Plains of Dura, Plains, and Paradox Church Crossroads in the southwest corner of Sumter. From there it crossed into extreme northwest Lee County and joined what is now the Edwards Station-Bodsford Road, just to the east of Chokeeligee Creek. This last route, a former Indian path, ran along the east-side of Kinchafoonee Creek. To the south of its juncture with Bond’s Trail, at a point about two miles northwest of today’s Neyami in Lee County, it forked with one branch leading southeastward through Neyami at the site of old Starkville, thence eastward to Pindertown, a noted Indian crossing point on the Flint River. The other prong continued south alone Kinchafoonee Creek to Kennards Settlement and Cowpen, at the present bridge on Georgia 32. (p. 36)

Even with the eight footnotes deleted here, the historical and geographical value of the work seems apparent even in these representative passages. The discussions of placenames are equally rich with information for the linguistic geographer and the folkorist. Besides the regional words, cowpen /képěn/, gopher, and pinder, mentioned above, subregional words are also documented in local designations, e.g., Redbug Road would be Chigger Road in North Georgia and the village of Red Bud northwest of Atlanta wouldn’t appear in South Georgia. Bonny Clabber Bluff would be Thick Milk Bluff if the area had been dominated by Germans instead of Irish, and Blue John Creek would be Skimmed Milk Creek if a modern urban namemaker felt obliged to use a dairyman’s pejorative. The political folklorist will surely find significance in the fact that Jimmy Carter’s hometown of Plains is a fairly recent abbreviation of Plains of Dura, the site of Nebuchednezzar’s great golden image that led to the fiery furnace for Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

In three essays on the phonology of Georgia placenames, Goff discusses local pronunciation of nearly 100 local designations, recording divided usage, illustrating variation with a fairly consistent and successful nontechnical description, and clarifying accentuation when needed. Outlanders are given the preferred native pronunciations of Albany [“All’ benny”], Aragon [“Arrow’-gun” or “Arrer’gun”], Schley [“Sly’”], and Taliaferro/Bolivar (which make a perfect rhyme in Georgia). Even Georgians will learn from this book; how many of us would pass a pronunciation quiz that includes Gardi (“Guard-eye”), Philamee (“Flimee”), Schlatterville (“Slaughterville”), Sowhatchie (“Syehatchie”), and Towaliga (“Tyelye’gee”)? There is some comfort, however, to find even the natives of Screven County rhyming it with Stephen, seven, or driven.

The good life and hard traveling of Georgia’s people are reflected across every page of this fine book, from Social Circle and Fancy Hill to Scrougetown, Scufflele Bluff, and Lordamercy Cove. Even without an Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, Bremen, Canton, Cairo, Damascus, two Dublins, Egypt, Geneva, Lisbon, Madras, Mecca, Natal, Rome, Scotland, Turin, Tunis, and Vienna on the map of his favorite state, Goff could have concluded his work as Man Walking and with no apology to Thoreau:

If with fancy unfurled
You leave your abode,
You may go round the world
By the Old Federal Road.

—Lee Pederson, Emory University

“–but this Thesaurus!”

I

A dictionary is a word-society
Recording next of kin-and doubtful heirs;
To know a word one must concede co-action
And recognize both genes and variants:

Consider gens, host to appendages
That he fulfills, becoming with their aid
Degeneration, gentry, and benign,
Congenial, generous, and genteel;
Through limpet affixes he can expand
Yet in himself remain intact.

To know a word–to wonder how it lapsed:
Why did stout toad-head yield its place to tadpole?
And Roman little mouse retreat to muscle,
Then later in sea-armor mask as mussel?
Did mob from mobile vulgus wax pernicious?
And bus from omnibus decrease in content?
And when did quelque chose, deprived of birthright
By artless tongue, descend to mocking kickshaws?
What lack of energy reduced the pace
Of quick s’aventurer to leisured saunter?
What weariness betrayed the jovial surfeit
To such vicissitudes as end in sad?

So in that ordered word-society
Is every member diagramed for sound
Maintaining each his use and proper place.

II

But this Thesaurus! Challenging your thought
To find the mediant word to give it flesh!

This teeming source that quickens or confines
Displaying for your choice its lavish store,
To ground your thought or kite it through the sky.

Kaleidoscopic words of shifting forms;
And blustering, leaping, turbulent words that rage;
Words straight as shot-purveyors of precision—
And undecided fluttering words on planes
Of almost-meaning—weightless butterflies;

Cargoes of samplings from the tongues of Time
(The very words poetic thought found sound.)

This Mardigras of words where thought is king.
These unrelated members own no rule
Except to serve–to shape the inherent arc
That launches thought into transcendency.

—S. C. Joughin, Hackettstown, N. J.

Spell-Bound

A movie about a screen siren who casts her charms on men should be hex-rated.

—A. S. Flaumenhaft, Lawrence, New York

ADDENDA: Names

Unusual names [II, 2] can be delightful: Larry Derryberry….

—Reinhold Aman, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

…embarrassing: Siflis; Hartupee; Marcy Tinkle; Edward L. Wiwi….

—Jack Grieshaber, Cincinnati, Ohio

… irresistible: Tordis Isselthwaite….

… contradictory: John Senior, Jr….

—Constance Finkel, University City, Missouri

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: WORDS AND WOMEN

Casey Miller and Kate Swift, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976

Prejudice is the name for the animosity between or among people on the basis of religion, color, nationality, sexual proclivity, language, wealth, health, employment, intelligence, taste, hirsuteness, education, height, weight, age, behavior, opinions, and, as we all now know, sex. In other words, any of the multitudinous, multifarious elements that serve to distinguish us from one another can serve as a basis for our prejudices.

Propaganda is the name for the process of persuading people to behave in a certain way. The authors of this book discuss one kind of prejudice only–sexist–and hold that the English language itself, by its very grammar, serves as a self-perpetuating medium for sexist propaganda. True, other, cultural factors–particularly such practices as a woman’s loss of her name upon marrying–are mentioned; but the focus is on language.

The argument is irrefutable, though it is sometimes a little difficult to separate Miller/Swift’s purely descriptive approach from a surely destructive reproach. For example, they cite the treatment of manly/manful/mannish vs. womanly/womanlike/womanish in The Random House Dictionary. At first, the reader is put off by the authors’ comment: “The broad range of positive characteristics used to define males could be used to define females, too, of course, but they are not. The characteristic of women– weakness is among the most frequently cited–are something apart.” [p. 59] Put off because one assumes that it is the lexicographers who are being taken to task. But on the following page appears this: “Lexicographers do not make up definitions out of thin air. Their task is to record how words are used, it is not to say how they should be used.” Thus, it emerges that Miller/Swift have it in for the language, not for the lexicographers.

That’s a great relief, for no lexicographer ought to tangle with these two ladies, whose argument is all the more telling for the volume of evidence they adduce from all kinds of writing. Who can doubt that English–though not, to be sure, English alone–reflects still the traditional anti-female biases of its speakers’ culture. Even those who object to the awkward, often silly distortions and contortions resorted to in an attempt to achieve “equality in language” will be compelled to admit, upon closing this book, that the language is rife with constructions, syntax, grammar, and lexicon that, even if not any longer deliberately anti-female, certainly perpetuates an inequality, willy-nilly, that women have fought to correct with considerable success. The problem that emerges and that is central to Miller/Swift’s argument is that notwithstanding the advances made in the liberation of women, the very language they must use tends to propagandize against their freedom and purpose.

In ranging far and wide for good and bad examples with which to support their cause, Miller/Swift sometimes slip, as when they praise the American Heritage School Dictionary for defining sage as “ ‘A very wise person, usually old and highly respected,’ in contrast to the ‘mature or venerable man sound in judgment’ of a widely used college dictionary.” The college dictionary happens to be right and the AHSD wrong in this instance, for, while there is no reason why a sage must be male, the unassailable fact is that all sages have always been male, and we would defy Alma Graham or anyone else to unearth evidence (outside of science fiction) that the word has ever been used to refer to a female.

There is some consolation for all of us (Miller/Swift, too): language does change and that for that reason alone we may look forward to a future of diminished prejudice. However, it must be emphasized that by that very token people should stop using etymologies of modern English words in order to “prove” that their “real” meaning is the original one. Etymologies are interesting and can be useful in determining the linguistic and semantic changes that a word has undergone, but it is as ridiculous to fasten on an obsolete meaning as the “true” meaning of a word as it may be to fasten on its current meaning: words are symbols; they are not things they symbolize.

It may seem that because of the sensitivity of the subject, any adverse remarks in a review of a book on sexism in language will be construed as an attack on feminism itself, notwithstanding protests to the contrary (especially by a male reviewer). But the only possible criticism that this reviewer might offer is about the authors’ intensity, which frequently results in nothing more than a switching in the order of explanations and arguments. One must therefore be careful to read to the end of each analysis in order to find the authors’ mitigation of their criticisms, which are usually directed at the medium rather than the message.

To the best of our knowledge, no comparable study– certainly, no comparably responsible, sober, comprehensive study–has been done by anyone else, and this work is welcome particularly because it should serve to lay to rest, once and for all, the facetious inanities perpetrated on us by those who, under the guise of humor, create linguistic absurdities that tend to perpetuate vicious sexist propaganda. [—LU]

EPISTOLA {Norman R. Shapiro}

Bravo to Bruce Price for his insightful and witty article on Nounspeak [II, 4]. He may be a little too categorical, however, in stating that, unlike Germanic, “the Romance languages virtually forbid it.” True, the practice is not indigenous to Romance, nor is it as versatile. (That is, with the debatable exception of Esperanto–of largely Romance lexicon but generally Germanic syntax–in which one can agglutinate nouns almost ad lib. E.g., the nouns pluvo ‘rain,’ mantelo ‘coat,’ fabriko ‘factory,’ and loko ‘location’ are easily combined to form a perfectly comprehensible chain: pluvmantelfabrikloko. But such a process is typical of the language and leads neither to obfuscation nor affectation.) French has been quite hospitable to noun pairs for some time–with or without hyphens, often capriciously–and is becoming even more so as the language suffers from the spread of its own equivalent of Newspeak, ironically dubbed Hexagonal. Except for some chic Anglo-American calques like auto-école ‘driving school,’ such pairs differ from the Germanic variety in that the qualifying noun always follows the qualified, not vice-versa. Hence homme ‘man’ + grenouille ‘frog’ for ‘frogman.’ They can be broken down into (at least) three types: >

1. True appositions, in which the second (qualifying) noun plays the role of a predicate adjective; as in soldat citoyen ‘citizen soldier,’ homme orchestre ‘one-man band,’ et al.

2. Metaphorical appositions, as in homme grenouille, guerre éclair ‘lightning war,’ i.e. ‘Blitzkrieg,’ roman fleuve ‘saga,’ lit. ‘river novel,’ homme sandwich ‘sandwich man,’ i.e. in the ambulatory, publicity sense, et al.

3. Syntactical ellipses, in which simple juxtaposition replaces anything from a preposition to an entire phrase. Thus, café-concert (for a café where one can also hear a concert of sorts), bloc-notes ‘note-pad,’ coiffeur hommes ‘men’s barber,’ pause café ‘coffee break,’ the slang arrêt pipi ‘rest stop,’ et al. One even hears (and reads) nowadays such innovations as trajet-bureau ‘office distance,’ i.e. ‘travel time from office to home.’

Another favorite ellipsis is of relatively recent vintage, namely the omission of the preposition de in such expressions as la question salaire ‘the salary question’ for la question du salaire, etc. As a result, three-noun chains are now quite possible in French, however much they may make purists cringe. One may well hear office workers discussing the question pause café, or historians analyzing the concept guerre éclair, for instance.

Given the fundamental difference between this type of chain and the Germanic, it is hard, offhand, to envision any four-noun examples. But who knows what wonders of verbal shorthand may yet lurk over Hexagonal’s horizon? [Norman R. Shapiro, Wesleyan University]

EPISTOLA {Francis E. Throw}

One of the horrible examples that illustrate and enliven your brief note about apostrophes [II, 4] invites a small quibble that leads directly to a somewhat more extensive tangential comment to supplement your summary–not to disagree with it. Certainly the punctuation mark in Drink with the Urdang’s is a catostrophe; and the one in Ham ‘n Eggs is a prepostrophe unless balanced by an a[fter] postrophe to mark the omission of the d. (Perhaps the best way to avoid the smell of “n” you rightly deprecate in the logical Ham ‘n’ Eggs would be Ham-n-Eggs, in which the two hyphens announce that the compound has been manufactured for the occasion and the absence of apostrophes implies that the process of contraction has been completed so the omitted a and d are no longer missed.)

My quibble is to deny the need to add an ‘s in St. Paul United Methodist Church (despite its Florida address), though the addition would undeniably be legitimate. The apostle is not thought of as possessing the church in any literal sense, but the use of St. Paul’s here would be just as correct as the use of Shakespeare’s picture in reference to a recent print that could never have belonged to the playwright. The possessive, expressed either by an ‘s or by an of, has less literal implication of ownership than our grade school teachers may have led us to assume. Conversely, it is legitimate to speak of the Adams mansion (without an apostrophe) whether the Adamses own it now or not; the house is associated with the Adams family in other ways too. Such adjectival use of a noun– either a common or a proper one–is firmly established in English.

This freedom to either use or omit the ‘s is quite common, though the degree of freedom varies widely from one situation to another. At one extreme, St. Paul’s municipal auditorium (if there is one in the Minnesota city) could be called the St. Paul Municipal Auditorium but hardly St. Paul’s M.A. At the other, one could not speak of Mr. St. Peter’s wife without an apostrophe, though a number of St. Peter wives (or, with a slightly different sense, St. Peters’ wives) might be met at a family gathering. But an association of teachers can equally well be called a Teachers’ Association (because the association belongs to those who belong to it) or a Teacher Association (in which Teacher is used as an adjective telling what the Association consists of or is for the benefit of); probably the choice in this case is based less often on logic than on the degree of aversion to punctuation marks. None of this, of course, is any defense for the traveler who reports having visited St. Peters while in Rome.

Incidentally, the cowbird letter by W.M. Woods [II, 4, 16] contains a misstatement, though this does not affect his argument. The cowbird is not “a relative of the European coocoo, or cuckoo, or whatever”–regardless of its egg-laying habits–though “some immigrant, probably of German origin” might well have been misled as indicated. The cowbird is one of the blackbirds and hence is an icterid, along with the meadowlarks and orioles. My own speculation, offered as a less amusing and less imaginative competitor to that of Woods, is that the association between cowbirds and cows may have been much closer in the days before spraying reduced the tick population on the latter. [Francis E. Throw, Wheaton, Illinois]

EPISTOLA {B.H. Smeaton}

The linguistic term Mr. Cimring is fishing for [II, 4] is presumably clipping. (In usage manuals, such as Fowler or Treble & Vallins, the broader rubric curtailed words is used.) The most thorough treatment of English clipping (to this writer’s knowledge) is in Hans Marchand, The Categories and Types of Present-Day Word-Formation (Ch. IX).

Even the term “curtailed words” does not cover all types of familiar designation, since some also add (affective) elements instead of subtracting, or subtract and add at the same time (cf. Johnny and John-Boy; Joe and Joey, for Joseph; and Chevvy and Chev for Chevrolet).

Cimring’s felicitous phrase, “over-familiarity with language,” is particularly applicable in the case of many popular place-name forms. Note, for example, the preciosity of the tourist who feels he must refer to Las Vegas as Vegas, as though this made him a member of some sort of in-group. Frisco (or sometimes, in writing, “‘Frisco”) is also a favorite of the pseudo-sophisticate (San Franciscans themselves cannot abide the appellation).

Not all local folk are upset by the pop name for their town, however–sometimes, indeed, it is known only in the immediate area (Pally, for example, for Palo Alto, California). In other cases the derived name has all but replaced the official one. L.A. has been in free alternation with “Los Angeles” for decades now, to no one’s distress (and in blissful unawareness, certainly, of the settlement’s name at the time of founding–“El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula”).

To anyone who wants to carry on with it I offer here the beginnings of a list of Western Canadian place-names that have undergone surgery, for better or worse:

British Columbia has, of course, Van for Vancouver, and, in a less-than-inspired wordplay, O.K. Falls for Okanagan Falls (to add to the complexity, the falls are no longer there). Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, famed for John Diefenbaker and its federal penitentiary, is (not surprisingly) P.A. Winnipeg, Manitoba, fulcrum of the nation, is called The Peg (reinforced, perhaps, by another Manitoba place-name, The Pas [*oe pa]?). And in Alberta, whence I write, there are The Hat (Medicine Hat); The Bridge (Lethbridge); Rocky or Rocky Mountain (for Rocky Mountain House); and Pincher (Pincher Creek).

To return to clippings proper, and to keep VERBATIM readers up to the minute, I close with the following note: Rhodesians, according to a recent news dispatch, now have one they could do without, namely, the Terrs (general for ‘the terrorists’). [B.H. Smeaton, The University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada]

EPISTOLA {Stanley H. Brams}

The discussion of Nounspeak [III, 1] prompted me to retrieve a choice collection of occupational titles which have long languished in my files, gleaned from the packinghouse industry.

Certain employes in that industry are, among other classifications, known by such job titles as catch basin skimmer, expeller operator, tallow washer, melter operator, deodorizer, evaporator man, glue bone residue man, inedible renderer, smoker, expeller, lard draw off man, dry sausage handler, temperature man, receive and feed man, put in tongue protector, cheek and temple chiseler, neck boner, beef shackle remover, burry sheep facer, jaw bone chiseler, cold calves splitter and bell puller.

Please do not ask me what any of these job titles mean. [Stanley H. Brams, Labor Trends, Southfield, Michigan]

EPISTOLA {Caldwell Titcomb}

I was glad to see that someone like A. Ross Eckler submitted [III, 1] a good many more examples of words with the five vowels in sequence. This does not, however, exhaust the list. I can add larcenious (for the more usual larcenous), aerious (which the 17th century used for aerial), and caesious. Of course these and the others can be made to contain six vowels in order by adding the adverbial suffix -ly.

As to the shortest words with the five vowels used only once, another seven-letter example is eunomia, listed in the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement. Without resorting to the French oiseau, I can even supply a six-letter example that English took over from Greek: eunoia ‘alertness of mind,’ listed in Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary.

In his discussion of the Gratuitous Negative [II, 4], Norman Shapiro went seriously astray in citing as an instance I can’t stay but a minute for I can stay but a minute. Both sentences are entirely correct, but being used in its meaning of except in the former and of only in the latter. What is of particular interest is that the latter usage descends from a stage of English when the but (for except) was combined with a negative ne or n’ before the verb, e.g. He n’ is but a boy. Thus we find John Lydgate writing in the early 15th century, They nentende nyght nor day/ But unto merthe, and William Caxton, later in the century, penning, I ne entende but onely to reduce thauncient rhyme to prose. Eventually the lightly-pronounced n vanished, and the negation was subsumed in the but, which thus came to mean only as well as except.

Bruce Price, in his article “Noun Overuse’ [II, 4], committed a howler in referring to “Sir Quiller-Couch.” The titles “Sir” and “Dame” must be immediately followed by the given name (with or without the family name). “Lord Olivier” is correct, but it has to be “Sir Laurence” and not “Sir Olivier.”

Robert St. Clair’s book review [II, 4] erred in saying, “What is important about this historic account….” He ought to have said historical–the two adjectives are no more synonymous than classic and classical.

Finally, Axel Hornos [III, 1] might like to know that for “Ouch!” the Japanese are just as likely to exclaim “Itai!” as “Aita!” Both interjections make use of the same ideograph. [Caldwell Titcomb, Brandeis University]

EPISTOLA {Frank Willard Riggs}

In light of a statement by John J. Ruster [II, 3] that “it is a peculiarly Celtic trait [to reckon] people and things in sets of twenty,” I think it worthwhile to note modern Danish ordinal numbers, which have an obvious historical root in a base-20 system. These numbers are: ti (10), tyve (20), tredive (30), fyrre (40), halvtreds (50), tres (60), halvfjerds (70), firs (80), halvfems (90), and hundrede (100). Until very recent decades, 50 through 90 were rendered with the suffix -sindstyve. Halvtredsindstyve, for example, yields a morpheme-by-morpheme translation as half (halv), three (tre), times (sinds), twenty (tyve). “Half-three” is equivalent to 2½, so what we have in the number is an equation, 2½ x 20 (=50). The western-oriented Swedes, who speak a very similar language, dispensed with this system, substituting for 50, for example, femti, or five-ten, which yields another equation, 5 x 10 (=50). The Norwegians have followed suit, and I suppose it is only a matter of time before the Danes do likewise. [Frank Willard Riggs, Orem, Utah]

EPISTOLA {John W.P. O’Brien}

Ed Fitzgerald, Radio Station WOR, New York:

Question: “What do you call transposing initials, Ed?
It isn’t Bowdlerism, is it?”
Ed: “No, that’s cutting down.”
[of certain mocking writers]: “They were bitten by the Mencken-Nathan syndrome.”

Pegeen Fitzgerald, WOR, New York:

“[I once saw] a statue of a female woman in the park.”
“[He] had an ear and an eye for the light touch.”
“The midi didn’t catch on but the long coat kinda semi got a foothold.”
“…the astrological sign you were born over.”
“That organization is largely, completely self-supporting.”

Jack O’Brian, WOR, New York:

“Ed [Sullivan] had little forensic talent.”
“He creates the best roast beef.”
“…the enormity of the probity of ‘Sherlock Holmes.’ ”

[John W.P. O’Brien, Flushing, New York]

EPISTOLA {James J. Kilpatrick}

If James D. White had been in San Francisco on election night, June 8, he might have added one more splendid specimen to his collection of malapropisms in California. This came from a TV commentator who assured his voters that “California voters have today dipped their toe into a very mixed bag.” [James J. Kilpatrick, Woodville, Virginia]

EPISTOLA {T.E.D. Klein}

While I’m not sure that all Mr. White’s examples are precisely what I think of as “malapropisms”–some are simply scrambled metaphors, while others sound rather bullish (in the Irish sense)–I submit two further examples of inventive speech, both from the same high school student of mine in Dexter, Maine: “That really hits the nail on the spot” and “No, not by a long short.” [T.E.D. Klein, New York, New York]

The mistress of modern malapropisms was, of course, the late Jane Ace, who, with her writer-husband, Goodman Ace, co-starred in the 1930s and 1940s on the radio program, Easy Aces. Such gems as You could have knocked me over with a fender, Don’t just sit there like a bum on a log, and I’ve worked my head to the bone trying to think of her name readily demonstrate the malapropinquity of the Aces. There is no doubt that Jane had that certain Je ne sais pas. [Editor{LU}]

EPISTOLA {Hugh T. Kerr}

It is true that the Authorized King James Version of the Bible uses both ghost and spirit, and that modern English usage prefers the latter (except in the phrase “to give up the ghost”), as noted by Mabel C. Donnelly [III, 1]. But the biblical vocabulary for psychic, spiritual, mental, and emotional states is vastly more complicated, and rich, than a single citation (Mark 1:8, 10) can suggest.

Biblical dictionaries on the subject can be exasperating, and concordances soon reveal the complexities involved. Hebrew uses at least two “spirit” words (ruach and nephesh), while Greek has three (pneuma, psyche, and nous). But the use of these words in the Bible often seems arbitrary, and so translation into English can be confusing. In addition to spirit and ghost, we can have wind, life, breath, soul, mind, etc. Try this text on your aeolian harp: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind…” (Luke 10:27).

Just to add further to the verbal maze, the biblical view of personality was psychosomatic (and distinct from Platonic dualism–“the body is the prison-house of the soul”). So in both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, what we would call psychic or spiritual states are freely ascribed to physical organs and other parts of the human anatomy. Blood, heart, head, hands, feet, eyes, breast, mouth, reins (kidneys), liver, bowels, etc. are all invoked as ways for expressing mental, spiritual, and emotional states. Here the Authorized King James Version, in my view, is much to be preferred to the more pallid modern English translations. I list some examples:

Two minor matters: (1) Holy Ghost is still preferred (to Holy Spirit) among many in the so-called Holiness churches, including–so I’m told–the serpent-handlers of West Virginia. Perhaps in this instance we have the association of snake-bite as the testing of faith (and victory over death) with ghost as the accepted word for ‘the soul of a deceased person’ (OED). (2) Giving up the ghost must be related to common expression of concern when someone sneezes. God bless you! and Gesundheit! are holdovers from the primitive belief that a person’s vital breath (spirit, wind, life, soul, ghost) is expelled during a sneeze. [Hugh T. Kerr, Editor, THEOLOGY TODAY]

EPISTOLA {Kenneth Seeman Giniger}

I do not know what church, if any, Ms. Mabel C. Donnelly of the University of Connecticut at Hartford, author of “Giving Up the Ghost” [VERBATIM III, 1], attends, but, in the Anglican Communion throughout the English-speaking world as well as in many other Protestant denominations, the liturgy continues in the great tradition of both the King James version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer and uses the term “Holy Ghost,” as in “Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.”

Ms. Donnelly is correct in that the Roman Catholic liturgy expresses a preference for Holy Spirit rather than Holy Ghost, but the very existence of a Roman liturgy in the English language is a contemporary development. The Book of Common Prayer, according to the best reference work on Christianity, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, “has remained practically unchanged ever since” 1662. [Kenneth Seeman Giniger, New York, New York]

EPISTOLA {M.R. Paskow}

Re: “The Enigmatic Eggplant” [II, 4]. Actually there are three English names, the third being Guinea squash. This may be a disparagement of the Italian farmers who just cultivated the eggplant commercially in the United States, or perhaps (I guess at this) a reference to the West African region whence it was transmitted to Spain by Arab traders.

[I cannot find Guinea squash in any of the dictionaries I have consulted but it is noted in Hortus II as is Pekin eggplant.]

Aubergine may have entered French through Catalan as the Catalonian pronunciation of al berginia is a bit nearer the French than the Spanish al berenjena. Aubergine has been used for the name of an artist’s color and was a popular color of cut French velvet at the turn of the century.

A distinctive type of eggplant grows in China and has been raised there since antiquity. China may have been the place of its first cultivation.

Among the Japanese there is an old saying: “He who sees an eggplant, a hawk, and Fujisan on New Year’s Day is blessed forever.” [M.R. Paskow, Sonoma, California]

EPISTOLA {Ed Rehmus}

Might I suggest that if aubergine [II, 4] derives ultimately from Arabic al-badhinjan we take a second look at the Hindi bharta and consider the possibility that it could be an even more ultimate source for the Arabic word itself? What is the exact breakdown of al-badhainjan? Is it ‘the indian egg’? The Arabic for ‘egg’ is bayda (badha?). I don’t know the Arabic for ‘plant’ but even if it is something like injan or hinjan the entire Arabic word could still be folk etymology for a word borrowed from the Hindus, perhaps even from Sanskrit. There are many examples of Afro-Indian correspondences (e.g., Sanskrit simha/Bantu simba: “lion”).

Price’s “Noun Overuse Phenomenon Article” [II, 4] is both welcome and telling. Perhaps its appeal is primarily to the poet, but everyone could profit from it. There are some who might say that it is not nouns so much which are at fault as the failure to use more evocative ones, but that is skirting this issue.

Noun overuse is the result of several invidious modern trends. One is the direct result of teaching adjective avoidance in our English classes. Another is that NOT stringing nouns together takes time, that modern commodity which is so poorly rationed. Good writing calls us to go back over what we have written, crossing out the dross, replacing it with a more acceptable style.

Perhaps we use fewer verbs because we do less. Sitting in an office all day and before a TV set all evening is scarcely conducive to thinking in terms of dynamically active verbs. But of course it is the use of verbs that is the allopathic antidote to excessive noun usage. Our overemphasis on commerce and technology slides us into dreary non-creativity. Even to use adjectives properly requires training in English usage. It’s easier to run nouns together than to worry about choosing between difficult alternatives such as, say, continuous and continual.

For it isn’t only more verbs and adjectives that we crave. We should sweat more over grammar. We should explore more carefully all the other parts of speech and we should cease to neglect our idioms.

If only we were to connect the noun strings with hyphens that would be a start. Our writing might not suddenly become clearer, but it would draw attention to noun overuse with an end to facilitating its excision.

Good sentences thrum to an inner rhythm. They don’t just galumph along any old way. They describe real processes. They don’t list unwieldy impedimenta over which we stumble as over a marine’s obstacle course. As Price points out, that is what makes sentences go clunk-clunk. We should remember Poe’s “Unity of effect” which means that the writer chooses only words that contribute to his whole thought, that enhance that thought or at least that do not distract us from its purpose.

This, however, requires discernment and word-sense, so maybe not everyone should be entitled to call himself a writer simply because he can link words to one another the way a monkey might string bunches of grotesquely unmatched beads together.

As usual, poeta nascitur non fit. Why not put all our starving poets to work rewriting the garbage turned out by the whole politics-advertising-Academia-technology-military-industry-institution-corpus? _[Ed Rehmus, San Francisco, California] _

EPISTOLA {Dick Creed}

Perhaps we look too hard for an explanation and become uncharitable.

Those who first said I could care less are misguided, but their motives are pure. Through faulty perception, they see less as a negative. Coupling it with couldn’t, they reason, would be to utter a (shudder!) double negative.

I would not dismiss them as H.N. Meng did: “people who couldn’t care less about what they are uttering.” They care, but their care is misguided. They worship in the same pew with those who ask, “Whom shall I say is calling?”

True, their error is picked up and perpetuated at the expense of correctness, but who is to say how many more errors would be made and perpetuated if they did not try to be super-correct? [Dick Creed, Winston-Salem Journal]

EPISTOLA {Robert Sinnott}

The little boy whose parents used to read him a story each night at bedtime complained about the stories saying: “Why do you always bring that book which I don’t like to be read to out of up for?” [Robert Sinnott, Norwell, Massachusetts]

EPISTOLA {Grant Sharman}

E.E. Rehmus, in “The Mysterious Origin of the Tarot” [III, 1], gives “Mandarin tsarng” as fitting the formula t-r-.

Apparently he does not know that the -r- merely encodes the second Mandarin tone according to the ingenious system of National Romanization devised by novelist Lin Yutang and linguist Y.R. Chao.

(The full four-tone set is: tsang, tsarng, tsaang, tsanq.) [Grant Sharman, Hollywood, California]

EPISTOLA {W.M. Woods}

I am collecting citations to trace the demise of the strictly intransitive verb. I am not ready to pin it down yet, but I think the tendency to find a transitive use for previously intransitive verbs–to make up a transitive form, if necessary–has been going on from the very beginning of English.

Our Germanic-based language is a little uncomfortable with the strictly intransitive verb, the verb without a direct object. German itself treats as a reflexive or insists on a direct object for verbs that in English are intransitive. In English, we can say, “Sit down.” In German we must say, “Seat yourself.” I could give hundreds of other examples in other “tonguages” to show the general aversion to verbs without a direct object, at least in our branches of languages.

I cite the following: Function. The firing pin functions the primer, the primer functions the igniter, the igniter functions the booster, the booster functions the main charge. (From Army TM’s of WW II.) Respond, Respond an ambulance to this location. (The Captain on the TV program Emergency, speaking on his radio.)

I solicit from your readers other examples of hitherto strictly intransitive verbs bent around into transitive shape. I need proper citations, source, author, date, etc., pinned down. [W.M. Woods, Oak Ridge, Tennessee]

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