VOL XII, No 1 [Summer, 1985]

Brand New Eponyms

Richard Lederer, Concord, New Hampshire

From Amelia Jenks Bloomer and the puffy ladies' drawers she helped to popularize to Rabelais' Gargantua and his gargantuan appetite, from King Tantalus and his tantalizing punishment to the explosive bikini bathing suit, names of people and places, both real and imaginary, are continually becoming enshrined in our everyday vocabulary. The pervasive and persuasive influence of mass marketing and advertising has speeded up this process, and the manufacture of common nouns and verbs from trademarks and brand names¹ has become a burgeoning source of new words in our language.

From morning until bedtime, much that we eat, drink, see, hear, touch, and wear is likely to bear a trademark. Each year, about 50,000 trademark applications are filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and almost half a million marks are kept actively registered. These figures indicate how large a role trademarks play in our society. When a product achieves wide popular appeal, its trademark may become a lower-case generic word for all products of its type. One might think that manufacturers would be flattered when their creations achieve such universal fame. On the contrary, companies will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to protect their marks from falling into the clutches of competitors. “The value of a trademark to a company is tremendous,” maintains Chicago corporation lawyer Jerome Gilson. “Some of the trademarks in the U.S., such as Coca-Cola, Kleenex, and Exxon, are undoubtedly worth millions to their owners. These trademarks represent the company more than any of its other assets.”

Here is an alphabetical listing of more than forty product names that have become somewhat generic but that have survived legal onslaughts and are still registered. Look on packages containing these products, and you’ll still see a symbol of their registered status, such as TM or ®, following each mark:

Baggies
Band-Aid
Brillo Pads
BVDs
Chap Stick
Coca-Cola/Coke
Cuisinart
Dictaphone
Dixie Cups
Fig Newtons
Frigidaire
Frisbee
Hi-Liter
Jeep
Jell-O
Jockey Shorts
Kleenex
Ko-Rec-Type
Kodak
Levi’s
Life Savers
Mack (truck)
Magic Marker
Miltown
Novocain
Ping-Pong
Polaroid
Pop Tarts
Popsicle
Pyrex
Q-Tips
Sanforized
Sanka
Scotch (tape)
Sheetrock
Simoniz
Slim Jim
Styrofoam
Technicolor
TV Dinners
Vaseline
Walkman
Wiffle Ball
X-Acto Knife
Xerox

Do you talk or write about “xeroxing” a document no matter what machine you use to do the photocopying? Beware: anyone who lower-cases Xerox runs the risk of hearing from the Xerox Corporation, which spends $100,000 a year to persuade the public not to say or write xerox when they mean “to photocopy” or “a photocopy.” The Johnson & Johnson Company writes admonishing letters to any periodical that prints expressions like “band-aid diplomacy” or “band-aid economics.” Although Band-Aid has come to be used for any temporary protective measure, it is a registered trademark and, by law, should be capitalized. And if you describe any plastic flying disk as a frisbee, you could get whammed by the Wham-O Manufacturing Company of San Gabriel, California. The idea for the plastic saucers came from the aerodynamic pie tins once made by the Frisbie Bakery in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the name Frisbee remains a registered asset.

Lawyer Gilson maintains, “If all Coca-Cola’s bottling plants burned to the ground tomorrow, the company could walk into any bank in the country and raise enough money to rebuild completely, just on the strength of its name.” Indeed, for decades the Coca-Cola Company has been playing legal hardball to protect its name. While the courts have allowed other purveyors of soft drinks to use the name Cola because it is descriptive of the product, the Supreme Court decided in 1930 that the combination Coca-Cola and the clipped form Coke are the exclusive property of the company. In its most celebrated victory, in 1976, Coca-Cola won an injunction against Howard Johnson’s chain of nine hundred restaurants for serving HoJo Cola in place of Coke without informing customers who asked for Coca-Cola by name.

It is ironic that the more successful a product, the more likely it is that its trademark will become generic and lose its privileged status as a result of lawsuits by competitors. Faced with such a catch-22 possibility, companies must protect and care for their trademarks or they will be lost. Suggested tools in a typical trademark protection kit include:

• Avoid descriptive names. At one extreme, generic names like hamburger and TV repair are totally descriptive and useless as trademarks. At the other extreme, purely arbitrary or fanciful terms such as Big Mac and Fiesta make strong trademarks because they are non-generic. Between the two extremes, terms that merely suggest a favorable aspect of the product can be effective. Well known examples are Rabbit, Whopper, and Ultra-Bright.

• Trademarks should be distinguished in print from other words: ARRID cream deodorant, “Arrid” cream deodorant, or (minimally) Arrid cream deodorant.

• Trademarks should be followed by a notice of their status and accompanied by the generic name for the product they identify; BAND-AID® brand adhesive bandages, LEVI’S® jeans and sportwear.

• Trademarks are always proper adjectives and should never be used as verbs or common descriptive adjectives. Avoid xerox the report or simoniz the car.

Failure to follow such guidelines has resulted in trademark litigation and loss of invaluable marks. The name Zipper, for example, was coined by the B. F. Goodrich Company in 1913 as the brand name for its slide fastener on overshoes. After numerous bouts in court, the company retained its right to use the name on footwear, but to what avail? Zippers are everywhere, and zipper, now lower-cased, belongs to us all. Aspirin, too, was once a brand name, but in 1921 the Bayer Company was deprived of its exclusive rights to the name. In his classic opinion, Judge Learned Hand stated that aspirin had become descriptive for the product itself and that consumers do not call the tablet by its chemical name, “acetyl salicylic acid.”

As a result of other court judgments, the exclusive rights to thermos, escalator, cellophane, and yo-yo slipped away from the King Seely, Otis Elevator, E.I. Dupont, and F. Duncan companies, respectively. And within the past few years, the Miller Brewing Company has had to relinquish control of the word Lite on low-calorie beer, Parker Brothers has lost its monopoly on the name Monopoly, and the Nestlé Company has had to forfeit its exclusive use of the words Toll House.

The same fate has befallen other former brand names, such as: brassiere (I’m not putting you on!), celluloid, corn flakes, kerosene, lanolin, linoleum, linotype, milk of magnesia, mimeograph, raisin bran, and shredded wheat. These words have made such a successful journey from upper-case brand name to lower-case noun that it is difficult to believe that they were ever “owned” by a particular company. As more and more brand names become common descriptive terms, rather than labels that distinguish particular products, business will increasingly leave its (trade) mark on our all-consuming American language.

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In the Name of the Pope

Arthur J. Morgan, New York City

In 1978 the Roman Catholic Church had three popes: Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II. On August 26, Albino Cardinal Luciani, was selected to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Pope Paul VI, and, to the astonishment of all, he adopted a double name. There was another departure from custom: to the name he chose he added I, ‘the First,’ although it was not customary for the first user of a name to add the ordinal. But this was a rather minor variance; the major deviation was the double name, but Luciani had reasons for both the name and the ordinal.

The pope is known by many names, since each country translates his name into its own language. John Paul II is Giovanni Paolo II in Italy, Jean Paul II in France and French Canada, and Juan Pablo II in Spain and Spanish America. He has but one official name, however, and that is his name in Latin. The name chosen by Albino Luciani in August, 1978, was Ioannes Paulus Primus; when asked why, he spoke of his admiration for Pope John XXIII, adding “and Pope Paul made me a cardinal.”

In political terms, we might describe Pope John XXIII as a liberal, and Paul as a conservative, somewhat to the right of center. Cardinal Luciani clearly leaned toward John’s views. If we look closely at the Latin name he chose, we find a play on words, for although Paulus is a name of great religious importance, it is also an adjective meaning ‘small.’

And now a great light dawns. The modest man who became pope in August 1978 (and died less than five weeks later) had called himself ‘Little John the First’, because, although he hoped to follow in the footsteps of his great predecessor, John XXIII, he did not pretend to be his equal. Furthermore, by adding “the First,” he was expressing the hope that later popes would also follow the same liberal line.

In the name of Pope John Paul I, therefore, we find a whole philosophy and theology. But even though his successor did indeed choose the same name, John Paul II does not appear to have chosen the same philosophy.

Eccentricity in English Lexicography

Elmer Suderman, Gustavus Adolphus College

From the beginning of English lexicography the craft has been serious, often pedantic. The first dictionary in the form in which we know them today, Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Usuall English Words, published in 1604, is solemn and brief, defining about 2,500 words. Cawdrey evidently didn’t think of either lexicography or lexicographer as hard words, for he defines neither. But then, since the OED has as its first citation for lexicographer as 1658 and for lexicography as 1680, one could hardly expect him to define a word which was not yet in wide use.

He must, however, have had some indication that such a word would come into the language because lethargie, which would have come just before lexicographer, is defined as “a drowsie and forgetfull disease,” and leuell, meaning “right and straight,” would immediately have followed. I’m sure Cawdrey didn’t deliberately omit lexicography, because he knew that the disease which makes us drowsy and forgetful is common to both lexicographers and the rest of us in the use of words and that we often assume that dictionaries are leuell, that is, “right and straight,” or correct and authoritative. A good example of our right and straight attitude is evident in John Wesley, if he was indeed the author of The Complete English Dictionary Explaining Most of those Hard Words which are Found in the Best English Writers (1753), who assures us that his dictionary, “by a Lover of Good English and Common Sense,” is both right and straight. It is, he thinks, “the best English dictionary in the world.” Henry Cockeram’s English Dictionarie, published 130 years earlier (1623) makes a similar claim: “What any before me in this kind have begun, I have not only fully finished but thoroughly perfected.” Lexicographers were not modest, either in the seventeenth or eighteenth century; they were very sure that they were right.

And they were serious. They were interested in a practical, correct, definitive, and usable tool where the reader would be able to find, in Cawdrey’s self-assured words, “the true writing, and understanding of hard, usuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French, Etc. With the interpretation thereof by plaine English words, gathered for the benefit & help of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull persons. Whereby they may the more easilie and better understand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in Scriptures, Sermons, or elsewhere, and also be made able to use the same aptly themselves.”

So much for Cawdrey’s title page, or a part of it. It is not brief, but the definitions are. Some are defined in one, two, or three words. Literature is “learning.” Lumber is defined, correctly enough for that time, as “old stuffe,” malidie as “disease,” mutation as “change,” a baud as a “whore,” and driblets as “small debts.” His two-liners are limited mostly to words like libertine (“loose in religion, one that thinks he may doe what he liketh”), luxurious (“riotous, and excessive in pleasure and wantonesse”). Theology is “diuinitie, the science of liuing blessedly for euer,” and a hipocrite is “such a one as in his outward apparrell, countenaunce, and behauior, pretendeth to be another man, then he is indeede, or a deceiuer.”

Cawdrey’s method is not much different from that exhibited by the early American dictionaries. Cawdrey describes an abricot as “a kind of fruit” which, though it fails to distinguish it from other fruits, is nevertheless not much different from Noah Webster’s definition in his A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806) in which apricot is defined as “a fine kind of stone fruit.” Webster further defined literature as “learning, reading, skill in letters or books,” and grammar, which Cawdrey doesn’t define at all, as “the science of writing correctly.” Cawdrey does make us smile now and then, particularly when he spells progresse as grogresse and vicinitie as virinitie; but such misprints were not deliberate or intended to be humorous or entertain the reader.

Early lexicographers were often capricious. What seems far-fetched and therefore titillates us today was not so then. Thomas Blont in Glossographia or a Dictionary Interpreting All Such Hard Words whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Teutonich, Belgick, British or Saxon as are now Used in our Refined English Tongue (London: 1656) had no intention of being ridiculous in defining Hony-Moon as “applied to those married persons that love well at first and decline in affection afterwards. It is hony now, but it will change as the moon.” Blont further describes, quite seriously, a ventriloquist as “one that has an evil spirit speaking in his belly, or one that by use and practice can speak, as it were, out of his belly not moving his lips.”

Edward Phillips’s humor is not deliberate but based on ignorance. In The New World of English Words (London, 1658) he locates California in the new world, which is correct enough. It is, he says, “a very large part of Northern America,” but he isn’t certain whether it is a continent or an island.

At least one lexicographer was deliberately idiosyncratic in his definitions. That lexicographer, of course, is Samuel Johnson. He did not refrain from allowing his wry humor to intrude even in the definition of his craft. A lexicographer, he wrote in A Dictionary of the English Language (1775), is “a writer of dictionaries.” So also had every other lexicographer who had defined the word before him. So also is it defined today. But Johnson did not stop there, but added: “a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.” So he defined his craft in the first edition and so the definition remained in the five editions which were published in his lifetime. Johnson was aware, as no other lexicographer before or after him has been, that the writer of dictionaries must enjoy words and can, without harm to the definition, intrude his own opinions and prejudices. Unfortunately, most lexicographers cannot distinguish their prejudices from what they consider the final word on the subject.

Johnson was even more eccentric in other definitions. Oats, he said, is “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses but in Scotland supports the people.” A stockjobber, he wrote, is “a low wretch who gets money by buying and selling shares in the funds.” Many would agree that the definition is still apt. Nor was Johnson afraid of words which until recently have not appeared in even the most authoritative dictionaries. He simply defines the noun fart as “Wind from behind,” and turns to Suckling to illustrate the word:

Love is the fart
of every heart;
It pains a man when ‘tis kept close;
And others doth offend, when ‘tis let loose.

For the verb he is satisfied with the definition “To break wind from behind.” To illustrate the meaning of the word from a reputable source he quotes Swift:

As when a gun discharge,
Although the bore be ne’er so large
Before the flame from muzzle burst,
Just at the breech it flashes first;
So from my lord his passion broke,
He farted first, and then he spoke.

I personally regret and am even a little surprised that Johnson does not include the definition of fizzle as “a silent fart” when used as a noun and “to break wind backwards with little noise” when used as a verb. These definitions appear both in Phillips’s The New World of English Words (1658) and later in John Kersey’s New English Dictionary, published in 1772. Fizzle retains that definition in the OED, which gives citations as early as 1532 and as late as 1848. Webster’s Third New International retains the definitions as well, although the bluntness is somewhat dulled. I have often wondered why, if there is a word to describe a silent fart, there isn’t also a word for a silent fart which smells, a silent one which doesn’t, a loud one which smells and a loud one which doesn’t. Such discriminations would, don’t you suppose, improve the precision of the English language.

Lexicographers do, then, at least on occasion, allow their eccentricities to enter into their definitions. And others do at times have their fun at the expense of the lexicographer and of the dictionary. At least they give the lexicographers work to do. We are accustomed to calling any dictionary “a Webster’s,” having gone so far as to enter into a lengthy court case in which the court decided that the word had, at least in the United States, become a generic term for any dictionary. In the nineteenth century an English dictionary in America was often labeled as a Richardanary, often simplified to a Richard or even a Dick. The only reference to this usage that I have been able to find was in John S. Farmer, Americanisms—Old & New, privately printed by Thomas Poulter and Sons in London in 1889.

Farmer is one of the most readable of all dictionaries. I would willingly take him along for a week on the proverbial desert island. He pays attention to American slang as well as to more colorful American definitions. While I was unable to find any definition in Farmer as delightful as Captain Francis Grose’s definition of a vainglorious or ostentatious man as “one who pisses more than he drinks,” Farmer has collected a number of rather eccentric words and definitions.

My favorite, I think, is sockdolager, which he defines as “a heavy blow, a conclusive argument; a winding-up, a general ‘finisher’.” He traces the etymology to a corruption of doxology, “and hence the signal of dismissal.” He gives other etymologies, probably more correct, but to my mind not nearly as delightful as its connection with doxology.

Farmer points out, moreover, that early settlers in America called all fruits apples; that a back house is a privy; that at Harvard “to have no bowels” is to be poor, destitute, or without means and adds that the expression is of scriptural derivation, “the word being used in a somewhat similar sense in the Bible” (I wish he had given some examples); and that a peacemaker is a Texas term for a revolver. President Reagan’s label for the MX as the “peacekeeper missile,” is, of course, in the same euphemistic tradition. On the other hand, in the nineteenth century a Quaker was either a member of the Society of Friends or a cannon made of wood, placed in the port-hole of a vessel in order to deceive the enemy. Farmer defined pimple as “the head”; Pork and Beans as “the American national dish”; prayer bones as the “knees”; to have prunes in the voice as “speaking huskily, the cause being emotion”; Ready John as money; rosebud as a “young unmarried woman”; and slim as “one of indifferent stand in the community, either as regards social position, morals, or politics.” A tooting tub is a pejorative term for a church organ, and to worry is to take a drink.

Neither Noah Webster, who published the first American dictionary in 1806 and in 1828 the first unabridged, nor Joseph A. Worcester, whose Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language (1848) was Webster’s chief competition, included many interesting definitions, although both seemed to be afraid of the word leg as too vulgar, even for use in a dictionary. Limb was the preferred word, although Webster does speak of the leg of a table. The prejudice of the lexicographers echoes the prejudices of the people in general. Pants, trousers, breeches were often replaced by variants, many of them introduced by Charles Dickens. Farmer and Henley in their Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English (London: 1912) list such words as ineffables, inexpressibles, unthinkables, unutterables, unwhisperables, etc. The “etc.” at the end is theirs: they must have been tired of looking for euphemisms for trousers and pants. After all, pants or trousers don’t sound so bad to us now, and probably didn’t offend everyone even in the late nineteenth century.

But the dictionary does more than define words authoritatively and eccentrically. It also furnishes us with fascinating though now discredited information. Noah Webster, in his 1806 edition, informs us that the world was created in 4004 B.C. but fails to give the hour, set by Bishop Usher at 9:00 a.m. Enoch was translated into heaven in 3013 B.C., and the great flood swept away all but Noah’s ark in 2348 B.C.. A year later, in 2347 B.C., Babel was built and the languages of the world came into being. Webster doesn’t tell us what the original language was, however. In 2328 B.C. Noah migrated eastward and founded the Chinese monarchy. Joseph died in Egypt in 1635 B.C., and Moses was born in 1571 B.C.. One hundred and fifty-two years after Moses wrote the Pentateuch (1452 B.C.; he died the same year), the first Olympic games were held. All this, and more, Webster told his readers.

Even more practical information comes from Cockerham’s The English Dictionary (1623), the first lexicon to use the word dictionary in its title. He warns his readers that the Hiena is, like the wolf, a subtile beast that can counterfeit the voice of a man and will at night call shepherds out of their houses and kill them. On a more cheerful note he advises his readers that the dung of a lizard is good to take away spots in the eye.

The Rev. Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus (1565), the first great classical dictionary, would have been published five years earlier had not his wife, fearing that too much lexicography would kill her husband, burned the first manuscript. … And I had best quit before my wife burns my manuscript.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Rather than hitting people on fixed incomes, the elderly-poor people, period, we took a look at some scared cows.” [From a report on a special session of the Texas legislature in The Weatherford Democrat, 11 July 1984. Submitted by Charles Cope, Weatherford, Texas.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“After the data is collected, city archaeologists and volunteers will decide which houses are best preserved to warrant a more excruciating examination.” [From The Alexandria Gazette, 6 March 1984. Submitted by Nancy R. Keith, Alexandria, Virginia.]

A Play on Words

Anna and Taffy Holland, Lincoln, Massachusetts

—Operator, I’d like to make a person-to-person call to Paul Blackstone, area code 413, 345-6789. What’s all that noise on the line?

—I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t get that. Was that Walt Watson?

—No, no, operator, it’s Paul Blackstone. This is really a terrible connection. I’m going to hang up and try again.

—I’m afraid this is the best line available right now. Perhaps if you spell it out for me…

—Okay; that’s P-A-U-L…

—Excuse me, sir, was that B as in ball?

—No, no—that’s P as in Phlox.

—There’s no P in flocks!

—Yes there is. P-H-L-O-X. To continue: P as in phlox, A as in heal, U as in beau, L as in balm. That’s the first name: PAUL. Last name, BLACKSTONE. B as in jamb, L as in yolk, A as in real, C as in scene, K as in knot, S as in corps, O as in you, N as in hymn, and E as in role. Got it?

—Yes, I think I’ve got it.

—Good. And just in case you don’t get it through, may I have your name?

—Certainly. My name is Sue Washhouse.

—Please spell that for me—I didn’t quite get it.

—Sue Washhouse. That’s S as in see, U as in queue, E as in are, W as in ewe, A as in pea, S as in sea, H as in oh, H as in eh, O as in you, U as in eau…

—Wait a minute! What is this S as in C, U as in Q stuff…? Never mind. Just put the call through.

FIRST ALPHABET

A as in heal
B as in jamb
C as in scene
D as in djinn
E as in ewe
F as in physics
G as in bight, gnash
H as in hour
I as in wain
J as in jai alai
K as in knead, know
L as in palm
M as in mnemonic
N as in damn
O as in women
P as in psalter
Q as in pique
R as in Worchestershire
S as in demesne
T as in rustle
U as in plaque
V as in Vaterland
W as in wrack
X as xerography
Y as in days
Z as in Czech

SECOND ALPHABET

A as in sea, aye, aitch, jay, eau, pea, are, tea
B as in double-u
C as in aitch
D as in double-u
E as in aye, bee, see, gee, eye, ell, em, en, eau, pea, queue, are, tea, double-u, yew
H as in eh, oh, why
I as in aitch
L as in double-u
O as in you, double-u
S as in see
T as in aitch
U as in eau, queue, double-u
W as in yew, why
X as in eaux
Y as in aye, eye, jay

In Praise of Irregularity

Elisabeth Larsh Young, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Irregular verbs may be the thorn in the side of every student of French, but that language holds worse terrors: some very eccentric ways of designating the inhabitants of towns, villages, and regions.

French people, of course, call themselves Francais or Francaises, according to sex. Similarly, the people of Paris call themselves Parisiens or Parisiennes. And so on. Other regular endings, as suffixes on place names, indicate ‘inhabitant of’: -ard/-arde, -ist/-iste, -ois/-oise, to name a few. But take some of the many places named after saints. People who live at St-André-les-Vergers, a community known for hat manufacture, are Driats. Those of St-Chély-d’Apcher are Barrabans, and those of St-Dizier, on the Marne, are Bragards. Imercuriens inhabit St-Laurent-Blangy, near Arras, the Medieval tapestry capital of Europe. (Many a character in a Shakespearean play would be hard put for something to get behind, were it not for the arras.)

Near Calais is a texile and metallurgy center, St-Omer, whose inhabitants are known as Audomarois. Close to Tours, where they used to say the very best French was spoken, is St-Pierre-des-Corps. The people of that rail center call themselves Corpopétrussiens. There are other odd twists in the variations of names of “saint places,” but these will suffice.

There is no village “Pétrocor,” but Périgueux, an important town of the Dordogne, is the home of some 170,000 Pétrocoriens and Pétrocoriennes. The Agathois hail from Agde, and the Trécorrois are the citizens of Tréguier. The village of étables-sur-Mer (literally ‘stables on the sea’), a modest place of perhaps 3,000 inhabitants, gives its folks the slightly Slavic-sounding label Tagarins. Or take Elne, near Perpignan. The logical people of Perpignan call themselves Perpignanais. However, their neighbors at Elne, about a twentieth the size of Perpignan, are nothing less than Illibériens. The denizens of Gévaudan, a region formerly terrorized by an alleged man-eating wolf, call themselves Gabalitains. Pont-l’Abbé, where they make a lot of jam, has male inhabitants unsurprisingly referred to as Pontl’Abbistes. But, because of the fancy headdresses the ladies of that charming Breton community wear, the feminine form is Bigoudens!

There are many places in France named Villefranche— ‘free city’—most likely stemming from early times. One cannot help wondering how the people of Villefranche-sur-Saône (on the River Saône) came to be known as Caladois.

Neung-sur-Beuvron lies in the chateau country. The village name itself is a bit odd; the inhabitants go by Nugdunois. The people of Moyenmoutier, a village of the Vosges, apparently traded what would have been a 14-letter name, Moyenmoutiens, for a 19-letter jawbreaker: Médianimonastériens. At least there was logic here, for both moutier and monastère mean ‘monastery,’ and both median and moyen convey ‘middle.’ The celebrated French writer Francis de la Rochefoucauld, if he came from the village of the same name, was a Rupificaldien.

Latin origins account for some of the seemingly freakish words. Also, in all probability, some go back to traditions and legends now lost in the mists of years or at least beyond the layman’s ability to track them down. But isn’t it things like these that add spice to language—and life? Let us hope, then, that all the divers human tongues with all their peculiarities, will persist, Esperanto and other synthetic languages notwithstanding.

Who is Rula Lenska? Some Thoughts on Reference

Don L. F. Nilsen, Arizona State University

David Lewis is the president of the Rula Lenska fan club. Rula Lenska is “the fair one.” There are twelve hundred fans in her fan club in thirty-five states. Rula Lenska Day occurs near the end of February, and on this day some of her fans leave their headlights on for twenty-four hours; others spray a can of hair spray into their hair; still others select some unusual activity to do nonstop for fourteen hours. All this dedication, and no one has ever actually seen or heard Rula Lenska personally.

There is something about the human mind that enjoys contemplating the nonexistent. We have magic elixirs. We have goblins, woodnymphs, satyrs, griffins, unicorns, gorgons, elves, gremlins, phoenix birds, cyclopes, minotaurs…. We have Zeus and Jupiter and Odin and members of their respective courts. We have skyhooks, and pole stretchers and left-handed monkey wrenches…. We have Utopia, Brobdingnag, Erewhon, Lothario, Damavand, Olympus, Avalon…. We have Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, and Old Father Time, and the Sand Man, and the Boogey Man, and Tinkerbell…. And sometimes we don’t even know where fantasy merges into fact. When we die, will we go to the Happy Hunting Ground, or to Valhalla, or to Heaven? Witches become so real to us that they are burned at the stake because they are possessed of the Devil.

In May of 1981, I contacted Thomas Flanigan to ask him if he would be interested in attending a conference of the “Western Humor and Irony Membership” (WHIM). On May 21, 1981, he wrote me a response:

I would definitely enjoy such a conference (WHIM), but Arizona is a long ways away, and I don’t intend spending money on a plane ticket only to find out because of its date (April first) that I was the butt of a cruel April Fool joke. Imagine the embarrassment when, returning to Maine, I have to admit that not only was there no conference, there was also no Arizona.

Even when someone is convinced that there is a real-world referent, it’s not always easy to determine it uniquely and correctly. Ross V. Hersey tells an anecdote about a student who raised his hand to go to the bathroom. The teacher excused him, but the student returned after a few minutes saying he couldn’t find it. The teacher told him to turn right in the hall and it would be the first door on the right, but in a short while he returned again saying he couldn’t find it. This time she sent an older boy with him, and after a while they returned with a satisfied look on their faces. “No wonder he couldn’t find it,” said the older boy. “He had his pants on backwards.”

The relationship between pronouns and antecedents is a tricky one. Paul Postal has pointed out that a sentence like “John is an orphan and I don’t have any either” is ungrammatical even though it makes perfectly good sense. This type of pronoun-antecedent relationship is termed by Postal an “Anaphoric Island,” because it is not the antecedent itself, but a feature of the antecedent (without parents) that is referred back to.

George Burns recently did a television dialogue with Bernadette Peters, who was playing the part of Gracie:

GEORGE BURNS: If you keep saying funny things, people are going to laugh at you.

BERNADETTE PETERS (as Gracie): That’s OK. Look at Joan of Arc. People laughed at her, but she went ahead and built it anyway.

Here, we have another anaphoric island, but with a twist.

We use rules of inference and logic in order to determine reference. But such rules are based on our knowledge of patterns and expectations, and sometimes when these patterns and expectations change we make the wrong assumptions about reference. In his 1964 Master’s thesis on humor, at the University of Utah, John D. Gibb tells about two people walking down a street. One turns to the other and says, “Look at that youngster with her short hair, sweat shirt, pedal pushers and gym shoes. You can’t tell if she is a girl or a boy.” “I can,” said the other speaker, “because she is my daughter.” “Oh, I’m sorry. I would never have said that if I had known you were her father.” “I’m not her father. I’m her mother.”

In Shuckin’ and Jivin’: Folklore from Contemporary Black Americans, Daryl Cumber Dance tells a similar story about the use of patterns and logic to determine reference; in this case the solution is based on egocentricity. A boy’s mother gave him two nickels, and she told him to put one in the church collection tray for God, and to keep the other one for himself. It happened that on the way to church, one nickel dropped to the ground and rolled into the gutter. The boy says, “Uh-oh, there goes God’s nickel.”

Evan Esar tells another anecdote which illustrates the same point but in reverse. A honeymoon couple were at a railroad station in great anticipation of their great adventure. The bridegroom, through habit, asked for a single ticket. His bride, who was standing beside him at the window, said, “But, John, you’re buying only one ticket.” The young man made a quick recovery. “How stupid of me, darling. I’d completely forgotten myself.”

Another difficulty with reference is that infinite regress can occur. The sentence “The man who was mixing it fell into the cement he was mixing” is termed an example of “Bach’s Paradox” because it was Emmon Bach of the University of Texas who first discovered that in this sentence each antecedent contains a pronoun that has as its antecedent a clause which has a pronoun that has as its antecedent a clause that has a pronoun, ad infinitum.

An example of infinite regress occurred at the 1979 meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English. Chaim Potok was one of the keynote presenters, and he told a story about someone who found out that Mollie Potok was the mother of Chaim, and therefore wanted Mollie to autograph her son’s book, My Name is Asher Lev. She signed it as follows: “Mollie, mother of the author.” Later, this same reader found herself in the presence of Chaim, whom she wanted to autograph the same book. Seeing that his mother had already written in the book, Chaim signed it, “Chaim, Son of the mother of the author.” This is where the anecdote ends; however, it would have been perfectly possible for the owner of the book to take it back again to Mollie, and then back to Chaim, until all of the white space in the book had been used up.

Of course Chaim Potok is famous, and fame is a necessary component for instant reference. But not everybody is as famous as is Chaim Potok. Vice-Presidents of the United States, for example, do not generally bring a spark of recognition to the listener’s ear when they are alluded to. In 1965, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey reported on a bit of research he had done on his predecessors and their contributions to the office. “Who can forget those storied Vice-Presidents of the past? William A. Wheeler! Daniel D. Thompkins! Garret A. Hobart! and Henry Wilson!”

Even when we do recognize a referent, this recognition (like beauty) is sometimes in the eye of the beholder. G.G. Pocheptsov tells a story about a man whose face lit up when he recognized a former friend walking ahead of him down some subway stairs.

He clapped the man so heartily on the back that the man nearly collapsed, and cried, “Goldberg, I hardly recognized you. Why, you’ve gained thirty pounds since I saw you last, and you’ve had your nose fixed, and I swear you are about two feet taller.” The man looked at him angrily. “I beg your pardon,” he said in icy tones, “but I do not happen to be Goldberg.” “Aha,” said Mr. Becker. “You’ve even changed your name.”

The juggler, Michael Davis, juggles a variety of objects. One of these objects is an ax, which he claims was the original ax which George Washington used to chop down the cherry tree. But then his patter continues, “However, I did have to replace the handle.” This is followed by a long pause, and then he continues…, “and the head.”

Myron Cohen tells a similar story about a missing referent. In a telephone conversation with Jane Robin Littman, Cohen was talking about how people must be able to relate to the humor. Mr. Cohen explained,

You see, it’s like this fellow who says to me (he was a comic)— “You know, you bombed in Gloversville, New York.” I said to him, “I was never in Gloversville, New York.” He says, “Yes, but I told your jokes there, and they didn’t laugh.”

Well, maybe this didn’t actually happen. Maybe, in fact, there is no Gloversville, New York, just as there is no Lilliput. In fact, there may be a lot of things we talk about all the time that don’t exist, but that doesn’t mean we should not talk about them. Samuel Goldwyn was perfectly correct when he said “A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.” The same might be said about a paper entitled, “Who is Rula Lenska? Some Thoughts on Reference.” I can only counter by saying that I believe in Rula Lenska, just as I believe in Santa Claus and Valhalla and magic elixirs and a lot of other neat things. I might even go so far as to say that language itself is a magic elixir whose main function is to allow us to imagine things that don’t exist—yet.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The president of the Chicago Federation of Labor was critically ill at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood after surgery last week to remove a brain.” [From New North News, 19 May 1984. Submitted by Daniel F. Roberts, Chicago, Illinois.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Jets quarterback Ken O’Brien was acquitted of similar charges arising out of a bruising melee by the jury.” [From the New York Post, 13 September 1984. Submitted by Carol Ann Hilton, Staten Island, New York.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Special retreat for those who have just experienced the loss of a loved one at Rye Beach on June 15-17.” [Item in a parish news bulletin in Nashua, New Hampshire. Submitted by Ralph Kelley, Hudson, New Hampshire.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“We want to provide them [visitors] with the information which will allow them to make informed decisions on where to go, so they don’t go.” [The warden of the Dorset Heritage Coast, quoted in Out of Town, May 1984. Submitted by Elizabeth Watters, Beaconsfield, Quebec.]

EPISTOLA {John McCluskey}

When I first began reading Willard Espy’s Garden of Eloquence, I simply assumed that it was a sound and accurate treatment of its subject. When I saw in the Bibliography on page 213 that Mr. Espy had consulted Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, 1961, I knew that either the edition or the date was wrong and supposed that he had simply committed an isolated scholarly gaffe. Later, I noticed that hendiadys was defined on page 133 as “the expression of an idea by two words connected by and, when normal usage would be to subordinate one to the other,” but on page 178, one of the examples given of hendiadys was “He is a man of great wisdom,” instead of the normal usage, “He is a very wise man.” The construction involving and, which was a central feature of the definition of hendiadys given earlier, is nowhere to be found in the illustration. At about this point, I began to see inconsistencies, questionable definitions, and ambiguous illustrations almost everywhere. On page 171 epanalepsis is given a different pronunciation and literal meaning than on page 51. Further, Espy speaks about epiphora on pages 174 and 205 as a rhetorical device containing the same word or phrase at the end of successive clauses. But Webster’s Third defines epiphora as a watering of the eyes while defining epistrophe as the “repetition of the same word or expression at the end of successive phrases, clauses, or sentences…” I could go on, but I think I have written enough to raise the question: Why did Dennis Moore not warn readers about these and other inconsistencies and inaccuracies in Mr. Espy’s book when reviewing it [XI,2]?

[John McCluskey, University of Tennessee at Martin]

EPISTOLA {Dennis Moore}

When I began reading Mr. McCluskey’s letter, I thought, “first began?”

Still, I wanted to assume the letter was sound and accurate. When I saw the gaffe he had committed with “normal usage,” I supposed it had resulted from an isolated instance of confusion. At about the point I read about epiphora, however, my eyes began to water—in the act of complaining about “inconsistencies and inaccuracies,” Mr. McC. is contributing several more inconsistencies to the pages of VERBATIM. His confusion over hendiadys and its “normal usage” is only one illustration. (More on another illustration in a moment.)

As Mr. McC. has discovered, hendiadys is treated twice in Mr. Espy’s book: on p. 178 in an excerpt from the Rev. Peacham’s 1577 book, and on p. 133 in a comment on contemporary usage. So, when Mr. McC. quotes from p. 133, he uses “normal usage” in the way Mr. Espy does there, to mean usage here in the 1980s. When Mr. McC. applies the expression “normal usage” to the quotation from p. 178, however, isn’t he suddenly setting himself up to judge an Elizabethan writer’s usage by our contemporary standards? After all, the Rev. Peacham’s illustration (“He is a man of great wisdom…”) does satisfy the Rev. Peacham’s definition (“… when a Substantive is put for an Adjective of the same signification”), just as Mr. Espy’s illustrations satisfy Mr. Espy’s definition.

Furthermore, Mr. McC.’s reference to “the definition of hendiadys given earlier” is odd. If he means chronologically earlier, then of course the definition on p. 178—the Rev. Peacham’s—is by far the earlier one. If Mr. McC. is calling the one from p. 133 “earlier,” though, isn’t he being more than a bit careless? When differences in definition four centuries apart reflect differences in usage, isn’t it more useful to acknowledge the differences than to blur them?

A gaffe that seems far more unfortunate involves Mr. McC.’s rigid distinction between epiphora and epistrophe. I confirm that Webster’s Third defines epiphora as “watering of the eyes,” a definition reassuringly similar to the first definition the OED gives for the same term. So far, so good—although the OED’s second definition, labeled Rhet., suggests that at least in the past epiphora did mean “a rhetorical device containing the same word or phrase at the end of successive clauses” (if I may quote from Mr. McC.’s letter again). The OED’s example is from a seventeenth-century dictionary, whose explanation of epiphora closely parallels the Rev. Peacham’s as Mr. Espy quotes it on p. 178.

I could go on, but I think I have written enough to raise the question—where’s the beef?

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

EPISTOLA {Donald R. Morris}

Richard Lederer, in his delightful article “Lost Metaphors of Land and Sea” [XI, 2], is somewhat off the mark in the etymology of between the devil and the deep blue sea. The devil here referred to is indeed ‘a seam between two planks in the hull of a ship,’ but those planks are not “on or below the waterline,” and the phrase is not equivalent to between a rock and a hard place—the phrase does not mean ‘caught between equally perilous alternatives.’

The devil here referred to is the outboard seam on the deck of a ship. The deck planking is laid fore and aft; the outboard plank must curve to conform to the plan view of the deck. The inboard edge of this plank, therefore, must be notched to receive the butt ends of the deck planking, in a long zigzag pattern. This notching is usually done by hand and is complicated by the fact that it is a compound curve, to allow for the sheer of the hull. It rarely can be made to come out exactly right, and the devil is consequently a wide and somewhat irregular seam.

To be caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, therefore, is to be ‘balanced precariously on the outboard plank itself.’ This is not the equivalent of Scylla and Charybdis, however, since the devil in this case represents safety, in the form of a step back. The phrase properly refers to a situation in which only moving forward will lead to disaster, and a prudent retreat is indicated. Popular (or more properly, lubberly) usage has long since converted the phrase to the usage which Mr. Lederer assigns it, and few if any of the popular compendiums of phrases or usage give the correct definition.

This definition of devil also figures in another well-known phrase that has also suffered a lubberly sea-change. When a seam is caulked to make it watertight, oakum is first driven into the seam with a caulking iron. (Oakum is acquired by picking apart old, frayed rope fragments; while in Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde was set to picking oakum.) The seam is then sealed by “paying” it—pouring hot pitch over the oakum from a funnel.

Actually, two seams aboard ship were so difficult to caulk properly that they were universally known as the devils. The first was the outboard deck seam referred to above, which could rarely be caulked and paid neatly.

The second devil was the garboard seam in the hull planking, between the keel and the garboard strake—the bottom strake of the hull planking. This seam was not only even more difficult to fit properly than the outboard deck plank (since it involved several compound curves), but was impossible to get at once the ship was afloat. It was the seam where leaks invariably started and couldn’t be reached from inboard because of the ballast (in the old days, gravel) which covered it. To caulk the garboard seam the ship had to be put in drydock, or beached and careened—and even then caulking was difficult if not impossible, as the working of the hull continually opened the seam.

The devil to pay and no pitch hot thus described a nautical crisis, and generally referred to a hopeless situation, in which looming disaster could not be averted.

This phrase was frequently abbreviated to there was the devil to pay, and since this sounded affected to landlubbers (who had adopted it in the process Mr. Lederer describes), it was converted in the last century to “there was hell to pay,” after which the nautical significance of “pay” was lost.

Hanson Baldwin, a naval expert, in referring to a typhoon, once used the phrase “To quote an old nautical expression, ‘there was hell to pay and no pitch hot,’ ” and he has not been alone in this compounded solecism. Even the OED, while correctly identifying the nautical devil, gives as an undated explanation of the devil to pay: “supposed to refer to bargains made by wizards, etc., with Satan, and the inevitable payment (!) in the end.”

[Donald R. Morris, The Houston Post]

EPISTOLA {James J. Kilpatrick}

I enjoyed Alma Denny’s little piece [XI, 2] on the disasters that can occur when a single letter gets misplaced. It is astonishing how often marital turns into martial and run into ruin.

But your correspondent unaccountably overlooked the most embarrassing troublemaker of them all. Do you know what inevitably happens when we write about public exhibitions, public performances, public parks, and public games? You do know.

As a former newspaper editor I speak from painful experience on these matters. During four years of my tenure we in Virginia had a governor named Tuck and a prominent state senator named Bustard.

[James J. Kilpatrick, Woodville, Virginia]

EPISTOLA {Kirkham P. Ford}

In her article, “Danger! Letter Loose!” [X,2], Alma Denny listed a number of changes that omitted or added letters can inflict on words. I am reminded of the remarkable arrangement of beheadable words in:

(S)how (t)his (b)old (P)russian (t)hat (p)raises (s)laughter; (s)laughter (b)rings (r)out.

[Kirkham P. Ford, Paris, Tennessee]

EPISTOLA {Fred R. Shapiro}

Norman R. Shapiro writes that the derivation of O.K. from oll korrect is “rather fanciful” [X, 3]. Obviously he belongs to the John Ciardi school of etymology, which holds that one conjecture (such as Shapiro’s own och aye theory) is as good as another. Some people, however, support their etymologies with evidence. Allen Walker Read is one, and I refer Mr. Shapiro to Read’s brilliant series of articles in the 1963 and 1964 volumes of American Speech, which demonstrated that O.K. originated as an abbreviation of orl korrect during a craze for jocular acronyms in the late 1830s. The orl korrect derivation is fact, not fancy.

[Fred R. Shapiro, Forest Hills, New York]

EPISTOLA {Alex McEwen}

Your review of William Safire’s I Stand Corrected, More on Language [XI, 1] displays commendable scepticism in questioning the supposition that posh originated from an acronym for “port outward, starboard homeward,” denoting preferential cabin allocation for important passengers.

But shame on you for allowing the expansion of P & O into Pacific & Orient. The venerable abbreviation stands for Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, a shipping line first formed in 1834 to carry mail between Britain and the Iberian Peninsula, and subsequently extended to serve Asian ports.

[Alex McEwen, Ottawa, Canada]

[Similarly from William A. Woolf, Watford, Hertfordshire.]

EPISTOLA {Frederic O’Brady}

Mr. Maurice Sagoff [XI,2] should have looked up some elementary French before deciding the gender of rime. It is feminine, and therefore: rime donnée.

[Frederic O’Brady, Rochester, New York]

EPISTOLA {T.L. Sherred}

Re Gary Muldoon’s letter [XI,1], in 1861-65, a soldier who had seen the elephant had been in action.

[T.L. Sherred, Utica, Michigan]

EPISTOLA {Philip Taterczynski}

Two observations by way of addenda to two of the articles appearing in the Winter 1985 issue [XI,3]:

1. Another contribution from the media (in the entertainment sector rather than the news this time) to append to those compiled by Barbara Lazerson, is the verb to Water-gate. This emerged in the NBC espionage series, “Code Name Foxfire.” The precise usage was a direction to watergate the door, i.e., place a piece of tape across the latch to prevent it from catching when the door is shut. Of course, one of the problems with Watergate-era neologisms is that they lose their immediacy among those who have become aware of the world around them in the time since the infamous trials. While teaching freshman composition at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a mere five years after the hearings, my references to and cautions against the jargon and circumlocutions which had become so familiar to me fell on deaf ears. “… but we were only twelve years old then!” said the proverbial Voice from the Back of the Room. It was the first time I ever felt old and dated.

2. Richard Lederer’s article on palindromes omitted at least two interesting extensions of the material he reported. One was the final question in the interview with Professor R. Osseforp: “And his wife, May, rides a motorcycle?” “Aha may? A Yamaha!” The other was an extension of a palindrome which appeared in the article (the original appears in brackets): “Naomi, [sex at noon taxes], I moan.”

It is interesting to note that such an obscure reference to Watergate should crop up in popular entertainment so long after the fact. On the subject of palindromes, I suspect, the books will never be closed.

[Philip Taterczynski, West Hartford, Connecticut]

EPISTOLA {D. J. Enright}

May I interject a couple of facts into Reinhold Aman’s maledictions [XI, 1] against my book, A Mania for Sentences?

I have met Philip Howard twice, or at most three times, briefly; we cannot be said, by any stretch of language, to be “buddies.”

The offending book—or the book containing the offending article—is the nineteenth of mine to be published by Chatto & Windus; nine of them came out before I joined the firm. Incidentally, it will be published in the U.S. early in 1985, by David Godine—whom I do not know and have never worked for.

I can assure Dr Aman that there was no conspiracy, either against the literary world or against Maledicta. But I fear he will not believe me. Like his magazine, he seems intent on finding dirt everywhere.

[D. J. Enright, London]

EPISTOLA {David Gold}

I would like to make a few comments about the Summer 1984 [XI, 1] issue of VERBATIM:

(1) Three cheers for Richard Lederer’s A Quiz About Sexist Language, but is it then not jarring to read, four lines below his piece, “As all Englishmen … know …”? Why not English people?

(2) Readers may be puzzled by Philip Howard’s gloss of the British English slangism bottle, namely ‘spirits, chutzpah, guts, courage’ (English English), since they are accustomed to the second word as a designation of a negative quality. However, as a result of emulated polysemy, it has come, in English, to denote a positive quality, too (see the explanation of Jewish English khutspe on pp. 273-274 of “Words of Jewish Origin in English Dictionaries: The Case of farblondzhet,” American Speech 39, 3, 1984, pp. 271-278).

Howard was right to reject a “learned Hebrew exegesis from the Talmud by which the transliteration bottel, meaning ‘to make something useless or void’, has moved into the slang of British low-life.” Since there has been no direct connection between “British low-life” and the Talmud (or the Hebrew language in any of its forms), there is a missing link (or links) in this rejected etymology, namely the Yiddish adjective botl ‘void, invalid’. However, since the English noun bottle designates something positive and the Yiddish adjective botl has negative associations, the explanation is far-fetched and Howard correctly rejected it.

(3) I have not read VERBATIM IX, 1 and 3, but there is enough in Zellig Bach’s letter in XI, 1 to prompt me to express support for his position (I had already pointed out the absurdity of treating Sholem-Aleykhem as given name plus family name in “On Quality in Translation: II,” Babel 18, 4, 1972, pp. 29-30). In trying to find the best spelling for this pen name, we can best proceed from the Yiddish greeting to the name. The writing of Yiddish in Latin letters was standardized by Yiddish linguists in the 1940s and the Standardized Yiddish Romanization (as it is now called) is unequivocal with respect to the spelling of the greeting: sholem-aleykhem. It so appears in Uriel Weinreich’s Yiddish and English dictionary which Bach cites (and not sholem-aleichem, as he miscopies from this dictionary). With respect to the pen name, the obvious solution is merely to capitalize the greeting, hence Sholem-Aleykhem (the hyphen, as Bach hints, will prevent misinterpretation of this name as given name plus family name). This spelling has been adopted, among other places, in Leonard Prager’s A Selective and Annotated Bibliography of Yiddish Literary and Linguistic Periodicals and Miscellanies and in the Jewish Language Review.

It is interesting that Mark Twain is sometimes so misinterpreted, too (“Twain, Mark” in bibliographies or “Twain’s humor,” etc.). The fact that Mark is a common English given name encourages this misinterpretation.

[David Gold, University of Haifa]

EPISTOLA {Frédéric O’Brady}

Allow me to rectify again a French item in Mary Stewart Craig’s article [XI, 3].

I have no competence in Cajun speech, but conasse or connasse does not mean ‘prostitute’ in French slang. A secluded old spinster may be called that. It means ‘stupid woman’ only. It is a slang feminine form of con (female sexual organ) in rough—not necessarily slang—speech, and politely [!] you would say “idiot,” masculine.

By the way, unlike the French, con’s American equivalent would be the masculine organ, prick, and schmock is, I think, probably derived from German schmuck (jewel); that is to say, “the family jewel.” An example of male chauvinism, I wonder?

Re conasse, I find confirmation in Aristide Bruant’s Dictionnaire Francais-Argot, edition by Flammarion, Paris, 1905, where the word appears under femme bête. Prostituée has about a hundred slang denominations, one more picturesque than another, from cricri ravageur to maîtresse de piano.

From a poem by Aristide Bruant: “Bon Dieu! faut-i' qu' tu soy’s connasse!” (Good God! Must you be such a fool!)

[Frédéric O’Brady, Rochester, New York]

EPISTOLA {Robert A. Stairs}

J. K. Galbraith, writing of his upbringing in rural Ontario (The Scotch, Macmillan, 1964), says “We referred to ourselves as Scotch and not Scots.” He could have added, “… or Scottish.” I have been taken gently to task by friends from Scotland for referring to them as Scotch. I was told that the people are Scots, the adjective is Scottish, and that Scotch means whisky. The fact is that words or phrases entrenched in the English language all seem to use the form Scotch: Scotch broth, Scotch mist, scotchman, (a pad to prevent chafing in the rigging of a sailing vessel), hopscotch, etc.

Galbraith’s forebears settled in Elgin County in the early 1800s. A woman of my acquaintance who emigrated from Scotland about 1880 still resolutely called herself Scotch in 1940. The change in usage in Scotland seems to have taken place within the last century.

Normal Lowland Scots spelling of plurals, such as bookis ‘books’ and of certain names, e.g., Wemyss ‘Weems’, had silent i (or y). It seems clear that, in the past, Scottish, or the spelling variant Scottisc, were pronounced Scotch. Scots, as an adjective, may have arisen by the same process from the latter spelling, or perhaps from the plural of the noun Scot, which seems to be ancient.

Perhaps this is one of those words, like often, that enables people who enjoy such things to demonstrate by their pronunciation whether they know how to spell or how to speak.

[Robert A. Stairs, Trent University, Ontario, Canada]

EPISTOLA {George Welsh}

The Autumn issue [XI,2] of VERBATIM seems to feature Chapel Hill but I have to admit that I do not know Dennis Moore, although I have known Clifton Brock for many years. Maybe all the local subscribers and contributors can form a local chapter.

The piece by Robert Fowkes throws us a challenge when he says that he could not find a sequence of four for his Primults or Protohysts. A little time spent with NID2, however, turned up at least one for me: Aram, Rama, amar, Mara. And with the use of a punctuation mark, I can contrive another: anom., noma, Oman, mano.

Three for three is not too difficult: ips, psi, sip; are, rea, ear; ean, ane, nea; aam, ama, maa.

There are plenty of three for four: Nome, omen, meno; enam, name, amen; meda, Edam, dame; sear, ears, arse; rone, oner, Nero; asor, sora, oras; eral, rale, aler; race, acer, cera; Edar, dare, ared; rede, eder, dere; sero, eros, rose; dore, ored, redo; rata, atar, Tara.

Finally, I turned up a couple of hemitetrad variants for Fowkes: rere, erer; nono, onon; rara, arar.

[George Welsh, Chapel Hill, North Carolina]

EPISTOLA {Alan Frank}

I appreciated Robert A. Fowkes’s article [XI,2] on primults and would like to add a few of my favorites: echoic: choice Marchais: archaism stable: tables: ablest (Marchais is [was?] leader of the French Communist Party.)

I would also like to point out an error of less than a letter in Alma Denny’s “Letter Loose.” Harry S Truman’s name should not have a period after the S.

[Alan Frank, Medford, Massachusetts]

EPISTOLA {Emery R. Walker, Jr.}

Here are a few palindromes not on Mr. Lederer’s list [XI,3]:

Pa’s a sap.
Won’t lovers revolt now?
A dog! A panic in a pagoda.
Draw putrid dirt upward.
Poor Dan is in a droop.
Zeus was deified, saw Suez.
I roamed under it as a tired nude Maori.
Draw no dray a yard onward.
“Do nine men interpret?” “Nine men,” I nod.

[Emery R. Walker, Jr., Claremont, California]

EPISTOLA {Maxey Brooke}

Anent Norman Ward’s article [XI,1], “I wonder what the English called spoonerisms before the Rev. W. A. was born in 1844?,” in 1711, Addison called them paragrams from the Greek phrase ta para gramma skommata (‘jokes by the letter’) and attributed them to Aristotle.

[Maxey Brooke, Sweeny, Texas]

EPISTOLA {Norman Shapiro}

Not all the animals (and animalcules) in Richard Lederer’s Language Zoo [IX,2] belong there. It’s just not cricket has nothing to do with the insect (from an onomatopoeia, via French criquet), but with the game (Flemish krick, a “stick,” via an archaic French word for goal post). But even the best research is bound to have a bug in it.

[Norman Shapiro, Wesleyan University]

EPISTOLA {David H. Spodick, M.D.}

Among the many delights of the prizewinners' issue [XI,3] was Alex Auswaks’s piece on meaningful Russian surnames. As a literary dilettante, I was captivated by his style and, as a linguistic dilettante, by his masterly command of the language. Yet, I wonder why Mr. Auswaks chose to transliterate the guttural kh by h. There is no h in Russian. Indeed, the Russians transliterate the Western h by g. Thus, no Russian is allowed to forget that they fought the Great Patriotic War against a country whose leaders included Gimmler, Gess and that arch-fiend, Gitler.

I have long wondered why the press and experts like Mr. Auswaks transliterate most Russian o sounds like our o. The Russians write it “o” but all Russian os that are not part of the stressed syllable are pronounced “ah.” Thus, “Gromyko” is pronounced GrahmEEkah, “Chernenko,” CherniENkah, and so on.

More to Auswaks’s subject: If he has been reading Pravda or Izvestia he would find that when these organs report on Gromyko’s telling us off, it will frequently come out “Gromyko gromit (GrahmEEkah grahmit:) nyet”— “Gromyko (Mr. Thunder) thunders: No,” making effective use of the root of his name.

The Russians, of course, are not alone in using surnames to convey personal qualities directly or indirectly. Plays of the Restoration Comedy era have characters like Surface, connoting superficiality, and Volpone, conveying wolf-like qualities, and there is the modern parody of that era that features a scoundrelly physician, Sir Cecil Malpractice. Finally, the allusion to the emphative of the Ryazan dialect kadi is reminiscent of the more general Russian emphative (usually pejorative), je, as in Prokofieff’s suite about an Asian military officer, named Ki—Lieutenant Kije.

[David H. Spodick, M.D., University of Massachusetts]

EPISTOLA {R. Antony Percy}

Norman Ward was a bit hasty in his statement that spoonerism has no synonym. Sixth Chambers and Webster’s Second give the word marrowsky, with the supposed origin of a Polish count. Can any of your readers shed further light on him?

[R. Antony Percy, Norwalk, Connecticut]

EPISTOLA {John Ure Anderson, Jr.}

I was delighted by Richard Lederer’s article on Palindromes [XI,3], but should like to comment briefly on my idea of a perfect palindrome and why the Greek inscription, properly written, is the only perfect palindrome I know of.

For me, a perfect palindrome: (1) has the same order of letters in each direction; (2) involves no change in capitalization on reversal; (3) has no changes in the distribution of spaces between words; and (4) has something interesting to say.

All single word palindromes which are not proper nouns (e.g., noon, madam, level) meet the first three tests. “Able was I ere I saw Elba” meets every test except the second, but would also meet that test if it were cast, like a telegram, in all capital letters.

As for the Greek inscription, it is my understanding that it appeared around a fountain at Hagia Sophia and not over the doorway. It must also be noted that PS is one letter in Greek and that the second word in the inscription is misspelled and should read ANOMEMA. Further, ancient Greek inscriptions were always done in capitals with no spaces between the words. As it says at the beginning of a chapter in the Greek grammar I studied 45 years ago:

NIψONANOMHMAMHMONANOψIN ‘Wash your sins, not only your face.’

I might also note that the interesting aspect of the Napoleonic palindrome is marred by the fact that the Emperor raised a good bit of hell, and did so ably, after his escape from Elba and before his rustication to St. Helena.

[John Ure Anderson, Jr., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania]

EPISTOLA {John Harris}

A pistol, eh? (Eh is Canajan for huh).

Baseball announcers need no grounding in Latin to be effective, as Tony Kubek proved a couple of years ago while doing the colour commentary for a Blue Jays game. He came up with this comment about a player whose name I didn’t quite catch, listening as I was not to what he was saying but to how he was saying it: “… can throw almost as well with either hand, but is a little more dexterous with his left hand.” Does that not have sinister connotations? The player in question would have to clap with the backs of his hands. A post-baseball career as a pianist would be out of the question.

Actually, Kubek was quite correct. But as a Latin scholar, he makes a great shortstop.

[John Harris, Toronto, Canada]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Out of our minds. Into your hands.” [Slogan from a TV ad for Quasar home entertainment products. Submitted by Frank Abate, Old Saybrook, Connecticut.].

English English: Frenglish

Philip Howard

The French and the English are old friends and old enemies, old neighbors and old strangers. The great object of the children’s game called “French and English” is to run off with the property of the opposing party, which is what the grown-ups have been doing for centuries. We are about to celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of one of our most important French connections. In October 1685 Louis XIV signed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, so depriving the French Huguenots of their remaining right to freedom of worship and lighting the signal for religious persecution. About 200,000 of his most energetic citizens fled the country with their industries and skills, impoverishing France and enriching the rest of the world.

One of the ways in which they enriched us was in their imports into the English language itself. The nickname of the French Protestants, “Huguenots,” has one of those doubtful etymologies dear to the heart of English pedants. The learned Onions derives it from the name of a Geneva Burgomaster, Besancon Hugues. Geneva was the home of Calvin’s ecclesiastical dictatorship, or sectocracy, and a convenient sanctuary just across the border for French Protestants when persecuted. He argues that the connection came by assimilation from the Swiss German word eidgenoss ‘oath-associate,’ or ‘confederate.’ It seems such a tall etymology to me, especially since what they speak in Geneva is Swiss French not Swiss German, that it might just be true.

The principal alternative etymology comes from Henri Estienne in Apologie pour Hérodote, published in 1566. Henri asserts that Huguenot comes from Hugues or Hugo, which seems fair enough, and that it is derived from the fact that the Protestants of Tours used to meet at night near the gate of King Hugo.

The Huguenots, perhaps because they arrived as refugees who had lost everything, worked hard and made their names and fortunes. The first Governor of the Bank of England, and seven of the original twenty-four founder-directors were Huguenots. The colony of Huguenot weavers at Spitalfields on the east of the City of London made it the world center for silk and velvet manufacture. Huguenot goldsmiths and other decorative artists changed the face of England. And Huguenot names became Anglicized and added to the national nomenclature of worthies: Blanch-flower and Cazalet, De La Mare and Layard, Olivier and Roget of blessed memory to wordsmiths. Garrick, the actor, and Paul Revere, of Longfellow’s The Midnight Ride, were Huguenots.

If you walk around London or the South of England, every so often you will see a heartening imperative: “Take Courage.” This is not, as you might suppose, a pious injunction from our native equivalent of the Moral Majority, but an advertisement for beer made by one of our biggest breweries, Courage’s. It is not, in my opinion, one of our better beers. But the name Courage is clearly Huguenot.

One of the great English firms is Courtaulds, manufacturers of all kinds of synthetic fibers and fabrics. There hops another Frog. Courtaulds came over with the Huguenots. Their products bring a little touch of French into the English language. For example, Courtelle, a popular synthetic fabric, comes from the old Huguenot surname, with the suffix -elle that suggests either femininity, as in mademoiselle, or a homely diminutiveness, as in bagatelle.

Now here is a really British English word for you: bosie or bosey. It is a technical term of cricket, I am afraid, and I am aware that there is no subject in the world that induces incredulity and ennui in Americans faster than cricket. A friend of mine who writes detective stories, which are always published in the States, had the last one turned down on the grounds that one quite short scene took place at a cricket match. Bosie is another name, particularly in Australia, for a googly. A googly is a ball delivered by a bowler that looks as if it ought to break from left to right across the bat of a right-handed batsman. In fact, the bowler releases the ball from right out of the back of his hand and imparts a final flick with his fingers, so that the ball in fact breaks from right to left, or else comes through straight and with a high bounce, giving the batsman a very nasty turn indeed.

The bosie was invented by a Bosanquet, a Huguenot, of course. Not Bosanquet the philosopher, nor Bosanquet the lawyer, nor Bosanquet the archaeologist, but Bosanquet, B.J.T., the cricketer who played for Middlesex. He secretly invented the googly at a childish ball game called tishytoshy, and unveiled it late in the nineteenth century in the presence of the great batsman, Victor Trumper, instantly dismissing him. The Australians were so amazed by this ball that bounced the wrong way when it was pitched, that they called it a bosie, and still do.

When Frenchmen give their names to a cricketing term, they are truly naturalized. The Huguenots are preparing to celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of their arrival here. Among other jollities they have drawn up are pedigrees demonstrating that Prince William and Henry of Wales are descended from Huguenots through fifteen lines, through both the royal and the Spencer families.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Man trying to get kite electrocuted.” [Headline in the Tampa Tribune, 2 September 1984. Submitted by Billy Finch, Tampa, Florida.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“A 10 week Beginners Quitting course.” [An offering of the Cyrville Community Centre, appearing in The Banar n.d. Submitted by I.G. Brossley, Gloucester, Ontario, Canada.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The Cherokee Nation’s main push is health prevention and health promotion.” [A quote from the newly appointed director of Health and Human Services, appearing in Cherokee Advocate, March 1984. Submitted by Richard Mayo, Sallisaw, Oklahoma.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Five persons presumed drowned off the California coast by the Coast Guard after their boat broke up in the area of a treacherous shoal.” [From the Springfield, Mass. Morning Union, 16 March 1984. Submitted by Ronald R. Jay, Springfield, Massachusetts.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The settlement to get the Solvang cityhood proposal on the November ballot almost fell apart Thursday, but the inertia generated by months of tough negotiation was enough for another unanimous vote.” [From The Lompoc Record, 20 April 1984. Submitted by Arthur G. Heinrich, Lompoc, California.]

Lost Tropes

David Galef, New York City

The average college graduate, that useful representation of a certain level of learning, knows what a metaphor is. He will also probably be able to tell you what a simile is. Unless he is specifically skilled in rhetoric or poetry, however, he may balk at catachresis. This term refers to ‘an extended, often mixed metaphor, as in Shakespeare’s “to take arms against a sea of troubles.” ' Hendiadys, too, may provoke a scratching of the head; hendiadys is the ‘use of two nouns instead of a noun and an adjective, as in “weeping tears and pity” rather than “weeping pitiful tears.” ' There is a long list of poetic and rhetorical tropes with odd names, from anaphora to zeugma. Many date back to Latin or Greek and were best suited for use in those languages. Just as the complex poetic meters of double glyconics and choriambs have faded, so have many of these figures of speech. They are, in effect, lost tropes.

Most elementary courses in poetry will dutifully go over the basic tropes a modern poet uses. Besides metaphor and simile, alliteration, personification, and irony will get their due. On a level once removed, logophilic students will learn apostrophe (“O noble trope”), metonymy and synecdoche (they will confuse these two), ellipsis … probably oxymoron, onomatopoeia, hyperbole, and litotes, too. There are, of course, classic examples of each figure. Providing an instance of litotes, a former English teacher of mine once remarked, “I would not say that he was the dullest of scientists.” He was talking of Einstein.

After this secondary level of tropes, however, one finds murkier depths. Should one decide to become a rhetorician, a classicist, or a well-schooled poet, one enters an arcane world where zeugma is king, or possibly I mean syllepsis. Zeugma occurs when ‘two different words are linked to a verb or an adjective, whereas only one fits literally.’ Pope, in “The Rape of the Lock,” does this well: “Or stain her honor, or her new brocade; / Forget her prayers, or miss a masquerade; / Or lose her heart, or necklace, at a ball.” Anacoluthon is another interesting beast, a change in grammatical structure within the same sentence, as in Wallace Stevens’s “To the One of Fictive Music”:

For so retentive of themselves are men
That music is intensest which proclaims
The near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom,
And of all vigils musing the obscure,
That apprehends the most which sees and names,
As in your name, an image that is sure,
Among the arrant spices of the sun,
A bough and bush and scented vine, in whom
We give ourselves our likest issuance.

As a careful reading will show, the word that functions as a relative pronoun, though the whole sentence seems to lose its predicate somewhere in the middle of the stanza. The stanza ends with a disconnected apostrophe, an invocation to something or someone who cannot answer back, often an inanimate object or an idea.

Anaphora is another good classical device, the repetition of a word at the beginning of successive clauses. Thomas Dylan, in “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” uses it to particularly good effect: “Though they go mad they shall be sane, / Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; / Though lovers be lost love shall not.” Anaphora should not be confused with epanorthosis, the repetitious use of a particular term for emphasis: the word element in certain of Ben Jonson’s poems, for example. Anastrophe, too, has its place, when a reversal of word order is called for. In Byron’s Don Juan occurs an exemplary anastrophe: “All, when life is new, / Commence with feelings warm, and prospects high…”

Obviously, these lost tropes have been used throughout the history of English, though occasionally one may have to search a bit. In his preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth promoted the use of ordinary speech in poetry, and high-flown syntax and diction began to wane. Still, exceptions throughout the history of English literature abound, both before and after Wordsworth. Pope is a great find in this connection; so is Milton, or any neoclassicist. A.E. Housman, great classics scholar that he was, goes to some lengths to show the comical extremes to which such tropes can lead. A quotation from his “Fragment of a Greek Tragedy” will suffice:

ALCMÆON
I journed hither a Boeotian road.

CHORUS
Sailing on horseback, or with feet for oars?

ALCMÆON
Plying with speed my partnership of legs.

CHORUS
Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus?

ALCMÆON
Mud’s sister, not himself, adorns my shoes.

CHORUS
To learn your name would not displease me much.

Obviously, Housman is writing with his nineteenth-century tongue in cheek. If one pursues the matter back in history, though, one runs smack against Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (The Education of an Orator,) which takes the subject seriously. Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars Poetica both refer to the plentitude of tropes available to the would-be playwright, and caution against excesses.

Still, the possibilities are tempting—and frequently, one may use a trope without knowing the nomenclature. The previous sentence, for example, shows the use of aposiopesis: ‘interruption for effect.’ Asyndeton is another method of assuring emphasis: just remove the conjunctions, as in Caesar’s famous “Veni, vidi, vici.” The Sixties generation found Timothy Leary’s use of asyndeton equally arresting: “Tune in, turn on, drop out.” In many instances, then, the tropes have survived; their names have not.

As a simple test, see how many of the following tropes you can match up with their meanings:

1. prosopopoeia
2. syncope
3. hysteron proteron
4. paronomasia
5. pleonasm
6. prolepsis

A. foreshadowing
B. punning
C. redundancy
D. personification
E. time-reversal
F. elision

(Answers are provided at the end of this article.)

If certain tropic nuances have been lost over time, so have the possibilities inherent in modern language. The fact that no one speaks Latin today, for instance, means that word-pictures in poetry are no longer really possible. Horace’s Carmina 1.5 provides a vivid illustration of what was possible in an inflected language: “Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa …,” or ‘What slender youth presses upon you in the rose bushes…?’ The hint of lechery in the English hardly conveys what is going on in the Latin, where the multa goes with the rosa, and the gracilis goes with the puer, all encircling the te:

Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa

In other words, the woman is physically surrounded by the youth and his slenderness, in turn covered by the rose bushes. Certain poets, some of scant talent and others of very great abilities, have attempted the same placement effects in English, but with limited success. The seventeenth-century religious poet George Herbert, with his shaped poetry (his poem “The Altar” is in the shape of an altar), is an interesting exception. The school of modern poets who employ typographical tricks may be searching after this kind of impact, but the results are not quite the same as in Latin.

One should also point out that Latin, besides being an inflected language, is also quantitative in its sounds. In other words, the length of a vowel-sound matters. Malum, for example, means an ‘evil deed,’ while mālum, with a longer-held a-sound, means an ‘apple.’ Differences in meaning can usually be figured out from context. In poetry, however, quantitative meter becomes important, not the stressed meter that English readers know. Instead of the non-stressed, stressed; non-stressed, stressed syllables in iambic feet, one might read long-short-short; long-short-short. Six feet of this type of meter, with a caesura and maybe a longlong foot as an occasional substitute, is dactylic hexameter, the meter of Vergil’s Aeneid. As with the usage of certain tropes, the rhythm and effect are hard to convey in English. Perhaps the poet best known for trying to adapt English verse to quantitative meter is the sixteenth-century Englishman Thomas Campion. His “Rose-cheeked Laura” is an example of a Latin long-short rhythm:

Rose-cheeked Laura, come
Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty’s
Silent music, either other
Sweetly gracing.

The attempt is laudable; the effect is up to the reader to decide.

Certainly, many of the old techniques are uncommon, if not awkward, in modern English. On the other hand, examples in literature are occasionally felicitous. The chiasmus, for instance, literally a ‘placing crosswise,’ concerns a crossing word-order, as in noun-adjective, adjective noun: “a heart untouched, an impure mind.” Pope’s Essay on Man shows a more complex type of chiasmus: “The rising tempest puts in act the soul, / Parts it may ravage, but preserve the whole.” One can diagram the crossing which occurs in the second line:

parts — ravage
preserve — whole

As a cross, the chiasmus may also have an implicit Christian meaning in its usage.

Hellenism, the use of Greek words and phrases, made more sense in the days when Latin borrowed heavily from Greek; but one can find T.S. Eliot doing it in “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service”:

In the beginning was the Word
Superfetation of TÓéV [to hen: ‘the One’]
And at the mensual turn of time
Produced enervate Origen.

And what of hypallage, or ‘transferred epithet’? Tennyson writes, in In Memoriam: “The little village looks forlorn; / She sighs amid her narrow days…” Admittedly, hyperbaton, or the ‘separation of words which belong together,’ is more for an inflected language like Latin or Greek. Still, there is Milton: “Is piety thus and pure devotion paid?” And the King James’ Bible is capable of synchysis, or ‘interlocked word-order’: “Yet setteth he the poor on high from affliction, and maketh him families like a flock.”

There are other lost tropes, of course. In a brief essay like this, one has to pick and choose. In so doing, I have left out anadiplosis, the ‘use of the last word in one clause to begin another.’ I have omitted to talk of synesis, the ‘agreement of words by logic rather than by strict grammar.’ More exciting than the discussion of tropes, however, is finding them in living usage, and many of them still exist, despite their jaw-breaking names. Brachylogy— a term covering a variety of condensation tropes, such as ellipsis and zeugma — is not dead. It may be seen in Vergil, and it may be seen in the pages of next year’s poetry anthologies. Politicians use the figures in their speeches. Far from sounding archaic, the words may come across as graceful, powerful, or poetic, which is the whole point, after all.

Answers to quiz: 1D, 2F, 3E, 4B, 5C, 6A.

Note: The author wishes to acknowledge the help and inspiration of Rita Fleischer and Floyd Moreland of the Latin/Greek Institute at City University of New York. Without their tireless efforts in teaching the classics, much of this material might never have seen the light of print.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Puns

Walter Redfern, (Basil Blackwell, 1984), 234 pp.

How do you judge a pun? It can be as hard to tell a good one from a bad one as it is to distinguish between the common tern and the arctic tern. This is so difficult, even for experienced bird-spotters, that (a distinguished ornithologist recently told me) a new species has had to be evolved— the comic tern. Apparently this piece of nomenclature is in such general use among the chaps with binoculars that it no longer raises even a smile, having passed from a joke into common parlance. For someone like myself who can scarcely tell a hawk from a handsaw, it is hard to say how good a pun this is. Pretty good, I would say, even if common and arctic terns are dull and boring birds. On the other hand, if their behavior consists of comic turns, then it’s very good indeed.

Suppose I were to say that the pun is mightier than the word. Pun/Pen is all right, but sword/word works better when written than spoken. Even so, I would justify it on the same grounds as Byron’s for rhyming laureate with Iscariot when writing about Southey in Don Juan. Byron says in a footnote, “as Ben Jonson did to Sylvester, who challenged him to rhyme with “I, John Sylvester, Lay with your sister.” Jonson answered, “I, Ben Jonson, lay with your wife.” Sylvester answered, “That is not rhyme.” “No,” said Ben Jon son, “but it is true.”

The pun is mightier than the word, since it says more than one thing at a time, often producing a third meaning in the process, just as a mixture of blue and yellow makes not only blue-and-yellow but, more importantly, green. Take an example from that master of paronomasia, Peter de Vries. His book-title Without a Stitch in Time is a play on words that endlessly turns on itself, like a pair of snakes biting each other’s tails (or tales). Since a stitch in time saves nine, to be without a stitch is disastrous. The naked and the dead, perhaps. At any rate, de Vries does not fail to have us in stitches, in which case in time we are not without a stitch.

The epigraph to Walter Redfern’s Puns comes from Raymond Queneau: “Tant d’histoire, pour quelques calembours.” Like all of Queneau’s puns, this is an excellent one, though not translatable. Because histoire has a double meaning, Queneau’s expression can be rendered both as “So much history over a few puns” and, at the same time, “Such a hoo-ha over a few puns.” (Incidentally, when I just said double meaning, I could have said double entendre, which is quite a complicated pun in itself. In French it’s double entente. The sea-change that took place in the passage across the Channel is itself a pun, since entendre means both to ‘hear’ and to ‘understand,’ just as entente means both ‘understanding’ and ‘agreement.' Redfern tries to take a step further when he says that the goal of his book, “a bipartite study of wordplay in French and English,” is a double entente cordiale.) Redfern describes his dizzying work as part-anthology, part-gloss, part-invention, part-speculation. It is indeed une histoire, giving at the same time the story of puns and making a hoo-ha over them, theorizing like mad about the use of puns, the usefulness of puns, the uselessness of puns, the need for puns, the fun of puns, while simultaneously and shamelessly taking the opportunity thereby provided to quote his favorite specimens and to let off a good many of his own.

He discusses erotic puns, scatological puns, puns in advertising, puns in the press, puns in literature, history, and all over the place. Puns aboundeth everywhere.

Compulsive punning is a symptom of psychological disorder, as anyone who has known a schizophrenic will know. This does not mean that schizophrenics are the only compulsive punners. As in so many ways, here “the lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact.” The pun combines lunacy, love, and poetry in a word. It is, in Johnson’s phrase, an unexpected copulation of ideas, and (one might add) it is a mating that produces offspring that may be beautiful or foul, brilliant or dull.

The pun is word-play, and play-behavior is based on flight and fight: that is to say, fear and aggression. Redburn emphasizes the aggressive aspect of puns: they “make people groan, squirm, flinch, grimace, or wince.” We speak of agonizing puns. Queneau spoke of his ambition to elevate the pun to the level of torture. (I have just noticed that I have mistyped the author’s name a couple of sentences ago. Sigmund would have had great fun analyzing why I wrote Redburn instead of Redfern.) I think he (Redfern) does not make enough of the defensive use of the pun. It is the weapon of the quick-witted physical weakling against the gorilla who kicks sand in his eyes on the beach and enables him to evade an unequal physical contest and to vanquish on his own equally unequal terms of verbal juggling. (Equally unequal? Moron versus the oxymoron.) The quickest punster I have ever met suffers from a terrible congenital handicap. One thinks immediately of Pope—that razor-sharp wit imprisoned in (and slashing out of) that feeble body. Or of the poor chap in Stevie Smith’s poem, who was not waving but drowning.

The United States has produced some great punsters, notably Perelman and de Vries, but has tended to sniff at puns as being a bit too English and therefore an un-American activity. Redburn, Redfern, whatever his name is, quotes Max Eastman saying that he counts it “a point of legitimate pride in my country… that it has, upon the whole, manfully resisted the transplantation and general propagation of the household pun.” As an Englishman, I would reply that puns are better than guns, which are what are toted Stateside, and that we Limies find it hard to see just what is so funny about spelling words wrong in the Artemus Ward manner/manor.

Jesus punned, though the Peter pun doesn’t work so well in English as in French where Pierre is both a first name and a stone. Shakespeare punned constantly. The deer/dear and heart/hart puns can get tedious, but he used them formidably for tragic as well as comic effect: Hamlet’s “A little more than kith and less than kind”; Gaunt’s deathbed playing on his own name; the witty and dying Mercutio’s referring to himself as “a grave man.” Donne, Swift, Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Flaubert, Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov —where would they be without their puns?

Redfern (I’ve got it right this time) could have said more about metaphor as puns (Is not a metaphor always a kind of pun?), rhymes (ditto) and visual puns both in art (such as Picasso’s bull’s head, made out of a bicycle saddle and handlebars) and in nature (such as the penis-like fungus phallus impudicus which made the Rev. Francis Kilvert wonder how God could have had such a dirty mind). Samuel Beckett knows the answer: “In the beginning was the pun.”

Only occasionally is Redfern’s book irritating. Mostly it is fun, funny, entertaining, informative, and thought-provoking, punningly operating at the same time on a high intellectual level and low gorblimey one. He does over-play the “As the actress said to the bishop” card, though it is, in practice, one that unleashes hidden meanings extraordinarily often, and often extraordinarily funnily.

A final word of warning. This is not a book for Snarks. As you will remember, there are three unmistakable marks by which a Snark can be identified.

The third is its slowness in taking a jest.
Should you happen to venture on one,
It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed:
And it always looks grave at a pun.

Definitely not recommended reading for a Snark. But a comic tern would enjoy it.

Richard Boston

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Wordtree: A Transitive Cladistic for Solving Physical & Social Problems

Henry G. Burger, (The Wordtree, Merriam, Kansas, 1984), 382pp.

What is it that makes two people think alike? Upbringing; social sphere; education; acquaintances and companions; country, region, even neighborhood of origin and residence; travel. All these are factors that would have to be shared by people for them to have essentially the same mental attitude and view of the world. Moreover, the genetic factor suggests that even given close similarity of environment, two individuals would have also to be biologically alike—one the clone of the other, say—to truly share the same sort of mind.

All this may serve to point up what is the essential flaw in a remarkable book called The Wordtree, a unique new language research tool. Editor and publisher Henry G. Burger has been compiling, processing, refining, and preparing the book over the span of twenty-seven years, and the product of his long and nearly solitary toil is an achievement that merits the serious attention of linguists. Applying his own theory of a hierarchical, semantic taxonomy of language (the Cladistic of the subtitle refers to the branching structure that results from this approach), Burger offers for each of some 20,000 key concept-words or “actemes” a definition in two parts, each of which is itself an acteme at a higher level in the hierarchy. Each acteme listed in the text can theoretically be traced back along its constituent, defining branches until ultimately we arrive at a set of 42 conceptual starting points. (More on these below.) As a result, a given acteme, with all of its defining branches illustrated in a drawing, would give the appearance of a genealogical chart or, metaphorically, a Wordtree.

There is great potential value in this sort of semantic research, but in the rigorous adherence to a two-and-only-two-branch approach, and in the unswerving use of one-word “definitions,” Burger has oversimplified his methodology to the point where it frequently yields dubious results. Many of Burger’s two-part analyses are so strained, unclear, or downright bizarre that only the editor himself—and that unlikely individual who might possess precisely the same mindset and world-view — can reasonably expect to make full and fruitful use of the book.

We should add, in defense of Burger’s theory: 1) his approach is in the spirit of and contributes to the notion of semantic indexing, a concept presently being pursued by many language researchers and one which eventually may make automatic machine-translation a formidable reality;

1. the still widespread resistance to and unfamiliarity with on-line research tools, making it practically necessary for reference material to be published in book form, are obstacles preventing a full realization of the value of Burger’s hypothesis. The Wordtree would prove far more useful and benefit greatly were it an on-line, highly accessible, quickly manipulable electronic utility, open and ready for muchneeded refinements, corrections, and expansion.

The layout of the book is in three basic parts: 1) front matter running 54 pages, with theoretical explanation, general background, and explanatory notes; 2) 130 pages of text in which the 20,000 or so actemes are presented in hierarchical order, from simple to complex, numbered sequentially and shown with their various derivatives and related forms; 3) 184 pages consisting of an alphabetic index of all actemes, as well as thousands of other associated forms for each of which the user is given an appropriate reference. It is worth noting that while these page counts are modest, WT is in fact dense with information, as each text page has six columns of 142 lines. The editor asserts that the amount of material is equivalent to a “regular-sized book” of 1755 pages; it is certain that WT contains far more information than the page count would normally indicate.

As it stands, The Wordtree (according to the claims of its editor) gives access to an array of more than 250,000 words, creating a source that is intended as “a handbook of physical and social engineering” that allows one to look up a word or concept and trace it to its cause or follow its effects. Burger has applied and carried through his theory of binary branching, ultimately tracing the language back to 42 primitive concepts that serve as his basic starting points for all subsequent branching. Some of these primitives—create, ascertain, relate, need, change, agree, order (all to be regarded as transitive verbs) — are at the base of Burger’s genealogical theory of semantics. This is a noteworthy and potentially powerful concept. Could these 42 in fact be key semantic building blocks? If so, a theory stemming from them could yield exciting results, especially if the concepts represented are universal to all languages.

Unfortunately, owing perhaps to an overzealous application of a result-oriented, engineered approach to language, Burger’s system shows many signs of weakness. We have already mentioned one of the rigid constraints of the method: binary (only) branching and one-word (only) defining. This principle results in the following “definitions,” all of which appear in WT (each element is to be considered as a transitive verb):

1. to retrieve = discover & bring 2. to explain = symbolize & particularize 3. to conflate = gather & present 4. to illume = level & bend 5. to bastile [sic] = fortress & confine 6. to brown = henna & dim 7. to ensweep = discloister & overtrip

Exception can be taken to all of these: they are either too simplistic (1), abstruse (2), misleading (3, 5), bizarre (4, 6), or simply incomprehensible (7). Admittedly, these examples have been selected for criticism, but objectionable definitions are not hard to find and seem to this reviewer to outnumber the arguably adequate ones.

This flaw is aggravated by insistence upon the principle of transitivity: all the concepts that are the key branches in Burger’s system must be regarded as transitive verbs. Some very peculiar -ize and -fy combinations appear, e.g., interrogativize, insonify, sensize, complexify, utilitarianize, not to mention a plethora of weird compounds which, despite the author’s insistence that the great majority are taken from documented citations, have the hollow ring of nonce, viz., to transhumanate, to racetaunt, to forecomprehend, to freezeframecopy, to jackiegleason. These and many other exotic forms seem to have been used so that Burger could bridge conceptual gaps in his branching structure. Add to these difficulties the fact that many English words which (until The Wordtree,) had never been regarded as verbs undergo functional shift within these pages —e.g., to ecstasy, to prose, to wall, to health—and the methodology appears truly Procrustean. Whether these grating novelties stem from an artificial or naive attitude toward language, the result is that The Wordtree displays, on nearly every page, the harsh results of an inflexibly applied hypothesis.

One can perhaps overlook the self-aggrandizing and highly defensive views of the author as expressed in the front matter (which cautions, for instance, against unauthorized use, photocopying, or counterfeiting, offering a bounty of $600 for evidence of such that leads to a conviction). Even the crabbed, printout-style type (set, even more unfortunately, in all capitals) and difficult organization, which render the book unattractive and far from convenient to use, may be forgiven on the grounds that WT is the first edition of a radically different sort of word book that was created principally by one man under constraint of limited funding. In conclusion, we recommend that semanticists and lexicological theorists peruse this unique creation and explore its principles. Although it contains numerous disconcerting, even absurd elements, Burger’s Wordtree is worthy of study, if only to emphasize the potential in a theory of semantic indexing. The Wordtree is certainly not the answer to the theoretical problem, but years from now it may well be regarded as an instructive attempt that provided some insight—on what to avoid as much as on what to do.

Frank R. Abate

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The bar will be moved to the back of the room, allowing even greater visibility of The Pubic Garden.” [From The Newsletter of the Ritz-Carlton, Boston, Massachusetts, Winter 1985. Submitted by Cornelius Van S. Roosevelt, Washington, D.C.]

Inscrutable Chinese Puzzle: Dialects or Languages?

Charles P. Trumbull, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

There is some argument among scholars as to whether the different forms of Chinese as spoken in the various parts of China are in fact dialects or separate languages, given that they all use the same writing system. One usually believes that speakers of one dialect are able to understand the speakers of another dialect of the same language just as Englishmen can understand other Englishmen from other parts of England who speak in different “dialects” or “accents.” With Chinese this certainly is not so. Each Chinese dialect has its many subdialects and these are mutually understandable just as are the English “accents,” but the so-called dialects are as far apart as are English and Dutch or Spanish and Italian.

It is therefore largely a matter of definition. Webster gives as one definition under dialect: “one or more cognate languages (French and Italian are Romance dialects.)” Cognate means related by descent from the same ancestral language. French and Italian as well as Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, and Rumanian are all related (by descent) to Latin and comprise the Latin dialects that we call the Romance languages. The Chinese dialects are all descended from Ancient Chinese spoken during the T’ang dynasty (A.D. 618-907), which, in turn, derived from Archaic Chinese spoken more than a millennium earlier during the Chou. These Chinese dialects are in fact separate cognate languages and differ from Ancient and Archaic Chinese as do French or Spanish or Italian from Latin and from each other.

In the areas now comprising France, Spain, Portugal, Rumania, and Italy, the official language was Latin during the time of the Roman Empire. Romans occupied all of the government and military positions and thus served as a stabilizing force to keep the language constant and uniform. The common man — including the soldiers, the colonizers, and the natives — spoke Latin, albeit a more popular form known as Vulgar Latin. The Roman script consisted of symbols which represented sounds, what we now call the Roman alphabet, so that the words of Latin sounded exactly as they were spelled. It was a phonetic writing system.

When the Roman Empire fell in A.D. 476 there was no longer a central government tying the European areas together and the population fell into isolated groups, frequently beset by incursions of the Goths from the north. As a result, many dialects began to develop, each with its many subdialects. Centuries later, as the individual countries were formed, one subdialect was decreed to be the official language of each: that of Castile became Spanish, of Tuscany, Italian, etc. Still, many of the subdialects persist to this day.

The writing system of each of these languages remained the same: i.e., the Roman alphabet. However, the symbols of this alphabet were continuously rearranged to reflect the changing sounds of the language in such a way that the pronunciation of the words could generally be determined from their spelling. French, however, lags markedly behind her sister languages in this respect.

With Chinese, the story was a similar one, except for the writing. The dialects of China developed in much the same way as did those of Europe—only they did so twice. The early history of China was a cyclical one in which a strong dynasty controlling the entire country fell into political, moral, and economic decay and was overthrown, usually by barbarian tribes along her border. China then disintegrated into many warring kingdoms, each trying to defeat the others in an attempt to reunify the country. Finally, after several hundred years, a new dynasty was established and ruled for three or four hundred years before the process started over again.

The Western Chou, the first of the great Chinese dynasties, lasted from 1027 to 771 B.C. Its people spoke Archaic Chinese. Its area was very much smaller than that of today’s China, covering the Yellow-Wei River basins through the present-day province of Shensi and extending south to include the Yangtze in central China. It was completely surrounded by hostile barbarian tribes, who eventually forced the king to move his capital from the west to the east. The result was that the king had only nominal control over his territorial lords, and the country was broken up into many small kingdoms. Although the years from 771 to 256 B.C. are officially known as the Eastern Chou, they really consisted of two periods of warfare known as the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. In the first, the number of kingdoms was reduced to only a few; in the second, those few fought until one dominated, reuniting China in 221 B.C. All in all, the fighting continued for some five centuries. This new dynasty was the Ch’in, from which the name China derives. During these years of fighting, the language split into many dialects according to political and geographic boundaries.

The new ruler set about making China great again. He simplified and standardized the Chinese writing system into its basic modern form. He established the dialect of his capital, Ch’ang-an, as the official language of his government and of its civil service throughout the land, but he did not try to force this language upon the common man.

The Ch’in dynasty barely outlived its first emperor, who was widely hated. After but five years of rebellion it gave way to the Han, a dynasty that lasted for more than four hundred years, from 202 B.C. to A.D. 220. It expanded its territory to almost the equal of present-day China. In its brilliance and magnitude the Han dynasty was the equal of the Roman Empire. However, it did not unify the language but merely followed the practice of the Ch’in in using the dialect of Ch’ang-an as the language of the court and of the officials assigned throughout the realm. The local dialects continued as before.

When the Han fell, there followed another period of disunity, with many kingdoms and much fighting; that lasted until A.D. 589, at which time the country was reunited by the northern Sui kingdom, a feat comparable to that facing Charlemagne as he tried to reestablish the Roman Empire. As with the Ch’in before them, the Sui shortly gave way to another dynasty, this time the T’ang, which ruled for almost three hundred years (A.D. 617-907). The T’ang established a civilization unexcelled anywhere in the world. Its capital, Ch’ang-an, was the largest and most cultured city in the world; its artists, sculptors, and poets were among the finest the world has ever produced. One of its unheralded feats was its unification of the language, so that by the end of its reign the entire country, with the exception of the non-Chinese minorities, was speaking the Ch’ang-an language, now known as Ancient Chinese. It is from this language that all modern Chinese dialects developed, although a few aspects of those spoken in the provinces of Fukien and eastern Kwangtung date further back.

After the decay and fall of the T’ang dynasty, there was again a period of disunity. First was the fifty-three year period known as the Five Dynasties. This was followed by the Sung dynasty. But after 170 years of rule it had to abandon the northern half—the cultural half—of the country to a tribe called the Chin. In 1234 the Mongols defeated the Chin and in 1279 took over all of China, calling themselves the Yuan dynasty. The Mongols had no interest in unifying the language nor the time in which to do so. They merely followed the example of their predecessors and used the version of Chinese spoken in their capital, Peking, as the court and government language. Their dynasty lasted lass than 100 years; in 1368, the Chinese once again took over control of their own country, with the Ming dynasty. The capital remained in Peking. By this time, the diversity of dialects as we know them today had become firmly established.

When the Manchus from the north defeated the Ming and proclaimed the Ch’ing dynasty, in 1644, they continued to use the Peking language, but again only as the official governmental language. The top governmental officials throughout the country were called “mandarins” by the Portuguese missionaries who arrived near the end of the Ming Dynasty, and their language thus became “Mandarin.” The word comes from the Portuguese verb mandar ‘to govern.’

As for the dialects themselves, there are six major ones. It is common to divide them into two main groups: one, Mandarin, spoken in all of China north of the Yangtze with the exception of that river’s estuary, and south of the Yangtze in all areas west of the coastal provinces; and two, the numerous dialects as found in those coastal provinces. Mandarin in its many subdialects is spoken by more than three fourths of the population of China; it is the native tongue of more people than any other language. It is divided into three groups: northern, which covers most of China north of the Yangtze; southern, which is centered along the Yangtze basin between Nanking and Wuhan; and southwestern, which is spoken in the noncoastal provinces south of the Yangtze and in the southern half of Szechwan. (In the western half of the country almost no Chinese of any kind is spoken.) These three groupings of Mandarin have been compared to English as it is spoken in the United Kingdom, North America, and in Australia and New Zealand. There are different subdialects or “accents” within each group, as well as differences in vocabulary, comparable to use by Americans of streetcar, elevator, and gasoline, while the British say tram, lift, and petrol.

The coastal dialects consist of Wu, which covers the Yangtze River estuary and all the province of Chekiang and parts of Anhwei and Kiangsi and which is typified by the speech of Shanghai; Foochow, spoken in the northern half of Fukien; Amoy-Swatow, the dialect of southern Fukien, the eastern tip of Kwangtung, and the island of Hainan (Foochow and Amoy-Swatow are collectively known as the Min dialects, with certain features predating the Ancient Chinese); and Cantonese, which covers most of Kwangtung and the southern half of Kwangsi: it is typified by the speech of the city of Canton. Cantonese is the sing-song dialect spoken by most of the Chinese in the United States. The sixth, Hakka, is the dialect of a people rather than of an area. It is predominant in eastern Kiangsi, which is not a coastal province, and in central Kwangtung, and it is found in isolated groups throughout all of southern China. The Hakka people were originally from north central China; from A.D. 300 through 1900 they migrated southward and overseas in several separate waves triggered by invasions, wars, and oppressions. Overseas, their dialect is common in the South Pacific and Hawaii.

There are several other minor dialects scattered about China, the most important of which is Hsiang, located around Lake Tung-t’ing. In general, the others are spoken by very few people, and are likely to disappear in the face of dominance by other, more widely spoken, neighboring dialects.

How do the dialects differ? Primarily they differ in pronunciation. Differences in grammar are minor; vocabularies differ as a given word may differ according to the choice of ideograms.

In ancient days Chinese was monosyllabic, each word consisting of but one syllable. Throughout the years, as the language became more and more homophonous and as knowledge increased and the world became more technologically sophisticated, polysyllabic words were created by stringing together two or more of the one-syllable words to arrive at new words, the meanings of which were determined by the syllables contributed. Chinese, in all its dialects, is now a truly polysyllabic language. In the discussion which follows, word will stand for “monosyllable.”

Each Chinese word consists of an initial, which is always a consonant, and a final, which consists of one or two vowels which may finish off with a nasal consonant. In Mandarin there are two finals which consist of three vowels, iao and uai, which never take the nasal endings. Many words do not have initials and so commence with a vowel or one of the semivowels w or y. The nasal endings are m, n, or ng. In Ancient Chinese many words endings in nasals were cut short by opening the lips after starting an m or by lowering the tongue after starting an n or ng, thus giving a muted p, t, or k sound. Also, Ancient Chinese had both voiced and unvoiced, aspirated and unaspirated initials. To illustrate: using’ as an aspiration mark, English has an aspirated k’ in kiss and unaspirated k in sky. Both are unvoiced. When voiced, k becomes g. In English, voiced consonants are generally unaspirated; but you can imagine an aspirated g' when the starter of a race shouts Go. Thus you have k', k, g' and g. The same applies for p and b, t and d, ts and dz, and ch and j.

It is in these initial and final consonants that the greatest changes took place as the Chinese dialects developed. By the laws of linguistic sound change, words tend to become simpler, not more complex. In most dialects the voiced initials were changed to unvoiced ones. (All dialects have initials l, m, and n, which are always voiced—they cannot be sounded otherwise.) In some dialects, the p, t, and k endings were dropped; in others they were kept; in still others some were dropped, but not all. In most cases where a final p, t, or k was dropped, the word was stopped by closing the windpipe rather than by stopping the breath. This form of articulation, somewhat resembling a slight cough, is called a glottal stop. Other changes took place as well: vowel sounds and initial consonant sounds changed.

Cantonese changed the least of the dialects. It kept all of the final consonant endings, and its vowels remain closest to those of the Ancient Chinese; but it did change initial sounds from voiced to unvoiced. Only Wu and the minor Hsiang dialects have kept the voiced initials, although, under certain conditions in connected speech, Amoy has kept some. Along with Cantonese, the Hakka and Amoy-Swatow dialects have kept the full set of final consonants and each has approximately the same initial consonants. Yet each developed so independently from the other that they are today completely separate languages. Only Amoy-Swatow retains the glottal stop. Somewhere in its development some of its words did lose their final consonants. Wu dropped not only the p, t, and k, but also the final m, and uses the n only after the vowel a. Foochow kept only the ng and k, its m and n having turned into ng and the glottal stop having replaced the p and t.

Another way in which the dialects differ is in the number of initial consonants. All have thirteen in common, but their totals vary from fourteen for Foochow and Amoy-Swatow, to sixteen for Cantonese, eighteen for Hakka, and twenty-one for Mandarin. Wu, with all its voiced consonants, has thirty-six. The greater numbers of some are caused mainly by variations in the s, ch, and j sounds.

If simplification is the sign of greatest development, Mandarin has progressed the furthest of all. The only final consonants it has kept are the n and ng; it has kept none of the earlier voiced initials, and it does not use the glottal stop. It has four retroflex initials, ch', ch, sh, and j, the last representing the sound of retroflex r, and three sibilant initials, ts', ts, and s, which are often used without finals to form a great many words. In such cases these initials are voiced and, in the Wade romanization system, this voicing is indicated by spelling changes: the adding of ih to the retroflex initials and the changing of sibilants to tz’u, tzu, and szu. Neither the ih nor the u is pronounced. Mandarin has become so simplified that it is the most homophonous of all the dialects, having as many as 143 words pronounced yi in a common Taiwan dictionary, 123 as chi, 100 as chih, 99 as hsi, and 93 as yen. Words that were once pronounced lan, lat, lam, or lap are now all lan. Whereas Cantonese has la, lam, lap, lan, lat, lang, and lak, Mandarin has only la, lan, and lang.

As an example of how the sounds of words changed during the evolution of the dialects, here is how a man from Peking would read a sentence from the Analects of Confucius and how a man from Canton would read that same sentence:

Peking: tsi yue wo wei chien hao jen che wu pu yen che

Canton: tsi ut ngo mei kin hou yan cha wu pat yan cha

As can be seen, some words are identical, some are close, and some bear no likeness whatsoever.

Chinese is a tonal language. The tone, or musical quality of a word has as much to do with its meaning as does its pronounciation. In Ancient Chinese there were four tones for each of two vocal registers, an upper and a lower, for a total of eight tones. There was a high even and a low even tone, a high rising and a low rising, a high falling and a low falling, and two short even tones, called entering tones, for the shortened words ending in p, t, or k. As the dialects developed so did the tones, so that the tonal system of each dialect differs from that of the others. Often, the tonal systems vary among subdialects of the same dialect. While these tones kept the same names as they evolved, they often exchanged registers, became falling instead of rising, or even combined into one tone from two. In the case of Cantonese, an additional entering tone was added, giving it nine tones, which accounts for its sing-song quality. Mandarin dropped the system of two registers altogether and, with no p, t, or k endings, also dropped the entering tones; yet it ended up with four tones. Some of the Mandarin subdialects have five tones, using an entering tone to go with the glottal stop which some of them did keep. The tones of the other dialects vary between five and eight in number.

Although the Chinese dialects developed in a manner similar to that of the Romance languages, the writing system did not. The Chinese did not use a phonetic alphabet but a system of ideographs, or characters, each of which represented a meaning or an idea rather than a sound. Each character had a one-syllable sound that was assigned to it. At the time of the Chou dynasty, in many of those characters that consisted of more than one element, one of the elements indicated the sound; but, as the language changed, those phonetic elements became meaningless except to etymologists. As the Chinese dialects emerged, the sounds of words changed, just as they did in Europe — and in accordance with the same laws of linguistic change. Moreover, the sound of the character representing each word changed. To complicate matters still further, the sound of each word was different in each dialect, with the result that the sound of a given character in one dialect was different from the sound of that same character in another dialect. Each character still had the same meaning in each of the dialects, however. Consequently, the speakers of one dialect can understand the writing, but not the speakers, of all the other dialects.

Which brings us back to the question of whether the Chinese dialects are separate languages. Those who say that they are not give as one of their reasons that these dialects are all found in one country and that, combined, they form the national language of China, whereas the Romance languages, although technically dialects of their mother tongue, Latin, are found generally in one country only and form the national language of that country. Also, they say, the common writing system allows all Chinese to communicate and has been a unifying force in the country for millennia, whereas the different writings in the European countries have been, if anything, separating forces. Those who argue that there are many Chinese languages hold that language is speech and that writing is merely a means of recording the language through the use of symbols. Furthermore, they state, up until very recently, more than ninety-five percent of all Chinese were illiterate, hence, their writing system meant nothing to them and did not in any way constitute a part of their language. Thus, unless they speak the same dialect (or language), the vast majority of Chinese are unable to communicate with one another. It is unlikely that the answer that will satisfy both sides of the question will soon be found.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Roofs were collapsing everywhere. The cries of the dead and the dying filled the air.” [From a description of the destruction of Pompeii in Lost Cities and Vanished Civilizations by Robert Silverberg, page 13. Submitted by George Johnson, Wausau, Wisconsin.]

Speaking English

Julie Elizabeth Graham, Preston, Lancashire

“When a passenger of foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at him melodiously first, but if he still obstacles your passage then tootle him with vigour.”

The author of this warning to motorists in Tokyo was not in the calculations that led Professor (now Sir) Randolph Quirk of University College, London, to announce that English has become the world’s dominant language. The international use of English, according to the Professor, now surpasses all other languages. Around the world about 370 million people speak it. And the rest, it appears, try to. The international misuse of English is a growing industry.

Consider, for example, the sign in the hotel elevator in Belgrade: “To move the cabin, push button for wishing floor. If the cabin should enter more persons, each press button for wishing floor. Driving is then going alphabetically by natural order.” Or these instructions gracing a packet of convenience food from Italy: “Beasmear a backing pan, previously buttered with good tomato sauce and after, dispose the canelloni, lightly distanced between them in a only couch.” Clearly the constructor of that message was not about to let a little ignorance of English stand in the way of a good meal. One of the beauties of our mother tongue is that even with the most tenuous grasp, anyone can speak it in volumes if enthusiastic—a willingness to “tootle with vigour,” as it were.

This hearty announcement appears in a Yugoslavian hotel: “The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of chambermaid. Turn to her straightaway.” This polite request can be found in a Tokyo establishment: “Is forbitten to steal hotel towels please. If you are not person to do such thing is please not to read this notis.” The syntax may not be entirely faultless, but could any two messages convey more discretion and good will?

To be entirely fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of gentlemen’s apparel, is asking to be mangled. Consider for a moment the plight of the poor foreigner who must learn that in the English- and American-speaking world, one writes down a name but lights up a cigarette, that one can slow down or up but can only speed up, that the simple word set has 58 uses as a noun, 127 as verb, and 10 as practical adjective.

With such baffling complexities to contend with, it is little wonder that a traveler to Hong Kong can see a dentist’s sign announcing: “Teeth extracted by the latest methodists.” Or this exhortation outside a tailor’s shop in Rhodes: “Order now your summer’s suit. Because is big rush we execute customers in strict rotation.” Or the Bangkok dry cleaner who suggests: “Drop your troussers here for best results.”

The vagaries of English are such that even native speakers cannot always communicate effectively—as visitors to America often discover. Indeed, Robert Burchfield, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement, created a stir not long ago on both sides of the Atlantic when he announced his belief that American English and English English are drifting apart so rapidly that within 200 years the two people won’t be able to understand each other at all. That may be. But if Briton and American of 2185 baffle each other, it is possible they won’t confuse many others— not, at least, if the rest of the world continues expropriating English words and phrases at its present rate. Already Germans speak of die Teenagers and das Walkout and German politicians snarl No comment at German journalists; Italian ladies coat their faces with colcrem; Rumanians ride the trolleybus; and Spaniards, when they are chilly, put on sueters. And almost everywhere one can find Night Clubs, Hamburgers, and Television.

Partly, this is because so many innovations have come from the English-speaking world. But even greater reason for their popularity may be that English phrases are often gems of clarity, brevity, and snappiness. The French have viewed this creeping polyglottism with a touch of disdain and, in 1977, introduced legislation outlawing all foreign words in advertisements. Instantly exiled were le weekend, le hot dog, le brainstorming, and le refuelling stop, among many others.

Elsewhere, however, English continues to penetrate. The Yugoslavs, for example, picked up the word nylon but took it to mean a kind of shady variation, so that a nylon hotel is a ‘hotel of ill repute,’ a nylon beach ‘a place where nudists frolic.’ German took on licked as a description for a modern structure, streamlined and clean. Other nations have left the words largely intact but given the spelling a novel twist. The Ukrainian hercot might seem wholly foreign until one realizes hercot is what a Ukrainian goes to his barber for. Similarly, unless you heard them spoken, you might not instantly recognize ajscrym, muvingpikceris, and peda—Polish for ‘ice cream,’ Lithuanian for ‘moving pictures,’ and Czech for ‘pay-day.’

The Japanese in particular are masters of the art of seizing a foreign word and alternately beating it and aerating it until it sounds like a native product. Thus the sumato (‘smart’) Japanese seasons his conversation with upatodatu expressions like gurma foto (‘glamour photo’), hikurasu (‘high class’), and kyapitaru gein (‘capital gain’). The more difficult words are simply and brusquely truncated. So “modern girl” becomes moga and “commercial” merely a sort, snappy cm.

Fracturing the English language is certainly not a new phenomenon. More than a century ago Mark Twain passed on to the world this hypothetical conversation he found in a genuine Greek-English phrase book:

“How is that gentleman who you did speak be and by?”
“I did think him Englishman.”
“He is of the Saxony side.”
“He speak the French very well.”
“Though he is German, he speak so much well that among Italians, they believe him Italian; he speak the French as the Frenches themselves. The Spanishmen believe him Spanishing and Englishes, Englishman.”
“It is difficult to so much well enjoy several languages.”

With education standards around the world rising, it is perhaps inevitable that fractured English, like Cornish and Sanskrit, will one day become a dead language. But it is hoped that for at least a few years yet, the traveler abroad may still expect to tootle with vigor and have his underwear pleasurably flattened.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Infant seats pose nutritional problems.” [Headline from Tufts University Diet & Nutrition Letter, Vol. 1, No. 10. Submitted by Laurence T. May, Jr., Cambridge, Massachusetts.]

Paring Pairs No. 18

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

(a). Watch for the “Man of the Year” cover article.
(b). Twist fourth (third?) digit.
(c). Prompter affords relief.
(d). C, C, C, C, C, C, C.
(e). An augur on the town.
(f). There is something in a vacuum! (Don’t be too sheepish.)
(g). Foggy conditions aboard ship.
(h). Hillumination for Christmas tree in port?
(i). Comics have trick joints.
(j). (De)pressing golf club.
(k). Too much (in years).
(l). Head of Solidarnosc.
(m). “Dessert’s ready!”
(n). Embassy from the Rams?
(o). Source of hydrocephaly.
(p). Provides cash flow at the orchard.
(q). Religious bigshot.
(r). Enroll for prison penmanship class.
(s). What an aggregation!
(t). Knight’s garment worn over armor.
(u). Surd nocturnal warmonger.
(v). Siamese expired—just a crazy pattern.
(w). Record—the other way emphatically.
(x). Blister is a real drag.
(y). Ambisextrous ambidextrous.
(z). Lie in ambush to test the garland’s gravity.

(1). Age.
(2). Aid.
(3). Apple.
(4). Arbor.
(5). Aries.
(6). Bell.
(7). Call.
(8). Cannon.
(9). Church.
(10). Coat.
(11). Con.
(12). Double.
(13). Down.
(14). Dyed.
(15). Ewe.
(16). Finger.
(17). Fun.
(18). Hawk.
(19). Head.
(20). Hitter.
(21). Iron.
(22). Knees.
(23). Knight.
(24). Lei.
(25). Lights.
(26). Mission.
(27). Mousse.
(28). Over.
(29). Piece.
(30). Poll.
(31). Position.
(32). Right.
(33). Role.
(34). Sad.
(35). Script.
(37). Seer.
(38). Seven.
(39). Sight.
(40). Sir.
(41). Soufflé
(42). Sum.
(43). Switch.
(44). Tie.
(45). Time.
(46). Toe.
(47). Total.
(48). Turnover.
(49). Under.
(50). Water.
(51). Weather.
(52). Weigh.
(53). Wring.

Winners receive a credit of $25.00 or the equivalent in sterling towards the purchase of any title or titles offered in the VERBATIM Book Club Catalogue.

Two winners will be drawn from among the correct answers, one from those received in Aylesbury, the other from those received in Essex. Those living in the U.K., Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa should send their answers to VERBATIM, Box 199, Aylesbury, Bucks., HP20 1TQ, England; all others should send their answers to VERBATIM, Box 668, Essex, CT, 06426, U.S.A. You need send only the correct solution, not the answers to all of the clues. Please use a postcard.

Answers to Paring Pairs No. 17

(a). Crying nun who writes a sentimental human-interest column. (46,44) Sob Sister.
(b). What a union marriage broker effects. (48,22) Sweetheart Contract.
(c). No one talks on the radio about the deceased inheritor. (23,31) Dead Heir.
(d). Someone who makes pointed punches is okay. (5,53) Awl Wright.
(e). Prop for Keystone Kop? (2,47) Arch Support.
(f). Unnecessary if you roll up your sleeves. (10,3) Bear Arms.
(g). Confined at home for Sudanese repose. (29,40) Hausa Rest.
(h). Sudden recoil of the cat. (6,34) Back Lash.
(i). Does the mitey hunter return to his sordid hotel with this? (27,7) Flea Bag.
(j). Dance for church bigshots on the express train? (21,8) Cannon Ball.
(k). Good grief! Are they the houris in Hades? (32,11) Hell’s Belles.
(l). Two cheers for No. 2—most unusual! (38,4) Rah! Rah! Avis.
(m). Sad seraph is in a nightclub with a Navy flyboy? (12,1) Blue Angel.
(n). Ennuyé alongside car in the marathon? (43,13) Running Bored.
(o). Descend low enough to spank. (33,14) Hit Bottom.
(p). English dental work, now in Arizona. (35,15) London Bridge.
(q). An unjustified spanking. (17,39) Bum Rap.
(r). A horse that follows a scorched-earth policy. (30,18) Hay Burner.
(s). An incidental method of purchasing milk serum. (20,51) Buy Whey.
(t). He who irritates Gautama is strictly from Hungary. (16,37) Buddha Pest.
(u). It takes 13 tricks, a 4 (loaded) base hit, or… (28,45) Grand Slam.
(v). Italian with the knowledge and good scents. (41,36) Roman Nose.
(w). Moldy ass is overrepresented in Parliament. (42,19) Rotten Burro.
(x). What the owner needs to support his corporation. (49,9) Waist Basket.
(y). Where to keep the ribbed fabric? (25, 24) Faille Drawer.
(z). What to expect from an honest greens grocer. (26,50) Fair Weigh.

The correct answer is (52) Whipping. The solutions are given below. The winner of No. 17 is Howard M. Berger, Lake Worth, Florida. The European winner of No. 15 was Bill Sloman, Cambridge, England.

MALEDICTA: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression is a 320-page “cornucopia of forbidden verbal delights” and “the bible of billingsgate” (Associated Press). This annual collection of serious and humorous uncensored glossaries and essays on insults, slurs, curses, and epithets worldwide is the “clearinghouse for connoisseurs of profanity” (New York Times Book Review). Featured on BBC, on ABC, NBC, PBS television networks, in Time, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. Latest volume: $18.50 (USA) or $19.00 (foreign) postpaid. Full refund guarantee. Order from: Dr. Aman, Maledicta Press, 331 South Greenfield, Waukesha, WI 53186-6492, USA.

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Musicians upset horse cart (9)
6. Show members' excellent class (5)
9. Social one garbled text about nomad (9)
10. Play “Change for a Cent” (5)
11. A lieutenant gets into her skimpy blouse (6)
12. Weather protector can make L.A. rumble (8)
14. Rude element of young—all antisocial (9)
16. Kick out former gym class locker opener (5)
19. The Spanish and the German are senior (5)
20. Flailing wildly, has thing about rash (9)
21. Witches try English town (8)
23. “State has oak, for example.” Oak, for example? (6)
26. Put on center of cute sinker (5)
27. Sap mixed brownish-gray fur (9)
28. Experience altered state (5)
29. Blabbermouths rebuilt Emery Arms (9)

Down

1. Phone exchange…Ring! Use for party (4,5)
2. Trickily got a decal registered (9)
3. Run off during hotel opening (5)
4. Friend’s word has the fifth letter (4)
5. Height measurers have changes? About time! (10)
6. Glum lecher goes nuts over curve (9)
7. Llamas return, lacking a little (5)
8. Special edition has contents of complex transaction (5)
13. Raging current by a cathedral town (10)
15. Handled glasses: Gentle … Rot! Smashed! (9)
17. To some, middle age is from 7. to 11 (5,4)
18. Lack of weight can make one thing less (9)
21. West Pointer has drink in Connecticut (5)
22. Planet visible in part of Vega before sunrise (5)
24. Using few words, gives bum steer (5)
25. Made up cheese (4)

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. M-OCKE-d.
4. Starfish.
10. All-Star.
11. REN-eg-ES.
12. WI-ndowsi-LL.
13. Love.
15. In-STE-ad.
17. Incense.
19. ELE-ctor.
21. Group-ie.
23. Spas.
24. DISAPPO-in-T.
27. Ea-RRING.
28. Chic-ago.
29. Fo-rewo-rd.
30. REPELS.

Down

1. M-e-AN-wh-I-le.
2. Cal-ends.
3. EXTROV-ERTS.
5. Th-rill-ing.
6. RENT.
7. In-grow-n.
8. Haste.
9. ORES.
10. Acc-O-m-PLICE.
16. Der-ringer.
18. EX-ER-t-I-on.
20. EM-per-OR.
22. Pr-iv-ate.
23. She-l.f.
25. Arch.
26. Vi-ew.

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. “A trademark is a word, name, symbol, or device, or a combination of them, used by a manufacturer or merchant to identify his goods and distinguish them from others. Trademarks include brand names identifying goods (“Pepsi-Cola” for a soft drink), service marks identifying services (“The Four Seasons” for a restaurant service), certification marks identifying goods or services meeting certain qualifications (“UL” for appliances meeting the safety standards of Underwriters Laboratories, Inc.), and collective marks identifying goods, services, or members of a collective organization (“AFL-CIO” for union locals).”— The United States Trademark Association. Since the last three types of marks seldom become eponymous, this article will concentrate on trademarks identifying products, although the same legal principles generally apply to all these terms. ↩︎