VOL X, No 4 [ Spring 1984]

The Blendsational Language of Contemporary Commerce

Barbara Hunt Lazerson, Illinois State University

Businessmen are busting their @#$%¢@ to sell us goods and even save us money. The products they sell are plentiful, automatic, delicious, terrific, fantastic, and sensational. Participating in the marketplace is a fun thing to do; it is, in fact, an act of celebration. At least, that is what some of the terminology of contemporary commerce would lead us to believe.

We are bombarded daily by advertisements that encourage us to buy! buy! buy! Many of the wordsmiths who would influence the way we spend the limited number of dollars we have are masters of the neologism. That is, they are skilled at producing from everyday words novel, attention-grabbing blends that jump out at us from billboards, television screens, and the pages of newspapers and magazines and exhort us to purchase blendsational products.

The adjectives delicious, terrific, fantastic, and sensational have been part of the English language for centuries. In the past few years, they have been overworked in describing products and therefore have lost most of their impact. Nevertheless, merchants often actually do want prospective customers to think of their products as being delicious, terrific, fantastic, or sensational. What can be done to convey the desired image without resorting to the use of a tired, overly familiar term? The answer is simple. Create a blend that employs a clipped form of delicious, terrific, fantastic, or sensational as the second element.

The blend Apple-licious was created to name an apple-flavored drink made by Pepsi Cola General Bottlers. Bubblicious is the name of a bubble gum produced by American Chicle. Honey Bran cereal by Ralston has been described as honeylicious. Two bundt cake mixes by Pillsbury are said to be tunnelicious. Thornton’s English Chocolate Shop has exhorted people to buy their truffles, because these chocolates are—what else?— Truffle-icious!

K-Mart once had an Easterrific sale; Zayre Department Store, a Zayre-iffic sale; and Sears, a Toy-rific toy sale. A restaurant in Milwaukee offers its customers a Lobsterrific special when it sells lobster dinners at a reduced price. Taco John’s, a fast-food restaurant that sells tacos and other Mexican foods, claims that its products are Tacorrific. Dean Foods of Illinois sells a chocolate drink that is named Choco-rrific.

Funtastic has been used to describe a number of vacation trips offered by various travel agencies. A trip from New York to Amsterdam via Finnair has been labeled Finntastic, although fin-tastic values are what a St. Louis seafood market claims to offer its customers. CRANtastic has been used to describe a cranberry cocktail drink. A real-estate ad describing a 152-acre modern cattle farm bore the headline Farm-tastic. Silksational is the name of a dress sold by Saks Fifth Avenue. Perfume by Nina Ricci has been advertised as Scentsational. Sunsational has been used to describe vacations, summer clothes, and a suntanned Barbie doll. A billboard near Chicago proclaimed a mixture of Seagram’s 7 Crown and cola to be Sevensational. Soundsational has been used to describe stereo equipment.

As the preceding terms demonstrate, blending allows an effete laudatory adjective such as delicious, terrific, fantastic, or sensational to be combined with another word, thereby producing a neologism that is tailor-made to suit the need of the merchant.

As opposed to our ancestors, who were forced to live by the sweat of their brow, we contemporary consumers want and expect products that will give us maximum results for minimum effort. The notion that a product is a labor-saving device can be conveyed by calling it automatic: automatic coffeemaker, automatic egg cooker, automatic washer, etc. But such terms lack pizzazz! How can they be endowed with greater eye-appeal and still get the most-for-least idea across? The solution is to transform these pedestrian terms into blends. Thus, we can cook our food in a microwave oven that has Menu-Matic, a device that reads programmed recipe cards and cooks automatically; prepare our coffee in a General Electric Coffeematic, which brews coffee automatically; cook our eggs in Egg-A-Matic, a ceramic device that shuts off automatically to give us eggs that are boiled, poached, scrambled, or shirred just the way we like them; pop our corn in ButterMatic, which butters the corn as it pops; scrub our floors with Roll-O-Matic, a self-wringing mop and waxer; sit on Inflat-A-Matic, a cushion that requires only the press of a finger to inflate and deflate; create one-of-a-kind designs with Art-A-Matic, a spin painting set; wash our clothes in Wash-O-Matic, a portable electric clothes washer; pull in our pot bellies by wearing a Reduce-O-Matic Slimmer Belt; protect our eyes with Ray-Ban AmberMatic sunglasses, which automatically change color to help us see better in any weather; extinguish our cigarettes in Snuff-A-Matic, an ashtray that puts out cigarettes automatically in less than ten seconds; fasten our garden gates with an Adjust-O-Matic latch; and gamble easily and conveniently via Lottomatic, a system that automatically enters numbers in the weekly draw. The list goes on and on.

In spite of the poverty that exists in this country, we tend to think of the United States as the land of plenty. Consequently, merchants find it to their advantage to project the image of offering their customers a cornucopia of goods from which to choose. The notion of plenitude can be conveyed by employing the term panorama ‘an unlimited view in all directions’ in a promotional blurb. Thus, Bloomingdale’s offered its customers a panorama of pillows, thereby suggesting that there were pillows, pillows, everywhere, as far as the eye could see. More common than phrases of this sort, however, are blends in which the second element is a clipped form of panorama. For example, under the rubrics Grape-a-rama, Plum-a-rama, Apple-a-Rama, Pear-a-rama, and Roll-a-rama, Eisner Food Stores presented their customers with eleven kinds of grapes, eight kinds of plums, six kinds of apples, four kinds of pears, and five kinds of rolls from which to choose. Other merchants have used Sports-A-Rama, Fan-orama, Coat-a-rama, and Plant-O-Rama to entice people to come into their stores to select from a wide array of sporting goods, fans, coats, and plants. Although these blends vary somewhat orthographically, the message to the prospective customer is the same in each case: If you come into our store, you will have a plethora of merchandise from which to choose!

In contemporary English, marathon may be used to refer to an event that is “characterized by great length or concentrated effort” [Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary]. Therefore, a businessman who wants to convey the notion that he is working very hard on your behalf can hold a marathon sale that lasts thirty-seven hours, four days, or some other seemingly great length of time. However, the phrase marathon sale is often changed to the blend Sale-a-thon. Even more popular is Sell-a-thon, which leaps out at us from one advertisement after another. In fact, the ubiquity of both Sale-a-thon and Sell-a-thon has cost them their novelty value. As a result, wordsmiths have found it necessary to create other blends to convey the image of a businessman who is working hard on your behalf. Save-a-thon and Deal-a-thon convey this idea and simultaneously suggest that the customer will save money. Other blends call attention to the product that the merchant is working so hard to sell: Ford-a-thon, Boat-a-thon, Toyotathon, Shoe-a-thon, Shock-a-thon (a sale of shock absorbers), Videothon (a sale of video equipment), Plant-a-thon (a sale of plants and plant accessories).

While Sale-a-thon and Sell-a-thon suggest that a merchant is going to marathon lengths to provide his customers with an opportunity to buy, Sale-a-bration and Sell-a-bration convey the notion that visiting a car dealer, furniture store, or whatever is an act of celebration. However, Sale-a-bration and Sell-a-bration, like Sale-a-thon and Sell-a-thon, have lost their novelty value as a result of frequent use. Consequently, neologisms such as Summer-bration (used by a Chicago restaurant to call attention to summer specials), Sail-abration (promoting a sale held on Columbus Day), and Stella-bration (headlining an advertisement for Stella Buick of Chicago) have been created in an effort to retain the festive image inherent in Sale-a-bration and Sell-a-bration while providing the attention-grabbing novelty the latter two blends have lost.

These terms represent only a small fraction of the blends that have been employed by the mavens of marketing in their efforts to influence the buying behaviour of prospective customers. It seems highly likely that an ever-increasing number of commercial blends will be created in the future: it is no exaggeration to say that the blending process can never exhaust the English lexicon as a source of potential neologisms. Although it is true that not every pair of words can be merged into an acceptable blend, within the constraints imposed by the language, a skilled wordsmith can always create just the right neologism to fill the advertising need of the moment.

Novelty is, of course, a major advantage of using blends to sell! sell! sell! Since the average consumer is inundated by commercial messages from both the print and the electronic media, the merchant needs any edge he can get to capture the attention of a potential customer. Hence, Easterrific sale rather than terrific Easter sale, Coffeematic rather than automatic coffee maker, and Stella-bration rather than Stella Buick Celebration.

Another advantage of commercial blends is that they can be tailored to the specific needs of a particular merchant at a particular time. If, for example, a merchant wants to emphasize the fact that he has many plants from which you may choose, he can advertise a Plant-O-Rama. If, on the other hand, he prefers to emphasize that he is working very hard to provide you with an opportunity to buy plants, he can advertise a Plant-a-thon. The merchant might choose to emphasize the name of the company (Stella-bration, Zayre-iffic), the product being sold (Ford-a-thon, Toy-rific, Truffle-icious), the material of which the product is made (Silksational), some quality of the product (Scentsational), or what the product does (Butter-Matic). Blends allow the merchant to convey two messages for the “price” of one word.

Finally, blends are compatible with the Zeitgeist of contemporary commerce, which emphasizes the quick, the easy, and the disposable. If they are well constructed, blends created from English words are understood the first time they are encountered in context. In this sense, they are quick and easy, like instant coffee, Minute Rice, cake mixes, frozen dinners, fast-food restaurants, and microwave ovens. And, like Styrofoam cups, plastic knives and forks, paper plates, no-return cans and bottles, and disposable lighters and razors, blends in general and commercial blends in particular are the throw-away words of the language: Easterrific, honeylicious, and Deal-a-thon will never become entries in any dictionary. Neologisms such as these are created for the nonce; once their usefulness has faded, they are cast aside like a crushed beer can or a dirty paper plate.

EPISTOLA {Harold Levy}

An open letter to Elaine Chailza, author of “RhoDislan Says It Differnt” [[x,3]:

Deah Doctah Chaiker,

Thea only problem regahding the pronounciation and spelling of the ah sequence is that theah are as many changes in sound as there are errors in change from one set of examples to anothah. Although RhoDislan Says It Different, “the south will nevah rise again.” I would rathah give an extreme example of the ah; then the ah; than the ah aw ah. If the ah is owed to ah language, aw if the o is ahd or even odd, then what would our language do with an extra missing letta, like el for example? Ah liquids ah impawtant, ahn’t they? Awe liquids ah impawtant, ahn’t they?

Sinceahly yaws,
Rochrster, New York

[Harold Levy, Rochester, New York]

Around the World by Dictionary

Stephen E. Hirschberg, Elmsford, New York

Excavating the roots of toponyms, words derived from place names, reveals the conjunction of language, history, and geography. Often the toponyms have outlasted their ancient progenitors, or the vagaries of language evolution have obscured the word origins.

Toponym etymologies are tidbits which may be devoured avidly by footnote-gourmands of divers professions. Thus, the archaeologist learns that the southern Italian region of level fields, Campania, was the source of metal from which bells were made; thence were derived campanile ‘bell tower’ and campanology ‘the art or study of bell ringing and casting.’ The same root evolved through French to campaign ‘military operations “in the field” ' and champaign ‘level and open country.’ The economist discovers that a mint in 16th-century Bohemia, at Sankt Joachimsthal, produced a coin, the Joachimsthaler, shortened by German to taler, the ancestor of the dollar. The philologist finds that the corruption of language dates from ancient times: solecism originally referred to the violation of proper Attic dialect by the Athenian colonists at Soloi in Cilicia. The architect notes that the lower-case attic evolved from the construction style of ancient Attica, which placed a small order (colonnade and entablature) above a much taller one. The decorative band of the entablature—the frieze— resembled the famed embroidery of Phrygia, in Asia Minor.

If one could meander (from Maiandros, a wandering river of Phrygia) through both space and time, the dictionary would be an excellent Baedeker, indicating places not to be missed, as well as those better avoided. Go to Rome to see the residences of the emperors—palaces—on the Palatine Hill. See, before its destruction in the 14th century, the ancient wonder, the lighthouse at Pharos (now generic for a conspicuous, guiding beacon). Visit Arcadia (whence arcadian), the region of ancient Greece regarded as a pastoral paradise. The activities at the fair at Donnybrook, Ireland are not likely to be so peaceful. Take care, too, while touring Cerreto (near Spoleto, Italy)—a town once so famed for its quacks and frauds that its native ciarlatano was the prototype charlatan. Unless one enjoys the company of large, hairy arachnids, skip Taranto, Italy, and the creatures so common there—tarantulas. For entertainment, tarry in the 15th-century valley of Vire, France (vau-de-Vire), to hear the satiric songs which evolved into vaudeville. If fatigued by the tour, consider recovering in Sybaris, the ancient Greek city of luxury in southern Italy; the less sybaritic traveler might be satisfied by the archetypal waters of Spa, Belgium. For quiet excursions, select, of course, from the horse-drawn carriages named for their places of first manufacture: coach (Kocs, Hungary), surrey (England), berlin or landau (Germany). The pace for such relaxed journeys naturally is a canter (after the easy gait of mounted pilgrims on their way to Canterbury).

Geologists may prefer the immortality of becoming eponyms for minerals, but they often name a find for the place of its discovery. Among the locales so represented are the Amazon River (amazonite), Aragon (aragonite), Fort Benton, Montana (bentonite), Norway (norite), Turkestan (turquoise), Tripoli, Libya (tripoli), Sardis, Asia Minor (sard), Badhakhshan, Iran (balas—a semiprecious spinel), and Alabanda, Asia Minor (almandine). The weight of the gold extracted from the ore calaverite (Calaveras County, California) might be expressed in troy weight, after Troyes, France, a mercantile center where weight standards were established.

Chemists, too, have been generous in glorifying places. Marie Curie honored her homeland, Poland, with her discovery, polonium. The artificial elements berkelium, californium, and americium were produced at Berkeley, California. Copper was named by the ancients for Cyprus, then its most noted source, and magnesium for Magnesia, a metal-rich region of Thessaly. The chemical element toponym champion is Ytterby, Sweden, where first were found ytterbium, yttrium, erbium, and terbium.

Creation of a new fabric may not have been what put a place on the map, but it often put the place in the dictionary. The more familiar of these toponyms include angora (Ankara, Turkey); calico (Calicut, East Indies); damask (Damascus, Syria); denim (from the French serge de Nimes); duffel (Duffel, Belgium); dungaree (Dungri section of Bombay, India); lisle (Lisle, later Lille, France); muslin (Mosul, Iraq); oxford (Oxford, England); paisley (Paisley, Scotland); and cashmere (Kashmir). Suede is or resembles the leather from which Swedish gloves (French, gants de suède) were made.

Care to spruce up (probably from the fineness of Prussian leather)? A wardrobe of toponyms contains headwear (fez, Morocco; homburg, Germany); neckwear (ascot, England; cravat, a Croatian, Cravate in French, who would wear a neckband while serving as a French mercenary); formal wear (tuxedo, popularized at a country club in Tuxedo Park, New York); outer wear (ulster, Ireland; mackinaw, traded in the 19th century on Mackinac Island, Michigan); footwear (galosh, from the Latin gallica solea, ‘Gaulish sandal’); and almost-no-wear (bikini, after its effects, supposedly similar to those of the atomic bomb tests at Bikini, in the Marshall Islands).

Most toponymic animals remain proper nouns Labrador retriever, Guernsey and Holstein cattle, et al. Among the lower-case fauna, the canary was directly named for its native Canary Islands, but back another etymological generation are still other creatures—the large dogs (Latin canes) for which the islands were named. The curator of a toponym zoo could show us a curassow (of Curacao), leghorn (of Leghorn, Italy), spaniel (of Spain) and rottweiler (originally bred in Rottweil, Germany); but the star attraction would have to be the baluchithere, a huge, rhinoceroslike (and extinct) mammal of Baluchistan, Pakistan.

Menus are peppered with toponyms. A sherry (Jerez, Spain) to open the meal? Amontillado (a sherry of Montilla, Spain) perhaps. A salad of cos (lettuce originally exported from the Greek isle, Kos) may be topped with mayonnaise (according to the American Heritage Dictionary, possibly a French commemoration of the capture of Mahon, Minorca, in 1756, by the Duke of Richelieu). The soup: vichyssoise (‘cream of Vichy,’ France). Entrees include the obvious bologna (Bologna, Italy), hamburger and frankfurter (Hamburg and Frankfurt, Germany). Finnan haddie was once findhorn (Findhorn, Scotland) haddock. Turkey is actually a misnomer: the Portuguese imported, via Turkey, guinea fowl (after Guinea, Africa), known as turkey cocks; the American birds—now turkeys—were erroneously identified with these. Have your dish cooked with onions lyonnaise style, (after Lyon, France), shallots or scallions (both from Ascalon, a port in southern Palestine), or currants (Corinth). For drinks, select from bourbon (Bourbon County, Kentucky), bock beer (Eimbeck, Germany), champagne (Champagne, France), malmsey (white wine of Monembasia, Greece), scuppernong (wine of grapes from the Scuppernong River basin, North Carolina), or mocha (coffee exported from Mocha, Yemen). Still hungry? Have some fruit: a peach (Latin, persicum malum ‘Persian apple’), quince (Latin cydoneum malum ‘Cydonian apple’; Cydonia is now Canea, Crete), or a macédoine ‘a mixture of fresh cut fruit or vegetables in jelly’ (a French metaphoric toponym, the population of Macedonia being a mixture of various peoples).

The athletic word-historian will appreciate that badminton is named for Badminton, the seat of the Duke of Beaufort in Gloucestershire, where the game was introduced to England in the 1870s. The modern marathon, created for the 1896 Olympic Games, memorializes the run to Athens with the news of the Greek victory over the Persians at Marathon, in 490 B.C.

World trade brought new goods to market and new words to the language. The importer (later, the maker) of women’s finery, originally produced in Milan, was a milliner. From Macassar (on Celebes) came oils manufactured into hair pomade in the 19th century; chair backs required antimacassars for protection from this product. Fine porcelain ware brought to Europe in the 16th century was named for its origin, China (the imitation, delft, came from Delft, Netherlands). Lack of adequate crews for the China trade led to the American custom of rendering senseless and kidnaping sailors to man the ships to Shanghai; one compelled in such a manner was shanghaied.

A toponym demonstrates that American political rhetoric has not changed much since the early days of the republic. During the critical 1820 House of Representatives debate on the question of slavery in states newly admitted to the Union, Representative Felix Walker of Buncombe County, North Carolina, made a speech of such nonsense and verbosity (and admittedly directed to his constituents rather than to the House) that a “speech for Buncombe” (bunkum or bunk) became synonymous with claptrap.

Thus the dictionary can take one around the world and into its past. Henry Ford said, “History is bunk,” but to the logophile, mere “bunk” is history.

EPISTOLA {Kenneth P. Pulliam}

The source of the name Chloe for the recoverable vehicle used on aircraft carriers to test the aircraft launching catapult (in your review of Sea Jargon, [X, 4]) is probably the song of the same name. The only lines

Through the darkest night
I gotta go where you are
If it’s wrong or right
I gotta go where you are
…
…
If you live I’ll find you
…

Spike Jones did a version which contains the line (not in the original), “Where are you, you old bat?”

I would surmise that the test vehicle is sometimes difficult to locate.

[Kenneth P. Pulliam, Pfafftown, North Carolina]

[Hadn’t thought of it, though I know it. I was dredging for a classical reference—Editor]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Words: The Evolution of Western Languages

Victor Stevenson, ed., foreword by Philip Howard, (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1983), 224pp.

As its subtitle indicates, Words is an introduction to the historical study of the Indo-European languages, with brief notice of the non-Indo-European languages of Europe. After the long lack of attention to historical linguistics in works for the general public, we can only welcome its publication.

The book is elegantly designed, with many maps and illustrations. The editor allotted his space well, giving 57 pages to the Germanic languages, 54 to the Romance, 22 to the Slavic, and lesser amounts to the sub-branches with fewer speakers. If the book were not focused on Europe, we might deplore the short section of 12 pages on Indo-Iranian, especially since half of it is devoted to Romany, the language of the Gypsies. The material is readily accessible through an excellent index, indicating in boldface more than 1000 words for which origins are included. Although professonal linguists may deplore its brevity—scarcely more than 100 pages available for text other than illustrations—Words may attract a large audience, helping to bring attention once again to the historical study of language.

The text sketches the external history of each sub-branch, with comments on the lexicon. Of phonological matters, Grimm’s law and the High German Consonant Shift receive brief mention; morphology gets only occasional comment, as on the “shedding” of noun and verb endings in late Old English. Especially welcome are the carefully designed maps indicating language and dialect areas, as for the Indo-Iranian, Celtic, Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages and for the Spanish, West Germanic, and Old English dialects. These maps with explanatory material, followed up by maps on “Europe’s national languages” in themselves make the work a valuable handbook at the elementary and secondary school levels and as a supplementary text for general college and university courses.

The material is generally accurate. It is a pleasure to have the “Indo-European homeland” placed north of the Black and Caspian Seas, rather than in Central Europe, as was done in the most recent widely published article on the Indo-European family, Thieme’s in the Scientific American of October 1959, since reprinted. Further, technical advances of the Indo-European speakers, centered on “the horse and the wheel,” are related to the extension of the languages and their maintenance, illustrated in excellent charts. The individual accounts of the sub-branches describe their status up to the present day, often with illustrations of their impact on English.

Yet the book is not without its flaws. One even wonders whether Lockwood and Robins, who are credited for assistance, saw the final version. It contains errors, makes overstatements, and provides generalizations, often with troublesome flamboyance.

Selection of a nonlinguist as editor may well have brought a lively style. But with it came statements that the consultants did not remove. It is unfortunate to perpetuate further the confusion of sounds and letters, language and writing systems by a statement like “the letter p… becamef or v” (14). This confusion also allows the statement that “the greatest single influence on all European languages during the sixteenth century was the introduction of the printing press”—this in the lifetime of Luther and the period of increased international contacts of Britain, France, Spain, and others.

Some errors can be readily eliminated, such as vader as the form of ‘father’ in German, the labeling of a Hittite hieroglyphic inscription as a “Hittite clay tablet” (15), identification of the Indo-European Hittites with the Hittites of the Bible (16), the statement that Sanskrit, not Hittite, was the “first Indo-European language to be written down” (18), and identification of Tiwas as the greatest of the Germanic gods (118). And one wonders where the notion arose that the Slavonic languages were spread by “peaceful farmers” rather than “warriors” (173). It would have been welcome news to the peoples living in the Balkan peninsula, to the monasteries of central Europe, and to the Baltic countries, not to speak of the Caucasus and Siberian areas.

Such statements apparently arise from an aim to answer all questions, whatever the state of our knowledge. Thus, Phrygian was the language of Homer’s Trojans (17), the Armenians destroyed “whatever was left of the Hittite Empire” (17), and the Old High German Consonant Shift resulted from Celtic influence, “as if the English … of the west chose … to speak English throughout England with a Welsh accent” (134).

Attempts at folksy learning may well be owed to the influence of the literary editor of The Times (London)—Philip Howard—who gives a precise, if qualified, figure on the number of languages spoken today: 2,759 (6); yet India and adjacent countries are said to have “500 mother tongues” (18). He also finds that “Aleut is exactly suited to the fishy needs of the Aleutian Islanders” (6). And although “the Indo-European mother tongue started to be spoken about 8000 years ago” (7), “Chinese is older” (6) than the languages of Europe, whatever such a judgment may mean. Some of the later text reflects such a point of view, as that on page 120: “Danes, Norwegians, Icelanders and Swedes can look back with mischievous glee to the days when their ancestral tongue brought terror to foreigners unfortunate to hear the berserkers for the first time.”

Some of the generalizations verge on silliness. The “meaning [of Classical Latin] was elusive to all but those who were masters of it. The order of words in a sentence could be varied for reasons of emphasis and nuances of style and the sense could remain unclear until the sentence was completed. It was not a language for everyday conversation” (66). And in the “perfectly good colloquial English” sentence ‘My father’s tobacco kiosk was blown to smithereens in the blitz,' “none of the italicized words has its origins in England” (160). Since “father and blown have their roots in the ancient Indo-European mother tongue,” there seems to be little likelihood that many English words “have their origins in England.”

In spite of such misguided attempts at popularization, Words is superior to many general works on language in reflecting an accurate view of it and in presenting facts. Students using the book can learn the general history of the spread of the Indo-European language family, one of the significant movements in human history, inasmuch as one of every two human beings today speaks an Indo-European language, and the number is growing with the massive attempt of the People’s Republic of China and other countries to teach their citizens English. Used to scholarly books with somber formats and few illustrations, one wonders why a beautifully designed and illustrated work must be flamboyant, stretching its presentation of data to the edge of truth. But since realism cannot be evaded even in 1984, we hope that Words attracts a broad audience, so broad that future editions will emend overstatements, correct the small number of misprints, and arouse interest once again in one of the most remarkable events in human history, the spread of the Indo-European language family and the contributions of its speakers.

[Winfred P. Lehmann, The University of Texas at Austin]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Wally the Wordworm

Clifton Fadiman, illustrated in color, (Stemmer House, 1983), 56 pp.

I have conducted a life-long quarrel with word-books and teaching tools for children that are based on the premise that there is a more-or-less “fixed” vocabulary that children of a certain age are familiar with. That is not to criticize the purely pedagogical theory that there are certain words that one can expect children of a given age to know. But that is a matter of analysis of reading matter, not of writing. If a child is fortunate enough to have intelligent parents who speak their language to him (instead of some idiotic notion of how children use language, i.e., babytalk), he will learn from them the words he needs for communication. In addition, and if he is less fortunate, he should, no, must acquire his vocabulary from reading and from watching TV programs like Nature, Nova, Nickelodeon, and, for those who cannot yet read, Sesame Street. Teaching vocabulary is a silly enterprise when applied to children, and I have some doubts about its usefulness for adults. When I was about eight or nine, I was given books like The Earth for Sam, The Sky for Sam, and The Sea for Sam, which I found fascinating. In short order, words like Tyrannosaurus Rex, nova, Horsehead Nebula, paleolithic, and dozens of others became familiar friends, though I had some difficulty in steering conversations with my contemporaries to topics that allowed me to exercise that kind of word stock.

There were, of course, many other books that yielded up their verbal treasures. Children tend, naturally, to acquire the vocabularies of the subject areas that interest them: ten-year-olds interested in computers, or astronomy, or baseball, or philately will quickly become familiar, on their own, with the words and concepts associated with those subjects. It is (partly) the function of education to broaden the base, so to speak, to acquaint them with subjects they have not or might not have otherwise encountered. Some of those are “academic,” in the sense that one does not, in the normal course of events, encounter much American history or geometry in everyday life, nor does the average person have access to the chemistry laboratories or the powerful microscopes that are met with when pursuing a general high-school curriculum. “Academic” education has its purpose in acquainting students with the sort of basic knowledge they might be likely to need just to get by in the modern world; only in a secondary sense does it acquaint them with the kinds of options that they might explore to fulfill their lives. Thus, if one never learns what a biologist or astronomer or anthropologist does, how can one choose to become any of those? In today’s specialized world, where choices of career abound, students are sore put to learn all or even many of the options open to them, options that may well coincide with their talents and interests.

Having delivered myself of that polemic, I’d best return to Wally the Wordworm. To many of us in the minority—that is, those born before 1940—Clifton Fadiman is known as the incisive host of a long-running radio show, Information, Please, peopled by experts like Franklin P. Adams, Oscar Levant, and other well-informed bodies who spontaneously answered questions sent in by listeners. If they failed to answer correctly, the questioner received a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It has always been my impression that few EBs were sent out, owing to the brilliance of the experts. More recently, Kip Fadiman has been on the board of the Book-of-the-Month Club, for more years than I can count. Wally was first published in 1964; the present edition, enlivened by sparkling illustrations by Lisa Atherton, is a welcome and refreshing addition to the welter of books for children, and it shouldn’t be allowed to go out of print again. Fadiman’s point is that words are fun. He “hated books for children in which the words were supposed to suit their age, so that they’d never come across a word too ‘hard’ for them.” (From the Foreword.)

Wally the Wordworm is a bookworm with an insatiable appetite for words: he not only loves dictionaries, he simply eats them up. In his gastronomic peregrinations, he encounters (and ingests) words like voracious, abracadabra, palindrome (where he stops for a post-prandial pause to consider madam, deified, and other examples of the genre), safari, alligator, and many other verbal delights. The presentation of these words varies from outright encounter to puns, analogies, spelling curiosities, and other funomena.

If you have (or are, or know) a child, buy this book, a joy to the eye, the mind, and the spirit.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Creative Publications 1984 Catalog: K-12 Mathematics

(Language Arts and Computer Education), 104 pp.

This is an attractive catalogue containing books, film strips, calculators, computers, computer software, and other teaching materials for students from kindergarten through high school. It may seem odd to review such a publication in VERBATIM, but, especially for younger children, learning can be more of a game than a chore, and I see no reason a thoughtful parent should not consider acquiring, for his five-year-old, The Children’s Discovery System Computer for only $69.95. Available for it are ten “modules” (programs) dealing with logic, words, music, art, foods, geography, fractions, and the (I suppose) inevitable arcade games. (Perhaps arcade games on computers can help improve eye-hand coordination; to be sure, that was never a sufficient rationale for pin-ball machines.)

If you are unfamiliar with what is available in the realm of teaching/learning aids, this catalogue is a revelation. Most of the items offered are quite inexpensive, though how good they are I cannot say, as I haven’t seen them “in the flesh.” Creative Publications’ address is P.O. Box 10328, Palo Alto, California 94303. The toll-free phone number (for orders) is 800-624-0822 (800-321-0707 in California). There are many beautiful full-color photos of seashells throughout the catalogue.

Laurence Urdang

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“Dear Ann Landers:… ‘There is now a fink of $100 if a person fails to come to the aid of someone in an emergency.’ …Also, in Massachusetts a physician…has an obligation to provide medical services…unless the physician’s training or experience makes him unqualified to do do, in which case the physician must make a reasonable attempt to secure competent emergency aid. To date neither the Vermont nor the Massachusetts regulation has been specifically appled….

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“For many years my husband and I talked about buying a fag and putting up a pole so we could appropriately celebrate patriotic holidays….

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“Our daughter and her husband are angry with us and I am hurt. My husband is on their side. He says he is willing to sin with the grandkids and that I am selfish. What do you think?” [From the Kennebec Journal, Augusta, December 17, 1983, p. 8. Submitted by Vernon D. MacLaren, Augusta, Maine.]

Non-Native Tongues

Stephen Trussel, Honolulu, Hawaii

The use of tongue for language is rare in idiomatic English today, although it has been used in that sense in literary English since the earliest times (as for example, in the 14th-century Cursor Mundi: þis ilke boke is translate In to Inglis tong to rede). We’re not surprised to hear someone assert that “English is my mother tongue,” but the question “How many tongues do you speak?” would no doubt cause a few eyebrows to be raised. While tongue is familiar in some standard phrases, with mother, native, or exotic, for example, we otherwise generally seem to require language.

In idioms the sense ‘speech’ prevails, rather than ‘language.’ We speak of keeping a civil tongue, holding one’s tongue, or having a forked tongue. Getting a tongue lashing, worrying about tongues wagging, or regretting a slip of the tongue, may leave me tongue-tied … (or maybe the cat’s just got my tongue!).

The use of tongue to mean ‘language’ or ‘speech’ parallels the anatomical sense historically, well illustrated by passages from Old English, and this connection of tongue and language is common throughout languages: we find the same word with both meanings in the romance Languages (Fr. langue, Sp. lengua, It. lingua, Pr. lingua, Rm. limbă), Czech (jazyk) and Serbo-Croatian (jezik), Hungarian (nyelv), Finnish (kieli), Greek (glõssa), Arabic (lougha), and Hebrew (laschon). And in poetic use it is found in many more, as in English and German. Our word tongue is native, coming to us ultimately from the Indo-European *dnghū ‘tongue’ by way of Germanic *tungōn. We find Old English tunge, tongue, Middle Dutch tonghe, tongue, Modern German Zunge. The Latin lingua (Old Latin dingua) from the same root, had both senses, anatomical and linguistic. It is the source for one of our nonnative tongue roots, lingu-, and indirectly, by way of French, for our word language itself. Even langue (French ‘tongue, language’) can be found in English texts into the 19th century.

It is from the Latin that the bulk of our scientific borrowings for language come directly, both when we speak of English becoming the lingua franca of the world, and when we form new constructions on the root lingu-. We may bemoan the monolingualism of today’s American youth, while admiring the bi-, tri-, and quadrilingual speakers who make up the multi-lingual populations of Europe. And if you know the lingo well enough, you can construct new compounds—trade names such as Linguaphone (the language teaching method), or impetuous coinages such as linguaphile or linguaphobe, with a good likelihood of being understood.

Webster’s Second, for example, lists linguipotence, ‘the mastery of languages,’ linguister (and later lingster), ‘interpreter,’ and even linguacious, ‘loquacious.’ Nowadays, linguists are students of linguistics (perhaps more often than they are masters of many languages), but this was not always the case. Only a hundred or so years ago it was another nonnative tongue which held sway in the science of language, one which might easily be glossed over. As Max Müller wrote in 1868, “The conception of a science of language, of Glottology, was reserved for the nineteenth century.” And there is our other tongue, from the Greek. The classical Greek glōssa, Attic glōtta (from Indo-European *glōgh ‘thorn, point’) meant both tongue and language as far back as Homer. And an additional meaning came with the borrowed form into English, also from the Greek: a word inserted between the lines or in the margin as an explanation equivalent of a foreign or otherwise difficult word in the text: our English gloss. Old English had a cognate glesan ‘to gloss, interpret,’ and this developed into both a noun and verb form gloze, which was refashioned in the 16th century, after the Latin and Greek, into glosse, gloss. Latin glossarium made its way into English by at least the 15th century as glossary, a collection of glosses. (The development of the negative sense in gloss over something ‘give a cursory treatment’ came from an extension of critical gloss ‘literary interpretation’ and not from the (unrelated) ‘surface shine.') So as we will see, it was the glossographers, compilers of glossaries, collectors and annotators of lists of obscure and foreign words, who were the antecedents of the glossologists and glottologists who were to become the linguists of today.

We find in Henry Cockeram’s 1623 dictionary glossographie: “an expounding of strange words,” and in Nathan Bailey’s (1721) glossography: “the art of writing a glossary.” Whitney’s Century Dictionary (1889) shows glossographical: “a description or grouping of languages,” as well as the anatomical sense, “a description of the tongue.” And indeed, anatomical compounds concerned with the tongue are quite common for the glosso- root, eventually superseding the linguistic sense. An extension of this usage has resulted in the anatomical glottis and epiglottis, with the concommitant glottal stop of articulatory phonetics, in addition to technical medical terms for disorders of the tongue.

Glossology, ‘the study of language or languages; the science of language,’ was in use from the 18th century. Consider William Taylor’s plea (in the “Annual Review and History of Literature,” 1808): “We appeal to every lover of glossology in general, and of English literature in particular, for assistance to promulgate and to preserve a supplement to Johnson’s Dictionary….” An admirable goal.

Some 20th-century introductions into linguistic vocabulary make use of the root: we find Bloomfield’s glosseme and Hjelmslev’s glossematics; the isoglottic line of linguistic geography; and glottochronology, Swadesh’s system for dating the divergence of linguistic family members. But these seem just stragglers from the large 19th-century herd. Along with many 19th-century concepts, most of the terms have vanished. Consider the report in the Edinburgh Review (1848) that “it appears that glottological considerations afford a strong presumption in favour of the origin of the nations of Asia, Europe, America and Polynesia, from one common stock.” Alas! Earlier still, James Howell (in his Lexicon Tetraglotton, 1659, an English-French-Italian-Spanish dictionary) wrote: “Touching Europe, glottographers tell us … that she hath eleven Originall, Independent, and Mother Toungs.” Terms and opinions change with the times. John Evelyn (1660) wrote in his memoirs that “Dr. Petty … had a main design to erect a Glottical College,” but such institutions are few and far between today. We can find references to glottogonic, ‘relating to the origin of language or languages’; glottic for ‘linguistic’; glossic, for a phonetic writing system, a replacement of an earlier glossotype; and glossograph, an electrical device to reproduce speech automatically. And if we should begin speaking in tongues, we have glossolalia, still with us today.

As an adjective and noun-forming suffix, -glot (earlier glott) is still familiar. Polyglot, perhaps the most common form, dates from at least the 17th century, with the same sense as found in the original Greek. Citations for its appearance in French date from 1639. Of the two senses, descriptive of a person speaking many languages or of a book or text written in several, it is the latter that has generally prevailed, especially in combination with Greek numerical prefixes. The Oxford English Dictionary gives citations for monoglot (1), diglot (2), triglot (3), tetraglot (4), pentaglot (5), hexaglot (6), heptaglot (7), and octoglot (8), dating back into the 16th century and most often descriptive of Bibles, dictionaries, or other texts. There is even an example of a hybrid (Latin + Greek) biglot (2), but hardly a sign of monolingual (Greek + Latin). Most of these have been replaced with lingu- forms today, especially when descriptive of speakers; and so, as we have seen above, we tend to use monolingual or unilingual, bilingual, trilingual or even quadri-lingual, along with poly-, pluri-, and multilingual.

But the eventual success of linguist over glossologist would not have been easily predicted by one scanning the OED, for the only sense current for linguist was ‘one who is skilled in the use of language, master of other tongues besides his own,’ the sense in which Shakespeare used it at the end of the 16th century. It also had the meaning ‘one who speaks a (specified) language,’ but ‘a student of language, a philologist’ was deemed obsolete (as were the senses ‘interpreter’ and ‘language master—one who uses his tongue freely or knows how to talk’). The most likely explanation may be the influence of the French (linguiste, linguistique), but the factors which led to the preference of the Latin root over the Greek are still matters for speculation. Perhaps there is a connection with the decline in the study of classical languages: Greek, with its less familiar, less accessible alphabet, might be the first to go. Or maybe there was a more intentional shift—an attempt to break with ideas of the past and their linguistic impedimenta. Or is there simply something objectionable about the sound of glot to the modern ear? Whatever the reason, we will presumably do well to heed the advice of Archibald H. Sayce in his Principles of Comparative Philology (1874): “As glottologists, we have to begin with roots.” And so we have come full circle.

Chaucer’s Fish

Leonard Cochran, O.P., Providence College

One might be hard pressed to say which provides more intellectual satisfaction: speculation about the origin of a word or the discovery of persuasive evidence.

In Our Marvelous Native Tongue (Times Books, New York, 1983), Robert Claiborne mentions Eric Partridge’s discovery of dover, “a bit of hotel waiter’s slang, apparently dating from the mid-nineteenth century, meaning a reheated dish.” After pointing out that Partridge “guessed that it represented a sort of condensation of ‘do over,’ ” Claiborne goes on to offer his own theory:

Something about the word struck me as familiar, however, and sent me back to my copy of The Canterbury Tales. At one point the Host, needling the Cook, remarks (with the English modernized), “Full many a Jack of Dover hast thou sold/That hath been heated twice and twice grown cold.” Here, I am convinced, is the true source of Partridge’s “dover”—evidently the proprietor of some inn or cookshop better known for economy than for quality.

Something about the word and the construction placed on it by Claiborne struck me, also, and I hastened to my copy of the Tales, edited by the well-known Chaucer scholar, John H. Fisher, who glosses the phrase Jakke of Dovere as “evidently a stale pie.” A Chaucer Glossary (compiled by Norman Davis, Douglas Gray, Patricia Ingham, and Anne Wallace-Hadrill, OUP, 1979) seems less certain: “?kind of meat pie.” At any rate, was Jack a penny-pinching innkeeper or a stale pie?

Methinks neither. He was a fish! And Francis Magoun, Jr., may agree, albeit more cautiously, as becomes a scholar. In A Chaucer Gazetteer (University of Chicago Press, 1961), the following entry appears under DOVER:

[Dover] … is mentioned in CT A 4347 to define some undetermined cooked dish, perhaps a pie of sorts, perhaps a Dover sole … at any rate much warmed over.

Let us look closer at the pertinent lines, which come from the Prologue of the Cook’s Tale, the Host speaking:

Now telle on, Roger, looke that it be goode,
For many a pastee hastow laten blood,
And many a Jakke of Dovere hastow soold
That hath been twies hoot and twies coold.

It is Roger who is being urged to tell his tale, and Roger who is accused by the Host of having lightened the meat pie by removing its filling, as Fisher glosses the second line. And it is Roger who has sold many a “Jakke of Dovere” which he had allowed to cool, then warmed over for sale to the unsuspecting guest. Therefore, Jack of Dover (whatever he or it may be) is not the innkeeper or the cook. Then, is it a pie, and a stale one, at that? Why would Chaucer use the same image in succeeding lines? Obviously, he might have done so to illustrate two different styles of the same fraud, but it seems more likely that, having already used a pie to point out Roger’s tight-fistedness, a poet of Chaucer’s range would select another example.

According to the OED, as early as 1466 the word Jack was used to indicate a ‘joint,’ as in a joint of mutton (“…a jakke of motone”). This might make some sense, but if jack means ‘joint,’ what is a joint of Dover? Perhaps the practice was so common in the port town that a dover joint became synonymous with warmed-over food. I am intrigued by this possibility; but I, too, have a theory I should like to spin out.

The John Dory, a flatfish popular in the Middle Ages, as Waverley Root tells us (Food: An Authoritative and Visual History and Dictionary of the Foods of the World, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1980), is found “…northward normally to the southern coast of England, but is occasionally encountered even off Norway.” Again, the OED informs us that John Dory is “A popular name of a fish, Zeus faber, formerly called simply the dorée or dory.” The first appearance of the word dory for fish is listed as 1440. The appellation John seems to have attached itself some 300 or so years later. But, as early as 1587, jack was used with reference to fish, specifically to the pike. The possibility of its earlier, even Middle English use, cannot be ruled out. And dorée may as easily have been in oral use in Chaucer’s time. Might we not, then, get fish of Dover from Jakke of Dovere? And how much more pungent Chaucer’s line when we know he is speaking of a warmed-over fish!

Far be it from me to challenge Partridge. From a strictly logical standpoint, his opinion rings true. But, if language were logical, it would be as cut and dried as Chaucer’s “twies hoot and twies coold” fish. And just as unappetizing!

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“Moscow Press says ‘Hysteria’ Over Korean Plane Will Not Effect Ties for Long.” [From The New York Times, September 12, 1983. Submitted by David Galef, New York City.]

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“East Coast’s leading snake-cake and pie company is now entering greater L.A.” [From a classified ad in the Los Angeles Times, September 22, 1983. Submitted by Julian Ross, Los Angeles.]

Language Crimes: The Case of the Count’s Companion

Richard L. Faust, New York, New York

The icy February rain was beating against my grimy office windows, and I was down to my last lychee nut, when there was a knock at the office door. The words on the glass panel were clearly visible in the dim light: AHA: PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. Beyond my palindromic name two shadows waited. As I shouted “Come in!’ ” I reached for a clean manila folder, for I knew another case was beginning.

They entered, two strangers in a strange land. I sized them up as foreigners, not used to our ways, and the man’s first utterance confirmed my deduction.

“Aha,” he exclaimed, “you are he, yes?”

Central Europe, no doubt about it. By his clothes he could have been upper class, shabby but upper, with an atmosphere of stale damask and fresh sorrow, the lost glories of a former greatness. He carried sadness like a pocket handkerchief. My oriental ancestors had learned a thousand years ago to counter hardship with aplomb.

“I am Count Abel Nownplurall,” he announced grandly, “and this is the Countess Hyphen-Enid Nownplurall, my loyal wife and companion in adversity.”

“Sit down, please.” I motioned toward the only two chairs (Automat circa 32), and they sat as if assuming a throne.

“We come about our dear good friend Fewer. He’s gone, perhaps forever, maybe kaput even. He is out of place in this modern world, helpless. And he was so attached to us, always.” He wept into his sadness.

“When did you first notice he had disappeared?”

“In the supermarket. When we saw the sign saying ‘Ten Items or Less,’ we knew then; we knew that Fewer had disappeared. Can you bring him back, yes?”

“It may take time, a lot of time. Maybe even until all the supermarkets have been turned into radioactive rubble.”

“But we need him now; we need his distinction. What clear distinction he always gives! Fewer is elegant, no less, and has to be with Count Abel Nownplurall. You must find him.”

“Describe him.”

“Well, he is of ancient lineage, as old as our family, and he has always associated with Counts, never non-Counts. He is lean, precise, learned. Recently he has suffered from neglect, like us all.” (He looked at the countess.) “No one wants to hear him mentioned in the media any more. People will not utilize him. The beer commercials on the television now use the famous actor Les Calories. We have heard Fewer say how much he hated Les Calories no less than ten times.”

So, I thought, Fewer and Les were bitter rivals. I decided to take on the case. Before they left, the Countess spoke up, “We love Fewer more than most. Return him to us.”

As usual, I checked in with my old friend Billy Emerald, the lex guard at the Oakland dictionary depot. Sure enough, he knew about the disappearance of Fewer—it was common knowledge among the guards—but he held out little hope of getting him back. “Do you know,” he asked, “how many such guys end up on the dungheap of language every year? The carnage is awesome. When is the last time you heard of Supercilious or Supernumerary? The Latins go first—highly strung, no resistance. There’s a chance Fewer may not be dead yet. He has the strength of most plural adjuncts, but he’ll need lots of help, maybe a good PR man. Aha, it’s a big job; are you up to it?”

“You forget, Billy, that my oriental ancestors in their wisdom taught me old proverbs like ‘Never choose a strong opponent.’ I shall be up against only ‘lesser’ men.”

I needed a break in the case. My wise oriental ancestors also said, “Ask the classic questions.” So I asked one: “Where would you be if you were Fewer?” The answer was obvious, of course: I would be in fewer places. So I went back to my office.

It was there I solved the case. I found him all right, or what was left of him, just skin and bones and beyond resuscitation, the cold body stuffed into the trash basket outside my office door. I made a phone call and waited, for I knew in my oriental wisdom who had done it.

They entered the office, bearing with them the faint scent of pumpernickel and rue. They assumed the same postures as before in the same chairs, but the scene was quite different now.

“How did you figure it out, please?”

“You made a slip. You said, ‘no less than ten times’ when talking about Fewer and Les. It should be ‘no fewer than.’ That mistake showed you, of all people, were in the habit of using less, and I realized what that would do to Fewer. You badgered him and weakened him until eventually he passed away, killed not by neglect, as one might expect, but by deliberate persecution. And I know why you did it, too.”

Their eyes showed pain but no fear.

“It was the beer, wasn’t it? You wanted to be famous on the commercials, to be rich again and adored, to associate with stars like Les. But as long as Fewer lived, you were stuck with him, since you and Fewer were historically linked. You had no chance to join with Les until you eliminated Fewer forever. That’s why you did it.”

I reached for the phone. In the dying light I saw their noble tears.

After the police had taken them both away, I sat listening to the rain beating against the grimy windows. The warm tea and the rain made me recall another piece of wisdom from my oriental ancestors—“You cannot avoid what is in the blood.” The Count and Countess had blood from Central Europe. I sighed and wrote at the end of the case memo—Cause of Death: Old beer trying to mix with new.

ANTIPODEAN ENGLISH: From Woop Woop to Bullamakanka

George W. Turner, University of Adelaide

When Mark Twain visited Australia in 1895, he seemed to be especially attracted by our geographical names (such as Woolloomooloo). He would not have encountered the names Woop Woop or Bullamakanka, as they are fictitious names for remote places, parodies of Aboriginal names, as Waikikamukau (pronounced “Why kick a moo-cow”) is a parody of New Zealand’s Polynesian names. But the Australian reality holds its own with parody. Tallygaroopna is a genuine name and so are Old Koomooloo, Tittybong, Jimboomba, Kookabookra, Ki Ki, Weebollabolla and Tharbogang. Some names, like Bong Bong, are easy enough to pronounce; others, like Goondoobluie (pronounced “gunder-bluey” with stress on the “-blu-”) might puzzle the stranger. There is no clear rule about accents. Goombargona, with the same number of syllables as Goondoo-bluie, has stress on the second syllable. Upper Botobolar has it on the last. Tyalgum in Queensland is pronounced “tie-alg-um,” with stress on the middle syllable, but Tyalgum in New South Wales has only two syllables, “tal-gum.”

It is not only Aboriginal names that make pronunciation puzzles. Like Americans, Australians sometimes adopt English names without following English pronunciation. Grantham in Australia rhymes with anthem, a permitted but less common pronunciation in England. Trentham in New Zealand likewise has a “th” sound, in this case not even a possible pronunciation in England. Australians sound the l in Faulconbridge and Highgate has a full a sound as if it were two words.

Not all newcomers were from England. A Belgian patriot named Antwerp, a rural locality in Victoria; Zeerust commemorates a birthplace in the Transvaal. The explorer Strzelecki named Mount Kosciusko, Australia’s highest mountain, after a Polish patriot, and is himself remembered in place names, with the pronunciation “strez-lecky” (accented on the middle syllable). Early German settlement brought German place names, especially in South Australia, but many were lost, at least for a time, during the first World War, when Germans and their language were considered unspeakable. Scholarship was not always accurate: Hahndorf, named after Captain Hahn, the captain of a Danish ship, became Ambleside for a while, and there was even a move to change Tanunda until it was pointed out that the name was there even before the Germans.

Literature provided some names. Ivanhoe in Victoria reminds us of the popularity of Scott in the early days of Australia, and the Bible explains Jericho, Jerusalem, and the Jordan, the basis of a joke in Furphy’s Such Is Life in which a traveler willing to recount his experiences in these places turns out to have been no further afield than South-Eastern Tasmania.

American names are not common and are usually, like Yankee Jim’s Creek, associated with the goldfields. Tomahawk Creek need not have a direct American origin but indicates the early adoption in Australia of the word tomahawk as the normal word for a hatchet. American River in Kangaroo Island was a name given by sealers because an American captain had visited the locality in 1803 and built a small ship there. Mississippi Sawmills, a former timber-milling area near Big Pat’s Creek, in Victoria, must owe something to Americans, but Lexington in the same state recalls an English locality.

Even in a young country the origins of names are often hard to trace. There are some surprises. Bendigo, the name of a famous goldfield and thriving city, well enough known to have produced offshoot names like New Bendigo and Little Bendigo, sounds like an Aboriginal name, but in fact is thought to recall the nickname of a station shepherd jocularly known by the name of the English pugilist Abednego William Thompson. The other large goldrush city in Victoria, Ballarat, has an Aboriginal name.

Literature and a touch of wit named the Victorian rural locality Lilliput. The name was originally chosen by a Lands Commissioner for a relatively small station (American ‘ranch’) owned by a man who had a number of children and whose name was James Gullifer. But, of course, if anyone takes the trouble to check the bearings given by Lemuel Gulliver in Dean Swift’s report of his travels, it will be found that the original Lilliput was really in South Australia.

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“Sick Sikh.” [From an Associated Press pick-up from a local New Delhi newspaper, reporting a stricken soldier. Submitted by E.A. Livingston, Richmond Hill, New York.]

A Grandfather Stories Glossary

Josephus Perrick, Los Alamitos, California

Grandfather Stories by Samuel Hopkins Adams (New York: Random House, 1955) is the linguistic equivalent of the finest wines, whiskeys, cheeses: a commingling of delightful flavors suitably mellowed and aged.

These memoirs cover the author’s “boyhood years of the 1870s and early 1880s” and contain many colloquialisms of that era. However, the dominant figure is Grandfather Myron Adams, “born at the tag-end of the eighteenth century,” who “consciously affected its archaisms” (to charm and often baffle his grandchildren). Add to that a generous amount of the slang current along the Erie Canal in the 1820s and beyond, and we have a savory mixture of vocabularies. The secret, as the saying goes, may be in the blend.

Not many of the book’s colloquialisms can be found in H. L. Mencken’s The American Language. Quite a few do turn up in Slang and Its Analogues (1890-1904), compiled by J.S. Farmer and W. E. Henley. And a number of the “archaisms” are explained in the Merriam-Webster Third New International (NID3); in fact, the source given for some of the NID3 definitions is none other than Grandfather Stories. Most of this quaint and flavorsome talk can be at least generally understood from the context; but in some cases, fortunately, Grandfather Adams translates Erie Canalese and other arcane expressions. The following selective glossary relies primarily upon the book itself rather than upon dictionaries. (All page references are to the 1955 Random House edition.)

accosts, n. unwanted sermons: Nobody could get from waterfront to capitol without a score of accosts from these well-meaning zealots [‘temperance advocates’]. (62)

affording, adj. generous and helpful: an affording and officious nature (119). Used later in the sense of comfortable or luxurious; see quotation after pompous. See also officious.

almshouse auction, auctioning off the poor of the parish. Bidders undertook to feed, clothe and lodge indigents for the price indicated—in return for services as cheap labor, domestic servants, etc. See also poor, poormaster.

ambition, n. grudge: All true boatmen [on the Erie Canal] have an ambition against the cumbering rafts. (307)

anatomists, n., pl. persons in the business of “body-snatching” [see also cad-wagons, resurrectioner]. Listed among many Erie Canal country “characters” and con-artists on p. 20: ash-bucket apprentices (q.v.), blanketeers, gyppos [‘gypsies’], shun-pikes, redemptioners (q.v.), swing kettles, and tenkers.

ash-bucket apprentices, apprentices who have run off and are listed in advertisements as, in effect, worthless and ungrateful wretches. A typical formula in such notices was “two cents and a bucket of ashes,” followed by the name and description of the runaway apprentice. (See 20, 288, and 289: You put the ashbucket on me.)

avails, n., pl. funds: I made it clear that none of my avails were going to be dissipated upon a sawdust siren. (84)

Baptist time, time on the clock in the steeple of the Peculiar Baptists’ church (56). There is a later reference to Presbyterian time.

bouker, n. bilker, pitchman: A professional bouker, higgling lewd prints for a penny (300). Comparable terms are bounetter (79), ingler (73, 247).

bunkum, adj. clever, smart, fashionable: Bunkum! Very bunkum! (113). NID3 conjectures a derivation, via Canadian French le buncum sa, from French il est bonne comme ca. Not to be confused with the variant of buncombe.

cachexy, n. fit, stroke: If you let your gorge rise like that, you’ll have a cachexy. (111)

cad-wagons, n., pl. wagons transporting illicitly-obtained cadavers (131). See also resurrectioner.

canal craft, types of, listed on p. 295: line boats, packet boats, ballheads, Durhams, gala boats, countersterns, toothpick scows, dugouts, arks, flats and per-iaugers, and always the slow rafts….

carcagne, n. terrible, vengeful monster: a storm-hag with a wolf’s head, a vampire’s mouth, and a bat’s wings (127). No dictionary listings located, but there is a reference to this apparition in The World of Washington Irving by Van Wyck Brooks.

cataplasm, n. a poultice: A doctor on a passing boat bled, purged and puked him, and applied a cataplasm of bread and milk upon a wilted cabbage leaf. (302)

chirk, adj. lively, cheerful: as chirk as a chitterdiddle [?] on a pokeweed. (282)

cholera sermons, dire utterances from the pulpit representing a cholera epidemic as divine retribution for sinners: a potent auxiliary of the disease in producing panic among the apprehensive populace. (63)

composition, n. agreement, understanding: The captains consulted and came to a composition. (150)

contagionist, adj. The “contagionist school of medicine” held that cholera was transmitted from person to person (62). See also meteorastic, telluric.

copious, adj. profanely eloquent: The most copious hoggee on the towpath could not have been more vituperous.

cruel, adj. very, decidedly: She [the gala boat] was cruel gay with bunting upon her rails and silk pennants flying. (298)

cupidity, n. a love-note. (186)

dibs, n., pl. dollars: fifty sweet dibs. (258)

doffer, n. textile worker: I was a doffer in the Bird of Freedom mills. (304)

dotch me, equivalent to ‘search me’ or ‘I’ll be dadgummed’: Dotch me if I quite twig it. (163) See also twig.

easeful, adj. at elegant leisure: Could they but see me now, as I sit, easeful and ladyish, upon my spotless foredeck! (294)

easting, n. progress eastward: … determined to make all the easting he could before the water subsided beneath us. (310)

elephant, I have seen the, slang for ‘once bitten, twice shy.’ (71)

feeze, all of a, very excited, distraught. (161)

fillip, v. equivalent to thumbing one’s nose: The man filliped his fingers toward his accuser, in jaunty farewell. (124)

fip, n. counterfeit coin: A fip from his mold fell into the sheriff’s hand. (91)

foofoo, n. Erie Canal term for a foreigner. (186)

gardaloo, n. variously, a heckler or the equivalent of a Bronx cheer. (175) Not to be confused with gardyloo, that marvelous old Scottish cry of warning just before the slops or chamber pot got emptied out a window on the street below.

ginseng, n. brightweed, mandragon, shang. See 199ff. for an account of the great “Ginseng Boom” which devastated wooded areas in rural New York. There was great demand for ginseng root among U.S. and overseas Chinese, who regarded it as the ultimate panacea and aphrodisiac. (Today, ginseng is popular among health food enthusiasts for the same reasons.)

harstle, v. to fret, upset: Don’t harstle yourself over it. (245) A possible ancestor of hassle, for which several current dictionaries say “origin unknown.”

hifer, v. to dilly-dally?: … who is to ply the metal if I hifer here listening to thy silly whoobub? (248)

hoodledasher, n. a “live” canal boat and a “dead” one pulled by one team of horses. (282)

horse-high & hog-tight, safe, secure, escape-proof?: locked in, horse-high and hog-tight. (305)

horse thief society, organization formed to discourage, chase, capture horse-stealers. The members, rather ambiguously, called themselves Horse Thieves. (9, 11)

humbox, n. pulpit: Back to your humbox, parson! (132)

ignorama, n. feminine of ignoramus. Significantly, perhaps, the word appears only in this form in the conversations of Grandfather Adams.

improvement party, meeting of a church congregation to cut a winter’s supply of firewood for the minister. (12)

jackeroo, n. blackjack?: There is great virtue in a properly leaded jackeroo. (102)

ladyish, adj. like a grand lady? See quotation following easeful. (MW-3 lists ladyish only in a pejorative sense.)

locomotivator, n. an earlier form, apparently, of locomotive. (52)

mac(c)aroni, adj. smart, fashionable, (as in Yankee Doodle). (25, 294) See also bunkum.

makebate, n. contentious person. Grandfather Adams discusses a petition opposing the Erie Canal which was signed by every makebate, dawplucker and mal-content. (43, 253)

meteorastic, adj. denoting a school of medicine that believed that all diseases came from the air. (60) See also contagionist, telluric.

mortal, adv. a general intensive: P. 301: a popet show of Punch and Judy, mortal risible. (161); mortal bunkum. (161)

mung-meetings, n., pl. Mung-news in canal parlance means gossip. (299)

notional, adj. inclined to think: I’m notional that there is something queer afoot. (178)

notion-higgler, n. a peddler of oddments. (307)

notorious, adj. in the earlier sense of ‘widely and favorably known.’ (119)

officious, adj. in the earlier sense of ‘kind, obliging, eager to assist.’ (119)

ort-book, n. scrapbook, book of memorabilia (frequently consulted by Grandfather Adams).

over the left, an expression of repudiation (like crossing one’s fingers to negate what one is saying).

Grandfather Adams thought his grandsons' schoolboy-slang phrase must derive from the Greek “thunder on the left.” (30, 83)

parmateers, n., pl. dispensers of hokum: windy parmateers (248); the parmateering appeals (248) of political candidates.

pompous, adj. splendid, elegant: How rich, how affording, how pompous is the career of a canal wife. (312)

poor, n. pauper: Did you want to buy a poor? (284) Apparently addressed to someone who might be willing to pay for the right to take a pauper from the country poor farm and put same to work for his keep.

poormaster, n. conductor of the almshouse auction or vendu (q.v.).

prank it, lord it, show off: How she will prank it over us other canal wives. (299)

pucker, n. disagreement: a pucker over the selection of an official. (119)

redemptioner, n. an indentured emigrant: … a pockmarked redemptioner who had been turned out of the farmstead where she worked as not worth her keep. (284)

resurrectioner, n. person in the business of body-snatching from graveyards and selling cadavers to medical schools. (130) See also anatomist, cad-wagon.

scrawn, n. scrawny youth, unprepossessing lumpkin: a pawky young scrawn. (259)

scrimshanker, n. rascal, ne’er-do-well. (248, 307)

soopling, adj. limbering: That’s our pitcher, Critchley, soopling his arm up. (151)

sorrow of stones, grave markers. (175)

strappado, adj. strapped, flat broke. (87)

telluric, adj. denoting a school of medicine that held that the ground, dirt, or earth was the source of disease. (60) See also contagionist, meteorastic.

temptational, adj. alluring: Grandfather Adams reminisces about a lady circus rider with a temptational eye. (84)

theologaster, n. a pious fraud?: a very theologaster for false respectability. (120)

toosey-woosey, adj. of the great vogue for Thomas Carlyle in Rochester, N.Y., during the 1880s: He [Grandfather Adams] regarded them as faddists. I have heard him apply the derogatory term “toosey-woosey” to their unbridled enthusiasms. (229)

trying it on the dog, a trial run. (239)

twig (it), to comprehend. (113) See also dotch.

under, v. to accept a lower price: Any man unders that, he’ll have me to deal with. (286)

vegetate, v. to collect vegetation. Sign in woods: All Persons Are Positively Forbidden to Vegetate on These Premises. (205)

wastethrift, n. unfrugal person; squanderer: Only a was-tethrift would plane the underside of a privy seat. (13)

Apart from the Erie Canal localisms, most of the relatively exotic words in Grandfather Stories fall readily into just a few other categories. One of the largest groups is made up of familiar-seeming words used in archaic or dialectal senses: accosts, affording, ambition, avails, bunkum, composition, copious, cruel, cupidity, notorious, officious, and pompous.

There is a rich vocabulary of insult, or expressions of disdain: ash-bucket apprentice, bouker, higgler, ingler, ignorama, makebate, parmateer, redemptioner, scrawn, scrim-shanker, theologaster, and wastethrift. And among terms of abuse listed on p. 248 we find chatter like a clape, dummock, Federalist muckworm, poxy Democrat, and drop that forge bar.

Still another category includes what might loosely be called medical terms: anatomist, cad-wagon, cachexy, cataplasm, cholera sermon, resurrectioner, and of course the contagionist, meteorastic, and telluric schools of medicine.

Certain words and phrases illuminate economic conditions and social attitudes during the youth and maturity of Grandfather Adams: the almshouse auction, poormaster, and poor vendu; the ash-bucket apprentices and redemtioners; the rejection of such outsiders as foofoos and gyppos.

If we are grateful to Myron Adams of 19th-century Rochester, New York, for the piquant, redolent language of Grandfather Stories, we should feel even more indebted to the phonographic memory, discriminating ear, and literary art of his admiring grandson, Samuel Hopkins Adams.

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“The Navy is considering basing a carrier group in the Gulf area … which could see a role for a battleship in places like the Caribbean where … they could cover 90 percent of targets in Cuba with their 16mm guns and impose … a oneship blockade.” [From the Alabama/West Florida Business Review, October 1983. Submitted by Stephens G. Croom, Mobile, Alabama.]

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“… legislation recently proposed by Minnesota Sen. Dave Durenberger to help provide funding for establishment of a silt barrier system to keep affluents from running into our nation’s waterways. Keep affluents out, we’ll again have clear water everywhere!” [From the Minneapolis Star & Tribune, Oct. 3, 1983; submitted by Dean R. Durken, West Saint Paul, Minnesota.]

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“Police seek widower after surgeon slained.” [Headline in The Orlando Sentinel, October 5, 1983. Submitted by Alexandra Warden, Maitland, Florida.]

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“The fight has just begun,' he said. ‘We will continue until infinitum.’ ” [Ronald Browning, president of the Association of Concerned Taxpayers for Quality Education, quoted in the San Bernardino Sun. Submitted by J.B. Lawrence, San Bernardino, California.]

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“Fresh hydrophonic Bibb lettuce.” [From an advertising brochure circulated in Columbus, Ohio, August 29, 1983. Submitted by Dorothy Branson, Columbus.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Naples City Councilmen on Thursday adopted a … budget … but only after a public hearing in which much rabble was raised….” [From the Naples Daily News, September 16, 1983. Submitted by Lynn G. Lee, Naples, Florida.]

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“2 Die in Apparent Murder-Suicide…. The bodies were found by each other in a house on Shamrock Avenue, said Johnny Shelton of the Surry County Emergency Medical Services, and each had been shot in the chest…. Neighbors told investigators that Hawks and Mrs. Jones had been dating since Mrs. Jones' divorce a year ago, but that, following an argument earlier this week, she had told him to pack his thing and leave.” [From Winston-Salem Journal, October 7, 1983. Submitted by W.D. Sanders, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.]

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“A person shall not be treated as suffering from physical disablement such that he is either unable to walk or virtually unable to do so if he is not unable or virtually unable to walk with a prosthesis or an artificial aid which he habitually wears or uses or if he would not be unable or virtually unable to walk if he habitually wore or used a prosthesis or an artificial aid which is suitable in his case.” [From a (U.K.) Department of Health and Social Services explanation regarding mobility allowances for the disabled, as reported in a letter in The Daily Telegraph, 30 October 1983. Submitted by Edward G. Taylor, Tangier, Morocco.]

Please Don’t F*** the Grass

Ann E. Bennaton, Guatemala, Guatemala

Inspired by “Never Ask a Uruguayan Waitress for a Little Box: She Might Apply Her Foot to Your Eyelet,” by John R. Cassidy [IX, 4], I found myself remembering similar situations from my experiences as an international conference interpreter and translator who has traveled extensively in Latin America.

Among the words considered taboo in Chile is pico, which in everyday Spanish means ‘peak, point’; ‘and a bit,’ as in “2 miles and a bit”; or ‘just after,’ in reference to the hour. To Chileans, however, the word only means ‘prick, pecker,’ etc., in its most vulgar form. When Indira Ghandi stopped off in Chile on her return from an official state visit to Argentina, she brought her Argentine interpreter along with her to interpret her speeches into Spanish at official functions. At a very formal luncheon full of naturally long-faced Chilean colonels, Mrs. Ghandi began her speech by stressing the similarities between India and Chile, saying that the two countries had so much in common, particularly their peaks—‘pricks’—and their valleys. The colonels' faces froze. She continued, stating that both countries also shared many economic lows and peaks. Neither Mrs. Ghandi nor her interpreter could understand why everyone looked so glacial, and both became rather hesitant as the speech went on. I recall being told that it was just about the least successful visit ever made to Chile by a foreign head of state.

Then there was the wife of a new French ambassador who, upon her arrival, stated that she was certain she would love Chile because of its lovely people and its magnificent Andean peaks—again ‘pricks.’ I don’t know if she ever lived it down.

Also in Chile, it seems that once, to welcome the Spanish soccer team, great banners were strung all over Santiago with the words Bienvenidos los Coños, which is what they call the Spaniards. In Spain, however, coño is a frequently heard expletive meaning ‘cunt,’ used rather as English-speaking people would say “Oh, hell!” I wonder who was able to explain to the visitors that “Welcome, You Cunts,” was really a friendly greeting.

Some years ago a Guatemalan diplomat on a mission to Uruguay was invited to a formal reception. The next day, he was asked whether he had enjoyed himself, and he said he had even gotten a bit bolo ‘drunk’ or ‘tipsy’ before he left. Shocked faces and dead silence greeted his reply, and then he was asked: “Didn’t they throw you out?” “No,” he said, “it wasn’t that noticeable.” “Not noticeable? That’s impossible. You said you were bolo.” Eventually he was told that what he thought meant ‘drunk’ means ‘naked’ in Uruguay, derived from “balls are showing,” similar to English “balls naked.”

Ponerse un pedo ‘putting on a fart,’ and ponerse un cohete ‘putting on a firecracker’ mean getting drunk in Mexico.

On my first interpreting assignment in Nicaragua, I found out much to my chagrin that my translation for ‘handling,’ manipuleo, meant ‘pocket pool’ to them (‘men playing with their testicles with their hands in their pockets’). However, I recently saw a document where the word ‘handling’ had been translated as manoseo ‘pawing.’

Being constipado is what they call ‘having a cold’ in Mexico. Once a Mexican delegate at a meeting of bankers wanted to indicate metaphorically that for simple matters he liked simple remedies. Cuando estoy constipado, uso Vicks was his way of saying: ‘When I have a cold, I use Vicks.’ However, his interpreter was from Argentina, and so the statement came back into English as “When I’m constipated, I use Vicks.”

In Hispanic America below Mexico, a causante is a ‘deceased (person),’ but in Mexico this word means ‘taxpayer.’ A Peruvian interpreter at a tax conference had to apologize to her listeners on day two and tell them that all those “dead people” she had been talking about were really Mexican taxpayers.

At a Family Planning Conference in the Dominican Republic, I was very impressed when they announced that the band would play the Merengue de la Ligadura, a merengue in honor of ‘tying the Fallopian tubes,’ I thought. I was somewhat disappointed when it turned out to be a merengue in favor of ‘sweethearts,’ for ligar there means ‘to be tied lovingly to each other,’ which might have the opposite effect of Family Planning.

Between the neighboring countries of Honduras and Guatemala, there are endless linguistic obstacles—some more embarrassing than others. A common saying in Guatemala is Amor de lejos es de pendejos ‘Love from afar is for fools.’ But in Honduras, the word pendejo is used almost exclusively for ‘pubic hair,’ something no lady would ever mention in mixed company.

Arrecha or arrecho in Guatemala is used as a compliment, meaning ‘courageous, brave.’ (“The penniless widow left with five children was very arrecha and managed to put them all through school.”) In Honduras, applied to females, the same word means a ‘loose woman,’ so when a friend of mine complimented my thrice-married Honduran aunt by calling her arrecha, she kept insisting that when she was young, people may have talked about her, but that she had never, never really been arrecha! On some of the Spanish-speaking islands of the Caribbean, arrecha or arrecho means ‘mad or angry,’ but if a woman used this expression in Honduras she would very probably be propositioned immediately.

In Honduras, the word pisar, elsewhere ‘to step on; to cover a bird; to ram, trample, tread on,’ means ‘to fuck,’ just as do coger and tirar in South America. This is why Hondurans tend to be shocked when reading signs saying NO PISAR EL CESPED in public parks, since to them it does not mean ‘DON’T WALK ON THE GRASS’ but rather ‘DON’T FUCK THE LAWN’!

Pupusas are a very popular sort of taco, originating in El Salvador, made from tortillas filled with cheese, meat, or other things and then fried or grilled. Pupusas are ‘cunts’ to Guatemalans and Hondurans. And for Spaniards, a tortilla is a sort of omelet.

The noun chingaste means ‘coffee grounds’ in Honduras, whereas in Mexico it could only mean ‘Did you fuck?’ Chingo in Honduras is an adjective meaning ‘short,’ as in a dress’s being too short; in Mexico it is a verb: ‘I fuck.’

One of my own most embarrassing moments was when, as a recently married young woman, I felt a cold coming on and was a bit feverish. So I asked my Argentine boss to let me go home early from the office, telling him I thought I had a calentura (which to me meant a low fever, whereas fiebre would have been a very high fever). He told me, of course, I could go home, but that he really never expected me to be so frank and open about it. This puzzled me, until I found out that to him and other Argentines calentura meant being ‘horny’ or ‘in heat.’

For the female genitalia, the people from the River Plate use the term cajita or cajeta, and elsewhere it may be concha; but in Central America there are other rather descriptive terms, such as cuchara ‘spoon,’ cuca, short for cucaracha ‘cockroach,’ bollo ‘bun,’ or pan ‘bread.’ In Middle America many women are named Concha, which is short for Concepcion, a popular biblical name meaning ‘conception.’ We also eat conchas ‘shellfish’ in seafood cocktails!

And then there was the Argentine lady who went to Mexico and met a charming, apparently very cultured gentleman who invited her out for tea at Sanborns and suggested she have crepas ‘crèpes’ with cajeta ‘a creamy caramel spread,’ which to her meant ‘cunt.’ She was furious, mostly at herself for having considered him a gentleman.

Until quite recently, when it became accepted in ecology circles, the word polución was totally taboo as a translation for ‘pollution,’ because its principal meaning was ‘semen,’ as in wet dreams. Now we may use this term officially at conferences without the fear of having our mouths washed out with soap.

The descriptive term for blondes in various countries can leave the best of us mystified. In Mexico they are called güero or güera, in Guatemala canche (for both males and females). In Honduras and El Salvador they are cheles (also sexless), and in Costa Rica—would you believe it—macho for men and macha for women, with the diminutive for girls being machita. The first time I heard a Costa Rican admiringly refer to my cousin as a machita, I thought he was calling her a lesbian! In Venezuela blondes are catiras and in Panama fulas.

In Central America breasts are known vulgarly as tetas and chiches, but in Chile chiches are ‘charms’ or ‘pendants,’ as worn on bracelets or necklaces. Consequently, more than one chileno has been slapped for voicing his admiration for the necklace or pendant worn by a lady with a low-cut evening dress. His compliment could be freely translated as, “What beautiful tits you have, señora.”

An automobile can be variously called automóvil, carro, coche, and in Cuba (before the forced popularity of the bicycle) maquina. However, in Guatemala coche also means ‘pig, hog,’ and South Americans might be more than bemused if offered carne de coche or manteca de coche, which to them would mean ‘meat of the automobile’ or ‘butter of the automobile’ instead of ‘pork’ or ‘lard.’

Argentines, to whom trastes are ‘bottoms, backsides, or behinds’ (preferably of pretty girls), tend to look rather shocked when asked by people from northern Latin America to fregar los trastes ‘to scrub the dishes,’ a request that to them would sound like ‘scrub those asses.’

I once received a text on Mexican rural housing for translation into English. I could hardly believe my eyes when a certain dwelling was described as being made of órganos ‘organs.’ My imagination did run wild, as I knew intuitively that they could not be the musical instrument. The dictionary did not help me either. Finally a Mexican told me that what was really meant was ‘organ cactus.’

As a final note, in Guatemala it is quite comme il faut to say to one’s hostess ¡Qué linda cola tiene Ud. señora! ‘What a lovely tail you have, señora!’ She will understand that you are talking about her ferns, which are called colas de quetzal, and not her tail.

EPISTOLA {Eric Winters}

I refer to your article “Down to Earth in a Low Country” by Harry Cohen [X,2]. I find the piece excellent and full of interesting information. However, Mr. Cohen is mistaken when he calls the Dutch word for ‘appendix,’ blindedarmonytsteking, an “outright misnomer.” The Dutch word, like the German Blinddarm, which is a little less frightening but means the same thing, is simply the native name for the small saclike appendage to the large intestine. It designates it as ‘blind,’ in the sense that it has no outlet. Indeed, the appendix is closed at one end, and therefore ‘blind’ is a very appropriate term and not a misnomer or a folk etymology.

[Eric Winters, Marble Dale, Connecticut]

Paring Pairs No. 13

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). Lashings of dried plums.
(b). Many new watches have it.
(c). Bronx cheer for demimonde.
(d). Supine and dead.
(e). Pan bad actor.
(f). Only one of many in Hell.
(g). Diesel fuel from Cockney ‘ooker.
(h). Irritating beauty.
(i). Drink to the dress from the deserted village.
(j). Soviet complaint.
(k). Dyspeptic German.
(l). Belgian child.
(m). Drunken coward.
(n). Causes stir among golfers?
(o). Meet saucy girl here?
(p). Slender supplication for nutty confection.
(q). Turnabout’s Poe story.
(r). À votre santé!
(s). Oviparous adder.
(t). Reared to be disdainfully ironic to Life staff.
(u). Purple rear or just dessert?
(v). Found tobacco substitute.
(w). Unusually tasty investment.
(x). Situation of some delicacy.
(y). Chocolate tram.
(z). Capital English heatwave.

(1). Belly.
(2). Bit.
(3). Biter.
(4). Bred.
(5). Broil.
(6). Brussel.
(7). Chafing.
(8). Chicken.
(9). Crate.
(10). Dish.
(11). d’Oeuvre.
(12). Duff.
(13). Egg.
(14). French.
(15). Fried.
(16). Grilled.
(17). Ham.
(18). Hand.
(19). Hors.
(20). Hot.
(21). Jovial.
(22). Kosher.
(23). Kraut.
(24). Lean.
(25). London.
(26). Mate.
(27). Plum.
(28). Potato.
(29). Pray.
(30). Prune.
(31). Rare.
(32). Raspberry.
(33). Red.
(34). Roast.
(35). Salmon.
(36). Salt.
(37). Second.
(38). Smoked.
(39). Soul.
(40). Sour.
(41). Spoon.
(42). Sprout.
(43). Stable.
(44). Stake.
(45). Sweet.
(46). Tart.
(47). Tee.
(48). Toast.
(49). Trolley.
(50). Up.
(51). Whine.
(52). Whip.
(53). Wry.

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“NO DUMPING/TRESPASSERS WILL BE VIOLATED” [Photo of a sign published in The Oklahomans magazine, Sunday Oklahoman, April 19, 1981. Submitted by Tom S. Reyenga, Oklahoma City.]

Rhyme Without Reason

Richard Lederer, St. Paul’s School

Very early in our careers as language users, we human beings take great pleasure in the repetition of playful sounds in words. In the crib and romper room, we babble ma-ma, da-da, and bye-bye, and we are soon intoning such ditties as eeny meeny miny moe, fee fi fo fum, and hickory dickory dock, not because they make sense to us, but because they satisfy a craving of our ears for rhythm and rhyme. The appeal of such playful repetitions is especially evident in the story of Chicken Little (also Chicken Licken); his cohorts in alarmism, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky, Goosy Loosy, and Turky Lurky; and their nemesis, Foxy Loxy.

When a sound or syllable repeats itself with little or no change in a word, the resulting combination is often a reduplication. There are more than 2000 such twin words in English, and they come in three types: rhymes, like hocus-pocus; vowel (or ablaut) shifts like zigzag; and repetitions, like goody-goody.

Rhymes

We are all familiar with the use of end-rhyme and internal rhyme in poetry, but how aware are we of the extent to which rhyme operates within English words?:

boogie-woogie
claptrap
hobnob
hodgepodge
namby-pamby
nitty-gritty
okey-dokey pell-mell willy-nilly

Some of these rhymed reduplications have intriguing origins. Joann Karges [VERBATIM: Volumes V & VI, pp. 918-20] explains that hobnob springs “from hob or nob ‘to drink to one another’; the hob ‘heating unit’ to keep the beer warm by the hearth and the nob ‘table’ where the drink was set by the elbow.” A hodgepodge (earlier hotchpotch) was originally a stew of many ingredients and has broadened in meaning to a ‘widely varied mixture, a mess.’ Namby-pamby was the title of a poem written by Henry Carey in 1726, ridiculing the poetic efforts of Ambrose Philips. Long after Carey and Philips have been forgotten, the reduplication namby-pamby has remained to denote someone ‘weakly sentimental and wishy-washy.’ Stuart Flexner [I Hear America Talking, Van Nostrand, 1976] attributes nitty-gritty to the black militants of the 1960s and the prevalence of “grit-like nits.” And willy-nilly comes from the phrase “will I, nill I?”—nill being an obsolete word meaning “not to will, to refuse” [Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, William and Mary Morris, Harper & Row, 1977].

Vowel shifts

Closely related to rhyming pairs are the many twin forms in which the second element reduplicates the first with only a slight change of vowel. The sound pattern of these combinations shows a powerful tendency to move from [i] or [iy], vowels formed in the front of the mouth, to middle or low vowels formed farther back in the mouth:

chitchat
dilly-dally
mishmash
Ping-Pong
riffraff
singsong
teeter-totter tiptop wishy-washy

In contrast, the initial consonants of most rhymed reduplications move forward, to the teeth and lips.

Repetitions

The third type of reduplication consists of an exact repetition of a syllable or syllables. Often these “bolo words,” as Nils Thun calls them, represent expressive sounds, such as the choo-choo, chug-chug, puff-puff, and toot-toot of a train or the quack-quack, tweet-tweet, and cuckoo of birds [Reduplicative Words in English, Uppsala, 1963]. But there are other types of bolo words:

dodo
fifty-fifty
goody-goody
no-no
tom-tom yo-yo

The striking effects of balance, rhythm, and rhyme endow reduplicative words with a special appropriateness to express certain concepts:

(a) onomatopoeic: boohoo, bow-wow, choo-choo, clip-clop, ding-dong, heehaw, Ping-Pong, pitter-patter, quack-quack, thump-thump, ticktock.

(b) confusion and disarray: harum-scarum, heebie-jeebies, helter-skelter, hodgepodge, hubbub, huggermugger, hurly-burly, mishmash, pell-mell, ragtag (raggle-taggle), willy-nilly.

(c) alternating movement: crisscross, flip-flop, seesaw, teeter-totter, ticktock, zigzag.

(d) idle talk: bibble-babble, blah blah, chitchat, claptrap, mumbo jumbo.

(e) disparagement: dilly-dally, dodo, dumdum, fuddy-duddy, no-no, riffraff (from Old French rif et raf), rinky dinky, shillyshally (from shall I, shall I?), wishy-washy.

(f) intensification: killer-diller, okey-dokey, razzle-dazzle, super-duper, teen(s)y-ween(s)y.

Recently I’ve been getting the heebie-jeebies about the hurly-burly, helter-skelter, and hustle bustle of modern life and have been working on a super-duper, tiptop, hot-shot theory to distinguish compounds, which I discussed in VERBATIM X, 3, from reduplications.

Most linguists, like Nils Thun and Hans Marchand, agree that reduplications are not to be classified as subtypes of compounds. Thun accepts as the definition of a compound “cases when both elements can be used separately as words” [p. 11]. By this logic, combinations like singsong and even Stephen are varieties of compounds, while those like chitchat and super-duper, in which only one element can function independently as a word, are not compounds. Such a conclusion is highly questionable.

Marchand’s distinction between reduplicative and compound words seems just:

All these words are basically motivated by rhythm and ablaut (or rime) underlying the significants of the twin form. Even those combinations which are composed of two independent words do not speak against this essential character of twin words. Sing-song is not really a combination of two signs comparable to rainbow … Nor is walkie-talkie just walkie + talkie, but we have a playfully matched combination whose elements were attracted to each other, so to speak, by the esthetic element of rime while the putting together of logical contents is more or less incidental.

[The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation, München, 1969, p. 436.]

In short, Marchand appears to postulate two primary criteria for reduplicative words: (1) motivation by the sounds of the twin elements, and (2) the absence of a grammatical relationship between the two parts. These two word-formation rules serve us well in identifying as reduplications such formations as flim-flam, hootchie-kootchie, super-duper, and razzle-dazzle, in which neither or only one element possesses semantic value and, hence, in which there can be no grammatical interplay between the parts. By the same logic, twin forms like tiptop and teeter-totter, in which both elements are morphemes, qualify as reduplications because the two halves do not interact grammatically.

But what about rhyming and vowel-shifted pairs containing two semantic elements that do evidence a grammatical alliance? Thun points out that in cases in which “the first element … can be replaced by an element of similar or opposite meaning … there is no reason to postulate a reduplicative word-formation” [p. 14]. As examples he shows that ill will corresponds to good will and that mole-hole has as its companions mousehole, pigeonhole, and the like. Thun’s insight does help us to confirm our hunch that combinations like cookbook (corresponding to textbook, checkbook, etc.) and downtown (corresponding to uptown, crosstown, etc.) are compounds and not reduplications. In such formations, rhyme is not the primary ingredient that glues the parts together, and the first element was not “chosen” so as to match the sound of the second. Similarly, in words such as freely, helplessness, and maintain we may confidently conclude that the rhyming of the roots and suffixes is more accidental than intentional.

Having come this far in segregating reduplicative words from compound words, we must still ask how we are to classify combinations like claptrap, prime time, jet set, and redhead. Each of these examples looks like a compound, for in each we find two semantic units bound together by a clear grammatical relationship: claptrap was originally ‘a trap that makes a clapping sound’ [Morris]; prime time is ‘time that is prime’; a jet set is ‘a group that travels by jet’; and a redhead is ‘one whose hair is red.’ At the same time, these words smack of reduplication. In each instance we have a strong sense that the word parts were selected for their rhymes as well as their meanings. For example, redhead is not matched by blondehead, brownhead, or blackhead (in the sense of hair color).

The process of trying to distinguish reduplications from compound words vividly illustrates how words resist our most prodigious efforts to classify them, how the living language insists on wriggling out from under the most precise of morphological microscopes. If you will allow me to switch metaphors, we cannot always tell where the front half of a horse ends and the back half begins, even though we usually know the difference between a horse’s head and a horse’s ass. Still, it is often that ambiguous midpoint that makes for the most intriguing investigations into anatomy and language.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Patient visits averaged 127.3 per week for the six months ending last March—a drop of -4.3% from …” [From the Journal of the American Medical Association, September 2, 1983. Submitted by Dorothy Branson, Columbus, Ohio.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Its smooth, white surface is almost undetectable and it never peals, chips, or cracks.” [From the instruction booklet with Snopake® correction fluid. Submitted by Andrew F. Downey, Atlanta, Georgia.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Students will perform scenes in English from Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute,’ Rossini’s ‘Barber of Seville’ and Verdi’s ‘Flagstaff.’ ” [From The Times-Picayune, New Orleans, January 8, 1984. Submitted by M. M. Kreeger, Metairie, Louisiana.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Bryant Gumble here, with Mary Nissenson, who is in her second week while Jane Pauley is on maternity leave.” [From NBC Today, 8 a.m., January 9, 1984. Submitted by Robert J. Powers, Shreveport, Louisiana.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“ ‘Hamburgers, pizzas, ice cream and snakes.’ ” [From a 20-foot billboard in South Delhi (India), as reported by Michael Hamlyn in The Times (London), March 5, 1984, p. 26.]

Paring Pairs Prizes

Winners will receive one of the following: the Collector’s Edition of Thomas H. Middleton’s Light Refractions (retail value, $30 or £15); English English by Norman W. Schur (retail value, $24.95 or £12.50); three copies of Wordsmanship, by Claurène duGran (retail value, $29.85 or £14.85); twelve copies of Definitive Quotations, by John Ferguson (retail value, $35.40 or £18); Word for Word, by Edward C. Pinkerton (retail value, $39.95 or £20); four one-year subscriptions to VERBATIM (retail value, $30 or £15); any two of the following: Verbatim Volumes I & II, Verbatim Volumes III & IV, Verbatim Volumes V & VI, Verbatim Index: Volumes I-VI; or a credit of $25 or £12.50 towards the purchase of any other title or titles offered in the VERBATIM Book Club Catalogue.

Those living in the U.K., Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa should send their answers to VERBATIM, Box 199, Aylesbury, Bucks, HP20 1TQ England. All others should send them to VERBATIM, Essex, CT 06426, U.S.A.

You need send only the correct solution, not the answers to all of the clues. Please indicate your choice of prize along with your answer. Please use a postcard.

Subtitles: Or, the Forgotten Words

Pat Tompkins, San Mateo, California

To attract readers, a book title should be memorable, informative, intriguing, and accurate. Sometimes a subtitle helps to meet those requirements. In 1719, Daniel Defoe’s solution was this title: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who Lived 8 and 20 Years All Alone in an Uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, Near the Mouth of the Great River of Orinoco; Having Been Cast on Shore by Shipwreck, Wherein All the Men Perished but Himself. With an Account How He Was at Last Strangely Delivered by Pirates. If Defoe were deciding on a title today, he would probably skip the synopsis and confine himself to Robinson. Or Crusoe. Something succinct.

Subtitles are out of fashion. “A Novel” sometimes appears on current covers to help separate the fictitious from the factual; a past convention labeled such novels as The Scarlet Letter and Ivanhoe as “A Romance.” But a real subtitle gives an author a second chance to entice readers, to provide an alternate label. Brideshead Revisited, for example, is less vague accompanied by its subtitle: “The Sacred and Profane Memoirs of Captain Charles Ryder.” A subtitle may clarify or mystify; by nature it is secondary and generally ignored or forgotten. Yet subtitles often contain stories, too.

The subtitle of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles was not overlooked; it provoked such controversy that, twenty years after it first appeared, Hardy declared that it would have been better not to have written the subtitle. In his preface to the 1912 edition of Tess, he stated that the subtitle was “the estimate left in a candid mind of the heroine’s character…. It was disputed more than anything else in the book.” The offending words? “A Pure Woman.”

A few of the subtitles in the following list are familiar, but your having read these novels is no guarantee of success in matching the subtitles with the main titles. For novels you may not have read, the subtitles will tell you that The Octopus is not an account of an eight-armed mollusk and Green Mansions is not about life on an English country estate. The subtitles may even make you curious to read the books; if so, the words have served their purpose.

Pairing Pairs

1. Madame Bovary (Flaubert) 2. A History of Tom Jones (Fielding) 3. The Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy) 4. Middlemarch (Eliot) 5. Cakes and Ale (Maugham) 6. The Octopus (Norris) 7. Frankenstein (Shelley) 8. Typee (Melville) 9. Of Time and the River (Wolfe) 10. Maggie (Crane) 11. The Loved One (Waugh) 12. Nostromo (Conrad) 13. Silas Marner (Eliot) 14. Green Mansions (Hudson) 15. Eva Trout (Bowen) 16. The Spy (Cooper) 17. Decline and Fall (Waugh) 18. Lorna Doone (Blackmore) 19. Bartleby the Scrivener (Melville) 20. The Good Soldier (Ford)

a. The Weaver of Raveloe
b. A Story of California
c. Or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard
d. A Tale of Passion
e. A Study of Provincial Life
f. A Peep at Polynesian Life
g. Or, A Tale of the Neutral Ground
h. A Romance of the Tropical Forest
i. Patterns of Provincial Life
j. A Story of a Man of Character
k. A Novel of Many Manners
l. A Romance of Exmoor
m. An Anglo-American Tragedy
n. Or, the Modern Prometheus
o. A Tale of th Seaboard
p. A Foundling
q. A Girl of the Streets
r. A Story of Wall Street
s. Or, Changing Scenes
t. A Legend of Man’s Hunger in His Youth

Answers

1. i
2. p
3. j
4. e
5. c
6. b
7. n
8. f
9. t
10. q
11. m
12. o
13. a
14. h
15. s
16. g
17. k
18. l
19. r
20. d

There’s an amazing story now making the rounds concerning an illiterate young fellow who joined the all-Ivy League firm as a salesman. This bloke was the original drop out. He dropped out in the fourth grade. Among his many deficiencies was his inability to spell—even three-letter words came out wrong in his jottings. When the president of the outfit caught up with this poor guy—through a letter back to the sales manager—he nearly blew his stack, and with some justification. The letter went something like this: “I have came to Jamestown to sea this here company which aint never bought nuthin from us but use can bet I will sel them some of our guds.” “Get rid of that fellow immediately,” the firm prexy ordered after reading the letter. The sales manager could see no way out but to do what the boss ordered, so a couple of days later he started to dictate a note telling the poor guy he was through. While dictating, he was going through his mail and came across a second message from our hero, which read: “That there outfit that aint never bought nuthin from us just did. I sole them our guds worth $90,000. Now I’m gonna to Houston.” The sales manager delayed his note, and the next day there was another brief letter from the illiterate salesman, as follows: “I got an order for halfa million from this Houston cumpny. I couldove sole them the moon.” Delighted, the sales manager made his way to the president’s office and showed him the messages and the orders. The next day, the following note from the prexy appeared on the bulletin board in the sales office, along with the communications from the salesman. The president’s letter read: “We ben spendin to much time tryin to spel instead uv tryin to sel. Let’s keep an eye on dem sails. I want all of use to reed dem letters from Joe (the new salesman) who is out on the rode doin a grate job for this here furm. All of use shood go out an do like he done.”

The Imperative of Opposites

Zellig Bach, Lakehurst, New Jersey

Opposites coexist in our mental life inseparably, like inoperable Siamese twins. They permanently stand side by side, or, like the obverse and reverse of a coin, back to back, which describes more accurately their constant position vis-à-vis each other, as well as the fact that they are forever bonded together.

Each half of a pair of opposites always has the power to evoke immediately the other half. This evocative power is often used very effectively in poetry, rhetoric, and religious prayers or hymns. A good illustration of the latter instance is the hymn by St. Francis of Assisi: “Praised be my Lord for our brother fire,” and “Praised be my Lord for our sister water.” Since the pairing and juxtaposition of brother/sister and fire/water already exist in one’s mind, the reader or listener experiences the pleasure of discovering within himself what was but dimly known before.

It is a mental imperative that if a word has an exact counterpart, it will promptly evoke this opposite. This principle is, in part, utilized in the psychological test called the Word Association Test, which consists of a list of words of various direct or indirect connotations. They are oral, anal, aggressive, phobic, and sexual words, as well as words about home and family. In this test the psychologist reads aloud from the list one word at a time (called the stimulus word), and the examinee has to respond promptly with the first word that comes to mind (called the reaction word), What is important to us here is that, whenever there is a specific opposite to a stimulus word, the expected reaction word is, as a rule, its opposite. Thus, love/hate, father/mother, dog/cat, hunger/ thirst, boy-friend/girl-friend. If a reaction word other than the available opposite is given, unless it has a logical connection (for example, hunger/food, summer/fall), the response may be considered an indicator of some emotional conflict (father/ tyrant, mother/market).

The closely woven—one might say “intimate”— relationship between two opposites is so strong that, occasionally, one of the pair may come to serve both meanings, its own as well as the other’s. Thus, Italian bestia and bestiale (‘beast’ and ‘bestial’) also mean, respectively, ‘friendly’ and ‘marvelous.’ Instances of such an interchangeability of opposites are found in many other languages.

One possible explanation for the phenomenon of the imperative of opposites is that, in the very early stages of the development of languages, when all communications were oral, there was only one single word for both opposites. Vocal intonations, facial expressions, and other bodily gestures and movements made it clear to the listener which one of the two opposites was meant.

The German philologist Carl Abel (1837-1906) called attention to this fact in a pamphlet about the oppositional meaning of primal words. He pointed out that in the ancient Egyptian language there was a large number of words denoting at one and the same time two opposites. Abel rejected the notion that two independent words (those for ‘strong’ and ‘weak,’ for instance) happened by chance to have the same sound and therefore “merged” into a single word for both concepts. He stated that the simultaneity of two opposite meanings in a single word can be explained by the fact that all our concepts are based on comparisons. If it were always day, not only would we not have the concept of ‘night,’ but we would have no concept or word for ‘day,’ either. Every concept, therefore, is a twin of its opposite. He quoted in this context the nineteenth-century English philosopher Alexander Bain, who postulated on logical grounds the double meaning of words: “The essential relativity of all knowledge, thought, or consciousness cannot but show itself in language. If everything that we can know is a transition from something else, every experience must have two sides…. The name [word] light has no meaning without what is implied in the name dark.” Bain referred to this as the “doubleness” of concepts.

In the Appendix, Abel gave many examples of words with oppositional meanings. Here are several (some without any changes in the word at all, some with phonetic modifications of the same root): Latin altus (‘high’ as well as ‘deep’); sacer (‘sacred’ as well as ‘accursed’); siccus (‘dry’), succus (‘juice’). German Boden (‘attic’ as well as ‘ground’); stumm (‘dumb’), Stimme (‘voice’). There are numerous examples of this nature from related languages.

A recent paper, “Homonymous Antonyms” [I, 4, 8], brought further interesting examples: The Chinese word kungfu, with identical characters and identical tones, means both ‘task’ as well as ‘leisure’; the Hebrew KoDes ‘holy’ and KeDesah ‘prostitute’ have the same root’ (cf. Latin sacer above); the Latin meretrix ‘harlot’ comes from mer(e) ‘earn,’ which in classical Latin meant both ‘merit’ and ‘demerit.’

Residues of this ambivalent semantic feature are, of course, found also in English. The word fast is a good illustration: in one context it connotes ‘moving speedily,’ in another, ‘firmly fixed in place.’ Without still carries the duality of meanings (‘with’/‘out’), and with itself originally meant both ‘with’ as well as ‘without,’ evidence of which can still be seen in such words as withhold and withdraw.

The editor of VERBATIM, in an unsigned note, listed six words with double meanings—scan, hew, cleave, impregnable, inflammable, clip—stating that “even within English problems can crop up in the writing of lucid, unambiguous prose.” [I, 3] A reader added the word let (‘allow’ but also ‘hinder or interfere,’ as in the tennis term let ball). [II, 2, 14]

Freud came to the notion of the interchangeability of opposites in the course of his analyzing dreams and dream symbols. He was puzzled by the fact that “every element in a dream can, for purposes of interpretation, stand for its opposite just as easily as for itself.” For instance, “a predominantly male symbol may be used [in dreams to represent] the female genitals or vice versa,” or nakedness to be represented by clothes and uniforms.

When Freud came across Abel’s pamphlet on the antithetical meaning of primal words, he seemed to be highly pleased, seeing in the phenomenon of words with opposite meanings a welcome analogy to his own findings. He wrote a lengthy review of Abel’s work and candidly acknowledged that he “did not succeed in understanding the dream-work’s singular tendency to…employ the same means of representation for expressing contraries” until he happened by chance to read this philological study. He quoted liberally from Abel’s text and examples and stated that psychoanalysts would be better at understanding and interpreting the language of dreams if they knew more about the development of language.

Another Freudian principle involving opposites is known as displacement—from below to above, or from above to below, referring to parts of the body. This mechanism, unknown to the dreamer or speaker, transposes, that is, replaces symbolically a lower part of the body with an upper part, or vice versa. Linguistic usage readily shows the way it works: We are all familiar with the expression “You’re (or Don’t be) a pain in the neck.” This is a euphemism for “…pain in the ass,” ass being a semi-polite cover-word for the tabooed buttocks or rectum.

Another instance of displacement is the British expression Keep your pecker up ‘keep up your courage.’ Pecker is a bird’s beak, but in slang it carries several meanings: ‘a person’s nose’; ‘a penis’; ‘a boy full of piss and vinegar.’ Thus, the opposites of nose/penis are carried in the same slang term. Many other instances from our daily speech show the ready unconscious— and sometimes conscious—interchangeability of opposite body parts and the general ease with which the directionality of the symbolic equation changes between pairs of opposites.

Freud pointed out a number of such pairs of opposite body parts that serve as symbols for each other: penis/nose, labia/lips, testicles/eyes. Oedipus, upon learning that he slept with his mother, blinded himself, an act symbolizing castration. While the eyes and testicles are equated symbolically on the basis of their number and their below-and-above positions, I believe that the eyes and the nose together strengthen the symbolic equation of their opposite below, the three-part male genital apparatus.

The imperative of opposites, their readiness to evoke each other, and, indeed, their interchangeability under special circumstances can thus be seen as a general mental mechanism embedded in the mind of mankind. Most of the time this mechanism operates without our awareness. But sometimes we use it on purpose to reverse or transform something into its opposite, or, at least, to demolish the very core meaning of the word—as when quotation marks are used to emphasize the opposite or non-meaning of what is written. Applied this way, the quotation marks literally work havoc upon the basic meaning of a word—turning it upside down, inside out, and rotating it 180° into its very opposite, rendering it totally devoid of its usual meaning. If one were to write, for instance, “The ‘patriotism’ of these people leads them to assume…,” the writer, by the use of quotation marks, actually questions their patriotism, denies their claim to it, and accuses them of falsely pretending to be patriots.

The pull of the imperative of opposites and the tendency toward a reversal into the opposite is extremely strong and is further reflected in slang, wit, and slips of the tongue or pen. Here are several examples:

(1) The term cool in its opposite sense of ‘hot’ is well known from jazz terminology. From there it spread to other areas with the same sense, as when a group of teenage boys is standing at the corner watching girls go by, and one of them comments that a passer-by of the opposite sex “is real cool.” The inference, of course, is that she is, metaphorically, hot.

(2) Theodor Reik tells of a party of Jewish students in Vienna where the religious and social significance of circumcision was discussed. One of the students, alluding to the commandments of the ritual in the Bible, quoted Shakespeare: “There is a divinity that shapes our ends.”

(3) A husband who went to Paris on a business trip wrote his wife an enthusiastic letter about his business deals, as well as about the city, and ended it with “I wish you were her.” The slip of the pen (her instead of here) conveyed the opposite of what he consciously thought of writing.

(4) Sometimes the imperative of opposites shows up in the strangest places. I once noticed in a local advertising sheet (distributed free in supermarkets and restaurants) the following advertisement:

Dingy, miserable, upstairs Studio,
semi. priv. bath,
Cranky landlady, high rent
Call PY 8-1829, Evenings=

Truth in advertising gone awry? (Contrast it with the next advertisement: “Large, airy, attractive room, separate entrance…”). Since it is against all conventions to advertise in such a negative way, an explanation based on the imperative of opposites presents itself, namely that the negative automatically calls forth in the reader’s mind its very opposite. All adjectives in this advertisement must, therefore, undergo a reversal of meaning, including the description of “high” rent. In other words, a pleasant landlady offers a neat upstairs studio at reasonable rent. (The lady has a sense of humor and hopes to get a tenant with the same characteristic).

The imperative of opposites is very likely an echo of the pre-history of man and may be traced to the times when primal man, without understanding the phenomena of his own body and nature around him, could not help but observe the rhythm of many fundamental life processes, a rhythm characterized by its alternation or polarity—day and night, the tides of the ocean, the beating of the heart, inhalation and exhalation, wakefulness and sleep. In this light the imperative of opposites appears to be a link in man’s mental development from ancient times, specifically in the historical development of language.

EPISTOLA {Michael Javoronok}

Robert Devereux [IX,4] comments on Garland Cannon’s “698 Japanese Loanwords in English” and questions the origin of the trademark Taka-Diastase.

Taka-Diastase is the name of a proprietary (Parke-Davis) form of diastase that is produced not from malt but by the growth of a certain species of Aspergillus upon rice hulls or bran. This ferment, discovered by Dr. Jokichi Takamine, is capable under proper circumstances of converting one hundred times its weight of starch into glucose in ten minutes.

[Michael Javoronok, Worcester, Massachusetts]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“No talk of ‘dreary Erie’ for Lou Tullio, a former high school and college football coach who seems to know or have coached about half the population of Erie. Tullio, who dispenses Erie souvenirs to visitors from his office closet, has a contagious enthusiasm for his city and he’s had some luck in passing the virus to federal officeholders.” [From Newsday, Sunday, January 22, 1984. Submitted by Robert Rachlin, Centerport, New York.]

Gaming and/or Gambling: You pays your money…

Thomas L. Clark, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

While preparing material for the “Dictionary of Gaming and Gambling,” I knew I must deal with the distinction between gaming and gambling. Las Vegas bills itself as “The Gaming Capital of the World.” Yet people who arrive in town expect to “gamble” by playing “games” or “gambling games.” My understanding, after working with these materials for more than five years, is that state officialdom, when hoping to sound professional and clinical, uses the term gaming as having an ameliorative sense. By contrast, then, the assumption would be that gambling has a pejorative connotation. This article examines some of the connotations in these terms from the standpoint of people committed to the industry of playing while paying and from the standpoint of other people equally committed to abolishing this (nearly) most ancient vice.

In the extreme views, gaming is a pastime for sportsmen, persons of gentility: genteel folk out for a lark may frolic and sport by taking chances on winning or losing some money, neither much nor little. Gambling, on the other hand, carries a note of desperation, a sense of wantonness, not a pastime but an obsession, risking high amounts on generally losing propositions; it is an activity for wastrels who dissipate estates and fortunes while carousing with all manner of strumpets and consorting with other riotous low-livers. Actually, the distinctions between gaming and gambling lie somewhere between these extremes. Indeed, for some people, the terms are synonymous.

The members of the Nevada State Legislature first legalized gambling in Assembly Bill number 98 in 1931. The prologue to the bill reads, “An Act concerning slot machines, gambling games, and gambling devices” [emphasis mine]. The bill goes on to list specific games played for money and to prescribe licensing fees for such wagering activities, along with a description of the premises where persons may risk money. The index to those statutes of 1931 carries only the listing Gambling and Gambling Devices. By 1939, someone in officialdom sensed the nuances between terms. The index for that year lists Gambling—see Gaming, and amendments to the 1931 bill are listed under the latter heading. Interestingly, the marginal notes placed alongside each bill and amendment use the term gambling.

By 1941 (the state legislature meets only every two years), the index for statutes was back to listing all such bills and amendments under the heading of Gambling, a practice that remained in effect even through the 1959 session, when the Nevada Gaming Commission and the State Gaming Control Board were established. In fact, the index for 1959 lists all bills and amendments under Gambling, while the entries under Gaming list only the two new regulatory boards. In 1967, the indexer for the Nevada Revised Statutes used see Gambling for all references to gaming. And so it has remained until today. That the indexer for these official papers has some latitude in description is demonstrated by the fact that the famous (or infamous) “Black Book,” a listing of persons “to be excluded or ejected from licensed gaming establishments” [emphasis mine] is referenced in the index but not in the amendment that established that famous and seldom-seen document.

It appears that the term gambling is used generally within the state to refer to any activity relative to wagering, while the term gaming is used in all official references. Today, Chapter 463 of the Nevada Revised Statutes is titled “Licensing and Control of Gaming,” and the first definition offered in the chapter is “Short Title: Nevada Gaming Control Act.” The definitions go on to explain that game and gambling game have the same meaning and that gaming and gambling have the same definition.

A short tour through historical dictionaries brings to light some of the more interesting aspects of the cohesive vocabulary associated with the two terms. First stop: the Oxford English Dictionary and Supplements.

Game was, from the first, connected to pleasant associations. From the first appearance, in Beowulf, on through the 16th century, associations with game are “glee, pleasance, joy, play, mirth.” By the 15th century, the connotation could be quite different, as the cruel aspect of game begins to make its appearance. In the late 16th century, the sense of game could designate an object of ridicule, a laughingstock.

On the other hand, from its earliest appearances, gamble was related to vices and foul practice. The relationship to dissipation and to cheating were close and constant through the years. In places where gambling took place, the excesses were such that writers of the times (from about 1815) described them as “gambling hells.”

The apparent derivative, gambling, antedates gamble. The OED records that in the 18th century the term was regarded as slang. It probably came about as a dialect survival from Middle English gamene-n. The rare 16th- and 17th-century gameling implies a verb, *gamel, which is unattested. Progressive partial homorganic assimilation could easily account for the intrusive b that showed up in later spellings, though the OED does not make such a speculation. In the sense of “wagering on the outcome of games,” gaming does not carry the pejorative senses of gambling, though the latter term is often used as part of the definition.

A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles (DAE) lists older citations for gaming than for gambling. Those 17th-century citations from Virginia and Plymouth, as might be expected, given the tenor of the time, link gaming to idleness, drunkenness, “excess in apparel,” and other ruinous pastimes. The earliest citations in DAE for gambling date from the 19th century but usually carry similar pejorative comments and “warnings to young men of substance.” A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles (DA) does not list gambling or gaming as discrete entries, which is hardly surprising, given the scope of DA. The terms, where found, are listed in attributive senses or as part of open compounds. For many years, then, gambling has had to sit below the salt, while gaming occupies a position at least even with the salt. Official references to the practice seem to prefer gaming. Indeed, the more than seven thousand items dealing with gaming and gambling in the Dickinson Library fall under the rubric of The Gaming Research Center, and I was named to the University Gaming Research Center Committee.

The perspective of the individual is often obvious from the relative frequency with which a term is used. In 1891, John Philip Quinn’s Fools of Fortune was published by The Anti-Gambling Association in Chicago. Quinn’s book is a Victorian tome of warning written in the breathless style and excruciating detail designed to appeal to those gentlemen who might like “to have been there.” In keeping with the tone of the time, the subtitle of Quinn’s book is Gambling and Gamblers; Comprehending a History of the Vice in Ancient and Modern Times, and in Both Hemispheres; an Exposition of Its Alarming Prevalence and Destructive Effects; with an Unreserved and Exhaustive Disclosure of Such Frauds, Tricks and Devices as Are Practiced by “Professional” Gamblers, “Confidence Men” and “Bunko Steerers.” His preface, dated 1890, begins, “Of all the vices which have enslaved mankind, none can reckon among its victims so many as gambling.” Throughout his book, Quinn uses gamble, gambler, and gambling in every reference to evil and vice. Other terms, such as gamester, appear only in connection with sharper or some other such appellation. Gaming is used rarely and in the most neutral statements, such as “one whose instinct for gaming is satisfied with a legitimate business.” For Quinn, speculation and risk in the name of legitimate business is gaming, otherwise it is gambling. Elsewhere, Quinn uses gaming in clearly marked phrases, idioms, or open compounds, such as gaming hells.

Other, more objective treatises have been more likely to use a variety of terms with less cumulatively pejorative force— cumulatively, because a term used once may carry only slight negative connotation but, used frequently, can create a considerable sense of pejoration in the mind of the reader. Herbert Asbury, in Sucker’s Progress (1938, New York: Dodd, Mead and Company) used gambling game, banking game, gambler, player, gaming tables, Faro Bank, Faro game, usually without prejudice or undue emphasis of one term over another.

On occasion, people have found a way out of the terminological dilemma. In 1977, the New Jersey State Legislature passed the Casino Control Act, which was described as a method for controlling “Legalized Games of Chance.” The policy body and the enforcement body, corresponding to the Nevada Gaming Commission and the State Gaming Control Board, are named the New Jersey Casino Control Commission and the Division of Gaming Enforcement. In the process of defining terms for the Act, the drafters used interesting variations. “Authorized Game” or “Authorized Gambling Game” is defined by exemplum: “Roulette, baccarat, blackjack, craps, big six wheel, and slot machines.” On the other hand, “Game” or “Gambling Game” is a stipulative definition: “Any banking or percentage game located exclusively within the casino, played with cards, dice or any mechanical device or machine for money, property, or any representative of value.” And, finally, we are given an operational definition: “ ‘Gaming’ or ‘Gambling’—The dealing, operating, carrying on, conducting, maintaining or exposing for pay any game.” We can ignore the style in which the definitions are written. We can even ignore the fact that the definitions exclude, legally, electronic gambling devices by referring only to “mechanical” machines.

By restricting the meaning of gaming to wagering on events, a dictionary of terms has a defined scope of coverage. Yet terms used in gaming events are not automatically excluded from future editions of such a book. Words and phrases from, say, basketball can be collected in the archives; terms like slam dunk, off the glass, in the paint are already being collected in the citation file.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“One out of every child has been sexually abused.” [From the 6 p.m. newscast, September 10, 1983, WCMH-TV, Columbus, Ohio. Submitted by Dorothy Branson, Columbus.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“TUDORING $4hr, reading, math computers…” [From the Seattle Times, January 18, 1984. Submitted by Caroline Feiss, Seattle, Washington.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Private Eye’s Colemanballs

Compiled and edited by Barry Fantoni, (Private Eye Productions Ltd/Andr&eacute Deutsch, London, 1982), 90pp.

VERBATIM readers in England may have beat me to the discovery of this fascinating paperback. It is a rich lode of (unintended) verbal entertainment—fun ‘n’ pun would seem as apt a motto for the linguist. As Colemanballs rings the proverbial bell in the ears of sports fans in Britain, at whom the booklet is primarily aimed, let me report on it anyway and share my enthusiasm with those as yet unfamiliar with the book.

Here is sports journalism at its liveliest: straight from the horse’s mouth into the microphone (often without any sobering detour through the brain), with results that are as amusing as they are revealing of what goes on in a speaker’s mind when his mouth produces a string of sounds that passes for language. Whatever can go wrong in that process has been recorded here, with full credit to the shamefaced authors. Mixed metaphor is probably the most common type of language error that occurs in reporting in general and in sports reporting in particular, with its uneven flow of events that leaves long stretches of time during which nothing worthy of comment happens, alternating with quick and unpredictable action, so as to tax to the breaking point the mental and physical reflexes used in speech: “…but yesterday Sir Peter played his final card in what’s been a tricky game of chess” or “Tottenham have got the bullets that can produce the goods.”

“Aston Villa began to harness the fruits of some good midfield work” is a slip of the tongue, whereas in other instances it is rather the mind that takes a tumble on the slippery ice of logic: “Liverpool always seem to find a boot at the right moment to keep Birmingham City at arm’s length,” “The dispute went on escalating like a snowball,” or “We all have some sort of chip on our shoulder which we want to get off our chest.” But then there are also such perfectly innocuous statements as “…Channel Tunnel project which seems to be getting off the ground again.” Here is another: “The government is clutching at sport as a straw with which to beat the Russians.” I would say it ties in effectiveness with “He’s bitten off more than he can chew,” said of a hunger striker.

In other instances, indiscriminate clustering of metaphors is alone sufficient to create garble: “The crunch has been reached. The crying wolves are out the window.”

The lesson to be learned from all this is that a speaker’s mind does, after all, work even while his tongue may get stuck. And it usually works toward building up a perfectly closed logic—the only trouble with this is that listeners, whose minds are set on different paths of thinking and associating, have no access to the speaker’s thoughts and therefore no clues to the meaning of the words. What a speaker intends as a reinforcing remark his listeners will frequently misunderstand as a separate—and, as such, tautological or otherwise illogical—utterance: “The battle is well and truly on if it wasn’t on before, and it certainly was,” or “Roscoe Tanner is one of the great runners-up of all time. No man could have played better.” There is no real contradiction in these examples; what the last one means is merely ‘Tanner didn’t make it, but he played a brilliant game all the same.’

This suggests that communication is achieved less through direct verbal equivalence to intended meaning than through allusive patterns that must observe certain standards of conventionality in order to work. When it comes to communication, there is not that much difference between sports reporting and poetry: just as poetry ceases to be “understood” by readers whose allusive range of thought does not measure up to the poet’s, listeners to ordinary language reportage are apt to mistake a speaker whose standards of association in language they cannot match. There is no such failure to understand when only the (shared) literal representation of meaning is applied, as in all forms of technical language with a fixed terminology.

Explaining is not excusing mindless blunders of the type “Agatha Christie is such a well-known name, her books sell all over the world—and other places as well” or “We are now into the third and final quarter of the game.” Some of those listed in Colemanballs are near-ingenious, as, for example: “In the case of my own case, this has not been the case” or “The French are not normally a Nordic skiing nation.” Speaking of royalty, a commentator once punned involuntarily, “Even to my untrained eye it looks as though she has a long train.” On the other hand, to err is human: “And Richie has now scored 11 goals, exactly double the number he scored last season.” It can happen to anyone, including this reviewer: “It’s so easy to have a fatal accident and ruin your life!”

[Kurt Opitz, Hamburg]

[Editor’s Note: Coleman is a sports announcer regularly heard in England. Colemanballs, we assume, are “foul balls” tossed into the game by Mr. Coleman.]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. What’s discussed is woo (5)
4. Forecast based on data from a very high source? (9)
9. 411 has its number, probably (9)
10. Alan’s confused about M and N sounds (5)
11. Crude citrus blend (6)
12. Dior sets new fashion for bodybuilder’s aids. (8)
14. Coward’s hot candidate for midday rabies? (10)
16. Powder in hospital container (4)
19. Elm or Maple Street inhabitant (4)
20. British batter a fan of Mickey’s friend Jiminy? (10)
22. Overhaul Reliant’s innards (8)
23. Brave makes comeback in Castro Havana (6)
26. Strange tales, Ducks!(5)
27. Sweet of the month? (In France it’s a fish) (5,4)
28. Ten madmen put straight, for a change (9).
29. Fear rabid adder (5)

Down

1. TNT recipe blows head off (9)
2. Watney’s Ale shippers hold auctions (5)
3. Clear bent clip in way out (8)
4. Shout loudly, Gibson (4)
5. Coming in again near center switch (10)
6. Divers bask, get thirsty (6)
7. What you are when I am firm and he is a pig-headed fool? (9)
8. Letter is from NYC island (5)
13. Here’s a love arranged for gobs' holiday (5,5)
15. Take large choppy body of water (5,4)
17. Rode together, sang about Italian river (9)
18. Last part in contract is itemized (8)
21. Circulated outmoded old English penny (6)
22. In front, beyond; alone, more (5)
24. Italian’s love found in Bergamo region (5)
25. Dry beast has no tail (4)

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Many gifts under $10, more under $5” [From a commercial for Swiss Colony cheeses, September 1983, WUAB-TV, Cleveland, Ohio. Submitted by Dorothy Branson, Columbus.]

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“Daisy is the dazzling offspring of an emigré aristo playboy (Stacy Keach, miscast) who is variously cheated, neglected, seduced and exploited before finding fame and fortune as the model for a perfume called Elstree.” [From The Sunday Times (London), March 4, 1984, p. 54.]

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“Fred and company would create cameras for prison mugshots, for panoramas of entire mountain ranges of girls' schools, for undistorted shots of the interior of Queen Mary’s dolls' House…” [From The Sunday Times (London), March 4, 1984, p. 5.]

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