VOL XI, No 1 [Summer, 1984]
And Oh, the Smell of Your Spile…
Norman Ward, University of Saskatchewan
Are spoonerisms words? The OED is unwontedly laconic about the spoonerism, defining it as “an accidental transposition of the initial sounds, or other parts, of two or more words,” and nodding courteously to Rev. W.A. Spooner as the source of the term; but it says little more. On word, however, the OED lets itself go for several columns, sometimes moving the reader to mutter, “Surely that’s true of spoonerisms?” But on the whole it is clear that the answer to the question above must be a regretful no.
Yet spoonerisms in the right context can be memorable, making a greater impact than the mere words which gave birth to them; and telling about them often requires some anecdotal stage-setting. More than four decades ago, for example, when one of the prices one paid for attending university was involuntary servitude in an alleged officers' training corps, I was a member of a company of laggards which contained few citizens likely to qualify even as privates, let alone people with military responsibilities. We were not entirely stupid; but where companies A to E held many zealots who later distinguished themselves in the field, F company consisted largely of people with other pursuits in mind, mainly academic. We were, in fact, the dregs of the libraries and laboratories, men who, on parade, were daily sustained by the hope that something would go wrong.
When, therefore, we were told that an eminent general was going to inspect us on an announced date, we sought to add interest to the proceedings by an early morning distribution of (to my recollection) wet potassium iodide in the drill hall, the chemical an unwitting contribution from the science faculty. Moist potassium iodide is (or was then) dull, inert, purply stuff, but dry it is wonderful. The slightest friction sets it off with a crack, so that at the inspection the marching boots of dozens of students were accompanied by a steady rattle of mysterious musketry fire. Companies A to E and their establishments were gratifyingly baffled, although the inspecting general did not seem particularly pleased. Our own sergeant, on civvy street a shipping clerk in a local store, was not among those taken in. “I don’t know what went on here this afternoon,” he told us as we were lined up for dismissal, “but I know you bastards did it.” For several minutes he was impressively eloquent for a shipping clerk, and after a pungent harangue he issued an unforgettable warning. “And as long as I’m your sergeant,” he concluded, “I don’t want any repetition of it. Not in any shay, wape, or form.”
Every member of Company F was, I’m sure, thereafter marked for life. If the sergeant had not spoonerized his code, we would all have dismissed it as no more reliable than any other fragment of wartime propaganda. But his spoonerism not only gave his words a unique identity; it elevated them to new levels of sound and consciousness, fresh creations as endearing as favorite notes of music. The sergeant’s name, oddly enough, offers evidence of a related phenomenon in another way: I associate it with geographical expanses of some dampness, but I cannot recall whether he was Sergeant Marsh or Swamp or, for that matter Slough. If I’d ever heard him referred to as Fergeant Sen or Bergeant Sog or, best of all, Mergeant Sorass, I’d know to this day who he was.
The sergeant’s spoonerism (the word has no synonym) revealed another characteristic of the genre: it did consist of real words, but words without meaning in the context where they appeared. Appeared may be the wrong term, for in my experience the best spoonerisms are heard, not seen. They do turn up in print, usually being exploited for comic effect, but it is probably no accident that an able exponent of the written spoonerism, the late Col. Stoopnagle, was a reformed broadcaster; his finest effort was heard on the air:
East is west, and west is best,
And never the main shall tweet.
Post-inspection analyses of Wergeant Setlands' admonition suggested that the unintended spoonerism is a bane of broadcasters. One of my university colleagues was the son of the owner, manager, or manipulator of a local radio station, and the technology of the day did not permit much pre-recording of the spoken word; my friend often spelled off the regular announcers on weekends, and I was interested to learn that going on the air “live,” without much experience or time for rehearsal, also meant broadcasting under the unrelieved threat of lousing up a script.
There was even a pecking order among radio spoonerisms. The bottom rung was the news, where unexpected spoonerisms, especially of proper names, might pass almost unnoticed. It was my friend’s opinion that a casual mention of Churchill’s associate, Cuff Dooper, or Roosevelt’s Stenry Himson, was acceptable to the listeners because they thought those were real names. (Lowell Thomas was less lucky when he invented the celebrated Sir Stifford Crapps.)
The addicts of sports reports were fussier than the aficionados of plain news, and a well-meant naming of the St. Blooie Rowns, then capering about in the baseball leagues, or of the New Yank Yorkees, no matter how obvious the error, was likely to bring not merely corrections but reflections on the hapless announcer’s intelligence and ancestry. Familiar names, interestingly enough, were in less danger of getting spoonerized than those of, say, boxers or jockeys or race-horses, who on the air enjoyed less regular seasons than professional teams. The same fact explained why there were fewer complaints about some of the individual stars; like a name in the news, a champion who appeared sporadically could be anybody.
That was emphatically not true of commercial announcements. A listener who has paid an honest dollar to hear his wares touted on the air is not likely to be satisfied by what may strike him as a frivolous mislabeling of his precious product, and my friend advised me that he agonized regularly over what he might say about several subjects, particularly if he disliked the stuff or its sponsor. He tried to anticipate possible spoonerisms, and learned (or claimed he did) that those which employed sounds beginning with a vowel were more improbable than those with strong consonants. He was not often worried about real estate becoming eel restate, or old books turning into bold ooks; spoonerisms like that did not sound real, and it is of the essence of a good spoonerism that it ought at least to seem to make sense. Thus while my adviser had no fear of general subjects like ublic paccountants and esh frice, he was haunted by specific products with names that could emerge as Weerless Pieners and Eggnoot Wheedles.
Like the limerick, some spoonerisms seem destined to follow the course of greatest impropriety, if not pornography; and for weeks my announcer pronounced with great care the label of a prosperous country restaurant. But one unclear day he lost it, and invited all who listened to take the family to dine at the Piss and Wiggle. Not long thereafter he decided that broadcasting was not for him, and it’s probably just as well. God knows what he might have made of such modern merchandisers as Crazy Lum’s Bicycles, Trott’s Waterbeds, or Lucky Phyl’s Donuts.
Nowadays, of course, he’d have the protection of both technology and unions, the one allowing for the erasure of errors through pre-recording, the other likely to insist on rehearsal time for even spontaneous ad libs. Even so, the deadly rhythm of some phrases (and most spoonerisms follow the rhythm of the original words) remains to drown out the best efforts of professional talkers. Not long ago I heard a commentator on American affairs speak critically of the Kissin-Nixonger Era, and nothing else he said so plainly caught what he meant. One of Canada’s best-known analysts reached the summit of his career with the identification of a federal cabinet member as the Minister of Hell and Wealthfare. At a more modest level, I once electrified a class by announcing that I was going to lecture on some common farts of political paulties. (I did, too, naming names.)
If spoonerisms can be both vivid and memorable, it may strike the hearers that at least the more dramatic among them should be enshrined in dictionaries or other reference works. But most dictionaries are very large now: adding the spoonerisms that are the potential accompaniment of almost any pair of words would make them unwieldy beyond management. Besides, most of us get through every day with the help of familiar sounds not in dictionaries: the noises of children and animals, of automobiles, trains, and airplanes, can be described and defined on paper, but not many of them can be accurately reproduced with phonetic symbols. Even when dictionary entries are involved, the ambiguity of television commercials has created a new dimension in meaninglessness for what used to be common words. Few of us know all our friends and acquaintances by words with meanings, since names usually get into dictionaries only under circumstances that apply to any other words. The lack of recognition accorded spoonerisms, however significant each may be in a particular context, is not so surprising after all.
Still, I like spoonerisms, especially when somebody else is the inventor. In my country’s other language, incidentally, Rev. Spooner gets no credit at all. The French for spoonerism is contre-petterie, and the related infinitive can be rendered ‘to imitate derisively’; if you trace that far enough you run into roots that suggest sundry popping sounds, as in “hoist with his own petard.” Shakespeare used that phrase, which makes me wonder what the English called spoonerisms before Rev. W. A. was born in 1844.
They Said That?!
Man wants but little here below. —John D. Rockefeller.
In all labor there is profit. —motto of St. Elegius Lying-In Hospital.
I was an hungered and ye gave me meat. —Wendy’s Restaurants.
In my father’s house are many mansions.—Christina Onassis.
I have played the fool and have erred exceedingly. —Richard M. Nixon.
These filthy dreamers defile the flesh. —Sigmund Freud.
How forcible are right words. —William Safire.
“A fool and his mother are soon parted.” —Motto of National Mother’s Day Committee.
“If you’ve got it, flout it.” —Dolly Parton.
“No man is a hero to his varlet.” —King Arthur.
Language Crimes: The Case of the Missing Vocabulary
Richard L. Faust, New York, New York
The pounding on my office door startled me out of my afternoon meditation—it sounded like the knock of doom. Through the glass panel I could see what looked like the silhouette of a recruitment-poster figure—burly, with a military cap, but no rifle in sight as yet, strong and impatient. As I stared at my name on the glass door—AHA (beautifully legible from both sides)—some inner voice urged me not to respond. My oriental ancestors often said, “Listen when the heart knocks, for the future is speaking,” but I was curious, and the noisemaker was obviously there because of the other two words on my door: PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR.
“Come in!' ” I called with some trepidation, and it was the start of a new case.
What came through the door would have been quite suitable as one of the Dragon Palace guards for my ancestors, a cross between a bulldog and a giant. It spoke: “You the head man, bud? My name is Drummond.”
“Aha is the name I bear. Will you sit down?”
“We can’t tarry in town, mister. You got to come with me.”
“Where are we going?” I asked tremulously.
“To The Saurus,” he answered, holding the door open for me. I grabbed my fedora.
In the car I had a chance to think. The Saurus! It was legendary, the fabled domain belonging to the Irish billionaire R. O’Gets, who had made his money by building vocabularies all over the world. His was the greatest name in vocabulary building, but such fame was purchased at a price—he lived now as a recluse on his large estate. The Saurus was named for a variety of lizard that can change its coloration to suit any circumstances. It was rumored that the estate had fallen into desuetude because no one wanted large vocabularies any more. All around the area one could see mansions decaying. There were newer things to build today, like missile bases.
With Drummond at the wheel, the trip took only 40 minutes. Within the gates, I gazed at the cloistered wonders: I saw arcane roots growing everywhere, untended and unused; rusted signs still linked the interconnecting fields, but antonyms could be seen sprouting among the synonyms. I caught a glimpse of something tall in the distance, probably the original vocabulary drill, now no longer pumping.
The house itself was a gigantic edifice composed of Greek and Latin elements supported on a Germanic foundation. Dadoes from all over the world formed the major decorations. As I was ushered into the house it almost seemed to be cracking apart; the odor of neglect was in the air. But there was something else, something that made my spine tingle—a feeling of suppressed energy, a pressure waiting to be released once more upon the world when a new generation of builders might be born: it was the feeling of raw word power.
O’Gets was wheeled into the drawing room by someone named Suffix, a faithful follower, but only after Prefix had come before to offer me a brandy. The staff was minuscule.
“Aha,” O’Gets exclaimed, “I’ll get right to the point. Someone has stolen my oldest and rarest vocabulary: gems like opalescent and nacreous, and priceless items like scrimshaw. I want them back!' ”
I calmly asked, “Where were they kept?”
“Where most vocabularies are kept—on the shelf. It was actually my latent vocabulary, but very valuable, extensive and barely touched, made up of words the world has hardly known. And now they’re gone.” He sobbed piteously.
I took refuge in the wisdom of my oriental ancestors, who always said: “Remain obdurate when others deliquesce.” I pursued my questioning.
“Who else lives here?”
“Only Webster, my teenage grandson, who romps at random in the house. But he has little interest in my treasures, for he spends his time helping college students write papers, a noble task I’m sure, but far removed from subtle etymologies. And then there is Semantha, my adopted daughter, whose Semantic ways give comfort and order to my old age. But they would not steal! They know the full meaning of such an act. Besides, the vocabularies that remain provide enough currency for us all.”
If only my friend Billy Emerald were here, he might be able to get a handle on this case. But this was one I had to solve alone. The problem was that there was no one who had any reason to commit the crime. The servants, of course, were not under suspicion since they had never wanted or used vocabularies of any distinction or value—that’s why they were servants. But I recalled an old proverb: “He who steals a minaret knows where to hide it.” Every thief has a use for what he takes and a place to hide it, but who needed a vocabulary these days?
My wise ancestors always said, “When all seems mysterious, ask the classic questions.” So I asked, “Was anything else taken?”
It was the breakthrough I needed, for O’Gets replied, “Yes. But nothing important—only a new video vocabulary game I was developing called Nam Cap. It was based on reversals: reverse spellings, reverse order, etc. But it is worthless compared with the priceless items that were taken, like didapper and nautch.”
In spite of his new interest in video, R. O’Gets’s views were quite retrograde. No wonder that the great vocabulary builders are out of work and the world of words lies fallow. His video game provided the solution; I knew how to find the thief.
“Give me a list of the names of everyone in the house,” I said.
Within five minutes, the latent and priceless vocabulary was found and was back on the shelf, and I had been ceremoniously handed a single word: remuneration.
Before the police took him away, I had a chat with Drummond.
“You and I have been blessed with the good fortune of special names. I have lived happily with my palindrome and can understand some of your strong feeling about your name. But why steal the video game?”
He raised his chin proudly, looking even more like a bulldog:
“I did it for my country. It wasn’t just that my name would be on millions of games but that the logo, the picture, would be there too, in red, white and blue, stirring up faith in our country again, bringing back patriotism. I could see the three inspiring figures—the one in bandages, the one with the flag, and the little boy—bringing back greatness to our land, giving us a marching beat. My name would replace Nam Cap, which is a dumb name for any game; it sounds Vietnamese, too Asian for an American game, and besides the bastards have cornered enough of the electronics mar….” He stopped, stared at me, then turned and left silently.
Back in my office I kicked off my shoes. My thoughts began brewing along with the tea. Surely my oriental ancestors would not have taken umbrage, for they lived by proverbs like “An unintended wound heals quickly.” When I wrote up the case, I took great delight in waiting to the end to write, very slowly and in my best calligraphic style, the name of the thief: Drummond Fife.
EPISTOLA {Zellig Bach}
The comment by Donald R. Ricklin [IX,3] completely misses the point of my paper “Neither ‘God’ Nor ‘Aleichem’ Is a Last Name” [IX,1]. He writes: “… Gilford is a peasant in … Aleichem, the play, as one might say, ‘in Shakespeare’ instead of ‘In Love’s Labour’s Lost.’ ” But herein is the very fallacy: Shakespeare is a last name, while Aleichem by itself, without Sholem, is not.
The same erroneous reference to the truncated name “Aleichem” is occasionally found not just in a theater review, where Ricklin mistakenly believes such usage might be justified, but also in a book review. For instance, Joyce Carol Oates, reviewing a book of a collection of Sholem Aleichem’s stories in English [The New York Times Book Review, July 8, 1979, p.l]: “Even the grimmest and most heart-breaking of the tales… is related in Aleichem’s characteristic voice—conversational, breezy, ironic….” [Italics added]
Bel Kaufman, Sholem Aleichem’s granddaughter and an author in her own right (Up the Down Staircase) informs me [personal communication, January 9, 1983] that some years ago the family thought of hyphenating the two parts of the name Sholem Aleichem to prevent this very confusion.
It is of interest that, as a compound expression, Sholemaleichem, the traditional Yiddish greeting meaning ‘peace be with you,’ is, indeed, hyphenated [Uriel Weinreich: Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary. YIVO Institute for Jewish Research/McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York: 1968]. Although Sholem was his real first name (he was also called Solomon in Russian), in the context of his pen name Sholem should not, in this specific and exceptional case, be regarded as a first name, nor Aleichem as a last name, but should be regarded together, as an integrated compound whole with a singular meaning, not to be split asunder.
The best justification and strongest evidence for this position can be found in the author’s own work. Many of his stories were written in the form of monologues in which he let his characters speak and in which he portrayed himself as the verbatim chronicler, a device which allowed him to “record” directly the way his people spoke. Not infrequently the speakers in these stories would familiarly address themselves to the writer, for instance, “You know, Mr. Sholem Aleichem …” but never, ever was he addressed in these stories as “Mr. Aleichem”—that is, never did Sholem Aleichem “address” himself in his own writing, through his characters, as “Mr. Aleichem.” This was simply unimaginable because, as I described in my above-cited paper, both the literal and symbolic meanings and nuances of the compound pen name do not admit such truncation.
[Zellig Bach, Lakehurst, New Jersey]
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Walker’s Rhyming Dictionary of the English Language, in Which the Whole Language Is Arranged According to Its Terminations
J. Walker, revised and enlarged by Lawrence H. Dawson, supplement compiled by Michael Freeman, (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1924, 1983), vii + 583pp.
[The scene is a seedy room in a loft. A desk is to one side, piled high with papers; an elderly typewriter is barely visible above the papers. Nearby, a battered upright stands against the wall. An old imitation-leather couch, springs exposed here and there, bespeaks wear and tear and poverty. From the ceiling hang bare light bulbs of such low wattage that the interior is scarcely discernible in the smoky gloom. George is seated at the piano; Ira, his brother, sits at the desk, holding his head. Despair is the mood.]
IRA: Dammit, George, I won’t do another lyric with tune, soon, spoon, June, or moon in it, and I can’t combine goon, loon, prune, poltroon, rune, baboon, and platoon into anything that makes sense.
GEORGE: (Noodling at the piano.) Okay, Ira, okay. Don’t get so excited. I have my troubles, too. For years I’ve been unable to interest a publisher in Rhapsody in Pink. (Musing.) Maybe I ought to change the name…. What do you think of Rhapsody in Mauve?
IRA: For God’s sake, George!
GEO.: …in Cerise?
IRA: George, we’re not getting anywhere. Neither one of us has had any inspiration in months. The last money we made was the $10 you got for playing in that honkytonk over near Broadway. We have to do something.
[There is a knock at the door. George rises to open it.]
GEO.: Yes?
MESSENGER: You George and Ira?
GEO.: Yeah.
MESS.: Ya mudda sent me ova wid dis here book faw ya.
GEO.: My mother?!
MESS.: Yeah. Sign here.
GEO.: (Signing.) Ira, do you suppose Ma has given up sending jars of chicken soup? Maybe hunger has driven us all mad.
[Messenger leaves. George crosses to desk, unwrapping book.]
IRA: Let’s see.
[They bend over the book.]
TOGETHER: (Reading.) Walker’s Rhyming Dictionary.
IRA: (Puzzled.) What are we supposed to do with this? Eat it?
GEO.: Let’s see. (Scanning through book.) Hey, Ira! How about this: can you come up with a lyric rhyming choreography with stereography and cardiography?
IRA: George, please!Be serious!
GEO.: I am being serious! Just think! You could write undying lyrics, which I could set to music, using this book. How about “You sleek geek/You reek from fenugreek”?
IRA: Beautiful, George. It doesn’t even scan.
GEO.: That’s okay. Suppose you set Ogden Nash to music? That wouldn’t scan, either. Take a look at this book, Ira, maybe you’ll get an idea.
IRA: (Reading.) Hey, this is great, George. Give me a few minutes.
[George returns to piano and beats out his famous composition, “Boogie-woogie to Read By.” Ira continues to read, then starts to write furiously. George completes the piece just as…]
IRA: (Almost shouting with excitement.) This is it, George! I’ve got it.
GEO.: (Eager with anticipation.) Let’s hear it, let’s hear it.
IRA: I see it as a romantic ballad, George. (Wistfully.) It’ll be another Begin with Bay’gin.
GEO.: That’s begeen', Ira; Bay’gin was the prime minister of Israel. The title is Begin the Beguine.
IRA: So what? Just listen to this: (Recites.)
When I see her samba I shout “Ai! Caramba!” She slips me a mamba While I eat my tsamba. Viola da gamba—
GEO.: (Interrupting.) Wait a minute! Just a minute! What’s a tsamba?
IRA: According to the Supplement to Walker’s, tsamba is a Tibetan barley dish.
GEO.: Isn’t that pretty far-fetched? What’s the viola da gamba doing there?
IRA: Poetic license, George. Poetic license. I’m just stringing you along….
GEO.: What’s romantic about mamba and tsamba?
IRA: Romance is in the eye of the beholder.
GEO.: I think you’d better try something else, Ira.
IRA: (Leafing through book. Stops.) I’ve got it!
GEO.: Let’s have it.
IRA: How’s this?
When push comes to shove,
As heaven knows above
I really am in love
with you.We stand in the breeze
You almost start to sneeze
I get down on my knees—
Adieu.
GEO.: Please! For heaven’s sake! Even if I could write music to that, who’d want to listen to it?!
IRA: Is this better? I’m filled with pusillanimity Whenever you’re in the vicinity….
GEO.: Give it up, Ira!
IRA: No! I won’t give up. This book is an inspiration. Maybe we can come up with a title that’ll help.
GEO.: Like what?
IRA: How about, “His Eye Is on the Marrow”?
GEO.: No.
IRA: “Alexander’s Rag-content Bond”?
GEO.: Ira!
IRA: “Effaceable You”?
GEO.: !
IRA: “White and Gray, You Are the One”?
[George picks up a batch of sheet music and throws it at Ira as the curtain falls.]
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: World Dictionaries in Print: A Guide To General and Subject Dictionaries in World Languages
(R.R. Bowker Company, 1983), xv + 579pp.
Although no mention is made of it in the section Further Reading, at the end of the Foreword of the work under review, Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, and Other Word-Related Books, edited by Annie M. Brewer, Gale Research Company, is a very useful adjunct to this book. A Supplement to the Third Edition was published recently. As the title makes clear, World Dictionaries in Print (WDP) covers only those works in print. While Mrs. Brewer’s books are much broader in scope, they are based on the catalogue at the Library of Congress and hence do not include some foreign and some American works of reference that are apparently not (yet) in the L.C. collection.
WDP starts out a little confused: it has both a Foreword and a Preface (they are, as far as I know, merely Germanic and Latin variant names of the same sort of thing). Although a note on James Campbell appears at the end of the Foreword, the Foreword is not attributed to him; at the end of the Preface, under Acknowledgements [sic] appears a note of thanks to Campbell for “his excellent essay: ‘Suggestions for Acquiring Foreign Reference Books,’ ” though the three paragraphs dealing with that subject appear as part of the Foreword, under the title “Buying from the Foreign Book Dealer.”
The book is organized into a Subject Index, Title Index, Author/Editor/Compiler Index, and a Language Index; the last 33 pages are devoted to a Key to Publishers' and Distributors' Abbreviations.
In such an array, my first inclination is to seek out my own name in the Author/Editor/Compiler Index. It appears eight times for only 14 titles, with more than a few errors. My given name is misspelt “Laurance” once and “Lawrence” twice, and my surname is misspelt “Urdung” once [see VERBATIM I, 2]. In one instance, an improper cross reference is made to a subeditor; one title is listed twice; and about 60 (yes, 60) other dictionaries are not listed at all or are miscredited. Some appear under L (for Laurence Urdang Associates, Ltd.), and one spells my surname “Ordang.” For example, the following titles are not listed:
Collins English Dictionary, Collins [U.K.]
Penguin Dictionary of Electronics, Penguin [U.K.]
Dictionary of Philosophy, Macmillan & Pan [U.K.]
Hamlyn Dictionary of Biblical Quotations, Hamlyn [U.K.], Facts on File [U.S.]
Treasury of Biblical Quotations, Nelson [U.S.], Pickering [U.S.] & Inglis [U.K.]
Mosby’s Medical & Nursing Dictionary, C.V. Mosby
Timetables of American History, Simon & Schuster
Twentieth Century American Nicknames, Wilson
…etc.
Many of those not listed are British books, but WDP lists other titles that are not readily available in America. Bowker cannot be held responsible for failing to list, with the proper attribution, an editor if the publisher has decided to discontinue listing his name (as in the case of the Random House College Dictionary, of which I was listed as editor in chief till the 2nd Edition was published, containing about 7% new matter, whereupon my name was removed, and the Random House Unabridged, of which Jess Stein was listed as editor in chief and I as managing editor: neither credit appears in WDP, despite the continued listing on the book’s title page). But Bowker can be called to task for listing Flexner, Stuart Berg, as “Bergflexner, Stuart,” and for numerous other proofreaders' and other errors.
There is much useful information in WDP notwithstanding, and the four main indexes make it readily accessible. Yet there are omissions that are quite unforgivable, like the Shakespeare Concordance published by Harvard University Press (Belknap), and what is there is not easy to find because of the misspellings.
In sum, WDP contains a large number of errors and omits many works it ought to have included. If you can live with that sort of frustration, then this book is for you; if not, use the Gale book referred to earlier or the catalogue of a library with an exceptional collection, though neither of the last two is as likely to provide information as up to date as that in WDP— alas!
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker
R.M.W. Dixon, (University of Queensland Press, 1984), 344 pp.
A few years ago we had a linguistics conference in Adelaide which attracted a number of people from remote areas in central and northern Australia. I got the impression that some of these people were a little shy with city linguists (even my students who went along), seeing them as people with access to good libraries, in touch with modern movements, and skilled in linguistic theory. Be that as it may, I know my students were full of humble admiration for these real linguists from the front line, in daily contact with still living Aboriginal languages. The armchair linguist may achieve all sorts of fame but he often wonders what life for the frontline linguist, the field worker, is really like. Now he (or of course she) and anyone else interested may find out something of this by acquiring a very readable account of a field worker’s experiences in this book by R.M.W. Dixon, who is thoroughly at home in both worlds.
It is a reminder that linguistics is a very human subject (it is an odd commentary on some modern trends in linguistics that we need to be reminded). To begin with, we are allowed to perceive that even the best investigating linguist is human, not endowed with some superhuman skill that effortlessly elicits the patterns of remote languages, but obliged to work through guesses and trial and error just as any of us would. Dixon is more thorough than some in undertaking to learn to use the languages he studied, to make errors, in fact, to test his hypotheses. We also learn that the academic linguist is not the only linguist involved in recording a language. He works in conjunction with native-speaking informants who vary considerably in their willingness and ability to help. An outstanding one, like Bob Dixon’s Chloe Grant, has all the qualities of a good postgraduate student except for the ability to read and write. Chloe identified herself with the project, volunteered information and analysis, worked out principles of gender in Dyirbal (involving a knowledge of Dyirbal science), developed theories of language (not all of which would win wide approval), and was virtually a co-author of parts of Dixon’s published account of the Dyirbal language.
What gives especial humanity to Bob Dixon’s book is his respect for the Aboriginals he encountered. Often there are poignant touches; there was the Aboriginal who saw a building labeled Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies and, having always wanted to study, went in only to be told the Aborigines were studied, not studying; and there was the informant favoring Dixon because he was English and not American, having been told at school that “Australians” came from England, without quite understanding that he was not meant to be included.
The pervasive tone is one of respect for the Aboriginal people. There were Europeans in the north who had lived in areas where there were many Aborigines and who got on well with them and were kind to them, who nevertheless assured Dixon that Aborigines had “no language” (just a few grunts) or had language with “no grammar.” The mere fact that the intricacies of the grammar of one of these languages was a subject for study would at least dispel that idea; this nontechnical book about languages yields a surprising amount of linguistic knowledge. Usually the information comes in the shape of a mystery story, a puzzle about a detail of a language: Why are there monosyllabic words in Barbaram when related languages seemed universally disyllabic? Why does the Yidiny language have two separate words for ‘what’?
There is always oddness and fun to be had with language. Odd that the first word the field worker encountered was the Barbaram word for ‘dog.’ It was dog! (One of the mysterious monosyllables, explained by regular phonetic change and not a justification for the monogenesis of language as hypothesized by Chloe Grant in her more speculative moods.) Phonetic considerations, such as the absence of “s” or “f” in most Aboriginal languages, explain borrowed words like naybu ‘knife’ or mijiji ‘woman’ (from “missus”). Imagination accounts for the Dyirbal word maralu ‘a shirt,’ a word originally meaning ‘hollow log’ because when the Dyirbal people first saw a European pulling on a starched shirt they were reminded of a bandicoot seeking shelter in a hollow log.
A recent issue of The Times Higher Education Supplement printed a cartoon showing two academics sitting at desks on an open lawn, one saying to the other, “At least there’s nothing left to be taken away.” Desks were a luxury beyond the reach of Professor Dixon and his informants. It was not permitted for Europeans to visit Aboriginals in their homes, and so work was done sitting under a tree. At least the biting ants that fell from it were, according to the informant, “good for you.”
Like my students, I am full of humble admiration for field workers. Since I read Dixon’s book, they have become less shadowy and remote, a good deal more human, but no less admirable. The book has the merits of an autobiography and a travelogue, in both cases fluently written; but its further dimension, its linguistic interest, makes it a travelogue of the mind, a richer insight into Aboriginal life than is usually available.
G.W. Turner, University of Adelaide
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Who’s Troubled?
Deputy chief subeditor is the sort of title that leads you up to the top of the hill and leads you down again. But Bill Bryson works as one for no less a paper than The Times, and that gives him exceptional qualifications for compiling The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words. Not a cloistered academic with a penchant for particles and participles but an experienced journalist used to the hurly-burly of newspaper offices from Iowa to Bournemouth, he is now charged with watching the tongue of The Thunderer. So he ought to be a reliable guide through the minefields of contemporary usage in English and American. And, up to a point, Sir William, he is. He knows only too well that writers aiming at trendiness or emphasis are apt to hit more magpies than bulls, and he is right to hoist a red flag of warning over fortuitous, flaunt and flounder, over straitjacket and co-equal, and over a score of spellings that trip up the unwary.
Difficulties in following Mr. Bryson arise, however, when he moves out from the subeditor’s legitimate sphere of helping writers to say what they intended and starts trying to legislate for the language more generally. Things get worse—and one can only sympathize with cub reporters on The Times—as it becomes clear that his policy is an odd mixture of liberal laissez-faire and conservative dogmatism. On the number of data, for instance, Mr. Bryson is prepared, after carefully weighing pros and cons, to pass the singular. He sets aside the protests of purists, explaining that “in English usage etymology doesn’t always count for much.” How often is “not always,” though? Well, Mr. Bryson won’t accept trivia as a singular, should we happen to want to use the word, because “there is no singular form.” As well as Latin grammatical niceness, ancient dramatic practice is invoked. Though we are to be allowed any number of antagonists (despite nec quarta loqui persona laboret), protagonist cannot, we are solemnly informed, properly be applied to more than one person. Perhaps so, but will that argument change anybody’s linguistic habits in the twentieth century?
Similar points can be made about several of Mr. Bryson’s observations. For all of us who like to identify words on the wing there is something of interest in the reminder that “epidemic” is related to “democracy” and so originally referred only to diseases afflicting the human race. But nobody ought to be worried that the meaning of the word has stretched over the centuries. Certainly epizootic, which Mr. Bryson appears to favor, cannot look forward to a bright future. English does not need the discrimination that term would offer, even if it were not doomed because there would always be confusion over its pronunciation. Academic principle rules again in the comment that flak should never be given a c before the k because it is a contraction derived from Fliegerabwehrkanone. True enough, but it is by no means unprecedented for English to modify the spelling of a word as it borrows it and bends its meaning. Besides, the form flak-jacket, which is frequently needed in reports of embassy sieges and the like, simply looks too much like a misprint to survive for long. The truth of the matter, as Mr. Bryson admits when he quotes his colleague Philip Howard, is that etymology demonstrably does not control the development of a word once it has been launched.
What is more useful than complaining that words change is exploring how they develop and why. Change is not synonymous with decay, and if there is rot, only good example will stop it, not pedantic precept. There is, to be sure, a good deal of slipshod writing around, but Mr. Bryson is unlikely to win friends or influence people by displaying scant sensitivity to the modern tongue. It is true that we managed with just weather for a long time. Nowadays, weather conditions are what people sometimes talk about. Is that just fashion? The telecasters urge for pompous polysyllables? Perhaps. But it probably also reflects some growing awareness of the interplay of atmospheric forces that bring the showers. Weather may have been good enough for shepherds hoping for red skies at night, but isobars and satellite pictures suggest weather conditions. Again, accountants know quite as well as Mr. Bryson what is meant by anticipated income, so we had better agree that there must be some reason why company chairmen are regularly allowed to write that the firm had not “anticipated losses on its underwriting operations.” The word conveys rather more than just expect, implying, it appears, something about taking appropriate steps.
Many of Mr. Bryson’s difficulties stem from his overrespectful attitude to dictionaries. He sees them as prescribing usage, rather than describing it, though it is only the latter role that gives them validity. His position is shown in a long paragraph on warn. He quotes a sentence from the Daily Telegraph: “British Rail warned that snow was bound to have a serious effect on its service today.” The meaning is perfectly clear, but Mr. Bryson becomes very uneasy on discovering no authority for this intransitive use of the verb, even though he considers the distinction rather fussy. He concludes with the disturbing thought that those who use it “do so at the peril of being called incorrect.” It is hard to think there is any real risk. But the caution is typical of Mr. Bryson, who is always fretting about being caught out in some impropriety in what he variously calls formal, careful, and serious situations. Worse still, he can be snobbish towards those he considers less well educated than himself. There may often be a touch of irony, a sort of verbal glorious Technicolor, when people insist on pronouncing as many syllables as possible in “Ye olde worlde teashoppe.” Even if there isn’t, there is no need to administer a magisterial put-down, as Alexander taught Marcus Aurelius a very long time ago.
Christopher Smith, Norwich, Norfolk
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words and I Stand Corrected, More on Language
Bill Bryson, (Penguin, 1984), 173pp. and William Safire, (Times Books, 1984), ix + 468pp.
[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection]
Anyone writing as much about any subject as Bill Safire writes about language (omitting comment on his regular forays into politics) is bound to generate some deadly prose now and then, and Bill is no exception. The important thing that most language professionals overlook is the fact that he is a reporter of language trends and anomalies. To be sure, he offers his own opinions, with which his readers sometimes take issue; but at least he takes a stand, and the lively exchange between him and his readers, which he diligently reports, without any (apparent) embarrassment, is revealing of the way people feel about language and, perhaps more important from the standpoint of Safire’s publishers, makes good reading, too.
As millions know, Bill Safire’s column, “On Language,” appears as a regular feature of The New York Times Magazine. This book is a compilation of selections from those articles in which he has proffered commentary that is either controversial or just plain wrong; hence, the title. It is the third collection of his essays to appear in book form.
Bill Safire writing about language probably provokes more controversy than Bill Safire writing about politics. In any event, they don’t give out Pulitzer prizes (as far as I know) for writing columns on language, and it is not insignificant that Bill was awarded one for his political writings. The controversies are often settled by his “Lexicographic Irregulars,” a raggle-taggle band of linguistic gypsies who, with true Talmudic reasoning, can find support for any side of any question of English usage. Safire calls on them from time to time for help in gathering citational evidence for usage and lexicon that eludes the mavens at Oxford, Merriam-Webster, Barnhart, and elsewhere: Safire, in short, is the answer to a maven’s prayer.
The Lexicographic Irregulars include, in addition to “regular” lexicographers, professors from Harvard, Michigan, Amherst, and other centers of learning, as well as members of the general public who are perceptive observers of the language. They frequently come up with evidentiary information that would be hard to come by through ordinary means. For instance, though lexicographers generally agree in disputing the origin of posh as an acronym for ‘port out, starboard home,’ Ellen Thackara wrote to Safire from Switzerland:
When I lived in the Orient the P. & O. (Pacific & Orient) Line out of London did put beside the names of important people “POSH,” so they would have the cooler side of the ship. [p. 280]
As no rebuttal to this was forthcoming from the Irregulars, we may regard the problem as unresolved, and you may draw your own conclusion from the evidence. (For instance, suppose posh was used to designate V.I.P.s because it was already current in the sense of ‘luxurious’ and was only later “derived” from ‘port out, starboard home’; why would P. & O. designations always, necessarily, assume a return trip?)
That is not a problem to settle here, even if we could; it is mentioned only in order to illustrate the sorts of things Safire deals with. Some may criticize his lack of formal training as a linguist. To them I would say that at least he broaches subjects that nettle us all and successfully evokes comment from amateur and professional alike. His influence is broad—too broad, perhaps, for the tastes of his academic critics. But, while it must be readily acknowledged that language is the province of linguists, it is not their property, and only good can come from an energetic airing of questions that many of Safire’s readers may not have entertained before. In other words, Safire makes people think, and there can be only good in that (so long as they don’t become restless).
There is no nook or cranny of language untouched by Safire’s probe: pronunciation (of Thule, for example); idioms and phrases (social safety net, out there); translation (décolletage); words (egghead); usage (everywhere); grammar (dived/ dove); syntax (double genitives); etymology (posh, hooligan), and so on. No sooner does Safire express an opinion about something in the language than a reader pounces on him with an argument, sometimes a correction. Opinion about language is give and take, and Safire writes evocatively and provocatively, eliciting responses from Cassidy, Steinmetz, Barnhart, Mish, Guralnik, Flexner, Bailey, and other lexicographers as well as from Barzun, Bolinger, Reagan, Shelley Berman, James D. McCawley, Peter Viereck, Norman Schur, Allen Walker Read, Allen Metcalf, Miroslav Rensky, Eugene McCarthy, and Arthur J. Morgan, to name a few prominent users of and commentators on language.
Although most of the questions raised are answered, not all of the problems are solved, which is only to be expected. It is extremely interesting and useful to have, in one place, such a wealth of commentary expressed by people who obviously think seriously about language, know what they are talking about, and are able to articulate their ideas so well. Safire adroitly applies Platonic dialectic to the medium he serves, presenting argument, reply, reaction, response, riposte, and rejoinder in true Dialogue fashion.
This is an enormously useful book. Whether you agree with Safire or with his correspondents, you will find much food for thought here. Except for a few inconsistencies (putting double genitive under genitive, double but double negatives under double), the index is excellent, and we can thank heaven for it.
Laurence Urdang
EPISTOLA {Christopher M. Lauer}
About the debate [X, 3] between Charles Suhor and those he calls “pop grammarians”: a plague on both their houses. Neither the elitists of John Simon’s camp nor the all-licensing apologists of Suhor’s offer real help where it is needed. Just as no run-of-the-armory opponent of gun control would normally read Art Buchwald’s satiric squibs about the NRA, no one who really needs to become more conscious and careful about his use of the language is likely to be reading the columns of the pop grammarians. Suhor is apparently a defender of the findings of such documents as the CCCC’s “Student’s [sic] Right to their Own Language” which he mentions on page 9. Presumably, he is in favor of letting students express themselves without obliging them to correct their spelling and grammar. This position provides an after-the-fact rationale for incompetent, lazy, or distracted teachers whose students never learn—or learn too late—that writing is an act of communication rather than of egoistic expression.
I encourage my own students to learn the rules before they break them and try to get them to predict how their own constructions will act on their reader’s understanding. I tell them that their reader’s eye and brain are constantly predicting the next word, phrase, even the next punctuation mark down the line of ink. When these predictions are fulfilled, the reader’s attention is on the meaning and hardly notices the language itself; when the predictions are not fulfilled, the reader is surprised, at least for a split second, at least subconsciously. In the time it takes to read the parts of a sentence (or hear one, for that matter), the mind performs thousands of these predictions and responses. When the reader is surprised, his attention is turned away from what is being said and toward how it is being said. The best writers use these surprises deliberately; the effect of the resulting dynamic interaction is called style. Less effective writers produce surprises that have no relevant emphatic function but, because the reader’s expectations are violated, merely distract from the meaning.
A misspelled word causes a momentary trip in a practiced reader’s mind; a dangling participle causes him, if only for an infinitesimal moment, to mis-predict the rest of the sentence; a disagreement between subject and verb makes him reread the clause, befuddled. In Suhor’s own article, for example, typographical errors, mixed metaphors, and misplaced possessive apostrophes accumulate to obscure the writer’s arguments:
Writing letters to pop grammarians isn’t just a matter of intellectual jousting; it is a way of lowering the ego stakes in discussion of the volatile issues at hand.
(page 7)
Here, visions of knights, gamblers, and incendiaries jostle in the mind’s eye; the point of the sentence is not illuminated. The sentence fragment (typographical error?) “Is a puzzlement.” (page 8) is followed by
When I debated John Simon…, he invented an obscure sentence in which failure to observe the standard forms of lie and lay supposedly lay [sic] to an obscene interpretation: “Last Sunday I laid in bed for several hours.” (page 8)
The interruption of my own reading process at this point in Suhor’s article at least gave me a moment to wonder if this Deputy Executive Director of the National Council of Teachers of English is opposed to my asking my students to make the distinction between lie and lay.
Of course typographical errors (“discountinued” on page 9 is a wonderful portmanteau neologism) can’t really be blamed on the author, but the distraction, the weakening of the communication results anyway. A more disastrous violation of the reader’s predictions is logical fallacy. Suhor cites clichés from the works of E.B. White, William Buckley, and Tom Wolfe and concludes:
It would seem, then, that respected writers from both the past and present use language far more playfully and freely than we normally admit.
Suhor’s implication here, that the use of clichés is evidence of a writer’s playfulness and liberality, is hardly what most readers would foresee as an inference from these examples.
The objection even to minor, unintended glitches (see OBITER DICTA: “Grammar vs. Common Sense” in the same issue) is not that they fail to communicate but that they can, collectively, weaken communication and that they signal the writer’s inability or unwillingness to concern himself with his reader’s understanding.
While none of my students are in any danger of reading too much of Simon, Middleton, Newman, or Mitchell and, as a result “gagging on their own obsessions with perfection” (page 9), they may all be in danger of coming under the lax guidance of teachers who find, in Suhor and others, justification for their holistic tolerance of schlock.
[Christopher M. Lauer, Midland School, Los Olivos, California]
EPISTOLA {Norman R. Shapiro}
All of us who are interested in the art and craft of translation have, I suppose, our personal chamber of horrors. Marcy S. Powell’s article, “Traduttore Traditore” [X, 1], prompted me to revisit mine and to share with VERBATIM readers my own favorite traduzione/tradimento.
It occurs in a 1957 anthology, in a Spanish translation of Emily Dickinson’s “I never saw a moor…”, and is so deliciously logical in its inaccuracy that one can only stand in awe before the monumental misunderstanding. The translator— himself a well-respected Catalano-Mexican poet, whom charity and professional sympathy restrain me from identifying— encountered Dickinson’s well-known lines “I never saw a moor, / I never saw the sea; / Yet I know how the heather looks, / And what a wave must be…” and confidently rendered them as follows (italics my own):
Jamás he visto a un sarraceno y jamás el mar contemplé.
Pero sé cómo es el pagano y cómo la ola debe ser.
Clearly, our poet was misled by his misreading of “heathen” for heather (which he apparently took for a misprint), and by the logical relationship between this supposed “heathen” (‘pagano’) and the moor (‘sarraceno’); a misreading all the easier to appreciate if we remember that, to a Hispanic, the spelling moor, without a capital, might well be thought to indicate nationality.
The mistakes would be delightful if Dickinson weren’t the loser. But thanks to our translator’s treason—or treasons—the Belle of Amherst’s poem rings false for Hispanophones.
[Norman R. Shapiro, Wesleyan University]
EPISTOLA {Gary Muldoon}
In “A Grandfather Stories” [X, 4], one of the “Erie Canalese and other arcane expressions” is I have seen the elephant. It is defined as ‘once bitten, twice shy.’
In Forgotten News, by Jack Finney (Doubleday, 1983), the author recounts an 1857 inquest of a murder. To “see the elephant” he defines as “nineteenth century slang for seeing the world, widening one’s experience” (p. 74).
[Gary Muldoon, Rochester, New York]
EPISTOLA {Ottilia Koel}
Ann E. Bennaton’s article [X,4] reminded me of a fellow I used to know in London: he came from Hungary, of aristocratic background, and had learned English from a governess. He was a good bridge player and in no time was introduced to upper-class families and invited to card parties. On one occasion, when he was the winner, his hostess called him “You lucky dog.” Next time around her ladyship was the winner and my friend took leave of her by calling her “You lucky bitch.” He was never invited back.
[Ottilia Koel]
EPISTOLA {John Levitt}
No, your Editor’s Note to the review of Colemanballs on page 22 of the Spring 1984 issue is wrong, I’m delighted to say. Early in his career as a BBC sports commentator, and late at night, David Coleman got into a fearful tangle with studio gremlins, and was provoked into shouting at the engineers or producers, at the peak of the awfulness, “Well, you made a right balls of that, didn’t you?,” more in anger than in sorrow. But he was still on the air, and the world heard him. Well, I did—and there were others. Private Eye never forgets these things; “Colemanballs” has been the title of their column of commentators' accidents ever since.
[John Levitt, University of Keele]
CORRIGENDA
“Yiddish for Fun and Profit,” by Lillian Mermin Feinsilver [IX,2]: P. 1, ¶3, line 3: for Needelman” read “Needleman.”
P. 2, Col. 2, penultimate line: for “panty” read “pant”; for “Gotka” read “Gotke.”
P. 2, col. 2, ¶3, penultimate line: insert comma before closing quote.
P. 2, col. 2, ¶4 3rd line from end: for “to” read “and.”
P. 2, col. 2, ¶5, line 11: following “What’s the matter with” and before closing bracket, insert “—recorded in 1962”; line 12: following “What is there to… about” and before closing bracket, insert “—recorded in 1970”; line 13: for “1962” read “1938”; line 15: for “1970” read “1958.”
On the “excellency of the English language”:
Now its beauties are most conspicuous in the four particular articles here undermentioned; that is to say, it is free and easy; and, in short, more sweet and harmonious, and by consequence preferable to any living language whatsoever.
Its freedom and facility, in the first place is demonstrable, since it is in a great measure exempt from that multiplicity of cases and flexions, which clog or encumber almost all others, and render them for that reason extremely intricate, difficult and abstruse. Our adjectives being all invariable, make the concordance with their substantives remarkably plain and easy: the English pronouns, likewise are not half so confused and perplexed as either those of the Latin or the French. And scarce any thing can more easily be conquered than the conjugation of English verbs: Besides, our language is burdened with no such thing as verbs reciprocal, which render the French tongue in particular very dark and obscure; and very often discourage foreigners from the study of it.
To illustrate its copiousness, very little need be said, since it is too manifest and self evident to be denied; for besides the antient Dutch, which the English retain in the Saxon monosyllables; the literati, of England, like so many industrious bees, have collected the quintessence of divers foreign languages, and rejected their refuse or dross; by which artful management, and their assiduity, they have improved their mother-tongue to that prodigious degree, that all such foreigners as have an adequate idea of the genius of it, are perfectly charmed to observe, that neither their own, nor any other language whatsoever, can stand in competition with it; and at the same time, to find a great variety of their own terms so happily transplanted and blended with it that they seem to thrive better in England than in their own native soil.
And whereas the French is to[o] much limited and constrained, and through its over-niceness is grown in some measure barren, spiritless, and insipid; the English, on the other hand, is become prodigiously copious and luxuriant through its innate power of making such compounds and derivatives as are very comprehensive, emphatical, and proper to contract any expression into a narrow compass; it must be allowed that neither the Greek itself, nor the Latin, can compound or join many words together in a more agreeable manner, which is one of the most shining beauties that any language can possibly boast of. In a word, there is no sentiment or thought that can be expressed in a greater flow of words, or with more propriety and better grace, than in the English tongue.
As to its harmony and sweetness, it must be confessed that the Italian abounds with vowels, as the Dutch does with consonants, which renders the first too effeminate, and the last too rugged and uncouth; whereas the English has, through a happy intermixture, the advantage of them both. We cannot but allow that the Italian language is peculiarly delicate, soft, and pleasing to the ear; but then it glides along like a purling stream. The French, doubtless, is very nice and courtly, but then it has too much in it that savours of effeminacy and affectation. The Spanish, it is true, is very solemn and majestic; but it is too apt to be stormy and tempestuous, and carries a kind of terror along with it. The German is very manly indeed, but it is harsh and unpolite; whereas the English, by judiciously borrowing a little here and a little there, from each of them, gives strength of consonants to the Italian, the full and perfect sounds of syllables to the French, the variety of terminations with much gentler accents to the Spanish, and dissolves the Dutch consonants with greater facility and ease.
Now what can possibly be wanting to the perfection of that language, where substance and solidity combine with pleasure; where copiousness unites with delicacy, beauty with majesty, and expedition with gravity and sedateness! And such doubtless is the composition of the English.
I shall now conclude … with the observations of two very judicious critics, who, though masters of divers languages, hold our English tongue in the highest veneration.
“As the English language (says the first) is at this present juncture arrived at so great pitch of perfection, is so very copious and expressive, by the accession of the life and spirit of divers other tongues with which it is blended, it were greatly to be wished, that a stop might be put to that boundless practice of naturalizing foreign words, of which the English seem too extravagantly fond; and that for the future all neological and factitious terms should be laid aside, except some few that might possibly be introduced with judgment and precaution. Was the English nation (says the last) but contented with making improvements on that grain which they have already, without over-stocking themselves by importation from foreign ports, and putting their language in a perpetual ferment, it would contribute greatly to its future credit and reputation.”
A Complete and Universal Dictionary of the English language, Comprehending The Explanation, Pronunciation, Origin & Synonymies of each Word… by the Revd. James Barclay. A New Edition enlarged, improved & adapted to the present state of Science. Brightly & Childs, Bungay, 1812.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
Explaining why a larger area is needed for a new building, “The Salvation Army’s downtown location has simply outgrown its needs.” [From the 6 p.m. newscast by Andy Saenz, KVUE-TV, Austin, June 26, 1984. Submitted by Helen H. Rugeley, Austin, Texas.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“The Number One benefactor of the education reform project would be the student.” [From comments made by Gib Lewis, Speaker of the House (Texas), KVUE-TV, Austin, several times. Submitted by Helen H. Rugeley, Austin, Texas.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“When I enter gifted classrooms, I often see posters that admonish children to be polite, kind, or generous. As any preacher or rabbit can tell you, moral messages are better conveyed by subtle stories…” [From Story Art, January, February, March, 1984, page 6. Submitted by Sylvia Khan, North Hollywood, California.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Wooden toys for children that last.” [From the headline of a Do It Yourself column in The Miami Herald, May 13, 1984, p. 2H. Submitted by Mrs. Murray M. Kassel, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.].
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Guide to Chaucer’s Language
David Burnley, (University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), xvi + 264 pp.
Since (J.) David Burnley intends his Guide for serious (i.e., academic) Chaucerians, much of it may not interest many readers of VERBATIM; more surprising, perhaps, is the fact that so much of it will.
The worst is first. In chapters one to four, Burnley reviews “The Language of the Text”—that is, “Chaucer’s Grammar, “Time and Tense,” “Negation,” and “Textual Coherence.” The etymological connection of grammar and glamor has deservedly become everyone’s favorite example of just how misleading etymology can be. Inevitably, there are times when the very matter of these chapters (not Burnley’s presentation) would numb a pulsar. But Burnley’s discussion is always correct, clear, complete and—best of all—concise. Furthermore, the reader may, as Chaucer himself allowed, “Turne over the leef.” Even in these chapters, however, one discovers some fascinating peculiarities of Chaucer’s language. For example, particularly fascinating is Burnley’s consideration of multiple negation as a device for achieving intensification natural to oral rather than written communication (pp. 65-68).
There are two quite distinct ways to appreciate Burnley’s final five chapters on the “Variation, Context, and Style” of Chaucer’s language. One may read them in order (as any Chaucerian should do) and study in order the implications of fourteenth-century “Linguistic Diversity,” of “Chaucer’s Vocabulary,” its “Register and Propriety” and “Levels of Style,” and the connotative systems of word-associations that the author refers to as “The Architecture of Chaucer’s Language.” Or one may simply refer to the insights of these chapters conveniently by means of the “Index of Words” (pp. 257-61).
I count some 428 items listed in this index, and I find it most illuminating (albeit, at times, humiliating) to look up words that seem familiar. For example, Burnley explains that the reference to Palamon’s prisoun in “The Knight’s Tale” does not modify his jail (nor even his gaol); rather, it is a French legalism for ‘detention aggravated by reduced rations and deprivation of other comforts’ (p. 160). One may also use the index to discover that such terms as lemman, gent, suete brid, fetys, and other such specifically courtly terminology (which English poetry had inherited from the French romances) already seemed to Chaucer and his audience often démodé, déclassé—no longer so groové, en effet. Burnley demonstrates particularly well that Chaucer frequently used (or abused) such termes, or technical vocabularies, as favorite comic devices. Ignorance can kill the comedy, though, when a reader fails to recognize a term as such; more significantly, the significance of a Middle English word can be too simplistically thought synonymous with its modern derivative, and this lexical sloth can result in major misinterpretations of Chaucer’s meaning. What is thought known and is not remains more dangerous than what is known to be not known.
Of course, if one is still an adolescent who likes to hide in closets, one may also use Burnley’s index to look up such favorites as bele chose, coillons, quoniam, and swyven. There exist, however, much fuller discussions of Chaucer’s bawdy than the Guide. So, too, there exist many, more thorough analyses of the foreign influences on Chaucer’s vocabulary. (Burnley’s fine footnoting will lead the interested reader to these more technical studies.) And, even though one may discover well over four hundred elaborate definitions (including that of diffinicioun) in this Guide, it makes no pretense to itself serving as a glossary of Chaucer’s total vocabulary. On the contrary, the author explains how arbitrary and pointless it can be to count all the words recorded in a poet’s whole canon. He then suggests a most interesting and (to this reader) convincing principle—that would-be exhaustive glossaries often generate a false sense of precision about Chaucer’s specific meaning(s): “Paradoxically, the simple vocabulary, by its very inadequacy for providing an instant translation has its own value …”; it forces the reader “to ponder the context of occurrence” (pp. 201-2). The thumb is still no substitute for the brain.
In sum, I recommend David Burnley’s A Guide to Chaucer’s Language to all who enjoy reading (and understanding) Chaucer’s poetry in the original—and, since all should, to all.
William A. Quinn
SIC! SIC! SIC!
One Hand Clapping Dept. “When a hundred tapping feet thunder like one—you’re at 42nd Street.” [From a television commercial for the musical.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“…the D.C. Story clocks are of such striking quality they’re hard to forget …” [From Cahill & Company Reader’s Catalogue, Spring 1984, p. 18.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“She is currently with a law office in Oakland, California, which represents plaintiffs in asbestos lawsuits.” [From “About the Author, Media Law, by Katherine M. Galvin, Nolo Press, 1984.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“SPEED LIMIT/15/WHEN FLASHING” [From a sign outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, schools. Submitted by Reginald Dunstan, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“House Approves Missiles With Strings Attached.” [From The New York Times, Sunday, June 3, 1984. Submitted by Raymond Fuoss, Hamden, Connecticut.]
OBITER DICTA
—Playback, Raymond Chandler, Ballantine, 1958, p. 96.
“…He ain’t in his room. The hotel people ain’t seen him around. I thought maybe you and the girl had some idea about it.”
“The girl is screwy,” I said. “Leave her out of it. And in Esmeralda they don’t say ‘ain’t seen.’ That Kansas City dialect is an offense against public morals here.”
“Shove it, Mac. When I want to get told how to talk English I won’t go to no beat-up California peeper.”
The Meaning of Scientific Names
Sam Hinton, La Jolla, California
There was no public library in Crockett, Texas, when I was a boy, and no biology program in the high school, so technical information about my beloved reptiles was hard to come by. Nevertheless, there were a few sources. One of these was the 1917 edition of Hegner’s College Zoology, lent me by Mr. Robin Burns, who taught chemistry and accounting at Crockett High. This book depicted one of my favorite lizards, and labeled it “Six-Lined Race-Runner—Cnemidophorus sexlineatus.” Even to my untrained eye, it was obvious that sexlineatus meant ‘six-lined,’ and I assumed that the generic term must mean ‘race-runner.’ And I thought that if only one could translate the Latin names, the real identity of an animal would be at once evident.
But later I learned that it wasn’t that way at all. I was right about sexlineatus, but wrong about Cnemidophorus: it means ‘greave-bearing.’ And a greave turns out to be a kind of leg-armor worn by Roman soldiers. The word was probably used to describe some enlarged scales on the lizard’s legs, but many other species have much more greave-like structures, and the translation doesn’t help the least bit in identifying the animal.
The sad fact is that a scientific name doesn’t have to “mean” anything in translation. There are lots of rules set down in the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature: the generic name (the first of the two words that designate a particular species) should be written with an initial capital letter and should be used as a substantive in the nominative singular; Latin endings should be used in both genus and species, whether the root itself is derived from Latin, Greek, a geographical name, a personal name, or even a so-called “barbarous” (non-Classical) source; the two words should agree in gender, and so on. But there’s no rule saying that the words must, in themselves, make sense. It’s even all right if there is a WRONG meaning; in fact, Article 32 holds that a name cannot be invalidated just because it gives erroneous information. One example of this is the name of the western American redshafted flicker, which for more than a century bore the name Colaptes cafer, Cafer means ‘of Africa,’ but the bird is not “of Africa” at all. The error was made by Linnaeus, who probably got his specimen labels mixed up.
The name of this bird was recently changed, but not because it didn’t come from Africa; it was because research showed it to be only a color phase of Colaptes auratus, whose name had been applied first and so had priority. Such changes are necessary in order to maintain a sensible nomenclature, but they can often result in the new name’s being a nonsensical derivation of the old one, most frequently as an anagram. For example, the spiny lobsters (langoustes) were formerly all grouped in the genus Palinurus; this is usually said to have come from the name of Aeneas’s navigator, but it could equally well be descriptive, referring to the undercurved tails of the creatures. However it was derived, later taxonomists found that one genus was not enough to accommodate this varied group, and a new genus had to be set up. This was simply an anagram of the first genus—Panulirus. When working with both genera, it isn’t easy to remember which is which!
The same thing happened with another crustacean genus, Epialtus. That doesn’t seem to mean very much in translation, but at least it consists of two familiar roots. Such is not the case with the new genus, Taliepus.
Anagrams may also be used in the original names proposed for a group. The biologist Leach was apparently fond of his wife, Carolina, and used the letters of her name in several genera—Cirolana, Nolicera, Conilera, Cilenora, and Nerocila.
It is quite within the rules to use a name that is simply an arbitrary collection of letters; as long as they look like Latinized Greek, they are quite acceptable. Such names include Oxynoe, Clancula, Milbora, Mycelis, Salifa, Tolpis, and Torix.
A very common type of name is the patronym, named in honor of some person. Leaders in taxonomy are very frequently honored in this manner. The name of the late Carl Hubbs, for example, is encountered over and over among fishes; there is a genus Hubbsia and any number of species called hubbsi. (The rules forbid the use of the same name for more than one genus, but this does not apply to the specific name.) The level of honor is sometimes debatable; I have only one species for me— a large louse that infests red-tailed hawks in East Texas.
Dr. Chester Stock, my paleontology professor at UCLA (he visited there for one semester), used to complain that some patronyms just didn’t sound right. I remember his words: “Not only do these names not mean anything; sometimes they sound like hell! I found some bones of a Pleistocene antelope that looked to me like the present Indian animal with a great name: Tetraceros. But a so-called friend of mine had to put it in a new genus he called Stockoceros. Now I ask you: Stockoceros?” This good friend was probably the same one who honored other friends in the same way, so that we have the fossil genera Hayoceros, Osbornoceros, and Merriamoceros.
It is possible to make pejorative use of a supposedly honorific taxon. One graduate student in parasitology came to dislike his major professor, whose name, let us say, was Smith. So, when he had safely left Smith’s institution, the student named a particularly loathsome spiny-headed parasitic worm for Prof. Smith; he did not, however, use the common form smithii, but made it smithicola instead—and this means dweller in Smith!'
There is a romantic story that tells of a young conchologist who set up a species name as annae, in honor of Ann, his fiancee. Later work showed that the species should be divided into several subspecies; meanwhile, Ann had jilted him, so he named his first subspecies … annae inconstans.
Occasionally, names have been so silly that the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature has chosen to invalidate them. One whimsical British entomologist had set up such genera as Polichisme (pronounced, of course, “Polly kiss me”), Florachisme, Nanichisme, Pegichisme, and Ochisme. For a time, it was considered a joke to give a large name to a small animal, and this resulted in several amphipod genera such as Cancell-oido-kyto-dermo-gammarus, but these were not allowed to stand. A joking name for a wasp was accepted as not TOO silly; this was Zyzzyx, made up for the purpose of being last on anybody’s list of Hymenoptera.
Vernacular names, of course, do not have to follow any sorts of rules, although the American Ornithologists Union and the Audubon Society make very strong recommendations about this in regard to the common names of birds. A tremendous number of animals simply have no accepted vernacular names, so they must be invented when showing these animals to the public. I often had to do this when I was Director of the Aquarium-Museum at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and often fell back upon the common practice of translating the scientific name. Thus a freshwater fish named Dormitator maculatus can be presented as The Spotted Sleeper. But some names are simply not appropriate to this manipulation. I never wanted to Anglify a little joke that Linnaeus himself perpetrated in naming a large but flaccid sea anemone Metridium senile. But I did learn that one should not be too quick to guess at a meaning. One of our west coast slipper shells, which is always found fastened to the top of a larger snail, is called Crepidula fornicata. As in my youth, I guessed what the specific name might mean and hesitated to translate it onto a label for the public. Fortunately, this time I had ample resources, and a quick check showed that the root fornix means ‘arched’ and that the word I didn’t want to use came about because the prostitutes of Rome used to frequent the lower levels of buildings, where the arched vaulting was visible. So Arched Limpet became a thoroughly respectable common name.
More Nervous Onomasticae
D.S. Bland, Ph.D., Southbourne, Dorset
It seems to me that Laurence Urdang was rather restrained in his listing of the meanings associated with our given names [VIII, 3]. I make no apology for the fact that my additions contain some rather more outspoken examples.
Albert, Prince Albert, watch chain with cross-bar.
Benjamin, favorite (and youngest) child.
Bob, 1. (Br.) pre-decimal shilling. 2. Bob’s your uncle! British expression indicating successful completion of a task. 3. (a) dry-bob, Eton schoolboy who plays cricket. (b) wet-bob, ditto, who rows.
Bobby, British policeman, from Sir Robert Peel who reformed the police system in 1829.
Catherine, Catherine Wheel, whirling firework, from St. Catherine.
Charles, Charles’s Wain, the constellation Ursa Major.
Charlie, 1. (Br.) a proper (or right) Charlie, a downright fool.
2. North-Vietnamese soldier.
Dick, penis.
Fanny, 1. buttocks. 2. (Br.) female pudenda. 3. Also found in British phrase sweet Fanny Adams which has an interesting history. In 1867 a Fanny Adams was murdered and her dismembered body thrown into a river. This seems to have prompted sailors in the Royal Navy to apply her name to their issue of tinned mutton ! Then the phrase took on the meaning of ‘nothing at all,’ and is often contracted to sweet F.A. But this extension is an example of “switch language” (e.g., Judas Priest for Jesus Christ) as it is a concealed way of saying “sweet fuck-all.” 4. (Br.) my Aunt Fanny, an expression of disbelief.
Geordie, George, (Br.) generic name for inhabitants of North-East England, particularly centered on Newcastle upon Tyne.
Guy, Guy Fawkes, 1. oddly dressed person, from the stuffed effigy burnt on Bonfire Night (5 November). 2. to imitate someone with intention to ridicule.
Herbert, (Br.) right Herbert, a stupid fellow.
Jack, 1. (Br.) jack it in, resign. 2. every man Jack, everybody. 3. Jack tar, British sailor. 4. Jackass. 5. jack boot. 6. Jack Frost. 7. (Br.) jack-in-office. 8. jack-knife.
9. jack-of-all-trades. 10. jack-pot. 11. jack-rabbit. 12. before you can say Jack Robinson. 13. jackanapes. 14. jack, ship’s flag, smaller than ensign…. And many more.
Jane, 1. Lady Jane, female pudenda. 2. Janeite, admirer of Jane Austen’s novels.
Jessie, (Br., derogatory) effeminate male.
Jim, Jim Crow.
Jimmy, 1. (Br.) jimmy riddle, rhyming slang for piddle. 2. variant of Jemmy, a device for forcing one’s way into something.
Jock, generic name for Scotsmen.
John, 1. John Hancock, one’s personal signature. 2. John Barleycorn, personification of whiskey. 3. John Chinaman. 4. John Citizen. 5. John Collins. 6. John Doe. 7. John Q. Public.
Johnny, Johnny-come-lately also means an arriviste or self-seeking person.
Lizzie, tin lizzie, model-T Ford.
Magdalen, also means a reformed prostitute.
Maria, Black Maria, paddy wagon.
Molly, effeminate man. 2. mollycoddle, to pamper.
Nora, (Br.) bloody Nora! expression of surprise.
Oliver, (Br.) snotty Oliver, unkempt person.
Peter, 1. blue Peter, ship’s flag hoisted before sailing. 2. Peter Pan, person who refuses to age. 3. (slang) a penis.
Pete, for Pete’s sake!
Randolph, dim. Randy. The association with randy ‘lustful’ is almost inevitable. (But see the final paragraph below.)
Richard, Richard Roe, John Doe’s cousin.
Roger, 1. to copulate with. 2. Jolly Roger (a) pirate’s flag, (b) penis. 3. Roger the lodger, hero of British limerick, as well known as lucky Pierre.
Sally, 1. (Br.) Aunt Sally, game with wooden peg at which balls or sticks are thrown, or carved figure in fairground as target for prizes, and so, figuratively, an object of attack. (To put up an Aunt Sally is much the same as flying a kite.) 2. (Br.) Sally Lunn, sweet tea-cake.
Sheila, Australian and New Zealand equivalent of Judy, any girl.
Simon, Simon Pure, the genuine article.
Taffy, David, generic name for a Welshman.
Teddy, 1. teddy bear. 2. (Br.) teddy boy, youth affecting Edwardian style of dress.
Thomas, doubting Thomas, skeptical person, from the apostle.
Tom, 1. peeping Tom. 2. (Br.) tom-tit, rhyming slang for shit. 3. tomboy. 4. Tom Collins. 5. Tom Thumb (also Br. rhyming slang for rum). 6. Tom Tiddler’s ground, (a) children’s game. (b) opportunity to make money without effort…. And many more.
Tony, annual theatrical award, from Antoinette Perry, U.S. actress.
Willie, (Br.) penis, used by parents to young boys.
I would maintain that there is absolutely no connotative connection between Bill (William) and bill (invoice), any more than there is between Pat (Patrick), pat (soft blow with the hand) and pat (right on cue). They are quite different words which happen to be spelled alike. It was for this reason that I deleted jerry ‘chamber pot’ from jeroboam, ‘large wine goblet,’ from the draft of this article, and hesitated over Randolph. I am not reminded of a chamber pot when I address Gerald by the diminutive of his name. But I decided to leave Randy in because the connotation must be there unless one is blessed with a mind as pure as untrodden snow.
A Quiz About Sexist Language
Richard Lederer, St. Paul’s School
Language is like a window through which we look at the world. Recently, many people have begun to wonder if our window on the world has a glass that distorts our view. If language reflects culture and in turn influences culture, could it be that the window through which we see “reality” is filled with ripples, cracks, smudges, blind spots, and filters so that we cannot see things with a clear and unbiased eye? In short, is language prejudiced?
To the estimated five percent of the population that is left-handed, many devices—from doorknobs to school desks, from musical instruments to athletic gear—seem to be designed for right-handed people. In “The Sinister Side of Language” [IV, 4], J. Frank Schulman inquired whether language itself is also designed for the right-handed majority. Schulman began with the question “Why does left get such a bad deal from language?” and showed how leftist words like left, sinister, gauche, linkisch, and izquierda evoke unfavorable connotations, while words like right, dexterous, adroit, and derecho enjoy admirable reputations.
In “Colorful Language” [VII, 1] Sterling Eisiminger found that “white generally connotes fairness (that’s white of you), harmlessness (white magic), professionalism (white collar), surrender or peace (white flag), and the white race (white slavery)… Black, on the other hand, in most languages has generally negative connotations.” Eisiminger demonstrated that, despite a few exceptions like black belt and in the black, pejorative words and phrases like blacklist, blackmail, black market, and black-hearted “are overwhelmingly in the majority and may be a factor in the widespread prejudice against the Negro [twelve per cent of the American population].” After all, what can you expect from a language in which the white pastry is called angel food cake and the dark one devil’s food cake?
Women comprise the majority of almost every country in the world, yet the English language stigmatizes women as an inferior group of human beings, undermines their self-images, and restricts their perceptions of life’s possibilities. To underscore and amplify this contention, I offer a quiz about sexism and the English language. Please answer the following questions as precisely and honestly as you can and compare your responses with the comments that come afterwards.
1. In each pair, which term carries more respect? bachelor-spinster, master-mistress, sir-madam, poet-poetess, major-majorette, governor-governess.
2. If a king rules a kingdom, what does a queen rule? If a man mans a station, what does a woman do? If a man fathers a movement, what does a woman do?
3. What do you picture when you hear or read the following expressions?:
Neanderthal Man, Industrial Man, Language separates mankind from the other creatures, Everyone should guard his valuables.
4. In each pair, which name forms the basis for the other? Victor-Victoria, Paul-Paulette, Joseph-Josephine, Henry-Henrietta.
5. Which of the following people are married, and which are single?
Mr. John Smith, Mrs. John Smith, Miss Mary Jones, Ms. Gloria Steinem.
6. Identify five eponyms, uncapitalized English words, that have their origin in people’s names.
7. What qualities do you think of when you hear or read the words manly and womanly? Compare your answers with the complete definitions that you find in your unabridged dictionary.
1. In question one, above, clearly the first word in each twosome carries more prestige than the second. Let’s start with spinster, a word that began its life meaning simply “a person (usually a woman) who spins.” Today spinster suggests a rejected, dried-up “old maid,” so much so that some single women are driven to adopt the ludicrous term bachelor girl to describe their status.
What about master and mistress, both formed from the same root? We can see the power and respect accorded master in such expressions as master craftsman, MasterCard, and master of my fate. Mistress, on the other hand, has taken on so much illicit sexual meaning that we often avoid using the word altogether.
And the situation is much the same with sir and madam: sir is unfailingly a term of respect, while madam has acquired the whiff of the brothel manager. As feminist Gloria Steinem has pointed out, how would a man feel if he were graduated with a “spinster of arts degree”—or a “mistress of arts degree,” for that matter?
The other masculine forms in the first question also carry an added degree of power and excellence. Poetess suggests a diminutive, quaint, drawing-room version of a poet. A majorette is a mere twirler of batons (certainly not a major activity), and a governess governs only the romper room. In her successful bid for the Connecticut governorship, the late Ella Grasso had to contend with the opposition’s slogan “Connecticut Doesn’t Need a Governess.”
2. Queens, of course, do not rule “queendoms,” and nobody “womans” a station or “mothers” a movement. These gaps in our language are significant. Apparently we feel that nouns like queendom and verbs like woman and mother are too weak and too connotatively distracting. But language can change. To father may mean little more than to provide the sperm necessary for birth, and to mother may mean much more. A new verb in our language, to parent, may be just the androgynous word we need to unite the two sexes in mutual activity.
3. Do words like man, mankind, and he embrace women? This question has been tested by sociologists who asked 300 college students to select illustrations from pictures they supplied for chapters in a textbook. One set of respondents was given the titles “Social Man,” “Industrial Man,” and “Political Man” and the other set the titles “Society,” “Industrial Life,” and “Politics.” Results indicated that the word man evoked pictures of males participating in that activity far more than women or children. Another survey revealed that children from kindergarten to seventh grade interpreted the sentences “Man must work in order to eat” and “Around the world man is happy” to mean male people, not female.
Regarding the singular pronoun he, it should be pointed out that two centuries ago the so-called plural pronoun was perfectly acceptable in sentences like “Everyone should guard their valuables” and that many languages today avoid sexual discrimination in their pronouns, as in the Turkish o, which can mean either he or she.
4. Though there are many exceptions, female names in our society are often derivatives of male names, as in the examples above. In contrast, males are assigned strong, independent first names and retain their fathers' last names their whole life long. When first names like Marion and Shirley come to be shared by both sexes, their use for males is generally discontinued.
5. Social custom announces the potential sexual availability of a woman in her name. Mr. John Smith may be married or single, but Mrs. John Smith is definitely married. In addition, she has acquired her husband’s last name, passively and proprietarily defined in relationship to his identity. Miss Mary Jones is, of course, unattached—and fair game. This is the unequal state of affairs that women are protesting when they ask to be identified as Ms., rather than Miss or Mrs., or simply as Mary Jones.
6. The chances are that your list is composed entirely of words descended from the names of men, such as sandwich, silhouette, lynch, poinsettia, pasteurize, and guillotine. Except for a handful of mythological eponyms like aphrodisiac, venereal, and cereal, the only common uncapitalized English words that issue from the names of women are tawdry, a clipping of (Sain)t Audrey, the patron of Ely, and bloomers, a pluralized designation for the once fashionable puffy ladies drawers that Mrs. Amelia Jenks Bloomer helped to publicize (and here, of course, the last name is the husband’s).
7. The definitions of what it means to be manly or womanly make it impossible for a woman to want fully to be a woman. One entry in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary tells us that manly means “having the qualities of a man, not effeminate or timorous: bold, resolute, open in conduct and bearing; of undaunted courage, gallant, brave.” Why, we may ask, are these qualities not also appropriate to a woman?
Womanly, in the same lexicon, means “characteristic of, belonging to, or suitable to women: conforming to or motivating a woman’s nature and attitudes rather than a man’s.” Examples given are “Convinced that drawing was a waste of time, if not downright womanly …” and “the usual womanly volubility.”
The whole concept of manliness evokes such positive suggestions that it is a special compliment to call a man a he-man or a virile man. Both virtue and virile descend from the Indo-European vir ‘man,’ and, in each of these terms we are implying that the person is doubly virtuous because he is doubly a man.
We limit and diminish males and females alike when we use sexist language, for we thereby abandon that which makes us human: the capacity to distinguish, discriminate, compare, and evaluate. In doing that, we lose our control of language and let ourselves become its prisoner.
The history of any living language is the history of constant change. I believe that our language can change so that men, women, and children can be free to imagine and explore the full range of their human potential. I believe that our language can become more humane by becoming more truly human and that such an evolution will make people feel better about themselves and the world in which they live and move and have their being.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
Truth in Advertising: Thomas Baking Company advertises its croissants on TV as being “as French as our English muffins are English.” As all Englishmen (and many visitors to England) know, there is no such thing in England as an “English muffin,” the closest thing being a crumpet, to which the muffin bears only a remote resemblance. Sampling Thomas’s croissants confirms the accuracy of the slogan.
Antipodean Newsletter: Can I have a baby?
G.W. Turner
It has been said (by me, actually, among others) that the smallest possible dialect is the language of one person, the idiolect. But this is not really true because an idiolect is many languages, formal and informal, technical and nontechnical, spoken and written, according to situation and audience. The real ultimate atom of language must be one of these, the smallest social unit, the language shared with one familiar person in one familiar situation. The language that grows up in a family is a prime example.
If you could eavesdrop on the language used by my wife and me after thirty-five years together, you might hear me say “I’ll see what the stove says,” or “Can I have a baby?,” or “Shall I put milk down or shall we use Buster’s?,” or “I’ll put it in Baby.” Of course there are more private topics than these but explaining these random samples will be enough for one newsletter.
The only reliable clock in our household is the electric clock on the electric stove, so that “I’ll see what the stove says” is a rational answer to a request for the exact time. “Can I have a baby?” needs a more complex background beginning with our attempt to grow a bottle-brush tree (an Australian tree with crimson flowers resembling bottlebrushes). To help it along, I gave it a mulch of compost from the heap where we throw vegetable waste. There must have been tomato seeds in it because our bottle-brush was surrounded and more or less suffocated by tomato plants. Some of the tomatoes were little marbles that were very tasty. We called them baby tomatoes or just babies. If I wanted one of these for my cold-tomato-on-hot-toast at breakfast time, how else would I ask if not “Can I have a baby?”
“To put the milk down” is merely to put out a milk-bottle as a signal to the milkman that we want milk. Buster is a cat who scorns our fat-reduced milk and requires full-cream milk of his own, which is specially bought. The milk is kept in the smaller of two refrigerators, called Baby to distinguish it from Leonard who has his name on the door.
Every family will have its collection of family words. At some points these private languages merge with public language. Domestic words like the name for a cloth used to dry dishes (tea-towel? tea-cloth?) or the soft edge of a loaf that has been broken in two tend to vary from family to family. My wife and I might refer to kookaburras or magpies as kookies or maggies. The second is in fairly general use, the first (I think) not.
Children are a prime source of “family language.” “I didn’t have a nice day” is one of our contributions. Our (then) small son anticipated the usual question after an outing with the somewhat rarer negative version. Some children had teased him by convincing him that there was a “hittapotamus” in the next paddock. Or we refer to a neighbor’s place as C’meely bank, perpetuating a youthful reader’s version of the name on the gate: Comely Bank.
The purpose of private languages, if something that grows up so naturally can be analyzed in terms of purpose, is to define or give substance to a habit of intimacy, of family unity, of belonging to something that has become established. In this it resembles regional varieties of language. In calling a magpie a maggie I may be sharing a word with my wife or asserting that I am Australian. (Neither need be particularly self-conscious.)
These private languages are no less real than public language but they will never be recorded. Perhaps some philological Kinsey will get into the intimate reaches of conjugal language someday but in the meantime everyone can supply from experience some linguistic facts not generally known.
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Writer’s Art
James J. Kilpatrick, (Andrews, McMeel & Parker, Inc., 1984), 254pp.
Millions know Jack Kilpatrick, some as the author of a regular column in the Washington Post, some as the serious, concerned panelist on Martin Agronsky’s television program, and some as the erstwhile sparring partner of Shana Alexander on 60 Minutes. Always the gentleman, Kilpatrick is characterized best by his incisiveness, his calm demeanor, his wit, his friendly Irish mug, and his conservativism. The last of these is one of the elemental properties reflected in his view of language; the other property is the simple fact that he is an artistic practitioner of writing—and, as one who has heard him speak, I must add of speaking, as well.
I am quoted in the Introduction, describing myself as a descriptive linguist, along with a description of the meaning of descriptive. Although all of that is true, it may be somewhat misleading in the context of this book—especially in that of its title—for I strive for purism in any attempts I might make at introducing art into my uses on language. In other words, when it comes to creating language rather than commenting on it, I am probably at least as puritanical as Kilpatrick considers himself to be.
[It might be useful, here, to add a note regarding the attitudes of some linguists I know. When asked why, if they condone all sorts of solecisms in the language of others, they tend to avoid them so carefully in their own usage, they reply that that is simply the way they talk. Do you believe them?]
Without going into the details too deeply, The Writer’s Art offers a number of useful, easy-to-understand guidelines on how to clean up your writing act. When trying to teach or learn rules, one can scarcely be wishy-washy about it, and it ill behooves the perspiring teacher or the aspiring writer to be “descriptive”—descriptive of what? Only of what he is writing about, not of the techniques he should acquire and use. Supported and illustrated by an excellent selection of citations from writings of all kinds, Kilpatrick warns against nonsense, among other things. Many examples, some quite hilarious, are cited in Chapter 4, “The Things We Ought Not to Do,” which begins on page 57. This is fairly typical of the advice given in the book, but I am unsure whether the author omitted the main premise out of respect or kindness toward the reader: I am reasonably certain that the omission cannot be attributed to squeamishness or shyness, as Kilpatrick is not known to suffer from either. What is this Main Premise? Very simply, it is that if you want to clean up your writing act you should start by cleaning up your thinking act. The fact, the ineluctable fact, is that most people who are incapable of setting down their thoughts on paper are likewise incapable of uttering them in speech and, ultimately, are incapable of thinking clearly.
Not all, of course. I have met some people who are very articulate speakers but poor writers. If they could be taught the technique of writing down what they might normally say, they would make passable and, in some (rare) cases, good writers.
One cannot blame Kilpatrick for exercising restraint in insulting his readers. Since it is unlikely that anyone reads VERBATIM in order to improve (much less acquire) writing skills, I have no such compunction. Our readers have enough sense to shut up when they have nothing to say or write, (though the same might not be said about “our” editor); aspiring untalented writers seldom have the sense or the sensitivity to stop and turn to basketweaving or some other occupation that may exploit their other talents. The reason for this is probably that editors to whom such hacks submit their writing are too kind, replying with a rejection slip that carries the message “Your article does not fit into our publishing schedule,” or in some other way failing to discourage the writer from setting pen to paper ever again. Unfortunately, literacy has too long been confused with literary ability in the minds of those learning to read and write. To be sure, everyone ought to be taught to read and write as well as possible, but the conquest of a rudimentary technique should not be confused with the ability to create art. Someone who has learned to paint a wall with a roller does not presume to being a portraitist; why should someone who has learned how to put words on paper presume to being a writer?
Kilpatrick makes no promises: “The country fiddler brings skill to his instrument, and often a remarkable level of skill; Menuhin on a Stradivarius is something else. My hope in this book is not to make greater Menuhins, but to make better fiddlers.” [page 11] I should have preferred the omission of “greater,” but no matter. The important analogy is of a writer to a country fiddler, who brings an often remarkable level of skill to his instrument. People who think they can learn writing skills by reading this (or any other) book are simply wrong: those with some skills can learn to sharpen them. The way to learn how to write is to read and write constantly, not by reading a book about writing, just as the way to “a more powerful vocabulary” is by reading assiduously and remembering well, not by reading a book (or taking a course) in vocabulary building.
The most important thing I can say about The Writer’s Art is that it is written well. It is lively, fast-moving, interesting, original, amusing, entertaining, and, like its author, incisive. There is no doubt that, put in the right hands, it can do a great deal of good, even for those who “fiddle” with the language.
Laurence Urdang
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Training Programs in Child Abuse and Neglect.” [Caption on a brochure from the Children’s Institute International. Submitted by Jean P. MacAllister, Beverly Hills, California.]
EPISTOLA {Reinhold Aman, Ph.D.}
Philip Howard’s fawning “review” of Enright’s A Mania for Sentences [X,3] is a disgrace. Worse, it’s unethical.
Seasoned readers of book reviews first look at the author’s and reviewer’s names to see whether they are known enemies or friends, then judge the fairness of the review by this key factor. When I saw Howard reviewing his buddy’s book, I knew that his “review” would be gushy. If you read Howard’s uncritical, shameless plug for his pal, you noticed that it contained not a single negative comment. Who published Enright’s book? His employer. Was this a mercy job? Instead of sending him off to the pastures with a gold watch?
Now comes Howard’s coup: out of the 211 pages of allegedly brilliant reviews, he singles out Enright’s hatchet job on that bloody awful Maledicta, to demonstrate Enright’s wit. Of course, Enright is as witty as a penile wart. If Howard wanted to show his loyalty to pal Enright by taking a swipe at Maledicta, why didn’t he act like a man and use the copy I airmailed to him? Instead, coward Howard, the author of Weasel Words, shows his character by weaseling out and quoting Enright’s drivel: “Maledicta calls itself ‘The International Journal of Verbal Aggression’ … It sees itself as a band of frank, gallant and daring intellects …” Good show, professor & poet Enright! Your antecedent is a bit off: it refers to the journal and can’t also refer to a group of people, poetic license notwithstanding.
Aside from this gross lapsus grammaticus, the poet is all wrong: none of “our band” has ever called himself or herself an “intellect,” as Howard and chums are wont to do for each other. The rest of his quotation is too silly to waste ink on. But if this is Enright “in typical form,” you might well think twice before shelling out £12.50 or about $20.00 for 211 pages of stale huffing & puffing by a passé poet.
As my friends in business assure me, “The only bad publicity is no publicity.” So, the $5.82 postage I wasted on airmailing a copy of Maledicta to Philip Howard wasn’t a total loss.
[Reinhold Aman, Ph.D., Maledicta]
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.
Paring Pairs No. 14
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 clues, 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). Those waiting to swim?
(b). été.
(c). Basic weapon.
(d). Caused Trojan War and no end of trouble.
(e). Interdigitator.
(f). Grand, central illness.
(g). He is not an oinophile. Pourquoi Pas?
(h). Valet dresses lucky Frenchman.
(i). Fortuneteller at The Times.
(j). Finis.
(k). Mission of the UN.
(l). Seat monitor filled with ennui.
(m). Tattooed message.
(n). Concubine’s part.
(o). Navajo bottle.
(p). Excessively lubricous French city.
(q). Book peddler.
(r). Silly fool approaching Macbeth’s castle.
(s). What Robin Hood did.
(t). Annoying Peeping Tom.
(u). Heavy soup.
(v). Sanguine South Pacific betel-chewer?
(w). Exupéry novel about heroic departure?
(x). Leg.
(y). Noise at Wimbledon.
(z). Bill sings well.
(1). Bean.
(2). Bed.
(3). Bloody.
(4). Body.
(5). Book.
(6). Bored.
(7). Chairman.
(8). Coal.
(9). Cue.
(10). Disease.
(11). Dunce.
(12). End.
(13). English.
(14). File.
(15). Flight.
(16). French.
(17). Gone.
(18). Gun.
(19). Hand.
(20). Helen.
(21). In.
(22). Inane.
(23). Indian.
(24). Knight.
(25). Loaf.
(26). Loose.
(27). Made.
(28). Marian.
(29). Mary.
(30). No.
(31). One.
(32). Pain.
(33). Paper.
(34). Piece.
(35). Pierre.
(36). Pool.
(37). Porter.
(38). Prophet.
(39). Racket.
(40). Robes.
(41). Roll.
(42). Staple.
(43). Stocking.
(44). Stuffer.
(45). Tennis.
(46). Terminal.
(47). Ton.
(48). Too.
(49). Voice.
(50). Weaver.
(51). Why.
(52). Window.
(53). Work.
Answers to Paring Pairs No. 13
The correct answer is (21) Jovial. The solutions are given below. The winner of No. 13 was Jinny Jones, Bethesda, Maryland.
(a). Lashings of dried plums. (30, 52) Prune Whip.
(b). Many new watches have it. (37, 18) Second Hand.
(c). Bronx cheer for demimonde. (32, 46) Raspberry Tart.
(d). Supine and dead. (1, 50) Belly Up.
(e). Pan bad actor. (34, 17) Roast Ham.
(f). Only one of many in Hell. (16, 37) Grilled Soul.
(g). Diesel fuel from Cockney ooker. (19, 11) Hors d’Oeuvre.
(h). Irritating Beauty. (7, 10) Chafing Dish.
(i). Disarmament on the up-and-up. (22, 35) Kosher Salt.
(j). Soviet complaint. (33, 51) Red Whine.
(k). Dyspeptic German. (40, 23) Sour Kraut.
(l). Belgian child. (6, 42) Brussel Sprout.
(m). Drunken coward. (15, 8) Fried Chicken.
(n). Causes stir among golfers? (47, 41) Tee Spoon.
(o). Sane spouse. (43, 25) Stable Mate.
(p). Slender supplication for nutty confection. (29, 24) Pray Lean.
(q). Turnabout’s Poe story. (3, 2) Biter Bit.
(r). A votre santé! (14, 48) French Toast.
(s). Oviparous adder. (13, 9) Egg Crate.
(t). Reared to be disdainfully ironic to Life staff. (53, 4) Wry Bred.
(u). Purple rear or just dessert? (27, 12) Plum Duff.
(v). Found tobacco substitute. (38, 35) Smoked Salmon.
(w). Unusually tasty investment. (31, 44) Rare Stake.
(x). Situation of some delicacy. (20, 28) Hot Potato.
(y). Chocolate tram. (45, 49) Sweet Trolley.
(z). Capital English heatwave. (25, 5) London Broil.
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Dictionary of Soldier Talk
Col. John R. Elting, U.S. Army, Ret., Sgt. Major Dan Cragg, U.S. Army, Ret., Sgt. 1st Cl., and Ernest L. Deal, U.S. Army, Ret., (Scribner’s, 1984), xiv + 383pp.
This dictionary comprises approximately 3800 words and phrases peculiar to the vocabulary of soldiers of the United States Army from its original establishment to the present and to that of their predecessors of the Colonial Period. Examples have been chosen to provide a representative selection of day-to-day speech in the Army during peacetime and war. They include slang; abbreviations and acronyms; technical terms; expressions borrowed from foreign languages, allied and enemy forces, and civilian life; eponyms and invented words; nicknames of famous commanders, units, weapons, and battles; and military folklore. There are also samples of obsolescent, little-used, and ephemeral expressions.
Standard terms pertaining to Army regulation, rank, command, and decorations are included when they have special historical significance or colloquial meanings that differ notably from their official ones. The short appendices of U.S. Navy and Marine Corps vocabulary contain expressions which are also more or less common knowledge in the Army. All of the combat and most of the support branches of the Army are represented, including the Air Force, both during its existence as a branch of Army command and as an independent service. There is also a selection of expressions used by West Point cadets with reference to classroom and social life as well as the daily routine and traditions of the United States Military Academy.
Entries are dated by historic names of conflicts rather than a chronology of the major and minor wars and lesser actions in which the United States Army has been engaged. Interim periods are designated by headings such as Ancient, Colonial, Old, Old Army, Occupation of Japan, Post-World War II, and Modern. Annual equivalents of each are listed in a table at the beginning of the Dictionary. About four fifths of the terms collected in this work postdate 1860.
The bibliography consists of about two hundred titles and contains standard military, slang, dialect, historical, and foreign-language dictionaries, besides an up-to-date selection of scholarly and linguistic studies. A noteworthy feature is the inclusion of works of fiction by soldier-authors such as From Here to Eternity, by James Jones, and The Lionheads, by Josiah Bunting, from which brief quotations have been excerpted to illustrate a number of entries.
It must be said that A Dictionary of Soldier Talk has aspects that are not characteristic of most military dictionaries. The joint professional careers of the compilers span eighty-five years, four major wars, and service in half a dozen branches of the Army and the Marine Corps. Their knowledge of many terms in the Dictionary is first-hand, and in such cases they have often enriched its entries with anecdotes, reminiscences, and blunt opinions of commanders and national policies; they have even included recipes for the preparation of powerful alcoholic drinks. These embellishments are lively, entertaining, informative, often full of humor, and sometimes grim, but all are personal, and it is this point of view and style that permeate the Dictionary.
The wing weenies have worked it over long before our throttle jockey walks out to his Thud.*
—Thud Ridge, Jack Broughton, Lippincott, 1969.
Few quotations in the Dictionary so well exemplify the unintelligibility of American military argot to outsiders. The expressions come from Modern Air Force usage. Wing weenie is slang for a ‘wing officer who serves as staff assistant to the commander.’ Thud is a nickname for ‘the F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bomber’ used in combat throughout most of the Viet Nam War, and a throttle jockey is a ‘fighter pilot.’ Another, earlier example is Bed-Check Charlie. Bed check alludes to nightly supervision of barracks by noncommissioned officers after “Lights Out.” However, Bed-Check Charlie refers to antiquated enemy reconnaissance aircraft that regularly flew over American lines at twilight during the Korean War, but could not be picked up by radar and were too slow to be intercepted by fast jet fighters.
The Dictionary contains many terms that have hidden as well as apparent meanings, and the explanations of their covert significance are always enlightening. How many draftees, on their first arrival in camp, have cheered the announcement by a beaming sergeant that they were “Just in time for a GI party” only to find that it had nothing to do with convivial refreshments but meant a thorough cleaning of the barracks? The definition of chief of staff can be found in any standard English-language dictionary—but not the information that it also means an officer’s wife. In the era of the Old Army (1919-1941), ‘a commanding officer’s wife’ was a COW, but in lower-case letters cow is Modem cadet slang for ‘a third-year man at West Point, Annapolis, or the Air Force Academy.’ What civilian without military experience would realize that among male soldiers, the Bay of Pigs formerly meant quarters occupied by members of the Women’s Army Corps?
Even the nomenclature of weapons components has its surprises. Headspace means ‘the clearance between the bolt-face of a rifle or machine gun and the base of a chambered cartridge’; if it is too large the weapon will not fire. Hence it has become a metaphor applied to stupid and inept soldiers. But checking the headspace, which is an armorer’s responsibility, is also used in the Army and Marine Corps for ‘any kind of routine investigation.’ A flash hider is ‘a device attached to the muzzles of small arms to suppress the muzzle flash’ that might reveal their position when fired in combat; but flash hider removed is Modem Medical Service slang for ‘circumcision.’
The Dictionary has flaws which occasionally make it confusing and awkward to use. Cross references and bibliographic citations are casual and frequently not indicated at all. There are also long entries without numbered subdivisions to clearly separate definitions from explanatory passages and anecdotes. The General Chronology, in particular, is too idiosyncratic and should be revised to conform with recognized practice for dating the events of United States history. Exact or approximate annual dates should follow each entry word together with abbreviations for historic periods and conflicts. This would provide the essential chronological data and eliminate such imprecise designations as Ancient, and Old, Old Army.
I have no major criticisms of the Dictionary that the compilers themselves have not already acknowledged: that its coverage of Air Force terminology is insufficient; that they have unintentionally “slighted” the Coast Guard; that there are too few examples of special expressions used by black servicemen; and that their selections from the speech of women members of the Army may be dated. Nevertheless, these deficiencies do not significantly detract from the over-all merit of the work. Colonel Elting and Sergeants Cragg and Deal have done a fine job of assembling from widely scattered sources the colorful, richly varied, and abundant information which is to be found in A Dictionary of Soldier Talk. Henceforth, all who seek to know more about this fascinating area of the American language will be in their debt.
K. Lawrence Parker
From Za-za to San-san: The Climate of Japanese Onomatopoeia
David Galef, New York City
Bells in Japan ring with a jan-jan sound; roosters cry kokekokko. “Even the dogs in Japan,” remarked one long-term foreign resident, “speak Japanese.” True enough: the sound of barking is written as wan-wan, not all that far from canine reality. But what is one to make of bata-bata, the sound of beating wings, or goro-goro, approximating the rolling of a barrel? This is giseigo, the Japanese version of onomatopoeia, where the sound of a word imitates its meaning.
Japanese onomatopoeia is really divided into two groups, giseigo and gitaigo. The three characters which make up giseigo mean ‘mimic-voice-language,’ really a word imitating a sound. The word bū-bū, for example, means ‘to complain or grunt’ because it is the sound a pig makes. Gitaigo, on the other hand, is an attempt to represent the sound of an action, subtler and more abstract than giseigo. An interesting instance of this second grouping is sassato, which means ‘quickly’ or ‘promptly.’ While possibly disconcerting to the foreigner trying to learn Japanese, these expressions add a lot of color to an otherwise polite, honorific language. In fact, a Japanese speaker’s style has a lot to do with the amount of giseigo and gitaigo he uses: the more sound-expressions, the more vivid the speech.
Since the world of nature figures so prominently in Japanese life, numerous expressions exist to capture the seasonal phenomena. A light wind makes a hyū-hyū sound; as the wind picks up, it becomes pyū-pyū; and a gale makes a rhythmic byū-byū sound. For those who like to form lexical rules, the h to p to b sequence usually represents stronger and stronger force. While pata-pata, for example, may be the flap of little wings, bata-bata might represent a helicopter’s massive dislocation of air. The k to g switch follows the same pattern. The familiar syllabic repetition represents a continuing state. For the Japanese, even smoothly flowing actions have this alliterative repetition.
Rain, so quintessentially Japanese, comes in a variety of forms: za-za is a downpour, heavy slanted drops soaking one to the skin. Potsu-potsu is a medium rain, striking the roof tiles, perhaps with a pinging sound. Finally, as the rain tapers off to a drizzle, the sound modulates to a polite shito-shito. The clouds roll away (goro-goro) and the sun shines brilliantly, san-san. Later, at night, the stars come out, twinkling kira-kira. And once in a great while, a shooting star may go flashing pika-pika toward the horizon. The Japanese natural world has its own distinct personality.
The Japanese represent their moods in a variety of sounds, as well. In moments of exasperation, they grimace muka-muka, or gnash their teeth with a giri-giri sound. Nervousness makes them waku-waku, and real fright causes them to tremble buru-buru all over. The shiku-shiku sound of sobbing can be heard right through a Japanese screen. In the neighboring house, someone is smiling niko-niko as he listens to a funny story. The punchline is delivered, and he gives out a big gera-gera belly laugh. In the next room, however, someone is exhausted (kuta-kuta) and trying to sleep. A half-hour later comes the gū-gū of gentle snoring. Japanese households can be very noisy and complex in a quiet, simple way.
This is not to say that English onomatopoeia is so plain, and in fact there are some interesting cross-cultural equivalents. A pocha-pocha Japanese child becomes roly-poly in America.
The kera-kera laugh, a step down from the rollicking gera-gera, approximates ‘giggle’ in English. Jara-Jara in Japan is as good as a jingle in New Jersey. As for the annoyed humph, fun (pronounced “foon”) is a much-used Japanese equivalent. The Japanese terms, however, extend to a variety of what English-speakers would consider silent actions: jiro-jiro is ‘to stare in fascination,’ the way many Japanese still do at foreigners.
The world of abstract actions, gitaigo, is more of a puzzle to nonnative speakers. The literal meaning of gitaigo is ‘mimic-condition-language,’ or mimesis, though the phonic connections seem less obvious than with the reduplicated words. Why does pittari mean ‘to fit perfectly’ or sokkuri ‘to be exactly alike’? The word gisshiri ‘squeezed in’ or ‘packed full’ has resonances of the English squished, but why does one resolve a matter shikkari to ‘firmly or decisively’? For the most part, these are words not representable by Chinese ideograms, so the etymology is unclear. Written in the phonetic kana syllabary, they appear to antedate the importation of Chinese characters by several hundred years: sounds before signs. Questioning a number of Japanese on the subject produces the response that words like hakkiri (‘clearly, obviously’) simply sound like their denoted conditions. Such is the essence of any onomatopoeia, and though gitaigo tends to be more adverbial in usage than the general giseigo, it may simply be that the Japanese have a more refined phonic sense. The onomatopoeic giseigo always makes good intuitive sense: bara-bara, which is the sound of an object breaking into pieces, has come to mean ‘scattered’ or ‘on all different levels.’ “This English class,” a Japanese instructor might say of his students, “is bara-bara.”
Though it would be an exaggeration to say that there is a Japanese sound-word for every occurrence, a full list would be extremely long. This is a country where trains rattle along goton-goton and buzzers go bun-bun. On the train, a lively pichi-pichi young girl is kicking and struggling jita-bata, while an old man with his clothes boro-boro (in tatters) looks on. It sounds like a scene from Japanese comics, which in fact rely heavily on giseigo for their impact. The American pow and zap seem uninspired by comparison. The Japanese for pow, incidentally, is pachin, while a ray-gun’s zap is bii-bii, coincidentally the sound of a baby’s crying.
The association of onomatopoeia with comics is not accidental. Giseigo and gitaigo remain informal, sometimes pungent expressions, bespeaking easy usage. That is not to say they are slang. Even the staid Kenkyūsha Dictionary admits their lexical validity. Still, the words retain a nonrigorous quality, not entirely fit for serious scholarship. Far better to get a sense of them bura-bura: ‘wandering around aimlessly, looking at the sights with no fixed destination in mind.’
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Vineyard Christian Fellowship of River Edge: A body of spirit-filled Christians gathering weekly to worship, teach and meet the needs of each other and the community.” [From an advertisement in the Twin-Boro News, June 13, 1984, p. 41. Submitted by W. Frank Kearney, Bergenfield, New Jersey.]
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English
Eric Partridge, eighth edition ed. and rev. by Paul Beale, (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 1400 pp.
We all collect slang, as part of our idiosyncratic vocabularies. No one person’s slang is identical with another’s. We all change our slang continually. It is the most evanescent and voguish kind of language. The slang of the Vietnam War period, no way, and all that, sound already dated over here: a sign that the speaker is getting on, set in his or her ways. I have two Greek girl cousins who came out of Greece at the end of the war, and were sent to posh English girl’s boarding schools in the 1950s. They picked up the genteel English slang of the period, and then went back to Greece, where their English slang was fossilized, and did not move on with that of the rest of us. So they still use it today: “Wizard beanfeast, Philip, old bean.” It sounds charming, and endearing, but quaint.
The attempt to record and explain the slang of all British English-speakers is as Herculean an enterprise as trying to record all the grains of sand, and shells, and bits of seaweed, and their position, on a big beach (say St. Andrews) between one high tide and another. To attempt it as a one-man band, without professional academic assistance, relying only on correspondents and fellow amateurs, is insane as well as Herculean. Yet this was the enterprise to which Eric Partridge devoted his long life, with Herculean success. He published the first volume of A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English in 1937. But, having put the engine of research in motion, he could not stop. His Addenda and revisions grew so numerous that by 1961 they warranted a second alphabetical volume, more than half as big as the original. Slang and the Partridge hunt for it have not slowed down since then. This is his last and posthumous work.
Partridge was working on it until six weeks before his death at the age of 85 on 1 June 1979. But he had handed over his voluminous notes, comprising some 5,000 new entries, in the autumn of 1978, to Paul Beale, the man he had chosen to carry on his task. Nearly 1,000 of the entries had been contributed by Beale himself, who was one of his volunteer army of Seven Maids with Seven Mops who were trying to sweep the beach clear of slang. Beale had started a regular and copious correspondence about language with Partridge in early 1974, when the former was nearing the end of 21 years service with the Intelligence Corps of the British Army. The services and war are great provokers of slang, and Partridge was always rich in military slang, just as he was always rich in Antipodean slang: he was born in New Zealand, and studied in Australia.
I hope that the great publication will continue to be revised and brought up to date for as long as people speak English. But this is the last edition to which Partridge himself can contribute his peculiar talents. The biggest change has been to conflate the two previous volumes into one fat alphabetical run. It was tiresome and confusing to look up, let us say Horse, and find assorted and sometimes conflicting information in Volumes I and II. It was irritating to find How’s your father? in Volume I but How’s your sister? in Volume II. The other major change of presentation has been to group in a large appendix at the back self-contained bodies of slang that were too long to fit comfortably into the main body of the text: for example, slang of prisoners of war in the last war; the rich jargon of Tiddlywinks; and the profusion of undergrowth that has grown around the word kibosh.
Inconsistencies, blind entries, duplications, and some downright contradictions have been removed; though no collection of slang can ever be free from such things. To make room for the new material, Paul Beale has left out a considerable number of solecisms and catachreses, illiteracies, or phrases couched in a grammar inconsistent with that of Standard English, and malapropisms. He has omitted some examples of Cockney dialect, not because of a prejudice against Cockney, but because he considers it a true dialect: if you include Cockney, you should include the whole English Dialect Dictionary, which would break the back of the book.
The Dictionary is intended to deal mainly with British English. Accordingly, Paul Beale has largely ignored the slang of the two imported fads that swept the country while he was preparing the work: skateboarding, and Citizens' Band radio. Skateboarding actually did sweep the country; CB dropped stillborn into Britain, and has been a total failure, to the grief of manufacturers of the kit.
Here is the latest Partridge then. What do we make of it? The first thing that a new reader will notice is that nine tenths of the slang is out of date. Not many living Englishmen would understand the meaning of, say, to be fullied, or would cry to a friend to snite his snitch. Partridge aimed at a historical dictionary of all English slang from the beginning of gibble-gabble, and nothing becomes obsolete quicker than slang. His work is a useful conflation of all previous such dictionaries and collections from Frances Grose onwards. Eton College slang, for example, is taken from a publication of 1900; not much of it would be used, or even recognized, by an Etonian today.
The second inevitable flaw in Partridge is that it is based almost entirely on written sources, either previous publications or correspondents of varying merit writing in about their observations and interpretations of slang. It is a melancholy, but not surprising fact that those enthusiasts who can be bothered to write unsolicited letters on such matters are not necessarily the most authoritative witnesses. In my lesser experience, they are often nutters.
Of all parts of language, slang is more an oral than a written form. By the time it comes to be written down, quite often the neophiliacs and trendy slang-makers are becoming bored with the word and have moved on to something new. The ideal way to make a dictionary of slang would be to send out researchers with tape-recorders and notebooks to ask people what they thought they meant by such-and-such a word or phrase. You could then draw tables and isoglosses to show the spread and different connotations of bits of slang. That is the way that Harold Orton’s English Dialect Survey at the University of Leeds works. And that has academic finance, and has managed to cover only a small fraction of English dialect, mostly dying rural dialect rather than growing urban dialect. Where is the dotty, obsessive, logophile multi-billionaire who will support such a project? Until he comes along, thank you and good night for Eric Partridge and Paul Beale. They are the best and broadest amateur slang-collectors in the field.
Philip Howard
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“The [Senate Banking] Committee’s Democratic members expressed dismay that Miss [Martha] Seger, Michigan’s former commissioner for financial institutions, hasn’t written any articles explaining her views on monetary policy and the economy. Sen. Donald Reigle, a Michigan Democrat, said, “Your views aren’t generally known, and on a matter of such enormity … people need to know.” [From the Wall St. Journal, n.d. Submitted by Arkules & Associates, Paradise Valley, Arizona.].
ENGLISH ENGLISH
Philip Howard
The image of London propagated abroad by the tourist industry bears as little relation to the real thing as the image of New York propagated in the other direction. There is more to London, thank King Lud, than the Changing of the Guard, Tower Bridge (often misrepresented as London Bridge, and in any case a massive blot on the riverscape), and Pearly Kings and Queens talking Cockney; just as there is, I dare say, more to New York than that ostentatious skyline and the tawdry glitter of Broadway.
First Visitors to London arrive expecting to find the place crowded with cheerful Cockneys talking to each other in rhyming slang: “Ullo Fred. Come in awf de frog an' toad [road] an' ‘ave a cuppa Rosie [cup of tea]. It’s on de Cain an’ Abel [table]. But wipe yer plates o' meat [feet] cos de ol' trouble an' strife [wife]’s just scrubbed de Rory O’More [floor]. She’s up de apples an' pears [upstairs] ‘avin’ a bo-peep [sleep]. I’m still on de cob an' coal [dole]. Get into that lion’s lair [chair] and let’s chew the fat [have a chat].”
Contrary to this romantic advertising agency view, rhyming slang has always been a small part of the Muvver Tongue of Cockney dialect. And in any case the Blitz, the death of the inner London docks, and the waves of new immigration have redistributed the Cockneys miles away from the sound of Bow Bell, and made Pearly Kings and Queens an endangered species, preserved only for the tourists.
Nevertheless Cockney rhyming slang does still live, and creates new words. A recent arrival into the lexicon of London slang is bottle. Over the past few years it has come to be widely used in informal contexts to mean ‘spirits, chutzpah, guts, courage’; what Brits used to call spunk a generation ago. The word has been widely broadcast by the Milk Marketing Board, whose advertising slogans persuade Brits to drink more cow juice per caput than any other nation in the world. There was DRINKA PINTA MILKA DAY. The latest slogan, somewhat derivative, is GOTTA LOTTA BOTTLE, beside pictures of pint bottles of the milk that is delivered to the British doorstep every morning. A persuasive motto, no doubt, for those that like such things. But whence the bottle—and wherefore— brothers and sisters?
The word has been around for a while in low slang. The Swell’s Night Guide, published in 1846, defines no bottle, or not a lot of bottle, as ‘no good or useless,’ with this example: “She thought it would be no bottle, ‘cos her rival would go in a buster.” The new vogue use of bottle has changed its meaning to something like ‘courage.’ Rhyming slang, would you say? If so, what is the rhyme? I made the mistake of raising the question in the columns of what you quaintly describe as “The London Times” and received a large, entertaining, and scabrous correspondence, too rude to publish in The Times.
The solution to the puzzle is scatological. Slang often is. I will try to put the matter politely. But those of a nervous disposition had better leave the page at this point.
There were many ingenious and persuasive suggestions of the origin of bottle. Could it be bottle of wine ‘spine’ as in the metaphor of showing backbone, or being spineless? What about bottle of stout ‘clout,’ as in, “She’s got lots of clout in the right places.” Might it be bottle of courage (Courage is also the name of a mass brewer with pubs all over London: when feeling low, you can look up almost anywhere in London and read a sign exhorting you to TAKE COURAGE)? I even received a learned Hebrew exegesis from the Talmud, by which the transliteration bottle, meaning ‘to make something useless or void,’ has moved into the slang of British low-life. I find this last explanation enchanting, but unpersuasive. There were those who declared that bottle was simply a euphemism for bottom, in the sense of ‘staying-power.’
Thumbs-down to all of those. The answer is obvious, if I had stopped to think about it. The phase in full is bottle and glass, and the rhyme is, I regret to have to tell you, with arse, or, as you spell it so confusingly for donkeys, ass.
To lose one’s bottle is to ‘lose control of one’s anal sphincter, in moments of extreme fear, and dirty oneself.’ The unpleasant phenomenon is illustrated by the old story of Admiral Nelson. Nelson is struck by a musket ball during a naval engagement, and calls to his cabin-boy: “Bring me my scarlet jacket: I would not have the men see that I am hit.” Just then the First Officer hurries up, and cries: “Admiral, Admiral, we have just sighted another fifty French sails to windward.” Nelson shouts after the cabin-boy: “While you’re about it, bring my brown trousers.”
There is much supporting evidence for this interpretation. The phrase probably originated in low-life and prisoners’ argot. I was sent a poem entitled “Requiem for a Dying Geligniter,” written by a man in prison and containing the line: “And you think of the day that your bottle gave way when popping off one that went wrong.” If you go to watch West Ham, in the East End, playing football, the crowd taunt an opposition player to whom they have taken a dislike by making a circle with their thumb and forefinger, and expanding and contracting the circle rapidly. They are miming the Cockney phrase, “Your bottle is going like a tanner [obsolete small coin] and a ‘alf-crahn [obsolete large coin].” That is to say, you have no guts, you are scared out of your wits, you have shat yourself, and West Ham Rules, OK?
The worst that can be said about a Punk, or a Rocker, or any other teenage football hoodlum, is that he has lost his bottle. Do not do so, without putting on your running shoes. Because the phrase is rude, its meaning has been unusually obscured by a second piece of rhyming slang: arris. Arris is a shortening of Aristotle, rhyming slang for bottle, short for bottle and glass, equals arse. Uniquely the phrase has now acquired a third rhyme: plaster. Plaster of Paris equals arris; arris equals Aristotle; Aristotle rhymes with bottle; bottle is short for bottle and glass; glass rhymes with arse. Hence you could hear a Cockney say something like: “Cor, that Richard’s (Richard the Third, equals bird, equals ‘nubile young woman,’ but can also equal turd) got a smashing plaster.”
It is agreeable to realize that the Milk Marketing Board’s proud claim that milk has GOTTA LOTTA BOTTLE would, if in the least true, render the Board liable to prosecution under the clean food legislation. One is alarmed at the etymological ignorance, or lack of curiosity, of the Eng. Lit. graduates who dreamed it up.
Other rude rhyming slang much used by many who would be horrified if they realized what they were saying includes berk [Berkeley Hunt = the ‘pudendum muliebre']; iron [iron hoof = poof]; and cobblers [cobblers’ awls = balls]. Recently rhyming slang has started to disguise itself with second rhymes, so that insiders can use it without giving offense to the outsiders. Thus, a Greek is no longer a bubble and squeak, but a bacon, bacon, bubble and squeak being a common order in a cafe. The best one I ever heard at the races was: “She got down on her biscuits and gave me a hundred to eight.” Biscuits = biscuits and cheese = knees; hundred to eight = plate = plate of ham = gam = gamahuche, or ‘fellatio.’ It’s poetry of a vulgar sort. But I bet that the Tourist Board don’t put anything as realistic as that in their puffs.
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Words about Words
David Grambs, (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1984), xix + 409pp.
[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection.]
You may not believe it, but I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about alphabetical order. I do not mean whether L comes before or after M, or the proper order of a sequence like pa, PA, Pa, Pa., P.A., and p.a. I refer to the infuriating restrictions placed upon the presentation of certain kinds of information by the Procrustean bed of alphabetical order. Alphabetical order is dandy if you want to look up a word, like frangipane or clavicembalo in a dictionary, and if you know how to spell it. It is of utterly no use if, confining the example to dictionaries, you want to look up
a word you cannot spell,
one or more words that were derived from a given word in a source language,
all of the words ending in -phobia,
all of the words with the combination -mpl- in the middle,
all of the words in which the -th- combination is pronounced as in hothouse,
all of the loanwords in English from Swahili,
all of the words that have anything to do with the idea of ‘book,’
all of the words that form their plurals by adding -en (instead of -s, -es, etc.),
all of the words that retain a “foreign” pronunciation in English,
etc. The information is all there, but it is completely inaccessible (unless the dictionary is stored in a computer with an elaborate database system or provided with an index). To be sure, there are other books, adjuncts to the dictionary, that may list the information in a retrievable form. But it is one of the great frustrations of my life that one cannot find what is being sought without going to an enormous amount of trouble, especially when confronted with a very large dictionary.
It is a pity that David Grambs’s book has to be in alphabetical order, as it contains a huge amount of fascinating information, and, I must confess, I find it tedious (after all these years) to have to read a book—especially as readable a book as this—in alphabetical order. Yet, there are compensations, not only in the rewards to be derived from a thorough, consecutive read-through of the book, but also because, at the end of some alphabetic letters, the author has provided some specialized glossaries and other information that is thematically oriented. It is also adroitly referred to in the “regular” parts of the book.
Words about Words is a dictionary of words used in writing about writing and language. It is very well done, and the definitions are models of clarity, notably unwarped by the constraints of space. Most useful, interesting, entertaining, and revealing are the citations that accompany most of the entries. These, drawn from an eclectic selection of modern writing, are not telegraphic, as one finds them in the OED or in Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged, but full and virtually whole, with syntax intact. There is plenty of context, and the selections are themselves interesting to read:
ladies’ club rhythm. Wolcott Gibbs’s term for mannered suspensions or discontinuities in the styling of direct speech, or dialogue presented in sections or bits within a sentence
I suffer myself very seriously from writers who divide quotes from some kind of ladies' club rhythm. “ ‘I am going,’ he said, ‘downtown’ ” is a horror, and unless a quote is pretty long I think it ought to stay on one side of the verb.
—Wolcott Gibbs, in
Editors on Editing
That is fairly typical of the style of entry. Not all of the entries are quite that picturesque—how could they be? Writers, even the best, are not at their best when writing about writing. But, lest you misunderstand me, the citations are not all taken from writers writing on writing. For instance, here is Thomas P. (“Tip”) O’Neill on metaphor, following the definition:
The Speaker of the House is not a goddamned metaphor; I have never been a metaphor and, God willing, I never shall be.
—quoted in The New Republic
Would that all of our dictionaries had such citations!
Grambs, who works as an editor and translator, was on the staff of the first edition of The American Heritage Dictionary. He must have had fun doing this book, but that could not have diminished the work involved.
The Special Entry sections, of which there are twenty, cover such diverse subjects as Libel, Word-Game Words, Newsroom Headline Jargon, Propaganda Devices, Irish Bulls, and Advertising Weasel Words. Carefully done, all are useful, informative, and thought-provoking.
An unusual book, Words about Words is one of the few that have crossed my desk in many years that is likely to have some staying power. It is good reading; unfortunately, its chiefly alphabetical order will interfere with some people’s enjoyment of it, but it must be made clear that I have no alternative to offer.
Laurence Urdang
EPISTOLA {David L. Gold}
Having published a ten-page review detailing the numerous errors in Charles Berlitz’s Native Tongues, I could not agree more with Gordon B. Chamberlain’s opinion of the book [X, 3]; but in defense of Berlitz one should point out that he was citing German Schwanz (which, besides an unmarked word for ‘tail,’ is also a vulgarism meaning ‘penis’) and not, as the reviewer thought, Yiddish shvants (sic recte), which has both of these meanings plus that of ‘fool.’
[David L. Gold, Haifa, Israel]
EPISTOLA {George S. Welsh}
In the Spring, 1983 issue [IX, 4], Robert Devereux questions the inclusion of hooch (hootch) on Garland Cannon’s list of Japanese loanwords. I believe the confusion comes from two different meanings of the term in question.
The word referring to ‘a strong or illegal liquor’ does indeed come from the name of the Indian tribe, Hoochinoo, that brewed the beverage.
But the word hooch was (and is) used by soldiers in Korea and Japan to refer to quonset huts and other structures. It seems to be a corruption of the Japanese uchi ‘a dwelling.’
[George S. Welsh, Chapel Hill, North Carolina]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“No gasoline will be sold to anyone in a glass container.” [From a sign in a gas station window in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Submitted by Veronica Egan, Tesuque, New Mexico.]
Crossword Puzzle
Across
29. Grief smears lady’s
1. Well so, it’s half done (for example, in a bun). (5)
4. Lowly hood busted in L.A. area. (9)
9. The last thing out of Pandora’s box is still in this one. (4,5)
10. Put 50 on Air Bureauon the nose. (5)
11. Agree while dispatched. (6)
12. Transcaucasian gives Marine an upset. (9)
14. What monks would do to books (to make the Dark Ages lighter?). (10)
16. Note before me from celebrity. (4)
19. In Chicago at first sign of New Year. (4)
20. Cooper hero eyes larder obliquely. (10)
22. Unbalanced arrangement of “Tan Blues.” (8)
23. Enterprise’s first space warp was for getaway. (6)
26. Nail back a vine. (5)
27. Not contracted after trust assured. (8)
28. Grab a copy of object. (4,5)
Down
1. Being around chief was Ko-Ko’s task. (9)
2. Yawns, flipping pages. (5)
3. Tom, Dick or Harry? Nom du diable! (8)
4. Hastened to conceal, we hear. (4)
5. Alter? True, I alter writing. (10)
6. Kind of clipper for Ruth? (6)
7. Actions by interpretation manifest mulishness. (9)
8. Bob’s last; Thomas’s first. (5)
13. Unites scattered rock inlets. (10)
15. One who takes too much interest in his work? (4,5)
17. Mistakenly sent in early. Seriously! (9)
18. Stretch favrics weave class tie. (8)
21. The ultimate “State of the Union” address? (6)
22. A bed in France is dark. (5)
24. Noon? Correct! (5)
25. Born after weekend in low joint. (4)
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“For example, we visit a school that teaches how to pick up girls and a blind carpenter.” [Milwaukee Journal TV-radio critic reporting (February 3, 1981) on what we could learn by watching CBS show “That’s My Line.” Submitted by Reinhold Aman, Waukesha, Wisconsin.]
Crossword Puzzle
Across
1. is-sue.
4. Horoscope.
9. Telephone.
10. NASAL.
11. RUSTIC.
12. STEROIDS.
14. Englishman.
16. TAL-C.
19. Tree.
20. Cricketeer.
22. ENTRAILS.
23. NAVAH-O.
26. TEALS.
27. April fool.
28. AMENDMENT.
29. DREAD.
Down
1. INTERCEPT.
2. S-ALE-S.
3. Ex-PLIC-it.
4. Hoot.
5. REENTRANCE.
6. Sun-dry.
7. Obstinate.
8. Ell-is.
13. SHORE LEAVE.
15. GREAT LAKE.
17. Car-Po-oled.
18. De-tail-ed.
21. Passe-d.
22. Extra.
24. AMORE.
25. Brut(e).