VOL XI, No 3 [Summer, 1984]
Word Play the Media Way
Barbara Hunt Lazerson, Illinois State University
This article was selected by the judges' vote to win the First Prize of $1000 in the 1984 VERBATIM Essay Competition.
In 1940 an article entitled “The Vocabulary of Time Magazine” appeared in American Speech (Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 232-42). The author of that article declared that “of all the journalistic phenomena of our age,… Time is linguistically the most interesting” because the editors of Time try “to achieve striking effects by the use of new words or combinations of words.” In the years since Time became the “lexicreator” par excellence, journalists working for other magazines such as Newsweek and People Weekly and for newspapers ranging in status from the illustrious New York Times to the little-known Council Bluffs, Iowa, Nonpareil have also contributed their share of neologisms. As a result of their propensity for word play, America’s journalists have helped contemporary American English become what is probably the most prolific word-producing machine that has existed since language first appeared on this planet. As the following examples suggest, anything that is newsworthy can serve as the fillip for journalistic “lexicreation.”
The year was 1969. Richard Nixon had been President of the United States for only a few months when Nixonomics was coined as a label for his economic policies. Columnist William Safire has provided the following account of the origin of the term:
In the summer of 1969, I wrote a memorandum for my White House colleagues using the term Nixonomics to hail the ingenious replacement of the Democrats' “new economics.” About that time, columnists Evans and Novak were the first to use Nixonomics in print. Walter Heller, a father of the “new economics,” was quoted in Time magazine in November 1969, using Nixonomics disparagingly. Since that time, the term I used with such high hopes has fallen on hard times. (N.Y. Times Magazine, Nov. 7, 1982, p. 18)
In the years since Nixonomics first appeared, journalists have used terms patterned after it to label the economic policies of other leaders (e.g., Carternomics, Fordonomics, Hoovernomics, Reaganomics, Volckernomics). Because such terms are so common, -(o)nomics has been recognized as a combining form by American Speech (Vol. 49, Nos. 3-4, p. 252). Because Reaganomics has been so widely used in the media, the editors of The World Book Dictionary have included the term in the 1983 edition of that lexicon.
For a number of years, inflation has been a major problem for the American economy regardless of whether it was Nixonomics, Fordonomics, Carternomics, or Reaganomics that was being discussed in the Oval Office. Recently, journalists have created blends labeling various types of inflation, including foodflation ‘the increasing cost of food,’ kidflation ‘the increasing cost of the things kids buy and do,’ mediaflation ‘the increasing cost of advertising in the media,’ oilflation ‘inflation caused by the high price of imported oil,’ and taxflation ‘the increase in taxes that occurs as inflation pushes one into a higher tax bracket.’ The proliferation of terms such as these has caused American Speech (Vol. 58, No. 4, pp. 361-62) to recognize -flation as a combining form.
On June 17, 1972, Watergate, a building complex in Washington, D.C., that housed the Democratic Party headquarters, was burglarized by Republican campaign employees for purposes of political espionage and sabotage. This illegal act was to have lexical, as well as political ramifications. Thanks in part to the investigative efforts of reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the term Watergate came to signify a scandal involving the misuse of power; and a decade later journalists were still using phrases such as industrial Watergate, French Watergate, and Irish Watergate to label corruption in high places. But the urge to clip has been strong; and the post-Watergate years have seen the creation of a great number of words in which Watergate has been reduced to -gate: Cattle-gate, Winegate, Koreagate, Banking-gate, Lancegate, Hollywoodgate, Billygate, Debategate, Briefing-gate, ad infinitum. (Time magazine used the word Billygate almost three years before the term appeared in the media as a label for charges that the Libyans had been granted favors in exchange for a $220,000 loan to President Carter’s brother. In the October 17, 1977, issue of Time, a blurb on page 2 read: “There’s no Billygate in sight, but the President would be well advised to tell his beer-swilling First Brother to shut up.”) Some -gate words are only tongue-in-cheek labels for incidents that could hardly be classified as scandals. For example, when George Brett, star slugger of the Kansas City Royals, was called out by an umpire’s ruling (later overturned) after hitting a home run with a bat heavily laden with pine tar, a writer for the Chicago Sun Times and a columnist for Fortune magazine labeled the incident batgate. Not everyone has been pleased with all of this lexical creativity. It has been condemned by the Unicorn Hunters, a group of language purists who issued “a Suffix Red Alert” against -gate words,1 and by columnist David S. Broder, who decried the fact that “any political scandal touching the presidency is now a Something-Gate.”2 Nevertheless, -gate has been recognized as a combining form by American Speech (Vol. 53, No. 3, p. 215) where it is defined as “scandal involving charges of corruption and usually a coverup (added to a noun that in some way suggests the particular scandal).”
Asexual reproduction was brought to the attention of the public in 1978 with the publication of In His Image, a book that claimed that the clone of a millionaire had been produced, and the release of The Boys from Brazil, a movie in which a legion of Hitler clones was produced. Before the year was out, entertainment journalists were writing about Beatles clones singing on Broadway, Elvis clones gyrating wherever there was an audience, and the “Angels” clones that CBS had put in prime time. Thus the semantic equivalent of carbon copy, in the metaphoric sense, had been born; and now a journalist who wants to indicate that B closely resembles A may choose to use either a carbon copy term or a clone term. To cite but one lexically productive example of the latter, the print media have referred to leading men who look like Tom Selleck, the handsome star of the TV show “Magnum, P.I.,” as Selleck clones, Selleclones, Tom Selleck clones, and “Magnum, P.I.” clones.
In 1979 a California court ordered actor Lee Marvin to pay $104,000 in rehabilitation money to Michelle Triola Marvin, a former entertainer who allegedly had sacrificed her career in order to be the actor’s live-in lover for six years. Soon journalists across the nation were using palimony (a blend of pal and alimony) to label this and similar lawsuits. The term has continued to be used widely in the media, and several lexicographers have recognized palimony as a permanent part of the lexicon of American English. (The word has been included in The Second Barnhart Dictionary of New Words; The Morrow Book of New Words; The American Heritage Dictionary, 2nd edition; Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary; and 9,000 Words, A Supplement to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.) Journalists have created neologisms patterned after palimony to name other types of suits for financial support, including kidimony ‘children suing their estranged parents for support money,’ equalimony ‘men may now sue their ex-wives for alimony,’ and galimony ‘Billy Jean King’s former homosexual lover sued her for support.’ The press has not limited its word play to terms such as these, however. When Mick Jagger’s wife sued him for divorce, People Weekly declared, “Bianca Michelles Mick”; and journalists have referred to Marvin Mitchelson, Michelle’s attorney in the Marvin case, by alliterative epithets such as the sultan of split, the paladin of palimony, the prince of palimony, and the pioneer of palimony.
When in the spring of 1980 a mass-transit strike caused approximately a quarter of a million cars a day to flood into Manhattan, newsmen who reported on the possible consequences of the increased flow of traffic used a word that strikes fear in the hearts of traffic controllers: gridlock ‘traffic backed up in all directions to such an extent that the movement of vehicles is impossible.’ Thus a term that had begun its lexical life c.1971 as part of the jargon of New York’s highway engineers was catapulted into the general lexicon through the synergistic efforts of the print and electronic media. As journalists used gridlock to describe other kinds of “clog-gestion,” (e.g., financial gridlock, legislative gridlock, gridlocked society), the word acquired a meaning that made it the metaphoric equivalent of log-jam, an Americanism that the lumber industry contributed to the language c.1886 and that became a metaphor in 1890 when American psychologist William James wrote in Principles of Psychology, “But at intervals an obstruction, a set-back, a log-jam occurs.”
Nineteen Eighty-Four, the classic novel published by George Orwell in 1949, introduced Newspeak, a language “designed to diminish the range of thought.” The concept was both frightening and intriguing; and over the years a few words patterned after Newspeak (e.g., doublespeak ‘double talk,’ which Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary dates from 1952, and businesspeak ‘business jargon,’ which The Second Barnhart Dictionary of New Words dates from 1971) were produced. As the year 1984 approached, the -speak terms created by journalists increased in both number and semantic variety. To provide but a few examples, Secretaryspeak and Haigspeak are labels that Time magazine applied in 1981 and 1982 to the garbled language used by then-Secretary of State, Alexander Haig; Primaryspeak is the name that Robert Merry of The Wall Street Journal has given to the euphemisms used during the recent Democratic primaries; and Whitespeak is what Meg Greenfield, columnist for Newsweek, has called the condescending language that many whites use when talking to or about blacks. Terms of this type are now so common that -speak has been listed as a new combining form in both American Speech (Vol. 59, No. 2, pp. 163-64) and the 1984 edition of The World Book Dictionary.
Because space restrictions do not permit a comprehensive delineation of the ways in which contemporary journalists have enriched the lexicon of American English, the preceding list of “lexicreations,” all of which have appeared in the print media in recent years, are only illustrative rather than exhaustive. Nevertheless, these examples are sufficient in number and variety to demonstrate that within the last decade and a half American journalists have created a plenitude of new, often colorful terms (e.g., Nixonomics, Selleclones, Haigspeak, kidimony, kidflation); have helped some neologisms (e.g., palimony, Reaganomics) to be recognized by lexicographers as words that are used frequently enough to warrant inclusion in “the” dictionary; have helped a term belonging to occupational jargon (i.e., gridlock) to become established in the general lexicon; have created synonyms for two already-established metaphors (i.e., gridlock = log-jam; clone = carbon copy); and have been instrumental in developing new combining forms from already-established words (i.e., -(o)nomics < economics; -flation < inflation; -gate < Watergate; -speak < Newspeak). In light of all of these lexical contributions, we are forced to go beyond H. L. Mencken (The American Language, Supplement One, p. 330) and classify journalists in general, not just gossip-column journalists, as professional wordmakers.
Diagnosis: Chronic Progressive Abstrusity
Stephen E. Hirschberg, M.D., Elmsford, New York
This article was selected by the judges' vote to win Second Prize of $500 in the 1984 VERBATIM Essay Competition.
“This 67-year-old man presented with paroxysmal noctur-jugular dyspnea. Physical examination was remarkable for jugular venous distension, lungs with rales to the apices, heart with an S3 gallop, no edema…” To a physician, this description of acute heart failure is not at all obscure—such terminology has been second-nature to him since his early days in medical school. An uninitiated listener would certainly identify the vocabulary and structure as English. He would, however, learn little less on stumbling, without a galactic interpreter, into a convention of extraterrestrials.
If the purpose of language is to aid communication, why does this arcane dialect—medical English—exist? As a mode of information transfer between doctors it can be most efficient. It is used to clarify and to becloud, to soothe and to shock. Its vocabulary ranges from the euphonic to the ponderous. Study of its etymology leads one from mythology to geography.
Any technical dialect will include words to label the specialty’s processes and machinery. Since the body is the physician’s concern, anatomic terms are a necessary, though not very interesting part of his jargon. (It is difficult, even for medical practitioners, to drop extensor digiti minimi—the muscle which extends the little finger—into casual conversation.) On the other hand, there are “perfect” medical words, expressing concisely and unambiguously concepts or phenomena which are familiar to the lay public, but only as multiple-word descriptions: borborygmi ‘the audible rumbling or gurgling sounds produced by movement of gas in the digestive tract’ (“stomach talking”); knismogenic ‘causing tickling’; paresthesia ‘a tingling, “pins and needles” feeling’; formication ‘the sensation of ants crawling on the skin.’
At the other extreme of the language spectrum are abstruse words used to avoid obvious self-incrimination before distrustful nonmembers of the medical fraternity (a.k.a. patients). The theory here is that a polysyllabic, preferably Greek-rooted diagnosis will flabbergast the patient and deter embarrassing follow-up inquiries. “Mea culpa” is not in the doctor’s vocabulary; rather, “Your illness is iatrogenic” ‘induced by a physician,’ or “It is a nosocomial infection” ‘acquired during hospitalization.’ Similarly, loath to concede his imperfection, the doctor rarely says, “God knows.” Diseases are not of unknown cause. They are “idiopathic,” “agnogenic,” “essential,” or “cryptogenic.” Your doctor may declare, for example, “You have idiopathic [‘we don’t know why’] thrombocytopenic [‘but you’re short of platelets’] purpura [‘and you have purple blotches from bleeding into your skin and mucous membranes’].” This sort of name sounds erudite, and the sufferer may find it somehow reassuring that his ailment at least has an imposing title, albeit no known cause and perhaps no cure.
For those patients who savor disease and desire professorial terminology for their signs and symptoms, physicians can oblige. A simple fall on a sidewalk may thus produce a knee abrasion [‘skinned’ knee], confusion, or ecchymosis [‘bruise’]. The hypochondriac prefers pyrosis to heartburn, furuncles to boils, and pruritus to itch. The common cold sounds less common as acute rhinitis with rhinorrhea [‘runny nose’], sternutation [‘sneezing’], cephalalgia [‘headache’], and pyrexia [‘fever’].
When delicacy is required, euphemisms are available. Patients don’t belch (they eructate), fart (they pass flatus), or bleed to death (they exsanguinate). Old taboos persist. There are still references to lues (syphilis) and Hansen’s disease (leprosy). “The prognosis is guarded” translates to “The patient is in trouble,” while “Prognosis grave” uses “grave” in both its adjectival and nounal senses. Most important (if one reads medical charts), the patient never dies, though he may arrest (short for “suffer cardiac arrest”), expire, cease (from “cease to breathe”), or be pronounced (not the unmentionable “pronounced dead”).
There are few medical dysphemisms. Disease is unpleasant enough without superimposed iatrogenic terror. One should avoid acquiring the rare diseases with these modifiers in their names: progressive [‘it will get worse and nothing can help’], necrotizing [‘causing death of tissues’], and lethal [‘perhaps you want a second opinion’].
Descriptions of physical abnormalities may be marked by imagery which is almost poetic. What can be heard with a stethoscope amounts to an onomatopoetic glossary: pistol shot pulses; cardiac murmurs, rumbles, clicks, and gallops; pericardial knocks and rubs; rales and rhonchi of the lungs; succussion splashes in the abdomen. Diagnostic hues range from violaceous “heliotrope” rashes and light-brown “café-au-lait” spots of the skin, to the “strawberry” tongue of rheumatic fever. The breath may smell “fruity” in uncontrolled diabetes, or “musty” in liver failure.
Medical language teems with eponyms, most of which honor the authors of the classic descriptions of the designated maladies (Hodgkin’s disease, Tay-Sachs disease, Huntington’s disease, and so forth). These can be convenient labels for complex disorders and may ease communication as long as both speaker and listener share the vocabulary. If ignorant of the eponym, however, the listener (even if he is a physician) will receive no clue to the cause or nature of the illness. With knowledge of a selection of eponyms (and little else), a lecturer may nonetheless leave an audience of his peers awestruck. Physicans are a proud lot, hesitant to demonstrate gaps in their learning. “We must consider the possibility of Wohlfart-Kugelberg-Welander disease” is unlikely to be rejoined by “What’s that?”
Legend and literature have also been sources of eponyms. Caesarean section purportedly derives from the legend of Julius Caesar’s supposed delivery by this means. (Untrue. The Romans did not perform this procedure on the living mother, and Caesar’s mother, Aurelia, was alive during the Gallic wars. The operation was mandatory under Roman law at that time for every woman dying in advanced pregnancy.) Mythology suggested the name Achilles tendon to the Dutch anatomist Verheyden in 1693 as he dissected his own amputated leg. (Achilles was held by the heel by Thetis, his mother, as he was dipped into the river Styx to render him impervious to harm. The heel, not immersed, became his only vulnerable spot.) Munchausen’s syndrome, in which the affected person repeatedly seeks hospitalizations and treatment for imaginary illness, is a reference to Baron Karl Friedrich Hieronymus von Münchhausen (1720-1797), the German soldier and fabricator of preposterous adventures, exaggerated further and written in English by Rudolph Raspe as Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia. (One of the Baron’s hs did not survive anglicization.) The complex of obesity, somnolence, excessive appetite, and inadequate ventilation of the lungs is Pickwickian syndrome, after Joe, the fat boy, in Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers (“The fat boy rose, opened his eyes, swallowed the huge piece of pie he had been masticating when he last fell asleep…”). A disorder characterized by recurrent staphylococcal abscesses and eczema has been called Job’s syndrome (“…Satan…smote Job with sore boils from the soles of his foot unto his crown.” [Job 2:7]).
Geography has supplied names to numerous afflictions, usually in recognition of the places of first recorded outbreaks. (Thus, St. Louis encephalitis, after a major epidemic there in 1933.) Diseases widespread before modern communication received multiple, local names. In this manner, the skin infection now generally called cutaneous Old World leishmaniasis is also known as Delhi boil, Bagdad boil, Biskra button, Aleppo evil, and bouton de Créte. Such etymologies may be confusing, particulary to medical students, who must remember that Rocky Mountain spotted fever is now most commonly found in the Atlantic states; another disease carried by the same tick, Colorado tick fever, is the more common in the Rockies.
The occurrence of similar pulmonary disorders in patients with common occupational histories led to the naming of a number of chest diseases for their victims. The names secondarily introduce us to vocations and avocations we may not have known existed. In addition to farmer’s lung, mushroom worker’s lung, plastic worker’s lung, malt worker’s lung, and bird fancier’s lung, there are maple bark stripper’s lung, silo-filler’s disease, cheese washer’s lung, paprika splitter’s lung, and blackfat tobacco smokers' lung. The infectious pneumonia, Legionnaire’s disease, was first recognized as a disease entity after an outbreak among persons who had stood outside the entrance or entered the lobby of a Philadelphia hotel during the American Legion convention of 1976.
As a rule, disease nomenclature has become more straightforward, and of lesser linguistic interest, with the current era of molecular biology. Medical literature has been increasingly peppered with the likes of “glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency” (a cause of anemia) and “C'1 esterase inhibitor deficiency” (a disease of the immune system). Surprisingly, there has been no movement to rename disorders as their chemical foundations are discovered, though it is apparent this would give further advantage to physicians in efforts to obfuscate their patients. Thus, it is still sickle cell anemia, not “hemoglobin beta chain (valine replacing glutamate in position 1) disease.”
In spite of the popularization of medicine and the pressures to speak to patients in plain English, the use of the medical dialect is likely to persist. It has been, after all, a tradition for over two millennia. Hippocrates wrote, in The Law:
Those things which are sacred are to be imparted only to sacred persons; and it is not lawful to impart them to the profane until they have been initiated in the mysteries of the science.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“The !Kung, who use no modern forms of contraception and have no fertility-regulating practices such as late marriage, taboo on intercourse during lactation or infanticide, have an average completed family size of 4.7 children.” [From Scientific American, April 1984. Submitted by F. Eugene Davis IV, Stamford, Connecticut.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“He rode his horse across Highway 12 and up and down the sidewalk in front of Fat Albert’s (saloon) a good half hour before deputies arrived, shouting obscenities and being obnoxious.” [Testimony to a jury, quoted in The Santa Barbara News-Press, 16 March 1984. Submitted by Elizabeth G. Christensen, Lompoc, California.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“We have passed a great gauntlet.” [A quote from Frederick W. Mielke Jr., chairman and chief executive officer of PG&E, appearing in The Los Angeles Times, n.d. Submitted by Jean P. MacAllister, Beverly Hills, California.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Eventually, you reach a stage in life where you don’t have to wear the same shoes everybody else does.” [Ad for Bostonian shoes in The Wall Street Journal, 13 November 1984. Submitted by John F. Sakz, Ross, California.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“We are a plethora of racing information.” [From a 6 p.m. newscast by Gary Radnich, WBNS-TV, Columbus, 8 June 1984. Submitted by Dorothy Branson, Columbus, Ohio.]
The Pearl of Hex
Virginia Howard, Metairie, Louisiana
“What’s the Pearl of Hex?” my brother asked, looking up from his crossword puzzle.
The Pearl of Hex! From the front porch of the vacation cabin where we had been having a family gathering, I gazed across the valley at the distant, blue-haze mountains. What stories, I wondered, could be told about the mysterious Pearl of Hex? What lives were altered in the striving for its possession? The Pearl of Hex! What fascinating history must surround it? “I don’t know,” I finally sighed, in answer to the question, “but it certainly sounds exotic.”
My brother gave me a puzzled look. “I just wanted to know whether the plural of hex was hex or hexes,” he said, with some vexation.
At times my eardrums seem to beat to the tune of a different drummer, and my imagination, well-tempered with Romanticism, creates a tympanic fantasy. For example, while waiting for my flight at an airport, I noticed a young soldier who was earnestly writing on a pad of paper. His concentration was so intense that at first I imagined that he was writing a technical report, but then I saw that it was stationery he was using. Ah, I thought, writing a letter to the folks back home, recounting his military adventures. My attention had been diverted to a magazine when the young soldier asked, “Excuse me, ma’m, but how do you spell whir?”
Aha! So he was a novice helicopter pilot, and he was relating in his letter (to the folks back home) his experience in flying a helicopter, complete with the sound of the rotating blades. His mother would probably say “My, my!” in admiration and pass the letter to his grandmother, who would cluck and shake her head over the idea of her little grandson managing a whirring helicopter.
To help me with my spelling task, the soldier continued, “You know, ma’m—whir, as in ‘This airport is whir we are raht now.”’
More truth may sometimes be heard in the mishearing. In an advertisement for floor wax, a young lady demonstrated how easily the waxed floor could be cleaned. Smiling at the camera, she chirped pertly, “If you get spills, you just clean it up with a damn sponge!” Did she say what I thought she said? When the commercial was repeated, she again admitted, quite cheerfully, “…just clean it up with a damn sponge!” Again and again, it sounded the same: “…clean it up with a damn sponge,” “…a damn sponge,” “…a damn sponge.” Despite her cheerful facade, a young lady having to clean spills off floors can maintain her fondness for damp sponges for only a limited time.
No matter how many times that commercial was repeated, the wording sounded the same, but in other instances repetition may resolve the misinterpretation. During a recent gubernatorial race in a Southern state, campaigning was heavy on the television tube. In one such spot, a gray-haired lady looked sternly into the camera and said, “Mr. Governor, you have a lemonade in our Council on Aging!” What an odd, but rather touching, statement to make about our incumbent governor, I thought. He had apparently found the Council on Aging to have problems, but following the adage, “If you have a lemon, make lemonade,” he had made the most of it, presumably to its success. But what a funny way of stating it. How many people would understand such an oblique comment? And the advertisement was sponsored by the governor’s opponent, how extraordinary! After hearing the advertisement several times, however, my ears slowly became more receptive to the truth. Thinking the joke was on me, I repeated the story to a native. “Ha, ha,” I said, “the woman faced the camera and said”—or I thought she said—“(here I enunciated clearly so that there could be no mistaking my original misguided interpretation) “ ‘Mr. Governor, you have a lemonade in our Council on Aging.’ ”
To this the native responded, “What’s wrong with that? He did eliminate the Council on Aging, you know.”
My sister-in-law encountered a similar problem when she read an article from VERBATIM to a neighbor, over the telephone. The article concerned accents, particularly Southern accents, and to my sister-in-law’s consternation she suddenly realized that what she had just read to the neighbor was exactly the way the neighbor herself spoke. No wonder she wasn’t laughing.
Accents of all kinds can at first create a lemon in my brain, but, true to my nature, my neocortex squeezes it into lemonade. A television chef with a beguiling European accent used to concoct most unusual dishes. Once he really caught my attention by announcing that he was about to cook a leggo flam. Was it some Lewis-Carrollian wag’s name for a wonderful flaming dessert, a flaming flan from Denmark? Was it something that required hours of preparation, yielding culinary perfection? Was it a new dish concocted from that British Erector Set, Leggo? “Ah!” the great chefs of Europe would chortle, gathering around the pot, or platter, or bowl, “Leggo flam! Perfection!” Did it require ingredients that were scarce outside the upper slopes of the Andes? What indeed could leggo flam be? What a disappointment when our chef hoisted a leg of lamb onto the table and stated that the recipe was “nahz ‘n’ zimble.” He did, however, springle it wiz pebble, which was a nahz touch.
Even if the words are clearly understood, the interpretation may be muddled. It all depends on the listener and the speaker, and whir their minds are raht at the point of communication. Distraction between the listener and the speaker—one mind veering in one direction and the other in another direction—can make the conversation most intriguing. Once when I parked in front of an ice cream parlor that had moved from a different section of the city, my nephew, espying a panting dog tied to a stob in front of a neighboring shop, said, “I wonder how long it’s been here.”
I, gazing at the ice cream parlor, replied, “Oh, about six years now.”
“Poor dog!” my nephew gasped.
The wording itself, approached from a different angle by the listener than the speaker intended, may cause equally startling results. I was about to go out of town and needed to buy a container to supply water for my two cats while I was away. An Albanian doctor was present when I stated to my work colleague that I needed to stop by the pet store to get a device for watering my cats. The doctor listened silently to the conversation for a few minutes, and then ventured a hesitant question. “Tell me,” he asked, “just how do you water these cats? Do you, er, sprinkle them, or…or… Just how do you water these cats?” After the explanation, he appeared relieved. He was afraid he was somehow neglecting his own cats by not keeping them bedewed with mist or at least slightly damp.
Sometimes, though, my understanding of a conversation seems clear despite possibly murky accents or the potential for fuzzy interpretation. At one such time, a Spanish friend was speaking of a situation in which an associate would feel envious. “He will,” he explained, “be jello … jello …” He hesitated, obviously searching for the right word.
“Jealous?” I offered, at least feeling confident that I could not possibly confuse the meaning.
“Jes!” he agreed, “Is like yellous, but is a color. It’s a saying, something like ‘jello with envy.’ Blue with envy? Red with envy?”
If I ever discover the owner of the Pearl of Hex, I shall meekly eat my leggo flam and be jello with envy!
Cinq Centmille Diables! W’at Dat Is? Dat’s Cajun, I Ga-ron-tee!
Mary Stewart Craig, Pineville, Louisiana
This article was selected by the judges' vote to win one of the four Third Prize of $250 in the 1984 VERBATIM Essay Competition.
Les Acadiens—les Cadiens—les Cajuns are a fascinating people who speak a fascinating language. Cajun French has been called a “verbal jambalaya,” and indeed it is. The Cajun tongue has appropriated expressions from so many different sources that what has emerged is a language mélange with extremely interesting ingredients.
The Cajuns have been in this country more than 200 years, since what they still call le Grand Dérangement. In 1775, when the British defeated the French in Nova Scotia, French immigrants there were deported from their adopted country. France didn’t want them back; most American colonies didn’t want them, period. They were welcomed in Louisiana, where the French population was already substantial.
According to William Faulkner Rushton in his 1979 book, The Cajuns, the language today contains many nautical and antique terms from the early 1500s, as well as other linguistic evidence of Celtic influence. Amarrer ‘to moor a boat’ is used in the phrase, “to tie one’s shoelaces,” rather than the standard nouer. Virer de board, literally, ‘to come aboard’ is used for “to turn around,” instead of tourner. Some words are thought to come from the old French of Louis XIV’s time: froumi for fourmi ‘ant’; fremer for fermer ‘to close’; boete for boite ‘box’; asteure for maintenant ‘now’; zozo for oiseau ‘bird’; éé for il ‘he, it’; ou for elle ‘she, it.’
There is at least a memory of standard French usage in many Cajun expressions in both French and English. For example, Cajun makes provisions to prevent a glottal stop, as standard French does, when two vowel sounds come together: vous autres is visotes; ‘green gumbo’ is gumbo s’herbes. There is a line from a Cajun song which goes, Mes altières étaient-z-entières.
The use of the reflexive pronoun for emphasis is seen in such phrases as: “They did it, them”; “She work slow, her”; “He go fas', him.” And then there is the interesting construction, “He be no bigger’n a swimps, much.”
Cajun French has a more simple grammatic construction than standard French. Usage varies widely from place to place, so that one who knows the language can pinpoint where a Cajun speaker is from by his use of certain expressions and vocabulary words. One may hear j’eus for je suis ‘I am’, j’va for je vais ‘I go,’ and mo pense for je pense ‘I think.’ The second person plural vous is not used in conversation except with priests, outsiders, or in jest. The present tense conjugation of aimer ‘to love’ is:
j’aime — nous aime
tu aime —
il, elle aime — ils, elles aimont
The future tense uses the present tense of aller ‘to go’ plus the main infinitive, as in: ‘Mary will eat,’ Marie va manger, literally, ‘Mary is going to eat.’ Marie mangera of standard French is not used. To say, ‘Mary is eating,’ one takes the present tense of être, plus après, plus the main infinitive; so, Marie est après manger. To ask a question, take the affirmative statement and change the inflection: Tu mange? Nous mange?
Besides the variations in grammatical structure, accents and other orthographic signs often go by the wayside. The oral tradition certainly accounts for this as well as the various spellings found for the same word. Only in recent years (and perhaps too late) has the language been put into written form in an effort to preserve and standardize it.
Among the many languages and dialects that have had an influence on Cajun, Black English accounts for such forms as: “He use”; “We uses”; “He be tall”; “I was goned a lon' time”; “a chirren” ‘one child’ but “chirrens” ‘more than one child’; “a mens” ‘one man,’ but “mens” ‘more than one man.’ Vocabulary has been added from the African, such as congo ‘water moccasin’; voudoo or hoo-doo; cush-cush ‘corn grits.’ Many Indian words are enmeshed in the language. There are bayou, and plaquemine, one of the parish names, ‘persimmon’; sacamite ‘corn grits’; gumbo ‘okra’; pirogue ‘canoe.’ The word ouaouaron is used for ‘frog,’ as grenouille has become a vulgar sexual term. Spanish contributed l’agniappe (or lagniappe), meaning ‘something extra,’ via ñapa. Cajun gouerre from güero is ‘someone stupid—or blond.’
Nonc comes from mon oncle ‘my uncle’; p’pere is ‘grandfather’; quofaire does nicely for pourquoi ‘why’; accordant ‘according to’ is used instead of sélon. Chaud ‘hot’ is used instead of fâché for ‘angry’; Boy Scout is perfectly good Cajun, but it is pronounced BOY SCOOT! T-Jean (or ‘Ti’-Jean or Tee-Jean) is Cajun for ‘Little John.’ When you want to ‘get out,’ you “get down” or gidonne, an' li' dat.
A brouhaha is an ‘argument or great excitement’; in France une ratatouille may be ‘a stew,’ but to a Cajun un ratatouille is ‘a dispute between a husband and wife,’ and sounds like it.
Revon Reed, Cajun author-in-residence from Mamou, in his book Lâche Pas La Patate, discusses two other interesting onomatopoeic words which he calls Mamou expressions: Bourdoudoum and ouarjoujoum. They both indicate what happens when two objects strike each other, but with a big difference. He says:
Bourdoudoum is used when someone falls on a solid object on one’s head, as: “The baby hit his head on a plank with a bourdoudoum.” [But you know it didn’t hurt when,] “The man jumped into the bayou with a ouarjoujoum.” (My translation.)
Carolyn Ramsey, back in the late fifties, recorded an unusual version of a Cajun folksong. Here are two lines:
Ton papa ‘semb’e ein elephant
Et ta maman ‘semb’e ein automobile.
‘Semb’e is rusticated from ressembler ‘to resemble.’ Ein originates from the German, as does the town named Des Allemands. Many people of German and Belgian descent have intermarried with the Cajuns.
Reed has noted several what I call “sweep-the-kitchen” words, because they are used to mean whatever one needs them to mean. (I remember a French professor giving us le disposatif ‘thing-a-ma-bob; doo-dad’ to describe the indescribable. One example from Cajun will suffice: gaboo.
manger: Il a gaboo son diner. ‘He ate his dinner.’
boire: Il a gaboo le vin. ‘He drank the wine.’
voler: Il a gaboo mon portefeuille. ‘He stole my wallet.’
In Cajun “Frenglish,” when one comes of legal age, one “makes eighteen.” “Lemme tole you, lemme make some spoke wit’ you!” a Cajun friend will say. When a pretty girl comes a boy’s way, he’ll “cass an eye on dat!” There is a character in a Cajun fable who describes a “baksetball” player as “a fallow twice ma’ tall an’ haf ma' skinny.”
“It’s fo' true” that Cajun might be interspersed with such neologisms as furimous, peculiarmous, magnifimous, gorgemous, delicimous, and intoximous, I ga-ron-tee! “For true?” my non-Cajun husband will often ask, showing the spillover of Cajun influence in Louisiana’s version of n’est-ce pas?
Some words are self-explanatory half-breeds: gambluer; le peace cop; la maison de show. “What’s your first name?” becomes, “How much is your front name is?”; “I don’t comprestand, me”; “Mo pense qu’il fait trop cold pour les catfish,” one fellow says in the book, People of the Bayou.
Cajun sayings abound. If you “show on where de bear sat in de buckwheat,” you tell somebody off but good. Cinq Centmille Diables! ‘Five hundred thousand devils!’ they will tell you, you can become a Cajun one of three ways: “By the blood, by the ring, or by the back door!”
Cajuns are sometimes called “Coonies” or “Coonasses.” But smile when you say that! The term “coonass” apparently originated during World War Two when French poilus, amused at the Louisiana Frenchman’s patois, called him a conasse, slang for “prostitute.”
Speaking of names, never call a Frenchman couvillion (pronounced COOB-YAWN or COO-YAWN), or you’ll get a coup de poing ‘fist blow’ instead of a coup de main ‘helping hand’ for casting aspersions on his intelligence.
Pronunciation of proper names depends on where one is at the time. Baillio is BUY-UH or BAL-EE-OH. Aucoin is OH-KWA or OH-QUINN. Bordelon is BIRD-UH-LAWN and Jordan is JERDUHN. DeBlieux is pronounced DOUBLE-U. Gauthier is GO-CHAY. Morace is MORE-AHS. Saucier becomes SO-SHAY and Cyriaque is SEAR-UH-QUE. Guillot JEE-YO, GE-YO, or GE-YAT. Gravel is GRUH-VEL, and the town of Cloutierville is CLUE-CHEE-VILL. A name like Boudreaux, Breaux, or Thibeaux came about when a French immigrant entering the U.S. was told by the customs man to put an X beside his name to certify that it was correctly written.
Changes in the language and customs have come fast since the Second World War. Up until then, in “them ol' days,” a Cajun “got himse’f married, him,” to his chère, when friends would “hole de broomstick a foots from de flo' and de' happy couple jump over it fo' de waddin' sara-mony,” and then later when a priest came to the area, he would bless the marriage.3 Sauter l’balai ‘to jump the broomstick’ made a marriage legal enough in their eyes.
People used to go to traiters ‘treaters’ to be cured of illnesses with a combination of magic tisanes ‘potions,’ secret herbs found in les prairies tremblantes ‘marshes,’ literally, ‘trembling prairies,’ and the saying of prayers and sprinkling of holy water. This kind of “religious” coodoo is still practised in places. Cajun Catholicism has long been mixed with superstition. The mythical Ol' Boudreaux was feared by generations of French kids, because he might put the gris-gris on them if they misbehaved. Many traditions are dying out. A few churches still have mass in French. A Frenchman will still navigate his pirogue (PEE-ROW) down the bayou (BUY-AH or BUY-OH), but with a motor instead of a long pole. Weddings and Mardi Gras are still occasions for a fait do-do (child’s expression for ‘going to sleep’). These carefree social gatherings used to take place every Saturday or Sunday night. While the parents danced the night away, all the “chirrens” slept in a room off the dancing area. Fait do-do has now broadened in its use to mean ‘argument,’ as in: “We had a real fait do-do, him and me, mais sho',” as one friend put it.
Laissez les bons temps rouler! could certainly be the Cajun motto, for they are a high-spirited people who do know how to “make the good times roll,” wrong placement of the infinitive or not. They have made a specialty of combining fun and food.
Tit noir (TEET-NWAR, literally, ‘little black’), made with parched coffee beans and chicory, is strong enough to stand in the corner and fight for its honor! French dishes include “Louisiana mudbugs,” crawfish (never crayfish) in bisque with heads stuffed and étouffée in a tangy sauce served on rice. Everything goes into the jambalaya and gumbo (soup) sprinkled with filé ‘ground sassafras root.’ Folks savor “dirty rice,” a spicy rice-meat-onion-garlic-et-al mixture, red beans over rice and boudin (BOO-DAN), sausage made with pork brains, livers, and blood. Speaking of pigs, a cochon de lait, where a “milkfed pig” roasts all day, is a “full-boar” (Sorry, irresistible impulse!) celebration enjoyed by Cajuns and cou-rouges alike. A “red-neck” was originally a sunburned Texas outlander hunting oil in Louisiana, but today he’s any North Louisiana WASP type.
With the formation several years ago of CODOFIL, the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, French finally became an accepted and legitimate language in the state. I am acquainted with several people who remember being punished as late as the 1950s for speaking French in the classroom or on the playground at school. Although there are textbooks out which teach Cajun French, CODOFIL teachers usually come from France or Canada, and they teach standard French. The controversy rages now, with good reasoning on both sides of the issue, over whether to teach Cajun or standard French. One suspects that, like most languages and cultures which are exposed to outside influences, Cajun French will eventually be absorbed into the great open-throated maw of the prevailing culture which threatens it. Quel dommage!
The Case of Gender
Robert N. Goss, San Diego, California
This article was selected by the judges' vote to win one of the four Third Prizes of $250 in the 1984 VERBATIM Essay Competition.
It may be that all has been said about gender in English that can be, but my own admittedly limited reading in the history of English does not bear that out. Most authors content themselves with pointing out that historical development has resulted in an English that is virtually gender-free, and most pronounce that outcome good. By casting gender aside, except when it is an indicator of sex, English has become a logical and natural language. A common thread in many of the accounts is the conviction that a language like German is somehow defective in its logic of reference. It takes only a gibe at Mädchen or Fräulein to prove that point. How absurd to refer to a girl in the neuter! Unfortunately, some treatments amount to little more than that. To balance the account, the historian of language should also point to the Latin nauta; this noun is feminine in form and declension but has been assigned masculine gender because it denotes a male being. So, faced with the same dilemma, German and Latin have chosen the opposite horns: German elects to maintain a consistent relation between gender and inflection type, while for Latin the decisive factor is the sex of the referent. Which is the more logical?
This note starts from the observation that there is indeed a detectible residue of gender in modern English but that the word has connotations different from those in synthetic languages. We shall first attempt to characterize the logical status of gender in terms somewhat more precise than language historians are wont to use. Then we shall cite several features of English wherein gender plays a nontrivial role and comment on one of these. We are particularly interested in implications of the fact that English has no formal mechanism to account for gender outside of the frame of reference of sex. Throughout the discussion sex will denote a biological category comprising two classes, called male and female, while gender will mean a grammatical category consisting of the three classes masculine, feminine, and neuter. We will assume that there is a mapping of sex into gender, that is, a correspondence which associates with each element of sex an element of gender, called the name of that element of sex. Thus, to a female horse corresponds the name “mare,” which has the property of gender; in this instance it is feminine.
We need to know how membership in the various classes is realized. As for the two sexual classes, the proper elements or members are beings who are living or who have lived, and membership is fixed by nature. The elements of the gender classes are words—nouns and pronouns, the vast majority of which do not refer to the sexual classes at all. There are various ways in which a noun can be assigned to a gender class. For example, we have three different processes that are characteristic of German, Latin, and English, respectively:
German model: Place noun in gender class according to the inflection pattern it exhibits.
Latin model: If noun names a male, put it in masculine; if noun names a female, put it in feminine; otherwise follow the German model.
English model: If noun names a male, put it in masculine; if noun names a female, put it in feminine; otherwise put it in neuter.
Each of these rules is expressed as a mapping which makes a given element of the category sex correspond to an appropriate member of the category gender. It is worth emphasizing that the correspondence is independent of our state of knowledge about the elements at any particular moment.
Now, within the narrow context we have established, the characterization of a language as “logical” should mean that the correspondence is one-to-one—that is, that in addition to the mapping mentioned, the inverse mapping (from gender into sex) also exists. No (Indo-European) language that I know satisfies that condition; certainly those tongues in which every noun has gender do not. We could term English “semilogical” because, according to the process above, the name of a female (or, alternatively, male) is always feminine (or, alternatively, masculine). A boy cousin is always “he” and a girl cousin “she”; hence the word “cousin” is masculine or feminine according to the sex of the referent. I prefer the term “sex-preserving” as being more specific than “semilogical.” Some authorities use the adjective “natural” to describe what I have called sex-preserving.
The procedure exhibited above for the three models lays bare the essential difference between synthetic and analytic languages in their concept of gender. In German and Latin nouns are assigned to gender classes associated with declension patterns. In English the gender classes are inextricably bound to sex. The main function of gender in synthetic tongues is to reduce the possibility of ambiguity by affording a variety of inflection classes to operate with the syntactic mechanism of agreement. In analytic languages, on the other hand, an elaborate apparatus of agreement is unnecessary, since semantic relationships are expressed mainly by word order. However, English has seen fit to retain a rudimentary inflection pattern for pronouns, whose role is to facilitate communication by minimizing both redundance and ambiguity.
The analogue of sex preservation is gender preservation. As we have suggested, English is not gender-preserving, and this point perhaps needs clarification. We shall understand “gender-preserving” to mean that a masculine (feminine) noun or pronoun always refers to a male (female) and a neuter noun or pronoun never to a male or female. But to leave it at that is not enough. The definition is without force unless it entails some means for correlating the gender of a noun in question with the sex of its referent. In contrast to pronouns, relatively few nouns carry any attribution of the sex of the object to which they refer. Aunt indeed preserves gender, but there is nothing in “I have a cousin in Milwaukee” to convey information about the gender of cousin; a listener must inquire directly or be alert for a telltale pronoun. As the following discussion will bring out, attempted deduction of gender is not invariably successful even when there is a pronoun in sight.
That one can turn up exceptions to almost any grammatical rule is well understood and constitutes no reason to relinquish attempts to find orderly patterns. Let us consider the instances in which one may draw conclusions about the gender of a noun by testing agreement with a pronoun. We examine only the singular. Since each of the pronouns in question (he, she, it along with their possessive and objective cases) can be paired with each of the three genders, there are nine possible cases to consider. Three of them are the obvious normal pairings in which agreement alone is sufficient. Of the remaining six, I know of only one that is invariably regarded as an error: the coupling of a masculine noun with a feminine pronoun. Each of the other five cases may occur from time to time. Since they are departures from the rule of agreement, we shall call them anomalies, meaning mismatches of sex with gender. It is the presence of these anomalies in English that precludes its being gender-preserving and hence completely logical.
Two of the anomalies are easily disposed of: a masculine or feminine antecedent with the neuter pronoun. “When I saw the dog, it was in the next block.” The pronoun is not used in its canonical sense of ‘neither male nor female’; here it means ‘either male or female’—perhaps a natural extension of the official meaning even though it indicates precisely the opposite. (There is irony in that the use of “he” or “she” or the specific “bitch” would probably mark the speaker as a connoisseur of canines before it would be taken as indicating care for accurate English usage.) “It” can be applied to humans only in the case of infants when there is no conspicuous hint as to sex and then only temporarily.
The reflections, so to speak, of the cases just mentioned are those in which the names have masculine or feminine gender but the objects they name have no sex. Mariner and landlubber alike refer to a ship as “she,” notwithstanding the suggestion conveyed by man o’war. Moreover, in our reservoir of idioms such expressions as Mother Nature, Father Time, and Ol' Man River could be called gender-preserving for the reason that gender-specific pronouns are customarily used to refer to them. However, the same would not be true of formally similar terms in which the gender-bearing noun is used as an adjective: mother tongue, grandfather clock, female plug. But whether there is total commitment to gender or not, the door is left open to the possibility that a noun might have gender and its referent have no sex. Indeed, the literary association of a masculine or feminine pronoun with a sexless object is the rhetorical device of personification, so loved by classical and Romantic poets, and this cannot be dismissed as improper usage.
If all of this smacks of pedantry, the one anomaly remaining gives a new flavor to the discussion. In recent years we have pointedly been made aware that the occurrence of a masculine pronoun does not always unequivocally refer to a male, and some have professed to find such usage offensive.
How many organizations have taken up resolutions to “remove sexist language” from their by-laws! It is by no means self-evident that “sexist language” (the term betrays confusion of categories) in itself fosters or even represents discrimination. Anthropological—and ultimately biological—factors have made it almost inevitable that until recent times the male would function as spokesperson for the family unit. The legacy we have inherited from this circumstance is a vast freight of terms in which the male role has been enshrined. But it is now recognized that any wholesale expunging of male-oriented elements from English would result in emasculation in the worst figurative sense. Discerning feminists have backed away from—indeed, have never advocated—such a drastic course, but “purging the language of sexism” is still a popular shibboleth. “When the chairman desires to speak to the issue on the floor, he shall…” becomes “When the presiding officer desires to speak, he or she shall….” An occurrence or two of “he or she” in this setting is not noteworthy (although it does leave unresolved a question of precedence), but, deadly in repeated doses, the coupling of the pronouns can work havoc upon even the most pedestrian prose. Some ingenious remedies have been proposed, often with satirical overtones, but that is not the way common usage becomes established. The least objectionable alternative to many users appears to be one that speakers of English already lapse into on occasion: an extension of the plural they/their/them to instances in which one wishes to be noncommittal about the sex of a singular referent. At first, “When the presiding officer…, they shall…” has a false ring to the discriminating ear, but as history has shown, there is nothing immutable as our language evolves to accommodate changing needs. Moreover, adaptation of the third person plural pronoun for use in the singular has features in common with the editorial we, the royal we and the supplanting of thou by you, all perfectly acceptable.
Our wholly inadequate inquiry has shown that gender is still with us as a resource for conveying unconventional nuances by means of what we have called the anomalies. At the same time, the indication is clear that users of English are uncomfortable with departures from isomorphism between the grammatical and the sexual categories. Is this a signal that the anomalies may one day be consigned to that limbo of linguistic niceties which, like our children, we can observe and cherish but cannot control?
What Mrs. Garnett Never Told Us
Alex Auswaks, St. Albans, Hertfordshire
This article was selected by the judges' vote to win one of the four Third Prizes of $250 in the 1984 VERBATIM Essay Competition.
The Georgian seminary student who changed his name from Yosif Jugashvili to Yosif Stalin (Mr. Steel) was following in a time-honored Russian tradition. Most Russian surnames have a meaning. In fact, Russian surnames not only have a meaning but a recognizable linguistic form. They have certain recognizable endings. To a Russian a surname with a meaning, even an ironic or pejorative one is a perfectly natural thing. (I know of a Russian exile in Siberia, bitterly committed against church and state, whose name was Popov, i.e., Mr. Priest.) Nobody sees anything in the fact that the Prime Minister is called Thatcher, in fact, few people are conscious of its meaning. But in Russia, every Russian is acutely aware that Molotov means ‘hammer’ (which is why he adopted the name) and Gromyko is ‘thunder.’
Russian writers have not been slow to exploit this characteristic. After all, if literature is to reflect reality, meaningful naming is a natural and acceptable literary device. When Mrs. Garnett translated the great classics into English, it was a great pity she did not tell her readers that in naming characters in their novels, Russian writers played games with their readers, hinted at their intention in the names they gave them, and, most important, circumvented censorship.
An early example was the famous (in Russia) playwright, Vonwizin, in a play called The Minor, sometimes referred to by translators as The Milksop. He names one character in the play Pravdin, which means ‘Mr. Truth,’ and another, Prostakov, ‘Mr. Simpleton.’ Yet another is Mr. Skotinin, which, colloquially, can only be translated as ‘Mr. S.O.B.’ A slightly more subtle use is made of the naming ploy in The Mischief of Being Clever by the Russian diplomat Griboyedov, which means Mushroom-eater. This play introduced into Russian literature the first of a long line of literary characters known as “superfluous men.” A hardly perennial in all Russian literature exams (at least in the United Kingdom) invites students to discuss this notion. Basically, a superfluous man is a member of the aristocracy or landed gentry, rich, highly intelligent and very capable. The stifling atmosphere of Russia allows no scope for the talents of such a man, and he ends up leading a singularly purposeless life, generally doing damage to others. The first such superfluous man in Griboyedov’s play is called Chatsky, a word that resembles the Russian chahat ‘to wither away.’ The villain of the play is Famusov, in whose name no doubt you recognize our word “famous,” and Griboyedov does portray a man looked up to and respected, albeit undeservedly so. Famusov has a secretary called Molchalin, which one can loosely translate as ‘Mr. Keeps Quiet’ or ‘Mr. Don’t Answer Back.’ A rather choleric colonel is named ‘Colonel Bare Your Teeth.’ Notice that whereas Vonwizin used naming to indicate moral qualities, Griboyedov virtually gives a thumbnail character sketch.
The next in the superfluous male line is Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, named after the River Onega, a common enough device. Lenin adopted it: he was exiled on the River Lena; but even the most dedicated Russian communist is painfully aware of its close resemblance to the Russian word for ‘lazy’. Onegin lived in the days of Alexander I, when the order of things was not as oppressive as under his successor Nicholas I. In the reign of Nicholas I, Lermontov (descended from a Scots mercenary called Learmont, with the addition of a Russian surname ending) wrote A Hero of Our Time, in which the hero is Pechorin, named after the River Pechora. Its significance was immediate to every Russian. Pechorin is a far more desperate, even wilder character than Onegin. As characters they are totally different. Onegin is quite a pleasant, even amiable man. Pechorin is … well, there are few polite words to describe him. Nevertheless, Lermontov wanted to underline the connection between them as superfluous men, and thus exculpate Pechorin’s character. The Onega and Pechora rivers flow side by side, and while the Onega flows smoothly the Pechora is a wild and turbulent river. Onegin had done nothing to offend prevailing morals and Pechorin had offended every prevailing moral, but they were literary brothers.
Naming really comes into its own in the works of Gogol, who uses names the way a cartoonist takes a physical feature and enlarges it so that it becomes a trade mark, e.g., the large jaw associated with Nixon, which crossed the Atlantic and was adopted by British cartoonists. Gogol’s names allude to qualities in the character of his characters. In The Inspector General (immortalized on the screen by Danny Kaye), a junior official from St. Petersburg who passes himself off as a local government inspector is Hlestiakoff, which means ‘Mr. Scourge.’ Three constables are ‘Whistle’ (Svistunoff), ‘Scare ‘em’ or ‘Button’ (Pugovitsin), and ‘Shut Your Gob’ (Derjhimorda). Their superintendent is ‘Twist-Your-Ear’ (Uhoviortov). The postmaster who intercepts and reads everyone’s mail is ‘Mr. Spy’ (Shpiokin). The Superintendent of Schools is ‘Mr. Bustle and Bothered’ (Hlopoff). These and other names have passed into the language and are used as nicknames by Russian people. Somewhere in the Soviet Union today at least one city mayor is called Skvoznik-Dmuhanovsky (a combination of ‘draught’ and ‘fly’). In Dead Souls a landlord who constantly pursues trivialities is named ‘Mr. Seductive’ (Maniloff), the scandal-monger is ‘Mr. Nostril’ (Nozdrev), who noses out all the local scandal. The epitaph on Gogol’s grave is, “It would be funny, if it weren’t so sad,” and even the tsar is supposed to have begun by laughing when he saw the Inspector General and then commented on what a sorry state the country was in to have folk like that in authority.
Tolstoy named his favorite characters after himself. Levin, in Anna Karenina, is supposed to be Tolstoy (his first name was Lev) personified. He seems to have overlooked the fact that it is also a Jewish name, ironic when one remembers that he was an anti-Semite. Vronsky, Anna Karenina’s faithless lover, is from the Russian voron, ‘raven,’ and Karenina is from the word karat ‘to punish.’ The book bears a Biblical epigraph.
One of the most interesting examples of a naming device is Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikoff in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikoff is the idealistic young man who murders a woman money-lender to try to prevent his sister from marrying a despicable elderly man. Raskolnikoff, on the face of it, comes from the Russian word raskol which means ‘schism’; hence Raskolnikoff means ‘Mr. Schismatic.’ There is some opinion that raskol also means ‘split’ and is a reference to his split personality, his mental and moral schizophrenia. It may even have had something to do with the split between Slavophiles and pro-Westerners in Russian society and amongst Russian intellectuals. However, raskol also means ‘cloven’ as in ‘cloven hoof,’ and Dostoevsky clearly equated this character with the devil’s work. H. H. Munro, better known as Saki, who knew Russia and Russian, wrote about a heartless young man, a sort of upper-class English equivalent of Raskolnikoff, and he called him Clovis. Now where did he get the idea for that name?
The revolution came and went, and the more things changed, the more they remained as they were. The naming device stayed, it even entered Russian political life, as Mr. Jugashvili became Mr. Stalin, Ulyanov became Lenin, a Mr. Molotov appeared on the scene. In literature the tradition continued, Alexander Solzhenitsyn used it with a vengeance. The Cancer Ward opens with a hospital scene in one of the Soviet Union’s Central Asiatic republics. The first person we meet is a typical Soviet apparatchik, a party hack. His name is Rusanov ‘Comrade Russia.’ He looks down in particular on another patient, Kostoglotov ‘Bone in the Throat,’ who is verily the bone in everyone’s gullet. There are two nurses: the one with the spiritual nature is aptly named Vera ‘Faith.’ The girl who goes to a lot of trouble for Kostoglotov is Zoya, Siberian vernacular for ‘Busybody,’ but in an affectionate sense. There is a former KGB man, whose tongue has developed cancer; his name is Podueff, an ‘ash pit.’ But there are two people, a married couple, whose naming is so subtle that I have often wondered whether I am reading more into it than Solzhenitsyn intended. They are an old couple called the Kadmins. They were sentenced and exiled for no reason at all. There used to be a joke in those times that life in Russia was like a bus ride on a crowded route. Some are to get on, some are on the buses, others will be allowed off. For “buses” read “prison camps.” No rhyme, no reason. If it’s your turn: you get on, or stay, or get off. The Kadmins never rail against their fate. They give Kostoglotov financial and moral support. What does their name mean? It is a well-known fact that Solzhenitsyn lived in Ryazan, where his wife taught at the Ryazan Polytechnical Institute. There is, in the dialect of the Ryazan district, a word kadi, from which the surname Kadmin is derived. The natives of Ryazan insert ‘kadi’ in their speech to emphasize meaning.
This naming kadi is really something, isn’t it, comrades!
Lexicography in the Scottish Highlands and Islands Cannibalism, Caves, and Amulets:
Philip Riley, Uppingham, Leicestershire
This article was selected by the judges’ vote to win one of the four Third Prizes of $250 in the 1984 VERBATIM Essay Competition.
“He that eats a slice of his grandmother, may, with great propriety, sip the soup that is made of the same.” This observation does not describe one of the customs of a remote cannibal tribe discovered in the days of the British Empire; it is to be found in a respectable dictionary of the Gaelic language first published in Glasgow a century and a half ago. The lexicographer to whom we owe our knowledge of this “proverb” was one Neil MacAlpine, at the time a parochial schoolmaster on the island of Islay, where he had been born in 1786 and where he was to die in 1867. MacAlpine’s Pronouncing Gaelic Dictionary first appeared in 1832 and became very popular, being cheaper than any of its rivals while remaining remarkably comprehensive. Indeed, we might well consider it over-comprehensive: was it, for instance, really necessary to include raibheic ‘the roar that a cow gives when gored by another; caiseach ‘well supplied with cheese; or frith, a word apparently used only in MacAlpine’s native Islay, meaning ‘an encantation [sic] to find whether people at a great distance or at sea be in life’?
There are many more equally idiosyncratic definitions within MacAlpine’s pages, some of which will stand comparison with any of Dr. Johnson’s more celebrated eccentricities. Thus we come across, for example, drip ‘snare meant for another, but ensnaring the author of it,’ meadhail ‘an uncommon and unaccountable burst of joy, on the eve of getting some distressing news; and roic ‘sumptuous feasting of boorish people; superabundance of the good things of life, without any of the refined manners of genteel society,’ to mention only three from a very long list. Sometimes all the possible meanings of a word in different areas are listed, giving rise to strings like “a prodigious large, red carbuncled nose (like a boiled lobster) … also the cog of a wheel; a ludicrous name for a large pinch of snuff… just a nose … the nasal canal… the cork of a bottle … a huge frog… conscience” (MacAlpine’s definition of the word cogais); or, for colgarrachd, “sternness; new-year’s eve; an absurd hammering at any thing.” Similarly, no Irishman is likely to be pleased to find that the word eirionnach, according to MacAlpine, means both ‘Irishman’ and ‘castrated he-goat’!
It must be admitted, nevertheless, that some of MacAlpine’s turns of phrase are well worth keeping: srullamas, for instance, is defined as “a person that speaks as if his mouth was filled with liquid,” and tighich as “state of being subject to callers” (surely the right word for the unfortunate protagonist of Edmund Crispin’s short story, collected in Fen Country, “We Know You’re Busy Writing, But We Thought You Wouldn’t Mind If We Just Dropped in for a Minute”?).
Gaelic, it is said, is a language rich in invective. Certainly MacAlpine includes a wide variety of opprobrious terms, including what seems a disproportionate number applying only to women. Perhaps he was disappointed in love at some time; the biographical sketch at the beginning of his dictionary makes no mention of a wife. Be that as it may, he provides a well-stocked arsenal for all Celtic misogynists, including biodanach ‘a bickering, eternally scolding or complaining female,’ cuilteach ‘a skulking female,’ grobag ‘a little female with broken teeth,’ and, comprehensively, gloichdeil ‘idiotical, as a female, stupid, senseless.’ There are many more.
MacAlpine would have had little patience with the descriptivist attitude of many of today’s lexicographers. For him, there was only one right way to spell and pronounce a given word: “Some pronounce drabhluinn, draoluinn and drowluinn, but in Islay we never murder a Gaelic word.” According to MacAlpine, “in the islands of Argyle, every word is pronounced just as ADAM spoke it,” so it is hardly surprising that any deviation incurs his censure: the spelling pairilis is “downright nonsense” for paralais, and raibheic is “most unconscionably murdered by the best Gaelic scholars RAOICHD.” Nevertheless, even he is sometimes at a loss: of biodag ‘dirk, dagger’ he says “It is impossible to pronounce this word”; similarly, his entry for iosail reads, in toto, “low, mean; can’t pretend to pronounce it properly; same as iseal.”
The marked individuality of MacAlpine is perhaps most clearly seen in his outbursts of national and local pride, which can occur in the most unlikely contexts. In a comment on the word paitireachd, which he translates as ‘phrenology, thumping,’ he declares that “The sublime science of PHRENOLOGY has been in use, in the Highlands, for time immemorial [I wonder whether any present-day Highlander could confirm or deny this?], though the inhabitants of Edinburgh, piqued themselves on its discovery.” Again, on the subject of Gaelic spelling, which an outsider would not consider very satisfactory (too many redundancies and silent consonants), MacAlpine asserts that “The orthography of the Gaelic, shews more acuteness and ingenuity in its structure, than any other language the author knows any thing of.” The word muirn is defined as “a respectful, tender reception or genuine Highland hospitality”; and to illustrate the meaning of iseal ‘low, humble’ he cites the phrase iseal am folachd ‘of a base extraction,’ adding helpfully “such as every person that is not HIGHLAND!!!!!” I have already drawn attention above to MacAlpine’s firm belief in the linguistic purity of the Islands, and of Islay in particular.
In the light of this attitude, which today would no doubt be regarded as rampant chauvinism, it is no surprise that MacAlpine has his own theory about Dr. Johnson’s well-known dislike of Scotland and the Scots. He explains this obvious aberration from rationality in a footnote to the word uamh ‘cave’ which deserves to be quoted in full:
Uamh nam fear, the Gentleman’s Cave,—a very singular cavern in the Island of St. MacCormaig, in the Sound of Jura, Argyle. It is the fate of every gentleman that enters this cave, that
“Out of his derogate body shall never spring, A babe to honour him!!!”
What a grand look-out for the Rev. Mr. Malthus!!! Report says, that the celebrated Doctors SAMUEL JOHNSON and MACCULLOCH were storm-staid in this untoward den,—and that this was the reason they vented their spleen on the poor HIGHLANDS and HIGHLANDERS. Government should look about them; St. MacCormaig is in the market.
This is by no means MacAlpine’s only excursion into the subject of local beliefs and customs. In his discussion of bòrd ‘table,’ for example, he notes the idiomatic usage tha e fo’n bhórd ‘he is dead,’ literally, ‘he is under the table.’ “This phrase is peculiar to a part of Perthshire, but is quite common in Ireland; originating from a practice that obtains, among the lower classes there, of placing the corpse when coffined under the table.” He also gives his readers useful advice on dealing with supernatural visitants (“Assaulted by ghosts or hobgoblins at any time in the Highlands, you have only to describe a circle, within which, you are as safe, as if aside your mother at the fireside”) and goes into great detail about the various types of orra, or amulet: they include, for instance, “orra-chomais… to deprive a man of his v-r-l-ty, particularly on the marriage-night, by way of vengeance, (a fine thing to cure blackguards)”; “orra-ghrúdaire… to make every drop of the wash to overflow the wash-tuns”; and “orra nan oìleamh… to prevent d—s to [sic] succeed in any publication, such as a Gaelic dictionary, &c. &c. &c.”
It seems unlikely that belief in such devices should still be found, though stranger things have happened and one should not assume automatically that Southron “enlightenment” is now universal in Scotland (or, indeed, in England). Traditions are tenacious, after all, and survive in the most improbable places; so I am unable to say for sure that one cannot obtain an orra-chomais today, just as I am unable to say whether Uamh nam fear retains its efficacy as a contraceptive. However, I can reassure prospective visitors to Scotland on one point: notwithstanding the observation quoted at the beginning of this article, the practice of anthropophagy is no longer considered socially acceptable in any part of the United Kingdom.
EPISTOLA {Kirkham Ford}
In Richard Lederer’s article [XI, 1] about sexist language, he asserted, “… the only common uncapitalized English words …from the names of women are tawdry… and bloomers.”
He should have been with me and my sheila on our motor trip. She wore a bertha collar and had a juliet cap on her pompadour. The girl is a professional nanny and may be a pollyanna, but is not a mollycoddle or a patsy, although she is a nervous nellie about riding in my tin lizzie.
The first evening we had a couple of margaritas before dinner, a stew flavored with rosemary, and charlotte russe and brown betty for dessert. I had in my pocket a couple of annie oakleys for the bullfights, so the next day we hired a victoria with a span of jennies and drove to the bull ring. The veronicas and chiquilitas were excellent. In the evening fireworks, the best was a catherine wheel. Later, we went back to the hotel and smoked some marijuana.
Some of the words in this account are made from Spanish names. I am not much of an entomologist, so for all I know, that may not be cricket.
Besides the examples I have given above, there are two units of measurement named for women: the curie (named for Marie, not Pierre) and the millihelen, the unit of beauty needed to launch one ship.
[Kirkham Ford, Paris, Tennessee]
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Acronyms, Initialisms, and Abbreviations Dictionary: A Guide to Alphabetic Designations, Contractions, Acronyms, Initialisms, Abbreviations, and Similar Condensed Appellations
Ellen T. Crowley and Helen E. Sheppard, eds., (Gale Research Company, 1984), Part 1: A-K, pp. 1-1017, Part 2: L-Z, pp. 1018-2048.
Formidable! That and the subtitle say it all for this reference source, which has become, in this day of AIDS and other afflictions, verbal and corporeal, an indispensable adjunct to every library. NASA uses AIDS to mean ‘Abort Inertial Digital System’ (whatever that means), and the 26 listings under the entry end with ‘North Atlantic Institute for Defense Study,’ which, curiously enough, merits no entry under NAIDS: perhaps the entire Atlantic is now a subject for study. There are more than 300,000 listings in these large tomes; in the event you considered that skimpy, a two-issue supplement, New Acronyms, Initialisms, and Abbreviations, by the same editors, by subscription in 1985 for $130, is in preparation. I didn’t have the strength to browse, but I have had much experience using earlier editions and can commend it, without reservation, to any who think they may need it.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: National Directory of Addresses and Telephone Numbers
(World Almanac Publications, 1984), 1985 Edition, 1069 pp.
Several years ago, a similar directory was published, but it is now out of date. We found it very useful quite often, though I have never been able to understand why some categories of companies are listed and others omitted, what the rationale is behind the various breakdowns of some categories (like those for Magazines), why some companies (e.g., under Book Publishing) are listed and others are not, etc. There is no answer to these questions in an Editor’s Foreword. In short, this is not— nor does it pretend to be—a “national telephone directory,” and one must be grateful for what is there: more than 75,000 listings. Because of its usefulness, we offer it in the VERBATIM Book Club Catalogue.
Laurence Urdang
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Now for 24 hours a day, I can sleep, swim and be completely active!” [An ad for hair replacement, from The New York Times 19 August 1984. Submitted by Rosemary Darmstadt, Glendale, New York.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Lady Diana, expecting her second child in about a month …” [From the Boston Globe, 22 August 1984. Submitted by Franklin Rodman, Brookline, Massachusetts.]
Palindromes: The Art of Reverse English
Richard Lederer, St. Paul’s School
During the 1930’s, the word radar was coined to describe a radio device used to locate an object by means of waves reflected from the object and received by the sending unit. The letters in radar form not only an acronym (they stand for radio detecting and ranging), but also a palindrome because they read the same forwards and backwards. As such, the word seems to be an especially happy coinage to denote the two-way reflection of radio waves.
A palindrome (from two Greek roots that mean ‘running back again’) is a word, sentence, or longer statement that communicates the same message when the letters of which it is composed are taken in reverse order. Madam is probably the most famous palindromic word in English, but once you begin pursuing what has been called “the abominable palindrome,” you will discover a surprising number of words in our language that do indeed “run back again.”
Start with your own family, and you will find mom, pop (or dad), sis, and tot. Soon you will come upon longer words, such as toot (four letters), level (five letters), redder (six letters), and deified (seven letters). Other seven-letter palindromic words include reviver, repaper, and rotator. The longest palindromic word listed in English dictionaries is redivider (nine letters), although some chemical handbooks list the eleven-letter word detartrated. Dimitri Borgmann, who has collected thousands of palindromes in all major languages, asserts that the longest non-hyphenated single-word palindrome in the world is saippuakauppias, a fifteen-letter Finnish word for ‘soap dealer.’
Close kin to the palindrome is the semordnilap. Take a good look at the word semordnilap and you will find that it is palindromes spelled backward. While a palindromic word reads the same forwards and backwards, a semordnilapic word becomes a new word when spelled in reverse. The ending of Stanley Kubrick’s chilling film, The Shining, hinges on the semordnilapic circumstance that the words red rum, which Jack Nicholson blithers throughout the story, spell murder when one starts from the back. Other semordnilapic examples include Al Boleska’s question, “Have you ever noticed what golf spells backwards?” and the anonymously penned definition of eros: “spelled backwards gives you an idea of how it affects beginners.”
Such words are more prevalent than you might think. For instance, along most highways you will see such signs as: “Stop Ahead,” “Food-Gas-Lodging,” “Speed Limit 55,” “Do Not Pass,” “Keep Right,” and “Motel: Pool.” The dedicated semordnilap stalker will quickly flush out the hidden reversals embedded in each message: pots, sag, deeps, ton, peek, and loop. Up until 1970, if you were driving on West Miner Street in Yreka, California, you would have come to the Yreka Bakery. Alas, that bakery is now closed; but its premises are now occupied by the Yrella Gallery.
It is to the sentence palindrome that we must turn to discover the most celebrated and adroit exercises in palindromic power. Some word-players claim that the first sentence ever spoken was a palindrome. Adam allegedly introduced himself to Eve thus: Madam, I’m Adam. Professional logologist J. A. Lindon offers the complete primordial dialogue, from which I excerpt the best exchanges:
ADAM: Madam —
EVE: Oh, who?
ADAM: Madam, I’m Adam.
EVE: Name of a foeman?
ADAM: O stone me! Not so.
EVE: Mad! A maid I am, Adam.
ADAM: Madam in Eden, I’m Adam.
EVE: Eve, maiden name. Both sad in Eden? I dash to be manned. I am Eve.
ADAM: Madam, I’m Adam. Named under a ban. A bared, nude man. Madam, I’m Adam.
EVE: Tut-tut, mad Adam. Tut-tut.
Another palindromic sentence of great historical pitch and moment is this classic, purportedly uttered by Napoleon after his defeat at Waterloo: Able was I ere I saw Elba. More recently, a palindromist characterized Jimmy Carter’s presidency this way: To last, Carter retracts a lot.
Palindromes have a long and honorable history. One of the oldest surviving examples of graffiti is found on the wall of an excavated tavern of ancient Rome: Roma summus amor: ‘Rome is the greatest love.’ Over the entrance to the sixth-century Hagia Sophia temple in Turkey is an inscription which, translated into modern Greek, reads: NIPSON ANOMENA ME MONAN OPSIN: ‘Wash your sins, not just your face.’
The first recorded sentence palindrome in English comes from the hand of the early seventeenth-century poet John Taylor: Lewd did I live & evil I did dwel. Dwel is acceptable seventeenth-century spelling, but the substitution of an ampersand for and is a bit of a fudge factor. Still, Taylor’s nine-word effort is a promising palindromic pathbreaker, which blazed the way for such tours de farce as this interview from the Harvard Bulletin conducted with the fictional Professor R. Osseforp, holder of the Emor D. Nilap, Chair in Palindromology. Note that not only are the professor’s name and title palindromic, but so are all his answers:
—And what about your new novel, could you tell me its title?
—Dennis Sinned.
—Intriguing. What is the plot?
—Dennis and Edna sinned.
—I see. Is there any more to it than that?
—Dennis Krats and Edna Stark sinned.
—Now it all becomes clear. Tell me, with all this concern about the ecology, what kind of car are you driving nowadays?
—A Toyota.
—Naturally, and how about your colleague, Prof. Nustad?
—Nustad? A Datsun.
A successful palindromic sentence must make a self-contained and reasonably clear statement and, at the same time, obey the laws of grammar. Writing sentence palindromes can be an extremely fascinating pastime, but the task is fraught with myriad possibilities for frustration. Two near-misses (near-hits, actually) will illustrate the problems involved: Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era? Here is a brilliant and ringing creation—if only an a could be inserted between to and new. But the a destroys the fragile design, and the elusive beast slips away uncaptured.
The second near hit is one that I made up: Eros, a ton tub stops spots, but a sore. While this sentence holds up grammatically, it requires an outpouring of background. You see the Greek Eros was afflicted with leprosy sores, and he tried to wash them away by bathing in a huge tub that held a ton of water. When he asked his physician why the strategy wasn’t working, the good doctor replied…. Unfortunately, by the time such an explanation is completed, the palindrome is dead.
Still, if you are persistent, you may be able to capture the perfect palindromic statement, one that requires no explanation and makes clear sense. My original creation, Pepsi is Pep meets these criteria, and I harbor dreams that the slogan may one day make much money for me.
Here follows a list of what are, in my view, twenty of the best long palindromes ever created, arranged in order of length:
I prefer pi. (mathematician’s palindrome)
Draw, o coward!
Rail at a liar.
Step on no pets.
Sex at noon taxes.
Never odd or even.
Dennis and Edna sinned.
Won’t lovers revolt now?
Emil asleep peels a lime.
Sit on a potato pan, Otis.
Rats live on no evil star.
Ma is as selfless as I am.
Now, Ned, I am a maiden won.
Was it a car or a cat I saw?
Some men interpret nine memos.
Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus.
Mad Zeus, no live devil, lived evil on Suez Dam.
As a palindrome expands, its sense tends to evaporate. Despite this law of palindromology, brilliant efforts of considerable density have been produced. Two of the most admirable are: Straw? No! Too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts and Doc, note I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod.
But many believe that for a palindrome that makes a lucid and elegant statement, it is impossible to beat the story of the Panama Canal, as written by Leigh Mercer: A man! A plan! A canal! Panama!
A Reverse English Quiz
1. How many of these commonplace palindromic words can you recognize from their definitions? The number of letters in each word is indicated in parentheses: midday (4); exploit (4); oaf (4); even; flat (5); allude to (5); northern boat (5); belief or dogma (5); address to a woman (5).
2. The following are definitions of phrases consisting of two semordnilapic words, followed by the number of letters in each word: [Example: canine deity (3) = dog god] drink a stopper (4); dull poet (4); therefore a monster (4); rodents’ sun (4); prevaricating engineer (4); feeling that the end is near (4); repulse victim of dread disease (5); prevents stains (5); dried grain growths (5); paid back baby’s pants (6); compensate an artist (6); poet’s bathroom bowl (6); bring in the hated (7); skunk makes another sweater (7); emphasized last meal course (8).
1. noon; deed; boob; level; refer; kayak; tenet; madam.
2. gulp plug; drab bard; ergo ogre; rats’ star; rail liar; doom mood; repel leper; stops spots; straw warts; repaid diaper; reward drawer; T. Eliot toilet; deliver reviled; stinker reknits; stressed desserts.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Library prefers ‘indented’ children.” [Caption on library bookmarks promoting “Ident-a-Kid” program. From The Columbus Dispatch, 29 August 1984. Submitted by Dorothy Branson, Columbus, Ohio.]
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: You All Spoken Here
Roy Wilder, Jr., (Viking, 1984), xvii + 215 pp.
It has been said that the clichés and idioms of a language are born in dialect areas, then, if they are felt to be apt, spread to other parts of the language community till they become accepted into the language generally or, in a lesser way, regionally. That is scarcely a profound observation, for every expression must have its origins somewhere, its originator must be a speaker of the language, and every speaker of every language speaks a dialect of some sort. In America, because of the universality of radio, television, and national periodicals and—to some extent at least—of the Völkerwanderung of the years since the early 1940s, the relatively firm isoglosses, or boundaries between conterminous dialect areas have been breached. One result has been the leveling of differences between and among certain dialects; another, the complete obliteration of geographical distinctions of certain dialects. From another point of view, we can observe the democratization of language, in the sense that people everywhere are far more aware of the differences in American dialects and, perhaps, are more tolerant of them, accepting the regional rhetoric of a John F. Kennedy, the polemical oratory of a midwestern Everett Dirksen, and the dulcet Texan tones of a Dan Rather with decreasing prejudice. It is not impossible that Mr. Rather’s popularity stems to some degree from his speaking in a dialect similar to that affected by popular singers, almost all of whom imitate, with varying success, the folksy country accents of the United States. (Nothing seems more ludicrous to me than listening to a radio or television interview with a popular singer or group with obvious Welsh or Liverpudlian accents only to hear the performance of their top hit record in which they try to sound as if they have just got off a plane from Dallas—or were they just watching the soap opera, Dallas?)
“Cornpone Country,” characterized on the dust cover of this book as “southern parts of the United States” but not more precisely focused by its author on North Carolina—probably about a howdy and a half [‘About a tater chunk—as far as you can throw a potato’] from his front door in Gourd Hollow (probably pronounced HOLLER)—yields what I can characterize only with the cliché “picturesque.” The metaphors abound and, because they are unfamiliar (at least to me), they amuse and entertain and confirm for the umpteenth time that the language and its speakers are thriving somewhere, albeit not in Washington or on Madison Avenue:
If brains were dynamite he wouldn’t have enough to blow his nose: … if a bird had his brains he’d fly backwards.
He’d steal flies from a blind spider.
He’s so ugly he has to slap himself to sleep: He’d gag a maggot.
He’s so ugly no fly’d ever land on him.
Looks like he’s been chewin’ tobacco and spittin' in the wind.
When he was a baby he was so ugly they fed him with a slingshot.
She’s so fat that if she had to haul ass she’d have to make two trips.
These are candidates for the Dictionary of Insults and for documentation in Maledicta. Similes are rife:
[As pretty as] … a speckled puppy under a red wagon.
[As confused as] … a rubber-nosed woodpecker in the Petrified Forest.
[As tearful as] … a child that’s lost his chewing gum on a henhouse floor.
The foregoing illustrate style rather than lexical regionalisms. But the latter occur in profusion, too:
pirootin': Messing around; from “pirouetting.”
tickler: A flat pocket flask.
favorance: Resemblance.
gumshot: Slingshot.
throddy: Well rounded; plump; chuffy.
in the room of: In place of.
… and many more.
Although Wilder has included some words and expressions that, doubtlessly, occur in the speech of the area he describes, I have my reservations about accepting them as exclusively indigenous or, indeed, as having originated there. Such terms as tacky ‘not couth,’ farthingale ‘hooped petticoat,’ smidgen, on tick, in a pig’s eye, hog wild, traipse, jitney, gallimaufry, tailormades, and What boots it?, for which a citation from Milton’s Lycidas is provided, can scarcely be said to occur exclusively in the dialect(s) he describes. Also, it is a shame that Wilder credits Robert Burchfield and not, more properly, Allen Walker Read with the etymology of O.K. [p. 173].
Most books of this kind are quite thin and are generally padded out by (large) illustrations. You All Spoken Here, a hefty 215 pages (plus a foreword by the redoubtable Willard R. Espy), is packed with entries and information. My only criticism is that its broad, topical organization affords little opportunity for reference, as the material is not readily retrievable and, alas, there is no index.
Laurence Urdang
Concealed Iranians
William Cole, New York City
Few scholars have recognized the importance and uniqueness of the contributions of the Persian language to English. Research in this area is difficult, because most of these contributions have been particularly indirect—Iranian words have traveled through as many as five or six different tongues before finally arriving in English. A related problem is that the roots of many words of Middle Eastern origin have long since fallen into obscurity, and whether a given word was first used by the Arabs, Turks, Hindus, Jews, or Persians is often impossible to determine. But many interesting words can be traced, and the study of this bastardized Indo-European language is invariably fruitful and fascinating. (It is true that, practically by definition, all Indo-European tongues have been bastardized to some degree. But vast cultural interchange with other groups in the area has affected Persian incomparably more than, for example, the Arab invaders affected Castilian.)
From the first, Persian words have traveled far to reach English—paradise, probably the first Iranian word to make the journey to the West, passed from Greek into Latin long before English was ever spoken. Tiger is also such a word, coming from Persian tier ‘arrow.’
During the late Middle Ages, French was the intermediary. The chess vocabulary arrived during that time. Chess and check both come from the Persian shah, ‘king.’ This relationship is more easily perceptible in the German word for chess, Schach. Checkmate comes from shah mat ‘the king is dead.’
From c.1650 to c.1850 many Persian words entered the English vocabulary. Some came directly, but most did not, this time being filtered through Turkish and Hindi. Included in this group are such words as shawl, seersucker and khaki—all of which indicate Iran’s longstanding importance as a textile and fashion center. Also belonging to this group is cummerbund, first coined by the Hindus but coming from Persian kamar ‘waist’ + band ‘band.’ Very few western words entered Persian during this period, the notable exception being the French merci—no Persian word for “thank you” had existed prior to the late seventeenth century. I wonder what a (socio)linguist would make of that.
Poló, the Iranian word for ‘rice,’ took perhaps the longest and most difficult route. Picked up by Arabs in the ninth century, it somehow spread to Arab-controlled Spain by the early 11th century. By the early 15th century it had become the Castilian paella, now referring to a rice-based dish usually made with seafood. On to France where, in the mid 16th century, it became pilaf. By now, both pilaf and paella are standard English.
Peach, coming from the Latin mālus persica ‘Persian apple,’ cannot, of course, be described as originating in Persia, but is still an interesting toponym.
Other words of cultural significance include drum, tambourine, and guitar, all of which seem to have their earliest roots in Farsee.
The more recent alleged contributions are less plausible. Haägen-Dazs, for example, means nothing in any language except Persian, where hokh-an-dause means ‘garbage can.’ That particular brand of ice cream would probably sell even worse in Iran than Perdue chickens would in France.
Equally interesting is the insight Persian gives into a certain surname. Philologists have woodenly assumed that Urdang originally comes from Middle High Germany, presumably meaning “primordial wisdom,” “original knowledge,” or the like. Yet I will now assert that perhaps it comes from Farsee: urdang-ee means ‘kick in the ass.’ (Mr. Urdang should consider himself far more fortunate than the NCAA soccer coach of the year, Diether Ficken: German ficken ‘to fuck’; and certainly no worse off than former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite: German Krankheit, ‘sickness, disease.')
[Which may be why I ran.—Ed.]
The Viking Linguistic Legacy
S. B. Godinez, New York, New York
The language of the Vikings has long been underrated as an influence on the English language. Hartvig Dahl’s Word Frequencies of Spoken American English counts five words of Old Norse (ON) origin among the hundred most common words uttered by Americans: possibly like; get, want, they, and them. Latin-Old French, understandably touted as a far richer source, counts but six words in the same range: just, because, really, possibly mean; very, and sort. Latin-Old French ultimately has the numbers, but ON has the depth. Rarely does a language borrow pronouns, since they’re part of the bedrock of a language; yet the ON borrowings they, them, and their suggest the powerful influence of the Scandinavians on Old English-speaking (OE) people. They also help when you want to impress your friends by formulating sentences almost totally borrowed from Scandinavian sources such as, “They got snagged,” or “Like die, scrub,” or “Their sister reeks whoredom!”
This essay discusses a few semantic categories of ON words that exist in Modern English (E). Each category includes the dialect words often unmentioned in similar treatments by history-of-English type books. All words have an ON etymon unless otherwise indicated as Scandinavian (Scand). This means the word seems to have an etymon or cognate in one of the five Scand languages (Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, or Faroese), but no attested form has yet been found in ON. Words are glossed when I feel the precise meaning is especially interesting.
A for animals is a good place to start. The Vikings were not prigs, and things porcine must have been important to them: galt, gilt ‘young sow,’ grice, griskin, and possibly hog. Sheep terms are gimmer, hirsel, and blissom ‘concerning ewe; in heat’, a blossoming bliss of sorts. Cattle terms: bull, quey ‘heifer,’ akin to E cow, and nowt with variant nolt ‘cattle,’ akin to E neat ‘ox’. Two deer terms are possibly elk; and rein(deer); dogs: cur, Dane, and sleuth, originally ‘animal track’ and later ‘bloodhound’; horses: filly and perhaps jade ‘worn-out horse’ and yaud ‘whore; mare’, the latter two words maybe ultimately from Finnish. Animals that annoy: insects as clegg ‘horsefly,’ Scand lop ‘flea’; mawk ‘maggot,’ and maggot itself; rodents as vole(mouse) and Scand lemming. Some miscellaneous animals: Scand bat; hagworm, possibly kid, possibly scut ‘hare’; walrus, and pad(dock) ‘toad’ from which padlock may have been formed due to a supposed similarity to the shape of the toad. Odd terms number brisket ‘animal breast,’ kitling ‘young of an animal; kitten’, scrag ‘lean person or animal,’ and tyke, originally ‘dog’—ON tik ‘bitch.’
Birds figure heavily in ON borrowings. Geese alone number several terms: brant, ember(goose), gosling, goosander, gull (not the sea bird, which is from Welsh), and solan. Only a few bird terms are commonly known: auk, (corn) crake, dove. The rest are generally known only by specialists: cadder and related kae; fulmar and related maw, akin to E mew; gare-fowl and possibly related gyrfalcon; gowk which superseded OE géac ‘cuckoo’>obsolete (obs) E yeke; the related loom and loon, the related scarf and scart; scua, steg, and tern. A few miscellaneous terms: down ‘feathering,’ egg ‘ovum’ (although egg ‘to incite’ is indeed another Norse borrowing), laughter ‘number of eggs laid by a fowl,’ and wing, cherished by Paul McCartney.
Just as many of the birds above are sea-related, the Norsemen, and presumably Norsewomen, were also interested in what lived below the surface: bloat(er), Scand brisling; flounder, hake, the whales narwhale (formed on ON nár ‘corpse’ with reference to the mammal’s skin) and rorqual; saithe, Scand scrabe; scrae, sile, skate, possibly skelly; torsk and related tusk and cusk; turbot. Some miscellaneous terms: gill, rip ‘wicker basket for fish,’ roe ‘spawn of fish.’
The popular image of the Vikings is far from that of flower children, yet borrowed flora terms abound. Plants include bur(r), later ‘obstacle in the throat’ and possibly even later ‘uvular pronunciation of /r/'; burdock, formed on bur(r); carl hemp, Scand golland and variant gowan, possibly akin to E gold; hulver, ling, seal ‘willow,’ and seave ‘the rush.’ The dahlia is eponymous for the Swedish botanist A. Dahl. Vegetables count cole, collard, kale, all ‘cabbage’ and preserved in kailyard ‘cabbage garden,’ symbolic of Scotland’s literature since 1895 as in “the kailyard school”; rutabaga ‘turnip,’ literally, ‘root-bag’; and skirret ‘parsnip,’ literally, ‘sheer-white.’ Various grasses are Scand fog (and later perhaps foggy ‘misty’ and by backformation fog ‘mist’), marram, literally, ‘mere [“sea”] haulm’; Scand s(a) ennegrass, tang, and varech, akin to E wreck; star ‘grass’ (the Norse heavenly body is preserved in stern, starn), and tangle. Shrubs: busk and adjectival bosky; rest-harrow, rone, and Scand whin. Trees: possibly fir; and Scand rowan. Grains: big(g) ‘type of barley,’ akin to OE béow ‘grain’; and skeg, akin to E shaw ‘thicket; surname,’ E shag ‘rough hair,’ and skaw, itself from ON meaning ‘promontory.’ Fruit: only the Scand bilberry. Various items concerning parts of a tree, plant, or hedge are awn, bark, blea, bole, root, sway, possibly Scand log; and trouse. Scand trash originally meant ‘broken twigs.’
Most of the terms inherited from Old Norse referring to human beings are disparaging. The etymological fallacy is belied by cheapskate, literally ‘cheap shit.’ The second element is preserved in blatherskate, blatherskite ‘talkative person’ and unbounded in skate ‘contemptible person’ and skite ‘to excrete.’ (One cannot overlook the important frequentatives skitter and probable variant squitter ‘to void thin excrement.') For a quick put-down try: duffer ‘incompetent person,’ akin to E deaf; fry ‘unimportant person,’ which I’ve never heard unchaperoned by E small, maybe redundant to purists since the etymon for fry meant seed; gowk ‘fool’ (also ‘bird’: see above); hobo, perhaps as Professor E. Fichtner has suggested, from ON haugbúi ‘ghost, “undead” man,’ formed on haugr ‘a how, a hill’ + bua ‘to dwell’; kid, originally ‘young of goat’; nithing ‘a wretch’ and variants nidder(l)ing ‘a coward; cowardly’; oaf, surprisingly akin to and originally meaning E ‘elf; outlaw; runagate ‘apostate, deserter’ with second element formed on gate ‘way; street; manner of going’ with variant gait ‘manner of walking’; possibly scout and variant scut ‘contemptible person’; possibly scrub ‘mean little fellow; low stunted tree,’ although I’ve heard this word used only to describe inferior athletes; Scand slouk and possible variant slouch ‘ungainly fellow,’ the latter also ‘stooping posture’; snob, originally ‘shoemaker(’s apprentice); townsman’; steg ‘stupid person’ (also ‘bird’: see above); swain, also preserved in boatswain and coxswain; and thrall. The Norsemen were apparently as sexist as we are: all of the following, flag, giglet, gimmer, skit, and slattern generally mean ‘low, contemptible woman’; only may ‘maiden’ has survived with specific reference to women without pejoration. Other words without necessary pejoration: fellow, literally ‘fee-layer’; guest, replacing OE g(i)est; and ombudsman. A surprising number of words have endured indicating familial relationship: bairn ‘child,’ fore-elders, forefather, friend ‘kinsman’, half-brother/sister, sister itself, replacing cognates of OE sweostor; and husband with variant hubby, the latter preferred in huge headlines of sensationalistic newspapers. The in-law hyphemes are partially Norse since law is directly from ON superseding OE æ ‘law.’ A few historical terms: hold ‘high-ranking officer in the Danelaw,’ housecarl ‘bodyguard of a king or noble,’ jarl ‘chieftain of ancient Scandinavia.’ Personal names, almost all compounds, include Eric, literally ‘honor-great’; Harold ‘army-wielder’; Ingrid ‘Ingvi (“a Germanic god”)-ride’; Leif, akin to E lief and E love; Ralph ‘counsel-wolf’; Ronald ‘decreeing powers-ruler’; partially Sigmund ‘victory-hand’; and presumably Thurston ‘Thor-stone.’ A few other proper names: Norman, literally ‘north-man’; Varangian “Scandinavian rover over Russia’; and— what else?—probably Viking.
And what did the Vikings like to do? Well, some scholars claim the Norse got a raw deal and were ultimately scholarly farmers. But their linguistic legacy in English sometimes seems otherwise: they apparently liked to bang, bash, baste (and lam and lambaste, of course), berry ‘to hit,’ ding with (re)duplicative ding-dong, dint (verb only), hit, nevel ‘to punch,’ scrap, scuff, slam, slat ‘to strike; to cast,’ sometimes slaughter, but sometimes only tip. Scandinavian words include bump, cuff (also in fisticuffs), rap, slug, and whither ‘to strike violently.’
Can the savage words above be counterbalanced by perhaps the most beautiful relic of Old Norse: hug?
EPISTOLA {John Mella}
The Hint of Print in Your Breath is a Mint of Divinest Flavor: A Note on Printed Spoonerisms
Norman Ward, in his witty article on spoonerisms [XI, 1] wonders “what the English called spoonerisms before Rev. W. A. was born in 1844,” and notes that “the word has no synonym.” While he is, of course, technically correct, words existed for the concept as long ago as Aristotle, and theoreticians of the English Renaissance discussed them exhaustively. While Mr. Ward is right on target when he says that “the best spoonerisms are heard, not seen,” there are several amusing ones immortalized (if that’s the right word) in print which deserve to be served up as an addendum, or tail, to his entertaining oral list, and it is in this spirit that the following note is appended.
Agnomination, or paronomasia, a form of pun, is, in appropriately wooden fashion, discussed by Aristotle in his Rhetoric (3.11): “The effect is produced even by jokes depending upon changes of the letters in a word…”; and he gives examples from Isocrates and others. Cicero’s treatment of what rhetoricians of the time called “figures of ambiguity” in De oratore was adapted by Castiglione in Il libro del cortegiano (1528) and thence by Wilson in The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), who cites an amusing instance of paronomasia by William Somer, Henry VIII’s fool:
[He] seeing much adoe for accomptes making, and that the Kinges Majestie… wanted money, such as was due unto him: and please your grace (quoth he) you have so many Frauditors, so many Conveighers, and so many Deceivers to get up your money, that they get all to themselves… He should have saide Auditours, Surveighours, and Receivers.
Related figures, or “topics of invention,” such as antanaclasis (two or more meanings attached to the same word), metathesis (the transposition of letters in a word), asteismus (a figure of reply; a facetious or mocking answer), and figures of deliberate obscurity (enigma, noema, schematismus) are cited by such 16th-century rhetoricians as Peacham (The Garden of Eloquence, 1577), Puttenham (The Arte of English Poesie, 1589), and Hoskyns (Direccions for Speech and Style, ca. 1599).
“Paronomasia,” says a more recent scholiast, “is a kind of verbal plague, a contagious sickness in the world of words.” Elsewhere, he speaks of “Life everlasting—based on a misprint !”, and in the novel, Bend Sinister, from which the former squib is lifted, characters form anagrams of each other. Nabokov, of course, is famous for witty inversions and for collecting, among his rainbow-bag of butterfly-specimens, the “dove-droppings” of words. In the afore-mentioned work we are treated to the perfectly mounted catch of a university president, the brilliantly named Dr. Azureus, who annotates, with the inanities unspun from the tape-recorder secreted in his stuffing, the grief which forms the book’s heart:
Gentlemen! When a man has lost a beloved wife, when an animal has lost his feet in the aging ocean…he regrets… So let us not by our own fault place ourselves in the position of the bereaved lover, of the admiral whose fleet is lost in the raging waves… (Chapter Four)
Verbal clutter, morphemic mazes, lexical labyrinths abound in the texture of this work, densely packed mirror-ripples of hilarity punctuated, as it were, with explosions of unreasoning terror: the immortal Dr. Hammecke, a synthesis, so to speak, of Heidegger and half-baked Hegel, his adam’s apple constricted at the proleptic intimation of his terminal toboggan-ride down sinuous slopes onto “the virgin snows of anonymous death,” “in a thick stream of apprehension and halitosis” spoonerizing “silence” and “science” (Chapter Seventeen).
Perhaps more affecting, in a kind of prurient-pathetic way, is the wilting and yet humidly tumescent Humbert Humbert (through whose tortured glottis the word nymphet has decisively been lifted into the linguistic mainstream from the minor Jacobean rivulets of Drayton and Drummond), whose speech is effectively spoonerized by the “tender, mysterious, impure, indifferent twilight eyes” of “Haze, Dolores” (to firmly place the child where she belongs—in a school attendance list):
“What’s the katter with misses?” I muttered (wordcontrol gone) into her hair.
“If you must know,” she said, “you do it the wrong way.”
“Show, wight ray.”
“All in good time,” responded the spoonerette.
Which is followed by a patch of macaronic prose-poetry to which I refer the titillated reader (Part One, Chapter 27, Lolita).
Perhaps it takes a philologist to eviscerate, with sufficient skill, the steaming entrails of words, though it certainly requires a poet’s touch as well. C.S. Lewis manages to bring both into play toward the end of his funny and horripilating That Hideous Strength (1946)—correctly subtitled “A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups”—where the pseudo-scientists of Belbury are afflicted with a kind of instant aphasia at their terminal dinner-party.
The Deputy Director [a courtly somewhat sinister aristocrat whose normal speech resembles that of a senile professor emeritus heavily sedated with Quaaludes] could not understand this, for to him his own voice seemed to be uttering the speech he had resolved to make. But the audience heard him saying, “Tidies and fugleman—I sheel foor that we all—er—most steeply rebut the defensible, though, I trust, lavatory, Aspasia which gleams to have selected our redeemed inspector this deceiving. It would—ah—be shark, very shark, from anyone’s debenture…”
The brilliance and delicacy of this satiric effect, if I may be allowed to hold Professor Lewis’s scalpel up so that its edge may catch the light, is owing in part to the uncanny way in which the intonations and rhythms of a characteristically turgid after-dinner speech are reproduced—as the comatose auditor hears it, buzzing with bordeaux and boredom, potty with port. (It will have been noted by astute readers that Mr. Ward’s point is reemphasized in these examples: though they all occur “in print,” each of them exists only in the mouth of one or another character—which brings us neatly, if unobtrusively, back to the oral nature of the phenomenon.)
Aristotle regarded such figures and fancies as “adornments,” but in the 19th century (which saw the birth both of Spooner and Sir James A.H. Murray’s monstrous lexicographical child) the icing on the cake, all froth and saccharinity to the humorless rhetorician, becomes in fact the entire bill of fare; the rhetorical flourish, all we can discern of rhetoric, and the play on words, the word itself. Here (to paraphrase A. D. Godley) is an art which does not conceal itself; and if one is not always able to do the trick, one can still see how the trick might be done. This is also, we should remember, the century of Lewis Carroll and the rage in England for crossword puzzles, of Lear and his alphabet soup of nonsense and his great word-haunted hybrids, of Browningesque ellipses and of Thackeray’s “faint fashionable fiddle-faddle and feeble court slip-slop.” On this languid note we will wish a rowdy yet reserved “Good night” —along with W. M. Praed (1802-39)—to
Miss Fennel’s macaw, which at Boodle’s
Was held to have something to say;Mrs. Splenetic’s musical poodles,
Which bark ‘Batti Batti’ all day…We’ll be seeing them in the next century.
[John Mella, Chicago, Illinois]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“…the new French dictionary being produced in France with the aid of some 1,700 computerized French texts dating back to the 17th century.” [From an article by Colin Campbell in The New York Times, reprinted in The International Herald Tribune, n.d. Submitted by Frank Abate, Old Saybrook, Connecticut.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“The 47-year-old Governor has received nationwide attention since she was elected Kentucky’s first governor who was a woman last November.” [From an article in The New York Times, 20 May 1984. Submitted by Doris Whalen, Kentfield, California.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“…The office they gave me was filthy. I had to clean it with my secretary.” [From an interview with an ousted justice, in the Detroit Free Press, 27 September 1984. Submitted by Rudy Simons, Oak Park, Michigan.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“If Oscar Mayer were alive today, he would turn over in his grave!” [Complaint by a worker about wage cuts by the present management of the Oscar Mayer sausage factory in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. WTMJ-TV, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 5 p.m. news, Sept. 10, 1984. Submitted by Reinhold Aman, Waukesha, Wisconsin.]
Paring Pairs No. 16
The clues are given in items lettered (a-zz); the answers are given in the numbered items, which must be matched with each other to solve the clues. In some cases, a numbered item may be used more than once, and some clues may require more than two answer items; but after all of the matchings have been completed, one numbered item will remain unmatched, and that is the correct answer. Our answer is the only correct one. The solution will be published in the next issue of VERBATIM.
(a). Ç for condom?
(b). Imitation of weeping Bohemian.
(c). Here, Pussy! Boo! Hiss!
(d). See the horologist.
(e). Vain addict from Paoli.
(f). Sturdy hooligan known for his persistence.
(g). Elfin loans are sacrilegious.
(h). Nasty argument in Hyde Park bridle path.
(i). Strange chap is fifth wheel.
(j). Legends of pixies beg the question.
(k). Lech Walesa is the cynosure.
(l). Explosive sticker.
(m). Pawnee takes it all back.
(n). Crafty shoeshine boy.
(o). Quixotic illumination.
(p). Has it rung for Esau’s brother?
(q). Henry IV and VIII furious in London street.
(r). Not wearing even a teddy in the railway station.
(s). Plan to accelerate disasters.
(t). Results of sex exposé.
(u). Collyrium for my ablutions?
(v). Where we once owned a pier, there is now a fish!
(w). He inherits the smog.
(x). Operating the thumbscrew has her in stitches.
(y). Confirm how old she is (just to be mean).
(z). A titter ran up to the squaw.
(zz). Gymnasts work out side-by-side in saloons.
(1). Age.
(2). Aver.
(3). Apparent.
(4). Bare.
(5). Bars.
(6). Boots.
(7). Call.
(8). Cat.
(9). Crash.
(10). Crewel.
(11). Cross.
(12). Cry.
(13). Dock.
(14). Felloe.
(15). Firing.
(16). French.
(17). Giver.
(18). Had.
(19). Haha.
(20). Hardy.
(21). Heir.
(22). Hood.
(23). I.
(24). I.O.U.s.
(49). Row.
(50). Sly.
(51). Star.
(25). Imp.
(26). Indian.
(27). Iron.
(28). Jacob’s.
(29). Kings.
(30). Knight.
(31). Ladder.
(32). Letter.
(33). Light.
(34). Liner.
(35). Lore.
(36). Main.
(37). Man.
(38). Mimi.
(39). Mini.
(40). Odd.
(41). Paddington.
(42). Parallel.
(43). Pin.
(44). Pole.
(45). Program.
(46). Public.
(47). Relations.
(48). Rotten.
(52). Wash.
(53). Watch.
(54). Work.
Answers to Paring Pairs No. 15
(a). Hack writer keeps his coins in a row. (34,1) Penny Aligner.
(b). Money all tied up in this? (49,18) Trussed Fund.
(c). Pile on the whip? (9,30) Cat Nap.
(d). Crazy about Ringo’s playmates? (4,31) Betel Nut.
(e). Singer Nags? (22,32) Horse Opera.
(f). Helper on Old West carriage. (44,20) Stage Hand.
(g). Coinvestment in a low dive. (23,50) Joint Venture.
(h). New England mohel. (53,11) Yankee Clipper.
(i). Employ Mehitabel’s friend in the ranks. (21,2) Hire Archy.
(j). Serious times. (13,12) Dog Daze.
(k). Golden journey? (19,48) Guilt Trip.
(l). Donate kisses. (27,41) Lip Service.
(m). Important event for yachtsmen and lions. (29,39) Mane Sail.
(n). Where British skiagraphs are kept. (42,7) Shadow Cabinet.
(o). Lucia’s “Mad Scene”? (36,14) Psycho Drama.
(p). Siege perilous. (15,10) Electric Chair.
(q). Tiny chivalrous man is feeble but never on Sunday—or Saturday. (52,26) Week Knight.
(r). Cushion litigation. (35,8) Pillow Case.
(s). Cobbler-composer. (43,28) Shoe Man.
(t). Cockney drink sends you into orbit. (16,3) Eye Ball
(u). Where funambulists practice. (38,51) Rope Walk.
(v). This can’t hold much (40,5) Sand Box.
(w). Did Miss Piggy transvect this disease? (45,17) Swine Flew.
(x). Chinese Cat. (33,47) Peiping Tom.
(y). Used car tester. (46,25) Tire Kicker.
(z). An Olympian bribe? (6,24) By Jove. (Please see page 16 for information about prizes.)
The correct answer is (37) Roam. We neglected to mention that the name of the European winner of Paring Pairs No. 14 was Anne Cutler of Cambridge, England. The winner of No. 15 had not been selected at press time.
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.
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Our Marvelous Native Tongue: The Life and Times of the English Language
Robert Claiborne, (Times Books, 1983), x + 339pp.
This history of English, from its remote ancestor spoken by Indo-European tribesmen probably in the valley of the Danube 8,000 years ago to what is becoming the world language, is written by a well-known amateur wordsmith in the honorable line of Partridge. It has the virtues and vices of the genre. It is enthusiastic, readable, and good fun; but in parts it is undisciplined, tendentious, and inaccurate. It certainly needed a sterner editor to cut out more of the endearing digressions.
Mr. Claiborne is unfortunate in his excursions into English history. To state as a fact that King Arthur established Camelot near Colchester is to beg a huge question. To suppose that King Canute tried to stop the tide misunderstands the late and unreliable legend. To call Shakespeare “the butcher’s son from Stratford” is, pace John Aubrey, at best inadequate.
He is not much happier in his adventures in literary criticism. Beatrice may well be described as one of the cleverest and therefore most delightful heroines who ever trod stage, which is a value judgment; but the play in which she appears cannot be described as Measure for Measure without some risk of dramatic inexactitude. His poor opinion of Milton is his own problem. But to declare that by the time of Alexander Pope poetry had become and remains a distinctly minor branch of English letters is a judgment so idiosyncratic as to verge on the agreeably dotty.
Digressions apart, the main theme of the book follows the growth of English through a series of leaps and bounds such as the transition from West Germanic to Old English, the infusion of French at the Norman Conquest, the first flowering with Chaucer and Caxton, the leap across the Atlantic, and the proliferation today into dozens of national dialects. This is thoroughly and interestingly done, though it sometimes gets stuck in a rut of long lists of related words. That’s all about animal words; now let’s have a catalogue of seafaring words.
There is also the preference of the amateur for an interesting explanation rather than a plausible or probable one. We all do it, even the great and good Eric Partridge. For example, if you insist on digging for the etymology of that notorious place-name London, I doubt whether you are wise to go for Lon-dunum (wild-beast town). I prefer a personal name such as Londinos (the bold one) or even Llyn-Din (the hill by the pool) to those wild beasts. But it is not a question that admits a final answer, and it is misleading to pretend that it does.
Or, for another example, to take another famous crux, consider the etymology of O.K. I can see that it is more romantic to suppose that it is a word from the West African language, Wolof, brought into the southern states of America by slaves. But to state unequivocally: “Its (O.K.’s) source was unquestionably one of various West African expressions such as o-ke or waw-ke” is to go too far. The serious historian and scholar of language should indicate that there is no form of acceptable documentation to support the wild conjecture. All probability points to the jocular alteration “orl korrect” as the origin. It is the difference between enthusiasm and scholarship.
The man is an enthusiast, dammit. And we need such people. I think he is sounder (not surprisingly) on American than Australian, and certainly British regional accents. He is often entertaining and a prolific source of useful, useless, and doubtful information. He is good on the purpose of language and the present decline of written English. He is a journalist, not an academic; for which relief, much thanks (Measure for Measure?). His book is readable in parts, entertaining in many parts, crammed with all sorts of linguistic matter and antimatter, on the side of the angels in most things, dotty in parts, plain wrong in parts.
Philip Howard
EPISTOLA {N.H. Behr}
The letter from Mr. George S. Welsh of North Carolina [XI, No. 1] regarding the origin of hooch and its meanings reminded me of a somewhat similar word that is found in The Voyage of the “Discovery,” by Captain Robert Falcon Scott, the British Antarctic explorer (Thomas Nelson & Sons, 2 vols., London, 1905). Describing here his first expedition to the South Polar Regions he uses the term hoosh for ‘the thick hot soup that constituted the sledging meal.’ It was made by boiling up a cauldron of water and adding the pemmican, biscuit, oatmeal, etc., which each man was carrying on the overland sledging journeys. The daily allowance was 35-1/2 ounces!
Incidentally, Wentworth and Flexner give a further meaning for hooch: “The hoochy-cootch dance”(?). Both the Shorter Oxford and Wyld give its origin as Alaskan. Were the Hoochimoo people from Alaska? They date it from 1903. The SOED also gives hoosh as ‘a thick soup,’ date 1905, but labels it “slang”—perhaps from Capt. Scott.
[N.H. Behr, Ramat Gan, Israel]
EPISTOLA {Harold Mann}
It certainly takes bottle to take issue with the redoubtable and respected Philip Howard [XI, 1] (pace Dr. Aman), but might not the gallant gunner be straying into a minefield? I have a strong suspicion that in these days of upward mobility and patronage by journalists, rhyming slang has become subject to a certain amount of wilfull coinage. Support for this view has just turned up unexpectedly in Laurie Lee’s “As I walked out one Midsummer Morning,” where he writes “Rhyming Slang…had not at that time been self-consciously elevated into a saloon-bar affectation.”
As to the earlier use of bottle in the sense of ‘use’ or ‘worth,’ what about not much cop ‘bottle of pop’? In this sense bottle and glass (=‘arse’) does not apply, and if the word developed into meaning ‘courage’ or ‘nerve’ it still doesn’t apply. On Mr. Howard’s terms, if one can lose one’s bottle, there must have been an earlier expression—to lose one’s arse. Well, was there?
Aristotle is interesting as I’ve seen harris in print, meaning ‘bum’ (arse), but was puzzled by it. However I remain unconvinced about some of these. In my experience rhyming slang uses homelier elements, butcher’s hook, four by two, mince-pies, and so on. This is not to suggest that Cockneys are ignorant, but that Aristotle, Richard the Third, and Berkely Hunt (formerly grumble and grunt) would not be the first things to come to mind.
In fact, rhyming slang may well be not only a minefield, so to speak, but a minefield sown in shifting sands.
[Harold Mann, Faversham, Kent]
OBITER DICTA: The (Proper?) Pronunciation of Proper Names
Laurence Urdang
A recent work on loanwords in English [Loanwords Index, Laurence Urdang and Frank R. Abate, Gale, 1983] lists more than 14,000 words and phrases “That Are Not Fully Assimilated into English and Retain a Measure of Their Foreign Orthography, Pronunciation, or Flavor.” This book is not an original selection but a compilation of the entries in 18 of the most widely available dictionaries listing such borrowings, as well as a special list of 640 Japanese words that appeared first in VERBATIM [IX,1]. Not included in the sources (hence, excluded from the Index) are thousands of proper names and adjectives. Yet they are familiar to speakers of English of various vintages and interests: some are names of people in music, science, politics, geography, literature, art, and just about any field you can think of.
Aside from those interested in music, art, and literature, insular America (before 1941) paid little attention to what was going on abroad. To be sure, we knew the “native” pronunciation of certain places that figured prominently in history—we had a choice between Paris and (the usually jocular) “Paree”; we knew that Cairo, Egypt, was pronounced differently from Cairo (KAYROE), Illinois; we referred to Albert Einstein, not “Eensteen”; and even the untaught could learn enough about the rules of a foreign tongue to come close to some approximation of the native pronunciation.
Curiously, some foreign cities had long ago acquired an established English pronunciation while others had not: we know about “Paree,” but the pronunciation in English is PARIS; but we say LEE-AWN for Lyons: one doesn’t hear “lions”; and we say NEES for Nice, not “nice.” Some place names have been changed in spelling, by English speakers or others: Rome for Roma, Florence for Firenze, Venice for Venezia, Munich for München, Leghorn for Livorno, etc., though some of these are corruptions.
Most recently, the 19th-century system for transcribing Chinese into Roman letters was revised in order to better reflect the pronunciation in the original language. Thus, we now have Beijing instead of Peking.
Notwithstanding the fact that English speakers ought to know better—look at the mismatches between spelling and pronunciation in English that can drive any sober person to drink—they persist in believing their eyes instead of their ears. Kowalski is pronounced with a w because it is spelt with a w, despite the fact that in Polish the w is pronounced as a v. People have no difficulty pronouncing my surname the way the family does—ERR dang—until they are told how it is spelt, whereupon they say “YOUR dang.” People in England, for some unexplained reason, have less difficulty than Americans. The French, Italians, Spanish and Germans pronounce it their own ways, but they are entirely consistent and, once they have heard it pronounced, can spell it.
If an accepted English name already exists for a place, there is no point in changing the name back to the native form. Poland should remain that and not become Polska; Germany should not be changed to Deutschland, or Spain to España. On the other hand, we have come to learn and live with the names of new African nations (and place names). English spelling pronunciations persist for Mexico and other places, but we seem to be capable of good approximations for Chile, Argentina, and other country names; though we still say KYOOBA for Cuba instead of KOOBA, and there are thousands of other examples.
World War II brought its share of foreign place names, rarely pronounced in English before 1941 and, in many cases, never even heard of by Americans: Irrawaddy, Ploesti, Katowice, Peenemünde, etc. The spelling of some foreign languages has diacritics, which Americans usually ignore: Göteborg and Peenemünde are pronounced as if the accents did not exist, but Bogotá (Colombia), which has a stress accent, is given (at least) an approximation. Bogota (New Jersey) is pronounced as one might expect in English—B\?\GŌ\?\t\?\.
In the past few years, Poland has come prominently into the news. At first, newscasters were heard to say WALESSA for Walę, and his first name, Lech, suffered outrageous fortune and made him sound like a profligate. Solidarność, readily translatable into Solidarity, fared better. Soon, however, newscasters picked up an amazingly close approximation of the Polish pronunciation of Wa\?\ęsa’s name—VAWENSA—and even caught the ichlaut sound in Lech.
All the more curious, then, is the recent (29 July 1984) New York Times Magazine article on \?\ódź, which suggests that the English pronunciation is similar to that of loge (LŌZH): a closer pronunciation would be WOODZH, which no one would have much difficulty with. Besides, whence the loge pronunciation? A spelling pronunciation would surely be LŌDZ.
Americans may, unless they are particularly careful (or affected), say BOCK for Bach, SĀNTSANZ for Saint-Saëns, and even PICASO for Picasso; certainly, we hear the g pronounced in Modigliani; and I know an American who tells people his name, Castagno, is pronounced KASTAGNŌ. Americans are capable of saying KÄSTÄNYŌ, but the family apparently cares more that the name be spelt correctly than pronounced correctly. More and more often one encounters people at the other end of the phone who say, “This is Ellie” (or George, or whatever) and, when asked “Ellie what?” reply “Oh, I have an unpronounceable last name.” What utter rubbish! How can anyone have an “unpronounceable” name? If they finally yield it up, it usually turns out to be something like Tagliatello, or Warszinski—that wasn’t so hard, now, was it?
Spelling pronunciations seem to have gained ground over traditional pronunciations in Connecticut with GREENWITCH and NORWITCH; as for stress, *New Ha’*ven was once about halfway between these extremes, but one increasingly hears New’ Haven.
Alas, the Cholmondleys have had to change the spelling of their name to Chumley, the Featherstonehaughs to Fanshaw, the Cockburns to Coburn; those Taliaferros who did not change to Tolliver now tell people their name is pronounced TALYA-FERO. If it’s any consolation, many British persist in pronouncing the second c in Connecticut. Nobody’s perfect.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“3 year old teacher needed for pre-school. Experienced preferred.” [From The DeLand-Sun News, 23 August 1984. Submitted by Richard E. Langford, DeLand, Florida.]
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“No one can really know which side of the fence McKinnon is straddling.” [From The West Palm Beach Post, 9 June 1984. Submitted by J. B. Lawrence, San Bernardino, California.]
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“Man held in fire at his psychotherapist’s home.” [Headline from The Los Angeles Times, 8 January 1982. Submitted by Neill D. Hicks, North Hollywood, California.]
Crossword Puzzle
Across
1. D, I, S, P, O, S, I, T, I, O, N, S (10)
6. Mongrel left lock (4)
10. Article, with the words on top? What is this? (2,5-8) & 27ac
11. For smash hit, urge Arlo (7)
12. Whipped, slashed, beheaded (6)
14. Left, could be sore (if so, not one of the ac’s) (5)
16. Preceding VERBATIM’s youngest child? (4, 5)
18. Are water colors best for these? (9)
21. Kiosk in St. Andrews Place (5)
22. French garlic, right to left (6)
24. Clipped greeting confused a whole number (7)
27. See 10ac (9, 6)
28. The Spirit of Iceland? (4)
29. Merchandise, and places to load it (They don’t mind finishing last) (4,6)
Down
1. Always the same: out of coins (10)
2. Santa zigzags over continent for a Romanov (9)
3. Rage from range war (5)
4. How a Moor made amour? (3,4)
5. Gang fights’ noises (7)
7. Not quite unclear, it’s relative (5)
8. Left one single (4)
9. Clubs about out of undergarments (8)
13. Nesters end squabble, show affection (10)
15. This kind of driver isn’t usually what we hear (8)
17. Astronomer’s rat grazes erratically (4-5)
19. Little Italian musicmaker (7)
20. Skied around dead ends, slipped (7)
23. Smell a city in Italia (5)
25. Pound the first hump (5)
26. Measure of Sierra crests (4)
Crossword Puzzle Answers
Across
1. Intruder.
9. Enervate.
10. Stoa.
11. Philadelphia.
13. Sierra.
14. Rotating.
15. Enliven.
16. Aspired.
20. Treasure.
22. Raking.
23. Unassailable.
25. Noes.
26. Taciturn.
27. Every one.
Down
1. Notation.
2. Reappraisals.
4. Dominate.
5. Repairs.
6. Cement.
7. Mash.
8. Deranged.
12. Patrick Henry.
15. Entrusts.
17. Scrabble.
18. Einstein.
19. Beeline.
21. Uranus.
24. Arch.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“A landlord argued before the Supreme Court Thursday that he had a vested right to a condom conversion before the Santa Monica rent control law passed.” [From the Los Angeles Daily Journal, 27 December 1983. Submitted by Eduardo Rodriguez, Los Angeles, California.]
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“Weaver said throughout the changes of ownership, the inn has managed to retain the original architecture, Italian Eight.” [From The Orlando Sentinel, 25 January 1984. Submitted by Adelaide A. Orton, Winter Park, Florida.]
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