VOL XIV, No 3 [Winter, 1988]
Sherlock Holmes Adds A Word
Walter P. Armstrong, Jr., Memphis, Tennessee
This year marks the centenary of the publication of the first Sherlock Holmes story, which appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887. Since then the stories have been translated into fifty-seven languages and published in thirty-eight countries, in which the name of the world’s first consulting detective has become a household word. Less well known, however, is the fact that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in relating Holmes’s exploits contributed a new word to the English language: grimpen.
It all began with “The Hound of the Basker-villes.” As Doctor Watson strolled across the moor in the company of Henry Stapleton, the latter pointed out to him some bright green spots which seemed more fertile than the rest.
That is the great Grimpen Mire. A false step
yonder means death to man or beast. Only yesterday I saw one of the moor ponies wander into it. He never came out. I saw his head for quite a long time craning out of the bog-hole, but it sucked him down at last. Even in dry seasons it is a danger to cross it, but after these autumn rains it is an awful place.
T.S. Eliot, an avid Sherlockian—he once wrote: “Every writer owes something to Holmes”—picked up the word and used it in “East Coker,” one of the “Four Quarters”:
We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure
foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights, Risking enchantment.
This was first commented upon by James Johnson Sweeney in an article entitled “East Coker: A Reading” in Southern Review, Vol. VI, No. 4, (1941) (reprinted in T.S. Eliot: A Selected Critique, 1948), where he says:
“Life has become” for us, as it had for Dr. Watson in A. Conan Doyle’s The Hound of The Baskervilles, “like that great Grimpen Mire, with little green patches everywhere into which one may sink and with no guide to point the track.”
The quotation from Dr. Watson occurs in a conversation, which takes place only moments after his first encounter with the Grimpen Mire, between him and Beryl Stapleton, whom he believes to be the sister but is actually the wife of Henry Stapleton. She, under the impression that he is Sir Henry Baskerville, has just warned him to leave the moor and return to London immediately. These are some of the psychological shadows which surround these four characters and which prompt Dr. Watson’s remark, using the Grimpen Mire as a metaphor for life’s pitfalls. This is apparently what attracted Eliot’s attention; as one writer (Derek Travers, “T.S. Eliot: The Longer Poems”) commenting on the passage from “East Coker,” puts it:
Such is the human situation, seen at a time of personal and universal stress, and imposing — as a condition of continuing to live in any real sense—the renunciation of all the easy consolations which offered themselves, in anticipation, as desirable goals and which have now turned out to be irrelevant in the face of an unknowable and menacing future.
More than thirty years after Johnson first noted Eliot’s use of grimpen, Trevor Hall in his essay “Thomas Stearns Eliot and Sherlock Holmes” wrote:
What, we may reasonably ask, is a grimpen? The word is not contained either in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, nor in Chamber’s Twentieth Century Dictionary, nor is it even to be found in the row of massive all-embracing volumes of the OED…. It can be said, therefore, that as a common noun grimpen does not exist in the English language.
A footnote to the essay in which this appears records that it is “an adaptation of a talk delivered … on 10 April, 1972.” At that time the statement quoted above was accurate; but it certainly was not so in August, 1976, the date which Mr. Hall assigns to the preface to his volume, Sherlock Holmes and His Creator, in which the printed version appears, where he writes:
I am not the first student to point out the use that the late T.S. Eliot made of the Baker Street canon in some of his poems, but I hope that I am the first writer to assemble all the facts in permanent form.
Dame Helen Gardner in her excellent book, The Composition of Four Quartets (1978), writes, quite correctly:
The supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, A-G (1972) gives “grimpen. (Etym. uncertain)? A marshy area.” It cites as the first use Conan Doyle, “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (1902): “Life has become like that great Grimpen Mire, with little green patches everywhere into which one may sink and with no guide to point the track.” The second citation is from “East Coker.” The third from W.S. Baring-Gould, Annotated Sherlock Holmes (1968): “As is well known, Watson’s Great Grimpen Mire' is Grimspound Bog, three miles to the north and west of Widecombe in the Moor.”
The publishers advise that Volume I (A-G) of A Supplement to the OED was published in Britain on October 12, 1972, six months after Mr. Hall’s talk was delivered but almost four years before it was reprinted in the volume in which he hopes to “assemble all of the facts in permanent form.” Robert W. Burchfield, Chief Editor of The Oxford Dictionaries (emeritus), in a letter to this writer states: “Grimpen was included because we had satisfactory illustrative examples for the word, including one from the works of T.S. Eliot.” It should be noted, however, that of the three examples given in the OED, two use Grimpen as a proper name; it would therefore appear that Eliot’s employment of it as a word was a nonce usage. Mr. Hall has fallen into a grimpen of his own making by failing to review the continued validity of his sources, and Sherlock Holmes’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, must be credited with adding a word to our native vocabulary.
[The substance of this article first appeared in the Baker Street Gazette, Issue #1, Summer 1987.]
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“Last year, 4 million people who wanted to go someplace else flew to Copenhagen.” [Full page ad for Scandinavian Airlines in Atlantic BusinessJanuary/February 1985. Submitted by Murray and Jean Kinloch, Fredericton, New Brunswick, who think SAS should have a word with their chief navigator.]
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“In South African politics the lunatic fringe is close to the center.” [Anthony Heard, editor of the Cape Times (Capetown, S.A.), in an interview with Alfred Balk, publisher, World Press Review, from World Press Review, July, 1986, p. 23. Submitted by Gordon B. Thompson, Etobicoke, Ontario.]
The Poem Recently Attributed to Shakespeare and the Misuse of Dictionaries
David L. Gold, Haifa, Israel
November 1985 saw the beginning of a controversy over whether a poem which Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells attributed to William Shakespeare was really by the Bard of Avon (see, for example, the front page of The New York Times of November 24, 1985, the editorial page of The New York Times of December 8, 1985, and The New York Times Book Review of December 15, 1985). Both sides tried to buttress their arguments by quoting from the Oxford English Dictionary [OED] and at least one side misunderstood the function of this dictionary. In a letter to the editor of the Times, published in the December 8, 1985 issue (p. 26 E), John J. Soldo, who identified himself as the author of The Tempering of T. S. Eliot and three books of poetry, wrote, inter alia:
The dating, given [by Taylor] as 1593-1595— primarily because of echoes in Romeo and Juliet—cannot be any earlier than 1591, when, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the use of die to mean “pining away for denied passion” came into the language. That is a year before Shakespeare is assumed to have arrived in London at the age of 28, a period in which his earliest comedies and histories display undigested literary dross. [Quoted verbatim except for slight typographical changes.]
The earliest citation for this sense of die in the OED is indeed from 1591; the Supplement adds no citations. This, however, does not mean that the compilers of the OED were suggesting that the sense in question arose in that year or that anyone is entitled to infer as much. All we can say is that the OED’s readers found no earlier citations. That is because: (1) the sense indeed arose in that year; or (2) it arose earlier but was not used in writing until that year; or (3) it was used in writing earlier than 1591 but these written sources were not extant at the time the OED was being compiled; or (4) it was used in writing earlier than 1591 but these written sources were missed by the OED’s readers. Indeed, written works do not usually contain the first instance of a usage and all that most of the citations in the OED and other dictionaries allow us to establish is a terminus a quo, that is, a time at which we may be certain the usage already existed.
Therefore, if the author of the poem used die in this sense and Taylor and Wells date the poem to 1593-95, this three-year period is after the terminus a quo for the sense, hence its appearance in the poem is in no way unusual. However, even if the OED had no citations for this sense of die from before 1596 (a hypothetical case!), the dating to 1593-95 could still stand. In such a case, the poem, if the dating is correct, would be evidence that die in this sense was used earlier than our hypothetical 1596 earliest citation in the OED (the poem would thus constitute an antedating). If so, we would be unable to tell whether this sense was first used in the poem since it could have been used earlier (elsewhere) but was missed by the OED’s compilers (and others) for reasons (2) or (3) above. Die in this sense is thus not relevant one way or the other to the dating or attribution of this poem.
Soldo goes further. If I interpret correctly his remarks about Shakespeare’s “literary adolescence” and display of “undigested literary dross,” Soldo is saying that in 1593-95 (and certainly earlier if anyone wants to date the poem before that time) Shakespeare was such a hack that he could not possibly have used die in what was then a freshly minted sense. As shown above, however, we do not really know when this sense arose: it could have been in 1591 or earlier. If earlier, it could have become quite common by the first half of the 1590s. Also, there is nothing to prevent even a hack from innovating once in a while or using a still unhackneyed form. It does not seem, therefore, that die in this sense is relevant in any way to the date or authorship of the poem.
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“All around the room are an exotic variety of very real pot plants. … She [Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird of California] has never been married and until recent death threats lived with her mother.” [From The Sunday Times (London), October 5, 1986, p. 49.]
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“It is not often that one tries to help his fellow man/woman and is bitten by the hand that feeds him….” [From a letter in the Syracuse Herald-Journal, July 31, 1985. Submitted by John S. Hogg, Hamilton, New York.]
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“In an essay answer on a Lit. exam, an Annapolis cadet wrote, ‘… Sancho Panza always rode on a burrow.’ The instructor deducted for this, with the explanation, ‘A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. As a future naval officer, you are expected to know the difference.’ ” [From a supposedly true story on an electronic bulletin board. Submitted by Dana Richards, Charlottesville, Virginia.]
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“I came within a hare’s breath of running for Congress. … ” [From an interview in the Beaumont Enterprise, March 25, 1985. Submitted by Winfred S. Emmons, Beaumont, Texas.]
Poison Penmanship
Richard Conniff, Deep River, Connecticut
For untold generations, well-meaning mothers have been passing on the idea that if you cannot find something nice to say, you had better say nothing at all. Good advice, really, but it is a safe bet most of those mothers were not travelers. Consider, for example, a daughter raised in this tradition who arrives at her London hotel at 8 a.m., bleary-eyed from the trans-Atlantic flight, only to be rudely informed that no room will be available till three, and, anyway, they cannot find her reservation. She will turn blue in the face and have veins pulsing pizzicato in the whites of her eyes if she is then required to say something nice. Much better for the blood pressure to cut one’s sniveling adversary down to size—if only to one’s spouse, and in muttered undertones.
It has, of course, been done before—and done well. Ogden Nash, an otherwise amiable soul, once spent 60 lines of verse venting his spleen on a sneering clerk at “an inn so vile, an inn so shameless,/For very disgust I leave it nameless.” Indeed, the occasional misfortunes of travel have inspired some of the great writers of the ages. Thus after an unhappy stop at a place called The Three Crosses, Jonathan Swift suggested that the innkeeper pin his wife to the sign out front and make it four. Swift, the great master of savage indignation, also neatly squashed the entire populace of historic Chester in a poem of six concise lines:
The Walls of this Town
Are full of renown,
And strangers delight to walk round ‘em:
But as for the dwellers,
Both buyers and sellers,
For me, you may hang ‘em, or drown ‘em.
While it has never precisely been celebrated, this sort of vituperative travel writing constitues a literary sub-genre. I began collecting instances of it when I was living for several months in Swift’s old neighborhood in Dublin. The result was an anthology of poison penmanship, on travel and other vexing subjects, called The Devil’s Book of Verse. (The Dodd, Mead hardcover is available from The Deep River Book Co., P.O. Box 64, Deep River, CT 06417, $17.30 postpaid.) The genre, I found, has ancient roots. The Greek poet Demodocus, for example, did not much like natives of the Cappadocia district of Turkey. In 537 B.C., he wrote:
A viper bit a Cappadocian’s hide
And poisoned by his blood that instant died.
And in the thirteenth century A.D., Robert de Brunne declared:
Frenchmen sin in lechery,
Englishmen in ennui.
The authors of these unpleasantries were by no means all predictable misanthropic sorts. Rupert Brooke, the World War I poet best known for writing that his soldier’s grave in a foreign field would be “forever England,” also once wrote:
Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile.
And Coleridge, celebrated for his imaginary travels in Xanadu, also evidently visited more earthly destinations:
In Cologne, a town of monks and bones,
And pavements fanged with murderous stones
And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches;
I counted two and seventy stenches,
All well defined, and several stinks!
Travelers have unleashed their anger even (or maybe I should say especially) on the world’s grandest cities. Thus, in a small way, Anthony Brode brought la ville lumiére into perspective when he wrote:
Paris is simply disgusting;
Nobody’s said it before,
But the Metro is rusting,
The Louvre needs dusting,
The women are plain and
I’m sick of the Seine and
It smells like a drain and
In fact I find Paris a bore.
The poetic batterings occasionally administered to London’s image have also been of a corrective variety. Almost everyone is by now sick to death of Samuel Johnson’s endlessly repeated declaration, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” Isn’t it pleasant then to reflect that, 40 years before he uttered that remark, Johnson himself described London in these terms?
Here malice, rapine, accident, conspire,
And now a rabble rages, now a fire;
Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay,
And here the fell attorney prowls for prey;
Here falling houses thunder on your head,
And here a female atheist talks you dead.
It would be gratifying to think that in the 40-year interval London had taken note of Johnson’s poem and amended its ways.
But in truth, I know of only one case where a traveler’s malediction has actually produced something like the desired result. An Irish eccentric named Patrick O’Kelly once lost his watch and chain in the town of Doneraile. In a prolonged fury, he wrote:
May fire and Brimstone never fail,
To fall in showers on Doneraile.
May all the leading fiends assail,
The thieving town of Doneraile,
As lightnings flash across the vale,
So down to Hell with Doneraile.
O’Kelly’s curse ran to 84 lines, and in one form or another it evidently made the rounds. When one of the local gentry kindly replaced the lost watch, perhaps with a view to restoring Doneraile’s good name, O’Kelly promptly recanted, announcing his blessings on the poor community at equal length. The reader who wades through all this verbiage will certainly agree that malediction is more fun than benediction. But there is a more timely lesson to be learned from O’Kelly’s case: It is possible to dispatch your adversaries with strong language rather than, for instance, with plastic explosives. A deftly-phrased malediction can make its target squirm in his castle or cower behind the hotel reservations desk.
Now I do not seriously expect our leading terrorists to take this hint, but think of the possibilities. Iambic tetrameter by the scalding reamful would be cheaper than an Uzi submachine gun, and not nearly as messy. Nor would it be suicidal, except perhaps in rare instances. And it might even work.
After all, didn’t O’Kelly get his watch back?
Ici On Parle Anglais?
Johanna Garfield, New York City
When is a vest an undershirt? Or a rug a bedspread? These are not childish riddles to be cast aside as infantile nonsense. In coping with the arcane lexicon of a British girls’ school clothing list, one finds they are questions that, while limited in scope, may have wider political implications. How have Americans been communicating with their English cousins all these years when such a minor document as a two-page list of required clothing turns out to be as loaded with potential misunderstandings as a mine field?
A few years ago our daughter, Clare, then twelve, was admitted to a school in Gloucestershire. An innocent-looking clothing list soon followed, and I promptly filed it away for late summer attention, imagining that I could breeze through it with the same ease with which previous camp lists for three had been dispatched. Not so. The first hint of trouble came when, late in August, I decided to try to fill the list here in the U.S. I soon discovered that even Blooming-dale’s and Macy’s have their limits. Aside from such standard articles as tights and gloves, the more esoteric items (“1 dark red cloak with hood lined in house colour”—in our case, that “colour” being green) were nowhere to be found.
But the real problem was the language barrier. What exactly was a games sweater: a cardigan or a pullover? And in the second half of the twentieth century, were girls really still wearing knickers? Bemused and increasingly anxious (time was running out), I decided to accomplish the whole job when we took Clare to England, and in early September, still groggy with jet lag, we hastened to Peter Jones, the school’s “official outfitters.” There, under the patient tutelage of Miss O’Halloran in “Girls’ Uniforms,” who addressed me as “Madam” and made me feel like a character in a P. G. Wodehouse novel, I began my reeducation in words I thought I’d known for years.
The games sweater, which I’d secretly fantasized as something my daughter and her friends might wear as they played checkers—or, more likely, whist or cribbage—turned out to be a heavy, loose-knit garment, something like a ski sweater, for use in athletics. 3 Aertex shirts in plain colours with sleeves were nothing but glorified, open-weave T-shirts. Temporarily elated (this wasn’t going to be so hard after all), I moved on to the next requirement: 2 overalls with loops (one plain coloured, not white, coat-style), and quickly came down to earth. That had me thoroughly confused in the States, and merely being in England did not prove revealing. Indeed, had the curriculum included a bit of farming or weeding—though a rereading of the prospectus revealed nothing about such earthy activities—how did coat-style fit into the picture of denim suspenders and pants I had firmly fixed in my mind? The answer, I learned from the omniscient Miss O’Halloran, was: it didn’t. Their overalls are our smocks (or coveralls), the kind in which children happily mess about during art period or in which one imagines the great masters executing their masterpieces.
That conundrum solved, we proceeded to three puzzlers in a row: 4 vests; 3 grey knickers; 4 liners or more. My original recollection of a vest as the somewhat antiquated part of the business suit across which my father’s gold watch chain had extended years ago had been replaced in recent years by the vest as a trendy, unisex item. In England, it turned out to be neither. There, I soon found, vests are cotton undershirts. The mysterious knickers are their mates, cotton underpants, and liners their heavier counterparts, with sleeves to ward off the rigors of English winters.
In a mistaken assumption that the worst was over, I was brought up short by 1 pair canvas laced gym shoes, and on the very next line, 1 pair white canvas laced games shoes. Either of these alone would have been no problem, since both sounded comfortably close to what I assumed was some English style of sneaker. But then why did she need two pairs? Because, it developed, only the games shoes were actually sneakers (plimsolls in England): the gym shoes turned out to be quaint, black, rubber-soled affairs, closely resembling the thin, pull-on slippers we were made to wear as children when walking into a pebbly lake or ocean.
We plunged on, attacking the final column now, and I soon found that a bathing dress (I had visualized some newer version of an 1890s’ model) was simply our standard tank suit. The rug was not, as I had foolishly imagined, something for the floor, but in fact a warm coverlet for the bed. The fully equipped work basket (Were they to learn plumbing and mechanics?) was a sewing box, and with its purchase, the last mystery was solved.
Since the job was now nearly done, I had time to relish the charm of some of the more comprehensible requirements. Summer dresses were referred to as frocks, a term I hadn’t heard since girlhood, and the directive that stated “All girls should bring back needlework, knitting, or other suitable handicraft for evenings in their House Drawing rooms” conjured up beautiful Victorian pictures of happy young ladies clustered around their house mistress, singing and chatting as they perfected the arts of needlecraft. Though my daughter could hardly baste, we were optimistic and sent along a small cross-stitch sampler of an English cottage and garden which, to our surprise, she actually completed before Christmas. Wellingtons—those heavy, reliable, waterproof boots that stirred childhood memories of Christopher Robin trudging through the rain—were the only item we were forced to look for beyond the now-familiar confines of Peter Jones, and without Miss O’Halloran’s tactful assistance. But our search for them provided me with a reminder of the superficiality of those verbal distinctions with which I had had such a struggle. En route from the ladies' room at Harrod’s, as I passed the open telephones, I overheard a starched and vested (waistcoated, I knew now, was the right term in London) gentleman exclaiming triumphantly to his wife in the purest Mayfair accents, “Darling, I’ve found the Wellingtons—and in Cynthia’s exact size, too!” I was warmed by this evidence of fatherly-husbandly concern, and immediately felt a renewed sense of comradeship with our so linguistically remote allies.
But what about all those treaties and pacts we’ve signed? Perhaps next time we’d better have a bilingual translator—just in case.
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“Diet of Primitive People Found Beneficial in Rats.” [Heading in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education-Scholarship, 13 February 1985. Submitted by Randy Alfred, San Francisco, California.]
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“Another of the [robins] was seen Thursday by Margaret Leffel eating crabapples in the backyard of her home on County Farm Road.” [From The Daily News, Greenville, Michigan. Submitted by Lloyd E. Walker, Greenville.]
The Serendipity of Cotyledon
Gene Gramm, New York City
… The night was opening like a cotyledon.
—Donald Junkins, The New Yorker
“Eugene,” Edith said, in the manner of a classic advertising campaign, “as long as you’re up—will you look up the definition of the word cotyledon?”
The Webster’s New International Dictionary (Second Edition Unabridged) yielded the following:
cot' y. le' don…, n. (L., navelwort, fr. Gr. kotyledon a cup-shaped hollow, navelwort, fr. kotyle Cf. Cotula)
1. Embryol. a patch or circumscribed area of villi on the placenta of a mammal; —applied esp. to the isolated tufts of villi on the chorion of the typical ruminants.
2. Bot. The first leaf, or one of the first pair or whorl of leaves, developed by the embryo sporophyte in seed plants; —also called seed leaf. The number of cotyledons is so constant that they afford a character for the primary division of angiospermous plants. Thus, the grasses, lilies, palms, etc. having only one cotyledon, form the class Monocotyledones; while the bean, rose, oak, etc., with two cotyledons, form the class Dicotyledones. Cotyledons sometimes perform the function of foliage leaves, but more frequently they serve as a storehouse of nourishment for the embryo.
3. (cap.) Bot. a. A large genus of herbaceous or woody-stemmed, succulent South African plants of the orpine family (Crassulaceae). b. Any plant of this genus.
I had now compiled, on a yellow scratch pad, the following list: navelwort, (I was certain that I had possessed one from birth), cotula, villi, (as in the phrase, “villi on the chorion”), chorion, ruminants, (I half-heartedly believed that this would refer to cud-chewing animals, but the qualifying word in the phrase, typical ruminants was like a red flag, waved in the face of a ruminant bull), sporophyte, angiospermous, and orpine.
Navelwort turned out to be “a European herb having round, peltate leaves with a central depression.”
Peltate was defined as a “shield-shaped, scutiform.”
Scutiform, of course, was defined as “shield-shaped.”
Cotula derives from Gr. and Rom. antiq. as “a cup or vase of medium size” and is also cotyla. It sometimes has slightly curved sides with horizontal handles near the brim and a flat base. In modern Greece, however, it is a deciliter—in pharmaceutical terms: the Mayweed—and under Anat. it is heartlessly described as “acetabulum.”
Deciliter is the equivalent of .1 liter in the metric measure of volume, or 6.1025 cubic inches. In the United States it is .211 liquid pints and among the British, .176.
Mayweed is something I should have let grow, as it does, “along roadsides in the U.S.” without further attention. For, on further reading it developed that this strong-scented, “naturalized” European weed has been used as an “emmenagogue,” which the wavering type on page 838 revealed as a medicinal substance aiding the menstrual process.
Acetabulum had various Antiq., Anat., and Zool. definitions ranging respectively from “a little cup to hold vinegar” to the “cup-shaped socket in the hipbone, which receives the head of the thigh-bone.” Other definitions: “The cavity into which the leg of an insect is inserted at its articulation with the body … one of the suckers of the cuttlefish … the large posterior sucker of the leeches.” And then my etymological heart quickened in the presence of the Grand Design, for there was one more definition: “One of the cotyle-dons or lobes of the placenta in ruminating animals.”
Wildly circumventing the “villi on the chorion,” which was next on my list, I proceeded almost directly to ruminants. I say “almost” because immediately above the target word were: rumgumption (which in Scotland and in the north of England means ‘keeness or shrewdness’) and rumfustian (‘a hot drink composed of strong beer, white wine or sherry, gin, egg yolks, sugar and spices’). And then on to ruminant, which verified my initial rumgumption about the cud-chewing, but included, also, a reference to the “ruminantia,” which are “a division of even-toed, hoofed mammals” including some which do not chew the cud! The cud-chewing variety, in addition to the familiar oxen, sheep, goats, deer, camels, etc., also included “chevrotains” (which are, as you might have guessed, “ruminant mammals” and are residents of tropical Asia, the Malay Islands, and West Africa). The chevrotains, of course, are not true ruminants, as are the Pecora. They are of the group known as Tragulina. There is also the Tylopoda, which includes llamas and the aforementioned camels.
Villi (see villus) are tufts of hair and are velvety or not velvety, depending on whether you gravitate toward Anat. and Embryol., Bot., or Zool. I left them hastily somewhere in the area of the mucous membrane of the small intestine (“including that of the plicae circulares”) and reverting to my rapidly proliferating list, journeyed back more than 1,360 tempting pages to chorion, only to find myself and it deeply involved with the fetus of mammals. This chorion on which those villi are situated is a membrane “always embryonic” and “not maternal in origin.” There was also a passing allusion to the fact that “in higher mammals the allantois becomes intimately united with it,” which something within me decided to accept as a compliment not to be questioned.
Sporophyte delivered the following definitive dissertation, which I quote, blindly: “In plants exhibiting alternation of generations, the individual or generation which bears asexual spores;—opposed to gametophyte. It is not clearly differentiated in the life cycle of the lower plants. In bryophytes it first becomes distinct, being known as the sporogonium. In pteridophytes it becomes the conspicuous part of the plant, the gametophyte being reduced to a small thalloid body (prothallium); in seed plants it is the only stage visible to ordinary observation, the whole visible tree, shrub or herb being the sporophyte.”
Yes. But there were still angiospermous and orpine on my original list; and the night was, indeed, “opening like a cotyledon.” I decided to issue an interim report to Edith, but when I returned to the bedroom I discovered that her eyes were closed and the magazine, face down, was softly rising and falling with her breathing.
EPISTOLA {Adrian Room}
I fear that Stephen M. Edson is being over-ingenious in inferring a reference to the rocky islands called The Mumbles when he considers the origin of the Cockney equation Bristol cities = titties [XIV,1].
The three factors that produced Bristol as the appropriate city for this piece of rhyming slang are in effect as follows:
1. Bristol (as Mr. Edson notes) suggests breast;
2. Bristol City is well known as the name of a popular football club;
3. Bristol is a familiar place-name in other phrases denoting this city, such as Bristol board ‘a heavy type of cardboard,’ Bristol fashion, as in the phrase ‘all shipshape and Bristol fashion,’ referring to Bristol’s former reputation as a port for sailing ships, and, perhaps more aptly here, if subconsciously so, Bristol Cream and Bristol milk, as types of sherry, the former being a proprietary name.
Incidently, Mumbles is not a ‘small nearby fishing village,’ but a busy district of Swansea, now popular as a seaside resort.
[Adrian Room, Petersfield, England]
Playing the Numbers Game
Richard Lederer, St. Paul’s School
From time to time, I hear people say, “That didn’t work. I guess we’ll have to go back to ground zero.” Ground zero is a relatively new compound in the English language that refers to the surface area directly below or above the point of detonation of a nuclear bomb. Thus, one can’t really go back to ground zero. The more common and more logical phrase is “I guess we’ll have to go back to square one.” Here the analogy is to a board game or a street game like hopscotch, where a player has to return to the square where he started. A number of common English words and expressions contain cardinal, ordinal, and embeddded forms of the numbers zero through ten. Doing a number on the origins of these words and phrases reveals some of the most intriguing and controversial etymologies in our language.
Something that is A-1 is absolutely first class. A-1 was first used by Lloyd’s of London in 1756 as the highest possible rating for purposes of maritime insurance. The letter pertained to the condition of the hull and the number to the ship’s rigging and gear. Hidden in the rigging of the word atonement is the number one. That’s because atonement, in its original religious sense, meant ‘at-one-ment’ with God. The verb atone came later and means ‘at one.’
Noting that lambs flick their tails so briskly that the action is scarcely visible, early nineteenth century farmers began using the expression two shakes of a lamb’s tail to mean ‘quickly, in the twinkling of an eye.’ A similar idiom, I’ll be done in two shakes, referring to shakes of dice in a cup or dice box, developed in gambling parlance. When we talk about people born with two strikes against them, we are, of course, invoking a baseball metaphor and comparing the disadvantaged or handicapped subject to a batter who is very close to being struck out.
More hidden forms of two occur in twilight, zwieback, between, and betwixt, in which twi, zwie, tween, and twixt all mean ‘two.’ Thus, twilight is literally the ‘time of two lights: the fading sunset and the emerging light of the moon and stars’ while the root sense of zwieback is ‘twice baked.’
In three sheets in (or to) the wind, a common expression for an unsteady state of drunkenness, sheets refers to the lines attached to the two lower corners of a square sail for control. When both sheets of an old sailing vessel came loose or were allowed to run free, they were said to be “to the wind,” and the sail would flap wildly, out of control, like a person inebriated. Since, technically, there are only two sheets, three sheets to the wind is a hyperbole.
Just as a third degree burn is the most severe and damaging type, so giving somebody the third degree is the most extreme method of questioning. Another explanation of the phrase is that in Freemasonry the third degree, that of master mason, requires of the initiate an extremely elaborate and severe test of his craftsmanship. Third world nations are those underdeveloped countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America who have not officially allied themselves with the first and second worlds, that is, the Communist and nonCommunist groupings.
Have you ever wondered if the tri in trivial is the same as the tri in words such as triple, tripod, and trinity? In fact, trivial does come from the Latin tri ‘three’ and via ‘way’ and means literally ‘like something found at a place where three roads meet.’ In ancient times, travelers and shoppers returning from the market place often stopped at intersections where a side road joined a main road in order to gossip. Hence the definition of trivial: ‘common, insignificant.’
Which brings us to the word quarantine. Is the quar in quarantine related to the quar in quarter and quartet? Again the answer is yes, and again we must look back in time. In thirteenth and fourteenth century Venice and other ports along the Adriatic, to prevent the importation of the dread bubonic plague, ships' passengers and cargoes were customarily isolated for forty days (from the Latin quadraginta and Italian quaranta), held to be the incubation period for the disease. Since then, the meaning of quarantine has been extended and generalized.
More obvious occurrences of the number four are found in four-flusher and Fourth Estate. A four-flusher is a phony or a bluffer. The term arose from the game of poker, in which a player may pretend to have a winning flush of five cards when in fact he or she holds a worthless hand of four same-suit cards and one that doesn’t match. Fourth Estate as a designation for the press originated in a speech of Sir Edmund Burke in Parliament. He noted the various estates of the realm—the Lords Spiritual, the Lord Temporal, and the Commons—then pointed to the press gallery and added: “And yonder sits the Fourth Estate, more important than them all.”
A fifth wheel on a vehicle is usually useless and burdensome, and a person so regarded is analogous to an extra, superfluous wheel. Far less apparent is the quin in quintessence, which turns out to be the same word part that appears in quintet and quintuplets and means ‘five.’ The ancient Greeks held that everything in the universe was composed of four elements—earth, air, fire, and water. To these Aristotle added a ‘fifth essence,’ the purest and most concentrated of all the elements because it made up the heavenly bodies and man’s God-seeking soul. Thus, the quintessence (Greek through Latin: quinta essentia) is its purest form.
Like A-1 and three sheets to the wind, to deep six is a seafaring metaphor. It is an old naval term meaning to ‘throw overboard,’ the six meaning ‘six fathoms down.’ By extension, the phrase has come to mean to ‘kill a person or get rid of something.’
Like the expressions two shakes and four-flusher, at sixes and sevens might have originated in the world of gambling, in this case a dice game old enough to have been reported by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales. Apparently the dice used by the Canterbury pilgrims had numbers higher than those in use today, but rolling a six and a seven was attempted only by stubborn or careless players. The present-day meaning of at sixes and sevens—‘all disorder and confusion’—appears to come from the fact that only a disordered and confused player would roll for such a combination.
Now that we’ve reached the number seven, your sixth sense (the one beyond sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell) may be leading you to the origin of the compound seventh heaven, the very height of happiness. In Islamic religion, as set forth in the Koran, the seventh ring of stars is the highest, “the heaven of heavens,” and hence represents the supreme bliss.
To be behind the eight ball is yet another gaming term. In one version of Kelly pool the balls must be pocketed in numerical order except for the eight, which must be saved for last. If another ball touches the eight, the player is penalized. Thus, any player whose cue ball or target is behind the eight ball is in the difficult position of having to sink another ball without touching the eight. By extension, behind the eight ball has come to denote any difficult situation.
With your new knowledge of numerical expressions, you may be on cloud nine, which is akin to being in seventh heaven. One theory proposes that, just as seventh heaven is based on the Islamic conception of a seven-tiered universe, on cloud nine derives from the Ptolemaic conception of the universe as nine concentric spheres, the highest of which is Heaven. Other theories explain the idiom as a reference to the International Classification of Clouds, in which a “cloud nine” is a cumulonimbus cloud that may reach 30,000 to 40,000 feet.
Etymologists continue to search for the origins of two other popular expressions involving the number nine. The whole nine yards, meaning roughly the same as whole hog and whole ball of wax, has inspired three theories, none of which can be absolutely proven at this time. Some contend that bolts of cloth used to consist of nine yards and that only the fanciest of dresses would require the whole bolt. Others postulate that a three-masted square-rigger carried nine yards of sail, three on each mast, so the whole nine yards would mean ‘the sails were fully set.’ A third explanation, and one supported by my interviews with local workers, is that the trucks on whose backs repose large, revolving cement mixers hold nine cubic yards of cement. Hence, any job that requires all that the truck holds will take the whole nine yards.
Dressed to the nines ‘wearing one’s best from head to toe,’ may be a corruption of the Middle English dressed to then eynes ‘to the eyes.’ Or the phrase may spring from the Scottish game of ninepins, in which nine is the maximum score possible on any one throw. Or the nines may simply represent numerological perfection, the number nine referring to the nine Muses, the loftiest of Ptolemaic strata, or a trinity of trinities.
A cowpoke dressed to the nines might well be wearing a ten-gallon hat. The traditional theory is that the high-crowned, broad-brimmed western hat was worn in part because of its water-carrying capacity, even though no such hat could literally hold ten gallons. Others assert that the gallon is borrowed from Mexican Spanish sombrero galón ‘ribboned hat,’ an item still in the costume of Mexican vaqueros. The larger the sombrero, the more galones are possible. A sombrero of diez galones is some hat indeed.
More hidden uses of the number ten occur in the words decibel and decimate. A decibel is so called because it expresses the ratio of two amounts of acoustic power equal to ten times the common logarithm of that ratio. Decimate arises from the nasty practice of the Roman legions of maiming or slaying one out of every ten captive soldiers. Some purists insist that decimate should continue to apply only to situations in which exactly ten percent of something is destroyed, but in common usage the word has come to mean ‘destroy a large part of,’ as in “the caterpillars decimated the neighbourhood maple trees.”
The earlies record of the ten-foot pole with which you wouldn’t touch something appears in a 1738 history by William Byrd: “We found the ground moist, insomuch that it was an easy matter to run a ten-foot pole up to the head of it.” For more than a century the ten-foot pole remained essentially a literal object denoting someone or something more than ten feet deep or distant. Midway through the nineteenth century the expression began evolving into I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole and came to refer to someone or something repugnant or distasteful. May you be less at sixes and sevens and behind the eight ball and more in seventh heaven and on cloud nine, now that I have touched these zero-through-ten expressions with a ten-foot pole.
EPISTOLA {Bob Marvin}
I wish Mr. Lederer could read his article on “American Slurvian” [XIV,2] aloud to us. How rare to hear a speaker avoid the common slurving of ngs by nasalizing them! How delicious to hear speech spittingly peppered with full-value ts and ds that are commonly elided to bland stops! I’d love to hear him avoid the elision of the ss in nonsense stops to give the a in glossary its full sound. I’m sure he’d never wither the roof of mumblings with a medial syncope, nor slight the vulgarly consonantal i in millionaire, but give it the same dieretic value it enjoys in idiom. (And he’d be no equivocator in pronouncing the i in easier.) His dictionary would likewise trumpet its full five syllables. Such speech would indeed set him apart from the throng.
We could expect such a fastidious foe of provection to need no napron to eat an ewt. But I won’t accept “numpire of language” as his ekename and hope his protests are only for then once.
The cartoon switchboard operator who answers the telephone “Boarda ejicashun speakin' ” is ridiculously incongruous more for suggested intonation (slowly gliding), body posture (neither relaxed nor toned) and facial expression (vapid) than for her “pronounciation” per se. In the proper context (and with proper social support) syncopes, elisions (and resultant provections), synaereses and the like are respectable, and almost any speech written phonetically can look silly. There’s a rich mine of social linguistics here, but it has a far broader vein that Mr. Lederer has sunk his pick into. Incidentally, the proper complement of “mayan” is not “yours,” but “urine” (often syncopated to “yearn”). Slurvian shouldn’t be a focus of calumny, but a reveling in the interplay between the fluid nuances of our speech and its stolid orthography.
[Bob Marvin, Eustis, Maine]
ADDENDA: More English Adjective-Nouns Ending in -ine and Relating to Animals
David L. Gold, Haifa, Israel
To the list of -ine adjective-nouns in VERBATIM III, 3, 8-9, and IV, 1, 14-15 may be added bibovine, cathartine, crotaline, gruine, panorpine, pierine, scolopacine, struthionine, sylvicoline (all in Webster’s Third), pulicine (in the OED), furciferine ‘animal having a forked appendage,’ pieridine ‘kind of butterfly,’ and talpicidine (used by Allen Walker Read in one of his articles; synonymous with talpine). The suffix is used with the names of other organisms too: coraline and hyacinthine are in Webster’s Third; monadine is in the OED; and there are clathrine ‘kind of ascon sponge’ and fistuline ‘kind of basidiomycetous fungi.’
ETYMOLOGICA OBSCURA
Arthur J. Morgan, New York City
In a New York Times obituary recently, the name of the city of Cincinnati was misspelled several times. I suppose that name is spelled wrong more often than that of any other U. S. city. As we know, Cincinnati got its name from Cincinnatus, the Roman hero who, in the fifth century B.C. was called from his farm to defend his country, and having done so, promptly returned to his ploughing. The name was adopted by the Society of the Cincinnati, a group of Revolutionary War officers, and so into Ohio and the city.
But cincinnatus with a lower-case c meant ‘curlyheaded.’ And that’s not the end of the story, since it came from cincinnus, ‘curly,’ and before that from Greek kikinnos which meant both a ‘curl,’ and a ‘fop’ (who had his hair artificially curled in ringlets). In Latin the word acquired an n before k for euphony. The noble family of Cincinnatus had curly hair, but they wanted no part of the foppish implication. So they added natus to explain that they were ‘born’ that way, without hairdressers.
Here another word raises its curly head: kink or kinky. This has been attributed to Dutch or Low German. OK, but it’s very close in sound and meaning to the Latin and the Greek.
‘Nam, Gook, Gung-ho: Nonsense
Henry Henn, Pacifica, California
Military slang is itinerant and erroneous. The term itself is misleading. There are more veterans than soldiers. The veteran more than the soldier spouts the nonsense picked up in military service. We should call it veteran’s slang.
Bergen Evans, learned, respected professor of English at Northwestern University, holds most slang to be mindless and infantile. Military—veteran’s—slang bears him out.
Those who call Vietnam ‘Nam miss the point of the war, the communist wish to consolidate its borders. The Chin Dynasty (255 B.C.) gave China its name, the Great Wall, and an empire. For two millennia before the Chin Dynasty, the Khmer, Lao, and other tribes of the area now known as Vietnam lived at peace with their Chinese neighbors to the north. The Chins and the Hans who followed them subdued the unorganized tribes and brought the area into the empire. China called the newly conquered area Vietnam; Viet ‘extreme’ + nam ‘south’: the southernmost reach of the Chinese empire.
Vietnam remained Chinese until 907 A.D., when the Chinese began fighting amongst themselves. Five Chinese clans seated thirteen emperors in forty-four years. The tribes of Vietnam took the challenge and declared themselves independent. In Vietnam’s stead came Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin.
France, on a colonial bent in 1867, took Cochin, Tonkin, Laos, and Annam and renamed the acquisition French Indochina. After WWII, France announced plans for federation of Indochina into the French Union. Vietnamese nationalists under Ho Chi Minh—with communist China’s support—fought the French for complete independence of Cochin, Annam, and Tonkin. The later North-South confrontation notwithstanding, the name, Vietnam, tattled a common alliance with China. To call it ‘Nam ignores thousands of years of history and millions of hardships, ours included. Vietnam tells a story. ‘Nam merely points south.
American sailors, merchant marine and U.S. Navy, who used the ports of Hong Kong and Korea’s Inchon before WWII, heard the natives shout “Mee Gook, Mee Gook” upon their arrival. George W. Woods, ship’s surgeon of the USS Juniata, in 1884, mentions gook in his log of travels in Korea. He mentions another new word, chow, in reference to shipboard meals. In this one instance, the listener didn’t err. Chow is a Chinese word meaning ‘to chew, to bite, to masticae.’ Still novel to officer Woods in 1884, it became part of our language circa 1877.
Origins of slang are hard to pinpoint, but it seems probable that sailors thought the Asians were saying, “Me Gook” to identify themselves. Mee, by whatever Chinese phonetic spelling, means ‘beautiful.’ Gook means ‘country or nation.’ America, the beautiful country. Americans were then and are now, Mee Gook, not the other way around. We are the gooks, not the Asians.
American troops serving in China in WWII heard their Asian allies calling Gung-ho when charging the enemy, heaving a heavy load, or towing enormous weights: Gung-ho ‘all together; a joint effort for the common good.’ How misleading to refer to a standout, a go-getter as being gung-ho. At work, some people call the boss “a real gung-ho type.” I certainly hope so. Let him lend a hand and help us get the job done—in true Mee Gook style.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Sir, Some time ago displayed outside St. Paul’s Church, Summer Place, London, SW7 was a large poster announcing ‘Christ is coming,’ and on the railings a notice saying: ‘Please do not obstruct these gates.’ ” [From The Times, October 26, 1983: a letter to the editor from Mr. Robert Buhler, RA, Chelsea, London.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“After a special screening of the movie, it encouraged an anti-abortion campaign to distribute hundreds of copies of the film to every senator, representative, and Supreme Court justice.” [From Newsweek, 25 February 1985. Submitted by Steve Short, Los Angeles, California.]
Antipodean English: Give a Dog a Bad Name …
George W. Turner
“What puzzles me,” said a German peasant who had been to a lecture on astronomy, “is not how they found out the size of the stars so much as how they found out their names.” This problem of finding names was one that faced the first Europeans meeting the strange animals of Australia. To some of them they gave European names, which were reasonably appropriate for magpies or even swans, though these swans contradicted the traditional logician’s proposition “all swans are white” by being black. European names were less appropriate when a small arboreal marsupial was called a native bear, and there was a considerable leap of the imagination in using jackass to name a bird. The native bear and the laughing jackass now have the more Australian names, koala and kookaburra. The kangaroo, which an early poet thought combined qualities of a hart and a squirrel, defied attempts to provide an English name. The native name recorded by Banks in 1770 was used from his time on.
There was, however, one animal that was quite familiar. The Aboriginal people were accompanied by domestic dogs, and some of the same dogs ran wild. Early settlers sometimes talked of native dogs or wild dogs, but the name dingo was established from early settlement. Oddly enough, the word dingo seems to have meant ‘tame dog’ in the contributing language, and another word, warrigal, referred to the wild dog. This word was also adopted into English and could refer to other wild animals or plants as well as dogs, but it has never been so widely used as dingo.
I think it might have been bad luck that gave the dingo a name of its own. Dogs on the whole are favorably regarded; the associations developed around the word dingo are uniformly pejorative.
The dog is man’s best friend. We talk of doglike devotion. A boy and his dog become a symbol of togetherness (Aboriginal dogs appear to be more communally owned). The dog is doggedly loyal to his master, however much a scoundrel that master might appear to his fellow man. Even Muslims, who use dog as a pejorative, admit a dog to heaven for his loyalty in guarding the legendary seven sleepers.
The English language is somewhat ambivalent in its treatment of dogs. A black dog is a symbol of the devil, one can be dogged by misfortune and go to the dogs and lead a dog’s life. Some dirty dog could be behind that. There is a hint of canine ferocity in the Roman cave canem (which does not mean ‘look out, I’m going to sing’), and even hair of the dog relates to biting, as does, presumably, let sleeping dogs lie. Yet the pet form doggie (will my doggie go to heaven?) is full of trust and friendship. Dingo has no pet form like that, nor any saying comparable with Love me, love my dog, at least not in the language of the conquerors.
The idioms of Australian English have added to the associations of dog. The ambivalence of attitude seen in the general language is equally evident in the Australian additions. The Footscray Australian Rules football team does not mind being nicknamed The Dogs; the man who dizzily rides on the load of a crane is honorably called the dogman (or has been, since the term is now condemned by Equal Opportunities legislation; a form dogperson, or, for that matter, bitchman, appears never to have been used). A political group based on “Defence of Government Schools” accepted the abbreviation DOGS. Against these uses, there is to turn dog, or dog on (your mates), meaning ‘to betray.’ To call someone a dog in this sense is, in the words of a recent writer, “the worst insult you can throw at a crim.”
Many of the Australian elaborations on the word dog are neutral in tone. A dogleg might be a boomerang-shaped piece of ground, a dogleg fence a zigzag of interlaced horizontal logs. The dogbox is a compartment in a train; in New Zealand in the dogbox means ‘in disfavor,’ general English ‘in the doghouse.’ To have a dog tied up is to have an unpaid account. Dog’s disease is influenza or malaria, and a horse or sheep difficult to manage is a dog. The night’s a pup is a way of saying ‘It’s early yet.’ In some set expressions dog may refer to dingoes, as in the dog fence (to keep dingoes out), or dogger, a hunter of dingoes.
On two occasions dogs have figured in Australian parliamentary discussion. In 1983 when the return of a Labor government reduced Malcolm Fraser to the status of an eminent person, Labor’s Deputy Leader, Bill Hayden, made the remark that a drover’s dog could have led Labour to victory in that election. On another occasion a Member of Parliament complained that the food in the canteen would kill a brown dog. A brown dog is a red kelpie, said to be able to digest everything except poison bait. The kelpie is a working sheepdog, a participator in dog trials, public displays of skill in marshaling sheep into pens. More merely ornamental is the Sydney silkie, officially the Australian silky terrier, a toy dog for the amusement of dog-lovers.
There seems to be no corresponding term “dingolover.” While (other) dogs have various associations, partly depending on whether you are a burglar or a householder, dingoes have nothing but a bad press. The worst meanings of dog are echoed. To dingo on one’s mates is to betray them. Similar meaning attaches to turn dingo or act the dingo. A recent dictionary defines dingo as a term of extreme contempt when applied to a man because of the animal’s reputation for cowardice and treachery. As early as 1855 a poet wrote of “the coward dingo of the bush,” and numerous literary uses of the term have reinforced similar associations. To dingo out is to ‘let the side down.’ There is at least one record of a form dingoism to describe the activities of undercover police officers tempting citizens to breaches of the law in order to arrest them. The dingo is, in the words of a more recent poet, “nobody’s good bloke.”
Much prejudice and preconception is hidden in language. We think of dogs as faithful guardians of property, loyal friends to those who befriend them. They are playfellows and protectors of children. We think of dingoes as cowardly marauders, attacking innocent and defenseless sheep and (who knows?) perhaps a baby. Feral animals naturally hunt for food but to this natural behavior our language adds numerous overtones of hatred and contempt. No child ever asked “Will my dingo go to heaven?”
Alpha Privative = A-Negative
Edward C. Echols, Waynesboro, Virginia
Of all the bits and pieces, odds and ends, flotsam and jetsam that go to make up the contemporary vocabulary of the English language, few have made less impact, in terms of totality, than the negating alpha of Classical Greek. Since it was a major negator for the Greeks, the alpha privative, so called because it “deprives” the word to which it is prefixed of its original meaning by reversing it, is highly productive of words in Greek. In English, however, the Latin negator in- became the preferred negating prefix, appearing extensively also as un-, reflecting Old English and Middle English un-. E.g., the common English adjective describing the absence of a material body is incorporeal, L. in- ‘not’ and corpor- ‘body.’ To describe this condition, yet a third choice is offered from Old English, bodiless, OE bodig ‘body’ and ileas ‘less.’ Given the caliber of the competition from two major languages contributing to the expansion of English vocabulary, it is not surprising that Greek a- ‘not,’ occurring as an- before words beginning with a vowel or h, runs a distant third in the important area of English negation.
Yet, in spite of its numerical inferiority to Latin in-, the Greek negating a- manages to appear in a number of English words in common use, in a far larger number of words with specialized application, especially modern coinages. In such coinages, a semantic distinction between Greek a- and Latin in- is to be seen, especially in abstract words: e.g., amoral means ‘neither moral nor immoral,’ whereas immoral means ‘not moral.’ On the other hand, such pairings as asocial/unsocial, asymmetrical/unsymmetrical in both cases reflect the true negating alpha privative.
Several special alpha privative words may be noted. Amazon is a part of the general vocabulary, but with the study of Greek in continuing decline, the perhaps false etymology of Amazon is less likely to be known than are its several meanings. More likely by folk etymology than by true, it has been analyzed as an a- word, combining a- and mazos ‘breast,’ Greek legend, at least as old as Homer, having it that this remote tribe of warrior women regularly excised the right breast to facilitate the path of the bow string.
Less familiar, perhaps, is Atropos, the third of the three sister Fates, she who makes the final cut of the Thread of Life. Atropos is a- and tropos ‘turn,’ so that she is the Inflexible One, whom not even Zeus himself could turn from her appointed snip.
Avernus, the Infernal Regions, Hell, Hades, is an a-negative word, combining a- and ornis ‘bird,’ so that Avernus is a place without birds. (The presence of the “v” reflects the loss of the original digamma from ornis; the Greek letter digamma represented the w sound, as in Gk oinos; L vinum, E wine.) While Hades might seem logically a place where the damned inhabitants are deservedly deprived of the pleasures of birdwatching, such a punishment, in view of the many other direr unpleasantries associated with the region, would not seem worthy of giving the place its bad name. Avernus, as the Infernal Regions, has reference to the famous lake near Naples, whose poisonous vapors were reputed to kill all birds flying over it. Lake Avernus was for that reason designated as one of the several entrances to the ancient underworld and by synecdoche, the underworld itself.
The negating Gk a- appears as prefix in a number of English (1) Words in Common Use; (2) Medical Terms; and (3) Descriptive Terms in Biology.
(1) Words in Common Use
| PRIVATIVE | STEM | STEM MEANING | ENGLISH WORD | WORD MEANING |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| a- | (gi)gnōskein | ‘know’ | agnostic | ‘unknowing’ |
| a- | mnasthai | ‘remember’ | amnesia | ‘loss of memory’ |
| a- | ‘remember’ | amnesty | ‘general pardon’ | (Forget it!) |
| a- | archein | ‘rule’ | anarchy | ‘absence of government’ |
| an- | hamia | ‘blood’ | anemia | ‘lacking red corpuscles’ |
| an- | ergon | ‘work’ | anergy | ‘lack of energy’ |
| an- | aisthesis | ‘feeling’ | anesthesia | ‘insensibility’ |
| a- | nomalia | ‘equality’ | anomaly | ‘abnormality’ |
| a- | nomos | ‘law’ | anomie | ‘lack of values’; ‘disorganization’ |
| an- | onoma | ‘name’ | anonymous | ‘nameless’ |
| a- | pathos | ‘feeling’ | apathy | ‘indifference’ |
| a- | sulē | ‘right of seisure’ | asylum | ‘sanctuary’ |
| a- | theos | ‘god’ | athesim | ‘belief in no God’ |
| a- | tomos | ‘cut’ | atom | ‘indivisible (particle)’ |
(2) Medical Terms
| PRIVATIVE | STEM | STEM MEANING | ENGLISH WORD | WORD MEANING |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| a- | kritos; chrōma | ‘distinguishable’; ‘color’ | acritochromancy | ‘color-blindness’ |
| a- | dipsos | ‘thirst’ | adipsia | ‘absence of thirst’ |
| a- | geustia | ‘tasting’ | ageustia | ‘no sense of taste’ |
| a- | L. glutire | ‘swallow’ | aglutition | ‘inability to swallow’ |
| a- | graphein | ‘write’ | agraphia | ‘inability to write’ |
| a- | hupnos | ‘sleep’ | ahypnia | ‘inability to sleep’ |
| a- | legein | ‘read’ | alexia | ‘inability to read’ |
| an- | osmē | ‘smell’ | anosmic | ‘deodorant’ |
(3) Descriptive Terms in Biology
| PRIVATIVE | STEM | STEM MEANING | ENGLISH WORD | WORD MEANING |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| a- | branchia | ‘gills’ | abranchia | ‘lacking organs of respiration’ |
| a- | kardia | ‘heart’ | acardiac | ‘heartless’ |
| a- | L. cauda | ‘tail’ | acaudal | ‘tailless’ |
| a- | kephalē | ‘head’ | acephalic | ‘headless’ |
| a- | cheilos | ‘lip’ | achilous | ‘lipless’ |
| a- | koilos | ‘hollow’ | acoela | ‘without a digestive tract’ |
| a- | komē | ‘hair’ | acomia | ‘hairless’ |
| a- | daktulos | ‘digit’ | adactylous | ‘fingerless’ |
| a- | dēlos; pod- | ‘evident’; ‘foot’ | adelopod | ‘without evident feet’ |
| a- | odont- | ‘tooth’ | adonta | ‘toothless’ |
| a- | gastēr | ‘stomach’ | agastria | ‘stomachless’ |
| a- | gliōssa | ‘tongue’ | aglossa | ‘tongueless’ |
| a- | gnathos | ‘jaw’ | agnathous | ‘jawless’ |
| a- | gunē | ‘woman’ | agynary | ‘lacking female organs’ |
| a- | L. manus | ‘hand’ | amanous | ‘handless’ |
| an- | enteron | ‘intestine’ | anenterous | ‘without intestines’ |
| an- | oura | ‘tail’ | anura | ‘tailless’ |
| an- | ōps | ‘eye’ | anopsy | ‘eyeless’ |
| a- | pod- | ‘foot’ | apod | ‘footless’ |
| a- | proktos | ‘anus’ | aprocta | ‘without intestinal outlet’ |
| a- | proteros; odont- | ‘in front’; ‘tooth’ | aproterodont | ‘no front teeth’ |
| a- | splanchna | ‘bowels’ | asplanchnic | ‘bowelless’ |
| a- | stoma | ‘mouth’ | astomata | ‘mouthless’ |
In thus running the vocabulary gamut from abyss (bussos ‘bottom’) to Azymite (‘leaven’), a member of a sect that makes use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist, the Greek alpha privative has played an essential, if statistically modest, part in the expansion of the vocabulary of English. As the vocabulary of science and technology continue to grow, it will continue to do so, perhaps leaving those of us observing such matters in an admiring state of apnea (pnéin ‘breathe’)!
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Classical Wizard/Magus Mirabilis in Oz (The Wizard of Oz)
Translated into Latin by C. J. Hinke and George Van Buren, (Scolar Press, 1987), 264pp.
[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection]
On occasion there appears in the popular press a story on the waxing or waning interest in Latin. In America, despite general indifference to foreign languages, there remains a certain reverence for the language, with nearly everyone having some notions (however inexact) about it—language of the Romans and of the Roman Catholic Church, a key to a richer vocabulary, the source of many common expressions and legal terms, and, of course, everyone’s readiest example of a “dead language.” Whatever vague or misty knowledge people may have of Latin, however much they may hold it in esteem, nearly all assert that it is dead.
In one sense, at least, this common opinion is correct—no living person can claim Latin as a native tongue. There are those few who can and do use Latin as a medium of communication, mainly classical scholars in moments of playfulness and those studying for advanced theological degrees at certain Roman Catholic seminaries—quite a select group.
There are signs of life for Latin, however, if enrollments in secondary-school Latin courses can be used as a measure. The American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages reports that, since the low point of 150,470 secondary-level students of Latin in 1976, enrollments have increased steadily, if not dramatically, to 169,580 in 1982 and 176,841 in 1985, the latest year for which figures are available. Prof. Gilbert Lawall of the Department of Classics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, one of the nation’s leading authorities in the field of Latin education, ascribes this steady growth to the “back-to-basics” trend in education and to the related phenomenon of the general conservative swing in the American social scene. Prof. Lawall notes that in the upheaval of the Vietnam War era, many traditional courses “fell out” of curricula, including, very often, Latin.
The recent comeback owes much to the recognition of Latin’s pedagogical value, especially as a vocabulary builder, something both intuitively and statistically known to be true. Students who have taken some Latin tend to score better than others on standardized tests, such as the almost universally administered Scholastic Aptitude Tests (the “SATs” or “College Boards”). The vocabulary-building argument is a potent one for proponents of Latin education, since it hits home to both students and parents, anxious about the SAT and its role in getting into a college of one’s choice and securing financial aid. In certain pockets of the country there is even a shortage of Latin teachers, a turnaround seemingly incredible to those who witnessed the doldrums of the ’60s and ’70s.
Arising from moribundity to steady growth, Latin is now taught in a growing number of schools and colleges with the aid of a host of newly developed materials that incorporate fresh approaches to learning. The emphasis is now put on the acquisition of reading skills and cultural knowledge. The sort of brutal, rote lessons so long associated with learning Latin—the Mr. Chips approach—is now de-emphasized. Students of Latin are now taught reading proficiency without a painful gantlet of declensional and conjugational paradigms.
Magus Mirabilis in Oz is the child of two unlikely parents: the rise of interest in Latin education and the perennial popularity of the Wizard of Oz story, both in book and movie form. The jacket copy of this attractive little book notes that L. Frank Baum’s children’s classic has sold more than ten million copies and has been translated into thirty languages; “it now can be read in the most classic of all languages. The Classical Wizard/Magus Mirabilis in Oz is the first Latin translation. When classic meets classic, the result, well … classicissimus est.” (The copywriter’s penchant for cuteness comes through, even in Latin.)
But to the book. The translation is absolutely thorough, including title page, Baum’s original introduction and dedication, and the 24 chapters of the text. In addition, this Latin version also includes W. W. Denslow’s illustrations of the original edition of 1900, which appear somewhat bizarre, especially if one’s images of the story are (and whose aren’t?) under the influence of Judy Garland and the M.G.M. film. But for real Oz buffs, no doubt the original illustrations will add significantly to the potential value as a collector’s item.
The translation itself was done with great diligence by people well versed in classical rules of composition, with a style that is true to the folksiness of Baum’s English without doing violence to Latin syntax or word selection. As examples, here are the renderings of some of the most familiar names in the Oz story:
Dorothy: Dorothea
Toto: Toto (3rd declension; genitive Totonis)
Kansas: Kansa (1st declension)
Auntie Em: Amita Em
Wicked Witch of the West: Maga Mala
Occidentis Munchkins: Munchkini, accusative Munchkinos (?)
the Emerald City: Urbs Smaragdorum
the road of yellow brick (Baum’s phrase): via laterum flavorum
the Scarecrow: Terriculum
the Tin Woodman: Lignator Stanneus
the Cowardly Lion: Leo Ignavus
Oz: Oz (indeclinable) the balloon: follis aërius
Winkies: Winkies (3rd declension)
Detailed examination shows that the translation is generally quite sound and readable. Two quibbles:
(1) Rendering the Wizard’s words, “You see, when I came to this country it was in a balloon.” (Chapter 17) as Ut scis, ad hanc terram folle aërio perveni is not precise. Ut scis is ‘As you know,’ not quite the same sense as the introductory English element You see. Better would have been: Scias me ad hanc terram folle aërio pervenire.
(2) When the Queen of the Field Mice (in Chapter 3) refers to the Tin Woodman as “This funny tinman,” the translation gives ridiculus for funny, when surely this is funny ‘peculiar’ (not funny ‘ha-ha,') and would have been better rendered as singularis or mirus.
Overall, however, the story comes through very faithfully, and with economy of language. We are spared torturous circumlocutions or recastings into sonorous Ciceronian periods. The original narrative is presented plainly in Hinke and Van Buren’s Latin prose:
The little old woman took the slate from her nose, and, having read the words on it, asked,
“Is your name Dorothy, my dear?”
“Yes,” answered the child, drying her tears.
“Then you must go to the City of Emeralds.
Perhaps Oz will help you.”
“Where is this City?” asked Dorothy.
“It is exactly in the center of the country, and is ruled by Oz, the Great Wizard I told you of.”
“Is he a good man?” inquired the girl anxiously.
“He is a good Wizard. Whether he is a man or not I cannot tell, for I have never seen him.”
“How can I get there?” asked Dorothy.
“You must walk. It is a long journey, through a country that is sometimes pleasant and sometimes dark and terrible. However, I will use all the magic arts I know of to keep you from harm.”
“Won’t you go with me?” pleaded the girl, who had begun to look upon the little old woman as her only friend.
“No, I cannot do that,” she replied; “but I will give you my kiss, and no one will dare injure a person who has been kissed by the Witch of the North.”
She came close to Dorothy and kissed her gently on the forehead. Where her lips touched the girl they left a round, shining mark, as Dorothy found out soon after.
“The road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick,” said the Witch, “so you cannot miss it. When you get to Oz do not be afraid of him, but tell your story and ask him to help you. Good-bye, my dear.”
“Estne tibi nomen Dorothea, cara mea?”
“Est,” respondit puella, suspiciens et lacrimas abstergens.
“Progrediendum est ergo tibi ad Urbem Smaragdorum. Fortasse Oz te iuvabit.”
“Ubi est haec Urbs?” rogavit Dorothea.
“Est in ipsa media terra, et regnatur ab Oz, Mago Magno quem tibi memoravi.”
“Estne homo bonus?” puella anxie rogavit.
“Est Magus bonus. Non possum iudicare utrum sit homo an non, nam numquam eum vidi.”
“Quomodo illuc ire possum?” Dorothea rogavit.
“Pedibus tibi eundum est. Iter longum est, per regiones modo amoenas modo tenebricosas et terribiles. Artibus autem magicis omnibus mihi notis utar ut te ab iniuria defendam.”
“Nonne me comitaberis?” imploravit puella, quae aniculam pro sola amica habere coeperat.
“Id facere non possum,” respondit ea; “sed tibi basium meum dabo, et nemo ei quem Maga Septentrionis basiavit nocere audebit.”
Ad Dorotheam appropinquavit et ei molliter frontem basiavit. Ubi labra puellam tetigerunt nota rotunda splendidaque relicta est, ut Dorothea mox cognovit.
“Via quae ad Urbem Smaragdorum ducit lateribus flavis strata est,” dixit Maga; “falli ergo non potes. Cum ad Oz perveneris ne eum timeas, sed rem tuam ei narra et auxilium ab eo pete. Vale, cara mea.”
Altogether a solid effort on the Latin, and, indeed, a reflection of the high quality of the entire package. The Classical Wizard is likely to appeal to avid fans of Oz memorabilia. Its value to students of Latin is less certain, despite the good offices of the translators. Some Latin instructors may find it a pleasing diversion for an afternoon or two, but most are already hard pressed to meet current currricular goals and lead their students to the ultimate prize, mastery of “real” Latin. A thorough reading of Magus Mirabilis in Oz will likely be undertaken only by the leisured, Latined few.
The publisher was encouraged to complete the project, no doubt, by the long-in-print Winnie Ille Pu (Winnie the Pooh) and the recently issued Tela Charlottae (Charlotte’s Web), two other English children’s classics in Latin. There is even a series of Disney cartoon character books with the stories given in Latin. But the success of the Latin Oz is likely to depend on the interest of the curious and of collectors, though its mere existence may bode well for the continued vitality of lingua Latina in America.
Frank R. Abate
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Plain English: a User’s Guide
Philip Davies Roberts, (Penguin, 1987), 191pp.
This is a short, breezy, superficial look at some of the usual problems facing those who would speak and write standard English. But the book has a few problems of its own. In the brief section on Grammar, at the beginning, is the information, “Let me (him, her, it, us, them) hammer.” That is the imperative of let, but I get the distinct feeling that the author has picked up let + pronoun + verb infinitive as an imperative construction in English because that is the customary way in which Latin, French, and other foreign-language (“true”) imperatives are normally rendered in English. English has only one true imperative, which is the same form as the infinitive and, as Roberts states, would be just Hammer! (often spelt with the exclamation mark). The “let us” forms, in strict analysis, are the imperative of let and only paraphrases of the infinitive following. Further on, we find that descriptive adjectives form their comparatives and superlatives either by adding -er and -est or by prefixing more and most. But the latter is so only (and mainly) for adjectives of more than three syllables (in the positive), and the examples, more happy, most happy are not entirely idiomatic, happier, happiest being preferred. Perhaps, because of The Most Happy Fellow, song and musical, happy is a modern exception, but most people would consider more silly, most silly or more dingy, most dingy to be less idiomatic than sillier, silliest or dingier, dingiest.
On into the alphabetic section, where we find, under the entry for adverse, averse, the example, “She is adverse to your suggestion that the money should be borrowed.” But is adverse idiomatically used of people? Sounds awkward to me. Adverse winds or adverse circumstances sounds natural. The entry for affect, effect ignores the noun affect: granted, it is somewhat specialized, but these days people encounter words in the strangest places, and terms from psychology (in particular) tend to be bandied about indiscriminately. At affinity we are told it is used with between or with: what happened to for? At amend, emend we learn that the former means ‘improve,’ the latter ‘revise, correct’: the latter is right, the former wrong, as any American dealing with amendments to the Constitution—merely addenda or modifications in many cases—will testify; also, who would say, “You had better try to amend your manners, my boy,” which is the example given?
By this point, we have reached only page 4 of the alphabetic entries, and it seems pointless to continue. A quick browse through other pages reveals, generally, that the examples are more idiomatically appropriate to the level of the author of the book than to that of its user, whom we might reasonably assume to be less sophisticated as well as less knowledgeable: “The unflappable hostess quietly apprised him of the state of his trousers.” “In contrast to his brother’s altruistic bent, Perry’s instinct for self-preservation shows true egoism.” “She eked out her diet of oats with apples and new-laid eggs.” “What does the posting offer in terms of living accommodation?” “Most illiterates know only a marginal standard of living.” Et cetera.
These idiomatic infelicities of American English may pass muster in the region of Quebec (where the author grew up) or in Nova Scotia (where he spent his formative years), but they do not do so in this part of New England. In no event do we consider preventive (formed from prevent + -ive) to be interchangeable with preventative (formed, presumably, from preventate + -ive).
Laurence Urdang
EPISTOLA {Frédéric O’Brady}
Please forgive my irresistible urge to pick on mistaken French in your columns. If it were just another kind of periodical, I wouldn’t bother you with it, but VERBATIM is so fascinating and wittily specialized in languages that I am somewhat obsessed with putting things right. “Right” is precisely the word this is all about. In the comparative table of the article “Sinister Dexterity” [XIV,2,2], the French word droit is wrong for ‘correct.’ It should be exact. Droit is of course the opposite of gauche; but in the sense “That’s correct,” as an emphatic affirmative or agreement, we say “(C’est) exact.” Canadians do use “C’est correct,” though; it is one of their numerous Americanisms. Droit does mean “right” in les droits du citoyen, for example, meaning ‘the citizen’s rights.’ But it can also mean ‘law’ as in étudiant en droit ‘law student.’ Otherwise it means ‘straight.’
And while we are at it, may I pick another error: this one in Japanese. Tadachii does not mean ‘correct,’ it stands for ‘at once, immediate(ly).’ ‘Correct’ is tadashii, transliterated with an s, not a c (difference in pronunciation, as between sheik and cheek).
[Frédéric O’Brady, Rochester, New York]
EPISTOLA {John Algeo}
David Crystal [XIII,3] has cited a supposed diametrically opposed difference in British and American meanings for the expression to be full of it (‘wildly enthusiastic’ versus ‘wildly unenthusiastic, had it up to here’ respectively), which caused an American to misunderstand his use of the form. Crystal notes that he has not found the difference in the usual sources. The reason for his failure to discover a record of this difference in meaning may be that the semantics is more complicated than that of simple antonyms.
The expression to be full of it occurs in several senses: in General English, for example, ‘to have one’s attention fixed primarily on, be preoccupied or engrossed with something, think and talk of nothing else.’ An American might also understand it as ‘to be mischievous’ or as a euphemism for to be full of shit ‘to be decisively wrong, untrustworthy, misleading.’ However, none of those senses is quite relevant to the conversation Crystal found himself in, namely:
Am.: So how did he like the place?
Br.: Oh, he was full of it.
Am.: Too bad.
In Crystal’s British use, the expression seems to have ameliorated from ‘to have one’s attention fixed on’ (without evaluating the quality of the attention) to the sense he cites, ‘to be wildly enthusiastic’—a sense not recorded in seven British dictionaries. Since the question called for an evaluation, Crystal’s American interlocutor may have identified the answer with a different General English idiom, to have/get one’s fill of. Because none of the available American senses of the answer fit the context, the American apparently responded to it as though it were that other, though formally similar, idiom.
What Crystal has identified may not be an unrecorded British-American antonymic idiom, but rather an instance of a speaker’s striving to make sense out of the apparently senseless, and succeeding to his own satisfaction, although not to that of the original speaker. If that was the situation, it is quite as remarkable as the putative British-American antonym, for it demonstrates two things: (1) the passion for making sense that leads us to remodel what we hear into what we think should have been said and (2) the process of dialect clash, one of whose effects is to force speakers to reevaluate their options and thus to keep language variation within acceptable limits.
[John Algeo, University of Georgia]
EPISTOLA {B.G. Kayfetz}
Yes, Mr. Arthur J. Morgan of New York City, the thesis you expound in your letter in VERBATIM [XIV,1] is indeed correct, i.e., that many Yiddish female names stem from Romance/Latin origins whose meanings have deteriorated over the years. But of the two examples you have, one is incorrect.
Yenta is not from Jeannette (which, as the female counterpart of Jean goes back ultimately to the Hebrew Yochanan, and is, therefore, also “Jewish” historically speaking). Yenta is from the early Judeo-Italian gentil ‘well-born, noble, gentle,’ the very opposite, as Mr. Morgan points out, of the meaning it later acquired. The -il ending was erroneously perceived in Yiddish as a diminutive and the formation Yenta or Yente is a retro-formation or de-diminutive. The late Max Weinreich deals with its evolution in his History of the Yiddish Language (English ed., pp. 416-17). Weinreich also deals with the phonetic change in the initial consonant from dž- or ž- to y-.
If there is any distinction between the two words, yente is the more often used common noun meaning a ‘gossipy woman of limited intelligence,’ and Yentel or Yentl is the given name (regrettably much avoided now because of its connotation, not even the Barbra Streisand movie having succeeded in raising its status).
[B.G. Kayfetz, Toronto]
EPISTOLA {Steve Kucharik}
I would like to add some information to that presented in “Iron Language” by Maxey Brooke [XIII,3]. First, the 2\?\P brand is not a tall tale or a practical joke. The Kansas Brand Book of 1920, for instance, lists two ranchers who have registered this brand. The only difference, however, is that the Kansas versions are written differently in that the “lazy two” would appear as \?\ on the animal; the pronunciation would remain unchanged. I find it hard to believe that this particular brand is registered in Kansas but not in Texas. I suggest that Maxey consult the Texas Brand Book for documentation. A copy should be available at most sale barns, verterinarians’ offices, or the animal health department. Finally, if any reader expresses an interest in brands, I would be glad to send them my copy of the Kansas Brand Book, given to me as a curiosity. Although it is out of date, it does list 24,000 registered brands.
[Steve Kucharik, Scott City, Kansas]
EPISTOLA {G. Gelato}
As an Italian who takes great pride in the knowledge and correct usage of his own language, I was astonished to read [XIV,2] the sarcastic comments of Arthur J. Morgan about a previous EPISTOLA of David Miles [XII,4].
I disagree with A. J. Morgan on the following points:
(1) As an adjective, in Italian, bravo is not a low-key descriptive (Where on earth did he get this notion?) but a wide-ranging adjective that could be translated into English as ‘good,’ ‘clever,’ ‘competent,’ ‘efficient,’ ‘skilled,’ ‘excellent,’ etc., depending on the context.
(2) I find it hard to believe that “Sii bravi mentre la mamma é fuori” has been taken from an Italian dictionary (Which one?) because it contains a grammatical mistake so unnatural to Italian ears that it is very unlikely to occur, even amongst illiterate persons. “Sii” is the form of the imperative, second person singular, of the verb essere ‘to be,’ while bravi is plural; the correct version is therefore “Sii bravo” (a boy), “Sii brava” (a girl), “Siate bravi” (boys, or children), or “Siate brave” (girls).
(3) As an “esclamazione” (not the same as “interiezione”), “Bravo!” is a compliment directly addressed to the performer(s): a tenor is acclaimed with a “Bravo!,” a soprano with a “Brava!,” and a trio by shouts of “Bravi!” If, in an Italian theater or concert hall, you hear a female performer or a group of performers being addressed as “Bravo!” you can safely take bets: there are foreigners in the audience.
The expression Accogliere dei “Bravo” che non finivano più is certainly correct in Italian, provided that quotes are used around bravo, which is then perceived as a literal quotation (in the spoken version, the quotes would be rendered by an audible pause before the word bravo). It is likely, however, that an Italian speaker would replace bravo with the appropriate form brava or bravi if he knew that the phrase was about a woman or a group. (He would then be quoting literally what he would automatically assume that the audience had been shouting.)
A final question: what makes A.J. Morgan put animals, children, and workingmen in a separate class from, I suppose, ordinary people, so that a “wet-rag” adjective (which bravo is not, anyhow) can be applied to them?
[G. Gelato, Geneva]
EPISTOLA {David M. Glixon}
Concerning “I Before E, Except …” [XIV,1], Richard Lederer errs doubly in arriving at 143 exceptions to the rule:
-
If he insists on counting every word as an exception, he could, with a little effort, score more than 143.
-
On the other hand, his count would be far lower if he had reduced all his examples of e before i to categories of exceptions:
I. (as in the rhyme he quotes): words in which the digraph is pronounced as in weigh.
II. words in which ei is pronounced as in height, including all German words (zeitgeist, Rheingold).
III. words in which ei is pronounced as in caffeine (weird, seize).
IV. words in which the e and i are pronounced separately (inter alia):
a. When an i follows a prefix ending in e, such as re- or pre- (reify, preinform).
b. When an e precedes a suffix beginning with i, such as -ing, -ity, -ian, -ism, and -ist (being, deity, plebeian, atheism, atheist).
V. plurals formed from words ending in -y (agencies).
VI. words ending in -scient or -science (ancient, conscience), in which the sci is pronounced sh.
The figure for the number of exceptions to the rule would thus be a mere 6 plus the relatively few examples that don’t fall into the above categories. I fear that in order to fashion a case, Lederer succumbed to galloping inflation.
In the same issue, John Brunner refers to an earlier letter on the double trochee in place names such as Pensacola. But he is wrong about the trochaic form being familiar in France, where the example he gives—Clermont-Ferrand—is actually (if any syllables are to be stressed) a double iamb. However, his error is pardonable on the ground of Britons’ general indifference to French pronunciation.
[David M. Glixon, West Hartford, Connecticut]
EPISTOLA {Morrie K. Blumberg}
My English teacher’s “i before e” jingle eliminated most of the exceptions cited by Richard Lederer [XIV,1]:
I before e,
Except after c,
When it sounds like e,
Except when it doesn’t.
And this jingle works positively, even with a bit of faulty grammar.
[Morrie K. Blumberg, Albuquerque, New Mexico]
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Random House Dictionary of the English Language - Second Edition - Unabridged
Stuart Berg Flexner, Editor in Chief, Leonore Crary Hauck, Managing Editor, (Random House, 1987), xlii + 2478pp.
[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection]
As regular readers of VERBATIM are aware, many dictionaries and other reference books are reviewed in these pages, in addition to other books dealing with the myriad aspects of language. In most cases, books are reviewed quite soon after their publication—bearing in mind that this is a quarterly—in fact, far sooner than in scholarly journals. In general, unless a review of some scholarly depth is required—the kind in which the reviewer devotes more space to showing off his erudition or, more commonly, his propensity for nitpicking and for accumulating as many footnotes and bibliographic references as he can, while trying to persuade the readers (of which there are pitifully few) that it was he who should have written the book under review—reviewing a book of any kind should not require more than a few hours. In the case of ordinary fiction and nonfiction, one expects the reviewer to have read the book in its entirety; that is clearly not possible or even feasible in the case of a dictionary or other reference work, and Letters to the Editor appearing in every kind of publication, from scholarly journals to the Times Literary Supplement to the Book Review of The New York Times (to cite at least one gamut) continually point out the real or fancied shortcomings of the reviewers. With few exceptions, those are written by the authors of the reviewed books; in some instances, they correctly point out genuine errors—misquotations, misinterpretations, and the like—in the review; in others, they protest against misunderstandings, which may be either weaknesses of the reviewers or, often, reflexes of the authors’ failure to have presented their theses with unambiguous clarity.
Too many reviewers take their role to be to discover all the reasons why the subject book should not have been published. It is unfortunate, but there is no eluding the fact that the designations critic, criticism, and their congeners have acquired the accompanying connotation “adverse”; as a consequence, many reviews tend to carp. “Kind” reviewers, those who are not, in principle, ill-disposed to almost any book they review, use language like, “I was disappointed not to find word X (or sense Y) in the dictionary.” It is not easy to write a book—any book, but especially a reference book—and the least an author can expect is some respect for his effort. Sad to say, there are many books that should never have been published, either because they are trivial and a complete waste of time or because they are poorly done. However small the percentage of books published may fall into this last category, it must be borne in mind that, taken together, there are about 50,000 books put out every year in the United States alone. (Only slightly fewer than that—more than 40,000—are published in Britain.) Although this includes every kind of publication that can be considered a book, the number is staggering. Moreover, it does not include new press runs of books published in previous years. Most newspapers that print reviews publish one a day, six days a week, or, say, little more than 300 a year; weekly reviews might cover between thirty and forty titles (many of which were reviewed in the dailies, as well). It is small wonder that most books receive scant attention and that the more responsible review publications have taken to listing bibliographic information regularly in a section called “Books Received” (though seldom reviewed). According to H.W. Wilson, publishers of Book Review Digest, approximately XXXXX reviews appear in all kinds of periodicals in the United States in the course of a year, but these are of only YYYYY titles, or ZZ percent of the books published: the rest are not reviewed at all.
To some extent, the foregoing is pertinent to this review of The Random House Unabridged - Second Edition [RHD-II]. The “reviews” already published have been of the “quickie” variety, in which the reviewers check to find some of the new words and senses that have been added and issue comments of a more or less virulent nature (depending on their dispositions) lamenting the omission of such-and-such a word. In general, such pap suffices for much of the reading public—or, at least, has sufficed in the past. It is patently ridiculous to write a review of a book like the RHD-II “off the cuff,” as it were; a dictionary is something like a new mattress: you do your best to select what you think is going to be the most comfortable one in the store, but it is not till you have slept on it for a while that you can be sure you have made the proper choice. Sleeping on a dictionary can prove a backwrenching exercise, but living with it is the only way you can tell whether it fits your needs comfortably.
As Managing Editor of the First Edition of the RHD, I spent about seven years with it before its publication; since 1966, I have lived with it at my side, referring to it so often that I have worn out several copies. Having been responsible for much of its content as well as its organization, I am intimate with the information it contains. To be sure, it does not contain all the information about the language that I am likely to need, and I am often interested in what other dictionaries offer concerning the treatment of a particular word; but, on the whole, I have found it to be the best dictionary I have ever used. [Note to cynics: I have never received a royalty on the sales of RHD-I and have never had any financial interest in its success.] I have almost invariably found it sensible and sensitive, though as time has passed, I, too, have been increasingly aware that it was falling out of date. Now and then, an entry that I should have expected to find was missing; but the omission has never been outrageous, and the dictionary has always been easy to use.
Although I have a couple of reservations about RHD-II, my opinion of the new edition, which I have been using for about four months, is favorable: the principles of inclusion and treatment followed in the first edition have been maintained in the new. There is little point in wasting space in this review to comment at length on the huge (ginormous, humongous) expansion that the lexicon of English has undergone during the past two decades (except to needle the editors about the absence of ginormous, a trivial matter): according to the advertising of the new edition, about 75,000 words and senses have been added. As far as I know, nothing has been taken away from the main (A-Z) section of the book.
The back matter retains the four small bilingual dictionaries (French, Spanish, Italian, German) that appeared in the first edition, as well as a Basic Manual of Style and a section on Signs and Symbols. For some reason, the (boring) section on Colleges and Universities, occupying twenty valuable pages that could better have been devoted to more useful information, has been retained. The (more) useful section on geographical data—biggest lakes, longest rivers, highest mountains, etc.—(which I used occasionally) has been deleted, and the attractive and useful set of maps, with a detailed index/gazetteer, has also been sacrificed: the present atlas of 28 pages with a skimpy, two-thirds-of-a-page index, is quite awful and resembles the quality of those found in vest-pocket dictionaries and diaries.
I am somewhat put off by two major elements in the redesign of the main body of the book: the decision to use sans-serif type for the headwords and other boldface text reflects poor judgment, for, in trying to find an entry quickly, I have always felt that the redundancy offered by serif type makes it faster and easier to read. Particularly, sans-serif type often makes it difficult to distinguish readily among a lower-case l, a capital I, and (in some fonts) the number 1. To differentiate them in RHD-II a serified “1” has been used, and the capital “I” has been thickened. This results in an ugly setting of Illinois, for example, as well as other words in which those letters occur, cheek by jowl. The decision to change to sans-serif type is probably attributable to the publisher’s art department, which, like most art departments, can seldom let well enough alone.
The other decision regarding design involves the illustrations. In the first edition, these were set with run-arounds—that is, the type of the contiguous entry or entries was set in narrower measure to allow for the width of those illustrations of less than a full column in width. When I first saw the illustrations a full column wide, I assumed that the decision had been taken to avoid the complexities of run-arounds when setting a book by computer. (It is not that it cannot be done, only that it makes life more complicated.) I have been assured by Stuart Flexner, however, that the decision was not affected by considerations of typesetting. I have no fundamental objection to the principle of full-column-width illustrations (with captions alongside rather than underneath), but not all the illustrations (especially the maps) lend themselves well to that treatment. Sad to relate, the art department also decided to place a fine screen over all illustrations (except maps), a very poor decision, indeed, for the screen frequently obscures the fineness of detail in many of the drawings. All the drawings in the first edition were commissioned by me, and I was very pleased with their appearance, believing that they added measurably to the look of the book’s pages; the toning and shading of the original illustrations has been all but obliterated by the screening. While I am at it, I might as well say that I can see no valid reason whatsoever for changing the design of the front cover: after twenty years spent in establishing the fine design of the original edition, it has been abandoned in favor of a pleasant, if undistinctive design. It is a pity that art departments do not seem to feel that they are doing their job if they do not make changes and would, undoubtedly redesign the Sistine Chapel if given the chance.
As for the content, only a few changes are immediately apparent, the chief one being the addition of a span of dates for the development of identified senses in the etymologies of given words. In some entries (e.g., quark), it is possible to pinpoint the date of coining of a term; in other cases, the editors have chosen to give either very general information (e.g., for shade, “bef. 900”) or rather specific information regarding a particular definition (e.g., shade, “1960-65 for def. 17”). As this kind of information can be provided neither consistently nor with complete accuracy, it is ill-advised to include it at all. Parallel data for entries like run and set with 178 and 116 definitions, respectively, is absent (quite sensibly). Besides, that kind of information is the most likely to be misconstrued by the average user: How often have we heard someone say that a certain word “came into the language” in a certain year (usually after looking up the first citation in the OED)? Even if a range is given, it is likely to be wrong. Admittedly, it is pretty safe to give “bef. 900” as a date if the word appeared in Beowulf; but def. 17 of shade, cast or put someone in or into the shade, although it might not be attested in written form prior to 1960 could certainly have existed earlier, especially when one considers that, with variants, it appears in four different forms. I feat that in a misguided attempt at being competitive with the latest edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, the editors of the RHD-II have fastened on the most volatile (and probably most likely to be misunderstood) information available to lexicographers.
An area that should have been researched a bit more assiduously is the pronunciation of British English. Scattered here and there are transcriptions showing the way words are pronounced in (southern) British, usually called “RP” (for “Received Pronunciation”). Thus, we find at controversy, after the normal U.S. pronunciation with the stress on the first syllable, the pronunciation [k\?\n trov’\?\r sē] labeled “Brit. also”], which would be correct if the [r] in the third syllable had been omitted. But no “Brit. also” pronunciations are given for disciplinary and a host of other words in which there is a variant pronunciation with a change of stress; nor, indeed, are such pronunciations as [mäsk] (for mask) labeled “Brit. also.” The basic question is Why show British pronunciations?, the secondary question is Why not show them consistently?, and the ancillary question is Why show British variant pronunciations when standard British pronunciation is not shown?
The length at which I have carried on about these two anomalous curiosities is more in proportion to the need to explain them, not as a reflection of their being of great moment: in a work of such considerable consequence, they are punctilious peccadilloes. (I also noted the absence of an entry for E. Nesbit, the author of The Bastable Children and other important books for children, but that could well be laid at my door, for she is missing from the first edition, as well.)
In sum, the RHD-II deserves praise for what it contains, the most complete and up-to-date description of the English language of the United States available. It is hoped that, unlike the earlier edition, it will be subjected to continual updating, if not annually then at least quinquennially.
Laurence Urdang
EPISTOLA {Donald E. Schmiedel}
Dan Soyka’s article on the second person singular [XIV,1] was timely. I note increasing confusion among writers, speakers, and young actors who are unfamiliar with the archaic cases and verb forms. (Never mind those whose confusion is non-archaic: “I saw he and his wife.”) Mr. Soyka’s reference to Spanish calls for some comment even though it was not his intent to analyze it in detail. Spanish indeed retains the second person pronouns tú (he cites the objective te) and vosotros for familiar address. But the statement that usted and ustedes are for “general use” is puzzling. They are for formal use and though they are, I suppose, second person in function, they are third person in form, descendants of the honorific Vuestra Merced ‘Your Grace.’ This is complicated by the fact that vosotros, though thriving in Spain, is almost completely abandoned in the New World. For most Spanish speakers the plural of tú is, in effect, ustedes.
[Donald E. Schmiedel, Las Vegas, Nevada]
EPISTOLA {Robert Marvin}
In setting us straight about the German connotation of quark, [XIV,1], Nicholas Demy suggests more of a connection between Dichtung ‘poem’ and Dichtung ‘condensation’ than my German dictionaries admit. The former comes from Latin dictāre, while the latter has a long Germanic lineage. But perhaps Mr. Demy has some yet anterior knowledge unexpressed by Duden and Kluge. Caveat corrector.
Harry Cohen only hinted at the interesting -ella diminutives of Latin -inas, such as patella (patina was a ‘little bronze bowl’) and female (from femina, no relation to male). The most fascinating pair is vagina-vanilla, both sheaths. (The -els in Brussels is no diminutive, but from sella or sala ‘habitation.') An extra vanillin fillip is that the plant is an orchid (as in orchidectomy, the operation that makes castrati).
I offer a word perhaps worthy of circulation—anthroponesia, the concept that we are all little islands of existence. John Donne was an anthroponesiast.
[Robert Marvin, Eustis, Maine]
EPISTOLA {Richard Libby}
Dennis Baron’s essay, “Public Cutespeak,” [XIII,4] suggested that The Kangaroo Court and Too Good to Be Threw were San Antonio’s only local “pun stores.” He neglects, though, (perhaps through no fault of his own), a more recent San Antonio establishment with the ultimate ironic moniker: a nightclub called Sunova Beach!
[Richard Libby, San Antonio, Texas]
EPISTOLA {A. Ross Eckler}
Sydney Abbey’s diliterals [XIII,4] have appeared in Word Ways at various times, usually embedded in plausible sentences (see Wolpow’s “Ealalalalala … lala,” February 1982, p. 13) and colloquy examples in May 1980, August 1981, May 1982, August 1982, February 1983. Much earlier, Borgmann and others developed charade sentences, such as
Flamingo pale, scenting a latent shark.
Flaming, opalescent in gala tents—hark!
J.A. Lindon called the phonetic equivalent of diliterals “stutterances” (Word Ways, August 1972) such as:
Al, be no albino.
Auntie, this is antithesis.
Agreed a greedy man, “Demand Patty’s patties.”
In connection with Norman Shapiro’s letter [XIV,1], he may be interested to know that there exist at least two articles in Nauka i Zhizh on Russian palindromic poems; both articles have been translated by Haim Kilov and S. El’Man and appear in the February 1984 and August 1987 issues of Word Ways. Herbert Pfeiffer published in Neue Texte (an Austrian poetry journal) a German palindrome about one page long; a copy of it appears in the May 1985 Word Ways, together with a partial translation.
However, he (and other readers) will be most interested to hear that Señor José María Albaigés Y Olivart, Numancía 87, Esc. B., 12.3, 3.a, Barcelona 29, Spain, has formed an International Palindromists’ Club with the object of exchanging ideas and publishing discoveries in this field. In June 1987 the club issued a 38-page newsletter to its members, detailing what had up to then been learned. It is written in Spanish, but there are English translations for many of the items. Anyone writing to them would, I am sure, be welcomed with open arms.
[A. Ross Eckler, Morristown, New Jersey]
EPISTOLA {Nancy Birkrem}
With regard to SIC! SIC! SIC! [XIV,1] which said “trucks and tools required but not mandatory,” I work in one of the libraries that subscribe to the online bibliographic database known as OCLC. When entering an item into the system, any given element of the description, e.g., the title, the collation, is either mandatory, required, or optional. OCLC defines the difference between “mandatory” and “required” as follows:
Mandatory: The library must enter data in order for the record to meet the designated standard.
Required: The Library must enter data when the data is readily available and applicable to the item being catalogued. (Source: Bibliographic input standards. 3rd ed. Dublin, OH: OCLC, c1985. p.22).
[Nancy Birkrem, South Hadley, Massachusetts]
Paring Pairs No. 28
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). Salary for Siamese becomes capital in Taiwan?
(b). Def.: (of a Chinese) to get drunk.
(c). Frowning, morbid fighter-plane pilot.
(d). Bury the fresco between the institutions.
(e). Caviar vessel.
(f). Iraqi street woman’s father?
(g). Polluted, wealthy people.
(h). Fat farm.
(i). Computer connection for grain shipments.
(j). Nude film-goer.
(k). That’s a no-no.
(l). Animated shorts.
(m). Cry stinking fish about the legacy.
(n). Little devil to wander about and get better.
(o). Policy of Doc’s memo.
(p). Productive distribution of hereditary character.
(q). Benedict Arnold in the Big Apple?
(r). Plastic surgeon is the expert.
(s). Tainted caviar in Hyde Park.
(t). Tbe Naughty Sombrero, a German spa?
(u). Makes the stool move smoothly.
(v). Patchy sidemen.
(w). Appealing fruit of your labors.
(x). Post partum for a man.
(y). Pitcher ends his career.
(z). Lachrymatory.
(1). Ace.
(2). Aids.
(3). Air.
(4). Bad.
(5). Bag.
(6). Band.
(7). Boat.
(8). Buff.
(9). Caster.
(10). Caul.
(11). Cereal.
(12). Commune.
(13). Dad.
(14). Double.
(15). Effluent.
(16). Gene.
(17). Grim.
(18). Hippie.
(19). Homburg.
(20). Hot.
(21). Imp.
(22). Inter.
(23). Job.
(24). Knows.
(25). Male.
(26). Movie.
(27). Mural.
(28). Negative.
(29). Northern.
(30). Note.
(31). Offal.
(32). Oil.
(33). On.
(34). Paring.
(35). Pants.
(36). Pay.
(37). Pears.
(38). Port.
(39). Quay.
(40). Ration.
(41). Roe.
(42). Rotten.
(43). Rove.
(44). Society.
(45). Sole.
(46). Spy.
(47). Thai.
(48). Up.
(49). Wail.
(50). Winds.
(51). Won.
Winners receive a credit of $25.00 or the equivalent in sterling towards the purchase of any title or titles offered in the VERBATIM Book Club Catalogue. Two winners will be drawn from among the correct answers, one from those received in Aylesbury, the other from those received in Old Lyme. Those living in the U.K., Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa should send their answers to VERBATIM, Box 199, Aylesbury, Bucks., HP20 ITQ, England; all others should send their answers to VERBATIM, 4 Laurel Heights, Old Lyme, CT 06371, U.S.A. You need send only the one-word solution, on a postcard, please.
Answers to Paring Pairs No. 27
(a). Destiny completed the job, but shed its ending. (12,1) Fate Accompli.
(b). Live backwards with élan. (11, 47) Evil Spirit.
(c). Low-class bird takes potshot at eavestrough. (16, 43) Gutter Snipe.
(d). Contest queen holds sway in wetlands. (33,3) Raining Beauty.
(e). Regretful betrothal. (44,31) Sorry Plight.
(f). Fishy appendage in Scottish lake artfully captures king in bridge game. (13,24) Fin Ness.
(g). Leer at Amerind athlete to found Georgia. (25,51) Ogle Thorpe.
(h). Washer and Mixmaster cycles make bachelor lady. (46,49) Spin Stir.
(i). Anti-bellum epergne for actress Berger. (40,28) Senta Peace.
(j). French drink regally in West End. (7,37) Café Royal.
(k). Arrest Creator for betting in bindery. (5,21) Book Maker.
(l). Flavorful additive has British County origin. (53,45) Worcestershire Source.
(m). “Avoid this Suez port’s stairway part,” he uttered. (38,48) Said Step.
(n). In other words, the sandy ridge destroyed. (36,35) Reef Razed.
(o). Signal greeting from lofty trigonometric function. (17,42) Hi Sine.
(p). Fruitful bracing contest. (26,29) Pairing Pears.
(q). Familiarity with the Almighty provides olfactory protection. (18,15) Knows God.
(r). Rising seance sound provides closing summary. (34,52) Rap Up.
(s). Gardner and Chaney make for misty isle. (2,20) Ava Lon.
(t). Headhunters lure intellectual talent into sinkhole. (6,9) Brain Drain.
(u). Course assignment on bishopric seat leads to high religious office. (27,39) Paper See.
(v). The key is to stay alert or get stung, Becky. (4,41) Bee Sharpe.
(w). Ministrel performer to make isle extinct. (10,22) End Man.
(x). Missing veteran golfer discovered in deep. (32,14) Pro Found.
(y). Bob the dog’s appendage. (8,50) Cur Tail.
(z). A bit of a legal professional. (23,30) Mouth Piece.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“These are not the habits of a president who would wield the line-item veto pen mercilously.” [From The San Bernardino Sun, 1 February 1985. Submitted by J.B. Lawrence, San Bernardino, California.]
Crossword Puzzle
Across
1. Display of maturity in storage room (9)
6. Wheelbarrow contains a bit of jewelry (5)
9. He holds policeman back for a time (5)
10. Telegram about damaged mail is ready to be picked up (9)
11. Unimportant court case involves six (7)
12. Not quite unnecessary syringes (7)
13. Bit of holly among gifts exchanged in boxes (6)
14. Left to cheer about learned bullfighter (8)
17. Brat pretended to be struck (8)
19. Took a break from exercise in apartment (6)
22. Stuck tag on, wrapping present (7)
24. Opponents with net, holding me back (7)
26. Coastline is rough in parts (9)
27. True weight lifting? (5)
28. Result in green suede (5)
29. Helpful person hurt by one possessed by the Devil (9)
Down
1. Petition Time to fold (5)
2. Getting old airplane part in collection (7, 2)
3. Skeptic at holdup (7)
4. Football player raising deer and lion (6)
5. Desire traveling on a ferry (5, 3)
6. Arrive to protect darling from struggle (7)
7. Stagger around front of barricade in riot (5)
8. Tramp clutching certain valuable (9)
13. Out of Africa’s seen with cook (9)
15. I had to be in disagreement! (9)
16. Necklaces wind up in drawers (8)
18. Red auto owned by me (7)
20. A gambler’s assistant (7)
21. Plot to flee from asylum (6)
23. Chops up workhorses (5)
25. Protest—trespass holding it (3-2)
Crossword Puzzle Answers
Across
1. PREORDAINMENT (anag.).
9. S(HERB)ET.
10. DECLARE (anag.).
11. TOTES (two meanings).
12. RES(I’D)ENTS.
13. STARSHIP (anag.).
14. A-DO-RED.
17. C(AN)OPY.
19. SE(ARCH)ES.
23. SC(A-RED) OFF.
25. DRAW-L.
26. AT-TRACT.
27. O-VERSE-A.
28. CLEMENT ATTLEE (hidden).
Down
1. PESETA (hidden).
2. E(YES)-TRAIN.
3. REB-USES.
4. A-STEROID.
5. NUDIST (anag.)
6. EN(CO.)DED.
7. TWAIN (anag.)
8. LEASED (homophone).
15. RE-HEARS-AL.
16. SE-AFRO-NT.
17. COSTAR (anag.)
18. P(REF)ACE.
20. RE(D) CENT.
21. SA(L)VAGE.
22. L(O)ATHE.
24. ANTI-C.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Now his golf balls are displayed on placks along the walls of his basement.” [From an Ohio AP wire, January 1984. Submitted by Randy Alfred, San Francisco, California.]