VOL XIV, No 4 [Spring, 1988]

Poetic Licenses

Paula Van Gelder, Los Angeles

As I inched along a congested roadway the other day, I found myself behind an otherwise nondescript white van whose license plate read VAN BLNC. How clever, I thought, wondering if even at that very moment, the driver was imbibing white wine and thinking of outrageous puns.

In recent months, I have made something of a habit of noting those personalized plates in the Los Angeles area that I find interesting or amusing. In California, plates of this sort are more accurately known as Environmental License Plates (ELPs), since the proceeds from this program are used to fund environmental projects such as wildlife parks. California’s ELP program is the largest of its kind in the country; the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) lists more than a million ELPs in its official compendium, many of them reflecting the humor and punning talents of their creators. Under the California program, vehicle owners may choose any combination of letters and numbers between two and seven characters in length for their plates. (Prior to 1977, the maximum number of characters allowed was six.) The only restrictions are that the selections must not duplicate previously issued plates or be offensive or misleading. Personalized plates seem to reflect contemporary language and society. For example, as the Los Angeles Times reported on September 20, 1984, the most sought-after personalized plate in California in 1970 was PEACE. In 1984, however, the most common requests included GO FOR IT, IM A 10, and PORSCHE.

In order to present names, descriptions, or sayings within the restricted format of a license plate, creators usually have to resort to some form of language reduction or wordplay. Reduction in many cases employs processes parallel to those used in creating signage (e.g., nite, lite, thru, Xing, laff), classified advertisements (e.g., dept mgr, ob/gyn), or other reduced forms, such as the call letters of radio stations (e.g., KLSX for classics.) In many cases, understanding a plate is all but impossible without the help of certain contextual cues. For example, the point of BORN TAN is understandable only if one has happened to spot the driver of the car, a black woman. Similarly, understanding RGR8GRM may be easier if one has seen the older woman driver (presumably, “our great gram”). My friend, given only the above plate configuration as a clue, suggested that the plate might belong to “Roger 8-Gram,” a local drug pusher. The place where one sees a plate may likewise help in interpreting it. For example, I glimpsed PERADOX in the parking lot of the UCLA Medical Center. Given the location, I guessed that the car might belong to a couple who are physicians. Similarly, NATE PT spotted behind a convalescent hospital, connoted “physical therapist” for me, rather than “part-time” or some other equally plausible, alternate interpretation of PT. Sometimes quite a bit of background information, as well as context, is necessary in order to interpret a reference. For example, the plate NADER 1 (illustrated in Life magazine on November 17, 1972) is understandable only if the reader knows that the make of car so described—a Corvair—was once described as unsafe by consumer activist Ralph Nader.

Given all of the possibilities for license plate subject matter, how do vehicle owners go about creating their personalized messages? While most of their strategies by necessity involve contraction and abbreviation of forms (to fit into the six-or seven-character limitation), others involve character substitutions or additions to achieve the desired result. ELP strategies appear to fall into one or more of the following categories. The plates described below, unless otherwise identified, are actual ELPs selected from the official compendium published by the state of California.

1. Dropping vowels, particularly schwa and silent e. This seems to be one of the strategies most commonly used in ELP formation. Sample plates include:

APPLPI CAMBRDG
CHPMNK
EGR2RUN
IDESGNR JRNLST
JZPLAYR
LTLPAUL MTRL GUY
NAVGTOR
PARALGL
RDRUNNR

2. Dropping consonants.

MRXIMNT (Mr. Excitement) MY MSTG3 (on a Mustang) PONIAC
SGLFILE
SKYSKPR
WYLFIRE

3. Using substitute characters rather than conventional orthography to represent perceived sounds.

BEATLZ
DIDJA3 EXSOLJA
FSHN BIZ
ISUPOZE
JAGWAR
MYKAR
ODOKTOR
SINTHIA SPSHULI

4. Substitution, addition, or deletion of characters to represent accent or dialect.

4GWAMA HAHVAHD IMNACTA
IWUVYOU
OIRISHI
SHOYL B
WATEVAH

5. Repetition of characters to represent stress, intonation, accent, or pronunciation. It is not clear, however, which of these plates reflect these purposes and which reflect merely their creators' inability to obtain a more traditional or closer spelling of a name or phrase. Examples include:

AAHOOGA BEEEEEP
BILEEE
BOOOOOM
BOOOOZE
EETALY
IMKOOOL OOOOGAH
RROWRR
RRRITA
SOOOLA
ZOOOOOM

6. Combination of numerals and letters. Some plate makers utilize alphanumeric forms, creating hybrid messages that could be written entirely in numeric or alphabetic characters. Examples include:

7. Use of numerals and letters as homophones or near homophones.

a) Simple: A homophone substitutes for a syllable or word:

ADVIZ4U
BGOOD
BOYIDER CBIRDGO
CMY81GO
EZTOC ODE4JOY
RDOG
T42ME4U T4U2NV
UBGD2ME

Examples using Roman numerals include:

IIGETHR
IIIWLR VIIHEVN

In some cases, plates using such homophones are wonderfully ambiguous, such as the message 2HIP MD. Was this car a gift to an orthopedic doctor or is this the self-description of a “too-hip” physician?

b) Complex: The sound of a homophone, usually a numeral, is incorporated into another, adjoining sound.

A2TH4U
A2THMAN
CUL8RQT
DR4A2TH
H82BL8
ICALQL8 LB8OVEN NAVG8OR
OBFUSC8

c) Use of character repetition to achieve the value of the homophone + plural ending. The repetition of a character often signals a change in meaning from that of the character standing alone. For example, Y would usually be taken as a homophone for why: YY, however, would probably be read as wise. Similarly, EE might be used to represent ease, while TT might convey tease. Examples of plates utilizing this technique include:

CBBB
DR4IIII
EXQQQME
IIIIBLU IMCRAAZ XUUUUME

d) Homophonic characters are sometimes used to represent colloquial or reduced forms in English.

4UNME1
ADDMUP
ILBCNU
IMNACTA
INDEYE
LOTZAFN
N2DRTS N4GETBL

8. Use of abbreviations, initializations, blends, acronyms, or symbols.

a) Many conventional abbreviations are commonly used:

15MAR57
75BMW COPYMGR
DEPTMGR
GV2UCLA
LAFD911
OBGYN2B
WWIACE

b) Nonstandard abbreviations include specialized terms from disciplines such as medicine (CAT SCAN, CODE3MD); chemistry—e.g., C2H5 (ethyl, perhaps a pun on the name Ethel), C2H5OH (ethanol), C3H8 (propane); and from the business world (SASAIR, HJS GRFX, KSCVFM). There is quite a lot of overlap in abbreviated forms, leading to potential ambiguities. MAC might refer to a Macintosh computer of Apple Computer, Inc., or to a Big Mac hamburger at MacDonald’s. IRA may refer to an Individual Retirement Account or to the Irish Republican Army. CAT could indicate a radiological procedure or Salomon Brothers' certificates of accrual on Treasury securities.

9. Use of foreign words, phrases, abbreviations, acronyms, etc. All of the processes outlined above can be applied to non-English words and phrases as well as to English. Furthermore, complete foreign words may occasionally be used to convey an idea or attitude that is not as readily served by an English translation. Examples of foreign plates include MAIS OUI, NOTABNY (‘nota bene’), JOI VIVR (‘joie de vivre’), 2CHE PAS (‘ne touches pas’ = ‘don’t touch’), LA BEL V (‘la belle vie’), BET NOIR (‘bête noire’; seen on a black car), and OISEAU ‘(bird’).

10. Use of codes, ciphers, or other techniques for conveying private messages. Occasionally, regardless of the linguistic processes selected by the plate creator, the message is presented in such a way that it is hidden, or at least not readily decipherable. While this is true for some of the plates illustrated above, the encoding referred to here involves manipulating the order of the characters in some fashion; the resulting form is unrelated to the expected phonological or other pattern. One example of this process may be seen in the plate for actor William Conrad, reading DARNOC, i.e., “Conrad” spelled backwards (reported in Newsweek, March 31, 1975). This plate illustrates what is technically referred to as a “transposition cipher,” one that does not change any letters of the original message. Similarly, the plate ETSYBAY appears to be the name Betsy rendered in pig Latin. Presumably, many other types of writing in cipher, employing both alphabetical and numerical characters, could be used to create ELPs.

As I continue to explore the infinitely varied world of personalized plates, I find that they seem to fall into one or more of the categories outlined above. However, given the human penchant for ever more novel forms of creativity, it will undoubtedly be only a matter of time before someone, somewhere, comes up with a unique identifier, created in a completely new and individual manner.

Indian Words in English: Resident Aliens and Naturalized Citizens

Peter Heehs, Wayne, Pennsylvania

When does a loanword cease to be regarded as a loanword? When, that is, does a word borrowed from another language cease to be considered an alien? The process of naturalization is complete when the word has lost its exotic flavor and is regarded by most speakers as part of the ordinary lexicon of the borrower language. The etymologist can of course still trace its origin, but as far as anybody else is concerned, its antecedents are of no consequence. There are a number of stages, overlapping but sufficiently distinct, between complete exoticism and complete domestication. These can be illustrated by loanwords from different Indian languages in English. We have been borrowing Indian words for more than three hundred years. Most of them still have the allure of the exotic East about them, but many are such solid citizens that no one would think of asking to see their immigration papers.

The linguistic commerce between Indian and the English-speaking world proceeds both ways, and it arouses the interest of both parties. At breakfast the other day, while I was questioning a friend about his use of Hindi words in English sentences, a gentleman beside us suddenly announced, somewhat defensively, that this sort of mixture was after all quite natural. Not only did he and other Indians use words from their languages while speaking English, but English speakers also employed many words of Indian origin. One could find them, he said, in the Oxford Dictionary. India has a great reverence for scriptures of all sorts. Lexicons like Yaska’s collection of glosses on difficult Vedic words have acquired, through centuries of use by scholars, some of the authority of the sacred texts themselves. Certain koshas or ‘treasuries’ of related words are studied side by side with Kalidasa’s dramas and Bhartrihari’s epigrams, and like them have achieved the status of classics. And I have heard on reliable authority that a modern pandit (literal sense), wishing to learn the language of the one-time masters of India, decided that the best way to go about it would be to learn the whole Collins Gem Dictionary by heart.

Among scriptures of English there is of course none so authoritative as the Oxford English Dictionary, so I was obliged to accept my breakfast-table interlocutor’s point as proved. I was, besides, familiar with the words he referred to. They appear periodically in Sunday-supplement articles. Who has not heard the story (probably fictional, as it turns out) of how punch was so named after the panch (Hindi, ‘five’) ingredients first used to make it? What visitor to India has not looked with renewed interest on his pyjamas once he has learned of their Persian origin? But most lists of Indian loanwords in English are disappointingly short. To get the full story one would have to search through the unabridged OED, and who has time for such a labor? Fortunately for the scholar, R.E. Hawkins has recently published, first as a Supplement to the Indian edition of the Little Oxford Dictionary, and later as a separate book,¹ a list of about two thousand lexical items culled from the OED and other sources. I am indebted to this book for several of my examples.

Two thousand words is surely a significant contribution by one group of languages to another tongue. When one goes through Mr. Hawkins’s list, however, one soon realizes that it contains many more Indian words used by Indians speaking English than by native English speakers. By my own very rough calculation, based on a random sampling of twenty pages containing 165 words, about 80 percent of Mr. Hawkins’s entries are not loanwords at all, but words without adequate English equivalents used by Indians while speaking English. Ghoongat (Hindi ‘face-veil’) is not used by English speakers. Neither are dudhi (Gujarati ‘gourd of family Cucurbitaceae’) or taka (Bengali ‘rupee’). Such words are included in English dictionaries for the convenience of readers of books about India. There is very little likelihood that they will ever become parts of the English language. Indeed, the three examples just given are hardly known outside the regions of their origin. Other words of this type, however, are known by English-speaking people in all parts of India, as well as by many foreigners; for example, kurta (Hindi-Urdu ‘shirtlike garment’), bindi (Hindi ‘mark on woman’s forehead’), and idli (Tamil ‘steamed cake of rice and gram’).

All of these examples and hundreds of others like them have a decidedly exotic air about them. They are regularly used in English only by two restricted groups of speakers: Indians who speak English, and English speakers resident in India. They cannot therefore be considered loanwords properly speaking. They are not resident aliens but visitors. India does have to her credit, however, a good number of words known by speakers without any special connection with India. Most of these words belong to one of three related categories: flora and fauna, food and drink, and fabric and clothing. Many names of Indian plants and animals, and products made from them, have entered our language with their meanings practically intact, and their pronunciations relatively undistorted. Cheetah flourishes in English even though the Indian variety of Acinonyx jubatus is practically extinct. Mangoes are now cultivated in Florida, and jute is twisted into rope in factories far from the Ganges delta. Afghan coverlets and cashmere sweaters are found in some of the best households. Calico and chintz grace the homes of the less affluent. All of these words are familiar, but most of them (calico and chintz may be exceptions) are clearly non-native. They roam through our language like Brahma bulls in a Texas pasture; put down roots like patchouli trees in Kew Gardens.

India has always been famous for its spirituality, so it should come as no surprise that another major source of Indian words in English is religion. Many such terms are rather new additions, and the list is growing: guru, avatar, swami, nirvana, ashram. These five, and a number of others, have entered the language directly from Sanskrit. Their careful use by scholars and devotees has allowed them to keep a fair approximation of their original phonetic form. The pronunciation of other borrowings from the spiritual world is commonly Anglicized, either because the words contain phonemes that the English speaker’s tongue cannot easily reproduce, such as the dh of Buddha, or because they were introduced not by admirers but by detractors, juggernaut, for example.

Juggernaut had to submit to semantic as well as phonetic deformation when it reincarnated in English. The word comes from the Sanskrit jagat-nath, Vishnu ‘Lord of the World,’ specifically the image of Jagannath at Puri that is taken out in a famous procession. It is doubtful whether many devotees of Lord Jagannath ever cast themselves under the wheels of his chariot; but the connotative meaning that has arisen from this supposed practice, ‘deity (or cause, etc.) to which people blindly sacrifice themselves,’ has in some English contexts entirely replaced the denotative meaning that is still current in India.

This sort of replacement of the literal by the figurative sense of a word can be observed in a number of almost completely naturalized words that might be referred to as quasi-religious or jocular-learned. Brahmin, pundit, and pariah are generally used in English figuratively. The same sort of semi-jocular meanings have been given to the Sanskrit religious terms mentioned above; all five are now employed more frequently in these derivative senses than in their proper meanings. Despite their increasing use, these “religious” words are all recognizably foreign. Their utility as ironic dismissive terms depends in large measure on their exotic character.

Only about two dozen of the words that English has borrowed from Indian languages have been so thoroughly assimilated that very few speakers think of them as aliens. Most of these belong to categories already considered. Indian weavers, tailors, and dyers have provided us with pyjamas, bandanas, shawls, gunny sacks, dungarees, and khaki. One of the materials previously mentioned has given rise to the more perfectly naturalized adjective chintzy. Indian plants have given us toddy and cheroots; their abundance has brought jungle into the imaginations of mountain- and desert-dwellers. India is not famous as a nautical nation, but we owe catamaran and dinghy to Indian boatmen. From Indian domestic life have come chit,² cot, shampoo, bungalow, tank, bazaar, and veranda. Almost all these words have significances in English that differ considerably from the original meaning. There is, in fact, a close correlation between the degree of assimilation and the amount of semantic change. Lut means ‘loot,’ dingi a ‘small boat,’ in Hindi, but few other well-assimilated Indian loanwords have kept their root senses so well. Tankh, the original of tank, does not mean a fabricated container for liquids, much less an armored combat vehicle, in Gujarati. Even if the original sense of a loanword is possible in English, as in toddy, chit, and bazaar, a derivative meaning, often far removed from the original, usually predominates, particularly outside India. Khaki can be used for anything “dust-colored” in English as in Hindi, but in our language the word is usually reserved for a certain color of cloth, or the coarse material that is dyed this color.

Occasionally the semantic change is so considerable that the borrowed word has in English a meaning quite different, sometimes the very opposite of what it meant in the source language. Shampoo comes from the Hindi champo, imperative of the verb champna, ‘to press,’ hence ‘to rub, massage.’ Somewhere along the line the verb began to be used as a noun, first in the sense of ‘body-massage,’ then ‘scalp-massage,’ then, according to Hawkins, ‘washing of hair with rubbing of scalp.’ Modern speakers of Hindi needing a soap for washing their hair go the grocery store (rather, the “general merchants”) and ask for shampoo. They use this word, which they assume to be as English as toothpaste, whether they address the shopkeeper in Hindi or English. None of the half-dozen north Indians I questioned had any idea the word was originally Hindi.

An even greater metamorphosis has been undergone by jungle. In Sanskrit jangla means ‘dry, a desert.’ This has given rise to the Hindi and Marathi jangal, properly ‘wasteland,’ but by extension ‘wild place, forest.’ The latter is the current meaning in Hindi and related languages, so current in fact that north Indians speaking English often use jungle to mean any sort of forest, even one with deciduous or coniferous trees. Only in English and languages that have borrowed the word from English does jungle carry exclusively the sense of ‘tropical rain forest,’ the distinguishing characteristic being denseness of vegetation. To Hindi speakers (at least to all four informants I have asked) what makes a jungle a jungle is the possibility of meeting wild animals; the type of vegetation does not matter. At any rate the familiar English word jungle has come a long way from the deserts of Rajasthan.

Enterprising immigrants adopt many of the habits of their new homelands. The more they do this, the more like the natives they become, until a point is reached when they no longer can be considered strangers. An apprehensive Londoner once complained that England was fish and chips, not rice and curry. But what about hot toddy? And if women in New York ashrams never look really at home in their saris, what could be more American than their children’s khaki dungarees?

---

A Man of Fire-new Words

Richard Lederer, Concord, New Hampshire

What do these sentences have in common? “Has Will a peer?, I ask me.” “I swear he’s like a lamp.” “We all make his praise.” Each of these three sentences is an anagram that uses all the letters in the name William Shakespeare, and each makes a true statement; peerless Will Shakespeare shines through the centuries and inspires our praise.

Shakespeare’s plays have been in almost constant production since their creation. Because the playwright dealt with universal truths and conflicts in human nature, his works continue to draw audiences from all walks of life, just as they did in his own day. History has proven the truth of what Shakespeare’s contemporary, Ben Jonson, said of him: “He was not of an age, but for all time.” An often neglected aspect of William Shakespeare’s genius is that he was the greatest word-maker of all time. Ongoing research demonstrates that there are 20,138 individual words (lemmata) in Shakespeare’s published works—a figure that represents approximately 45 percent of the total recorded for the English language up to the year 1623. Of the 20,138 such words that Shakespeare employs in his plays, sonnets, and narrative poems, his is the first known use of more than 1,700 of them. More than 8.5 percent of Shakespeare’s vocabulary was fashioned from neologisms, making him by far the most verbally innovative of our authors.

Here is a list of fifty representative words that, as far as we can tell, Shakespeare is the first to have used in writing. So great is his influence on his native tongue that we find it hard to imagine a time when these words did not exist:

accommodation
aerial
amazement
apostrophe
assassination
auspicious
baseless
bump
castigate
changeful
clangor
control (n.)
countless
courtship
critic
critical
dexterously
dishearten
dislocate
dwindle
eventful
exposure
fitful
frugal
generous
gloomy
gnarled
hurry
impartial
indistinguishable
invulnerable
lapse
laughable
lonely
majestic
misplaced
monumental
multitudinous
obscene
palmy
perusal
pious
premeditated
radiance
reliance
road
sanctimonious
seamy
sportive
submerge

Now add to these individual words Shakespeare’s daring originality with compounds. In addition to splendid audacities such as proud-pied April, heaven-kissing hill, and world-without-end hour, Shakespeare gave to the English language such now-familiar compounds as barefaced, fancy free, green-eyed, heartsick, hot-blooded, housekeeping, lackluster, leapfrog, long-haired, and pitched battle. The striking compound that Shakespeare used to describe Don Adriano de Armando in Love’s Labour’s Lost is an appropriate epithet for the playwright himself: “a man of fire-new words.”

Unrivaled in so many other ways, Shakespeare has no equal as a phrase-maker. A student who attended a performance of Hamlet came away complaining that the play “was nothing more than a bunch of clichés.” The reason for this common reaction is that so many of the memorable expressions in Hamlet have become proverbial. In that one play alone were born mind’s eye; brevity is the soul of wit; primrose path; it smells to heaven; there’s the rub; the very witching time of night; not a mouse stirring; towering passion; there’s method in his madness; ministering angel; dog will have his day; the apparel oft proclaims the man; neither a borrower nor a lender be; to thine own self be true; frailty, thy name is woman; something is rotten in the state of Denmark; more honored in the breach than the observance; hoist with his own petard; the lady both protest too much; to be or not to be; and to the manner born.

To these we may append a small sample of everyday, idiomatic phrases from other Shakespearean plays: what the dickens; breathe my last; live long day; the be-all and end-all; break the ice; one fell swoop; foregone conclusion; heart of gold; all that glisters is not gold; strange bedfellows; give the devil his due; the course of true love never did run smooth; wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve; we have seen better days; more sinned against than sinning; it’s Greek to me; the most unkindest cut of all; itching palm; eat out of house and home; paint the lily; too much of a good thing; and the milk of human kindness.

Shakespeare was an extremely prolific writer. In twenty-five years he turned out thirty-seven long plays and co-authored several others, yet so felicitous was his phrasing that he still found time to provide generations of authors with titles for their books. Take Macbeth, for example. Near the end of the play, Macbeth expresses his darkening vision of life: “It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.” Centuries later, William Faulkner purloined a phrase from that speech, and The Sound and the Fury became a great American novel. Earlier in the play, one of the witches chants, “By the pricking of my thumbs,/Something wicked this way comes.” Agatha Christie plucked the first line and Ray Bradbury the second as titles for their bestsellers. Other borrowings from just the one play Macbeth include Rose Macauley’s Told by an Idiot, Ellis Middleton’s Vaulting Ambition, Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, Ngaio Marsh’s Light Thickens, Alistair MacLean’s The Way to Dusty Death, Edward G. Robinson’s All Our Yesterdays, and John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down. From those other favorites—Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet—have been lifted the titles of Robert Stone’s The Dogs of War, James Barrie’s Dear Brutus, John Gunther’s Taken at the Flood, R. Lance Hill’s The Evil That Men Do, H. Hall’s *The Valiant,*A.G. MacDonnell’s How Like an Angel, Joyce Martins' Rosemary for Remembrance, Arthur Schnitzler’s Undiscovered Country, Ernest Hebert’s A Little More Than Kin, Eric Knight’s This Above All, Dorothy Parker’s Not So Deep as a Well, and Henry Wade’s No Friendly Drop. Add to these Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, James Stewart Carter’s Full Fathom Five, and Andrew Soutar’s Strange Bedfellows (all from The Tempest); W. Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale (Twelfth Night), John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent (Richard II), John van Druten’s Bell, Book, and Candle (King John), Richard Oke’s Wanton Boys (King Lear), Frank Swinnerton’s The Merry Heart (Much Ado About Nothing), and Francis Ferguson’s Naked to Mine Enemies (Henry VIII); and, from the sonnets, John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes, Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (the English translation, of course), and Gary Wills' Bare Ruined Choirs—and it becomes evident that William Shakespeare was one of the most generous souls who ever put quill to parchment. Although he was never granted a title, he freely granted titles to others.

The etymologist Ernest Weekley said of Shakespeare, “His contribution to our phraseology is ten times greater than that of any writer to any language in the history of the world.” The poet Walter Pater exclaimed, “What a garden of words!” If Shakespeare had not lived and written, our English tongue would be immeasurably the poorer. No day goes by that we do not speak and hear and read and write his legacy to our language.

Agatha Christie’s Works Are Not Legal Fictions

Stephen E. Hirschberg, Elmsford, New York

In “Tooth and the Whole Tooth” Robert Benchley offered the challenge: “The English language may hold a more disagreeable combination of words than ‘The doctor will see you now’… I’m not narrow-minded about it. I’m willing to consider other possibilities.”³ I wish to propose three statements which, if not more unpleasant, are close runners-up:

1. “There’s a lawyer on the phone for you.”
2. “There’s a policeman at the door for you.”
3. “Is that a man coming through our window?”

Our fear and loathing of contact with both sides of the law may be enhanced by our difficulty in understanding the English of its denizens, whose dialects are alien to us.

The law is, like Euclid’s geometry, a self-contained, internally consistent set of postulates and rules. It is purported to have relevance to the real world. There its similarity to a mathematical system ends. The observer who is unfamiliar with the mysteries of courtroom proceedings may question his own ears. As Alice said to the Caterpillar in Wonderland, “Some of the words have got altered.”

The law distinguishes facts (actualities) from truth (a legal principle governing or declaring facts). False facts—also known as simulated or fabricated facts—(those existing only in their assertion, and without foundation in reality) are contrasted to legal fictions (things known false but presumed true). Fabricated facts have another meaning—actual facts which a lawyer has artfully given a false appearance. The mathematician’s proof (beyond any doubt) does not allow for the sort of flexibility of thought inherent in the lawyer’s concepts of clear and convincing evidence, preponderance of the evidence, and proof beyond reasonable doubt.

Flexibility lets judges interpret the laws, and is at the heart of the appeals process. Further linguistic peculiarities arise because definitions are not engraved in stone. Thus:

Artificial persons are not androids; they are creations of the law for societal purposes.

Corporations and partnerships are examples. They are distinguished legally from natural persons—what nonlawyers would call “human beings.” Since a corporation is a person it must have a domicile—the primary locus of its business affairs. Collectively, persons are “such, not because [they are] human, but because rights and duties are ascribed to [them].”⁴

Though lawsuits are allegedly adversarial, there exist amicable actions, brought by mutual arrangement of the parties, with facts already settled by agreement, so that courts might make findings on doubtful questions of law.

Violent presumption is not, for instance, asking for a date while brandishing a submachine gun; it is, rather, indirect proof of a fact by proof of necessarily attendant circumstances. Here it is illustrated, in a demonstration of when to stop asking questions on cross-examination:

Q. Did you actually see my client bite off the victim’s nose?

A. No. [The questions should stop here.]

Q. Then how can you say he bit it off?

A. I saw him spit it out.

Not a gynecological conclusion, but a legal one, is the negative pregnant. This is a denial formulated in such a way as to admit the substantial fact which appears controverted. For instance:

Q. Lizzie, did you not take an axe and whack your mother forty times and then whack your father forty-one times when faced with the prospect of cold mutton stew?

A. Not true. We were to eat Brussels sprouts fondue that day.

To deny comprehensively in court, one must deny every aspect of the allegation individually.

Since imprecise turns of phrase might allow the opposition to inflict a fatal blow on his case, the lawyer sets up a linguistic strategic defense. The favorite weapon is iteration, to the point that one sometimes wonders whether the father of the thesaurus was really a lawyer. (Alas, Peter Roget was a physician.) Legal proceedings are thus peppered with phrases like lands, tenements, and hereditaments, ‘real property,’ goods and chattels ‘personal property,’ goods, wares and merchandise ‘chattels subject to trade or sale,’ lewd and lascivious cohabitation (as if lewd were not enough!), fair and impartial jury (could it fair and partial?), sick, sore, lame and disabled (how to make a point in a personal injury action). A standard form of will includes in one of its sections:

All the rest, residue and remainder of my estate of whatever kind and nature, real, personal, and mixed and wherever situated … I give, devise, and bequeath to my trustees … for the following uses and purposes:⁵

Along with arcane use of common English words, the legal profession’s vocabulary contains healthy doses of French and Latin, as well as hoary terms. Some of these are useful shorthand for legal complexities, and have entered the language of nonlawyers (e.g., res ipsa loquitur, caveat emptor, habeas corpus). Others are exclusively of the law, e.g., voir dire—French, ‘to speak the truth’—the preliminary screening examination of jurors or witnesses by the court; barratry—the offense of stirring up frequent groundless lawsuits, profiting only the attorney; champerty—third-party funding of a lawsuit in exchange for a share in the proceeds if it is successful; estoppel—precluding of one’s allegation because of his previous acts or allegations to the contrary.

Sometimes lawyers do manage to loosen up, especially when bantering off the record. Then their terms of art may overlap the vocabulary of their less-reputable clientele. A straightforward, polite legal contest with clear evidence and solid witnesses on both sides is a swearing contest (the winner “swears” its evidence more convincingly). It is contrasted with proceedings in which each side gives the other as difficult a time as possible by means of dilatory, nitpicking, senseless technicalities—the pissing contest (after the decathlons of micturition for which small boys are notorious). Their criminal clients might offer the SODDI defense (Some Other Dude Did It), with the more fortunate defendants convicted only of a paper felony (a finding on paper, but involving no added prison time) or sentenced to a bullet—a one-year term. Judges and attorneys speak of a dropsy case, in which an unscrupulous police officer, wishing to circumvent the legal requirement of a probable cause for having searched the accused (with the fruit of an unreasonable search inadmissible in court), testifies that “as I approached I saw him take the [gun / knife / packet of white powder / etc.] from his pocket and drop it on the ground at his feet.”

Police dialect’s formal voice, used in court testimony and official reports, may have arisen (or descended) from emulation of the erudite verbiage of attorneys. It may be an attempt thus to gain credibility with a jury. Its use certainly causes a loss of color in the portrayal of events. An annotated version of an excerpt from a typical police report may illustrate the point:

On a radio run⁶ to the above location I and my partner⁷ observed⁸ that entry had been made through the rear door.⁹ At this time¹⁰ we exited¹¹ our vehicle¹² and observed the subject.¹³ Subsequent to this¹⁴ the subject turned and drew a firearm¹⁵ from his pocket. I drew my weapon¹⁶ …and apprehended the alleged perpetrator.¹⁷ At this time, I advised the subject of his rights from a card which I carry with me.¹⁸

The colloquial cop-to-cop talk is metaphorical, colorful, and telegraphic—a more accurate reflection of the electricity and urgency of police work. Perpetrators are reduced to perps, their offenses to initials (OC ‘organized crime,’ D&D ‘drunk and disorderly,’ CCW ‘carrying a concealed weapon,” B&E ‘breaking and entering’). Fans of broadcast police shows, from “Racket Squad” to “Dragnet” to “Hill Street Blues,” know of A.P.B. (all points bulletin—a general alert) and M.O. (modus operandi—the perp’s method). The policeman’s club is a billy; his second, nonregulation gun a saver. The officer’s badge or ID card is a potsy (tin, used to make pots, was used to make badges), with favors received for showing a badge on the tin.

When a body (a person chargeable with a crime) is apprehended he is busted or collared. Upon apprehension in the United States, a suspect is read his rights or Mirandized (from the decision in Ernesto A. Miranda v. the State of Arizona). Because these rights (to remain silent, to have a lawyer’s advice before interrogation and his presence during questioning, to a lawyer free of charge if one cannot be afforded, to stop answering questions at any time) must be clearly and completely stated, the arresting officer may rely on reading from his Miranda card. While there are constitutional guarantees against warrantless searches, a no-knock raid (without the warning, “Open up. Police. We have a warrant.”) may be used to secure evidence before it can be destroyed. No-sock laws say that force cannot be used in resisting an illegal arrest. The suspect is then mugged (photographed—from the picture of a face, or “mug”), and his rap sheet, or yellow sheet (‘arrest record’) obtained.

There is an extensive jargon among police for corrupt or less-than-scrupulous behaviour of their colleagues. To improve his batting average (‘arrest statistics’—a basis for promotion), an officer might resort to accommodation collars (‘arrests made only to improve that record’). Unjustified arrests may be fortified by plants (‘evidence hidden by the police on the person or in the home or car of the suspect’). In contrast to the saint—the incorruptible cop who will not accept a nut (‘bribe’)—are the grass-eaters (who accept, but do not solicit, whatever bribes their beats offer) and the meateaters (who solicit and compel bribes). Collectively, crooked cops are bent.

With a population exceeding that of attorneys and police, and absent the stabilizing influence of a written language, criminal society’s dialect is more varied and liabile than that of the law. As fresh terminology is popularized, users of obsolete vocabulary risk sounding like Damon Runyon characters or, worse, undercover police. Guns are no longer “heaters” or “Roscoes;” they are pieces. The murder victim is no longer “rubbed out,” “taken for a ride,” “hit,” or “offed;” he is iced.

A criminal specialist merits a specialized designation: paper-hanger ‘passer of bad checks’; crib man ‘house burglar’ (a “crib” is a house or apartment); plastic artist ‘one who engages in credit card fraud’; blanket man ‘arsonist’s accomplice’ (who holds the blanket for extinguishing the arsonist who is overly involved in his work); heavy ‘safecracker’; and rip-off artist a ‘prostitute whose specialty is theft rather than commercial sex’ (and more generally, a ‘thief who does not deliver goods paid for’).

After he does a job (‘commits a crime’) the miscreant may split or book (‘flee’). If caught by the heat (‘police’) he may try to cop out (or cop a plea ‘plead to a lesser charge’) or turn (or flip ‘become an informer’) lest he pull time (‘be sentenced to imprisonment’). However, informing is a dangerous game. Many prefer to take the weight (‘take punishment alone though not the sole guilty party’) and not appear to have cooperated with the police. Higher-ups may put a notice on (or take out a contract on ‘make a paid assignment to murder’) one who is thought to have squealed, and his wardrobe may soon include a cement kimono.

Cement kimonos, no-socks, artificial persons… Yes, I’d very much prefer to see the doctor now.

---

Noticing Nouns

John de Forest, New York City

Many people, when telling a story these days, even a brief and very simple one, insert a rhetorical question at every possible opportunity in order to ensure that they are being listened to and understood. You have often, I am sure, heard things like this: “I’m walking down the street, right? And I see this guy coming towards me, right? I think I know him, but I’m not really sure, right? Anyway, he doesn’t seem to recognize me, right? But all of a sudden, right?…,” and so on. When somebody talks like that to me I want to slam my first on the table and shout, “Yes! I understand you! I have excellent hearing. It’s clear that you are speaking to me, and I am listening to you. What’s more, I am quite capable of following a number of short sentences, related in import, and spoken in the English language.”

But justified though my exasperation may be, his narrative style has been formed as a direct reaction, albeit unconscious, to his usual experience of not being really listened to. He is not necessarily a bore, but a victim of the haste, impatience, and inattention of today’s ordinary conversation. Unfortunately, the habits of mind developed under those conditions have also had an influence on more formal speech and on our writing, where among a number of other effects we find a stultifying repetition and perverse misapplication of nouns.

Thirty years ago, when I attended a junior high school of not very high standards in upstate New York, my teachers carefully informed me that it was unacceptably clumsy and annoying to use the same noun more than once in three consecutive paragraphs unless a special effect was intended. And they were pretty much right. Nowadays, to do so is normal, even among the better educated. The New Yorker magazine, where graceful prose was formerly required, now prints some of the lamest, of which the following examples must stand for countless others in that and other publications.

“[S] he has made the British public aware of its wildflower heritage and the threatened loss of that heritage.” Why not say, “and the threat of its loss”? The published version not only has bad rhythm, it prevents “loss” from having the force it ought to have, and would have if it came at the end. (It also misstates the case, for it is not the loss that is threatened, but the heritage.) “Eventually,” says another writer, “investigators discovered that bacteria that had entered specific wells could cause cholera in everyone who drank the water from the wells.” Why not, “who drank the water from them”? And in the next paragraph he writes, “Decades followed the doublings and triplings in size of English cities and the subsequent alarming increases in the death rates in those cities before …” Why not, “and the subsequent alarming increases in the death rates there”?

In the same magazine, not long ago, I came upon an article that described how its author learned to paddle a very small, round boat, of ancient design, called a coracle. Now, I happen to be very interested in such aquatic pursuits, and the location of the man’s self-instruction, a beautiful English river, strengthened his claim on my attention. I also happen to feel, or rather, I did, that “coracle” was an especially lovely old word. It suggested the light buoyancy of the little vessel, and the sound of the water, licking and slightly slapping her skin. But one can have too much of even a very good thing. Never substituting “boat,” “craft,” “conveyance,” “bowl,” “tippy little thing,” “she,” “her,” or “it,” he relentlessly, remorselessly, invariably employed the word “coracle.” After about ten repetitions of it in the first two pages, I wanted never, ever to see it again. My initial interest in the subject, though declining, made me continue, but I skimmed the rest with my eyes screwed up and my head averted to reduce the force of the remaining fifteen recurrences.

Like the speaker with his “right?,” those writers have a chronic fear of our inattention, and they are so numbed by what they hear every day that they no longer recognize bad style. “In Los Angeles,” says the man on WNYC-FM, “Senator Dole announced that he would propose new legislation. That legislation would provide the means for the removal of Clark Air Force Base from the Phillipines.” Someday soon, such copy will begin, “In Boston, Senator So and So announced that he would propose new legislation. Do you follow me so far?” Though all such reiterations deaden our pleasure and blunt our perception, it can at least be said for them that they don’t mislead or confuse, which is far from true of the use of nouns as verbs and adjectives, a practice which has become just as common, one which almost everybody has come to rely upon. The television announcer says that “it’s hard to defense against” a certain play in football, and an editor of The New York Times recalls “the mystery sinking of the U.S.S. Maine.” We read of a television show that “can frequently pack a relevancy wallop,” of a person who is suffering from “multiple blunt-trauma injuries,” and of another who has “all but mastered the all-but-all-dialogue novel.” Alexander Haig says, “Let me context that for you, senator,” and The New York Post screams, “Freed on Possession to Sell Charge.”

Haste, again, is working here. Speakers and writers are in a hurry. Worried about making their point at all, they try to cram together as many elements of their message as possible. “A loss of revenue” sounds almost leisurely to them, and they say “a revenue loss” instead. But that is not all there is to it. The editors of the Times have to fit their headlines to the space available, but they prefer to print, “U.S. Accuses Shearson of Money Laundering” to “U.S. Accuses Shearson of Laundering Money,” though the length of the latter is just the same.

No, the disease has another and perhaps a deeper cause, which is our culture’s preoccupation with what things are, and its concomitant failure to consider how they are what they are. I once read a legal brief that discussed whether someone’s rights had been abridged as a result of being “excluded by denied access.” That the phrase does not use a noun incorrectly, and is not, therefore, an instance of the particular solecisms I am decrying, makes it all the better an example of how characteristic is the sensibility that lies behind them. If the lawyer had said, “excluded by the denial of access,” “excluded by being denied access,” or even “excluded because he was denied access,” he would have accorded a full measure of importance to the act of denial as well as to what it was that had been denied. But this denied access gives more weight to the access, and by merging the two concepts, it depreciates their relation to each other. It is as though denied access were something with so familiar and established an identity, something like brick wall, that no question about its nature need ordinarily arise.

By the same means, “the arms sale to Iran” and a “confidence loss” repress the associations, resonances, implications, and speculations that the words can stimulate when properly used. Those phrases make the events they describe seem silent and far away. They withhold from us the humming immediacy of “the sale of arms to Iran” and “a loss of confidence.” Referring to a place where her friend’s young daughter was being looked after, somebody once confided to me, “I hope there are no child abuse things going on there.” How very abstract that seemed. Had she said, “I hope they don’t abuse the children there,” I would have felt my heart jump.

It is distressing also to notice that even as meanings are being reduced in this way, it is increasingly difficult to tell what they are at all. Because people are disregarding the grammatical relation of one word to another, they are relying more and more on our knowing beforehand what they have in mind. If fire fighters fight fires, why don’t freedom fighters fight freedom? Does Saga of Shareholder Neglect mean that shareholders are neglecting something, or that they themselves are being neglected? Are the words Save the West Branch Coalition an exhortation to save an organization known as the West Branch Coalition, or are they the name of a coalition formed to save something else called the West Branch? The New Yorker, perhaps in atonement for publishing similar language every week, has reprinted from elsewhere an advertisement that reads, “Infant teacher and 2 year old teacher’s aid needed. Experience desired,” and has commented, “Seems like a lot to ask.” Indeed it does, and we are asking far too much of our luck when we rely on others to supply our meanings for us.

Although the speaker or writer is worried about our keeping up with him, he is busily undermining the means by which we are enabled to do so. The parts of speech, when respected, serve as indicators of his intention. But if they do not perform their grammatical function, we must proceed haltingly, and often lose the way. The United Farm Workers, according to The Wall Street Journal, “drew a $25,000 fine for reporting violations.” When I came to the word reporting, I naturally assumed that whatever followed would tell me what it was that had been reported. But the writer was not to be trusted, for in fact the union was not fined for reporting any violations; it was fined for its violations of a law that required the reporting of contributions to political campaigns.¹⁹

To illustrate how endangered English syntax has become, I am willing to confess that on my first reading I misunderstood the following sentence, simple and blameless though it is: “What is one to think of the seriousness of an American President who offers his people fantasies as the pass to safety?” So accustomed was I to reading about things like “people fantasies” that I thought that that is what were being offered.

---

Shakespeare’s Legal Language

D.S. Bland, Bournemouth

…his knowledge of legal terms is not such as might be acquired by the casual observation of even his all-comprehending mind; it has the appearance of technical skill.

With these words, which appeared in his edition of Shakespeare’s works in 1790, Edmund Malone began a debate which has continued to this day, the question of whether Shakespeare was ever a student of the law, either as an attorney’s apprentice or as a member of one of the London Inns of Court. It is a question which, in default of direct evidence, cannot be satisfactorily settled. We just do not know whether he received any legal training. What we do know is that he used the vocabulary of the law to enrich the texture and the impact of his verse.

Even the briefest survey of his legal terms will reveal their great variety, ranging as they do from the literal in Shylock’s “I will have my bond,” to the metaphorical, indeed the metaphysical, in Macbeth’s entreaty to Night, that it will destroy the daylight and so enable him to proceed on his path to the murder of Duncan.

Cancel, and tear to pieces, that great bond Which keeps me pale.

It is the metaphorical uses to which Shakespeare puts the legal vocabulary that are the important ones. One way in which a language lives and grows is by modifying existing meanings and employing them in new contexts, and it is the poets who contribute most to this process.

.bqb As an example from Shakespeare we can take the word quietus which at first sight seems not to lend itself to poetry at all. But Shakespeare uses it twice, the first time in Sonnet 126.

Nature’s audit, though delayed, answered must be,

And her quietus is to render thee.

Here the metaphor is tied to the literal legal meaning. Quietus is a short form of the term quietus est or abeinde recessit quietus, the formulae used in the Court of the Exchequer to show that an account has been correctly presented and cleared. The Court and its formulae are long dead (although it is from this piece of procedure that we get the modern colloquial term to be quits). But Shakespeare’s other use of the word, in Hamlet’s self-debate on suicide,

When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin,

carries the meaning well away from the dusty offices of the Exchequer Court. The basic meaning is still there, of course: by committing suicide one closes the account book of one’s life. But death also involves the concept of quit in the sense of leaving one place for another, of moving from the turmoil of the world to the quiet of the grave.

This extension of meaning, from the almost literal to the fully metaphorical, is to be found quite frequently in Shakespeare’s work. Once again, the Sonnets and Hamlet will furnish an example. Sonnet 74 speaks of death as the moment

when that fell arrest
Without all bail shall carry me away.

This is striking enough in its way, and very contemporary, since an arrest in the street was a familiar sight to the Elizabethans. Shakespeare makes use of it in Henry IV, Part II, when the Chief Justice orders Falstaff and his companions to the Fleet prison. But the sonnet’s phrase is somewhat abstract. In Hamlet’s dying words, however, the idea is given flesh and blood, becomes a personified image which is as visually dramatic as the taking up of Falstaff.

Had I but time—as this fell serjeant, death,
Is strict in his arrest—O, I could tell you.

This comparison tells us something about Shakespeare’s development as a poetic dramatist. He discovered early in his career that the decorative style he had employed in his poems would not work satisfactorily in the theater. Drama is action, and dramatic verse, if it is to be effective, must move. It needs activating as much as plot and character, and in his mature work Shakespeare makes no exception to this rule, even when he is building up a scenic effect. Duncan, approaching Macbeth’s castle, declares:

This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.

The air is not only sweet; it moves in the adverb nimbly.

But to return to strictly legal matters. Hovering continually in the background of an examination of Shakespeare’s legal vocabulary are several questions which sooner or later have to be faced. The first is: how accurate was he in his use of legal terms? G.M. Young, in his essay, “Shakespeare and the Termers” (Today and Yesterday, p. 294), singles out his use of misprison in All’s Well that Ends Well (II, iii, 155) as an example of error.

Here, take her hand,
Proud, scornful boy, unworthy this good gift,
That doth in vile misprison shackle up
My love and her desert.

Young says it looks as though Shakespeare “thought that misprison was such a good word for poetry that the meaning did not matter.” In other words, Shakespeare thought it meant ‘false imprisonment’ rather than ‘contempt.’ But did he? Elsewhere we find him using misprise correctly as a synonym for despise.

Here is another example in which legal terms are used correctly on one occasion and apparently incorrectly on another. Sonnet 137 distinguishes accurately between enclosed land and common land.

Why should my heart think that a several plot
Which my heart knows the wide world’s
common place?

Here, several means ‘enclosed’ or ‘private,’ and Shakespeare is quite accurate in distinguishing between the two terms. But in Love’s Labour’s Lost (II, i, 224) he seems to be confusing them. Katharine, flirting with Boyet (who has just tried to kiss her) says:

My lips are no common, though several they be.

Here we have the sort of crux which delights Shakespeare’s editors: by using the work though he seems to be equating several and common. Or is it that, not for the first time, he is being carried away by a pun, a play on several as meaning ‘private’ and several as meaning ‘more than one’ or even ‘separate’ or ‘open,’ which is what common land is and lips can be? Or is he intending to show that Katharine is ignorant of the distinction? Hardly, for when Boyet asks “belonging to whom?” she answers “to my fortunes and me.” But is it necessary to get Shakespeare off this semantic hook? For myself, I am content to follow the Princess of France who breaks in at this point to declare that “good wits will be jangling.” In other words, one need not look for absolute consistency in a quick bout of verbal fencing.

On the whole, it is obvious that Shakespeare is accurate in his use of legal terms, that they occur with great frequency and embrace many aspects of the law. It is likely that references to English Common law, so much concerned in his day with property, inheritance, and contract, are in the majority. But there are references also to constitutional law—inevitably so because of the large area of his work which deals with English history—as well as to ecclesiastical law and the law of equity. And since Shakespeare was a dramatist and therefore concerned with people, there is a wide spectrum of officers of the law and a variety of ways of alluding to them. On the one hand, there is the respect paid to the Chief Justice in Henry IV; on the other, there is Doll Tearsheet’s disrespectful reference to the parish beadle as a bluebottle because of the color of his uniform. Strictly speaking, this is not a legal term, but slang, as is bum- … baily (a ‘sheriff’s officer’) in Twelfth Night. But they have to be taken into consideration because they show the dislike for the lower officers of the law which was felt by the ordinary man. The bum-baily, after all, could well be the man who lived next door.

This raises a further question: how did Shakespeare himself regard the law? It is immediately obvious that he wrote no play or even a considerable part of a play in which the law and its officers are made the subject of satire. And yet it was a common enough theme at the time and had been, both in England and on the continent, since the Middle Ages. One example is Ignoramus, a Latin play of 1614 presented by the University of Cambridge to James I. There is nothing similar in Shakespeare, even when he creates Justice Shallow. Of course Shallow is an ignoramus—his very name is a give-away; of course he is an incompetent Justice of the Peace who learned nothing at Clemen’s Inn except where to find the local prostitutes. But Shakespeare gives us no picture of that incompetence in action in the manor court. Shallow is introduced into the second part of Henry IV solely to be Falstaff’s gull and to be cheated out of a thousand pounds.

As to the question raised by Malone, Did Shakespeare receive any formal training in the law?, scholars who have examined the matter have on the whole decided on a verdict of “not proven.” I would go further and say that there is no case to answer. There are many images in Shakespeare drawn from medicine, for example. Does this mean that he was apprenciated to an apothecary or a barber-surgeon? There are numerous references to the sea and to the life of a soldier. Was Shakespeare ever a Jack Tar or a Tommy Atkins? It seems most unlikely.

What can be said in respect of his knowledge of the law is this: Working as he did in London, the national center of legal activity, rubbing shoulders with Southampton and Pembroke and others at the royal court, looking to the Inns of Court for an appreciable part of his audience at the Globe, providing entertainment at the Inns themselves, and having regard to his own involvement with legal matters (his grant of arms, the Bellott-Mountjoy suit, the purchase of property in Stratford) it is not surprising that “the law” figures so largely in his work. And when his own knowledge, experience, or acquaintances failed him there were works of reference he could have consulted, such as John Rastell’s Les Termes de la Ley, first printed in about 1525 and many times reprinted in the next eighty years, or John Cowell’s Law Dictionary of 1607, as well as standard texts such as Littleton’s Tenures.

In the end, however, it was his remarkable assimilative powers as a creative artist that enabled him to make such a rich and varied use of the language of the law, that central feature of the social fabric of this day. But if a legal training were to be regarded as a precondition of that richness and variety, then there would be something to be said for the Baconian theory of authorship after all!

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The English Language

David Crystal, (Penguin Books, 1988), x + 288pp.

People, being (for the most part) human, make mistakes. In a book of mine published about a year ago, for some unaccountable reason, I wrote that the Brontë’s real name was Bell, while, of course, as every literate person knows, it was the other way round. There are certain kinds of mistakes that are mystifying: despite having been advised countless times that the first syllable of the name of that city in Texas is pronounced “Hugh” and not “Who,” British presenters, commentators, announcers, and, seemingly, anyone who gets a chance to do so on radio or TV pronounces it “Who-stin” or (worse) “Who-ston.” If they can ever be persuaded to say “Hugh” for “Who,” it will probably be carried over to the New York City street name, spelled the same way but pronounced “How-stin,” and we shall be going on about that.

Recently, published materials (articles, books, etc.) written by otherwise qualified, usually responsible, and traditionally careful scholars have contained unconscionable errors—errors that could have been avoided by minimal checking. I will come to the article later; for the moment, let us look at the book in hand. For 20 years David Crystal was Professor of Linguistic Science at the University of Reading. A few years ago he resigned to write and, generally, to pursue studies that do not include full-time teaching, though he is an Honorary Professor at University College, Bangor. He is also linguistics consultant to English Today, a relatively new British language quarterly. I personally know Crystal to be a good scholar, and I like his relaxed writing style. All the more reason for me to express some surprise at some of the misinformation found in his book. A chapter on British and American English begins with nine more or less categorical remarks about American pronunciation; unfortunately, most of them are wrong:

The middle vowel of tomato rhymes with mate in AmE, but with car in BrE. [As the song goes, you say tomayto and I say tomahto. Both pronunciations occur in AmE, and a quick check in an AmE dictionary would have yielded that information.]

The first syllable of lever rhythms [sic] with that of level in AmE, and with leaver in BrE. [I don’t know what the percentages or distributions are, but again, a quick check in an AmE dictionary would have revealed that speakers of AmE—a lot of them, in fact—say “leaver.”]

Conversely, the first syllable of leisure rhymes with lee in AmE, but has the vowel of let in BrE. [At this point one wonders whether Crystal had gathered incorrect data within a single dialect area in the U.S. or whether he’d simply had a bad informant. The AmE dictionaries I checked all gave both pronunciations. Perhaps Crystal has little or no respect for (American) dictionaries and deliberately ignored them in favor of his own or his informant’s data. He was ill-advised to do so, for they happen to be correct.]

Vase rhymes with days in AmE, with cars in BrE. [For some Americans, this word rhymes with base, for some with days, and for some with cars (without the “r”). It might be true that the last, “more British” pronunciation is used when a Ming vase is referred to, while either of the first two is used for an ordinary vase from Woolworth’s, but that has not been confirmed.]

Docile is ‘doss-ile’ in AmE, but ‘doe-sile’ in BrE. The -ile ending regularly changes in this way: missile is often pronounced like missal in AmE, and similarly fertile, hostile, etc. [This is a bit more complicated: the second syllables of hostile, fertile, and a few other words were once uniformly pronounced to rhyme with pill in AmE; in the past 30 years or so, possibly because the psychologists and psychiatrists (who use hostile almost as a technical term) felt that pronouncing it to rhyme with pile removed it somewhat from the grasp of lay speakers, started saying “hos-tile” rather than “hos-til.” Some AmE speakers caught the bug and, though they are not in the field, affectedly say “hos-tile.” This has been carried over to fertile, perhaps, but there is no evidence that it has cropped up in missile or docile.]

Herb is pronounced without the initial h in AmE, but with the h in BrE. [That is certainly correct, but it might have been interesting to have added that in AmE herbaceous, herbalist, herbarium, herbicide, herbivore, herbivorous, herbology, herborist, and herborize are usually pronounced with the h, but (in addition to herb) herbal, herbless, herblike, herbage, and herby are usually pronounced without it.]

Many words have the stress in different places:

AmE debris address inquiry magazine BrE debris address inquiry magazine And several words which have one main stress in BrE have two in AmE: AmE Birmingham BrE Birmingham

[(I have not included words about which Crystal is right.) Some AmE speakers do say daybree, address, inquiry, and magazine, so again Crystal was misinformed, and the AmE pronunciation Birmingham is usually reserved for the American cities in Michigan and Alabama, with Birmingham for the city in England.]

All this is most unfortunate. In his comments on spelling, Crystal refers to “some BrE spellings [that] are used in the U.S. (e.g. enclose, judgement).” I suppose it depends on one’s point of view, but the facts of the matter are that inclose is far less frequent in AmE than enclose and that the spelling judgement was originally the AmE spelling till Noah Webster’s simplified spelling campaign removed the e (and effected other changes, like dropping the u from words like honour, colour, etc.). Also, mould is sometimes so spelled in AmE, and, while the preferred spelling is theater in written text, it is very likely that the names of most of the theaters in the U.S. contain the word spelled theatre, possibly because it is felt to have more cachet. Smoulder is a free spelling variant of smolder, and Americans usually write endorse in preference to indorse. Ensure is the preferred form when the sense is ‘guarantee, make sure, make safe’ but insure when the sense is ‘guarantee against loss or harm, procure an insurance policy against.’ Fibre is frequently seen, though not as often as fiber. Among the individual items listed, moustache is almost in free variation with mustache, storey ‘building floor’ with story, tsar with czar. BrE spells programme that way except when referring to computer software, and AmE writes programmed, programming, programmer only in the context of computers. Although Americans were once taught to spell kidnaper, kidnaped, kidnaping that way, they appear far more often today with two ps.

Other fables, either concocted or perpetuated by the author, are that Americans do not say twenty to four or five past eight, preferring twenty of four and five after eight; that they say real good for really good (some do, of course, but it is considered a solecism); that they say in back of for behind (they say either; it is the Brits who do not say in back of); that they prefer a half hour to half an hour, etc. Crystal does remark, “variations in style are not noted,” but what he might, more accurately, have said was that some of the constructions in the AmE column are not usual in BrE and vice versa. Nonetheless, some are simply wrong: AmE does not say I’m visiting with her tomorrow in preference to I’m visiting her tomorrow, I’ll go get the car in preference to I’ll go and get the car, Come take a look in preference to Come and take a look, I asked that he leave in preference to I asked him to leave, etc.

Where these bits of misinformation come from is not easy to determine: most of the sources listed in Appendices B and C are British, with the possible exception of Whitney F. Bolton, who might be an American (his book, with which I am not familiar, was published by Random House) and who collaborated with Crystal on a book, and The State of the Language, by Michaels and Ricks. As I have remarked on other occasions, in recent BrE the word billion is used to mean ‘thousand million,’ not, as Crystal has it, ‘million million’ (though that was the way it was once used). The financial pages of the newspapers in Britain and the numerous radio and television programs dealing with finance and business consistently use billion to mean ‘thousand million,’ as in AmE. Pavement in AmE does not mean ‘road surface’ but ‘any paved surface (road or sidewalk).’ The chapter concludes with a list of AmE and BrE equivalents some of which are quite misleading: for example, when BrE sofa is equated with AmE couch or davenport, is the reader to understand that AmE does not have sofa? That BrE does not have davenport or couch? Of course, BrE has couch, but davenport sounds distinctly old-fashioned in AmE, which, of course, has sofa. There are many other similar confusions, none of which is resolved by the simple listing of pairs of words. The problem is that BrE roundabout is AmE traffic circle, and neither is customarily used in the other dialect; that is true about a certain number of the pairs—check (mark) / tick, checkers / draughts, diaper / nappy, dish towel / tea towel, drug store / chemist, eggplant / aubergine, gas / petrol, elevator / lift, etc. But other words need more to be said about them, since they are not mutually exclusive in either dialect: AmE does use sweets, sweet corn, sofa, cot, autumn, tap, tramp, … and BrE does use couch, detour, fall.

I have always felt that a relaxed, colloquial style of writing does not, of necessity, require the admittance of nonstandard usage. Moreover, it seems indefensible in a book on language to use nonstandard constructions when they add nothing to the communication with the reader, especially when standard usage would in no way interfere with the message. Thus, I am bothered by the following, which appear to be almost deliberate, for Crystal is certainly not a sloppy writer:

“The problem is how to choose between the many indigenous languages …” [p.3]

“But why [choose] English? In Ghana, Nigeria, and many other countries, the choice is motivated by the weight of historical tradition from the British or American colonial era.” [p.3. What does this mean? The British colonial era was, largely, the 19th century, when Britain colonized other countries; the American colonial era was, largely, the 17th and 18th centuries, when it was being colonized by Britain.]

[The subject of splitting infinitives, discussed on p. 25, suggests that the rules against it were first ariculated by Lowth and others in the mid 18th century, but Dryden’s objection to the practice appeared almost a hundred years earlier.]

[p. 53: In the pronunciation of glimpsed, the transcription should have an “I” not an “i”: / glImpst /.]

[p.60: “apparatus… vowel in 3rd syllable as in car or *fate” AmE would have the vowel of hat.

“derisive… vowel in 2nd syllable as in *rice or rise” The vowel is the same, so it should read, “s as in *rice or rise”]

“… the same vowel sound turns up in cot and wash [p.72: That rather depends on the dialect, doesn’t it?]

These criticisms having been registered, it is fair to note that they appear in only small sections of the book, the majority of which deals with other aspects of language. The chapter on Personal English and those dealing with the History of English are among the best I have ever read. Bearing in mind that the intention is to remain quite informal in approach and that certain matters (like the Great Vowel Shift) are referred to obliquely rather than being treated as fully as one might expect in a thorough-going text, Crystal succeeds in making interesting and lucid the subjects that are covered. Because of the omission of the straightforward, scholarly impedimenta for the sake of producing a “user-friendly” approach, it is difficult to see the application of the book except for the purposes set forth by the author in his Introduction—“what, in the world of travel, tourists would expect to find in a ‘guide’ or a ‘companion.’ ” To focus on that comparison, which is borne out in the subtitle, “A guided tour of the language,” I must say that it follows the lead of the more superficial guides of the type: it emerges as more of a Good Food Guide than as a traditional Baedeker (which, after all, directed the reader’s attention to the art and culture of the sites to be visited). Of its kind, The English Language is by far the most palatable, given my earlier reservations. The questionable bits (like the sidebars, on pages 198 and 199, listing Shakespearian and Biblical “Idioms,” most of which, in my opinion, would be classed as metaphors) need reexamination, and it is hoped that a second edition might yield an approach to some of the objectionable areas that finds the author focusing on the subject more than on an attempt at reaching the lowest common denominator of reader.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Dictionary of Days

Leslie Dunkling, (Routledge, London; Facts On File, New York, 1988), xiii + 156.

[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection.]

Many readers may be familiar with Holidays and Anniversaries of the World, published by Gale Research Company and, I believe, now in its second edition. Then there is the Book of Days, an interesting Victorian relic that seems to be in most libraries either in its original edition or in a Gale reprint. The former is a large (8½” × 11”) work of almost 900 pages arranged in calendar order and with a detailed index; it lists all kinds of important holidays in all countries of the world and offers a brief chronology of the major events that took place on each day; it ranges from religious, historical, and political days to promotional items, like National Laugh Week. For its avowed purpose, it is probably the most comprehensive work available. The old Book of Days lists far fewer holidays and anniversaries but gives interesting (if not always accurate) descriptions of their origins. The first is a reference book, the second a fascinating browsing medium.

Leslie Dunkling’s book is not like either of the above. It does have a calendar in the back, but that lists only the relatively few days the author has selected for treatment in the main body of the book, where they are listed by name, in alphabetical order. For those benighted few who are unfamiliar with Dunkling’s works, they include the Guinness Book of Names, First Names First, Everyman’s Dictionary of First Names, You Name It!, and, with Gordon Wright, A Dictionary of Pub Names. The last, as far as I know, has not been published in the U.S. To make a long story short, Dunkling is an onomasiologist or onomastician, and president of the Names Society, a U.K. counterpart (in more modest guise) of the American Name Society.

The number of entries in the book (850, according to the jacket blurb) may seem a bit sparse, but they make up in quality what they lack in quantity. The list is eclectic, covering the days important to people in the U.K., Commonwealth, and the U.S. It contains not only “real” days (like gaudy day, Geranium Day, German Day, Gesuffa Day [See TOAST ‘N JELLY DAY], and Girl Scout Day, but Gloomy Sunday (after the lugubrious song of the same name, which I had not known was of Hungarian origin), insipid day, and Teacher for a Day Day. Nights, like Thump-the-door Night and Burns Night are there as well as anything else one might think up having to do with day, night, the names of the days of the week, and other associated references, including busman’s holiday. All the information is set forth in a clear, straightforward style; knowing Dunkling’s meticulous scholarship, I assume the facts are as accurate as available evidence permits. My only criticism of the book is that it lacks an index. The calendar in the back, already mentioned, serves as a kind of chronological index, but there is much good material buried in the entries which, once one has read through the text, remains almost inaccessible to those who haven’t memorized it. This is the kind of reference book one reads through, cover to cover; but if readers recall a detail, mentioned in an entry, to which they want to refer again weeks, months, or years later, the absence of an index will stymie them. How experienced publishers of reference books, like Routledge and Facts On File, can allow such a work to be published without an index is a mystery.

Laurence Urdang

OBITER DICTA

The owner of a hotel in the Dordogne, Le Moulin du Roc, has been expelled from the “prestigious” international association of inns, Relais et Châteaux de Campagne, and is likely to be dérosée and détoquée by the two other major corps of renown for restaurateurs, Guide Michelin and Guide Millau, because she doctored a photograph of Nancy Reagan and Raisa Gorbachev to put herself in the picture, representing that she had been invited to prepare the food served at the recent summit meetings. This intelligence is imparted to readers of VERBATIM in the interest of attestation for etymologists: the woman’s name is Solange Gardillou. One might have expected Gardemanger.

Readers of the review of The Random House Dictionary in the Winter 1988 issue might have been somewhat mystified by the following:

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, of ZZ percent of the books published: the rest are not reviewed at all.

The simple explanation is that the figures were not available when the article was written, so the Xs, Ys, and Zs were inserted for later replacement. As it turned out, the statistics did not become available at all (at least, not from Wilson), and the appropriate adjustment was not made to the text. We regret the error. In any event, we can be reasonably confident that “XXXXX” is not a very large number, that “YYYYY” is a much smaller number, and the “ZZ percent” is, at a guess, in the single digits, probably not more than 5. We should be grateful to any reader who can provide the suitable statistics.

According to The Times [19 February 1988], the leading brand of condoms sold in the Soviet Union is nicknamed galoshers.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Corn Borer Levels Building.” [Headline in the Sheboygan Press, early July 1987. Submitted by Rodger L. Holton, Newark, Delaware.]

ETYMOLOGICA OBSCURA

There are probably many things in western culture that we take for granted—or, at least, are not wont to question too closely. Whatever curiosity might have been aroused at the tender age when we first learned Pop! Goes the Weasel was likely to have been squelched (if, indeed, it ever manifested itself as a question) by mother or nanny who, herself ignorant of the answer, dismissed it as a bit of nursery-rhyme nonsense: after all, it took Baring Gould and the Opies to alert the world to the secretive, satirical undertones lying beneath many common nursery rhymes. William Greaves, in an article on a collection of Victorian music hall posters [The Times, 10 February 1988], reports that the Hackney borough archivist, David Mander, speculates that the expression arose because the frequenters of the Eagle, a pub mentioned in the song, found their finances occasionally stretched, requiring them to pop (‘pawn’ in the vernacular of the day) their weasel. As to the nature of a weasel, there is some doubt: Mander suggests it was “some kind of carpenter’s tool”; Len Deadfield, current landlord of the Eagle (rebuilt around 1900), thinks it was a tailor’s flatiron; Bill Manley, a local historian, questions the likelihood that any worker would pawn the tools of his trade, thus disabling his ability to get them out of pawn. In Manley’s opinion, weasel means, ‘any item of value, like a family watch chain.’ There are so many factors at work in expressions of this kind—poetic license, lost sources of metaphors, etc.—that it is dangerous to offer definitive answers without sufficient supporting evidence. Nonetheless, one might well question the image, literal or metaphoric, of the monkey chasing the weasel “once around the cobbler’s bench,” which makes little sense if the weasel is an object. Moreover, how is the monkey explained, either literally or figuratively?

Turning to the OED, we find quite a large number of glosses for monkey:

1. literally, the animal.

2. monkey on a stick, a kind of toy.

3. one who resembles a monkey in looks or behavior.

4. a term of playful contempt, used of young people.

5. (in Australia) the monkey-bear, or koala.

6. a kind of gun or cannon.

7. a drop hammer (machine).

8. the instrument which drives a rocket.

9. short for monkey-block, a kind of nautical sheave.

10. a wooden container for grog.

11. a hunting flask.

12. a kind of earthenware water vessel.

13. a bricklayer’s hod.

14. a device for checking railcar movement in a mine.

15. a solution of zinc chloride used in soldering.

16. suck (or sup) the monkey, (a) drink from a bottle; (b) drink spirit from a coconut; (c) drink spirit from a cask through a straw.

17. monkey’s allowance, “more kicks than halfpence.”

18. get or put one’s monkey up, enrage someone.

19. a bet of $500 or £500.

20. have a monkey on a house, have a mortgage on it.

Definitions of weasel yield little: the only remotely applicable senses seem to focus on weese, an old word meaning ‘distil gently,’ and an obsolete term for the windpipe, or trachea, weezle, itself a variant of weasand, with the same meaning. To be sure, one of the problems in accepting pop in the sense of ‘pawn’ is that the words of the song would seem to indicate that the monkey received some sort of knock or rap in retaliation for “chasing the weasel”—whatever that might mean. The most tempting theory combines the semantic content of senses 10, 11, and 16 of monkey with weese—at least those place the expression into the general realm of bibulation, in keeping, if remotely, with the folklore of the Eagle.

Alas, all of the foregoing is too clever by half, for we can find (also in the OED), under Pop, int., adv., the following intelligence:

Pop goes the weasel, name of a country dance very popular in the ‘fifties,’ in which these words were sung or exclaimed by the dancers while one of them darted under the arms of the others to his partner; also the name of the tune; hence as a vb. and in other humorous uses. See N. & Q. (1905) 10th Ser. III. 492, IV. 209.

…c 1854 (Musicseller’s Advt. in Newspaper) The new country dance ‘Pop goes the weasel,’ introduced by her Majesty Queen Victoria.— Musical Bouquet No. 409. Pop goes the Weasel; La Tempête; and Le Grand Père. These fashionable dances as performed at the court balls. 1855 in N. & Q. 10th Ser. IV. 211/1 This dance is very popular, it is without deception, ‘Pop goes the weasel’ has been to Court, and met a good reception….

That is not to say that pop goes the weasel (the dance and the expression) could not have originated at the Grecian Saloon, the theater annex to the Eagle in City Road; but the embellishing information puts us no closer to the etymology. Is it possible that what is described is a popping sound made when tapping a keg with a bung-starter in order to suck the monkey? Perhaps. But that still does not explain the words of the jingle. Clearly, what we need is some attestation for weasel (or a similar word) having the meaning ‘bung,’ ‘barrel’ or ‘keg,’ or the like.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

Sign spotted in a Chelsea restaurant: “Plat du jour, changed each day.” From The Times [London] Diary, 25 February 1987.

Language As a Source of Conflict

Geoffrey Kingscott, Editor, Language Monthly

In the Terror which followed the French Revolution, the hated aristocrats, whatever their disguise, could usually be distinguished from honest toilers because their hands were unroughened by manual labor. But to make doubly sure they could also be tested to see how they pronounced the particular diphthong written as oi in French (as in moi, foin, soin etc.). If it came out as a somewhat effeminate WE and not as a straightforward proletarian WA (as in modern French) they were condemned out of their own mouths.

I often think of this story whenever I hear someone speak with a languid, drawled “Oxford” or “cut-glass” accent. Because of a quite unreasoning prejudice the upper class accent sets my teeth on edge, and in a social upheaval I can quite imagine myself as a latter-day Fouquier-Tinville, sending the Horray Henries to the guillotine on the evidence of a single drawled vowel (mairn, perhaps, as in “I say, my good mairn”).

Sometimes an actual language (not just the pronunciation) divides the ruler from the ruled, as is said to have happened in 11th- and 12th-century England, when the court and all officials spoke French and the rest of the population English. A case in point in the modern world is the Philippines, where the educated elite prefer to communicate in English. The mass of the population speak local languages, of which Tagalog is the best known. The Communist insurgents are said to owe much of their success in maintaining their ground under various regimes to the fact that they can communicate in Tagalog to the local peasants, whereas the Manila politicians cannot.

Speech and language are powerful sources of individual and collective identification, and so it is hardly surprising that even in our internationalized world, many social conflicts owe their origin to linguistic differences.

The problems are seen most clearly, of course, in countries which are officially bilingual, of which poor little Belgium is the most striking example. Even as I write [late 1987], that country is in the throes of a political crisis. It may be the undeclared capital of the European Community, where in 1992 there will be a barrier-free common market of 320 million souls from 12 member countries speaking a variety of languages, but such international vision does not govern domestic politics.

The Fourons crisis, which provoked the fall of the Belgian coalition government in December 1987, is but the latest in a whole series of language disputes which have vexed the Belgian state since WWII, and which determine political allegiances more than any economic theory or social class.

In the northern and western parts of Belgium the language spoken is Flemish (the local name for what is, in fact, Dutch). In the south and east they speak French. For much of Belgium’s short history (the country was not created until 1830) French was the more fashionable language, and the sharp-eyed visitor to Flemish-speaking towns such as Ostend or Antwerp may still see texts in French carved on some buildings. The Flemings came more and more to resent their own tongue being looked down on, and since WWII, in particular, they have been asserting themselves.

The problems became so acute that the country has in effect been split into Flemish-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia, each with its own regional administration. The capital, Brussels, a predominantly French-speaking island in a Flemish-speaking area, is a third zone, officially bilingual in everything. But linguistic boundaries are never tidy, and a small group of predominantly French-speaking villages called Les Fourons were included in the Flemish zone. They have elected a French-speaking mayor, José Happart, who refuses to take the examination for proficiency in Flemish required for the exercise of his office in that region. The Flemings take this as an affront and insist on dismissing him, but he is always re-elected. The national government coalition fell apart on this very matter, but in the subsequent general election no one seemed to offer a solution to the problem.

Even if the problem of Les Fourons—or perhaps we should use the Flemish name Voeren—were solved, many Belgians feel that the language question would then immediately raise its head somewhere else. The Belgians joke wryly about their predicament. Their favorite story is one in which a class of European schoolchildren is asked to write an essay about an elephant. The French child writes about the love life of the elephant. The English child writes about the hunting of elephants. But the longest essay was that written by the Belgian child—it was called “The Elephant and the Belgian Language Question.”

Canada is another country with bilingual problems, although in the eyes of the world it seems to have settled these with tact and diplomacy. Officially the country is bilingual in English and French. Quebec has always been predominantly French, and the other provinces predominantly English. Hitting back at the danger of being swamped in an English-speaking North America, Quebec has always been militant in the defense of French, and this has caused some friction. Inspired by De Gaulle’s splendid indiscretion, shouting “Vive le Québec libre” to an ecstactic crowd during his official visit to Canada 20 years ago and by the influence of the militant Parti Québécois, Quebec has tried to insist on the primacy of French, even to the extent of banning English-only signs outside shops and business premises.

On the other hand, as official English/French bilingualism is extended to more and more of those Canadian provinces with English-speaking majorities, reports are coming in of a backlash: In New Brunswick, which is said to have a 38 percent francophone population and which was the first province to go officially bilingual, there were fist fights at one public meeting held in Moncton to discuss the proposals. In the summer of 1987 there were hostile demonstrations in Salisbury when the post office hired a francophone manager in a primarily anglophone town. “French language services stir fear, anger—Alliance for Preservation of English slowly taking hold in Eastern Ontario” was a headline in November 1987 in the Toronto Globe and Mail over reports that support for the backlash’s own association had been booming since the Ontario provincial parliament passed Bill 8, the French Language Services Act, in November 1986.

In the United States there has also been something of a backlash against the increasing official and unofficial use of ethnic languages, particularly Spanish, with the passage by referendum in California of a proposal to enshrine in legislation that English should be recognized as the official language.

Even in the United Kingdom, cradle of the world language English, there are problems with the Welsh in the Welsh-speaking part of Wales, though protests are usually limited to painting out the English in official signs. From time to time, however, martyrs find ways of provoking the authorities to send them to prison, usually by refusing to pay a fine for some infraction committed during a demonstration.

In the countries of Asia linguistic consciousness is only just starting to stir. Up to now so many activities were locally centered that language problems did not arise, or where various communities lived side by side, as do the Malays and Chinese in Malaysia and Singapore, each community kept to itself. But now there are problems, for example, in Malaysia over the respective educational provision, particularly in higher education, for Malay, Tamil, and Chinese speakers, with political parties becoming aligned—as in Belgium—on linguistic lines.

And so, we can go on round the world, with communities, national, social, or tribal, often drawing battle lines along linguistic frontiers. But one should not exaggerate. Linguistic differences might occasionally lead to fisticuffs, but rarely to loss of life—in contrast to religious differences.

Language is a form of individual and corporate identity, necessary to the human psyche. But only if we feel our identity is threatened do we become aggressive. It is no accident that dictatorships tend to frown on diversity in language—in the reign of Franco in Spain there was little tolerance for the two regional languages, Basque and Catalan, both of which have enjoyed a new flowering since the old regime was laid to rest.

If we could all recognize that there is richness in diversity, the world would be a more tolerant, and altogether more tolerable, place in which to live.

Antipodean Newsletter: The Coming of the Strangers

George W. Turner

It was in the warm part of the year that the strangers appeared. Yet they were wrapped up in peculiar close-fitting cloaks or blankets. They came from the sea, from enormous floating objects, were of indeterminate gender, and were as pale as if they were returning from the dead. They brought with them terrifying animals with big ears, and others even taller, which with a snort and a loud noise caused a man to fall dead and bleeding. They made noises unlike any known language.

In the language of the newcomers this was January 1788 and they called the land New South Wales. Unlike other visitors among the local people they tended to stay in one place and began to crowd out their hosts from the best hunting grounds and fishing places. It was a convenient fiction among themselves that the land had no previous owner, a fiction still challenged two hundred years later in a call for land rights.

The elders among the newcomers were well-meaning. They brought what they felt to be a superior religion and a superior civilization. It was not immediately obvious to the local people why working most of the day was better than hunting for a few hours a week, and the intricacies of personal ownership sometimes eluded them, as, indeed, they had eluded many of the newcomers who owed their passage out to that very shortcoming. Nevertheless there was some exchange of learning. The local people learned that the big-eared ones that made terrifying noises at night were called cows and the snorting ones horses, and they knew that the man with the gun was inseparable from the horse. More familiar animals were now called kangaroos since the newcomers seemed to think that this would be the native name in Sydney, as it was farther north. Sometimes the local people made their own names for the new animals; rabbits were ‘stand-up ears,’ sheep ‘soft feet.’ Horses were named ‘white man’s kangaroo’ (in the Adelaide region) or yarraman which seems to mean ‘long teeth.’ European food was named too: rice was called ‘white man’s maggots.’

The newcomers began to learn the names of Australian animals, plants, weapons, and other things from the first people they met, the natives of the Sydney area, so that many Aboriginal words in English are from this region. The koala (for a long time called native bear), the dingo, the wallaroo (a large brownish-black kangaroo), the wallaby (a small kangaroo), waratah (a red-flowering tree or shrub, the floral emblem of New South Wales), boomerang, waddy (a club or stick, possibly a Pidgin word from English wood), cooee (a call to attract attention from a distance), and corroboree (Aboriginal singing and dancing), appear to have this origin. Sometimes, as with galah or kookaburra, names of noisy birds, it is not easy to determine a source language as several languages provide a plausible source but perhaps reflect onomatopoeic names independently arrived at.

Some Aboriginal people accepted invitations to closer relations with the newcomers. One named Bennelong lived for a time with the Governor and later, wearing the clothing of a British officer, lived in a hut at what is now Bennelong Point, where the Sydney Opera House now stands. A few miles to the north at Parramatta, Captain Watkin Tench of the Marines encountered a native whose name he recorded as Yel-lo-mun-dee (with the stress on the first syllable). This presumably explains the oddly named Yellow Monday Creek and thence the names of the cicadas yellow Monday and (in imitation of it, we may presume) green Monday, also known as greengrocer. The plethora of popular names for kinds of cicadas (others are floury miller, double drummer, and cherry nose, also known as whisky drinker) is explained by the popularity of collecting cicadas among boys, especially round Sydney.

Opera lovers and boys who collect cicadas commemorate the names of Bennelong and Yel-lo-mun-dee, but this beginning did not lead to fruitful cultural exchange. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, nationalism promoted native names such as koala and kookaburra rather than native bear and laughing jackass, and in the early twentieth century the Jindy-worobak movement in poetry encouraged Aboriginal themes. But there is not really much to show for two hundred years of sharing a land. It is not surprising that many Aboriginal people see little cause to celebrate a much-publicized bicentenary of an intrusion into their land.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“But opponents of the road insist that the planned extension will bring even more traffic into the area, as well as destroy the parkland habitat of wild creatures bellybuttons such as pileated woodpeckers and red-shouldered hawks.” [The Potomac Almanac, Potomac, Maryland, early December 1987. Submitted by Cornelius Van S. Roosevelt, Washington, D.C.]

EPISTOLA {Harold Mann}

Robert Marvin seems to have “dropped a clanger” in dubbing John Donne an anthroponesiast. Donne wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.” Perhaps, taking a cue from Edward C. Echols, he could have been an ananthroponesiast. For whom the clanger tolls….

[Harold Mann, Faversham, Kent]

EPISTOLA {Judith Collins}

I very much enjoyed the article on moroxes. May I suggest a candidate for this classification from the world of corporate mergers and acquisitions: “hostile tender offer”?

[Judith Collins, Arlington, Virginia]

EPISTOLA {Robin Gill}

With reference to “Sinister Dexterity,” [XIV, 2] it is curious that left-right can be discussed without reference to up-down, which might be the penultimate prejudice (light-dark is apparently the ultimate one).

Heumann and Wellisch point out that “astronomers have found that a very much larger number of galaxies spin leftward rather than in a clockwise direction.” What the astronomers do not say is that the “clockwise = rightward, anticlockwise = leftward” nomenclature is an arbitrary one based on an assumption of superiority for the upperside of the spin span.

As the authors would surely agree, a check for correspondence of right and correct alone is only one measure of left-right prejudice. For example, while ‘right’ migi and ‘correct’ tadashii are not the same in Japanese, migi-ni deru (literally, ‘appear to the right’) means ‘to be superior’ or ‘go above,’ ‘be second to none’; a dependable person is migi-ude (literally, ‘right arm’) or ‘right-hand man’; hidari-leiki can mean a ‘sot’ as well as a ‘left-hander,’ hidarimae (literally, ‘left (side) in front’) can mean being on a ‘downward course’ or ‘in adversity’; and hidari-malti or ‘anticlockwise’ also means ‘an eccentric’ or ‘screwball.’

And if I can interject a purely personal observation, Esperanto, while using a different word, prava, for ‘correct’ than for ‘right,’ dekstra, as was shown in the authors’ list, is surely the most hopelessly prejudicial of languages. Not only is ‘left’ (maldekstra) a mere ‘not right,’ but ‘old’ is ‘not new’ (mal-nova), ‘bad’ is ‘not good’ (mal-bona), ‘down’ is ‘not up,’ and ‘cold’ is ‘not warm’ (mal-varma). I find this disgusting.

[Robin Gill, Tokyo]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“…the situation is likely to deteriorate if nothing is done quickly.” [From an article by Kirk Makin, The Globe and Mail, Winnipeg, 11 November 1987. Submitted by Charles C. Bigelow, Winnipeg.]

EPISTOLA {David Galef}

Ms. Graham’s reflections on foreigners who mangle English “Speaking English” [XIV, 1], was entertaining, if not entirely new: in “Japanese English” [VII, 3], I wrote up my own collection of such phrases. It is true, as Ms. Graham says, that the Japanese are “masters of the art of seizing a foreign word and alternately beating it and aerating it until it sounds like a native product.” Unfortunately, having made that statement, Ms. Graham goes on to mangle the Japanese loanwords. Sumato, for example, undergoes a sea-change in crossing the Pacific: it no longer means ‘intelligent,’ but ‘slim and stylish.’ Upatodatu and gurma foto— well, no Japanese could pronounce those words that way: for one thing, there are no isolated tu or r sounds in Japanese. The words should be appu tsu deto and gurama foto. A little more attention to detail and Ms. Graham’s article would have been really haikurasu ‘high class.’

[David Galef, New York City]

EPISTOLA {John B. Mullen}

As Horace said, “Sometimes even Homer nods.” So also VERBATIM; but twice in one issue [XIII,4]?

The lead article, “Folk Etymology…,” offers several questions. First, listed among words as “simply invented,” is tercel. Hardly. It is a legitimate word for a class of hawks, used in falconry.

When dealing with invented words, especially in an article on etymology, it would seem appropriate to distinguish between words that are truly invented (of which Kodak and Nylon are perhaps the most famous) on the one hand; for these one could truly say that they have no etymology. On the other hand are words like Xerox and Amtrak, which are invented but have known roots, often in Greek or Latin, but also in English and other modern languages. It’s a useful distinction.

The various examples of unusual words and spellings cited in the article, created and innovative though they be, are often malapropisms rather than folk etymology—at least if you understand “folk etymology” as meaning ‘providing a plausible-sounding explanation of the derivation of a word or expression that is totally different from its actual roots and/or original meaning’; with possibly the addition of ‘… thereupon distorting the original words (as in “chaise lounge”).’ Etymology, folk or genuine, has little to do with most of the cited expressions.

[John B. Mullen, Barrington, Illinois]

EPISTOLA {N. Hamment}

Having read Mr. Demy’s article on James Joyce [XIV,1] and the “odderkop in the myre,” I begin to wonder if there is yet more to be dug out of the quotation. In my native Lancashire dialect an attercop is a spider: it can be found in modern Danish also as edderkop. In the same language myre means ‘ant.’

[N. Hamment, Bolton, England]

OBITER DICTA

1. Advertising:

(a) Before your very eyes, another intransitive verb bites the dust! If you enjoy watching the language change, keep your eye on shop. It is an established transitive verb in British slang, where to shop someone means to betray him to the police or other authorities. But the Americans, always ready to exploit commercialism, have taken to removing the at from the traditional Shop at Gimbels: now that Gimbels is (are?) gone, we are told to Shop Macys, Harrods, etc. What have they ever done to me?

(b) One is easily seduced into believing that the advertising agency for a new headache remedy must be delighted that the name of the product seems to be the 1980s’ version of MadAve: it is called Advil(le).

(c) Coors managed to make the wrong choice no matter how one looks at it. Their current slogan is Coors ages their beer. With a name like Coors, which sounds like a plural anyway, there is unlikely to have been any objection to Coors age their beer. If they revel in their singularity, then Coors ages its beer, Coors ages the beer, Coors ages beer, or what-have-you—anything but what they have.

(d) On a logic-defying note, how about this exchange in a TV commercial for Genovese Drugstores?:

SHE: How can we afford to take so many pictures?

HE: At Genovese, the more we take, the more we save.

(e) To marathon, sale-athon, you might want to add Toyotathon. On the other hand, you might not.

(f) Wrangler seem to be having DNA problems. In their TV commercials aimed at women, in which “special fitting” is stressed, they have come up with a line that ought to arouse the feminists: “It’s not a better body you need, it’s better genes.”

(g) There are desperate drinkers in the West Country of England. An advertisement in The Sunday Times (27 September 1987) offers “Sheep Dip—An 8 year old pure Malt Scotch whisky much enjoyed by the villagers of Oldbury-on-Severn.”

2. Insurance/Law Note: [from Buck Rogers, 19 April 1987]

WILMA: I’ll check the engineroom for damages.

3. [Editor’s Prejudice Department] Don’t you wish that TV would

(a) stop spending so much of its time promoting itself and the entertainment business in general? Virtually everyone interviewed on every talk show (with a few notable exceptions) is an “entertainer.” Where are the artists, musicians, authors, philosophers, teachers, historians, craftsmen, physicists, chemists, biologists, psychologists, etc.?

(b) notwithstanding the (disconcerting) prospect of 3D reception in the future, reduce for the time being the overwhelming frequency of commercials for Douches, Diapers, and Drugs? The latest disposable diaper commercial features blue urine!

(c) eliminate—or, at least, reduce—violence by making those actors who meet a horrible death on the tube stay dead?

(d) make toilet-paper manufacturers confine their sponsorship to shitcoms?

(e) discontinue (at once) all domestic comedies in which every five-year-old is a wise-cracking Groucho Marx? (On a heartening note, the Bill Cosby show died a quick rating death in the U.K.)

(f) forbid Kentucky Fried Chicken from using chickens on TV to promote their own consumption?

(I’m no vegetarian, but aren’t there limits?)

4. Felicitous metaphor: In an interview concerning the Reagan/Gorbachev summit scheduled for late 1987, Peter Hobday (BBC4, 25 September 1987) referred to those hardworking people responsible for the complex organizations details as Sherpas.

5. The British Home Office maintains a register of prisoners who have escaped custody. According to a newspaper report, it is called The Book of Exodus. [September 1987]

6. Irish Bull Department: “But how do I know what is going to be useful or make me laugh until I see it?” [Philip Howard, The Times, 28 September 1987]

7. The name of the former Conservative Lord Mayor who urged the city councillors of Birmingham, England, to license brothels is Freda Cocks. [October 1987]

8. In an effort to acquaint London taxi drivers with the whereabouts of the new Stolport (short take-off and landing airport) in the East End, Brymon, the proprietors, are holding a competition for an airport monicker in rhyming slang. [October 1987]

9. Librarians, Thesaurus Compilers, and Other Cataloguers Please Copy: According to The Times City Diary [15 October 1987], the Sheffield City Council lists cemeteries and crematoria under RECREATION DEPARTMENT; Wirral County Council lists them under LEISURE (along with parks, museums, and public baths); the London Stock Exchange lists funeral directors under FREIGHT AND TRANSPORT.

10. In October 1987, the British Independent Broadcasting Authority, several Tory MPs, executives of Channel 4, and several prominent literary figures, including Auberon Waugh, Harold Pinter, Andrew Motion, and Peter Levi, became embroiled in a dispute concerning the banning from a reading, scheduled for November on Channel 4, of “v.,” a poem by Tony Harrison on the grounds that it is “a torrent of abscene language” and a “stream of four-letter filth.” It does seem curious that Great Britain and America, which make so much of the issue of the freedom of the press (and, one must assume, other media), still suffer from periodic attacks of puritan logomancy, while countries that have never made such a fuss over such matters appear to be surviving quite well, unsullied by pornography on TV and, in the case of Italy, unaffected by the election to Parliament of “La Cicciolina” (Ilona Staller), a star of pornographic films. In his leading article in The Times [19 October], Bernard Levin quite properly (if that is the right word) laces into the Yahoos. Harrison’s poem, according to report, is an account by a Leeds United skinhead on finding graffiti sprayed on his parents' gravestone. As no one has yet come up with a cleaning material successful in removing graffiti, perhaps the only way to get rid of it is to legislate it away. The furor has had one desirable effect: if the reading is broadcast, Channel 4 can be assured of the widest possible audience, even though a significantly large percentage of the viewers is likely to consist of prurient prudes.

11. All Belgium is divided into two parts; in the northern, the official language is Flemish, in the southern, French. In the Flemish village of Fouron, quite close to the border and at the eastern (Dutch) border, it has been reported that the mayor, who, by law, must be able to speak Flemish, was dismissed because he failed a language proficiency examination. Countering this action, the people of Fouron reelected him. The law being what it is, he was required to take the examination again—and again, and again—in all, he refused nine times to submit. As a result (the details were sketchy), in October the entire Belgian government was compelled to resign, and the problem was not expected to be resolved till the end of 1987, when elections were again held.

12. “[A] layer of unskilled yahoos devoid of either intellectual or spiritual depth” is the way Sir Geoffrey Elton, regius professor of modern history at Cambridge University, characterized the coming generation if the government were to allow Latin to seek its own level in the national curriculum. The present requirement is for “a modern language”; the Secretary of State for Education and Science, Mr. Kenneth Baker, plans to change this to “a foreign language” or “a modern foreign or classical language.” By the time they have sorted out what “a modern classical language” might be, it will probably include standard English.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Iranian interpreter Wahid Gordji… is wanted for questioning in some bombings by French police.” [Caption under a photograph in the Chicago Tribune, 27 July 1987. Submitted by Robert N. Feinstein, Downers Grove, Illinois.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Millions of others were rehabilitated posthumously.” [From an article about Russia by Barry Schweid in The Patriot Ledger, Quincy, Massachusetts, 14 February 1987. Submitted by Dr. Adam G. N. Moore, Boston.]

CORRIGENDUM

In Walter P. Armstrong, Jr.’s article, “Sherlock Holmes Adds a Word,” [XIV,3], reference was made to “the centenary of the publication of the first Sherlock Holmes story….” The article was submitted in 1987, when the centenary was celebrated; there is no convenient English word for ‘101st anniversary,’ so some other change should have been made, but wasn’t. Nostra culpa.

Paring Pairs No. 29

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). Record work and create star of first magnitude.
(b). Castle in the air.
(c). Look briefly through cravat collection.
(d). Entrance for wandering opera star.
(e). Churchman’s debts to second-hand experiences.
(f). Blemish from being borne in Pullman.
(g). Aptly named country of angry people.
(h). Coin is something at a great distance.
(i). Nonitalic (!) words inspire sentimental twitch.
(j). St. Andrew’s bunker for athletic supporters?
(k). Gypsy man’s horseplay leads to love.
(l). What one must pay today even for a doghouse.
(m). Rambunctious western without music.
(n). The least you can expect from Little Mother.
(o). Fake ache from the bubbly?
(p). Unimportant midget’s coffin.
(q). Scented French chamberpot sounds mixed up.
(r). Allow me to say the swindle is over.
(s). Chance’s partners become one always in bad odor.
(t). Lovers entwine to create woman’s plant.
(u). Fertile lorry source.
(v). American beauty is up to it.
(w). Recognize information about current electrical state.
(x). Purchase!
(y). Hip joint.
(z). Clupeid delicacy arranged on this before fiery furnace?

(1). A.
(2). A.C.
(3). Antic.
(4). Beer.
(5). Berth.
(6). Butt.
(7). Buy.
(8). Can.
(9). Con.
(10). Cur.
(11). Diva.
(12). Done.
(13). Dun.
(14). Ever.
(15). Far.
(16). Garden.
(17). Gate.
(18). Her.
(19). Hinge.
(20). Horse.
(21). House.
(22). I.O.U.s
(23). Ire.
(24). Jock’s.
(25). Knowledge.
(26). Land.
(27). Light.
(28). Mark.
(29). Mini.
(30). Mum.
(31). Oleander.
(32). Opus.
(33). Pain.
(34). Paris.
(35). Play.
(36). Po.
(37). Rack.
(38). Rent.
(39). Rom.
(40). Roman.
(41). Rose.
(42). Scan.
(43). Shad.
(44). Sham.
(45). Small.
(46). Stinker.
(47). Thing.
(48). Tic.
(49). Ties.
(50). Trap.
(51). Truck.
(52). Vicar.
(53). Word.

Winners receive a credit of $25.00 or the equivalent in sterling towards the purchase of any title or titles offered in the VERBATIM Book Club Catalogue. Two winners will be drawn from among the correct answers, one from those received in Aylesbury, the other from those received in Old Lyme. Those living in the U.K., Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa should send their answers to VERBATIM, Box 199, Aylesbury, Bucks., HP20 ITQ, England; all others should send their answers to VERBATIM, 4 Laurel Heights, Old Lyme, CT 06371, U.S.A. You need send only the one-word solution, on a postcard, please.

Answers to Paring Pairs No. 28

(a). Salary for Siamese becomes capital in Taiwan? (47,36) Thai Pay.
(b). Def.: (of a Chinese) to get drunk. (47,51,33) Thai Won On.
(c). Frowning, morbid fighter-plane pilot. (17,1) Grim Ace.
(d). Bury the fresco between the institutions. (22,27) Inter Mural.
(e). Caviar vessel. (41,7) Roe Boat.
(f). Iraqi street woman’s father? (5,13) Bag Dad.
(g). Polluted, wealthy people (15,44) Effluent Society.
(h). Fat farm. (18,12) Hippie Commune.
(i). Computer connection for grain shipments. (11,38) Cereal Port.
(j). Nude film-goer. (26,8) Movie Buff.
(k). That’s a no-no. (14,28) Double Negative.
(l). Animated shorts. (20,35) Hot Pants.
(m). Will he inherit his father’s fishy odor? (45,3) Sole Air.
(n). Little devil to wander about and get better. (21,43) Imp Rove.
(o). Policy of Doc’s memo. (39,30) Quay Note.
(p). Productive distribution of hereditary character. (16,40) Gene Ration.
(q). Benedict Arnold in the Big Apple? (29,46) Northern Spy.
(r). Plastic surgeon is the expert. (24,23) Knows Job.
(s). Tainted caviar in Hyde Park. (42,41) Rotten Roe.
(t). The Naughty Sombrero, a German spa? (4,19) Bad Homburg.
(u). Makes the stool move smoothly. (9,32) Caster Oil.
(v). Patchy sidemen. (6,2) Band Aids.
(w). Appealing fruit of your labors. (34,37) Paring Pears.
(x). Post partum for a man. (25,10) Male Caul.
(y). Pitcher ends his career. (50,48) Winds Up.
(z). Lachrymatory. (49,7) Wail Boat.

EPISTOLA {Hugh Grant Allamson}

I refer to the article, “Sherlock Holmes Adds a Word,” by Walter P. Armstrong, Jr., [XIV,3] and particularly to his quotation from Dame Helen Gardner quoting, in turn, Baring Gould.

It is believed locally—or certainly was by me when I lived in that part of the world—that the bog called “Grimpen Mire” was based on Foxtor Mire. I do not think that the term “Grimspound Bog” is used: this bog is simply called Grimspound, whereas Foxtor Mire is always referred to as such. Perhaps “Grimpen Mire” is a composite.

I believe that the story was written when Sir Arthur was staying at Prince Hall, just along the road from Two Bridges. Foxtor Mire is much nearer Prince Hall than is Grimspound, being only a couple of miles or so from Prince Hall, whereas Grimspound is some distance beyond Postbridge.

[Hugh Grant Allamson, Hove, Sussex]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Introduces wrestling holds in professional matches (13)
9. Troubadour almost makes toast (5)
10. Nude has to sing boating song (9)
11. Vitamin C is ordered to retain smile in part? (7)
12. Lioness tearing parts of shoes (7)
13. Careless among merry bunch of stars? (6)
15. Signs of maturity covered by newspapers (8)
18. Morally weak period of time before New Testament (8)
19. Eight slips covering top of one hamper (3-3)
22. Kind of exercise drill held by spy group, in retrospect (7)
24. Bunk made with energy and two trees (7)
26. Charms in appearance on stage (9)
27. Imperial Beer overturned (5)
28. Spy with an accent returned some silverware (13)

Down

1. Taking chances, hide in outfit (7)
2. Snapshot captures an alarm (5)
3. Nymphomaniacal love poem crossed out (9)
4. Future nun drunkenly holds up mug (6)
5. Stories about stray dogs (8)
6. Gems from ring put before chums (5)
7. Call attention to minor in possession of marijuana (9)
8. Last of college dons doesn’t eat in banquets (6)
14. Torn frilly fabric evaluated (9)
16. Mossy plant spreads to necropolis’s center (9)
17. Family member grabs frozen vehicle (8)
18. Phone user is again set up (6)
20. Hex cast on porter’s pants (7)
21. Kid with time to make cups and saucers (3,3)
23. Carries empty into saloons (5)
25. Non-Hispanic wandering along (5)

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Coin—$10 gold embezzled.” [Classified advertisement in the Orlando Sentinel, 21 December 1987. Submitted by Paul Pink, Orlando, Florida.]

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. P(AGE)ANTRY.
6. CAR(A)T.
9. E(POC)H. (HE, COP rev.).
10. C(LAIM)ABLE (MAIL anag.).
11. TRI(VI)AL.
12. NEEDLES(s).
13. FIG(H)TS (GIFTS anag.).
14. TO(READ)OR (ROOT rev.).
17. IMP-ACTED.
19. PA(USE)D.
22. AD(HERE)D.
24. EN(EM)IES. (SEINE, ME rev.).
26. SECTIONAL (anag.).
27. T-HEFT.
28. ENSUE (hidden).
29. SA(MAR-I)TAN.

Down

1. PLEA-T.
2. GRO-WING-UP.
3. AT-HEIST.
4. TAC-KLE (rev.).
5. YEARN FOR (anag.).
6. COM(PET)E.
7. RE(B)EL.
8. TREA(SURE)D.
13. FRICASSEE (hidden).
15. DISS(I’D)ENT.
16. P(END)ANTS.
18. CAR-MINE.
20. A-BETTOR.
21. BED-LAM.
23. HACKS (two meanings).
25. S(IT)-IN.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Fetus taken from womb to perform surgery.” [Headline in Petoskey (Michigan) News-Review, 7 October 1986. Submitted by David L. Miles, Charlevoix, Michigan.]

Internet Archive copy of this issue

---

1. R.E. Hawkins, Common Indian Words in English. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984. ↩︎

2. I think of chit as being well assimilated because it was of frequent occurrence in my home in Illinois when I was growing up. I was surprised to find that none of my fellow expatriates were familiar with it before coming to India. My father tells me he picked up the word from other servicemen in the South Pacific in 1944. ↩︎

3. In Benchley: Love Conquers All ↩︎

4. Pollock: First Book of Jurisprudence ↩︎

5. Klipstein: Drafting New York Wills 2nd ed. ↩︎

6. Sent by radio. ↩︎

7. we. ↩︎

8. saw. ↩︎

9. the back door was open. ↩︎

10. Then. ↩︎

11. got out of. ↩︎

12. car. ↩︎

13. suspect. ↩︎

14. Next. ↩︎

15. Suspects' guns are “firearms” … ↩︎

16. …and police guns are “weapons.” ↩︎

17. arrested the suspect. ↩︎

18. I read him his Miranda rights [vide infra]. ↩︎

19. This is an example of what Theodore M. Bernstein, in Winners & Sinners, used to call a “two-faced head.” —Ed. ↩︎