VOL XIV, No 1 [Summer, 1987]

Go to the Dictionary, Thou Sluggard

Nicholas G. Demy, East Hampton, New York

In the Winter, 1987, issue of VERBATIM, Arthur Plotnik bemoans the state of arts and letters in which the words have gone stale and flat. Scientific language in contrast, he avers, is sonorous and sparkling.

Beware the scientist as well as the humanist who casually uses a word without exhausting all the nuances of its etymology before choosing the one best suited to his meaning. He need not be agonizingly Flaubertian, but he should take care that no infelicitous notion creeps into print, for once it does, it becomes a prisoner for life. An example is in a passage from Plotkin’s article:

Subatomic particles receive such whimsical names as quarks, gluons, gypsies, truths, and beauties. As not quite everybody knows, physicist Murray Gell-Mann borrowed quark from James Joyce’s phrase “Three quarks for Muster Mark” in Finnegans Wake. In German, quark means ‘curds, cream cheese, trash, rubbish, or nonsense.’

… Or ‘dung.’

Just about every physics text states Gell-Mann’s source for quark and gives ‘cheese curds’ for its dictionary meaning. Finnegans Wake is a Babel of tongues, a thing of rags and patches from the languages of the arts and sciences in a linguistic meld of syllables he called “solubles.” These “solubles” have as many quirks of meaning as quarks have of charm, color, flavor, strangeness, ups-and-downs in physics. This topsi-turviness of physics and humanities came about in 1963 when theoretical physicists were debating the existence of a putative subatomic particle which might be the fundamental building block of the universe. Murray Gell-Mann was among a group of physicists at Columbia University who had gathered to discuss this strange particle when he used an odd word—quark— (rhymed with pork) as a provisional name for it. Being a fan of Finnegans Wake and of a whimsical turn of mind which delighted in the vagaries of not only physics but of language, he thought the strange sound of quark appropriate for a strange particle. He described the events leading to the final adoption of the name thus: the word, he said, seemed appropriate as

… a strange sound for something peculiar. When I was going to publish the idea eight months later or whenever it was, late in sixty-three, I was paging through Finnegans Wake as I often do trying to understand bits and pieces—you know how you read Finnegans Wake—and I came across “Three quarks for Muster Mark.” I said “That’s it!” Joyce’s word rhymes with bark but it was close enough to my funny word. … The whole thing is just a gag. It’s a reaction against pretentious scientific language.

His “reaction against pretentious scientific language” led him unwittingly into one of Joyce’s linguistic traps. In the Brideship episode of Finnegans Wake, Tristan and Isolde have just had their Liebestod, and as the vessel approaches the harbor, it is greeted by the jeering seagulls who sing a derisive song for the cuckolded monarch: “Three quarks for Muster Mark.” Joyce slyly knew what he was doing with the word quark. He said he could justify the use of every word in Finnegans Wake, that there wasn’t a single serious line in it, that he had put so many linguistic puzzles in it, the professors would be busy for centuries figuring out what he had meant….

Anyone who has read Joyce’s letters in German, French, and Italian will be struck by two things: first, that he could use the language with academic ease and precision; and second that he could also use the lowlife language of the vulgar his sharp ear picked up in the taverns and gutters of Austria, Italy, France, and Switzerland. This is the scatologic material he used in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and his method was a deliberate melding of “solubles” into a fakesimilar of the originals. Nora Barnacle reported hearing him laugh uproariously in his room during the composition of Finnegans Wake. The same tale is told by Phillipe Soupalt in describing a typical day in Joyce’s life in Portrait of the Artist in Exile:

No one in my knowledge has subjugated his life to his work more than James Joyce did. Not without suffering, which I have witnessed, he accepted that perpetual slavery, a slavery of body and spirit. I see him again during one of those days I spent with him, tortured by a word, almost rebelliously constructing a framework, questioning his characters, extracting a vision from some music, throwing himself exhaustedly on a couch, the better to hear that phrase which was about to be born, about to burst into light. Then for an hour or more, a deep silence, broken by laughs.

This was the resolution we see in two hundred puns in eight different languages on a single page, laboriously and too often contrivedly constructed. This is the method Joyce used to put a fizz into the language, a method admired by no less a linguist than George Steiner who said

… his work, more than any since Milton, recalls to the English ear the wide magnificence of its legacy. It marshalls great battalions of words, calling back to the ranks words long since asleep or rusted, and recruiting new ones by stress of imaginative need.

There is an Uncertainty Principle in language as well as in physics. This applies only to the meaning of Joyce’s words, not his intent and performance. When it comes to a choice of two, three, or more meanings, it is always a safe bet to choose the slyest, the funniest, and most scatologic one. There are almost 5,000 German words in Finnegans Wake, many of them sly disguises for vulgarity. Joyce had roistered in German-speaking taverns and had picked up the idioms there. He knew Goethe’s Faust and has based the Circe episode in Ulysses on the Walpurgisnacht. Also, in the Prologue in Heaven, the Lord and Mephisto are having their amiable colloquy, with Mephisto jeering the Lord’s servile creature—man—that long-legged grasshopper who sticks his curious nose into every pile of dung. In the original, it is:

In jeden Quark begraebt er seine Nase.

Joyce indubitably had the idiomatic meaning of quark in mind, given as dung in most translations (Harvard Classics, for one). None gives ‘cheese.’ Goethe was as earthy a poet as Joyce was a scatologic one, and both knew a grasshopper rummaged a dung heap, not a cheese pot.

In the episode of the Ondt and the Gracehoper, Joyce says the Gracehoper had his “odderkop in the myre.” The Lord only knows how many meanings lie in odder in addition to ‘more odd’—‘other,’ ‘odor,’ ‘udder,’ ‘utter,’ and puns on these—but kop (Kopf) in German means ‘head,’ so we may assume the Gracehoper (Joyce) had his head in the mire. Certainly, he had a nose for not only the curiosity Mephisto jeered but also for the odor of Quark—dung.

Goethe gets to use the word again in the Entombment scene of Part II, lines 11743-4:

Irrlichter fort! Du, leuchte noch so stark,
Du bleibst, gehaucht, ein ekler Gellert-Quark.

The sum of this is that a will-o'-the-wisp, when grasped, is as disgusting as the feel of a clammy, sticky, gelatinous mass of frog’s eggs. Cheese, no; something slimily disgusting, yes.

German literature provides overkill for the idiomatic use of Quark. A notorious scatologic poet named Jakob Lenz was a contemporary of Goethe in Weimar, from which he was banished for his scurrilous verses. He wrote a series of love lyrics to Friedericke Brion, famous for her attachment to Goethe, which were for a long time attributed to Goethe. Lenz had neurosyphilis from which he died at 44 in Moscow. In one of his dejected periods he wrote:

Lieben, hassen, streben, zittern,
Hoffen, zagen bis ins Mark,
Kann das Leben zwar verbittern,
Aber ohne sie waers Quark.

Allowing for the treachery of translation, there is no escaping Lenz’s burden of thought:

To love, to hate, to strive, to jitter,
To hope, yet to the winds be flung,
Indeed can make our life seem bitter,
Though life without them would be dung.

From what I know of the quirks of Joyce’s mind, the cloacal physiology of gulls, and the onomatopoieic meaning of Quark in German, I believe Joyce intended the gulls to jettison a cloacal cargo on the already crapped-on monarch.

H. G. Wells, in reviewing Joyce’s Portrait in 1916, wrote that Joyce had a “cloacal obsession”; Stanislaus Joyce asked his brother “Isn’t your art in danger of becoming a sanitary science … everything dirty seems to have the same irresistible attraction for you that cow-dung has for flies.” And dainty Ezra Pound complained to Joyce that he could have drawn Bloom quite effectively “without such detailed treatment of the dropping feces.” An example of this obsession is in one of Bloom’s interior monologues, speculating existentially on the composition of the universe and concluding it was made of dung.

Well—it took a voyage to the moon to prove that the moon wasn’t made of green cheese, but the books on nuclear physics still give ‘cheese’ as the meaning for quark. Ironically, at least in etymology, Bloom’s cosmogony may be right after all if the quark is the building block of the universe.

Poets can be forgiven for the mistaken use of facts, as when Keats put stout Cortés silent on a peak in Darien and when Henley made himself a King in Babylon toying with a Christian slave; but scientists must have factual rigor, not poetic flights. Whether in science or the humanities, we must still say with Voltaire (by way of Socrates) “If you wish to discourse with me, first define your terms.”

If the humanities wish to recharge their words with fizz (the ultimate is Joyce in Finnegans Wake), they should go directly to an etymologic dictionary, not to the taxonomic sciences to discover the heady truth in Emerson’s “Every word was once a poem.” Not for nothing do the Germans call poetry a Dichtung—a ‘condensation.’ For the scientists it is a cinch: he simply borrows from the humanities as Gell-Mann did. Sometimes it is felicitous, sonorous, and precise—Linnaeus at his best. But science is a Johnny-Come-Lately on the linguistic scene. Once man discovered language some half-a-million years ago, he deposited his experiences and history in words, and every word was then a poem. Abstractions didn’t come into language until the dawn of conscience when such social artifacts having only human values and no objective correlative in nature were coined—such “non-things” as “justice, freedom, honor, good, evil, true, false, love, cruelty, compassion, gods.”

Three fourths of the words in Roget’s Thesaurus are abstractions, and it is these which are fuzzy though fraught with unnamed emotions. Western society is dominated by the phenomenological, verbal, analytic left brain of the scientists; it is only when the noumenological, imaginative, synthesizing, poetic right brain of the humanist bodies forth the picture of a thing or of an airy nothing that the left brain provides a local habitation and a name.

Writing is a creative art; no word has been written or spoken, read or heard twice in exactly the same way. Joyce had Vico’s definition of creativity in mind when he wrote Finnegans Wake, namely, that creativity is nothing more than the reworking by the imagination of what is already in the memory. It is the ability to see and hear more than meets the eye and ear. This was the last skill to be taught to the philosopher-guardians of Plato’s Republic. “The synoptical man,” he says in Huntington Cairns’s Legal Philosophy from Plato to Hegel, “the man who has a conspectus of knowledge is the philosopher; and the man who is not synoptical, who cannot see two subjects in their relations is no philosopher.”

Take it from this humanist/scientist: this is the only way to put the fizz back into a fresh vocabulary—whether literary or technical.

Way To Go, Aubie!

Brian Cahill, Ottawa

On July 29, 1983, Homer nodded and the following appeared in the Home News section of The Times [London]:

A father jailed for savagely beating a man who was prosecuted for sexually molesting his young handicapped daughter had his six-month sentence halved by the Court of Appeal yesterday.

Despite the repellent subject matter, I pounced with some satisfaction on this clumsily constructed sentence. A Canadian just beginning a two-month visit to Great Britain, I thought I had discovered the first of a reasonable number of examples of bad writing to be found in even-the best of popular British publications, examples which I intended to bring back to Canada and fling in the face of a supercilious member of the British diplomatic service, Sir John Ford. The flinging would, of course, have had to be metaphorical and, indeed, in absentia. Sir John Ford had been British High Commissioner to Canada during a period in 1981 when rather delicate negotiations were going on about the more-than-symbolic move of Canada’s written Constitution from London to Ottawa. His major contribution to the spirit of the negotiations had been a public remark to the effect that a certain document could not have been leaked from his office because, as any fool could see, the English was so bad that only a Canadian could have written it.

You may have noted that I described Sir John as a member of the British diplomatic service—not as a diplomat. His subsequent fate is not fully known, but he was quickly yanked back to London and for a while was believed to be hanging by his thumbs in the Tower.

It is against this background that I hope that readers of VERBATIM will understand why a Canadian journalist with some experience in speech writing and the preparation of “position papers” on public issues, should at that time have fallen with glad cries upon any evidence that the usage of English in Great Britain was at least as bad as in Canada or elsewhere in the world.

I had no illusions at all about the sorry state of English in Canada. On the morning that I had left Ottawa for London, the Toronto Globe and Mail, which regards itself as the best-written newspaper in Canada and may be right, had reported:

Dawson, the oldest of eight children of a career U.S. Army man who never married his mother, grew up in South Miami….

And on the plane I had been wading through an official document on the Canadian transportation industry which was full of sentences like:

If Canada is to achieve its full economic potential the performance of the transportation system must be optimized for people and goods to move at the lowest achievable total cost.

I had this altered to read “Canadian prosperity depends upon the low-cost movement of goods and people,” muttering the while about the kind of bloated bureaucratese that gave people like Sir John the occasion to put us down but still convinced that standards of English were falling everywhere in the world, including Great Britain. And I was also convinced that I would find good evidence of this in The Times and other British publications.

It is with some embarrassment that I must now report that after the first find there was no other. Daily reading of The Times over the next eight weeks as well as less frequent but careful scanning of other newspapers and publications, including Punch and The Economist, produced not one other example of really bad writing, in the sense of unintentional misuse of the language. Some amusing typographical errors, of course. A shocking amount of fatuity and stupidity. Platitudes by the ream and, in the dreadful London tabloids and their provincial imitators, lying sensationalism carried to the point of criminal irresponsibility. But no further examples of the “tin ear” for language—the scrambled syntax, the confident use of the wrong word, the pretentious redundancy—which is so characteristic of popular and official writing in Canada, as in the United States, these days.

Nothing, for instance, to match this classic Canadian Press item moved out of Edmonton, Alberta, a few years ago and carried, without editing, in major dailies across the country:

The controversial movie, Without A Stitch, has been termed a framework on which to hang explicit sexual acts by Crown Prosecutor Richard Anthony.

Or this, from a June 30, 1980 editorial in the Globe and Mail:

‘I do not trust this man,’ Ayatollah Khomaini said, leaving ajar no plausible hope that the Secretary General and the Ayatollah would meet.

Or this from a February 25, 1981, speech by Robert Blair, a successful and influential Western Canadian businessman opposed to “separatist” sentiment in that part of Canada:

In fierceness of purpose that there be a balanced and distinguishable Canada by continuation of Confederation, there is an abundance in the West. I honestly feel that, absent of very unusual provocation, there is no depth of support for separation…. What is present is a sense of demand for fairness within Canada.

The mangled syntax, wrong word usage, and redundancy illustrated above are, I am afraid, typical of contemporary popular writing in Canada. Why this should be so I am not sure. Explanations I have listened to include inadequacies in the educational system, chain ownership of newspapers, proximity to the United States, the influence of television, and a low-fiber, high-fat diet. Perhaps each of these does play some part. But why then did I find popular English to be so much better in Great Britain? They, too, have problems with mass education, newspaper chains, U.S. cultural penetration, and television. Indeed, some people, including Edwin Newman, say that a universal rot is well under way and that it is only a matter of time, as Newman wrote in Edwin Newman on Language (Warner Books), before “America will be the death of English” in Great Britain and all over the world.

My experience in the summer of ‘83 causes me, however, to disagree with this gloomy prognostication. On August 30, 1983, shortly after my return to Canada, I came across the following by Michael Valpy, then an editorial page columnist for the Globe and Mail:

Allan MacEachen, Hecate-like, whispers a beguiling exorcism into the trembling ears of the Liberal Party’s platform committee on the weekend, 48 hours before two by-election votes, neither of which the party has a hope of winning. No need to be spooked by Brian Mulroney, the Deputy Prime Minister incants. Right. Not until Birnam wood comes to Dunsinane hill. Besides the Prime Minister’s Office has moved to a political war-footing.

This pretentious mishmash was intended, as far as I can make out, as an elegantly literate put-down of a Canadian politician and his party.

Contrast it with a similarly intentioned paragraph by Auberon Waugh in the London Sunday Telegraph of June 19, 1983:

Neil Kinnock would seem to be the best choice to lead Labour towards its historic destiny as a minor tourist attraction. He gives the impression that he believes most of the rubbish he talks and it is certainly not his fault that he has the face of an incontinent schoolboy.

Well, my sympathies are socialist, but Way to go, Aubie!

Call me dreamer, if you will, but I hold to the faith that good writing will eventually drive out bad. Anywhere. And in that faith I foresee Waugh triumphing over Valpy. My research has indicated that good English still flourishes in Great Britain and to me this presages the resurrection rather than the death of English in America.

EPISTOLA {Jim Ramsay}

I was enthralled by the article on cattle brands by Maxey Brooke [XIII, 3], especially the simple and elegant solution which changed XIT (“Ten in Texas”) to “Starcross.”

I am sure I join other armchair rustlers in offering further brand switches that can be made from XIT. The cattle I liberated from “Ten in Texas” would bear the following brands:

The names of the ranches where I would graze these ill-gotten herds are, of course, “Fish Eye,” “Fission Chips,” and “Cow Pie.”

In closing, I would note that the pastime of discussing brands and brand switching is not limited to cow people. My colleagues and I at Philip Morris U.S.A., the domestic tobacco subsidiary of Philip Morris Companies Inc., often address these subjects.

[Jim Ramsay, New York City]

Whither Thou, Thee, Thy and Thine

Dan E. Soyka, Brownsville, Texas

“Doest thou, Michael, take this woman to be thy lawful wedded wife…?” This antique wedding formula was spoken by a justice of the peace at our son’s marriage. I marveled at this legal usage here in Texas in this day and age. That unexpected use of the archaic pronouns stirred up all of the old difficulties caused by the lack of a distinct pronoun for the second person singular.

The forms of thou are termed archaic by Merriam-Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged: “In this dictionary, the label archaic is affixed to words and senses relatively common in earlier times but infrequently used in present-day English.” M-W III’s entry for thou indicates that its usage prevailed into the 17th century as the appropriate form of address to an intimate friend or a person of lower social status. The first act of King Lear provides ample examples of the use of the plural form of the second person pronoun (you) when responding to the kingly first person plural (we). The Oxford English Dictionary says that the practice of using you to superiors was later extended to equals. If, therefore, each individual is conceived of today in the second person plural, will usage eventually dictate the elimination of first and third person singular pronouns, too? Will we then bewail:

Alack for I and me,
Along with thou and thee,
Farewell to he and she,
For now each one is we
And so, of course, we also say
That he or she or it is they!

That reductio ad absurdum aside, I do know that for me, as probably for many who have had an intensely religious upbringing, or have taught or read widely in English literature, or both, the archaic second person singular does not seem so terribly archaic in either sacred or secular contexts. Allen Walker Read may have supplied the reason in his article, “Dictionary,” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1976. He writes of the dangers of affixing labels such as obsolete and archaic “because some speakers have long memories and might use old words very naturally.” However, an effort to restore the use of a distinct second person singular pronoun would be, I know, as vain as crusading against the pre-Galilean imagery of the sun rising and setting. I can only bemoan the awkward consequences.

There are persistent problems caused by the current modern English practice. None is more evident than the controversies over the translation of the Bible into English. Most modern versions, and there are many, succeed in rendering the ancient documents into reasonably vernacular English, but some stop short of applying the plural pronoun you to the deity and to Christ. Strangely enough, historically speaking, this practice seems to contradict the origins of applying the plural pronoun you to a superior, such as a king. Could an unspoken fear of blasphemy underlie the hesitation of those translators who use Thou to the deity? There is an amusing citation in the OED under the entry you, verb transitive: “1675 H. More in R. Ward Life (1710) No Man will You God, but will use the pronoun Thou to him.” The two most respected versions that do make this exception for the deity are the Revised Standard Version and The New English Bible. Other respected versions fearlessly follow modern English practice, confident, I suppose, that God’s English is up to date and that He will understand the form you, as it applies to Him, as singular. Among the latter versions are the American Bible Society’s Good News Bible, the Roman Catholic New American Bible, Tyndale’s Living Bible, and the New York Bible Society’s New International Version (NIV). The controversy is encapsulated in a curious volume published by Zondervan, entitled, The New International Version Interlinear Greek-English New Testament. Within its covers is waged a Swiftean “Battle of the Books” between the NIV translators and the interlinear translator, the Reverend Alfred Marshall.

NIV boldly thrusts: “As for the omission of the pronouns thou, thee and thine in reference to the Deity, the translators felt that to retain these archaisms (along with the strange verb forms, such as doest, wouldest, and hadst) would have violated their aim of faithful translation. The Greek text uses no special pronouns to express reverence for God and Christ. Scripture is not enhanced by keeping, as a special mode of addressing Deity, forms that in the days of the King James Bible were simply the regular pronouns and verbs used in everyday speech, whether referring to God or to man.”

The Reverend Mr. Marshall counters by excoriating the practice of employing the ambiguous you. He concedes the modern forms of verbs, “but the older ye has been retained for the nominative (you for the oblique case) of the second person plural pronoun; and thou (thee), not you, for the second person singular. It is a loss that in modern English these differences have disappeared; so unaccustomed are we now to them that even the average reader of the Authorized Version misses the point of Luke ch. 22, v 31. The loss is even more to be regretted when God is addressed as You.”

The point of the reference to the verse from the King James Version is germane to this discussion.

v.31 And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, Behold,
Satan hath desired to have you, that he may
sift you as wheat;

v.32 But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail
not; and when thou art converted,
strengthen thy brethren.

The Greek pronoun for you in v. 31 is plural. Marshall is pointing out that modern readers are so accustomed to you as singular or plural that they fail to realize that the Lord is addressing Simon on behalf of all His disciples, not Simon alone.

The Revised Standard Version, which here uses you unmodified in both verses, footnotes v. 31: “The Greek word for you is plural; in v. 32 it is singular,” The NIV translates v. 31 you all: Berkeley uses all of you; the Living Bible misses the distinction.

Naturally, whichever version is used in the liturgy of the various denominations, antique forms may or may not be on the lips of today’s worshipers. However, I have yet to run into a modern version of the Lord’s Prayer in public worship. The good old “Our Father which art in heaven; hallowed be thy name…” rises with vigor and spontaneity. I doubt that there is a more conspicuous battlefield of language, nor one fought with as much rancor, as that of Bible translation.

The controversy over second person pronouns is by no means limited to Bible translating. If usage eased quietly into change, as Robert Henry Robins writes in his article, “Language,” also in the Britannica, this usually happens “without any direct volition on the part of speakers as regards the language itself.” He goes on: “More deliberate, however, have been various attempts at preserving the purity of a language, at least for some uses, or at arresting the processes of change.”

Simeon Potter in his “English Language” article (EB, 1976) decries the hard-line grammarians who succeeded Samuel Johnson: “They spent too much time condemning current ‘improprieties’ … Without explanatory comment they banned you was outright, although it was in widespread use among educated people (on that ground it was later defended by Noah Webster). You was had, in fact, taken the place of both thou wast and thou wert as a useful singular equivalent of the accepted plural you were.”

In the conclusion of his article, Potter discusses the future of English. “The abandonment of the forms thou and thee may encourage the spread of yous and youse in many areas, but it is not necessarily certain that these forms will win general acceptance. The need for a distinctive plural can be supplied in other ways (e.g., the forms you all, you fellows, you people.” An amusing citation in the M-W III entry for you-all will cap this observation: “down here we can always spot Yankees by the way they use you-all in the singular—Arthur Gordon.”

Here in Brownsville, Texas, English is a second language to the majority, which speaks Mexican Spanish. Spanish has not only the familiar second person pronouns in both singular (te) and plural (vosotros), but also has second person pronouns for general use: singular (usted) and plural (ustedes). Teaching English here is an especially difficult task, but the simplistic and ambiguous you as a translation of all four of the Spanish forms is a substantial stumbling block.

In a cursory examination of personal pronoun paradigms of five additional languages—French, German, Italian, Swedish, and Yiddish—I tentatively conclude that modern English is the only European language without a distinction between singular and plural second person pronouns.

Eric P. Hamp’s article on “Grammar” (EB, 1976) discusses grammatical categories: “Some categories …turn out to have very ramified implications; that of person, since it involves and flows from the speaking situation, is bound up with that of deixis, or the kind of pointing that demonstrative pronouns normally carry out (I = this; thou = that (near); third person = yonder).”

Pondering the fact that the use of thou implies nearness and that English speakers (with some exceptions, such as the Friends and speakers of some modern British dialects) have spurned it, I wonder with Zeno Vendler as he concludes his article on “Semantics” (EB, 1976): “How much, finally, of the semantic structure can be attributed to a particular language and how much can be ascribed to common (and possibly innate) elements of the human mind?”

Is it possible that the collective unconscious (to use Carl Jung’s term) of English-speaking people shies away from nearness, from intimacy, and prefers to deal with everyone “at arm’s length,” as some British are fond of saying? To settle for a second person pronoun which fails to distinguish between one and many might have to be explained in another discipline, such as epistemology, psychology or, even, metaphysics.

Bristol Cities

(Almost) everyone knows the above to be (Cockney) rhyming slang for titties. Why Bristol in particular? Of course, the Brist- for breast is almost obvious enough to stand by itself; but in a further burst of upfront research, I suggest that the connection may lie in the Bristol Channel where one may find, as described in a travel article, “a pair of conspicuously mammiform islands known locally as The Mumbles” by association with a small nearby fishing village called Mumbles.

[Stephen M. Edson, Riverside, Connecticut]

OBITER DICTA

Arthur J. Morgan, New York City

When is an infant not an infant (any longer)?

In Latin, when it starts to talk (infans from in fari ‘speechless’).

In Law (both U.S. and English), when he or she becomes an adult, usually at 21.

Microlinguistics

Harry Cohen, Brussels

My new flatlet is the smallest apartment I’ve ever had. The kitchen is a mere cubicle; there isn’t even a place to hide the cookies from the dog. The only window is in the dining room (aptly called dinette). It looks out on a hillock where a red-headed damsel with a kitten on a leash is tending her goslings. Near the top, a lambkin is dozing in the shade of an obelisk.

A load of nonsense? Agreed. I don’t even have a dog. The sole purpose of this silly tale is to present a number of words all of which convey a certain idea of smallness: flatlet, cubicle, cookie, dinette, hillock, damsel, kitten, gosling, lambkin—all of these suggest objects of less than average size. Clearly, the effect is achieved by the endings: -let, -cle, -ie, -ette, -ock, -el, -en, -ling, -kin. A little experimenting will show that these endings can do the same for certain other nouns. In the case of -ock, for instance, think of the relative size of a bullock or, if you are Scottish, a bittock. Suitable test material for the other endings includes: tartlet, booklet, particle, versicle; birdie, bootee, statuette, superette. In this article, such words will be called DIMs, and their endings DIMSUFs.

On closer inspection, the phrase “objects of less than average size” appears to fit rather loosely in most cases. It may be all right to use droplet for any little drop but it would be incorrect to apply kitchenette to all undersized kitchens. Kitchenettes constitute a category of their own, a recognized offshoot of kitchens proper. Admittedly, they are small, but smallness is just one of their characteristics (as for the others, ask your interior decorator). Similar observations could be made about words like starlet or cigarillo (-illo is also a DIMSUF). Interestingly, what is true for cigarillo does not hold for cigarette. Cigarettes are no longer looked upon as a subspecies of cigars but rather as a separate smoking article, on the same footing as, say, pipe tobacco. In other words, cigarillos relate to cigars as children to parents, whereas cigarettes and cigars are more like siblings. Other examples of this kind: ballet, operetta, (-etta is another DIMSUF).

Many DIMs have become even more emancipated. A lancet has little in common with a lance, though it may be used for lancing. Eyelet and catkin are linked to their origins by similarity in shape or appearance only. Yet, the implication of smallness subsists. As these examples suggest, there is a tendency for DIMs to evolve toward semantic independence; indeed, many have lost their DIM character altogether. Muscle, for instance, derives from the Latin DIM musculus ‘little mouse,’ a name probably inspired by the way the muscle moves under the skin when tensing the biceps. The DIMSUF is still visible, but any association with smallness has vanished. Mussel, though it stems from the same source, seems to retain no sense of diminution.

Less well known is the story of obelisk. The word originally meant ‘small spit,’ -isk(os) being an ancient Greek DIMSUF (cf. asterisk ‘little star’). Designed to impress the populace (and probably serving as phallic symbols), obelisks were bound to expand, and we now think of them as huge. However, to remind you of their humble beginnings, one of them has been given a place in our introductory story. In fact, we do not need to go back to antiquity to find autonomous ex-DIMs. A budget was once a ‘little bag,’ a morsel a ‘little bite,’ a manikin a ‘little man,’ a cutlet … no, not a little cut, but a ‘small rib’ (from French côtelette). More arcane are the fortunes of tinsel and toilet, of codicil, calculus, and carbuncle, of gazette, bulletin, and formula, of mosquito, casino, and spaghetti. Real curios are DIMS that have preserved their ending but shed most of their base, like cello (a shortening of violoncello) and ghetto (probably from Italian borghetto ‘little borough’). Uncle also comes under this heading. Because of the foreign origin of these words, identifying their DIM character requires some familiarity with DIM mechanics in other languages. However, English keeps adopting new DIMs from all parts of the globe: babushka, neutrino, kopje, guerrilla. It is hard to say whether all these importees ought to be classified as DIMs in the English lexicon. And it would certainly be vain to attempt to compile an exhaustive list of English DIMSUFs.

Even if we had a complete DIMSUF list, two problems would remain. First, most word endings serve different functions in different contexts. For instance, the ending -let acts as a DIMSUF in platelet but its role seems different in wristlet or necklet. A sapling is small but a hireling, though lowly, is not. And the Rockies are certainly no tiny rocks! In short, there are not only ex-DIMs and crypto-DIMs but also pseudo-DIMs. If you come across a doubtful case, ask your neighborhood etymologist.

The other problem is that DIMs often have side effects. While smallness remains the underlying concept, other ideas are conveyed as well. One such concurrent notion has already been demonstrated in the first paragraph of this article. The various animals on the slope of the hillock were indicated by DIMs that defined them primarily as young creatures. Their smallness was rather a corollary. The same holds for ducklings and lionets, and also for maidens and princelets.

Then too, the DIMSUF -ette is often employed as a feminizer, either to create a new female-agent name, like suffragette, or to convert an existing male-agent name, as in majorette, or to adapt a proper name, as in Paulette. The link with smallness rests on age-old conceptions about sex differentials but is rapidly losing force.

Many other DIMs, however, retain their full emotional charge. In fact, the conveyance of affective meanings is the most notable side effect produced by DIMs. A lambkin is not just a small lamb, it’s a ‘sweet little lamb,’ a piglet a ‘cute little pig,’ a doggie a ‘charming little dog.’ Where feelings like tenderness, intimacy, or coziness come in, the size-reducing function retreats. It may even become virtually imperceptible, as in darling or daddy, not to speak of biggie. A borderline case is the adding of -ie (or -y or -ee) to clipped words, not only in nursery talk (nappie, hankie, grannie) but also in colloquial speech (telly, hubby, comfy), especially for proper names: Eddie, Maggie, Dizzy (Disraeli), Monty (Field Marshal Montgomery).

So much for DIMs as terms of endearment. Verbs like belittle and slight suggest that they can go other ways as well. Princeling and kinglet can be derisive, darkie and blackie patronizing. And it could be argued that hireling is a DIM after all, used disparagingly. As for truncation, Aussie, Argie, and Paki range in Britain from good-humored mockery to outright contempt. In areas like these, interpretation becomes precarious. Context or intonation can make all the difference. Indeed, some parts of DIM territory merge into a semantic no-man’s land where conflicting connotations momentarily emerge, even overlap.

Many languages apply the DIM concept, through DIMSUFs or other means. This article can offer only a few fragmentary remarks on the main official West European languages. Of these, the members of the Romance group are best equipped. A quick look at Italian yields -ino, -ello, -etto, -uccio, to mention only the most common. Not surprisingly, Italians are virtuosi in the art of DIMming. They even concatenate their DIMSUFs, e.g., casa ‘house’ > casetta ‘small house’ > casettina ‘houselet.’ Also, DIMSUFs are attached to adjectives, e.g., caro ‘dear’ > caruccio ‘somewhat expensive,’ and to verbs, e.g., piovere ‘to rain’ > pioviscolare ‘to drizzle.’ Another handy device consists of tagging DIMSUFs to verb roots or adjectives to create new nouns, e.g., spogliare ‘to undress’ > spogliarello ‘striptease,’ povero ‘poor’ > poverino or poveretto ‘poor devil.’

The range seems dazzling, but English does sport similar features, though less exuberantly: yellow > yellowish, to crack > to crackle, single > singlet. Still, the difference between the English and the Italian systems is not just a matter of degree; they contrast essentially in openness. In Italian, DIMSUFs may be attached to practically any noun (and occasionally to other parts of speech), so that legions of potential DIMs are at a speaker’s disposal. Even if quite a few have risen to lexical independence, the vast majority are not even mentioned in the simpler dictionaries. (Just as concise English dictionaries do not bother to indicate regular plurals or conjugations: native speakers are supposed to know how to modify the main entries.)

Similar possibilities exist in Spanish and Portuguese, but not in French. Although French DIMSUFs are numerous, the set of DIMs is as good as closed, in other words, the freedom to create new ones is extremely limited—much as in English. Another similarity is that, generally speaking, the DIM of noun X does not refer to a small specimen of X but rather to a member of a class of objects somehow related to X. Thus femme ‘woman’ > femelle ‘female animal,’ orge ‘barley’ < orgelet ‘stye,’ the swelling on the eyelid being grain-shaped. In rare cases, different DIMSUFs yield diverse meanings: lune ‘moon’ > lunettes ‘pair of spectacles’ but also > lunule ‘lunula,’ the white area at the base of the fingernail being crescent-shaped.

On the Germanic side, the equipment is simpler. The Germans have basically two DIMSUFs: -chen and -lein. These can be freely applied to practically every concrete noun and, in a few cases, to other parts of speech. The Dutch are content with one single DIMSUF (-tje and its variants) plus some archaic remnants, but the range of deployment is vast. It comprehends abstract as well as concrete nouns and considerable parts of other word classes, including even a few numerals and interjections. The DIM density of spoken Dutch is perhaps the highest in western Europe. (Swiss-German speakers may hold the absolute record, but theirs is not an official language.)

Although this anecdotal overview does not warrant scientific conclusions, we may perhaps say that speakers of most west European languages can apply their DIM apparatus at will to all concrete nouns and, to varying degrees, to other nouns and other parts of speech. English speakers—and the French, for that matter—do not enjoy such freedom. They have to keep within a given set of DIMs. Can they never create a new one? Of course they can, but they are restricted, both in the choice of DIMSUFs and in the areas of application, which might be delimited as follows:

Feminization: Words like usherette are relatively young, and this model may catch on. A British newspaper facetiously offered hackette for ‘female journalist.’ However, this usage is criticized by feminists.

Commercial novelties: DIMs are incessantly invented for new products (diskette), new facilities (launderette), new mock materials (Leatherette). The association with smallness is not always obvious.

Nonce words: Nobody can stop you from calling a small house a “houselet” if that word happens to possess the expressive value you are looking for. Also, you may wish to synthesize a temporary DIM for reasons of euphony or style, or just for fun. BBC Wildlife magazine recently published a photograph of a little girl holding a baby owl. The caption read: “Tawny owlet with blond humanlet.” Inevitably, some of these intended one-liners hang on. Many a clipped word may have come into being that way: commie, quickie.

Whatever the area of application, modern DIM-makers seem to restrict themselves to -ette, -let, and -ie. But then, there is a tendency to forgo word endings altogether and instead to put mini- or micro- in front. Maybe we are entering the DIMPREF era.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

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

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“After the jury convicted a rapist in circuit court last week, Judge Ted Coleman sentenced him to prison ‘for the rest of your natural life with credit for the 3 days already served.’ ” [From Column World, by Bob Morris, in The Orlando Sentinel, November 19, 1986. Submitted by Richard E. Langford, Deland, Florida.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Slang and Jargon of Drugs and Drink

Richard A. Spears, (The Scarecrow Press, 1986), xv + 585pp.

[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection]

Anyone even vaguely familiar with slang and jargon and with the seemingly bottomless source they draw on in the language of drugs and drink will shudder to consider how formidable a task Spears set for himself in compiling this work. I read recently—though it merely confirmed a deep-seated conviction of mine— that there are more synonyms for drunk than for any other word in the language. I haven’t bothered to count them exactly, but I found about 125 (listed as standard, Informal, and Slang, in separate paragraphs) for the adjective alone, and listed in The Synonym Finder (Rodale, 1978). Spears’s list goes on for almost eight pages! Moreover, The Synonym Finder count includes phrases like drunk as a—, while Spears carries on with another two pages of entries. The only other entry that lists such a profusion of terms is that for dope ‘any drug, narcotic, opiate, or chemical which produces sedation, euphoria, stimulation, analgesia or stupor.’ That, too, goes on for eight pages. The dope list is extremely interesting in that it reflects the linguistic resourcefulness of those associated with a subculture that is scarcely connected in most people’s minds with lexicographic or metaphoric or poetic inventiveness. (A publisher’s blurb reports that SJDD lists “167 terms for powdered cocaine, 151 for P.C.P. (angel dust), and 624 terms for marijuana.”

This is a subject about which I am pitifully naive: indeed, the material, with its documentation, is so overwhelming that I should be surprised to discover that our friendly neighborhood drug peddler knows a large percentage of the terms. My eye was caught by a number of compound terms that included Owsley, under the entry of L.S.D., and a look at the entry for Owsley revealed that Augustus Owsley Stanley III was the name of one of the early makers of L.S.D. (Timothy Leary does not appear to have been memorialized in the culture he did so much to publicize.)

I assume that crack arrived in the language too late for inclusion: from the compilation in the SJDD I can only assume that the term is actually as new as it is reported to be, for Spears adduces evidence from 283 sources (some representing a number of informants) and, had crack been around earlier, he would surely have found it. I cannot offer comment on a great number of entries. I am not quite sure that I understand why, under mother’s milk (also mother’s ruin) ‘gin; any liquor’ we find “Heard on the MAS*H television program (1970s)” but no reference to Shaw’s Pygmalion. Other sources date the term back to 1821, but I am reasonably sure there is a reference to mother’s ruin in one (or more) of the series of engravings by William Hogarth, which would antedate 1821 by a century.

Even if one were to analyze the terms from the standpoint of word play, the SJDD would prove an invaluable source, with its thorough documentation of its subject: every single entry is cross-keyed to the source(s) where it was found. The definitions are terse, to the point, and, where necessary, explanatory. For instance:

mosquitoes cocaine. This may refer to marks left by hypodermic injections rather than the drug itself…

Oz man a drug seller or distributor… See ounce man…

This last item, which, without the reference, I should have thought had come from a reference to L. Frank Baum’s novels, obviously comes from the abbreviation for ounce.

Space does not permit a more detailed description of this impressive work, which is a pity, for it is patently one of the best specialized dictionaries to have come my way in any field.

The only sour note, which I cannot restrain, concerns the typography, which is simply awful.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Language of Sex from A to Z

Robert M. Goldenson and Kenneth N. Anderson, (Pharos Books, 1986), 314pp.

[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection]

The first thing I noticed in the Foreword (after the announcement that this book contains 5,000 terms) was that freudian was spelt with a small F.I doubt it. However, I have no reason to doubt anything else recorded in this dictionary of sexology, which contains quite straightforward definitions of any sexual term I could think of, plus a number that had never occurred to me and I had not encountered—I almost wrote “come across”!—in my meanderings through the English language. This is the sort of book where one finds entries which move him to say “Do people really do that?!” By this time, with contraceptives being advertised openly on television, we seem to be letting it all hang out (if you will excuse the expression), and none of us is likely to be surprised by anything. Gone are the days when one might have mistaken “condominium” for a tiny contraceptive, or condom as a small condominium.

Yet, to those uninitiated into the liberal society (and its open description), revelations are to be found in the pages of The Language of Sex. Many of the terms defined are anatomical, pathological, medical, or psychiatric, but those aren’t the interesting ones. I am not alone, I suppose, in assuming that once people have devised a name for something, it must be sufficiently common. To be sure, there are one-time occurrences that are talked and written about enough to warrant their being given a name, like Watergate. But it seems unlikely to me that anyone would give something a name unless it had to be discussed. Thus, like other people, I am occasionally brought up short by certain linguistic discoveries, and I found a few such documentations of kinkiness in this book. Here is one:

candy pants a commercial term for edible panties—Bikini pants that are made out of sweet material, for example, cherry-flavored “fabric” with licorice string ties.

I hate to show my naïveté, but Wow! A commercial term? That means that there are businesses out there making these things! I am impressed. Everyone knows about the drug subculture and terms like crack. Does everyone except me know about candy pants? How about:

TV style a slang term for intercourse in “doggie fashion”: Both can watch TV.

Undoubtedly that practice must have a profound effect on a show’s Nielsen ratings. An interesting entry is tabooness rating of dirty words, too long to repeat here: I found it as a cross reference when browsing through the entry for son of a bitch. POSSLQ ‘partners of the opposite sex sharing living quarters’ is here but not tallyman or tallywoman, which, though not slang, are terms for the same thing that have been in the language for hundreds of years. There is also the convenient adverb tally, as in to live tally ‘to live together as husband and wife though not married (to one another).’

Gastronomic references occur, as in fish and onions “a culinary concoction designed to ensure an erotic reaction…”

I don’t mean to give the impression that the Dictionary is either a joke book or a manual of obscenity: it is somewhat erotic in the sense that each alphabetic initial is decorated with a stylized illustration of two or more Orientals engaged in a sexual act, though decorously clothed. (Why Indians and Japanese seem to symbolize “clean” sex to westerners is beyond me, but there are no westerners represented: too close to home?) Nevertheless, it treats its subject with decorum, in an informative, direct style; the definitions are excellent, and there is nothing offensive about the book at all. Moralists, prudes, and others of prurient inclination should note (from the definition for perversion): “… sexologists tend to avoid the terms perversion and perverted, as well as deviant, deviation and ‘unnatural,’ preferring the less judgmental and more neutral descriptive terms variation and variant.” The approach is clinical and sensible.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Needed—experienced carpenters … truck and tools required but not mandatory.” [Employment ad in The Enterprise. Submitted by Jerome Foster, Falmouth, Massachusetts.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Facts On File Visual Dictionary

Jean Claude Corbeil, (Facts On File, 1986), 792pp.

For many years Bibliographisches Institut, a German publisher, has published the Duden series, an extraordinarily useful set of books in which each detail of a full-page drawing with call-out numbers is identified on a facing page. If one is visiting a foreign country, such a book is particularly useful because it helps in the naming of familiar (and some unfamiliar) objects. I vividly recall, for instance, my first visit to France. I had studied French for many years and could speak and understand it quite well. But, while I could discuss Racine and Baudelaire, I had no idea how to ask a chambermaid to get my laundry done and had not encountered, in reading the great French classics, the words for toothpaste or light switch. A Duden would have shown me a detailed drawing of a bathroom, with all accessories numbered, and the legend opposite would have provided their names in French, German, or a variety of other languages. Unfortunately, I did not have one; sign language yielded le linge, but my pocket dictionary revealed that that meant ‘linen.’ As I wanted to enquire about personal laundry, not (bed) linen, I was confused, for none of my clothing was made out of linen. But then, neither was the bed linen, and that had never confused me. Well, anyway….

The FOF Visual Dictionary (VD) is something like the Duden series but it is not as good. In the first place, there are errors, and from those I found in a brief browse, they are not rare. For example, under family ties, a two-page spread where I was disappointed not to find things like third cousin once removed and cousin german explained, the male and female illustrations are switched for the parents’ brothers—that is, the brother is called a wife/aunt-in-law, the sister-in-law is called a husband/uncle-in-law. Besides, just whose aunt- and uncle-in-law these people are is unclear; and, finally, what is an aunt-in-law/uncle-in-law? A few dictionaries I checked were not forthcoming with entries.

Under Communications is a page on proofreading that contains some errors which are too boring to retail here. On the one-design sailboat the bow and stern are unmarked, the spreader is incorrectly named “crosstree,” the preventer is misnamed the “vang,” the spinnaker boom is rigged without any spinnaker shown, and the telltale is attached to the mainsail, where it is less likely to be as useful as on the jib. Also, there are many other parts that are unidentified. In a section called upperworks, a term unfamiliar to me, a chock is called a fairlead, the function of a hank is not clear, nor is that of a turnbuckle, and what we on the East Coast call a jam cleat is identified as a “clam cleat.” All in all, sailing and sailboats are only sparsely covered. Under heraldry, the terms crescent, fleur-delis, and mullet, which are properly ordinaries, are labeled charges, and lion passant and eagle, which are properly cadence marks, are also labeled charges. The equipment list for the scuba diver omits the regulator, a vital piece of gear.

Notwithstanding such shortcomings, the book contains a great deal of miscellaneous information which might be hard to come by if one has no multivolume encyclopedia to hand. The only problem is that, having encountered errors of the type documented, my faith in anything the book has to offer is very much shaken, and were I to rely (albeit tentatively) on the VD as a source, I should feel compelled to look up a given term and verify its accuracy in a good dictionary or encyclopedia. I am slightly puzzled by the difference(s) between the French and English chessboards: except for a minor difference in the silhouette of the bishop symbol, they seem identical.

The greatest compliment I can pay is to VD’s indexes: in four columns of tiny type they cover 85 pages, showing all terms in one alphabetical order, then thematically arranged, and finally organized by special subjects.

The illustrations are generally clear, especially for the simpler and diagrammatic matter, but they tend to get confusing for things like gasoline engine, where it is hard to tell where the edges of the cutaway views begin and end. Occasionally, extraneous items creep in: What has a water bottle (or, indeed, a water bottle clip) to do with a bicycle (especially one without a bell or horn)? Of what use is a drawing of a station hall (which is, for Americans at least, an odd name for a railway station)? This particularly silly illustration shows a change machine and—unlikely to be found in most stations—a currency exchange office. Where are the public phones? the restrooms? the bagladies? the drunks? the litter? the overflowing waste containers? The airport passenger terminal, curiously, shows an automatically-controlled [sic] door as well as the services usually found only at international airports. I can easily see the usefulness of the office supplies section: a new employee who may know English well may have no idea of what to call a scratch pad, a coat tree, or a book end. But I have never heard of a swivel-tilter armchair (only a swivel chair), and it is somewhat ludicrous to show a series of boxes from which one is supposed to identify various components of computer hardware. Not only that, but the scale is all wrong, with a microprocessor (which is a couple of inches long and looks like a mechanical centipede) made to appear to be about one quarter the size of an entire central processing unit (represented as a rectangular box with some vents and a black dot on one side). At this point, the exercise is virtually useless and would best have been ignored. At the more primitive end of the technological spectrum, letterpress, intaglio, and planographic printing, which the huge printing industry in America will be interested to find under Creative Leisure Activities, are covered in only the crudest way, with offset lithography and typesetting ignored entirely.

To sum up, there is a lot in this book, but there is a great deal missing. Much of what is here can be found elsewhere, particularly in The Way Things Work, published by Simon & Schuster, which ought to be a sufficient source of information for this sort of thing when referred to alongside a good encyclopedia. Talking about encyclopedias, there are a number of typographical errors in the Selective Bibliography, among them “Encyclopedia” for Encyclopaedia Britannica, Mitchell “Beazleg” for Beazley, McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science @ [sic] Technology, “Chamber’s” for Chambers’s, etc.

Laurence Urdang

OBITER DICTA: New Uses for the One-Letter Word

Richard Bauerle, Ohio Wesleyan University

Many a speaker has avoided the embarrassment caused by uttering a specific four-letter word by resorting to the expression a four-letter word. Now more and more speakers seem to be using variants of the one-letter word for similar purposes. Among those in current use are the C word for commitment, the M word for marriage, the Y word for Yuppie, as well as the familiar F word. It seems quite possible that the F word with its many uses was the first one-letter word to gain currency. It did not require great innovative powers to substitute new single letters to indicate new meanings.

The potential for creative use of the one-letter word has caught the attention of two well-known and widely syndicated cartoonists who have become adept at exploiting its humorous possibilities while escaping the problems of censorship. Recently in a comic strip concerning the campaign against AIDS, Berke Breathed sketched the Bloom County editor displaying a health bulletin consisting almost entirely of one-letter words: the I word, the H word, the A word, the A II word, the L word, and the C word. The health bulletin clarified nothing about AIDS, of course, but it teased the reader into guessing what it meant. More recently, in his Doonesbury cartoons Gary Trudeau devoted three consecutive daily strips to the Y word (Yups was also used) and the C word (apparently for condom). However, in keeping with their lifestyle, the Yuppie characters took the C to stand for condominium.

The one-letter word seems to be of limited usefulness in serious discourse. With only twenty-six one-letter words available in our alphabet, multiple meanings would become necessary. The C word has already been used to indicate both commitment and condom. The potential for misunderstanding is also increased by the broad range of meanings already in use. Four-letter words are normally restricted by taboo.

Perhaps anthropological linguists should take note of the increased range of meanings that the one-letter words allude to. Avoidance of such words as marriage and commitment is scarcely trivial. Marriage, according to cultural anthropologists, is a cultural universal which societies past and present have honored and protected. Why now the M word? A few social scientists are suggesting that the basic social unit in our culture will soon be the single person, not the family. The substitution of the M word suggests that they may be right.

OBITER DICTA

Arthur J. Morgan, New York City

Among the Jews wandering through Europe after their expulsion from the Iberian peninsula, and to some extent from Provence and Italy, two names became inordinately popular for girls. As they deteriorated, their origins lost, they became Yenta and Sprinze. Yenta persists as a word for a fishwife type of woman. What is surprising about these names is their ladylike origin. Yenta came from the French Jeanette. Sprinze came from the word for (and the name meaning) ‘hope’ in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian: Esperanza, Esperança, and Speranza respectively.

How the lovely have fallen!

OBITER DICTA

David M. Glixon, West Hartford, Connecticut

An article on Asia in the Encyclopaedia Britannica reveals that at one time the southeastern boundary of Europe was considered to be the Manych depresssion—which would account for much of the world’s chronic condition! (Unfortunately for the pun, however, the name of the Manych rivers and lakes, which are in the Caucasus region, is pronounced manitch.)

EPISTOLA {Clark Jobe}

I concur with Professor Smith’s conclusion [XII, 4] that the words peckerwood and hoppergrass have their origins in the human playfulness with language. To aid the professor’s search for similar examples, I offer these: everwhich, everhow, everwhen, and howsomeever.

I first noticed these specimens in the speech of the commission’s now-retired personnel director. They quickly spread to those employees who were known to sit with him at length over coffee. These inversions now serve to identify membership in this breakfast clique. If you will permit wild speculation in the learned pages of your journal, I propose that these variants come from a playful link between every which and whichever (as in, Pick whichever one you want).

The threat, I’ll turn you every which way but loose, is commonly visited upon the young in our Southern dialect. Indeed, a Clint Eastwood/orangutan movie bears that title. The well-known tendency in the South to drop the y in every (as in everday), allows the conjunction everwhich. The resulting compound is easily mistaken for the inversion of whichever. That forms the link, as well as the pattern for the other forms: everhow and everwhen. (The method of creation of howsomeever as a variant of however yet eludes me.)

[Clark Jobe, Austin, Texas]

EPISTOLA {Donald Drury}

Looking over a back issue of VERBATIM [XI, 1], I came upon one of the EPISTOLAE taking issue with a definition in “A Grandfather Stories Glossary” [X,4] by Josephus Perrick.

Perrick had explained the saying I have seen the elephant as “once bitten, twice shy.” Correspondent Gary Muldoon, apparently by way of refutation, cited a 1983 book by Jack Finney which defines see the elephant as “nineteenth century slang for seeing the world, widening one’s experience.”

In counter-rebuttal, I now cite pp. 71-72 of Samuel Hopkins Adams' Grandfather Stories (the subject of Perrick’s glossary). Grandfather Adams has just been overheard using this locution by four grandchildren:

To betray embarrassment before us would have been beneath the old gentleman’s dignity, but for a moment he looked a bit discountenanced. He had been guilty of using slang, something he considered reprehensible in us.

‘A figure of speech,’ he said mildly. ‘More commonly and crudely expressed in the form of the familiar saw, once bit, twice shy.’

According to Farmer & Henley’s Slang and Its Analogues, however, both Adams/Perrick and Finney/ Muldoon are correct—though the Grandfather Stories usage seems to be the earlier:

1841. Kendall, Narrative of the Texas Sante Fé Expedition. When a man is disappointed in anything he undertakes, when he has seen enough, when he gets tired and sick of any job he may have set himself about, he has SEEN THE ELEPHANT.

1870. L. Oliphant, Picadilly. So had Mr. Wog, who went up to town to see what he called THE ELEPHANT—an American expression signifying ‘to gain experience of the world.’

A very different meaning is noted by Farmer & Henley in Puck’s Library, 1889:

Forepaugh says that elephants have a natural liking for whiskey. We have often wondered, when a man went out to SEE THE ELEPHANT, why he always brought back such a strange odour with him. This seems to explain it.

[Donald Drury, Long Beach, California]

EPISTOLA {Bill Simon III}

I read, with frustrated glee, Lillian Mermin Feinsilver’s article bemoaning the ubiquity of one criteria, the media has…,” and so on [XI, 4].

I spent 25½ years in employment in a sector (the U.S. military) where the Queen’s (or anybody else’s) English doesn’t always receive fair treatment.

An interesting perturbation of the language which I observed repeatedly over many years in aviation concerned the small index markers affixed to aircraft engine instruments. For example, if it is permissible to operate a particular jet engine at 97 percent, then a small red index marker would appear on the RPM gage at the “97” position. In multi-engine aircraft, there would, naturally, be such indices on each of the four RPM gages (temperature gages, oil pressure gages, etc.).

When one pilot was instructing or discussing a problem with another pilot, it was universally common to refer, in the singular, to the “indice [in-di-see] on the #3 RPM gage” or to the “indice on the #2 oil pressure gage.”

I would have screamed, but that’s not a wise thing to do in an airplane cockpit.

Oh, well, as an old friend used to say, “We live and lean [sic].”

[Bill Simon III, Lt. Colonel, USAF (Ret.) Berlin]

SEX VS. GENDER

An American visiting France to do some flyfishing with a French friend vowed that he would speak only French during his visit. One day, when they were out casting for trout, there was a sudden hatching of mayflies. “Voilá! said the American, “Regardez le mouche!” “Vraiment” acknowledged his friend, “Mais, c’est la mouche.” “Incroyable!” countered the American; then, at a loss for the proper French words—“What eyesight!”

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Word Mysteries & Histories: From Quiche to Humble Pie

Editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries, (Houghton Mifflin, 1986), xi + 308 pp.

[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection]

Anyone who is interested in etymologies of English words (or words used in English) should enjoy this book. Its pages reflect the sense of joy and relief that lexicographers feel when released from the shackles of space limitations: as much as needs to be said in tracing the history of a word has been set forth here. In some instances, one might criticize a bit of overwriting, often the result of the authors' attempt at lightening the burden of scholarship that inevitably attends the research into word origins. No one who has been frustrated by the telegraphic, often cryptic style imposed on etymologists in vitro—that is, in their dictionaries—will fail to be satisfied by the full in vivo treatment offered here. The choice of entries (“more than 500”) is eclectic if viewed superficially: as someone who has worked on more etymologies than I can shake my shtick at, it seems to me that the words have been chosen because their histories are interesting, surprising, typical of a particular category of word generation or borrowing, or “all of the above.” The editors have the enormous advantage of an available citation file, which must be a good one; they also have lost neither their sense of humor nor their perspective in discussing the words selected. Not only is the style refreshing but every page reflects original scholarship, not just the same old turf plowed over again. The editors took the trouble to find out about Quaaludes, for example, and did not just guess at its source. As an old China hand—the surface is beginning to show signs of crazing—I am familiar with many of the etymologies. You may be, too, but each contains some filip of information that I did not remember or that had eluded my earlier visits to the territory. Of special interest to me was the entry for Teflon, which runs to four and a half pages and is neatly put together: I cannot reveal the ending here, and nobody will be seated in the last fifty pages of the book.

This is not just another popular etymology book with a pretty face, though it must be said that the design, illustration, and manufacture of the tome make it a pleasure to have in one’s library.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Dimboxes, Epopts, and Other Quidams and The Insomniac’s Dictionary

David Grambs, illus. by Simon Stern, (Workman Publishing, 1986), 190pp. and Paul Hellweg, illus. by Joan Leigh Herder, (Facts On File Publications, 1986), xiv + 159pp.

The English language is an inexhaustible mine of lexicographic curiosities, and publishers (if not compilers) seem to have at their disposal an inexhaustible supply of language buffs who gluttonously gobble up poplollies, bellibones, tenderfeet, ladyfingers, and other linguistic delectables. David Grambs, an editor of the Random House Dictionary (which I once had some remote connection with), has collected about 500 “succinct, knockout sobriquets and epithets” (according to the back-cover blurb), which are arranged into twenty-four categories, from Dentiloquists, Leptorrhinians & Pithecoids, through Blateroons, Energumens & Solipsists, to Mumpsimuses, Parvanimities & Solitudinarians. The descriptive definitions are well done (though the entries be rare), and if you are searching for another way to refer to the people whom you have traditionally characterized as gormless ninnyhammers and attocerebral twits, perhaps this book is the solution. The definitions are blithe and often funny, with many esoteric, exotic words buried inside them, each (I believe) with its own definition.

Paul Hellweg’s book also contains lexicographic rarities, but of a different sort; moreover, it is organized thematically in a somewhat more productive way—that is, if you cannot think of (or don’t know) the word for excessive sexual desire in men (the counterpart of nymphomania), you can find it by scanning a short list of Erotic Manias, a subset of Chapter IV, Manifestly Manifold Manias, which boasts of listing 277 manias, “the largest list in print anywhere.” This can readily be made 278 by the addition of a mania listed in most self-respecting dictionaries of any size— tulipomania. Maybe it’s there, but The Insomniac’s Dictionary, unfortunately, has no index and there is no quick way of again finding a word once encountered in the text. The categorization of the contents is convenient and would usually enable a user to find the word he may be seeking—I say “may be” because there are, buried in the linguistic debris that is documented here, many words that could well be useful and, indeed, may be sought. Generally, the book is a potpourri of lexicographic matter—eponyms, longest words, acronyms, -cide words (those are real killers), and so on. Hellweg has published some of this material in Word Ways, The Journal of Recreational Linguistics. If you are unfamiliar with Word Ways, you can find out more by writing to A. Ross Eckler, Spring Valley Road, Morristown, NJ 07960.

I cannot allow one egregious error in Hellweg’s book to slip past without comment: like some others before him, he attributes supercallifragilisticexpialidocious (or, as he has it, -cali-) to the movie Mary Poppins. Although the word does appear in a song in that film, I (and my contemporaries) knew the word very well in the 1930s, long before Disney made the movie. I haven’t the slightest idea where it came from, but it was “going around” when I was a lad, and I should hope that whoever wrote the lyrics for the song would acknowledge that he or she did not coin the word. Perhaps, though, the lyricist has more information on its provenance.

Laurence Urdang

In Praise of St. Jerome

Virginia Howard, Metairie, Louisiana

It all started with The Grapes of Wrath. A friend who had seen the movie version on television asked me how the book ended. After my cryptic instruction for her to read it for herself, she returned from the library with a new question, “Where did the title come from?” Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic came immediately to mind, but, we asked ourselves, was that the origin of the phrase, or were its roots in ancient soil? The answer was in the library’s 1968 edition of Bartlett’s Book of Familiar Quotations. Under “grapes of wrath” in the index, I was referred to Mrs. Howe’s offerings, and from her quote “…trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored…” a footnote sent me to Isaiah 63:3:

I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger and trample them in my fury; and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment.

My trek through “grape” in the index of Bartlett’s also led me to “Beulah, peel me a grape” (Mae West) and “For they wish to fill the wine press of eloquence not with the tendrils of mere words but with the rich grape juice of good sense” (St. Jerome). So taken with St. Jerome’s choice of (translated) words was I that later, while seated in a comfortable chair at home, I reached for my own 1955 edition of Bartlett’s to pursue and ponder St. Jerome’s other verbal gems. But what’s this? My copy of Bartlett’s listed only five quotations under St. Jerome’s name, and the one about the rich grape juice of good sense was not among them. The only quotations given were as follows:

Avoid, as you would the plague, a clergyman who is also a man of business.

A fat paunch never breeds fine thoughts.

Preferring to store her money in the stomachs of the needy rather than hide it in a purse.

The best almoner is he who keeps back nothing for himself.

It is no fault of Christianity if a hypocrite falls into sin.

In the 1968 and 1980 editions of Bartlett’s, St. Jerome was credited with 38 “familiar” quotations. How could St. Jerome (A.D.C. 342-420) have said so much between 1955 and 1968? At least one of his comments among those in the 1968 listing was certainly familiar back in 1955: “Never look a gift horse in the mouth.” If St. Jerome was credited with saying it in 1968, who got credit back in 1955? The 1955 edition indicated that Rabelais, in 1532, said, “He always looked a given horse in the mouth,” and a footnote clarified: “Archbishop Trench says the proverb (Never look a gift horse in the mouth) is certainly as old as Jerome of the fourth century, who, when someone found fault with certain writings of his, replied that they were free-will offerings, and that it did not behoove to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

In the 1968 Bartlett’s, St. Jerome said, “No athlete is crowned but in the sweat of his brow.” Upon whose brow was that drop of wisdom placed in 1955? I found the index deluged by sweaty brows, none having to do with athletes:

Badness, look you, you may choose easily in a heap: level is the path and right near it dwells. But before Virtue the immortal gods have put the sweat of man’s brow; and long and steep is the way to it, and rugged at the first. (Hesiod, c. 720 B.C.)

Which I have earned with the sweat of my brows. (Cervantes, 1547-1616)

The sweat of a man’s brow, and the exudations of a man’s brains, are as much a man’s own property as the breeches upon his backside. (Laurence Sterne, 1713-68)

His brow is wet with honest sweat. (“The Village Blacksmith,” Longfellow, 1807-82)

Thoreau, ever the maverick, had a different view: “It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.”

Another 1968 St. Jerome offering that must have been familiar even back in 1955 was “Do not let your deeds belie your words, lest when you speak in church someone may say to himself, ‘Why do you not practice what you preach?’ ” Who was sermonizing in 1955? Rowland Howard (floruit 1876) said:

Waste not, want not, is a maxim I would teach,
Let your watchword be dispatch, and practice
what you preach.

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946) then came along and said, “That we should practise what we preach is generally admitted; but anyone who preaches what he and his hearers practise must incur the gravest moral disapprobation.”

St. Jerome’s other maxims in the 1968 Bartlett’s did not appear to be duplicated by other sages in the 1955 edition of the book, although one particularly pleasing one had an earlier parallel of sorts. St. Jerome said:

The face is the mirror of the mind, and the eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.

Centuries earlier, Publilius Syrus (c. 42 B.C.) said, “Speech is a mirror of the soul: as a man speaks, so is he.” Man sometimes speaks with such glib insincerity, however, that more truth may be found in St. Jerome’s observation than in that of Publilius Syrus.

In fact, St. Jerome admonished, “Everything must have in it a sharp seasoning of truth.” He did, however, occasionally contradict himself. Although he insisted, “A friend is long sought, hardly found, and with difficulty kept,” he also admitted, “The friendship that can cease has never been real.” If the second premise were true, then the friend in the first premise would not be difficult to keep—unless the friendship was never real.

Other insightful comments that mysteriously surfaced between 1955 and 1968 as a part of St. Jerome’s repertoire did fit his own admonition:

Love is not to be purchased and affection has no price.

The scars of others should teach us caution.

Even brute beasts and wandering birds do not fall into the same traps or nets twice.

Small minds can never handle great themes.

It is worse still to be ignorant of your ignorance.

No one cares to speak to an unwilling listener. An arrow never lodges in a stone; often it recoils upon the sender of it.

That clergyman soon becomes an object of contempt who often asked out to dinner never refuses to go.

When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting.

The fact is that my native land is a prey to barbarism, that in it men’s only God is their belly, that they live only for the present, and that the richer a man is the holier he is held to be.

Early impressions are hard to eradicate from the mind.

When once wool has been dyed purple, who can restore it to its previous whiteness?

Athletes as a rule are stronger than their backers; yet the weaker presses the stronger to put forth all his efforts.

And thus I capped a concoction fermented from a cluster of grapes. Mae West said “Beulah, peel me a grape” in both editions of Bartlett’s, but in the 1955 edition she said it in She Done Him Wrong and in the 1968 edition, it was in I’m No Angel. Should this inconsistency be pursued? I think not. One peeled grape could lead to a bushel of slippery berries.

Antipodean English: Going Decimal

George L. Turner

Linguists tell us that a language is a system in which everything hangs together. If that is so, we would expect that a dislocation of elements in one part of the system would introduce stresses, not always foreseen, in related parts. The Australian Government has (unwittingly) provided us with an experiment to prove that this is indeed so.

The beginnings of the experiment are just coming of age. It was on February 14, 1966, that decimal currency was introduced to Australia. Instead of a pound of 20 shillings, each of 12 pence, we were to have a dollar of a hundred cents. There was some argument about the use of the word dollar, since other countries (Hong Kong, to name but one) already used the term, but the new currency proved easy to use and immediately popular. Americans will find that easy to understand.

In fact, the word dollar was not entirely new to us. Few Australians know that Australia almost had decimal currency 140 years earlier. When Australia was first settled by Europeans, no currency was provided. Coins from visiting ships were used, Spanish dollars being especially prominent. Dollar was then an everyday word; it gave a name to the dollar-bird with its whitish patch in the center of each wing suggesting the shape of a silver dollar. Until 1826 when Britain legislated that sterling should be used in the colonies, it seemed likely that a currency based on a dollar would be officially adopted in Australia.

The eventual adoption of decimal currency nearly a century and a half later caused few linguistic problems. Words like penny farthing, penny wise, penny-pinching already had an old-fashioned ring and could go on being used, perhaps with a fading awareness of their origin. A number of slang terms, quid for ‘pound,’ bob for ‘shilling,’ and the already less used zack for ‘sixpence’ or trey ‘threepence’ were suddenly unemployed. Bookmakers thought the loss of the old terms spin (£5), brick (£10), pony (£25) and spot (£100) slowed business, but racing and betting went on.

But decimal coinage was only a beginning. Metrication of weights and measures followed. This time there was no simple “translation” as £1 = $2. An inch was now 2.45cm and a bushel 0.0364 cubic meters (which we spell “metres”). Despite the efforts of authorities (such as prohibiting the importing of rulers showing imperial measurements), people found it harder to get used to the new terms. I must admit that I still invariably think of my weight as (well, ideally) 10 stone 7lbs (which Americans would, I think, call 147 pounds), and cannot visualize heights expressed in centimeters.

The use of kilograms (usually now shortened to kilos) in shopping presents few problems. Kilometer, however, divides Australians into two camps, those who follow the recommendations of the metrication board and analogy with (e.g.) centimeter and pronounce with stress on kil-, and those who follow the arguments, based on a sound knowledge of Greek, of the former Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, and pronounce with stress on -lom-. Rules for abbreviated forms had to be set. The decision is to regard them as symbols, not abbreviations, and write them without points, “2m,” “3cc,” “4 km/h,” etc.

Metrication was far-reaching. Volumes were to be in liters and milliliters (the European continental deciliter seems not to be used in Australia). Paper sizes were reorganized. People who had just become used to calories were expected to think in kilojoules. Acres gave way to hectares. The one timber term everyone knew, the four-by-two, perversely called a two-by-four by Americans, seems not to be replaced by a widely known term. Fahrenheit thermometers were scrapped for Celsius and one could no longer welcome summer with a “century” temperature, though for a while newspapers tried to keep up the excitement with a coined “celtury” for a temperature just under 38°C.

Problems arose in sport. In Australian Rules football, a mark was made only when a ball had traveled ten yards. For simplicity the required distance was changed to ten meters. But in cricket a popping-crease is still four feet from the wicket and has to be defined in Australia as 1.22m.

Measurements have not provided slang terms as much as money has, but they have entered more deeply into compounds and metaphors. University English departments are frequently asked to decide what an official should call a number of kilometers traveled when claiming payment for what used to be called “mileage.” There are place-names (Mile End, Five Mile Creek), and while people might argue whether a well-known song is called Five Miles from Gundagai or Nine Miles from Gundagai, no one wants to measure the distance in kilometers. We are used to expressions like miles better, within an inch of his life, every inch a king (or, facetiously, every inch a ruler), an ounce of practice is better than a pound of theory. We use mileage, milestone, yardstick, metaphorically, and will go on doing so perhaps until the miles and yards and inches mean no more to us than the ell connected to our elbow.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Take My Word for It

William Safire, (Times Books, 1986), ix + 357pp.

Anyone interested in language is aware of the ubiquitous, perennial presence of Bill Safire’s column, “On Language”: it appears in The New York Times Magazine almost every Sunday and, on other days, in other newspapers. Occasionally, Bill is off on a holiday somewhere—presumably keeping mum—and someone else occupies his personal space (a sense that seems to be missing from the OED and Supplements). That adds up to many a month of Sundays (to coin a cliché), and his numerous columns have been collected in a series of books, the main advantage of which (to a faithful reader) is their indexes. (I’ll let Bill struggle with the copula in that clause.) Another (major) advantage is that the correspondence he received relating to a particular topic accompanies that article, providing better continuity.

Safire is not always right in his linguistic observations—one of his books is entitled, I Stand Corrected— but his writing is always lively, and like most of us, he gets more careful as he goes along. I am occasionally put off by the arch style of “On Language,” and a book’s-worth of it is a bit much. But others do not, apparently, agree with this criticism. I am not suggesting that commentary on language need be sobersided, merely that in a perpetual attempt at being lighthearted and clever, Safire frequently obscures the very clarity he is trying to bring to his subject.

Notwithstanding the writings in The Times [London], by Philip Howard, and those that appear in VERBATIM, “On Language” is probably the most widely read commentary on language—especially English—in the world. Its influence may therefore be profound, and it behooves language-watchers to attend to Safire’s briefings, even if they are occasionally misleading or deal with subjects that often seem esoteric to those of us not in the midst of the Washington maelstrom.

Laurence Urdang

EPISTOLA {John M. Balsam}

Concerning “Our Playful Vocabulary” by Burt Hochberg [XIII, 2]:

He omitted several clichés from the dice game of craps:

to crap out: When one throws a two three or 12 on a coming out roll one loses. This has passed into the language as a synonym for ‘drop out or fail’ as, “He crapped out (‘dropped out’) from Bucknell in his freshman year. I was aceing (‘getting a Grade of A in’) a biology course and then I got caught unprepared for a batch of pop quizzes and crapped out (‘failed’).”

Then there is the term play the field. This comes from a section of the crap table where the numbers 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, and 12 are displayed. Some layouts use a 5 instead of a 9 and some pay double or triple on 2 or 12. The term describes someone who is no longer dating a particular person on a regular basis, but rather anyone on a random basis: “He was going with her, but they broke up. He’s pretty depressed and doesn’t go out at all, but she is playing the field.”

Lastly, there’s the term hard way. In craps this consists of the numbers 4, 6, 8, or 10 made with a pair, as an 8 with two 4’s. It is used to denote a difficult way of doing something, as, “The Mets were expected to bear the Red Socks in 4 or 5 but they did it the hard way” (i.e., in 7 games).

One other term that I thought was used only in Nevada has popped up elsewhere. The game is Keno, a relative of Bingo distinguished by its low price (one can play for 70 cents) and long odds. The odds for example of catching 12 out of 12 spots are 500 million to one. A Florida friend of mine used it to denote a cheap political shot, as in, “A lot of Keno shots (‘cheap shots’) were taken at Senator Paula Hawkens because of her neck injury.” A friend in Massachusetts used the term this way: “Pittsburgh has only a Keno shot at the division title next year,” meaning, of course, ‘Pittsburgh at best is a very, very long, well-nigh impossible shot to win the National League East Title.’

[John M. Balsam, Las Vegas, Nevada]

“I” before “E,” except…

Richard Lederer, St. Paul’s School

My seventh-grade English teacher, Mrs. Huckins, had blue hair, wore a paisley smock, and kept an avocado seed in a glass vase on the radiator. I wish that everyone could have a Mrs. Huckins for English, for she was the mentor who taught me the basic spelling rules: how to drop the e in words like writing and dining, how to drop the y and add ie in words like babies and studied, how to double the final consonant in words like stopping and occurrence, and, of course: “i before e, except after c.” Alas, though, as I gradually attained the age of the sere and yellow leaf, I came to realize that the last rule did not really work. Granted that an occasional exception may prove a rule, but this rule has so many exceptions that the exceptions bury the rule.

To begin with, the most famous of all spelling jingles has a small amendment tacked on:

I before e,
Except after c,
Unless sounded as a,
As in neighbor and weigh.

The last two lines suggest exceptions such as beige, deign, eight, feign, feint, geisha, heinous, heir, inveigh, inveigle, lei, neigh, neighbor, reign, rein, reindeer, skein, sleigh, their, veil, vein, weigh, and weight. That makes twenty-three exceptions to the i before e rule already.

Another batch of exceptions consists of words in which both the e and the i are sounded: absenteeism, agreeing, albeit, atheist, being, contemporaneity, fleeing, freeing, guaranteeing, pedigreeing, plebeian, reify, reimburse, reincarnate, reinfect, reinforce, reinstate, reinsure, reintegrate, reinterpret, reinvent, reinvest, reissue, reiterate, seeing, simultaneity, spontaneity, teeing, and treeing. That raises the total of exceptions to fifty-two.

Now it does not take a genius to realize that the i before e rule does not work for the names of many people and places: Eugene O’Neill and Dwight Eisenhower drank Budweiser and Rheingold in Anaheim and Leicester. We could add a long scroll of names to this cluster, like Steinham and Weiss, but we shall settle for fifty-eight rule-flouters at this point.

Here are thirty blatant breaches of the i before e dictum that do not involve names, separately pronounced vowels, or the long a sound: caffeine, codeine, counterfeit, eiderdown, either, Fahrenheit, feisty, foreign, forfeit, heifer, heigh ho, height, heist, kaleidoscope, keister, leisure, neither, nonpareil, obeisance, onomatopeia, protein, seismograph, seize, sheikh, sleight, sovereign, stein, surfeit, Weimaraner, and weird.

We are now up to eighty-eight exceptions, with miles to go before we sleep. For we must remember that the rule proclaims that i comes before e, except after c. This concept works perfectly well for words like receive and ceiling, but what about words in which c is followed by ie?: agencies, ancient, concierge, conscience, conscientious, contingencies, currencies, emergencies, fallacies, fancied, financier, glacier, mercies, omniscient, policies, prescient, science, society, species, sufficient, and tendencies.

Now have a look at three more words of this type: deficiencies, efficiencies, and proficiencies. Note that these are double plays, each shattering the rule twice within a few syllables. But we shall count each as only a single violation, bringing our accumulation to 112.

In the same category, if we are to move upward and outward, we shall have to consult with a genius, like Albert Einstein. Einstein would point out that his surname is another double violation. But again we shall be lenient and count him as one, bringing our total to 113.

Einstein might also spout arcane words like beidellite, corporeity, cuneiform, deice, deictic, deionize, eidolon, exigencies, femininity, gaseity, greige, hermaphrodeity, heterogeneity, homogeneity, leifite, leister, leitmotif, Manichaeism, meiosis, mythopoeic, peiramater, reive, rheic, seity, sulphureity, weibullite, weir, xanthoproteic, zein, and zeitgeist (another double).

These thirty everyday words raise our total of exceptions to the i before e rule to 143, just one away from proving that the famous spelling aphorism is grossly misleading.

So we ask: is there one more common exception that will bring the count to a satisfying dozen dozen? For the answer we’ll have to consult with the Deity.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“We can’t make good grammar great. But we want to make flawed writing acceptable.” [Lance A. Miller, in the Wall Street Journal, September 29, 1983. Submitted by Robert O. Vaughn, West New York, New Jersey.]

EPISTOLA {Norman R. Shapiro}

The recent letters [XI,3, et al] regarding palindromes have had me coming and going. As a longtime aficionado in search of foreign examples, I’ve run (backwards, that is) across most of the Greek and Latin ones mentioned, and as a matter of (retro) course, have found a handful in French and Spanish. For example:

Ésope reste ici et se repose. ‘Aesop remains here and is resting.’

Élu par cette crapule ‘Elected by that scoundrel’

L'âme des uns iamais [i.e., jamais] n’use de mal. ‘The soul of some never makes use of evil.’

Dábale arroz a la zorra el abad. ‘The abbot was giving rice to the she-fox [or prostitute, if you prefer].’ etc.

But I’ve always wondered whether some of the more orthographically esoteric languages, with lots of consonant clusters, could possibly lend themselves to the phenomenon. It’s hard for me to imagine palindromes in, say, Polish.

Colleagues assure me that they do exist in German, though they have yet to come up with any of real substance. (The compound noun Reliefpfeiler, a ‘column sculpted in relief,’ is the best they can do; rather feeble stuff, I’d say.) Others swear that they have seen some in Russian, but suggest that they have probably been stricken from the language as backward Westernisms. A Hebraist tells me that Hebrew creates palindromes—prosthendromes?—rather easily, given the absence of written vowels, but hasn’t yet supplies any examples.

Be that as it may, thanks to my friend, Joseph Stasa, I have recently discovered an apparent treasure-trove in, of all languages, Czech. The Ĉeskoslovensky Svet of December 1985 documents the work of one Stanislav Tvrdík, from Praha-Radotin, who has collected some 3500 palindromes—the Czech term is ráček, the word for the ‘backward-walking cray-fish’—of which well over 2000 are in his native tongue. The following examples display the same delightfully forced logic typical of so many of the palindromes we all know and love:

Do háje si Jan Aleŝ ŝel a nají se jahod. ‘Jan Aleš went to the woods and will eat strawberries.’

Rád líbil se Vit sleĉnám, Manĉe lstivé slíbil dar. ‘Vit was glad that young ladies like him; he promised a gift to the running Manĉa.’

And, if we accept the ch as an individual grapheme:

Do chladu si mísu dal Chod. ‘Chod put a bowl in a cooler.’

I am assured that Mr. Tvrdik will welcome correspondence addressed in care of Ĉeskoslovensky Svêt, Vinohradská 46, 1200 Praha 2, Czechoslovakia, which will backward all mail to him.

[Norman R. Shapiro, Wesleyan University]

EPISTOLA {Adrian Room}

In his interesting musings on Uranus and its name, “Below the Belt Among the Stars” [XII, 4], Thomas H. Middleton says he never managed to discover who actually did name the planet. It was the German astronomer Johann Elert Bode. He proposed the name in 1781, the year that Herschel discovered it. His reasoning was that since Uranus was the father of Saturn in Greek mythology, while Saturn was in turn the father of Jupiter, it made sense to call the newly discovered planet Uranus as the two planets nearest to it already bore the names of Jupiter and Saturn.

Then in his perfectly fair review of my book Dictionary of True Etymologies, Laurence Urdang accuses me of misspelling Abraxas as “Abrasax.” In fact the name can be spelled either way, and I actually based my version on the one selected for the etymology of the word abracadabra in Collins English Dictionary, of which Mr. Urdang was the Editorial Director. So my “misspelling” is in good company!

[Adrian Room, Petersfield, Hants.]

EPISTOLA {John Brunner}

Mr. Lamar York states, in “The Antepenultimate” [XII,4], that “the South redounds” (that’s a nice Spenserianism!) “with thundering double trochees” for names of towns, cities and so on, and “gives his vote” to the Indian origin of Pensacola, Tallahassee, etc., as an explanation of the stress pattern he is discussing.

But surely he’s overlooking the fact that dual stress in town names is a very ancient format in Europe. Two of the pubs to which I walk the dogs on Sunday morning are at Shepton Beauchamp (“Beecham”) and Over Stratton. A little further afield one comes to Weston Zoyland or Castle Cary. Here are others that spring to mind, in no particular order: Aston Clinton, Milford Haven, Wootton Bassett, Newport Pagnell, Moreton Pinkney, Churston Ferrers, Bognor Regis, Newton Abbot, Marston Magna, Chipping Campden (likewise Chipping Norton—this is the Norse influence, of course: cf. -köping), Burton Bradstock…. The list is immense, and the adoption of names bearing this stress-pattern hasn’t stopped; during the recent reorganization of the London boroughs one of them became Tower Hamlets.

What is more, this trochaic form is familiar in France (e.g., Clermont-Ferrand), Germany (e.g., Möchen Gladbach), and to a lesser extent in Scandinavia (e.g., Södertälje).

I’m afraid I must dismiss his case as “not proven.”

[John Brunner, South Petherton, Somerset]

[There are, of course, many others that spring to (my) mind: Aston Abbots, Leighton Buzzard, Stony Stratford, Stratton Audley, Sutton Courtney, Princes Risborough [sic], Stanton Harcourt, Steeple Claydon, Little Chalfont, (et al.), Aldermaston, Westcott Barton, etc. —Ed.].

Paring Pairs No. 26 (Gaelic Division)

The clues are given in items lettered (a-z); the answers are given in the numbered items, which must be matched with each other to solve the clues. In some cases, a numbered item may be used more than once, and some clues may require more than two answer items; but after all of the matchings have been completed, one numbered item will remain unmatched, and that is the correct answer. Our answer is the only acceptable one. The solution will be published in the next issue of VERBATIM.

(a). Concrete evidence of first Gael?
(b). Annie Laurie in Scotland.
(c). Gaelic sailor stern first at airfield.
(d). Whistler catches Gael at genuflection.
(e). If he hadn’t bloomed, Gael would make history.
(f). Gaelic bird call.
(g). A Gaelic scheme born after seven.
(h). Gael insensate at speed of sound.
(i). Gael amazed at Indian blanket—this is straight.
(j). Trim Gael.
(k). Gael tells long country tale.
(l). Gaelic bovine in Hong Kong harbor?
(m). Composer for woodwinds?
(n). Gaelic-Indian mother.
(o). Noisy Gaelic lexico-grapher.
(p). Gaelic weatherman.
(q). Gaelic actor never went up on his lines.
(r). Reagan’s horizontal line of Gaelic descent.
(s). Poetic relative of Gaelic uncle?
(t). Attendance was spotty, Scotty, and you are tardy.
(u). You win either way with Gaelic inventor.
(v). Bashful Gael is the genuine article.
(w). Gael given to insolent, elementary writing.

(1). Adam.
(2). Awe.
(3). Cauliflower.
(4). Caw.
(5). Cloud.
(6). Cloy.
(7). Cow.
(8). Coy.
(9). Cree.
(10). Dowel.
(11). Eight.
(12). Guffey.
(13). In.
(14). Kneel.
(15). Late.
(16). Loud.
(17). Mc, Mac, Mick.
(18). Niece.
(19). Number.
(20). Or.
(21). Ready.
(22). Ron.
(23). Rural.
(24). Tar.
(25). Tosh.
(26). Truck.
(27). You.

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.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

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

Answers to Paring Pairs No. 25

(a). Vandals amok in Castro’s fields. (39,7) Raze Cane.
(b). My dad, a weak hitter, is at the plate. (37,50) Pops Up.
(c). Bar patron fakes convulsion. (13, 21) Counter Fit.
(d). It’s depressing to leave these lovely rooms. (48, 45) Suite Sorrow.
(e). St. Louis ball club’s imported mascot could be a heart stopper. (8, 53) Card Yak.
(f). Gradually assembled luncheon to promote reconciliation. (34, 30) Peace Meal.
(g). Universally heard in control towers. (35, 17) Plane English.
(h). Minor infection makes boss unreceptive to suggestions. (24, 11) Head Cold.
(i). What she’ll do when she goes back to that boutique on Main St. (40, 1) Return Address.
(j). Endurance test for an angry nation. (15, 14) Cross Country.
(k). Had cosmetic surgery, and now … (28, 3) Knows Better.
(l). Existentialist work violates fire laws. (32, 18) No Exit.
(m). Clowning actors spoil mood of Trojan War drama. (26, 36) Horse Play.
(n). Token applause for deceptive move. (20, 38) Feint Praise.
(o). Champion Dervish took students for a spin. (51, 9) Whirled Class.
(p). Aspiring leftist physician serene about revolutionary movement. (6, 27) Calm Intern.
(q). Feds intercept pop-carrying coach. (10, 5) Coke Bussed.
(r). “Officer down!” Or is it just an excuse? (12, 33) Cop Out.
(s). Interrupted dairy snack by scaring “h” out of her. (46, 25) Spied Her.
(t). Daunting ceremonies, even for one of publicized courage. (52, 49) Writes Tough.
(u). Discussion of terms of shipment leaves directors cold. (22, 4) Freon Bored.
(v). Monarch, soon to be executed, issues pronouncement. (29, 42) Louis Says.
(w). Avoid impairment of countenance by wearing mask. (41, 19) Save Face.
(x). Gossips next door track our every move. (31, 47) Neighbor Stalk.
(y). It’s not all bad news. For instance, we can expect plenty of chicken. (16, 2) Eggs Ample.
(z). Some people rub Glaswegian star the wrong way. (23, 43) Grate Scot.

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Tender parts of the art editor’s midsection (11)
9. Photo of wild couples (5-2)
10. Young actress in genuine trouble (7)
11. Countryman takes A-Train in story (9)
12. I dispense with model (5)
13. Walks in street, then takes a cab (7)
16. I’d left a sign of spring in journals (7)
17. Returning, a Republican once more falls for a newlywed? (7)
19. Carnivorous plant from Florida upset wing-ding (7)
21. Narrow cassette user (5)
22. Heavenly gateman keeps frost to outskirts (9)
25. More smooth compliment (7)
26. Former spouse breaks in, sees good-lookers (7)
27. Prisoner makes beer for monetary awards (11)

Down

1. Posts filled by company subordinates (7)
2. Look inside for a story (5)
3. Laugh about desire to be a wild laugher (5)
4. Uses middle of knife cutting cobbler fruit (7)
5. Doctor has ache in the rear (4,3)
6. High official turning in shoddy rating I deserve (9)
7. Make assumption about resort city—it’s second-rate (8)
8. Ladies to be raising hawk? (6)
14. Show up again to harvest fruit (8)
15. Give a lift to help reviewer with accent (9)
17. Tell of tiny switches (6)
18. Hopeful, getting rid of the last drug (7)
19. Divine metals included in professional charge (7)
20. Congressman comes up with uses for studies (7)
23. Mangle about ten with saw (5)
24. Sticker in front of the trumpet (5)

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. HER-O-IN-E.
5. MA(CAB)RE.
9. SUSHI (hidden).
10. P(A-RENT)AGE.
11. ALLEGRO (anag.).
12. H(AIRC)UT (CAR I anag.).
13. IRENE CASTLE (anag.).
18. FRE(D A-STAIR)E.
21. RADI(C)AL.
23. K(NOW)ING.
25. STEV-EDORE (VEST anag.; ERODE rev.).
26. EXI(S)T.
27. DEB-A-TES (SET A BED rev.).
28. STAN-D IN.

Down

1. HIS-PANIC.
2. RESOLVED (anag.).
3. I-RING.
4. ESPIONAGE (anag.).
5. MARCH (two meanings).
6. CONT(IN)ENT.
7. B-RANCH.
8. ERECTS (anag.).
14. EFFI(CI)ENT (FIFTEEN anag.).
15. THANKLESS (hidden).
16. CITIFIED (anag.).
17. H(EIGHT)EN.
19. ERAS-ED.
20. ADVERB (anag.).
22. LOOTS (rev.).
24. O-PER-A.

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