VOL XIII, No 1 [Summer, 1986]

Canting Heraldry

D. H. B. Chesshyre, Chester Herald of Arms

Heraldry emerged in Europe towards the middle of the 12th century as a means of identifying knights and noblemen, particularly in battle and in tournament. We do not know how these early warriors chose the emblems for their shields, but in due course canting arms, or armes parlantes, devices involving a pun on the owner’s name or occupation, became fashionable. According to Professor G.J. Brault, an expert on early blazon, they were rare in the 12th century. They were certainly not rare by the 13th century, and it is an interesting exercise to work through medieval rolls of arms seeing how many puns one can detect. Sometimes they are obvious, but in other cases they have been obscured by changes in the meanings of words.

As far as the word cant itself is concerned, it is said to derive from the Latin cantus ‘song,’ though it has some less attractive overtones: for instance it can mean ‘a whining manner of speaking,’ ‘a secret or peculiar language of a class, sect, or subject,’ or ‘the jargon of thieves and beggars.’ Its punning connotation seems to be restricted to the realms of heraldry and perhaps arose because the cant of heralds was generally assumed to include puns. An alternative term is allusive heraldry, but this is even less satisfactory, as coats of arms can include references to items or events without any play on words: for example the skull in the arms of Zephaniah Holwell, who survived the Black Hole of Calcutta. We must therefore be content with the word canting for arms which include pictorial puns.

Returning to the 13th century, in the “obvious” category we can place the arms of Eleanor of Castile (died 1290), Queen of Edward I and daughter of Ferdinand III, King of Castile and Leon, who bore quarterly 1 & 4 a castle, 2 & 3 a lion. Also Odinel Heron (Azure three herons Argent) and Thomas Corbet who bore Or two ravens (corbies) sable, which conveys to me something of the primitive flavor of the old folk-song “The Twa Corbies,” in which the sinister black scavengers plan to feast on the body of a newly slain knight. Then there are the hammers (martels) of Martell, the oak of Oksted, the three pike (lucies) of Lucy, and the horseshoes (fers) borne by Montgomery as the tenant of Ferrers.

Among the less obvious puns I would mention the coat of Robert Muschet (Azure 3 sparrowhawks Or), a musket being a male sparrowhawk; that of Nicholas de Kennet (Gules 3 dogs Argent), a kennet being a small hunting dog (French chienet); the gurges or whirlpool in the arms of Gorges; the degrés or steps in the barry coat of Grey; the cross voided (crevé au coeur) of Crevequer; the six annulets (VI points) of Vipont; and the sharply pointed fusils in the arms of Montagu (alias Mont-aigu or de Monte Acuto) and in those of Percy. In the latter case there may be a double allusion: being piercing they suggest the name Percy, and if seen as mill-picks they recall the 12th-century Picot de Percy.

There must surely be other 13th-century canting coats with earlier roots. For instance, 12th-century seals in the Archives Nationales in Paris for members of the family of Candavéne, Comtes de St. Pol, all include garbs or sheaves which one assumes to be of oats, as a pun on the surname (l’avoine = ‘oats’). Then there is the familiar coat of Bar of Bar-le-Duc, which includes two barbels (fish). The version which appears in several popular books on heraldry shows the banner borne by John de Bar at the Siege of Caerlaverock Castle in Scotland by King Edward I in 1300, but it has much earlier precursors. A single barbel appears on a coin of Henry I, Count of Bar, in 1180 and on his equestrian seal of 1189; while the seal of his brother Thibaut I, also dating from 1189, shows two barbels back to back.

There were many other medieval canting coats but I shall mention only a few. The family of Setvans or Septvans bore three vans (winnowing fans), illustrated on the shield and surcoat of Sir Robert de Setvans on his brass of about 1305 at Chartham Church in Kent. Inspired by this example I asked a modern artist to include butterflies and winnowing fans in the illuminated border of the grant of arms to a current client of mine, Mr. Alan Buttifant.

Queen’s College, Oxford bears three eagles in honour of its founder, in 1340, Robert Eglesfield, confessor to Queen Philippa, wife of Edward III. There are many other ornithological puns in the heraldic repertoire, including the swallows (hirondelles) of Arundel and the kingfisher crest of Fisher. I was recently responsible for a grant of arms to the English conductor Sir David Willcocks, whose shield includes two cockerels each supporting a wheel.

Intricately carved rams may be seen in the chantry chapel at St. Albans which commemorates Abbott Ramryge (died 1524), and other allusive beasts abound in heraldry, including three bears (safely muzzled) for Barham, a camel for Camel, and two elephants supporting the shield of Lord Oliphant. Fish are likewise a common source for the punster and apart from the barbels and lucies already mentioned, we find eels for Ellis, trout for Troutbeck, gudgeon for the French family of Goujon, a dolphin between three ears of wheat for John Fyshar (“fish-ear”), Bishop of Rochester, and of course the dolphin in the arms of the Dauphin of France.

Some writers have been scornful of canting heraldry and many of the more obvious puns do indeed seem to insult the intelligence. Nevertheless, the practice has a venerable history, and I have no doubt that it will persist as long as heraldry survives. When designing new arms it is difficult to resist a pun if an obvious one presents itself, and many of the examples to be found in the records of the College of Arms seem almost inevitable: a robin on a sun for Robinson; a rat LEFT: John Fysharl for Ratton; three rabbits for Hopwell; three apples for Sweetapple; per bend grady (i.e., in the form of steps) for Stairs; a hedgehog (hérisson) for many a Harris or Harrison. One of my favorites is the coat for Dodge, recorded at the heraldic visitation of Kent and other counties in 1531, which includes a woman’s breast (dug) distilling drops of milk.

Sometimes, however, a grantee prefers not to impose on his descendants a canting coat, particularly if he considers the suggested charges to be crude or undignified. When Jesse Boot (founder of the famous chain of chemist’s shops) was knighted in 1909, he was granted arms consisting of a chevron between three black boots with smart red tops, soles, and heels. When he became a Baronet in 1919, the boots acquired spurs; but when he was made a Peer in 1929, with the title of Baron Trent, the boots disappeared and were replaced by more traditional heraldic emblems (two galleys and a rose).

I rather enjoy heraldic puns and I encourage my clients to accept them. I was the agent for a recent grant to Sir Herbert du Heaume, formerly a senior official in the Indian Police, whose arms include two helmets. On the same theme I have another client, Mr. Paul Holmer, lately British Ambassador to Rumania, whose name is thought to derive from the Norman haulmier meaning ‘helmet maker,’ and accordingly a single helm takes pride of place in his shield. In order to take full advantage of the punning opportunities afforded by his surname, we included in the crest a homing pigeon with a sprig of holm oak in its beak! Another modern coat which may provoke a groan is that granted in 1977 to Dr. Claude Bursill, which includes three burrs, or teasels, and the heraldic ordinary known as a fess, which resembles a horizontal slab or sill. One of the tricks of the trade favored by some heralds is to use terms which do not resemble the surname, so that the enthusiast can have the pleasure of working out the pun for himself. Sometimes the motto is made to join the game: for example, QUERCUS ROBUR SALUS PATRIAE ‘The strength of the oak is the safety of our country’ for a family of Oakes, with an oak tree for their crest; and QUO SPINIOSOR FRAGRANTIOR ‘The more thorny, the more fragrant’ for a family of Ross whose crest is a hand holding a sprig of rose.

So far I have discussed mostly the formal heraldry of shield and crest; but there is also the most casual sphere of badge and rebus where pictorial puns have always been the order of the day. There is not room here to discuss the subtle differences between badge and rebus so I will merely give some examples.

The badge attributed to the Plantagenet kings of England was a spring of broom (planta genista) and during Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon he symbolized the link between England and Spain by means of a badge combining the English rose with the canting pomegranate of Granada.

Familiar examples of the rebus are the owl with a scroll in its beak bearing the letters dom for Bishop Oldham in his chantry at Exeter, and the human eye with a branch (or slip) of a tree for Abbot Islip in Westminster Abbey. Another device used by the latter was a man falling from a tree (“I slip!”) We are back to fish with the attractive rebus of William Pickering, the 19th-century publisher (a pike with a ring and a scroll bearing his Christian name); a final example is Kruger Gray’s elaborate rebus for the late Lieutenant Colonel George Babington Croft Lyons, which includes St. George, a babe in a tun and two lions in a croft! The Colonel was a notable antiquary who died in 1926, leaving money for an ambitious new dictionary of British arms, of which I am one of the editors.

Mafia, Cosa Nostra, Camorra, ‘Ndrangheta and Mammasantissima

George Bria, Pound Ridge, New York

Street vendors hawk arance mafiuse (‘fine oranges’) in Palermo and a frisky horse or pretty girl are mafiusi, too; but where does the mafia come in? A true mafioso, if his lips are not sealed by omertá, may say he belongs to the onorata societá (‘honored society’) or is un amico (‘a friend’) or un amico degli amici (‘a friend of friends’), but shrugs off mafia.

Omertá, the code of silence, stems from Sicilian omu (uomo, Italian; homo, Latin) and thus connotes ‘manliness.’ Real men are supposed to settle their own accounts and keep quiet. Informers are despised in many places besides Sicily, but the mafia may dispatch them with a lupara ambush and sometimes with cement overcoats in Manhattan’s rivers.

Lupara (from lupo ‘wolf’) are heavy shotgun pellets (not the shotgun itself, as often mistakenly translated) used for hunting wolves. Someone whose fate is simply to disappear—like U. S. Teamsters leader James Hoffa, a presumed gangland victim in 1975—is said to have received the lupara bianca (‘white lupara’) treatment.

Protected from such an end by 200 Federal marshals, Joseph M. Valachi made history in language as well as crime in 1963 when he added Cosa Nostra to the world’s vocabulary. Valachi, a convicted murderer who sang about the inner workings of the mob, told U. S. Senate investigators that his crime brothers never said mafia among themselves but called it la cosa nostra (‘our thing’). This was news in Italy where cosa can signify just about anything and has multiple idiomatic couplings—cosa pubblica the ‘State or government’; far le sue cose ‘go to the toilet’—but where cosa nostra had not theretofore been synonymous with mafia. Italians nevertheless instantly accepted the term as meaning the mafia in America, and it is so identified to this day in the Italian press. Cosa Nostra indeed may qualify as a peculiar American hybrid, U. S. mobsters of Italian extraction having possible antecedents in the Neapolitan Camorra or Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta as well as the mafia. A coincidence, but in U. S. gangland’s hall of fame, Al Capone, was by origin a Neapolitan, Charles “Lucky” Luciano a Sicilian, and Frank Costello (born Francesco Castiglia) a Calabrian.

Had Valachi said cosca instead of cosa, he would, curiously, have been using classic mafia coinage. What in U. S. terminology is known as a mafia “family” is called a cosca in Italy, cosca being the ‘tightly bound leaves of an artichoke.’ Internecine mafia warfare is called a war of the cosche (plural of cosca), while an alliance of cosche is known as a consorteria. The Italian press has also adopted the English gang and clan as variants of cosca.

Italian newspapers nowadays like the simple English boss for a mafia leader and use it more than capo dei capi ‘chief of chiefs’ or mafia don, still beloved of some U. S. writers. A mammasantissima ‘holiest mamma,’ sometimes used in Italy for the big chief, hasn’t made it yet to America. But uomo di rispetto ‘man who commands respect’ and pezzo da novanta ‘big shot’ (from a fireworks display), still appear ritually in writings about the mafia on both sides of the Atlantic.

English killers, as in Hemingway’s famed short story, is much used in Italian publications to describe those gangland operatives enshrined in American journalese as “hit men.” A current favorite in the Italian journalistic lexicon is a pentito, (from pentirsi ‘to repent’), a person who regrets his sins and turns state’s evidence. Besides mafia, the mob in Italy is also known as piovra ‘octopus’ (its tentacles reaching everywhere), Mano Nera ‘black hand’ (the famed mark adorning death-threat letters), and the onorata societa. But clearly mafia is an outsiders’ term and not the members’ own label for the criminal group. It may be spelled “maffia” as well as “mafia” in Italian; the “o” in mafioso becomes “u” (mafiuso) in Sicilian dialect.

Theories abound on the origin of the word in Sicily, with its many cultures over the centuries and its inbred mistrust of foreign rule and authority, including that of mainland Italians. Some scholars believe mafia comes from Arabic m\?\afah ‘protected force’ mahais ‘a braggart,’ or Máafir, an Arab tribe that ruled Palermo. Others see links to the Greek omorphie ‘handsome,’ the French mauvais ‘bad,’ the Piedmontese malaffare ‘shady deed,’ and the Tuscan maffia ‘poverty or misery.’

One (probably fanciful) version traces the word back to the Middle Ages and the Vespri Siciliani (Night of the Sicilian Vespers), a revolt against French rule that broke out at the hour of Vespers on Easter Tuesday 1282. Mafia supposedly was an acronym for Morte Ai Francesi Italia Anela ‘Italy wants death to the French.’ Another seemingly far-out acronymic explanation jumps to 19th-century patriot Giuseppe Mazzini and would have it: Mazzini Autorizza Furti, Incendi, Avvelenamenti ‘Mazzini authorizes thefts, arson, poisonings.’ Another theory is that a mafia was a cave in which the Carbonari, 19th-century revolutionaries, hid. Or, says another theory, Maffia or Maffio was just the name of a founder of the secret society.

Giuseppe Pitré, a turn-of-the century scholar of Sicilian folklore, believed the word stemmed from a dialect expression for beauty or excellence—the mafiusi oranges, or horses or girls—acquired the association with manly carriage or bravery, and thence became the name of the secret society.

The current Encyclopaedia Britannica traces the origin of mafia as an organized group to Sicilian landowners in Napoleonic times who hired toughs to keep down rebellious peasants. According to this theory, the toughs formed an organization among themselves that eventually became more powerful than the landowners. On the other hand, the Oxford English Dictionary [OED] says mafia connotes a “spirit of hostility to the law” prevailing in Sicily but labels as erroneous the idea of its being an organized secret society existing for criminal purposes.

With no such doubts about its existence, some Italian writers capitalize Mafia to describe the secret society and use a small “m” for the state of mind or attitude toward the law. Thus you can be mafioso without necessarily being a Mafioso. The prestige Turin daily La Stampa uses a small letter for both. The Associated Press Stylebook capitalizes Mafia and Mafiosi and defines them as “the secret society of criminals and its members” but adds, “Do not use as a synonym for organized crime or the underworld.” Some Italian-Americans have campaigned against such a synonym, perceiving it as having derogatory fallout for all Italians. In English, mafia has also acquired the meaning of ‘powerful clique or coterie,’ like the Irish mafia, constituting President John F. Kennedy’s inner circle, or the opinion mafia, applied to pundits of a certain persuasion.

A Sicilian dialect play, I Mafiusi della Vicaria, by Giuseppe Rizzotto (1863), appears to have been the first published use of mafia with a criminal connotation, the Vicaria being a Palermo jail. Through the centuries, jail seems to have been the general headquarters of the camorra, the Neapolitan (and quite distinct) version of the mafia. Etymologically, camorra is also elusive. The OED mentions “a kind of smock-frock or blouse” and “Irish rugge or mantle” and suggests the Naples society got its name from “a species of short coat worn by members.” Most scholars, however, see a Spanish connection. One theory claims camorra derives from Raimondo Galmur, a 17th-century Spanish adventurer, jailed in Naples, who organized convicts into a society that gained political control of the prison and spread its power beyond bars. Others say similar criminal associations existed in Spain and that the concept emigrated to Naples with Spanish domination of southern Italy. Camorra is a Spanish word in current usage, meaning a ‘quarrel.’ There’s also a verb form, camorrear ‘to quarrel.’ According to one theory, camorra entered Spanish from Arabic kumar and once meant ‘gambling or a game of chance.’

Aside from expertise in the extortion and protection rackets—and lately in drug-smuggling activities rivaling those of the mafia—the camorra was renowned in earlier times for the sfregio, a knife or razor cut inflicted on the face of a victim, marking the person for life. A person so scarred was called a sfregiato.

Scholars of the ‘ndrangheta—a dialect name for the Calabrian mafia—believe the word may be of Greek origin, deriving possibly from andras ‘male’ or andraghia ‘wise men’ or from the verb andragazeo ‘I act as an honorable man.’ The ‘ndrangheta specializes in kidnapings. The most notorious was the 1973 abduction of oil heir J. Paul Getty III, whose right ear was cut off and sent to a newspaper during negotiations leading to his eventual release for a reported $2.7 million ransom.

‘Ndrangheta will never be loved by headline writers, whose favorite is the three-letter mob. This term has long-time underworld connotations, and was once applied [OED] to gangs of pickpockets working in concert.

Let Us Pick Your Brains

Louis Phillips, New York City

Subway riders in New York City have been receiving small cards that list terms used by professional pickpockets. How well do you know the world of dips and cannons? Can you match each term to its correct definition?

1. dip
2. mark
3. stall
4. tip
5. wire
6. whiz
7. prat
8. breech
9. cannon
10. lushworker

a. crowd
b. a person who takes money from sleeping drunks
c. an organized gang of pick pockets
d. side pocket in a pair of pants
e. rear pants pocket
f. the victim
g. the crook who takes property out of pockets
h. to place one’s hand into a purse or pocket
i. the pickpocket
j. accomplices used by a pickpocket to distract the victim

Answers to Pick Your Brains

1. h
2. f
3. j
4. a
5. i (or g)
6. c
7. e
8. d
9. g (or i)
10. b

Horsing Around with the English Language

Richard Lederer, St. Paul’s School

In modern life, horses are no longer crucial in helping us to hunt, do battle, draw vehicles, round up livestock, or deliver mail. Nevertheless, our equine friends still figure prominently in the words and phrases we use in our everyday conversations and writing.

“Horsefeathers!” you respond, bridling at my suggestion and working yourself into a lather. “Now hold your horses, you horse’s ass. You’re just trying to spur me on to the end of my tether and beat a dead horse.”

The meanings of the horsy expressions in the paragraph above are generally clear, but horsefeathers deserves an etymological exegesis. Rows of clapboards are laid on roofs to provide flat surfaces for asphalt shingles, called “feather strips.” Oldtimers in New England and New York, nothing the feather-like pattern, called the clapboards horsefeathers. Why the horse in the word? Because the boards were large, and large things sometimes attract the designation horse, as in horse chestnut, horsefly, and horse mackerel. But why has horsefeathers—like tommyrot, balderdash, and poppycock—become a three-syllable explosion of derision? Because it is a euphemism for a shorter barnyard epithet. Check your dictionary and you’ll discover a paddock of additional, more disguised words that descend from the world of horses, including cavalier, cavalcade, chivalry, henchman, hippopotamus, marshal, and any variation of the name Philip.

The time has come for us to talk some horse sense. I’m full of horsepower and feeling my oats. I’m champing (not chomping) at the bit and eager to give free rein to horsing around with the English language. So prick up your ears and listen to how often we compare people with horses—disk jockeys, coltish lasses with ponytails, dark horse candidates who are groomed to give the frontrunners and old war horses a run for their money, and work horses who, although saddled with problems of galloping inflation, can’t wait to get back in harness each Monday at the old stamping (not stomping) ground.

Now, straight from the horse’s mouth, here is a glossary of less obvious equine expressions that are stabled in our language. Learning the origins of these phrases will help you to see that English is really a horse of a different color.

We often call an exasperatingly entangled situation all balled up. The spheroids in this case are the icy balls that become packed under the hooves of horses when they are driven over soft winter snow or during spring thaws. As the footing becomes treacherous, the horses may fall, singly or in teams, producing a state of chaos that is vividly all balled up.

When is a holiday not a holiday? When it’s a busman’s holiday. This expression originated with the close relationship between horse teams and their drivers back in the last century, when London (omni) buses were horse-drawn. The regular driver would often spend his day off riding as a passenger alongside the substitute driver in order to check on his replacement’s handling of the horses and treatment of the riders. That is why a vacation or day off from work spent doing the same activity as one’s usual work is called a busman’s holiday.

A charley horse is a muscular cramp in the leg or arm of an athlete. Fanciful explanations for the origin of this compound include one story that the first victim was a lamed racehorse named Charley and another that a limping horse of the same name used to drag a roller in the Chicago White Sox baseball park.

One of the most subtle allusions to horses is the word cinch, meaning a ‘sure thing.’ When a cowboy mounts a half-wild cow pony, he buckles the saddle on tight with a strong cinch strap. He bets his life on the cinch, so it has to be a sure thing. Through the semantic process called generalization, any sure thing has become a cinch.

When an adventure fails badly, particularly after an auspicious beginning, we say that it has come a cropper. This expression is a figurative extension of the jargon of horse racing and polo playing that means “to tumble headlong from a horse.” A crupper (from French croupe ‘hindquarters’) is a leather loop passing under a horse’s tail and buckled to the saddle.

When we are kept waiting, we cool our heels, a figure of speech that dates back to the early 17th-century expression to cool one’s hoofs. Here the reference is to the saddle horse which, during a long trek, would have to stop intermittently and lie down in order to cool its overheated hoofs. Closely related is to kick up one’s heels, originally referring to a horse out in the field that frisks with the careless abandon of a colt.

To curb one’s anger and to curry favor are two more embedded phrases that we trot out from the vanishing world of horses. A curb is a type of bit that exerts severe pressure on a horse’s jaw, and the act of currying is the cleaning and grooming of a horse’s coat with a curry comb.

See, we’ve only got through the letter c in our galloping glossary, and we’re running out of room. So let’s leap forward to the letter h:

A hackney once signified “a horse or carriage for hire,” which is why cab drivers in New York are sometimes called hackies. And it is whence we derive the terms hack writer and hackneyed expression. Like the hackney carriages and small, half-breed hackney horses, hack writers and hackneyed clichés, like at this point in time and dead as a doornail, are cheap and easy for anyone to rent out and abuse.

In the 14th century, persons of lofty rank were mounted on high horses—great, heavy chargers used in tournaments or battles. Hence, get off your high horse means ‘stop putting on arrogant, superior airs.’

Is hobby a shortening of hobbyhorse? In a word, yes. The connection is that some people pursue their hobbies with the same child-like zeal that romper roomers ride their hobbyhorses.

When is a choice not really a choice? When it’s a Hobson’s choice. Thomas Hobson (1544-1631), the owner of a Cambridge livery stable, gave his customers the dubious choice of taking a horse in its proper turn or taking none at all. To prevent the ruin of his best mounts, Hobson tolerated no picking and choosing, insisting that each rider take the next horse in line, the one nearest the stable door. Thus, when somebody offers you a Hobson’s choice, you are really being offered no choice at all.

In this space, I’ve tried to lead a horse to language, and make you think. I hope that I haven’t ridden roughshod over you and that you won’t look a gift horse in the mouth. A horse is roughshod (‘roughshoed’) when the nails of its shoes project, allowing for more sure-footed progress but also damaging the ground over which it gallops. Thus, to ride roughshod over people means to advance oneself ruthlessly at their expense.

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth is one of the oldest proverbs known. It has been traced back to an A.D. 420 Latin text of St. Jerome, who labeled it a common saying. The age and health of a horse can be ascertained by examining the condition and number of its teeth. Although an animal may appear young and frisky, a close inspection may reveal that it is long in the tooth and ready for the glue factory. Thus, it is considered bad manners to inspect the teeth of a horse that has been given you and, by extension, to inquire too closely into the cost or value of any gift. But if you are buying a horse from a trader, you are advised to determine its age and health by examining the teeth straight from the horse’s mouth, the precise source of this article.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“ ‘Easy writing makes curst hard reading,’ said Alexander Pope.” —Martin F. Nolan (in Washington Journalism Review, December 1984, p. 52).

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“ ‘Easy writing,’ Hemingway once said, ‘makes hard reading.’ ” —Glen Evans (in The Complete Guide to Writing Non-Fiction, Writer’s Digest Books, 1983, p. 25).

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Easy writing’s curst hard reading.” —Attributed to Richard Brinsley Sheridan by the Oxford Book of Quotations, 1944.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“ ‘Easy writing,’ said Sheridan, ‘is sometimes d——d hard reading.’ ” —Thomas Carlyle (in Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, London and Westminster Review, 1837).

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Easy writing’s vile hard reading.” —Richard Brinsley Sheridan (in Clio’s Protest, 1795). [Submitted by H. Wendell Smith, Canyon Lake, Calif.]

Akeries and Eaneries

Robert A. Fowkes, New York University (quondam)

Two groups of establishments, mostly real or conceivable, may be designated by names, mostly unreal, rhyming with bakery for one set and with beanery for the other. The object is to match the definition or description with the pertinent name.

A. Akeries

1. Friends’ seismographic station
2. Painless (?) dentist’s office
3. Beauty parlor
4. Vampire-queller factory
5. Funeral parlor
6. Auto repair shop
7. Hula school
8. Roués’ hangout
9. Nest of vipers
10. Photographer’s studio

a. fakery
b. rakery
c. snakery
d. takery
e. quakery
f. shakery
g. wakery
h. stakery
i. brakery
j. achery

Akeries Matchings:

1. e
2. j
3. a
4. h
5. g
6. i
7. f
8. b
9. c
10. d

B. Eaneries/E(e)neries

1. Young folks’ hangout
2. Academic abode
3. Vegetable store
4. Supply house for Levi’s
5. Place to take bankrupt husband
6. Reducing salon
7. Assemblage of Scrooges
8. Female monarchs' club
9. Film-set factory
10. Nursery school

a. greenery
b. weanery
c. meanery
d. leanery
e. scenery
f. queenery
g. teenery
h. deanery
i. cleanery
j. jeanery

Eanery Matchings:

1. g
2. h
3. a
4. j
5. i
6. d
7. c
8. f
9. e
10. b

Unusual Place Names in Canada

Marc A. Schindler, Gloucester, Ontario, Canada

A widely repeated observation currently in vogue in Canada is that after more than a century of searching for our national identity, we’ve finally found that our identity consists of not having an identity. If language is a major key to a country’s soul, there are hints that this sardonic remark may have an element of truth. There is no such thing, linguistically speaking, as a uniquely Canadian place name, but one can distill from the large variety of different types of place names borrowed from imported or aboriginal cultures at the very least a unique combination (or mosaic, to use a cliché with special meaning in Canada) of unusual or interesting place names. Although this article does not even attempt to deal with the complete range of unusual place names, it should serve as an introduction. I offer eight categories:

1: The Whimsical Names of Newfoundland

Newfoundland was probably first visited by Europeans in the 11th century when Norsemen discovered it, but was not visited regularly until the early 16th century, when the Portuguese discovered the rich fishing grounds in the vicinity. It was apparently the Portuguese who coined the name Labrador, meaning a ‘farmer.’ Today’s district of Labrador, which consists of the mainland portion of the province of Newfoundland, is about as suitable for farming as Greenland is green. So much for early efforts at public relations!

Eventually the French touched down here and there on Terre-Neuve—even today the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, which are geographically part of Newfoundland, still belong to France—but it was the great flood of Irish and working-class English who immigrated to Newfoundland in the 19th century who gave the province its existing dominant culture. Newfoundland’s place names reflect the whole mixture. Many names are mixed French and English: Bay L’Argent, Bay de l’Eau, Barasway de Plate, Rouge Harbour, Channel-Port-aux-Basques, and Port-auPort. If the last sounds like a redundancy or a reduplication, how about this feat of bilingual redundancy: L’Anse aux Meadows (Anse is a meadow). L’Anse aux Meadows has become famous in recent years as the site of an early Norse settlement and is now a UN cultural heritage site.

What Newfoundland is really famous for, though, is its truly whimsical names. A selection of my favorites follows:

Halfway Tucks
Cupids Crossing
Juniper Stump
Pick Eyes
Blow Me Down
Heart’s Content
Spread Eagle
Heart’s Desire
Tickle Bay
Heart’s Delight
The Tickles
Little Heart’s Ease
Tickle Cove
Come-by-Chance
Leading Tickles
Ireland’s Eye
Chimney Tickle
Little Seldom
Happy Adventure
Whale’s Gulch
Joe Batt’s Arm
Nicky’s Nose Cove
Muddy Hole
St. Jones Within
Tumbledown Dick
Nameless Cove
Island

There used to be a town called Gayside, but because of the evolved (devolved?) meaning of gay in North America, the local residents recently had the town’s name changed to Baytona. Fortunately for enthusiasts of unusual names, disgruntled residents of the birthplace of Shannon Tweed, Playboy’s 1982 Playmate of the Year, were not successful in changing the name of their town. It remains Dildo, Newfoundland.

2: The “Multiplying” Place Names of Nova Scotia

As in New England, Nova Scotia seems to have been dealt only a limited number of place names, which then made do, with auxiliary words, for daughter settlements and suburbs. Two of the most profligate “multiplying” place names are Margaree, on Cape Breton Island, and Pubnico, in Shelburne County. Margaree has spawned Margaree Harbour, Margaree Centre, Margaree Valley, North East Margaree, Margaree Brook, South West Margaree, and Upper Margaree. I am not sure if the United Empire Loyalists of Shelburne County were more fecund than the Scots of Cape Breton or just less imaginative, but here are the metastases of Pubnico: East Pubnico, West Pubnico, Upper West Pubnico, Middle West Pubnico, Lower West Pubnico, Pubnico Point, Centre East Pubnico, and Lower East Pubnico.

3: Genitive Forms of French-speaking Quebec

It has been pointed out before that French place names have associated genitives which sometimes do not appear to resemble the place names in any way, shape, or form [e.g., Elisabeth Larsh Young, “In Praise of Irregularity,” VERBATIM, XII, 1]. Admirers of Gallic unpredictability will be happy to know that this tendency was brought over to le nouveau monde as well, by the French settlers in Canada, with some unique twists. I can understand why someone from Bois-Franc is called un(e) Silvifranc (-franque) (consider the Latin roots), but it totally escapes me why someone from the north shore town of HavreSt.-Pierre is un(e) Cayen(ne). Other genitives derived from Latin abound: Pierrefonds/Pétrifontain(e), Saint-Etienne/Stéphanois(e), etc.

An interesting Latin genitive is that of Salaberry-de-Valleyfield, a town on the St. Lawrence near the New York and Ontario borders which, when settled by the English, was originally known simply as Valleyfield. In French a Valleyfielder is known as un(e) Campivallensien(ne), which is straightforward enough if you know where the English words campus and vale come from, but the situation was confused in the 1970s when the nationalist Parti Québecois government went around francisizing as many “English” names as it could, so they added the “Salaberry-de-,” resulting in a reference to a completely nonexisting person.

Some French-Canadian genitives can be described only as small acts of mercy. If you wonder why a hockey player from Saint-Stanislas is called un Koska, you’ll be glad to know that it is probably because even les Koskas get tired of saying the complete name of their village, Saint-Stanislas-de-Koska-de-la-Riviéredes-Envies.

In the north of Quebec (Nouveau Québec) there are many Inuit (“Eskimo”) settlements, but fortunately the long arm of Quebec’s language police does not extend that far; Inuktitut, the Inuit language, has its own rules for forming genitives. For example, someone from Inukjuak is an Inukjuamiuq, and a native of Kangiqsujuaq is a Kangiqsurjararmiuq.

4: The Alphabetical Railroad Hamlets of Saskatchewan

They say that Saskatchewan is so flat you can stand on a sardine can and see the U.S. border. My childhood memories seem to consist almost entirely of interminable hours on the hot dusty highways of southern Saskatchewan, stopping periodically for pee breaks while Dad scraped the dead crickets off the windshield. A lot of grain elevators and telephone poles seemed to zip by but we never seemed to get anywhere. Thus I can empathize with the builders of the Grand Trunk Railway (now part of Canadian National) who had to dream up names for the little railway station hamlets stretching out along great straight lines of steel track from Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, to Edmonton, Alberta. What more worthy notables to name towns after than company VIPs? In order to give every bigshot a chance, they named the towns in alphabetical order, starting at the eastern terminus of Portage la Prairie, then proceeding northwest through Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, ending in Edmonton. They managed to exhaust the letters of the alphabet at least three times. I will not repeat the whole sequence here, but here is the second A-Z stretch, which includes Hubbard, Saskatchewan, where my own great-grandparents homesteaded. The sequence isn’t perfect any more because some of the towns have since disappeared (indicated by a dash), or have been renamed (indicated by the present name in parentheses):

Atwater, Bangor, Cana, (Melville), (Birmingham), Fenwood, Goodeve, Hubbard, Ituna, Jasmin, Kelliher, Leross, (Lestock), —, —, Punnichy, Quinton, Raymore, Semans, Tate, (Nokomis), Venn, Watrous, —, Young, Zelma.

5: Anglicized Amerindian Names of Alberta

In common with the Plains Indians names of the U.S. prairies, Canadian prairie Indian names were often translated literally into English, resulting in a unique type of place name. Examples in Alberta and to some extent Saskatchewan, including one or two contributed by European settlers are: Wild Horse, Manyberries, Medicine Hat, Smoking Tent, Whiskey Gap, Seven Persons, Stand Off, Crowfoot, Bearspaw, Buffalo Pound, Dogpound, Moose Jaw, Westward Ho, Red Deer, Sweathouse Creek, Crowchild, White Elk Night, Starlight, Two Guns, and the former name of Regina, Pile o' Bones. Whiskey Gap is a town in a gap in the Milk River Ridge of the Rocky Mountain foothills through which U. S. whiskey traders from Fort Benton, Montana, smuggled alcohol to their secret trading post near modern-day Lethbridge, known as Fort Whoop-Up. Whoop-Up was closed down by the Northwest Mounted Police in the 1880s when those scarlet-coated precursors to today’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police were sent west to assert Canadian sovereignty over the prairies. Stand Off is a Hutterite colony on the Blood Indian Reserve near the Mormon settlement of Cardston.

6: The Tongue-twisting Names of British Columbia

I am really impressed with the names of the Pacific Northwest Amerindians. I cannot pronounce many of them, but it is fun trying! From the Halkomelem Salishan we have Yakweakwioose, Aitchelitch, Lukseetsissum, and Puckatholetchin; from their Thompson Salishan neighbors: Inklyukhinatko and Unpukpulquatam; from the Coast Tsimshiam: Tsemknawalqan and Nishanocknawnak; and for dessert, Quan-skum-ksin-mich-mich, courtesy of the Nass-Gitksan Tsimshian.

7: Place Names of the Inuit

After practising on Pacific Coast place names, I grit my teeth, loosen up the old uvula and try these Inuit names: Tuktoyaktuk and Umingmaktok from the District of Mackenzie, Northwest Territories. Tuktoyaktuk was immortalized by oil workers who sported T-shirts with a phony university crest and the legend, “Tuk U.” Igloolik and Pangnirtung are in the District of Franklin, N. W. T., where the latter settlement serves as the port of entry to Auyuittuq National Park on Baffin Island. Finally, these grand-daddy tongue-twisters from northern Quebec: Kuujjuaq (mercifully known in English as Fort Chimo), Inoucdjouac, Umingmaoautik, and Kangiqsualujjuaq.

8: “Be-of-good-cheer-my-backside”: Names given in moments of despair

Perhaps you can imagine the endless ennui interspersed with dashes of pure horror experienced by our early northern explorers and settlers. These courageous heroes exacted occasional revenge at the expense of our toponymy, as evidenced by Deception (Quebec), Resolute (N. W. T.), Ruin Point (N. W. T.), Terror Point (N. W. T.), Stormy Point (Nfld.), Mistaken Point (Nfld.), Breakheart Point (Nfld.) and this expression of anguish by some anonymous Irish immigrant wife: Harbour My God Point (Nfld.) It is a shame that the Canadian toponymic committee does not recognize exclamation marks as being a legitimate part of place names!

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases

Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), second edition, xlviii + 1021pp.

HOBSON-JOBSON … an Anglo-Saxon version of the wailings of the Mohammedans as they beat their breasts in the procession of the Moharram— “Yā Hasan! Yā Hasan!”

First published in 1886, this book is not only a monumental early work of lexicography but fascinating reading matter. It should be pointed out before going any further that the authors' scholarship in etymology may be called into doubt by later research, notwithstanding the publication, in 1903, of a Second Edition of which this is a reprint, but the citational evidence and the definitions, with their encyclopedic commentary, make for an extremely valuable work that ought to be on the shelf of anyone with an interest in the English language and, especially, in the acquisition of loanwords. Citations abound, and they are not the brief sort that provide mere evidence for the existence of a form at a particular date: many make for engaging reading in themselves.

BANG, BHANG, s. H. bhāng, the dried leaves and small stalks of hemp (i.e. Cannabis indica), used to cause intoxication, either by smoking, or when eaten mixed up in a sweetmeat (see MAJOON). Hash\?\sh of the Arabs is substantially the same; Birdwood says it “consists of the tender tops of the plants after flowering.” Bhang is usually derived from Skt. bhanga, ‘breaking,’ but Burton derives both it and the Ar. banj from the Old Coptic Nibanj, “meaning a preparation of hemp; and here it is easy to recognise the Homeric Nepenthe.”

“On the other hand, not a few apply the word to the henbane (hyoscyamus niger) so much used in medieval Europe. The Kámús evidently means henbane, distinguishing it from Hashísh al haráfísh, ‘rascal’s grass,’ i.e. the herb Pantagruelion … The use of Bhang doubtless dates from the dawn of civilisation, whose earliest social pleasures would be inebriants. Herodotus (iv.c.75) shows the Scythians burning the seeds (leaves and capsules) in worship and becoming drunk upon the fumes, as do the S. African Bushmen of the present day.”—(Arab. Nights, i. 65.)

1563.—“The great Sultan Badur told Martin Affonzo de Souza, for whom he had a great liking, and to whom he told all his secrets, that when in the night he had a desire to visit Portugal, and the Brazil, and Turkey, and Arabia, and Persia, all he had to do was to eat a little bangue …”—Garcia, f. 26.

There follows another columnful of citations, too lengthy to reproduce here.

It should be made clear that this is a dictionary that describes the variety (or varieties) of English used in India. While it is true that scores of words admitted into Anglo-Indian were imported into England by colonials and thence into the English language, many of those catalogued in Hobson-Jobson either never earned their passage or, perhaps because they referred to cultural matters and objects that had no counterparts in western life, lost whatever currency they might once have had. The authors collected, also, imported words that occurred in Anglo-Indian; banjo is included, for example, with these words:

… Though this is a West- and not East-Indian term, it may be worth while to introduce the following older form of the word:

1. “Permit thy slaves to lead the choral dance To the wild banshaw’s melancholy sound.”—Grainger, iv.

Many of the words described are not Indian in origin but derive from Arabic, Persian, Portuguese, and other tongues spoken by traders whose settlements antedated those of the British. Thus, betel is traced to Malayalam, beri-beri to Singhalese, bulbul (‘nightingale’) to Persian, calash to French (from Slavic?), cassowary to Malay, catamaran to Tamil, hooka to Hindi (from Arabic), Mandarin to Portuguese; but, as is to be expected, the great majority are derived from one or another of the dialects of the subcontinent. It should be mentioned, too, that some attempt is made to provide etymologies for placenames, but these tend to be speculative.

This review cannot give the flavor of the work without an example or two. In the etymological note for CANDY (SUGAR-) appears the following intelligence:

A German writer, long within last century,… appears to derive candy from Candia, “because most of the sugar which the Venetians imported was brought from that island”—a fact probably invented for the nonce. But the writer was the same wiseacre who (in the year 1829) characterised the book of Marco Polo as a “clumsily compiled ecclesiastical fiction disguised as a Book of Travels.”

And, in the matter of the use of boy for ‘servant,’ Hobson-Jobson suggests that it probably does not come from English at all, for there are several cognate forms, bōyí, bōvi, bhoi, bhūī, derived from Malayalam, Tamil, Hindi, and Mahrathi, which mean ‘palankin-bearer’; moreover, the citations antedate any possible involvement with speakers of English.

Yule’s Introductory Remarks make an excellent essay, in which a number of words from diverse sources are conveniently listed together. There is also an Index that lists headwords as well as all of the variant forms for which citations are given. This is truly a welcome reprint of a book that has become increasingly hard to find in the antiquarians' shelves and catalogues.

Laurence Urdang

[Editor’s Note: A review of this book appeared in a recent [XII,2] issue of VERBATIM; the reviewer regarded it less than favorably. Henri du Chazaud has sent us the following review to even the score, and we thought it useful and interesting to publish it as well. One might say that the book will thus have received “mixed reviews” within the same periodical.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: French-English Dictionary of Modern Colloquial French

René-James Hérail, and Edwin A. Lovatt, (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).

I appear to be one of those “not-so-few” consulters of dictionaries who take the trouble to read prefaces, both in English and in French; in the case of this Dictionary of Modern Colloquial French. I found it to be a very useful exercise before “plunging headlong” into its 8000 or so headwords.

The fundamental importance of this underworld, or unconventional language—which is being more and more widely used because of the increasing permissiveness of the media and of literature in general, where this type of language received its first seal of approval—has been well grasped by these authors who have not only found a way of penetrating the mysteries of this secret language in French, but have also been able to come up with good English equivalents. This presupposes a perfect knowledge of both languages and, even more important, of both cultures in general and in particular; on top of this, rapid publication of the material is called for, something which is not easy to achieve even in one’s mother tongue, because the colloquial language changes so quickly these days in response to the fast-changing world of fashions and techniques. In addition, the main users (and creators?) of slang belong in a relatively narrow age-band, that of “youth,” and the communicationgap does not make the researcher’s task any easier.

If one wishes to avoid the problem of a turn of phrase leading to an awkward situation, one must be aware of the need to avoid hapax legomena and too specialized terms. The authors have managed here, by juxtaposing texts and contexts in a graded way over three registers, to help the reader avoid these pitfalls; he is also helped to tackle in an appropriate manner the new “mainstreams” of our culture, like pop music and comic books. The authors have avoided the use of the rather arbitrary and superfluous labels such as “vulgar,” “obscene,” “popular,” etc. The information passed on to the reader is thus improved, and his freedom and responsibility are safeguarded.

Nothing should be taboo for today’s lexicographer, but this does not mean that anyone can claim to be exhaustive, especially in the area of argot which is, of necessity, a secret language, one which is in a constant state of evolution. When a word of argot passes into common usage it ceases to belong to argot but comes to enrich the colloquial language. Later still, perhaps, it will come to form part of the standard language. The reader of this work must not be put off if he does not find all that he is seeking, despite the vast number of words and expressions given, since a volume like this is only elaborated over many years (ten in this case), and the colloquial language researcher’s task is akin to the spinning of a veritable spider’s web of language.

The problem of choosing the final list of words for such a dictionary is a difficult one. Should such-and-such an obscenity be left out? And where does obscenity begin and end? Who would take offense at hearing the words feuille or pétale de rose? Is this a technical term or a poetic one? Is it obscene or just slightly rude? Yet again it must be said: only the context and the actual usage of the speaker can decide. Should such-and-such expression be included? It seems obsolete, yet “in the swing of things” at the same time. The authors have, perhaps regrettably, taken the cautious path, yet they have produced a wealth of material which is all the richer for being bilingual. The English and French speaker will make many discoveries in his own language as well as in the other.

The method adopted for the choice of the entries and for the arrangement of the material within each entry makes this elegantly presented dictionary a very handy manual to consult as it offers the maximum of specific information with the minimum of clumsy detail. It is a unique reference work in its field, but it is also a useful book to take on one’s own travels to help while away the hours agreeably. They say that their book “should be taken as living proof that French humour is translatable, that vulgarity knows no national boundaries, that ‘risqué’ puns and ‘ripe’ jokes are just as common on both sides of the Channel and the Atlantic”; in other words, the English are no more stilted than the French, and “what is vulgar today may perhaps no longer be so tomorrow, and what was vulgar yesterday is scarcely any longer so today.”

Rather than select a few examples for illustration, I shall leave the reader to appreciate for himself the surprise and even amusement he will get from this fine collection of unconventional French and English.

Henri du Chazaud

Antipodean Newsletter: Where Words Run Widdershins

G. W. Turner, University of Adelaide

This really is an antipodean newsletter. As I look out of a window in the week before Christmas I see the grass on the Adelaide Hills bleached in the sun. It has passed from the green of winter through golden brown to what women might think of as a sort of ecru, almost white, the only white Christmas we will ever have in South Australia.

In the southern hemisphere the months are out of phase with the seasons. An introduced language with its associations formed in the northern hemisphere does not match experience. Even Australian dictionaries do not always adjust; one of them defines midwinter as ‘about Dec. 22.’ Similarly, midsummer’s day is defined as June 24, perhaps more forgivably since we hardly use the term here and are more likely to meet it in English contexts where it refers to a quarter day and the feast of St. John the Baptist.

Failure to give southern-hemisphere dictionary meanings to midwinter and midsummer can only be oversight which a moment’s thought will correct. The same is true of vernal equinox when an Australian dictionary dates it circa March 23. But these are obvious and striking differences between the hemispheres; more subtle ones require sharper attention and more strenuous thought.

In both hemispheres the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. If you look at the setting sun in either hemisphere, the direction to your right is north and south is to your left. So far, so good. But during part of the year (depending on where you live), if you look towards the midday sun you look south in the northern hemisphere, north in the southern hemisphere. Therefore the sun moving from east to west appears to move in a clockwise direction (left to right) to the northernhemisphere observer but anti- (or counter) clockwise (right to left) to us.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines a phrase with the sun as ‘clockwise.’ This would not do in the southern hemisphere (the phrase appears not to be used here). More interestingly, the old (especially Scottish) word widdershins or withershins, etymologically suggesting ‘a contrary direction,’ similarly refers to a movement against the apparent course of the sun and therefore considered unlucky or unnatural. The word is not unknown to Australians since a very well-known poem, “Bullocky,” by Judith Wright, tells how the bullocky (driver of a bullock team) “weathered all the striding years till they ran widdershins in his brain.” The poet here, as elsewhere, may exploit the eerie associations of the word, but a lexicographer has to remember that here, if widdershins still means anti-clockwise, the sun runs widdershins every day.

The word draws attention to an inbuilt ambiguity in our language and literature and the traditions of our culture. In South America also, where, as here, Orion’s belt falls upwards and the man in the moon hangs upside down above the bundle of sticks he is reputed to carry, the seasons are out of phase with tradition, and I am told that monasteries with a very severe rule have been obliged to relax the restrictions of Lent because it coincides with the heavy work of harvest. In Europe, religion and nature were in harmony; in our hemisphere, an imported religion and nature are opposed.

It is doubtful whether Australians would have thought it obvious—were it not for an inherited linguistic classification—to divide the year into four distinctive seasons. In Northern Australia there are two seasons, the dry and the wet; and even in the south no burgeoning buds or falling leaves celebrate spring or autumn except for some introduced trees.

Probably, as time goes on, nature will increasingly assert itself over tradition. Already Christmas seems more suitably celebrated at the beach or with light meals rather than a heavy Christmas pudding. The celebration of Guy Fawkes night on November 5 started too many fires in tinder-dry early summer grass to survive. With the name cracker night it was transferred to May 24 (Commonwealth Day, formerly Empire Day) and is now usually replaced with public fireworks displays.

Antipodeans live with a divided consciousness. Northern hemisphere nature invades our literary and traditional consciousness, while the world outside our libraries confronts it with an opposite rhythm. In return we gain a more than usual awareness that there are places and ways different from our own.

Misquotations

Norman W. Schur, Weston, Connecticut

In his mercilessly denunciatory poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Byron wrote of critics “with just enough of learning to misquote.” Some twenty centuries earlier, Publilius Syrus, in his Sententiae (Maxims), advised: “Better be ignorant of a matter than half know it,” a sentiment echoed in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia when he wrote, “Ignorance is preferable to error,” and again by Dickens in Sketches by Boz: “A smattering of everything and a knowledge of nothing.” Pope, in his Essay on Criticism, capped it all with “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” itself usually misquoted “A little knowledge….” Oscar Wilde wrote: “A poet can survive everything but a misprint,” and he might have added, “or a misquote”; and even that witticism is often misquoted, “A poet can survive anything….” So let us proceed to a dismal collection of grating misquotations.

“The best laid schemes o' mice an' men,” wrote Burns, “Gang aft a-gley,” echoing the truth expressed a hundred years earlier in Ihara Saikaku’s Japanese Family Storehouse: “There is always something to upset the most careful of human calculations,” and anticipating the modern Murphy’s Law (known in Britain as “Sod’s Law” and in France as “La loi d’emmerdement maximum”). But poor Burns’s “schemes” are all too often misquoted “plans,” and the contractions “o' ” and “an' ” usually come out as “of” and “and.” (Even Bartlett distorts the “an' ” to “and”!)

“Water, water, everywhere,” groaned the ancient mariner, “Nor any drop to drink.” The “Nor any” comes out as “And not a” as an improvement on Coleridge most of the time.

Portia, in The Merchant of Venice, cries: “How far that little candle throws his beams!” but “his” becomes “its” and “beams” turns up as “light” on the lips of some who would quote the Bard and should know better. And in the same play, the Prince of Morocco never said, “All that glitters is not gold”; glisters was the word. Gray got it right, in his Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, when he swiped the line from Shakespeare: “Not all that tempts your wand’ring eyes/And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;/ Nor all, that glisters, gold.”

Does pride go before a fall? No: according to Proverbs, XVI, 18, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”

It is in King John that Salisbury says to the king: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily/ … Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.” Nothing about gilding lilies.

And Everett never wrote about “Great oaks” or “Big oaks:” what he said was “Tall oaks from little acorns grow.”

“How doth the little busy bee/Improve each shining hour,” exclaimed Watts, but it’s the “busy little bee” we keep hearing about. And it isn’t money that is the root of all evil: Paul, in his First Epistle to Timothy, rightly said: “The love of money is the root of all evil.”

Finally, Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson.” He addressed his friend and colleague as “my dear Watson,” and when he felt unduly praised, he said, “Elementary,” but he never put the two together.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Stories Behind Words

Peter R. Limburg, (H. W. Wilson, 1986), x + 288pp.

Still another book containing informal, brief essays on the origins of English words, this time 285 of them arranged into seven loose thematic categories (Mood and Character, Democracy and Aristocracy, Religion, Sorcery and Superstition, Eating and Drinking, Dress, and Names That Have Entered the Language). There is an index, but it lists mainly the 285 headwords, not their cognates or the forms from which they derive. Thus, glamour is in the index but not grammar, trousers but not trews, though the latter in each case is discussed in the text. On the other hand, denim, discussed under jeans, does not have its own entry but appears in the index. As there is no stated rationale for these aberrant treatments, they must be chalked up to sloppiness. There is a five-page entry for cardigan, which tells me more than I ever wanted to know about the word.

The style is informal, occasionally folksy, and I found nothing factual to quarrel with—but then I was so bored by the whole enterprise that I confess to having given it short shrift. It is beyond me why publishers continue to publish books of this sort rather than responsible scholarly work on etymology, which is so much needed. The “packaging” is attractive; the price is intimidating; the value dubious.

In defense of The Private Lives of English Words, by Louis G. Heller et al., published by Gale Research in the U.S. and Routledge & Kegan Paul in the U.K., it must be said that that work is scholarly, that it has not only a good index (of all words, cognates, and sources) but several useful appendices, and that it has as its central theme words that have changed their meanings drastically since their entry into English. The recent spate of books listing informal etymologies seems to be devoid of such rationale: the purpose of a thematic arrangement in a book on etymology eludes me.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Dictionary of Cliches

James Rogers, (Facts on File, 1985), 305pp.

On several occasions I have started writing an article on the importance of “white noise” in communication. The world, awaiting that extraordinary piece of scholarship, couched in deathless prose, will have to be disappointed, as I have consistently encountered problems after the first few pages. The idea behind the article is simple to delineate; but, as everyone knows, an article must take up a fair amount of space to give its subject some weight: no one pays heed to an idea that is set forth in a short paragraph—no matter how good it may be. Therefore, the reader should not be deceived by the brevity of the theory that follows; though I readily acknowledge that it needs support beyond that which mere intuition can provide, such support is hard to come by considering the sparse facilities I have to hand—a pen and paper—and it will have to remain for others to test the validity of my argument. The reader is asked to bear in mind that what follows is, at bottom, intuitive, which is to say that it reflects what is common sense (to me).

I am of the opinion that the human mind is capable of assimilating only a limited amount of information in a given time interval. Clearly, the amount varies with the attention span, intelligence, and other factors concerning the individual as well as with the familiarity the individual has with the subject matter. For instance, my attention span for the subject of botany or flower arranging is quite limited; another’s attention span for a subject related to mathematics may be extremely short, and so on. To be sure, the ability to assimilate information depends on many factors, of which interest in the subject is merely one. Others are the language (or other medium) in which the information is presented, the speed of presentation, etc., as well as the receiver’s reaction to the presenter: a Gorgon speaking about the most fascinating subject on earth could turn any audience to stone. But these variables, in a properly conducted experiment, could be controlled—George Miller: Are you listening?—and we might then turn to the more important aspects of the theory.

The sum of the preceding point is that given certain conditions, people need a certain amount of time to understand certain kinds of information; above, I used assimilate for understand: what I mean is ‘absorb,’ ‘know well enough to be able to use’ information.

Let us go on to the next point, best made by illustration. Everyone—especially everyone in academia— has experienced the enormous difference between listening to a learned paper prepared for oral delivery by someone adept at such writing and one delivered orally that was written for publication in a journal. There is little point in going into the details of the differences, which we all know: suffice it to say that it is often impossible to understand the latter, especially if it deals with an arcane subject; the best examples of the former can be encountered by watching “Nova” or some other such program on TV, Disney’s “Nature’s Half Acre,” and the like. Such information-packed presentations are carefully prepared, with visual materials as support, by people who seem to have a pretty good feel for how much information (and what kind) a person can absorb. The success of these presentations is testimony to their writers' ability to gauge properly the capacity of a wide segment of the population to assimilate such information, regardless of age, education, and so forth. A few people are bored by such matter, undoubtedly, but most seem to enjoy it and to learn from it. If we try to characterize what it is that makes material “prepared for oral delivery” different from material prepared for publication (in a journal), we are ineluctably led to the conclusion that it must be written in a certain way. That may seem obvious to many, but what is not immediately apparent is the set of criteria that apply to such writing. Some scholars, Louis T. Milic of Cleveland State University among them, have for many years been doing research in the branch of linguistics that deals with that question and related ones. It is called stylistics. But from my understanding of stylistics, it is more often used in analyzing and comparing texts than in synthesizing them, and I am not sure that the criteria of simplicity—if that is what we are discussing—have been satisfactorily identified. There are a number of ways in which simplicity can be achieved, but from what I have seen, it would seems that they must be considered as guidelines more than as hard and fast criteria. They include recommendations regarding high-frequency words, convoluted syntax, the use of nested relative clauses and other modifiers, and so on—all quite valid, but scarcely definitive.

None, as far as I know, has concerned itself specifically with “white noise,” which, applied to language, I should define as empty words, phrases, clauses, even sentences that enable a listener to “recover” from a heavy, concentrated barrage of information. (It may enable the speaker to do so, as well, but these comments have to do with the understanding of information by a receiver.) The obvious examples are y’know, Do you see?, You know what I mean?, and other utterances that are either meaningless or that allow the brain to recover from a preceding utterance that (presumably) contained a message of some import. This white noise, if overdone, leads to pretty vapid conversation, and we all know how much of that there is about. But if it is not done enough, the resulting concentration of information can be overwhelming.

There would seem to be some sort of obsession about clichés in the national mind, if we judge by the popularity of game shows. Many people win many dollars daily by responding to questions or clues with answers that require no more knowledge than the ability to fill in the blanks of cliché structures like the following: “To die is ‘to kick the —’ ”; “In Washington, the President lives in the ‘—House’ ”; “Margaret Mitchell’s book about the South was called ‘— with the Wind,’ ” and so on. Virtually anyone who is alive these days can answer questions like that, and it is beyond me what sort of special talent or knowledge it takes. These questions are the trivia of trivia.

Take, for example, The $100,000 Pyramid, in which a contestant and a partner (usually an actor or actress badly in need of publicity and promotion) are paired together. One is given a list of seven words, one at a time, and is supposed to provide the other with clues that will allow all of the words to be guessed within 30 seconds. The contestant picks the category, which, for the purpose of this illustration might be cutely called “Strike me pink”; the television viewer is shown the word to be guessed, but it is unclear whether the studio audience sees it, too. Here is a typical exchange:

Clue 1: “Roses are —, Violets are blue.”
Clue 2: “The President lives in the —House.”
Clue 3: “An old English song is named — Sleeves. The color of grass is—.”
Clue 4: “When something is perfectly clear, you say ‘It is there in — and white.’ ”
Clue 5: …Need I go on?

There are several game shows, broadcast daily on a nationwide basis, that are based on the contestants' ability to provide similar information; though the structures of the shows differ, all pay hundreds— some thousands or tens of thousands—of dollars. Of course, the “game” aspect and the characteristic that gives such shows the appearance of moving along quickly, thus building excitement, lies in the speed with which the contestant can come up with the correct answer. And it must be assumed that shows of this kind would not be on television at all if they weren’t popular. Yet, it makes one wonder whatever became of Information Please or even its feeble-minded imitator, Dr. I. Q. (“I have a lady in the balcony, Doctor.” “A box of Snickers to that lady if she can answer this question: ‘Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?’ ”) Even Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life had humor: these modern shows are vapid, and their only attraction is watching people walk off with money, cars, refrigerators, and other accoutrements of American covetousness for knowing little more than how to speak their own language. Greed turned The $64 Question into The $64,000 Question, and greed created the problem of dishonesty that banished the show from television.

All of the foregoing is a somewhat long-winded introduction to a point I wished to make about the book under review in order to emphasize that the clichés (which I prefer to spell with the accent) covered are not merely a trivial exercise and may well provide investigators with a convenient catalogue of examples of white noise. The prime clichés mentioned above, as well as There you go, Good-by, How are you?, Pleased ta meetcha, Howdy do?, Have a nice day, etc. are not in the book; but that is understandable, for, as white noise, they are quite boring, virtually devoid of meaning, and of unimportant origin. On the other hand, some of them are essential to politeness in society, and it is doubtful that many consider Please and Thank you to be dispensable clichés. Although most of us would agree that the elimination of clichés like lets no grass grow under his feet, letter perfect, lick your chops, lie low, life and soul of the party, and life of Reilly (just to list those appearing on one page of Rogers’s book) would improve any written material, I am not sure that their presence—unless used to excess—would be quite so obtrusive in spoken colloquy. Such matters are often a matter of taste, and there are those who would hold that any form of language liberally salted (if not peppered) with clichés is to be avoided. The accomplishment of such an end, while possibly commendable, may yield so highly distilled a pattern of utterances as to make conversation (and its comprehension) difficult. At the very worst, one might have to concentrate on what others are saying, which, in the present climate of triviality, may be a useful exercise.

Beyond the usefulness of the list, Rogers provides meanings and origins of the clichés selected for entry. It is conceivable, I suppose, that learners of English as a foreign language, who are unable to distinguish between a cliché and a well-turned phrase, might need to know their meanings, but it is beyond me of what use the book is otherwise. The “origins” are often merely citations. Though they might be early, they are not consistently so, and, unless a specific quotation from Shakespeare or Milton or Pope can be adduced, one is hard put to accept the citations as origins, per se. Also, some of those I spotted cannot be said to be the origins of the cliché and may be nothing more than the earliest citation for its metaphoric extension. For example, get your second wind contains an 1830 quotation for a metaphoric use of the phrase second wind, and Rogers quite properly points out that the “phenomenon got the name…, which is almost literally descriptive, long ago.” In fact, many of the entries do not contain information about the origin of the expression treated—How could they?—and, instead have an example of it in use. What I think is a shortcoming is the failure, say in an entry like food for thought, to mention, after an irritatingly literal definition, the word ruminate. I hasten to say that it is not Rogers’s fault that definitions of clichés are irritating: the fault lies in the necessary task he has set for himself of stating the obvious. To a great extent, all general dictionaries contain definitions that are “irritatingly obvious”: although guesses of the number of words known to an educated speaker range from 10,000 to 30,000, it is seldom that such estimates take account of the multiple meanings that words like set, take, run, etc. may have. Thus the number of senses known to a speaker probably far exceeds the number of mere words counted. Because general dictionaries—that is, those not dealing with a specialized subject area— purport to be descriptions of the lexicon of the language, they have entries for words that few if any native speakers are ever going to look up: the, a/an, but, for, in, etc. And such entries occupy a relatively large amount of space.

Students of the genre should be referred to Frank Sullivan’s New Yorker pieces about Dr. Arbuthnot, the Cliché Expert, and to the articles by Joe Queenan, “When Everything Was Everything,” and Barbara Hunt Lazerson, “Patterned Words and Phrases,” in VERBATIM XII, 3.

This book may one day be of great value, but that day is not likely to come for the native speaker of English till he finds many of the clichés unfamiliar in meaning. Try to explain (if you know) the meaning of 23 skiddoo! to anyone who doesn’t know it. See? It isn’t obvious, is it?

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Lexicography: An emerging international profession

Robert Ilson, ed., (Manchester University Press in association with the Fulbright Commission, London, 1986), xiv + 167pp.

Lexicographers, burdended for more than 200 years by the definition imposed by Samuel Johnson who described us as “harmless drudges,” are finally out of the closet—at least, that is one way of interpreting the subtitle of this book. With the “information explosion” following WWII, dictionaries assumed a role in society far more important than any they had ever enjoyed earlier; with the increasing application of computers to sort and analyze the source materials used by lexicographers and, later, to drive automatic typesetting devices that made their production considerably less expensive than before, dictionaries proliferated, creating work for those who have well-organized minds and a sufficient measure of assiduity to sustain them in the often wearying plod from A to Z. Even respectable linguists have come forth in the past forty years to confess their interest and involvement in lexicography. In the late 1950s, the number of full-time, active, professional lexicographers working in the English language numbered about half a dozen, but that, of course, excluded the editors who worked on pronunciation, etymology, definition, and the various other elements that go to make up the information contained in monolingual dictionaries; at a recent meeting of Euralex, the European Association of Lexicographers (which has members everywhere), there were about 350 participants. Though many who attended may not have been full-time professional lexicographers (we have our groupies, too), it may be assumed that for various reasons not all of the professional lexicographers in the world attended. At a guess, including bilingual lexicographers, I should put the current number at about 500, worldwide. That is still a relatively small clique, but clearly an enormous increase over any earlier estimates. Lexicography is a profession like any other: it demands a thorough background in many aspects of a highly specialized and often abstruse subject (linguistics) as well as an artistic ability with language combined with a systematic turn of mind. The creative, artistic imagination of the lexicographer to a great extent helps determine his proficiency, just as those attributes serve as criteria for truly proficient doctors, lawyers, engineers, and people in other professions.

There are good, mediocre, and bad dictionaries, though the critic, in classifying them, ought always be aware of any constraints of cost and market that might have been imposed by the publisher. Works of fiction and other works of nonfiction are either good or bad, and publishers seldom interfere with their scope or length; reference books are another matter: publishers usually set budgets for them, and the sales managers of publishing companies often impose strict guidelines of page length and format, for many dictionaries are tailored to particular markets.

Of the many companies that have published dictionaries, only a handful maintain a regular, full-time staff devoted to the continued tracking of the language, the updating and revision of dictionaries that are kept in print, and a regular program of publication of new works. Thus, there have sprung up a few independent, professional compilers of dictionaries and, usually, other kinds of reference books who are employed by companies wishing to publish or revise a specific work. In general, originating a new dictionary or revising an existing one is an expensive undertaking. Webster’s Third Unabridged, which cost about $3.5 million to prepare in 1961, would probably cost several times that today; even by its publication date in 1966, the Random House Unabridged, about half the size of Webster’s Third, had cost some $3.5 million, and its revision alone would probably cost that much today.

From all those millions, one might expect that lexicographers are pretty well off. The facts, alas, are quite different: many publishers who yield, however reluctantly, to paying considerable amounts to compositors and printers and paper manufacturers for the production of a major dictionary become unconscionably penurious when it comes to paying lexicographers. Moreover, contrary to popular opinion, lexicographers almost never receive royalties on the sales of copies of the better-selling dictionaries, though they are able, now and then, to make royalty deals on lesser works, especially, outside of the United States.

A major dictionary is a very profitable enterprise for the publisher who succeeds in establishing it in the marketplace, hence, the dictionary has become an institutionalized money-spinner for some of them. An American college dictionary, for instance, could sell between 300,000 and 500,000 copies a year, which is quite respectable. On the other hand, such dictionaries are very competitively priced: just think of the average novel of about 300 pages (about 200,000 words) selling for $20.00; then consider the average college dictionary of about 1700 pages (about 3,000,000 words) involving an investment in the seven figures and selling for $15.00; it requires little calculation, taking into account the useful life of the dictionary—roughly ten years—to realize that such books are the biggest bargain on earth.

Lexicography barely touches on these matters, nor, indeed, do I suggest that it should. It is an interesting and well-edited “report” of a Colloquium held in London in September 1984. Fifty-four invited lexicographers and lexicographic groupies from thirteen countries met, gave papers, commented on papers, and exchanged ideas under the auspices of the United States-United Kingdom Educational (Fulbright) Commission. I attended an earlier planning session organized by Professor Sir Randolph Quirk, then Vice-Chancellor of the University of London, the entire event having been thought up by John Herrington, outgoing Executive Director; the Colloquium and this book are a tribute to him and to the many years of work he did in London in behalf of the Fulbright Commission.

The papers, which are interesting and useful—not the usual turgid academic gobbledegook foisted on scholars who convene mainly to give their own papers rather than hear others'—range from a few on the history of lexicography, the training (but not the care and feeding) of lexicographers (and users!), some blue-sky projections, “Dictionaries of the next century” (Professor Richard W. Bailey, University of Michigan), and a number of “Final” recommendations and concluding remarks by Dr. Gabriele Stein and Herrington.

The book is eminently readable, thanks both to the sensible papers of the participants and to the judicious editing by Ilson, no mean lexicographer himself. If you want to read about some of the matters that command the attention of lexicographers and those involved in lexicography, you couldn’t find a better introduction to their concerns.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Names and Games: Onomastics and Recreational Linguistics

A. Ross Eckler, ed., (University Press of America, 1986), xvi + 281pp.

Word Ways is the quarterly devoted to puzzles, solutions, games, language curiosities, and wordplay. If those are the aspects of language that interest you, you should be a subscriber. (Write to A. Ross Eckler, Word Ways, Spring Valley Road, Morristown, NJ 07960, for information.) It is quite different from VERBATIM in content and appearance, and the two are not in the least competitive. Word Ways is by far the best periodical of its kind.

Eckler has compiled (to quote the subtitle of this book) “An anthology of 99 articles published in Word Ways, The Journal of Recreational Linguistics [,] from February 1968 to August 1985.” As the title suggests and the Table of Contents bears out, the book deals with Names of People, Names of Places, and Other Names; and the 99 articles are more or less evenly distributed among these headings, each of which is further divided into subcategories like “Palindromes, Acrostics and Telephonics,” “Names of Imaginary People,” “Numerical Place Names,” “Brand Names and Trade Names,” and thirteen others. Many of the articles are concerned with anagrams, which I find rather tedious. However, I must be alone in that regard if one comes to consider the amount of anagramming going on in the cryptic puzzles of the world. Besides, anagrams seem to offer their enthusiasts an outlet for their shifty energies similar to the sort release that must be felt by numerologists: there is a kind of logomancy involved in anagrams. I am not prejudiced against anagrams, but I do feel that there are an awful lot of them about and I find it difficult to sustain interest. The same goes for palindromes (of which there are, obviously, fewer).

Although the book is a bit heavy with such items, they are by no means overwhelming, and, even if you are a subscriber to Word Ways, you ought to have a copy of Names and Games if only to have such a wealth of material on onomastics in one place. Though I realize that an Index would have been impractically vast, it would still have proved a useful adjunct.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“… the golden bowl … is surrounded by the figurines of Faith, Hipe and Charity …” [From The Times, July 4, 1985, p.l.]

When You Say It in Other Words…

Zellig Bach, Lakehurst, New Jersey

The playful spelling devices “A as in heal,” “C as in scene,” “K as in Knot” [“A Play on Words,” VERBATIM, XII, 1], reminded me for some reason of my friend Irving Peterson. Mr. Peterson is a healthy, robust man in his early 40s. Never a sick day in his life. Never saw a doctor (nor did a doctor ever see him). Last year he purchased, strictly for his personal use, a word processor, and he became thoroughly fascinated with the many magnificent facilities his software offered—insertions, deletions, margin justification, paragraph reforming, moving parts of a sentences or entire blocks of typed matter to new places in the text, etc., and all of this without having to erase or retype the entire “document” (as they call it in computerese). He found new energies and reasons to start a wide correspondence with old chums from his H. S. days, from college, and with many other old friends from whom he had not heard in ages.

Mr. Peterson does not know the touch system and, naturally, has to hunt-and-peck, looking for each key before striking. But his fingers are very chubby, and every time he strikes a key he inadevertently also touches the adjacent key. As a result he has to delete in practically every word the extra unwanted letters.

For these three reasons—typing his letters, checking the typed matter on the monitor, and then continually correcting it—he spent hours and hours of his evenings at the word processor. He also developed severe eyestrain. His wife, as well as his friends at the office, suggested that he go for an eye examination. “It’s a good idea,” they said, “especially after 40.” Although initially reluctant to see a doctor (“for the first time in my life,” Mr. Peterson kept saying) he made an appointment with an eye specialist. The ophthalmologist inquired into the nature of his eyestrain, his line of work, and after examining his eyes with various instruments, asked him to read the Snellen Chart on the wall, first with the right eye, then with the left. Mr. Peterson rattled off all the letters with either eye in no time:

“Just amazing,” the doctor said. “If it were not for one single error, the same error several times—you read k each time there was an f—you would have been letter-perfect. Just to make sure, let’s check your eyesight once more. However, to rule out any possible practice effects, please read the chart this time from the smallest letters at the bottom upwards.” The procedure was repeated, again first with one eye, then with the other. But, lo and behold, Mr. Peterson made the very same mistakes again: each time there was an f—a total of four times—he saw a k.

The doctor turned on the light in the examination room, and shook his head in disbelief. After scribbling some notes in the patient’s file, he said: “In all my years of practice I encountered many patients with perfect 20/20 vision. But never before did I have a patient with 20/10 visual acuity. Just amazing! Such a unique case should be written up in the ‘Annals of Ophthalmology.’ ” Then, after a moment of silence: “But there is one thing that puzzles me, Mr. Peterson. Why is it that every time you come to the letter f you see k?…”

EPISTOLA {Florence Goldman}

Referring to “Caveat Viator” [XI, 4], the expression “Ah, no” should be avoided in Czechoslovakia, as well as in Italy.

Reading the article, I remembered with a grin an incident I witnessed some years ago in a hotel lobby in Prague. An American businessman returned to the hotel after an ardous day of negotiations. The concierge kindly inquired if he wanted to have dinner sent up to his room. The American mulled it over and finally said, “Ah… no.” He then disappeared into the elevator.

Twenty minutes later, he was back, trying to find out why a vast tray of food had been delivered to his room.

“Because you wanted it, sir,” said the concierge. “No,” the American protested. “I said I didn’t want it!”

They stared at each other in bewilderment until I stepped forward to solve the mystery. “Ano” in Czech means ‘yes.’

[Florence Goldman, New York, New York]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“We will oil your sewing machine and adjust the tension in your home for $1.00.” [Heard on Radio KBOR in Brownsville, Texas on June 5, 1985. Submitted by Max R. Tyner, McAllen, Texas.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Our manager was held hostage at gun point for six hours in a police auction.” [From the May 31, 1985 issue of Sh’ma. Submitted by Claire Lee, Cincinnati.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Homophones & Homographs, An American Dictionary

James B. Hobbs, (McFarland & Company, 1986), viii + 264pp.

I have had occasion to use books similar in subject matter to this one and have in my library many of those listed in the Bibliography. My general criticism of some of them is that they do not cover the language thoroughly. It would appear, from those few that are comprehensive (like the work at hand), that there are about 3,500 homophones, about 600 homographs, and about 100 words that are both. Yet some of the books I have seen list only a fely a hand of the first, which seems to me too casual a treatment of the subject to make the result worthwhile. My other criticism of most of the other books is that their organization is poor and interferes with the best uses to which such books can be put.

Hobbs, who teaches at Lehigh University, in Pennsylvania, has done quite a thorough job of it, beginning with a discussion of the meanings of homophone, homograph, homonym, … and a few rare alternatives. He then goes on to discuss, albeit briefly, how languages deal with homophones (especially): the answer is that ambiguity seldom arises because most homophones (and, for that matter, homographs) are distributed differently in the language—that is, oar and ore, though both nouns, are rarely confused because they occur in quite different contexts; neither is likely to be confused with or, which has a different grammatical distribution.

There follows a dictionary of homophones of 217 pages, well laid out, easy to use, and thoroughly cross-referenced. Beginning on page 220 there is a 30-page dictionary of homographs. Appendix I consists of several listings—“Unusual Groupings”—of four or more one-syllable homophones (note air, are, e’er, ere, err, eyre, and heir), three or more two-syllable words, and so forth, as well as a list of words (like mole) that are both homographs and homophones. Appendix II is a short annotated Bibliography.

Homophones may cause one kind of ambiguity, but homographs cause another, and, till relatively recent advances in parsing systems for computer processing of natural language, they made machine translation something less than successful. A word like axes, for instance, was indistinguishable as the plural of ax or of axis; lead can be a metal or a verb, and so on.

Hobbs’s book is a very useful one—at least for lexicographers, other linguists, and writers of readers for those learning English, either as a native or a foreign language. Inevitably, I have some criticism: loanwords, some of which have a high frequency in English, seem to have been either overlooked or deliberately omitted (I cannot tell which), so one doesn’t find lox ‘smoked salmon’/‘liquid oxygen,’ or ‘gold’ and d’or ‘(made) of gold,’ etc., though piqué, coupé, bouché, and other items are listed. These are not vital, but one would hope to see them included in a second edition.

Laurence Urdang

OBITER DICTA: Halley’s Comet and the Power of Conventional Usage

Frank R. Abate

In a discussion of the return of Halley’s Comet on the ABC program “Nightline,” newsman Ted Koppel, the show’s very able and usually unflappable host, bowed to the pressure of convention on the issue of the pronunciation of the name Halley. Mr. Koppel revealed that the Halley family of England, astronomer Edmund Halley’s descendants, pronounce their name “HAW-lee” and took this as his justification for using said pronunciation in favor of the more widely heard “HAL-ee.” He rightly attributed the oft-heard pronunciation “HAY-lee” to the influence of rock ‘n’ roll’s Bill Haley, whose popular combo “Bill Haley and the Comets” seems to have greatly reinforced, on the strength of the high frequency of the use of its name in the popular culture, the alternate pronunciation of Halley with a long a, notwithstanding the difference in the spelling. In any event, Mr. Koppel, having laid out the fruit of his research, went on to use the pronunciation “HAWL-ee” several times, apparently feeling justified by the family pronunciation.

After cutting away to a taped report, during which another correspondent spoke several times of “HAL-ee’s” Comet, Mr. Koppel returned saying, “All right, so be it, ‘HAL-ee’s’ Comet.” Despite his findings on the Halley family pronunciation, and his own self-confidence, Ted Koppel could not go against the established trend that seems to favor the pronunciation “HAL-ee”; he used this pronunciation through the rest of the show, as did his guest experts.

This is a clearcut example of how convention operates in language, in this case affecting a pronunciation by a man who abandons the suggestions of his own research to fall in line with common usage. In no way do I wish to appear to be criticizing him for this. The point is that what becomes recognized as the established usage of the day—be it a pronunciation, a new meaning, a peculiar spelling, or whatever— generally carries a great deal of weight and influence, such that the forces of reason and propriety are overwhelmed.

Recognition of the power of conventional usage in language is a keynote of the approach known as descriptive linguistics. Language, in its function as a medium for communicating ideas, necessarily is subject to the dictates of convention. If a particular usage comes to be established in the broad community of language users, the railings of purists, schoolmarms, editors, or TV commentators will be likely to have little effect on that usage. Language does not necessarily operate according to the strictures of logic, reason, or authority. As Mr. Koppel is aware, convention seems to be favoring the pronunciation “HAL-ee,” and it is quite futile to go against such a trend. Those who wrangle with language convention do so at the risk of being written off as pedants, stick-in-the-muds, or elitists.

English English: Philately

Philip Howard

English is the putty language, infinitely flexible and accommodating to new words and new uses. But at least there are some certainties in it. When we come to the etymology of most words, we can say with certainty that this is the derivation. Or can we?

There was an agreeably surrealist misprint and wrong derivation in The Times the other day, when we reported that a woman had tried to hold up a bank with “an imitation Biretta pistol.” This unusual Roman Catholic weapon is evidently related to the French miter-shaped, multiple-barreled machine-gun of 1870 known as une mitrailleuse. It was a sporting attempt at spelling. In fact there is an old Italian firm at Cardone, which has been making guns for more than 300 years. It is an honorary member of the Tercentenarians' Club; and its name is Beretta.

There is certainty in language for you. Biretta is the square cap, of different colors according to grade, worn by papist clergy. Beretta is the lethal little handgun carried by private eyes, James Bond, and other professional killers.

We can be almost as certain as this about the roots of most words. Take philately for example, the magpie ‘obsession to collect postage stamps.” There is surely no doubt about its daft but elegant etymology.

I always took it to be straightforward and reasonably well-known. Came into English from French around 1865. Herpin defines philatélie in 1864 as: ‘Le collectioneur de timbres-poste.’ Derivation from Greek philo- ‘lover of something or other’ plus ateles, meaning ‘free from tax or payment.’ Ateleia means ‘exemption from payment’ in Greek, taken from a-‘without’ and teleia ‘payment, charge, tax.’

The Greek ateles was taken as a reasonable equivalent of ‘free’ or ‘franco,’ which used to be stamped on prepaid letters, before the introduction of the impressed receipt stamp, and its successor, the little adhesive label with perforated edges that always refuse to tear in the right place.

Postage stamps themselves may be pitiful little sticky toys. British ones were better value and got the mail through quicker when they carried invariably the head of the sovereign, instead of all these trendy new pictures. But they represent a noble ideal, that the mail must get through. As the Persian King of Kings arranged, before the Ayatollah Khomeini took over the posts: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers, the postmen, from the swift accomplishment of their appointed routes.” I would not go so far as that about the United Kingdom postal service today. But philately is a harmless, if silly hobby; and its name is soundly derived.

No,—whoa, there, just a minute, Philip. Hang about. Look the word up in the big Greek dictionaries. And you will find: “philoteleia and philateleia— the love of collecting stamps.” The word philoteleia is the correct derivation in Greek, although it derives from the French philatélie, which is wrong etymologically. However, it has been adopted by nearly all European countries.

“Philoteleia magazine was established in 1924, and is published by the Greek Philotelic Society, which was founded in 1926.”

If the Greek dictionaries are right, the British have raped the Greek language, as well as pinched the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon. Of course English and any language reserve the right to change the meaning and form of words they borrow from other languages. That is the nature of a living language. Pedants who insist that we must use words that we borrow from French in their native meanings, and ditto for words from other languages, do not understand how language works.

But in this case the difference is between black and white, ‘amateurs of free from tax things’ and ‘amateurs of taxes.’ You would think that the Greeks should be allowed to pronounce on what their own language means. Can it be that the well-established English and French derivation is wrong? Can it be that the Greek lexicographers don’t know their alpha from their omega? Can it be that both philately and philotely are both right, and that tax and no-tax are equally good in the whacky world of postage stamps? I think we should be told.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Abbreviations Dictionary: Augmented International Seventh Edition

Ralph De Sola, (Elsevier Science Publishing Co., 1985), xviii + 1240pp.

The dust jacket promises “over 23,000 new and augmented entries, with a grand total of over 250,000 definitions; Bafflegab (euphemisms), British and Irish County Abbreviations, Citizens’ Band Call Signs, Dysphemistic Place-Names, International Vehicle License Letters; Prisons of the World and Their Toponyms, Rules of the Road at Sea, and much more….” Defined in the Introduction are abbreviations, acronyms, anonyms, contractions, eponyms, exonyms, geographical equivalents, initials, nicknames, place name pseudonyms, short forms, signs, slang shortcuts, symbols, and toponyms.

As can be seen, this goes beyond a mere dictionary of abbreviations; if it were only that, it could be as large as Acronyms, Initialisms, and Abbreviations Dictionary, published by Gale Research Company at $170. The comparison between the two must be made, and there is no gainsaying that the latter is more extensive and complete. But its sheer size and price make it more suitable for public libraries than for filling a niche in a home reference library, for which De Sola’s book seems ideal. Offices that cannot afford the Gale work will also find the Abbreviations Dictionary a handy reference, replete with all sorts of useful information. But we cannot allow a book to escape our clutches without one adverse comment, so here it is: missing is what might be called (if there were prizes for such things) “The Acronym of the Year 1984-85,” namely WYSYWYG (pronounced “wizzeewig”). Referring to an image on the screen of a computer in comparison with what one gets in the printed-out text, it stands for ‘What You See Is What You Get.’

Puzzle

1. Who was known as the Word King?
2. What is a nickname for the xylophone?
3. What does QANTAS stand for?
4. Who was the Bard of the Stumblebum?
5. What was the Baron Munchausen’s real name?
6. What does DIRT stand for?
7. If iud stands for ‘intrauterine device’ what does IUD stand for?
8. Why is Haydn’s String Quartet in D (opus 76, no. 2) nicknamed the Quinten?
9. If your airline ticket destination is FNG and your baggage goes to FIG, how far away is your toothbrush?
10. If a job applicant told you he spent five years studying at Lovelady, would you hire him?
11. What is Europe’s northernmost city?
12. What is Europe’s southernmost city?
13. If someone offered you a full-time job on a YGN, would you accept?
14. You are in a sailboat and your fairy godmother offers you a choice between an Irish hurricane and a yalca: which do you choose?

Answers

1. Eric Partridge.
2. woodpile.
3. Queensland and Northern Territories Aerial Services.
4. Nelson Algren.
5. Rudolf Erich Raspe. (Do you believe that?)
6. Department of Industrial Relations and Technology (Australian).
7. Institute for Urban Development.
8. Quinten refers to the fifth form or grade in Austrain schools.
9. About 800 miles: FNG is the airport designation for Fada Ngourma, Upper Volta, FIG that for Fria, Guinea.
10. It depends what for: Lovelady is a maximum security prison for felons north of Huntsville, Texas.
11. Hammerfest, Norway.
12. Nicosia, Cyprus.
13. That’s up to you: YGN is the designation for a non-self-propelled garbage scow.
14. I’d prefer the former, ‘a dead calm’; the latter is a ‘snowstorm in the northern Andean passes, in Peru.’

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Pinckert’s Practical Grammar

Robert C. Pinckert, (Writer’s Digest Books, 1986), 232pp.

The buying of books on usage, how to improve one’s writing or language in general, and on how to get ahead by acquiring a larger vocabulary must be something like buying lottery tickets: the dream is there, either of incredible social or financial success or of writing the great American novel. The key to it all is the mastery of the language, and the book at hand is always the secret method for finding the magical key.

Writer’s Digest is a periodical that caters to those who dream about being published, and their publication of PPG is entirely appropriate. The problem lies in the fact that getting published has only little to do with writing “proper” English: it has everything to do with writing good English. Many years ago—about thirty, come to think of it—Random House received every week of the year some 500 unsolicited manuscripts. (In publisher’s jargon, an unsolicited manuscripts is one that does not come in through a literary agent or an editor’s personal contact with the author.) Today, the number may be twice that. I looked at quite a few of them out of curiosity and found that few had to be read past the first page to determine that they were unpublishable. It is impossible to retail here all of the reasons why this was so immediately obvious, but it was. True, once in a while, something of value surfaced from the sea of semi-literate muck, but that was—and, I assume, still is—a very rare event.

It probably goes without saying (but I shall say it anyway) that in order to write at all one must have some control over grammar, spelling, and all the rudiments of language. Often, those who can speak reasonably well and even with some eloquence are totally incapable of writing down their own words. In a very limited way, Pinckert deals with that—and the occasional unacceptability of writing the way one speaks— in his justaposed lists of Informal/Formal usages. I disagree with some of his examples, but that is not important. What is important is that as far as I know or can imagine, no one has ever learned how to express himself by reading a book: books like Fowler, Perrin, even PPG do not yield up secrets. They are useful as reference books but, like reference books, one must know enough to understand the need to look up something, what to look up, and how to find it. Someone recently phoned to complain that supersede was not in the dictionary. Of course it is there! It’s not listed as “supercede” and wasn’t findable in that part of the dictionary, that’s all.

The media today are bulging with all manner of writing, much of it good, much of it bad, most of it nondescript or not worthy of classification. Because of the sheer number of magazines, newspapers, radio programs, and television shows, millions upon millions of words are gobbled up and spewed out daily. Never before in history has so much verbiage been so much in demand—notwithstanding (and not including) revivals, reissues, and reruns. Clearly, that means more writers are needed than ever before, and with volume comes mediocrity.

How do all these people learn to write, whether adequately or well? They learn by reading, and by reading the good stuff, much of which, believe it or not, abounds in the English language. Only after years of reading should one try to write, and then only with a severe critic at hand to review what has been written. English teachers in secondary schools (if not earlier) and teachers of special writing courses in universities are supposed to fill this need, but one is given to wonder whether the standard of their criticism is what one likes to believe it once was. The good old days are always, somehow, the better days, especially in retrospect. I am under the impression that teachers are so completely occupied trying to instruct nature students in the rudiments of writing basically clear, expository prose that they have no time to pay attention to art. And, after all, it is art that makes a writer good, not the ability to decide that a verb should agree with its noun in number. Notwithstanding, the mechanics of language are important, and there are probably not a large number of good writers—at least published ones—whose art outshines their bad grammar.

All that said, it is understood that mastery of the mechanics of language makes one a master of the mechanics, and not an artist, any more than identifying red from green makes one an artist. The analogy of a skill against a natural ability may be a poor one, but creative writing is not just writing, any more than painting a bookcase is painting a portrait that will hang in even the most modest gallery.

In the context of these admonitions, Pinckert’s (and others') books may be regarded as worthwhile, but following their precepts is arduous and the practitioner will inevitably encounter constructions that are not covered by a work of such narrow scope. Yet, what is there is useful, provided that it is put to good use.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“This past June an unidentified local priest was barred from a state prison when he tried to lead a celebration of [the] Mass with a small vile of red wine.” [From Institutions, Etc. November, 1984, Vol. 7, No. 11. Submitted by Judi Chamberlin, Somerville, Massachusetts.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Descending on the Seljestad side, the bus will make a short stop at the Latefoss waterfall, tumbling down the mountainside in a double avalanche and gently spraying the road.” [From Fodor’s Scandinavia, 1984, p. 315. Submitted by Steve Bonner of Rockville, Maryland, who thought this quite a tourist trap!]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Smallest microcassette records memos from your tie.” [From The Sharper Image catalogue, Fall 1984. Submitted by C. Steven Short, Los Angeles, California, who shrugs, “Frankly, I’ve never received a memo from one of my ties that was worth recording!”]

Paring Pairs No. 22

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. A numbered item may be used more than once, and some clues may require more than two answer items; after all of the matchings have been completed, one numbered item will remain unmatched. That is the correct answer. Our answer is the only acceptable one. The solution will be published in the next issue of VERBATIM.

(a). Normally a tasty thirty-two.
(b). Two-bit gee-gee.
(c). Twenty-five pesetas here?
(d). Sherwood Forest potty.
(e). Fred Astaire’s beer hall.
(f). Reverse into the boondocks.
(g). Watch out at the theater!
(h). Quartette of southern ladies is timely.
(i). Desist—unless you’re loaded, Dad.
(j). Jason found them periodically strange.
(k). Pitch horseshoes into the mold.
(l). Former publicity man now works for freight company.
(m). Down east seamstress in colaca maxima.
(n). Are quarks, etc., edible?
(o). Nuder area.
(p). Churchill’s method for removing wrinkles from the draperies.
(q). Netting a crafty place.
(r). Spartan tatting fiend.
(s). Reach for the Skies!
(t). Get twenty-four sheets of paper.
(u). Montezuma takes his revenge on Indians, too.
(v). Monkey’s fist is abhorrent to pacifists.
(w). Torturous embroidery.
(x). Choreographed podiatry.
(y). Fossil fuel or regal fool?
(z). Fixed by a Saturday night special.

(1). A.
(2). Agent.
(3). Back.
(4). Bear.
(5). Bellers.
(6). Belly.
(7). Bizarre.
(8). Box.
(9). Buffer.
(10). Cast.
(11). Chips.
(12). Cole.
(13). Crew’s.
(14). Cruel.
(15). Curse.
(16). Curtain.
(17). Delhi.
(18). Demon.
(19). Express.
(20). Fission.
(21). Foot.
(22). Four.
(23). Gun.
(24). Harpies.
(25). Horse.
(26). Iron.
(27). John.
(28). King.
(29). Lace.
(30). Latin.
(31). Little.
(32). Main.
(33). Missile.
(34). Quarter.
(35). Quire.
(36). Room.
(37). Sewer.
(38). Show.
(39). Spire.
(40). Staple.
(41). Sum.
(42). Tap.
(43). Time.
(44). Tooth.
(45). Tulle.
(46). Water.
(47). Work.
(48). Zone.

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 ITQ, England; all others should send their answers to VERBATIM, Box 644, Old Lyme, CT 06371-0644, U.S.A. You need send only the one-word solution, on a postcard, please.

Answers to Paring Pairs No. 21

(a). At death’s door from weak drink? (28,7) Near Bier.
(b). Loftier loft for Egyptian priests. (19,2) Higher Attic.
(c). King Kong loved this enchanted skate. (16,38) Fey Ray.
(d). According to the paper, 0900EST = 1300GMT; 1300EST=1800GMT. (23,47) London Times.
(e). Extraordinary crane for hanging ten. (5,14) Beau Derrick.
(f). Dracula maddened by the numbers. (10,29) Count Off.
(g). Allons, enfants de la patrie! (9,33) Come Patriots.
(h). Passover dance. (26,3) Matzoh Ball.
(i). Chinese fast food. (30,15) Orient Express.
(j). Palaver at the séance. (37,40) Rap Session.
(k). The perverted item is making me squirm. (51,46) Wry Thing.
(l). What lads' breath comes in. (42,31) Short Pants.
(m). What you won’t be awarded if you floss daily. (13,35) Dental Plaque.
(n). Best thing available for shading overseer’s eyes. (45,49) Super Visor.
(o). Jack, once popular with mother, having traded cow… (18,4) Has Bean.
(p). Chop up the Greek letter, then eat it. (27,34) Mince Pie.
(q). Intensive study of car wrecks. (12,11) Crash Course.
(r). Sir Launcelot refuses to budge from Queen Guinevere’s bedside. (21,43) Knight Stand.
(s). Neatening up the cabinet by delaying consideration of the document. (41,32) Shelving Paper.
(t). Where the Eucharist is sold. (25,24) Mass Market.
(u). Cape Cod attraction. (25,1) Mass Appeal.
(v). Give the scrubwoman the eye and she takes charge. (8,22) Char Lady.
(w). Netted mad mackerel in Paris? (20,39) In Sane.
(x). Place for fashionable ladies. (20,50) In Vogue.
(y). Colostrum from insect bites? (6,44) Bee Stings.
(z). Leapin' athletes! Are the flagstaffs safe in Warsaw? (36,48) Pole Vault.

The correct answer is (17) French. The winner was Diane diClementine, Sacramento, California.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The committee’s goal is to collect $52 million by 1990, the 100th centennial of the founding of Yosemite National Park….” [From the Daily News, Van Nuys, California. Submitted by Otis H. Wade, Los Angeles.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

he grizzly discovery [a dismembered body] was made…. A civilian witnes opened the suitcase and saw the upper torso of a man’s body.” [From the Evening Out-look, Santa Monica, California. Submitted by Merrill Sarty, Rancho Park, California.]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. VERBATIM cryptic for someone both bold and shy (8)
2. Retreat back to theater district (6)
3. Cuts delicate fabric prices (9)
4. Smart people writing lead for Sunday Times (5)
5. Plastic twisted at left (5)
6. Native in Boeing air crashes (9)
7. Wild sheep struggle to breathe (7)
8. Shape of track is different around border (7)
9. Crack angler by the sound (7)
10. I color in March and ‘July (7)
11. The French disrobe for washerwoman (9)
12. Turned up with Mom’s cats (5)
13. Decimal, in many instances (15)
14. Plum grower’s first to agree to a second marriage (9)
15. Poem: “Tsetse Flies” (6)
16. Visionary’s transaction is in it (8)

Down

1. Sensual love requires grasping everywhere (3,4)
2. Meat company breaking prohibition (5)
3. Like some diseases from bit of radium in small bottle (5)
4. Former president is upset—Time to take back assertions (7)
6. Deep-rooted lentils I’d torn up (9)
7. Strangely appealing gift (9)
8. Derek’s upcoming scene is fit for censoring (7)
9. Volcanic debris and rocks on the beach (6)
15. Pesky insects in swamp growth surrounding South American capital (9)
16. Plenty to roll under a ball (9)
18. Men in train in midst of rushes (7)
19. Schemer, generally hiding, to come out (6)
20. Key held by crazy fool (7)
21. Revere’s scepter is broken (7)
23. Papa bears and bearlike critter (5)
24. Batter raised near one Southern city (5)

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. Verbatim.
5. Bossed.
10. No-s-hing.
11. Out-rage.
12. Stars and Stripes.
13. ENDWISE.
14. Embers.
17. A-muse-D.
20. CHORALE.
21. Red, White and Blue.
25. O-ratio-n.
26. B-rough-t.
27. (s)elects.
28. Frum-IOU-s.

Down

1. Van-I-shed.
2. (P)Ro(u)st-and.
3. AMIDS-hips.
4. INGENUE.
6. OUTER.
7. SCARPER.
8. Dr-ess-y.
9. Mousse.
15. B-road-loom.
16. Sevenths.
18. MEDIATE.
19. Do-tin-g.
20. C-ham-B’-er.
21. Allegro/A-leg-row.
22. Gr-o-ove.
24. HEIST.

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