VOL XII, No 3 [Winter, 1986]

Polysemania, Semantic Taint, and Related Conditions

John Ellison Kahn, London

pol·y·se·ma·ni·a (\?\polisi\?\meinia) n [POLYSEMY + MANIA; syncope of polysemimania: compare mineralogy] (1985) an abnormal awareness of possible ambiguity; an uncontrollable tendency to bring to mind the inappropriate or unintended sense of a word in any context.

A traveling companion looks up from her book—a collection of science-fiction stories—and says “It’s a dead giveaway, this one: the lead character’s name is Hilda … don’t you see?—Hitler.” A word- and hormone-intoxicated friend during my adolescence (“I wonder who that friend could be”—Ogden Nash) constantly trades tenuous double entendres with his fellow schoolboys (“There’s something I want to put to that Gloria.” “Yes, it’s time you got something straight between the two of you.”) to the point where ordinary conversation becomes impossible (hormone! conversation! becomes!) In its extreme form, the overingenious poet or crossword puzzler is afflicted by a hysterical muteness, having arrived at the mad (and obvious) intuition that almost any utterance is susceptible of a faulty interpretation. (And the microbiologist ended by starving himself, knowing what he knew, and unable to trust the purity of any food offered to him.)

Like neurosis, polysemania afflicts us all to some degree; the occasional registering of an unintended pun might almost be taken as a proof, or at least a condition, of our semantic competence (just as various mild neuroses are the lot, and the proof, of our Western humanness, Freud suggested). But only those whose neuroses are fairly disabling need be thought of as neurotics, and only those whose powers of communication and comprehension are seriously impaired by polysemy need be regarded as polysemaniacs. (In both conditions, the problem, of course, is deciding on the cut-off point.)

Polysemania is not new. Hamlet and Othello were victims of it in their way. Pathological punsters have no doubt always plagued polite society, and willful verbal misunderstandings have always ruined human relationships. The history of linguistic taboo even reveals a mild kind of mass polysemania: the discontinuation of ādl, ‘illness,’ in Old English (to be replaced by the euphemism disease) through a clash with adela, ‘dirt,’ was not the work of some individual polysemaniac; similarly, the 20th-century decline, noted by Bloomfield, in the use of cock in American English to refer to a male chicken points to a nationwide awareness of and embarrassment at the awkward dual meaning of the word.

Polysemania does, however, seem to be more widespread today than in former times. There are several reasons for this. Perhaps there is, for a start, simply more polysemy about of the relevant kind: new metaphorical senses, through the process of “radiation,” are continually accumulating. And there is perhaps more semantic sensitivity, too (which is not to deny that there is also greater insensitivity nowadays than formerly). The fashion for self-scrutiny and self-improvement perhaps prompts middle-class speakers to reflect more carefully on the words they use and hear. The media have taken to showing a greater interest in language than in the past: the newspaper columns of William Safire or Philip Howard, for instance, or the various series of BBC radio programs on language—examining current usage and monitoring abuses—have sharpened the lay educated public’s linguistic alertness. Finally, modern philosophical, linguistic, and literary methods of analysis (as these have filtered into secondary and higher education) encourage an intense concentration on individual words—their several kinds of ambiguity, the amount of scrutiny they seem to demand.

But you cannot encourage a sensitivity to words without risking a hypersensitivity. The overingenious readings of Empson and occasionally of Leavis stem partly from a semantic overloading of the words in a text—the attribution of a 20th-century meaning, for instance, to a word in a 17th-century poem. More of this in a moment. Overheated word-consciousness is a particularly favorable environment for various other linguistic conditions: polysemy proper, connotation, “semantic taint,” “idio-connotation,” and so on.

Connotation seems to gain strength in the hothouse of a word-conscious mind. The honorific/pejorative associations of a word tend to intensify. This is true of both universal connotations (stingy = bad; thrifty = good) and optional connotations (parsimonious = good or bad, according to the context, or to your own feelings about the word and the world; similarly conservative, genteel, muckraker: you may regard these terms favorably or unfavorably, but the chances are that your regard is a fairly strongly felt one).

It is true, too, of “idio-connotation”—the unique set of associations that a word has for an individual user—its semantic fingerprint, so to speak. Proust’s place-names provide a standard example. An example of my own: in my family, a common term of endearment is Petunia (based on pet?), and I cannot hear the word petunia “purely,” even when it is spoken by a florist. One last example: when I was eight or nine, I read the following definition on a sweet wrapper: “A damsel is a little plum.” (The joke, such as it is, had to be explained to me by my father.) To this day, I cannot divest the word damson or the word plum of a slightly saucy overtone.

The modern word-conscious mind is a good breeding-ground too for “suggestibles,” as they have been called. The word fatuous has a suggestible: fat. Polysemaniacs cannot read or hear the word fatuous without conjuring up some image or other of fatness, possibly a paunchy wise-guy at a party. Near-homonymy generates and sustains obvious suggestibles for such words as titter and hoary, and even farfetched “idio-suggestibles”: pith, for instance (as a result of a joke about lisping); or prognathous for prognosis.

When a word acquires a distinctive coloring in any of these various ways, it can be said to suffer “semantic taint.” (This does not imply deterioration—witness petunia— though the taint usually does take that form.) The words appeasement and pacification, in the wake of Munich and Cambodia, have acquired distinctly unfavorable connotations. It would be a very ignorant or a very audacious speaker who used appeasement in a quite neutral and literal way today. Appeasement and even pacification have probably gone further than just acquiring new connotations and have acquired new denotations too. It is in fact polysemy that is the major cause of semantic taint. Gay and queer are more clear-cut examples. Their relatively recently acquired denotations have strongly tainted, though not quite yet fully tabooed out of existence the use of the words in their earlier senses. No up-to-date language-user could unselfconsciously speak or write the words gay and queer in their old acceptations. Not so much through fear of being misunderstood as through fear of raising an inappropriate laugh. Traditionalists may continue in defiance to parade the word gay forthrightly in its older sense (though attested in British underworld slang as long ago as 1935, gay in the sense of ‘homosexual’ became widely established only in the late 1960s and early 70s), but in their decrying of the new sense and its “annexation” of the word they are in effect admitting its firm hold. Or consider the modern use of pathetic in British English, ‘inadequate, feeble, useless,’ which is now almost certainly more frequent than the older sense of ‘arousing sympathy; pitiful.’ It would be unwise, in Britain at least, to write of “the prima ballerina’s pathetic performance in Swan Lake” if what you are intending is a eulogy.

Though the turnover of the primary meanings of words is greater today than in past times, it remains a turnover of dominance rather than of existence. A primary sense may be overshadowed and subordinated, but it is likely to persist for a long time. Surprise in the sense of ‘to see or attack unexpectedly; to catch unawares’ survives, though the more modern sense of ‘to astonish, shock, or amaze’ had probably gained the ascendancy as long ago as the early 18th century. (Similarly, jealous, intercourse, luxuriously.) Not that all dethroned senses survive, of course; the displaced senses of disease and crafty, for instance, have died out, but that was the work of generations if not centuries. (Similarly, obsequious, silly, admirable, undertaker, edify, quaint, quick, curious, sad, lewd, cunning, shrewd.)

The “survival” of a sense is a tricky notion, however. A dislodged sense may survive merely in people’s passive rather than active vocabularies. Educated speakers would understand (though not without being distracted) the phrase “friendly intercourse between the nations,” but they would be unlikely to initiate it in ordinary conversation. Some words, even though “tainted,” do remain in the active repertoire, since there is no convenient synonym. Balls, to take the most obvious example. Circumlocution is sometimes possible: “I’ll meet you at the courts, and get some tennis-balls on the way.” But not consistently: you cannot repeatedly complain that “Our tennis-balls keep disappearing”; at some point you have to speak simply of “our balls.” The middlingly sensitive man will after a time stop noticing the notional ambiguity; the polysemaniac will be pulled up short every time and have to grit his teeth and wait for the distraction to fade.

What remedy? “Try not to think of an elephant” goes the children’s joke. Try likewise not to be distracted: for the polysemaniac, prurient puns never lose their gloss, their incapacitating distractiveness. Further examples: diaphragm, come, fairy, grope, hole, period, piles, pill, prick, screw, stool, streak, tart, tool—all tainted, all indispensable.

To a greater or lesser degree, many tainted terms are dispensed with nowadays. In some cases, the loss is a small one, since the word in its old or unprovocative sense may be old-fashioned anyway and easily substitutable: bondage, curse (“ ‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried/The lady of Shalott”), ejaculate, erection, gay and intercourse again, make love (“Emma found, on being escorted and followed into the second carriage by Mr. Eiton, that the door was to be lawfully shut on them, and that they were to have a tête-à-tête drive … scarcely had they passed the sweep-gate and joined the other carriage, than she found her subject cut up—her hand seized—her attention demanded, and Mr. Elton actually making violent love to her”), lover, motion, prophylactic, seduce (though A. L. Rowse, just a few years ago, wrote in the TLS of “the half-wild cat I am engaged in seducing at present.”)

With other shunned expressions, however, the loss is clearly an impoverishment. It would be very risky in British English to use back passage in its literal sense. The following sentence, from The Yearbook of the British Pirandello Society, 1981, is almost certain to elicit a snigger: “Also, in the finale, the audience see the aunt, Lena, touching La Demente for the first time, but it’s behind the pane, in the back passage.” So too with pick up, jerk off (“She watched Rena back the yellow Mini into the main stream of traffic and jerk off to the right. Then she let out a low sigh.”— A. N. Wilson, The Healing Art), and so on.

Note that semantic taint is not always sexual or scatological in origin. Taint can be transmitted by political associations (fellow traveler, solidarity, comrade), modern history (holocaust, Watergate, Lebanon), sociology (chauvinist, WASP, certifiable), entertainment (python, Tom Jones), science (transplant, plastic—“God’s plastic arm”), or mockery or puristic disapproval (vogue words and modern clichés such as ongoing situation, adrenalin, and parameter, and “misuses” such as aggravate, hopefully, psychological moment, and viable).

How disabling is semantic taint, really? The fact is, it seldom generates fully paralyzing polysemania. Empsonians do manage to continue reading, even after undertaking their exhaustive analyses of single words within a poem or play. Perhaps some natural immune-system comes into operation to counteract semantic taint. When the commonest linguistic microorganisms—make, thing, pull, blow, rear—acquire bawdy meanings, then some filter or antibody must be at work if linguistic life and sanity are to be preserved. Or rather, some controlling mechanism: the virus is not destroyed but kept in check. It is as though one goes through life with a mild fever. One copes. One accepts one’s hopelessly anachronistic readings of old texts, but puts them to one side: “A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk” (Boswell, quoting Johnson).

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay …
All things fall and are built again,
And those that build them again are gay.
—W. B. Yeats, “Lapis Lazuli.”

You did not come.
And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.
—Thomas Hardy, “A Broken Appointment.”

The modern senses of gay and come must not be allowed to affect one’s final reading of such lines, even though they will almost inevitably enter one’s consciousness and impinge on one’s first reading.

A few corollaries and qualifications:

First, alongside semantic taint, there seems to be a reverse process, though it is quite rare. In certain contexts in certain dialects, the words bugger and shit, for instance, may undergo decontamination, as it were: “He’s an energetic little bugger, that youngster of yours”; “Hey shit, man, look at that car move!” More subtly, terms originating as metaphors may through frequent use come to lose their metaphorical feel: just as abysmal no longer evokes the idea of an abyss, so perhaps virgin snow no longer evokes the idea of a virgin.

Second, British and American English differ in semantic taint. Some expressions that are tainted for North Americans—rubber, notably—are free of taint for most British speakers. And vice versa: back passage (again), bog, on the job, sod, spanking, stuff. (Compare the differing standard interpretations of to knock up or to keep your pecker up in British English and American English.)

Third, some words seem to remain surprisingly resistant to taint. In conversation, for example, it is the centuries-old sexual association rather than the standard sense that has been subordinated. (Contrast intercourse.) So too with know. More recent stalwarts include fruit, hump, nuts, purge, skin, and aides. Or so it seems to me. But this might just be my idio-connotation, or lack of it. A proper survey is needed to ascertain the truth of the matter here.

Fourth—accordingly—research is necessary. A few pointers, then, by way of conclusion, for some adventurous doctoral student in search of a dissertation: try to draw up a comparative service list of various tainted words decade by decade this century; to what extent has come, for instance, declined in recent years, and been replaced by arrive where appropriate?; trace the fluctuations in popularity of such given names as Lou, John, Adolph (and Hilda?) over the years; devise tests (along the lines of The Measurement of Meaning by Osgood et al.) for measuring semantic taint, and propose ways of incorporating the results of such tests into standard English dictionaries; compare the 27 stylistic values—poetic, facetious, laudatory, vulgar, and so on-used in A. S. Hornby’s Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English.

Two examples, finally, of the kind of material that might be used in testing a subject’s “distraction-index” in the course of such research. Try assessing in yourself the “purity” of your response to the humor of the following joke, and to the datedness (or simple badness) of the lines of poetry:

“How can you put up a sign saying ‘Beware of the Dog?'—that dog of yours doesn’t even have any teeth left…”

“That’s true, but if he ever gets his jaws around your ankle, he can give you a really nasty suck.”

Her beauty smooth’d earth’s furrow’d face!

She gave me tokens three:—

A look, a word of her winsome mouth,
And a wild raspberry.

—Francis Thompson, “Daisy.”

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Footnotes

1. See pp. 32 and 159 respectively. The informant using peckerwood was born on 10th March 1887 in Kosciusko, Attala County, Mississippi. No such clues are given for hoppergrass, however.

2. Even some examples of reversal can be explained as folk etymology. Thus when Wîhoppe, ‘hoopoe’ becomes Hopwîwecken (see above), the second element (-wîweken) can be taken to mean ‘female,’ as Suolahti points out (p. 14). However, the larger incidence of ‘nonsensical’ reversals still suggests that, in transposition, word-play is the primary motive.

Patterned Words and Phrases

Barbara Hunt Lazerson, Illinois State University

In a sky-breaking ceremony that was held in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in March 1981, a helicopter hovered 318 feet above the ground to mark what was to be the top of a planned 28-story structure. In May of the preceding year, debris from Mount St. Helens, a volcano in Washington state, had caused a baseball game to be ashed out. TV Guide¹ has published a cop’s-eye view of the program Hill Street Blues; the Chicago Tribune² has published a man’s-eye view of Dr. Joyce Brothers’ book. What Every Woman Should Know about Men; and Today³ has presented a child’s-eye view of being homeless. Newspaper articles have dealt with jayjoggers, jaydriving, jaymarching, and joysailing. Illegal aliens from Canada have been labeled icebacks and snowbacks. Johnny Carson has jokingly referred to illegal aliens from outer space as spacebacks. Desmond Wilson, who for six years was a star of the TV sitcom Sanford and Son, has declared that he is a Johnny Jesus-seed because he is now a full-time evangelist who plants his religious seeds and goes on. These terms, all of which have appeared in the media in recent years, fill one with a sense of lexical déjà vu; and rightly so, for they were patterned after ground-breaking ceremony, rained out, bird’s-eye view, jaywalkers, jaywalking, joyriding, wetbacks, and Johnny Appleseed, respectively. As The Second Barnhart Dictionary of New English⁴ has pointed out, a patterned form “is distinctive because it might never have been coined had a previous form or pattern of forms not existed to serve as the blueprint for its creation.” The mechanism underlying this phenomenon is illustrated by a statement made by movie critic Neal Gabler on Sneak Previews⁵ regarding the movie The Lord of the Flies: “They call some books a good read. Well, this movie is a good watch.” A farrago of patterned forms is discussed below. When such information is available, an earliest-use date, which usually appears in parentheses after the word, is provided for those terms that have been accepted by lexicographers as a permanent part of the language. Unless otherwise specified, this date is from Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1983).

According to Suffixes and Other Word-Final Elements of English, ⁶ -buster is “a noun and a noun-forming word-final element, derived from the verb bust ‘burst, break’ and -er [‘a person who does or performs an action’], used in combination meaning ‘a person or thing that breaks or breaks up something’ named by the combining root: sodbuster, broncobuster, bellybuster.” Lexicographers have listed several words ending in -buster. Webster’s Ninth has recorded as main entries broncobuster (1887) ‘one who breaks wild horses to the saddle’; trustbuster (1903) ‘one who seeks to break up business trusts; specif: a federal official who prosecutes trusts under the antitrust laws’; sodbuster (ca. 1918) ‘one (as a farmer or a plow) that breaks the sod’; gangbuster (1940) ‘one engaged in the aggressive breakup of organized criminal gangs’ (the radio show that was apparently the source of this term was first broadcast in 1936); blockbuster (1942), a term that began its lexical life during World War II as the label for the 8,000-pound bombs dropped by the RAF, so called because one bomb could destroy an entire city block. Barnhart’s Second has recorded fuzzbuster (1977) ‘an electronic device for detecting radar,’ from fuzz, slang for police + -buster, so called because the device makes police radar ineffective, and silo buster (1977) ‘a nuclear missile designed to destroy enemy silos to prevent a retaliatory attack.’ 9,000 Words⁷ has recorded chartbusters (no date) ‘one that is a best seller; esp: a best-selling phonograph record.’ While this list of terms is incomplete because not every -buster word created between 1887, the date given for broncobuster, and 1983, the year Webster’s Ninth and 9,000 Words were published, is included in “the” dictionary, the list is undoubtedly accurate in suggesting that for nearly a century compounds ending in -buster were produced only intermittently. However, this changed dramatically in 1984 with the advent of the movie Ghostbusters. This mega-hit had been preceded by months of media hype that featured the international symbol for prohibition (a circle with a diagonal line cutting it in half) imposed upon a stylized picture of a ghost. This popular comedy about ghost exterminators served as the impetus for the creation of a plethora of neologisms. The baker’s dozen that follow are but a sample: backache busters, exercises designed to reduce or eliminate back pain; bug busters, a humorous label for specialists who rid software of bugs and a trendy term for techniques that will rid the house of bugs; clichébusters, an epithet for that group of language guardians known as the Unicorn Hunters who included -busters in their 10th annual list of words and phrases to be banished from the English language; dust busters, a support group that helps women deal with housework; fake Apple busters, those who try to rid the market of foreign-made clones of the Apple computer; funbusters, an epithet given to the police in a central Illinois college town because of their efforts to control beer-drinking parties; holiday stress-busters, suggestions for reducing holiday-related stress; nailbiter busters, artificial nails that keep you from biting your natural nails; Reaganbusters, a group of students who tried to keep President Reagan from being re-elected; thugbuster, an epithet for Bernhard Goetz, who shot four teen-agers on a New York subway; troll busters, a label for those who harass vagrants in Santa Cruz, California, where vagrants are known as trolls; waistbusters, exercises designed to reduce one’s waist; weed busters, what a lawncare company called itself in an advertisement that promised the elimination of dandelions, thistles, and other weeds. It is highly likely that this word-generating phenomenon will subside long before Ghostbusters is relegated to the late, late show. Be that as it may, the “neologorrhea” stimulated by this movie has been of such a magnitude that The 1985 World Book Year Book⁸ has commented on it: “Ghostbusters … became the most successful comedy ever released in the United States. The term busters became part of American pop culture, appearing in advertising for insecticides (Roachbusters), cigarette warnings (Smokebusters), and other products.” USA Today⁹ has labeled this lexical phenomenon buster-mania and the resultant neologisms busterisms.

It has taken sixty-five years for only a handful of collar terms to be added to the language, and semantic restrictions make it highly unlikely that such adjectives will ever proliferate in the way -buster terms have. The “ur-term” was white-collar (1920), a label for those who hold jobs that do not require them to wear protective clothing. White-collar was followed by three other adjectives, each of which was based upon the color of the work clothes allegedly worn by people in a particular branch of the workforce: blue-collar (1946), a label for those who do manual labor; gray-collar (1968¹⁰), a label for those who repair television sets, washing machines, and similar equipment; pink-collar (1977), a label for those in jobs that traditionally have been held by women. The latest addition to this list of “chromatic” collar terms is gold-collar, a word too new to be included in even the most recently published dictionary. Gold-collar was introduced by Robert E. Kelley in his book The Gold-Collar Worker (Addison-Wesley, 1985) as a label for that new breed of workers—lawyers, computer programmers, stock analysts, community planners, scientists, researchers, editors, and engineers—who engage in complex problem-solving. In this case, gold alludes not to the color of a work uniform, but to the elite status of these cream-of-the-crop workers who are so valuable that they have mobility in even a tight job market. Collar terms based upon features other than color have also appeared in recent years. Ralph Whitehead, a University of Massachusetts professor, has coined new-collar to label that third of the baby-boom generation who are what he calls the “workhorses of the service community.” These new-collar workers, who are employed as clerks, keypunch operators, insurance agents, teachers, nurses, and secretaries, are under 45 and have family incomes of between $20,000 and $40,000. Small-collar was used by Time¹¹ to refer to youngsters who sell seeds in order to earn money. This undoubtedly will prove to be a nonce term. By way of contrast, steel-collar, which dates from approximately 1982,¹² shows signs of becoming a permanent part of the language; for robots “who” have been called steel-collar workers and a steel-collar workforce, appear to be the wave of the future where industry is concerned. Robots have also been referred to as iron-collar workers, but I doubt that iron-collar will be able to compete successfully with steel-collar.

Culture shock (ca. 1960) entered the language approximately a quarter of a century ago as the name for the confusion and anxiety that can affect a person who is suddenly exposed to an alien culture without adequate preparation. In the intervening years, Americans have been shocked by a variety of things that have been given labels by the media. For example, squeezing one’s overweight body into a formfitting dress results in size shock; coping with the demands of an infant gives new parents baby shock; being required to select a personal computer from the myriad that are available produces a condition known variously as computer shock, personal computer shock, and option shock; and viewing the numerous tragedies—e.g., the hostage crisis in Beirut—presented on TV results in tube shock. However, inflation has been by far the greatest source of shock terms; for journalists have created names for the distress resulting from the high price of cars (sticker shock), college degrees (sheepskin shock), electricity (meter shock, electricity shock), utilities in general (rate shock), petroleum (oil shock), mortgages (mortgage payment shock, payment shock), interest on the use of credit cards (credit shock), and bills in general (bill shock). But it is future shock, Alvin Toffler’s label for the physical and psychological distress resulting from one’s inability to cope with rapid social and technological change, that has become the most widely used of all shock terms. In fact, future shock, which Toffler introduced in a 1965 magazine article,¹³ became a national buzzword when his book by that name was published in 1970. Since then, past shock and present shock, which, as used in the media, mean essentially the same thing as future shock, have been created to fill the lexical gaps in the time dimension suggested by Toffler’s term. Other neologisms based upon future shock have been created by replacing shock with similar sounding words: future schlock, a generic term for the new junk foods that will soon be on the market; future shuck, a derogatory term for the prognostications made by futurists; future frock, a dress soon to be worn by the fashion-conscious; future shack, the maintenance-free home of the future. By simply adding -s to future, one journalist created futures shock, a label for the consternation that swept through the commodity futures industry in the spring of 1985 when it was learned that the customers of Volume Investors Corp., a member of the Commodity Exchange, might lose about $3.5 million as a result of that firm’s collapse. Finally, cartoonist Thaves, who draws Frank and Ernest, has replaced both future and shock with sound-alike words to create Feature Schlock, the name of an imaginary documentary about the making of a TV miniseries.

A whodunit is a mystery novel, play, or motion picture that challenges the reader or viewer to figure out who committed a crime, usually a murder. Whodunit (1930) is an interesting term from a patterning perspective because it consists of three words, all of which have been changed, either singly or in parts, to produce new triadic nouns. Barnhart’s Second lists whydunit (1971), which it defines as ‘a mystery novel, play, or motion picture which deals primarily with the motivation for the crime.’ Similar terms that have appeared in the media in recent years are who’ll-do-it, whatsawit, whodunwhat, and howdunit. The mix-and-match quality of these five progeny suggests that the patterning potential of whodunit is far from exhausted.

Some borrowed phrases that still retain their foreign quality have generated phrases patterned after them. Pièce de résistance (1839) has produced the sound-alike pièce de residence, an eye-catching designation for a magnificent lakefront residence in the Chicago area. From tour de force (1805) has come tour de farce, a “punny” label for the NBC-TV contemporary comedy, Saturday Night Live. Soup du jour (ca. 1945) has given us scoop du jour, a humorous term for an exclusive news story, and sloop du jour, which is what cartoonist Thaves has called a sailboat that is used as a daily ferry.

Even an acronym can produce patterned progeny, as Yuppie (Young Urban Professional + -pie) has demonstrated. This vogue term, which may have been influenced by Yippie (the label for a person belonging to Youth International Party, a hippie organization) has stimulated wordsmiths to create a plethora of similar acronyms that almost invariably have been used in a tongue-in-cheek manner: Buppie = Black Urban Professional; Grumpie = Grownup Mature Person; Cuppie = Gay Urban Professional; Juppie = Japanese Urban Professional; Mummy = Mature Upwardly Mobile Mommy; Muppie = Mature Urban Professional (a Yuppie who has reached the age of 40); Puppie = Pregnant Urban Professional; Scampie = Societally Conscious, Affluent, Mature Parent; Schleppy = Screwed-up, Haggard, Lackluster, Exhausted Person; Yappie = Young Aspiring Professional; Yechie = Young Elite Chicagoan; Yubbie = Young Urban Breadwinner; Yucky = Yammering Urban Curmudgeon; Yuffie = Young Urban Failure; Yummie = Young Urban Mafioso; Yummy = Young Upwardly Mobile Mommy; Yumpy = Young Upwardly Mobile Papa or Young Upwardly Mobile Professional. Additionally, Yuppie has resulted in the creation of yuplash ‘a strong, negative reaction against the Yuppie concept,’ patterned after backlash (ca. 1957¹⁴); yupscale, after upscale (1972); Yupper West Side, after Upper West Side; and onward and yupward, after onward and upward.

Rhyming and opposition are the ready handmaidens of patterning. Rhyming has produced colorful terms such as sky à la mode—a skyscraper condominium that provides as a “topping” the luxury of being close to shops, restaurants, and theaters—patterned after pie à la mode (1880s¹⁵); Bourbon Cowboy—the title of a potential movie about drunken cowboys—patterned after Urban Cowboy, which was the title of a 1980 movie; and slime time—an undesirable time slot for a TV show—patterned after prime time (1958). Opposition has produced antonyms for words and phrases that have been in the language for several centuries as well as for terms of such recent origin that they are almost neologisms themselves: brand-new (1570) > brand-old; old-wives' tale (1656) > new wives' tale; malpractice (1671) > malhealth, what one physician recommended patients be charged with when they violate the orders of their doctors; fair-weather friends (1736) > foul-weather friends; G-men (1917) > G-women; upward mobility (1949) > downward mobility; Moral Majority (1979¹⁶) > Immoral Majority and the double antonym, Immoral Minority; user-friendly (ca.1) > user-unfriendly and the even-more-negative user-hostile.

Patterning is the sine qua non for the punster. One need look only as far as the adjective born-again (1967) to see that this is so. This term, which Barnhart’s Second defines in the figurative sense as ‘marked by a rebirth or renewal (as of interest, freshness, or youth); resurgent,’ served as the inspiration for the following three puns. A used-clothes store in Decatur, Illinois, is named Worn Again and bills itself as the place “for clothes too good to be through.” Punster Edward Stevenson has declared that “back-to-the-soil advocates [are] barn-again farmers.” An eye-catching caption above an article that raised the question of whether Bjorn Borg would ever return to tennis queried, “Bjorn-again tennis player?”

At first glance, patterning would appear to be the antithesis of creativity; for the word pattern conjures up images of products such as pictures, dresses, and prefabricated houses that are all of a kind. However, as the preceding examples have shown, patterning is a lexical device that enables the capable wordsmith to generate neologisms from familiar terms. Thus, patterning adds to the flexibility that is the hallmark of contemporary English.

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When Everything Was Everything

Joe Queenan, Tarrytown, New York

On September 27, 1967, The Consumer’s Report on Banality listed the expression, “Everything is everything,” as the single most popular cliche in the continental United States, with “If you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem,” a close second, and “You can be in my dreams if I can be in yours,” a strong third. By the following September, only “You can be in my dreams …” continued to appear in the Top Ten (No. 8), while “If you’re not part of the solution…” had dropped to Number 67, right behind “You can’t fight City Hall,” and “It takes one to know one,” (tied for No. 65). Incredibly, “Everything is everything,” was not even listed in the top three hundred American clichés. By the spring of 1969, all three phrases had vanished from the national idiom, a phenomenon which has recently sparked great interest inside the academic community. How, specialists would like to know, was it possible for three inanities of such a spectacularly fatuous nature simply to drop out of the language like that, as if they had never existed? Was it merely a question of overuse? Or does the answer lie deeper, perhaps rooted in the dark folds of the national psyche?

In his provocative work, Clichés To Live By And The Death Of The Sixties, Anaxamander O’Flaherty, a necro-ethnolinguist at the University of Altamont, suggests that the expression, “Everything is everything,” succumbed to a natural death brought on by such factors as over-utilization, deterioration of relevance, and lack of adaptability to altered states of reality vis-à-vis the American experience. Says he:

It was all right to believe that everything was everything back in 1967 when everything, in a very real sense, was everything. But the escalation of the war, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, and the Chicago riots made it increasingly difficult to go on believing that everything was everything, when it seemed highly unlikely that ‘everything’ was much more than ‘something.’ By the time Nixon was elected, it was obvious that ‘everything’ was ‘nothing.’

In Lowered Expectations And The Politics of Banality, the follow-up volume to Clichés, O’Flaherty suggests that the expression, “Everything is everything,” could have survived in a modified form (say, as “Everything ain’t what it used to be”) had habitual users of the remark been willing to “scale down their estimate of the quantitative quality of life in these United States.” Their refusal to do so spelt doom for the luckless mouthful of twaddle.

Much more sinister doings are suspected in the demise of the phrase, “You can be in my dreams if I can be in yours.” Wotan Schnitzler, in his absorbing Beyond The Role Of The CIA In The Death Of My Favorite Cliché, adamantly maintains that secret federal funding allocated by the Nixon Administration was used to sabotage the youth countercultural movement by utterly discrediting its most revered platitudes. Citing various memos and receipts which have come into his possession over the years, Schnitzler contends that thousands of students at major universities were paid thirty to forty dollars a week by the government to say, “You can be in my dreams but stay out of my neighborhood,” “You can be in my dreams if I can be in your reveries,” and “You can be in my dreams if I can be in your 16mm porn-flick.” Yet though evidence of some government intrigue is irrefutable, Shiloh Sokoloff’s thesis, set forth in What Johnny Can’t Say, Much Less Read, seems much more plausible; namely, that the sentence, “You can be in my dreams if I can be in yours,” was simply too hard for most young people to remember. “Chronic drug-abuse ravaged so many collegiate brain cells that only banal expressions without a dependent clause could be summoned forth from the canyons of the mind. Ergo, ‘What’s happening?’, ‘Hang loose,’ and ‘Like wow.’ ”

To this day, no one knows whatever became of the phrase, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” As late as March 25, 1969, it was still being heard in strip joints just outside Fresno, California, yet by the following Monday, it had disappeared from the vernacular of the trite, never to be heard again. “Like Henry Hudson, Amelia Earhart, and a couple of other people whose names I forget,” says Wendy Bakunin, amateur insipidographer, in her book, Our Vanishing Culture, “this cliché seems to have literally dropped off the face of the earth. For the love of Mike.” Bakunin goes on to say that “If you’re not part of the Aleutians, you’re part of the problem,” an Eskimo separatist rallying cry, may be a derivative form of the expression, but confesses total ignorance as to the current whereabouts of the original catch-phrase, a tight little nugget of piffle so dynamic it was once voted “Hackneyism Of The Decade” by the American people. “Everything is everything,” on the other hand, has recently surfaced in certain outlying cantons of Switzerland, as the phrase, “Tout est tout,” though an application for a license to use the cliché inside France itself has twice been rejected by the Minister of Ephemera, the Government obviously fearing a subsequent decline in the use of “C’est la vie,” and “Plus ca change, plus c’est la même chose.”

As regards “You can be in my dreams…,” The League For The Decriminalization Of Overtly Anti-Social Behavior last month purchased the legal rights to the triviality, hoping to rent out the phrase, “You can beat in my dreams if I can beat in yours,” to various sadomasochistic supper clubs. Given this fact, it seems unlikely that the famed remark will ever again be heard in its pure, unadulterated form.

In all this, there is one bright note. Several weeks ago, The National Foundation For The Preservation of Endangered Banality authorized funding to look after shopworn expressions and, where necessary, see that they receive a decent burial, thus sparing them the indignity of outright purging from the American idiom. Furthermore, a Cliche Hall of Fame will soon be erected in Peoria, Illinois, and here will be stored valuable tape recordings of the country’s most treasured platitudes being uttered by their inventors (where possible) as well as by those who helped make them famous. Someday soon, if all goes well, the great cliches of the 1960s will be brought home to their final resting place; and then, if only for a short time, everything will once again be everything. Which would, at the very least, be right on.

Playing Words with Games

Stephen Hirschberg, Elmsford, New York

It was a more relaxed age: before political leaders were portrayed as “huddling” with their advisors, “putting the ball into their opponents' courts,” “playing hardball,” and “going to bat for” their friends; before we all could be “Monday morning quarterbacks.” It was the epoch of nonathletic games, when the “dead man’s hand” was common knowledge, and “earned-run average,” “yards-per-carry,” “aerobics” and “jogging shoes” were colorless features on a far horizon.

In the millennia between the dice-and-board amusements of ancient Egypt and the ascendancy of spectator sports in the last century, most games for the populace required no particular physical prowess. Their consequent public favor advanced the idiom of card, dice, and board pastimes through metaphor to game-unrelated slang and standard language.

Like the dinosaurs, some games have become extinct, known only by their fossilized etymons. Lurch, which had its heyday in the 16th century, is said to have resembled backgammon; its only relic, the phrase leave in the lurch— ‘discomfit,’ by greatly outscoring one’s opponent. Once the most celebrated card game of the American West, faro is now an endangered species. It leaves as its spoor breaking even—by betting on a card in equal amounts to win and to lose.

Since uniform laws are essential to all games, Edmond Hoyle’s definitive volumes of rules met considerable public appreciation. His Short Treatise on Whist appeared in 1742; by the end of the next century his name was to rule books what Webster’s was to dictionaries, and according to Hoyle signified correctness.

I cannot believe that God would choose to play dice with the world. —Albert Einstein

Dicing dates from the Stone Age, when sheep knucklebones, astragali, were the primordial “rolling bones.” With dice extensively employed by the ancients for both play and prognostication, “lacta alea est” may have been a catch phrase among the Romans, even before the time of Julius Caesar. Modern use of the die is cast on crossing a personal Rubicon is yet further removed from the gaming sense, given the rarity today of single-die gambling. Cheating may occur in most games of chance—it is so likely that it is in the dice. One technique of dice cheating is to weight one side of the cubes. Thus, unfair, one-sided arguments may load the dice, and a respondent may be placed at a disadvantage when asked a loaded question. The terminology of craps is used to express life’s peaks and valleys: shooting crap—‘taking excessive risks’; on a roll—‘repeated success’; cropping out (making a losing throw)—‘failure.’ No dice!—the call made upon an incorrect throw which must therefore be repeated—means ‘futile’ adjectivally, ‘Deal’s off!’ exclamatorily. A life in disorder is at sixes and sevens, the result of hazarding one’s fortune on figurative throws of the dice. In its original form—to set on cinque and sice—the phrase alluded to the die’s two highest numbers, the lucky five and six; alliteration then dominated accuracy of translation from French.

The chess-board is the world…. —Thomas Huxley

Perhaps because banter during play is frowned upon, chess has contributed relatively little colorful jargon to English. Its objective, checkmate (from the Persian shah mat— ‘the king is dead’), has become synonymous with complete defeat. One of the few acceptable utterances during the game, “check” (alerting the opponent to an attack on his king) extended its meaning in the 14th to 18th centuries to ‘attack, repulse, restraint and control’ (the bank check having developed originally for verification and control of forgery; the check-list and check-mark as means of certifying accuracy). The field of play, the checkerboard, with its alternation of light and dark, engendered the check pattern (of textiles), the game of checkers, and checkered (‘inconstant,’ as in a checkered career). A no-win, no-lose position can be described as the deadlock draw, stalemate. A gambit is a chess opening in which sacrifices are made to gain positional advantage; outside the game it is now taken to mean ‘any opening strategy or remark.’ The gambit sacrifice is usually a chessman of lowest value, a pawn, which by the 16th century denoted a person used to further another’s objectives.

They laugh that win. —Shakespeare (Othello)

Not only do they laugh; triumphant gamesters verbally dance about their prostrate opposition with terms of victory accepted beyond the domain of games. The opponent may be defeated by a large margin—schneidered (‘having been prevented from making any points at gin rummy’), or ‘driven into debt’—put in the hole (‘given a minus score’). According to the game authority, John Scarne, the image derives from the practice of indicating a negative score by drawing a ring around it. The loser may be ‘outwitted’— euchred (prevented from winning the necessary three tricks at euchre), or ‘thwarted’—snookered (his direct shot having been blocked in the game of snooker pool). In Kelly pool, a snooker variant, he can be placed in a hazardous position, behind the eight-ball, the striking of which incurs a penalty. Under such pressure he may ‘blunder’—miscue.

Or, a winner may celebrate with a simple exclamation of victory—Bingo!

As expected, a trailing player wants to ‘reverse the situation’ and turn the tables. “Tables” was a name for backgammon in the Middle Ages. The phrase evokes an image of a conjurer’s patter and sleight of hand, with an extraordinarily inattentive opponent, allowing the perpetrator, undetected, to rotate the board and begin playing his adversary’s pieces.

“Who cares for you?” said Alice… “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” —Lewis Carroll

Card players, it must be admitted, are generally on friendlier terms with their equipment than was Alice with the Queen of Hearts and her court. (Those addled souls who talk to cards before falling down a rabbit-hole might be characterized as not playing with a full deck.) Outcomes ‘within the range of possibility’ are in the cards, with ‘success’ expressible as playing one’s cards right or strengthening one’s hand, and ‘defeat’ as playing into the hands of others. In most games, an ace is the desirable, highest-ranked card of a suit, having ascended from its earlier use—designating the one-pip, lowest value, hence bad luck face of a die.

Empoisoned of thyn owene folk thou were; thy sys [six] fortune hath turned into as [ace]…

—Chaucer: The Monk’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales.

During World War I the meaning extended to a crack fighter pilot, and afterward to one who excels in any field.

The gambler discontented by the caprices of Dame Fortune may have a ‘secret winning plan’—an ace up his sleeve. No well-fitted cardsharp lacks a piece of equipment for sequestering desirable cards until they become useful. The name and function of this mechanical device suggested the label for a ‘person who delays payment or cooperation’—a hold-out.

In their colorful stacks, chips are visually-appealing tokens of the cash they represent. The gambler prefers being in the chips—‘wealthy.’ One ‘makes a contribution’—‘adding to the pot’—by chipping in; having so done, ‘the consequences are irrevocable’—the chips are down. With ten times the value of white chips, blue chips are ‘highly-rated assets.’ (The term survives despite the emergence of yellow chips, worth twenty-five white ones, to satisfy modern high-rollers.) The old gambler never dies: he cashes in his chips, maybe so he can “buy the farm.”

Martin, if dirt were trumps, what hands you would hold! —Charles Lamb, quoted by Leigh Hunt

For centuries, players of the trump games, from euchre to contract bridge, have taken disproportionate pleasure in capturing opponents' non-trump high cards with the lowliest of a trump suit. (Are they enjoying the allegorical victory of Common Man over Tyranny? Or do they merely like to see opponents squirm?) Consequently, any trump is a ‘key resource,’ and a trump card a ‘telling argument.’ If possible, however, one must ‘emulate the leader’ by following suit. A long suit can be a ‘powerful asset,’ even with play at notrump.

The buck stops here. —Harry S. Truman

Virtually every aspect of poker play is represented by terms assimilated into common parlance. One wishing to ‘participate’ may say “Deal me in.” Each player then has to ante up—‘pay his share into the pot.’ (Pot, or kitty, thence denoted any common fund of individuals' contributions. The kitty—a diminutive from the Middle Dutch kitte ‘jug,’ and thus a “small pot”—originally had a more restricted meaning: it was a pool composed of a part of each player’s winnings, used to pay the expenses of the game.) ‘Low limit betting’ (later, any small-scale transaction) is penny ante. In the early days of the game, the buck—a ‘pocket knife'—was passed around to designate the player whose turn it was to bet; to shift responsibility (up to the next player) was to pass the buck. “Up to,” indicating ‘incumbent on,’ is also of poker origin. If a participant ‘puts all he has in the pot’— taps out (‘goes broke’ in non-poker circles)—he can continue to play the hand, but cannot bet further.

Deception is the heart of poker: in its early days the game was often called “bluff.” Disguise begins with the inscrutable poker face: “…the countenance should not betray the nature of the hand,” advised the 1885 Encyclopaedia Britannica. In most variants of stud poker, players are dealt four cards face-up, and one or three face-down (hole cards). One showing four cards of a suit (but not holding the fifth needed for a flush) may bluff his way to winning the pot, but if opponents demand that he support his boast he will be exposed as a pretentious fake as the cards are revealed when the issue is forced to a conclusion: in other words, if they call his bluff the fourflusher must put his cards on the table at the showdown. Of course, a bettor may not be bluffing: there may be a hidden asset—an ace in the hole. The hands are closed in draw poker. Each player has options to discard part of his holding in exchange for new cards or to stand pat, ‘declining a change.’ The successful player cannot let the opposition see his cards: strategy is kept secret by playing close to the vest and taking care not to tip one’s hand.

One way to increase the size of the stakes in draw poker is requiring that every player ante, but prohibiting anyone from opening the betting without a pair of jacks or better. The jackpot so created increases if no one opens, as additional hands are dealt and new antes contributed. ‘Any large pool of funds’ (such as a slot machine’s payoff) could thus be called a jackpot. The winner or anyone so enjoying sudden great success hits the jackpot.

The dead man’s hand? According to legend, it was the holding of Wild Bill Hickok when he was shot in the back at a poker game in Deadwood City, Dakota Territory; contrary to his custom, he was sitting with his back to the door. The dead man’s hand is two pairs—aces and eights—which, for reasons clear (to Wild Bill, anyway), is considered bad luck.

Mapping the Words or How I Justified My Sneck

Rosemary Courtney, Newmarket, Ontario

In my youth, I almost worked on the Linguistic Atlas of England. To explain how (and why “almost”) I must provide some academic background.

All my life I have been a devotee of words as words. I preferred language to literature, to the consternation of my teachers, especially one. Herself a comer-in from London, she disapproved of this language buff’s language and mocked my Yorkshire accent (the same as everyone else’s), making me say “batter” instead of my native “butter” with the rounded /u/ of look. Until then, like everyone else in the world, I had no idea I had an accent.

True, I said sneck for “latch” and would say, “You’ve closed the door but not snecked it”; I called the local stream a beck, an alley a ghinnel, and cow-dung at the local farm muck (rhyming with look); I shortened the to t’, as in “I’m going to t' shops,” and even used thee and thou, but only with my Quaker friend, for I knew that the second person singular had died out among eddicated people. But now I was condemned for not talkin' posh, and rapidly acquired a Received Standard English (RSE) vowel in butter. For the rest, I felt entitled to my native tongue.

So when I enrolled in Leeds University’s English Language scheme (designed by J.R.R. Tolkien, the previous professor), I were right glad to find—I mean rejoiced to discover (I was becoming bilingual)—that the present professor, Harold Orton, not only respected the local speech but was anxious to record all the dialects of English before they vanished under the pernicious influence of the BBC and my teacher. I became a keen student of his phonology classes under the watchful eye of Tolkien’s portrait; of Old and Middle English; and of phonetics under no less than Peter MacCarthy, whose Listening Lab was sound-proofed with eggboxes. I was cock-a-hoop when money arrived to finance the Linguistic Atlas, with students like myself trained to work in “the field.” I thought this was an anthropological term until I discovered that it was too often literal.

Beginners did their field-work for a B. A. thesis, then graduated to Ph.D. research, which would be published in the Atlas. We gathered data from informants according to a questionnaire devised by Orton and his colleague, Eugen Dieth of Zurich; then analyzed the phonemes, tracing them back to Middle English. The words and pronunciations were mapped onto locations in the Atlas. Our model was the first Ph.D. student, Stanley Ellis, so dedicated that he lived in a caravan trailer in “the field” (literally), conversing with his informants in exactly their own dialect and not that of the village next door. We envied him his ear and admired his dedication. He was our Henry Higgins.

For my B. A., I was invited to record the town dialect of Leeds itself, for which I was mercifully provided with informants, thus saving months of labor tracing old people who had never moved, were illiterate, and preferably isolated from RSE. My first informant was a 75-year-old lady still working as a char (‘cleaning woman’) and living in the house where she was born. While I scribbled phonetics, she mashed (‘brewed’) the tea and then teemed (‘poured’) it, before asking me to help side (‘clear’) the table and sneck the door. Ahl my “sneck” was not “bad accent” but “pure” dialect ! She spoke of her bairns (‘children’) who were often badly (‘ill’) with something smittlin' (‘infectious’), or were gawmless (‘stupid’). Aye, she was a right smashin' informant; her only drawback was that she stank.

My next informants were a group of retired miners in their eighties, congregating in a council shelter on a desolate stretch of gravel known euphemistically as Hunslet Moor. Hunslet is south of the river Aire, so across the isogloss, and I sounded like a comer-in speaking in my broadest Leeds-north-of-the-river. Oh, for Stanley’s talent for mimicry! They were unfailingly cooperative, erring rather on the side of enthusiasm than reticence; but they were a pack of liars and teasers. What fun it was to take the mickey out of the naive “lass frum t' college,” forcing her to elaborate on roundabout questions designed to elicit rude words like fart. They didn’t even give me a new word for fart. They did say gawky and golliker for ‘left-handed,’ and the Old English cockstride for ‘astride,’ but these were in the English Dialect Dictionary (EDD). Their chief contribution was in pronunciation.

Leeds vowels are mixed because it lies just south of another isogloss, the river Wharfe, which divided the North and North Midland dialects of Middle English. My miners, innocent of their linguistic ancestry and oblivious of their accent, produced classic divided usage: of words in -ight, right was pronounced “rate” or “reet,” frightened became “freetened,” but sight was “site”; ea words from Middle English long e included clean, beans, and eaves as in RSE, but also “scahms” for seams and even “paze” for peas. Coal was “coil” but foal “fohl”; about was “abaht” as expected— and they called each other thee.

It had its uses, this acquaintance with antique forms of speech: I could converse with the natives. Even children. On my way home from a particularly embarrassing session in Hunslet, I passed a tiny grubby child sitting on his step beside my feet. “Weeah ta bahn?” he challenged. Without breaking stride to translate from early Middle English (before the /d/ was added to his last word) I replied, “Nay, Ah’m bahn to t’shops.” He had asked me where I was going, or in his ancient words, “Where art thou bound?”

I chose the next informants myself, where I had played in t' muck as a child: at a farm 300 years old, in the family for generations, with no radio and only one literate person, and far from town. As an old friend, I could get them to answer the rural questions which my char and my miners couldn’t do. Off I trudged (traipsed in “dialect”) along the familiar dirt track, to ask my farmers their words for rude parts of a cow. They used a lot of rude words: ‘rabbit droppings’ were turds, the ‘butt end of a shaff’ (sheaf) the arse end; but curiously, only a dead cow had an udder: a live one had a bag with four paps, unless “she were a three-papped ‘un, wi’ one dud.” Her vagina (I blushed) was simply passage, of greatest interest when she was bullin' (‘on heat’), pickin' (‘slipping’) a calf, or a-gate calvin' (‘in labor’). On her way to market, her udder was distended because the farmer had been beggin' em up (‘stocking’) to make her more saleable. My ears sang: this was not in EDD! Nor was the stirk she bore, whether bullock or wy (‘heifer’). I was in uncharted territory, where words had no spelling: I wrote them in phonetics, even in my thesis, and invent their spellings here (u is always the vowel in look). The cow yielded treasures like milk: even her milk yield was a new word, meal, her ‘cloven hoof’ a sluven foot and her ‘forelock’ a toppin'; when she was ‘hornless’ she was polly, and when she was ‘butting’ other cows she was aypin' (hiping?).

The sheep were dialectal too, being mawky when ‘plagued by ticks,’ and rigweltin' when ‘overturned.’ But the pigs were prizewinners: a ‘female’ was a ghilt, a ‘runt’ a greck, and a ‘snout’ a gruwin—all hitherto unrecorded words.

Professor Orton went wild. I was to make audio recordings for the lab. Here was a tape recorder (vast bulky reel-to-reel, circa 1945) and an autocycle to carry it on—a bicycle with an engine, uneasy in either role. I traipsed back up the dirt track with my equipment. But time had passed. It was one thing to trot through sand in summer, quite another to lug (Shakespeare’s word, and mine) a heavy Machine on a recalcitrant Bike through mud ruts and across sodden fields. The Bike, torn between its roles, kept breaking down and having to be pushed through the ruts, while I starved (OE steorfan, ‘to die’) wi' cold. My farmers were proper flummoxed (‘very disconcerted’) by The Machine and took three weeks to be “conditioned” to it. But I got my recordings.

Lugging them back to the lab, I summoned H.O. to a demonstration of my tapes, and shoved the plug in its oil (‘hole’). The Machine bedled (‘bellowed’), farted smoke from its arse end, and died. I burst into tears, horrified at costing The Project so much of its precious budget. H.O., gentleman as ever and very embarrassed, patted me kindly and forgave me. Praise be, the recordings were unharmed. And my data complete.

Pregnant with data, I settled into the long labor of bornin' my thesis. Each word was written on a “slip” of paper, which was then assigned to a pile according to consonant or stressed vowel, prior to comparison with Middle English. After six months, I had piles of little piles all over a huge table. Fagged out by the work, and moithered by the heat, like a daft twit I opened a window. A mini-tornado swept everything off the table, demolishing half a year’s work in half a second. This time I cussed (was growing up).

My thesis did get finished and accepted. I was a “Bachelor” of Arts, although by now a married woman. I was summoned to the lab and offered a Ph.D. working on the Linguistic Atlas of England.

Oh no, I thought. Not more “field” work. Not more smelly old ladies and dirty old men. Not traipsing up tracks to flummoxed farmers. Not benighted bikes, malevolent machines and medieval infants. Not trailers in tractor yards, slippery slips, and treacherous tornadoes. Much as I loved words, I needed no more. I had justified my use of sneck by proving it to be authentic dialect. Enough, already. In short, I hadn’t the guts. How could I refuse without offending my gentle mentor?

I became pregnant. Not with data, but with my first bairn (I had the guts for that). No lady-in-waiting [sic] should traipse through mud or lug machinery, no mother raise childer in a trailer, no husband follow his wife into “the field.” I “deferred” my Ph.D.—as it turned out, for thirty years.

The Linguistic Atlas of England, on which I so nearly worked, was finished, and published, as my chidren grew up and just before Harold Orton’s death. He saw his great work completed, and passed his mantle to Stanley Ellis. I can no longer hear Leeds-south-of-the-river from Leeds-north-of-the-river (no Henrietta Higgins, I) but I can tell Toronto from Calgary and Ottawa Valley from New Brunswick. I sound-proof my basements with eggboxes. And I still say sneck.

The Lofty and/or Assumptive We

Donald Drury, Long Beach, California

This discussion is not concerned with the genuinely collective first-person-plural of good fellowship and equality, but the far more common we of authority, unwarranted assumptions, elitism, and co-optation. Definitions of we in unabridged and “college” dictionaries generally mention the “royal we” and the “editorial we,” then stop after barely scratching the surface. Many other special varieties deserve—indeed, cry out for—comparable recognition. What most of these have in common is the bland assumption that others concur in whatever the speaker is about to assert: “We all know (recognize, understand, agree) that….” I shall arbitrarily presuppose that “we” will all agree with the classification which follows.

Beginning at a tender age, most of us were subjected to the parental we (also employed by big sisters, grandparents, babysitters, and others acting in loco parentis): “We’re going to have our pablum (cod-liver oil, broccoli) now, aren’t we, dear?” “We’d better get ready for our music lesson (dental appointment, visit to Aunt Agatha)….” “Now we’d better start cleaning our room (doing homework, mowing the lawn)….”

Long after escaping the parental we, one way or another, many of us continue to be patronized by the clinical we of physicians, dentists, nurses, and allied practitioners. It often goes something like this: “We’re going to have our shot (enema, blood-letting, root-canal work) now, aren’t we?” What rankles here is the obviously unequal degree of participation “we” have in such exercises: somebody else inflicts the pain and you receive it.

At its worst (as employed, say, by Mrs. Proudie of Barchester), the spousal we is perhaps the most formidable of these pre-emptive pronouns. But even in less extreme cases, one marriage partner or the other may sometimes assume that the two hearts that beat as one are also two minds with but a single opinion. Thus a husband at a cocktail party who is exhibiting undue interest in some refulgent blonde is abruptly propelled toward the door by a smoldering wife who explains to the hostess: “Sorry we have to leave now—Fred is getting tired and we have to be up early tomorrow.” Similarly, a husband whose wife seems about to entertain the assembled company by go-go dancing on the piano may announce: “We really have to get back to the children. We promised the babysitter we wouldn’t be late tonight.” And many married readers can very likely recall more routine manifestations of the spousal we to which the co-opted spouse responds, in silent or vocal astonishment, “We do?”

The exclusivist we ranges from the noble or at least pardonably proud to the merely snobbish. At its best it represents the bond of mutual risk, shared suffering, or the ultimate comradeship in the face of death. Recall the cohorts of Henry V, about to battle the French at Agincourt:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s Day

and the eloquent epitaph of the small band of warriors annihilated in the rearguard action at Thermopylae: “Stranger, tell the Spartans that we behaved as they would wish us to, and are buried here.”¹⁷ Then there is the U.S. Marine Corps recruiting slogan: “We’re looking for a few good men.” But too often the exclusivist we is an arrant appeal to the apartness, elitism, or intolerance of caste, class, race, or creed, as in Kipling’s “We and They”:

All of the people like us are We,
And everyone else is They.

Though similar in some respects to the preceding variety, the confederate we emphasizes the common cause of its participants rather than excluding the outsiders. It is the we of loyal companions through thick and thin: the Three Musketeers, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson concluded that document with this lofty rhetoric: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” Rather more pungently (as if playing realistic Sancho to Jefferson’s romantic Quixote), Benjamin Franklin remarked to John Hancock, “We must all hang together, else we shall all hang separately.” Indeed, the idealistic confederate we shades off to the conspiratorial we: “Don’t try anything funny. We’re in this together, you know.” Not uncommonly, alas, there can be a sudden collapse of those supposedly unbreakable ties—when the noble sentiments of comradeship give way to the sauve-qui-peut reflex. Consider, for example, the old gag about the Lone Ranger and his trusty sidekick when they find themselves surrounded by hostile and well-armed redskins:

LONE RANGER: What’ll we do, Tonto?
TONTO: What do you mean we, white man?

The permutations of we have by no means been exhausted. One might go on (at the risk, to be sure, of inducing ennui) to explore such possible variations as the corporate we, the connoisseurial we, and so on. But let us conclude, instead, by examining anew the editorial and the royal we.

There is some disagreement among lexical authorities about these long-established varieties. According to one dictionary, “We is used for the singular I by kings and other sovereigns, and by editors and other writers to keep an impersonal character or to avoid the egotistical sound of a repeated I.” Another dictionary says that we is “sometimes used for I by a monarch or by an editor who purports to speak for a publication.” Still another observes only that we is used by “a monarch, author, editor, judge, etc. in referring to himself.” If we is used by some writers to avoid the egotistical effect of I, in the hands of others it takes on an appalling archness or the lip-smacking overtones of utter self-satisfaction. And an interesting sub-variety of the editorial we was identified in a Los Angeles Times article of March 27, 1985, on the recent crisis at West 43rd Street— the sale of the New Yorker to the Newhouse publications empire: “In the high-tech world of magazines, the New Yorker, proprietary heir to the omniscient we [emphasis added], remains a proud anachronism.”

Finally, there is the entry in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Revised Edition) on the sniffy bit of royal disdain usually attributed to Queen Victoria: “We are not amused.” Brewer’s offers this indignant comment: “There is no record of her ever having used the royal ‘we’ in other than official proclamations; nor is the spirit of the words in keeping with Queen Victoria’s conversation or character.”

Aye, aye, sir. Or, if you prefer—oui, oui!

---

EUREKA: Memorandum

To: All those who have been struggling to come up with a word to describe the relationship between unmarried couples living together, the man in the relationship, the woman, etc.

From: Laurence Urdang.

Source: The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, The Century Co., 1889.

tally 1…To live tally, to live together as man and wife without marriage. [Prov. Eng.]

tallyman…4. A man who lives with a woman without marriage. [Prov. Eng.]

tally-woman…2. A woman who lives tally. [Prov. Eng.]

EPISTOLA {Michael Gorman}

Ms. Graham’s Speaking English [XII, 1] contains a quotation from what she describes as “a genuine Greek-English phrase book.” It is, in fact, from the immortal Fonseca’s Portuguese-English phrase book as described in my “English as She is Spoke” [VII, 4].

[Michael Gorman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library]

EPISTOLA {Norman R. Shapiro}

Alma Denny’s discussion of “one-letter-mayhem” [XI,2]—the havoc wrought by a minor misspelling— reminds me of a double example that a friend swears he saw in a newspaper some years ago:

East German defecator, disguised as nun, fouls guards and flees to West.

Clearly another incident in the catalogue of Cold War confrontations.

[Norman R. Shapiro, Wesleyan University]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang

Jonathon Green, (Pan Books, 1984), ix + 323.

Being the most colorful side of language, slang offers temptations to the unwary amateur. It is immediately apparent from even the most cursory glance that this book was not written by an amateur. It is a bit curious, though: on the one hand, its scope is international, and even the most naive reader must be aware of the breadth that such coverage implies; on the other hand, possibly at the behest of the publisher, who felt it necessary to limit the compass of the book, the entries are short—too short for my taste. For, while it is likely that some people may use such a dictionary solely as they would a small dictionary of general English— that is, in order to discover the meaning of a word or expression—dictionaries of slang always seem to me to have a great deal more to say about language and, particularly, about the useful array of rhetorical devices available to a speaker, many of which are more colorfully (if not often better) displayed in slang. In placing constraints on the length of each entry, the art of slang has been badly served, much as one might have to be satisfied by a black-and-white print of a Turner or Van Gogh which exhibits only the form but none of the color of the original. Many who have turned to the lexicography of slang have applied too heavy an academic hand to its discussion, analysis, and presentation, and that, too, reduces the dimensions of this most interesting aspect of language.

Lest my criticism be taken amiss, I hasten to add that Green has done well within his brief brief: it is lamentable that his skills could not have been employed to produce a larger, looser, more flexible work.

The entries are arranged in strict alphabetical order, words, expressions and all. In most cases, senses, which may be numbered where there is more than one under an entry, are given attributions, the sources of which are listed at the back of the book. I can understand the omission of Farmer & Henley’s Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English, for it is interesting and useful mainly as an archaic relic. But Mencken’s American Language is missing, which is cause for concern. There are nineteen works by P. G. Wodehouse, eight by Tom Wolfe, and seven by Charles Bukowski—yes, Charles Bukowski. It goes without saying (but I shall succumb to the inevitable), but one could hardly compare even nineteen novels by Wodehouse with either of the slang dictionaries—Partridge or Wentworth & Flexner—as a source for entries.

Many of the entries are labeled as to where they are used, but some are not. E.g., “bottle v. to collect money from a busker’s audience”: why should the editor assume that buskers are known universally and, even if they are, that slang terms associated with their activities are likewise familiar? Close scrutiny reveals the results of occasional carelessness, e.g., bounce (in the ‘check’ sense) is defined only transitively, while its use in the U.S. is often intransitive; button one’s lip is the wrong form for the entry, which should be button someone’s lip or button your lip (as it can only rarely be reflexive); crack up is in, but not crack up to be ‘emerge as, turn out to be’; “suck v. 3. to be worthless, pointless” is not adequately covered.

There are many entries here that have not appeared in other dictionaries of slang, partly because they are too new, partly because they have not been picked up by other editors (perhaps because they did not consider them to be slang). Some are surely nonce uses, coming from TV shows, some might have been made up by the scriptwriters. For example, is there any evidence that anyone except the actor on Thames TV’s Minder (not seen in the U.S., but one of the best of British programs) ever said Lucozade for ‘spade’ (= ‘black person’)? I don’t know. All in all, the evidence for any given entry is one citation, and that is too little to allow us to believe that some of the terms are in “general” use.

In sum, the DOCS looks very much like a (slang) lexicographer’s citation file—or the beginnings of one. That does not diminish its interestingness nor its usefulness to students of slang. But the “definitions” read more like the sort of gist definitions that a lexicographer might write in his notebook than the carefully drawn, disambiguated definitions he is likely to write for a dictionary that is to be published. The problem is that an entry that the author has found in one novel or other single source lies between the entries that have been established in the language for scores or even hundreds of years, and there is no way for the reader to distinguish them. As Green points out in his Introduction, he has done “as much as possible in the time available,” however we are to interpret that.

The DOCS is good and it is interesting, but it might best have been given a title like, “Slang—A Lexicographer’s Notebook.”

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Fair of Speech: The Uses of Euphemism

D.J. Enright, ed., (Oxford University Press, 1985), 222pp.

It seems almost impossible to open the mail these days without finding a book on euphemisms. Why this sudden preoccupation with the subject? As readers of these reviews are aware, I am no aficionado of the genre, though I hasten to add that the present book is a collection of good, interesting, and often amusing essays on euphemisms, in contrast to the dictionary format followed by others, which I cannot readily see the point of. The only serious failing of the work at hand is the total absence of an index, an execrable fault which reduces the usefulness of the work, once read.

In the event, I am becoming increasingly confused by the modern interpretation of euphemism. I have always understood it to refer to a word or expression of apparently harmless, decorous connotation used in place of one that is for some reason unpleasant or taboo. Thus, pass on, go west, and dozens of others, for die; move the bowels for either (technical) defecate or (vulgar) shit, and so forth. In other words, a euphemism must always be used as a substitute for something better left unsaid (or unwritten) for any of a number of reasons. Calling a spade a spade is not the name of the game.

What we find, however, is that compilers of dictionaries of euphemisms and writers of articles on the topic have begun to include in the class almost any kind of metaphor, whether substituted for something unpleasant or something entirely innocuous. Admittedly, it is difficult at times to distinguish between the nocuous and the innocuous, for one may not always be aware of contemporary sentiments. Today, for instance, we have no compunction about using the word leg, though I know (from reading)—and presume it common knowledge—that the Victorians did. Thus we also have inexpressibles and unmentionables for trousers or breeches, as Robert Burchfield reports in his essay in this book, “An Outline History of Euphemisms in English.” But how can one be certain that, as Burchfield writes, well-carriaged is a euphemism for having large breasts, let him do just what he pleased for succumb to a seducer, and so on? It seems to me that in order to identify a euphemism, we must know the author’s purpose, and I find it curious that those who comment on euphemisms choose to ignore the author’s poetic (or other licentious) intent in employing paraphrastic subleties. I should scarcely call for Chrissake a euphemism, though it is cited by Burchfleld as such: it is a spelt form of the rapid colloquial for Christ’s sake and nothing more.

Some of the euphemisms cited by Burchfield for, say, prostitute have their origin in slang. Slang can only rarely said to be euphemistic: rather, it often tends to be a secret language, inventing terms which, as they “leak out” to the general public and are adopted by them, are replaced; in addition, users of slang like to keep their lingo fresh, uncluttered by yesterday’s clichés, and stale stereotypes are quickly rejected in favor of more up-to-date metaphors. I cite examples from Burchfield’s article only for convenience, not to pick a nit with him personally, for, as I see it, all collectors of euphemisms interpret the class too broadly. They tend to find euphemisms under the bed. Taking that literally, they are likely to call chamberpot a euphemism for pisspot or shitpot; but is that really so? Aren’t pisspot and shitpot merely made-up, alternate forms? Is there any evidence for their existence (outside the present context)? There is plenty of evidence, on the other hand, for chamberpot. Which makes me wonder if all words or expressions for marginal or taboo functions or objects are to be deemed euphemisms just because the euphemologist can concoct otherwise nonexistent rude counterparts for them.

Jasper Griffin has contributed an interesting piece, “Euphemisms in Greece and Rome,” which contains hints of problems that encroach on considering euphemisms as a class from another angle—propaganda. If the upper class in Greece and Rome called themselves boni ‘the good men’ or aristoi ‘the best men,’ are those euphemisms or just propaganda? What of Eupatridae ‘those with good fathers,’ as the Athenian nobles referred to themselves? To be sure, the genres overlap, as in naming the MX missile, a destructive weapon, The Peacekeeper; this example, among others, appears in Robert M. Adams’s article, “Soft Soap and the Nitty-Gritty.”

Some of these points are (at least) suggested in “Sex and Euphemism,” by Joseph Epstein. Following his citation of a passage from Homecoming, by Floyd Dell, in which sexual activities are referred to obliquely and subtlely, through paraphrase and suggestion, Epstein writes:

Does such a passage seem hopelessly old-fashioned—it was written in 1933—corny, prudish? At the risk of sounding an old-fashioned, corny prude, I must confess that it doesn’t seem any of those things to me. What I rather like about it is the room it leaves to the imagination…. It could not, I am confident, be improved by additional detail recounting every chronicle of the crotch, saga of the sack.

There is insufficient space to comment on each of the other eleven essays in this book. They are all interesting and deal with the subject and its peripheries in more or less adroit fashion. I find this prose treatment of the elusive, allusive euphemism preferable to the dictionary approach because it offers the reader useful comment at a length stylistically proscribed by the customary glossarial treatment, regardless of how loosely it may be interpreted. What remains unresolved at the end is the question suggested at the beginning: What is a euphemism?

Laurence Urdang

EUREKA: Nine Tailors

I recently came across the proverbial expression, Nine tailors make a man. Is this some oblique reference to Clothes make the man? What of the title of Dorothy L. Sayers’s detective novel, The Nine Tailors?

I believe that I have sorted things out.

1. With the help of a leading expert on paroemiology, Mr. Emanuel Strauss, of Redhill, in Surrey, I have been led to various sources relating to Nine tailors make a man. The OED, for instance, reveals that “In proverbial and allusive phrases, [tailor is used] often implying disparagement and ridicule.” The citations that follow are a mixed bag:

1605 SHAKS. Lear II. ii. 60, Kent. A Taylor made thee. Cor. Thou art a strange fellow, a Taylor make a man? 1607 DEKKER Northward Hoe II, i, They say three Taylors go to the making up of a man, but Ime sure I had foure Taylors and a halfe went into the making of me thus…. 1651 CLEVELAND Poems 23 Like to nine Taylors, who if rightly spell’d, Into one man, are monosyllabled. 1663 BUTLER Hud. I. II. 22 Compos’d of many Ingredient Valors Just like the manhood of nine Taylors. 1819 SCOTT Let. 26 July in Lockhart, They say it takes nine tailors to make a man—apparently, one is sufficient to ruin him. 1908 H. B. WALTERS in Church Bells 96 ‘Nine tailors make a man,’ is said to be really, ‘nine tellers,’ ‘tellers’ being the strokes for male, female, or child, in a funeral knell or passing bell. 3×3 for male. [In Dorset these strokes are said to be called tailors: Acad. II. Feb. 1899, 190/1.]

The one omitted at the ellipsis, preceding CLEVELAND, is:

1625 B. JONSON Staple of N. I, i Believe it, sir, That clothes do much upon the wit,… and thence comes your proverb, the Tailor makes the man.

It doesn’t seem to belong with the rest; indeed, it seems to have to do with Clothes make the man, and I can discern nothing disparaging in the citation; moreover, the entire thing seems a non sequitur.

In A Shakespeare Word-Book, Routledge 1908, John Foster offers (in part), following a passage from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II, i, 54:

The term tailor is locally employed for a bungler, a botcher, or a clumsy fellow, and these meanings have been suggested in the passage quoted. But as, according to the old saying, it takes nine tailors to make a man, might there not be some allusion to Puck’s size? Hence the expression may be equivalent to mannikin! dwarf! mite! urchin! elf!

From this gallimaufry of Gongorisms, I sort out the following, with Mr. Strauss’s help:

(a) Tailors were considered worthless fellows who were likely to steal cloth from the bolts given to them by customers.

(b) Nine tailors make a man (note—not the man) means that because tailors are worth so little (and are a cowardly lot, besides), it would require nine of them to make up one “real” man—though why nine and not seven or eleven remains a mystery.

1. The use of nine tailors in the Sayers title very likely comes from the teller use for bell. This seems to be borne out by a citation under teller in the OED:

b. A thing that makes known or announces.

…1877 N.&Q. 5th Ser. VII, 164/1 At Frisby and elsewhere these tolls [for the dead] are called ‘tellers’. 1898 TYACK Bk. about Bells 1.8 The use of bells as tellers of the passing time. 1909 DEEDES & WALTERS Ch. Bells Essex 149 We now come to the uses of the tellers,—for which the normal custom is 3 × 3 strokes for a man, 3 × 2 for a woman, including children, usually both beginning and end of tolling.

The Nine Tailors were bells in Sayers’s novel, and I am reasonably sure that, had I been able to lay my hands on a copy of it, I would have found there the sort of documentation she was in the habit of providing.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Facts on File Dictionary of First Names

Leslie Dunkling and William Gosling, (Facts on File, 1986), xiv + 305pp.

[Published in England by Dent in 1983 as Everyman’s Dictionary of First Names]

The study of names is called onomastics. More than 30 years ago, enthusiastic individuals interested in place names, literary names, and personal names formed the American Name Society. The organization now has two regular publications (Names and ANS Newsletter), and several hundred members as well as affiliated societies with their own publications.

As their joint contribution to onomastics, Dunkling and Gosling have focused on first names. Why are first names important? Why should there be a book on them? And, if they are important, why is this book an improvement on those we already have? These are some of the questions that have to be answered.

Probably, the major reason for most people to be interested in names is for naming babies. While it is perhaps true that a number of parents who choose a name do so because they like its sound or for some personal association, there are many who give the naming process considerable thought. Parents are concerned, and appropriately so, that the new members of the family bear first names that are in harmony with family traditions, ideals, aspirations, ethnicity, and surname and that are, at the same time, acceptable in American/British culture. These parents sometimes want to know about the original meaning of the name, its ethnicity, and the famous people who bore that name. For them a good reference book may be helpful.

A second group of individuals interested in names are those who are concerned with how a name (especially their own) affects others. In the last hundred years there has been a considerable body of research evidence accumulated which indicates that clear stereotypes do exist for many names. These stereotypes can affect how an individual is perceived and treated. Imagine what a Wilbur or a Hortense or a Phoebe would be like. Or, suppose that there is a new staff member in your office: Would you prefer to work with a Stanley or a Michael? a Bertha or a Susan? Not only do we perceive and treat other individuals differently because of their names, but our self-perceptions can also be affected. It is apparently true that when some individuals with unpopular (or perceived as unpopular) names finally change their names, they have a better self-perception: for example, a Clarence shifting to Michael and then later admitting how much of a wimp he felt he was when he was called Clarence. In addition to being interested in the stereotype associated with a name, many people are interested in how popular it is, whether it is relatively common or infrequent, or whether it is relatively stable or coming into or going out of style. In general, the scientific literature seems to indicate that men prefer relatively common names; women, less common. And women’s names seem to peak in popularity more quickly. George and Ann are currently way down in popularity in the United States compared to their standing in 1925. Another concern for researching a name is to identify its origin in terms of nationality or meaning. What is the origin of Michael and Jennifer, two of our most popular recent names? [Michael < Hebrew ‘Who is like God’; Jennifer < Welsh ‘fair,’ from Guinevere, King Arthur’s queen.] Another aspect of interest is the identity of famous people who have held the name. Mitzi is associated with Mitzi Gaynor; Jacqueline with Jackie Kennedy or Jacqueline Cochrane; Jason with Jason Robards; Gary with Gary Cooper.

A third group interested in names includes writers, people who are creating stories set in different periods or epochs. It is to their advantage to use names that are historically accurate. Sir Philip Sydney first used the name Pamela in 1590, so if one were writing a novel set before that date or even a bit later, the name would be an anachronism.

These are some of the reasons why people are interested in first names. Now, before going further, mention must be made of some standard references on first names. The first really modern reference book on names is that of Charlotte Yonge, History of Christian Names (1863). Revised in 1884, it is still in print. Her approach, which emphasizes original meanings of names, appeals to philologists. More recent is Elizabeth Withycombe’s Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names (1945) which is now in its third edition. Withycombe made careful accounts of name usage in medieval English records but was less interested in recent name usage. George Stewart’s American Given Names (1979) is excellent, especially on names in the United States, but it is disappointing in the relatively few names covered. Finally, there is the recent work by Rabbi Alfred Kolatch (1984), The Complete Dictionary of Hebrew and English First Names. This has wide coverage of names and gives excellent derivations for those of Hebrew origin; but is not as strong in names of European origin. While all of these references have their strengths, they also have weaknesses which Dunkling and Gosling sought to address. Let us now look at the backgrounds of the authors.

Leslie Dunkling is a BBC producer. His fascination with names has produced several previous books on names: English House Names (1971), The Guinness Book of Names (1974), Scottish Christian Names (1978) and First Names First (1977). The late William Gosling was a classical scholar at Wadham College, Oxford, and an authority on 17th- and 18th-century Christian names.

What Dunkling and Gosling have focused on, which is different from what other scholars have concentrated on, is the usage of names. These investigators obviously put a tremendous amount of effort into identifying just how much a specific name was used, consulting parish registers from 1600 on in England, Indexes of the Registrars General of England, Scotland, and Ireland over a period of time, university graduation lists in Australia, Canada, and the United States, and other sources, including some specifically for blacks. Thus, we can have some assurance that when Dunkling and Gosling write about the usage of a name, popular or not, in an ascending or descending cycle of usage, they have some basis for their statement.

A second aim of Dunkling and Gosling was to go, insofar as possible, to the original meaning of the name in its original language. The bibliography lists eighty-five entries, many of which are non-English.

The main section of Dictionary of First Names has 4,500 main entries in alphabetical order. However, a given entry may mention several more names, so the total number of names is more than 10,000. Thus, under John, there is Jon, Jack, Johnson, Jones, Jenkins, Jackson, Hancock, Ian, Iain, and feminine forms like Jane, Jean, Johanna, Shiona, etc. One useful improvement over many name dictionaries is that there is just one section of names instead of two sections, one for men, another for women.

Each entry includes the gender usage, linguistic/ethnic origin, and in many cases stories, legends, myths, or famous people associated with the name, how the name was introduced, its current popularity, and its use within group(s). Thus, we find the name Elizabeth [< Hebrew Elisheva ‘oath of God’] was borne by Aaron’s wife (Exodus 6:23) and by the mother of John the Baptist, (Luke 1:60), two saints, and two queens of England. The popularity of the name is declining (in Britain) in this century. Those who are interested in the patterns of popularity of specific names throughout the English-speaking world should consult Dunkling’s First Names First. For the name Daniel, there is an appropriate etymology [ < Hebrew ‘God is my judge’] from the Old Testament, followed by a discussion of how little the name was used until 1955, then how it hit a peak in the 1970s. Mention is made of the influence of Daniel Boone (1735-1820) and that of two films (1950, 1956) and a television series (begun in 1964) based on his life.

For many of the entries, diminutives and pet forms are given, as Bill, Billy, and Will. For some names, where there might be a problem, pronunciations are given. Variant spellings are also included. Thus Eileen can show up as Eilean, Eilleen, Ilean, Ileene, Ilene, and, in a Scottish form, as Aileen. For names that do not appear among the entries, the authors are sympathetic: in the Introduction they give some good suggestions on how to go about tracking down a name.

Finally, literary references are given for a number of names. Jasper is cited for a Dickens character in The Old Curiosity Shop; Helen for some famous lines in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus.

Concluding the book is a series of tables of the 50 most popular names over several selected years, from 1925-1981, for boys and girls, for England and Wales, and for the United States.

An overall assessment of Dunkling and Gosling would have to conclude that this is clearly the most valuable book available on first names. The authors have done as much as anyone could reasonably do to bring together such a vast amount of rich material. They have achieved their goals of dealing with aspects of names concerning etymology, meaning, introduction, popularity, usage, and literary reference. Those who have enjoyed John Ciardi’s A Browser’s Dictionary will probably enjoy browsing through this volume’s stories about names. The Facts on File Dictionary of First Names is a tremendous contribution and belongs in personal, university, and public libraries—wherever there is need for a reference source on names.

[Edwin D. Lawson, State University College, Fredonia, New York]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

‘‘The Illerate But Arrogant American.’’ [Headline for Sylvia Porter’s column in The Warren Times Observer, Warren, Pennsylvania, May 17, 1985. Submitted by Bill Hill, Warren.]

Mark Twain and the English Language

Richard Lederer, St. Paul’s School

If 1984 was the year of George Orwell, 1985 is certainly the year of Mark Twain. In this year of chronological confluences, we mark the centennial anniversary of the American publication of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the sesquicentennial of the birth of its author, Mark Twain, and the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in the small village of Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835. As a barefoot boy sitting on the banks of the Mississippi River, he watched stern-wheeler boats churning the muddy waters, and he heard the crewmen measuring the depth of the river by calling out to the captain, “By the mark, five; by the mark, four.” When the river bottom was only two fathoms down, he would hear the lusty cry: “By the mark, twain.” Long after he left the Mississippi, and after various careers as a riverboat pilot, prospector, and printer, Sam Clemens, now a journalist, contributed an article to the Nevada Territorial Enterprise on February 3, 1863, and signed it with a new name—Mark Twain.

In 1876, Twain published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a novel that reached back into his Missouri childhood. Later that year, in a casual letter written to William Dean Howells, Twain mentioned that he had begun “another boy’s book—more to be at work than anything else. I’ve written four hundred pages of it—therefore, it is nearly half done. It is Huckleberry Finn’s Autobiography. I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have got, and may possibly pigeonhole it or burn the manuscript when it is done.”

Fortunately, Twain did not destroy his text, and on February 18, 1885, 30,000 copies of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were released in America. The novel turned out to be Twain’s masterpiece, and it changed the direction of American letters. Ernest Hemingway spoke for generations of twentieth-century American writers when he said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”

“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter.” With this sentence Mark Twain not only began his greatest novel, but uttered a clarion call for a new way of writing. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain became the first important American writer to capture the freshness and vitality of our spoken idiom in narrative as well as dialogue. In Huckleberry Finn America found a voice to sing of itself.

The man who wrote “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt” and “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” also had a lot to say about the American language that he, more than any other writer, helped to shape. As we commemorate the sesquicentennial of his birth and the centennial of his finest novel, we reflect on Mark Twain’s words about words, language, and writing:

• On American English, compared with British English: The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company, and we own the bulk of the shares.

• On choosing words: The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—‘tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

• More on “the right word”: A powerful agent is the right word; it lights the reader’s way and makes it plain. A close approximation to it will answer, and much traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do not welcome it and rejoice in it as we do when the right word blazes out on us. Whenever we come upon one of these intensely right words in a book or a newspaper, the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt. It tingles exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn butter that creams the sumac berry.

• On style (in a letter to a twelve-year-old boy): I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words, and brief sentences. That is the way to write English—it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; and don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.

When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them—then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart.

• On the first-person plural pronoun: Only presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‘we.’

• On clichés: What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before.

• On grammar: Perfect grammar—persistent, continuous, sustained—is the fourth dimension, so to speak. Many have sought it, but none has found it…. I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by rules. A generation ago I knew the rules—knew them by heart, word for word, though not their meanings—and I still know one of them: the one which says—which says—but never mind, it will come back to me presently.

• On spelling: I don’t see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothing alike and cook all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasure. Kow spelled with a large K is just as good as with a small c. It is better. It gives the imagination a broader field, a wider scope.

• On simplified spelling: Simplified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far.

• On the classics: A classic is something that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

• On reading: The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.

• On dictionaries: A Dictionary is the most awe-inspiring of all books; it knows so much…. It has gone around the sun, and spied out everything and lit it up.

• On speaking: It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

• On being a writer: I have always been able to gain my living without doing any work; for the writing of books and magazine matter was always play, not work. I enjoyed it; it was merely billiards to me.

On April 20, 1910—the night before Twain’s death— Halley’s Comet shone in the skies. Just a year before, Twain had said to a friend: “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt, ‘Now here go those two unaccountable frauds; they came in together, they must go out together.’ Oh! I am looking forward to that.” In December of this year, Halley’s Comet will once again begin its journey across our heavens—a brilliant reminder of the birth, life, and death of Mark Twain, who was, in the words of William Dean How-ells, “sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.”

English English: Take Care

Philip Howard

“Take care,” people say to me all the time, as a term of informal farewell. Over the past ten years “Take care,” meaning ‘So long, goodbye, see you around, I look forward to our next merry meeting,’ has become an irritating vogue phrase. I think that it is a trendy Southern British invention rather than an import from across the Atlantic or up from the Antipodes. You are always telling us that Brits are obsessed with class, in the same way that Americans are obsessed with celebrity and money. Guilty, if you say so, M’Luds. I suspect that the valedictory locution “Take care” is a bit lower-middle class if not downright Non-U, as Alan Ross and Nancy Mitford divided the lexicon. It is the sort of thing that golfers or publishers’ reps say to each other. It seems a gloomy piece of advice on which to part from an acquaintance. I doubt whether it is very good or very British advice. We cannot go through life as carefully as porcupines making love. It would be too boring. Hippoclides is the hero. You remember Hippoclides. Sporting boy, competing for the hand of a rich heiress. At the party to select the groom, he ordered the flute-player to play a dance, and “he danced, probably so as to please himself,” and ended up standing on his head waggling his legs in the air. Rich, old, intended daddy-in-law remarked coldly: “Hippoclides, you have danced away your marriage.” The boy replied: “Hippoclides doesn’t care.” You can read about it, if you want, in Herodotus vi, 128. No good saying to Hippoclides: “Take care.”

What is life, if full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

I shiver and grit my teeth when somebody says “Take care” to me. But I can see that there is a problem of sorts. The Brits are becoming as concerned as the Americans not to sound cold, so they cannot say “Goodbye.” Farewell is archaic and a bit final.

Fare thee well, and if for ever,
Then for ever fare thee well.

Au revoir is charming, but foreign. Ciao is twee. So is Hasta la vista. Adiós is twee and pretentious. “Be good” is archaic and chummy. I dare say that there is no solution to the problem. I tend to say “Go well,” which I can see is silly. But at least it is not as offensively silly as “Take care.” I dare say that there is a piece to be done about the tribal taboos in the matter of saying goodbye.

In the United Kingdom we used to say “Cheerio” or “Cheero” or “Cheery-ho.” They all sound quite antique now, and are dated by the best authorities to the First World War. But you can find references in the poets from Betjeman on about beefy ATS (female soldiers) without their hats shooting the bridge at Henley,

And cherrioh and cheeri-bye
Across the waste of waters die.

to Don Marquis with,

its cheerio
my deario that
pulls a lady through.

We must not become paranoid about this; but I reckon that there is a distinction to be observed in the class use of “Cheerio” and associated words. “Cheerio” is the Non-U, sergeants' mess form. Crusty old colonels use the more aristocratic forms “Cheer-o” or “Cheer-ho.” Either way, the word is quite whiskery. You would be surprised to hear it from somebody too young to have fought in the last war. “Cheerio” as an upper-class adjective is not so much whiskery as dead. It was defined agreeably by Dorothy Sayers in Clouds of Witness (1926): “ ‘He seemed particularly cheerio’…, said the Hon. Freddy…. The Hon. Freddy, appealed to, said he thought it meant more than just cheerful, more merry and bright, you know.” I do not believe any Brit, however old and silly and Hon., could use the word that way today, unless inside inverted commas, being deliberately quaint.

But everybody says “Cheers.” It used to be an exclamation before dipping into a pint or some other alcoholic drink. It has now been adapted widely outside the pub. In British English “Cheers” means “Thank you.” If somebody in the supermarket gives you your change, or somebody in the corridor stands aside to let you by, you might well say, “Cheers.” The putty word also means “Sorry.” If you bump into somebody in the supermarket or corridor, you might well say “Cheers.” It is decidedly Non-U. It is a fashion. It will not last for ever. Meanwhile, Cheers: Take care.

The Strange and Quarky Language of Physics

Richard F. Bauerle, Ohio Wesleyan University

Did Euclid “alone look on Beauty bare”? Edna St. Vincent Millay’s view has often been quoted and accepted. But now, thanks to the efforts of modern scientists, one cannot be sure. Theoretical physicists now claim that they, too, have discovered beauty bare. And it’s not some Euclidean mathematical form, but a type of “quark.” Their claim was heralded in The Scientific American [July 1983] by a headline, “Particles with Naked Beauty,” subtitled, “The beauty of the new composite particles is accordingly exposed.”

John Keats’s famous line about beauty also seems vulnerable to the inroads of particle physicists. His well-known affirmation, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is not their view. To them truth and beauty are related, but not so intimately. They see truth as the “top” quark, beauty the “bottom.”

Among the linguistic innovators in physics, Murray Gell-Mann seems to be the most imaginative and productive. He is perhaps best known for borrowing the word quark from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (“Three quarks for Muster Mark”) and giving it a radically new meaning. He chose the “silly-sounding” name, he says, to stay away from “pretentious scientific terminology” [Atlantic Monthly, August 1984].

There seem to be six quarks: down, up, strange, charm, beauty, and truth. (Gell-Mann named the first three.) All six are what he and others in the field call “flavors.” But flavors also come in “colors.” Recently, another pioneer in subatomic theory, Sheldon Glashow, has begun thinking and writing about “the smelly force” [Atlantic Monthly, August 1984]. If its existence is confirmed by further research, it will become the fifth of the elemental forces in the universe, joining the four already accepted by theoretical physicists— gravity, electromagnetism, weak force, and strong force.

After flavors, colors, and smells, can touches and sounds be far behind? Perhaps future issues of Physics Today will bring the answer.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Semiotics, An Introductory Anthology

Robert E. Innis, ed., (Indiana University Press, 1985), xvi + 331pp.

It is not our custom to review scholarly works in the pages of VERBATIM, and no exception is to be made here. However, this excellent anthology of essays by Peirce, Eco, Langer, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Sebeok, and others, accompanied by Innis’s helpful commentaries, will provide the reader interested in semiotics with a basic introduction to the subject that is understandable and manipulable. [Available from Indiana University Press, Tenth & Morton Streets, Bloomington, IN 47405 U.S.A.]

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Origins of Sea Terms

John G. Rogers, (Mystic Seaport Museum, 1984), xv + 215pp.

This dictionary has many engaging qualities: it is readable and interesting and clearly reflects its author’s affection both for his subject and for the work of compiling the material. Particularly useful is the Subject Classification Index. There is also a Bibliography which, though apparently extensive, reveals the sources of some of the book’s shortcomings: on the one hand serious omissions (e.g., the books by Hiscock, who probably wrote the best works available on modern sailboat cruising); on the other, reliance on some sources that reveal somewhat dubious work by etymologists (e.g., Partridge’s Origins). As a dictionary, it emerges as a fairly good book, though it contains only about 1100 entries; as a source for “origins of sea terms,” it could have been better, for many of the etymologies are speculative. That is not always Rogers’s fault. Although many terms one might expect to find are lacking, those omissions may be attributed to the highly personal nature of the book, borne out by the author’s informal asides (e.g., “Here’s one for you!”).

As an etymologist, Rogers is—albeit confessedly—an amateur. For instance, it is hard to understand what is meant by his comment, at aloft, “This word is one of the surprisingly few that seems to have originated in English,” a naive remark at best. In other cases (e.g., boot top) no etymology is given. Elsewhere (and prevalently) confusing or misleading information is given (e.g., [at brail] “Earlier spelled brale, it came from Old French, braile, belt.”): Is the inference to be that the modern English word brail was borrowed from Old French in the fifteenth century? If so, that makes little sense, for one thing because the period generally consigned to Old French does not stretch beyond the thirteenth century. One is given to wonder how Rogers used his sources, for in this particular instance he shows that he gleaned information (mainly, I imagine) from Middle English Sea Terms and the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Onions). It is hard to see how he could have interpreted either in such a way as to yield his result. It would appear from other etymologies he records that Rogers copied from his sources those origins he most fancied as being interesting: as no linguist appears among the list of his acknowledgments, one must assume that he had little professional help in that quarter.

More’s the pity, for, informal and attractive though it is, Origins of Sea Terms cannot be recommended for its scholarship.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Craft of Lyric Writing

Sheila Davis, (Writer’s Digest Books, 1985), 350 pp.

“A lyric is not a poem,” contends Sheila Davis in one of the chapter headings of her useful and informative book. “It is merely an unfinished product, half a potential song.” Not that some poems cannot be set to music: Shakespeare, Goethe, and Baudelaire attest to such adaptability; but the result, she makes clear, is an art song, not a pop song. The words to pop songs—evocative or provocative, but above all instantly comprehensible—is what this practical how-to-do-it volume is about.

Davis draws her pedagogical examples from all eras of the American popular song. In her analysis of song forms, she notes that lyrics are attached to melodies which, with individual variations, fall into permutations of two or occasionally three sections, of which some formulas have been with us since the 1800s. She discusses AAA (“By The Time I Get To Phoenix”), AB (“Oh! Suzanna”), AABA (“Ol' Man River”), ABAB (“Swanee”), and ABAC (“Days Of Wine and Roses”).

The lyricist works within the limitations of these forms along with the demands of several additional considerations. There must be an immediate appeal. Elegant craftsmanship there may be, but the success of a pop song depends on the essential “hook”—a phrase, concept, or rhyme which, like the proverbial plank on the mule’s head, grabs the listener’s attention. Moreover, words must complement the melody emotionally, although occasional irony is possible when an ostensibly cheerful lyric is belied by a sad melody. Furthermore, lyrics must be singable, with the needs of voice production and ease of pronunciation ever borne in mind. When the pressure of writing to a deadline is considered along with all of these professional requirements, one must feel deep respect for the masters of such an exacting discipline.

It is to the author’s credit that she gives the songwriters of the present era their due and does not confine her discussion to the gems of Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, and Ira Gershwin. In truth, contemporary writers such as Paul Simon and Bob Dylan present emotions and concepts unthinkable in terms of older norms. The writers of today come in various stripes, of course. There are those who continue in the tradition of the earlier show and film score craftsmen—Stephen Sondheim and Marilyn & Alan Bergman come to mind immediately—and those whose orientation is to the age of rock music. The latter, who have so greatly expanded the subject matter and emotional range of pop songs, are also, unfortunately, responsible for a perceptible decline in the craft in terms of exact rhyming. It is true that great poetry of the past is filled with substitutes for exact rhyme, but one suspects that the rock-oriented writers are not prepared to offer Milton’s use of consonance (food-stood) and assonance (meet-seen) in Paradise Lost as justification for their sins. Davis sadly admits that simple ineptitude is more likely to be at the root of the prevalence of false rhymes. She catalogues these, in addition to consonance and assonance, as pararhyme (nine-noon), unstressed (given-heaven), augmented (harbor-starboard), and, particularly popular with present-day writers, diminished (ground-town). After enough hearings, lyrics such as “You’ve been running around, All over town” seem less offensive to our ears; our standards have become lowered.

For readers of VERBATIM, at any rate, examples of classic full rhyme from the golden age of musical comedy are, as always, inspiring. The inspiration of Porter, Hart, Ira Gershwin, P.G. Wodehouse, Oscar Hammerstein, Yip Harburg, and the rest was indubitably W.S. Gilbert.

From “The Sorcerer” (1877), a paean to a dealer in magic and spells:

For he can prophesy
With a wink of his eye
Peep with security
Into futurity
Sum up your history
Clear up a mystery
Humour proclivity
For a nativity,
With mirrors so magical
Tetrapods tragical
Bogies spectacular
Answers oracular
Facts astronomical
Solemn or comical.
And if you want it, he
Makes a reduction
in taking a quantity…
Then if you plan it, he
Changes organity,
With an urbanity
Full of Satanity
Vexes humanity
With an inanity
Total to vanity
Driving your foes
to the verge of insanity.

Consider Hart’s “Mountain Greenery” (1926), and note, by the way, that the lyric came after the melody had been written, as was the usual form of Hart’s collaboration with Richard Rodgers:

Verse: On the first of May
It is moving day.
Spring is here, so blow your job,
Throw your job away.
Now’s the time to trust
To your wanderlust.
In the city’s dust you wait.
Must you wait?
Just you wait.

Chorus: In a mountain greenery
Where God paints the scenery,
Just two crazy people together.
While you love your lover, let
Blue skies be your coverlet;
When it rains, we’ll laugh at the weather.
And if you’re good
I’ll search for wood,
So you can cook
While I stand looking.
Beans could get no keener reCeption in a beanery.
Bless our mountain greenery home.

The Gershwins also commonly collaborated on a music-first basis, but in all such procedures there must have been considerable give-and-take on both sides. A melody can be altered up to a point in order to accommodate a syllable or two, and a lyric for a specific stage purpose may well be the stimulus for the composer. In any case, as Sammy Cahn responded to the eternal query as to which comes first, “First comes the phone call.”

All of these matters are set forth in clear prose by the author, whose course at The Songwriters Guild in New York City is the basis for this book. Her presentation is complete and highly recommended.

[Dick Hyman, New York City]

EUREKA: Droste, Dutch Girl, et al.

Many years ago, I came across a word that I have since lost—everyone has had a similar experience, I am sure. It referred to that special kind of drawing in which something in the drawing contains a picture of that thing, which, in turn, contains a picture of itself, and so on (presumably, ad infinitesimum). Though not common, examples can be seen in obvious places, like the Droste cocoa boxes, where the box the boy and girl are holding has on it a picture of a Droste Cocoa box showing a boy and girl holding a box, which …you get the idea. It is also represented on the Old Dutch cleanser box. (What connection may there be between the Dutch and this sort of representation?) Another, albeit fleeting, manifestation is often seen on television as when, for example, a newscaster is shown seated before a monitor that shows him seated before a monitor that shows…. For decades I have been searching for the word, asking people, writing to English Notes and Queries and other journals that tolerate such trivia, combing dictionaries, and so forth. Being a lexicographer, hence exposed (at least) to a great many words, many weird, many wonderful, it is odd that I have not encountered the word again. From that failure I have concluded that the term originally met with must have been a nonce coinage. I seem to recall its consisting of Greek elements.

Everyone will be much relieved, then, to learn that I have found a word which, if it is not the one I lost so long ago, may well serve the purpose. Nucleoline, probably well known to zoologists and botanists (Where were you when I needed you?) means ‘of or pertaining to a nucleolinus.’ A nucleolinus is the nucleus of a nucleolus, and a nucleolus is the nucleus of a nucleus. Thus, though I readily acknowledge that the term may not be perfectly descriptive of the phenomenon, it should serve well till another comes along. At least it is established in the language. Therefore, to sum up, an added sense of nucleoline is ‘of, pertaining to, or characterizing a pictorial representation in which an object appears that contains a representation of itself, which, in turn, contains a representation of itself, and so on, in infinite regression.’ Free use is hereby accorded to all lexicographers, though they could undoubtedly improve on this wording. (And, just to forestall irrelevant correspondence on the subject, infinite regression and infinitely regressive don’t work as well.)

Laurence Urdang

Paring Pairs No. 20

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). Often overturned.
(b). Warm woman up in the gorse.
(c). Pop addict uses this to make it last.
(d). Norden WWII device in Gilead.
(e). Lake Mead.
(f). Trade in caviar for British ballpoint.
(g). Find tranquillity in Italian town.
(h). Once past the bee, he is lost.
(i). Scatterbrained air delivery of Earl Gray. cy man in protracted salaam.
(k). Hedge about its use in pork sausage.
(l). Thanks again and goodbye.
(m). Waterproof Mexican leader’s vacation home?
(n). More mature than black.
(o). Ruminating skinny regent.
(p). Dissuade the man from keeping it clean.
(q). Before Xote made an ass of himself.
(r). Will horse delay king of beasts by knocking ‘ell out of him?
(s). What record London mousetrap holds.
(t). Who could blame the little devils for getting it together?
(u). It is not a capital idea to put down a lawsuit.
(v). Reversible traitor.
(w). Flat eight has been rented.
(x). Slight upset by man of the cloth.
(y). Thriving business leaving town is worrisome.
(z). According to the Rev. Spooner, illicit is still the word for one who panhandles for robber’s gold.

(1). At.
(2). Balm.
(3). Beggar.
(4). Berry.
(5). Bow.
(6). Buy.
(7). Case.
(8). Coat.
(9). Coke.
(10). Concern.
(11). Damn.
(12). Deter.
(13). Don.
(14). Elder.
(15). Fly.
(16). Gent.
(17). Going.
(18). Ground.
(19). Heat.
(20). Her.
(21). Hog.
(22). Imp.
(23). Is.
(24). Key.
(25). King.
(26). Leaf.
(27). Let.
(28). Lion.
(29). Long.
(30). Loot.
(31). Lower.
(32). Mind.
(33). Mini.
(34). New.
(35). Pisa.
(36). Playing.
(37). Poncho.
(38). Roe.
(39). Sea.
(40). Sight.
(41). Site.
(42). Spoon.
(43). Stall.
(44). Stir.
(45). Ta.
(46). Tea.
(47). Thin.
(48). Turn.
(49). Unity.
(50). Villa.

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. 19

(a). Is Cambridge U. run by the vice squad? (39, 10) Sin Dicks.
(b). Is Hollywood star acting as Christmas reveler? (25,35) Miss Rule.
(c). Disney septet’s East End debtors’ song. (14,29) Eye Oh.
(d). — —, no cheese. (28,50) No Whey.
(e). Broke. (21,12) Kneads Dough.
(f). Patron of jailbirds. (36,22) Saint Knick.
(g). Solmization artist. (11,33) Do Re.
(h). Tigers, lions, leopards, etc., need the birch. (8,20) Cat Kin.
(i). Opera(tors) for trams. (7,24) Car Men.
(j). Labyrinth offers corny surprise. (1,23) A Maize.
(k). True Christian love leaves one open-mouthed. (1,16) A Gape.
(l). Everyone accounted for in change-ringing. (2,45) All Told.
(m). Where are you going? Into a decline? (51,3) Wither Away.
(n). Carriage sweeps all before it. (27,5) New Broom.
(o). She’s taken up with hairier fellow. (18,43) Her Suitor.
(p). Unassailable with a lavender dress on. (19,47) In Violet.
(q). Pantechnicon provides this. (26,13) Moving Experience.
(r). Harrowing experience. (32,17) Razing Hell.
(s). Suitor’s ordinary squabble. (30,44) Plain Tiff.
(t). Stops in the orchestra for “Mary Seton, Mary Beeton, Mary Carmichael, and me.” (15,41) Four Stalls.
(u). Deep in the whisky business. (42,49) Still Waters.
(v). Professional write would be prohibitive. (31,37) Pro Scribe.
(w). Possession allows one to view the Buddhist in the spring. (38,52) See Zen.
(x). Boardinghouse sailor has a quartering breeze. (4,34) Broad Reach.
(y). Citified, suave cowpuncher. (46,9) Urbane Cowboy.
(z). This team has an evil hold on you. (48,40) Vice Squad.

The correct answer is (6) Brush. The winner was Elaine R. Ford, Metairie, Louisiana.

The European winner of No. 17 was Dr. J.M. Varney, London, and of No. 18 was Sandy Lyons, Cambridge.

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Recherché French article: ‘‘Wild Luaus’’ (7)
2. Rubber rings belonged to the lady (7)
3. Porter, and right sharp! (5)
4. Island cocktail (9)
5. Took in sail for turbulent feeder (6)
6. Disheveled mime late for dinner hour (8)
7. Needed in German city: Spanish aunt with Latin (9)
8. Distribute thin paper minus lead (5)
9. Pacino follows ‘‘Taxi’’ plot (5)
10. Boniface in North has retainer (9)
11. Quiet before Twisted Sister’s remains (8)
12. Dozing, please shake (6)
13. Game left liar in 2H and
14. NT (9)
15. Locations are something to see, we hear (5)
16. Gets used to being around Democrat, lasts (7)
17. Deal ends in ‘‘Pig!… Ripoff!’’ (7)

Down

1. In trouble, a repute gets shaky (2,1,4)
2. Don’t employ so many to no avail (7)
3. Topless Mom’s sis is free (5)
4. 50-ampere bulb (4)
5. Place for Alice W. on the German estate (10)
6. Mickey Mouse’s young age (5-4)
7. Journal notes watchmen beheaded (7)
8. Honest, it’s in raisin cereal (7)
13. Small ones use martini stirred (10)
15. Negating one upset, in full ire (9)
17. Telegram about wire service showing skill (7)
18. Smashed rubble low- grade, as Jabberwock might have said (7)
20. Folded entreaty to Kennedy (7)
21. Rough sport, i.e., making comeback (7)
24. Cafe Matsushita features dish (5)
25. ‘‘Goddess’’ is repeated (4)

EPISTOLA {Judith Tetzlaff}

Anent the recent article on oxymorons [XI, 4], I submit the following addenda to the list:

Adult children
Holy war
Cherry tart
Industrial park
plastic glasses (or plastic silverware)

And my current, unfavorite, bêtes noires:

computer literacy (!)
personal computer.

[Judith Tetzlaff, Skokie, Illinois]

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. ABACUS.
5. Care-le-ss.
9. Uninviting.
10. Chic(k).
11. Bunny Hop(e).
12. L-AD-der.
13. Stir.
15. N-o-RSEMAN.
18. Harmonic(a).
19. Take.
21. ESTHER.
23. Up in arms.
25. G-obi.
26. EXORBITANT.
27. Stat-Utes.
28. Endure.

Down

2. DurBAN TUrban.
3. Con-un-drum.
4. Slight.
5. Clipping Coupons.
6. REGULARS.
7. L-UC-id.
8. S-pice r-ack.
14. TRANSPORT.
16. e X-t RA c TED.
17. ANGRIEST.
20. fLuId As BiLgE.
22. HEIST.
23. MANOR.

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. June 20, 1981, p. A-5. ↩︎

2. June 13, 1982, sec. 12, p. 1. ↩︎

3. NBC-TV, April 9, 1985. ↩︎

4. Bronxville: Barnhart, 1980, p. 346. ↩︎

5. WILL-TV, Urbana, Illinois, Feb. 18, 1983. ↩︎

6. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1982, p. 224. ↩︎

7. Springfield, Mass: Merriam-Webster, 1983, p. 36. ↩︎

8. Chicago: World Book, Inc., 1985, p. 405. ↩︎

9. July 23, 1985, p. 2B. ↩︎

10. Barnhart’s Second, p. 358. ↩︎

11. Oct. 12, 1981, p. 86. ↩︎

12. American Speech, Vol. 59, p. 68. ↩︎

13. “The Future as a Way of Life.” Horizon, 1965, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 108-15. ↩︎

14. The Oxford English Dictionary, Supplement I, p. 177. ↩︎

15. Stuart Berg Flexner (I Hear America Talking. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976, pp. 68-69.) has stated that “pie à la mode …has been around since the 1880s, but became widely known only after the famous Delmonico’s restaurant put it on its menu around the end of World War I.” ↩︎

16. According to Newsweek, Sept. 21, 1981, p. 17, the Moral Majority was established in June 1979. ↩︎

17. As paraphrased by William Golding in The Hot Gates. ↩︎