VOL XII, No 2 [Autumn, 1985]

Nullspeak: A Question of Rotating Strawberry Madonnas

Steve Bonner, Rockville, Maryland

Some linguists concern themselves with the evolution of languages over time. Others prefer to study language as it is used at a fixed point. I suggest we pause for a moment to consider language as it will never be used. Ever. This involves the deliberate construction of phrases that could never, under any circumstances, be construed to have any meaning whatsoever. Consider the expression

rotating strawberry madonna

I submit that no human being has ever uttered this phrase. More important, I suspect that no one ever will. I am unable to construct a scenario in which a speaker would find it necessary to use this construct. Note that the important criterion here is that the phrase not only be absurd, but thoroughly unusable. I’m not sure what it would mean for a madonna to be “strawberry,” and I certainly see no advantage in having one that rotates. Here are a few more:

glorious b-flat noodles
carbonated burlap gentleman
forgetful elbow soda
mighty duckie snacks
concealed explorer fondue
feathery professor moments
angry tuba gravy.

The more memorable expressions of this form have some properties in common. For example, they must conjure up imagery. They must deal with familiar, everyday objects in order for any absurdity to peek through. Thus, even though a glorious b-flat cyclotron may never be devised, the expression doesn’t warm the heart quite like the noodles, simply because our daily experience with cyclotrons may not, a priori, preclude the possibility of their being either glorious or tuned in the key of b-flat.

But why do we insist that our expressions be absurd? Aside from the sheer frivolity of it all, we should note that every memorable passage that we have ever read has used a (perhaps slightly) absurd—or at least creative—use of images. P.G. Wodehouse writes:

Bashford Braddock removed his opera hat, squashed it flat, popped it out again and replaced it on his head. He seemed disappointed that he could not play a tune on it.

This nervous tic of Bashford’s leaves us with a whimsical mental superposition of a man’s garment and an orchestral instrument. Braddock may be persuaded to provide us with a

polyphonic garment rendition

The effective use of metaphor in literature requires that the quantities under consideration be normally separate entities. It does us no good to liken two things which are understood to be equivalent from the outset. Indeed, the entire creative process itself is nothing more than a deliberate synthesis of opposing, or even contradictory notions.

Having rationalized as to why we engage in such nonsense, we may now proceed with reckless abandon:

naughty symphonic potatoes
accelerating tweed mailman

I suppose, as in the case of the garment rendition, we could try to produce a situation in which we would be compelled to discuss the accelerating tweed mailman. But to engage in such an endeavor would be to miss the point. The mental picture we get exists independently of the specific situation, and any attempt at producing a world in which the mailman might live would only serve to distract.

If we can devise useless phrases, why not useless words as well? For example, how about the word geoslavic? In morphology, it seems not at all unreasonable. But I challenge the reader to place it in context—any context. Here are a few others:

agrinasal
micromatrimony
hexayummy
rotunditron

An object might be describable as “yummy,” but the addition of the prefix hexa- just doesn’t seem to add anything. (This is not, of course, to say that Madison Avenue won’t use it anyway.)

One might describe “words” such as geoslavic as “semantic fragments.” After all, we are adjoining chunks of words—roots, prefixes, and suffixes—to obtain new words that convey rather curious, hybrid notions of (perhaps) dubious usefulness. One might draw an analogy between this and genetic engineering. Components of words selected at random and spliced together may, if done correctly, produce a new, living thing, which takes on a personality all its own. Thus, even though I’ve never seen a rotunditron, I have already begun to form a mental picture of one.

How does this process differ from that used in Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”? When Carroll informs us that it was brillig, and that the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe, we (somehow) have an idea of what he is talking about. Such is the power of suggestion. This is, of course, precisely why “Jabberwocky” has always been so very entertaining. But unlike our semantic fragments, Carroll is playing with phonology, not semantics. Slithy sounds as though it ought to mean something. Our fragments operate on semantic units. Agri- and nasal are both firmly implanted in the Indo-European lexicon, and are both used in a variety of useful ways (and now in a way that is not at all useful).

I can’t help but wonder whether a technical journal somewhere has already coined the word geoslavic, perhaps in reference to Polish lignite deposits, or some such thing. I sincerely hope not.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Tongue Tied by Lost for Words out of Verbatim.” [A horse with his lineage, listed on a racing program at Belmont Race Track, Elmont, New York. Submitted by L. Phillips, New York City.]

Landmarks in Arabic

N. C. Nahmoud, Jerusalem

The etymological distance between Arabic and English needs no comment, of course, and it was this total unrelatedness to any of the European languages I knew that made my initial stages in Arabic somewhat confusing. I often felt as though I were alone, wandering through a desert. Once in a while, however, I would come across an occasional word which sounded familiar, and I copied it in the back of my grammar book with a joyful feeling of “Whee! A landmark!” Of course, obvious words such as those beginning with al-, and others like cotton, admiral, and saffron were no surprise. Cotton (cotón) was an old friend from Spanish, algodón; saffron’s ancestor was safrún ‘yellow.’ Admiral, I was delighted to find, comes from the poetic phrase ámir albáhr ‘prince of the sea.’

One of my first landmark words was qitt (masculine). The feminine of qitt is qítteh, the literary word for—you guessed it—‘cat.’ There also exists, in literary Arabic, hirr (masc.), hírreh (fem.), an onomatopoetic alternative. These words, however, are not understood by most of the people one would meet in the souq ‘marketplace,’ who speak colloquial Arabic. The local word for cat is bíssi, (from pussy), which presumably arrived in our city with the British Mandate. The cats of East Jerusalem, however, respond nicely to all three of these words. (As an inveterate cat lover, my research in the subject has been rather extensive.)

Other words were pure serendipity, one of which was dáraba ‘to strike.’ The first thing that flashed through my mind was drub, as in “He received a good drubbing.” Sure enough, when I looked it up in my English dictionary, there it was: “Arabic: dáraba.” Under tumbrel, however, I found only “a farmer’s cart, especially a boxlike cart for carrying and dumping dung: Old French.” I was inspired to look this one up because of a word I came across in a third-year children’s story. It was túnbur, which in the story referred to a garbage collector’s cart.

The category consisting of words like qitt and túnbur left me wondering if the relationship to similar words in Indo-European languages might not be a very ancient one. The words for earth, for example. One of these is \?\ard; the other is túrbeh, which gave me an image of turbid, muddy water. Sáut is ‘voice which, when used in a certain manner, produces a shout.’ By the same token, \?\áwwal translates to ‘howl.’ Shout is marked “Old Norwegian: skūta” in the dictionary, and howl, “Middle English: houlen.” Silk, too, is given an Old English origin seolc. Yet the identical word in Arabic means ‘thread.’ Nod seems to me to be an archetypical Middle English word—yet here is nad (pronounced nod) in the Arabic lexicon in front of me, with the meaning ‘swing, oscillation.’ The Hebrew infinitive for ‘swing’ is lenadnéd.

There is no dearth of “eureka!” words in Latin and its derivatives, either. Súmu w, meaning ‘height, elevation,’ comes too close to summum for comfort. Agile, my English dictionary tells me, is a Latin-origin word meaning ‘able to move quickly and easily.’ Its Arabic counterpart is ajaleh ‘speed.’

A French policeman carries a matraque ‘nightstick’; the Arabic táraqa means ‘to hammer, knock,’ and the Spanish for ‘bang-bang, bonk-bonk,’ etc., is trac-trac. Before leaving the subject, there is the French casser ‘to break’; in Arabic ‘to break’ is kásara.

There is one word which makes me think of the possibility that, once in a while, there was an exchange of some sort. The word is \?\arsh ‘throne.’ It may be stretching it a bit, but when I saw this word I stopped for a moment, and the following scene took place in my imagination. I pictured a delegation from an exotic land, standing before the king of England, once upon a time, long ago. The visitors marveled at the ornate throne, for their own king sat upon velvet cushions on an oriental rug. One of the men whispered to a courtier, “What is His Majesty sitting on?” and the answer he received might have caused an Old English word to enter the Arabic language.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Principles of Language and Mind

T.P. Waldron, (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), xxiv + 232pp.

As anyone who has concerned himself with language is aware, attempts have been made over the centuries to develop a cohesive, coherent theory of what language is and how it works. The problem has occupied some of the greatest minds in the history of human culture. The theories have ranged from the poetic to the structural to the mechanistic. Yet each of these theories contained the seeds of its own destruction: Bloomfieldian linguistic theory disallowed any consideration of meaning—the very core of language—on the grounds that meaning was properly part of a discipline (or of disciplines) other than linguistics; Friesian theory resulted in an infinity of grammars, each developed to describe the context under investigation at the moment; and Chomskyan theory presupposed an innate propensity for language that is supported neither by physiology nor by any other documented science.

The foregoing descriptions are, obviously, greatly simplified. Yet, each points out a fundamental concern, that regardless of how intensely these theories have been supported by their adherents, many linguists have expressed their dissatisfaction with some of their basic tenets for various reasons, among them the cardinal objection based on the unavoidable fact that instinctively they feel that the language simply doesn’t work in the ways the theories describe. Some of the theories have been advanced out of dissatisfaction with the traditional eight parts of speech because they are felt to be improperly descriptive of how language works. The parts-of-speech system is not, after all, very “neat”: a noun, defined as the “name of a person, place, or thing,” is identified by its semantic content; whereas an adjective, defined as “a word or phrase that modifies a noun,” is identified by its function.

This lack of “neatness” has proved frustrating to many linguists. But if one can accept that grammar is a descriptive system imposed on a natural phenomenon (language) and that we have ample evidence that language is not inherently “neat” to begin with, then parts-of-speech grammar is no less valid than any other and, at least, has the virtue of having been around long enough to enable a large percentage of the population to become familiar with it.

And there is no justification for assuming that language is “neat”: our days are filled with ambiguities and other difficulties of communication that we constantly seek to clarify. There are far more interplays of function than any one theory of language can accommodate.

This is not to suggest that we should stop trying to develop a “scientific” theory of language, only that such theories can be demonstrated to have failed to provide answers to many aspects and manifestations of language as it is actually used.

Moreover, one cannot ignore the fact that for certain applications, parts of some of the theories have proved useful. But, for the most part, such applications have been useful mainly in the computer analysis and synthesis of language and in machine translation. Although these are useful exercises, they must be viewed as artificial, and they have little or nothing to do with the way human beings use language. Nor, in fact, have they revealed very much useful information about how language works. Above all, except for a few (artificial) experiments, they do not concern themselves with language as art. In short, the processing of language by computer, though undoubtedly useful, must not be confused with the analysis or creation of natural language; especially, it cannot be confused with an application of language in the humanities, any more than a picture created by a computer program should be confused with one created by a human being. In either event, one might accomplish a superficial approximation or imitation, but that is neither natural nor art by definition. Computer experts and theorists who fail to realize this essential fact are only deluding themselves by confusing language creativity (not to say aesthetics) with a utilitarian, poverty-stricken imitation of it. What is disturbing is not the work that computer specialists are doing, for that may, indeed, be utilitarian, but their utter failure to understand that all they can ever hope to achieve (Hal notwithstanding) is a poor simulation.

In the context of the preceding, it is refreshing to read Principles of Language and Mind, for its author, a philosophically minded philologist at Cambridge University, has developed what he calls an “evolutionary theory of language,” founded on an Aristotelian base (with thanks also to Plato) and in harmony with the Darwinian theory. In his extension and application of evolutionary theory, Waldron provides a step-by-step analysis and synthesis of the progression from speech and thinking to the more abstract forms of theoretical discourse and philosophical understanding, filling the gaps in the humanities and natural science, and unifying into logical entity problems formerly treated separately as the diverse provinces of linguistics, psychology, logic, and epistemology. Waldron writes:

Evolution theory concerns not only the origin of species but also their survival and extinction. Its purpose is the systematic explanation of the findings of many scientific disciplines, and of much else which we know about life and nature. All this cannot be accounted for in terms of genetics and blind ‘natural selection’ alone. There is also conscious human selection: the result of rational choice, but very often also, of irrational thought and action. Ours is the only species which in large measure controls its own destiny. Since all conceptual thought (rational and irrational alike) is language-dependent, an understanding of the origin, nature, development, uses and misuses of language, and of its central place in human psychology, is a prerequisite for determining what course human evolution will take in the future. [p. 209]

Waldron’s concern is knowledge and its nature. To encounter his succinct treatment of the subject is to appreciate the essentially humanistic character of his approach:

To know is to be able: to walk, swim, speak, count, remember, reason, and so on. Knowledge may be instinctual; the result of behavioural feedback; or of sign interpretation. These forms of knowledge are common to animal life at large. But knowledge may also be conscious, conceptual, theoretical, rational. Such forms of knowledge are distinctively human, and are dependent on the symbolic functions of language. [p. 211]

As described above, theories of language have suffered from their failure to bridge the gap between the humanities and natural science. Indeed, it is Waldron’s contention that heretofore, even among evolutionists, “speculation on language, mind, and human culture in general has tended to be reductionist in character, thus leaving evolution theory defective in the very area that concerns us most.” [p. x]. In developing his argument, the author clarifies universal principles of semantics and of a “theory of knowledge in general and of human understanding and reason in particular.” [p. 209]. He examines current misconceptions of the nature of language and shows how these exemplify misconceptions within “the three philosophical traditions—idealism, naturalism, scepticism—which have now engaged in repetitious and sterile debate for well over two thousand years.”

The author disposes of current theories based on behaviorism, structuralism, and sociobiology:

…Academic orthodoxy… currently offers three bogus options which exemplify…confusion and one-sidedness: a mindless behaviourism which would reduce all human thought and action to a matter of stimuli and reflex behaviour; a vacuous structuralism which sees language as an ethereal, quasi-mathematical system of signs, curiously detached from external reality and human experience; and the pseudobiological doctrine dubbed “sociobiology” which—by-passing millennia of evolution, as well as the obvious perceptual and behavioural origins of language and intelligence—offers implausible and quite groundless ‘explanations’ of all aspects of human culture in terms of genetic determinism and selection pressures. [p. 188]

In ten main chapters, each a masterful essay, supplemented by a beautifully turned glossary in which is set forth a distillate of the concept of the book as reduced to its terminological essentials, Waldron introduces, develops, and expounds on his evolutionary theory of language. Disobeying the 19th-century “rule” laid down at Le Cercle de Linguistique de Paris (forbidding the presentation of any paper dealing with the origin of language), Waldron presents a theory, that is at once logical, biological, and psychological, showing how language naturally emerges from its prelinguistic antecedents (perceptual and behavioral) to become the key factor in the development of a distinctively human kind of intelligence and thought. As in the case of many of Waldron’s arguments, it is not only persuasively and simply stated, but it fits neatly into what many people informally believe to be true about how language works.

Principles of Language and Mind is a short book, but it is not quickly read. In some ways, in his pithiness of presentation, the author does his theory a disservice, for, instead of supplying illustrative examples at the points where they would help to support an argument, he often relies on the reader to dredge them up from his own store of knowledge. For example, the contention that “alphabetic perfection” was approached for the first time in archaic Greek [p. 111] is a notion that could use some bolstering or, at least, some supportive reference. Likewise, statements like the following could use clarification:

Failure to distinguish a name from a noun is failure to distinguish a mere sign from a categorial symbol. [p. 116]

There is no argument with the point, only that—if only for pedagogical reasons—it would be helpful to have a somewhat more expansive treatment than that accorded by the sentences that follow:

A name is no more than a verbal sign associated with some individual. The noun, by contrast, is the categorial symbol par excellence.

In the Appendix, further clarification is offered under the entry Name and noun [p. 212]. True, when thus isolated, the understanding is clear; but set within a paragraph (which goes on to discuss how classes of discrete individuals were the starting point for further Aristotelian logical and epistemological analysis), such statements lose their impact and, for those who are not philosophers, have their meaning diminished or diluted. And there are other places in the book where a more thorough exposition, with examples, would have been helpful. However, that chore will remain for those who prepare teaching texts from this seminal work.

There are many bright passages in this book, reflecting not only the author’s felicitous use of language but the uncompromising clarity of his thinking. He warns against the acceptance of a mathematical model of language and calls attention to the fact that language preceded mathematics (which would be impossible without language), hence depends on it entirely for its “logicality.” In other words, the use of mathematics to analyze and describe language is a hysteron proteron. However, Waldron has respect for mathematics as a “unique deductive system”:

…Mathematics, being a highly specialized form of theoretical discourse, necessarily observes [those principles] if it is to be valid. This does not mean, however, that mathematics is logic or that logic is mathematics. It means simply that mathematics is a rational pursuit. Failure to grasp these simple facts has helped to create the whole mystique of ‘mathematical logic’, which has hung like a pall over modern philosophy for the best part of a century, and has given a new lease on life to a seventeenth-century fad: the craving for a universal fool-proof language which would do our thinking for us. It is not language… which needs to be rendered proof against folly, but human beings. No language has yet been known to go mad. [p. 174]

Notwithstanding, he emphasizes that regarding language as a “deductive system” is a grave error:

…[S]trenuous efforts have been made and are being made to convert ordinary language into algebra. …It now bars progress not in mathematics and natural science—whose practitioners treat it with the neglect it deserves—but in the humanities, where superstition is rife, and where any doctrine sufficiently opaque to be incomprehensible is treated with respect. [p. 175]

Many theorists have grappled with the question of the interconnections between language and thought. Some believe that conceptual thought, or theoretical understanding can exist independently of language, calling to evidence such common experiences as eidetic imagery, spatial relations, and other matters that the brain naturally occupies itself with and that are not readily verbalized. Waldron’s view is that symbols, which are, at bottom, what we learn the use of when we learn language, “perform many psychological functions—designatory, categorial, differential, mnemonic, heuristic—which naturally fuse to form what we vaguely call thought.” This is, essentially, an associationist view, but without the stigma that associationism attracted among behavioral psychologists. The author’s development of these ideas is adroitly set forth in a chapter, Speech and Thought, but a thorough presentation of his arguments cannot be promulgated in a review. In Waldron’s words,

…[L]anguage is the basis of human reason and hence the basis, as well as the vehicle, of all theory whatever: but pre-eminently of all theory of knowledge, of human understanding, of mind. [The theory of language] is no ordinary theory. It concerns what human life is about. But since human reason also begets unreason—and worse, perverted rationality— this unique theory concerns also the greatest question of our age: whether civilized life is to continue to exist at all. [p. 201]

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Malpractice Made Easy.” [Title of a book advertised in Legal Aspects of Medical Practice, November 1981. Submitted by Dr. V. P. Collins, Houston.]

Telling Like It Isn’t: The Queen’s English

Journalists (or, as Philip Howard dubs them, “journos”) seem to be suffering from an ever-increasing paranoia, worrying whether anyone reads what they write. Generally, the news is serious business; but where the opportunity arises, the headline writer, whether he be the reporter himself or an aspiring tyro at the copy desk, resorts to all sorts of devices to catch the reader’s attention. Often, he creates headlines that reflect his paranomastic tendencies, perhaps the result of a misspent education. Many of these are corny—very corny—and almost all do not stand alone as puns: they become so only in the context of the articles they head.

The affliction is not confined to American newspapers. Here are some examples from The Times, the first four from the issue of 10 October 1984, the fifth from that of 29 October, and the last from that of 1 November:

End of the road—Monaco Grand Prix road race is discontinued. [p. 1]

Nato jets keep Greeks buzzing—Greek planes turn back Turkish and US jets from Greek airspace in Nato maneuvers. [p. 5]

Snakes alive!—Children are forced to flee school invaded by 80 snakes. [p. 7]

Changing her tune—Chinese opera singer who defected to Taiwan denounces communism. [p. 8]

Shell shock—French farmers destroy British eggs in price protest. [p. 6]

Labour of love—Rehabilitation of statue of Eros for Piccadilly Circus [p. 3]

England, of course, does not always live up to the romantic image of her that is cherished in the bosoms of Anglophile Americans. Chromotrichial punk-rockers with spiked hair-dos scarcely turn Londoners' heads any longer— not even the other way; the Englishman’s fascination for westerns may even have created a British Cult of the Urbane Cowboy. Judging from some of the mischief being done the language in what some may regard as a bastion of grammatical conservatism (at least!), The Times does have its howlers:

Neither he nor his brother want the police to investigate the assault because they want to deal with it in their own way. [30 October 1984, p. 35]

The improved offer to help came after Mr Giorgis’s complaint, accepted by ministers, that the idea of sending two Hercules for a month was too short for them to have any impact. [30 October 1984, p. 1]

But nobody was more surprised than him… [1 November 1984, p. 14: ‘Moreover … Miles Kington’]

Boyle had hoped to take over this year but has been delayed because of pressure on his centre in Edinburgh, which has dealt with 700 addicts and deprived youngsters since it opened in August. [31 October 1984, p. 12: ‘The Times Diary’]

…and, on the subject of multiple negatives:

The court upheld a prosecution appeal against the decision of a London stipendiary magistrate to dismiss a charge of failing to provide a breath specimen brought against Miss P—H—, aged 20. [10 October 1984, p. 3]

Where else in the world could one find the Impact School of Motoring (Harrow), Headstone Hire (seen on a van on the M-40 motorway), Graham Spittle, Solicitor (Berkhamsted), and Silicon Glen (between Ayr and Dundee)?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Laurence Urdang

English English

Philip Howard

I have a friend called Henry Button: a logophile and a good egg. He is a retired civil servant, and a contender for the title of the writer of most letters published by The Times of London on all subjects under the sun and over the moon. For years we have been hunting the origins of the British catchphrase, He couldn’t run a whelk stall, which is related to the American saying, A hell of a way to run a railroad.

We have sought it with thimbles, we’ve sought it with care. We have discovered enlarged variants, as, He could not run a whelk stall on a Bank Holiday on Southend Pier. We have found cognate or related expressions: He could not run a village toffee shop; She could not organize a piss-up in a brewery. At present the earliest use of the whelk-stall insult comes from John Burns, the leader of the London dockers, and a founding father of British socialism, in 1894. He was referring to the vanished Social-Democratic Federation: “From whom am I to take my marching orders—from men who fancy they are Admirable Crichtons, Pitts, and Bolingbrokes, but who have not got sufficient brains and ability to run a whelk stall?” There the matter rests at present. Maybe we shall find an earlier instance.

But until that glad day comes, Henry has started us on another wild word chase. Let us call it Quinquagrams, for want of a better word.

A Quinquagram is a word of five letters, the components of which can be so arranged as to give five words, each beginning with a different letter. For example, TIMES (God Bless her and all who hack in her), EMITS, ITEMS, MITES, SMITE. Another Quinquagram is STONE, which makes TONES, NOTES, ONSET, and ETONS. Etons is not in the big Oxford English Dictionary, but it is recorded in both Webster and the Shorter Oxford Dictionary as a name for the Eton suits, or monkey-jackets, or bum-freezers worn by younger boys at Eton College.

With a little bit of fudging, you can make a Quinquagram out of BORES: it gives ROBES, SOBER, EBORS, and ORBES. Milton helps, by spelling orb as orbe on occasion. The EBORS is a perfectly acceptable English way of referring either to the Archbishop of York and his wife, or as a collective noun to all the Archbishops of York, past and present.

The Guinness Book of Records, which takes an interest in such dotty superlatives, says that there are 28 anagrams of the word ASTER. The trouble is that they are by no means all English. A number of them are taken from other languages, and they include a number of geographical names. And the biggest trouble is finding one of them beginning with E to make a true Quinquagram. There are two: the auxiliary verb ESTAR in Spanish, and EARST, described by Chambers as an obsolete form of erst.

Then there is REAPS, which gives APERS, SPARE, PEARS, and EARPS. What the hell are earps? you may ask. The verb to earp means to conk someone on the head with a long-barreled Colt, in the manner of Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp, the famous gun-fighter at the O.K. Corral, who was always doing it. I thought that you would have known that.

And then we should consider EDITS, which gives us TIDES, DIETS, SITED, and ID EST. If P.S. can become postscript, i.e. might one day become idest, e.g.,: “The only idest in this letter so far is in the first paragraph.”

The letter E is a stumbling block with APTER: PRATE, RETAP, and TAPER. E also lets us down with CEDAR: RACED, ACRED, and DACRE or DACER or DECAR. To decar is to ‘get out of a car,’ in analogy with to debus and deplane. Yorkshire could be called a many-acred county. A dacer might be a man who catches dace, in the way that a mother can be a man who catches moths. There ought to be a verb to dacre from Lord Dacre of Glanton, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, meaning something like ‘to authenticate ropy diaries purporting to be by Hitler.’

Now the hunt is on for a Hexagram. TIMERS gives MITERS, SMITER, and REMITS. Once again the initial E is the problem. PRIEST gives RIPEST, STRIPES, ESPRIT, and TRIPES. Ben Jonson in Cynthia’s Revels used the nonce-word irpe: “From Spanish shrugs, French faces, smirks, irpes, and all affected humours, Good Mercury defend us.” The authorities guess that an irpe is a fantastic grimace or contortion of the body.

If we turned this useful noun into a verb, it would give us thou irpest, and Bingo, we should have our first Hexagram. Meanwhile, the hunt goes on. We pursue it with forks and hope. As you can see, it is not all cakes and ale in the word factory, but serious, gritty research.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Traveler’s Phrase Book

Mario Constantino, et al., (Barron’s Educational Series, 1985), vi + 505pp.

This is a nifty little paperback, a chunky 3½'' × 6'', packed with useful phrases that have been categorized into a number of different situations in which the traveler is likely to find himself: The Basics for Getting By, When You Arrive, Money Matters, At the Hotel, Getting Around Town, Shopping, Medical Care, etc. It is not a dictionary, nor does it have an index; but that makes no difference: it is still useful, and, as such books go, quite good.

What struck me about it was a certain lack of uniformity among the sections (French, German, Italian, Spanish). For instance, in all the sections except the German, under Problems, Problems, Problems, one finds phrases like:

Hurry up!
Look!
Watch out! Be Careful!
Listen!
Wait!
I have lost…
Stop bothering me!
Go away!
Help, police!
I’m going to call a cop!

In all the sections one finds

I want to go to the American consulate
to the police station
Can you help me, please?
Does anyone here speak English?
He has stolen my car
passport
purse
suitcase
wallet
watch

but only in German can one add ticket money.

In Germany, you can say “I’m lost (on foot)” or “I’m lost (driving),” but not in France, Italy, or Spain. Only in Spanish and Italian can you shout Fire!, but otherwise the “problems” are pretty much the same.

At the Dentist, you can say “I have a rotten tooth that’s giving me a lot of pain” only in France, and “I can’t chew” only in France and Germany. Is there something sinister in the suggestion that in France, Italy, and Spain you can ask the dentist “When should I come back?”—but not in Germany? (Shades of Marathon Man!)

We discover, under Medical Care, that headaches are possible in France, Italy, and Spain, but apparently not in Germany, though there one can tell the doctor that he is suffering from a venereal disease.

If you are a teacher, doctor, lawyer, businessperson, or student, you are identifiable in all the countries; but if you are a mechanic, a salesperson, or a secretary, you may admit to it only in Germany.

When dining out, it would appear that the Germans either disapprove of toothpicks or of asking for them; on the other hand, in Germany you may ask where the toilets are, and you may have to ask the waiter for a chair, from which one might assume that they are provided in the other countries.

Under Hotel Service, in France, Italy, and Spain you can (must?) ask room service to provide

a towel
soap
hangers
ice cubes
an ash tray
toilet paper
a reading lamp
an electric adapter

but in Germany you must (can?) also request

matches
envelopes and writing paper
postcards
an extra bed
a wastebasket

When Shopping for Souvenirs, only in the German section does one learn how to say, “I don’t want trouble at customs.”

At Nightclubs, only the French tell one how to say, “May I have this dance?,” “May I take you home?,” and how to accept.

In Passport and Customs, only in Spain does it seem necessary to know how to say, “What’s the problem?” And under Baggage and Porters, you can learn how to tell someone a suitcase is missing except in France, where they never lose your luggage. In Exchanging Money, only in Germany can you mention that you think a mistake was made; and only in Italy can you ask if they accept credit cards—presumably you don’t have to ask elsewhere.

Finally, one might construe from the absence of any information under Saying Good-Bye, that the Germans never say it (or, at least, don’t like to), for, in addition to the usual platitudes common to French, Italian, and Spanish speakers, the last two would appear to be in the habit of saying “Thanks for the (Sp. wonderful) evening,” “I must go home now,” and “You must come to visit us.” What seem to be missing from all are Adieu, Au revoir or À bientôt; Auf Wiedersehen; Arrivederci (or Ciao, baby!); and Adiós and Hasta luego—in other words, just plain Goodbye! I’m only joking—those are included in a list of Most Frequently Used Expressions at the beginning of each section.

The book comes in a clear plastic jacket—presumably gravy-proof for use in restaurants—and has some country maps, though they show only major cities. A serviceable and friendly little package, The Traveler’s Phrase Book might have done better to have been more sturdily bound—I have a feeling that the (so-called) perfect binding is not secure enough to prevent the loosening of pages from continual use. If you are on an “If-it’s-Tuesday-this-must-be-Belgium” kind of tour, you’ll enjoy having this as a companion.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Complete Word Game Dictionary

Tom Pulliam and Gorton Carruth, (Facts on File Publications, 1984), xvi + 648pp.

People who like to work with words usually like to play with words. It was probably through playing word games that many writers, editors, English teachers, puzzle constructors and book reviewers first appreciated words as words.

Most of these games were portable and public domain: Ghost, Superghost, Categories, and Hangman required at most pencil and paper. A few dollars or a birthday may have gotten us board or dice games: Scrabble®, Perquackey®, Probe®, Boggle® or Anagrams. More recently—and for more money— we may have bought computer word games.

Playing, we learned things other than spelling and vocabulary: Bluffing, arguing, applying rules, and bending them. We may have first tasted the thrill of victory in debate after aggressively challenging a questionable word in such a game— or resisting an aggressive challenger’s attack. Eventually, players found they needed an objective authority to settle disputes. A dictionary was agreed upon, and if the word was an entry— voilá! If not, Ah hah! Simple enough.

But apparently not simple enough for Tom Pulliam and Gorton Carruth, who have compiled The Complete Word Game Dictionary to “[settle] challenges almost instantly.” Were it not for their credentials (Pulliam is a frequent Word Ways contributer and Carruth a former Funk and Wagnalls editor in chief), one might suspect them of having written a cynical ripoff, a non-book. The need it fills seems fabricated, the ten-page preface perfunctory and padded. The remaining 645 pages are two lists. One gives 180,000 words in root and variant forms. Example: PANIDROSIS PANIER PANIFICATION PANIME PANIMMUNITY PANINI… you get the idea. The second list arranges “45,000 High-Scoring Words”—containing J, Q, X and Z—for Scrabble players' use.

TCWGD’s preface states that the book’s “greatest value will be for the Scrabble player, whether neophyte or tournament caliber.” Don’t believe it. Serious Scrabblers recognize only one reference work: The Official Scrabble® Players Dictionary (Pocket Books, $4.95). Tote TCWGD to a tournament and you’ll get some very strange looks. OSPD (as it’s called) is a real dictionary, providing parts of speech and definitions, while TCWGD gives neither. This is not a quibble; players need this information to tell which inflections are possible. For starters, OSPD lists “AA: n, pl. -s rough, cindery lava.” TCWGD lists “AA,” leaving the user to guess whether it can take -s, -ed, -ly, or -ing. Some inflected words are listed, but irregularly. Too often the two books do not agree. Among many examples, TCWGD proposes DHA, BRABANT, and SLIRT, all verboten at Scrabble tournaments, while ignoring the usable ZAIRE, CARICES, and FOWLPOX.

Finally, Pulliam and Carruth have included too many longer—hence rarely usable—words. Boggle, Perquackey, Scrabble, and Probe players would be ill-advised to study the tens of thousands of 9-or-more-letter words: when would they use them?

The Complete Word Game Dictionary will help neither beginning nor advanced word game players. As such players will recognize this immediately on seeing the book, it remains necessary only to warn their gift-giving friends and relatives.

Barry Tunick

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Crime Dictionary

Ralph De Sola, (Facts on File, 1982), xiii + 218pp.

Ralph De Sola, a prolific compiler of reference books, has defined some 10,000 terms dealing with the legal and illegal sides of crime in the Crime Dictionary. What is especially interesting about the book is that it provides not only definitions of the entries but other kinds of information that must be considered encyclopedic. For example, Saturday-night special is defined as a “cheap handgun of the type produced in large quantities by RG Industries of Miami, Fla.” Go to RG and find: Rohm Gesellschaft (German—Rohm Company) initialized corporate name of the Rohm Tool subsidiary engaged in the assembly and manufacture of handguns at its Miami, Fla. plant on Northwest 20th Street,” which tells it all—including where to go to do your picketing and demonstrating or, if you’re a crook, where to pick up your hardware.

The Crime Dictionary is not a how-to book, and I’d rather not know how De Sola came by much of the information it contains. On the one hand, it goes back to the period of the Wild West and, on the other, is so up-to-date that it (almost) gives addresses where drugs can be purchased today. Mata Hari and Judge Roy Bean are in, but not Doc Holliday; a special foreign section has lista negra ‘blacklist’ (misspelt “negro” on the cover), but not vache, French for ‘cop.’ One can get a real education here:

lobato: (Mexican Spanish—wolf cub) nickname given to a Mexican child or juvenile who comes north across the U.S. border to engage in automobile theft, mugging, robbery, prostitution or shoplifting.

Pubang buaya: (Indonesian—crocodile hole) Djakarta water hole infested with crocodiles and used as a place to dispose of people at odds with the current administration, as during the abortive communist coup of 1965.

It would be unfair to continue; besides, with the book in hand, the reader can find his own gems. Many of the entries read like fiction or sound like TV crime drama, which is plentiful these days (and nights). It is disturbing to think of these entries as truly reflecting events continually taking place in the real world, and I welcome the security of the ivory tower from which I can experience such goings-on vicariously: I had, in my sheltered life, always thought of Big Boy as being a variety of tomato; according to De Sola, a big boy tomato would be a woman who uses heroin. Where have all the heroines gone?

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The mountain is named for the Rev. Starr King, who was an invertebrate climber.” [From The Boston Globe, 25 June 1984. Submitted by B. Goldstein, New Center, Massachusetts.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: British/American Language Dictionary

Norman Moss, (Passport Books (National Textbook Company), 1984), xvii + 174pp.

In a serious attempt to avoid adopting too supercilious an attitude towards this book—after all, it must be measured against English English, by Norman W. Schur, the most comprehensive work in the field and a VERBATIM Book—I acknowledge a modicum of admiration for its generally simple approach to a subject that can become relatively complicated. To be sure, the complications are not strictly lexical or even lexicographical: they stem chiefly from the differences between the kind of lexical alternation of the bonnet/hood, roundabout/traffic circle, dustman/ garbage collector type and the type that is sociolinguistic and meaningless without some sort of acculturative comment, like tea, which occurs in both varieties of English but means quite different things in each, the Ashes, which doesn’t occur at all in American English, and back bencher, Bath bun, and pound (monetary), which have no equivalent in American English and, if encountered by an American, require some sort of explanatory definition.

Although Moss has handled the equivalents well, his explanatory definitions leave something to be desired. One of the main shortcomings of the book is reflected in the lack of research: the author was either completely unaware of English English or was completely oblivious to it, and one can only conclude, in examining his dictionary, that it would have benefited greatly from familiarity with the content and treatment given in other books, as well. The copyright notice bears the dates 1973 and 1984, and, from the reviews quoted from the International Herald Tribune, The Economist, and The Sunday Times in the back-cover blurb, one must surmise that the book was originally published in England.

As for the entries themselves, they are brief and generally useful. They begin to feel inadequate when one looks up terms like bristols to learn that (quite correctly) the meaning given is ‘breasts.’ But the label “Cockney” is not helpful, as the proper form would have been “Cockney rhyming slang, short for Bristol City/titty.” Similarly, those wondering where sod, n. and v., (which has no usage label, though it is certainly slang) came from will find no information about its derivation from sodomy, sodomite, sodomize. Blooming, on the other hand, is labeled “col(loquial),” and is defined as “an all-purpose adjective, much as ‘bloody’ is, but mostly working-class,” which doesn’t tell the story at all: it was for many years a euphemism for bloody and is rarely heard today mainly because there is little reluctance in using bloody (once taboo); it is somewhat old-fashioned, almost having achieved the status of “Wodehousian” slang typified by old chap, old bean, and Ain’t it?, now found mainly on the lips of Bertie Wooster and those who emulate him (mostly Americans who acquired what they know about British English from Jeeves and similar books).

The book is divided into two alphabetic sections, like a bilingual dictionary, one American-British, the other British-American. The foregoing comments pertain to the latter section, which contains a number of entries that could not be classified as British: aerial, a variant for ‘antenna’— not “antennae”—in American English [AE] is the only term for the radio-TV type in British English [BE]; unfortunately, antenna, which in BE used to refer only to the entomological kind, is not an entry; anorak is no longer strictly BE for ‘parka’; Antipodes never was BE (by which I mean it was universally known in English); similarly, balaclava (helmet), barrel organ, bespoke (‘custom-tailored’), billiards, etc., such entries amounting to, perhaps, five percent of the total. The comment at bill, “The word ‘check’ is not used for any kind of bill in Britain,” is just plain wrong—it is used frequently today, possibly having been picked up as an Americanism from tourists. What is lacking, in the main, is commentary on the usage of some terms. For instance, use of the term swan-upping is always greeted with a smile in England. Also, some terms are missing, e.g., poof or pouf(fe) ‘homosexual,’ and others, e.g., glaze and glazier, are just as American as they are British.

In the American-British section, users may be misled by the inclusion of entries like filling station (widely used in Britain), chutzpah (Yiddish, not American, though the influence of Yiddish on AE is admittedly greater than on BE), pipe story (which I’ve never encountered), and polecat (which I recently encountered in a crossword puzzle in The Times). Where is Civil War (different events in Britain and America)? And why is cookie-pusher in? And why is pissed (off) in with a “col (loquial)” label?: it is taboo (or nearly so) in America, while pissed (‘drunk’)—as well as balls, knockers, arse, etc.—can be heard (and sometimes seen) on British TV. Also, the statement that pissed “never means drunk, as in British” is simply at variance with the facts. And it would be useful to have included dummy, with its senses, in the AE section as well as the BE.

As with most books, there are some good points in this one, but they are scarcely inspirational. The errors abound: the classification of maisonette into the British-American section is simply wrong, as I have encountered its use in real-estate advertising for several decades; the omission, from the BE section, of estate agent (for AE real estate agent); the equivalent given there of realtor, which is, in fact, Realtor, a registered title; the omission from the entry rock and rye of any mention of the large block of rock candy in the bottle (whence, of course, the rock); the inclusion of eavestrough?? (for ‘guttering’); the inclusion in BE of gunsmith (same as in AE); runner beans (BE) are ‘green or string beans’ in AE, not French beans, which are green beans sliced lengthwise. I have never heard of fruit bread; a garter snake does not have “three stripes around its body” but along it; gloryhole is too rare to be included; gook should have a label other than just “col(loquial)” (as properly done for greaser, guinea, and wop); Gulla (properly Gullah) is too rare for inclusion; and gyp ‘cheat, swindle’ is not necessarily “used lightheartedly.”

In short, Mr. Moss has some work to do, at home and abroad. Period. (Which isn’t in AE, though full stop is in BE.)

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf

Robert Manson Myers, (University of Illinois Press, 1984), ix + 91 pp.

The subtitle, “An Astounding and Wholly Unauthorized History of English Literature,” and the title page information, “New Edition/Thoroughly Devised/Diffusely Illustrated,” give only the slightest hint of the rough trade in scholarship that follows. For that matter, it precedes as well, with a frontispiece literary map of the British Isles on which are identified landmarks like The Hence of Forth, Pepys' Dairy, Heath Cliff, Jonathan Cape, Longman’s Green, McGraw Hill, and Macmillan-the-Floss.

The text, punctuated here and there by full-page profane illustrations, treats of the great tradition of English literature and its influences from the German minnowsingers and the French chansons de beau geste. Famous events (the defeat of the Invisible Armada), famous people (Lady Zane Grey), famous literary works (Love’s Labour’s Lust, The Merchant of Venus), famous political bodies (The Parliament of Fools), and other famous references are here, though, as a point of criticism, this reviewer noted the absence of Famous Amos (albeit he spilled his cookies on the American scene in—where else?—California). Reproductions of famous and influential paintings, like that of Ann Gothica Radcliffe, mistress of Udolpho, bride of Frankenstein, and founder of Radcliffe College, abound. This valuable exegesis includes the early part of the twentieth century. Unaccountably lacking is any mention of the decline of the cinema (so aptly treated by Edgar Allan Wallace in The Fall of the House of Ushers). Despite this, the author has managed to convey with great sensitivity the panorama of the English literary traduction, which lovers of the genre should take sitting down, as that is the most suitable place for its perusal.

Laurence Urdang

OBITER DICTA: Lost and Found

Eric Winters, Marble Dale, Connecticut

For some miraculous reason some words lose a letter when they cross the water, be it the English Channel or the Atlantic Ocean. To exemplify:

For a while, England’s reigning dynasty was the House of Hanover, named after the German city of Hannover. One n was obviously lost in the Channel crossing.

When I studied history in Vienna, the name of the famous Austrian Empress was Maria Theresia. In England (and, of course, also in this country), she is known as Maria Theresa. Another case where a letter must have fallen into the water.

The symbol Al signifies the metal that we call aluminum. In England and on the Continent it is known as aluminium. There exists a story, probably an apocryphal one, which tries to explain this discrepancy. A secretary in a Canadian city supposedly typed a long treatise on this metal and consistently spelled it aluminum. Instead of having the whole paper retyped, the word aluminum was accepted.

Anyway, two i’s and one n got somehow lost on their sea voyages.

Conversely, only one case comes to mind where the opposite happened and a letter was gained. In English (British and American English alike), the word address differs from the spelling in other languages (e.g., German and French) where the word is spelled with only one d, namely: adresse. Where did the additional d come from?

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The manuscript has now become priceless,” a Harvard spokesman said, although it is not in Johann Sebastian Bach’s handwriting, which would have made it even more valuable. [From an article in The Washington Post, 19 December 1984. Submitted by Ivan R. Schwab, Morgantown, West Virginia.]

Noah Webster—An Appreciation

David Soibelman, Los Angeles, California

Recently I looked up a word in a newspaper story quoting a police officer: “… I think the Department will be able to work with the community to prevent an exanthemus [sic] of existing problems in Venice [a Los Angeles community].”

I found the reporter had misspelled this odd word and was amazed that a cop had used a Greek-root word, exanthem—properly, too. I had rooted out the word in my copy of the massive Webster’s New International Dictionary, Third Edition, a huge and heavy volume of 550,000 entries. It is a direct and living descendant, grown fatter and more sophisticated, of Noah Webster’s master work, The American Dictionary of the English Language, 70,000 entries, published in 1828. The author was 70 at the time of publication and had devoted years to the production of this great work.

Yet this genius, this Renaissance man in the world of words, has not been voted into The Hall of Fame for Great Americans. Many lesser folk whose names come not easily to mind have been elected, but when Webster’s name was considered he failed in several ballotings.

America’s literary heritage truly can be said to have been born in Webster’s creation. In it, in seventeen words, he defined dictionary as “a book containing the words of a language arranged in alphabetical order, with explanations of their meaning.” Clear, concise, and understandable; the modern fat volume takes twenty-one lines to define the word.

Webster was more than a compiler of dictionaries. He was a volunteer in the American Revolution, lawyer, school teacher, and author of school texts: his famous Blue-Backed Speller—so called because of its blue binding—sold in the millions. Yet, whatever occupied his time, he always was afire with the belief that the United States should have its own version of the English language. In his Dissertations of the American Language he wrote, “… As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as in government.”

In exemplifying this theory he taught this country to drop the British u from words like honour, humour, colour, favour, and glamour, and to excise the k from musick, publick, and other such words. His dictionary also transposed the final two letters in the British spelling of theatre, centre, chambre, and other words ending in re to conform to the simpler and more logical American form. He also changed the ancient and earthy plough to plow.

Nevertheless, he failed in one of his orthographic endeavors: he did not succeed in taking the a out of leather, feather, and weather, nor in changing tongue to tung, and ton and tonnage to tun and tunnage. Many years later, Theodore Roosevelt, Congressmen, teachers, and losers of spelling bees tried to reform the American spelling of certain words by deleting letters and combinations of letters because they were unnecessary to their pronunciation and interfered with their meaning. They failed.

Webster did not hesitate to take on those who questioned his knowledge of the language. He even won a number of skirmishes with Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great English lexicographer, poet, and critic, who sneered at American words as “barbarisms” and the language of the Yankees as a “dialect,” then a pejorative term. Webster accused his English counterpart of slovenly research and quoted Greek, Roman, and Norman etymologies in support of his barbs.

There was a practical and proprietary side to Webster also. More than anyone else he may be considered the father of American copyright laws. To safeguard his rights to the spellers, as well as the rights of other writers, he advocated the establishment of copyright laws, succeeding in the late 1780s in persuading several states to enact such laws. And in 1790 Congress followed with a federal copyright statute.

In 1806 he turned out his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. Its 37,000 entries constituted the first major dictionary since Dr. Samuel Johnson’s in 1755. It defined compendious as “concise, brief.” One of England’s greatest lexicographers called Webster “a born definer.” This mini-dictionary included about 5,000 new Americanisms: skunk “a quadruped remarkable for its smell”; tomahawk “an Indian hatchet”; bravo “one who murders for hire, an assassin”; and some homespun coinages: hickory, applesauce, succotash, chowder, handy, and bullfrog. To promote the sale of his works he traveled the country as far south as the Carolinas by horse, carriage, and steamboat, taking orders wherever he went and filling notebooks with words, ancient and new, listening to the speech of people, seeking the origin of their words and expressions, all the while studying etymology, philology, and linguistic and orthographic lore, and lecturing on the language, on education, and on government.

A farm lad, he had entered Yale at 16 where studies often were halted by recesses caused by lack of food, aggressive action by the Redcoats, or by outbreaks of typhoid fever. In one such interval, he and his father marched to join the fighting at Saratoga; but they arrived too late: Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne had surrendered to General Horatio Gates on October 17, 1777, a day after Noah was 19.

To prepare himself for the herculean task of writing his Dictionary, Webster is said to have taught himself 26 languages, including Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit. Books in 20 languages—reference works, grammars, and dictionaries— cluttered the large round table on which he wrote his 1828 magnum opus. To do his research, he moved to Amherst, where he also became active in the town’s civic and academic affairs. He was elected to the Massachusetts legislature, became a trustee and president of Amherst Academy, and, with Samuel F. Dickinson, grandfather of poet Emily Dickinson, he helped found Amherst College. Yale, his alma mater, awarded him an honorary LL.D. in 1823.

He was a man of disparate interests. He was an orchardist, a gardener, an experimental scientist, a constant traveler. He was a councilman and alderman for Hartford and served on its school district committee. He plugged for a municipal water system, and for planting elms along the sidewalks; and he wrote on such diverse topics as meteors, the art of growing potatoes, experiments relating to dew, and mythology, and to keep his hand in, on the affinity between the languages of Europe and Asia. But a foray into medical and health topics led him astray. He wrote a two-volume Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases, contending, among other egregious reaches, that yellow fever had its sources in noxious vapors billowing up from fissures in the earth.

Webster died at 85 in New Haven, on May 28, 1843. Men who love words for their own sake, writers, etymologists, philologists, and lexicographers appreciate the greatness of the genius whose dictionary was the sturdy progenitor of today’s American word books. To many, the name Webster has become virtually eponymous, a household word, connoting the standard, the apotheosis of American dictionaries, which are today filled with strange words. By his works he has added an incandescent nimbus to the shining and singular splendor of the American language.

OBITER DICTA: Distribution

Laurence Urdang

Articles in VERBATIM have dealt with various dialects of Spanish in which the same word has quite different meanings—usually a quite harmless one in the form of the language spoken in one country contrasting with a taboo sense in a form spoken in another country. The phenomenon is called distribution by linguists, for the same word is differently distributed in different dialects—whether semantically or by usage level. Perhaps observers of English have commented on the same situation in British and American English, but if they have, I am unaware of it. Below is a collection of some differences between the usages in England and America of a few words, with explanatory remarks. Perhaps our readers will be interested in contributing to the list.

AMERICAN	BRITISH
ass bottom; jackass; fool.	ass jackass; fool.
all in exhausted.	all in 1. everything included. 2. anything goes; Amer. all-out, as in all-in wrestling.
balls Taboo. testicles.	balls, Somewhat risqué because of the ‘testicles’ sense, but quite common as an expletive expressing disgust, frustration, etc.
bum hobo; tramp.	bum bottom, arse.
cheesy shoddy; cheap.	cheesy swank(y).
cock 1. Taboo. penis. 2. male bird.	cock 1. male bird. 2. Chiefly in satirizing Americans. penis.
cunt Extremely vulgar, taboo 1. female pudenda. 2. a most undesirable person.	cunt 1. a fool; an idiot.2. female pudenda (but far less frequent). See fanny.
dinky small; shabbily made.	dinky cute.
fanny Cute. bottom.	fanny 1. bottom. 2. Taboo. cunt.
knock up Slang. to make pregnant.	knock up wake up; rouse.
mean cruel.	mean stingy.
pissed Vulgar. 1. drunk. 2. angry.	pissed Colloquial. drunk.
rubber condom.	rubber eraser.
smart clever; intelligent.	smart chic.
table postpone.	table bring up for discussion.
twat Taboo. cunt.	twat Colloquial. silly fool; berk.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Regardless of anything to the contrary in this booklet, if your medical insurance terminates for any reason including death, you…may elect within 30 days…to continue such medical insurance…” [From Group Insurance for 1-14 Employees, Consolidated Group Trust, The Hartford, p. 70.]

Antipodean English: Of Camels and Tamarillos

George W. Turner, University of Adelaide

Salesmen who aspire to sell snow to Eskimos might spare a moment’s admiration for the Australians who sell camels to the Middle East. Camels are not native to Australia, but in desert areas they have become as much part of the landscape as kangaroos. The word hooshtah ‘a shout of encouragement to a camel’ might now, in its English use, be called an Australianism, since all the Oxford English Dictionary’s recent quotations to illustrate the use of the word are from Australian sources. Australia is now the only place where camels run wild and the only source from which other countries can replenish their stocks. In 1975 sixty-five Aussie camels even emigrated to the USA. They required no work permits, as they were destined to provide disease-free stock for zoos.

There were desultory attempts to bring camels to Australia as early as 1840, but it was not till the 1860s that large shipments were brought in from India. With them came drivers collectively referred to as Afghans. Most were from Afghanistan, some from Rajasthan, Baluchistan, West Pakistan, a few from Egypt, Iran, and Turkey. All were Muslims and spoke Pashtu. Besides providing outback transport for explorers and goldfields, they were employed in building the rabbit-proof fence in Western Australia and the Overland Telegraph Line from Adelaide to Darwin. They did not bring women and could not, in accordance with the prejudices of the time, become British citizens, so few remain; but their collective name, shortened to Ghan, survives in the historical term Ghan towns, Afghan settlements on the outskirts of some inland towns, and, especially, in the name of the train, the Ghan, that runs from Adelaide via Port Pirie to Alice Springs. The old Ghan was subject to many delays as lines were washed out by floods, so that a train could easily be two weeks late in arriving at its destination. By 1980, a new and more reliable standard-gauge line was completed, but the name Ghan survives for the train.

No new name for camels was needed to sell them. Across the Tasman in New Zealand, however, export industries are aided by a little linguistic engineering. Two well-known New Zealand exports, neither of them native, are tree-tomatoes and Chinese gooseberries, but neither is called that by the exporters. The tomatoes are a South American fruit, a rich source of vitamin C and long popular in New Zealand. About twenty years ago, the name tamarillo was deliberately contrived, much as a brand name is. On the basis of tomato, a diminutive -ill- was added; then tomatillo was altered, in honor of a legendary Maori tribal hero, Tama-te-kapua, to tamatillo; and then a change to tamarillo was considered more euphonious. And so a new word was born.

At about the same time, an export market for Chinese gooseberries was growing in the United States. The trouble was that at that time China was not popular in the USA. The invention kiwi-fruit proved more acceptable, and a thriving industry perhaps owes much of its success to the linguistic artifact. But perhaps in the new international climate growers will want to change the name back again—or try to sell their Chinese gooseberries to China.

Spherical Containment Device

Theodor Schuchat, Bellevue, Washington

I hereby salute Bartelt Design & Manufacturing of Mill Valley, California, for trying—with a smile—to dispel some of the verbal fog drifting across the face of American business and industry, obscuring the simple truth. Bartelt makes one of those wooden gadgets that stand on your kitchen table or counter and hold a roll of paper toweling upright. You tear off a piece to wipe up a spill. Self-evident.

Bartelt’s version of this commonplace item, however, is sold with Technical Bulletin No. 3306-7, an illustrated sheet that explains, with a straight face, how to get the roll of paper toweling on Bartelt’s Towel Tote and how to tear off a piece after the roll is installed. The Technical Bulletin, by Jeff Bartelt, is a parody of the fatuous nomenclature that clutters the contemporary American economy. The stick on which the paper roll is impaled is called a Vertical Tube Core. The wooden base is identified as a Low Friction Moisture Resisting Pad. And Bartelt gives away a trade secret by admitting that its Spherical Containment Device was “formerly Knob at Top.” The latter, Bartelt explains, is “anthropomorphically designed” and “welcomes the carrying hand (left or right).”

We’ve been seeing entirely too much of this kind of pretentious prose lately. The Strand Theater in Madison, Wisconsin, has the nerve to call its trash cans “patron assistance containers.” John McSweeney of Cedar Falls, Iowa, makes so bold as to advertise that he builds “hog containment units”: pigpens to thee and me. No self-respecting business is satisfied with a truck these days: it must operate a “mobile unit.” The truck with the television camera gear, of course, is a “location production unit.” The carts they push down the Northwest Orient aisles are now “food modules.” Once the Seattle Public Library had a bookmobile; now it has a “Traveling Library Center.”

If the frequency with which I encounter it is indicative, even classier than operating a “unit” or a “module” is running a “center.” A hospital laundry calls itself a “Fabric Care Center.” A drugstore is now a “Family Health Care Center.” The ship’s bridge has become the “Vessel Control Center.” In Seattle, Kelley’s Telephone Answering Service doesn’t have an office; it has its very own “Communications Center.” The St. Louis airport has replaced its ticket counters with “service centers,” but the computer goes down anyway. Not to worry, though, the trouble-shooting mechanic is hard at work, providing “hardware support” to the “end-user.” Why can’t they just repair the machine for the customer? Because plain talk is unfashionable nowadays, that’s why. Because they get more money for old railroad ties if they call them “landscape timbers,” that’s why. Because people will more willingly wash windows and clean floors if you label their truck a “pollution control unit,” that’s why.

Who dreams up this fustian? It is people who sit at a “work surface” instead of a desk, the kind who carry a “data transport system” instead of an attaché case. They’re the ones who sold me an “Energy Management System” instead of a thermostat. They never need laundry or dry cleaning, only “textile services.” They think we don’t know what’s afoot when they go into a massage parlor that calls itself an “Adult Social Service Center.”

But Bartelt Design & Manufacturing is a beacon of hope amid the miasma that surrounds us. They’re using the right weapon: laughter is the only intelligent response to mindless affectation. Poking fun at the pretentiousness of others apparently is profitable, too. Bartelt’s Towel Tote is a bestseller. And I can hardly wait to read the Technical Bulletin that accompanies the gadget they make to hold toilet paper.

Some Impletons

DEFINITIONS

1. When mischeivous elves put on a striking show, it is an IMP—.
2. They breathe IMP—, which may harm their lungs.
3. They drink frothy IMP—, which pins them to the wall.
4. We drive them upwards to take the IMP—.
5. All their legitimate acts, mmentioned or not, are IMP—.
6. Blown into the mine, they discover a rich IMP—.
7. They pass along their creative work, known as IMP—.
8. Scholars pleading for information on their traditions become well-versed in IMP—.
9. Their imminent demise is IMP—.
10. Merely by hinting at duplicity, they IMP—.
11. They guaranteed not to fall off the IMP— on the skyscraper.
12. They shut up the Cockney elf’s dog, an IMP—.
13. The street wasn’t IMP—, the elf’s horse could not traverse it.
14. Nor could his burro; it was (or wasn’t) IMP—.
15. Through togetherness they hope to escape penalty by IMP—.

SOLUTIONS TO SOME IMPLETONS

a) act
b) air
c) ale
d) art
e) assable
f) el
g) ending
h) ledge
i) licit
j) lied
k) lode l) lore m) (h)ossible n) ‘ound o) unity

ANSWERS TO SOME IMPLETONS

1-a
2-b
3-c
4-f
5-i
6-k
7-d
8-l
9-g
10-j
11-h
12-n
13-m
14-e
15-o

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Hot Cod Pieces are Perfect for Little Soldiers.” [Headline in The Australian, March 27, 1985. Submitted by Dr. H. H. Macey, Floreat Park, Western Australia.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Eugene Klein, who owns the colt along with his wife, …” [From the Columbus Dispatch, May 19, 1985. Submitted by Dorothy Branson, Columbus, Ohio.]

EPISTOLA {A.M. Kinloch}

Like most articles in VERBATIM, Frank R. Abate’s “Postpositive Modifiers in English” [XI,2] is informative as well as amusing. However, it does contain one blunder: the phrase penny dreadful does not exemplify a postpositive modifier. In this phrase, the word dreadful is a nominal, meaning ‘a story of crime written in a sensational or morbidly exciting style; a journal or print of such character; a ‘shocker.’ colloq.’ (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. dreadful C. sb.). The whole phrase, penny dreadful, is recorded with the meaning ‘paper of a crude, sensational kind aimed at older children’ in the Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English, vol. 2 (Oxford: O.U.P., 1983), page 453, col. 1. Neither reference points out that the word penny in the phrase in question meant ‘costing one penny,’ and is hence an adjectival or modifier, preceding its nominal.

[A.M. Kinloch, University of New Brunswick]

EPISTOLA {Walter Staaks}

The note on postpositive modifiers in English [XI,2] by Frank Abate was particularly interesting to me. When teaching American university students the placement of adjectives in French, to underline this structural difference between French and English I would invite them to come up with examples of adjectives following the noun in their own language. Not surprisingly, they failed to find many on the spur of the moment. The construction is rare. Having a head start on them in pondering the question, I was able to cite several combinations like those offered by Dr. Abate. (In French, of course, although it is true and generally taught that most adjectives come after the noun, their preposition is by no means limited to the dozen or so bland high-frequency qualifiers often limited as normally precedent; to the contrary, nonrestrictive adjectives are frequently placed before their nouns for the sake of rhythm, emphasis, or other stylistic considerations.)

I write now in acceptance of Dr. Abate’s invitation to supplement his lists. Saving the best till later, I begin with pairs that might be rejected under strict interpretation of the rules of the game:

1. Combinations most often but not exclusively encountered as headings of columns of statistics, like free throws attempted, fumbles recovered, points scored, etc. These are at least akin to Abate’s accounts payable/ receivable.

2. Similar to the above, nouns plus past participles occurring alone as headings or in elliptical constructions [meaning (nouns) that are/were/have been (+ past participle)], e.g., questions unresolved, measures taken, topics addressed, etc. Such pairings are innumerable, and probably shouldn’t count. Incidentally, this noun-plus-past-participle parallels French structure exactly, whereas German syntax requires that the adjective precede. On the other hand, of course, an indefinite pronoun plus adjective, e.g., nothing new, someone important, reflects German structure and differs slightly from the French.

3. Titles (of books, poems, shows, paintings, organizations, and the like): Paradise Lost, Brideshead Revisited, Alcoholics Anonymous, Mood Indigo, Voyage Extraordinary, Boy Blue, House Beautiful, Mission Impossible, Toys Unlimited, Moments Musical, etc. Dr. Abate, who mentions Vanity Fair and Knights Templar, obviously does not exclude this category.

4. Pairs consecrated by convention: life eternal (Biblical), joy unconfined (poetic), virtue triumphant (literary), proof positive (judicial), delegates at large (political), person or persons unknown (legalistic), steak tartare (culinary), patent pending (without verbal context), brother mine (in semi-facetious address), battle royal (idiomatic), laughs aplenty (colloquial), chicken supreme, veal Florentine, etc. (gastronomical). One should no doubt draw the line short of degrees Fahrenheit, because the modifier is elliptical for “on the Fahrenheit scale” and could be—perhaps ought to be— separated from its noun by a comma or parentheses.

Of the above group, the first seven could grammatically be transposed without alteration of sense, and may therefore be less than perfect examples. In this connection I applaud Abate’s “God Almighty,” which when inverted changes in tone from profane to reverent.

I forbear to suggest seriously the names of beings, from Chicken Little to Pope Pius—the latter especially, since it involves a pun that the editor surely “could do without.”

If the ideal postpositive modifier is (a) one which usage forbids to precede and (b) is not a participle, there seem to be very few, and Abate has proposed several of them, like heir apparent, time immemorial, and devil incarnate. To these perfect examples I can add, without extensive searching, only three (besides any of the above that might be acceptable): minister plenipotentiary, things French (or any of countless other adjectives thus placed for emphasis with respect to the colorless noun [one would not say “art French”!]), and for the crowning delight, cherries jubilee. (Never to be served with Bud Lite.)

[Walter Staaks, Associate Professor, Emeritus, Purdue University]

[Dr. Abate comments: Many of the culinary combinations are such, of course, because of their being loan translations from a Romance phrase (veal Florentine, steak tartare, etc.) or because they pick up the postpositive placement on the model of the French syntactical rules.]

EPISTOLA {Caldwell Titcomb}

The engaging article by Frank Abate on “Postpositive Modifiers in English” [XI, 2] contained “a fault too too unpardonable,” to borrow an example from Shakespeare. I refer to his inclusion of the term penny dreadful. Although we most often use penny as a noun and dreadful as an adjective, in this phrase the words are in the standard adjective-plus-noun order. Dreadful has been around as a noun for more than a century, being a designation for a lurid and sensational crime story such as used to be printed in the late 19th century and sold for a penny.

On 30 January 1883, the London Daily News informed us, “Persons of culture are apt to speak harshly of penny dreadfuls, as they call the novels which appear in cheap weekly journals.” And the Morning Advertiser for 18 March 1891 told us, “The chairman said he must have been reading some penny dreadfuls or other low literature.” Note that the plural is not pennies dreadful. A synonym was the penny awful, in which again the second word was a noun.

The cheapness could be conveyed by the adjectival use of shilling as well as penny. Someone with a low opinion of Robert Louis Stevenson reported in the Athenaeum for 14 November 1885 that “Mr. Stevenson is writing another shilling dreadful.” Those with a taste for alliteration could employ the term shilling shocker, as in the Illustrated London News of 17 September 1887: “The three-volume novel may be dying out, as they tell us; but we have the shilling shocker rampant among us.” That was the year that saw publication of the most influential early example of the genre: The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume (1859-1932).

The current theatre season in New York has offered Charles Ludlam’s play The Mystery of Irma Vep, which bears the subtitle “A Penny Dreadful.” Penny as an adjective is at least as old as the 17th century. And I am old enough to remember that in this country we had what was called a penny postcard.

[Caldwell Titcomb, Brandeis University]

EPISTOLA {Emily Mitchell}

Your article, “Postpositive Modifiers in English,” [XI, 2] was highly interesting and must have spurred many readers of VERBATIM to seek further examples of grammatical influences of Romance languages on English. It did me, and my contribution to your list of noun-modifier pairs is in the form of place names. The first lakes discovered by the 17th-century French explorers in North America were named by placing the modifier after the word lake, and thus we have Lake Ontario, Lake Huron, Lake Superior. This method of naming lakes has prevailed in the U.S., although small lakes are usually named in the reverse way, modifier-noun, such as Loon Lake or Rogers Lake.

Capes were also named in reverse order (the first to name them were English explorers): Cape Fear, Cape Cod, Cape Hatteras. There are also points thus named: Point Possession, Point Pleasant, Point Judith. Of rivers named in reverse order, I know only of the River Rouge in Michigan, so called by the French. Most of the Florida keys are in modifier-noun order but there are notable exceptions, due to the Spanish influence: Key West, Key Largo, Key Biscayne.

Single mountains have traditionally been labeled in English with the modifier following the geographic term: Mount Snow, Mount Ida, Mount Moriah; so have ports: Port Royal, Port Ritchie, Port Charles, and all forts: Fort Bragg, Fort Leavenworth, Fort Ancient.

It seems that reverse-order place names in this country can be attributed to the French, to the Spanish, and to the English, whose language, of course, had been subjected to the influence of a Romance language before they reached here.

[Emily Mitchell, Niantic, Connecticut]

EPISTOLA {Carolyn Williams}

Michael Gorman, in “The Trivial Pursuit of Grammar,” [XI, 4] errs if he supposes that Trivial Pursuit was intended for anyone with perception. Nobody with a reasonably developed sense of values would ever buy it, for it must qualify as the most over-priced board game ever produced! But leaving aside the awful grammar, it seems that the game is guilty of factual errors also. A magpie, as I was able to verify in my back garden this morning, has three distinct colours of plumage: black, white and blue. Honest.

[Carolyn Williams, Derby, England]

Light Refractions: Puzzling and Processing

Thomas H. Middleton

I do most of my writing on a word processor. Using a word processor has great advantages—and a few disadvantages—over writing the old-fashioned way, with pen, pencil, and typewriter. The most obvious of the advantages is the ease with which you can do your rewriting. Just push a few of the proper keys and whap! what you don’t want no longer exists, and you can replace it with what you do want. By the same magic, you can shift whole blocks of words, moving them from this place to that in the text. It makes editing a cinch. All the changes take place on a screen, and when you get just what you want, you push some buttons to let your printer know that you’re ready to see the whole thing on paper. Then you get a beer or a cup of coffee and listen to the printer go through its blappety-blap-zip-zip.

Most of the writers I know have used typewriters for years, and some of them have even done most of their rewriting on the typewriter. I can’t do that. My mind has always been so tatterdemalion that I’ve never, never put the right words in the right order on a typewriter the first time around. Not even in a friendly letter. Even a half-page note to an old pal has usually required a scrawled first draft on scrap paper before commitment to honest-to-God stationery. I’ve always envied those guys who could slide a sheet of blank paper into a machine and tap out just the right stuff the very first time. Years ago, I decided that the only way I could write for publication was to use a pen or a pencil and do my rewriting as I went along, so that by the time I finished my first draft it was completely indecipherable to anyone but me. Pages were covered with crossouts, carets, stars, circled numbers, and words in circles connected by long, looping, meandering arrows leading to the spots in the text where the words were to be moved. Only when I’d reread these scrawls, turning and twisting the pages to reveal scribblings along margins and on backsides, finally sensing that I had managed to marshall my refractory thoughts in what seemed to me to be recognizable order, did I finally put a sheet of paper in my typewriter.

That I had to go through this tortured process depressed me, and still does. It shows that my mind lacks the discipline to square itself away without looking at its own skimbleskamble output on paper and piecing the elements together like a puzzle. Probably what I like most about the word processor is that I no longer feel like such a fool. I straighten my thoughts out on the screen of my TRS-80 Model III Microcomputer, and those outrageous squiggles and arrows that used to accuse me of mental dishevelment are not there as silent witnesses to my ineptitude.

The computer-word-processor has a few disadvantages. In my own case, an important disadvantage, but one that is easily overwhelmed by the aforementioned advantages, is its lack of portability. When I used to do all my columns on a legal pad, using a pencil or ballpoint, my favorite way to write was to hop on my bicycle and write the column in my mind as I rode approximately three and a half miles to the beach in Santa Monica, then another three miles along the beach bike path to an outdoor restaurant. There, having conjured an inchoate but viable composition, I’d order a salad and a glass of wine and scribble my thoughts as I sat in the southern California sunshine. That was where I’d do my puzzle-solving—my mental house-straightening. Then I’d ride home and translate the scribbles into a coherent piece on my typewriter. I can’t load my TRS-80 on my ten-speed, and so nowadays I sit here in my office on the second floor of our home, dealing with ephemeral little light-letters. Every time I hit a snag in my thoughts, the refrigerator whistles softly from downstairs, and too often I respond to its siren call. The result is predictable. I’ve expanded through the hips and waist, and the muscle-tone of my legs is now shot to hell.

By now, everyone is computer-wise enough to know that an entire day’s work can be wiped out in a flash—literally—if some disturbance shatters the inner integrity of whatever goes on among those tiny chips that miraculously hold your mind’s work on their invisible electrical charges. A sudden loss of power due to a windstorm or a cantankerous appliance somewhere can blank out your screen, and when the power comes back, you’ll very likely see the screen covered with a mess of extraterrestrial markings interspersed with familiar but meaningless numbers and letters.

Some people, on discovering that you’ve been doing your work on a word processor, seem to think you haven’t actually done the writing. I was giving a talk to a group of writers a few weeks ago, and I mentioned this phenomenon. Later, a woman told me of having been introduced as “Jane Brown. She’s just had her novel published.” The couple to whom she’d been introduced replied appropriately, “How wonderful!” Then the introducer added, “She used a word processor.” The enthusiasm disappeared. Poor Jane Brown had been accused, however mutely, of having let a machine write a novel for her and of having taken full credit for the machine’s work. She said she felt like screaming, “Hey! They were my words! The word processor just processed them!” But she said she’d have felt like a damned fool. I can see her point.

Now we come to the major problem with word processors and computers in general: It seems that the geniuses who deal easily with microchips and their bits and bytes and all that sort of baffling esoterica are seldom very good at making themselves clear in the English language. My TRS-80 came with a few manuals, among them a little booklet called Getting Started With TRS-80 Basic. I suppose this booklet was designed to take the computer-fear out of the mind of the new owner. It was full of drawings of what must be a “user-friendly” computer—a talkative little computer-human cartoon character who gets into amusing situations and makes little inside jokes about computer stuff. No one who wants to learn how to operate his marvelous new machine is helped much by a gabby little comic-strip guy. What you want is a way of looking up what you want to know, and that is often quite impossible in a computer manual.

In my Disk System Owner’s Manual, for instance, there’s a page that purports to tell me how to append files. If you’re computer-illiterate, you probably don’t know what that means. Bear with me. It says:

APPEND source-file destination-file source-file is the specification for the file which is to be copied onto the end of the other file.

destination-file is the specification for the file which is to receive the appendage (addition).

Note: Both source- and destination-files must be in ASCII format (data files or BASIC programs saved with the A option).

It’s that “Note:” that caused me trouble. Because I have friends who’ve been involved in the computer field for decades and are willing and able to converse in clear English with me, I know that ASCII is pronounced “asskey,” but I have no idea what, in fact, ASCII means. That isn’t my friends’ fault; it’s mine—and the manual’s. In the index, I looked up ASCII. No diceky. Under ASCII, they list lots of pages on which the term ASCII appears, usually in the phrase ASCII format. But nowhere does it tell me what ASCII stands for, or what ASCII format means. I figured they’d at least tell me what “the A option” is, but nowhere in the index can one find A, Option, or A Option. So that “Note:,” which appears to be an important bit of information, means absolutely zilch to one unfamiliar with the science. From sympathetic souls, I have learned that this problem arises in the owners' manuals of virtually every computer and computer program ever manufactured.

“Error messages” appear on your screen with only the tersest elucidation of their import. You go to your manual to see what’s happened in the innermost workings of your computer’s bowels. (I used that word for fun. If ever there was a machine whose inner workings cannot be thought of as “bowels,” the computer is it. I think of my computer’s interior as phantom quicksilver.) If you can find the error message listed in your manual’s index, you’re doing well. If you can find a further explanation of the error you’ve committed, buy yourself a drink.

One of my most frustrating experiences is to type SAV, which is the “save” signal on one of my programs, follow it with what in computer lingo is called the FILENAME (meaning that I want what I’ve just written to be saved on the diskette), to hear the humming and whirring that tell me the TRS-80 is working its heart out, then to have flashed on the screen NO ERROR FOUND. I repeat the process: SAV, followed by the filename, and again, instead of getting my file saved, I get the “error message”: NO ERROR FOUND. The circularity is infuriating. If you can find in your own manual just exactly what any “error message” means, you’re lucky. If you can discover what can be done to correct the error, count yourself uncommonly blessed in the sight of the great computer god IBMAC.

Still, in spite of its sometimes frustrating ways, my computer-cum-word-processor is welcome on my desk any time.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Gorbachev Tows Communist Line.” [Headline in The Anchorage Times, March 13, 1985. Submitted by DeLynne Chambers, Anchorage.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“…Furniture Company’s seventy-fifth Diamond Anniversary.” [From an advertisement on radio station WGAY, Arlington, Virginia. Submitted by Charles T. Reyner, Arlington.]

Words That Don’t Look Right

Richard Lederer, St. Paul’s School

Last year, St. Paul’s School, where I teach, sponsored a series of programs designed to heighten our community’s awareness of the realities of living in a nuclear age. The last of these programs began with a debate about the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars, between a speech-writing Naval Commander representing the Defense Department and a University of New Hampshire Physics Professor. As one would guess, the Commander stoutly defended Star Wars as scientifically feasible and strategically ideal. As his speech soared to its conclusion, the Pentagonian exulted: “In Star Wars, America has finally come up with the penultimate defense system!”

Oops! The egg-on-the-face solecism in the Commander’s exclamation is the word penultimate. The speaker obviously thought that penultimate means ‘the absolute ultimate.’ So do a lot of us, like the Tony Award winner who was quoted in a recent issue of VERBATIM as saying, “I knew what my goal was when I saw Lauren Bacall touring in a play in Buffalo. To be an actress like that—well, to me that was the penultimate!” But penultimate doesn’t mean the absolute ultimate. Derived from the Latin paene ‘almost,’ and ultimus ‘last,’ penultimate means ‘next to the last.’ Thinking that pen- was an intensifier, rather than a qualifier, our Naval Commander ended up saying something contrary to what he meant. The last thing we want is a penultimate defense system against nuclear weapons.

Also quoted in a recent issue of this quarterly was this message: “The Bureau of Animal Affairs will help you get those clucking, flapping pigeons off your window ledge, and will issue a summons to those who scatter food that attracts bands of the noisome birds.” Oops! again. The Bureau of Animal Affairs writer, like many other English users, apparently thought that noisome means “noisy.” But noisome has nothing to do with noise. In truth, the word is formed from a shortening of annoy plus the adjectival suffix -some. Most frequently noisome is used to describe an offensive odor, annoying to the point of being nauseous.

Last year, a March 1984 catalogue from a Portland, Maine, publishing company came in my mail. The cartoon on the cover shows Shakespeare’s Juliet, standing on her balcony, gazing off into the distance, and asking, “Wherefore art thou, teaching aids?” Lower on the page, Romeo stares up at Juliet and says, “Inside! Eighteen new publications plus many other fine materials.” I would hope that most of my fellow Inmates in the House of Correction (of Composition) caught the blooper. Quite obviously, the publisher of English materials interpreted wherefore as meaning ‘where,’ a mistake that has been perpetuated by generations of would-be actresses who misconstrue the famous line in Romeo and Juliet, “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?” But a knowledgeable examination of Shakespeare’s language—“Wherefore rejoice? /What conquest brings he home?” (Julius Caesar, I, i, 32-33); “But wherefore could not I pronounce ‘Amen’?” (Macbeth II, ii, 39)—reveals that wherefore means ‘why,’ not ‘where,’ further proof being the pleonastic cliché “the whys and wherefores.” Thus, those who deliver the sentence “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” should place emphasis on the word Romeo rather than on the word art.

Then there is the general who extended his “most fulsome congratulations” to a medal recipient. It is true that the original meaning of fulsome was ‘full, abundant,’ but the well-meaning general overlooked the dominant sense of the word today—‘offensive to the senses or sensibility’—and said the opposite of what he really meant.

Penultimate, noisome, wherefore and fulsome are four especially deceiving examples of words that don’t look right, words that don’t mean what their appearance or sound would have the unwary believe they do. Here is a small quiz that presents a dozen additional words whose form or sound is misleading. Beware and be wary as you choose the correct definition for each entry. Answers appear at the end of this article.

1. antebellum a. against women b. against war c. before the war d. after the war.

2. apiary a. school for mimics b. place where apes are kept c. place where bees are kept d. cupboard for peas.

3. cupidity a. strong desire for wealth b. strong desire for love c. obtuseness d. love of amusement parks.

4. disinterested a. bored b. lacking a bank account c. restless d. unbiased.

5. enervated a. nervous b. energized c. weakened d. cowardly.

6. forestress a. ancient hair style b. stress on first part of a word c. female forester d. dread anticipation.

7. friable a. easily crumbled b. unhealthy c. easily fried d. relating to holy orders.

8. herpetology the study of a. herbs b. herpes c. female pets d. reptiles.

9. inflammable a. calm b. incredulous c. not easily set on fire d. easily set on fire.

10. meretricious a. falsely attractive b. worthy c. good-tasting d. diseased.

11. prosody the study of a. drama b. music c. prose d. versification.

12. raze a. to burn with the sun b. to lift up c. to tear down d. to shear.

Taking a simplistic (there’s another one!) approach to words can generate bizarre results. Once, after one of his many luncheon speeches on the wonders and promises of rocketry and space flight, NASA scientist Wernher von Braun found himself clinking cocktail glasses with an adoring woman from the audience.

“Dr. von Braun,” she gushed, “I just loved your speech, and I found it of absolutely infinitesimal value!”

“Well then,” von Braun gulped, “I guess I’ll have to publish the speech posthumously.”

“Oh yes!” the woman came right back. “And the sooner the better!”

ANSWERS TO THE QUIZ

1. c.
2. c.
3. a.
4. d.
5. c.
6. b.
7. a.
8. d.
9. d.
10. a.
11. d.
12. c.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Sarasate had the fastest fingers ever to set foot on stage.” [From “St. Paul Sunday morning,” MPBN, May 12, 1985. Submitted by Charles Bolté, Dresden, Maine.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“A modern-dress version of the virgin birth is inconceivable.” [From MPBN News, May 10, 1985. Submitted by Charles Bolté, Dresden, Maine.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The English Language

Robert Burchfield, (Oxford University Press, 1985), xiii + 194 pp.

Broadly speaking, this book deals with four aspects of the language:

(a) the history of English, including the changes that are taking place right under our noses;

(b) the recording of the language system;

(c) the main features (vocabulary, pronunciation, spelling, syntax);

(d) the roles of English outside the British Isles.

The story of the English language is an old one. We have been told many times how this thick linguistic soup has blended through the ages, how migrating Germanic tribes brewed the stock in a Celtic cauldron, subsequent invaders added their Scandinavian and Old French ingredients, and the builders of the Empire sprinkled in the spices culled on distant shores. Burchfield does not provide any new facts, but he does show new facets. As he tells it, the historical account takes on the quality of a saga. In Anthony Burgess’s words, quoted on the dust cover, “it conveys an authentic sense of the great mystery of language.” He also makes us aware (should we need it) that the story has not come to an end. We are witnessing large and small linguistic changes today, and, what’s more intriguing, we are effecting with our own mouths and pens the processes we observe. Will whom be completely driven out by who? What is happening to the apostrophe? To the subjunctive mood? We are under constant pressure to familiarize ourselves with new grammatical usages, new shifts in pronunciation, not to speak of the 60,000 words in the four-volume OED Supplement, which Burchfield edited.

The examples are perhaps the greatest charm of the book. For each period, for every aspect, there is a profusion of them. And how well they are chosen! Some are unavoidably on the technical side, but the greater part are helpful and enjoyable for the general reader.

A language is always in the making; it really is a chain of imperceptible changes, like the frames of a motion picture. However, it is possible to take stills. We call them dictionaries and grammars. Burchfield devotes a separate chapter to their history and taxonomy. The first English dictionary offered 2,500 words. It appeared in 1604, and became the ancestor of a strain that has never stopped proliferating (mainly through plagiarism). Each new generation has gratified its readers with more entries and additional features: etymologies, encyclopedic information, labels for usage, directives for pronunciation, even pictures.

The history of English grammar seems less easy to outline. We note that during the first half of this century, we had to put up with “historical” grammars, which were voluminous and indigestible to all but scholars (curiously, they were mainly compiled by foreigners). Since World War II, new approaches have been attempted. Burchfield deals fairly with them all, though hardly concealing where his sympathies lie. He gives Chomsky his due (a “messianic figure”) but his heart is with Quirk’s Grammar of Contemporary English (a “clinical and compendious work”).

Much attention is given to the question of prescriptivism versus descriptivism. To oversimplify, prescriptivists are the meddlers who lace every piece of information, be it on grammar, style, meaning, spelling or pronunciation, with a catalogue of dos and don’ts. Descriptivists, on the other hand, just inform you and then leave you alone (or in the lurch, depending on what you expected). In practice, of course, each dictionary or grammar stands somewhere between the two extremes.

Non-British readers may be puzzled by the statement that most changes in pronunciation during the last two centuries have been brought about by “the Mitford factor.” As some may know, Nancy Mitford was a nobleman’s daughter who, in the 1950s, edited a volume of essays on the relations between social class and linguistic usage. In spite of the authors' probable tongue-in-cheek intent, the distinction between U (= ‘upper class’) and non-U became a public issue that has left many a present-day Englishman in doubt about whether to call the john “toilet” or “lavatory,” whether to have or to take a bath. Although relatively few of these class markers bear on pronunciation, Burchfield has singled out this very aspect. The “Mitford factor” points to shifts in pronunciation set in motion by sociological rather than phonetic impetuses.

The last chapter deals with the fortunes of the English language outside the United Kingdom. There are two main manifestations. First, from the seventeenth century onward, offshoots of English have been planted by settlers in the various lands of Empire. By the time independence came, it was natural that they should become the national language (or one of the national languages). However, they had already begun to take on hues of their own, and they then developed even more independently (although there have been, as Burchfield expresses it, “no linguistic Boston Tea Parties”). The results can be seen in Canadian English, American (U.S.) English, South African English, etc., each with its own features of spelling, pronunciation, and vocabulary; eventually each had its own dictionaries. Of all these, American English is the most colorful. It is really a conglomerate of innumerable geographic variants. It has also absorbed much material from the linguistic substrata that already existed in the country (Amerind, Spanish) or arrived later on immigrant waves (Italian, Yiddish), and it spawned subvariants of its own, like Black English and Hispanic English. Curiously, it has provided more feedback to the mother language than any other member of the breed.

There is a second strain. For hundreds of millions of people, English is not the national but the vehicular language; other hundreds of millions know it as a second language. Their study targets may point to Oxbridge or New England, but the vast majority are conspicuous by their accents and unusual idioms (and their anxiety about correctness). Linguists call the various flavors Sri Lanka English, Japanese English, German English, etc., and, collectively, the Englishes (a pluralization born too late to be included in the OED Supplement). The ubiquity of English speakers explains why a Swede and a Peruvian, meeting in Bangkok, are likely to resort to English as a common language. English is today’s lingua franca, more widespread than Latin ever was or Esperanto has ever been or hoped to become.

As Burchfield notes, a lack of English can be a serious handicap to any denizen of the globe. But why did he not devote a few pages to the more general problems that arise when English penetrates daily life in non-English-language countries? This is a fascinating subject, especially where the national language is written in non-Latin script. To give a trivial example, should the Greeks spell the name of their capital on the English part of their bilingual roadsigns as Athens, as we call it, or as Athína, as they call it? (They have opted for the latter.) How do Israelis or Egyptians manage to insert English Latin-script words into their Hebrew or Arabic texts that run from right to left? (By using special typewriters with two-way carriages.) And so on.

The English Language pays no attention to such worries. It is Anglocentric, and rightly so. Would anybody but a foreigner complain?

[Harry Cohen, Brussels]

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“If you think you’ve seen everything in Paris, visit the Père Lachaise Cemetery. It…boasts such immortals as Molière, Jean de la Fontaine, and Chopin!” [From a travel agency brochure. Submitted by Warren L. Felton, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.]

Humpty Dumpty and the Sluggish Slut (or, Subjective Onomatopoeia)

D.S. Bland, Southbourne, Dorset

In his Human Speech (1930), Sir Richard Paget dealt at some length with a theory that intelligible language began when man, besides imitating sounds in the external world, also made mouth gestures which corresponded in some degree to what he was saying. A basic example of this theory can be found in words which express location. Thus, when I say here, I draw my mouth back, as though towards myself: “here” is where I am. But the opposite gesture is made when I say there: the tongue comes forward and points away from me towards the place I have in mind. The same distinction (and the same movements) can be seen in ici and là in French and idr and udr in Urdu. A further example can be found in globe, where the mouth rounds and closes, as it very nearly does in round itself. Similar movements occur in bowl and womb. For a final example (to which we will return in a moment) consider this group: flame, flare, flicker, flash, where, in the fl- cluster, the tongue moves in a way that resembles the movement of a flame.

It would seem, then, that there is something to be said for the gesture theory of language, but how much in relation to a highly developed language like English? Certainly it cannot play any part in words which express abstract concepts like education and democracy. But sneer cannot be said without the nose and mouth wrinkling in an expression of dislike, and namby-pamby, a person who is sneered at for his weak affectedness, cannot be so called without a suggestion of nose-wrinkling. Ambrose Philip’s Christian name and his insipid pastorals combined in Henry Carey’s mind to produce an unflattering but appropriate nickname which seems to suggest a gesture.

There is an equal appropriateness in the name Humpty Dumpty. Anyone so called, we feel, ought to be globular, and the reason is not far to seek. There are quite a number of words ending in -ump which express compact rotundity: bump, chump (originally a short, thick piece of wood), clump, lump, mumps, plump, rump, stump, tump, and of course hump and dump, the sources of the original egghead’s name. Exceptions to this conformity are slump and sump in that they drop down from a level while all the others rise above the surface. (Even so, in a graph, a line indicating a slump is an upside down bump, and a sump follows much the same contour.) Further exceptions are crump (which is purely onomatopoeic) and pump (which is quite neutral). But thump hovers somewhere in the wings, in that it is an action which gives rise (literally) to a lump.

In this group we have words which force the mouth into a rounded shape in -um, while the solidity of the objects they refer to is expressed in the plosive p. (And the plosive b as well in bump.)

Slump, which has figured in this group as something of an exception, can be brought into another group, however, where the predominating element is the initial cluster sl- combined with (mainly) short vowels. A number of them can be brought together in the following sentence:

The slovenly sluggish slut slouched out of her slum with her slops and slithered in her slippers through the slush.

None of these words (with the exception of slippers) denotes anything very pleasant. One, slouched, seems to include mouth gesture, while slops, slithered, and slush are at least partly onomatopoeic. But how are we to classify the rest? Neither slut nor slum indicate the object by mouth gesture, and there is nothing onomatopoeic about sluggish. And yet they all hang together as a group of words expressive of unpleasant actions and appearances. Why is this? I suggest that it is because there is a slackness of jaw movement in sl-, a slackness reinforced in five out of the nine words by the -u- sound which follows and which cannot be pronounced without a downward movement of the jaw.

It is an interesting linguistic phenomenon for which we seem to have no descriptive term. All these words sound right in relation to their meanings (as does slime)—that is, most of them suggest something moistly unpleasant. And yet no objective sound (as in bleat, crash, or tinkle) is being imitated.

I would like to suggest that we call this phenomenon subjective onomatopoeia. It is, let me hasten to add, an aspect of language which has not gone unremarked. The OED records (as of 1860) an extension of onomatopoeia from pure echoism into a device of rhetoric, namely, “the use of naturally suggestive words, sentences, and forms for rhetorical effect.” The illustrative quotation (via Tennyson) is from Paradise Lost, Bk. II, lines 879-883:

on a sudden open fly,
With impetuous recoil and jarring sound,
Th’infernal doors, and on their hinges grate
Harsh thunder, that the lowest bottom shook
Of Erebus.

Writers on style have also touched on the subject. Herbert Read does so briefly in English Prose Style, as does Jespersen (whom Read quotes) and G.H. Vallins in The Best English. But an identifying term has so far been lacking.

Poets, naturally, have always been aware of the power of subjective onomatopoeia. It is hardly surprising that Tennyson should approve of Milton’s use of it. And Keats also uses it to good effect in a line in Autumn:

For summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells.

And not only to good effect but to surprising effect as well, since clammy, like slush and slime, ought to suggest something moistly unpleasant. Prison cells are clammy, and so are sewers and ghostly fingers laid on one’s arm. But Keats suppresses these associations by bringing the word into conjunction with the double m sound of summer and o’erbrimmed. Say the line aloud two or three times over and you can feel the honey sticking to your lips. Nothing unpleasant about that!

Once we are alerted to it, subjective onomatopoeia may be noticed at every turn. Can the full, sustained sound of enormous suggest anything other than a very large object, or the more restrained sound of tiny anything but the opposite? So too with meagre and mean, and perhaps even more obviously with smooth and soothe, the fitness of sound to sense is undeniable.

But to every rule there is bound to be an exception. The group of words with a fl- sound in them, suggestive of a flame, or the associated group of flight and flutter, suggestive of the flapping of a bird’s wing, make neat little packages in which gesture language and echoism both play a part. But flop, like slump, is a downward action which has nothing in common with the movement of a flame or a bird in flight. And the group of sl- words, mainly indicating unpleasant objects or ideas, is assailed by one of the most beautiful poetic words in the language. When the slut has emptied her slops and has returned to her slum and her slob of a husband, the pair of them will retire to their slumbers.

OBITER DICTA: Linguistic Hybrids

Frank R. Abate

Recently we have been noticing an interesting phenomenon, viz., phrases that combine English words and syntax with elements taken from Latin or French. Some of these hybrids are well established, some jocular or frivolous, some just wrong, but all share the characteristic of combining English with a (sometimes tiny) bit of another language that seems to retain its foreignness despite the English context.

Typical examples of the more established hybrids are “pie à la mode,” sometimes printed and most often pronounced without a French accent; “on the qui vive,” containing the French equivalent to “Who goes there?”; “ubi sunt theme” (sometimes “formula”), showing the Latin for “Where are they (now)?” used of a literary motif which addresses the transitoriness of life; “a certain je ne sais quoi,” often heard on the lips of those affecting a sophisticated air—wags with a flair for mockery have since coined “a certain je ne sais pas.”

The cited examples seem to possess some legitimacy of purpose or intent if not the sanction of tradition; at least they do not jar linguistic sensibilities too violently. But with widespread use of à la, as in “chicken à; la king,” there has been an erosion of traditional barriers and a way opened to hybrids that violate grammar or good taste. A growing number of restaurant menus tout “soup de jour” and “beef with au jus sauce.” Also on the increase in recent years are pseudo-sophisticated uses of French articles, for instance, “Le Car,” a compact car of French design and manufacture, “Le Bag,” seen on popularly marketed canvas satchels, and “La Shake,” a potable yogurt concoction. Such bastardizations are apparently considered very chic (not pronounced like the brand of jeans) by the Madison Avenue trendy-setters. While we might accept them as quaint little leaps of imagination, we wonder how one determines that Car and Bag are masculine and Shake feminine.

Readers of VERBATIM are encouraged to send to the editor’s attention other examples of linguistic hybrids that they have read or heard frequently. Please exclude from consideration nonce uses and legal Latinisms such as “writ of habeas corpus.” Combinations involving English and foreign languages other than Latin or French would be particularly appreciated. Contributions will appear in future issues.

OBITER DICTA: Molotov and Other Cocktails

J.B. Lawrence, San Bernardino, California

False etymologies abound. Here is a chance for your readers to step on one before it multiplies.

An AP dispatch today [6 July 1984] relating to the political rehabilitation of V.M. Molotov ended as follows: “During World War II Molotov’s name was on an order for mass production of bottles of flammable liquid that-could be used against German tanks. The Germans nicknamed the fire bombs ‘Molotov cocktails.’ ”

This may or may not be literally true, although the charm of the Molotov cocktail was that it was made from locally obtainable empty bottles, gasoline, and rags. I doubt that the overburdened Russian industry was grinding them out, but let that pass. The implication of this item, which is likely to become a bald assertion in the future, is that the name “Molotov Cocktail” was invented by the Germans some time after June, 1941, when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union.

The memory of old fogies like myself will contradict this, but documentation is needed. All I have at hand is a popularization called The World War II Quiz and Fact Book, by T.B. Benford (Harper & Row 1982), which says on page 27 that the M.c. “got its name from the Finns…in the winter of 1939-40.”

That isn’t good enough. A book called Men Against Tanks, by J. Weeks (Mason/Charter 1975), says on page 31 that the Spanish Civil War “produced” the M.c. This is confirmed by Guerilla Warfare, by “Yank” Levy (Penguin 1942, p.33). However, neither is explicit as to the origin of the name itself.

Can someone produce a clear citation showing the use of the term Molotov cocktail during the Spanish Civil War?

SIC! SIC! SIC!

Among the titles listed by Pocket Books as out of print as of 9/20/84 in Publishers Weekly, June 22, 1984, p. 114, is Words Most Often Misspelled & Misspronounced.

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“ ‘[Eckhard Schmitz] has just totally disappeared,’ said Larry Tankersly, chief investigator for the district attorney’s office.” [From the San Francisco Chronicle, June 9, 1984. Submitted by N.M. McGee, Daly City, California.]

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“It all depends on the rappaport you have with your doctor.” [From the Donahue Show, NBC, June 4, 1984. Submitted by Alma Denny, New York City.]

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“As a member of AAA East Florida, you are currently covered…under Group Policy No. AAA 00119. Benefits… include assistance with expenses incurred for the following services: Hospital room and board, Hospital services, including laboratory fees…cats and splints…” [From a mailing piece distributed by AAA-Medical Expense Rider, Miami, Florida. Submitted by Dr. Roy Graves, Winter Park, Florida.]

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“Remington bronze ‘Coming thru the Rye,’ P.J. Mene bronze soldier with brace of five dogs. Dated 1860. Box—, Pebble Beach—.” [From a classified advertisement in the Monterey Penninsula Herald, July 5, 1984. Submitted by Clifford L. Wolf, Pacific Grove, California.]

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“Your safety and the security of your personal property are of the upmost concern to those of us who welcome you as our guest.” [From a card in the rooms at the Holiday Inn, Dublin, Georgia. Submitted by Jennifer J. Goode, Atlanta, Georgia.]

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“Antony wondered what exactly he had done when he had joined the household on his father’s death at the age of 13.” [From The Bloody Book of Law, p. 24, by Sara Woods. Submitted by Si Goodwin, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots

Joseph T. Shipley, (The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1984), xxxiii + 636 pp.

In VERBATIM IX, No. 1, Summer 1982, p. 13, I was obliged to spend sixteen tiresome lines on Shipley’s Dictionary of Word Origins (1945), then reprinted. As if that wasn’t burden enough, America’s Oldest University Press (founded 1878: napping in senility?) has now wished on us a far more pricey enormity.

This book is beyond belief.

Pages 453-636 comprise simply a 2-columned Index of English Words. Index to what? To the alphabetized morass (1-451) of so called “roots” under which is found the most amazing midden of italicized words and isolated syllables (apparently meant to be Indo-European reconstructions) and unrelated dates and uncommented citations and barely relevant anecdotes and accumulated junk that defies classification.

At first I was affronted on opening the book by the absence of accents and length marks on the cited linguistic forms. Then I realized it really didn’t matter. Let’s follow Shipley-type logic: look up matter—one reference is ma II. This is said to be “imitative of a baby’s cry, or noise when suckling.” (I suppose we may agree to this under the condition that all suckling noises contain a Roman II.) Here we find Greek meter (no diacritics), as well as Dirac’s antimatter, Roman Maia, mammoth, mamma, mammals, and Mammillaria, a genus of cacti with “nipples.” Nowhere do we find out HOW these get derived and related.

Let’s move on to the entry peter, which we are told means ‘father.’ I thought at first a typesetter had missed his aim at a schwa in the first syllable and then a proofreader had nodded. But we soon see that’s too high-grade an error for this remarkable dungheap. For we immediately learn what should raise headlines in Athens: the Greek word is peter (goes with meter like his and hers, I guess). After that comes Latin and English (yep) pater. If you aren’t already down for the count, note that “Roman Jupiter is a blend of Gk Zeus-peter.” Then you can go on to such moonshine as Gk petros, petroleum, and “Step on the gas!”

I think I’ve already taken enough of your time. Don’t let them take any of your money.

[Eric P. Hamp, The University of Chicago]

EUREKA: The Third Man

Not having played the game and being one who generally eschews spectator sports, I only recently encountered the intelligence that there is a sort of back-up position in cricket called third man. Is it possible, I asked myself, that the title of Graham Greene’s novel is allusive? None of the Englishmen I asked had made the connection, but then, I might have asked the wrong ones…

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Dictionary of Modern Colloquial French and Faux Amis and Key Words

René James Hérail and Edwin A. Lovatt, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 327pp. and Philip Thody and Howard Evans, (Athlone Press, 1985), 224pp.

The Dictionary of Modern Colloquial French has a page-size about the same as that of VERBATIM, contains 327 pages, and weighs a quarter of a ton. It is therefore anything but a pocket-book, unless you are a gamekeeper or have an eccentric tailor. You’re hardly going to whip it out in a Marseille bistro on hearing a new bit of argot while taking your apè (‘aperitif’). Anyway, it doesn’t give apé, only the more common apéro.

The bulk of the tome means that for practical purposes it is less likely to be used in conversation than to be consulted in the study or library for translating colloquial language that is written rather than spoken. Accordingly, I tried it out on a few pages taken at random from Raymond Queneau’s highly argotique (and immensely entertaining) Zazie dans le métro, a severe test which it passed very successfully as far as including the slang words is concerned.

For this the book deserves high marks. However, what is odd about it, extremely odd, is the translations into English (for it is a one-way traffic, French-English only). On the first page we are told that à table! means ‘Grub’s up!’ A few entries later the example given for the use of abattage is J’ai pris un vache abbatage du prof, which apparently means “Teacher gave me one hell of a slating.” The French is fine, but the English strikes me as very strange. As Jack Lemmon says to Tony Curtis after his Cary Grant impersonation in Some Like It Hot, “No-bod-y talks like that.”

Accrocher is to ‘have a barney.’ And so on, with a multitude of old-fashioned words, phrases and expletives such as By Jove! By jiminy! Strewth! Crumbs! and Crikey! This is all very entertaining, if not intentionally so. If any francophone reader gets hold of the book, he or she will be going about talking like someone out of P. G. Wodehouse, which should at least add to the gaiety of nations. A particularly enjoyable entry is the one for Acrobate, ‘a cat-burglar, or character who always lands on his feet.’ As in Lui faire faillite?! N’y comptez pas, c’est un drôle d’acrobate! which is rendered into modern colloquial English as ‘He’ll never be in Queer Street, he treads the tight-rope of high finance like a real trooper!’ Apart from anything else, the word is “trouper,” which has quite a different meaning. Likewise “poufter” (for homosexual) should be “poofter.”

On some occasions it is a pity that the authors do not provide a word-by-word translation. For example, Andouille à col roulé is correctly translated as ‘prick, cock, or penis,’ but it would have been helpful to add the literal translation, which is ‘a roll-necked sausage.’

René James Hérail is half-French; Edwin A. Lovatt comes from New Zealand. Perhaps this explains why the English slang strikes this English reader as so awkward and so dated. Still, there is no need to give them one hell of a slating for their French, which is just as well since they teach it at the University of Leeds.

So too do Professor Thody and Howard Evans. Their book also has its eccentricities, though in a rather more self-aware manner. The free-wheeling approach of Faux Amis and Key Words is indicated by the sub-title: “A dictionary-guide to French language, culture and society through lookalikes and confusibles.” The well-known false friends are here, such as interéssant, déception, and important, as well as the classic examples of a linguistic chassé-croisé (‘cross-fire’) such as the pairs Secretary of State/Minister of State and Ministre d’Etat/Sécretaire d’Etat, vicar/curate and curé/vicaire, chicory/endive and endive/chicorée.

As well as helping students of French to avoid making mistakes which are to be found even in highly reputable translations, the book delightfully fulfills its subtitle’s promise of being a guide to French culture, society, and indeed history. The digressions are so informative and entertaining that this is one dictionary that can be enjoyably read straight through rather than merely consulted when in difficulty. Many entries are like mini-essays or short stories. An example taken almost at random is the one on rude, which does not have its English sense but rather means coarse or harsh. The authors then tell us that when Robert Damiens (1715-57), a servant who tried to stab Louis XV with a penknife, having “learned that he was to have his right hand burned off, boiling pitch poured into his wounds, and be torn apart by horses, he commented—to the horrified admiration of Diderot—la journée sera rude, it’s going to be a hard day.”

I highly recommend this instructive, informative, and entertaining book.

[Richard Boston, Reading, Berkshire]

EUREKA: Ngaio Marsh

I seem to have known for a long time that ngaio, the given name of the late Novo-Zelanian author of detective novels, was a Maori word, but only recently did I learn that it is the name of a New Zealand shrub or tree, related to the Australian blueberry tree and the Hawaiian bastard sandalwood, the wood of which was used for making gunstocks. Its Hawaiian name is naio. Am I—have I been—missing some allusive reason for her parents so naming the famous writer? Do ngaios grow in marshes? Is there something else suggested?

Laurence Urdang

Paring Pairs No. 19

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). Is Cambridge U. run by the vice squad?
(b). Is Hollywood star acting as Christmas reveler?
(c). Disney septet’s East End debtors' song.
(d). — —, no cheese.
(e). Broke.
(f). Patron of jailbirds.
(g). Solmization artist.
(h). Tigers, lions, leopards, etc., need the birch.
(i). Opera(tors) for trams.
(j). Labyrinth offers corny surprise.
(k). True Christian love leaves one open-mouthed.
(l). Everyone accounted for in change-ringing.
(m). Where are you going? Into a decline?
(n). Carriage sweeps all before it.
(o). She’s taken up with hairier fellow.
(p). Unassailable with a lavender dress on.
(q). Pantechnicon provides this.
(r). Harrowing experience.
(s). Suitor’s ordinary squabble.
(t). Stops in the orchestra for “Mary Seton, Mary Beeton, Mary Carmichael, and me.”
(u). Deep in the whisky business.
(v). Professional write would be prohibitive.
(w). Possession allows one to view the Buddhist in the spring.
(x). Boardinghouse sailor has a quartering breeze.
(y). Citified, suave cowpuncher.
(z). This team has an evil hold on you.

(1). A.
(2). All.
(3). Away.
(4). Broad.
(5). Broom.
(6). Brush.
(7). Car.
(8). Cat.
(9). Cowboy.
(10). Dicks.
(11). Do.
(12). Dough.
(13). Experience.
(14). Eye.
(15). Four.
(16). Gape.
(17). Hell.
(18). Her.
(19). In.
(20). Kin.
(21). Kneads.
(22). Knick.
(23). Maize.
(24). Men.
(25). Miss.
(26). Moving.
(27). New.
(28). No.
(29). Oh.
(30). Plain.
(31). Pro.
(32). Razing.
(33). Re.
(34). Reach.
(35). Rule.
(36). Saint.
(37). Scribe.
(38). See.
(39). Sin.
(40). Squad.
(41). Stalls.
(42). Still.
(43). Suitor.
(44). Tiff.
(45). Told.
(46). Urbane.
(47). Violet.
(48). Vise.
(49). Waters.
(50). Whey.
(51). Wither.
(52). Zen.

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. 18

(a). Watch for the “Man of the Year” cover article. (45, 29) Time Piece.
(b). Twist fourth (third?) digit. (53, 16) Wring Finger.
(c). Prompter affords relief. (33, 2) Role Aid.
(d). C, C, C, C, C, C, C. (38, 36) Seven Seas.
(e). An augur on the town. (39, 37) Sight Seer.
(f). There is something in a vacuum! (Don’t be too sheepish.) (12, 15) Double Ewe.
(g). Foggy conditions aboard ship. (6, 51) Bell Weather.
(h). Hillumination for Christmas tree in port? (4, 25) Arbor Lights.
(i). Comics have trick joints. (17, 22) Fun Knees.
(j). (De)pressing golf club. (34, 21) Sad Iron.
(k). Too much (in years). (28, 1) Over Age.
(l). Head of Solidarnosc. (30, 31) Poll Position.
(m). “Dessert’s ready!” (27, 7) Mousse Call.
(n). Embassy from the Rams? (26, 5) Mission Aries.
(o). Source of hydrocephaly. (19, 50) Head Water.
(p). Provides cash flow at the orchard. (3, 48) Apple Turnover.
(q). Religious bigshot. (9, 8) Church Cannon.
(r). Enrol for prison penmanship class. (11, 35) Con Script.
(s). What an aggregation! (42, 47) Sum Total.
(t). Knight’s garment worn over armor. (40, 10) Sir Coat.
(u). Surd nocturnal warmonger. (23, 18) Knight Hawk.
(v). Siamese expired—just a crazy pattern. (44, 14) Tie Dyed.
(w). Record—the other way emphatically. (32, 13) Right Down.
(x). Blister is a real drag. (49, 46) Under Toe.
(y). Ambisextrous ambidextrous. (43, 20) Switch Hitter.
(z). Lie in ambush to test the garland’s gravity. (52, 24) Weigh Lei.

The correct answer is (41) Soufflé. The winner was Andrew F. Downey, Jr., Atlanta, Georgia. The European winner of No. 17 was Dr. J.M. Varney, London.

The European winner of No. 16 was Helen Reynolds, Cambridge.

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“We’ve been buried before, but we’ve never had dirt thrown in our faces.” [Coach Riley of the Philadelphia Lakers, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times, May 28, 1985. Submitted by Jean MacAllister, Beverly Hills.]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Counter-revolutionary, as Cuba (6)
5. In caress, the French get sloppy (8)
9. Unattractive types who get no RSVP’s? (10)
10. Smart chick curtailed (4)
11. Bugs Crosby crony endlessly for dance (5, 3)
12. 50 A.D., the German way up (6)
13. Move pen (4)
15. Viking’s crude manners get zero (8)
18. Mouth organ lacks a partial tone (8)
19. Confiscate receipts (4)
21. There’s change for the Queen (6)
23. Awake like some babes —fighting mad! (2, 2, 4)
25. Geisha’s first sash in Asian area (4)
26. No extra bit can be excessive (10)
27. Quick Indians make laws (8)
28. Suffer last (6)

Down

2. African in Durban turban (5)
3. Mystery scam with a French snare (9)
4. Small insult (6)
5. Job for those who’ve been to the market—or for those preparing to go (8, 7)
6. Normal sizes, but they could make us larger (8)
7. Even beheaded, Euclid could be clear (5)
8. Cook’s aid has most of recipe going up in fire (5, 4)
14. Carry away ragged torn parts (9)
16. Taken out, etc., among adults only (9)
17. A stinger can make you most irate (8)
20. Likely fluid as bilge, alternatively (6)
22. Armed robbery is the bust… (5)
24. …and busted Italian makes the Big House (5)

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“…send black and white prints…related to cruising in a stiffened envelope to…” [From the Cruising Association Bulletin (U.K.), September 1984. Submitted by Vaughan Meyrick, Welwyn Garden City, England.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Sex abuse leaves parents groping.” [Headline in The Morning Call, Allentown, Pennsylvania, May 21, 1985. Submitted by Alvin J. Olsen, Zionsville, Pennsylvania.]

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. ORCHESTRA.
6. Cast e.
9. EXTROVERT.
10. ENACT.
11. H-a-lt-er.
12. UMBRELLA.
14. Young all antisocial.
16. Ex-P.E.-1.
19. El-der.
20. Th-rash-ing.
21. Coven-try.
23. S-tree-t.
26. Don-ut.
27. UND-ermine.
28. TASTE.
29. YAMMERERS.

Down

1. OPEN H-ouse.
2. CATALOG.
3. Hotel opening.
4. The-e.
5. Al-time-ters.
6. CHEERL-ess.
7. Small.
8. Complex transaction.
9. CANTERBURY.
15. LORGNETTE.
17. Prime time.
18. LIGHTNESS.
21. C-ade-T.
22. Ve-nus.
24. TERSE.
25. Edam.

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