VOL X, No 1 [Summer 1983]

Never Ask a Uruguayan Waitress for a Little Box: She Might Apply Her Foot to Your Eyelet

John R. Cassidy, Clifton, Virginia

The English-speaking nations may believe themselves to be divided by their common language, but their plight doesn’t even approach that of the Spanish-speaking peoples. The visiting American who says bum inopportunely or the Englishman who urges Americans to Keep their peckers up may perhaps suffer mild embarrassment, but neither of them will experience the show-stopping thrill induced by a Cuban lady who gratefully acknowledges to the Buenos Aires civic organization, “Yes, your welcoming committee fucked me right in the door of the airplane.”

Unless coached beforehand, any visitor from a northern country of Latin America is likely to have at least one experience like that before he learns that in the Rio de la Plata area the elsewhere perfectly decent verb coger ‘to pick up, grasp, catch, gather’ is taboo. In those southern lands, coger, which is the verb our Cuban lady used, has come to have only one meaning, an obscene one, and the verb has therefore been lost to the rioplatenses for civil discourse. A comparable situation might be for English to lose the use of the word get because overemphasis on its minor generative meaning has shouldered out all other uses. It is difficult to imagine the ends we would have to go to to avoid the use of the lost word, but it is exactly that kind of a struggle that occurs every time somebody in gaucho country has to express precisely what coger would say if he could use it.

The northerners rail at this silliness, but in doing so they forget the beam in their own eye. The people of many of the northern countries have inflicted on the verb tirar ‘throw, pull, stretch, discard, shoot, publish, etc.’ the same fate that coger has suffered around the Rio de la Plata. In fact, when you compare the space taken up in dictionaries, you are led to conclude that tirar is an even greater loss to the language than coger.

How is a traveler to know these things? Having lived in several Latin American countries and Spain and having traveled in every one of them, I have suffered a few linguistic bruises myself, and I conclude that no ordinary mortal can foresee all the possibilities for embarrassment, especially since most of the bothersome differences seem to be in the areas of food and sex, neither of which boons one wishes to forswear. One must eat. But no matter how fluent one’s Spanish, one may find eating in restaurants an unexpected struggle during the first few days in a new Hispanic country. It might surprise many Americans to know that, even without much knowledge of Spanish, they would understand a typical Mexican restaurant menu more readily than a Chilean would, because in Chile a taco is the ‘heel of a shoe or a billiard cue,’ and the Chilean never heard of enchiladas, frijoles, or tamales. [The American should not be complacent, however. He or she may recognize the word tamales on the menu, but if only one is wanted, the customer must ask for a tamal, not a tamale.] Our Chilean visitor may see tomates on the menu and of course knows what they are, but he or she may be in for a surprise, because it will be green. If you want a ripe tomato in Mexico, you must order a jitomate. If the Chilean complains, the Mexican might justifiably claim a sort of proprietorship over the words, whose structure implies their origin in the ancient world of the northern part of what is now Hispanic America, along with aguacate, elote, ayote, pataste, zapote, and peyote, to name but a few, which are, respectively, an ‘avocado,’ an ‘ear of corn,’ a ‘squash,’ ‘another variety of squash,’ a ‘fruit,’ and a ‘high.’

It is true that an American in England might stumble over treacle or corn and might not have the faintest idea what a Cornish pastie is, but he or she would at least recognize the ingredients of the pastie if a Briton named them. In contrast, if a Uruguayan tried to describe to a Mexican the ingredients of the beloved boiled dinner, the puchero, the Mexican would not understand the words for corn on the cob, sweet potato, beans, and beef ribs.

As far as I know, English speakers everywhere generally agree on the words for potato, tomato, bacon, sweet potato, butter, lard, chops, grapefruit, strawberry, peach, banana, pineapple, avocado, beans, and green pepper. (Sweet potatoes are also called yams, of course, but most English speakers are familiar with both names.) Hispanics are not unanimous about any of the words for those foods nor about many others too numerous to list here, and as a general rule you will not be understood if you use the wrong variant for your current location. As is the case with tomate and jitomate between Chile and Mexico, so it is among the various nations with regard to ‘potato’ patata, papa; ‘bacon’ tocino, panceta; ‘sweet potato’ batata, boniato, moniato; ‘butter’ manteca, mantequilla; ‘lard’ manteca, grasa de cerdo; ‘chop’ costilla, chuleta; ‘grapefruit’ toronja, pomelo; ‘strawberry’ fresa, frutilla; ‘peach’ durazno, melocotón; ‘banana’ plátano, banana, guineo, mínimo; ‘pineapple’ piña, ananá; ‘avocado’ aguacate, palta; ‘green bean’ habichuela verde, judía, chaucha, haba; ‘beans’ habichuelas, frijoles, porotos; ‘sweet pepper’ ají, chili para relleno, pimienta; ‘corn on the cob’ elote, choclo.

Sometimes the struggle for comprehension involves both food and sex in the same word. In many countries of Latin America, cajeta, a creamy caramel spread, made from milk and sugar, is used on pancakes or toast or as an icing or filling for cakes, candies, and cookies; but woe to the sweet-toothed Mexican who asks a waitress in Montevideo if she has cajeta. She will not know he means dulce de leche: she will understand him to be asking her if she has a cunt. On the other hand, if the Mexican slips and says chingada, which might burn the ears of a Mexican waitress, the Uruguayan will not bat an eye, because she will not know the word at all. Many Americans whose Spanish is a rudimentary Tex-Mex assume that ¡chingada! and its bowdlerized form ¡chihuahua! are universal expletives among Hispanic peoples, but it is not so. Even where a certain sexual allusion is common throughout the Hispanic world, the words that express it may not be the same for all regions. Spanish speakers everywhere cite testicles both to label a man a hero and to call him an idiot. To say that a man has pelotas or bolas ‘balls’ or huevos ‘eggs’ is to qualify him as a brave and most admirable he-man. [I never use the word macho any more, because the English-speaking world has adopted it and ruined its noble connotations.] But if a man is pelotudo or boludo or huevón, it means he has outsized testicles, i.e., he is stupid or subhuman.

Every region of the Hispanic world has its own collection of words for human genitalia, and sometimes these words are transferable to other regions, but more often they are not. In Buenos Aires, for example, the penis is known variously as la pija, la pistola, la poronga, el nabo ‘turnip,’ or el mongo. [Those who assert that language can be sexist may note with perplexity that the most commonly used words for penis, testicles, and beard, attributes which characterize men as men, are of feminine gender in Spanish, whereas the words for a woman’s breasts, except for the indelicate tetas, are masculine (senos, pechos.)] One can imagine the impact on the public of Buenos Aires the day a careless or mischievous typesetter set up a headline chronicling the doings of the famous General Slim, known east of Suez as Monghi Slim. The headline stood out blatantly on the newsstands, and even those who spoke no English could understand from the words MONGO SLIM VICTORIOUS that he had won and what somebody thought of him.

I have heard fewer names for female genitalia, and that may be because the shape offers fewer opportunities for similes than the male organs. As noted, cajeta is used in one region. Although in some other countries it means ‘caramel syrup,’ its original Spanish meaning is a ‘small box,’ and the sexual application is obvious. Concha means ‘shell’ and is also apt. Vaina, a descendant of vagina, is perfectly acceptable in most Hispanic countries and means exactly what its Latin root meant, ‘sheath.’ Like vagina everywhere in the modern world, vaina in Colombia has come to be used for one human organ; but whereas vagina is clinical and acceptable in most circumstances, vaina is obscene in Colombia. Anyone who has spent time there can testify that Colombian males use the word with the same emphasis, intent, and effect as English-speaking males of all nations use the word fuck in locker rooms and barracks.

Some years ago the State Department assigned a friend of mine, who is fluent in Spanish, to a tour of duty in Bogotá, a city he did not know. He was accompanied by his wife, Vina. Now, when one uses the word señora as an adjective in Spanish, it can have the meaning ‘magnificent, grandiose’—as in ¡Es una señora casa! ‘It is a tremendous house!’ For many days, my friend’s new Colombian friends were either too embarrassed or too mischievous to tell him that he was introducing his wife (“Señora Vina”) to Colombian society as “my magnificent cunt.”

Anyone who has tried to enter into a foreign language in another land has experienced or heard about those moments when the innocent use of a word suddenly submerges the speaker in a shocked silence.

It happened to me. A group of close friends took me partridge hunting in Uruguay, and I had an excellent day. My friends argued good-naturedly among themselves and with me about whether this yanqui was really that much of a crack shot or whether it was all puro ojete. Ojete means ‘eyelet,’ but it was obvious from the context that they were saying I was unbelievably lucky. Pues bien, at a cocktail party in Montevideo a few days later, I was holding forth to a mixed group of Uruguayans on the marvels of their country’s game birds, and this kind of praise invariably garners a sizeable and attentive audience. After announcing the number of birds I had bagged, I modestly admitted in a clear and ringing voice that it had been nothing but puro ojete.

Reflexively, a friend standing nearby said, “What did you say?”

And so, I said it again.

By now, the glassy eyes around me told me something was wrong. Later, I learned that in Uruguay, ojete means only one thing —‘asshole.’ In defense of my hunting companions, they had not tried to play a trick on me. They assumed that I knew what the word meant, just as they assumed that I knew that the most vivid way to call a man phenomenally lucky is to say that he has a huge asshole.

Uruguay was also the scene of a slip that I think must stand as an all-time classic. A young woman from a northern country (Ecuador, I think) was visiting a posh country club near Montevideo. She was of that green-eyed, blonde Spanish type one sees so frequently and with such pleasure on the streets of Madrid, and her face was matched in beauty by a superb body. The bikini had not yet shrunk to the string size of today’s models, but she was nonetheless giving the males around the club pool a pleasant afternoon contemplating the contents of a provocative bathing suit. Needless to say, a large number of young males had gathered to enjoy the spectacle.

In the midst of the almost palpable lust, she eased herself gingerly into the water. She wasn’t serious about swimming; it was simply a continuation of the show. After paddling about daintily and seductively for two or three minutes, she got out and stood dripping divinely at the edge of the pool. But when she took off her bathing cap and fluffed her golden tresses, she discovered that they were damp. Whereupon she exclaimed, “¡Ay, mira mi cabello! ¡Y apenas me mojé la concha!”

In her native region, concha means ‘skin,’ and so she was not saying anything extraordinary from her point of view. But to the dumfounded Uruguayans, she had exclaimed, “Darn it, look at my hair! And I just barely got my cunt wet!”

I wonder if she still blushes when she remembers, as I still feel embarrassed about having proclaimed the size of my asshole at an Uruguayan cocktail party. She and I belong to an exclusive club from which any normal person would, in fact, wish fervently to be excluded. If I had any way to get in touch with her, I’d tell her it helps to write about it. Or, if she prefers not to do that, then my advice, in her own dialect, would be to relax and try to maintain a thick concha.

The Failures of Success

Laurence Urdang

Large corporations elicit little sympathy in our society. Despite their employment of large numbers of people, their providing of income and security to many who are shareholders, their contributions to charity and worthwhile causes, and their other activities that directly and indirectly affect the lives of many with whom they have no discernible connection, large corporations are often criticized, chiefly because they tend to be impersonal and offer little in the way of individuals with whom the man-in-the-street can identify. The days of Henry Ford, DuPont, and the unfortunate theme, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America,” are behind us, replaced by the instant millionaires of Silicon Valley.

This is not an apologia for corporations, large or small, personal or impersonal; rather, it is to point out that all companies share one concern: the protection of their rights and property. The governments of most countries that offer patent and copyright registration make no claims of protection of those registrations: it is the responsibility of every company to protect itself, and the larger companies, with more resources at their disposal, are generally better able to cope with what their lawyers deem to be infringements.

This publication was first published in the spring of 1974, and its name, VERBATIM, was immediately registered with the U.S. Patent Office as a tradename. That did not stop a western manufacturer of computer media (mainly floppy discs) from calling its product “Verbatim” several years later. We filed a formal protest attempting to block their registration of the name, but we did not get very far because a quarterly periodical on language was too remote from computer media to be directly competitive. (Thus, duPont cigarette lighters do not “interfere” with DuPont chemicals or other products.) A settlement agreement was reached providing, basically, that Verbatim media would not be sold containing any text or information on them and VERBATIM would not go into the computer media manufacturing business (at least, not using that name). (Several years after that agreement, we received a firm note from the—evidently—new law firm for the manufacturer who had just noticed our quarterly and wanted us to stop using “their” name. A quick note brought them up to date. All this is prompted by an advertisement in Publishers Weekly for June 10, 1983, in which the Xerox Corporation (which, incidentally, owns R.R. Bowker, the publisher of PW) reproduced a part of a page from “a leading Roget’s Thesaurus” in which noun and verb synonyms for duplicate are given as “Xerox.” The copyright notice indicates that the publisher is Doubleday & Company and, if I know anything about such matters, I can vouch for Xerox’s having written a firm but friendly letter to Doubleday about the listings. (The same listings appear in the Synonym Finder, edited by someone named Laurence Urdang, and published by Rodale Press, but those carry the label “Trademark.”) Protectors of trademarks insist that their charges are adjectives. Although people may say “Make a Xerox copy of this, Miss Phoebelfinger,” when they do it is likely that they are thinking about Xerox as a noun in attributive position modifying copy, in much the same way as one might analyze house call, baby boom, paper profits, or any of the myriad other such combinations. Yet the authors of the Xerox advertisement write the following:

… But we’d like to bring up a grammatical point.

• The Xerox trademark is not a noun. Nor is it a verb. It is a proper adjective and should always be followed by a word or phrase describing one of our products. Such as a Xerox copier, Xerox word processor, Xerox electronic printing system, etc.

• So please check your Thesaurus and, if necessary, make these corrections. And please feel free to use Xerox—the proper adjective—as a part of your speech.

• That way you can be sure that when you ask for a Xerox product, you’ll get only a Xerox product. And not just a synonym.

Sympathetic though we may be toward the protection of trademarks and copyrights and patents, it seems obvious to all that the entire matter, whatever its legal weight, is merely a trivial token of protest: language cannot be legislated (except, perhaps, in France) nor can its grammar or even its “grammatical points.” It is unlikely that any analysis by a grammarian or other linguist would yield the information that Xerox is only a proper adjective. Moreover, adjectives are identified not by legislation but by analysis of text; in such circumstances English is a proper adjective in English muffin, French is one in French letter, and American is one in American English. But English is a noun in He speaks English and French is a verb in Let’s French Oswald’s bed.

Besides all this, language is usually considered as essentially spoken, written language being merely an adjunct form. To be sure, writing has been around long enough to have acquired various styles of its own (in the sense that we have formalized certain kinds of writing so that they differ from what almost anyone is likely to say, viva voce), but that is not at issue here. The proverbial fly on the wall would probably be able to cite Xerox as a verb and as a noun millions of times a day in offices all over the world.

That fact dismays trademark lawyers. Imagine starting a company that manufactures a particular product. Surely, your dream would be to make the name of that product a “household word,” uttered by anyone in preference to any other term that might exist for the product or the process it performs. In this way, the British use hoover for vacuum (verb) and vacuum cleaner, and Americans use thermos for vacuum bottle. (Although Thermos is still a trademark of the Thermos Company, it is also a generic used to describe a Pelican vacuum bottle.) As the story goes, Cellophane was once a trademark, a status that was lost when, at a legal proceeding, the company’s attorney was asked, “If this product were not called ‘Cellophane,’ then what would you call it?” At a loss to offer a suitable generic, the case was lost, and cellophane became a generic name.

Such is not the problem with Xerox, for there are generics that can be substituted—machine copy or just copy. The difficulty arises because the Xerox Corporation has been so successful in promoting its copiers that the word Xerox is on everyone’s lips, even for copying done on machines that do not employ the xerographic process. Trying to remove a word from everyone’s lips is like trying to persuade women everywhere to stop wearing lipstick. Such are the vicissitudes of success.

Language Etiquette

Sterling Eisiminger, Clemson University

At the age of fifteen, George Washington wrote his “Rules of Civility” (1747), which included the following admonition, “In Speaking to men of Quality, do not lean nor look them full in the face.” This was not the first advice that Americans got on the etiquette of oral and written language, for books on manners and morals had long been in heavy demand from both European and domestic authors. Arthur Schlesinger in Learning How to Behave (1947) summarizes the advice of pre-Civil War writers on language etiquette as follows, “When conversing…pains should be taken not to remind one’s companions of their plebeian origins…. On the other hand, you mustn’t put on airs….” Such democracy, however, did not extend to the use of dialects. The author of The Habits of Good Society (1858) (“A matron”), advised, “Good society uses the same language everywhere, and dialects ought to be got rid of in those who would frequent it…. Localism is not patriotism, and therefore until the Union is dissolved, we must request people to talk English in English society.” On the other hand she argued that dropping “that eighth letter of our alphabet” is far better than bad grammar.

Though no pre-Civil War book of etiquette that I have seen prescribes conversational guidelines between whites and blacks, a 1937 study reconstructs what they must have been. Bertram W. Doyle in The Etiquette of Race Relations in the South (1937) notes that “in some instances, if addressed by the master, the servant might enter into the conversation ‘as if he were a family friend, better informed on some local and domestic points’ than the master. He did not, however, initiate or enter into a conversation unless addressed.” In private, there were undoubtedly exceptions to the above, but when several whites were gathered, blacks generally stood, hat in hand, and remained silent.

While social intercourse between whites and blacks was apparently ignored by the standard bearers of etiquette, the discourse of young ladies was not. In 1859 Miss Elisa Leslie offered some very specific advice concerning “the phraseology of females,” who had evidently fallen under the influence of “nurses and servants.” Miss Leslie suggests that one avoid “monstrous glad” when one means “very glad”; avoid “turn out the tea” when one means “pour the tea,” and avoid “braid the eggs” when one means “beat” them. The list below summarizes her advice.

AVOID	USE
admire	like
beat out	tired
cunning	pretty, dainty
down cellar	down in the cellar
drunk	awry
dump	put down
emptyings	yeast
floored	disconcerted
gale	fit of laughter
ice-ball	snow-ball
“I love oysters.”	“I like oysters.”
Kate (etc.)	Katherine (etc.)
“I live to Newark.”	“I live at Newark.”
mayhap	perhaps
muss	mess
pin-ball	pin-cushion
“Pork is not healthy.”	“Pork is not wholesome”
rich	comic
seedy	faded
snooze	nap
stoop	porch, door-step
trade	exchange
ugly	bad-tempered

The post-Civil War era saw prescribers of etiquette turning much of their attention to affected elegance, though certain indelicacies were still proscribed. Schlesinger summarizes the post-war advice saying that long words, high-sounding phrases, “and other ways of showing off should be sternly repressed if one wish[es] to avoid the faux pas of the lady who, being asked whether she had seen the Dardanelles while abroad, replied, ‘Oh, yes; we dined with them several times.’ ”

Concerning the use of slang during this time, Richard A. Wells in Manners, Culture, and Dress (1894) counsels that “all slang is vulgar” and should not be mistaken as “a substitute for wit,” for it lowers “the tone of society and the standard of thought.” Concerning the double entendre, “A well-bred person always refuses to understand a phrase of double meaning.” Should one chance to hear an indelicate word, “Then not the shadow of a smile should flit across the lips.” And should a gentleman converse with a lady, he should pay her “the compliment of seeming to consider [her] capable of an equal understanding with gentlemen.”

Such condescension receives some comeuppance in Francis W. Crowninshield’s Manners for the Metropolis (1908). Crowninshield, who edited Vanity Fair for many years and who was an urbane member of New York society, nimbly and succinctly deflates the stuffed-shirt snobbery and pretensions of the smart set. Among his ironic aphoristic pieces of advice are “Try to remember that there are only two kinds of plays and novels—they are either ‘bully’ or ‘rotten,’ ” and, “It is not modish to speak kindly to the servants…. In addressing them, simply say: ‘Where the devil are my boots?’…Remember that they get even' in the servants' hall.” Tongue in cheek, Crowninshield advises finally that a man should avoid calling the wine “the fizz,” and his wife “his mother.” Other phrases to be dutifully avoided are “Pardon my glove” and “Pray rest your cane.”

Following the First World War, there was a great relaxed sigh that permeated the stuffest of etiquette books, which continued to be in demand; over sixty were published in the 1920s alone.

As typical of the new relaxed mood, Schlesinger cites the following as representative, “As for men swearing before ladies, one college youth adjured his fellows, ‘Try not to,’ while another observed, ‘If they say damn, so do I, when useful.”’ Still, while some post-war guides sanctioned swell, sweetie pie, taxi, flivver, movies, hunch, flapper, and the blues, others remained quite prescriptive. The list below, drawn from Martens’s The Book of Good Manners, Richardson’s Standard Etiquette, and Eichler’s The New Book of Etiquette, all published during the 1920s, gives a representative sample of words and phrases to be avoided.

AVOID	USE
beastly	nasty
bred and born	born and bred
bum	waster
chin music	talk
dander	anger
dinge	Negro
dippy	foolish
durst	dare
elegant house	handsome house
fresh	impudent
geezer	elderly man
genteel	well-bred
“He’s a case.”	“He is odd.”
murderous	deadly
nerve	independence
“No flies on her.”	“She’s very clever.”
sheeny	Jew
show	play
tony	stylish
vest	waistcoat

Frederick H. Martens in The Book of Good Manners (1924) goes a step beyond the above general proscriptions and forbids the following “vulgar elegancies”: alleviated poverty, banquet, effluvium, felicitate, lassitudinous, lineament, liquid refreshment, and ventilate in the sense of ‘explain.’

Since the 1930s, writers of etiquette books have generally avoided specific recommendations of diction like those above and offered instead very general advice that few would quarrel with. Llewellyn Miller in The Encyclopedia of Etiquette (1967) does inveigh against euphemisms like “in a family way,” “expectorate,” and “lavatory” and such gobbledygook as, “finalize an undertaking.” But Charlotte Ford is more typical of recent writers. She states that “conversation is like a dance, in that one partner leads and the other follows, the difference being that the roles of leader and follower shift continuously.”

Of all the contemporary etiquette advisers, Elizabeth L. Post seems to be the most prescriptive, yet compared to Miss Leslie, she is mild indeed. Concerning pronunciation, “cherce” for choice is not acceptable, while “wawsh” for wash is. “A markedly local accent,” she warns, might suggest to some “a mind limited to that particular locality and uninformed about the broader issues.” And while “coarse or profane words are unnecessary,” slang, she notes, can be an asset to your conversation. A few terms are proscribed (“drapes” for draperies, “reckon” for think, “folks” for family, and “party” for person), but generally she advises, “Everything that is simple and direct is better form than the cumbersome and pretentious.”

Of course every generation would agree with this last statement by Ms. Post, but each has its own definition of the cumbersome and pretentious. To be sure, linguistic codes quickly outlive their usefulness, but reviewing them can throw much light on the growth and direction of contemporary language.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“We treated between 70 and 71 people.” [Mary Zeigler, assistant director of nursing at Coshocton County Memorial Hospital, quoted in The Columbus Dispatch 27 March 1983. Submitted by Dorothy Brauson, Columbus, Ohio.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“…the test of the MG Turbo Metro revealed the achilles' heel of mixing old and new wines. By this I mean the ‘A series engine’ has been coupled to a Turbo.” [“Road Test,” by Denzil Angoves, in Somerset & West, April 1983. Submitted by John Brunner, South Petherton, Somerset.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Handbook of Good English

Edward D. Johnson (Facts on File, 1982), x + 309 pp.

Time was when one could write or publish a dictionary or other book dealing with language, reasonably secure in the knowledge that those who bought it and used it would be guided by the information it contained on spelling, pronunciation, meaning, usage, and so on. Increasingly, we receive letters from teachers complaining about students who are so ignorant that (a) they haven’t even the foggiest notion that there might be something awry in their spelling, grammar, or usage, and (b) even if they have doubts are so ill equipped that they are incapable of spelling a word correctly, hence cannot look it up. There is nothing wrong with the book under review except the following assumptions on which it is based:

1. The user suspects that something may be wrong with what he has written.

2. The user—if he does suspect something amiss—can find the part of the book relating to his question.

3. The user—if the two foregoing prove true—is capable of understanding the advice given.

Of what use is it to write of adjectives and adverbs when many—those, in fact, who need most to know—haven’t the slightest idea of what adjectives and adverbs (or, for that matter, nouns and verbs and prepositions, etc.) are? The good advice, “Do not put a comma between an adjective or adverb and a following word or phrase that it modifies. When an adjective or adverb follows the modified word, usually set off the adjective, but not the adverb, with a pair of commas” is totally lost on those who are unfamiliar with the terms used. Can you imagine such people dealing with words like adjectival, compound, and participle? This book abounds in such nasty terms. Even though there is a glossary (in which adjective, but not adjectival, is defined), that can be of little help to those who do not know the alphabet.

It is a pity that the sound advice given in this book is not likely to reach those who need it. Those of you who do not need it may wish to buy it because it contains direct, easy-to-follow counsel based on the philosophy expressed by the author in the opening line of the Introduction: “This book is strict rather than permissive, because it assumes that those who consult it want to be protected from criticism.” I have no quarrel with that. If I must nitpick, it is with the sparse treatment (Rule 1-7) of the possessive with the gerund (vs. the objective with the participle). That is a fine point, and the author, who is certainly not incorrect in his view, would have prepared his argument better had he adduced more examples instead of writing, “But often there is a difference in meaning, and then the distinction [between possessive + gerund and objective + participle] is worthwhile.”

Another matter on which I should take issue is the comment, “Do not usually consider the part of a periodical’s name.” Examples follow, including a set showing the results of the author’s own judgment. In my opinion, the article is either part of the proper name of the periodical or it is not: when it is, it should be treated as the title is treated (underlined or italicized); when it is not, it shouldn’t be.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Everyman’s Good English Guide

Harry Fieldhouse (J.M. Dent, 1982), xiii + 270 pp.

The first item served up for criticism in this book is the pronunciation system: without wasting much time on it, I should point out that it is awful, though undoubtedly it would have not been quite so bad had the book designer kept his itchy fingers off it and set it in a serif face, not sansserif, as it appears in the book. If the reader does not know how a word is pronounced before checking it in the Guide, he is likely to learn little from the information provided.

I am confused, too, as to why Dent thought that this book would (or could) do well in America. Its orientation is British; though American English is occasionally mentioned, the punctuation of the text is British in style, and the language and style described is mainly British. For instance, classified is described as “a contraction of classified as secret”; in American English (at least), it means “classified as confidential, secret, top secret, etc.” The comment under differ from/with concerning different/differently with to/from illustrates a typically British usage: Americans may say “different than,” but they are rarely heard to say “different to,” which is British. The pronunciation of muezzin, given as rhyming with “Dewey’s in,” is not verifiable in any American dictionary I checked or in Collins English Dictionary. Other pronunciations are also odd: that of crochet, for instance; the comment that depot is pronounced in American English as DEE’POE (how about the WWII repple-depot?); mezzanine is never pronounced metsa- in the U.S.; only British *r-*less pronunciations (HAWD for hoard/horde) are shown. Other problems: Celluloid is still a trademark (in the U.S.), where hoover for ‘use a vacuum cleaner’ is not used; the objection to hopefully is by no means confined to Britain; alternate is not stressed on the second syllable (when used as a verb) in America.

There are many other matters that could be taken up here. Were it not for the publication of this book in America (where it contains too many inaccuracies to be useful), it might be passed off as unworthy of comment. But the inaccuracies about American English are a serious disservice to British readers, as well, making the work of dubious value on either side of the pond.

Laurence Urdang

Light Refractions

Thomas H. Middleton

Credits

Remember the old days when movie credits told us who produced the film, who wrote it, who directed it, who recorded the sound, and who acted in it? Even that was a bit more than most of us wanted to know; but today, credits have taken on a life of their own, and we are treated to a cornucopia of names and titles rivaling the Manhattan telephone directory.

My wife and I saw Sophie’s Choice a few weeks ago, and when the final scene had faded and the credits started to roll, we slowly rose and threaded our way across the row of raised seats, then up the aisle, all the while looking back at the screen, on which an interminable list of positions and the names of the people who filled them was being projected at a reasonably fast clip. The names were still rolling as we left the theater.

A few days later, I thought it might be interesting to investigate this phenomenon, so I called my friend Bert Freed, who is on the executive committees of three separate branches of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (Bert is one of those many fine actors whose names are unfamiliar to the average movie-goer, but whose work on stage, the big screen, and the television screen is consistently excellent and whose face you would surely recognize.) He arranged to have the Academy send me several of the official folders distributed by the studios for the important preview showings of their biggies. Among the batch they sent were the credits for Sophie’s Choice and E.T.

E.T. is a dilly. Not counting cast and stunt men, I figure one hundred seventy-seven credits.

E.T., of course, is a special case, what with all the special effects. Nevertheless, the list includes the names of scores of people who worked on the film who fifteen years ago wouldn’t have received screen credit and whose jobs could have been done by anyone. Now they’re getting their names on the screen in a sort of “egos-bustin'-out-all-over” display of publicity. We would certainly expect to be given the names of the producer, director, writer, and actors. We might reasonably expect the names of the cinematographer and the editor; but the first assistant editor? the second assistant editor? “E.T. Eyes Design”? “Matte Photography Assistant”? What the hell is that?

How about “Best Boy”? As Laurence Urdang says, “Sounds like a catamite!” Having acted, with extraordinary skill and a plethora of anonymity, in dozens of films, I’ve known a few “best boys,” and most of them have been very close to the time of life for Social Security. A best boy is an assistant, either to the gaffer, who is the head electrician, or lighting man, or to the key grip, who is the head of the grips-the grips being the guys who move equipment around a movie set. I asked Robert Wise, the producer and director (Sound of Music, West Side Story, The Sand Pebbles, etc.), about the specifics of “Best Boyhood,” and he said that the best boy is not simply the first assistant to the gaffer or the key grip, but the one who’s in charge of maintaining the equipment. A job entailing considerable responsibility, surely, but hardly one meriting space on a crawl, I should think. The fact is that probably no more than a dozen people in the universe give a best boy’s bum about who filled the position of gaffer, key grip, lighting best boy, grip best boy, transportation captain, first aid, or “Harvey’s owner and trainer,” whatever the hell that means. (I suppose if I had the time, money, and strength to sit through E.T. again, Harvey’s identity would come back to me in a flash, but you mustn’t expect martyrdom.)

In the E.T. credits, they also list the “Dolly Grip.” That’s a special category I’d never heard of, though I’ve seen many of them. They’re not, as you might surmise, Barbie-holders, but the guys who are skilled in moving the camera dolly at exactly the pace the director has called for in a “dolly shot.” It seems to me like the sort of thing any idiot could do, but, never having tried it, I could be quite wrong.

“Dolly Best Boy” would be an intriguing title, but the E.T. bill doesn’t list it as one.

“Script Girl” is a credit that used to raise leers and chuckles among the lay audience. I mean, everyone knew a script girl was a lay for the director or the producer, right?

“Script-Girl” might have appeared as a credit on French films before it did on American films. I’ve seen “Script Girl” on American films, but it was a short-lived credit on this side of the Atlantic. The feminist movement did it in. The title is now “Script Supervisor,” and I think it’s about time. The Script Supervisor is now often a man. And back in the days when a script girl was a script girl, she was almost always a woman of some maturity, however tender her years, and, unless the film was a bad joke, she was someone of considerable competence. I’ve worked on many a film in which the script girl contributed infinitely more of value than the director. The script girl is usually responsible for making sure that dialogue, costume, hairdo, facial smudges, and all the other essential minutiae match from take to take, and the coordination of those minutiae can mark the difference between a good scene and a mess.

E.T., as everyone knows, was directed and produced by Steven Spielberg. Not everyone knows that it was also produced by Kathleen Kennedy, and you’d be hard pressed to find a man-in-the-street who knows or cares that the production supervisor was Frank Marshall.

The reason I mention these folks is that their assistants also get billing. The Assistant to Mr. Spielberg was Janice Pober; the Assistant to Ms. Kennedy was Denise Durham; and the Assistant to Mr. Marshall was Patty Rumph. This would hardly be worth mentioning except that Robert Wise, who is an old-timer, tells me that “Assistant to” is the latest term for “Secretary to.” He said he was on one of the major lots a few months ago and he ran into a young woman whom he knew as a fellow producer’s secretary. He introduced her to a friend as “So-and-so’s secretary” and was corrected on the spot. “Assistant !” said the young woman; “I’m his assistant!” As his assistant, she probably doesn’t make any more money than she would as his secretary, but at least she gets screen credit to make her parents proud.

“DGA Trainee” is an interesting credit. The DGA Trainee on E.T. was a guy named John Flynn. DGA is the Director’s Guild of America, and a DGA trainee is someone who gets paid a minimum wage to hang around the set and sort of help out. Robert Wise tells me that they do things like showing visitors around. He says he was quite startled when, after a film of his had been released, a DGA trainee wrote him to complain bitterly that he hadn’t received film credit.

I guess that tells us precisely what film credits are all about. They’re not for the film-going public. They’re for the people credited, who evidently get a kick out of seeing their own names flash past fleetingly in a brief display of light and shadow on a screen. Talk about the bubble reputation! This one vanishes without a trace, and yet someone’s ego has been fed. I think that must say something about something, but I’m damned if I know what it is.

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“THE LOS ALAMOS SCHOOLS SUMMER SCHOOL PROGRAM WILL NOT DISCRIMINATE AGAINST ANY PERSON BECAUSE OF RACE, CREED, NATURAL ORIGIN, SEX, AGE OR HANDICAP.”—Los Alamos Schools Summer School, General Information. [Submitted by Barbara DuBois, Los Alamos.]

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“U.S., France, and Germany Take First Steps Against U.S. Technoleurephobia…Israel Jumps on Anti-Technoleurephobia Bandwagon”—Defense Electronics: April 1983, page 14. [Submitted by Robb L. Hoover, Bellevue, Nebraska.]

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“You almost expect people to fall on their knees and genuflect when they come here.” [Carl Graziano, executive assistant to the State Supreme Court (N.Y.), quoted in The New York Times, 23 May 1983. Submitted by M. Jordan, Ardmore, Pennsylvania.]

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Ristorante 75, N.Y.C., offers “Toastada Italiano—w/ Amaretto Butter Syrup” and “Sankaccino—Sanka, steamed milk & cinnamon.” [Submitted by Dennis Wepman, Bronx.]

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“Child grows into sweater.” [From a headline in the New York Daily News, 30 November 1982. Submitted by Bernard Witlieb, White Plains, New York, who comments, “Perhaps his bones began to knit.”]

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“Slow Down…Children Playing Sleeping Drunks on Road.” [From a road sign in Newnes, Australia in the National Enquirer, <5 October 1982. Submitted by Fairfax Stephenson, Seal Beach, California.]

Quasi Malediction: The Case of Linguistic Malentendu

D.G. Kehl, Arizona State University

One of the anecdotes to come out of Bernard Malamud’s twelve years of teaching at Oregon State recounts how the yet-unpublished novelist concluded his first class by leaning over the lectern and saying, “It has been brought to my attention that many of you people here today are practicing celibacy. I have nothing against this practice and will not penalize you for it.” When a few nervous giggles issued from the back of the room, Malamud pointed his finger at the gigglers and said, “I have documents in my possession which show that each one of you back there matriculated within the last two weeks. One as recently as this morning.” It is rumored that when the session ended with the sound of more nervous laughter, most of the class stole forth to consult dictionaries or roommates.

When the same linguistic ploy was used a year later, allegedly by Claude Pepper’s opponent in the 1950 senatorial election in Florida, the provincial rural listeners either had no dictionaries and roommates or felt no need to consult either. The remarks, which had a considerably more devastating effect, were as follows: “Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper before his marriage habitually practiced celibacy.”¹ Pepper was soundly defeated by 67,000 votes.

These two anecdotes illustrate what might be called quasi malediction—fancy but unfamiliar, sinister- or risque-sounding words somewhere between paronomasia and malapropism. Like the pun and double-entendre, quasi malediction is based on similarity of sound between two words with vastly different meanings, but, unlike the pun, it is less a play on words than a confusion between words: linguistic malentendu. Like the malapropism, quasi malediction involves similarity in sound between words, but, unlike the malapropism, it is not used incorrectly, nor does it express an untruth. Rather, the confusion results from a kind of linguistic short-circuiting through phonetic association.

If it seems hard to believe that the example Malamud used in 1949 would work effectively on today’s more sophisticated freshmen, here is a suggested update: “It has come to my attention that many of you are openly practicing altruism. Furthermore, I know for a fact that there are numerous thespians on campus and a great deal of unabashed homogeneity. As if that weren’t incredible enough, there are openly acknowledged philatelists, Saturnians, and practitioners of Satyagraha ! To those of you tittering in the back, let me say that I have seen students on this campus openly defenestrating and can assert unequivocally that you people have been masticating up to three and four times a day—and even doing it openly in groups.”

It would not be hard to imagine Senator Sludgebottom, reactionary member of the state legislature’s Appropriations Committee, speaking in opposition to the proposed budget for State U. “I wonder if you, my esteemed colleagues, and the morally upright taxpayers of this state, realize what is going on at State U., supported by our tax dollars! On a recent visit to the campus, I saw students openly festinating on the malls, conjugating in the halls, and even lucubrating in library stalls till all hours of the night! Altruistic professors are teaching things like syntactics, synonymy, syncretism, and synergism. And, incredible as it may seem, professors make a habit of examining students' theses! Furthermore, I have documented proof that several have openly advocated polysyndeton! One of the custodians told me that he has found used phylacteries around the campus. English professors actually teach their students to conjugate, even providing demonstrations, and talk about copulative verbs and genitive case, about rising action, climax, and falling action! Because of such a paradisaic atmosphere, which spawns lustration and plenipotent activity among students, tax monies are now being expended on such things as CLEP examinations and herpetology! If we don’t put our foot down now, next thing we know the administration will be dispensing phylacteries in the Student Union!”

Unlike the punster, who relies on his audience’s awareness of the two words' denotations, the user of quasi malediction relies on his audience’s ignorance of the denotation and confusion over connotation through phonetic association. Unlike Mrs. Malaprop and her kin, who confuse the denotation of two words and substitute one for the other on the basis of connotative confusion, the user of quasi malediction, fully aware of both, chooses an erudite but pejorative-sounding word, intending the false connotation to short-circuit the correct denotation.

One of the few belletrists to make use of quasi malediction in fiction is Peter De Vries. Perhaps his favorite example, at least the most often recurring (appearing in four of his twenty novels) is this one: “I have just found out my husband is heterosexual.”² Another version occurs in Madder Music, when a character announces at a fashion-show luncheon hosted by his wife, “Hi. I’m a closet heterosexual.”³

In De Vries’s Through the Fields of Clover there is this interchange:

“He’s a famous philatelist.”

“I suppose the theater is full of those…. Well in that case I suppose a girl is safe from him at least…. Has he ever undergone treatment for it?”

“It’s hopeless. He’s up all night with the things. Some rare specimens in his collection.”

“I can imagine. Can you tell me something about his background? Where is he from?”

“Walla Walla. His father was the town podiatrist.”

“Then it runs in the family. My, this sort of thing is on the increase….”⁴

When Cotton, the confused character, finally gets it all straight—or thinks she does—someone tells her that So-and-so is a well-known pederast, and she says, “Tell me, does he have a large practice?” —an example of true malediction unrecognized. Later in the same novel, another character says to Cotton, “You’re still interested in monads.” Cotton’s mother, Mrs. Marvel, replies, “Well, intellectual often goes with high-sexed.”⁵

Another example occurring in two of De Vries’s novels uses charisma as quasi malediction: “They tell me you have charisma. You certainly don’t look well. Are you taking anything for it?”⁶

Another example occurring in two of De Vries’s novels uses charishma as quasi malediction: “They tell me you have charishma. Tou certainly don’t look well. Are you taking anything for it?”⁷ Then there is the woman who fed her husband oysters “because she’d heard they were good for virility— thinking that was something to be cured”⁸ the woman who thinks afro is short for afrodisiac, having something to do “with colored people being so highly sexed”;⁹ the character who thinks “exhibitors” are “preverts”;¹⁰ the character who thinks a penal colony is a place where male chauvinists should be incarcerated¹¹ and the character who says, “I seemed to have an animus—I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded dirty.”¹²

Quasi malediction is innocent language which sounds dirty. Sometimes the connotative short-circuiting is completely unintentional on the part of the speaker or writer. Any English teacher who has attempted to teach Emily Dickinson’s poem “There Is No Frigate Like a Book” to a class of undergraduates has been introduced to the effect of unintentional quasi malediction in the classroom! The same nervous giggles can be heard when one uses such innocuous words as fructifying, frigorific, feckless, scrutable, and copulative verb.

Examples of quasi malediction with anatomical associations are: Regina/reginal, Künstlerroman, cochlea, cochinal, cockchafer, cockshy, cocksure, penal and penology, titillate, titivate, tit for tat, asinine, and assonance. Associations with bodily functions and scatology (a word sometimes confused with eschatology, thus rendering the latter, in those cases, quasi malediction) have produced such examples as: crapulence/ crapulous, shittah, piscine, pisiform, piscatology, epistemology, fasces, infarct/infarction, and mensuration. Sensitive speakers will be wary of talking about seminal influences, Pithecanthropus Erectus, cunning lingua franca, and in the case of Catholic theology, ejaculatory prayers.

When words are used with full reliance on the audience’s knowledge of denotations and awareness of, with no confusion over, the connotations, the result is a form of paronomasia. For example, the movie “E.T.” used a pun on Uranus. Similarly, such titles as Jerzy Kosinski’s Cockpit and Mickey Spillane’s Erector Set are double entendres, whereas Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants could validly be called an example of quasi malediction—if for no other reason than the fact that relatively few would be acquainted with those forms of medieval music.

Humorless readers of C.S. Lewis might summarily dismiss as unintentional quasi malediction what is more likely an effective double entendre. In his Preface to The Screwtape Letters, Lewis, discussing the depiction of angels in visual art, refers to “the frigid houris of a teatable paradise.” Both adjectives can be read as effective puns: the beautiful, black-eyed, seductive, Persian nymphs are not only stiff and formal but also sexually cold, just as the “paradise” is characterized not only by an atmosphere of people sitting at tea but also by a profusion of ample, abundant, and available teats! Such a reading hardly conflicts with the attitudes of a writer who argued eloquently in The Four Loves for humor in the bedroom!

More than most linguistic modes, such as paronomasia and malapropism, quasi malediction has diametric force. On one hand it can be used perniciously for propagandistic manipulation and even character assassination—the linguistic form of guilt by association—but on the other hand it can be used beneficially in the cause of Thalia—to create effective humor. Perhaps more widespread knowledge of the mode will decrease manipulation and increase and enhance the humor.

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More Heteronyms: Addenda & Corrigenda

Donald Drury, Long Beach, CA

Thanks to the response of VERBATIM readers north, south, east, and west, the original “Harvest of Heteronyms” [IX, 3] has now been greatly augmented in all previous categories. There have also been many useful suggestions, corrections, and even proposals for new classifications. Additions and changes are listed separately by category, with some explanatory notes for each section. To save space, however, I omit pronunciations and definitions. Readers may consult appropriate dictionaries for these—but are advised that some “heteronymic” words may be found only in certain sources (the OED or the Second New International, for example).

The numerical superscripts in the lists that follow identify the contributors of these addenda and corrigenda; their names are listed numerically at the end of this article. Where more than one person is credited, contributions arrived in the same mail or were postmarked on the same date. (Other correspondents subsequently offered a number of the same heteronyms, but recording all the duplications would be too cumbersome.) Entries not otherwise acknowledged were supplied by the author.

I. Pure Heteronyms

(Same spelling, different meanings and pronunciations, different origins)

are¹³
as¹⁴
ay
barrage¹⁴
boule
chela¹⁴
colon¹⁵
denier
dingy¹⁶
do¹⁴
evening¹⁷
flower^{17 18}
gibber¹⁹
gin¹⁹
glower^{17 20}
grave
hades¹⁹
he¹⁴
kine²¹
lamed¹⁴
lied²²
lunged
lunger¹⁷
mamma
morel
mow²³
nun¹⁴
peaked^{24 19}
sheave11¹⁶
perpend
placer
poll²¹
pussy¹⁷
rather
re
real²³
river
rugged¹⁷
salve²⁵
seer
severer¹⁷
shin¹⁴
sin¹⁴
singer¹⁷
skied
sol¹⁷
supply
tales
tier
titi
viola
winding

II. Quasi-heteronyms (Same spelling, different meanings and pronunciations, common derivation)

abuse²⁶
addict²⁷
address²⁷
affect
aged¹⁷
alternate¹⁷
anathema^{28 29}
appropriate²³
associate³⁰
attribute
bathing³¹
blessed
bustier³²
confines^{23 17}
close²³
collect¹⁵
combat²³
combine¹³
commune²³
compact¹⁷
complex¹⁷
compound^{23 13}
convert^{23 17}
compress^{23 17}
concert²³
conflict^{23 17}
conscript²³
consort^{23 17}
construct²³
contest^{23 17}
contrast²³
converse
convict^{23 17}
cursed
defect²³
delegate¹⁷
deliberate¹⁷
digest¹⁷
dogged
envelope³³
excuse¹⁷
forte³²
frequent¹⁷
hinder¹⁵
house¹⁷
impact¹⁷
import¹⁷
impress
imprint²³
impugnable^{34 29}
incense
incline
insult²³
integral¹⁹
intimate invalid
invert¹⁷
learned³⁰
live^{23 17 33}
liver
minute^{23 17 35}
moderate
mouth²³
object
occult
palatine
perfect¹⁷
permit^{23 17}
pervert¹⁷
pontificate
precedent
precipitate³⁰
premise
present(s)¹⁷
proceeds¹⁵
produce
progress
project
prospect
protest²³
putting³⁶
read^{23 17 37 26}
rebate²³
rebel^{23 17}
recall
refund¹⁷
reject²³
replay²³
route
second³¹
separate¹⁷
shive¹⁹
subject²³
suspect¹⁷
ultimate

III. Heterostructural³⁸ Heteronyms (Heteronymous pairs involving hyphenation or accent marks)

charge/chargé¹⁷
coax/co-ax¹⁷
coop/co-op¹⁷
cure/curé
expose/exposé¹⁷
file/filé
instate/in-state²⁷
lame/lamé¹⁷
mate/maté
pate/pâté²³
pave/pavé²³
pique/piqué
rebound/re-bound
recite/re-cite
recollect/re-collect²³
recount/re-count
recover/re-cover
redress/re-dress²⁷
reform/re-form
relent/re-lent²³,¹⁷
remark/re-mark
repose/re-pose
repress/re-press
resent/re-sent^{23 17}
reserve/re-serve³⁹
resign/re-sign⁴⁰
resort/re-sort^{23 17}
resorter/re-sorter
resound/re-sound²³
restrain/re-strain
resume/résumé^{23 17}
rissole/rissolé
rose/rosé¹⁷
sundry/sun-dry²⁷
unionized/un-ionized^{17 41}
vise/visé¹⁹

Other correspondents had questions and comments: Richard R. Centing (Columbus, OH), David Lemmon (Sydney, Australia), Sheffey Gregory (Norfolk, VA), Mrs. Arthur M. Bettman (Cincinnati, OH), and Mrs. K.M. Brown (Woodcliffe, NJ).

Still others suggested somewhat marginal types of heteronyms outside the scope of my article: those involving dialect words, words with apostrophes, or proper nouns and adjectives. W. Oliver¹⁶ noted two Lowland Scots words, know and row (both rhyming with cow), respectively meaning knoll and roll. Dr. Oliver adds, “Both of these words are in my trusty old Webster’s New International, ed. of 1931.” Al Oestreich (Cincinnati, OH) offered as/a’s, is/i’s, os/o’s and us/u’s.

Both the previously cited J. Rockwell¹³ and Charles M. Newman (New York City) sent in lists of lower-case/upper-case pairs. Mr. Rockwell noted the following “Semi-proper Heteronyms”: barre/Barre, liege/Liège, mobile/Mobile, natal/Natal, nice/Nice, polish/Polish⁴² rainier/Rainier, said/Said, and seine/Seine. Others he listed do not qualify as heteronyms, however, because of virtually identical pronunciation: bled/Bled, palatine/Palatine, and tyre/Tyre.

In addition to Nice, Polish, and Said, Mr. Newman’s list included job/Job, levy/Levy, lima/Lima, and reading/Reading. To these the author has since added acre/Acre, afar/Afar, air/Air, berry/Berry, chosen/Chosen, colon/Colon, deli/Deli, lanai/Lanai, maria/Maria, ravel/Ravel, scotia/Scotia, spree/Spree, tanka/Tanka, and worms/ Worms.

Finally, I must confess to having misplaced or lost a letter from yet another correspondent proposing multilingual heteronyms. Where will it all end?

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“TOPIC: Common Genital Heart Lesions in the Child & Adult.” [Title of a Conference held 8 March 1983 at the Department of Internal Medicine, University of Virginia Medical School. Submitted by Johannes Veldhuis, Charlottesville, Virginia.]

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“Orders and inquiries are mostly welcome.” [Advertisement of the China National Native Produce & Animal By-Products Imp. & Exp. Corp. Liaoning Animal By-Products Branch, 139 Stalin Road, Delian, China, in Financial Times, 14 March 1983. Submitted by C. Black, Malmö, Sweden.]

Antipodean English: Harmless Drudgery

G.W. Turner

“Revising a dictionary?” my friends say, “That must be a pretty straightforward sort of job.” In some ways it is; dictionaries feed on other dictionaries. Daniel Fenning’s Royal English Dictionary in 1761 inadvertently omitted the word uncle and a succession of dictionaries after his had the same tell-tale gap. A revision is of course even more openly derivative. But it is not without its problems.

Take one example. The Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary, which I am currently revising, has as a definition of quinine-tree ‘horse-radish tree (Petalostigma quadriloculare) or native quince, with bitter bark.’ Seems straightforward enough. Need to check a couple of cross-references—and the Latin name. These scientific names in Australia seem to be almost as unreliable as vernacular names. Snakes called Demansia a while ago are Pseudonaja now. A pretty little green bird called a greenie or chickowee used to be officially Meliphaga and is now Lichenostomus, and three species of Australian magpies, because they were found to interbreed, are now one species with the old specific names retained as varietal names, so that South Australia’s emblem, the white-backed magpie, maggie to his friends, is in full dress Gymnorhina tibicens hypoleuca. So back to Petalostigma quadriloculare.

First we put to one side, as a separate problem, the quinine bush (Alstonia constricta) and concentrate on the quinine-tree. A useful up-to-date guide to botanical names is Jean Galbraith’s Collins Field Guide to the Wild Flowers of South-East Australia, so we try that for quinine-tree. It is there along with another alternative name, cracker-bush, but the botanical name is given as Petalostigma glabrescens (not quadriloculare); there is no mention of horse-radish trees. We go to the new Macquarie Dictionary. It does include horse-radish tree but identifies it as Moringa pterygosperma; it does not mention quinine-trees or cracker-bushes. The Australian Encyclopaedia (the older and fuller 1956 edition) is probably the source of the entry for quinine-tree in the first edition of my dictionary; it also identifies Petalostigma quadriloculare as quinine-tree but adds the names crab-tree, native quince, and emu-apple, mentioning that all these names are shared by other plants. The Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary already has an entry for emu-apple but calls it Owenia acidula (also called native nectarine or native peach). It doesn’t have crab-tree. The Macquarie agrees with it about emu-apple but doesn’t have crab-tree either. Galbraith can’t be referred to for Owenia because it is not a south-eastern plant.

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary gives quinine-tree as an alternative name for three separate trees. One is the horse-radish tree (which is where we came in), but reference to its entry reveals that it refers to two trees. One of them does have the generic name Moringa, but it is an East Indian tree (M. oleifera); the other is Australian, but it has the generic name Codonocarpus. The other two references are to hop tree (an American tree) and native quince—which does indeed lead us back to the Australian tree and the name Petalostigma quadriloculare. But is their information up to date? The search goes on. There are botanists to write to, library lists of taxonomical names to consult. But sooner or later a decision must be reached and all the available information condensed into an allowable line or two before the next word is attacked.

And, similarly condensing my newsletter in a line or so, you will be patient next time you find one of those apparently vague but in fact very precise dictionary definitions of the kind ‘any of various Australian trees or shrubs.’

Television Advertising and the Language of Myth

Robert E. Ziegler, Montana College of Mineral Science and Technology

When Bill Cosby appears for Coca-Cola on TV, he derides the competition for engaging in “taste tests” and “challenges.” He implies that Pepsi and Royal Crown Cola still have to prove that people really prefer the way they taste. For the nation’s number-one soft drink, however, there is no such need for demonstration: “Coke is the real thing.”

Why does no one think to ask what the thing is that Coke purports to be? Because, to borrow from Roland Barthes, the ad employs mythical language that uses Coke as an empty signifier and then fills the significance with evidence of the product’s authenticity. It awards to Coke the status of a “predicative nature.” Thus the only suitable response to the ad that dresses its claim in the guise of truth is simple acknowledgment, silent acquiescence. Of course, Coke carries with it the memory of the other functions it has served. It has acted as a socializing agent for those who “shared a Coke and a smile.” It has even been presented as a force for world peace, as in the Christmas card commercial that shows young people from different cultures holding candles and coalescing into a single living tree, whose parts come together “in perfect harmony.” Barthes writes of the character of the mythical concept that it “appears in global fashion, it is… the condensation… of a certain knowledge.” So as a product that has absorbed its own advertising history into the mythical status it enjoys, Coke is freed from the need for self-description. Everybody knows what Coke is. “Coke is it.”

Viewers of massive amounts of television advertising function alternately as readers and decipherers of the myths they are exposed to. They feel they are inoculating themselves against the efficacy of the medium by presupposing a lack of artistic merit in the presentation of the message. As Jeffrey Schrank observes, “the personally immune… consider most ads silly…and generally a waste of time…. The problem is that the belief in personal immunity from the influence of advertising is the… group’s greatest weakness. A person who believes himself… immune will not take defensive actions, will not protect against exposure. The result of this weakness is a hidden susceptibility.” [Jeffrey Schrank, Snap, Crackle, and Popular Taste, New York: Dell, 1979, pp. 84-85.]

This presumed immunity exists most often with regard to advertising conventions that are so familiar to the viewer that he imagines any reading of them as entailing a demystification of the product claim. Thus the buyer feels that beneath the statements the advertisement makes he can see an advancement, an insinuation of the sponsor’s own self-interest. This recognition of the commercial’s motivation discredits the commercial’s message, he thinks. The meaning is that it is the advertiser’s advantage that is furthered by the product’s sale, not the consumer’s. Commercials that lend themselves most readily to this kind of cynical decoding emphasize the performance of the products they propose. Their language, even when self-serving, is informational and transitive, explaining what the product does, unlike the metalanguage of myth, in which the product is defined, revealed for what it is.

The most effective of these action-focused ads attend less to the transmission of the message than to its reception by the viewer, less to causes than effects. They depict an ameliorated state of things already brought about by the product’s purchase and consumption. Hemorrhoids shrunk, carpet clean, glasses spotless, headache gone: the mythologist of the language of the television ad often finds verbal actions in commercials instantly resolved into a set of statal adjectives. Thus the slimness of the models in the ads for diet soft drinks presumes a history of their product use. Fat adult men and women are never seen consuming on TV the colas that are light or free or the beers that are less filling. Only adolescents with fast metabolisms are shown partaking of the calorie-laden sodas of other, sugared brands.

There are also products meant to work on problems that arouse such anger in consumers that it is not the absence of an evil but the forcefulness of its eradication that interests viewers in the ad. Rodents, germs, insects, dirt, and pain: the penetration of the consumer’s body, clothes, or home is a prospect so distasteful that he takes at first for granted his exemption from all illnesses and infestations. But when he finds himself a victim, his shock and indignation are relayed by the shrillness and intensity of the advertising message. “Ralph, we’ve got rats!” a distraught housewife screams in horror to her husband, and at that point, no product is too violent, no ad too loud in offering a cure. Frequently personified by sneering animated figures, these nuisances require harsher treatment from the sufferer than their benevolent removal. They invite a retribution as unpitying as the scouring corrosiveness of bathroom cleansers and Listerine’s medicinal astringency. In matters of soil, vermin, and discomfort, the product’s own combative energy is transferred to the buyer. As Patricia Neal for Anacin asserts, “The world belongs to the fighters.”

In the interest of giving further proof of the competence and power of these products, the ads must also tell how far the problem they will remedy can otherwise ultimately spread. One rat or roach detected in a home betokens hosts of others out of sight, behind the floorboards and in cellars. Only d-CON can definitively purge the rodents; insects must be treated with the aggressive redundancy of Raid, which “kills bugs dead.” A simple tension headache may escalate into one that only analgesics of maximum arthritis strength can root out and destroy.

Unlike ads that document a buyer’s satisfaction with merchandise he used some time before, the commercial for a pain reliever or detergent will stress its working now. Barthes allows that advertisements like those for the French soap powder Omo, which frees the garment of its occupation by oily ground-in dirt, to some extent still indicate the performance and effects of the product. But chiefly, he observes, they “reveal its mode of action;… they involve the consumer in a … direct experience of the substance, make him the accomplice of a liberation rather than the mere beneficiary of a result.” These ads will therefore show the product “acting things” more than they will celebrate its understood achievements.

Even in commercials that concentrate on praxis, one can see how language often functions as the medium by which the results that one desires are finally attained. Instead of having famous personalities or actors explain how well the product works, the advertisement confers a certain volubility upon the symptom the item claims to cure. Thus nagging backaches can be silenced by Doan’s pills and tell-tale odors squelched by Carpet Fresh or Glade. Sometimes the enemies of consumers’ peace of mind are invested with an ability to talk, only to be drowned out, overpowered by the higher volume of the speech with which the product is endowed. “Want a tough stain out?” one bleaching agent asks. “Shout it out!”

Clearly, though, most commercials try conferring on their products the status of myth, so the merchandise they sell, like Band-Aids, Sanka brand, or Kleenex, acquires an absolute generic fullness and identity. When asking for a product, the consumer cannot even name the competition, thereby consigning it to a state of nonexistence. If, as Barthes contends, myth is a kind of language robbery, then the theft that takes place in an ad is that of language as prospective buyers use it to identify and then describe the goods that they have chosen. This appropriation of evaluative language from consumers takes place most basically and first of all on the level of the product’s name. Thus when asking for Good and Plenty candy from a movie house concessionaire, the patron cannot help but state that in each box he discovers quality and that it is abundant. Such instances of language usurpation by the product, in which to name an object is to praise it, are too numerous to mention. In past years, however, the function of television advertising language as a manner of doxology has extended to whole sentences as well. (Gregor Goethals explains that while advertising involves a trivialization of the sacred, it uses the same methods practiced by religion, only substituting commercial values for spiritual ones. “This transformation is accompanied by a metamorphosis of both images and faith: from gods to goods, from salvation to soaps.” [Gregor T. Goethals, The TV Ritual: Worship at the Video Altar, Boston: Beacon, 1981, p. 138.]) In this way, the I Can’t Believe It’s A Girdle girdle addressed the skepticism of the queen-sized woman who wanted to be comfortable and shapely all at once, as did the Support Can Be Beautiful bra. Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific shampoo went so far as to elaborate on the declarative remark contained in other product names and made of it the end point of a dialogue, an exchange with an imaginary person whose compliments attested to the benefits the product claimed to bring about. Today cats run up the stairs to talk on telephones and win pet food contest prizes by giving answers their owners are too ill-informed to know. But, as with their human counterparts, the repertory of their sounds and recall of brand names is limited. They are echoes of the advertising messages they have previously witnessed and are therefore reduced to asking for Meow Mix since there is nothing else that they can say.

In ads for products that pretend to the status of myth, there is meant to be an adequacy between the signifier and the signified, between a product and the satisfaction its use allegedly delivers. Because of this relationship, consumers are intended to infer that no other brand will do, that the fullness of the advertising message can be extended to the commodity itself. Yet sometimes the product’s value outdistances the expressiveness of the language that describes it. Thus shoppers are informed that “Safeway is everything you wanted in a store and a little bit more.” On the other hand, the item’s action may itself include a verbalizing of performance standards that still transcend the words used to convey them. “The Pine Sol signal says more than clean.” As with the lengthiness of brand names made into testimonials, there is an overflow of meaning here as well, so that advertising language must admit its inability to say how good the product really is. It is this that Barthes describes as “the silent garrulity of myth.”

While much in advertising still relies on the numbing repetition of rhyming slogans and incantatory jingles, there are other spots where messages are hushed, their speech intentionally muted, the better to elicit the interest of a mass of jaded listeners. “If you want to catch somebody’s attention,” a Coty commercial used to say, “Whisper.” And in fact it is most often in the advertisements for perfumes that the language is lightened by a certain airiness. Its message ventilated by the agreeable elusiveness of meaning, the speech already can be seen becoming rarefied to suit the nature and the substance of the product. In the end the messages are vaporized, suffused with a faintly sweetened vagueness so that they waft into the subconscious and permeate it with their soft mnemonic power. “I can’t seem to forget you,” a lover haunted by the memory of his woman’s scent recalls: “Your Windsong stays on my mind.”

Long saturated by the prolixity of ads that told of the advantages of product use and promised satisfaction with results, the consumer allows himself to be more open to commercials that work simply on the level of an invocation. Henceforth he becomes the reader of a metalanguage that does not “act the things,” as Barthes declares, but rather “acts their names.”

Already in commercials for Windsong and Chanel, for Essence Rare, the message was subtilized, expressing a need for less expression. Unlike the ads that rhapsodized over what their products did, these others began evincing a convenient manner of amnesia. They have consciously and willfully forgotten their own explanatory history, their obligation to define an item as better than the other leading brands, because the buyer cannot help remembering the product’s name and apparent value. The advertisement takes the vicious world in which a product has to fight the competition for its rightful market share and then subjects it to the magic language of myth. It in turn creates an image “that comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences.” As merchandise comes closer to attaining to this privileged, exalted state, the commercials become ever more laconic, their language marked by growing signs of complacent reticence.

In 1983 a television ad for Michelob consisted of several close-up shots of beer being poured slowly into glasses. Each was crowned by an ample head of foam, and the whole piece was accompanied by majestic strains of music. At the end, a man’s voice delivered the only line of text in the ad: “Some things speak for themselves.” From the plenary language of commercials that state a product’s name as proof of its naturalized superiority, there is but a short step to the commercial from which speech is altogether absent. Consumers’ participation in the ad becomes a manner of commemoration, in which the only thing remembered is the evidence of the timeless excellence of the products. Myth takes things, Barthes avers, and “purifies them,… makes them innocent… gives them a natural and eternal justification,… a clarity which is not that of an explanation but… of a statement of fact.” The economy of language in television ads, therefore, depends upon its having only to reinforce an earlier consensus, to take a product whose goodness it posits as already acknowledged, and then assert again that it is good. The purpose of the ad is to say the things that go without saying.

This substitution of essential speech for more operational speech can be found in almost every ad that reveals its product at the same time it envelops it in the mantle of myth. It is language as disclosure, articulated in a variety of figures, from the false antithesis of Parkay margarine that says it isn’t butter to the tautology of the soft drink ad that says that Coke is Coke.

When products start to talk in place of salesmen, one can be assured that they will soon be talking less, their need for explanation beggared by a meaning that is both ineffable and obvious. The product has assumed the value of an icon whose cause for veneration has long been lost in the eternity of its established value. Ideally the ad need only re-present a logo, reiterate a name in its performing of the liturgy of orthodox consumerism. Having raised the product to the level of myth, the ad can then depict a world that “wallow[s] in the evident, … establishes a blissful clarity,” whereby things, like Michelob, “mean something by themselves” [Barthes]. In the end, the nation’s best-loved products are sold in commercials where the meaning of the item is enriched by the impoverishment of the language that describes it. Speech then verges on the brink of silence, as sponsors and audiences alike concede that, in the context of the ad, their words are superfluous and insufficient all at once. Thus TV ads use language whose sole function is to celebrate its own exhaustion. They say Budweiser and then declare, “When you say Budweiser, you’ve said it all.”

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Oxford Dictionary of English Eymology

C.T.Onions et al., eds. (Oxford University Press, 1982), xiv + 1024 pp.

[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection]

For those who cannot afford the OED and find the etymologies given in college and unabridged dictionaries inadequate, the ODEE is an ideal companion. The etymologies provided are not, of course, as full or as thorough as those that can be found in larger works, but they are probably adequate for most use beyond the casual. Cognates and reflexes in other languages are provided, as well as the century in which the earliest evidence places them. About 24,000 basic etymologies are listed; with derivatives, more than 38,000 forms are treated. Entries are succinct and contain glosses for the various stages of semantic change undergone by the word. To pick a typical, well-known example of this genre, here is the entry for nice:

nice nais †foolish, stupid XIII; †wanton XIV; †coy, shy XV; fastidious, dainty; difficult to manage or decide; minute and subtle; precise, critical; minutely accurate XVI; dainty, appetizing; agreeable, delightful XVIII. - OF. nice silly, simple = Pr. nesci, Sp. necio, It. nescio :- L. nesciu-s ignorant, f. ne- NE + sci-, scīre know (see SCIENCE). So niceTY nai.s\?\ti. XIV. - OF. niceté.

As can been seen, various obvious symbols are used to indicate obsoleteness (†), and dated matter (small capital Roman numerals); other, less self-evident symbols (:— which signifies ‘normal development’;— ‘adoption of’, etc.) are clearly set forth in the front matter.

The only shortcoming of the ODEE is its pronunciation system, which repeats, in part, the curious system used in the OED. Moreover, the key is of little help for it contains examples like the following:

\?\ moral (m\?\r\?\l), priority (prai\?\r\?\ti).

Do you say the first vowel in moral to rhyme with that in shot or in short? The clue comes in

\?\ oft (\?\ft), broth (br\?\p),

I suppose. But why give boreen and cocotte, which can scarcely be said to be everyday words, as the key words for the pronunciation of the symbol o? Other sample words listed in the “Key to the Pronunciation” (ix) are Marathi, loofah, borax, gatling, discrepant, bodega, opulent, endue, and frustrum—not exactly words you find around the house. It comes as some consolation that the ODEE is a dictionary of etymology, not of pronunciation.

Notwithstanding this criticism, the ODEE is a serviceable, workaday reference that offers much useful and interesting information in usable form.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Kathy Miller of Scottsdale, Ariz., and her mother will discuss how the young teenager recovered after being handicapped in an accident during a luncheon sponsored by Bender’s Christian Supplies.” [From the Buffalo Pennysaver & Community News, n.d. Submitted by Joan Murray, Buffalo.]

Traduttore Traditore

Marcy S. Powell, Oxford, Ohio

Consulting a bilingual dictionary, all of us have doubtless had the experience of choosing the wrong translation of a given English word. Looking up the word ball for instance, the student is likely to find several French equivalents, but unless he also checks the French-English section (or better, a Petit Larousse), he may not know that un bal is ‘a dancing party,’ une balle ‘a tennis or golf ball’ (as well as baseball, cricket or hockey ball, and bullet), un ballon ‘a football,’ une bille ‘a billiard ball’ (or ball bearing or marble), and une boule ‘a croquet or bowling ball’—not to forget boulet ‘cannon ball,’ boulette ‘meatball,’ pelote or peloton ‘ball of string,’ and couille ‘testicle.’ Translating into one’s own language is of course less difficult, but the context may not always indicate whether to render esprit as ‘spirit,’ ‘ghost,’ ‘inspiration,’ ‘mind,’ or ‘wit.’

A university colleague of mine, upon receiving a Christmas greeting from a Chilean student that ended with the pious phrase “May the Lord bless and can you,” easily surmised that the lad must simply have taken the first dictionary meaning of Spanish preservar ‘to can, preserve.’ A French teacher, correcting a student’s composition, was puzzled by the expression plateau de frˆne, until it occurred to her that he had probably looked up ashtray as two words in the dictionary, then put them together. Some English schoolboy was responsible for interpreting Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift as La dernière chemise de l’amour, another for translating Shakespeare’s “Out, out, brief candle” as “Sortez, courte chandelle.” When Chateau-briand began putting Milton’s Paradise Lost into French, he came to the lines “Siloa’s brook that flow’d/Fast by the oracle of God,” and translated fast as rapidement. In a French magazine article devoted to the early works of Daniel Chester French, a picture of his Minuteman statue was labeled Le Petit Homme. In the French adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s amusing French Without Tears, a character asks how one would translate “Red designs on China” and gets the reply, “Eh bien, des motifs en rouge sur la porcelaine.” A keen-eyed proofreader on an American newspaper wondered why a bomber should be christened Shadow Theory, and discovered that the reporter had misheard the real name, Château Thierry. Such blunders corroborate the observation of Maimonides that the translator must know three things: the genius of the language from which he translates, the genius of the language into which he translates, and the subject matter.

American travelers have not generally excelled in their command of foreign languages. One, bound for Paris, was asked if he understood French, and replied, “I do, when I speak it myself.” On his return he was asked whether he had had any difficulty with the language while in France, and answered, “No, but the French did.” When the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, James Reynolds, was about to leave for a trade conference in Paris, he assured Senator Root that he spoke enough French to make waiters and cab drivers understand; whereupon the Senator wondered aloud, “Suppose there should be no waiters and cab drivers at the conference?” An American couple dining in a French restaurant, impressed by their French-speaking companion, failed to understand that he was instructing the waiter to give the check to the monolingual husband. And in the ladies' room, when the wife tried the water tap marked C she got scalding-hot water—for of course the C stood for chaud rather than the expected “cold.” Any traveler who hasn’t learned to think in the host language is likely to find himself translating word by word, as did the American who, seeing his bus rapidly disappearing down the street without him, made a wild effort to translate “I am left behind!” by shouting, “Je suis gauche derrière!”

Two of my favorite stories concern Americans traveling with a paucity of linguistic luggage.

Mr. Smith, visiting Paris, passed by a church where a wedding was taking place, and approaching a policeman, asked who was getting married. “Je ne sais pas,” replied the flic. The next morning the visitor, passing by the same church, noticed that a funeral was in progress and stopped a woman to ask who had died. “Je ne sais pas,” she responded. “Well!” exclaimed Mr. Smith, “he didn’t last long, did he?”

Mr. Goldberg registered at a French pension and went in to his first dinner. Presently he was joined at his table by a Frenchman who, before sitting down, bowed politely and said, “Bon appétit.” With equal formality Mr. Goldberg rose, bowed, and said “Goldberg.” This ceremony was repeated at each meal for a couple of days, until Mr. Goldberg consulted an acquaintance in the lounge, explaining how “the Frenchman tells me his name—Bon Appétit—and I tell him mine— Goldberg; but why keep it up day after day?” “Oh, you don’t understand, Mr. Goldberg,” was the reply, “Bon appétit isn’t his name; it means ‘I hope you have a pleasant meal.’ ” Mr. Goldberg thanked his friend, and arriving late for dinner, found the Frenchman already at the table. Before sitting down, Mr. Goldberg bowed formally and said, “Bon appétit.” The Frenchman rose, smiled, and murmured, “Goldberg.”

So, in the land where, as someone has said, one man’s fish is another man’s poisson, the French make similar errors when venturing into English. A French tycoon, addressing a group of American journalists, was asked what detail of American life had made the greatest impression on him. Wishing to be gallant, he replied, “The ladies' toilets”; and it took the journalists a while to realize that he was merely pronouncing in English the word toilettes in the sense of ‘dresses.’ Another Frenchman sought to attract the attention of a shapely English girl by exclaiming, “Oh, what a beautiful corpse!” A Belgian manufacturer, wanting to advertise his wares in English newspapers as highly durable, translated the French word inusable as ‘unusable.’ And in a military bulletin in World War II, a similar—and potentially serious—error was made by confusing des villages inhabités and ‘inhabited villages.’

Still another story has the Macmillans lunching with the de Gaulles in Paris. Mrs. Macmillan asks Mme. de Gaulle, in English, “What are you looking forward to now?” Mme. de Gaulle replies simply, “A penis.” A chill falls upon the table, until the silence is broken by M. de Gaulle saying softly to his wife, “My dear, I don’t think the English pronounce the word quite like that. It’s not ‘a penis’ but “appiness.' ”

Imagination often leads the translator astray. One recalls the irrepressible Hyman Kaplan, who explained to his night-school class that the “R.S.V.P.” he’d tacked onto his composition meant “Reply, vill you plizz?” Another youthful American defined mal de mer as a French expression meaning ‘mother-in-law,’ and his girl friend thought a tête-à-tête was a ‘doubleheader.’

During the Korean war, a comedian on a USO tour was addressing an audience of Korean soldiers who did not understand English, so a Korean officer volunteered to translate his jokes into Korean. After each joke, the Korean spoke into the microphone and the audience collapsed in laughter. The whole routine was a howling success, and afterwards the comedian thanked the Korean for translating his jokes so successfully. “Sorry,” said the officer, “but I wasn’t translating; you talked so fast I couldn’t follow you.” “But what were you saying into the mike?” With a sly grin, the Korean replied, “I was telling some jokes of my own.”

An American technician employed in a Russian plant received a distressing wire from home about his only daughter: “Harriet hung for juvenile crimes.” He discovered that the telegram had been translated into Russian, then retranslated into English—the original message had been “Harriet suspended for minor offenses.” Someone else had the idea of testing a computer by having it translate an English phrase into Russian and then back into English. He fed in the English maxim, “Out of sight, out of mind,” and a moment later got back “Invisible insanity.”

Samuel Johnson insisted that a man should not “let himself down” by speaking a foreign language imperfectly, and so spoke only Latin when he was in Paris. The rest of us do our best with the native tongue. When my wife and I were living in Paris, we spent an enjoyable evening in a French home where only French was spoken. Reminiscing about the past, my wife meant to say, “Je suis née à Cleveland,” but it came out “Je suis nue à Cleveland”—which brought to my mind an earlier occasion when I had referred to a middle-aged man as “Un homme du moyen âge.”

In conducting 30 tour groups through 60-odd countries around the world, I have enjoyed the services of many local guides, most of whom spoke commendably good English. However, even the best of them were likely to slip up occasionally, and as a language teacher I was interested in the kind of mistakes they made. In the Holy Land the guides frequently referred to the “seplucher”; in Cairo they must have been influenced by Arabic verb tenses when they informed us that “in Egypt it is very seldom raining.” In Kashmir, riding ponies up a mountain trail to Gulmarg, we halted to let a train of porters pass down; after watching four men plod past carrying a woman on a litter, my guide said in a low voice, “That’s for inválid old ladies.” Our Russian guides handled English very well, but I decided that they must all use the same textbook, after noting, in the course of ten tours over the years, that they consistently referred to public figures as having “perished” rather than “died”; and one guide in Leningrad must have wondered why the group laughed when he described the dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral as “the third-largest erection in the world.”

OBITER DICTA

Either usually means ‘one or the other,’ so Insert a washer at either end of the axle can easily mean ‘… at one end of the axle or the other’ rather than ‘… at each end.’ In constructions like the train had a baggage car at either end, the ambiguity becomes plain silliness. Avoid this ambiguity by avoiding the use of either: use either(!) each, or both, or one or the other, depending on the meaning.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Our quality temporaries can do your employees' work while they enjoy a deserved rest.” [Advertisement for Burnett Temporary Personnel in The Houston Post, 15 June 1983. Submitted by Frederick W. Harbaugh, Houston.]

Paring Pairs No. 12

The clues are given in items lettered (a-z); the answers are given in the numbered items, which must be matched with each other to solve the clues. In some cases, a numbered item may be used more than once, and some clues may require more than two answer items; but after all of the matchings have been completed, one numbered item will remain unmatched, and that is the correct answer. Our answer is the only correct one. The solution will be published in the next issue of VERBATIM.

(a). Does he slide on a rug?
(b). Act of affectionate podiatrist.
(c). Penultimate test of topless show.
(d). Cockney beauties at the prow?
(e). Needed for crystal-gazing.
(f). Film clips about Atlantic resort.
(g). Is this where to keep escape stash?
(h). Complete reversal by Briton of treatise on seabird.
(i). Caravanserai for aggressive youngsters.
(j). Amazing but not shocking that older actresses demand it.
(k). Three kings and famous pair find no room at the inn.
(l). Are these kids clockwatchers?
(m). Bury the delegation between the acts.
(n). Footwear for fisherman in the Serpentine.
(o). Jazzy means for cleaning cathouse.
(p). When the windows are bare.
(q). No more than is expected from Avis, rara or not.
(r). Diet food.
(s). Wheelwright.
(t). Depart after the third.
(u). You chaps practise pretense.
(v). Counterfeiter in flimsy airport building.
(w). Besotted beneficiary.
(x). Dammit! The sluice.
(y). Farmer’s play with a camel.
(z). Needed to elevate U.S. composer’s tunes?

(1). Eye.
(2). Tern.
(3). House.
(4). Bottle.
(5). Time.
(6). Rehearsal.
(7). Mission.
(8). Pink.
(9). Slipper.
(10). Shorts.
(11). Brain.
(12). Gang.
(13). Moccasin.
(14). Belles.
(15). Rag.
(16). Hostile.
(17). Kiss.
(18). Bow.
(19). Surprise.
(20). Flee.
(21). Curtain.
(22). Bird.
(23). Carpet.
(24). Bermuda.
(25). Inter.
(26). Youth.
(27). Sole.
(28). Hour.
(29). Glass.
(30). Undress.
(31). Full.
(32). Water.
(33). About.
(34). Tiger.
(35). Bag.
(36). Vanity.
(37). Man.
(38). Dairy.
(39). Heir.
(40). Felloe.
(41). Forth.
(42). Fare.
(43). Go.
(44). Guys.
(45). Polluted
(46). Chute.
(47). Air.
(48). Paper.
(49). Berlin.
(50). Drama.
(51). Lift.
(52). Youse.
(53). Eau.
(54). Hanger.

Paring Pairs No. 11

(a). Febrile cerebral. (22,20) Hot Head.
(b). B.P.O.E. fanatic wears deerstalker. (12,23) Elk Hound.
(c). Most deeply in the red. (31,28) Loss Leader.
(d). Bragging gets flimflam artist the chair. (8,42) Con Seat.
(e). Caution! Fruity exhibitionist. (36,15) Orange Flasher.
(f). Sojourn in Kennebunkport for person of substance. (32,49) Main Stay.
(g). Illegal whispering gallery. (47,11) Speak Easy.
(h). Greek soldier has flea? (21,29) Hop Light.
(i). Flower yields proper wine. (38,39) Prim Rose.
(j). Navigate through this network till your ship comes in. (35,5) Old Buoy.
(k). Head of Eames Company. (7,34) Chair Man.
(l). Tyre or Sidon, e.g. (51,37) Vintage Port.
(m). Mideast delicacy draws adoring glances. (44,13) Sheep’s Eyes.
(n). Disarmament on the up-and-up. (27,40) Kosher Salt.
(o). Cause of the Fall: just dessert. (1,14) Angel Feud.
(p). Restaurant investment. (18,50) Grub Steak.
(q). Slothful spirit in Islam? (45,26) Slow Jinn.
(r). Lassie—are you serious? (10,48) Dog Star.
(s). Basically revealed by tight jeans. (4,30) Bottom Line.
(t). Smell of the pitstop is rude. (24,41) Indy Scent.
(u). Tumbler of phenolphthalein. (52,17) Water Glass.
(v). Cross the line by burying the faction. (25,43) InterSect.
(w). Man-talk is a curse. (33,9) Male Diction.
(x). Catafalque for a midget. (46,2) Small Beer.
(y). Gambling spouse. (3,19) Better Half.
(z). Big (shot) daddy. (6,16) Cannon Fodder.

The correct answer is (53) Wine. The solutions are given below. The winner of No. 11 was Ms. Helen L. King, Dallas, Texas.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Well-Tempered Sentence: a Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed

Karen Elizabeth Gordon, (Ticknor & Fields, 1983), 93pp.

The subtitle may be a bit arch, and one may be given to wonder how only 13 marks of punctuation can possibly merit coverage in about 84 pages, but the secret is that there are a lot of attractive, amusing illustrations and the type is large. The book is, moreover, fun to read and is populated (in some of the example sentences) by people who might be close relations of those who populate Wordsmanship, by Claurène duGran: Charmiane, Nobiscus Kahn (professor of Angst), Charlotte Tingle (a sophomore), Saint Fracas, Lady Zipworth, et alii. Books (Om, Om on the Range), place names (the Nismer-East Blagundia Express), and friendly nonsense abound.

All this helps to relieve the boredom of examples usually encountered in such material. For instance, in the brief treatise on the comma, subsection dealing with introductory participial or infinitive phrases, we find,

Menacingly bopping down the road, the thug consulted his horoscope and decided to take the day off.

Under “A question mark can turn a declarative or imperative sentence into an interrogative one,” we find,

You don’t mind playing croquet in the mud?

Mind you, this is not the Chicago Style Manual, but for many the usually odd and often off-putting examples will serve as useful mnemonic devices for recalling an arcane instruction. The book has verve, panache, cachet: an ideal gift for a perspiring writer, though the donor is likely to wish he’d kept it for himself.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Oxford Latin Dictionary

P.W. Glare, ed. (Oxford University Press, 1982), 2126 pp.

[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection]

For more than a century Latinists have relied on A Latin Dictionary by Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, published by Oxford, as their first and best choice for a comprehensive, one-volume Latin-English lexicon. Based ultimately on Freund’s Latin-German dictionary of 1834, subsequently revised and enlarged in English editions (the last in 1879), the “Lewis and Short” is a venerable tome but has long since begun to show signs of its advanced age. Nevertheless, it has remained the standard for reading and rudimentary research while the community of Latin scholars awaited a fit replacement. Now the Oxford Latin Dictionary, which has been appearing bit by bit in fascicles since 1968, is complete and available in a single, weighty volume.

This is a truly fine and handsome dictionary. Far more than merely a modernized replacement for the Lewis and Short, the OLD is founded on a thorough-going re-evaluation of the ancient sources, all in the light of the past century’s significant scholarly advances and refinements in textual criticism, grammar, paleography, epigraphy, and, of course, lexicography. The principles of the Oxford English Dictionary have been employed in doing the OLD: articles are laid out in clear sections and subsections (a vast improvement over the crabbed appearance of the type in Lewis and Short), with different senses treated individually, each supplemented by chronologically arranged citations. Coverage includes Latin texts dating from the earliest known through the second century A.D. The treatment of individual words is extensive, with major and minor senses sharply defined and illustrated in context, the selections drawn from as great a variety of periods as possible. Some users may be disappointed at the exclusion of Late Latin words and sources, many of which (especially from Christian authors) are in Lewis and Short; but the superb treatment of the period covered, embracing the majority of the great Latin stylists, more than justifies the editors' decision to set A.D. 200 as the terminus.

A close comparison with Lewis and Short quickly reveals the significant differences between the books and the superiority of the OLD. The OLD contains about 30% more text than its predecessor (based on character, line, and page counts), not only a sizable advantage per se, but indicative of the much deeper coverage everywhere in evidence, all concentrated on a somewhat narrower span of the history of the language. As a result, the OLD is a fair bit bulkier, but still quite manageable in one volume. Another major advantage is the very readable and attractive typography and layout, making the OLD very pleasant to use, even over a long sitting. Etymologies are brief (the editors suggest reference to a standard etymological source for full treatment) but far more accurate than the woefully outdated ones to be found in Lewis and Short. In a justifiable move for consistency and accuracy, consonantal and vocalic forms of i and u are not distinguished (Lewis and Short distinguished i from j, u from v), except for use of V for capital u, with capitalized entries interfiled (Vaticanus between vatia and vaticinatio). The OLD treats only those proper nouns and adjectives that the editors deemed literarily or historically significant, a departure from the more encyclopedic approach of the Lewis and Short but in keeping with much modern lexicographical practice, which urges the use of other, more appropriate sources for historical and biographical information.

We might expect this thoroughly modern dictionary to be less squeamish than its Victorian era counterpart in defining matters venereal, but such is not always the case. Mentula, a vulgar word for ‘penis,’ is straight forwardly defined, (Lewis and Short, typically, has ‘membrum virile’), but irrumo, another infamous Catullan word, is defined ‘to practice irrumatio on.’ Under irrumatio one reads ‘the action of an irrumator.’ Irrumator is given as ‘one who submits to fellatio.’ But there is no entry for fellatio, despite the the editors' use of italics in the entry for irrumator; indeed this is correct, as the word was not used in Latin during the period in question. Strangely, under fellator is the definition ‘one who practices fellatio’ (with no italics). This is just a small inconsistency, apparently for the sake of decorum.

In other regards, the OLD, in further contrast to its ancestor, defines derivative formations as separate headwords, gives full principal parts for verbs, shows the irregular comparative and superlative forms for adjectives, and generally has more—and more useful—contextual examples for the different senses of a word. For the first time in Latin lexicography, suffixes are treated as headwords, a welcome innovation and one that balances with the traditional treatment of prefixes as such. From many points of view, the OLD reveals itself as a tool for reading and scholarship that is far more convenient and reliable than any other Latin-English dictionary.

Some minor criticism: definitions are set in the same typeface as descriptive information, which can be disconcerting; synonyms and usage notes have been eliminated; early bound copies are made up from unsold fascicles, which were printed at different times and on different stock: when trimmed, the outside edges have an uneven appearance; page 1918 has an incorrect running head. Clearly these are minor points, even taken together, not enough to detract seriously from the outstanding merit of this dictionary.

Another formidable example of historical lexicography from Oxford, OLD deserves acceptance as the standard in the field, which it will probably become in years hence. It proudly carries on the legacy of the OED, and at the same time is an example of that uncanny (British?) knack of creating a reference book which incorporates the best parts of serious scholarship while still acknowledging the important considerations of convenient size and scope, ready accessibility, and sound synthesis. While not recommended for the casual or novice student, the new OLD is indispensable for the serious student or anyone reading or doing research in the Latin language beyond the most basic level.

Frank R. Abate

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“At least one bullet broke the pen in half, ricocheted through Sarmiento’s heart and lodged in his lung. ‘If it wasn’t for the fountain pen in his pocket,’ Chambers said, ‘he’d be dead now.’ ” [From the Daily Hampshire Gazette, June 10, 1983, p. 6. Submitted by Anon.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“For every Marilyn Monroe admirer, a remarkable life-size reproduction of the beautiful actress. Handpainted vinyl doll wears a red gown, feather boa, necklace and spiked heels. 18” tall. #E927. 85.00 (4.85).” [From a mail-order catalogue published by Esplanade, Colonia, New Jersey. Submitted by Nancy B. Watson, Colebrook, New Hampshire.]

English English

Philip Howard

We have a new Chambers over here. No, not chamber pot, dope; the dictionary. It is one of our oldest, and most idiosyncratic, and most endearing word-books. The Chambers family of Edinburgh has been a scholarly cottage industry producing dictionaries for more than a century. In 1868 the Chambers family published a small etymological dictionary. In 1898 they published an English Dictionary. George Bernard Shaw was a fan of it. He wrote in a PS to the firm: “My Chambers Dictionary (my favourite of half a dozen) is dated 1898. Is there a later edition—unspoiled?” We cannot take this commendation entirely on its face value: he was possibly hoping for a free copy.

The first edition of Chambers was published in 1901 and the next two in 1952 and 1972, with a supplement in 1977. This year we have the new edition, which makes it a red-letter year for us wordsmiths and logophiles. The firm is still run from Thistle Street, Edinburgh, by Tony Chambers, great-great-grandson of one of the founding fathers. The dictionary is edited by Betty Kirkpatrick, a sharp, witty Edinburgh woman, with an editorial staff of six, concentrated on the company’s reference books.

The new edition has two and a quarter million words, of which ten per cent are new material. The opposition to Chambers over here in the medium, single-volume dictionaries are principally the Concise Oxford, Collins, and the Longman New Universal Dictionary. So let us ask ourselves what is special about Chambers. For one thing, its Scottish bias. You are more likely to find an obscure Scottish dialect word in Chambers than in the others. For another, its habit of grouping words in clumps derived from the same source, so that, par exemple, Theosophical Society comes before Theocritean, because it is grouped with words derived from theo-. When looking for a word in a hurry, I have been known to curse this habit.

That is a minor carp or quibble. Chambers is much favoured by our native crossword compilers and is the official reference dictionary for the National Scrabble Championships: do you still play Scrabble over there? Chambers is good on obscure words. Only the other day I found in it theriac, meaning an old-fashioned antidote to venomous bites, which I deduced must exist for The Times jumbo crossword. Oxford Concise has it; but not Collins or Longman’s. Characteristically, Araceous, which I also needed for the crossword (some rubbish about “lords and ladies in a race round America”), was in Chambers, but listed under Arum.

By definition, because it is the latest dictionary, the new Chambers gets first crack at a number of new words in BritEnglish; for example, ra-ra skirt, multilateralist, total allergy syndrome, kidology, and yomp, the verb meaning to march across country with bag and baggage, as the British paras and other infantry did so devastatingly in the Falklands. Chambers suggests that to yomp is in its derivation imitative, alias onomatopoeic. I thought that there was a possibility that it was derived from a skiing term for slogging across flat snow in one of the Scandinavian languages. (British troops, particularly paras, frequently train in Norway.) I must look into the matter.

Another endearing characteristic of Chambers is its taste for whimsical, not to say humorous, definitions, which suits its connection with crosswords. For example, we have picture-restorer: “one who cleans and restores and sometimes ruins old pictures”; Pict: “one of an ancient people of obscure affinities, in Britain, esp. north-eastern Scotland; in Scottish folklore, one of a dwarfish race of underground dwellers, to whom (with the Romans, the Druids and Cromwell) ancient monuments are generally attributed”; perpetrate: “to execute or commit (esp. an offence, a poem, or a pun)”; and eclair: “…long in shape but short in duration.” New in this edition is the definition of man-eater: “a woman given to chasing, catching and devouring men.”

Alas and dammit, Chambers has dropped the last three words of its definition of ghost-word: “a word that has originated in the blunder of a scribe or printer—common in dictionaries.” Boo to that.

As you see, it is a good book of words.

What’s Your Phobia?

Richard Lederer

Do you have a pet phobia? No? Think again. Does your stomach want to scream when it and you arrive at the zenith of a ferris wheel? Does your head sink turtlelike into your body when the lightning flashes and the thunder cracks? Or do you tremble at the sight of a snake or cat or dog?

Such fears are called phobias. If you are afflicted with a few of these syndromes, don’t worry. Studies show that the average man has 2.21 phobias and the average woman 3.55. Things could be worse: count your blessings that you are not a victim of pantophobia—the morbid dread of everything. Then you would be stuck with verbaphobia, and you wouldn’t be able to enjoy VERBATIM.

Humankind is beset with a host of fears, and there is a name for practically every one of them. Phobos, ‘fear’ was the son of Ares, the god of war, and was the nephew of Eris, goddess of discord, and brother to Deimos, ‘terror.’ The names for our deepest dreads generally include the Greek root phobia, meaning ‘fear or hatred,’ affixed to another root, which is usually also Greek.

The two most common human phobias are acrophobia, (‘a morbid dread of heights,’ and claustrophobia, ‘a morbid dread of enclosed spaces.’ Look for your deepest dreads among the following lists. By assigning names to these terrors you may be taking the first step in overcoming them.

Let us start with our fellow creatures who run, walk, creep, fly, and swim upon this planet. From time immemorial, some of these organisms have inspired fear and even terror in the human breast. Each of these dreads has a label. Fear of animals is called zoophobia, of birds ornithophobia, of fish, ichthyophobia, of reptiles herpetophobia (not “fear of herpes”), and of insects entophobia.

Here are names for the fears of more specific organisms. In each case, I leave it to the reader to supply the words “fear of.”

acarophobia mites, parasites
aelurophobia cats
apiophobia bees
arachnephobia spiders
bacilliphobia bacilli
bacteriaphobia bacteria
batrachophobia frogs, toads
cynophobia dogs
eisoptrophobia termites
entonophobia ticks
galeophobia sharks
hippophobia horses
musophobia mice
myrmecophobia lice
soleciphobia worms
swinophobia swine
taeniophobia tapeworms
taurophobia bulls

A much smaller cluster of fears is centered on the plant world. Evidently, plants are regarded as much more docile and less threatening than other organisms:

anthophobia flowers, plants
dendrophobia trees
hylophobia forests, woods
lachanophobia vegetables

(Hence, if you despise eating spinach or broccoli, you are a lachanophobe.)

For some of us, it is other people who inspire in our hearts the greatest palpitations—anthropophobia. If you fear men, you are afflicted with androphobia, if you fear women, gynephobia. If it is your relatives who most irritate you, you have syngenescophobia. More specifically, if you hate or fear your mother-in-law, you are burdened with pentheraphobia, and if you hate or fear your stepmother, novercaphobia.

If you are possessed by an irrational aversion to politicians, you have politicophobia, if to thieves, kleptophobia, if to foreigners, xenophobia. If those foreigners are English, you’ve got Anglophobia, if French, Gallophobia, if German, Teutophobia, and if Russian, Russophobia. And, if you break out in a cold sweat at even the thought of going to the dentist, you share with me a condition called dentophobia.

In addition to the various fears of people, humankind is fraught with terrors of natural phenomena:

acousticophobia noise
aerophobia air
anemophobia cyclones, hurri-canes, winds
antlophobia floods
aquaphobia water
astraphobia lightning, thunder
astrophobia stars
auroraphobia northern lights
blennophobia slime
brontophobia thunderstorms
cheimaphobia cold
chionophobia snow
cometophobia comets
cyrophobia frost, ice
dinophobia whirlpools
elektrophobia electricity
eosophobia dawn
heliophobia sun
homichlophobia fog, humidity
hylephobia wood
lilapsophobia tornadoes
metereophobia weather
nephophobia clouds
nyctophobia darkness
ombrophobia rain
phengophobia daylight
photophobia light
potamophobia rivers
pyrophobia fire
selaphobia flashing light
skiaphobia shadows
thalassophobia the sea
thermophobia heat
xerophobia dry places, like deserts

When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, God said to the serpent, “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed.” During our post-Edenic existence, humankind has acquired not only herpetophobia, but so many other fears that up to this point I have listed fewer than half of our named dreads. Naming these terrors may be a kind of magic for holding them at bay. For example, enough people fear the number 13 that many buildings pretend not to have a thirteenth floor. Still, we assign this affliction a name—triskaidekaphobia: treis (three), kai (and), deka (ten), phobia (fear).

In the pages of my local newspaper appeared a story about a woman who for thirty years was held prisoner in her apartment by agoraphobia, an intense fear of the outdoors and open spaces that affects nearly 2,000,000 Americans. Here are 120 more words that describe the terrors that go bump in our minds:

acrophobia heights
aichurophobia being touched by pointed objects
algophobia pain
alychiphobia failure
amathophobia dust
amaxophobia riding in vehicles
ambulophobia walking
asthenophobia weakness
ataxiophobia disorder
automysophobia being dirty
ballistrophobia being shot
basophobia standing (for fear of falling)
bathophobia depth
bibliophobia books
blenophobia pins and needles
bogyphobia demons and goblins
bromidrosophobia body smells
cainophobia novelty
cardiophobia heart disease
cathisophobia sitting
catopthrophobia mirrors
cherophobia gaiety
chrematophobia wealth
chromophobia colors
chronophobia time
cibophobia food
claustrophobia enclosed spaces
coitophobia sexual intercourse
coprophobia excrement
cremnophobia precipices
crystallophobia glass
deipnophobia dining and dining conversation
demophobia crowds
diplopiaphobia double vision
diplychiphobia accidents
dromophobia crossing streets
dysmorphophobia deformity
ecophobia home
emetophobia vomiting
ergasophobia work
erotophobia sexual feelings
erythrophobia blushing; the color red
eurotophobia female genitals
febriphobia fever
gamophobia marriage
gephyrophobia crossiing bridges
gerascophobia growing old
glossophobia speaking in public
graphophobia writing
gymnophobia nudity
hagiophobia saints and the holy
halophobia speaking
hamartophobia error or sin
haphephobia touching, being touched
hedenophobia pleasure
hodophobia travel
homilophobia sermons
kopophobia mental or physical examination
laliophobia talking
lepraphobia leprosy
linonophobia string
lygophobia dark
lyssiophobia becoming mad
macrophobia long waits
maieusiophobia childbirth
mehalophobia large things
merinthophobia being bound
metrophobia poetry
molysomophobia infection
monophobia being alone
motorphobia motor vehicles
musicophobia music
nosophobia becoming ill
odontophobia teeth, especially those of animals
odynophobia pain
oenophobia wine
olfactophobia smells
onomatophobia a certain word or name
ophthalmophobia being stared at
papaphobia the pope or the papacy
paralipophobia responsibility
paraphobia sexual perversion
parthenophobia young girls
peccatiphobia sinning
pedophobia dolls
peniaphobia poverty
phagophobia eating or swallowing
pharmacophobia drugs
philophobia falling in love or being loved
pnigophobia choking
ponophobia fatigue
rhabdophobia criticism, punishment, being beaten
rhytiphobia getting wrinkles
scriptophobia writing
siderodromophobia train travel
sociophobia friendship, society
sophophobia knowledge
spectrophobia looking in the mirror
staurophobia cross or crucifix
stenophobia narrow places
tacophobia speed
taphephobia cemeteries, being buried alive
tapinophobia small things
teleophobia religious ceremonies
telephonophobia using the telephone
thanatophobia death, dying
thassophobia sitting idle
theatrophobia theaters
theophobia God
tomophobia surgical operations
topophobia certain places
trichophobia hair
uranophobia homosexuality
vaccinophobia vaccines
verbaphobia words

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, in his 1933 inauguration, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he was warning us against phobophobia, the fear of being afraid. Now that you know your phobias have names, you may experience less fear about your fears and about fear itself.

Return to Grose

John Ferguson, Selly Oak Colleges

Francis Grose, antiquary and artist, was born in Greenford, Middlesex, in the early 1730s. His father, an immigrant from Switzerland, was a successful jeweler, and was responsible for the crown of George III. Young Francis received a sound classical education, but instead of university went to Shipley’s drawing school, and became a moderately successful artist. He was adjutant and paymaster, and later captain, in the Hampshire militia, but, to judge from the prodigal way he ran through his father’s fortune, one wonders about the state of the regimental finances. He himself declared that his only account books were his pockets. He paid into the right and out from the left.

In his day he was probably best known for his Antiquities of England and Wales, which he illustrated. It was while collecting for his Antiquities of Scotland that he ran into Robert Burns, who wrote “On Captain Francis Grose”:

The Devil got notice that Grose was a-dying, So, whip! at the summons old Satan came flying; But when he approached where poor Francis lay moaning, And saw each bed-post with its burden a-groaning, Astonished, confounded, cried Satan, “By God! I’ll want him, ere I take such a damnable load!”

Burns immortalized Grose in two other poems. One is kindlier, though it gives us the same impression of Grose’s size—an antiquarian Falstaff. It begins:

Hear, Land o' Cakes, and brither Scots,
Frae Maidenkirk to Johnny Groat’s;
If there’s a hole in a' your coats,
I rede you tent it:
A chiel’s among you, taking notes
And, faith, he’ll prent it.
If in your bounds, ye chance to light
Upon a fine, fat, fodgel wight,
O' stature short, but genius bright,
That’s he, mark weel
And wow! he has an unco slight
O' cauk and keel.

Fodgel is ‘plump’; cauk and keel are ‘chalk and pencil.’ The other is a little squib, written on the envelope of a letter, and beginning:

Ken ye ought o' Captain Grose?
Igo and ago,
If he’s amoung his friends or foes?
Iram, coram, dago.
Is he south, or is he north?
Igo and ago,
Or drowned in the river Forth
Iram, coram, dago.

It continues in the same vein. These are jokes between friends. Noble called Grose “an inimitable boon companion.”

Grose wrote much, including, somewhat surprisingly, A Guide to Health, Beauty, Riches and Honour. He may have known about honor, but not too much about the rest. His most lasting book was delightfully entitled A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, and first appeared in 1785.

Grose has a charming passage in his introduction:

To prevent any charge of immorality being brought against this work, the Editor begs leave to observe, that when an indelicate or immodest word has obtruded itself for explanation, he has endeavoured to get rid of it in the most decent manner possible; and none have been admitted but such, as either could not be left out, without rendering the work incomplete, or, in some measure, compensate by their wit, for the trespass committed on decorum. Indeed respecting this matter, he can with great truth make the same defence that Falstaff ludicrously urged in behalf of one engaged in rebellion, viz. that he did not seek them, but that, like rebellion in the case instanced, they lay in his way, and he found them.

A pleasing example of reticence is

NICKUMPOOP, or NINCUMPOOP, a foolish fellow; also one who never saw his wife’s ****.

Another is

HODDY DODDY, all a-se and no body, a short clumsey person, either male or female.

More complex is:

A BITER, a wench whose **** is ready to bite her a-se with a pound of butter.

A lascivious rampant wench.

Slightly more surprising are:

PAY…(sea term) also to beat; I will pay you as Paul paid the Ephesians, over face and eyes, and all your d-d jaws.

SIR REVERENCE, human excrement, a t-d.

Pleasant is

DAB, an adept; a dab at any feat or exercise; dab, quoth Dawkins, when he hit his wife on the a-se with a pound of butter.

LARKING, is tantalizingly defined as “a lascivious practice that will not bear explanation.”

The dictionary is at its liveliest in its improprieties, and terms relating to sex or excretion. There are plenty of words for bawd (ABBESS, or LADY ABBESS, AUNT, BUTTOCK BROKER, MOTHER, SHE NAPPER, MACKAREL), and brothel (ACADEMY, or PUSHING SCHOOL; BORDELLO; NANNY HOUSE; NUNNERY; SERAGLIO; VAULTING SCHOOL; CAVAULTING SCHOOL). One of the most delightful of all entries is

ATHANASIAN WENCH, or QUICUNQUE VULT, a forward girl, ready to oblige every man that shall ask her.

Another is:

CARVEL’S RING, the private parts of a woman. Hans Carvel, a jealous old doctor, being in bed with his wife, dreamed that the devil gave him a ring, which, so long as he had it on his finger, would prevent his being made a cuckold, waking he found he had got his finger the Lord knows where.

Another is:

THINGSTABLE, Mr. Thingstable, Mr. Constable, a ludicrous affectation of delicacy in avoiding the pronunciation of the first syllable in the title of that officer, which is found has some similarity to an indecent monosyllable.

BITCH is said to be the “most offensive appellation that can be given to an English woman,” and a regular answer was “I may be a whore, but can’t be a bitch.” To stand bitch, however, is ‘to make tea.’ A seaman catching venereal disease abroad is said to have been “sent out a sacrifice, and came home a BURNT offering.” COCK LANE is the private parts of a woman. FART CATCHER is a valet or footman, from his walking behind his master or mistress. FLAYBOTTOMIST is defined as “a bum brusher, or school master.” PLUG TAIL is one of various phrases for the penis. PROUD is “desirous of copulation”; SALT is similarly used. PUREST PURE is “a courtezan of high fashion.” Two STONE under weight is a eunuch. TEA VOIDER is a chamber pot, as is MEMBER MUG. URINAL OF THE PLANETS is Ireland, because of the rain. WAGTAIL is a lewd woman. WOMBLETY CROPT is the indisposition of a drunkard. A girl who is got with child is said to have sprained her ANKLE, or to be POISONED. A STAR GAZER is a hedge whore. A THOROUGH GOOD-NATURED WENCH is “one who being asked to sit down, will lie down.”

There is a variety of words for a simpleton (itself derived from Simple tony or Simple anthony) or silly fellow. Such are NICK NINNY; NIGMENOG; NINNYHAMMER; NICKIN, NIKEY or NIZEY; NIGIT (apparently “an idiot”); DOODLE; BUZZARD; CAKE or CAKEY; CLUNCH; CULLY; MR. CUNNINGHAM; DRUMBELO; GOOSECAP; GULL; HONEY MOON; NOCKY; NODDY; NOKES, NUPSON; NUMBSCULL; OAF; PAPER SCULL; PUT; JOLTER HEAD; RALPH SPOONER; SAPSCULL; SHALLOW PATE; SIMPLE SIMON; SINGLETEN; TONY; WINDY; ADDLE PATE; BOTTLE HEAD; CLODPOLE; COD’S HEAD. There are various adjectives also, such as BEETLE HEADED; BUFFLE HEADED; CHUCKLE HEADED; PUDDING HEADED; and the like.

Drunk is another word with plenty of synonyms, such as DISGUISED, BOOSEY, FLUSTERED, FUDDLED, WRAPPED UP IN WARM FLANNEL, IN HIS ALTITUDES, CHIRPING MERRY, CORNED, CUT, DROP IN THE EYE, FLAWD, MAUDLIN, MELLOW, NAZIE, SUCKY.

Hanging is another, as WRY MOUTH AND A PISSEN PAIR OF BREECHES. CHATES or SHERIFF’S PICTURE FRAME is the gallows. NOOZED or CRAPPED or SUS. PER COLL. is ‘hanged.’ So is died of a HEMPEN FEVER; a hanged man leaves a HEMPEN WIDOW. DERRICK, DUN, GREGORY BRANDON, and KETCH were famous hangmen; you could say of a criminal Derrick must be his host, and Gregorian tree was a familiar phrase. To go up the LADDER to rest is another phrase for being hanged; so is to go with the fall of the LEAF: so is to dance the PADDINGTON frisk; so is TRINE or TYBURN.

There is quite a lot of ecclesiastical slang: AMEN CURLER ‘a parish clerk’; AMINADAB ‘a Quaker’; CRAW THUMPER ‘a Roman Catholic’ (beating the breast in confession of sin); CROW(E) FAIR ‘a visitation of clergy’; DIPPERS ‘Anabaptists’; NON-CON ‘a nonconformist’; PANTILE HOUSE ‘a dissenting meetinghouse; also a cockpit’; POT CONVERTS “proselytes to the Romish church, made by the distribution of victuals and money” (like the more recent phrase rice Christians); MUM BOX or PRATTLING BOX ‘pulpit’; PRIEST CRAFT “the art of awing the laity, managing their consciences, and diving into their pockets”; RED LETTER MEN ‘Roman Catholics’; RIB ‘wife’ (from Adam’s rib); SOLOMON ‘the mass’; SOUL DOCTOR, SOUL DRIVER, or SPIRITUAL FLESH BROKER ‘parson’; also UNGRATEFUL MAN (since at least once a week he abuses his best benefactor, the devil); THOROUGH CHURCHMAN “a person who goes in at one door of the church and out at the other without stopping”; TUB THUMPER ‘Presbyterian parson’; to come home by WEEPING CROSS ‘to repent’; YEA AND NAY MAN ‘a Quaker’; JAPANNED ‘ordained’ (from the black collar); CHUCK FARTHING or SOLFA ‘parish clerk’; HUMS ‘people in church.’ Pleasing also are ANABAPTIST “a pickpocket caught in the fact and punished with the discipline of the pump or horse-pond,” BAPTISED or CHRISTENED “Rum, brandy, or any other spirits that have been lowered with water.” Port wine is KILL PRIEST. A PANTER is a ‘hart’ (which pants after the water brooks). She PRAYS with her knees upwards is used of a woman “given to gallantry and intrigue.” RESURRECTION MEN are, familiarly, persons employed by the students in anatomy to steal dead bodies out of churchyards. STEWED QUAKER is ‘burned rum with a piece of butter,’ an American remedy for a cold. A SUNDAY MAN is ‘one fearful of arrest’ (who appears in public on Sunday only). CHURCH WARDEN is a ‘shag or cormorant’ (probably from its voracity). ST. LUKE’S BIRD is an ‘ox.’

Some familiar phrases there are. My eye, BETTY MARTIN (without and) is an answer to an attempt at humbug. In Grose’s day one licked the BLARNEY STONE. BLINDMAN’S BUFF and HIDE AND SEEK were played by children. To BLUBBER is to ‘cry,’ and to look BLUE is to ‘be disappointed.’ BOG HOUSE is “the necessary house.” A woman who governs her husband wears the BREECHES. One in a reverie is in a BROWN STUDY. To kick the BUCKET is to ‘die.’ A CAT’S PAW is an instrument to accomplish another’s purpose. DOG LATIN is ‘barbarous Latin.’ EYE SORE (two words) is a ‘disagreeable object.’ To take FRENCH LEAVE, GIFT OF THE GAB, GREENHORN, HENPECKED, to be left in the LURCH, to sow his wild OATS, PIN MONEY, SLEEPING PARTNER, all have their modern meaning. GLUM is ‘sullen’: curious to think of it as vulgar. PHYZ is given for ‘face,’ but without the derivation from physiognomy. POT HUNTER, which one used as a schoolboy for an athlete seeking a trophy, is ‘one who hunts more for the sake of the prey, than the sport,’ presumably pot meaning the ‘contents of the stew-pot.’ ROUND ROBIN has its familiar meaning and is given a naval origin: the circle of signatures prevented the identification of the ring leader. SPUNK is figuratively ‘courage,’ derived from a kind of fungus (punk) prepared for tinder. A BAKER’S DOZEN is fourteen, not thirteen. POTATO TRAP is mouth, now shortened to ‘trap.’

A few curiosities. CAPTAIN LIEUTENANT is ‘meat between veal and beef.’ A CHERRY COLOURED CAT is a ‘black cat’ (there being black as well as red cherries). CROAKUMSHIRE is ‘North-umberland’ (from the accent). FUBSEY is a pleasing word for ‘plump.’ GENTLEMAN COMMONER is an ‘empty bottle’ (from a head empty of learning); GIMCRACK is a ‘spruce wench or a person who has a turn for mechanical contrivances’ (very different from the modern meaning). A schoolmaster is a HABERDASHER of pronouns. To ‘tumble about’ is to JERRYCUMMUMBLE. JOBBERNOLE is the ‘head.’ LILLEY WHITE is a ‘chimney sweeper.’ LOLLPOOP is a ‘lazy idle drone.’ MUNDUNGUS is ‘bad tobacco.’ NICKNACKATORY is a ‘toyshop.’ NIMGIMMER is a ‘physician.’ To fly a blue PIGEON is to ‘steal lead off a church.’ The ‘youngest child’ is a PIN BASKET. PLUMB is a ‘hundred thousand pounds.’ PONTIUS PILATE is a ‘pawnbroker.’ A PRIGSTAR is a ‘rival in love.’ PUFF GUTS for a ‘fat man’ is obvious but pleasing. Persons dipped in the river SHANNON are forever cured of bashfulness. A SHE HOUSE is a ‘house where the wife rules.’ A ‘profligate’ is called a SQUIRE OF ALSATIA. STARVE ‘EM, ROB ‘EM, and CHEAT ‘EM are soldiers’ and sailors’ names for Stroud, Rochester, and Chatham “and not without good reason.” STUBBLE IT means ‘Hold your tongue.’ VAMPERS are ‘stockings.’ WHITHER-GO-YE is a ‘wife’ (who is always asking the question of her husband). ‘Tea’ is SCANDALBROTH.

Grose may have been a fubsey cull, but he was also a rum duke.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Game Theory, second Edition, by G. Owen, Navel Postgraduate School.” [From a business reply card order form distributed by Academic Press, Inc. Submitted by Eduardo Rodriguez, Los Angles. Presumably, one arrives at game theory through omphaloskepsis.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“…Albania, a country of two and three-quarters million people about the size of Maryland….” [From The Wall Street Journal, 6 June 1983. Submitted by Kenneth J. Pulliam, Pfafftown, North Carolina.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Crossword Words

Michael Donner and Norton J. Bramesco, (Workman Publishing, 1982), 384 pp.

Millions of people have delighted in solving crossword puzzles ever since their introduction in the 1920s—the first successful book published by Richard Simon and George Schuster was a collection of crossword puzzles, and look at Simon and Schuster today! From the beginning, solvers were taught about ‘volcanic lava,’ ‘bitter vetch,’ ‘Persian fairy,’ ‘young salmon,’ and other esoterica dredged from the nether reaches of the language by the compilers who needed odd bits and pieces to fill in the gaps with aa, ers, peri, and smolt.

British puzzles, which came later, require little of this linguistic detritus because only alternate characters in horizontal words are crosskeyed to vertical words (and vice versa); besides, British puzzles tend more toward the kinds of clues found in America in the “puns and anagrams” puzzles, though recent imports from Britain are called “cryptic” crosswords. (For a rather easy American version, see our Anglo-American Crossword on page 24.)

This book defines and, in many instances, illustrates the odds and ends of (mainly) the English found in crossword puzzles. One omission noted is parr ‘young salmon,’ but for all I know, that may be a common word on everyone’s lips and, hence, has no place in this collection. Mercifully, the compilers have avoided listing the kinds of nonsense appearing in so many puzzles today: ‘—go home’ as the clue for I wanna, ‘Pierre’s nail’ for ongle, etc. Such items are used by bad puzzle-makers (and published by worse puzzle editors): the English lexicon is sufficiently replete and solvers should not be expected to know French, German, or Swahili; multiword combinations have long been standard in cryptic puzzles (where the arrangement of words and the number of characters of each is usually given), but they have only recently begun to creep into American-style puzzles, where they have no place.

American puzzles—some, at least—have become tricky but more in the wiseguy mode than by becoming clever. Also, more and more of them contain outright errors of fact, which is inexcusable. These shortcomings are to be laid at the door of the editors who seem increasingly less capable or less energetic in checking for accuracy.

All that criticism has nothing to do with The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Crossword Words, which is good fun and should be in the library of every puzzle-solver if only to inform him about what he has been doing all these years. [If copies are not readily available from your bookshop, send $10.95 (including postage) to Workman Publishing, I West 39th St., New York, NY 10018, mentioning VERBATIM, and a copy will be sent to you.]

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

Suggested slogan for Kentucky Fried Chicken (Col. Sherlock Sanders): Murder Most Fowl.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

Closet Quean: a prostitute who turns her tricks in a Murphy bed.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

The woman who used Listerine for slimming because she heard it would cure bad breadth.

OBITER DICTA: O, TEMPORA!

There is only one “The Times,” and that is the newspaper published six days a week in London. The Sunday Times, published weekly, also in London, and The New York Times, published seven days a week in You-know-where, are not the same.

The Times takes some pride in the care with which it is written and edited, and the results are quite obvious most of the time. As Lord Deming remarked at a recent awards dinner for journalists, the journalistic tradition is strong in England, where every effort is made to uphold a high standard of language style and usage. My second clue that something might be awry was revealed when I distinctly heard Lord Deming say “viligent” (presumably for vigilant). The first clue came a few days earlier, when The Times reported:

Sandra Jackson, aged 19, who is expecting her second child in three months’ time… [16 February 1983]

Can it be, I asked myself, that the birth rate in Britain (which, I noted earlier in January, stood at zero) is in for a change? Or, perhaps, Mrs. Jackson had been got to by the test-tube baby crowd?

Clues continued to accumulate. On 18 February appeared the information:

There was a plastic bag over his head when Sir Trevor [Dawson], aged 51, was found by his chauffeur. An inquest will be held, but the police said there was [sic] no suspicious circumstances.

The interesting point here is not the singular verb/plural noun problem, but what the police in England might consider “suspicious circumstances” to be. Perhaps it is/they are something like “Mr. A—is helping the police in their enquiries,” usually translated into real English as “Mr. A— is under suspicion of [whatever the crime might be].”

Maintaining the talent for curious juxtapositions of information, The Times (again on 18 February) reported:

[Peter Bird] will have broken the world record for staying at sea in a rowing boat when he celebrates his 37th birthday tomorrow.

That must, indeed, be a record.

“PHS,” author of “The Times Diary,” a regular feature of the page facing the editorials, is not known to be above apostrophizing. Yet the column for 28 February carries the following:

Those whose interests David has now bought include his brothers, Jonathan and Nicholas.

Those who live in or have visited England are aware of the weight of the coins one accumulates in a jacket pocket or a purse; notwithstanding the parlous state of the pound these days, a pocketful of change worth £1 would appear to weigh at least 18 ounces, giving male residents and visitors to that seafaring nation a perceptible list to starboard. Always sensitive to the comforts of the commoner, the House of Lords, as reported in The Times of 4 March, has heard debate on the Currency Bill suggesting that, because of this financial burden carried by citizens, trouser pockets should be free of VAT (value added tax) charges. Lord Lyell, in response to this suggestion, pointed out that, as people in Scotland carried their money in sporrans when they were not wearing trousers, the proposal should be extended to highland dress.

A photograph in the same issue of the newspaper shows workers contemplating strike at the Citroën plant in France, a country recently plagued by workers' walkouts. The Times captions the photo, “The French Disease?” Perhaps someone will send in a French letter explaining what the French disease is.

In the caption on another photograph, we learn that the tarsier is a “member of a little-known zoological group called Asiatic profimians,” prompting us to wonder whether that group, if in favor of “fimians,” is anti something. In any event, it is probably a fringe group and, in fact, so little is known as to be nonexistent.

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. Come second;
6. Suit;
10. Disc-over America;
11. TR-ick-kn-EE;
12. Style;
13. DUN-nag-E;
14. TRANCES (CANTERS);
16. F-ired-OG;
18. CHE-aP-ER;
19. REPRO (Poorer);
21. Rein-state;
23. SWORD OF DAMOCLES (Anagram COWARD DOOMS SELF);
24. STEW;
25. Memo-RY LANE (NEARLY).

Down

1. CADET;
2. MIS-si-ON-er;
3. Stocks and bonds;
4. C-le-AN-se;
5. NEAREST (EARNEST);
7. UN-IFY;
8. Traver-SER;
9. NEWSPAPER STORY (Anagram PEN WAR SPORT YES);
13. DE-for-E-st-S;
15. Co-PS A PLEA (APPEALS);
17. GIRAFFE;
18. (mu) CH I CAN O(ffer);
20. Prose;
22. E-nsu-E.

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. Time (April 25, 1983), p.29. ↩︎

2. The Tents of Wickedness (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1977), p. 223. ↩︎

3. Madder Music (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1977), p. 196. ↩︎

4. Through the Fields of Clover (New York: Popular Library, 1961), pp. 42-43. ↩︎

5. Ibid., p. 170. ↩︎

6. Madder Music, p. 193. (See also Mrs. Wallop, New York: Popular Library, 1970, p. 76). ↩︎

7. Maddler Music, p. 193. (See also Mrs. Wallop, New York; Popular Library, 1970, p. 76). ↩︎

8. Mrs. Wallop, p. 113.; ↩︎

9. The Glory of the Hummingbird (New York: Popular Library, 1974), p. 103. ↩︎

10. Madder Music, p. 74. ↩︎

11. I Hear America Swinging (New York: Popular Library, 1977), p. 149.; ↩︎

12. Reuben, Reuben (New York: Popular Library, 1964), p. 16. ↩︎

13. John B. Rockwell (New York City) ↩︎

14. George Meyer, M.D. (Pompano Beach, FL) ↩︎

15. Mary Lane Stevens and Tom Hard (Portland, OR) ↩︎

16. W.A. Oliver, M.D. (Napa, CA) ↩︎

17. Joel Chinkes (Atlanta, GA) ↩︎

18. James Storrow (New York City) ↩︎

19. Dave Chambliss (New Orleans, LA) ↩︎

20. W.M. Woods (Oak Ridge, TN) ↩︎

21. John B. Rockwell (New York City) ↩︎

22. Prof. Maurice Tatsuoka (Champaign, IL) ↩︎

23. Barbara M. Elesh (Rockville, MD) ↩︎

24. I had originally listed this one with the quasi-heteronyms. D. Chambliss called attention to the fact that peaked (v.) and peaked> (adj.) are not from the same source. ↩︎

25. Even before the original article appeared in VERBATIM, Georgia Gaspar (a friend in Long Beach, CA) directed my attention to this quadruple heteronym. And W. Woods was the first to note that lather, which I had listed with just two meanings and pronunciations, is actually another “triple”; to these should be added the word rhyming with bather, meaning lathe-operator. ↩︎

26. Mary Louise Gilman (Hanover, MA) ↩︎

27. Prof. Maurice Tatsuoka (Champaign, IL) ↩︎

28. Here are two elegant examples of what could be called controheteronyms ‘heteronymous words of contrary meanings.’ This term is—logically, I trust—derived from Jack Herring’s coinage of contronyms (in Word Study, XXXVII, 3) to designate homographs of opposite meanings. Anathema, in its familiar guise of “a-NATH-ema,” has such meanings as ‘accursed, excommunicated’; as “AN-a-THEME-a” it means ‘consecrated to divine use, votive offering.’ Impugnable as “imPYOO-nable” means ‘liable to be impugned (attacked, assailed)'; as “im-PUG-nable,” however, it means ‘that cannot be assailed or overcome.’ ↩︎

29. J. Bryan III (Richmond, VA) ↩︎

30. S.E. Wilkinson (Charlotte, NC). ↩︎

31. Harry Cohen (Brussels, Belgium) ↩︎

32. Words in boldface were incorrectly listed as “pure” instead of “quasi” in the original article. Correspondents who first called attention to their misclassification were M. Stevens and T. Hard, Mary Lane Stevens and Tom Hard (Portland, OR) H. Cohen, T. Webb, Prof. Thompson Webb (University of Wisconsin) and N. Seico. Noel H. Seico, M.D. (Rye, NY). ↩︎

33. Ama D. Rogan (New Orleans, LA) ↩︎

34. Here are two elegant examples of what could be called controheteronyms ‘heteronymous words of contrary meanings.’ This term is—logically, I trust—derived from Jack Herring’s coinage of contronyms (in Word Study, XXXVII, 3) to designate homographs of opposite meanings. Anathema, in its familiar guise of “a-NATH-ema,” has such meanings as ‘accursed, excommunicated’; as “AN-a-THEME-a” it means ‘consecrated to divine use, votive offering.’ Impugnable as “imPYOO-nable” means ‘liable to be impugned (attacked, assailed)'; as “im-PUG-nable,” however, it means ‘that cannot be assailed or overcome.’ ↩︎

35. Larry S. Myers (Elizabethtown, KY) ↩︎

36. Noel H. Seico, M.D. (Rye, NY) ↩︎

37. Ama D. Rogan (New Orleans, LA) ↩︎

38. At the suggestion of M. Tatsuoka, I employ this term in place of the “semi-demi” designation previously used. As he pointed out, many pairs in this category have different origins and are thus more nearly “pure” than those in the “quasi” section. Although some recent dictionaries have dropped the former hyphen in many words, other authorities (happily) insist on retaining it wherever there is any likelihood of confusing two different words. B. Elesh proposed that the same rule be applied to impure heteronyms involving diacritical marks. ↩︎

39. Gracia Drury (Long Beach, CA) ↩︎

40. Thomas L. Bernard (Springfield, MA) ↩︎

41. David H. Spodick, MD. (Worcester, MA) ↩︎

42. Many other correspondents mentioned polish/Polish, but without exploring the l.c./u.c. byway any further. ↩︎