VOL XI, No 2 [Autumn, 1984]

Lost Metaphors of Land and Sea

Richard Lederer, St. Paul’s School

James Greenough and George Kittredge point out in Words and Their Ways in English Speech, “Language is fossil poetry which is constantly being worked over for the uses of speech. Our commonest words are worn-out metaphors.” These fossils lie so deep in the mine of our language that we are hardly aware that they are figures of speech at all. Let’s do some digging to uncover the rich metaphoric ore that is embedded in our speech and our writing, our thoughts and our dreaming.

America used to be a nation of farmers, but by the turn of this century most of us had moved to towns and cities, and we began to lose touch with our agricultural roots. In “God’s Grandeur” (1877), Gerard Manley Hopkins lamented the effects of the Industrial Age on our feeling for the land:

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil,

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell; the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

We may be vaguely aware of the agricultural comparisons in expressions like cream of the crop, to crop up, to feel one’s oats, to sow one’s wild oats, a tough row to hoe, to farm out, a farm team, to weed out, to plow into, vintage year, easy pickings, to nip it in the bud, gone to seed, seedy, to reap the benefits, to mow down, a needle in a haystack, neither grass nor hay, and to make hay while the sun shines. But because our shod feet no longer touch the soil, most of us remain unconscious of the earthy metaphors embedded in the following words and expressions:

a cultivated person Like well-fanned land, the mind of the cultivated person is carefully tended and yields a rich harvest.

a furrowed brow The lines in a worried forehead resemble the furrows (grooves) in the earth made by a plow.

delirium and delirious These words, signifying a state of frenzied emotional excitement, are subtly rooted in the Latin de- ‘from’ and lira ‘furrow.’ Thus, delirium and delirious metaphorically compare behavior that deviates from a course that we think of as straight to the action of “straying away from the straight course in plowing.”

a harrowing experience A harrow is a cultivating implement set with spikes, spring teeth, or disks that pulverizes the earth by violently flipping over the topsoil. Knowing this etymology helps us to see how a terrifying experience truly harrows us.

a windfall As a term for an unexpected stroke of good fortune, windfall refers to fruits or branches blown down from trees by strong winds. Such gratuitous food and fuel requires no effort on the part of the lucky recipient.

aftermath In bygone days, math meant ‘mowing’ and aftermath meant ‘second mowing.’ As the compound gradually lost its metaphoric force, it came to signify results, effects, or consequences.'

to cut a swath When a pompous swaggerer shows off, he or she “cuts a (big or wide) swath.” This expression figuratively extends the Middle English meaning of swath; ‘a row of cut grain or grass left by a scythe.’

to go haywire Anyone who has ever tried to use haywire to bind bales or to make repairs knows how inefficient and omery the stuff is. Attempts to manipulate haywire often go haywire.

In “Sea Fever,” the poet laureate sang:

I must down to the seas again,
To the lonely sea and sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship
And a star to steer her by.

—John Masefield, “Sea Fever”

Relatively few of us go down to the seas any more, and even fewer get to steer a tall ship. And, having lost contact with the sea and with sailing, most of us no longer taste the salty flavor of the nautical metaphors that ebb and flow through our language.

Consider our use of the word ship. We continue to ship goods, even when that “shipping” is by truck, train, or plane. We compliment someone on running a tight ship, even when that “ship” is an office or a classroom. And many things besides ships can be shipshape. Consider, too, our use of the compound word bailout. When we talk about a Chrysler or a Seabrook bailout, we are unknowingly comparing a financial strategy to the act of removing water from a sinking craft.

To help you learn the ropes and get your bearings, I’ll see if the coast is clear by sounding out the lay of the land. Then, without going overboard, I’ll barge ahead, come hell or high water. If you feel yourself going off the deep end, all washed up, on the rocks, and sinking fast in a wave of confusion, try to stay on an even keel. Relax, I won’t lower the boom and leave you high and dry. Now that you get my drift, consider how the following idioms of sailing and the sea sprinkle salt on our tongues: shape up or ship out, to take the wind out of his sails, the tide turns, a sea of faces, down the hatch, hit the deck, anchorman, to steer clear, don’t rock the boat, to harbor a grudge, and to give a wide berth to.

Most of us landlubbers are unaware of how liberally we have borrowed everyday expressions from sailors. I wish you smooth sailing in fathoming lost seafaring metaphors like:

to fathom an idea When we try to fathom a concept, we are making poetic use of an old word that originally meant the span between two outstretched arms. Nowadays a fathom is a unit of six feet used for measuring the depth of water. By poetic extension the verb to fathom has come to mean ‘to get to the bottom of.’

to take one down a peg Ships' colors used to be raised and lowered a peg at a time. The higher the colors, the greater the honor. Thus, to take someone down a peg means to diminish his or her self-esteem.

by and large For ancient mariners, by and large was a command that meant ‘to sail slightly off the wind’—in contrast to full and by. When we say by and large today, we mean ‘in general’ because we do not wish to sail directly into the topic.

taken aback This expression probably conjures up in your mind an image of a person caught off guard and staggering backwards. But the origin of the phrase is nautical. Sailing by and large left an inexperienced helmsman in less danger of being taken aback, which means to catch the wind suddenly on the wrong side of the sails, which can lead to a serious situation, especially in a square-rigger.

in the doldrums Figuratively, when we’re in the doldrums, we are ‘stuck in a condition of boredom or depression.’ Literally, the doldrums are ‘those parts of the ocean near the Equator that are noted for calms and neutralizing trade winds.’ Recently, one of my students malapropistically misspelled the word as dull-drums. Clever lad.

landmark decision Landmark is a sailing term denoting a ‘mark on the shore by which to steer or lay a course.’ Landmark decisions act as points of reference for future legal navigation.

to take a different tack A sailing ship tacks by turning its bow to the wind and shifting sails in order to change direction.

hand over fist Like “left and right,” “a mile a minute,” and “hellbent for election,” hand over fist describes a rapid, extended action, especially the act of making money. In England, the original expression was hand over hand, a literal description of climbing up or down a rope or hauling in or letting out a sail. The phrase acquired the figurative sense of advancing rapidly, and, in America in the early nineteenth century, it became hand over fist.

between the devil and the deep blue sea This phrase, like between a rock and a hard place, means caught between equally perilous alternatives.' Devil in this context is not the evil one but, rather, a nautical term for the seam between two planks in the hull of a ship, on or below the waterline. Anyone who had to caulk or fill such a devil with pitch was placed in the most precarious of predicaments.

three sheets in/to the wind In this common metaphor for an unsteady state of drunkenness, sheet refers to the line attached to the lower corner of a sail, used to control its set and position. When all three sheets of a sail on an old square-rigger were allowed to run free, they were said to be “in the wind,” and the ship would lurch and stagger like a person inebriated.

Like phrases and idioms, individual words also spray forth from the ocean. One of the most ancient of single-word nautical metaphors is governor, which harkens back to the Greek word kybemao, meaning ‘steer a ship.’ The Romans changed the form to gubemo, and eventually it crossed the channel to England and became governor. Thus, when we speak of “the ship of state,” we are more accurate than we know.

Leeway descends from lee, the side of a ship that is sheltered from the wind, and fluctuate, undulate, and redundant from fluctus and undo, both Latin for ‘wave.’

Nave, the long, narrow central hall of a cruciform church, is a figurative extension of navis, the Latin word for ‘ship,’ because the church is conceived as an ark for its congregants. Many naves do indeed resemble upside-down ships, for ships are often built bottoms up. The Greek word for ‘ship’ is naus, and the Greeks took their word nausia, which we now spell nausea, straight from the vehicle that produced seasickness.

On sailing ships of yesteryear, butt was the popular term for the large, lidded casks that held drinking water. These butts were equipped with scuttles—openings through which sailors ladled out the water. Just as today’s office workers gather about the water cooler to exchange chitchat and rumor, crewmen stood around the scuttled butts to trade scuttlebutt, which is how the word came to mean ‘gossip.’

If you’ve followed this article so far, you’ve read right up to the bitter end. You guessed it: the bitter end is also a nautical phrase. Mariners called that part of the cable that is to the rear of the windlass bitts, and the bitter is the turn of a cable around the bitts. When a ship rides out a gale, the cable is let out to the bitter end, or as far as it will go.

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“Movie: ‘Lifeboat’ Tallulah Bankhead. The commander of a German U-boat joins the survivors of a freighter he sunk in their lifeboat.” [From TV Week, San Francisco Chronicle, June 24-30, 1984. Submitted by Susan Avry, Palo Alto, California.]

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“When the birds were hauled up close to the stern, the boy hit them five or six times with a short gaffe…. He said he also saw the boy clubbing two seagulls to death with a long gaffe…” [From the Monterey Peninsula Herald, December 7, 1983, p. 5. Submitted by Hugh Bayless, Carmel, California.]

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“[Mr. Bob Calvert] wore an oxygen mask during the 90-minute flight. He and his machine weighed a total of 30 kg.” [From The Times (London), March 9, 1984, p. 2: That’s microlight!]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography

Sidney I. Landau, (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984), xiii + 370pp.

[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection.]

Sidney Landau has been involved with dictionaries for more than 20 years, having started in the converted stable on East 24th Street, in Manhattan, where the Funk & Wagnalls dictionary department was situated and where, a decade earlier, I had labored over the pronunciations and the mathematics and linguistics definitions for the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary, International Edition, a dictionary “inherited” by Landau. He has edited The Doubleday Dictionary and the Doubleday Roget’s Thesaurus. At present, he is editor in chief of the “International Dictionary of Medicine and Biology,” to be published in 1985 by John Wiley & Sons.

Dictionaries is not a book for the casual reader, for it must be delved into carefully, analytically, and thoughtfully. As a professional lexicographer, I found much valuable material, never before gathered in one place. But I also found much to disagree with, both in the arguments advanced in certain areas and in the description of events and processes. The latter appear to have been researched almost entirely from written sources; interviews with some of the people about whom Landau has written, even if conducted by correspondence, would have revealed a number of useful facts, which, though not necessarily essential, could have added measurably to the documentation in this volume.

For instance:

1. I suggested (and proposed doing) a revision of the English Duden to Bibliographisches Institut in the early 1970s.

2. The Longman Dictionary of English Idioms, edited by Thomas Hill Long, was produced by Laurence Urdang Associates, Ltd., Aylesbury, England.

3. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language-Unabridged Edition was prepared mainly by me: I hired and directed the staff, made all of the major editorial decisions, read every word of the book six times (at various stages of preparation), and did all of the systems designs for the computerization of the work. The RHD, begun in 1959, was, as far as I know, the first dictionary of any kind to be compiled using computers.

4. The Collins English Dictionary, of which Patrick Hanks was the editor, was prepared under my direction at Laurence Urdang Dictionaries, Ltd., in Aylesbury, England.

5. In all, more than 110 dictionaries and other reference books have been researched, compiled, written, edited, and, in most cases, typographically designed and composed by me or under my supervision, in England and America. Landau mentions me only in connection with the Random House College Dictionary and the Collins English Dictionary and quotes something from a paper published in a 1966 journal, Word.

I could go on. But my purpose is not to list my activities; rather it is to suggest that the documentation of others' accomplishments is likely to be as sparse. Just to cite another, Allen Walker Read, Emeritus Professor of English, Columbia University, is by far the most prolific (and imaginative and lucid) writer on the English language, particularly on aspects of lexicography, yet only a minute fraction of his contributions is cited, and there isn’t so much as a suggestion of the extent of Read’s scholarly work in the field of lexicography.

My other major criticism is that the index is—what shall I call it?—niggardly (or has that become a taboo word?). It is a meagre twelve pages long and lists major topics, people, and dictionaries mentioned in the text. It does not list the words discussed nor does it cover the footnotes, which are annoyingly bunched together at the back of the volume. I am not a footnote aficionado to begin with, and when I have to read a book with my index finger tucked in the back (or at the end of a chapter, as some books place them), I am especially annoyed. Modern (automatic) typesetting procedures allow for making up pages with the footnotes at the foot (Isn’t that where footnotes belong?), and there is no excuse for making it inconvenient for the reader to find them. Landau’s footnotes contain much of interest, and their inaccessibility is irritating.

As to content, Landau does an excellent job of revealing to the reader many aspects of dictionaries and of dictionarymaking that will be of interest to those who are unfamiliar with the art and craft of lexicography. His style, while not exactly conversational, is informal and readable, and he is good not only at describing what is in a dictionary but also how it gets there. In his discussion of streaking (“Deciding What to Put in the Dictionary,” pp. 161-3), he writes about the “four basic considerations in evaluating whether the citations justify the inclusion of a word… their number; the period of time covered; their geographic distribution; and the diversity of sources.” He goes on to justify entering streaking because it meets all of the criteria except the second. I suggest that there is a fifth criterion, not considered by Landau, namely, Is the word worthy of documentation? In other words, is there some historical justification for including it? “College-sized” dictionaries offer very little space for such indulgences, and I take Landau’s remarks to be focused chiefly on these 160,000-170,000-entry books, so one cannot be too critical of omissions.

Also, Landau does not, in his treatment of citation files and their uses, mention the inclusion of citations from other dictionaries—that is, the use as citations of definitions published in other dictionaries. There are many OED citations that consist of definitions from other dictionaries, and, because of the widespread use of (certain) dictionaries, such citations have a validity all their own.

Landau’s defense of the inclusion of names (pp. 167-170) is excellent, especially in (apparent) conflict with Randolph Quirk’s position. But the telling argument in favor of the inclusion of, say, Cleveland (the city in Ohio or Grover, himself), is that it is not really different from phoenix (the bird, not the city) or roc, or Medusa (not the animal), all of which can be found in dictionaries. Surely, the criterion of capitalization is trivial, and, frankly, Grover Cleveland is of much less interest to me than phoenix; yet his name appears as a word in the language, a denotatum, if you want to get technical about it, and there is no justification for omitting his name (unless citations fail to meet the four—or five—criteria cited above). As for frequency, Coca-Cola, Wendy’s, and AT & T are far more common in the language than glyceraldehyde, placage, and skyphos; yet the latter can be found in dictionaries usurping the space properly belonging to the former, which fulfill Landau’s criteria of number, distribution in time and geography, and diversity of source. As can be seen, these problems are knotty ones for the lexicographer, and their solutions are often arrived at somewhat arbitrarily.

Landau treats the policy of Webster’s Unabridged toward “broadening its definition of standard [usage]” as proper (p. 209). I have no quarrel with Merriam’s inclusion of such matter, of course; but I believe that if the lexicographer’s task is to describe the words of the language accurately, then it is likewise his responsibility to describe how its speakers view those words, and, at bottom, the real objection to the labels (and lack of them) in the Unabridged is that they are inaccurate. Landau points out, citing Labov (p. 208), that “nonstandard usage occurs in every social class” [his emphasis]. What he does not say is that the worse-educated, lower social classes of a community are quite well aware of what standard usage is (even though they may not be able to reproduce it), which I believe to be the case. In other words, any speaker of a language is able to recognize, albeit with varying degrees of refinement, several levels of usage. Affected uses of words like ain’t and constructions like he don’t in the speech of educated users do not constitute valid evidence for the editors of the Unabridged to say about ain’t that it “occurs in the speech of educated users,” any more than they would be justified in including a word like pioner because Olivier said it when performing in Hamlet: both are acting.

All this is set forth here to emphasize the fact that there is a great deal to be said about language in its myriad aspects. I am persuaded that more revealing and accurate analysis of language has appeared in the last 50 years or so than in the accumulated centuries preceding 1930. But that doesn’t mean that valid solutions have been arrived at or are even at hand. The beat goes on, and there are many drummers. Many, alas, publish their findings, couched in uninterpretable, recondite language, fortunately in obscure journals. Lexicographers, unlike those who theorize only abstractly, must commit the results of their theories and attitudes and analyses to print, where their successes and failures lie exposed to the scrutiny of many, laymen and scholars alike. Sidney Landau has lucidly and articulately set down an excellent presentation of some of the tangled questions faced by those who work with dictionaries. Inevitably, there are things to quarrel with in his book (just as one might find disputable treatment of various kinds of information in the dictionaries he—or anyone else—has edited). Regarded as a thoroughgoing exposition of those questions and as one lexicographer’s “confessions,” Dictionaries is the most informative and useful book on the subject that has come to my attention.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Style Manuals of the English-Speaking World

John Bruce Howell, (Index, Oryx Press, 1983), xiii + 138pp.

This is a well-conceived, well-organized, well-written descriptive bibliography listing 231 style manuals. The front matter covers the Scope and Arrangement of the book and adds a useful historical note and an interesting paragraph, Standardization of Bibliography, General Manuals and Subject Manuals, the former further divided into Commercial Publishers, Government printing, Term papers and theses, and University press; the latter lists works in 25 specialized fields, from Agriculture to Zoology. There are two brief appendices, one listing two style books for writers of materials for Disabled People, the other three works on Nonsexist Language.

Under Criteria for Inclusion, the author specifies that the style manual must be at least 5 pages in length. Thus, the American Psychological Association’s, “Guidelines for nonsexist language in APA journals,” which is 8 pages long, and Preparation of zoological papers with special reference to taxonomy, a mere 5 pages in length, published by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (Melbourne)— and an adjunct to that organization’s 22-page CS/RO style guide— merit inclusion.

The descriptions are quite succinct, but nonetheless useful for that. Howell has obviously studied the books carefully and his comments, notwithstanding their brevity, are a model for works of this kind: in addition to describing the work at hand, he has provided comparative information with other manuals and cross references to the other entries in the book, which are numbered consecutively for convenience. The book is well bound (Smyth-sewn), in hardcovers.

This is not exactly your basic bedside reading. But its importance, not only for libraries but also for publishers and institutions and for writers, editors, and proofreaders who must process a broad variety of materials, cannot be overstated.

Laurence Urdang

EPISTOLA {Henrik M. C. Luykx}

Although I do not have the article by Harry Cohen [X,2] at hand, I imagine Eric Winters [X,4] may welcome a clarification of how the Dutch term blindedarmontsteking (there appears to be an adventitious y in the word as printed in X,4) translates into appendicitis in two steps. Blindedarm is the Dutch word for the anatomical appendix. The Dutch and the English terms each derive from their own morphological concepts. In Dutch, blind(e) means ‘blind,’ darm means ‘gut’ or ‘bowel.’ The ‘blind gut’ is indeed a “blind alley” leading from the large intestine in that it has no outlet. In English the appendix is so named because it is an appendage hanging from the cecum (also called the blind gut), a section of the large intestine. The Dutch ontsteking means ‘inflammation.’ In English medical terminology virtually any body part is designated as inflamed by simply adding the suffix -itis. Running these Dutch words together (blinde, darm, ontsteking) follows the German practice of combining a noun with its modifiers into one word. In normal everyday Dutch, that is not the usual custom, but it invariably is in German. Dutch sentence structure more often parallels the English rather than the German, thus avoiding many of the jawbreakers so common in German.

[Henrik M. C. Luykx, Frederic, Maryland]

OBITER DICTA: …for the birds

Arthur H. Baum, of Stamford, Connecticut, submits that the phrase … for the birds originated back in the days when horse-drawn vehicles were in abundance and the birds were seen to be picking out undigested grain from the horse droppings. It was an easy semantic transition from the sense of ‘something of trifling value to be gained only by resorting to extreme measures’ to the modern sense of ‘something unworthy of consideration; something to be scorned as contemptible.’

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“—Who wrote, ‘Edipus Rex?”’ [From Gettysburg (Pa.) Times, January 28, 1984 (in an article entitled ‘Search for Knowledge…'). Submitted by Donald Marritz, Biglerville, Pennsylvania.]

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“And whereas Atget’s work became known to the world at large a few years after his death in 1928 (due mainly to the efforts of Berenice Abbott)…” [From Popular Photography, May 1984, page 35. Submitted by John Stanley, Merced, California.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Garden of Eloquence: A Rhetorical Bestiary, Including Portions of the First Garden of Eloquence

Pub. 1577 by Henry Peacham and Willard R. Espy, (Harper & Row, 1983), 221 pp.

Emerson, that source of so many pithy aphorisms, gets credit for this fairly sound bit of advice: “Never read a book that is not a year old.” To update Mr. Emerson a bit: Now’s the time to relish Willard Espy’s The Garden of Eloquence: A Rhetorical Bestiary.

For a reader who enjoys Mr. Espy’s droll self-indulgences, his cuddliness, his good humor, this book will be a pleasure, one containing a treat-within-a-treat. Mr. Espy has carefully revived passages from another book whose title included “Garden of Eloquence” and whose pages contained a bestiary. That 1577 work, by the Reverend Henry Peacham, has been rightly called “one of the most important English rhetorical treatises.” Mr. Espy deserves credit for trying to popularize Rev. Peacham’s decidedly dated study. For specialists, of course, the Elizabethan original has been reproduced in a facsimile published in 1954 by Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, of Gainesville, Florida. That book is based on the second (1593) edition of The Garden, thereby incorporating a number of valuable emendations to the original edition on which Mr. Espy is drawing here. Indeed, Professor Crane’s introduction to the facsimile edition bears quoting, quickly, here:

Yet we can hardly appreciate what Lyly, Spenser, Sidney, Greene, Shakespeare, and others of the time were trying to do unless we know something of the more than two hundred figures which on occasion they employed in their writings…. Figures also played an important part in the books on letter-writing which appeared in Latin and English in the sixteenth century.

(In acknowledging this scholar’s contribution, a correction is also necessary. When the fictional commentator “E.K.” pointed out Spenser’s use of various rhetorical figures, such as cacozelon, he did so in “The Shepheardes Calender” and not in The Faerie Queene.)

Mr. Espy’s own Introduction contains this eloquent, persuasive example of antithesis, a figure he doesn’t even mention for another 41 pages:

Granted that the eloquence of a Jesus Christ set for mankind a goal of goodness and love to which we still aspire; yet it must be granted also that the eloquence of an Adolf Hitler led a great nation into madness, and forced a great civilization to the edge of destruction.

Sometimes Mr. Espy provides examples, sometimes comments, as in “If we all had to label our excuses ‘dicaeologia’ we might not make so many of them. It is a hard word to pronounce.” That aside is vintage Espy, vintage cute—in the old sense of acute, as W. R. E. reminds us in discussing aphaeresis, the “loss of an initial letter or syllable.” That latter term is of course itself yet another example of diaeresis, the “pronunciation of two adjoining vowels in a word as separate sounds.” (Speaking of pronunciation: Mr. Espy graciously gives credit to Steele Commager for help in showing the way many of these Greek terms would sound if anyone were to pronounce them.)

As do most thought-provoking books, this one occasionally raises the question, “Is this example, that illustration, appropriate?” (More on the illustrations in a moment.) One example that does seem unfortunate comes from Shakespeare: Hamlet’s debating with himself about taking up arms against a sea of troubles. Mr. Espy calls the passage an example of catachresis, a form of inappropriate metaphor-making. But, as the fine American poet Donald Hall points out in an anthology introducing college freshmen to literature (and vice versa), Shakespeare’s metaphor is especially fitting. Noble Hamlet, torn, is picturing “tak[ing up] arms,” literally, and is picturing the futility of any such resistance.

By way of further second-guessing Mr. Espy’s usually apropos use of examples, is he being ironic in claiming that these earnest, over-quoted lines from Tennyson illustrate sarcasmus?

Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

As do most of Mr. Espy’s books about playing with words, this one also occasionally reminds a reader of other examples, of the ones that seemingly got away. After all, what more fertile source of aposeopesis than the “Eumaeus” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses? That chapter’s pompous, off-putting narrator indulges several times in such “lead[ing] up to a key word until his listeners have it clearly in mind, but then stop[ping].” Here he’s rattling on about Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, and here he’s trailing off into aposeopesis: “You just took the words out of my mouth, he said. A hocus-pocus of conflicting evidence that candidly you couldn’t remotely… [.]” If Mr. Espy needed more examples more recent than Rev. Peachman’s, he might do well to continue browsing further through “Eumaeus.” As Professor Barbara Stevens Heusel points out, the episode contains numerous instances of tmesis (“division of a compound word by the insertion of one or more words between its parts”) and especially of pleonasmus (“using words to state what is clear without them”).

Almost in closing, here’s a note on the drawings by one Teresa Peekema Allen. Some do capture Mr. Espy’s descriptions very pointedly, recreating ruffles and flourishes on the various odd beasties. But midway through the book they do start to cloy, to look too much alike, to favor Sir Joshua Reynolds' 1777 “Strawberry Girl.” You’ve seen her, on all those damnable big-eyed-little-waif posters.

In closing, the book’s most pleasing illustrations flow from Mr. Espy’s pen, not the cartoonist’s. Carefully showing the way metaphora works, Mr. E. says that the exercise of rhetoric “calls into service the whole network of muscles that articulate the body of language…” That articulate is an especially effective touch, the kind that keeps Espians coming back for more, year after year.

[Dennis Moore, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill]

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“Our nachos are the tostada town.” [From a reader-board outside a restaurant in Albuquerque. Submitted by Veronica Egan, Tesuque, New Mexico.]

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“Signs mark the growth—from bustling neighborhood ‘botanicas’ selling cult supplies to headless chickens left in church pews.” [From The Houston Post, June 9, 1984, p. 11G. Submitted by Betty Dillingham, Houston, Texas.]

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“This work [Automobile Liability Insurance—The Law in Georgia, by Frank E. Jenkins III] was originally written to help fill the gap in the lack of material available in Georgia on Automobile Liability Insurance. It is still filling that need.” [From a flyer promoting the book, published by The Harrison Company, Norcross, Georgia. Submitted by Philip R. Oordes, Decatur, Georgia.]

OBITER DICTA: Postpositive Modifiers in English

Frank R. Abate

Very early in any formal study of English we are taught that the grammaticaf heritage of the language is Germanic. This is demonstrated by certain fundamental characteristics of English, such as (a) the essential meaning of sentences is dependent upon patterns of word order; (b) auxiliary verbs are used to denote tense, mood, and aspect; (c) two basic classes of verbs, “strong” and “weak,” are present; and (d) there is unmistakable evidence of regular sound changes similar to those in other Germanic tongues. Despite all of this, the loss of most inflectional endings and the many thousands of non-Germanic vocabulary borrowings by English have done much to mask the inherent nature of the language. Indeed, there is a popular fallacy, still in circulation, asserting that Latin is the ultimate ancestor of English. Notwithstanding the overwhelming influence of Latin on the English lexicon, which gave rise to this fallacy, it is safe to say that English is unquestionably Germanic in its grammatical core.

It does not necessarily follow, however, that English grammar has remained totally unaffected by Romance influence. The Norman aristocracy may have been unable to supplant the language of the native English, but their social and intellectual influence was vast, and the effect of this, long recognized in our vocabulary, can also be seen in English syntax.

Linguists distinguish between Germanic and Romance languages by noting that the former regularly place an adjectival modifier before the noun, while the latter have the modifier following (albeit with certain special exceptions). Thus, English speaks of green beans, open window, and a private room, while the equivalents in French are haricots verts, fenêtre ouverte, and salon privé, all showing the reverse of the English pattern of adjective-noun.

But then, what of phrases such as court martial, attorney general, heir apparent, and the like, which violate the English rule? These three are not all, viz.:

abbot general
accounts payable
accounts receivable
annuity certain
bend sinister (and other terms in heraldry)
body politic
fee simple
fee tail
knight errant
Knights Templar
malice aforethought
mother superior
postmaster general
president-elect
retort discourteous
secretary general
sum total

These can be viewed merely as relics that have become fixed in the language by tradition. Norman influence was particularly strong in the areas of law, government, church Hierarchy, heraldry, and the manners of the court. Norman terms used in these fields were doubtless borrowed verbatim into English, so that now these phrases seem quite natural to native speakers of English. Other examples of Romance combinations used in English can be found in literary and other formal phraseology; these, too, may be borrowings, or loan translations:

devil incarnate
God Almighty
poet laureate
rhyme royal
third person plural, etc.
time immemorial
Vanity Fair

Other literary examples could be added, but we have intentionally tried to avoid listing phrases that may reflect rhetorical use of the figure anastrophe.

Even without the poetic combinations, we have a goodly list of Romance combinations, several of them of considerable frequency in the language. Is it too far-fetched to suggest that these phrases, owing to their vitality and venerability, have contributed a non-Germanic pattern of word order to English? Certain examples, some of them certainly of recent vintage, give evidence that this pattern may be not only a syntactic possibility, but a productive part of the language:

ace high
Boston proper, etc.
Agent Orange penny dreadful
body beautiful (cf. The prizes galore (cf. Pussy Galore, femme fatale in one of Fleming’s James Bond stories)
Body Principal, a fitness book by TV personality Victoria Principal)

Readers are invited to supplement these lists and to submit their observations of other grammatical influences that non-Germanic languages have had on English.

EPISTOLA {Arthur G. Read}

I should like to nit-pick a bone with Mr. Harry Cohen over his concern that simple words should be used so that “any layman can understand them.” I refer to his article, “Down to Earth in a Low Country” [X, 2], in which Mr. Cohen cited a number of usages in the Dutch language that, one might say, were, very much “down to earth,” rendering them quite understandable to the layman. However, he did not follow those examples when writing in the English language.

In the spirit of better understanding of English by the use of simple words, why did Mr. Cohen write, “Numerous medical terms are equally unesoteric in Dutch,” when he might have written, “equally clear in Dutch”? Again, Mr. Cohen wrote, “A high frequency of vocables of Romance root is therefore unsurprising.” Wouldn’t it have been more easily understood had he said, “A high frequency of words derived from Latin roots is therefore not surprising”? Another excerpt: “Whereas a considerable proportion of English scientific terminology is compounded from recondite elements (usually of Latin or Greek origin) and hence abstruse.”

Why didn’t he say, made up from, rather than compounded from? And why the redundant use of recondite and abstruse when both words have essentially the same meaning, i.e., ‘concealed or hidden’? Then he uses the word components, rather than the simple word, parts. And why use the word memorization rather than remembering? Then we find mnemonic aid, which is somewhat of a redundancy inasmuch as the word mnemonic alone is defined as “assisting, or aiding memory.' It is doubtful that many ‘laymen’ use, or understand, the word, and why should they?

Analogous is another example. Why not simply use similar or alike?

Unambiguous could be expressed by simple words such as clear, definite, or certain.

Excerpt: “Dutch scientists seem to be more often in a position to use such a demotic term than their English-speaking colleagues.” Wouldn’t it have been clearer to the layman if the word popular had been used rather than demotic?

Calques: a word ten laymen out of ten—and probably nine out of ten students of English—have never even heard of! Couldn’t Mr. Cohen have used the simple word, copies, rather than calques?

Agglutinations is another. The layman would have more clearly understood had it been stated that two or more words had been united or glued together to form one word, such as beefsteak, grapevine, or inasmuch.

One wonders if Mr. Cohen was more intent on displaying his knowledge of the Dutch language, and his own undoubted erudition, than to writing in language that “any layman can understand.”

[Arthur G. Read, Charlottesville, Virginia]

EPISTOLA {Selma Göksel}

In Daniel Dorff’s article, “The Meaning of Personal Names” [X, 3], reference is made to the name Jesus as being taboo in cultures other than the Hispanic and irrelevant outside of Christianity. The fact is that Isa, Turkish via Arabic for Jesus, is a fairly common name in Turkey, a country whose population is approximately 99% Muslim, as are many other Biblical names.

The reason for this seeming anomaly is that the founders of the two monotheistic religions preceding Muhammad, namely Moses and Jesus, are recognized and revered as prophets by the Muslims. Actually there are many stories from the Old Testament in the Koran, with the names of the persons involved given in their Arabic equivalents. Having thus been given Koranic approval, it is no wonder that they are considered good Muslim names, even including Mesih (‘Messiah’).

It may interest VERBATIM readers to examine the list of Biblical names and their Turkish equivalents given below. The asterisks indicate those most commonly used in Turkey.

Aaron Harun
Abraham
Adam Adem
David Davut
Elias
Ezra Uzeyir
Isaac Ishak
Ishmael
Jacob
Jesus
Job
Jonah Yunus
Joseph Yunus
Messiah Mesih
Moses
John
Mary
Noah Nuh
Solomon
Zacharias Zekeriya

One of my acquaintances has three sons named Musa, Isa, and Mehmet (Turkish form of Muhammad), peace be within their walls!

[Selma Göksel, Ankara]

EPISTOLA {Michael Javoronok}

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

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

[Michael Javoronok, Worcester, Massachusetts]

OBITER DICTA

Sir Brian Young has been discovering “the delights of pedantry” for his Radio 3 column, “Standing Matters.” One of his targets was “that notorious trap, the use of the word ‘literally’ just to be emphatic.” He quoted a letter from a vicar who, on his retirement, had been described by the parish magazine as “literally a father to every child in the parish.” “Still the practice goes on,” Sir Brian said. “When Mrs Thatcher appeared on French television, a reporter said admiringly, ‘There on the screen was the Prime Minister, literally seducing her interviewer.’

“There’s another, rather subtler, group of confused sayings where the words contain the seeds of their own destruction. Hollywood is a rich source of these sayings, most of them credited to Sam Goldwyn. My favourite here is the mogul who told a young actor, ‘Sincerity is the key thing: if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.’ Maybe it’s a type of snarl-up to which Americans are specially prone: certainly I saw a notice in the middle of Lake George which proclaimed, ‘This is Pleasure Island: no landing, no camping, no picnicking.’

“Our clergy are not immune from these self-contradictions either: Bishop Ullathome, when asked to recommend a book on humility, answered without hesitation, ‘Best book on humility? I wrote it myself.’ But I think it was Huw Wheldon who collected the most attractive remark in this class: two women were overheard on the top of a bus, and one was comforting the other with these words, ‘Be philosophical, dear; and don’t give it another thought.’ ”

—Reprinted from The Listener, 3 November 1983, with permission from Sir Brian Young.

EPISTOLA {G. A. Coulson}

I think your correspondent Norman Shapiro [X,3] will have to retrieve his hat from the ring. His argument seems to hang on the pronunciation of the word aye meaning ‘yes.’ Even in Scotland it rhymes with “I”—indeed it is so spelled in the two earliest references given in the OED (1576 and 1594). As for och aye being a common phrase, it may be heard about as often as oo la la is to be heard in France—in fact not often at all if you will believe a Scot with a more than nodding acquaintance with France over some fifty years.

[G. A. Coulson, Diss, Norfolk]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Hospital Disaster Planning Seminar in Room.” [Sign in the lobby of the Baltimore Hilton, December 7, 1982. Submitted by Jeannes S. Wells, Glendora, California.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Flaws Outweigh Faults of Modest Pamphlet.” [From Chess Life magazine, August 1983. Submitted by Drew Downey, Washington, D.C.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Does your child need help with their education?” [From an ad in the Cincinnati Enquirer September 26, 1983. Submitted by Eleanor S. Leigh, Dearborn, Michigan.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“A Rapist Is Sought For 12 Brooklyn Attacks.” [From a headline in The New York Times, May 16, 1984. Submitted by George S. Welsh, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Is It [mIS] or [mIZ]?

Dennis E. Baron, University of Illinois

The present-day status of the feminine marriage-neutral title Ms. is not clear. Its use is widespread, particularly in the business world, but it is also controversial. None of the popular usage guides, even the ones dedicated to nonsexist writing, recommend it. Most advise their readers to employ the title— whether Miss, Mrs., or Ms.—that is preferred by the addressee. When preference is unknown, they suggest that no title at all be used. Claims are made by some authorities that Ms. is spreading, while others insist that it is on the wane. Unfortunately, no accurate usage survey has been made to determine the true status of the title. More puzzling however, to the language historian, is not the present status but the source of Ms.

Although its origins and early history are cloudy, we can determine that Ms. is at least forty years old. It appears to have originated in the 1940s, though it may have been coined even earlier than that. The controversy surrounding its use is much more recent: it does not surface until the 1970s. Ms. does not, however, go as far back as 1767, as some have suggested. The Ms carved on the tombstone of Sarah Spooner, who died in that year and was buried in Plymouth, Massachusetts, is not an example of colonial feminism or a slip of the chisel, but an abbreviation for Mistress. Neither is Ms. the first proposal for revising the Mr., Miss., Mrs. paradigm. As early as 1911 Ambrose Bierce, who opposed the use of all titles, suggests Mush, abbreviated Mh., as a title for a single man; Mr. would then serve to indicate a married one (The Devil’s Dictionary, s.v. Miss). In 1941 American Speech reports proposals for Mk. (short for Mark), and either Br. or Bch. (for Bachelor), to designate available males, as well as Wd. and Wr. for widow and widower, respectively (16:229-30). All of these suggestions for the revision of the masculine title to bring them into line with the feminine ones are made in jest. Ms. is the only serious twentieth-century addition to the system of titles, and the only one that has made some headway.

The earliest cite so far uncovered for marriage-neutral Ms. occurs in Mario Pei’s The Story of Language (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1949). Pei attributes its creation to the women’s rights movement:

Feminists, who object to the distinction between Mrs. and Miss and its concomitant revelatory features, have often proposed that the two present-day titles be merged into a single one, “Miss” (to be written “Ms.”), with a plural “Misses” (written “Mss.”), even at the cost of confusion with the abbreviation for “manuscripts.” [p. 79]

It is evident from Pei’s tone that Ms. had been around for at least a short while, and that it had achieved enough currency or notoriety to merit inclusion in his discussion of titles, though the comments on Ms. are silently dropped from later editions of the book. The pronunciation indicated by Pei suggests that the term may have been at first nothing more radical than a new abbreviation for the marriage-neutral, generalized sense of Miss, a sense which was common through the seventeenth century; which continued, though it was not considered standard, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and which has never entirely disappeared. In 1914, the feminist Fola La Follette urged the formal extension of Miss to serve as the general feminine title both before and after marriage. By the mid twentieth century, usage books acknowledged Miss as an appropriate title for a married woman to retain in business or public life. In addition, twentieth-century secretarial and etiquette handbooks often suggest that Miss could function exactly like Mr., that it could be used as a safe generic title in addressing a letter to a woman whose marital status was unknown.

The history of the current pronunciation of the title, [miz], is not clear, though it suggests that Ms. is not simply an abbreviation of Miss, but a blend of Miss and Mrs. This is the derivation of the word suggested by Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1983). 6,000 Words, published in 1976 as a supplement to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary gives both pronunciations: “miz, sometimes mis,” though the eighth edition of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1974) lists only the more common pronunciation, miz, as does the recent ninth edition (1983). Neither the American Heritage Dictionary nor Webster’s New World Dictionary gives the pronunciation [mis], though both give [miz] and the spelling pronunciation, [\?\εm \?\εs], which does not seem common, and which is occasionally heard in jest, though the dictionaries do not note this fact.

The new term Ms. appears in the paradigm of personal titles included in the seventh edition of Lois Irene Hutchinson’s Standard Handbook for Secretaries (N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 1956). Hutchinson advises her readers, “Always use ‘Mr.,’ ‘Mrs.,’ ‘Miss,’ or ‘Ms.’ before a personal name, unless another title is applicable, as ‘Dr.’… If in doubt about ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs.,’ use ‘Miss’ or ‘Ms.’ (meaning either ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs.').” Hutchinson does not indicate a pronunciation for Ms., but unlike Pei she apparently treats it as separate from, though an alternative to, generalized Miss. No feminist she, Hutchinson also counsels the use of a generic masculine in the most troublesome of cases: “If unable to tell whether the addressee is a man or woman, use ‘Mr.’ ” (310).

If Pei’s information about Ms. is correct, it is distinctly possible that the title originated as an abbreviation for the generalized title Miss. And if by a process of folk etymology the title later came to be reinterpreted as a blend of Miss and Mrs., the terms that it was seen to replace, [miz] could be accounted for as a subsequent pronunciation which was motivated by the need to distinguish Ms. from Miss. Such an explanation is attractive in that it provides Ms. with a history it does not at present have, connecting the title both to the women’s movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and showing it to be an integral and logical part of the development of the feminine title paradigm of Miss, Mrs., and Mistress from Middle English to the present. Unfortunately, we cannot know much more until earlier cites for Ms. are found.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Kevin Wade (Playwright) considers his acting career to have begun as an alter boy in Chappaqua, New York, where he grew up.” [From Stagebill, August 1983, for Key Exchange. Submitted by John T. Metcalf, Lake Forest, Illinois.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The condition of J. P. Lovette, the world’s youngest heart transplant patient, was upgraded from stable to satisfactory, and the 4-year-old Colorado boy munched cornflakes and peddled a stationary tricycle.” [From The Houston Post, June 14, 1984. Submitted by Graciela S. Daichman, Houston, Texas. Somebody has to pay for the operation.]

Light Refractions

Thomas H. Middleton

Regional dialects are disappearing—too slowly, I suspect, for those of us who long for conformity and too swiftly for those who cherish differences. I was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and if you know the Charleston accent, you’ll understand why a Charlestonian hates to see our accents become homogenized—even a Charlestonian like me, who moved to New York at the age of two and no longer bears the slightest trace of Charleston in his speech. The Charleston accent is unique and, to many ears, including mine, beautiful. It is not in any respect a typical “southern accent.” My father, who was both born and reared in Charleston, retained his accent in almost full force all his life, and many people, on hearing his Charlestonian pronunciations and cadences, asked him if he was Irish. There are similarities, and anyone not well tuned to the nuances of dialect might confuse the two. I think it is probably impossible to render the Charleston accent accurately in writing, but perhaps a few words and phrases can convey some of the feeling. The long “a” is usually pronounced approximately as a short “e,” but then that short “e” is given an extra half beat; thus, gate is pronounced “get,” except that the “e” is pleasantly prolonged and briefly savored. Charlestonians used to stick a little y-shaped hook in certain words. A car became a kyaw and a garden a gyawden. In Charleston, one “pled kyawds,” but that “pled” lasts longer than a simple “pled.” Maybe “plehhd” will give you the idea. Using that double-h as an indication that the “e” is to be held for a moment, try “a lehht dehht at ehht by the gyawden gehht” as a rendering of a late date at eight by the garden gate.

I said they used to stick that y-shaped hook in there. About ten years ago my wife, Jeannie, and I went to Charleston, and I told Jeannie she’d fall in love with the accent. I told her specifically to listen to the way they said “kyaw,” “gyawden,” “kyawd,” and so on. I’ll be damned if they hadn’t stopped doing it. We were at a party one night at the home of one of my cousins, and I mentioned that I hadn’t heard anyone say “kyaw” or “gyawden.” My several aunts and cousins and sundry friends considered this for a few moments and then agreed with some astonishment, “My Law-w-d, that’s saw! We used to sehh ‘kyaw,’ but I dawn’t suppaws we do enni maw!” (That’s not bad, as difficult renderings of unusual speech into writing go). The loss of that strange little y in those words saddened me just a little, as any loss of something familiar and endearing will do.

My father once told me that there were four words in the English language, spelled four different ways, meaning four different things, but all pronounced the same. He said a teacher had pointed them out to him when he was in grade school. The words are “heyuh,” as in the “heyuh on yaw head”; “heyuh,” as in the rabbity creature; “heyuh,” as in “I can’t heyuh you”; and “heyuh,” as in “Come awva heyuh.”

The Charleston accent is said to have been greatly influenced by Gullah, that fascinating patois of the Gullah Negroes of the South Carolina Sea Islands and the Middle Atlantic states. Gullah evidently has its origins partly in the African cultures from which the slaves were taken and partly in the dialects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century working-class England and Scotland, whence came most of the early overseers, who taught their own brand of English to the blacks.

A story my niece Elizabeth told me a few months ago was the inspiration for this article. Elizabeth lives in Nova Scotia, and she was visiting some of our relatives in Charleston some years back. In conversation with two of our several very dear and somewhat daft aunts, Elizabeth asked one of the aunts if she’d had pets when she was a young girl. “Well, yehhs,” she said, reminiscing about the long, long ago, “I rememba I had a terrapin.” Elizabeth, who had never heard of a terrapin, asked, “A what?”

“A terrapin.”

“What’s a terrapin?” asked Elizabeth.

“Why, Elizabeth, a terrapin is a cooter.” (Cooter is generally pronounced the same as “Could’a’,” as in “I could’a' had a cooter,” could’a' and cooter being indistinguishable as spoken terms.)

“What’s a cooter?” asked Elizabeth.

“Well,” said our dear old aunt, seeing herself in a hopeless conversational cul-de-sac, “Elizabeth, if you dawn’t knaw what a terrapin or a cooter is, I just dawn’t knaw how I can explehhn it.”

Luckily, another of our dear old aunts was present to say, “It’s a damn turtle.”

My father had mentioned cooters when I was young. It was to him a term of endearment in addition to being a damn turtle. After Elizabeth told me her story, I decided to look it up. I went to The Random House Dictionary. It doesn’t come completely naturally to look up what sounds like “coulda” under “cooter,” but I found it after a brief search. Random House implies that cooter rhymes with hooter; it might, outside of Charleston, but in Charleston, it doesn’t. What interested me particularly was the proposed etymology, “Perh. of Afr. Orig.; cf. Mandingo kuta, turtle.”

Gullah is said to be the language of Porgy, and, in turn, of Porgy and Bess, and, to a degree, it is. If Porgy and Bess were actually pure Gullah, most audiences wouldn’t understand much of it. However, the Gullah expression, “a woman is a sometoim t’ing”—obviously equivalent to the Italian “La Donna e Mobile”—is clearly the basis for the song of approximately the same name from Porgy and Bess.

You might have noticed that “sometoim” for sometime. That isn’t precise, but it’s close enough. It’s certainly a lot closer to Charleston and Gullah than the standard southern “sometam” or “sometom.” And “sometoim” might indicate why people asked my father if he was Irish.

Many years ago, I was told of a Gullah conversation—as brief a conversation as can be imagined, containing two syllables in toto—that can have a great many different meanings:

“Shum?”

“Shum!”

That can mean

‘Do you see (him, her, or it)?’

‘Does he see (him, her, or it)?’

or ‘Does she see (him, her, or it)?’

‘Yes, I see (him, her, or it)!’

‘Yes, he sees (him, her or it)!’

or ‘Yes, she sees (him, her, or it)!’

or ‘Did you see (him, her, or it)?’

‘Did he see (him, her, or it)?’

or ‘Did she see (him, her, or it)?’

‘Yes, I saw (him, her, or it)!’

‘Yes, he saw (him, her, or it)!’

or ‘Yes, she saw (him, her, or it)!’

When I first heard this, I was given about a dozen other tenses, voices, and moods in translation of “Shum?” “Shum!” but my feeling is that they get a bit hifalutin for such a simple exchange.

It seems only reasonable that in time all these lovely dialects will vanish. When my father was a child, he heard practically no English spoken that was not either white Charlestonian or Gullah. Today, it is almost certain that every child in the United States has heard a vast array of accents, from the precious tones of Maurice Evans to the super-plebeian bleats of Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker. First phonograph records, then radio, then the talkies, and finally television have changed the world in so many ways, not the least of which is the enormous range of speech patterns we’re all exposed to.

It would be interesting to see what accent obtains when we all speak in approximately the same way, but that day is still a few generations in the future, and, to tell you the truth, I’m just as glad I won’t make it that far.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Devil’s New Dictionary

Richard lannelli, (Citadel Press, 1984), 324pp.

Here is another book that, for want of a better system of presentation—there must be one somewhere—is in alphabetic order. If you are familiar with Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, you will know what this book is about, but I suppose one should note that the title is not “The New Devil’s Dictionary.”

Humor, the nature of which I have no intention of discussing, is peculiar: things that some people find funny, others view as macabre, tragic, nasty, or just unfunny; as we all know, it works the other way, too. It is impossible to be funny or even amusing for 324 pages, so lannelli tries, pari passu, to be sardonic, sarcastic, bitter, paronomastic, poetic, and various other things. His success, as might be expected, is mixed. It ranges from

Plymouth Rock A kind of popular music originating in south of England.

which I could have done without, to

masochist A person who is fit to be tied.

beard The hair on the face of a man who is extremely careful, and who therefore does not experience many close shaves.

and from

acrophobia Morbid fear resulting from the ancient superstition that falling to the ground from a great height brings bad luck.

to

actor Someone whose job frequently alternates between memorizing lines at the theatre and standing in lines at the unemployment office.

As can be seen, some are corny, some are cute, some are neither. Occasionally there is a poignant entry:

deer An animal which is too beautiful for words, and so it is shot.

The problem with such books, as I have pointed out on many occasions, is that alphabetic order, which is a useful retrieval system if you know what you are looking for, is not particularly well suited for browsing or reading. Perhaps this book would work better were the entries arranged thematically. As it is, one has to read through it to find the good stuff, which is not a thrilling prospect, notwithstanding the fact that much worthwhile material is here, though one should take it in small quantities:

mithridatism The act of taking poison in increasing doses as a means of building an immunity to it, as in the case of people who start out with talk shows and gradually work their way up to situation comedies.

Laurence Urdang

DANGER! Letter Loose!

Alma Denny, New York, New York

“Anger is only one letter away from danger,” reminds my philosopher-friend in the homily he mails to me each month.

Only one letter, but what havoc it can cause when omitted, added, misplaced, changed! Wars may have been averted, marriages saved, jobs preserved simply because of conscientious proofreaders who rescued marital from martial, uniformed from uninformed, and singers from sinners, in the nick.

But one-letter-mayhem still abounds, whether fresh from the typist or the typesetter, and everyone has lists of examples which amuse, shock, amaze, and shake, at the power of that small one twenty-sixth of the alphabet. For example, it can turn:

Friend into Fiend

Lots of talent into Loss of talent

Hire into Fire

Million into Billion

Engaged girl into Enraged girl

United into Untied

Nuclear into Unclear

Comely into Homely

Wool business into Woo business

Married into Marred

Milestone into Millstone

Inducting a judge into Indicting a judge

Deifying into Defying

Venial into Venal

Moral into Amoral

Brother into Bother

Recital into Rectal

Years ago, while a senator, Hubert H. Humphrey was quoted in print as having called the then Vice-President, Richard M. Nixon, a “slocker,” and was forced to insist that the term he used was “slicker,” a form of palatable rhubarb during Presidential campaigns. But just that one letter could have conceivably promoted a libel suit or, in Aaron Burr’s time, even a duel.

Sometimes, the one-letter gremlin forces a double-take as we encounter him in context, as

When the fire broke out, 20-year-old Russell was alone in the house with his baby sitter.

For several reasons, Clarinda LaRue has played leading rôles.

For the victims of slips such as these there may be some comfort in the knowledge that most people don’t read very critically, just scan lines of print to “get the drift,” and may not notice that what is said may, thanks to one errant letter, be not at all what is meant. The absolutely hapless victim, however, is the one caught up in a headline—big bold print that’s inescapable. What could John Doe do when his picture appeared on the Financial Page of his local newspaper under this banner:

John Doe Chosen to Ruin Machine Works Corp.

The only person we know who didn’t object to an error in a headline was Harry S. Truman when an early edition of a newspaper declared Thomas E. Dewey the winner in the 1948 Presidential election. Copies of that error are preserved under glass and treasured.

As for the one-letter mischief afoot, let us rejoice that there are only 26 possible culprits. The Polish alphabet has 45 letters,—but censors, rather than proofreaders, keep them all in place.

Comparatively Speaking

Shelley Saltzman, New York, New York

Having met disaster when preparing my first apple pie, I took exception to the saying “easy as pie.” “Says who?” I countered.

“Says I,” said my husband who finds me cute as a button when I’m angry.

“You’re high as a kite,” I accused.

“Not I, I’m as good as gold.” In anguish, I shouted “You’re driving me nuts. In moments I’ll be crazy as a loon.”

“What the hell is a loon, anyhow?”

“I don’t know, it’s just an American saying.”

“As American as apple pie?”

“Yes, and often right as rain.”

“But not always, dear. Remember what your brother Tony said about my cousin Dolores when we tried to set them up in order to keep the prune business in the family?”

“How could I forget? He said that she was big as a house, flat as a board, and tough as nails.”

“He’s so unfair, she has quite a few nice qualities. For instance, her voice is as smooth as silk, she’s quiet as a mouse, and as gentle as a lamb. She always kept her room neat as a pin.”

“Dear, she’s also mad as a hatter.”

“Well, let’s not discuss it. Could you get me a drink of prune juice? My throat’s as dry as a bone.”

“You always keep me busy as a bee.” I said, and handing him his drink, I added, “I guess it’s an understandable opinion coming from your brother who is handsome as a prince, and fit as a fiddle, but whose outpourings of affection are as phony as a three-dollar bill.”

“Queer as a three-dollar bill,” said my husband.

Tony? Gay?

“Sure as shootin',” said my mate.

“I always thought he was straight as an arrow and as pure as the driven snow.”

“Well, your idea of him is clear as mud and your mores as old as the hills. The fact that he’s homosexual is as plain as the nose on your face.”

Since I always knew my husband didn’t like my nose, I became as silent as a corpse. The only sound heard was that of my canary, proud as a peacock, singing away in his gilded cage. I knew he was as happy as a lark, although I realized he was not as free as a bird.

I was not to be consoled. I phoned Tony: “Come over, I want to talk to you.”

“I’ll be there quick as a wink.”

“You will? But you’re always slow as molasses. Are you going to drive quick as a bunny?”

“Of course I am. I own a Rabbit, don’t I?”

“Oh Tony, you’re quick as a whip.”

As I hung up the phone, I informed my husband that there was no more static on the line and that I could hear Tony clear as a bell. With that, the doorbell rang. Opening the door, my husband responded, “And I see him clear as day. Come in, Tony.”

“How are you, Tony?” I asked.

“Cool as a moose, but twice as loose,” he replied. “And you?”

“Oh, I’m loose as a goose and Herb is as cool as a cucumber.”

“You know, it’s hot as hell out there,” he said. “But it’s cold as ice in here,” replied Herb, lowering the thermostat on the air conditioner.

“What’s up?” asked Tony.

“I want to discuss Dolores with you.” He blushed red as a beet. “What’s to discuss? She’s ugly as sin.”

“Not true, Tony. She’s pretty as a picture,” I stated.

“She’s fat as a cow.”

“Come on, she’s skinny as a rail.”

“And light as a feather,” Herb added.

“No! She’s heavy as lead and dull as dishwater.”

“Oh! She’s sharp as a tack.”

“And rich as Croesus,” I added.

“What? She’s poor as a church mouse.”

“She’s a good woman and good women are as rare as hens' teeth.”

“Women like that are as common as dirt.”

“Now, now, with her you’ll be as happy as a clam,” piped Herb.

Our arguing lasted late into the evening. Outside it was as black as coal. Inside it was as dark as night. Herb and I were worn out. He was as white as a sheet and I was as pale as a ghost. “Come on, Sweetie, let’s go to bed. Tomorrow we’ll be good as new, and convincing Tony will be as easy as one, two, three.” As if he were counting sheep, I fell immediately to sleep. It had been a comparatively long day.

A Special Gift of Words

Maurice Sagoff, Acton, Massachusetts

The poet Paul Valéry gave it a name: vers donné—a poetic expression that comes wafting in like a gift out of the blue, presenting the writer with a perfect opening line for a lyric. I have received such a gift once or twice in my life. I can also attest to the phenomenon of a rime donné—a single word that is not only the perfect rhyme to finish a couplet, but is in fact the only word in the entire language which could serve this purpose. This does not refer to “made up” rhymes which some poets have resorted to when the gift of the Muses failed to arrive. Thus, Poe in Ulalume:

The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere…
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year;
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber…

Poe, it appears, found a rime donné in “sober” to rhyme with “October”; but he needed one more rhyme-word to round out the image, and since it did not come wafting in over his study door he created a fictitious “dim lake of Auber.” Not the real thing, but it worked. Robert Browning also did not wait for the gift but concocted his own outrageous rhymes: Congo/let’s on go; capsule/perhaps you’ll; and dozens more. These are not, I think, what Valéry had in mind.

To cite some legitimate examples: a 19th-century poet whose name I cannot recall evoked a peaceful evening mood with these beginning lines:

The sun sinks ‘neath the ridge
And the usual evening midge
Is settled on the bridge
Of my nose…

Note that the three rhyming words are virtually the only “-idge” trio that one could possibly adduce. A triple gift!

Again, in the light-verse category, I might give an example of my own. I was writing a few clerihews—those four-liners that start with a famous name and go on to say something insightful about the person named—just at the time when da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was being exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (on loan from the Louvre). It was well guarded by security agents and was stared at by thousands of viewers daily. I started my clerihew

Mona Lisa—

then came to a dead stop.

I could think of no exact rhyme. “Teaser,” “pleaser,” etc., are not true rhymes. I was about to give up when the rime donné flashed on my mind as if out of a conjuror’s box.

Mona Lisa, Here on a special visa—

The rest followed easily:

Guarded by FBI and Sûreté agents all the while, Still managed a little smile.

Another instance: while “shrinking” seventy classics of literature and transmuting them into verse for a paperback called Shrinklits, I tackled Walden by Thoreau. The exercise called for drastic verbal economy while preserving the sense of the original. Here is the beginning of the “shrinklit”:

Beyond mere goods
The pond, the woods;
Live there as I
And simplify…

(it runs on for several more lines). Knowing Thoreau’s aversion to commercialism and his reasons for going to the Walden area, I was obliged at the outset to find a rhyme for “woods.” As you observe, the gift-word arrived in the first line.

This phenomenon makes no class distinctions. It may be found in the lowliest ditty, as one song-writer discovered while composing lyrics for “The Bearded Lady,” a barber-shop melody some readers may recall. It begins

I love the bearded lady ‘cause her whiskers tickle so, Her whiskers make me prickle from my head down to my toe,

Now the lyricist wanted to employ the word “passionate” but that appeared impossible to rhyme, except for the inspiration of the donné:

The kiss with the mustache in it!
No wonder I’m so passionate … etc.

Ogden Nash must have been on excellent terms with the Muse in this particular. A striking example is his brief but pungent observation, entitled (I quote from memory) “Lines to a Baby’s Bottom”:

A little talcum
Is always walcum.

It may be questioned whether Valéry would have admitted the last two specimens as qualifiers. I leave the judgment up to the reader.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Poles salute underground.” [From a headline in the Chicago Tribune, December 5, 1983, Sec. 1, p. 14. Submitted by Roseanna Mueller, La Grange, Illinois.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Visitors in Burlington’s City Hall may be in for a surprise when they want to go to the public bathrooms on the first floor. The bathrooms have been closed to the public during the day because of repeated abuse of them by a small group of vandals. … The bathrooms will be open for public meetings, such as the aldermen, Planning Commission and Finance Board.” [From the Burlington (Vermont) Free Press, March, 1984. Submitted by Alain Guilloton, New York City.]

In Honor of the Occasion

Clifton Brock, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

In east-central North Carolina, heading in a southwesterly direction out of Chapel Hill, yon can drive over back-country roads through an area which has remained surprisingly rural. The terrain is that slowly rolling kind found along the fringes of the Piedmont plateau, with plenty of hills, but which only a sailor would call mountainous. In areas where the soil was more hospitable, this kind of country can be bountiful. But around here the advancing icecaps slowed and dumped too much rock. Centuries of erosion carried off most of the topsoil, and now the pines and hardwoods struggle on almost equal terms, with neither doing well. The land was never much for farming, and by the 1950s, depressions, wars, and the pull of the city had drained it of population. The Piedmont rivers, which had attracted 19th-century textile mills with their water power, are too far away, and those man-made rivers of concrete, the Interstate highways, also have by-passed it. Today the area consists mostly of deserted farms, with only an occasional mobile home or brick ranch house to indicate the flight back to the land of furniture and textile workers from the surrounding but distant towns of Asheboro, Pittsboro, and Greensboro.

The region did enjoy a brief prosperity in the late 1800s. Some early geological accident deposited there the precise mix of clay and minerals needed for pottery making, and around the turn of the century—before liquor became commercialized and bottled—it was a center for producing and exporting whiskey jugs. A few potters still survive and in recent years have enjoyed a modest revival, based on the carriage trade from Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and other urban areas, plus the occasional Yankee tourist who has read about the potters and goes out of his way to find them. They have not adjusted well to this new market. Most stubbornly persist in making useful objects, don’t much care if you buy or not, and—if they come to trust you—not only will sell you a jug but will arrange to have it filled for you.

Other than the potters, there is not much there. You can drive through the area undisturbed except for the occasional teenager testing his engine and skills. Today the principal export is first-class stock-car racers.

We have come to know and love that country, but several years ago my wife and I were making our first exploration there. We were partly trying to search out the potters, but mostly we were celebrating a day away from work and kids, just driving around leisurely and aimlessly, keeping cool with a nice wine. Somewhere south of Asheboro we came upon a small place, not even a crossroads, with just a house, a country church, and a gas station. I slowed down to accommodate a passing dog, looked up and saw a highway sign reading “Whynot.” After all the “boros,” each dutifully and dully named for long-forgotten generals and statesmen, at least this was something different. We laughed and puzzled a bit about it as I drove on, turned right, and headed down an even smaller country road. Shortly we came to another place, this time a crossroads with a stop sign, a store, and a farmhouse off in the distance. Eunice, already a little loose and giggly from the wine, let out a whoop and pointed up to another sign, which read “Erect.” We sat there awhile, laughing and speculating over the naivete of the locals. I turned left, and as we headed north we began passing other crossroads, with signs pointing back down the road and reading “Erect 2,” “Erect 5,” “Erect 7,” etc. Eunice was holding both hands out, slowly spreading them apart as we passed the signs, letting her eyes go wider and wider, and making ribald comments. Somewhere along there she gave me a meaningful look and grin, shrugged, and asked “Why not?”

When we returned to the car and continued on down the road, we came shortly to another crossroads, this one a little larger, with two stores, a small branch bank, and several houses.

Its name was “Climax.”

After several more trips down that way I became curious about the names. And I can tell you that no one knows how those names arose. Neither the most learned historians of the state university, nor its most diligent librarians, nor the region’s sharpest journalists have been able to discover their true origins.

The major newspapers of the state periodically run stories on the odd and sometimes suggestive place-names which dot the map of North Carolina—Ad Valorem, Vengeance, Bear Wallow Ball, Shoofly, Loafers’ Glory, Charlie’s Bunion, Hearts-ease, Huggin’s Hell, Bottom, Hasty, French Broad, etc. They almost always include Whynot but seldom mention Erect and Climax, much less indicate that they are all located within a few miles of each other. The state gazetteer, which must strive for completeness and is used in the public schools, has some explanations which you may believe if you wish. We are told there that Whynot got its name when the people around there were required to name their settlement for postal purposes, got together one day, but could not reach agreement. Everyone kept saying “Why not name it this,” or “Why not name it that,” and so they named it Whynot. The name of Erect, so the book says, “was suggested to the post office department in the 1870s by C. M. Tyson, local merchant, to compliment the posture of his neighbor, Tom Bray.” Climax was so named “for its location on high ground.”

There are no early records regarding Whynot. It is said that this version of its origin was passed along over generations as part of the local folklore, and it makes a quaint story. In his Names on the Land; a historical account of place-naming in the United States, however, George R. Stewart notes that “the same type of story turns up in various regions” and that “there once was a Whynot in North Carolina, and there is still a Whynot in Nebraska.” The one in North Carolina is still there, too, though it no longer has a post office, and postal names formed the basis for Stewart’s book. Stewart does not mention Erect or Climax, but there are some manuscript records in the University of North Carolina Library that conflict somewhat with the official version. From those, it appears that the merchant Tyson was the local wit, and something of a disreputable fellow, but that the name itself originated well before the 1870s and that he probably just passed it along to the postal authorities when they designated his store as the post office and required him to name it. As for Climax, you can stand there, look both north and west, and see range after range of hills, all higher than Climax, climbing up to the Blue Ridge Mountains, which are visible on a clear day.

I have a hunch about those names. Perhaps it is fanciful, but you be the judge.

It is known that this area of North Carolina was settled in the mid 18th century by Scotsmen moving down the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania. They were a devout people whose church at that time was in a militant phase, eager to proselytize and keep the Church of England from spreading inland from the coast. They brought with them fire-breathing preachers, famed for their fundamentalist rhetoric, but some of whom nevertheless were not immune to at least one of the homeland’s weaknesses and were known to drink what the Indians called “firewater.” There are records that prove all this. The records also show that during this early time it was clergymen, not politicians or real-estate developers, who were called upon to christen places as well as babies. The place-names frequently reflected the hopes of their people, and that is why you see so many “New Hopes” and “Lebanons” and “Salems” scattered over the Southern countryside.

I like to think that it was some magnificent old joker of a Calvinist circuit-rider who started out on his rounds one summer morning, picked up a pretty and willing passenger, dallied along the way, and named those places in honor of the occasion.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Two Santa Barbara divers were trapped underwater when they got stuck in a crack while repairing the submerged face of Exchequer Dam in Mariposa County…. A third diver, Jack Fonner, tied another rope around Rogers, and he was freed by several men pulling on it. A wench on a barge then had to be used to extract Thompson, who was submerged for three hours.” [From the Porterville, Cal., Recorder, May 19, 1984, p. 11. Submitted by Ruth E. Smith, Porterville, California.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“No Hop Pickers, Travellers or People With Adverse Hairstyles.” [Sign on the door of an inn in Alton, Hampshire. Submitted by Thomas L. Bernard, Springfield, Massachusetts.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Once or twice she had ridden the steamboat with Papa to Baltimore and walked among those glittering and swirling crowds holding Papa’s hand and gaping at the wonder of it.” [From Growing Up, by Russell Baker. Submitted by Joe Owens, New Paltz, New York, who comments, “It must’ve been some hand.”]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“ ‘A Tale of Two Cities,’ 8 p.m., Ch. 7. Chris Sarandon stars in TV version of Victor Hugo’s classic French Revolution romantic adventure.” [From TV Week in The Boston Globe, June 10-16, 1984. Submitted by Robert Sinnott, Norwell, Massachusetts.]

Rose Moles

Lawrence Dugan, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“Rose Moles” is a metaphor from the poem “Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and is the name that I give to memorable poetry—couplets, phrases, a word or two—that I first came across outside of the original poem. For instance, “… For rose-moles in all stipple upon trout that swim”; is Hopkins’ line, but I first heard the words “rose-moles” quoted by themselves. A professor at Temple University used them as an example of a beautiful metaphor, never giving the rest of the line. He probably never gave the title of the poem, because it was several years before I found the words again, in “Pied Beauty.”

In his biography, Adolf Hitler, John Toland groups several chapters about Hitler’s diplomacy in the 1930s under the heading “War In Masquerade,” and opens with these lines from John Dryden.

…
At least such subtle covenants shall be made
Till peace itself is war in Masquerade.

They are from Dryden’s “The Second Part of Absalom And Achitophel,” a long poem in heroic couplets using the Biblical story of Absalom’s revolt against his father, King David, as an allegory for the shaky state of political affairs in Restoration England. The lines refer, of course, to the use of diplomacy for warlike ends. Toland doesn’t cite the poem’s title, just the author, and it was three years before I read the complete poem. This is the usual form of the rose mole, a dramatic phrase, perhaps the author’s name, rarely a title, and never line numbers.

James T. Farrell quotes A. E. Housman at the opening of his novel A World I Never Made.

I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.

I was a high-school student when I read these lines and didn’t know about the battery of reference books like Bartlett’s and Granger’s Index To Poetry that can be useful in placing quotations. So every couple of months I’d look up Farrell’s novel in the library, usually late in the afternoon, and reread Housman. I must have picked up A Shropshire Lad a hundred times, but never found the couplet until my sophomore year at Temple University, when Professor Richard Llwellyn, of the English department, told me that it came from “The Laws Of God, The Laws Of Man” in Last Poems.

For obvious reasons the couplet is the form most likely to take a hold on us. The second line somehow strengthens the first, and if the thought moves us, we hold on to the rhythm even if we only remember a few words.

The indirect rose mole can be the trickiest. I saw the film version of The Horse’s Mouth, with Alec Guinness as Gulley Jimson, before I read Joyce Gary’s novel. At the end of the movie as he floats down the Thames on a houseboat, Guinness shouts:

…
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

When I read the novel the lines weren’t there. Eventually I found them, not in Blake, as I thought I would—he is quoted throughout the book—but as the last lines in Chesterton’s “The Rolling English Road,” one of GKC’s best poems. When I saw the film again I checked the credits and noticed that Guinness, along with playing Jimson, was listed as screenwriter. Chesterton’s optimism is a deeper, more complex impulse than we often realize; Guinness understood that, and the lines fit perfectly the personality of a hard-working, slightly crazy, elderly English painter who, having been a success as a young painter, is now a flop as an older one.

I still find it strange to think that I first read two of my favorite lines in American poetry in John Updike’s Bech: A Book.

…
As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God.

I don’t know when I finally located them in Sidney Lanier’s beautiful ode about the South Carolina seashore, “The Marshes Of Glynn,” but I doubt that I’ve ever forgotten a word of them, and I owe a great debt to Updike’s funny book.

The best-placed rose mole I’ve come across is at the top of Frank O’Connor’s short story, “The Long Road To Ummera.”

Stay for me there. I will not fail
to meet thee in that hollow vale.

The lines are from Henry King’s 17th-century elegy, “The Exequy.” Here again I don’t know how I finally found the original poem, for O’Connor makes no attribution, not even the author. Somehow those lines seem to just float over his melancholy story about the death and burial of an old Irish woman.

I have emphasized the couplet, but Keats used only one line on the dedication page of “Endymion,” his long poem “inscribed to the memory of Thomas Chatterton:”

The stretched meter of an antique song.

The thought of the early deaths of Keats and Chatterton, the unfinished quality of “Endymion,” and the bitter attacks of the Scottish critics on Keats gave the line such a haunting, complete meaning—a sort of finished fragment—that I almost wished not to know the author. I eventually saw the words attributed to Shakespeare in a critical piece on Keats. They are from Sonnet 17, and Keats substituted “the” at the beginning of the line for Shakespeare’s “and.”

Poe insisted that poetry is a lyrical medium, that even great long poems like Paradise Lost are uneven, their beauty lying in wait between stretches of prosaic flatness. I suspect that most poetry readers would not agree with Poe’s theory, but in practice many of us push it farther: even within short poems we fix on a couple of lines that sum up a truth so easily that all modern philosophy seems the long road to a nearby place.

Now can anybody help me with these lines?

… If I could say a thing or two, The Dutch have mighty things in view.

I saw them a few months ago as a chapter heading in Sir Walter Scott’s St. Ronan’s Well. I not only cannot place them, but I have forgotten over which chapter in the novel they appear, so I might have misquoted them. They don’t contain the concentrated feeling that you want on or just after the title page of your autobiography, but I can’t shake them loose.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“… Mr. Millhouse will bear the brunt of the failure. In 1979, he bought majority control of the company’s stock, along with his mother.” [The Wall Street Journal, October 11, 1983. Submitted by Pamela Kay Stone, Beaverton, Oregon.]

Primults or Protohysts

Robert A. Fowkes, New York University

If we take the initial letter of an English word (which sometimes represents the initial sound, but not always) and place it at the end, we often get a different word having, of course, very little to do with the original. Sometimes the results are amusing to those of us sufficiently stunted intellectually to enjoy such nonsense. It may not be abundantly clear why anyone should indulge in this sort of tomfoolery, but in the days when Pig Latin flourished, the first step in forming the alloporc was, while essentially phonetic, a process similar to the aberration being indulged in here. A swinified dice, e.g., would be something like ice-day. One hesitates to write Pig Latin, for it never achieved a kosher orthography. People ont-day itewray ig-pay atin-lay. Unlike words in Latina porcina, primults do not add an element; they merely put the first (prim-) element last (-ult). Protohyst is merely a Greek synonym. They are no respecters of phonetic shapes; the new orthographic form—the spelling—is everything. Thus the primult of dice is iced, which preserves quite a lot of the phonetic content, while the primult of heart is earth, which does violence to practically everything but the r (assuming it is present in one’s speech). Some other primults of moderate interest include:

drake: raked
ebon: bone
ether: there
ewe: wee
flea: leaf
gelatin: elating
height: eighth
kin: ink
low: owl
malar: alarm
mite: item
plum: lump
rave: aver
ruse: user
saddle: addles
sharp: harps
spew: pews
tar: art
thin: hint
tough: ought
trap: rapt
wane: anew

The cheapest primults are those derived from words with initial s, because that letter is so frequent, both initially and finally, in English that we can find dozens of primults of such words almost without effort, for example:

scream: creams
screw: crews
scud: cuds
sewer: edges
sewer: ewers
shade: Hades (with obviously no respect for the integrity of sh = s) sink: inks
share: hares
sherd: herds
ship: hips
shoe: hoes
shook: hooks
shorn: horns
shovel: hovels
shunt: hunts
skid: kids
skill: kills
slake: lakes
slaughter: laughters
slumber: lumbers
smother: mothers
spawn: pawn
spill: pills
spoke: pokes
spun: puns
sputter: putters
stale: tales
start: tarts
stinker: tinkers
strumpet: trumpets
swaddle: waddles
swallow: wallows
sword: words

We could add to the list, but it is almost shamefully easy, despite some titillating overtones.

Sometimes we can imagine a semantic link between a word and its primultimate twist, but the connection is usually far-fetched. We may try to cope with Opec, and one may tire of stale tales. It would be pandering to start tarts. The pub rarely has a sale on ales. Yet evil is not too different from vile, and scat is a word for some cats. A swallowed plum may produce a lump. Along the Isar I sometimes have seen a sari. A ramble may well be enjoyed by an ambler. My hair resembles sedge around the edges; on top I must opt for a smoother simile. A classical shade is assigned a spot in Hades, and by its side, perhaps, is that of one slain on the Ides. Cattle may be shorn of their horns. Don’t shoot everything that hoots; a low owl may be the victim. There is sparse likelihood of a class that parses these days. A smart shopper could look for marts in small malls. It takes spunk to stand up to punks. A stumble should be avoided by one who tumbles. Much wounding can be done by the sword of words.

Stingy primults can be formed from petty words like has, (ash), the (het), hug (ugh!), sit (its), yam (Amy), two (wot), and the like. In rare cases a second primult can be formed, yielding a sequence of three barely or boringly connected words:

eon: one: neo
Ida: Dai: aid
Levi: evil: vile
rave: aver: Vera
sera (pl. of serum): eras: rase
side: Ides: Desi
spa: pas: asp
stern: terns: Ernst (?)
tea: eat: ate

But in these there is considerable cheating with names, etc. A sequence of four was not found.

The first shall be last. Perhaps only a stinker tinkers like this with our sacred words.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character and Community

James Boyd White, (The University of Chicago Press, 1984).

James Boyd White holds three positions at the University of Michigan—professor of law and English as well as adjunct professor of classical studies—and he combines all three disciplines in this extremely interesting, if somewhat esoteric, volume. What he characterizes as “a book of readings” is designed to be “a way of reading, a set of conceptions and questions and attitudes—a language of criticism, if you will— that the reader can learn, if he [she] chooses, and put to work in his [her] own life.” (Material in brackets supplied by this enlightened reviewer.) In other words, an eclectic how-to work that will appeal to all those who, like myself, daily deal in language as our primary substantive tool.

It was Thucydides who, during the chaos created among Greek city states by the wearing Peloponnesian War, complained bitterly that, because of the conflict, words themselves had lost their meaning. White, building on this ancient observation, promises early on that he intends to demonstrate “the ways in which words came to have their meanings and to hold or lose them and how they acquire new meanings, both in the individual mind and in the world.” This is just another way of saying that language is so inherently flexible that the same words or phrases in different mouths can convey intended meanings that are diametrically opposed to each other, very much like Mark Twain’s sectional preachers during the Civil War who called upon the same God to grace their respective armies with swift and glorious victory.

To demonstrate his bedrock premise of the essential untrustworthiness of language, the author, by a painstaking but, by no means, uninteresting, point by point analysis, takes apart the poetry of the Iliad, Thucydides' History, Plato’s Gorgias, Swift’s Tale of a Tub, Johnson’s Rambler Essays, Jane Austen’s Emma, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and Chief Justice John Marshall’s remarkable opinion in McCulloch v. Maryland, the celebrated 1819 national bank case. The purpose behind the utilization of these widely variegated resources is, putting it somewhat more earthbound than does White, to illustrate that, in relying on language, we are pinning our hopes and reasonable expectations on sand so shifting that it will not support our collective weight.

However, When Words Lose Their Meaning raises infinitely more questions than it answers, a fact that its author freely acknowledges. As he states in his Afterword, “I express the hope that this book has offered the reader a set of experiences that can serve as the material of allusion and reference, a ground on which to stand in looking at other texts, including those of his and her [he has finally conceded that females can read and write] own production.” But the rather pedantic close encounters he enjoys with the selected texts of his literary examples will hardly furnish the general reader with any practical guide to the uncertainties, perversions, and outright deceptions promoted by those who employ language to reach a particular result or convey a desired impression.

Since, like White, I am a lawyer, I was most interested in his last chapter, Constituting a Culture of Argument, which is overoptimistically subtitled, The Possibilities of American Law. In it, employing the same techniques applied to his earlier analyses of the particular works of Homer, Swift, Austen, Burke, & Co., he picks apart the Declaration of Independence with a minuteness and a fervor which, if there is indeed an afterlife, will certainly have Thomas Jefferson whirling like a dervish in his Virginia grave. It will surprise many readers that this document, which most of us have always regarded as a heated call to arms, runs, according to White, by the tone of much of its language, “a temperature … of … nearly … zero.”

Whenever Jefferson and his collaborators managed to surmount their mildness and gentility and hinted that there lay ahead text that would ring the tocsins and saddle the horses, the good professor declares, they immediately drew back with a phrase intended to mollify those who eschewed slogans that made the heart beat and the blood flow faster. For example, in the Declaration’s first sentence, the one beginning with the all too familiar phrase, “When in the course of human events,” the flamboyant reference to “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” now entitled the rebellious colonials is quickly followed by the temporizing explanatory phrase, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” In Professor White’s analysis, this opening sentence “simply ‘declares’ that certain ‘causes’ have produced certain effects, and it does so with no more passionate motive than ‘a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.’ ”

While I found this type of verbal dissection fascinating to read as well as to ponder, I did not sense it to be much more than stimulating table talk. The autopsy of a work of art—and the Declaration certainly qualifies as one—completely sublimates its overall purpose and effect and reduces it to nothing more than a collection of vulnerable ingredients. As I read on, I kept being reminded of e. e. cummings' wholly appropriate couplet:

as long as you and I have lips to kiss and sing with who cares if some one-eyed son-of-a-bitch invents an instrument to measure spring with

The Declaration was conceived as a supremely political document, intended to provide a legal justification for revolution, inspire those who would have to fight it, and win as many supporters, foreign and domestic, as possible in the difficult days that undoubtedly lay ahead.

Of course, White is not oblivious to the needs which the Declaration served. While describing what he calls the document’s “unstable constitution,” he acknowledges that “[I]t creates in its ideal reader a resolve based on a sense of common identity, on the justice of the cause, and on necessity, and it does this enormously well.” Then, one might ask, of what earthly value was it to engage in the laboratory exercise of looking at every word and phrase through the semanticist’s superpowered microscope? Why not accept the instrument for what it so obviously was, an explanation of why revolution was the only possible course for the colonists and a stimulus to risk life and limb to make it a successful one?

As one who spends a great deal of his waking time writing briefs or memoranda for lower and appellate courts, treatises which are designed to move those to whom they are addressed to my clients' points of view, I am extremely sensitive to many of the author’s pungent observations on the use and effect of language. My criticism, if indeed my remarks reach that station, is that I do not believe that Professor White can fulfill the promise he makes to his prospective readers that his “book of readings” can be “put to work” in their own lives. That he will tickle and delight them is a given, but that he has created a useful tool with which to analyze the written (or spoken) word, I am not prepared to say. I will leave, as all reviewers, in the final analysis, must, the ultimate judgment to those who come to his book with their own degree of expectations. All that I can add is that I enjoyed it as one enjoys a completed house, but I would hardly regard it as capable of teaching me to wield the hammer, the saw, and the lathe necessary to bring the full edifice into being. To paraphrase one who rarely minced his words, if this be reason, make the most of it.

William M. Kunstler

Vice-President

Center for Constitutional Rights

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Power of Little Words

John L. Beckley, (Economics Press, 1984), 128pp.

“Power” is right. “Economics” may be the misnomer of the year for a publisher pricing a book of about 35,000 words at fifteen dollars: that is heavy going even for these days.

But my first suspicions were aroused by the author’s first words (in the foreword, titled “Hello!”): “This is not a book for scholars.” He seems to have got it wrong from the start, for if there is any group of writers (aside from the illiterati who produce much of the computer documentation these days) who are in dire need of instruction on the simplification of their writing, it is scholars. There are always exceptions, of course, but, as a group, scholars, whose main function must be to interpret some facet of the world’s myriad phenomena into terms that others can understand, seem to be extraordinarily successful at the exact opposite—obfuscation—and a few lessons in logic, in the straightforward clarification of ideas, and in basic language skills in expository writing ought to be a prerequisite for all academic degrees, especially the advanced degrees awarded to those who are likely to be the ones responsible for explaining the universe to others.

Beckley, who turns out to be the founder of the Economics Press, is not your man, I’m afraid. On pages 20 and 21, for starters, he presents two passages of writing, the first “from an editorial that appeared in a business magazine,” the second, his rewritten version “using somewhat simpler wordage”:

“This has been a time of grand visions for the economy—some optimistic, some pessimistic. We have heard proposals for ‘reindustrialization.’ We have been told about structural shifts that are carrying us along to a service economy. We have heard of the death of basic industries—and of their renaissance, “Whatever school of thought we embrace, we can be misled about the essential truth of what is going on. Sweeping visions of what is happening tend to make us think that mystical laws of economics will shape the days ahead—that we should wait to see what is in store for us.
“This has also been a time of criticism of
American management, with much of the criticism coming from within its own ranks. Healthy self- analysis can be constructive. But, if we wallow in self-blame, the effort can be destructive to individual companies and to the nation.”

“This has been a time of grand predictions for business—some good, some bad. Some people propose rebuilding our basic industries. Others forecast a shift in emphasis from manufacturing products to delivering services- computer and communications services for example. We hear that basic industries are dying— then others report they’re reviving. “Whatever school of thought we embrace, we can easily be misled. Sweeping predictions of what will happen tend to make us think that mystical laws of economics are shaping the days ahead. All we need do is wait and watch it take place. “American management has been criticized, with much of the criticism coming from its own ranks. That’s not bad—it’s good. But enough is enough. If we wallow in self-criticism, it can be bad for individual companies and the country as well.”

The curious thing about the rewritten version is that although it is slightly different from the original, it isn’t simpler, and Beckley has done nothing that I can see to improve it. In fact, he has changed the tenses of the verbs to detract from the immediacy of the original message (“what will happen” for “what is happening”), has changed some words for the worse (substituting “predictions” for “visions”), and has distorted the sense of the original writer’s words (changing “we should wait to see what is in store for us” to “we need to wait and watch it take place”). The reader can make his own comparisons.

But the book is a waste of time for other reasons. It would take a lot of persuading to convince me that people can learn to write simply and clearly without being subjected to a training program of some concentration over a period of (at least) several months; they should be required to write regularly thousands of words a week which would be edited by someone who knows not only what he is doing but how to teach it to others. There is no shortcut to learning how to write clearly (let alone well, much less artistically); it cannot be learned from a book of any kind, and anyone who suggests that an aspiring writer can take a pill one day and wake up the following morning knowing how to write well is perpetrating a fraud. Another requirement of learning how to write is learning how to read, how to read critically, and how to understand. There may be some who are capable of writing well with little training, but they are geniuses, and we know how few of them there are.

Laurence Urdang

From A to Zygoste for Yexing Readers

Louis Phillips, New York City

Who compiled the first English language dictionary? The answer to that question is open to considerable dispute. Some standard reference works give the nod to Nathan Bailey who published his dictionary in 1721. I, however, harbor considerable fondness for Henry Cockeram who published his English dictionary in 1623. The title page of that work at least uses the words “English Dictionarie,” and the alphabetical listing of words contains definitions of considerable charm. The title page of the 1623 edition reads:

The English Dictionarie, or Interpreter of hard English Words—Enabling as well Ladies and Gentlewomen, young Schollers, Clarkes, Merchants, and also Strangers of any nation to the Understanding of the more difficult authors already printed in our language, and the more speedy attaining of an elegant perfection of the English tongue, both in reading, speaking, and writing. Being a collection of the choisest words contained in the Table Alphabeticall and English Expositor, and of some thousands of words never published by any heretofor

By H. C. Gent.

Now what more from a dictionary can any reader want? Henry Cockeram designed his work to be published in three volumes. As he tells us in “A Premonition from the Author to the Reader,”

First the method is plaine and easie, being alphabetically, by which the capacity of the meanest may soon be inlightened. The first Booke hath the choisest words themselves now in use, wherewith our language is inriched and become so copious, to which words the common sense is annexed. The second Booke contains the vulgar words, which whensoever any desirous of a more curious explanation by a more refined and elegant speech shall looke into, he shall there receive the exact and ample word to expresse the same: Wherein by the way let me pray thee to observe that I have also inserted (as occasion served) even the mocke-words which are ridiculously used in our language, that those who desire a generality of knowledge may not bee ignorant of the sense, even of the fustian termes, used by too many who study rather to bee heard speake, than to understand themselves. The last Booke is a recitall of severall persons, Gods and Goddesses, Giants and Devils, Monsters and Serpents, Birds and Beasts, Rivers, Fishes, Herbs, Stones, Trees, and the like, to the intent that the diligent learner may not pretend the defect of any helpe which may informe his discourse or practice.

In one sense, Book Three of Cockeram’s work is the great-great granddaddy of The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable by the Reverend E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

We may not know much about the true character of the Gentleman Cockeram, but there is no doubt that he was a true lover of the English language—and of its quirks and peculiarities. And, if his “Premonition to the Reader,” is a typical example of the man’s style, we can also feel a lively and witty mind at work. In addition, he was certainly not given to any false modesty, for the opening pages of his work contain a number of verses praising himself. Nicholas Smith’s poem (one line short of being a sonnet), wherein the first letters of each line spell out (nearly) HENRIE COCKERAM, provides a choice example of a poet unraveling, in the labyrinth of fustian diction, a thick clew of vocabulary:

To his very good friend, Master Henry Cockeram, on his Vocabulary

H e whose seife love, or too ambitious spirit,
E nvies or carpes at this thy Muses action,
N ere let him live, or of a Muse once merit
R egard or fame, but die in his detraction,
I rrevocably plagu’d with Zoilan spight,
E re he once taste of Hellicons delight.
Could I, oh could I quintessence my skill,
O r with Elixir truly alcumize,
K nowledge with learning should instruct my quill
Effectually to praise thy Muses guise,
Re-felling all the criticall disasters,
A mong some captious, yet wise seeming masters,
Made by her curious eye, their owne distasters.
NICHOLAS SMITH,
Eques Auratus Encomiastes Posthumus.

The Dictionary itself is very rare and very difficult to locate, but Book One is a delight for those readers in search of out-of-the way, obsolete, quirky and playful terms. One rainy afternoon, when I should have been cleaning out my closet, I decided to compile a list of choice morsels from Cockeram’s book. Definitions affixed to some of the more common words may surprise you, but, in any case, here are a few gleanings from 1623 to enliven your next conversation or your next Scrabble™ game—whichever comes first.

aconitum A poysonous herbe whereon Cerebus spued out his poyson when he was dragd out of Hell by Hercules.

acromicke Having long hair.

adolescenturate To play the boy, or foole.

bandle An Irish measure of two foot in length.

bath Ten Pottles in liquor.

brachilogies Short speeches.

caligation Dimness of sight.

callette A lewd woman.

curiositie More diligence than needs.

cyrne A goblet to drink wine in.

daffe A coward.

danist A usurer.

deboyst fellow A lewd scum of the earth.

definition A declaration what a thing is.

dicker Ten hides of leather.

didinie Twins.

effacinate To bewitch.

elephancie Leprosie.

ephi A measure containing five pecks.

etymologie The true exposition of a word.

fastigate To sharpen a thing upward.

fenchmoneth A Moneth (month) wherein Does doe Fawne.

It begins about the Ninth of June, and continueth untill the Ninth of July, in which time it is not lawfull to hunt in any forrest without paying fees: which fee, for a paire of Wheeles is foure pence, and for Paniers two pence, which fee being once paid they may for that season freely passe.

flammigerate To cast out flames.

frondosous Full of leaves.

galactopoton One that still drinks milk.

glyciamerides Dainty meats.

gymnasticke A teacher of the wrastling sciences.

haberdepoise A pound weight of sixteen ounces.

hamkin A pudding made upon a shoulder of mutton, all the flesh being first taken off.

hide of land Some say it is one hundred acres.

hippoboton A feeder of Horses.

hirquiticke One part of fourteene yeeres of age, beginning to bee moved with Venus delights.

ideall A proper man.

imberbiche Without a beard.

intercourse Passing or sending one to another.

interlucate To cut boughs.

jewife A gallows or gibbet.

jub A bottle.

juorie The Elephant’s tooth.

kab Three Wine quarts.

karos A drowsie disease in the head.

kintall A hundred weight.

lachanaopoll Which selleth herbs, or herb market.

lesses Dung of some ravenous beast, wolfe, or bear.

lingle A shooe-makers threed.

lurdein A clowne.

lymphat To make mad.

marches Bounds lying betweene two countries.

Marcian-moneth The moneth of March.

massell To stammer.

mastuprate Dishonestly to touch one’s privities.

monologie A long tale of little worth.

mustricle A shooe-maker’s Last.

notice Knowledge.

noverca A mother-in-law.

novercall Belonging to a step-mother.

nullifidean One of no account or religion.

obambulate To walke abroad.

option Wishing.

ovatike season The time when Hens lay.

pact A bargain.

pactolean sands Golden sands.

phlebotomie Blood-letting.

pioner An underminer in an armie.

pupillate To cry like a peacock.

pytillise To go on tiptoe.

Quintilian moneth The moneth of July.

racenation Gathering of grapes.

scut The taile of a hare or Conny.

seminairie A nurserie.

sorbition A sipping often.

sugillate To beat blacke and blew.

synopsie The full view of a thing.

tentipels Shooes with iron soles.

thrill One that has no nose.

thummen Perfection.

uberate To give suck, to fatten with the brest.

ultion Revenge.

undosous Full of surges and waves.

urinate To dive or swimme under water.

vacacitie Manliness.

vacation Emptinesse, a ceasing from labour.

wanze To perish, to decay.

waife Goods that a felon flying, leaveth for haste behind him, which are commonly forfeit as the Lord of the soile, if the right owner be not knowne.

Xanticall moneth The moneth of April.

yexing Sobbing.

zoograph Any-one that painteth beasts.

zygoste One that is appointed to see to weights, a Clarke of the Market.

Paring Pairs No. 15

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

(a). Hack writer keeps his coins in a row.
(b). Money all tied up in this?
(c). Pile on the whip?
(d). Crazy about Ringo’s playmates?
(e). Singing Nags?
(f). Helper on Old West carriage.
(g). Coinvestment in a low dive.
(h). New England mohel.
(i). Employ Mehitabel’s friend in the ranks.
(j). Serious times.
(k). Golden journey?
(l). Donate kisses.
(m). Important event for yachtsmen and lions.
(n). Where British skiagraphs are kept.
(o). Lucia’s “Mad Scene”?
(p). Siege perilous.
(q). Tiny chivalrous man is feeble but never on Sunday-or Saturday.
(r). Cushion litigation.
(s). Cobbler-composer.
(t). Cockney drink sends you into orbit.
(u). Where funambulists practice.
(v). This can’t hold much.
(w). Did Miss Piggy transvect this disease?
(x). Chinese Cat.
(y). Used car tester.
(z). An Olympian bribe?

(1). Aligner.
(2). Archy.
(3). Ball.
(4). Betel.
(5). Box.
(6). By.
(7). Cabinet.
(8). Case.
(9). Cat.
(10). Chair.
(11). Clipper.
(12). Daze.
(13). Dog.
(14). Drama.
(15). Electric.
(16). Eye.
(17). Flew.
(18). Fund.
(19). Guilt.
(20). Hand.
(21). Hire.
(22). Horse.
(23). Joint.
(24). Jove.
(25). Kicker.
(26). Knight.
(27). Lip.
(28). Man.
(29). Mane.
(30). Nap.
(31). Nut.
(32). Opera.
(33). Peiping.
(34). Penny.
(35). Pillow.
(36). Psycho.
(37). Roam.
(38). Rope.
(39). Sail.
(40). Sand.
(41). Service.
(42). Shadow.
(43). Shoe.
(44). Stage.
(45). Swine.
(46). Tire.
(47). Tom.
(48). Trip.
(49). Trussed.
(50). Venture.
(51). Walk.
(52). Week.
(53). Yankee.

CORRIGENDA

The imp of the perverse figured noticeably in Paring Pairs No. 13: clues (i) and (o) were wrong (from another puzzle), but the answers (22, 36) and (43, 25) were “correct”—that is, the clues for which the answers were given did not appear. At least one reader, Jinny Jones, figured it all out anyway and got the correct answer, Jovial. We apologize to those who were bamboozled, and we promise (to try) never to do that again.

Answers to Paring Pairs No. 14

(a). Those waiting to swim? (36,9) Pool Cue.
(b). Été. (16,1) French Bean.
(c). Basic weapon. (42,18) Staple Gun.
(d). Caused Trojan War and no end of trouble. (20,17) Helen Gone.
(e). Interdigitator. (19,50) Hand Weaver.
(f). Grand, central illness. (46,10) Terminal Disease.
(g). He is not an oinophile. Pourquoi Pas? (51,30) Why No.
(h). Valet dresses lucky Frenchman. (40,35) Robes Pierre.
(i). Fortuneteller at The Times. (33,38) Paper Prophet.
(j). Finis. (5,12) Book End.
(k). Mission of the UN. (34,53) Piece Work.
(l). Seat monitor filled with ennui. (6,7) Bored Chairman.
(m). Tattooed message. (4,13) Body English.
(n). Concubine’s part. (2,41) Bed Roll.
(o). Navajo bottle. (23,14) Indian File.
(p). Excessively lubricous French city. (48,26) Too Loose.
(q). Book peddler. (8,37) Coal Porter.
(r). Silly fool approaching Macbeth’s castle. (11,22) Dunce Inane.
(s). What Robin Hood did. (27,28) Made Marian.
(t). Annoying Peeping Tom. (52,32) Window Pain.
(u). Heavy soup. (31,47) One Ton.
(v). Sanguine South Pacific betel-chewer? (3,29) Bloody Mary.
(w). Exupéry novel about heroic departure? (24,15) Knight Flight.
(x). Leg. (43,44) Stocking Stuffer.
(y). Noise at Wimbledon. (45,39) Tennis Racket.
(z). Bill sings well. (21,49) In Voice.

The correct answer is (25) Loaf. The solutions are given below. The winner of No. 14 was Edward McHugh, Fitchburg, Massachusetts.

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 ITQ 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.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Friday night, shots were fired at two officers in Portsmouth, Va., more than 100 miles away….” [From the Los Angeles Times, June 2, 1984, Part 1,3. Submitted by Lani Oliveira, Whittier, California.]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Trespasser makes tin alloy less refined (8)
2. Stagger, even tear, to weaken (8)
3. Old portico stands after Taos quake (4)
4. No place for Cain in Pennsylvania? (12)
5. Mountain chain quake is rare (6)
6. Turning trash by giant recycling (8)
7. Animate, in elven dances (7)
8. Despair transformed, showed ambition (7)
9. Valuables often found under “X”? (8)
10. Sun god-ruler doing garden chore (6)
11. Like Luigi’s broken boat? (You can’t attack it) (12)
12. Wrinkled nose indicates anti votes (4)
13. Cat turns, I turn silent (8)
14. Each’s companion, is all (5,3)

Down

2. Marking system has notion at heart (8)
3. A Paris pearl’s out for new ratings (12)
4. Control made into chaos (8)
5. Congressman exposes fixes (7)
6. Copper takes in mob leader as unifying agent (6)
7. Medics show a bit of Christmas happiness (4)
8. Disturbed when bell sounded in middle of act (8)
12. Dad fool Ford? That’d be revolutionary (7,5)
15. Runs test oddly, but gives confidently (8)
17. SCRAWL on tiles for 11 points—game? (8)
18. Scientist was a mug in Munich (8)
19. Direct route from Belgrade outskirts, east to border (7)
21. Alpha Centauran usually has heavenly body in orbit (6)
24. Cunning leader leaves parade (4)

Across

1. B-e.g.-un.
4. HOLLYWOOD.
9. Hope chest.
10. NASAL.
11. As-sent.
12. ARMENi-an.
14. Illuminate.
16. Fa-me.
19. ChicaGO-AT.
20. DE-e-R-s-LA-ye-R.
22. U-n-S-ta-BLE.
23. ESCAPE.
26. liaN-a.
27. Confide-nt.
28. Take issue.
29. SADLY.

Down

1. Be-head-ing.
2. GAPES.
3. Nick name.
4. Hied.
5. LITERATURE.
6. Yankee.
7. O-b-STINAC-y.
8. Dylan.
13. INTE-r-L-ock-S.
15. Loan shark.
17. Ear-NEST-ly.
18. E-las-TI-cs.
21. Hawaii.
22. Un-lit.
24. A.M.-end.
25. K-nee.

Internet Archive copy of this issue