VOL XIII, No 4 [Spring, 1986]

Folk Etymology on Campus

Richard Veit, University of North Carolina, Wilmington

Of the constant stream of new words entering our language, most are introduced deliberately, to fill perceived needs. Foreign words imported by journalists (such as contra, jihad, or ayatollah) soon find a home in the national vocabulary. Other lexical additions are crafted from old words by combination, or blending (Reagan + economics = Reaganomics, tele vision + evangelist = televangelist), or by abbreviation (narcotics officer shortened to narc, professor to prof), or as acronyms (yuppy or yuppie derived whimsically from young urban professional). Still other new words are simply coined, invented afresh (aspertame, Xerox, Tercel.)

But not all lexical change is so orderly and deliberate. Blunders and misperceptions play no small part in shaping our language. Since language is passed on through use—from speaker to speaker and from writer to writer—each time language is put into play, an opportunity for error arises. And while the vast majority of communication occurs without significant misunderstanding, every now and then one speaker or reader misperceives some word, and a mutation results. In a very few of these instances, the mutation takes hold and thrives, passing from user to user until the original form of the word is quite driven from the language, with few speakers being aware that a change has occurred.

This process, known as folk etymology, is most likely to succeed when the new form appears more apt or plausible to users than the old one. Our modern word penthouse, for example, has changed significantly from its Middle English form pentis, which contained no suggestion of house. The original form derived instead from the Latin appendix, meaning ‘appendage,’ an appropriate term for a crude shed added as an afterthought against the side or on the roof of a larger building. But as the pentis became used more for habitation, it is easy to see how people misperceived what they were hearing as “penthouse.” The new form made sense, it caught on, and the original pentis soon lost all currency.

Folk etymology involves perceiving an unfamiliar word as having a more familiar form. Such changes occur most frequently among illiterate folk, because speech is more easily misperceived than writing and more likely to take root, as nonreaders have no permanent written form to compare their speech with. Other examples include crayfish from earlier crevis, hangnail from Old English angnægl (ang meaning ‘painful,’ as in the modern anguish), and Pennsylvania Dutch (people who are not Dutch but Deutsch, or German).

But just as the ear can deceive, so also can the eye. How else could the pronunciation “chaise lounge” come about but by readers glancing at the unfamiliar French import chaise longue and unintentionally moving the u to a more comfortable position? The process was taken a step further by one of my freshman composition students who described a “Shay’s lounge” in a paper. His novel version invloved both an ear and an eye mutation.

The oddities and inconsistencies of our spelling system have led to many similar blunders. Probably most of us as we were growing up added separate words to our personal lexicons from written and oral experience without realizing that both belonged to the same item. It came as a surprise to me in high school to have it pointed out that the “duh-bree” I had often heard was one and the same with the written word debris that I had been pronouncing “deb-riss” in my mind and, on this occasion, out loud. A friend from South Carolina was well into adulthood before she realized that “arsh potatoes” her mother served during her childhood were the same as the “Irish potatoes” she now bought in the supermarket.

Freshman writers with scant reading experience sometimes create novel spellings from their unfamiliarity with the etymology of words they have heard. Witness the student who wrote of his plans to marry his “feonsay.” Another writing about the evils of drugs warned against becoming a “dopadic.” The boss of another student always sat in his “nitch.” A description of one student’s college dorm room included among its furniture a “chesterdroors.” What consists of five units of meaning (called morphemes by linguists) in the minds of sophisticated speakers (chest + of + draw + er + s) is apparently but a single unanalyzed unit in this student’s mind.

Amusing as they are, these phonetic spellings are not true examples of folk etymology, since they do not involve conversion to more familiar forms. When a real example does come along in student writing, it provides a welcome diversion for teachers from the tedium of reading themes. One frequent occurrence is upmost, as inof the upmost importance. Upmost certainly makes more sense than utmost; how is a student to know that the ut derives from the Old English form for out? The frequent appearance of upmost in student papers makes me suspect it stands a reasonable chance of ousting utmost as the dominant form in years to come.

A truly original example of folk etymology in a paper is especially welcome, like a lump of gold that suddenly appears in a prospector’s pan. When one stu dent complained of a “metalsome” friend, might she have felt that the person had altogether too much brass? Or when another criticized some “outradious” behavior he had observed, was he in fact demonstrating considerable etymological sophistication? After all, isn’t the literal meaning of eccentricity behavior that occurs outside the radius of a given circle?

If the student who coined outradious was sophisticated, what about the one who condemned the “sufistocated” ways of hoity-toity sorority girls? The image that came to my mind was of society suffocating her by ramming the fist of convention down her throat. When a like-minded classmate complained of the “clicky” ways of school snobs, was she representing the sounds of derision such people make toward their inferiors? Was another showing just how much the world has gone to the dogs when she wrote, “It’s a doggy-dog world”? And when in an exam another gave the name of a play he had heard of as “Edipus Wrecks,” wasn’t he giving a reasonable plot summary?

An example of a misperception of the eye occurred when a student referred to the “cruxifiction.” The error surely occurred when he transposed the x and c he recalled when he last encountered the word in print (perhaps when he read The Passover Plot?).

Because the process of folk etymology is generally confined to illiterate cultures, we might expect that universal education would have banished it from the modern world. My experience with college freshmen has demonstrated to the contrary that it is still very much with us. Perhaps, however, it is largely restricted these days to student writing. If so, the world has little to fear that folk etymology outside the university will ever, in the words of one student, “reach academic proportions.”

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Osborne chased it around the back of the net, dug the puck off the sideboards and fired a pass to Poddubny, who beat Buffalo goaltender Tom Barrasso between the legs.” [From an AP story in the Danbury News-Times, November 13, 1986. Submitted by Ed Rosenberg, Danbury, Connecticut. Anyone would be a tender goalie after that. Did Barrasso get his surname from playing without his pants?]

EPISTOLA {Basil Wentworth}

In your comments on the distribution in the OBITER DICTA column [XII,2] you could have added Edward’s first lines in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Trial by Jury. It takes rare courage for an American to sing:

Is this the court of the Exchequer?
Be firm, be firm, my pecker.

In Australia, the verb to root has connotations that require the expression to be accompanied by winks and nudges. And when an Australian says that he is bushed, he means that he is ‘lost,’ as if in the “bush.”

[Basil Wentworth, Bloomington, Indiana]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Dedication and commencement of Ecumenical Stud Groups on the theme ‘Growing Together.’ ” [From a church newsletter, Greater Manchester, England. Submitted by John Ferguson, Birmingham.]

The Deep Structure of Breakfast Cereals

Steve Bonner, Rockville, Maryland

The study of homonyms is a basic staple of linguistic research. But to deal with the semantics of homonyms properly requires that we also think along psychological lines. A word which Noah Webster or the Oxford English Dictionary might regard as having several equally valid meanings may in fact have a preferred meaning for any given individual. For example, the word base would immediately conjure up a very specific meaning for a military person and yet quite another for a researcher in chemistry. In fact, the word also has specialized meanings in mathematics, electrical engineering, cosmetics, and art, to name a few more. While using such a word in a technical publication might present no obstacles to understanding, problems may arise when attempting to communicate with a larger audience.

We all keep foremost in our minds those words and ideas which are of the greatest use to us in our own studies. When we encounter a word for which we have a meaning readily available, we eagerly jump at the chance to place the word in that context. Very often our first attempt to do this fails, and we spend a few fractions of a second rummaging around to find the meaning that was intended. So a numismatist might wonder whether a carton of mint ice cream was made in Denver or Philadelphia. Or a gardener might object if you offered to put a touch of lime in his drink.

What is happening here is a form of word association. But the usual responses are circumvented by our specialized vocabularies. The response to “color” might normally be “red.” But a physicist might provide the word “charm.” (Subatomic particles are said to have properties such as color, charm, and strangeness.) These reactions need not to be at the conscious level. But where such a word association exists, our overall perception of the information presented is biased.

It is easy to imagine situations in which ambiguities caused by the careless use of homonyms can be exaggerated even further by our own preconditioning. An example of such an ambiguity is the war-time newspaper headline: SAVE METAL, WASTE PAPER. Anyone reading this can see the dual meaning, since everyone is equally familiar with the terms paper and waste paper. But if we encounter expressions which carry special meaning in our own occupations, we may find ambiguity more readily than other readers. Continuing with newspaper headlines, consider the following samples. Each headline is followed by the type of specialist who might have the alternative interpretation:

STUDENT BODY FOUND UPSTANDING (mortician)
STAFF TREBLED, NOTES DIRECTOR (musician)
INMATE SCALES CELL WALL (biologist)
SUBJECT FOLLOWS ACTION IN INTERROGATION (linguist)
SPEAKER COMPLETES LECTURE CIRCUIT DESPITE RESISTANCE (elec engineer)
RADICAL REACTION STOPPED BY PRECIPITATION (chem engineer)
HEARING AIDED BY SILENCE OF JURORS (audiologist)

So completely do our fields of study occupy our thoughts, one might easily imagine a linguist absentmindedly considering the deep structure in the sentences of the back of a box of breakfast cereal. (Probably a box of “Chomskies.” You know—the ones that retain their meaning even in milk.)

Even in situations where a word may not have distinct, homonymic forms, the very presence of the word may reveal the background and point of view of the author. A computer scientist may find himself “generating” and “interfacing” in places where one might normally expect to “create” and “talk.” A mathematician would much rather describe something as “nontrivial” than “difficult.” And the only people who ever “allege” anything are journalists. The rest of us just “say” things.

Let me present an absurd story which illustrates how views of the world might differ with occupation. An astronomer, a physicist, and a mathematician are walking along a path when they spot a black sheep ahead of them. The astronomer concludes, “All sheep are black.” The physicist, accustomed to taking precise measurements of objects smaller than galaxies, insists merely that “Some sheep are black.” The mathematician, unwilling to take anything for granted, replies that “There exists a sheep, at least one side of which is black.”

The rigors in terminology honed by years of training also preclude the imprecise use of certain words. Such “sacred” words receive special attention. A mathematician would never use the world “infinite” unless this were truly the case. The number of grains of sand on a beach must therefore be finite. Another person might use the phrase “infinite diversity” or “infinitely more.” But since the study of the infinite is so central to all fields of mathematics, the word is not bandied about lightly. Similar taboos exist with the following words:

virtual (computer science, optics)
work/energy (physics)
epoch (geology, celestial mechanics)
random (statistics)

As the number of new areas of specialization continues to increase, so too will the frequency of specialized words. Some of these terms, such as clone and software, are finding their way into everyday usage. It seems likely that a much larger number of them will not be usable outside of their specialized fields. In the cases where these words are homonyms for existing words there will be the possibility of ambiguity. It will be interesting to see which of our commonplace words become sources of confusion.

I, Madam? I’m Adam (and other inconsequential verbal trivia)

Sydney Abbey, Ottawa, Canada

Let’s not jump at conclusions. The above title is not, repeat, not a palindrome, that prey of so many word-butchers (word-botchers, spoonerized bird-watchers?). No, it is an entirely new kind of word-botchery. It is an example of what I call a “diliteral,” although professional linguists will probably think of a better term. One can easily imagine situations which could lead to the use of the following additional examples:

Edited it.
Hot shots.
Her washer was.
Was Ted wasted?
Mark the remark, there.
Sentry’s entry.
Attendances at ten dances.

We may now have entered an entirely new happy hunting ground for word-botchers—if someone else hasn’t thought of it first. Not having encountered such prior use in Borgmann’s Language on Vacation, Brandreth’s Joy of Lex or his More Joy of Lex, nor in any other readings, I trus I can claim criginality.

Now, let us broaden our horizons by going beyond the bounds of English. Here I must give credit to van Rooten’s Mot d’Heures: Gousses, Rames and to Hulmes’s Morder Guss Reims for inspiration, but not for content.

What, for example, has the French word quatrein common with the English word strong? (In what follows, French words are followed by (F), English words by (E).) Well, quatre (F) = four (E), which in turn, sound like fort (F), which, of course, equals ‘strong’ (E). Other examples follow:

repas (F) = meal (E) / mille (F) = thousand (E)
dit (F) = says (E) / seize (F) = sixteen (E)
coulait (F) = sank (E) / cinq (F) = five (E)
blé (F) = wheat (E) / huit (F) = eight (E)
minerai (F) = ore (E) / or (F) = gold (E)
poirier (F) = pear tree (E) / perdrix (F) = partridge (E)
syndicat (F) = trade union (E) / trait d’union (F) = hyphen (E)

According to some analysts, that is how the partridge happened to be in a pear tree for those Twelve Days.

I cannot think of a good name for these bilingual phenomena, but let’s look at them from a somewhat different angle. The two middle words in the above examples depend on homophony. How about trying a similar exercise with homography?

This time, we might well ask what quatre (F) has in common with oven (E). The answer is, using the notation as above, quatre (F) = four (E) / four (F) = oven (E). Here are a few more examples:

verser (F) = pour (E) / pour (F) = for (E)
douleur (F) = pain (E) / pain (F) = bread (E)
principal (F) = main (E) / main (F) = hand (E)
sou (F) = cent (E) / cent (F) = hundred (E)
créche (F) = manger (E) / manger (F) = eat (E)
le (F) = the (E) / thé (F) = tea (E)
emplacement (F) = location (E) / location (F) = rental (E)

Several of the foregoing comparisons involve what the French call les faux amis. A “better” example of that translation pitfall may be found in the sad case of the three kittens who fell into deep water while skating on thin ice—i.e., “un, deux, trois cats sank.” Another version might be “un de trois cats sank,” but French purists might object to that one. Perhaps we shall never know whether all three kittens drowned, or only one of them.

A little thought might well reveal further examples of all the foregoing useless information. Similar cases are likely discernible in other bilingual combinations—I just happen to know English and French better than any other two tongues. French, being one of the languages in which pronunciation is not consistently reflected in spelling (and vice versa), lends itself readily to punning. An example? (You asked for it!): “J’ai soixante-neuf ans, mais quelquefois je me trouve cent-vingt [read ‘sans vin’].”

But let us glance into the fertile, if less familiar field of other languages. Consider beer, biére, bier, birra. If English, French, German, and Italian can have such similar words for that beverage, why must Spanish use cerveza? Other cases: How come that the Japanese expression for “good morning” sounds very much like the name of an industrial mid-western state? How come that the Italian expression of “My God” sounds much like the Hebrew “Who knows?”? (Imagine an Orthodox Italian Jew intoning “Who knows my God?”!) How come that the Russian word for ‘shape, form,’ when rendered in cursive script, looks identical to English “bug”? Looking at it from another angle, how does it happen that a man who would refer to himself as Deutsch is called German by the English, Allemand by the French, Tedesco by the Italians, and something like Nemyenetz by the Russians?

Yes, playing around with language(s) can be fascinating, at least amusing. It would be interesting to see more of such material in the pages of VERBATIM.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

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

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“As a homeowner, you know the value of your trees and shrubs in terms of atheistics and monetary replacement costs.” [A letter from a tree service company. Submitted by Henry C. Maguire, Killingworth, Connecticut.]

OBITER DICTA: Doublets

Anthony A. Allen, London

Early in his studies the beginner in English etymology is sure to encounter the fascinating and instructive class of word-pairs commonly known as doublets; in fact they offer an easy avenue of approach to that science. Broadly defined, a doublet is a pair of cognate words, almost always of Latin or Greco-Latin origin, of which one (here always placed second) retains a form close to the source, while the other has diverged by having passed through Old and Middle French and thence into Middle and Modern English— though French is occasionally by-passed. The two words may differ in as little as one letter (cage: cave), or, at the other extreme and exceptionally, in all (coy: quiet). One of the pair has sometimes become archaic or obsolete. The source-word, hereafter called the original, may be purely technical (botanical, medical, etc.). In certain cases, the derived word has in the course of its history split into two, so that there are then three associated words.

Although the members of a doublet may have moved apart very little in meaning (as frail: fragile), more often—through specialization or other changes of use over the centuries—the semantic link between them is almost if not quite severed. As a rule it is the original that keeps more or less closely to its ancient meaning, the derivative having moved away from it. However, the reverse is sometimes true, as in the case of chamber, pestle, ray, reason, and vow; here the original is now specialized, the older or more general sense being retained by the derivative.

The list that follows, based on jotting made as the words came to mind, aims simply at giving a wide spectrum of examples. A number of interesting specimens must have escaped the net; erudite readers may care to supply some of them. Anything approaching completeness would however be both tedious and impractical, for there are all manner of “borderline” cases and others that are unsatisfactory for various reasons, and on the whole better excluded.

(a) venge: vindicate
abridge: abbreviate
adjudge: adjudicate
amiable: amicable
assemble: assimilate
attitude: aptitude
bedlam: Bethlehem
bishop: episcopal
cage: cave
caitiff: captive
cattle: chattel: capital
challenge: calumny
chamber: camera
champion: campion
chance: cadence
change: cambium
channel: canal
chivalry: cavalry
clerk: cleric
commodore: commander
conceit: concept
conjoint: conjunct
costume: custom: consuetude
count: compute
court: cohort
coy: quiet
cull: collect
declension: declination
diamond: adamant
dress: direct (vb.)
employ: imply: implicate
entirety: integrity
fancy: fantasy (or ph-)
fashion: faction
fealty: fidelity
feat: fact
frail: fragile
glamour: grammer
hermit: eremite
hotel: hostel: hospital
isolate: insulate
lesson: lection (‘a reading’)
lodge: lobby
loyal: legal
mean (adj.): median
migraine: hemicrania
naive: native
noise: nausea
nowel (obs.): Noel: natal (viz., day)
ointment¹: unguent
palsy: paralysis
parcel: particle
parlous: perilous: periculous
pestle: pistil
pity: piety
poignant: pungent
poison: potion
preach: predicate
priest: presbyter
proctor: procurator
prove: probe
proxy: procuracy (obs.)
raisin: raceme
ransom: redemption
ray: radius
reason: ration
reply: replicate
rickets: rachitis
round: rotund
royal: regal
sample: example
sexton: sacristan
shrift: script
sordid: swarthy
spices: species
strai(gh)t: strict
sure: secure
treason: tradition
treatable: tradition
vow: vote
vowel: vocal (viz., sound, letter)

---

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“See where the Pilgrims landed by bus.” [Billboard along the Mass. Pike near Boston. Submitted by Larry Ockene, Newtonville, Massachusetts.]

Acery and Asery

In response to “Akeries and Eaneries” [XIII, 1], my junior-high students and I created a matching game. Not incidentally, the students attend Jefferson Junior High School and Oakland Junior High School, both in Columbia, Missouri; the students participate in a program for precocious children. We started with “space” and thus titled our game “Acery and Asery.” All the terms are aligned with “spacery,” a rather appropriate term for teenagers.

1. A province for zits or the god, Janus
2. A lawyer’s pursuit or four six-packs of Diet Coke
3. An expectant father’s waiting room or the gait of a horse
4. A group of Elmer Fudd-like joggers
5. A home for plastic surgeons
6. A language for horses
7. A teenager’s mouth or the holding of pants
8. A school for drums
9. An avocation for teenagers
10. A bodyguard in a can

a. Facery
b. Wacery
c. Neighcery
d. Casery
e. Pacery
f. Macery
g. Re-facery
h. Basery
i. Bracery
j. Embracery

ANSWERS

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

[Dexter Schraer, Columbia Public Schools, Columbia, Missouri]

OBITER DICTA: John Doe in Iberia

Arthur J. Morgan, New York City

In both Spain and Portugal the equivalent of John Doe is Fulano, or Fulano de tal. The same name comes up if we want to say any Tom, Dick or Harry, which is rendered in Spanish as Fulano, Zutano y Mengano; and in Portuguese as Fulano, Beltrano e Sicrano. Why the difference? Perhaps a reader can tell us.

The Portuguese sometimes provide Senhor Fulano with one or more addenda to his name: dos Anzóis, (‘of the hooks,’ meaning ‘traps or tricks’) or dos Anzóis Carapuca, adding a word meaning a cowl or hood, or an innuendo.

Finally, one Mr. Anybody can be besmirched with a Portuguese agnomen dos Grudes, which means ‘of the goos,’ or sticky messes. Poor fellow! He’s better off as just plain Fulano.

“Into Noah’s Ark”

Edgar Humphreys, Gwynedd, North Wales

Whether there exists a comprehensive list of place-names which reflect flora and fauna, with relevant maps of their world-wide distribution, others may be more well informed. Characteristics of various flora and fauna have enriched figures of speech of all languages whether people are merely living, for example, in clover or simply just being pig-headed and cocky.

Bantam, we are told, is a village in Java and said to be the original home of these small breeds of domestic fowl. The word bantam itself is not only of geographical significance but incites one to conjure images of fast-footed boxers and nimble wrestlers. Although I can only refer with a certain amount of authority to place-names in Wales, I should think that the global percentage of such place-names would be extremely low. Apart from Swansea and, indirectly, Tiger Bay, the more obvious examples in Wales are Eryri (< Welsh ‘home of the eagles’), i.e., Snowdonia Mountains, Epynt (< W eb ‘horse,’ hynt ‘path’) a mountain range in Powys, and Boncath (< W ‘buzzard’), a village in Dyfed. I assure you that there is no truth in the rumor that certain inhabitants of Cardigan, Dyfed, prefer to hold marriage ceremonies in their farmyards so that chickens in attendance may gobble all the rice thrown during festivities. Surely it must have been originally a Scottish tale! However, gob ‘beak’ in gobble and shut your gob appears to be of Irish origin.

To continue this fowl discussion, I wonder how many East Enders nowadays are aware of their Cockney origins (possibly Middle English cokeney < coken ‘of cocks’ + ey ‘egg’) used contemptuously to townsmen. Since all tax-collectors, bailiffs, and other “undesirables” usually lived in towns, country folk would naturally view them with suspicion and derision. A full list of such scornful names for various town and city dwellers must be extensive. Equally, country folk have been called bumpkins, even pumpkins and sheep-shaggers, amongst other names.

In my neck of the woods, for example, the people of Bethesda, a slate-quarrying town in Snowdonia, are often referred to as How gets by neighboring rural communities, in reference to their pidgin English (or should I say “pigeon” in this context?). Natives of nearby Caernarfon are frequently referred to as Cofis (sing. Cofi). It seems that covey is either a ‘small flock of grouse or partridge’ or even a ‘small group of people,’ but cove, former slang for ‘fellow or chap’ (< Romany kova ‘person’) seems to be its more likely etymon. In respect of Epynt referred to earlier, compare eb with Greek hippos ‘horse,’ and Epona, Celtic goddess of horses. Displaying a mare’s head on a broomhandle on New Year’s Eve is still a lively tradition in certain parts of Wales and considered to be a remnant of Celtic pagan rites.

The intake of English words into Welsh has been considerable. However significant the Tudor impact may have been on English history, a minority Celtic language such as Welsh continually progresses with difficulty to coexist with the powerful forces of a neighboring international language. To the contrary, the English language has not easily embraced any penetration or influence by the “language of Heaven.” Of the few exceptions, corgi (< W cor ‘small,’ ci ‘dog’) has been generally accepted—and with even more enthusiasm in royal quarters. In the dialect of the Anglicized parts of South Pembrokeshire where guillemots (< F Guillaume ‘William’—a royal connection?) thrive on the coast, local English-speaking inhabitants refer to this bird as an eligug which no doubt derives from its Welsh name heligog, literally ‘sea-cuckoo.’ One of the standard jokes of South Wales miners is that the cuckoo’s name and song imitate the bird’s immediate response as it flies through the polluted air of the industrial area, i.e., “Coo, bloody coo!” Hard characters are equally hard with their definitions. After all, any child could tell you that cuckoos never have nests because they either live in clocks or are duly locked up!

Possibly certain species deserve more disrespect than others. As a talking point, however, I have yet to see the significance of a simile such as “sick as a parrot” or am I to believe that, in between gulping seeds and chatter, this bird is in fact more prone to the blues and other ailments than its fellow cage-birds? Our old friend the parrot, nevertheless, may not be as popular in the future since by now there are “parrot-bandit” machines on the market. For a few coins this mechanical parrot will chat endlessly without any ill-effects unless the owner has failed to oil its beak. Its manufacturers researched the international market carefully before any export prototypes were assembled. Suitable export versions of parrot-talk were required for various countries. I can imagine, if an English parrot were to be inadvertently exported to the U.S.A. to utter “Who’s a pretty boy, then?” New Yorkers might take it for a gay bird. In the U.S.A. I believe the equivalent parrot-intro is “Polly wants a cracker.” In Britain, on the other hand, since a cracker can be a ‘well-endowed female’ (She’s a cracker, etc.), Londoners might think that the American parrot may very well be a sex maniac. So much for the manufacturers' problems.

Parents should be equally careful with their versions of the birds and the bees story. I was quite amazed to learn from one girl that she was convinced that birds in this context was slang for ‘girls’ (compare broads) and that bees stood for ‘b’s,’ that is, boys. In a rather odd way, I suppose that she was right. At least she did not think that she would be pregnant if stung by a bee. In some peculiar way “Buoys” and “Gulls” toilet signs in sailing clubs always remind me of her.

Some recent publications still maintain that penguin derives from W pen ‘head’ + gwyn ‘white.’ Ardent Welshmen would no doubt gladly support such claim but a most blatant misgiving surely is the fact that penguins are black-headed. Pengwyn is commonly used in Wales today as in the past as a somewhat derisive reference to a fair-haired lad (compare ginger). It certainly cannot be argued that our Antarctic friends are fair-feathered on top. Another possibility would be that, rather than the compound pengwyn, its etymon might have been W pen + gwyn ‘white-headed’ (most adjectives follow nouns in Welsh). Again this description in Welsh would be confined to creatures with completely white heads. Since the penguin’s head is two-toned one could hardly justify such claim. Time would be more profitably spent in examining the possibilities of “pin-wing” or Latin pinguis ‘fat.’ Let it not be forgotten that William Owen-Pughe, an early Welsh lexicographer, erroneously attributed the origin of coffin to W cau fi yn ‘shut me in’!

Antarctic itself is a rare, contradistinctive place-name < Gr anti ‘opposite’ + arkitos, adjective of arktos ‘bear,’ i.e., ‘opposite the arctic or opposite the North Pole.’ In Arctic, polar, terrestrial, and celestial Bear are significant—or should one say of certain “bearing.” For other and more obvious reasons, Russia is also referred to as The Bear. In one sense antarctic therefore might well be synonymous with anticommunist.

Vocabulary related to animal toys and pets has had its own distinctive development and associations. -y and -ie are common suffixes of endearment, e.g., piggy and doggie. Where semantic sanctions (e.g., catty ‘spiteful’ and rabbity ‘rabbit-like’) prohibited adherence to the above basic patterns, suitable alternatives were sought accompanied by common suffixes, e.g., pussy and bunny (< Scots Gaelic bun ‘scut of a rabbit’), puss being an alternative informal name, and in the absence of such name in the latter, bun simply highlighted a rabbit’s distinctive feature. It boggles the mind to note that puss is a homonym and an informal name for a hare (< L lepus). Nightclub bunnies might be offended if referred to as pets. Let us say that they are merely subjects of endearment. Ironically, “tender name” is a cognate anagram of “endearment,” in the same way as “flirting” can be transposed to form “trifling,” or at worst, “Adolf Hitler” to “ ‘Heil,’ old fart.” In a recent news item a certain pet rabbit (not a March hare) kept cool and contented during recent hot summer days (dog days no doubt) by floating on its back in a pet pool. This was delightfully referred to by the BBC as one way of ensuring that this likable character from Alabama did not become “a hot, cross bunny”—or was it just harebrained!

In one context, most current dictionaries give the wrong impression that rabbit is a native Welsh word—see Welsh rarebit - “< W rabbit” [sic]. It is true that a > e occurs in the Anglicized area of Gwent and East Glamorgan (compare Cardiff > Cediff). Hence rabbit > rebbit was believed to explain rarebit. However, since a Welsh rarebit consists of melted cheese and toast it is rather confusing here that we should be thinking at all of rabbits, although pieces of rabbit meat might have been included with the cheese in the distant past to constitute its original and now forgotten ingredients. Its pronunciation certainly supports rebbit < rabbit, although in certain South Wales English dialects and elsewhere, the second r in rarebit could be silent, hence < rare + bit seems more plausible: i.e., an exceedingly good snack. As a verb, rabbit also means to ‘confound’ (compare drabbit < “God rabbit”) which probably accounts for some of the above confusion!

Whatever may be the aquatic habits of Brer Rabbit, Bugs Bunny, and the overdomesticated variety in Alabama (à la bunny), the poodle is a more obvious puddle-pet (< German Pudelhund < pudeln ‘to splash’ + Hund ‘dog’), not because of its particular incontinence as a carpet sprinkler but for its renown when formerly trained as a water dog. Tales are also occasionally told of dogs and birds. As its names suggests, a Spaniel was originally a Spanish dog and the tale of the Cocker Spaniel is more specifically a cock and dog story. Cocker refers to cocking, i.e., ‘hunting woodcocks,’ rather than to its fighting qualities or sexual appetite. The Canary (< L canis ‘dog’) Islands were so called because of their large dogs in Roman times. However, it was their small, yellow finches of that name which became more renowned. There is no such obscurity to the origin of the equally popular budgie or budgerigar (< Aborigine budgeri ‘good’ + gar ‘cockatoo’).

Someone tried to explain once that kangaroo was the Aborigine equivalent to “I don’t know.” Pointing to the marsupial, it was said that one of the earliest European settlers in Australia asked a native to tell him the name of this peculiar animal. Since the native did not know either, he simply replied “Kangaroo.” Unfamiliar as he was the native language, the settler believed that this was the animal’s proper name. No doubt, to propagate such theory today would drive any philologist hopping made. Abor. kanga and walla ‘to leap’ + suffixes -roo and -by ‘animals’ are sufficient to counter any equally less informed proposals regarding wallaroo or wallaby. Like the Titanic, etymological misconceptions may have been sunk once and for all, but their death only lasts as long as our lapse of memory. They should always be recorded for posterity, even for the sake of innocent fun. (Compare the etymology of indri.)

Just in case that there is no such record of the following teaser for wider circulation, I submit a manuscript prank which students offered amongst friends. Preferably it should be given for an aspiring linguist to decipher:

DARE DEGO
FORTI LOREZ IN AROU
DE ARENT LORIZ DEI ARE TRUX
FULOW ENS AN GIZ AN DUX.

Some university students, particularly the over-serious types, have pondered at length to regurgitate glossaries of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Breton before quivering with humiliation on realizing that merely a very rudimentary English pronunciation was sufficient to cope with “hens and geese and ducks.”

Cowper’s “Retirement” reminds us that philologists sometimes “…hunt… in the dark” and even “…into Noah’s Ark.” It can be hoped only that their plight may never be a swan song.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: If I were king…: Semantics of the Enlgish Subjunctive

Francis James, (University of British Columbia Press, 1986), vii + 168pp.

Although this is a specialized monograph, it seems worthy of mention in VERBATIM because so many of our readers are concerned about the “disappearing” subjunctive. Generally, the book treats the various manifestations of the subjunctive and traces the forms back to Middle and Old English. Except for the semantic structuring and the transformations (both of which are mercifully sparse), the discussion is well written in English—that is, not the usual, obscure gobbledygook that characterizes most academic tracts—and “real people” should be able to read and understand it easily. It may reveal more about the subjunctive than you cared to know, but there are few alternative readings of a direct, expository nature available. Chapter 5, “Extensions and Conclusions,” is particularly interesting for it comments on the subjunctive in French, and it must be acknowledged that English speakers are more likely to encounter the formal complexities of the subjunctive in studying a language like French than in their native tongue.

My only criticism is that I find it curious to note James’s failure to mention the influence of the contractions ‘ll and ‘d for shall/will and should/would, respectively, in his discussion of the latter pairs: I should think that some coalescence of these forms would be traceable to the absence of distinction in their contractions. Also, Curme’s Grammar of the English Language in the bibliography has been published by VERBATIM since 1977 (with new indexes in 1983).

Laurence Urdang

EPISTOLA {Nowell Sadlier-Brown}

The excellent and entertaining essay on Polysemania, etc., by John Ellison Kahn [XII,3] was sure to raise memories of amusing, and sometimes vulgar instances of an ambiguous reading of literary passages whose authors were completely innocent of duplicity.

Until Shaw’s Pygmalion, and in bourgeois British (including Canadian) society even long after Eliza Doolittle raised the aristocratic eyebrows of Professor Higgins and his friends by her “Not bloody likely! I’m taking a cab,” the word bloody was not used in polite company. Accordingly, when in school we met the word in certain passages in Macbeth, we pupils were moved to rude giggling, and we noticed that our masters also could scarcely forbear to smile.

The euphemisms for bloody in those days were blooming (mild) or blasted (fierce)—and in Canada, blamed—but even some of these caused amusement in such contexts as Wordsworth’s lines:

And turning from the grave, I met
Beside the churchyard yet,
A blooming girl whose hair was wet
With pearls of morning dew.

And where Thomas Hood has:

I stood beneath a hollow tree;
Its blasted hollow blew.
I thought upon this hollow world,
And all its hollow crew…

schoolboys would recite “I thought upon this blasted world, and all its blasted crew…” if they thought they could get away with it.

One poem that discreet English-teachers would be sure to omit from the syllabus, if possible, was Thackeray’s “The Cane-Bottom’d Chair.” Poor Thackeray could never have foreseen that raucous laughter would follow each reading, in a Canadian classroom, of his pathetic little poem, especially when the blushing reader came to the lines:

We sit here alone but we yet are a pair—
My Fanny I see in my cane-bottom’d chair.

We had one master who used to read short stories to his junior classes, and we loved to have him read Kipling’s Just So Stories and Jungle Tales; we were probably much older before we understood why we never heard him read to us “How the Camel Got His Hump” and “How the Monkey Got His Tail.”

[Nowell Sadlier-Brown, Blind Bay, British Columbia]

EPISTOLA {J.B. Lawrence}

Your review of Hobson-Jobson [XIII,1] starts with an apparent error. See Kipling’s “On the City Wall,” the last story in my edition of Soldiers Three, for an account of the “mourning for the martyrs Hasan and Hussain, the heroes of the Mohurrum”; “the crowd were howling ‘Ya Hasan! Ya Hussain!’ and beating their breasts.” See also the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Hasan and Husain.” The point is that the wails were as stated above, and not just “Ya Hasan!” repeated: there were two martyrs, not just one.

[J.B. Lawrence, San Bernardino, California]

EPISTOLA {Marc A. Schindler}

Here are some of my own suggestions for contrived counter-examples to some of Mr. Bonner’s “impossible” terms [XII,2]:

agrinasal—referring to truffle-farming (which is possibly even agripocinasal!);

micromatrimony—the usual state of affairs in Las Vegas;

hexayummy—something which owes its attractive taste to aromatic amino acids, which are based on the hexacarbon benzene ring; and

rotunditron—any automaton designed to service foyers.

Re “Landmarks in Arabic,” by N. C. Nahmoud [XII,2], on the similarities between Arabic and the Indo-European languages, the author may be interested in knowing that some research has been done on possible connections between German, one of the oldest Indo-European languages, and Arabic’s sister-Semitic language, Hebrew. One reference would be the doctoral dissertation by Terry Marvin Blodgett: “Phonological Similarities in Germanic and Hebrew,” University of Utah, Salt Lake City, 1981.

[Marc A. Schindler, Gloucester, Ontario]

EPISTOLA {Edward W. Devlin}

I have just finished reading my first copy of VERBATIM, and I’m delighted that I shall, with any luck, be receiving it for the rest of my life. Without wasting a moment I’d like to get into the fray.

Frank Abate might, if he has not already done so, add to his list of linguistic hybrids [XII,2] that bit of fractured French invented by furniture stores, “chaise lounge”—so spelled in ads, and pronounced “shayze lownge” in TV commercials. It is probably written in the honest belief that it refers to a kind of lounge with a fancy French word stuck in front of it, to make it sound prestigious, and that that is the way the French spell lounge. But it does seem to belong to the pretentious style of misused French that Mr. Abate has spotted.

And Richard Lederer [same issue] has probably included in his list of almost unavoidable solecisms the increasingly popular misuse of enormity to mean ‘immensity.’ This presents a slippery slope to the most careful of word-users. Those of us who belong (Thank heaven!) in that select group are apt to give silent thanks when we hear some public figure use the word properly.

[Edward W. Devlin, Westport Point, Massachusetts]

EPISTOLA {Arthur J. Morgan}

Reporting the recent eruption of Mount Etna, The New York Times [December 26, 1985] contained the following sentence:

Mr. Sorge said the twelve injured people had been taken to a hospital in Linguaglossa, about ten miles northeast of Etna.

Linguaglossa! What a marvelous name for a town in Sicily! A veritable Rosetta stone in a country whose language and origins are both Latin and Greek, since it means ‘tongue’ in both senses in both languages.

[Arthur J. Morgan, New York City]

EPISTOLA {Bandera Brandt}

About your Spring article by J.B. Smith on reversed compounds, “Laughing Jackass…,” allow me to suggest that his seeing an intentional humor in their coinage is a projection on the part of the more sophisticated listener. If the speaker knew enough about the language to crack these jokes he wouldn’t use the words to begin with.

In a small South Texas town populated by recent emigrants from Germany, a woman told my grandmother that she had been stung by a crackerjacket. My aunt, a child at the time, laughed. The woman blushed and said, “Of course, I know better. What I meant to say was ‘yellowcracker.’ ” In case the wasp is regional, I should tell you its usual name is yellow-jacket.

Also, my many Japanese friends in Honolulu uniformly refer to unsightly things as “sore-eyes.”

Mexicans here often call the housing studs four-by-two’s, and once referred to my greyhounds as racehorse dogs.

My untutored conclusion from all of this is, it is simply caused by the speaker’s unfamiliarity with English. This is certainly true of the first example I cite. As to the others, they make as much sense as most words in the arbitrary English language. Smith’s peckerwood and hoppergrass make more sense to me than the more usual forms because the verb-derived word precedes its object, as in the rest of that malady we call English.

[Bandera Brandt, Poteet, Texas]

EPISTOLA {Frédéric O’Brady}

With respects and apologies to Mr. Reinhold Aman concerning my letter, I submit that I would not need dictionaries to explain conasse; I quoted Bruant because he still is an authority in argot; literary words do change meanings in French, and formerly obscene words often lose their connotations with age; but argot words might date (many of them have become obsolete within my lifetime), however they cannot enlarge their meaning. Conasse does not, even today, refer to prostitutes. Those girls might be “dumb broads” (another synonym, along with “stupid bitch,” quoted by Mr. Aman) but conasse does not refer to their profession, rather to their I. Q. I have never heard of Jane Pratt. What are her sources, I wonder?

No, I don’t think I need a dictionary. In spite of my name, I happen to be French. I spent about forty years on the Paris stage; I even played that French musical La Plume de ma Tante on Broadway and on a U. S. tour some 26 years ago; three French novels of mine were published in Paris in the ’50s; I have been a tenured professor of French at Princeton University (1965-72) and Scribner’s published my advanced French textbook for colleges in ‘73 (for all I know it’s still in use).

Of course, I bow to Mr. Aman re schmock. I wrote “I think, probably…” and didn’t dare affirm anything. The sixteen or so Russian words that I managed to pick up during my short apprenticeship with the Russian ballet in Paris sixty years ago don’t count: my knowledge of Slavic languages is zero. I merely thought (thought!) there was a parallel between the female and the male organ, referring to a stupid person. Sorry.

I will be eight-three this year, and—may I boast a little bit?—I am a knight of the French order of Arts and Letters. I always read VERBATIM cover to cover, and I like the paper too much to “rectify” anything in which my knowledge is superficial.

[Frédéric O’Brady, Rochester, New York]

EPISTOLA {Frank E. Ferguson}

Hunky Dory

There is, I believe, some evidence that the term hunky dory came into use in the late 1850s; however, the dictionaries I have consulted all seem to provide no clear explanation of its origin. My wife, who lived many years in Japan, tells me that its “Japanese origin” is taken for granted there. The story is plausible, and perhaps even true. During the years following Admiral Perry’s opening of Japan, many ships stopped in Japanese ports and the sailors on shore leave trooped into the town and up into the surrounding hills looking for entertainment and perhaps companionship of sorts. The problem was how to return to the ship: having negotiated soberly the branching of narrow streets into narrower passages in the distant reaches on the outward trip, the return trip in an alcoholic fog was less certain. Nonetheless, once one reached the main street all was well, for that led straight to the wharf in many of the coastal towns, and Yokohama in particular. The street in question is, of course, honcho dorii, or ‘main street.’ Wouldn’t it be nice if this bit of etymology could be substantiated and the proper origin of hunky dory be put in our dictionaries. Perhaps readers can cite furthe evidence.

[Frank E. Ferguson, Lexington, Massachusetts]

EPISTOLA {Robert J. Zani}

In the review of Ralph De Sola’s book Abbreviations Dictionary [XIII,1] a prison in Texas named “Lovelady” is mentioned. There is no Texas prison named “Lovelady.” Probably, Mr. De Sola was referring to the Eastham unit, in the Texas prison system, which has a mailing address of Lovelady, Texas. The Eastham unit is a maximum security unit, and has been so for many, many years. In the past, the clientele (if you will) of the Eastham unit has been made up, primarily, of recidivists, many because they are misogynists.

Hence, the name “Lovelady” for such a prison unit would be/is incongruous with the facts, not including the fact that no such unit (Lovelady) exists.

[Robert J. Zani, Huntsville, Texas]

EPISTOLA {Ralph De Sola}

Lovelady is used by former inmates to let others know where they were during a period of months or years. Lovelady looks better than the “Eastham maximum-security unit.” Former inmates do this nationwide. They tell you, for example, they were in Atlanta, or Leavenworth, or Elmira rather than the name of some federal penitentiary.

[Ralph De Sola, San Diego]

EPISTOLA {Jack Nixon}

I enjoyed reading [XII,4] the article entitled “De mortuis (linguis) nil nisi bonum,” in which David Soibelman presents a very cogent apology for the persistence of a “dead” language, Latin, throughout the world. It might interest or amuse him to know that some ten years ago, when I was living in the remote town of N’Djamena (until 1973 named Fort Lamy), Chad, in the depths of Africa, I found and purchased in the only bookstore there a work bearing the following words on the cover:

FRANCISCA SAGANA
TRISTITIA SALVE
FABVLA AMATORIA E GALLICO
IN LATINVM SERMONEM
CONVERSO AB
ALEXANDRO
LEONARDO
JVLLIARD MCMLXII

It was, of course, a translation from French into Latin of Francoise Sagan’s first novel, Bonjour Tristesse. Merely the concluding words of the translation suffice to make one wish that it were still possible to hear Latin spoken as often as one hears languages derived from it:

Demissa voce, per multum tempus reitero nomen. Mihi nescio quid in sinu excurgit, quod opertis excipio oculis: TRISTITIA SALVE.

[Jack Nixon, Lanham, Maryland]

The World According to Student Bloopers

Richard Lederer, St. Paul’s School

One of the fringe benefits of being an English or History teacher is receiving the occasional jewel of a student blooper in an essay. I have pasted together the following “history” of the world from certifiably genuine student bloopers collected by teachers throughout the United States, from eighth grade through college level. Read carefully, and you will learn a lot.

The inhabitants of ancient Egypt were called mummies. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere, so certain areas of the dessert are cultivated by irritation. The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube. The Pramids are a range of mountains between France and Spain.

The Bible is full of interesting caricutures. In the first book of the Bible, Guinesses, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, once asked, “Am I my brother’s son?” God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Montezuma. Jacob, son of Isaac, stole his brother’s birth mark. Jacob was a patriarch who brought up his twelve sons to be patriarchs, but they did not take to it. One of Jacob’s sons, Joseph, gave refuse to the Israelites.

Pharaoh forced the Hebrew slaves to make bread without straw. Moses led them to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Afterwards, Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. David was a Hebrew king skilled at playing the liar. He fought with the Philatelists, a race of people who lived in Biblical times. Solomon, one of David’s sons, had 500 wives and 500 porcupines.

Without the Greeks we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns— Corinthian, Doric, and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth. One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intollerable. Achilles appears in The Iliad, by Homer. Homer also wrote The Oddity, in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his journey. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.

Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.

In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the java. The reward to the victor was a coral wreath. The government of Athens was democratic because people took the law into their own hands. There were no wars in Greece, as the mountains were so high that they couldn’t climb over to see what their neighbors were doing. When they fought with the Persians, the Greeks were outnumbered because the Persians had more men.

Eventually, the Ramons conquered the Greeks. History calls people Romans because they never stayed in one place for very long. At Roman banquets, the guests wore garlics in their hair. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his poor subjects by playing the fiddle to them.

Then came the Middle Ages. King Alfred conquered the Dames, King Arthur lived in the Age of Shivery, King Harold mustarded his troops before the Battle of Hastings, Joan of Arc was cannonized by Bernard Shaw, and victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. Finally, Magna Carta provided that no free man should be hanged twice for the same offense.

In midevil times most of the people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the time was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verses and also wrote literature. Another tale tells of William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son’s head.

The Renaissance was an age in which more individuals felt the value of their human being. Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at Wittenberg for selling papal indulgences. He died a horrible death, being excommunicated by a bull. It was the painter Donatello’s interest in the female nude that made him the father of the Renaissance. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented the Bible. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.

The government of England was a limited mockery. Henry VIII found walking difficult because he had an abbess on his knee. Queen Elizabeth was the “Virgin Queen.” As a queen she was a success. When Elizabeth exposed herself before her troops, they all shouted, “hurrah.” Then her navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.

The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespear. Shakespear never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He lived at Windsor with his merry wives, writing tragedies, comedies, and errors. In one of Shakespear’s famous plays, Hamlet rations out his situation by relieving himself in a long soliloquy. In another, Lady Macbeth tries to convince Macbeth to kill the King by attacking his manhood. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet. Writing at the same time as Shakespear was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.

During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic. His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Fe. Later, the Pilgrims crossed the Ocean, and this was known as Pilgrims Progress. When they landed at Plymouth Rock, they were greeted by the Indians, who came down the hill rolling their war hoops before them. The Indian squabs carried porpoises on their back. Many of the Indian heroes were killed, along with their cabooses, which proved very fatal to them. The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers. Many people died and many babies were born. Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.

One of the causes of the Revolutionary Wars was the English put tacks in their tea. Also, the colonists would send their parcels through the post without stamps. During the War, the Red Coats and Paul Revere was throwing balls over stone walls. The dogs were barking and the peacocks crowing. Finally, the colonists won the War and no longer had to pay for taxis.

Delegates from the original thirteen states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin had gone to Boston carrying all his clothes in his pocket and a loaf of bread under each arm. He invented electricity by rubbing cats backwards and declared, “A horse divided against itself cannot stand.” Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.

George Washington married Martha Curtis and in due time became the Father of Our Country. Then the Constitution of the United States was adopted to secure domestic hostility. Under the Constitution the people enjoyed the right to keep bare arms.

Abraham Lincoln became America’s greatest Precedent. Lincoln’s mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. When Lincoln was President, he wore only a tall silk hat. He said, “In onion there is strength.” Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address while traveling from Washington to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope. He also freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation, and the Fourteenth Amendment gave the ex-Negroes citizenship. But the Clue Clux Clan would torcher and lynch the ex-Negroes and other innocent victims. It claimed it represented law and odor. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. The believed assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposingly insane actor. This ruined Booth’s career.

Meanwhile in Europe, the enlightenment was a reasonable time. Voltare invented electricity and also wrote a book called Candy. Gravity was invented by Isaac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the Autumn, when the apples are falling off the trees.

Bach was the most famous composer in the world, and so was Handel. Handel was half German, half Italian, and half English. He was very large. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.

France was in a very serious state. The French Revolution was accomplished before it happened. The Marseillaise was the theme song of the French Revolution, and it catapulted into Napoleon. During the Napoleonic Wars, the crowned heads of Europe were trembling in their shoes. Then the Spanish gorillas came down from the hills and nipped at Napoleon’s flanks. Napoleon became ill with bladder problems and was very tense and unrestrained. He wanted an heir to inherit his power, but since Josephine was a baroness, she couldn’t bear children.

The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West. Queen Victoria was the longest queen. She sat on a thorn for 63 years. Her reclining years and finally the end of her life were exemplatory of a great personality. Her death was the final event which ended her reign.

The nineteenth century was a time of many great inventions and thoughts. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper, which did the work of a hundred men. Samuel Morse invented a code of telepathy. Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis. Charles Darwin was a naturalist who wrote the Organ of the Species. Madman Curie discovered radium. And Karl Marx became one of the Marx brothers.

The First World War, caused by the assignation of the Arch-Duck by a surf, ushered in a new error in the anals of human history.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: New Dictionary of American Slang

Robert L. Chapman, ed., (Harper & Row, 1986), xxxvi + 485pp.

[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection]

Everyone, it seems, takes Slang to mean something different. One of the most difficult decisions a lexicographer of a general dictionary faces is when to label a word or a definition Slang: perhaps it should be labeled Colloquial, Informal, or something else; perhaps it should not be labeled at all. It is the lexicographer’s job to collect the words and senses in which they are used by speakers and writers of a language, and, with the proper resources, that collection can be effected without too many problems. Then comes the task of sorting everything out and the art of writing definitions that synthesize the senses into a set of definitions that reflect some cohesiveness of treatment, consistency, and style.

But whether a word, expression, or sense is to be labeled Slang or something else cannot easily be determined by research among users of the language: without exception, I believe, it is the lexicographer who must make the decision and, as far as I know, there has never been a survey done among users to ascertain their opinions. In any event, the decisions are quite sophisticated, and users are probably not capable of making them. On the other hand, it is extremely difficult to make consistent decisions. That doesn’t apply to clear-cut instances, like four-letter words, but it does apply to thousands of borderline cases, and what might seem to be slang on Monday morning might appear to be standard on Friday evening.

I tried to derive a useful definition from Dr. Chapman’s Preface. The New Dictionary of American Slang (NDAS) is a revision of The Dictionary of American Slang (DAS) by Wentworth and Flexner (published by T.Y. Crowell, which was bought by Harper & Row a number of years ago), and reprinted in its front matter is Stuart B. Flexner’s Preface to the DAS. I have read that, too, and while both essays reveal a great deal about slang and its characteristics, I am not satisfied that either leaves me with a sufficiently restrictive notion of the concept to allow me to make cogent decisions. Let me take this one step further: some linguists—quite reasonably, I suppose—take the attitude that slang is an alternative language, that is, users of slang (almost) always have or know a standard word for the slang one they employ. This is certainly demonstrably true for many words and expressions. But if one examines a number of terms in a slang dictionary, it often seems that there is no alternative way of saying certain things. Take, for instance, crack, the relatively recent coinage defined in the NDAS as “very pure cocaine intended for smoking rather than inhalation.” (I never knew that: I thought it was a synthetic cocaine that was much more concentrated, hence more powerful than the natural stuff. But that isn’t relevant.) Is there an alternative to crack? If there is, I do not know it, and there is no suggestion of one in the definition. In the circumstances, if crack is the only (practical) way we have to refer to the substance in question, can the designation properly be called slang?

Another example is burp, the noun and intransitive verb senses presumably slang for belch. I have no quarrel with that. But then comes the transitive sense, as in burp the baby, quite accurately defined as “to cause a baby to belch…”; but nobody says “I have to cause the baby to belch,” “I have to belch the baby,” “I have to make the baby belch,” or any other possible variant with belch, eruct, or any other word or phrase I can think of: everyone says Burp the baby. As there seems to be no alternative, does that mean that only two of the three senses of burp are properly slang, the transitive sense being standard? I am not persuaded that the criterion is silly, but the conclusion is, to be sure, for a lack of consistency in the entry, occasioned by the omission of the transitive sense, would be ridiculous.

There is little point in discussing four-letter words (literally or figuratively)—all are in the NDAS, of course. As Chapman quite sensibly writes in his Preface, “Yes, children will sneak off into corners with this book, and find the dirty words, and have dirty thoughts. If I believed that our whole culture could be made the least bit more decent, more respectful, more harmonious, happier, and mentally healthier by not making a slang dictionary, I might refrain. But I do not believe that and have not refrained.” So much for the prurient prudes in the Bible Belt and in pockets of California who think that people learn naughty things from books. (It reminds me of the time when, during the preparation of the illustrations for the Random House Unabridged, I was cautioned to make sure not to show male animals in profile lest children draw “pee-lines” in the dictionary. Examination of reference-book illustrations is likely to confirm that all mammals are retromingent.)

Entries that are likely to be offensive, either because they are derogatory or taboo, are marked with solid black triangles or white triangles, the former for the really bad stuff, the latter for the somewhat less bad. There are always things to argue with in dictionaries, so I shall refrain from disputing these markings: racial and religious slurs seem to be universally black; male anatomical terms are white, female black; most sexual terms are black. Gang-bang, however, is white, and it is a pity that Chapman could not use the citation provided by Professor Sir Randolph Quirk for the term, though Quirk is, of course, British.

These and many other terms are indubitably slang. Questions arise, however, about a large number of entries, some of which might be classed as jargon (some of which is included as slang), some not: game plan, gandy dancer, gangland, gangster, ganja, garden-variety, gate (‘ticket revenue’)—just to pick a few from a three-column interval. Some of these may be poor style (game plan); others are so familiar and well established in (modern) English that they seem natural enough, though admittedly not what one might call elevated usage: ganja is a denotative term for which there is no standard alternative, as far as I know: marijuana, bhang, heroin, opium, etc. are not in; why ganja? Why crack? These are not criticisms; they are expressions of perplexity.

I disagree with the etymology of Mickey Mouse ‘showy, meretricious, shoddy, inferior …': “apparently this pejorative trend began after the wide distribution of Mickey Mouse wrist watches … which were regarded as shoddy, gimmicky, etc., at that time.” The entry is dated “after WW2.” Mickey Mouse wrist watches were sold in the early 1930s (by the Ingersoll Watch Company, and they cost $2). They had disappeared by WW2 and certainly were not around “after WW2” till they were revived years later. There seems to be no evidence for the pejorative use at the time they were popular, and, in any event, they were children’s watches—nobody older than 12 years of age would be caught dead with one. Besides, everyone liked (and likes) Mickey Mouse, and there seems to be no foundation for the pejorative sense. My own theory is that in the animated cartoons in which Mickey appeared, he was always saved from a terrible situation by a not always artfully contrived set of circumstances. As the cartoons were seen during the war by servicemen everywhere, the sense of ‘contrived’ attached to Mickey metaphorically, to account for equipment failure—perhaps gremlins had something to do with it.

None of this is anything but speculative, of course, and should not diminish the usefulness and importance of the NDAS, which, unfortunately, will be out of date very quickly. It is hoped that the publishers will see fit to maintain it in new editions at a frequency greater than that it has thus far enjoyed.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Street Talk: The Language of Coronation Street

Jeffrey Miller, (CBC Enterprises, 1986), 96pp.

If fans of Star Trek are called Trekkies, are fans of Coronation Street called Coronaries? Perhaps, for when one comes to reflect on this TV soap opera in Britain and Canada, the conclusion is that its popularity is clearly an affair of the heart. Recently, one of the actresses in the series died, driving virtually all England into mourning; even the TV news and newspapers gave the event long shrift. Although encroachments have been made by East Enders, another British soap opera, Coronation Street remains the favourite of many. It caught the attention of Jeffrey Miller, an American who went to live in Toronto, where the show airs six days a week, “with an extra half-hour on ‘the Lord’s day.’ ” The series is set in Lancashire, and Miller has recorded an interesting collection of words and phrases used by the characters. As far as I know, his is the first work devoted to the language of flctional characters in a television soap opera. If only one out of ten of those who regularly watch Coronation Street were to buy the book, it would be a huge financial success.

In any event, the book is well worth having: the definitions are encyclopedic and cover many expressions that, as far as I know, are not doucmented elsewhere. There are many photographs, more than half in color. Here is a sample or two:

Flaming Nora!: ‘Flippin ‘eck!'; or as Americans put it, ‘Holy cow!’ Nora is the Dark Lady of Coronation Street vernacular. The expression has been used by countless characters, from Elsie Tanner to Jack Duckworth, yet veteran Street scriptwriter H.V. Kershaw admits, ‘I have used this phrase many times without any knowledge of the lady.’ Even the peerless scholars of Oxford University Press dictionaries can provide no clue to Nora’s history.

muriel: Hilda Ogden’s pronuciation of ‘mural.’ She has a blow-up of an Alpine scene on her wall. Many viewers have written to ask where they could buy one.

worse things happen at sea: ‘Cheer up, things could always be worse.’ Hilda once pulled the plug on Stan’s bath-tub of home-made beer, fearing it was against the law. Stan was devastated. ‘Worse things happen at sea,’ she told him.

It must be said that not all of the entries are unfamiliar, and I am not sure why spliced ‘married,’ yammer for ‘cry for,’ set-to ‘argument,’ and other well-known slang terms are there. Also, there are familiar Briticisms—yobbo (but not boyo), bog ‘toilet,’ duck-egg ‘goose-egg,’ etc.—which can be found in other sources. But no claim is made for exclusivity of coverage, and if that is how the Street people speak, so be it. As the author points out in a note, “this book is a compendium of idiomatic British English, mostly Lancashire English as, and only as, that language is portrayed in the scripts of Coronation Street.”

To order a copy, send US$12.70 to Street Talk, CBC Enterprises, Box 500, Station A, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5W 1E6. Mentioning VERBATIM won’t get you a discount, but it will impress the CBC and Mr. Miller with the considerable (or negligible) influence we have on our readers. In Europe, information may be obtained from Ward Lock Ltd, 8 Clifford Street, London W1X 1RB.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Make Your Homecoming a Memorial One.” [From an ad in the Dakota State College (SD) Eastern. Submitted by Jim Swanson, Madison, South Dakota.]

Public Cutespeak

Dennis Baron, University of Illinois, Urbana

Time was, when you surveyed the alluring names of American business establishments, you didn’t find much humor in them beyond the level of the Dew Drop Inn, the punning title of many a neighborhood bar or roadside rest. Of course, there are some unintentional double-meaning business names, like the paradoxical Vitale Funeral Home which I noticed once in New York’s Little Italy. (Many of these have been recorded in the pages of The New Yorker.)

But nowadays the American public is going in for cutespeak in a big way, a predictable outgrowth of the many variants of love and/or happiness is a warm/ sorry puppy, the ubiquitous smiley face, and the new goodbye on everybody’s lips, Have a nice day. Coupled with this exaggerated sentimentality and sense of good will is a new turn in the direction of corny wit. Public cutespeak dictates that bars be called The Office or The Library, so you can tell your friends you spent a productive afternoon at the office or the library. Eateries are taking names like Out to Lunch, The Lunch Hour, My Choice, or My Place For (as in ‘Let’s go to my place for …'). One Los Angeles clothes store is called The Competition (check out the competition). There are also the cute-name restaurants, like Fritz That’s it, TGI Friday’s, or P. Eye McFly.

One aspect of this outbreak of cutespeak is the deliberate business pun. There is a tumble-down Tumble Inn on the outskirts of our small downtown today, an indication that this mildly reprehensible tradition of naming bars persists. In fact, the pun phenomenon is making a strong comeback in the midwest, and there is some evidence that this trend has established beachheads on the coasts as well. Outrageous punning business names are found, for example, in nursery schools, where cutespeak is never out of place: Babes in Toyland, Captain Kidd, Patti’s Cakes Nursery, The Next Generation, and of course the Toddle-In-Nursery, not to be confused with the Toddle Inn cocktail lounge nearby.

This sort of punning is now spreading to midwestern restaurants and beauty salons, and to a lesser extent, to the names of other kinds of businesses. A survey of telephone directories for Chicago and Champaign-Urbana produces the following eateries, which I suspect are just the tip of the iceberg: Lettuce Entertain You (the flagship of a chain of pun food places), Barnum and Bagel, The Boston Sea Party, Franks-A-Lot, Gables on Clark, The Great Impasta, Just Dessert, Just for the Halibut, Lawrence of Oregano, Let Them Eat Cake (a bakery), Lox Stock and Bagel, Relish the Thought, Snax Fifth Avenue, Something Fishy, Sweet’n’ Counter, and Jonathan Living-ston Seafood. There is even a name which puns on another business: Dogs R Us (a hot doggery borrowing from Toys R Us).

In contrast to Chicago, San Antonio is more limited in its inventory of pun stores, sporting just the sidewalk cafe called The Kangaroo Court; and San Francisco, the city of food, offers little more than Coneheads Ice Cream Parlor, two barbecue restaurants, Hog Heaven and Holy Smoke, and the Higher Grounds Coffee House, Surely the gathering place for local philosophers. Los Angeles seems also behind—or ahead of—the times, with only two pun foodaterias: The Bread Winner and Dem Bones Bar-B-Q. Although Boston has had a Tower of Pizza chain for some time, there is no evidence that other hub restaurants are joining the bandwagon. The current Manhattan Yellow Pages (1986) offers little evidence that this naming trend affects the Big Apple; I cannot even find a listing for the macaronically named Chinese fast foodery some friends of mine operated a few years back, Gung Ho.

These Punny places with names like overripe Camembert seem to have grown up with the middle-American Yuppies, whose fondness for such unsophisticated twists of the tongue must be an acquired taste. Even more cutthroat than restaurants for their upwardly mobile custom are the unisex hair salons, who go in for such monickers as Blood Sweat and Shears, The Clip Joint, Cut and Dryed, Cut-It-Out, From Hair to Eternity, Hair Today Gone Tomorrow, The Hair Berdashery Hair Salon, Haircutecture, Hair It Is, Hairizons, Hair Majesty, Hair Port, Head Hunters, The Headliners, Head Quarters, Heads or Nails, Hi-Roller Hair Castle, Mane Street, New Wave, Sharper Image Hair Design, Shear Excitement (also Shear Artistry, Class, Elegance, Madness, Magic, and Pleasure), Shear Love (a clip joint for pets), The Upper Cut, US Hair Force, United Hairlines, and my own favorite, Curl Up and Dye.

Clothing stores, particularly those catering to women, have come out of The Closet to sport such punning attire as The Clothesline, Bottoms Up, Clothes Quarters, County Seat, Fashionation, The Fashion Bug, The Lady’s Room, Purse Snatcher, Simply Tops, Smarty Pants, The Great American Short Story (dealing in petites), and The Long & Short of It (for talls and petites). Larger sizes and puns seem to go together, for we also find Added Dimensions and 3 Dimensions, along with The Fashion Bug Plus and Ladies at Large. One New York discount clothier does business as The Emotional Outlet (is the clothing preshrunk?). There is a San Antonio resale store— throwing out both grammar and good taste—called Too Good to Be Threw, a chain of upscale sneaker shops called The Foot Locker, and a Chicago swimwear emporium known as Liquid Assets.

Other types of businesses go in for names in this style only rarely, as yet, for example, Sound Experience (car stereos), The Lock Up and The Spare Room (storage facilities), Splinter Group (a woodworking shop), The Framer’s Market (from farmer’s market) and The Great Frame Up, both of which sell picture frames, Flatts and Sharpe Music Company, For Pet’s Sake, The Lazer’s Edge (a printer), and First National Frank, a hot doggery complete with teller.

Cutespeak also makes itself felt in how we name our boats and automobiles. There is a long tradition of punning yacht and power boat names such as QT II (pi, that is; L. Urdang, personal communication; I cannot report on this phenomenon directly since the Chicago boats are all put away for the winter). With the introduction of vanity license plates in more and more states, car owners have gone in for cuteplates in a big way. One litigious attorney in our town has SUE M on his automobile. A doctor affects VIRUS, and a Latin teacher, JOVIS. One car, no doubt a gift from a doting parent, boasts MAZL TOV, the clipped Hebrew precursor of ‘have a nice day,’ while a dilapidated, flower-child Volkswagen microbus displays APATHY. A low-slung Lotus sports car calls itself MUTANT. A pair of academics new to the area evidence loyalty to their old alma mater with a van labeled PENNST 8 and a station wagon with PENN ST. And a dentist asks the inevitable acronymic question, RUNUM (Are you numb?). Frank Nuessel, Jr. (American Speech, 1982) records a variety of cuteplates, including HI U QT, 10SNE1 (‘Tennis, anyone?'), 2TH DR (‘tooth doctor’) and NUTS 2 U, as well as several that manages to evade the watchfulness of motor vehicular censors: RRGASM, BOOZER, AC-DC, and IM GAY.

A casual finger-walk through the yellow pages of the heart of the country and a visit to your local marina or the parking lot of any good-sized shopping mall in any vanity state should provide similar evidence for store, boat, and car names. My own list of terms grows daily. Product names, long subject to the most bizarre twists and turns of cutietude, are falling into line as well with the introduction of a new brand of microwave popping corn, Pop Secret.

I should make it clear that I am not opposed to wordplay. There is nothing like a good pun, and I resist the inevitable comment that these names are nothing like good puns, because some are very choice indeed. However, the better part of public displays of humor may ultimately require restraint of trade. A good witticism is enjoyable the first time around, and sometimes the second or third time as well. But frequent repetition sours the joke, and since names are meant to be repeated endlessly, the staying power of funny names is seriously limited. That is one reason why most parents shun the temptation to burden their children with the likes of Pearl Button, Penny Price, or Merry Christmas. (A more important reason is that such naming practices are cruel.) Our only hope for relief may lie in the fact that the names discussed above are fashionable, which means that one day the fashion will change. There can be no guarantee, though, that it will change for the better, for business names are exhibitionist by nature, and who is to say that the M-T Cup and Saucer (food) or The Cookie Cutter (hair) are any worse than Ernie’s Liquor and Lunch or Le Elegante Beauty Salon. In the meantime, there is little to do but monitor our increasing desire to play with our words in public.

EPISTOLA {Murray R. Pearce}

I recently subscribed to VERBATIM and soon realized what I had been missing. Fortunately the back issues were available, and I am now the happy owner of a complete run of the journal.

I enjoyed Robert Fowkes’s article on primults [XI, 2] and would like to make two additions. The longest “cheap” primult I have noted is speculation: peculations. More interesting is a pair of the same length but without the “s”: lethologica: ethological. Lethologica can be found under *letho- *in Webster’s Second.

[Murray R. Pearce, Bismarck, North Dakota]

EPISTOLA {Cosima V. Lyttle}

Elmer Suderman [XII, 1] speculates on other words for various varieties of farts. Nathan Bailey, in his numerous dictionary editions (1721-85), gives the noun feist ‘a fart without noise,’ also the verb fizzle ‘to break wind backwards without noise, to feist or to foist,’ and also poop ‘to break wind backwards softly.’ He further defines fart ‘an eruption of wind backwards’ and belch ‘to break wind upwards.’

[Cosima V. Lyttle, Decatur, Georgia]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Indeed, the Fifth of Shostakovich dwarfed Beethoven the way that composer’s Erotica dwarfed the symphonies of the Classical era.” [From the Upper Arlington News, Columbus, Ohio, March 27, 1985. Submitted by Peter L. Jepsen, Columbus.]

OBITER DICTA

Edward W. Devlin, Westport Point, Massachusetts

When the century and I were young, magazines and newspapers made us familiar with writers and illustrators named Albert Payson Terhune, Kate Douglas Wiggin, James Montgomery Flagg, and Charles Dana Gibson (of the Gibson Girls). It seemed to me then an amiable but stodgy fashion of the times, a pointless affectation. But now a closer look reveals a multitude of three-named people, writers, artists, philosophers, even business tycoons, endowers of art galleries, museum wings and concert series, even sportsmen, spanning the last century and reaching into our own day—from, you might say, John Quincy Adams to Jack Kent Cooke.

Adams and Francis Scott Key were among the forerunners, I suppose; but there seems to have been a flood of them during the High Victorian Age, and many since then. You can spot at once Harriet Beecher Stowe, Julia Ward Howe, Henry Wadsworth Longfel-low, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry David Thoreau, John James Audubon, Edgar Allan Poe, to name obvious American examples. My Beginner’s list contains 109 trinomials.

If this thing is worth investigating, you can start by asking vague general questions: what was the motive for calling yourself Ralph Waldo Emerson, instead of plain Ralph Emerson? Or Louisa May Alcott, James Fenimore Cooper, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, Edward Everett Hale, Helen Hunt Jackson, Joel Chandler Harris, Mary Baker Eddy, Frances Hodgson Burnett, William Dean Howells, Frank Lloyd Wright? What were the impulses at work? Were they dynastic pride, or desire for distinction, or feminism, or compliance with custom, or transcendental thinking?

Across the Atlantic, of course, family or dynastic pride were in full control of many name-combinations, but these were generally of the double-barreled kind: Quiller-Couch, Baring-Gould, Granville-Barker. Sometimes the middle name without hyphen was used as though the hyphen were there: Conan Doyle, Vaughan Williams—a sort of invisible hyphenation. However, the hyphenates are a separate and special branch of the species. The de-hyphenated forms were useful to ladies who were in the public eye, usually for literary reasons. They could tack their husband’s name to their father’s, as did Miss Barrett and Miss Wollstonecraft, and have the best of both worlds.

It would take more time than it is worth to chart the ebb and flow of trinomials by lining up names in order of dates of birth. But it does seem that after the Victorian flood there was a lesser surge that came up to the doorstep of the 1980s. To the ones I mentioned above you can add, with almost no effort, Edger Lee Masters, James Whitcomb Riley, Joseph Wood Krutch, Samuel Eliot Morison, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Katherine Anne Porter, Alice Duer Miller, William Randolph Hearst, Alexander Graham Bell, Harry Emerson Fosdick, to name some of the Americans. And of course Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He rather spans the gap between the earlier and later groups of three-namers. The later group makes the venerable custom seem quite new and trendy: Alan Jay Lerner, Robert Russell Bennett, Michael Tilson Thomas, Joyce Carol Oates.

However, when you jot down even a beginner’s list of trinomials, including the worthies and notables of the last century and a half, you begin to wonder who is left. The great exceptions stand out by contrast—Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, William James, Anthony Trollope, Ernest Hemingway, Alistair Cooke….

This idle but engrossing pastime led me to the other principle that has been at work on both sides of the Atlantic: two-initialism, which combines austerity and ambiguity. We know that Eliot’s first name was Tom, but we’re not really supposed to call him anything more than T.S. Who knows, off-hand, the first two, or three, names of P.D. James, M.M. Kaye, M. F.K. Fisher, C.V. Wedgwood, E.M. Delafield, R. M. Delderfield, E.L. Doctorow, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Forester, E.M. Forster, I.M. Pei, P.G. Wodehouse, W.H. Auden, E.B. White, O. Henry, e.e. cummings, O.J. Simpson, S.J. Perelman, S.N. Behrman, or even P.T. Barnum and H.L. Mencken? Not to mention L.L. Bean.

There’s a special category of those who need no more than three bare initials to be recognized: F.D. R., L.B.J., J.F.K., H.H.H., F.P.A., G.B.S. I think of two two-letter persons who need no more: T. R. and E.T. Unless H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) qualifies. Even more minimal are the Irish poet George William Russell who reduced himself to AE, and Arthur Quiller-Couch who nom-de-plumed himself Q.

A broad middle ground, of course, is occupied by the combination of first name and initial: David O. Selznick, Franklin P. Adams, Jean M. Auel, James M. Cain. But this doesn’t seem to prove anything. Except possibly that the users have struck a happy balance between family pride and reliance on their own achievement.

Is all this trivia, or social study? For all I know, someone has already published a thesis on the subject. If so, I don’t think I want to read it.

When I sign my name I itch to spell out the second, a family name to be proud of. But modesty prevails, and I join the broad middle band noted above.

A beginner’s list of three-part names, British and American, mainly from the last century but with a sprinkling of contemporaries:

Alan Jay Lerner
Albert Payson Terhune
Alexander Graham Bell
Alfred North Whitehead
Alice Duer Miller
Andrew Lloyd Webber
Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Wing Pinero
Ben Ames Williams
Carrie Jacobs Bond
Catherine Drinker Bowen
Charles Dana Gibson
Charles Dudley Warner
Clare Booth Luce
Cornelia Otis Skinner
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Earl Derr Biggers
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Lee Masters
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edward Arlington Robinson
Edward Everett Hale
Edward Everett Horton
Eleanor Naylor Dana
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Ernest Thompson Seton
Finlay Peter Dunne
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Frances Parkinson Keyes
Francis Scott Key
Frank Lloyd Wright
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
George Bernard Shaw (aka GBS)
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harry Emerson Fosdick
Harry Leon Wilson
Helen Gurley Brown
Helen Hunt Jackson
Henry Arthur Jones
Henry David Thoreau
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Herbert Beerbohm Tree
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Jack Kent Cooke
James Branch Cabell
James Elroy Flecker
James Fenimore Cooper
James McNeill Whistler
James Montgomery Flagg
James Russell Lowell
James Truslow Adams
James Whitcomb Riley
Jessie Wilcox Smith
Joel Chandler Harris
John Alden Carpenter
John Greenleaf Whittier
John Hay Whitney
John James Audubon
John Maynard Keynes
John Quincy Adams
John Singer Sargent
Joseph Wood Krutch
Joyce Carol Oates
Julia Ward Howe
Kate Douglas Wiggin
Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Lee Bates
Logan Pearsall Smith
Louisa May Alcott
Margaret Chase Smith
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Martin Luther King
Mary Baker Eddy
Mary Ellen Chase
Mary Russell Mitford
Maud Touzy Fangel
Michael Tilson Thomas
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Penn Warren
Samuel Eliot Morison
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Sarah Delano Roosevelt
Sheila Kaye Smith (or does she John Philip Sousa hyphenate?)
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Love Peacock
Walter Savage Landor
William Butler Yeats (aka W.B.)
William Carlos Williams
William Jennings Bryan
William Lloyd Garrison
William Makepeace Thackeray
William Randolph Hearst

A beginner’s list of those who are known best, or only, by their initials:

A.A. Knopf
A.A. Milne
A.E. Housman
A.M. Rosenthal
A.P. Herbert
C.L. Sulzberger
C.P. Snow
C.S. Forester
C.S. Lewis
C.V. Wedgwood
D.H. Lawrence
D.W. Griffith
E.B. White
E.F. Benson
E.G. Marshall
E.J. Kahn
E.L. Doctorow
E.M. Delafield
E.M. Forster
E.V. Lucas
G.K. Chesterton
G.M. Trevelyan
H.B. Warner
H.G. Wells
H.I. Gardner
H.L. Mencken
H.V. Morton
I.M. Pei
J.B. Priestley
J.B.S. Haldane
J.M. Barrie
J.R. Ewing
J.R.R. Tolkien
K.C. Jones
K.T. Stephens
L.L. Bean
M.F.K. Fisher
M.M. Kaye
N.C. Wyeth
O. Henry
O.J. Simpson
O.O. McIntyre
P.D. James
P.G. Wodehouse
P.T. Barnum
R.M. Delderfield
S.I. Hayakawa
S.J. Perelman
S.S. Van Dine (aka W.H. Wright)
T.E. Lawrence
T.S. Eliot
V.S. Naipaul
V.S. Pritchett
W.B. Yeats (aka William Butler)
W.H. Auden
W.H. Hudson
W.S. Gilbert
W.W. Jacobs

If you’re an editor in fact or in spirit, there’s a new magazine for you: Righting Words, The Journal of Language and Editing. If you care about words and the English language because you’re paid to or proud to—or both— you’ll want to join us in Righting Words. It’s the only magazine especially designed for editors, educators, and everybody who loves the majesty and mystery of the English language.

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English English: Scab

by Philip Howard

I do not enjoy walking the gauntlet to work through pickets, some of them friends, shouting “scab,” “blackleg,” and other insults, and occasionally spitting and jostling. I do not think that the epithets apply to me. And yet I walked the gauntlet for nearly a year to do my job at The Times, the flagship (after the treasure ship, the Sun) of Rupert Murdoch’s News International British Armada. I could have taken the armored coach behind drawn curtains. But that really is a cowardly way to go to work. If I were too ashamed to walk into my place of work, I should rather not work at all.

This is a complex political argument. What is not often written about it in Britain is the good thing that for the first time in two centuries it gives control of the way their words appear into the hands of journos. I can use an upvee* if I want to. And I keep on trying to find an excuse. I can use foreign languages. I can correct. If there is a typo on the Books Page it is my fault. It takes a great deal less time and a great deal less class war to produce a page.

Nevertheless, if we cannot agree about the politics, at least we should try to get the semantics right. I think that there is a faint but useful distinction, by no means regularly observed, between a scab and a blackleg. Viz. a scab is ‘somebody in a factory or industrial enterprise who refuses to join a strike’; a blackleg is ‘somebody imported from outside to take the place of a striking worker, so helping the employer to carry on his business and break the strike.’

The ugly words did not get their modern connotations before the Industrial Revolution. From the sixteenth century scab was applied to a rascal, scoundrel, rotter, or scurvy fellow, often a constable or sheriff’s officer. It is found in this sense in Lyly, Shakespeare, Defoe, and as surprisingly late as Kipling. Captain Francis Grose, that rich well of bad language, defined scab merely as “a worthless man or woman” in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, first published in 1785. But the word was already being adopted in the specific sense of a worker who would not join a strike, so forming a crust over a suppurating industrial sore. Patridge reckoned that it was taken in this sense from American slang of 1811. In fact the latest volume of the OED cites an interesting early example from a Bristol newspaper of 1777:

Whereas the Master Cordwainers have gloried that there has been a Demur amongst the Men’s and Women’s Men;—we have the Pleasure to inform them, that matters are amicably settled …The Conflict would not been [sic] so sharp had not there been so many dirty Scabs; no Doubt but timely Notice will be taken of them.

A blackleg was originally a gambling man with whom you would have been unwise to do business. Gambling is a mug’s game anyway, in my view; but then I do not have the sporting instinct. The invaluable Grose again: “Blacklegs: A gambler or sharper on the turf or in the cockpit; so called, perhaps, from their appearing generally in boots; or else from gamecocks, whose legs are always black.” Other slang-smiths suggest more pertinently that those black legs refer to the rook, as a swindler, cheat, and generally unfeathered bird of ill omen: an old avian metaphor. The earliest example of blackleg in its strike-breaking sense found by the OED is as late as 1889: “The question of the preparation of a list of master-baker ‘blacklegs’ was also touched upon. These men are selling bread at 4¼d the quartern, and at even a lower rate.” Those inverted commas around the blacklegs suggest that the metaphor was new, at any rate to the writer, in 1889.

Both words are now widely used as abusive insults in the political cockpit, scab in particular having a harsh monosyllabic vehemence. Even fucking scabby has become a bore. Both are clichés and monotonous: OK for shouting, if you feel like a shout, but adding nothing to the argument. Blunt instruments compared with reasoned abuse. For instance:

How Thomas Paine gets a living now, or what brothel he inhabits, I know not. Like Judas he will be remembered by posterity; men will learn to express all that is base, malignant, treacherous, unnatural and blasphemous by the single monosyllable.

—Paine

That was not a reactionary, menopausal old fogy of the time, surprisingly; but William Cobbett, “Peter Porcupine,” before he became a rabble-rousing radical, and a fan of Paine. Cobbett was a grand, angry vituperator, who would never have starved himself for a year by parroting scab.

EPISTOLA {Charles G. Bolte}

Further to Richard Lederer’s splendid collection of oxymorons [XII,4], here are some more editorial ones:

Moderate Arab leader, limited nuclear war, military justice, Beirut cease-fire, South African human rights, journalistic ethics, international law, national security, Egyptian commando hostage-rescue, Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI: Mexico’s ruling party always), Master of Science degree in publishing (Pace University ad), perfect binding (term for binding used for mass-market paperback books).

“Criminal lawyer” is a puzzler: oxymoron or tautology?

First prize for oxymoron title of this year’s books: “Nuclear Ethics,” by Joseph Nye.

[Charles G. Bolte, Dresden, Maine]

Paring Pairs No. 25

[By Walter Staaks]

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 it is the correct answer. Our answer is the only acceptable one. The solution will be published in the next issue of VERBATIM.

(a). Vandals amok in Castro’s field.
(b). My dad, a weak hitter, is at the plate.
(c). Bar patron fakes convulsion.
(d). It’s depressing to leave these lovely rooms.
(e). St. Louis ball club’s imported mascot could be a heart stopper.
(f). Gradually assembled luncheon to promote reconciliation.
(g). Universally heard in control towers.
(h). Minor infection makes boss unreceptive to suggestions.
(i). What she’ll do when she goes back to that boutique on Main St.
(j). Endurance test for an angry nation.
(k). Had cosmetic surgery, and now…
(l). Existentialist work violates fire laws.
(m). Clowning actors spoil mood of Trojan War drama.
(n). Token applause for deceptive move.
(o). Champion Dervish took students for a spin.
(p). Aspiring leftist physician serene about revolutionary movement.
(q). Feds intercept pop-carrying coach.
(r). “Officer down!” Or is it just an excuse?
(s). Interrupted dairy snack by scaring “h” out of her.
(t). Daunting ceremonies, even for one of publicized courage.
(u). Discussion of terms of shipment leaves directors cold.
(v). Monarch, soon to be executed, issues pronouncement.
(w). Avoid impairment of countenance by wearing mask.
(x). Gossips next door track our every move.
(y). It’s not all bad news. For instance, we can expect plenty of chicken.
(z). Some people rub Glaswegian star the wrong way.

(1). Address.
(2). Ample.
(3). Better.
(4). Bored.
(5). Bussed.
(6). Calm.
(7). Cane.
(8). Card.
(9). Class.
(10). Coke.
(11). Cold.
(12). Cop.
(13). Counter.
(14). Country.
(15). Cross.
(16). Eggs.
(17). English.
(18). Exit.
(19). Face.
(20). Feint.
(21). Fit.
(22). Freon.
(23). Grate.
(24). Head.
(25). Her.
(26). Horse.
(27). Intern.
(28). Knows.
(29). Louis.
(30). Meal.
(31). Neighbor.
(32). No.
(33). Out.
(34). Peace.
(35). Plane.
(36). Play.
(37). Pops.
(38). Praise.
(39). Raze.
(40). Return.
(41). Save.
(42). Says.
(43). Scot.
(44). Show.
(45). Sorrow.
(46). Spied.
(47). Stalk.
(48). Suite.
(49). Tough.
(50). Up.
(51). Whirled.
(52). Writes.
(53). Yak.

Answers to Paring Pairs No. 24

(a). Insignificant container for a dead midget. (44,3) Small Bier.
(b). This beauty can be found in low places. (12,2) Diving Belle.
(c). Underwear holder for quick suit? (4,6) Brief Case.
(d). Advertising slogan. (5,53) Buy Word.
(e). The show doesn’t go on in Japan. (36,45) No Theater.
(f). Impossible for knowledgeable dairyman. (29,49) Know Whey.
(g). Collected on the lotter—himself! (37,52) Number Won.
(h). Bum photo yields spacy trip. (35,43) Moon Shot.
(i). Postman in drag? (32,19) Male Fraud.
(j). Holy Grail. (28,47) Knight Vision.
(k). Underweight officer is a bit of a nut. (31,26) Light Kernel.
(l). These give soprano mal de mer. (24,41) High Seas.
(m). Inexperienced violinist in Davy Jones’s locker. (16,21) Fiddler’s Green.
(n). Loud, electronic blues are like lead. (23,33) Heavy Metal.
(o). Bouncing evil Sudetenlander. (1,9) Bad Czech.
(p). Left to be used by most people. (42,22) Second Hand.
(q). Unusual collector’s cravats. (40,46) Rare Ties.
(r). Woman whose husband is away peddling dope. (20,50) Grass Widow.
(s). Stormy, but nice for ducks. (18,48) Fowl Weather.
(t). Roots (the movie). (27,17) Kin Flick.
(u). Bottle for a message. (7,39) Correspondence Phial.
(v). What the equitable railway conductor is. (15,34) Fare Minded.
(w). Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, etc. (15,38) Duel Personalities.
(x). Microcomputer operator. (11,25) Disc Jockey.
(y). Source of black light? (10,30) Dark Lantern.
(z). Sagacious Georgian. (51,8) Wise Cracker.

The correct answer is (14) Easy. The winner of No. 24 was Linder Chlarson of New York City. The winner of No. 23 in Europe was William Simon of Berlin.

Paring Pairs Prize

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.

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Brave woman with her love in adventure’s conclusion (7)
2. Taxi runs into horse—ghastly! (7)
3. Census hireling catching fish (5)
4. Origin of a tear in book leaf(9)
5. Rolling log real briskly (7)
6. Mohawk’s shack holding car I remodeled (7)
7. Dancer tripping in center aisle (5,6)
8. Dancer free to incorporate
9. % of dance step (4,7)
10. Revolutionary tire type filled with carbon (7)
11. Sage at present wrapped by monarch (7)
12. Dock worker with torn vest to wear around (9)
13. Live outlet holds origin of shocks (5)
14. In retrospect, prepared a foundation for arguments (7)
15. Tennis star Smith with racket replacement (5-2)

Down

1. The man’s fear of Latin Americans (8)
2. Determined to serve old nuts (8)
3. Making angry call after one (5)
4. Page one is designed with intelligence (9)
5. Time for St. Patrick’s Day parade (5)
6. Comfortable housing in Africa (9)
7. Second-rate Western setting shows river tributary (6)
8. Establishes secret changes (6)
14. Businesslike—fifteen bucks netting a hundred and one (9)
15. Ungrateful for stocking with ankles swollen (9)
16. Urban deficit I totaled (8)
17. Raise fowl, having a small number (8)
19. Times editor made corrections (6)
20. Braved fractures quietly, perhaps (6)
22. Lifted seat in sacks (5)
24. Love for a musical story (5)

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Flaunting means to exhibit ostentatiously, to show off. But flounting, of course, means to show contempt for, scoff at.” [From Reading in Virginia, Winter 1984, published by the Virginia State Reading Association.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Mako … Because these species not only survive, but flourish in the sea, we can look forward to a steady supply as public acceptance continues to grow.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Coho Salmon … One of nature’s most delectable foods, we buy fresh farm-raised fillets from the cold water of Puget Sound, Washington.” [From the menu of Phillips Harborplace, Baltimore. Submitted by Alice V. Farley, Baltimore.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Can’t tell who from whom?… Help is available from the Purdue University grammar hotline … “We get a lot of business writing calls and how to deal with a salutation when you don’t know who you’re writing to,’ [Bob] Child [assistant to the writing lab director] said.” [From the New Haven Register, November 9, 1986, AP syndicated story by Diane M. Balk. Submitted by Dennis G. Jarry, New Haven, Connecticut.]

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. CHAP(T)ER ONE.
6. B-EEF (FEE) rev.).
10. SH(ALL)OW.
11. C-ON TOUR.
12. BO-UNTIES.
13. LYRIC (hidden).
15. E(ME)ND.
16. E-PIG-RAPHS (PHRASE anag.).
18. HO(THOU)SES.
21. SEPA-L(APES rev.).
23. REED-S (DEER rev.).
24. GOLD MINE (anag.).
26. OR(BIT)E-R.
27. TOPSIDE (anag.).
28. TEEM (rev.).
29. CHA(RIOT)EER

Down

1. CASH (homophone).
2. A LA MO-DE (ED. rev.).
3. TALONED (hidden).
4. ROW(DINES)S.
5. NICKS (homophone).
7. E-GO T-RIP.
8. FORECASTE-LE.
9. ANG(L)ER.
14. NE(THERMOS)T (MOTHERS anag.).
17. INSULATOR (anag.).
19. TRE(M)BLE.
20. ONSETS (anag.).
21. SEMIPRO (anag.).
22. PENS-I’VE.
24. GIRTH (anag.).
25. HEIR (homophone).

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. The -ment suffix arises from a popular Latin refashioning as unguimentum of the classical unguentum. ↩︎