VOL XIII, No 3 [Winter, 1986]
Science Words for Humanists
Arthur Plotnik, Chicago
Take it from this humanist: the last English words with any fizz left to them are bottled up in the sciences, leaving the arts and letters with an idiom as flat as yesterday’s champagne.
Who can resist a good science word? Oozes. Neap tides. Apogee. Chiasma. Ytterbium. Endoplasmic reticulum. Superluminal quantum connectedness. If your tongue isn’t dancing, stop reading.
My own attraction to words outside the humanities began in grade school. To little ears dulled by the clunk of “noun,” “pilgrim,” and “citizenship,” came the music of deciduous. Coniferous. Hypotenuse. I was seduced.
Today many of us in the humanities weary of our own noises. In fact, we are heartily sick of our words, and we are sick of saying so. The language of discourse and criticism in the arts is used up, bankrupt. Here is a recent shovelful of book-reviewing prose:
Her novel proffers the reader the same uneasy union of present and past concepts of fiction, the same uncomfortable synthesis of modern scepticism and Victorian morality….
Now, for a sound as fresh as newly turned earth, hear a scientist describe a type of soil in northern Ontario:
Entic haplothord, a humo-ferric podzol….
Humanists desperately need fresh vocabulary. We have used up our own words by burdening them with the functions of art. Our words must convey originality; our words must stimulate. And once they do so, like the bee that loses its sting, they no longer excite anyone. For example, when Baudelaire first used the word agate in an original and evocative metaphor for cat’s eyes (Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux,/ Mêlés de métal et d’agate), he immediately exhausted that image for all poets to come.
In science, however, a term need only designate, not stir our souls. To a scientist agate simply designates a variety of the mineral chalcedony, and nothing else is ever asked of it. Whenever that substance must be spoken for, agate will be the perfect word, the only word, and no scientist will ever use it up. But humanists daily turn their best words into dust, creating an insatiable thirst for newly evocative language. It is natural that, eventually, they will be drawn toward the lush vocabulary of the sciences, with the notion of borrowing the succulent terms for their own purposes. Yet this very borrowing, say some of our language masters, constitutes a vile and unnatural act!
In Wilson Follett’s Modern American Usage (edited and completed by Jacques Barzun), four pages rail against the borrowing of scientific terms for “vulgar” usage. This “scientism,” as it is dubbed, harms language “because it is not the product of genuine need or thought; it is by definition affected….” Follett condemns the use of technical-sounding jargon to imitate the supposed solemnity and authority of science; and certainly no one who loves words can love such constructs as group-dynamicalaa, one of the examples Follett gives. But is a humanist never to enter the temple of scientific denomination? No, not ever, says Follett—unless one knows and uses the precise scientific meaning assigned to each word. Thus, we non-scientists are never again to use such common borrowings as focus, allergy, potential, experiment, and laboratory without the Oxford Concise Science Dictionary in hand to inform us. No more “language laboratory,” no more “experimenting with new cuisine.” And certainly no more flocculation or isotopic spin in casual conversation.
Lancelot Hogben, distinguished author, is another who would protect the sanctity of precise scientific terminology. In The Vocabulary of Science, he celebrates two great breakthroughs in science nomenclature that have led to unique names for millions of organisms and substances: Linnaeus' Systema Naturae, and the Méthode de Nomenclature Chimique by Lavoisier and associates, both some two centuries ago. He warns non-scientists to leave science nomenclature alone: “Assimilation of technical terms in everyday speech especially by mass media—exposes them to the process of semantic erosion responsible for the multiplicity of meaning conveyed by other words in daily use.”
What makes many science words irresistible to humanists is, of course, their foundations in Latin and Greek. Not the nasal Latin of a Chicago courtroom, but the good old stuff, resounding as a Roman war drum. Medulla oblongata! Not the rat-a-tat Greek heard in the Plaka of Athens, but majestic classical Greek, whose syllables flow like wine down our gullets—polyembryony. The classical constructs are rich in meanings as well as sound, full of mystery and surprises. Students of Greek will know that Grompha-dorhina portentosa represents gromphas ‘old sow’ plus rhinos ‘snout’ plus the word for ‘portentous or ominous.’ But will they know the full term to mean a species of cockroach?
Why did Latin and Greek become entrenched in scientific language? The seventeenth and eighteenth-century scientists who set the pattern for classical borrowings were not driven by the melodiousness of the two tongues. The languages were already the vehicles of ancient knowledge, preserved by medieval scholarship. When the rise of scientific knowledge in Europe called for codes of international communication, the classical languages were naturally employed. Because they were linguistically rational and comprehensible to the community of scientists, yet set apart from the corruptible, imprecise, ever-shifting babble of vernaculars, Latin and Greek were ideal for creating systems of nomenclature.
Daniel Boorstin (The Discoverers, 1983) recounts the heroism of Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, who within twenty-five years (1735-60) created the first workable, widely accepted system for classifying plants and animals—and provided the names for every species known to him. Before Linnaeus' “binomial” scheme, the names of particular species were often strings of descriptive Latin terms that grew to such lengths as this: Convolvulus foliis palmatis cordatis sericeis: lobis repandis, pedunculis bifloris. As grand as it might have been to trumpet such terms, they had become impossible to remember. The binomial system as science majors know, used only a generic name (Latin, Latinized Greek, or a construct from Greek words), along with a unique species or “trivial” name (usually Latin or Latinized). The system may have been simple, but not Linnaeus' acts of naming, in a hurry, the whole of the plant and animal kingdoms. Boorstin writes of how Linnaeus “ransacked his Latin for enough terms to make up thousands of labels,” and asks, “when was there another such colossal feat of name-giving since the Creation?”
The fun of science verbalization goes far beyond classical posturing. In fact, the introduction of Latin-and-Greek-based systems actually took some of the fun out of nomenclature by displacing thousands of colorful common names. In chemistry, for example, blue vitriol became copper sulphate, and salt of worm-wood, potassium tartarate. What common names may lack in euphony, they often make up in imagery or high-spirited silliness. Give me a purple-headed sneezeweed over a Helenium nudiflorum any day. Give me a tufted titmouse or red-breasted nuthatch at my window, not Parus bicolor or Sitta canadensis. I’ll take a stinkhorn fungus over Dictyophora duplicata, if I have to take a stinkhorn at all.
High spirit isn’t limited to biological nomenclature:
—The discoverers of a dwarf elliptical galaxy named it after the candy bar, Snickers, to provide an alternative to that chewy chocolate, Milky Way galaxy.
—Subatomic particles receive such whimsical names as quarks, gluons, gypsies, truths, and beauties.
As not quite everyone knows, physicist Murray GellMann borrowed quark from James Joyce’s phrase “Three quarks for Muster Mark” in Finnegans Wake. In German, quark means ‘curds, cream cheese, trash, rubbish, or nonsense.’
Science terms frequently derive from personal names, such as those of discoverers, innovators, and patrons. Sometimes the terms sound like players in a Teutonic fairy tale: One day, long ago, a Schrödinger equation, Schwann cell, and Schwartzchild radius met in the Black Forest…. Or they sound goofy, as in Gooch crucible. Andrade’s Creep Law, the Sorensen Titration, Abbe’s Sine Condition, and other titillating nomenclature can be found in Ballentyne and Lovett’s A Dictionary of Named Effects and Laws in Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics, which defines the reaction, flaw, axiom, or paradox of one scientist or another.
Individual scientists or teams often compete to have a plant, insect, comet, star, or whatever named after them, subject to the pronouncements of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, International Astronomical Union, International Committee on Nomenclature of Viruses, and other authorities for names in their fields. Being apart from such competition should please humanists. Of course it does not. In 1960, while studying at the Writers Workshop of the University of Iowa, I was struck by the naming of something 40,000 miles wide after James Van Allen, a physicist across the campus. Here we were in barracks classrooms, two hundred humanists who would struggle a lifetime to see their names in 10-point type; and there, in the science buildings, a man had pointed to the earth’s invisible girdle of radiation and would have his name forever in the skies.
It was a traumatic insight into the “two cultures,” but I accepted it: different reward systems and all that. If the physical world from Okazaki DNA fragments to Comet Araki-Alcock were to be named after scientists, let it be. Most scientists slave obsessively at their work, probably alienating friends and families. They deserve an honor. Humanists have other means of immortality, such as carving their names in park benches. Besides, names derived from one’s own can prove embarrassing. Hogben cites a plant named Kniphofia in honor of J.J. Kniphof (1704-65) of Erfurt, Germany. The honor, however, is qualified: Kniphofia is a phallus-shaped plant whose common name is red-hot poker.
To immortalize their names in a term, scientists have associated themselves with organisms as dreadful as, say, a tumor virus. In a lively argument for a rational system of virus nomenclature (Nature, 303: June 1983) Peter Newmark cites a new christening: the Hardy-Zuckerman 2 feline sarcoma virus. “Not that everyone would wish to have a tumor virus named after himself or herself, especially one that kills cats,” Newmark observes. Because viruses are named in several inconsistent ways, Newmark calls for a non-erratic system, perhaps “an acronym for the virus type followed by a designation of the isolate by place (and number if necessary).”
Newmark’s argument reflects the general movement of science nomenclature away from the colorful, bizarre, personal, and passionate, and toward the objective, rational, quantitative, and dull. With thousands of unique names needed for new discoveries and developments, how far can scientists stretch the language before it becomes ridiculous? Galaxy cluster NGC 6822 isn’t much fun to say, but would anyone want to continue the candy-bar series, calling something bigger than the mind can conceive a Chunky or an Almond Joy?
The scholarly Linnaeus “ransacked his Latin” for his thousands of labels. What have today’s scientists left to ransack? I know they’re running dry when I read (in the March Science 86) the names they propose for a new sixty-atom molecule resembling a seamed soccer ball or a geodesic dome: carbosoccer, soccerene, and Buckminsterfullerene. Perhaps humanists can help, even as their own literature pales. Clearly, science terminology has become too important and too much fun to be left to scientists alone. I propose that humanists—with radiant exitance and Perfect Cosmological Principle—move in and save the day.
EPISTOLA {John Henrick}
Apropos Richard Lederer, in “Words That Don’t Look Right,” [XII,2]:
If your work has been called meretricious,
Or you’re offered a job adventitious,
Or if in recent days
You’ve received fulsome praise,
Better go look those words up—they’re vicious!
[John Henrick, Seattle, Washington]
What Do You Call a Person from…?
Robert R. Rasmussen, Arcadia, California
When I first studied Spanish, I was disappointed to learn that there is no rule for deriving a word from a place name that identifies inhabitants of that place. Often the suffix -no is used: Mexicano, Cubano, Colombiano. But then so is -ense, as in Nicaragüense, Sonorense, Londinense. Sometimes -ño is used, as in Puertorriqueño, Salvadoreño, and Limeño. There are other endings as well. For example, -és, as in Japonés and Francés. Still others exist that seem to have no reason for being: Guatemalteco and Ecuatoriano.
I thought that English is so much more systematic. But upon reflection, perhaps not. English is no less puzzling and capricious than Spanish. And this whole question of naming someone from a particular place is more complex than I had at first imagined.
Certainly those of us who try to systematize the language know that there are rules for creating a name for a person from the name of a place, but these rules are all too plentiful and interchangeable. Commonly we have -ian, from the Latin -(i) anus meaning ‘pertaining or belonging to,’ as a suffix for words ending in -a or -on. Thus we have Canadian, Philadelphian, Floridian, Washingtonian, and Oregonian, to name a few. Sometimes, however, we use only -n for words ending with -a or most consonants: Texan, Nevadan, Coloradan, Kansan. Still a third way is the -er suffix, coming through the Middle English -ere or -er from the Old English meaning ‘a person who is a native,’ as in New Yorker. At the same time, we may use -ite, from Middle English through Old French and Latin from Greek -it(ēs) meaning ‘a native of an area’ most commonly for words ending in d, f, g, l, m, n, r, s, or y: New Jerseyite, Berkeleyite, Wyomingite. People from Berkeley used to call themselves Berkeleyans, but they switched many years ago. H.L. Mencken, writing in 1936, referred to the -ite ending as a “hideous suffix.” Still, it is charming to hear Carmelites, as the residents of Carmel, California, call themselves. The -ite ending is common in the Bible: Hittites, Moabites, Israelites. The descendants of Abraham are called Israelites until their return from the Babylonion Captivity; after that, with the Northern Kingdom destroyed, they are referred to as Jews, with an occasional reference to “people of the house of Israel” or “children of Israel.” There is a strong religious significance to the word Israelite. When Israel proclaimed itself a sovereign state in 1948, the word Israeli came into being, the -i suffix coming from the Latin and denoting possession. Israeli is a political word only, without the religious implications of Israelite.
With a few words naming places outside the United States we use the -ish element, derived through Middle English from Old English -isc meaning ‘belonging to,’ as in British, English, and Welsh. It is curious we use English to mean all of the citizens of England and Englishman, Englishmen, English-woman, or Englishwomen to identify the people. Similarly, Welsh stands for all the people of Wales, and Welshman or Welshwoman is used to speak of just one. Then too the British is a collective noun, while Britisher or Briton refers to a particular one. We cannot use Englisher or Britishman. But when we cross the Atlantic, we find that a person from New England is not a New Englishman but a New Englander.
Most cities that end in -on will use the -ian suffix to name their inhabitants. Then London should yield Londonian. The word seems to support the image the world has of England as being formal and somewhat aloof. But no. They are Londoners. And as with New Yorker, the word suggests a business-like, no-nonsense quality, getting straight to the pith and core, as it were.
But Burbank, California, made famous by the television industry, chooses not to have a name for its citizens, even though Burbanker, after New Yorker, has a hard-hitting, straightforward sound, and Burbankian would suggest old-world charm, handsome princes dancing gracefully with beautiful princesses in large ballrooms with vaulted ceilings and crystal chandeliers. But the newspapers in the area often use Burbank man. A headline might read BURBANK MAN INJURED IN CRASH.
While the Boston Celtics dismantled the Houston Rockets, the Boston fans appeared more like Bostoners than Bostonians. At the same time, the Houstonians— for that is what they call themselves in Houston, though the word is certainly not so familiar as Bostonian—acted more like Houstoners. Also, residents of Galveston call themselves Galvestonians, the word seeming incongruous with the Texas image.
Another rule tells us that words ending in -o will add -an to create a word naming inhabitants: Chicagoan, Ohioan. But in California there are a number of cities ending in -o and for these, that is not the way it is done. Rather, we have San Diegan, San Franciscan, Palo Altan, San Matean.
During the World Cup of Soccer we heard both Argentinian and Argentine. During the Falklands War one linguist explained that Argentine is closer to the Spanish, and Argentinian is in the manner of the English. This means that one could tell whose side one was on simply by noting which word was used.
The citizens of Los Angeles call themselves Angelinos, or Angelenos. H.L. Mencken claimed the word was spelled Angeliños but the press had dropped the tilde because it was difficult to set in type. He showed the phonetics to be an-gel-EE-no, but a tilde would make the word an-gel-EE-nyo, which is never heard in Los Angeles. Since the word ends in -s, Los Angelesian is possible. Thank God it is not used.
Things seem to be confused in Oklahoma. People outside the state often use Oklahomian, but within the state they use Oklahomian, which follows one of the rules quite nicely.
El Salvador falls victim to many errors. Several years ago, several Salvadorans perished in the intense heat of the Sonoran Desert in northern Mexico and southern Arizona. The reporter who first relayed the story used Salvadorian, a common but nonstandard form of the word. The first news releases on television repeated that form, but by the time the evening newscasts carried the story, the change had been made. Yet both Ecuadoran and Ecuadorian are accepted. Peru changes totally, to Peruvian, which is in the style of the Spanish Peruviano.
The citizens of Kansas call themselves Kansans. This seems much better than Kansasians, which is possible; but with the accent on the second syllable, the word does not sound complimentary. Residents of Arkansas used to call themselves Arkansayers, but now they call themselves Arkansans.
In Idaho, the state university used to prefer Idahovan, but Idahoan is more common. And in Moscow, Idaho, the state university preferred Moscovite, but Moscowite and Moscovian are in general usage, with Moscowite being more popular.
Jonathan Swift, writing in 1726 in Gulliver’s Travels, contributes some magnificent place names for us. In the land of Lilliput, the citizens call themselves Lilliputians, but they could just as easily have called themselves Lilliputites or Lilliputers. And Swift gives us the land of Brobdingnag with its Brobdingnagians, and not, heaven save us, Brobdingnaggers or Brobdingnagites. And the people of Glubbdubdrib, Swift mercifully calls the people of Glubbdubdrib. He refers to another nation charmingly as the country of the Houyhnhnms.
Citizens of Liverpool are Liverpudlians. And for many countries in Europe, the hapless student simply must learn each one: Holland, Hollander or Dutch; France, French; Ireland, Irish, etc. Someone learning English can, at best, make an educated guess based on other similar words, but it is often wrong.
One may conclude that the rules are helpful and uniform in many cases, but at the same time, there are many, many exceptions. The names that inhabitants call themselves in a region are derived from local tastes and traditions, and are often not formed to conform to rules gleaned from many examples. The local press may be a leader here. But often, residents will not allow themselves to be led. For instance, here in the United States some have balked at the word American, because both continents bear the name: American can refer to anyone on these two continents. So, to distinguish the people of the United States from those of other nations, there was a movement to use Unisian or United Statesian, and even Columbard, but these words never caught on. One suspects that if the media used these terms exclusively, one would hear them only in the media, and citizens of the United States would staunchly stick to American.
In short, people will think for themselves. Burbank’s citizenry will not accept Burbankian. Inhabitants of San Francisco will not call themselves San Franciscoans. New Englanders will never agree to New English. And residents of Los Angeles will not consent to Los Angelesians. It is this brand of selfdetermination that has forged a world of individualists and at the same time fostered a diversification we have all come to appreciate and admire.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“J. McG—, a former trooper with the Household Cavalry,… admitted stealing a ceremonial state helmet valued at £1500 from Knightsbridge Barracks and dishonestly handling its chinstrap and rosettes….” [From The Times, 31 May 1985, p. 3.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Consent to Medical Treatment by the Mentally Ill.” [Headline in The Lancet, February 9, 1985. Submitted by Dr. Eugene G. Laforet, Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Pau Vergó’s St. Anthony of Padua, c1495, features tempura and tooled gold on wood.” [From TWA Ambassador, April 1985. Submitted by Bernard and Masha Schweitzer, Los Angeles.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“…the golden bowl… is surrounded by the figurines of Faith, Hipe and Charity…” [From The Times, July 4, 1985, p.1.]
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.]
Naming-Day in Eden
Nehemiah H. Behr, Ramat Gan, Israel
And he called the name of that place Beth-El, but the name of the city was Luz at the first.—Genesis 28:19
There is a Puyallup in Washington State, as well as a Queets. There is a Poth and a Dublin in Texas. Oklahoma has a Cement and a Swink, while North Carolina has a Zap. Montana has a Yaak, and Oregon has a Talent as well as a Drain. To come nearer to my theme, New Hampshire has a Lebanon and Maryland has a Zion. These and many more can be found in a few minutes' stroll through the Index to any good road atlas of the U.S.A.
The British Isles, too, have their share of quaint and curious town names. What about Beer and Bunny, Bun and Dun, Hoo and Wye, Hosh and Jump? Each is a separate town or village. Then there is Muff in Northern Ireland and Marazion in Cornwall, also known as Market Jew. Perhaps it is as well that Fighting Cocks in the North of England is well away from Fighting Cocks Crossroads in the State of Eire. And one wonders whether the people of Nasty in Hertfordshire would prefer to change with Nutts Corner in Northern Ireland?
Toponomy can be as addictive as Scrabble, and many readers of VERBATIM are probably devotees. For those who are not, I offer the idea without charge. But these names no doubt have their roots in local American and British history.
A different task faced the State of Israel, and its predecessor, the Zionist movement, when called upon to find names first for dozens and later hundreds of new towns and villages, scattered over the map of Palestine, “from Dan to Beersheba” and points further south. This could not be left to private enterprise, however well-meaning, so as far back as 1925 a Place Names Committee was established; it was first attached to the Keren Kayemeth Leisrael (Jewish National Fund), and it is now in the Office of the Prime Minister of the State of Israel. It is composed of geographers, historians, and scholars in various fields who follow certain principles:
(1) Historical: If a new settlement is on or near the site of a place known from the time Israel was established in the land, as shown in the Bible or elsewhere, the ancient name is revived.
(2) Commemorative: Some unusually important event or person in national or Zionist or general Jewish history may be the source of a name.
(3) Symbolical: The new name may be based on the character of the settlement, or an event in its life, or some natural feature in the surroundings.
Guided by these broad ideas, the map of Israel has been able to avoid some of the stranger names we have seen in Britain and the U.S.A.; and the names selected, in their modern Hebrew forms, create a remarkable mosaic of history, geography, botany, and other features.
Obviously, the Bible has provided much of the source material, for the early settlers, who came to Palestine from the 1880s, even though they were not all religious, were familiar with the Bible. So the first agricultural school, opened near Jaffa by a French Jew, Charles Netter, in 1870, is called Mikveh Yisrael, from the verse in Jeremiah 14:8, “O Hope of Israel, its deliverer in time of trouble.”
Petach Tikva was set up in 1880 by a group of Jews from Jerusalem, and means ‘gate of hope.’ They wanted to buy some land near the traditional site of the Valley of Achor, and took the name from Hosea 2:17, “And I will give her vineyards from thence, and the valley of Achor ‘troubling’ for a gate of hope.” But the purchase fell through. So they bought another tract of hill and swamp, nearer the coastal plain, and opened their “gate of hope” there, instead, and it is now a thriving township for the region.
Perhaps one of the most surprising features of the new names is the extensive use of acronyms, still within the above principles. Hebrew, both classical and modern (which is a direct development of the former), has a long history of acronyms under other names, such as Notarikons and acrostics, and in many forms, such as the names of famous rabbis or their works, numbers, dates of the month and year, etc. Many of these have been incorporated into the names of new settlements. But Israel has also known the loss of many settlers, in wars and other troubles, and some of their initials have been woven into names for places settled by their friends. Thus, Neve Ativ is a moshav ‘cooperative village’ on the Golan Heights, near the borders of Syria and Lebanon, which operates ski facilities on Mount Hermon. The name is an acronym of Avraham, Tuvia, Yair and Benyamin, four soldiers who fell in the fighting for the Golan. So too, Avnei Etan, a moshav in South Golan, is an acronym of the initials of other soldiers who died in Israel’s wars.
Further south a kibbutz ‘communal settlement,’ Netiv Ha-Lamed Hé bears a numerical acronym in its name, for the letters Lamed-Hé stand for 35. It commemorates 35 soldiers, led by Danny Mass, who set out in 1948 from the coastal plain in an attempt to cut through the hills and relieve the besieged settlers of the Etzion Bloc; but they were discovered and fell after a fierce battle near the site of the present settlement. Givat Hashelosha ‘the hill of the three’ is named for an earlier episode. In World War I three Jewish labourers were executed by the Turks (who then ruled the country) on charges of espionage. Ma\?\aleh HaHamisha ‘the hill of the five’ is a collective settlement near Jerusalem, named for five of its members who were killed near there during the disturbances in 1938. Dorot, a kibbutz in the south, is an acronym of three names: Dov, Rivka and Tirza. Dov Hos was a labor leader and pioneer, killed with his wife and daughter in a road accident.
Other settlements bear the initials or acronyms of figures in recent or earlier Zionist history. The main airport of Israel is known as Natbag, or Namal Teufa Ben-Gurion. Givat Hen is a moshav, the initials of which are the first names of Haim Nahman Bialik, the foremost Hebrew poet of modern times. Yitav is a kibbutz in the Jordan valley, named for Yad Yitzhak Tabenkin, a Labor party leader. Nearby is a statue in the form of the Hebrew letters nun dalet, which symbolize 54, to commemorate those killed here in a helicopter crash during Army training in 1977. Mitzpeh Aviv is one of the new hilltop outposts in Galilee, and is an acronym of Abraham Yaakov Braver, a veteran teacher and geographer, whose maps and books taught many of today’s leaders.
Pa\?\amé Tashaz ‘the footsteps of the year 5707’ is a curious “date acronym.” The name commemorates a lightning settlement operation in the desert of the Negev, when eleven outposts were set up together, in October 1946, which fell in the year 5707 of the Hebrew calendar.
Kerem Maharal, in the foothills near Haifa, goes even further back in history, for this is the “vineyard of Maharal,” the acronym of the name of the famous Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, who died in 1609; he was a Talmudic scholar, a moralist, and mathematician, whose statue stands (or stood) at the entrance to the Prague Town Hall.
Some place names commemorate rabbis or their works, and this is true of the Kibbutz Hafetz Hayyim, on the coastal plain. Founded by religious pioneers of Poalei Agudat Yisrael, it bears the name of Rabbi Israel Meir HaKohen, better known simply as the “Hafetz Haim,” after the title of his book of that name; it treats of the dangers of slander and tale-bearing, as in the verse in Psalms 34:13, “Who is the man that desireth life, and loveth days that he may see good therein? Keep thy tongue from evil, and thy lips from speaking guile.”
Although I have dealt, so far, mainly with Jewish settlement names, it should not be thought that Israel is concerned with these alone. In recent years there is a movement to persuade the Bedouin Arab tribes, who live chiefly in the deserts of the south, to abandon their nomadic tent life and to settle in new towns built near their tribal areas. Four of these have been put up and are now on the map: Tel Sheva, Rahat, Kuseifa, and Tel Ar\?\oer.
The rulings of the official Names Committee are usually accepted by the settlers who live in the place: they themselves often propose a name to the Committee and get its approval. But not always. In 1977 a group decided to settle near a forest called Um-Tsafa in the Samarian hills, and took the name Neve-Tzuf, which might be taken to mean ‘Honeytown.’ They had their reasons: the Hebrew root in this name means both ‘honey’ and ‘view,’ and they have a fine view from their hill. Also, they intended to raise bees for honey. Indeed, there are some 54 places in the Bible where honey is mentioned, so the name chosen by them might have been approved. But the Committee thought of the passage in Deuteronomy 32:13, “And He made him to suck honey out of the crag, And oil out of the flinty rock.” The Hebrew for ‘flint’ is halamish (Psalms 114:8). And in the area are many olive groves. So the Names Committee gave the place the name Halamish, which now appears on official maps. The settlers refused to take this “hard” ruling and took the matter to the High Court in Jerusalem; but the learned Justices felt that the opinion of the experts must prevail. So the place now has two names, one official for maps and the post office, and the other, the settlers' own…
Another somewhat strange story is that of the kibbutz Ir-Ovot in the Arava, the long rift valley leading down to the port of Eilat. It is said to be named after Oboth, one of the stations mentioned in the wanderings of the children of Israel in the wilderness (Numbers 21:10-11). But the location of that place, unlike those associated with many Biblical names, has never been determined. And this spot has been through many changes of settlers. The Hebrew word ov also means ‘sorcery or magic,’ so some wags have connected the varying fortunes of the place with that idea…. But of late the settlers have developed a new branch of light industry: there seems to be an abundance of warm underground water there, so they are trying to use it as the basis of a spa, and thus to get out of the hot water of their financial burdens.
In most of the new settlement names there is much of the poetry of the Bible, not least that derived from trees and plants. Thus Nitzanim ‘blossoms’ comes from Song of Songs 2:12, “The blossoms appear… the time of singing is come.” The vine gave to Kiryat Anavim its name, the olive to Kefar Zeitim, the almond to moshav Luzit. And lest you think that all this savors too much of the past, it is good to know that a civic-mined businessman has founded a modern garden town in Galilee and named it Kefar Veradim, the ‘village of Roses.’ Just as Palestine is in a central position in the hearts of men of good will all over the world, so the names of its towns and villages find echoes in the hearts of all men.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“This time she was in the audience; Berlioz, contemporary accounts declare, was at the drums, and every time their eyes met he beat them with re-doubled fury.” [From program notes, City of Birmingham (England) Symphony Orchestra, 14 March 1985. Submitted by John Ferguson, Birmingham.]
Iron Language
Maxey Brooke, Sweeney, Texas
There is, in the United States, a written language with a vocabulary of a half million words, complete with an orthography, a grammar, a syntax, and an accidence. Almost everybody knows a few words of this language. But those with a complete understanding are limited to a few thousand. It is the language of cattle brands. The practice of branding cattle for identification seems to have begun with the Moors in Africa and carried with them when they invaded Spain. The Spanish brought it to the New World.
\?\The early Spanish and Mexican brands were simply arbitrary marks with little or no meaning of their own. Perhaps the earliest New World cattle brand was that belonging to Cortez. It was simply three crosses.
Most brands consist of letters and/or numbers along with a few arbitrary signs, such as:
Bar \?\
Slash \?\
Rail \?\
Bench \?\
Two Rails \?\
Rafter \?\
Stripe \?\
The position or structure of a letter determines its name.
Tumbling R \?\
Running R \?\
Lazy R \?\
Dragging R \?\
Crazy R \?\
Swinging R \?\
Walking R \?\
Rocking R \?\
Flying R \?\
The last two are a bit tricky. If the are is not touching the letter, the name changes. \?\ is “quarter circle R,” and \?\ is “R quarter circle.”
\?\ is simply “WR” but \?\ is “WR connected.” \?\ is “double R” and \?\ is “Box R.”
By now you have probably deduced the principal syntax rule of cattle brands. Brands are read from left to right, from top to bottom, and from outside to inside. \?\, \?\, \?\ are all “circle R.”
There are a thousand stories about cattle brands. J. Frank Dobie told one about a renegade long-horn with a huge DEATH branded on both its sides. The cantankerous animal was avoided by men and other cattle alike. It wandered alone in the desert for some twenty years before it disappeared, presumably dead.
A pastime among some cow people is the drawing of brands in the dirt and challenging others to name them. \?\ is not too hard; it is “H on T.” Logically \?\ should be “Flying half circle diamond and a half,” but in reality it is “Fleur de Mustard.” This \?\ is not “double cross” but “pigpen.” And because this brand \?\ means absolutely nothing, it is called “Quien sabe,” Spanish for ‘I don’t know.’ Brands that can be read in two ways can lead to ceaseless arguments.
One consideration in selecting a brand is; Can it be easily changed. \?\ could easily become \?\. There is a story about a cattle rustler who stole a herd of IC cattle and changed the brand to ICU. But before he could dispose of them, they were stolen from him and the brand changed to ICU2. To prevent this, some ranchers used big brands.
One such was \?\ which covered the entire side of a cow. It was registered as the “pothook” brand, but it was known far and side as the “straddle bug.” The trouble with this approach is that it decreases the value of the hide.
The XIT brand is commonly known as “Ten in Texas.” It is said that this is because the ranch covered ten counties in West Texas. In truth it was so designed because it would be difficult to change. The owners were so proud they offered a reward to anyone who could change the brand so that it could not be recognized.
Naturally, somebody did it with the “Star cross” brand.
\?\
Brands lend themselves to puns. 4D inevitably became “Ford.” Instead of being “Bar circle”
—\?\ became “Bar none.”
I had heard the story of \?\ (remember, a two lying on its back is a “Lazy 2”) a dozen times and dismissed it as a tall tale. But a few years ago, just five miles from where I live, I saw a cow, I am sure it was not brand. Since it was only one cow, I am sure it was not a registered brand, but someone’s idea of a practical joke.
Turkeys, Bombs, and Other Theatrical Souvenirs
Stephen E. Hirschberg, Elmsford, New York
It is the birth of theater: fresh from singlehandedly slaying a woolly mammoth, Og returns to his cave and reenacts (and, being human, embellishes) the triumph for his paleolithic associates; surly grunts emanate from a rival, the first drama critic. With such ancient origins it is not surprising that much of the theatrical lexicon has been assimilated into our everyday vocabulary.
The drama of ancient Greece is the senior donor of such words to English. Early performances were of choral dances, with the drama’s poetic lines of secondary importance. Chanting and moving as a unit, the chorus would proceed in one direction (movement called the strophe), turn back using the same meter (the antistrophe), and conclude, standing still, in a different meter (the epode). From the root strophe developed apostrophe—a turning aside in the midst of a speech—more generally, a digression. An allusion to these choral movements, the catastrophe was the fatal turning point of a drama.
In the mid-sixth century B.C. the eponymous Thespis of Icaria, a chorus trainer, revolutionized the format by separating a single recitiative actor—him-self—from the chorus. Today’s actors, thespians, aspire to such stardom. This separation afforded opportunity for verbal conflict (in Greek, agōn), a foundation of modern drama. The leading character (now, any leading figure) was the protagonist, and the opposition, antagonists. Complexity of the struggle was enhanced by the addition of a second actor (deuteragonist) by Aeschylus, and a third (tritagonist) by Sophocles. The Greeks' word for the stage actor was hypokritēs (one who pretends to be what he is not; thus, hypocrite).
Through the 5th century B.C., the Classical Greek period, all action took place on the circular flat bottom, the orchēstra (from Gr. orcheisthai ‘to dance’), of the bowl-shaped theater. Musicians occupied seats adjacent to the orchēstra. Actors could change masks and costumes away from the performance area in a small tent, the skēnē (the term later referred to a wooden partition closing the back of the orchestra to permit more convenient garb changes and prop storage). The next century saw the skēnē become a more substantial, flat-roofed structure with doors to the orchēstra. It is believed that the actors spoke from the roof of the skēnē while the chorus remained below, in the orchēstra. With the extinction of the chorus in the modern drama, the Greek theater structure has left to English the scene (from skēnē), and orchestra to denote both a collection of musical performers (who occupied the orchēstra after actors and chorus abandoned it) and the lower section of seats in a theater.
Masks were used to identify characters, show their emotions, and cope with open-air acoustical challenges. They were equipped with megaphone-like mouth holes in order to project sound better. The Latin persōna—‘mask’ (probably from personāre ‘to sound through’)—gives us person for ‘any human being.’
Perhaps the most peculiar of the Greek stage props was the mēchanē, a crane used to lower a god from heaven (theos ek mēchanēs) to disentangle the plot and save the day for the hero (and playwright). In its non-stage sense, deus ex machina is any unexpected device to resolve a difficult situation. A kindred term from the French, coup de thé\acap\tre (a ‘sensational sudden turn in a play’), likewise denotes a surprising turn of events.
The pragmatic Romans adopted much of the Greek form. Modesty was apparently not an attribute of the Roman actors: the end of a performance was marked by actors' cries of “Plauditē!” ‘Applaud!’ Praiseworthy feats still rate our plaudits. What seems valid invites applause, and hence is plausible.
Though the English stage direction Enter was perfectly acceptable to Elizabethan playwrights, departures were in Latin: Exit ‘he or she leaves’ and Exeunt ‘they leave.’ From this Roman heritage is our off-stage meaning of exit. The OED cites the 1607 source Barley-breake; or a warning for wantons, “so Much like vnto a Player on a stage… As one distract doth exit in a rage.”
Roman theater also gave a term for the bragging, swaggering soldier, miles gloriosus. Titus Maccius plautus created the eponym c.206 B.C. in his comedy, Miles Gloriosus.
The medieval mystery play, characterized by tableaux, dances, songs and dramatic scenes, was a transitional form between liturgy and lay drama. The plays were presented on a movable stage, a pageant (subsequent embellishments of which included wheels and a lower-level dressing room), now synonymous with pomp. Between the acts of mystery plays might be inserted a broadly humorous episode based on wild improbabilities—an interlude or farce (from the Latin farcīre ‘to stuff [into the program].’ A farce thus came to signify something ludicrous, or an empty show.). A related device is comic relief (such as Hamlet’s ridicule of Polonius), a break in tension between serious events.
With the end of the Middle Ages new dramatic forms were born in Europe. Sixteenth-century Italy saw the development of commedia dell’arte, in which troupes of stock characters improvised on plots which usually involved the amorous entanglements of masters, servants, mistresses, and confidantes. Eponyms emerged from the cast: Pantalone, a lustful Venetian merchant identified by his tight trousers (from which pantaloons and pants); Zanni, a ludicrous buffoon (thus, zany), servant to a charlatan; Arlecchino, another buffoon servant with tights which were parti-colored (so harlequin, from the French for this name, means ‘bright and multicolored’); and Soubrette, the coquettish lady’s maid and intrigante (whence soubrette ‘any frivolous or flirtatious young woman’).
Melodrama evolved as a distinct genre in France in the 18th century. It was characterized by elaborate action, dialogue, spectacle, suspense, and sentiment (thus, melodramatic). In Germany late in the century arose the Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement, opposing established society and featuring extreme nationalism and impetuosity of style and diction. Its name came from the 1776 drama DerWirrwarr, oder Sturm und Drang, by Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger. The movement ended in 1784, but Webster’s III records Sturm und Drang in English meaning ‘turmoil.’
The curtain-raiser (consequently a preliminary to an event) appeared in the late 19th century as a concession to theater latecomers. It was a short play presented at the program’s start so that the featured presentation would not be interrupted by the unpunctual.
Producers of vaudeville shows stimulated audience interest with the idea of amateur night. In the course of the evening the worst of the performers would be jerked off stage by a hook on a long pole. Vaudeville may be dead, but to give the hook still means to ‘discharge for incompetence.’
With the significant exception of commedia dell’arte, the theater moved indoors with the Renaissance. From their building plans as well as their visual and acoustic properties the playhouses of the Renaissance and subsequent eras gave us phrases now in commonplace use. The least expensive seats were the highest ones, in the gallery, occupied by those presumed to be lacking the artistic sophistication brought by wealth (thus gallery was identified with the general public). To play to the gallery, originally by overacting to appeal to the taste of its denizens, is to ‘curry favor with the masses by crude devices.’
What actors require is visibility on stage. Even theatrical stars (so called because of the brilliance of their performances) need to be in the spotlight. In 1816 Thomas Drummond invented the limelight, a spotlight which provided brilliant white illumination by the incandescence of calcium oxide (lime). Used in theaters from 1837 until supplanted by Edison’s electric lights in the 1880s, its legacy is the wish of performers and public figures to be in the limelight. Occupying center stage assures good lighting for the actor and unobstructed sight lines for his devotees in the audience.
An actor trying to force attention on himself might stand in the upstage (the rearward part of the stage) while engaged in dialogue, thus forcing a fellow performer to turn his back on the audience. Upstaging is a form of stealing the show (another is forcing out of the spotlight), or practising one-upmanship. The extreme of stage attention-getting is the inept though flamboyant overactor, the ham. In general use indicating a ridiculous or obnoxious exhibitionist, the word is a relic of the minstrel shows. In these a hambone was a performer in blackface overacting dialect routines (as in the song, “The Ham-Fat Man”). Testifying to the qualities of the ham, hamming up means ‘wrecking by ill-advised, extravagant behavior.’
The acoustics of the theater must permit all the playwright’s lines to be audible. A stage whisper is in the script—a ‘whisper intended to be overheard.’ Some stage talk is not meant for theatergoers' ears— for example, a prompt for an actor who forgets a line.
Off-stage left and right are players ready to take cues for their entrances. They are anticipated but unseen, waiting in the wings. An actor called to undertake a part on short notice might study it while waiting thus and be prepared to ad lib; such an effort with little preparation is winging it.
Preparation of the theater includes setting the stage. A trompe l’oeil painted curtain at the back of the stage, establishing location, is a backdrop. What is invisible at the theater (hence private) is behind the scenes, or backstage. The stage manager has responsibility for all physical aspects of the production. He generally is off-stage (the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is a notable exception). By back formation, to stage-manage is to arrange from behind the scenes.
Non-theatrical English has assimilated from the stage a number of terms indicating success or failure. Something accepted by the common man is said to play [well] in Peoria (Peoria, Illinois—a reflection of the recepetion of road-company productions by smalltown audiences with middle-American taste). Box office ‘success or drawing power’ may be more likely with a star to fill the bill ‘meet requirements’; the phrase refers to the need for large-type lettering of the featured player’s name to occupy space on the printed program, or bill. A ‘major success,’ in a vaudeville program, for instance, is a tough act to follow.
On the other hand, the show may be a ‘total disaster,’ a turkey (theatrically, an entertainer whose attributes are dullness, poor writing, inferior production, and financial failure). Some turkeys do not have the sense to die quietly, but ‘conspicuously fail’—they bomb. [Though bomb in England is equivalent to smashit in America.—Ed.]
Dramatic characters, even those with minor parts, live outside their roles as eponyms. Shakespearean creations who have gone from proper to common nouns include Shylock ‘an exacting creditor’; Romeo capitalized, a ‘male lover,’ lower-case, a ‘kind of man’s slipper’; Juliet a ‘type of woman’s slipper’; and Benedick (a newlywed in Much Ado About Nothing), spelled benedict or benedick, is a ‘newly married man, in particular, one who had a long bachelorhood.’ Falstaffian individuals resemble the fat, jovial, dissolute Sir John Falstaff of Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor. A blundering official may be called a Dogberry (the foolish constable in Much Ado About Nothing, who says [Act IV, Scene 2], “though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.”).
Other notable eponyms from plays are Lothario (a gay blade, in Nicholas Rowe’s The Fair Penitent), malapropism (Mrs. Malaprop had this proclivity in Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals), Mrs. Grundy (a narrowminded, intolerant person like the unseen neighbor in Thomas Morton’s Speed the Plough), Tartuffe (a religious hypocrite, like the hero of Moliére’s Tartuffe), and Peter Pan (one young at heart, though old in years—the title character in Sir James M. Barrie’s play. The name is also attached to a style of collar for women and children.). In Susanna Centlivre’s A Bold Stroke for a Wife, Simon Pure, impersonated by another, proves his identity in the end; simon-pure thus denotes unqualified authenticity.
Let us not leave this subject without mention of the utility of theatrical terminology in philosophical discourse. We offer this illustrative fragment from a recently discovered dialogue:
GLAUCON: What, then, is the fate of Man, Socrates? Is it death and nothingness?
SOCRATES: Assuredly, Glaucon, it’s curtains for us.
GLAUCON: What you say rings true, Socrates. But what of Evil? Can it be that Evil exists without logical cause, even as balls bounce and cookies crumble?
SOCRATES: Certes, Glaucon. That’s showbiz!
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Bird-watching chart/map… poster of tips for attracting birds with migration map on back side.” [From the National Geographic 1985 Publications Catalog. Submitted by Jane Walsh, Berkeley, California.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“It isn’t going to be any one person’s park…. I think dogs are wonderful. But they’ve got to be kept on leashes, like everyone else.” [From an interview in the Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1985. Submitted by Pamela Jones, Sepulveda, California.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Nationally reknown literary counsultant…. There Is No Substitute for Excellence.” [From Children, Naturally, Spring 1985, front page. Submitted by Alexandra Urdang, New York City.]
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, Ohio.]
Images, Ornithology, and Jargon in the Defense Establishment: Some Reflections on a Refractory Subject
Amrom H. Katz, Los Angeles
Examples of military strategic jargon are found frequently in editorials, articles, and speeches dealing with defense, arms control, and strategy. I had to redefine many of these terms so that I could understand them. A few examples follow.
Consider deterrence. This term is usually applied to the military relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States. One is not sure that deterrence is working. On the other hand, if a war starts, it is clear that deterrence has ceased. The end of deterrence is conspicuous but while some think deterrence is going on, others will not agree. Deterrence is arguable and it is not very well understood. Were we to draw up a contract and say, “We’ve deterred you. signed, the United States,” and then persuade the Soviets to countersing it saying “Yes, we’ve been deterred” that would be deterrence. But we have no examples where both sides have signed such a declaration or even agreed verbally. Deterrence has been principally a matter of unilateral declarations. This has led me to define deterrence as follows:
Deterrence is threatening to do something to somebody if he does something to you, which, when he does not do it to you, you claim he has been deterred, whereas he may never have had it in mind in the first place.
Another widely discussed topic is limited war. There have been many different definitions of limited war, most of them containing some limitation with respect to ferocity or to the kinds of weapons used. Some raise questions about sanctuaries, as in Vietnam and in Korea. No definition seemed to cover all cases, so I made my own definition:
Limited war is a war that is somewhere else.
Let’s think about that for a moment. If limited war is a war that is somewhere else, when you are at the place where it is, it is not somewhere else. It is right there. For most of the wars that have been called limited wars, the people who live where the war is being fought do not believe that it is a limited war. By some current standards, World War II was a limited war. One would be poorly received, or worse, if he were to explain to the French, the Germans, or the English that World War II was a limited war. The relativistic nature of my definition is clear.
Let us turn now to preventive war and preemptive war. Strategists and columnists use these words, as do presidents, senators, and congressmen. Einstein is alleged to have defined preventive war as “anticipatory retaliation.” What is the difference between preventive war and preemptive war? I have produced a pair of definitions that clarify the matter for me, and may for you, too.
Preventive war is a war, which if you wait awhile, you can still have it.
Preemptive war, on the other hand, is a war such that if you wait awhile, it is a second strike.
In other words, preemptive war is the last possible preventive war: If you wait anymore, the other side has gone first.
As an example of the semantic traps lying around the political landscape, let me describe my position on Vietnam when the national debate was at its height in the late 1960s. I wanted the United States to get out of Vietnam and to stay out. I wanted the shooting to stop. I wanted the Vietnamese free of outside influences. I wanted them to be free to make up their own minds on their government. How does that sound for a position? Well, the trouble with that position (and that kind of statement) is that it was probably held simultaneously by President Johnson, Senators Eugene McCarthy and Barry Goldwater, Women’s Strike for Peace, the Federation of American Scientists, President of North Vietnam Ho Chi Minh, and President of South Vietnam Thieu, to list but a few names.
That kind of position statement, one that carries with it (seemingly) precise prescriptions but has imprecise applicability, is a statement without content. If such a disparate a set of people could agree on that statement, it is not a useful statement, but a position without program, policy, or plan for getting there from here. Watch out for similar statements about today’s problems. Statements that are without prescriptions and a road map seem to me to be very much like standing on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, looking across at and focusing on the north rim, thus missing the entire Canyon. Vietnam is, unfortunately, not the only booby trap on the political landscape. Arms control is probably the most contentious, complex, and political subject before the public. I leave it as an exercise for the student to flush out and then to flesh out some more examples.
Every specialized group, whether sociologists, educationists, psychologists, or strategists, has its own peculiar vocabulary, or jargon. One function of jargon is to enable swift communication between experts, many of whom are self-appointed or self-anointed. Another main use of jargon is to raise barriers against outsiders. The outsider must run an obstacle course over the words being used before being admitted to the field.
Discussions of defense, arms control, and deterrence provide many opportunities for the skillful use of jargon and the stimulation of images. For example, consider arms race. This phrase has been employed for so long that it has pre-empted the field, making it hard to introduce any other image. The image of a race usually involves a starting line, an agreed starting time, rules to run by, a winner, and at least one loser. Ordinarily, the image conjured up by the arms race is that of a 100-yard dash. Typically, spelling out the details of the image proves the error in its choice. Suppose that before we adopted that image we had drawn the metaphor of a crawl, a jog, a walk or a steeple-chase. Some people, depending on their viewpoint about the defense budget, can point to the arms race, saying, “It’s nothing but a walk.” They could add that the percentage of our GNP going into strategic arms is steadily decreasing. If we really need and demand an image, I would suggest a different one. The so-called arms race to me more closely resembles a continuous track meet, a never-ending track meet, with the results being posted every once in a while. We might, for example, give the Soviets some points for winning the shotput and the United States for winning the archery contest. These two events correspond to the Soviets' greater throw-weight (of their missiles) and to the (presumed) greater accuracy of the U. S. missiles. Moreover, in a track meet, somebody wins this event, somebody wins that event, and the team scores may come out about the same. In this Grand Track Meet, from time to time there may be more than two contestants, which can affect the scoring.
One of the most interesting examples (unfortunately still with us) of the sterilization and polarization of discourse in the United States derives from the dichotomous and forced sorting of people into hawks or doves. We are treated and expected to react like litmus paper: red or blue; acid or base. We are forced into making a choice. In my experience, I find that using such labels is (all too frequently) a substitute for thought. They illustrate the increasing tendency to talk in code language, using flag words and overdrawn and stark caricatures. Most national problems have some fine grain, some subtleties, some shading of realities other than black and white. Complex and important choices are reduced to black and white cartoons: yes, no; in, out; for, against.
Except for specialized symbols (bulls and bears, elephants and donkeys) images based on mammals haven’t caught on. The bird family, however, furnishes lasting imagery. I have come to believe that these images work not only for individuals but for nations as well. But we must enlarge the choices.
Consider the spectrum of possibilities furnished by the birds. While you read the list, think of friends, colleagues, enemies, or nations to whom they could apply. We have, besides hawks and doves, eagles, owls, crows, buzzards, dodos, ostriches, parrots, chickens, shrikes, mockingbirds, vultures, yellowbellied sapsuckers, coots, loons, pigeons, bustards, grouse, titmice, and quail, just to mention a few. There are many more available images; consult your nearest bird-watcher. However, once launched and adopted, an image conditions the description. Instead of being a mere symbol of what you are talking about, the images often determines and becomes the very thing itself.
This short tour may embolden the reader to question any communicator, great or otherwise, who attempts to paper over genuine problems with jargon or images. Remember that the images being projected on the screen cannot be changed merely by attending the theater. You have to pay attention to the projector and to the slide being projected. And you must see to changing the slide in the projector.
EPISTOLA {John F. Salz}
This is in regard to your review of Mr. Steinmetz’s book on Yiddish [XII, 4]. The first thought that came to my mind reading the review was—you’re definitely not into Yiddish.
For starters, enjoy is definitely not Yiddish. Maybe a Jewish college student waiting tables in a California Health Food Bistro might say “Hi, my name is Bruce; I’ll be your waiter for the evening. Enjoy.” But even that scenario is unlikely if the kid is really Jewish and not formisched (i.e., ‘mixed up’).
As to your statement that Yiddish owes its dissemination to New York publishing houses and other New York training grounds for Hollywood types. Well, maybe. Still, Yiddish outside Jewish circles is a relatively new phenomenon, not more than 25 years old. Before that it was rather uncool to be Jewish, especially if one wanted a job, or a house in certain neighborhoods, or membership in clubs.
I think the main dissemination was accomplished by the schmatte schleppers (manufacturers' representatives in the ready-to-wear industry) about the same time an anti-discrimination movement in the U.S. was taking place. Many of the salesmen who spread throughout the U.S. promoting their wares originated from New York. They used Yiddish words such as tineff for ‘shoddy goods,’ goniff for ‘thief,’ mumser for an ‘unpleasant person’ (usually the head merchandise buyer), zu viel gelt for ‘too much money,’ schlock for ‘junk,’ and so on. The words caught on with the store personnel and owners, even in the department stores—and even with the goyishe—i.e., the ‘gentiles.’
At trade exhibits and other gatherings of the schmatte industry, Yiddish words became part of the unwritten trade lexicon. I think being Jewish became somewhat in vogue (people I had never suspected— and had known for many years—admitted to being Jewish) and Yiddish found its way into conversational English, especially among the intelligentsia.
Yet, hearing Yiddish from the mouths of gentiles doesn’t always sit well with many Jews, because the gentile simply does not understand the delicate meanings of some of those words—words created in the ghettos of European communities to describe situations, things, and people unfamiliar to American culture. As a collector of Jewish humor, I cannot resist telling good Jewish jokes to my gentile friends—only to regret it moments later. They simply do not “get it,” although those of Italian heritage often surprise me with their insight into such humor.
There are many dialects of Yiddish. For example, Jews who lived in the German sector of Czechoslovakia (Sudetenland) all spoke German, most also Yiddish and Czech. Their Yiddish was a localized version; but they also spoke “proper” Yiddish. They spoke German in dialect, but they all could also speak “hoch Deutsch.” And the same with Czech—the dialect of the region as well as the Prague (classic) Czech. Surely a nightmare for a linguist, no? The moment he opened his mouth, a stranger could be instantly classified as to his station in life, his politics, religion, and the reason for his presence.
So, Mr. Urdang, enjoy… and Bleib gesund (‘Stay healthy!')
[John F. Salz, Sausalito, California]
EPISTOLA {John Simpson}
I was surprised by a comment contained in Barry Tunick’s review of The Complete Word Game Dictionary [XII,2]. Mr. Tunick states that “Serious Scrabblers recognize only one reference work.”
This is certainly not the case in Great Britain, where Chambers 20th Century Dictionary is the official reference dictionary for the U.K. National Scrabble Championship.
[John Simpson, W & R Chambers Ltd, Edinburgh]
EPISTOLA {Norman R. Shapiro}
In his article about sexist language [XI,1], Richard Lederer refers to Sterling Eisiminger’s observations on racist language (“Colorful Language,” [VI,1]), as reflected in the pejorative use of the word black. The subject has been with us for some time now. Over a dozen years ago, psychiatrist Dr. Alvin Poussaint decried the demeaning effect of such terms as blackmail, black list, black market, etc., on the black psyche (Boston Globe, 8 November 1971), and I doubt that he was the first to do so. Given the unhappy polarization of the races, I can understand why such negative expressions stick in the craw, especially when other colorless terms are available or easily coined.
However, in all objectivity, it should be emphasized that the roots of this linguistic problem are not really racist at all, as today’s heightened sensitivities might lead us to believe. As Mr. Eisiminger rightly pointed out, in many cultures the world over, black and white have long been symbolic of evil and good respectively; probably since man realized that the dark of night was more conducive to danger and mischief than the light of day. And this, with no racial connotations whatever.
In fact—and this is the essential point—one finds even among many peoples of color, both in Africa and the Caribbean, the very same distinctions. For example, anthropologist Geoffrey Parrinder, in a discussion of African witchcraft, explains that “some African peoples themselves use the word black in speaking of (the) evil type of magic. For all African tribes believe that there is good magic also, white magic.” (Witch-craft European and African, p. 139). Similarly, any student of Haitian voodoo—a direct descendant of West African religion—knows that the evil divinities of death are characterized as black, while white is the color of the good divinities of life. Many other examples, anthropological and linguistic, could be given. But we would not accuse the Haitian or African blacks of racism against themselves on the basis of such associations.
Of course, it must be admitted that the American black of today has more reason to be sensitive to this issue than those blacks who live (or lived) in relative isolation from the white man and his real—not linguistic—racism. Still, let us not lose perspective. Racists there are, aplenty. But let us not go looking for more under every innocent adjective.
[Norman R. Shapiro, Wesleyan University]
EPISTOLA {Alan S. Kaye}
I should like to offer some comments on N. C. Nahmoud’s “Landmarks in Arabic” [XII,2]. In addition to errors in diacritics, ‘cat’ is gitt, sawt is ‘voice,’ sumūw is ‘height’ (no accent on the first u), etc., the spiritus lenis should be the voiced pharyngeal fricative (the spiritus asper). Thus awwal = ‘howl,’ arsh = ‘throne.’ It was left out in ajaleh ‘speed.’
Also, coincidence explains these similarities; there are even better ones which Maurice Swadesh pointed out in his last book: qarn = ‘horn,’ \?\a = ‘three,’ etc. As is well known in comparative-historical linguistics, even words with very similar phonetic structures and identical semantic structures are not necessarily related (for example, English bad and Persian bæd = ‘bad’ are not related at all, that is, the resemblance is pure chance, even though English and Persian are both Indo-European languages). So Arabic qata\?\a and English cut are coincidental just as the Algonquian pronominal prefixes first person n-, second person k-, and third person w- match up with Arabic pronouns and prefixes in verbal morphology perfectly (and, I might add, with the other Afroasiatic languages), but by total coincidence (certainly not genetic relationship and indeed not borrowing or diffusion).
Nahmoud’s examples remind me of trying to relate Arabic \?\umm and English mother, \?\ab and English pop, papa, etc.
[Alan S. Kaye, California State University, Fullerton]
EPISTOLA {Douglas I. Pirus}
Philip Howard should “take care” lest his diatribe against this expression [XII, 3] opens up a can of worms that has raised the hackles of more pedantic grammarians than Hippoclides could waggle a leg at.
According to my translation of Herodotus’ The Histories (Aubrey de Selincourt), the exchange between Cleisthenes and Hippoclides was as follows:
‘Son of Tisander,’ he cried, ‘you have danced away your wife.’
‘I could hardly care less,’ was the cheerful reply.
As for me, the parting admonition to “take care (of yourself)” makes a lot more sense than Goodby or Ta Ta. I “could hardly care less” what someone says to me when parting, “so long” as it is not something like, “Just you wait till I see you next time.”
[Douglas I. Pirus, Garden Grove, California]
EPISTOLA {Cosima V. Lyttle}
In his letter [XII,1] R. Antony Percy mentions the word marrowsky in lower case. J.C. Hotten, in The Slang Dictionary (Chatto & Windus, 1873) includes in the definition for medical Greek “the slang used by medical students at the hospitals. At the London University they have a way of disguising English, described by Albert Smith as the Gower Street dialect, which consists in transposing the initials of words, e.g., poke a snipe = smoke a pipe; flutter-by = butterfly, etc. This disagreeable nonsense, which has not even the recommendation of a little ability in its composition, is often termed Marrowskying.” The word is capitalized.
Eric Partridge, in Slang Today and Yesterday (Macmillan, 1954), also refers to “Gower Street dialect, Marrowskying or Morowskying, and Medical Greek.” All are capitalized. He gives the earliest date recorded for each of the four terms as, respectively, 1845, 1850, 1860, and 1855. He mentions that Ware defines and spells “Mowrowsky… interchange of initial consonants, by accident or intention, as bin and jitters for gin and bitters. Very common, 1840-56. Brought into fashion by Albert Smith from hospital life. Now (1909) chiefly patronized in America.” Ware further states, “A Mowrowsky is often a transfer of two words, as in The Taming of the Shrew, where Grumio cries, in pretended fright, ‘the oats have eaten the horses!’ During the Donnelly discussion (1888)… an intended satirical mowrowsky was invented by an interchange of initials… Bakespeare and Shacon.” Ware does not capitalize mowrowsky.
Partridge also refers, in his Slang Dictionary, to a “supposed origin from a Polish count,” but neither he nor any of the other aforementioned sources were able to confirm or identify that person.
[Cosima V. Lyttle, Decatur, Georgia]
EPISTOLA {John B. Rockwell}
Anent your speculation [XII,2] on Greene’s The Third Man (and Carol Reed’s The Third Man) having a sports (cricket) provenance, I doubt it. The movie The Third Man had the occasional plot device that logically required a third man who was unidentified and who must be found. This was the American, Harry Lime, who fled to the Viennese sewers (Greene despises Americans). Recall that in connection with the Mac-Lean/ Burgess spy ring in Britain years ago there was a suspected fourth man who years later turned out to be Blount, the (late) Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures. (Sorry not to be able to recall the name of the “third man” in this notorious instance.) Here the existence of a fourth man was a logical necessity—as in Greene’s “Entertainment.”
[John B. Rockwell, New York City]
EPISTOLA {Basil Wentworth}
I refer to Professor Staaks’s letter on postpositive modifiers [XII,2]. It’s a pity to disqualify the pun, but Pope Pius does not properly portray a postpositive modifier. Pope is, of course, a title. Pope Pius belongs to the family of Captain Smith and Brother John, rather than to that of Captains Courageous and Brothers Karamazov.
The name Pius (which, incidentally, means ‘merciful,’ rather than ‘pious’) reminds one of the story about the schoolboy who learned that the -ous suffix meant ‘full of,’ as in righteous and joyous.
As another example of the postpositive modifier, I play in a group called “Tubas Two” (modeled after “Fiddlers Three,” of course). Two other examples would be durance vile and man alive! (or Sakes alive!, whatever that might mean).
Alive is a rather curious adjective, by the way, in that it apparently can appear only after the word it modifies—whether immediately after or separated by a verb.
[Basil Wentworth, Bloomington, Indiana]
EPISTOLA {Robert Goodland}
Eric Winters' apochryphal explanation of aluminum in OBITER DICTA [XII,2] is trivial compared with (my hazy recollection of) the more veracious one. Al was discovered (to be a metal) and was originally named by Sir Humphrey Davy as aluminium, from the salt alum, following prevailing chemical nomenclature. Subsequently, this was misspelt as aluminum by Danish physicist Oersted when he isolated the metallic form. Can the case therefore be made that the original and more correct term is aluminium, still prevalent as British English? Incidentally, doesn’t Canada’s “mid-Atlantic” spelling compromise make Winters' secretary correct?
[Robert Goodland, Arlington, Virginia]
OBITER DICTA
Joan D. Freudy, Freeport, New York
Read any good books lately? Noticed anything disturbing about them? As an inveterate book-a-holic I experience a euphoric moment whenever the librarian hands me a shiny-jacketed hard-cover volume which has been waiting on reserve. I can hardly wait to start reading and I anticipate with excitement and enthusiasm delicious hours of adventure to come.
Sadly, though, I must confess that during the last few months those relaxing hours have been punctuated by a series of unwelcome and irritating interruptions. For, as I read my way along, I encounter with ever-increasing frequency misspelled, misused or misprinted words and awkward, inept expressions… a dismal phenomenon.
Yes, these days the products of our once revered publishers are liberally sprinkled with mistakes: wrong spelling, poor phrasing, omissions, incorrect grammatical constructions—all of which create visual impediments, diminish the exhilaration of reading a fine book, and deplorably demean the printed page. I cite below a list of obvious errors in the marvelously readable and enjoyable And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmyer—a weighty tome, it is true, but totally fascinating in its broad-spectrum overview of small-town America down through the years. It is published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, prestigious publishers since 1838.
As I have found many similar errata in other current books, I have written letters on the subject to several publishers. None took the trouble to answer. What price computers? At what cost have we computerized production? What has happened to excellence?
We in the United States have always claimed leadership in technology. Can we then allow such slipshod, careless work? Do we accept the publication of error-laden material by our foremost publishing houses? If we continue to buy these books without comment or protest, we tacitly sanction defective products and denigrate the position of our country in every sphere.
Why not instead make ourselves heard in the market place? Let us resolve that from now on we shall notice and denounce all departures from good usage. Let us demand, yes, insist upon careful screening, unerring proofreading, top-quality editorial and production supervision for all the books we read.
AND LADIES OF THE CLUB
| PAGE | READS | SHOULD READ |
|---|---|---|
| 37 | Vigil | Virgil |
| 42 | wags | was |
| 76 | whim | whom |
| 99 | he | she |
| 135 | wws | was |
| 182 | not | now |
| 188 | this | his |
| 215 | war | were |
| 215 | should put | should have put |
| 306 | come to the help | came to the help |
| 323 | henna | Hanna |
| 357 | peof | pair of |
| 376 | Waht | What |
| 389 | One the evening | On the evening |
| 390 | Baron munchausen | Baron Munchausen |
| 391 | Binney | Binny |
| 409 | althought | although |
| 433 | cannot managed | cannot manage |
| 549 | Capain | Captain |
| 624 | though | thought |
| 645 | though | thought |
| 654 | one evening when was late | one evening when he was late |
| 717 | better that Mark | better than Mark |
| 722 | I was quite true | It was quite true |
| 732 | Barara | Barbara |
| 794 | go of | go off |
| 849 | Lugwig | Ludwig |
| 853 | Buy | But |
| 859 | went back to standy | went back to stand |
| 864 | unkept | unkempt |
| 873 | judgement | judgment |
| 884 | mther | mother |
| 885 | Nor Jessamine | Nor could Jessamine |
| 918 | change you mind | change your mind |
| 918 | I won’t changed | I won’t change |
| 921 | her were | he were |
| 943 | pretened | pretend |
| 945 | could no forbear | could not forbear |
| 949 | the only Rausch Paul’s wife really knew | Out of context. Ellen is Paul’s wife |
| 949 | Paul’s mother had half off | Paul’s mother had held off |
| 950 | who enjoys | who enjoy |
| 953 | helpless elderly widow | helpless elderly widows |
| 961 | rememberance | remembrance |
| 965 | thot for myself | than for myself |
| 965 | proselyting | proselytizing |
| 967 | resemblence | resemblance |
| 967 | finer | finger |
| 969 | the things is | the thing is |
| 969 | taking ifs | taking it |
| 995 | wating | waiting |
| 1015 | Kiddy | Kitty |
| 1017 | what can manage | what we can manage |
| 1019 | to all Club meeting | to all Club meetings |
| 1026 | resored | restored |
| 1046 | though | thought |
| 1048 | when he asked | when he asks |
| 1051 | off the sleep | off to sleep |
| 1054 | When Papa planned, I suppose. He wanted | When Papa planned, I suppose he wanted |
| 1065 | Gara | Gare |
| 1071 | presure | pressure |
| 1071 | though | thought |
| 1106 | he father | her father |
| 1110 | scence | scene |
| 1112 | of Jenny | to Jenny |
| 1117 | waw | way |
| 1117 | use | used |
| 1127 | Waynesobro | Waynesboro |
| 1128 | though | thought |
| 1148 | frist | first |
| 1149 | She has look in her eyes | She has that look in her eyes |
| 1154 | I you | If you |
| 1173 | cam | can |
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Word or Two Before You Go…
Jacques Barzun, (Wesleyan University Press, 1986), c. 244pp.
I am tempted to refer to Jacques Barzun as a Simon-pure purist, but I fear that it would need pointing out that it is John Simon that was being referred to. Confronted with a book by Barzun, who is, after all, an eminent, expressive, articulate writer, I am at once intimidated (Who dares criticize the Master?) and gleeful at the prospect of finding slips. Though scarcely abundant, they do occur, both in form and style: for example, after scoring anecdotage for, essentially, its corniness (not allowing for the fact that not everyone is as well-read or as venerable as he), Barzun resorts to “wall-to-wall carping,” which, I submit, may go as well in casual conversation as the puns he criticizes but doesn’t merit enshrinement in the deathless text of a Barzun opus. Criticizing astrolaw as a poor substitute for space law (not without justification), he identifies astra as Latin for ‘stars’; although it does appear in Latin (where the word for ‘star’ is stella), astra is really Greek plural (from ástron). Barzun does not seem to be prejudicial against metaphors as a race, but he finds impact in the sense of ‘importance, effect, influence, etc.’ reprehensible. It may not reflect the most felicitous of writing, but it is an attempt, however feeble, to break out of the mold.
And talking about mold, Barzun objects to words the meanings of which have changed during their history. He is fond of words in their “original” meanings. Thus, he writes “Tact is literally touch.” I am familiar with a few English words employing Latin tact-in the sense of ‘touch’—tactile, taction, tactual-but the statement is completely wrong for English, in which tact means something entirely different from ‘touch.’ He also objects to words that have been coined on the basis of a false analysis of their morphemes (meaningful elements), like workaholic, breathalyzer, and reprography. But ordinary speakers of a language are not trained etymologists, and they never have been: English (as well as other languages) has many words that have come about as a result of false analysis of their components: Barzun simply chooses to criticize those that seem unnatural to him, presumably because they did not occur before he was born. He has nothing bad to say about alchemy or chemistry, about jade (‘semiprecious stone’), or about other words that have changed in meaning for one reason or another. In Sanskrit, jangala meant ‘arid, desert land’; would Barzun object to the modern sense of jungle, a direct derivation, because it hasn’t retained its original meaning? Then, too, there are those that are just plain fun, like monokini based on bikini.
Barzun on words is not very good, I’m afraid: his nations are old-fashioned, prejudiced, and intolerant.
Barzun on style is much better, especially because his own is usually exemplary. When he is not discussing the technology of language, he is on much firmer ground, though he often falls prey to his own corny sense of humor: In his citation of idiotic idioms like “the proof is in the pudding,” he cannot resist adding, “Some will recall that with Whittaker Chambers it was in the pumpkin.”
This book is a collection of essays, some of which are quite old. In most instances, it is difficult to tell just how old—“English As She’s Not Taught,” for instance, has a reference dated 1952—and I was wondering as I read them, if Barzun really believes as strongly today the statements he wrote some 35 (or more) years ago. As it was he who edited the book, I must assume that he does, which is so much the worse.
Sometimes he misses the point entirely—or adroitly. He takes to task Alien Walker Read, Professor Emeritus at Columbia University and one of the most eminent, productive, and skilled observers of the English language. (The very first footnote in Mencken’s The American Language refers to Read, so you know he has been doing his thing for a long time.) In 1964, Read delivered a paper, “Can a Native Speaker Make Mistakes?” to which he answered “No.” Read is a very careful, well-spoken native speaker of English; he is also a prominent linguist and, as such, a keen analyst of language. He is neither rash nor cynical (as Barzun would have us believe). As a scholar who examines language, he may be likened to a physicist or a chemist: It is not readily conceivable that Barzun would accuse a physicist of rashness or cynicism because he investigates the phenomenon of gravity (which kills people if they step out of windows of tall buildings) or a chemist because he analyzes and describes arsenic (which, if eaten, is fatal). Yet the function of a linguist is justly parallel to that of any other “scientific” observer, and the conclusions he draws are equally valid, provided that they are correct. The perception of correctness about the observable phenomena of life change as we learn more. I recall a cartoon by Gahan Wilson, published just before NASA landed men on the moon. As we all know, the moon’s rotation around the earth is almost exactly the same period as its rotation on its axis; hence, the same side of the moon (with slight variation) is always facing us on earth. Wilson’s cartoon showed the moon as a huge, hemispherical stage set in the sky, completely hollow and with the back supported by wooden framework. To us today, that notion is ludicrous—as ludicrous as a Ptolemaic structure of the universe, with spheres within spheres—hence, we can be amused by such a cartoon.
Barzun’s view of language is somewhat Ptolemaic, if not almost superstitious. In “English As She’s Not Taught” he writes (or wrote):
During the last hundred years, nearly every intellectual force has worked, in all innocence, against language. We can gauge the result from the disappearance of the Dictionary properly so called. Consult one of the best of them, Webster’s New World Dictionary, and what you find is a miniature encyclopedia filled with the explanations of initials, proper names, and entries like “macrosporangium” and “abhenry,” which are not and never will be words of the English language.
The power of words over nature, which has played such a role in human history, is now an exploded belief, a dead emotion. Far from words controlling things, it is now things that dictate words.
That is Barzun in his role of logomancer, and if you believe that, you will believe that the moon is hollow (and made of green cheese). His exposition abounds with examples of howlers to illustrate his thesis that the language is degenerating. As readers of chuckle or two. But Barzun takes such things seriously and regards them as symptomatic of deterioration.
It is not enough for Barzun to condemn many words of English: he also condemns dictionaries for listing and defining them, as if the lexicographer were responsible for the lexicon he describes. Barzun confuses the description of a word list with a qualitative analysis of it:
…[W]hat need of écrasé, elinguation, eloign, embassador, furfuraceous, followed a little later by a long list of non-words, many unreadable and some quite imaginary, for nonastronomic, nonvaginal, non-Attic, et cetera? It’s a pity, too, that Churchill’s unlucky triphibious should be accepted here….
The dictionary referred to (though not identified) is The Random House Dictionary of the English Language—Unabridged Edition, but that is immaterial. The point is that Barzun wants a dictionary—if he wants one at all—that contains only words approved by him. He fails to understand that the words he cites appear in writing (if not speech), though it may not be the kind of writing he reads. Moreover, all of the words in the RHD are supported by citations, and his charge of their being imaginary is simply wrong. Finally, (again), the lexicographer’s function is to report the lexicon, not to pass judgment on what it should contain. Were Barzun’s logomancy to function, we could strike cancer from the language and everyone suffering from it would be instantly cured.
Barzun is dead wrong about other things, too. In “Page Mrs. Malaprop,” he fastens on the meaning of legend as “a story without basis in fact” and refuses to move off the spot. Yet, the dictionary—albeit the RHD—shows other (appropriate) senses for legend:
6. a collection of stories about an admirable person.
7. one who is the center of such stories: She became a legend in her own lifetime.
The word in this sense has been extended, especially in its adjectival form, legendary, to things, allowing us to speak of a legendary wine, which means ‘a wine about which (encomiastic) legends might be written.’ I see nothing wrong in that (except hyperbole). But Barzun clings to the ‘fanciful, mythical, imaginary’ overtones of legend and admits no semantic spread—by which one is led to assume that he is equally intolerant of metaphor.
For a critic who is often quite vituperative in his excoriation of the writing of others, Barzun is not without sin. He refers to constructions like the Columbia campus and the Ford factory as examples of “simple apposition,” while any grammarian would describe them as noun phrases with the first (noun) element in attributive position. (Apposition is generally reserved to describe a word like stylist in Barzun, the stylist, considers most people to be poor writers.) He persists in referring to-holic as a compounding element, when the element is-(a)holic. He disapproves of making a transitive verb from an intransitive, as in They strolled the boardwalk, totally insensitive to the difference between that and They strolled along the boardwalk. Presumably, he would also condemn She cruised the avenue, unaware of the distinction between that and She cruised along the avenue. Barzun is on very thin ice, indeed, in criticizing depart as transitive in Cunard Princess departs Apaculco: What will he do when the time comes to depart this life? Presumably, he will leave all functional shifts behind and retire to a Nirvana where everyone speaks Proto-Indo-European, where (in his imagination) all words have only one meaning and one function. He really ought to do some homework on the history of language before uttering his pronouncements, some of which seem to spring from an entirely erroneous view of what something means. At one point, he offers, “Now although many people are unaware of the fact, ‘I am pleased’ is not a nice expression. It does not mean ‘I am glad,’ or ‘happy,’ but ‘it pleases me’—it is the formula of royalty condescending to a subject.” Where does Barzun come up with such balderdash? “I am pleased to inform you that you have won $1 million in our lottery” is not condescending in the least. And should sprachgefühl be capitalized when, in italics in the text, it is clearly a borrowed German noun? But then, what can one expect from someone who gave a rave review to Eric Partridge’s Origins, a work so riddled with inaccuracies and misconceptions as to make it useless as a serious reference book?
It is pointless to go on. On those rare occasions where Barzun confines his remarks to style, he makes some useful contributions. But most of the essays in this book read like a strung-out litany of don’ts, for which (usually) the wrong reasons are given. As a pedagogical method, simply listing all the things one should not do is negative and not constructive. To some extent, this book is passively constructive in the sense that it offers, notwithstanding its dogmatic, opinionated Bourbonism, examples of good writing, which anyone can study to good advantage as long as the information is taken with a grain of salt and the opinions are ignored. What is missing almost entirely is any positive guidance on what the reader should do to improve his writing and to enable him to write clear, expository prose. A good place to start would be to train himself in clear, expository thinking.
Not all of the essays are concerned with condemning modern (American) English usage. Later on, one encounters, in tones that are a bit less testy, subjects that are treated with greater knowledge, perception, and dignity. Notable is “Mencken’s America Speaking,” about The American Language, a long piece, though that, too, descends into the occasional diatribe. Alas, Barzun seems unable to keep himself from being silly about “a standard language,” and he appears particularly silly when he persists in harping on his (apparent) contention that the Standard to be hewn to is the variety of English he speaks and writes. But for the fact that his words see the light of publication, he would be talking and writing to and for himself.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Hammond Barnhart Dictionary of Science
Robert K. Barnhart, (Hammond, 1986), xxiv + 740pp.
These days the general public and the media exhibit an increasing inability to distinguish between science and technology. Indeed, it is not always easy to draw the distinctions, though the editors of this book (HBDS) have achieved some measure of consistency. Thus, radiology is in but not radiography or radiograph; on the other hand “ ‘a photograph made by means of X rays,’ ” is given as the second definition (after the Physics definition) under X ray. This illustrates not a shortcoming of the dictionary but of the problems encountered in trying for a separation between technology and science: omitting the photo sense would have been silly; including it violates the most stringent application of principle. In those instances I have checked, the editors have erred on the side of common sense. Wheel and axle, a simple physical machine, is in; wheel is not.
For the student of science and for any person functioning outside his own discipline, whether scientist or layman, the HBDS is a fine work. The only fault I find with it is in its illustrations of ostensive objects, many of which are crudely executed.
The style of defining is explanatory and straightforward: the editors have eschewed the stilted, formulaic definitions so often found in many dictionaries, especially those compiled by amateur lexicographers who seem to feel that definitions must be written in a turgid, old-fashioned way. Thus, for example:
graft… 2 Biology, Medicine a to transfer (a piece of skin, bone, etc.) from one part of the body to another, or to a new body, so that it will grow there permanently.
renal… Anatomy. of, having to do with, or located near the kidneys: renal arteries.
This latter is certainly preferable to the “of or pertaining to …” or “of or relating to…” which pervades most dictionaries. I might pick a bone with “located near” for which I should have preferred “situated near.” Generally, I like the almost conversational approach.
One particular nasty problem in scientific defining for the layman—for much of this century—has been a definition of relativity. The special theory and the general theory present serious obstacles to the definer for several reasons, the most important being that neither can be adequately defined in the compass of a paragraph. Another is that there are few people who truly understand the theories. Yet, the terms are bandied about by amateurs, in contrast to other highly specialized terms in science, most of which are seldom encountered outside their disciplines. In the circumstances, the editors have, I think, done very well, indeed.
Entries incorporating uncommon words show their pronunciations in a respelling system that is easy to use and for which essential key information is provided on odd-numbered pages. In some cases, brief etymologies are provided. Some of the illustrative examples are contrived (e.g., renal arteries); those that have been taken from scientific writings do illustrate the entry in context, but they are not always revealing:
scatter… 2 to undergo scattering: The majority of the energy is carried by phonons which inelastically scatter at the interface (Nature).
Such instances, however, are rare, and most of the citations I read provided not only syntactic evidence of the use of the term in context but yielded up additional information not provided by the definition itself.
This is a fine work, certainly usable at the secondary school level and by people of any age and persuasion who need ready access to good definitions in the sciences.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Collins English Dictionary
New Edition, (William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1986), xxvii + 1771pp.
Omitted from the front matter of this edition is Patrick Hanks’s article, “Meaning and Grammar”; added to the main alphabetical text of the dictionary are eighty-one pages of entries and definitions that have come into the language since about 1978, when the editorial work on the first edition was completed. The latter addenda are welcome; the former essay will not be missed (if, indeed, anyone but the authors ever read the prelims of dictionaries). Aside from the new matter, the only other noticeable change is the omission from the new edition of markers to indicate syllabic breaks in polysyllabic headwords, a useful guide to their hyphenation. The first edition offered an elaborate and unique symbology: ordinary syllable breaks were marked by a centered dot; preferred hyphenation breaks were indicated by a tiny plus sign. Although these marks gave the headwords a slightly cluttered look, they imparted useful information (e.g., Where does one hyphenate words like special and communism?), the publisher’s research into users' preferences yielded evidence that many people do use the dictionary to find out where words ought to be broken at the ends of lines. I should have written “did use,” for, as we all know from reading any daily newspaper or many another type of periodical, hyp-hens can now appear almos-t anyw-here in a word. It is my understanding that Collins has now determined that the usefulness of such information has diminished considerably and that it could well be sacrificed in favor of a cleaner-looking, easier-to-read headword. As other British dictionaries do not generally show syllabication markers, there was no justification for keeping them for competitive reasons, and nostalgic sentiment plays a very small role in the dictionary business.
Well, on to an attempt at assessing what has been done in this new edition. I have acquired the habit, as a lexicographer, of scribbling marginal notes in the dictionaries I use more or less regularly. These range from queries regarding the accuracy and wording of definitions (which might be viewed as criticisms) to notations of words and senses omitted (which can be either criticism, if the word or sense was known to have existed at the time of compilcation, or mere commentary, if the word or sense appeared in the language later on). Thus, Johnson could be criticized for having got wrong the definition of pastern but could scarcely be taken to task for the “omission” of telephone or electronics.
Rambling casually through my scribbling, I note, for example, that neither edition of the CED carries the generalized sense of stonewall ‘obstruct,’ though it has been around for many years (and on both sides of the Atlantic). Properly, the sense ‘(often passive) to thwart; defeat’ has been added to snooker. On the other hand snuck ‘a past tense or past participle of sneak,’ labeled “U.S., not standard” in the earlier edition is now labeled “U.S., and Canadian, not standard,” but it ought to be labeled (in addition) “often humorous.” The cross reference under SLR to reflex camera is an improvement over the earlier definition. Shopfitter, shopfitting ought to have been added, and the verb definition of concertina ‘to collapse or fold up like a concertina’ is not helpful without the appropriate information about how concertinas fold up, which ought to have been in the noun definition for concertina, a shortcoming in both editions. Résumé is given a pronunciation showing stress on the first syllable; but I continue to hear people in Britain, who seem to persist in an arch contempt for simulating French pronunciation, stressing it on the second: riZOOmi. Other perverse pronunciations (conTROVersy) are shown, but not the pervasive REStauranTEUR, with its intrusive -n- (on both sides of the Pond). The Americans have also engaged in inducing strange shifts of stress into some words; one that amuses is the shift from AFFluent to afFLUent, possibly to avoid any confusion with a word from the vocabulary of ecology that has intruded into the popular language: EFFluent. Possibly the thing to be avoided is an effluence of affluence, the affluence of effluents, or some other such peril.
Focusing on a run of words at the beginning of Q, a few of the types of changes made in the new edition become evident. The editors seem to have found sufficient evidence for the dropping of periods in abbreviations in modern (British) practice to have eliminated many of them entirely, without even showing the older forms as variants: QARANC, QB, QC, QED, QEF, QF, ql, qm (but q.l. remains), Qld, QM, QMC, QMG, QMS, and so on. Notwithstanding evidence gleaned from modern sources, which I cannot question, it seems to me that there is a sufficiently large body of older evidence in existence to warrant the listing of these with their traditional full stops. In the same interval, Q to quadraphonics, there appear several changes and a number of new entries: QANTAS, Qingdao, Qinghai, Qiqihar, Q-methodology, Qom, QSM, Q-sort, quad (for quadraphonic), quadr- (var. of quadri-). The Chinese place names show commendable attention paid to the Pinyin transliteration of entries formerly entered under spellings conforming to other systems for transliteration. Pinyin did not make it into the 1979 edition, but it is there now.
It would be unfair to evaluate each of these addenda on its own merits, and that is not the point of this exercise. The point is to demonstrate that there are a great many new entries—more than 10,000 according to a comparison of claims made in the jacket blurbs of the two editions—and, though it would be tedious to document other changes here, it is clear that every entry in the old book was examined and reviewed and that little has slipped past the editor’s eagle eye. Even propitiatory, for some reason omitted from the first edition, has been added.
This new edition is well worth buying: if you have the earlier one and have become accustomed to its style, you will need this updated and revised edition; if you do not have the 1979 edition, here is an opportunity to avail yourself of a superior work of lexicographic reference.
Laurence Urdang
EPISTOLA {Dwight Bolinger}
The phenomenon for which D.S. Bland proposes the term subjective onomatopoeia [XII, 2] has been examined and discussed for decades by a number of linguists and critics, including Otto Jespersen (with examples such as those of the -ump family cited by Bland), Edward Sapir (the ici and lá vowel contrast that Bland picks up from French), Russell Ultan (size and distance symbolism in general), J.R. Firth, Fred W. Householder, Jr., Roger Wescott, Norman Markel, Eric Hamp, Yakov Malkiel, E.M. Uhlenbeck (for Javanese), Raimo Anttila (for Finnish), Morton Bloom-field, V. Christian (for Semitic vowels), Arthur Crisfield (for Lao), Marshall Durbin (for Mayan), A. A. Fokker (for Russian proper names), A. Graur (for Rumanian), Charles Hockett, and others almost too numerous to mention. There is no lack of proposals of names for it. Householder credits J.R. Firth with the term phonestheme, which a number of us who developed the theme in the' 40s and' 50s adopted; one could generalize the discipline as phonesthematics, I suppose. The late Peter Tamony suggested coincidental support. Robert Longacre speaks of phonological syntagmemes, Malkiel of phonosymbolism, Wescott of phonosememes. The traditional term of course is sound symbolism, but that is probably too comprehensive. If subjective onomatopoeia can stick, good luck.
[Dwight Bolinger, Palo Alto, California]
EPISTOLA {Peter A. Douglas}
In his article “Words That Don’t Look Right” [XII, 2], Richard Lederer omitted one notable example from his list of words that do not mean what their appearance suggests. The word is restive. This word has nothing to do with rest, though the unwary could very easily assume otherwise and equate it with restful. After all, such words as active, captive, festive, and plaintive have obvious connections with their roots and are no more than they seem. But restive comes from OF restif, meaning ‘balky, unwilling to go forward, stationary.’ The earlier English spelling was restif or restiff and was later assimilated to the -ive adjectives.
Restive means ‘refractory, stubborn, resistant to or impatient of control or authority,’ and can be equally descriptive of horses and people. The overall meaning of the word has come to have a flavor of unruliness, irritation, and chafing under restraint or against coercion. By extension, therefore, restive has come to mean ‘fidgety or discontented—or restless.’ Restive and restless are now generally used as equivalents, though each carries its own distinct meaning in exact usage. Here we have rather an oddity: two words whose meanings are converging while they appear to mean the opposite.
[Peter A. Douglas, Albany, New York]
EPISTOLA {Joel R. Hess}
The phenomenon which P.S. Bland terms “subjective onomatopoeia” in his article “Humpty Dumpty and the Sluggish Slut” [XII, 2] has indeed been noted before. My linguistics professor described it in detail, and gave it the name “phonesthemism.” Webster’s Third defines phonestheme as “the common feature of sound occurring in a group of symbolic words.” Thus, Mr. (Ms.?) Bland seems to be mistaken in claiming it to be an unnamed phenomenon.
The word phonestheme is, of course, a blending of phoneme and esthetic, indicating quite elegantly the tendency of certain sounds to acquire esthetic or emotional connotations. Unlike Bland, I don’t believe these sounds, or groups of sounds, need be inherently connected with the idea expressed. The “slackness of jaw movement” in sl- followed by short vowels can just as easily be characterized as a “sustainment of a seamless column of air” in such words as slick, sleek, slide, slippery, or as a “savage sibilant” in slit, slice, slaughter. The point is neither that there is something inherently slovenly in sl-, nor that the whole concept is the figment of our mass imagination, but that sl- has, by processes which remain unclear, somehow acquired at least three distinct phonesthemic connotations: the slippery, wintry connotation of ‘sleds’ and ‘sleet’; the quick, violent connotation of ‘slayings’ and ‘slashes’; as well as the unsavory connotation of ‘sluggish sluts.’ The various connotations interact and give our language yet another layer of richness. (Incidentally, the phenomenon can be found in all languages, not just English.)
[Joel R. Hess, Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia]
EPISTOLA {Kirkham P. Ford}
In Mr. Urdang’s article [XII, 2] “Telling It Like It Isn’t,” he gave examples of attention-getting devices in newspaper headlines. Sometimes headlines get attention unintentionally. Some examples are:
Not Easy for Woman to Get in Foundation (Article on hiring by charitable foundations.
Cleveland (Ohio) Plain Dealer, 1958)
Flight Simulators Teach U.S. Navy Pilots to Fly Without Wings (Advertisement in Barron’s, 1979)
Pre-Natal Smoking Could Kill Baby (Paris, Tenn. Post-Intelligencer, 1980)
What’s Happening in Bedrooms (Practical Builder, 1966)
[Kirkham P. Ford, Paris, Tennessee]
EPISTOLA {David Crystal}
Regarding your list of British/American distributional differences, [XII, 2], here’s one that caught me out completely a few weeks ago: I was talking to the U.S. psycholinguist Danny Steinberg in Japan about someone’s visit somewhere, and the conversation went something like this:
Steinberg: So how did he like the place?
Me: Oh, he was full of it.
Steinberg: Too bad.
Me: ??
I haven’t been so tongue-tied since my first encounter with a U.S. breakfast, when I was asked “How would you like your eggs?” and stammered “Er, cooked!” A post mortem showed that to be full of it had diametrically opposed meanings for the two of us. For me it meant ‘wildly enthusiastic’; for him it meant ‘wildly unenthusiastic.’ ‘had it up to here,’ as one says. I have been looking for this difference in the usual sources, but haven’t found it mentioned yet. An interesting one, yes?
[David Crystal, Holyhead, Gwynedd]
EPISTOLA {Robert J. Powers}
Mare Schindler writes [“Unusual Place Names in Canada,” XIII, 1] “Anse is a meadow.” I doubt that, even in Canadian French, and his context rules out a typo. Anse is ‘cove’—in its geographical sense. My Hammond Medallion World Atlas, 1971 edition, lists six Canadian towns with names beginning with L’Anse; four in Newfoundland, two in Quebec. All seem to be firmly secured on the shores of large bodies of water. My Cajun French dictionary [A Dictionary of the Cajun Language, by Rev. Msgr. Jules O. Daigle, M.A., S.T.L., xxxvii + 594pp, Edwards Brothers, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1984] says of the watery anse:“ …Cove formed by woods or streams in a more or less semicircular shape. In Louisiana many places go by the name of cove or anse. E.g.: L’Anse des Ardoins, L’Anse aux Briques, L’Anse aux Pailles, etc.”
[Robert J. Powers, Shreveport, Louisiana]
EPISTOLA {Marc A. Schindler}
At the end of my article, “Unusual Place Names in Canada,” I implied that the Canadian Toponymic Committee does not recognize the exclamation mark as a legitimate part of a place name. It seems that I spoke too soon—while perusing a map of the Temiscouata area of Quebec, I ran across this gem: Saint-Louis-de-Ha! Ha! And in Chicoutimi County, Northern Quebec, is La Baie des-Ha! Ha! The official at the Surveys and Mapping Branch of the Canadian government who compiled their gazetteers confirmed that the only punctuation mark allowed as part of a place name in (English) Canada as far as she knew is the apostrophe. Quebec has its own toponymy committee.
Mr. Robert J. Powers is right about anse; I cannot account for having made such an error.
[Marc A. Schindler, Gloucester, Ontario]
Paring Pairs No. 24
The clues are given in items lettered (a-z); the answers are given in the numbered items, which must be matched with each other to solve the clues. In some cases, a numbered item may be used more than once, and some clues may require more than two answer items; but after all of the matchings have been completed, one numbered item will remain unmatched, and that is the correct answer. Our answer is the only acceptable one. The solution will be published in the next issue of VERBATIM.
(a). Insignificant container for a dead midget.
(b). This beauty can be found in low places.
(c). Underwear holder for quick suit?
(d). Advertising slogan.
(e). The show doesn’t go on in Japan.
(f). Impossible for knowledgeable dairyman.
(g). Collected on the lottery—himself!
(h). Bum photo yields spacey trip.
(i). Postman in drag?
(j). Holy Grail.
(k). Underweight officer is a bit of a nut.
(l). These give soprano mal de mer.
(m). Inexperienced violinist in Davy Jones’s locker.
(n). Loud, electronic blues are like lead.
(o). Bouncing evil Sudetenlander.
(p). Left to be used by most people.
(q). Unusual collector’s cravats.
(r). Woman whose husband is away peddling dope.
(s). Stormy, but nice for ducks.
(t). Roots (the movie).
(u). Bottle for a message.
(v). What the equitable railway conductor is.
(w). Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, etc.
(x). Microcomputer operator.
(y). Source of black light?
(z). Sagacious Georgian.
(1). Bad.
(2). Belle.
(3). Bier.
(4). Brief.
(5). Buy.
(6). Case.
(7). Correspondence.
(8). Cracker.
(9). Czech.
(10). Dark.
(11). Disc.
(12). Diving.
(13). Duel.
(14). Easy.
(15). Fare.
(16). Fiddler’s.
(17). Flick.
(18). Fowl.
(19). Fraud.
(20). Grass.
(21). Green.
(22). Hand.
(23). Heavy.
(24). High.
(25). Jockey.
(26). Kernel.
(27). Kin.
(28). Knight.
(29). Know.
(30). Lantern.
(31). Light.
(32). Male.
(33). Metal.
(34). Minded.
(35). Moon.
(36). No.
(37). Number.
(38). Personalities.
(39). Phial.
(40). Rare.
(41). Seas.
(42). Second.
(43). Shot.
(44). Small.
(45). Theater.
(46). Ties.
(47). Vision.
(48). Weather.
(49). Whey.
(50). Widow.
(51). Wise.
(52). Won.
(52). Word.
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 Old Lyme. 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, 4 Laurel Heights, Old Lyme, CT 06371, U.S.A. You need send only the one-word solution, on a postcard, please.
Answers to Paring Pairs No. 23
(a). Privilege to worship as they please. (26, 34) Pagan Rite.
(b). Skirt the issue of whether the drink’s worth a groat. (13, 2) Farthing Ale.
(c). Counterfeit coin doesn’t smell right. (11,37) False Scent.
(d). Hypochondriac’s favorite drink? (38,27) Sham Pain.
(e). Sailor coils rope on phony featherbed. (10,7) Fake Down.
(f). Source of pork sausage? (19,20) Ground Hog.
(g). Destiny and the sick poorly celebrated. (21, 15) I11 Feted.
(h). Participated in strike against fabric of society. (35,22) Sat In.
(i). Official in charge of depravity. (47,29) Vice President.
(j). Sailor’s worst way to commit peccadilloes. (39, 3) Sin Bad.
(k). Poor finale at the Sabbath. (49,9) Weak End.
(l). Holding on till end of story. (18,40) Gripping Tale.
(m). Formerly, strolling, sauntering. Now jogging? (5,16) City Gaits.
(n). Yielding to feeble hebdomadal necessity occasioned by tiny genuflecting parts. (50,23) WeeKneed.
(o). This rogue knocks the big chive. (32,36) Rap Scallion.
(p). They’ve gone off on this fellow who’s been in the sun. (41,17) Tan Gent.
(q). Infantile golfers gum on about this. (42,46) Tee Thing.
(r). An Oxonian decemvirate held together by these? (43,6) Ten Dons.
(s). Pole on which earth rotates rests on turtle, according to myth. (44,28) Terra Pin.
(t). Spain is where it’s at—not Don Carlos. (45, 33) The Rein.
(u). Legal clause favours eyesight. (30,48) Pro Vision.
(v). Support Mussolini, the fruit—or vegetable? (30, 8) Pro Duce.
(w). Bennett Cerf, a sharply humorous chap. (31, 17) Pun Gent.
(x). Loaded deck cannot supply bridge pincers. (43, 1) Ten Aces.
(y). A person could die laughing. (25,24) Man’s Laughter.
(z). According to Beaufort, knocking the H—-out of a hoop skirt is breaking wind in a force 8. (12,22,14) Fart In Gale.
The correct answer is (4) Cent. The winner was Rose Corbett, of Long Island City, New York. The winner of No. 22 in Europe was Sean Devine, of Co. Dublin, Ireland. The winner of No. 21 in Europe was Helen Reynolds, of Cambridge.
Crossword Puzzle
Across
1. Escort has time to write beginning of book (7,3)
6. Returning money paid after bishop makes complaint (4)
10. Superficial movie about everything (7)
11. Profile leader of cast playing in one town after another (7)
12. “10” star loosens knots for rewards (8)
13. Multiply riches, penning words to song (5)
15. Correct me in final (5)
16. Quotations including turn of phrase about roast victim? (9)
18. You once planted amid houses in gardening buildings (9)
21. Monkeys around with left part of flower (5)
23. Rushes south after retreating elk (5)
24. Fashion modeling—a source of riches (4,4)
26. Atom in metal piece of Russian satellite (7)
27. Deposit slips, on the surface (7)
28. Turned to face swarm (4)
29. Ben-Hur to encourage holding a revolt (10)
Down
1. Sound place to hide money (4)
2. Fashionable editor raised south of Texas landmark (1, 2, 4)
3. Scout alone dodged bears with claws(7)
4. Banquets held amid brawls and horseplay (9)
5. Cuts to veto in hearing (5)
7. Millionaire finally collected rent—a selfish course of action (3, 4)
8. Predict the future with quarter of pinochle deck (10)
9. Man with hook and ladder originally breaking fire up (6)
14. Lowest income brackets: working mothers (10)
17. Bad conductor ruined Soul Train (9)
19. Soprano ingests bit of milk shake (7)
20. Rolling Stones' beginnings (6)
21. Athlete breaking promise (7)
22. Moody writers I have abridged (7)
24. Made alternations to right size (5)
25. Will winner broadcast to audience? (4)
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Any person with information on residents of the Union cemetery… [From the Genealogical Helper, May-June 1984. Submitted by Dorothy Branson, Columbus, Ohio.]
Crossword Puzzle Answers
Across
1. INTERMITTENT (hidden).
10. S(CREW)UP.
11. RO(UN)DUP (PROUD anag.
12. BOUND-ARIES.
13. ERA-S (ARE anag.).
15. REH-EAT (HER rev.).
16. RE(ARM-O)ST.
19. WESTERNS.
20. A-VA-TAR.
23. R-APT.
25. A-C-COUN(TAN)T.
27. T(IN) HORN.
28. DR-I-VEIN.
29. PU-LL A F-A-ST ONE (FALL UP rev.).
Down
2. NE-WSDEALER (LEEWARDS anag.).
3. EX(P)ERT.
4. M(ARK)ETER.
5. TAUT (homophone).
6. EI-DER (RED I.E. rev.).
7. TYPESET (hidden).
8. I-SO(B)AR.
9. D(ROUGH)TS.
14. P-REVENTI-ON (NO IT NEVER rev.).
17. OUTRAGED (hidden).
18. AN(ACON)D-A.
19. WIRETA-P (WAITER anag.).
21. RO(TUN)D (NUT anag.).
22. H(OLD) IT.
24. PAN-EL.
26. S-ODA (ADO rev.).