VOL XV, No 2 [Aytumn, 1984]

Women on Language; Women in Language

Helen W. Power, Washington University

Poet Muriel Rukeyser envisions Oedipus “old and blinded” asking the Sphinx why he hadn’t recognized his own mother. It was, the Sphinx explains, his answer to the riddle: “Man.”

“… You didn’t say anything about woman.” “When you say Man,” said Oedipus, “you include woman too. Everyone knows that.” She said, “That’s what you think.”

Were Oedipus alive today he might offer the same solution to the riddle. But he would indeed be feigning naïveté to claim that generic man is now understood to include woman. Even the most casual observers of social movements and language changes are conscious of what some might call the crusade for nonsexist language. (Careful feminist writers avoid unthinking use of imagery redolent of colonialism and militarism.) Though the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 noted and deplored the silence about women in the Declaration of Independence and though nonfeminists have worked toward removing sexism from English, most current activity stems from the women’s movement that began in the 1960s.

Feminists concerned about language relentlessly reveal language’s capacity to discriminate against women or to render them invisible. Poking and prodding at contemporary speech and writing, feminists condemn the use of a term identified with one sex or gender to designate all humanity. (“Gender” is preferred to “sex” in designating the cultural construct rather than the purely biological. However, some recent studies explore the connection between development of linguistic gender and sex/gender, and the question of anatomically determined language is fashionable.) Mankind tacitly imposes male values on all of humanity; manhours denies women’s work as a measure; manpower effaces women. So, too, feminists lobby for gender-neutral terms when appropriate. A familiar example: reasoning that in terms of job duties the sex or gender of the person who passes peanuts on an airplane is unimportant, editors of the Handbook of Nonsexist Language propose flight attendant rather than steward/stewardess and oppose gratuitous regendering of job titles (female flight attendant). (A court case notes a male purser and a female stewardess with identical job descriptions, but different salary scales.) Similarly, feminists discourage titles that identify women’s (but not men’s) marital status (though many users mistakenly assume Ms. a synonym for Miss).

More generally, feminists reveal and question implied norms in language and hence in our consciousness, ranging from the application form’s unmarried which suggests that marriage is the normal state (as parents of twins imply double births expected, referring to non-twins as singletons) to more complex issues, such as those associated with terms like masculine and feminine. Anomalies in language become evidence. What to make of the fact that one may be henpecked but not cockpecked? That some of us are cleaning ladies, but none of us is a “garbage gentleman”? That girls, a term suggesting youth but not dignity, have been females of any age, but the call on television’s Electric Company, “Hey, you guys,” summons boys and girls alike?

The hypothetical modern Oedipus might join some humans of both genders who carp at the most radical-seeming alterations of the language. Opponents of nonsexist language show passionate loyalty to principles of etymology and tradition and unexpected respect for grace and style (admittedly frequent victims of inclusion of the feminine pronoun). More subtle and less readily articulated objections probably exist. But few proponents of nonsexist language are ignorant of the claims of etymology, of custom, of aesthetics, or even of the inappropriateness of gender-neutral terms in a nongender neutral world. For them, as for most feminists, political considerations are primary. This explains support of “herstory” or “‘wim-min,” terms that finesse etymology to emphasize the male-orientation of conventional history and to eliminate the man in the word woman. (When etymology serves political concerns etymology is honored. For example, one writer cites a preference for cunt over vagina, because of the latter’s derivation from a Latin word meaning ‘sheath,’ often sheath for a sword.) The feminist position recognizes the power of language. Language is viewed not only as the product but the shaper of culture and as such is able to perpetuate or discourage discrimination or oppression. (In spite of symphony auditions of barefoot, screened musicians, church hymnals laced with maternal imagery for God, commencement addresses to “Women and men of Yale,” affirmative action and the resulting tokenism, few feminists think the cause won. Attitudes toward women, often assumed to be natural and hence sacred, are not easily changed.) Nonsexist language is no universal antidote. But most feminists, even recognizing the influence of preverbal and nonverbal forces and various sexist institutions, see acceptance of sexist language as an insidious poison.

This retreading of English, this adjusting of it, altering it, bandaging, and plastering it to promote a particular vision of society is the most widely perceived activity of feminists interested in language. But it is arguably the simplest philosophically and, though this is relatively unimportant, the least attractive. (A familiar but irrelevant complaint against feminists is that they lack charm, as though an unappealing style negates the justice of a cause. Rukeyser’s Sphinx was not very affable, either.) After all, those who undertake this dirty work are necessarily naysayers, rule-givers, censors of the word rather than bringers of it. Generally anti-elitist and anti-authoritarian by declaration, feminist alterers of language find themselves corralled with prescriptive grammarians and linguists.

The issue of nonsexist language envisions men and women as subject (or object) of language. Yet this is but one aspect of gender and linguistics, a subject that has its own conferences, bibliographies, and college courses. As literary critics, feminists look not only at images of women in literature but at women as writers and readers. So those interested in language look at women not only as writers and readers, but also as speakers and listeners. Such inquiry is less direct and more exploratory than nonsexist language promotion, but is no less political. Some theorists describe women’s relation to language as primarily a product of patriarchal oppression; others, usually acknowledging oppression, focus on women’s strengths.

Most investigators, feminist and nonfeminist alike, agree that women’s vernacular differs from men’s: Jespersen listed adjectives favored by women, noted women’s use of “little” intensifiers. Feminists ponder causes, implications. Does the close adherence of British women of all classes to accepted proper norms suggest women’s repression? Their conservatism? Their upward mobility? What attitude should feminists take to women’s suggested more frequent use of tag endings (“It’s a nice day, isn’t it?” “We’ll vote Democratic, won’t we?”)? Identified by early feminist linguist Robin Lakoff, women’s frequent use of tag endings has been both discounted by some but not all empirical studies and re-examined by other studies that distinguish different kinds of tag endings used by men and women. Those feminists who emphasize success within the world as we know it tend to encourage women to purge their speech of tag endings and to retrain themselves to speak in what is perceived as a more masculine, more assertive way. Others, emphasizing women’s particular values, urge retention of this and other features of women’s talk (for example, women frequently assume noncompetitive roles in conversation), suggesting that women’s talk encourages participation and the likelihood of consensus.

Such analyses of language pass as traditional in form if not in content. They echo the old question, posed regularly by missionaries, anthropologists, and linguists, as to whether women speak (or “chatter,” a word used only for females and nonhumans) a different language, a dialect, a “genderlect” with each other and with men, whether they can, do, or should speak what the title of Dale Spender’s book calls Man Made Language. The answers often appear in measured, academic prose. When offered by feminists, the answers frequently appear in a style that is marked by word play dependent on written forms; a style that is unconventional, mannered, at its best witty; a style that suggests alternatives to those styles that feminists would designate male-influenced. For it is no praise for most feminists to be included within the best accepted (for which, read “male-endorsed”) tradition. (Admittedly, no party completely purges its rhetoric of terms like phallologocentric, however.) Such a style marks both a reference work, A Feminist Dictionary, and the writings of theologian Mary Daly.

A Feminist Dictionary, edited by influential Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler along with Ann Russo, suggests the style and the substance of some recent feminist discourse. The editors disclaim objectivity. Yet, they imply, conventional lexicographers are not objective, though they neither recognize nor admit it. For example, in lexicographers’ frequent reliance on “best authors” as a source, dictionaries draw evidence from men, more frequently published and admired, and not women. Other significant editorial practices: the Feminist Dictionary lexicogaphers refuse to label a word like herstory a coinage. All words are coinages, the editors claim, and they resist charting relations between their entries and an “authorized” or canonized list of words. A Feminist Dictionary includes new words and new definitions; words from utopian literature suggest “what might be”; definitions are elaborate, the stated aim to stimulate research or theoretical development.

Under “A,” for example, the lexicographers provide entries for Adam, Ad feminam, ageism, “Ain’t I a Woman” (Sojourner Truth’s speech), and amniocentesis. “Z” is limited to three entries: Zamani Soweto sisters, Zeitgeist (‘Spirit of liberty, equality, and sorority’), and Zugassent (a term for male continence as practised by the Oneida utopian community). Under “L,” entries include Latin/Greek, defined by Aphra Behn, cited in Dale Spender’s book, as ‘Secret codes supplied through an education traditionally denied women.’ Another entry under L is Laadan, a language constructed by linguist Suzette Hayden Elgin and first used in her science fiction novel Native Tongue, a language which is designed to contain many “woman function” words not included in English. (British linguist Deborah Cameron in Feminism and Linguistic Theory doubts these lacunae, suggesting that English is flexible, and that women are disadvantaged primarily by alienation from high language.)

The energetic defining and developing of a woman’s language, the inevitable doubting and questioning of it, is energized by the work of French feminists, and is displayed in the verbal acrobatics of radical feminist theologian Mary Daly. For example, Daly describes the title of one of her early books, Gyn/Ecology, as saying “exactly what I mean to say.” It is “a way of wrenching back some wordpower,” and in a way not “a-mazing” (a typical Daly twirl of language to make the reader re-examine words) to our “fore-sisters who/were the Great Hags,” terms used in unconventional ways. Tacitly, Daly, like most feminists, invokes an earlier, quieter voice, that of Virginia Woolf. Woolf identified but did not describe “a woman’s sentence” and, in the same text, wrote of women ancestors (for example, Shakespeare’s putative sister) who was silent, silenced by a society dominated by men. Women’s language is often metonymy for women’s literary style. Woolf here suggests two lines of thought currently pursued by feminist linguists; feminists both seek to describe women’s language and to explore the cluster of related conditions summarized under the rubric “silence.” The discussion by women about women’s language is lively; the discussion of the related and complementary topic, women’s silence, is elaborate, complex, and a bit sad. Tillie Olsen identifies silent periods when women are diverted from their work by needs of their families; Spender talks of “silence upon silence” that has kept women’s experience from being encoded; Adrienne Rich, in On Lies, Secrets and Silences, sees women’s struggle for self-determination “muffled or silenced over and over”; most recently, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar chart women authors' apparent alienation from language, their frequent use of pseudonyms an attempt at renaming or, really, naming themselves. Feminists have much to say about men’s claim that women talk too much. To many, it is significant that the privilege of naming, granted to Adam, was denied to Eve.

Modern feminists interested in language may be sisters to Rukeyser’s Sphinx. The Sphinx may be silent, as in many traditions, or not, but she and Oedipus, who did not recognize parents of either gender, probably do not understand the same language.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing and The Nonsexist Word Finder

Casey Miller and Kate Swift, (2nd Edition, Harper & Row, 1988), x + 180pp. and Rosalie Maggio, (Oryx Press, 1987), xiv + 210pp.

The subject of nonsexist language is a matter of genuine concern, not only to women [see page 1 of this issue] but to everyone. It ill behooves us to be unfair to any segment of the population, and it is not only immoral but illegal to discriminate against people on virtually any basis. In recent decades, certain changes have taken place in the language that reflect voluntary choices of the words used to characterize people; these have focused largely on the conscious and conscientious substitution of neutral, sexless words like individual(s), person, and people for terms that normally denote only males. Journalists and other commentators have sometimes taken a facetious view of the situation, suggesting that person, itself, is sexist because -son denotes ‘male offspring,’ that words like manhole are sexist, and that even woman (wo + man) is sexist. By this time the humor, if there was any there to begin with, has worn very thin, indeed, and the end of it would be welcome. Then, too, there have been the campaigners who have gone to what some regard as opposite extremes: if the head of a committee is known to be a man or a woman, then chairman or chairwoman must surely be the proper denotation; if the sex of the person is not known, then chairperson, though awkward-sounding, is the preferred form. But it is patently ridiculous to refer to someone whose sex is known as a chairperson. Chair should be reserved for the office of the chairperson, not the person holding the office. Yet, many prefer chair to chairperson on the grounds of brevity and because it avoids the awkwardness of the longer alternative. Miller and Swift [M&S] treat this problem and seem to believe that it has been solved:

The lexicographer Alma Graham points out that chair has been recognized, in the sense of “the occupant of the chair … as invested with its dignity,” since the seventeenth century just as the Crown has been used for the monarch, or the Oval Office has come to stand for the President of the United States. “Address your remarks to the chair” illustrates metonymy, a figure of speech in which something is called by the name of something else associated with it. Nobody understands an injunction to “address the chair” as an order to talk to a piece of furniture. [pp. 33-34]

The final sentence is about as valid as would be the comment that nobody understands such an injunction as an order to write the address of the chairperson on a dozen envelopes, either. But there are other specious arguments in the above statement:

1. Recognized? By whom? The fact that Graham has found that citations for such usage exist (how old they may be is of little consequence) is not to be construed as evidence that they (necessarily) existed in sufficient profusion to warrant acceptance by the English-speaking populations. Moreover, what are the contexts in which the citations were found? There are many difficulties inherent in adducing citational evidence unsupported by frequency. There are many other instances of the misuses of citational evidence, not only by users of dictionaries but by lexicographers themselves: there is no way, using the citational materials at present appearing in dictionaries as prima facie evidence, that one would be justified in assuming that a broad statistical segment of English speakers is thereby represented; even the most cursory examination of entries in the OED (which I assume to be the source of Graham’s information) will rapidly, ineluctably lead the observer to realize that

a) the evidence in the published work is quite thin, and

b) the conclusions drawn by the OED’s definers and commentators often cannot be supported by citational evidence—at least, not the citational evidence that appears in the published work.

1. That chair is used metonymically in the same way as the Crown and the Oval Office is true, but to refer to the office, not to the person occupying it. Certainly, in the case of the Crown, as ample evidence will show, reference is so made specifically to avoid mentioning a particular regent and not as a figure of speech employed for rhetorical effect. As for the Oval Office, it is mostly used when the referent is ‘authority of the executive branch of the government’ to avoid identifying the (incumbent) president personally and to indicate official policy. In both cases, the point is exactly opposite that identified by Graham: it is the position, institution, authority, etc. being referred to and not “the occupant.” By the same token, when people address the chair, they address the office, whoever might hold it, and not the incumbent individual.

I find little to dispute with M&S in the matter of principle. But there are two elements of their argument that merit further comment. The first is that I find their interpretation of the evidence often skewed; the second is that while adjustment to lexicon, which they have always strongly advocated, is one thing, modification of grammar is another.

In referring to an item in The New York Times in which youth is used to refer to a young woman, M&S write:

Though the term may once have been anomalous when used of a young woman, today it is a recognized common-gender noun, and the next round of dictionaries will no doubt add their authority to the change. [p. 6]

The First Edition of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language lists youth with a definition, “a young person, esp. a young man”; the Second Edition, published after the M&S Handbook and, presumably, in the “next round” they refer to, defines the word as “a young person, esp. a young man or male adolescent.” Thus the evidence at the RHD offices indicated the need for reinforcement of the notion of maleness associated with the word, not, as M&S suggest, a trend toward epicenism. I am not entirely in agreement with the RHD treatment, for, personally, I believe that youth has lately appeared more and more often in context like youth center, youth rehabilitation, etc., where the context is clearly common-gender, and the foregoing is merely set out as a warning to those who try to predict what lexicographers are likely to do. On the other hand, I do not have the hard evidence at hand and assume that the RHD does.

The following appears, in bold italics, on page 8:

To go on using in its former sense a word whose meaning has changed is counterproductive. The point is not that we should recognize semantic change, but that in order to be precise, in order to be understood, we must.

I am not sure that I should have characterized the perpetuation of obsolete or archaic meanings as “counterproductive”: perhaps “wrong,” “misleading,” “ambiguous,” or “old-fashioned” would have been closer to the mark; phrased another way, I must agree that people ought to use words in their current senses if they expect to be understood. Most do, of course, use them that way. When will people learn that dictionaries are not the product of the collective imaginations of those who prepare them or the manifestations of the dreams of a single lexicographer but the result of lengthy, painstaking research to determine how the language is being used, the analysis and codification of the results, and then their organization into a usable reference source? What is “counterproductive” is the notion that speakers of a language have to recognize semantic change: they don’t “recognize” it, they create it. Of course, if a researcher tampers with the evidence, making a unilateral, unsupported claim or assumption that a word means something that it does not, then that does not constitute semantic change: it is what is known as dirty work at the crossroads, and M&S are indulging in a bit of mischief by suggesting that semantic change either has taken place or is taking place because they have some evidence that a certain change in usage had crept in. Notwithstanding the unfortunate fact that the gathering and assessment of citational evidence is not what it should (or might) be, I should still put my money on professional lexicographers and their resources rather than on M&S.

In Chapter 1, “Man as a False Generic,” M&S question whether the definitions “2. the creature, Homo sapiens, at the highest level of animal development, characterized esp. by a highly developed brain.

3. the human race; mankind …” [from the 1984 College Edition of the RHD] are “still fully operative or whether the first, limited meaning [‘an adult male person, as distinguished from a boy or woman.'] has, in effect, become the only valid one in modern English.” I trust that this is a fillip of propaganda and not a serious query. To be sure, it is the most common meaning, which is why it is listed first. But one must contend not only with the way the word might be used today but with the evidence of centuries of culture reflected in billions upon billions upon billions of words of text all of which shape the way we think and speak. There is nothing wrong with trying to change that shape, and advocates of nonsexist English have worked miracles in the short time since they have succeeded in making their concerns known. But to deny that the oblique senses of man are still very much with us is mere optimistic folly. And there is no gainsaying the fact that the first sense of man (‘male human’) tends to contaminate (if that is the right word) the oblique senses. But grammar enters the picture here, too, and dictionaries are remiss in syntactic description of how the language works in comparison with what its words mean, how they are spelled and pronounced, and where they came from. To put it differently, it is not (yet) the function of the dictionary to show that articles (definite or indefinite) are not usually found preceding man in senses 2 and 3 but are invariably present before sense 1 uses. No normal speaker of English encountering Man wants but little here below wonders—except facetiously—why women have been ignored. More likely, they read wants as meaning ‘desires’ rather than ‘lacks,’ but that might well be a deliberate, facetious ambiguity. We use terms like Neanderthal Man, Peking Man, etc., without believing for a moment that there were no Neanderthal or Peking women (leaving aside Peking Toms). Cartoonists might depict a child asking a parent about Neanderthal women, but that is recognizably a joke that depends for its humor on the characterization of the questioner as a fool: that it is a child is irrelevant; it might be Edith Bunker. Perhaps the most significant comment on the failure to distinguish between man generic and man ‘male human’ appears on page 25:

When Edith Bunker, on the television series “All in the Family,” quoted Sam Walter Foss’s

“Let me live in my house by the side of the road

And be a friend of man,”

Archie’s response was, “Yeah, I heard about them kind of houses in the army.”

Is it possible that M&S are serious in invoking Archie Bunker, the archbigot of all time, as a model of understanding and a paragon of modern English usage? There are many thousands of such jokes in every language, for they depend for their humor on polysemy or homonymy, which exists in all languages. Yet, this nonsense is compounded.

Lexicographers appear to agree. Although they do not label the supposedly generic meaning of man obsolete, they write some definitions as though we all know it is. For example, Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1986) defines a man-about-town as a “wordly and socially active man.” But if man sometimes means “any human being,” should not the definition of man-about-town read “a wordly and socially active person of the male sex”? How can the definers be sure we will know without being told that a man-about-town is never a woman? [p. 8]

On the face of it, one might dismiss this question as just so much rubbish and wonder how people of the intelligence of M&S could possibly have come to frame it. The answer has nothing to do with their cause, however, but with the simple fact that dictionaries are not exercises in bi-unique substitutability; in other words, if one of the senses of run is ‘operate’ (as in She runs an engine factory), that does not make it valid to assume that one can substitute operate for run in We run in the marathon every year. Although recognizing this as a shortcoming of dictionaries and assigning it arbitrarily to what, for lack of a better term, we might call the “genius” of the language, might seem trivial to the casual observer, it is a valid matter for concern in the realm of lexicology. Using it to bolster an argument is plainly a mistake. Unfortunately, the mistake is compounded and perpetuated by dragging in expressions like man in the street, the average working man, and others, and, as a result, the entire argument degenerates. Perhaps we ought to be saying street person for the first and working stiff for the second, but the first has been pre-empted and it seems a little incongruous to find anyone actively seeking to be called a “stiff.”

There are actually two things at work in the Handbook: one is a genuine concern, when a generalized statement about people is to be made, about being unfair to women through the use of references which, though denotatively neutral, carry the strong scent of maleness. That is, if you are going to say something about people, then avoid using the word man (for example) because, regardless of the ancillary definitions one might find in the dictionary, in its most common meaning and use it denotes ‘male’ and the strong connotations of that denotation are carried over to all other applications of the word: it is not, in fact, as neutral as some believe it to be. If that is what M&S mean, why don’t they just say so? The other thing is that generalized statements employing reference to males constitute a not-so-subtle form of propaganda interpretable either as pro-male, anti-female, or both.

(A third possibility, though naturally not treated by M&S, is out-and-out misanthropy vs. misogyny, for the notion of simple man-hating should not be ruled out entirely. As a male reader, I get strong vibrations from this book that the authors advocate the paranoid view that everything in the language that is not exactly as they would like it to be is the result of a gigantic hate program against women. In that context, one is given to wonder about the circumstances in languages that have grammatical, not sex gender.)

The remainder of Chapter 1 is mainly a catalogue of misinterpretations, aberrations, and plain errors regarding the use of man as a generic. A number of excellent suggestions to help people avoid the inadvertent expression of prejudice are offered, albeit interspersed among excoriating, castigatory comments that are entirely irrelevant to The Cause, hence diminish the impact and strength of purpose of both. It is indeed a pity that the authors persist in expressing their ideas as they do, for were they more practical and not so aggressively all-inclusive in their condemnation of the slightest hint of maleness, they would probably serve their cause more successfully.

Curiously, British English (of all things!) has provided a solution of sorts to the perennial ancillary problem of the “neutral he” as the pronoun of reference in the language. In British English it is no longer considered a solecism to use the plurals they, their, them, theirs as a generalized pronoun for words like eyeryone, everybody, anyone, anybody, etc. Thus, it has become standard (British) English to say or write, Everyone can get their copy at the bookshop, Everybody should make certain to take their own coat, etc. I don’t know about Canada, Australia, etc., but in the U.S. this kind of referent usage is considered a heinous illiteracy (by those who consider such matters), and those who wish to appear educated would be wise to avoid it. It scarcely needs pointing out that the British usage was not brought about by any sense of justice toward women but by the apparent fact that the people in Britain are not quite as uptight about usage as the Americans. The second chapter of the Handbook is devoted in its entirety to The Pronoun Problem, mercifully concluding with the expression of some doubt that an artificial generic pronoun, like hir, thon, per, and other abominations, is likely to take hold.

Chapter 3, Generalizations, treats with good sense methods that can be employed to avoid sexism in a wide variety of constructions. Alas, M&S continue to take up the cudgel, carping against writing which, in some cases, antedates recognition of a problem: it is like nattering on about how awful the Romans were because they condoned slavery; rather a waste of space, time, and motion, Wot? Much that might have been offered with sober good advice here is contaminated by an obsessive concern with the identification of the sex of the perpetrator of past injustices. The approach is vindictive and castigatory. Other libertarian movements advocate similar policies: it is not enough that wrongs be righted; the discrimination and other injustices suffered by past generations, back through the ages, must be avenged, and the descendants of those responsible must be made to pay for those crimes and somehow to compensate the descendants of the sufferers. Such policies are not only asinine, they are—and here I have found another appropriate place for the buzz word of the decade— counterproductive: the energies expended on vengeance are entirely wasted and should be channeled to changing the present system to ensure that they are not continued. Although we continue to track down criminals who did their dirt in WWII, we do business with and carry on other normal relations with the descendants of the Nazis and of those who bombed Pearl Harbor. The sins of our forebears should not be visited upon us. In the same way, those who support equal rights for women would be well advised to concentrate on the issues at hand and not contaminate their cause with trivia, like whether Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra ought to have the order of the names reversed in odd-numbered years so that women get top billing. While that has not been literally proposed (as far as I know), the fact that the men’s names appear first has been used by some feminists to illustrate the manifestation of an attitude that women have had to put up with all these centuries.

Seeing Women and Girls as People, Chapter 4, settles down to some good advice, describing what might be offensive to women and how to get around it through paraphrase. M&S also go out of their way to praise usages that neatly sidestep offensive usage. Specific cliches—working wife, working mother, house-wife, etc.—are discussed, with sober explanations of why they are offensive and with suggestions for suitable alternatives.

Chapter 5 covers Parallel Treatment, quite properly bearing down on descriptions in which “a man and his petite blonde wife” appear. They go too far, though, when they attack “I lost my job” in place of “They fired me” on the grounds that such phrasing contributes to “the harmful stereotype of ‘woman as victim.’ ” What unmitigated nonsense! Men say that, too, of course. To be fair, M&S also criticize identifications (mainly from news stories) of women as “mother of five” and other gratuitous characterizations that are not only irrelevant to the item’s newsworthiness but are rarely offered about men.

Chapter 6 discusses, under A Few More Words, a number of suffixes (-trix, -ess, etc.) and words (hero/ heroine, alumnus/alumna/alumni/alumnae, etc.) that apparently offend the authors: they campaign for the elimination of la différence. My own attitude is that I find such terms not in the least denigrating: Why should a woman object to being called a heroine, a divorcée, or an actress any more than being called a female or a woman? I see the rather boring point about using alumni to cover both men and women, and I quite agree that the use of relatively newer and less widely used terms like authoress, aviatrix, and poetess seems to be a deliberate, unwarranted attempt to identify someone as a female; but a graduate of the feminine gender is a ‘woman graduate’ = alumna, the ‘first woman dancer in a ballet company’ is a prima ballerina (I’ve never heard of a “prime ballerino”), and a ‘woman opera star’ is a diva or prima donna. I hesitate to point out that we use prima donna of men, too, because my critics will say that they disapprove of the term’s second life as designating a “temperamental person of either sex.’ These, of course, are loanwords borrowed from languages that have (or had) grammatical gender. The same is true of heroine and thousands of other words. What are we to do? The answer is not clear unless we accept a policy of drawing up a (very) long list of taboo words. A short list is not impossible, for it would join words like nigger, kike, mackerelsnapper, and others.

The book concludes with A Brief Thesaurus, which lists a few offending words and their suggested alternatives. If this were indeed to have been a handbook, users would have found a longer list more useful. There follows a desexing section on maxims (for “He who laughs last laughs best” read “The last laugh is the best”: not only does it not say the same thing but the second is totally lacking in the rhetorical devices packed into the first), and a two-page bibliography, reference notes to chapters, and an index. On the last page is a short biographical note about the authors in which, through pronoun references, we learn that both are women.

The Nonsexist Word Finder, subtitled A Dictionary of Gender-Free Usage, opens with a foreword by Miller and Swift. Most of the book is an A-Z listing of words that are, for the most part, sexist, but, as the author sets forth in the User’s Guide, “Some words are included here because they are ambiguous: Is a belly dancer always a woman? Is a Canadian Mountie always a man?” Odd question, that; I had to phone the Canadian consulate to find out that there have been female Mounties since 1975, though one might question their approval of being so designated. As for belly dancers, not only have I never heard of a male belly dancer but find the very idea more exotic than erotic. Put on what, in the military, they like to call a “need-to-know” basis, then why not distinguish between belly dancer and belly danseuse?—though I daresay the author, Rosalie Maggio, would scarcely approve of danseuse. Put another way, are not these very questions sexist? In one sense they are, but if people were to pay hard cash to watch a belly dancer only to find that it was a man, I think they might have some justification in asking for their money back. I would feel the same way if I paid to see the Rockettes only find that they were “Rockets.” There would probably be little chance of a refund if the place were run by a feminist.

Is a men’s room attendant always a man? Any man who has traveled in Europe knows the answer to be No.

The entries themselves are more or less helpful, depending on the information one is seeking. The treatment ranges from an explanation of a term to a list of alternatives. Here are two typical entries:

according to Hoyle according to/by the book, according to/playing by the rules, absolutely correct, cricket, in point of honor, on the square, proper/correct way to do things. See Appendix A for the rationale on avoiding sex-linked metaphors, expressions and figures.

acolyte usage of this word varies from one time, culture, and religion to another. In the Roman Catholic Church, for example, women can function as acolytes (one of the minor orders of the diaconate) but may not be officially installed as acolytes. Insofar as it means “attendant,” an acolyte can be either a man or a woman.

Reference to the designated section in Appendix A reveals a brief discussion of the subject of sex-linked metaphors which quite correctly points out that many common metaphors, metonyms, and allusions refer to males—Achilles' heel, before you can say Jack Robinson, Bluebeard, David and Goliath, and many more. (Why should one assume Hoyle to be a man?) Maggio does not get bent out of shape about these, providing the following advice:

There is nothing wrong with any of [these images] in themselves. However, their cumulative effect tends to be overpowering. This dictionary lists alternatives for many of these expressions, not so that they can be removed from the language, but so that you can attempt to balance your writing and speaking with both female and male images or use alternatives when gender-fairness is not possible. In addition, there are times when it is awkward and illogical to use a male metaphor for a woman. There is nothing ungrammatical or wrong about saying “She’s a real Johnny-comelately,” but it grates.

It is hard to imagine anyone, regardless of sex, enjoying being referred to as a Johnny-come-lately. The self-styled humorists could have a field day with this one, too, suggesting “She’s a Jacquelyn of all trades” or the sexless Robin Crusoe. I looked up in the dictionary section a few of the allusions that cannot really be paraphrased. At Bluebeard, advice is given to avoid reference to him completely, which is understandable on nonlinguistic grounds, too. Superman (the character) is not in, nor is there an entry for Mutt and Jeff. Don Quixote is listed in the Appendix, but I could not find him in the dictionary, nor could I find quixotic, Queen of Sheba, Jeeves, Venus, Einstein (for ‘genius’), Hitler (for ‘demagogue, tryant’), Attila the Hun (for ‘barbarian’), Robinson Crusoe (for ‘castaway; lonely person’)—but man Friday is in—Horatio Alger, Narcissus, etc. But what are we to do about eponyms?

Were the two Washingtons (state and D.C.) named for George or Martha? Some people (mistakenly) think that the slang term for a commode was named for Thomas Crapper, English plumber. Leotards and daguerreotypes will have to go.

For the most part, as might be expected, Maggio’s alternatives and equivalents are phrasal definitions which, if assiduously applied, would effectively sterilize all writing. The interesting and useful entries are those in which the author explains, without the frenetic anguish that pervades the M&S book, why the term is offensive. I cannot say that I agree with everything she says nor with every item selected for inclusion, but, on the whole, the book comes off as a very good treatment of the subject.

Such books are an education. Were I in a position—say as editor of a newspaper—in which I was responsible for treating the kinds of subjects that might be construed as sensitive to antiwoman prejudice, I should find The Nonsexist Word Finder the sanest of the lot and the easiest to understand and use. Compared with The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing, it covers much more territory and readers are made to feel that the author is cueing them in to the information she thinks they ought to have. The Handbook is a polemical work; despite its title, it is not organized the way a handbook for writers, editors, etc., normally would be. It might have been more useful as a handbook had it cleaved more closely to the structural model of standard style manuals. My greatest objection to it is its argumentative, disputatious tone, which frequently borders on the vituperative. It is as if you looked up, say, infer/imply in a usage manual and the author’s treatment, in place of an explanation and sound advice, were an unpleasant diatribe against anyone so dense and rude as to have had to look up the entry to begin with. M&S are testy—which they may have every right to be in light of the trials and tribulations of women—but their moody petulance does not lead to a winning, let alone diplomatic style, and their purpose is accordingly ill served.

As for me, I do my utmost to avoid language that may offend people, including men. I refuse, out of conservatism and sheer curmudgeonliness to give up English grammar (like the “neutral” pronouns of reference) when I cannot paraphrase without losing what little elegance there may be in my writing, and I refuse to sacrifice metonyms, metaphors, allusions, and other figures of speech that contain male referents, substituting “big liar” for Baron Munchhausen and “Peeping Thomasina” for Peeping Tom or trying to get around saying or writing Pollyanna, say uncle, raise Cain, or Jesus Christ!

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Punch Ross to Stop Child Abuse.” [Campaign poster for Anna Mae Ross, Miami, Florida. Submitted by Jessica S. Kalish, Miami.]

How Big Is Your Dictionary?

Robert Ilson, Editor, International Journal of Lexicography

Britain and North America are not only literate, but “dictionarate.” In Britain, the dictionary’s “success is shown by the fact that more than 90 percent of households possess at least one, making the dictionary far more popular than cookery books (about 70 percent) and indeed significantly more widespread than the Bible (which was to be found in 80 percent of households in England in 1983, according to the Bible Society”). In North America, “It was established some years ago that there are more dictionaries than television sets …” (Preface, American Heritage Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1987).

So you, dear reader, probably own a dictionary. But how big is it? Let us consider two recent British dictionaries. The Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary of 1987 (Cobuild) boasts xxiv plus 1703 pages. The Collins English Dictionary of 1986 (CED) has xxvii plus 1771. Looking at these figures, or at the books themselves, one would assume that the two dictionaries are of roughly the same size. And in one sense they are. But between water and watt there are fifty-four main entries in Cobuild and 148 in CED. They share such entries as water biscuit and waterworks. But in addition CED alone enters water measurer (a ‘bug’), Watford (a ‘town north of London’), etc. On the other hand, the shared main entry for watershed has twenty-three words in CED but 93 in Cobuild. And the word waterless is a main entry in Cobuild, explained in twenty words, whereas in CED it is naught but a so-called “undefined runon”—merely mentioned, but not explained explicitly, as a sub-entry at water. So CED enters more items than Cobuild, but devotes less space to explaining them. And that is probably as it should be. CED is intended for the adult native speaker of English, whose main concern is with understanding a large number of unfamiliar items (including proper names) encountered in reading and listening. Cobuild is intended for the foreign learner of English, whose dual concern is with understanding and using the core vocabulary of English, and who, having achieved that aim, can “graduate” to a dictionary for native speakers—like CED.

More generally, the size of a dictionary is a function of two variables: the number of items entered (its “macrostructure”), and the amount of information given about them (its “microstructure”). In Charles McGregor’s words, a dictionary that says “a lot about a little” and one that says “a little about a lot” can end up roughly the same size. Cobuild and CED are far from being such polar opposites, but they exemplify this general point.

In measuring dictionaries, how far can we rely on the dictionaries' own estimates of their size? Let us consider the dust-jacket blurbs of Cobuild, CED, and two other native-speaker dictionaries: the British Longman Dictionary of the English Language (Longman, 1984) and the American Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (W9, 1983). Here is what they say:

Cobuild: over 70,000 references
CED: 170,000 references
Longman: Over 225,000 definitions and more than 90,000 headwords
W9: Almost 160,000 entries and 200,000 definitions

Both Longman and W9 estimate their macrostructure (headwords/entries) and their microstructure (definitions). But what of Cobuild and CED? What do they mean by references? In CED the relevant definition of reference seems to be “a book or passage referred to,” or perhaps “a mention or allusion”; in Cobuild, “something such as a number or name that tells you where you can obtain the information that you want, for example from a book, list, or map….” We are none the wiser. It is only from an article about CED that we learn it has “171,000 entries,” which suggests that Collins means by references what Merriam-Webster means by entries. But CED and Cobuild certainly do not say so!

And what about Longman’s headwords? Their relevant definition of headword is “a word or term placed at the beginning (e.g. of a chapter or an entry in a dictionary).” Does that mean that the number of headwords equals the number of entries? And that therefore Longman’s macrostructure (number of entries) is much smaller than that of W9 or CED? We need to look more closely at the meaning of entry.

For entry our four dictionaries have this to say in their relevant definitions:

Cobuild: a short article about someone or something in a dictionary or encyclopedia,…

CED: an item recorded, as in a diary, dictionary, or account.

Longman: a dictionary headword [!], often together with its definition.

W9: “4b … (3): HEADWORD (4): a headword with its definition or identification (5): VOCABULARY ENTRY”

W9’s relevant definition of headword does not even mention dictionaries: “a word or term placed at the beginning (as of a chapter or an entry in an encyclopedia)”. But its definition of vocabulary entry is about dictionaries only:

a word (as the noun book), hyphened or open compound (as the verb book-match or the noun book review), word element (as the affix pro-), abbreviation (as agt), verbalized symbol (as Na), or term (as man in the street) entered alphabetically in a dictionary for the purpose of definition or identification or expressly included as an inflected form (as the noun mice or the verb saw) or as a derived form (as the noun godlessness or the adverb globally) or related phrase (as one for the book) run on at its base word and usu. set in a type (as boldface) readily distinguishable from that of the lightface running text which defines, explains, or identifies the entry

If we can sort out all the details here—no mean task—it emerges that W9’s vocabulary entries include both what I earlier called main entries (like watershed) and what I called subentries (like waterless in CED). But it appears that Longman’s headwords are only those that are, or introduce, main entries. So we still have no way of knowing whether Longman’s macrostructure is smaller or larger than W9’s! Nor do our troubles end here. For in its Explanatory Notes (p.12), W9 not only calls our attention “to the definition of vocabulary entry in this book,” but also introduces us to a wholly new notion, that of dictionary entry:

The term dictionary entry includes all vocabulary entries as well as all boldface entries in the separate sections of the back matter headed “Abbreviations and Symbols for Chemical Elements,” “Foreign Words and Phrases,” “Biographical Names,” “Geographical Names,” and “Colleges and Universities.”

No sooner have we assumed that W9’s macrostructure of “Almost 160,000 entries” means vocabulary entries, than we must face the possibility that it includes such other dictionary entries as Harvard U., McGill U., and Abilene Christian U. Have they been counted in? We simply do not know. But, as a British journalist might say, we should be told. For W9’s exemplary precision in telling us what vocabulary entries and dictionary entries are is offset by its vagueness about which type of entry its PR-wallahs have counted for their blurb.

Furthermore, our gratitude to Longman and W9 for saying something about the size of their microstructures is offset by our sorrowful recognition of how little they say. Counting definitions is a start. But a definition can range from a single-word synonym (entry 4b(3): HEADWORD) to the 117 words of W9’s definition of vocabulary entry—and beyond! And the microstructure of dictionaries includes more than just definitions: it can embrace examples, illustrations, synonym essays, usage essays, etymologies, and all sorts of other information. Everyone talks nowadays about making dictionaries user-friendlier. How about making their publicity buyer-friendlier as well?

Aux armes, citoyens! Let us strive to get dictionary publishers to cry their wares in ways that allow us to compare them. But, citoyens, let us not forget that the value of a dictionary resideth not in size alone. The best dictionary for me is the one that gives about the word or phrase that puzzles me the information I need at the moment I need it. People have different reference needs at different times. The standardization of the way dictionaries estimate how much they contain need not, and should not, entail the standardization of what they contain.

OBITER DICTA

Those who have driven along the New York State Thruway west of Albany encounter a string of town names that (presumably) reflect the nationalities of their original settlers. Amsterdam was settled by the Dutch, Geneva by the Swiss, etc., till one passes by a town apparently settled by the British—Sodus.

A painting (1988) by Andrew Festing of about 156 of the 290 Members of Parliament who had earlier been omitted from a portrait of Members, drawn by lot, who had been immortalized in 1987 by June Mendoza. The painting, which includes seven scenes on a canvas 52 in. by 116 in., is entitled, “The Other Picture: A view of the smoking room and library of the House of Commons in March 1987, commissioned for the House by 156 of the members of Parliament who were not included in the Official Painting.”—The Times, 7 May 1988, p.3.

The Fifth Estate

Tom McArthur, Editor, English Today

It began in medieval Europe, and in the late 20th century it is everywhere in the world. Its overall influence is profound but undiscussed, although aspects of that influence are discussed constantly, under headings like “language,” “education,” “standards,” “literacy,” “literature,” “science,” and “medicine.” There is little that it does not touch, being physically present in the architecture of schools, psychologically present when we talk and think about what makes us civilized, linguistically present in much of modern communication and in what we call educated usage. Yet is has no name.

Let me therefore give it a name: “the scholarly guild.” The phrase is a reminder of its medieval provenance, its academic focus, and its corporate style. This guild of scholars is one of the most successful enterprises in the history of our species. Indeed, some of its 18th-century members gave our species the elevated title Homo sapiens, as if thinking of themselves while labeling all the birds, beasts, and bugs in creation. The guild takes many forms now, but it retains much of the Middle Ages, of the ecclesiastical Schoolmen, who gathered together in quasi-monastic “colleges,” behind walls that marked them off from the rest of the world (a phenomenon that in England is still called “town and gown”).

The men (and increasingly the women) who have inherited the mantle of the Schoolmen have no trouble recognizing each other. They live similar lives, conduct similar courses, and with similar subventions go to similar conferences and give similar papers on every continent (much as David Lodge describes them in Small World). They are not as tightly knit as other fraternities, past and present (Knights Templar, Freemasons, Jesuits, Mafia, Ancient and Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross, corporate executives of Coca-Cola or Chrysler, or managers of labor unions). The guild’s gentler cohesion and lack of obvious international hierarchies have contributed to its marked success and curious anonymity. Its institutions take many forms and survive under many different political regimes. They possess neither a Vatican nor a Vicar-General to report to, and, although the guild can at times be arcane (with Latin charters and capping ceremonies), by and large its doings are overt and benign.

Historically, the bulk of the human race has never known a classroom, let alone a cloister or an ivory tower, or met up with teachers empowered by letters after their names. Nowadays, however, there are few people who have not come across colleges and college graduates or (at the periphery of things) been invited to learn to read and write. That is a physical and social measure of the guild’s success. Its continuance seems assured. Working in its favor is a social contract with a three-part system established in every country in the world:

Bottom-up progression: the young being inducted into school at an early age and proceeding, level by level, to institutions of ever “higher” learning, stopping off for various reasons at various levels, usually marked by tests and the distribution of certificates providing a social grade. These processes are often reinforced with such comments from parents and teachers as, “You’ll never get anywhere nowadays without a college education.” There are even league tables among nations, showing the percentages of those who stay in the system longer.

Top-down rank: an apex of professors and doctors buttressed by the holders of college degrees (many of them lower-level administrators, teachers, and researchers within the system). These are in turn surrounded and supported by holders of school certificates and other qualifications. Spreading out from the base of the pyramid are those who have less suitably certified educations or no formal education at all, people who may have mixed feelings about “book learning,” “big words,” “fancy degrees,” “eggheads,” “highbrows,” and “absent-minded professors,” as well as the perils of scholarship, science, and technology. Within the system, there are others with similar mixed feelings, but by and large the system remains intact. We all send our kids to school.

Language appropriate to level: a basic ability to read and write, followed by the capacity to handle abstract usage, and, at a higher level, to be at ease with what Philip Gove in Webster’s Third called ISV, ‘international scientific vocabulary.’ For English, this means a capacity to add the Latinate onto the vernacular, then Greek onto the Latinate, so that you can eat a hearty breakfast, and be cordial afterwards without suffering from cardiac arrest. Beyond English, entry into the guild may mean acquiring a special language of education (such as French in Senegal and English in Kenya), because many of the world’s tongues are not yet (and may not ever be) part of the circle of standardized print languages in which the work of the guild can be conducted.

You and I, gentle reader, are accredited members of the guild. This is demonstrated in a variety of ways: a shared literacy and the assumptions and biases that go with it; an awareness of what books are for; consciousness and use of innumerable cultural allusions and educated idioms; and a relative ease in reading a periodical called VERBATIM, with sections called OBITER DICTA and EPISTOLAE. We are generally capable of conducting ourselves in the company of others who have been group-educated to college level.

In school, college, and university, people have for some six centuries been receiving diplomas and titles to prove that, in varying degrees (a loaded word), they are educated. Oftener than not, use of language establishes membership and social-cum-educational rank as clearly as any parchment. One of the less pleasant ways in which such rank can be pulled is to label the linguistically less secure “illiterate.” They, too, can read and write, of course, but their “solecisms,” “barbarisms,” and “vulgarisms” call for rebuke, and what better rebuke than to treat them as if they did not belong at all—to condemn them figuratively to the outer darkness of the unlettered? Subtler still is the label “self-educated” applied to people who have little formal learning. Thomas Hardy described an extreme case in Jude the Obscure.

The scholarly guild has always interested itself in language, its standards and usage, its literature and classics, its mediums/media of manuscript and print, its academic apparatus and Latin tags. It places a high value on success with such things. Its members have tended to place a lower value on rural and urban dialect, popular culture, and folklore. These are only accepted into the canon of good usage and literature after a long and vigorous rearguard action. Only now, for example, is the soap opera (with its enormous social impact) beginning to be recognized as a fit topic for academic analysis. Movies and soaps attain respectability when there are enough papers in learned journals and theses in bound volumes to elevate them beyond being “merely” popular. It is similar with members low on the ladder of rank. Once upon a time there was a playwright who knew little Latin and less Greek. Much of his skill was acquired in the hurly-burly of life, but his works had a certain merit. With the passage of time he was canonized by the guild, and his Complete Works have been annotated and organized by folk with doctorates in Shakespearian Studies. He made it to the top. It can be done, but it is rare.

The guild’s institutions have, in their unobtrusively ubiquitous way, become more powerful than both the Catholic Christianity which gave them birth and the regimes of Europe that scattered them round the world. Their diaspora has been so successful that most of us unreflectingly see schools as the natural dispensers, controllers, instruments, and structures of education—and of educated discourse—everywhere on earth. It is another measure of the guild’s success that we can hardly imagine an alternative to it. The utopian communes of anarchists, socialists, and hippies, for example, have not even dented it.

After centuries of social and cultural direction from the guild’s leaders (the professorial elite, the academic, scientific, and medical establishments), it is hardly possible for anyone in the Western or Westernizing world today to be reckoned (or to feel) educated without having been to school—and the more school the better. It may be possible to imagine alternatives (or significant adaptations, if we wish them) only after we have found the right label for the subject. Societies seldom see what is central in their own cultures, having much less trouble identifying it in the cultures of others.

Historians have often discussed the “three estates” of the Western world—nobility, church, and commons. Many of us also from time to time talk about a “fourth estate”—the media. The idea of social estates can be taken one stage further, to the global agglomeration of educational and scientific communities. They constitute a “fifth estate,” an entity as worthy of anthropological investigation as the Yanomama of the Amazon or the Dinka of the Sudan. Unfortunately, just as we find it hard to imagine the guild as a whole and to envisage alternatives to it, so no organization exists outside this fifth estate that could investigate it. Anthropology is one of its own more recent subdivisions. So who might assess these diplomaed assessors?

There appears to be only one solution. A traditional aim of the guild is the quest for truth. If that aim is sincere (and, by and large, it seems to be), the fifth estate may yet turn the bright light of science and scholarship on itself. That would be an interesting day.

Texican

Maxey Brooke, Sweeny, Texas

English is a mongrel tongue. It is basically composed of 29 percent Anglo-Saxon and 60 percent Romance (including Latin and Greek) words. The remaining 20 percent are either invented (laser, bogus, splurge) or have been borrowed from more than 200 other languages or dialects from Arabic to Zulu. No other national language even comes close to that. One reason for this diversity is the custom of English-speaking explorers and pioneers in a new land to adopt the native name for unfamiliar plants, animals, and things. Other cultures do not follow this custom. When the Greeks first saw a huge animal in Egypt, they called it hippopotamus, the Greek word for ‘water horse.’ When the Boers first saw a strange animal in South Africa, they called it aardvark, a Dutch word for ‘earth pig.’ The English, however, seeing a large bearlike animal in Indo-China, adopted the Nepalese name panda; and a strange water mammal was given its Javanese name dugong.

When two peoples speaking different languages share a common border, there is an infiltration of words from one language to the other. The north border of the United States is with Canada, most of whose people share our common English speech. True, the official language of the province of Quebec is French; and true, we have borrowed a few words from there; lacrosse, for example. But the south border is another matter. For more than 160 years, since the Anglos arrived in Texas, there has been a culture transfer back and forth across the Rio Grande. The process is still going on. Fifteen years ago, few people north of San Antonio had heard of burritos, fajitas, flautas, or chalupas. Today, thanks to franchise Mexican restaurants, they have become a part of America’s vocabulary. Other food names that have passed through the Texas pipeline into common usage are chile, enchilada, taco, tamale, tortilla, fríjol, frito, picante, jalapeño, nacho, mescal, tequila, and margarita. It may be interesting to note the Spanish borrowed chile, tamale, mescal, and mesquite from the indigenous Indians before passing them on to us.

Let us now pass on to the names of some clothing items that Texans borrowed and then passed on to the rest of the country: sombrero, mantilla, poncho, rebozo, serape, and huarache. A number of animals and vegetables followed the same route: avocado from aguacate; mesquite; sapodilla from zapote; guayule; coyote; armadillo; ocelot from ocelote; chaparral; and javalina from jabalina. Since cattle ranching is common to both sides of the border, it should come as no surprise that there has been an exchange of ranch-related words: lariat from la reata; bronco; lasso from lazo; rodeo; chaps from chaparreras; charro; hackamore from jáquima; mustang from mestengo; and quirt from cuerda or cuarta.

Finally, there is a miscellaneous group of words. Alamo, the site of the Texas defeat by Santa Ana; hoosegow from juzgado ‘court’; dinero ‘money,’ a Spanish corruption of the Latin denarius; macho, from the same root as machete: he who wields a machete must be skillful and powerful, hence the word has come to mean ‘virile’ and its associated noun, machismo, ‘virility.’ A gringo, from griego ‘Greek,’ is one whose speech “sounds like Greek to me.” The story that it comes from the song “Green Grow the Lilacs,” said to have been sung at San Jacinto, is an example of folk etymology. Let us not forget marijuana which is simply ‘Mary Jane’ in Mexico, or cucaracha, the ‘cockroach’ that entered English via a popular song.

Some time ago, Texans picked up a speech habit that is being acquired by the rest of the country. When Texans, in particular South Texans, want to emphasize a statement, they often use a Spanish word. If they want to be emphatic about a large undertaking, they might say, “I’m going to do it all! The entire thing! The whole enchilada!” About someone who is in complete charge of a project, they could say, “He runs things completely! He’s the boss! Número uno!” Then there is negation: “I had nothing to do with that! Nothing at all! Nada!” And to request confirmation, they might well say “You do it exactly this way! You’d better do it right! Comprende?”

Texas has contributed a few good words to the English language without any help from Spanish or Mexican. During the 1850s, a Texas lawyer acquired a small herd of cattle on Matagorda Island. Because he knew little about the cattle business and cared less, he never got around to branding his stock. That man was Samuel Maverick. As time passed, cattlemen began calling all unbranded cattle mavericks. The word spread throughout Texas and into English generally. And its meaning expanded to mean any nonconformist. Then there are the cattalo and the beefalo, crosses between cattle and buffalo, first attempted in Texas. A jackalope is an imaginary horned rabbit, reputedly inhabiting West Texas.

These fifty words that have entered English after a brief sojourn in Texas can be found in almost any dictionary. That is to say, about one of every thousand English words came into the language via Texas. If the average American uses from three to five thousand different words each day, the chances are everybody in this country will use three or more Texican words.

Hidden Compounds

Don Sharp, Springfield, Missouri

The compounding process is a simple, economical system of word formation is modern English. Compounding native English words or elements produces all classes of combinations—noun: farmhouse; verb: understand; adjective: twenty-one; adverb: herewith; preposition: into; pronoun: someone; conjunction: because; interjection: good grief. It is also a gradual process, as evidenced by the sequence of to day, to-day, today.

Of much more interest, however, are the common words used in English that were once compounds but are not easily recognized as such today. Let us reveal their dual disposition:

Alone, in Middle English, is al ‘all’ + one ‘one’. If one is by himself, he, she, or it is alone. The word is generally associated with being lonely.

Atom is from the Greek a- ‘not’ + temnein ‘cut.’ The atom was named before it was split. Around 400 B.C., Democritus theorized that a thing could be divided and divided until it became so small it could no longer be divided. The theory was largely shelved for two thousand years until several physicists produced theories which led to the fact that the atom could be split. Because of this, atom is a misnomer today.

Atone comes from the Middle English at ‘at’ + on ‘one.’ The term is used largely in the Christian sense of Jesus dying to atone for the sins of man; his death reconciled, “made one,” God and man.

Barn is compounded from the Old English words beren ‘barley’ + ern ‘house.’ The barn was the building for storing barley. Since Anglo-Saxon times, the word has gone through a process of generalization, whereby it has taken on a wider range of meaning.

Chair is a Greek compound of kata ‘down’ + hedra ‘sit, seat.’ An appropriate name it is for the object in which we sit ourselves down to rest.

Copy is a blend of the prefix, co ‘with’ + Latin opia ‘abundance.’ Before the invention of the printing press, manuscripts had to be copied by hand. Since a second copy exceeded the first by one hundred percent, it was considered an abundance.

Daisy is a combination of the Old English words, dæges ‘day’s’ + ēage ‘eye.’ Perhaps it was so called because it opens in morning and closes at night, or because of its eyelike shape.

Denim is a French compound. In the older days of France, several towns produced serge, a material for making clothing. Of all the towns, the serge de Nîmes was the finest. Denim is from de ‘from’ + Nîmes, the town.

Dozen is a mathematically compounded word from the Latin duo ‘two’ + decem ‘ten.’ Two plus ten equals twelve in any language.

Enemy is a combination of the Latin in ‘not’ + amicus ‘friend,’ and is thus a doublet with inimical. That enemy could be related to amiable, is more than a little ironic.

Garlic is compounded from the Old English gar ‘spear,’ and lêac ‘leek.’ Garlic is a member of the family of leeks which is related to the onion. Its blades are its “spears.”

The Old English hlāf, ‘loaf’ + dige or diīge, variants of dæge ‘kneader,’ combine to make lady. Apparently, the first kneaders of bread were ladies.

Lariat is compounded from the Spanish la ‘the’ + reata ‘lasso.’ Even though lariat contains its own Spanish article, when we imported it into English, we added another, the English the, to create a literal the la reata, ‘the the lasso,’ and we never think of it as redundancy.

None is the combined Old English ne ‘not’ + ān ‘one.’

Obese is a compound of two Latin words, the prefix, ob- ‘over’ + ēdere ‘eat.’ Overating is a prerequisite for becoming obese.

Two Greek elements, ō ‘the letter “o” ‘+ mêga ‘large, great,’ combine to make omega. It contrasts with ō + micron ‘small’ which form omicron, the “smaller” o of the Greek alphabet.

Stirrup has been compounded from the Old English stige ‘ascent’ + rāp.’ Anglo-Saxon stirrups were made of rope and were probably used for ascending objects other than horses.

Windows is compounded from the Icelandic words vindr ‘wind’ + auga ‘eye,’ a window being the eye of a house.

Because they are short—some reduced to only one syllable—such words are not immediately apparent as compounds, and their true nature is exposed only by word archaeology.

EPISTOLA {Robert S. Keefe}

Richard Bauerls writes interestingly about the recent proliferation of “one-letter words” [XIV, 1; XV, 1]. One hopes he will continue his annual chronicle.

Although he didn’t draw the conclusion explicitly, real life and his examples, make it clear that OLWs are used mainly as surrogates for romance and (where there’s a difference that matters) sex. For example, in the OLW lexicon, when two people—sometimes but not always a man and a woman—agree that they Lword one another, they often enter into one of the Cwords, which leads perhaps eventually to the M-word, which in turn authorizes them to F-word with the sanction of church and state….

But the implication that OLWs are new—just because they now appear routinely in comic strips and on television—is misguided. Thirty-one years ago, in a song for The Music Man called “The Sadder-But-Wiser Girl,” Meredith Willson wrote the lyric: “I hope and I pray/For Hester to win just one more ‘A.’ ” We knew exactly what it meant. In fact, I bet they even knew what it meant in 1850 when The Scarlet Letter hit the streets.

[Robert S. Keefe, New York City]

Maxwell Bodenheim’s Harlem Slang

Louis Phillips, New York City

Maxwell Bodenheim is no longer the cat’s pajamas. If he was once something of a cult figure in Chicago and, later, in New York City’s Greenwich Village, he is no longer of much interest to any reader—except perhaps to some stray dissertation student or to some crime reporter dredging up the gruesome details surrounding his violent death. So much for the vicissitudes of poetic fame.

Back in 1931, however, when Bodenheim was coming into his own as a literary maverick, New York publisher Horace Liveright issued his novel—Naked on Roller Skates. The title is a grabber, but the book itself would be anathema to feminists since it features a heroine who wishes to be beaten and degraded:

“Listen, Terry—any man can beat up a girl’s body. That’s no trick. I want an A number one, guaranteed bastard. I want him to beat my heart and beat my brain. I want him to hurt me so I’ll get wise. I want him to lug me everywhere. All the lowest dives, the phoniest ginmills … I want him to throw me up against everybody—the crummiest woodchucks… the worst fourflushers… everybody. I want to meet the coldest women—the women who get their diamonds and cars and then start to bawl about how sad and unlucky they’ve been… I want to run into everybody just once …They say a girl can’t do it. They say she runs into a smashup every time. Well, believe me, she’ll smash up in a village cupboard too, if she can’t hide herself and settle down. That’s a lot of newspaper hokum….

Today, Bodenheim’s novel might be of interest to students of the English language because of its use of slang. Indeed, Bodenheim appends to his book a short glossary of Harlem words used in the course of the novel. I take the liberty of reprinting the glossary here, because some of the terms are far from common (chippy, hootch, and century are perhaps the more familiar) and many are not included in standard dictionaries of slang:

acecray outcray — putting the ace on the bottom of the deck, where the dealer can abstract it
bah-bah — negligible object
cake-slashing — assault and mayhem
century — hundred dollars
chippy — dissolate girl
chivvy — unpleasant odor
clip your tongue — be silent
cram the paper — cheat at cards
cut your chops — mind your own business
five hard — a fist, or a punch
frill — girl, woman
glued their traps — remained silent
going to the timbers — retreating
grand — thousands dollars
grease it — pay bribe money, or blackmail
hamburger down — take it easy
hock your skin — make a difficult promise
hootch — liquor
hotsprat — trival but agreeable entertainment
in the hole — out of money
lame your foot — deprive you of assistance
leathered — kicked unfairly
lippy-chaser — a negro who prefers whites
payman, a — a cadet
pinktail — white person
scrub — face
slide them into the concrete — eject them to the sidewalk
spreadeagle — to knock down
stick it — capture something
stick-stick — defeated by the previous capture
stretch — jail term
three-nine — sexual variant
thumb — use the thumb to displace cards in a poker-game
trip his muscle — over-reach himself
wraps, or skins, or strips — dollars

Bodenheim adds a note: “Most of the above-listed terms are peculiar to Harlem, but some of them are also used by whites in other sections.” Only a third of the terms have found their way into The Dictionary of American Slang, compiled and edited by Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1967) or Robert Chapman’s New Dictionary of American Slang (Harper & Row, 1986). Also Went-worth/Flexner and Chapman both cite the term the leather as meaning a kick, but they date the term from 1946, citing a passage from Damon Runyon: “he would give his fallen foe what we called ‘the leather,’ meaning a few boots abaft the ears…and spareribs.” Bodenheim’s glossary indicates the term was popular long before 1946.

As for hamburger down, meaning to ‘take it easy,’ could there be any relationship between that term and the hamburger cited by both Chapman and Went-worth/Flexner? Hamburger means a ‘prize-fighter who is badly beaten’ or a ‘bum’—both persons who are “taking it easy.” Indeed, Bodenheim’s list might be a source of enlightenment and delight to curators of American slang and is commended to their attention.

Of Course, Cuthbert

J.A. Davidson, Victoria, British Columbia

Recently I found in one of those files in which for many years I have been systematically losing things a magazine clipping from many years ago which points out that the formal language of a century and more past can lead to misunderstandings today. It offers a case in point from one of the 17 volumes of The Lives of the Saints, a massive work written between 1872 and 1889 by Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924), the English clergyman who is best remembered as the author of the hymn, “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Here is what he had to say about Saint Cuthbert, an English monk who became Bishop of Lindisfarne and who died in the year 687:

No saint of his time or country had more frequent or affectionate intercourse than Cuthbert with the nuns, whose numbers and influence were daily increasing among the Anglo-saxons, and especially in Northumberland.

I wasn’t quite sure about the clipping, so I checked the work itself in our public library—and that’s what it gives. (Bearing-Gould, a compulsive writer, was a man of Victorian delicacy. In one of his novels he mentioned “certain heavily-frilled cotton investitures of the lower limbs” and elsewhere referred to “the bloomer arrangement in the nether latitude.”)

Anyway, this sent me to the big Oxford, where I found about a column-and-a-half on intercourse. As a noun it was first used of trade dealings between people of different localities. Originally spelt entercourse, it comes from the French entrecours ‘commerce,’ which is from the Latin intercursus (also ‘commerce’).

Soon it came to denote ‘communion between persons’ and ‘that which is spiritual or unseen.’ (I vaguely remember a hymn I heard, and perhaps helped sing, that contains the phrase “intercourse divine.”)

As early as 1806 the word was used with apparent sexual signification by Thomas Malthus, the parson and economist who is remembered for his Essay on the Principle of Population: “An illicit intercourse between the sexes.” But that use apparently was rare in those times. I do not know when the word, standing alone, came into common use with an explicit sexual sense. In the 16th century the word was also a verb: ‘to run through, run across. To have intercourse with.’

Now back to Cuthbert the saint. Ivor Brown, in one of his delightful books on words, Random Words (1971), writes that Cuthbert had been an honored English name, but that somehow during the 1914—18 war it “ceased to be a name and became an insult” and was used of slackers who evaded military service. Brown does not know how that happened. This use of the name as a derogatory noun is given in both the 1933 Supplements to the OED and in the recent one. Seventy-two churches in Britain were named for Cuthbert. Kirkcudbright (‘Church of Cuthbert’), the name of a small former Scottish county and its main town, is pronounced “kir-KOO-bree”—which Brown reports is said by the natives with a “dove-like murmur.”

EPISTOLA {Rita Sakitt}

Re Dan Cragg’s letter [XV, 1], he should note that while there are many different views on “the point of the Vietnam war,” those military personnel other than the Vietnamese operating ships and planes “out of our former base complex at Cam Ranh Bay” are Soviet rather than Russian. In particular, it is interesting to wonder what percentage actually are Russian, that is, from the state/province (S.S.R.) of Russia. The Soviet government has the problem of balancing the widely diverse needs and values of people from 15 states or republics within a military bureaucracy. It is my (wholly unsubstantiated) guess that the majority of Soviet personnel in Vietnam are in fact not Russian.

[Rita Sakitt, Stony Brook, New York]

EPISTOLA {Benjamin Roth}

Paula Van Gelder’s “Poetic Licenses” [XIV, 4] reminded me of the license plate a friend reported recently. My friend, a punster, spotted the fact that the plate nicely violated the no “offensive” plates rule. It read, “R-SOUL.”

[Benjamin Roth, St. Louis, Missouri]

CORRIGENDA

A “scribal” error was responsible for printing hidari-leiki for hidari-kiki in Robin Gill’s epistola [XIV, 4].

In response to Richard Lederer’s “Gunning for the English Language” [XV, 1], Mr. Charles Kluth, Baltimore, points out that the difference between the coefficients of expansion of iron and brass—a mere 1/64th inch—would be insufficient to cause the (cannon) balls to be dislodged from a brass “monkey” and survive as a justification for the origin of cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.

Mr. Thomas B. Lemann points out that the transliteration of the opening quotation of “Onomatoplazia” [XV, 1] contains the following errors:

κλαννη should be klange, not klagge
geneto argureolou bioiou should be genet’argureoio bioio.

And, where the reference is made in the first paragraph to “the twanging release of Ulysses’ silver bow,” that the bowman is not Ulysses but Apollo, shooting into the Greek camp.

EPISTOLA {Mark Carroll}

Aficionados of duende who enjoyed George Bria’s exegesis, (“Duende: Gypsy Soul and Something More” [XV, 1], of its “magical quality,” should refer to the works of George Frazier, another of its champions. Frazier (1911-1974), a Boston newspaper columnist, sometime entertainment editor of Life magazine, and general journalistic critic and gadfly, was enamored of the word, which he first found in a Kenneth Tynan article (1963) in Holiday on Miles Davis:

Duende is very difficult to define. Yet when it is there it is unmistakable, inspiring our awe, quickening our memory—…to observe someone or something that has it is to feel icy fingers running down our spine.

My source for the preceding is Charles Fountain’s engaging biography of Frazier, Another Man’s Poison, Globe Pequot Press, Chester, CT, 1984.

[Mark Carroll, Bethesda, Maryland]

EPISTOLA {Arthur J. Morgan}

Duende [XV, 1] may be absent in Italian and French, as Mr. Bria assures us, but it is alive and prospering in Portuguese. It has the original meaning, a ‘sprite or hobgoblin that plays tricks, especially at night in people’s houses; a poltergeist.’

There is a term in English for a tennis player reaching a height, for a brief stretch or longer, when he cannot miss, and tennis people call it zoning. I have not heard it used in other cases, but when used it seems to equal tener duende. I do not know whether that use of duende has reached Portuguese speakers in Brazil or Portugal, but if it has not, it probably will soon, because so many Portuguese speakers are bilingual in Spanish.

[Arthur J. Morgan, New York City]

EPISTOLA {Gillian Vardon}

In his delightful article, “Onomatoplazia” [XV, 1], Chester Delaney writes, “analysand … was obviously derived directly from the -nd marker of the active gerund in Latin, which suggests the therapist (active agent) rather than the patient….”

Not so. Mr. Delaney is a victim of the confusion so often experienced by Latin students between the gerund, which is a neuter noun, active in meaning, and the gerundive, which is an adjective of similar form, but passive in meaning. Analysand, like several -nd words in English, is derived from the gerundive, and so means ‘(a person) to be analyzed.’ Similarly, reverend means ‘one who is to be revered,’ ordinand is ‘one who is to be ordained’; an old standby of crossword compilers, deodand, is a ‘thing to be given to God,’ and legend is ‘something to be read.’ We use in their original Latin forms addenda and corrigenda meaning ‘things to be added/corrected.’

An interesting example of a derivative from the passive gerundive that has acquired a quasi-active meaning is reprimand from reprimendus, ‘one who is to be repressed.’ In the course of its transfer to English through French it has become ‘a severe or formal rebuke,’ i.e., the act of repressing.

[Gillian Vardon, Amherst, New York]

EPISTOLA {D.S. Bland}

Charles Delaney asks for further examples of onomatoplazia. Here are two which misled me for years:

hogget Nothing to do with pigs. It is the term applied to a one-year-old sheep.

passerine It ought to be a bird of passage, but it isn’t. It is a bird that perches.

An amusing example of this kind of semantic confusion will be found in Chapter XX of Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow. From boyhood the romantic, poetically inclined hero, Denis Stone, found the word carminative particularly evocative. It suggested the warmth, the rosiness (carmine) of wine and flesh, and, by association with carmen-carminis, the idea of singing. To find out that it meant ‘able to cure flatulence’ was the death of youth and innoncence. All the same, in one respect, Denis was right. The word (like charm) is indeed associated with singing, and goes back to the time when men attempted to cure the ills of the flesh by incantation. And, to return to Mr. Delaney, swimmingly is associated with aquatic sports: “with a smooth gliding movement” says OED. No confusion there, I would suggest.

[D.S. Bland, Southbourne, Dorset]

EPISTOLA {Warren Buell}

Onomatoplazia struck a delightful chord for me. When I first began to study German it took a while to learn that Gift was not something one wanted for Christmas, and that Mist was not cool and dewy, but warm and smelly.

Here are a few of my favourites in English, coupled with their deceitful meanings:

demarché — a retreat
narthex — a high, exalted church official
suffragan — someone barely tolerated
pleonasm — a rapidly growing cancer
afflatus — a fart. The words “divine afflatus” thus create an unforgettable image
jejune — like a gumdrop

A salute to Delaney for creating onomatoplazia, a much-needed new word. Safire should take note.

[Warren Buell, Los Angeles]

EPISTOLA {Barbara Bassett}

Re the linguistic division in Belgium [XIV, 4], there is a story that goes back to a time when it was required by law that every town council have at least one French-speaking member. When a visitor to one of the councils asked, “Qui est-ce qui parle francais ici?” one man rose to say, “Je.”

[Barbara Bassett, Alexandria, Virginia]

EPISTOLA {Israel Wilenitz}

Two comments on articles in XV, 1:

My favorite expression from the language of guns (“Gunning for the English Language”) is lock, stock, and barrel. If someone gives you the lock, the stock, and the barrel, you have pretty much the entire musket.

The “lowing herd” (“Onomatoplazia”) wound slowly in the first verse of “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” by Thomas Gray, not Oliver Goldsmith.

[Israel Wilenitz, E. Setauket, New York]

EPISTOLA {Garretta E. Howard}

The onomatoplazia of inflammable is so common that flammable, or even flamable is now commonly substituted, especially on trucks.

[Garretta E. Howard, Del Rio, Texas]

EPISTOLA {Jerome Rhodes}

Anent earlier items by Timothy Hayes [XI, 4] and by Richard Lederer [XII, 4] on the oxymoron, I submit some oxymora found in local advertising:

reuseable disposable plates
draft beer in a bottle
in-store warehouse sale
boneless bar-b-p ribs

[Jerome Rhodes, Delray Beach, Florida]

EPISTOLA {Robert D. Anson}

In his winning essay [XIV, 4] on Shakespeare’s extensive use of legal language, Mr. D.S. Bland makes one error for sure, and, if I read him rightly, yet another in the same spot. He refers to those chilling lines at the end of III.ii, where Macbeth invokes Night’s cover for the intended murder of Banquo. Bland slips up when he states it is to “enable him to proceed on his path to the murder of Duncan.” Your Third Prize notwithstanding, Duncan was murdered several pages earlier.

The serious error is in his (apparently) thinking that Macbeth’s

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

relates to night destroying daylight in the sense that darkness will cancel the daylight’s ‘bond,’ whatever that may be. No, the bond here is Banquo’s lease on life and his fatherhood, with great alluding to the supernatural powers of the witches, especially the Third Witch. It is she who had addressed Macbeth, in I. ii, as “that shalt be king hereafter.” A few lines later she confounds him by prophesying that Banquo shall “get kings.” Macbeth harps on this mystery after the witches vanish, muttering to Banquo in a tone of envious wonderment, “Your children shall be kings.”

In the tyrant’s mind, that great bond really means Banquo/Fleance, both subject to the bonded prophecy uttered by the Third Witch. The father can beget new offspring safe from Macbeth’s hand; the son is the palpable threat. Both their lives must be snuffed out immediately, or the usurper will remain paralyzed, kept pale, by that unearthly promise. He views either of them as the instrument, the bond, of his not being able to pass on the crown to a successor of his choosing (or of his subsequent begetting). Yes, Night will devour Day, but Macbeth’s significant meaning here is: under cover of darkness—in reckless defiance of weird authority—he will have his black agents eliminate the bonded progenitor of Scottish kings, along with his only progeny. As it turns out, Fleance escapes to fulfill the prophecy of Banquo begetting a line of kings. Macbeth’s action to have the bond canceled becomes null and void.

True to the terms of the indenture set forth by its guarantors, that great bond will suffer no default.

[Robert D. Anson, Midland, Texas]

EPISTOLA {D.S. Bland}

In answer to Mr. Anson’s first point I can only say mea culpa. It is the kind of silly slip that we are all guilty of making from time to time. Witness Chester Delaney [XV, 1] who attributes “lowing herd” to Oliver Goldsmith instead of to Thomas Gray.

As for Macbeth’s great bond, this is a crux over which commentators have argued for years. Mr. Anson’s interpretation is one that has been advanced before and is dealt with, for example, in Kenneth Muir’s Arden edition. My own reading of the passage turns as much on the word pale as on bond, but the word limit set by the essay competition forced me to be rather elliptical. Briefly, I interpret bond as being implicit in God’s first act of creation—the separation of night from day. In praying for its cancellation Macbeth is unwittingly asking that chaos should come again, as indeed it does within the world of the tragedy until the restoration of order through Macbeth’s death and the assumption of the crown by Malcolm.

But my main object in choosing the passage was to illustrate the way in which Shakespeare could move from the literal to the metaphorical or metaphysical in his use of a legal term. From that point of view the differing interpretations Mr. Anson and I read into the passage are of secondary importance.

[D.S. Bland, Southerbourne, Dorset]

EPISTOLA {Robert J. Powers}

Henry Henn’s “Me Gook” [XIV, 3] prompts me to ask which Chinese language his Asians were speaking. If we say “the Chinese language” we refer, of course, to the written language. Chinese speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Fukienese, Hakka, etc., tongues often so dissimilar that verbal intercommunication is impossible. Only written or printed Chinese provides the glue to hold the Babel together.

In Mandarin the name America becomes ‘beautiful nation,’ as Mr. Henn says. In the Romanization system I learned (and a pox on Peiking/Beijing for replacing the clear with the opaque) the two characters are transliterated as mei-kuo, disregarding the tonal diacritical marks. A roughly approximate atonal pronunciation is thus mā-gwō. A family resemblance, to be sure, but far from “me gook.” So, back to my question: In which Chinese language is America ‘me gook”?

Even on so small an island as Taiwan the Mandarin-speaking ex-mainlanders cannot converse with the Taiwanese-born majority who have not bothered to learn Mandarin. Older Taiwanese are usually bilingual, but the tongues are their native Taiwanese and Japanese, a result of the fifty years (1895-1945) Japan ruled the island. A common sight in China (either one) is two individuals closely observing the upturned, outstretched palm of one while the other “draws” ideographs on that palm with a forefinger. It’s a delight to see the smile of recognition when communication is established.

[Robert J. Powers, Shreveport, Louisiana]

EPISTOLA {Charles G. Mendoza}

I found Mr. Henry Henn’s amphigory [XIV, 3] on military slang interesting, but his explanation of the meaning of Viet is at variance with my information.

Let me begin again by making two observations. First, we must realize there is a difference between spoken and written Chinese. Next, when looking at a Chinese character, the symbol can be purely phonetic, purely semantic, or a combination of both. Mr. Henn knew that the two characters for Vietnam could be translated individually as ‘extreme’ and ‘south.’ When he looks at the map it is obvious that Vietnam is to the extreme south of the Chinese Empire. His misconception is thus reinforced.

Let us go back in Chinese history to the beginning of the Warring (or Contending) States Period. At about this time new powers were arising around the old Chinese heartland. Among them the Ch’in (Mr. Henn’s Chin) and the Yueh. As explained by Professor Paul W. Kroll, Chairman of the Department of Oriental Languages and Literature, University of Colorado (Boulder), this new people called themselves by a name that was very similar to the Chinese word for ‘extreme.’ Thus in the Chinese spoken language of that time we have two homophones, one meant ‘the Viet (people or kingdom),’ the other simply ‘extreme, to exceed.’

When a literate Chinese had to write about this new kingdom a problem arose as there was no charactter for the Viet. The problem was solved simply by using an already standard character that had a similar sound to what the Viet called themselves.

For example, the Chinese word for Buddha is used as the first character for the English word Florida. Let me quote from Professor John DeFrancis’s The Chinese Language Fact and Fantasy (p. 8):

When the Chinese were confronted with the problem of expressing foreign terms and names, as happened on a large scale with the introduction of Buddhism in the first century A.D., they did so by further extending the use of Chinese characters as phonetic symbols. The word Buddha itself came to be represented by a character which at one time had a pronunciation something like b’iwat and now, after a long process of phonological change, is pronounced fó.

It seems the character “fó” is being used phonetically a second time around in Florida.

Let me emphasize “by further extending,” in the quote above. My argument is not that the Chinese pronunciation for Viet is “Yueh” but that Mr. Henn errs when he translates the Chinese character as ‘extreme.’ The Chinese character is simply a phonological rendering of a Viet word meaning ‘people.’ The correct translation is the “Yueh (or Viet)” of the “south” (as opposed to the “Yueh” who used to be just beyond present-day Shanghai).

[Charles G. Mendoza, North Miami, Florida]

EPISTOLA {David L. Gold}

In XIV, 3, Richard Lederer notes (p. 10) that the idiom dressed to the nines could be from Middle English dressed to then eynes ‘dressed to the eyes.’ However, similar expressions in French, Spanish, and Judezmo, all mentioning numbers, give pause (they are listed in Jewish Language Review 7, 1987, p. 205). It is regrettable that Lederer uses the word “corruption” (p. 10), which one does not expect to find in objective writing (see p. 426 of Robert A. Hall, Jr.’s Introductory Linguistics, Philadelphia, Chilton, 1964).

Frank Abate writes that “the recent comeback [of Latin studies] owes much to the recognition of Latin’s pedagogical value, especially as a vocabulary builder, something both intuitively and statistically known to be true…. The vocabulary-building argument is a potent one for proponents of Latin education…” (p. 15). I’m all for Latin courses, but there’s an easier way of building your English vocabulary then plowing through the intricacies of Latin morphology and syntax. All you need is a course in English vocabulary which, among other things, explains Latin stems and affixes relevant to English. This is neatly illustrated, though with Greek, in Edward C. Echols’ “Alpha Privative = A-Negative” immediately above (pp. 14-15 of the same issue), where, without getting involved in complicated matters, the author explains almost fifty Greek-related English words just by nothing a prefix and various stems. Also, since many English words and their Classical Latin etymonds share little or no meaning, Classical Latin can at times hinder rather than help; for example, Classical Latin conferre has none of the present-day meanings of English confer. (Conversely, reading English meanings into Classical Latin words can be misleading.) These differences are due to semantic change somewhere on the etymological chain (Medieval Latin, French, Italian, English, etc.). A more convincing case for Latin studies can be made on other grounds (if the study of ANY language requires pleading). I am happy, by the way, that Abate did not say that studying Latin helps you to think clearly—an erroneous notion still often heard.

Rusine should be added to the supplement of English words ending in -ine (p. 11). After some searching, it can be found in Webster’s Third. Rusine is not listed in its alphabetical place, but if you look for it where it should be, you’re bound to see the entry for rusine antler, at which rusine is etymologized as being from New Latin rusa + English -ine. If it then occurs to you to look up rusa, you’ll find rusine as an undefined runon. All of this is a minor irritation to the user, but Philip Gove wanted to save space at all costs. Webster’s Third, as is well known, is not user-friendly.

[David L. Gold, Haifa, Israel]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“By the most conservative estimates, the church’s property in the Bay Area is worth uncountable millions.” [From the San Francisco Examiner, 30 August 1987. Submitted by Richard M. Harnett, South San Francisco.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“…the lecture was heavy with the importance of dream state, pulse and heart rate, vaginal tumescence and temperature change, rapid eye movement and the size and frequency of penal erection.” [From Playing After Dark by Barbara L. Ascher, Doubleday, 1986. Submitted by Richard C. Casey, Darien, Connecticut.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Madam, I’m Adam, and Other Palindromes

William Irvine, illus. by Steven Guarnaccia, (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987).

Here is a friendly, attractive picture-book. The fact that the pictures are a full page each with captions that seesaw across the bottoms (as palindromes will) would be frustrating were it not for the quality of the drawings. As for the quality of the palindromes—well, they are rarely sheer poetry. After all, what can one do with a language like English except come up with things like A SLUT NIXES SEX IN TULSA or I MAIM MAIMI? I shudder to think what a future archaeologist might make of those or of GOD! A RED NUGGET! A FAT EGG UNDER A DOG! As anyone can tell, I am not a great fan of this form of amusement, and I thought they were original till I encountered the well-known A MAN, A PLAN, A CANAL—PANAMA. That sings. The only other one I know (aside from ABLE…ELBA) focuses on the rumor that the South American singer named Yma Sumac was really a girl from the Bronx named Army Camus; that is what might be called a “distributed palindrome” since it operates one term at a time.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Facts On File Dictionary of Troublesome Words

Bill Bryson, (Facts On File, 1987), 192 pp.

Under its, it’s, Bryson gives, among others the following examples from the Washington Post, “Its the worst its been in the last five years,” “Its come full circle,” then goes on to say “It’s, which was intended in each of the examples above, is the contraction of it is. That is where I happened to open this book, where I closed it, and why this review is so brief. There seems little point in going any further, except to say that this is the “Revised Edition”; one shudders to think of what might have been in the first edition.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Cat’s Pajamas, A Fabulous Fictionary of Familiar Phrases

Tad Tuleja, (Fawcett, 1987), xii + 226 pp.

The true etymologies of some words are weird and fanciful enough—sometimes unbelievably so—and it must be they that inspired Tuleja to compile this collection, largely (if not entirely) out of his imagination. The entry for get one’s goat, for example, begins:

In eleventh-century Lapland, before they discovered the nutritional value of reindeer milk, most of the inhabitants kept goats….

It goes on to describe the ‘inhabitants” propensity for “goat-rustling.” This is on a par with the attribution of leave me be to a Celtic origin having something to do with a warning against raiding hives or the ascription of the origin of the name of an obscene prosthetic device to a woman from Water Isle (the Duchess d’Île d’eau).

Having recently completed a (factual) book along the same lines—The Whole Ball of Wax and Other Colloquial Expressions, Perigee, $8.95, paper—I extend Tuleja my sympathies. Anyone amused by well-done, outlandish nonsense will enjoy this, a spoof-reader’s delight.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Word Smart

Adam Robinson and the staff of the Princeton Review, (Villard Books, 1988), approx. 400pp.

If you need this book, it is probably too late— unless you are about to take an SAT or GRE. People should learn vocabulary from reading literature and listening to articulate speakers, not by memorizing the dictionary. That said, it must be acknowledged that some may be in great difficulty if facing an examination, and if memorizing words and meanings will pull them through, then they need this book. The problem lies, of course, among those who make up examinations that purport to judge a person’s intelligence or aptitudes on his precise and proper use of words, at bottom a thoroughly idiotic notion, clearly unrelated to being a musical or other artistic or mechanical genius or craftsman. Control of language may be a manifestation of a certain kind of ability, but nobody is quite sure how it should be characterized.

I have nothing particularly adverse to say about the book. It would probably fulfill its function if those impelled to study it learn what it contains—then promptly forget it the day after the exam. How many people need words like desiccate, didactic, innocuous, immutable, etc., when dry up, instructive, harmless, and unchanging or unchangeable are around? Anyone who doubts the impact of the proper use of simple language should read (or reread) Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil. Though a translation, it puts English polysyllabicity to shame.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“As a mother of an 18-month-old daughter with an M.A. in education who has decided to stay home to raise my child (a difficult and soul-wrenching decision), I resent the characterizsation of the full-time mother as one who is occupied with ‘laundry, shopping, preparing dinner,’ to the exclusion of one-to-one contact with my child.” [From a Letter to the Editor of The Toronto Star, 16 July 1988, which asserts its right “to edit all contributions.” Submitted by Maria Erskine, Pickering, Ontario.]

Paring Pairs No. 31

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 is the next issue of VERBATIM.

(a). Friar’s grumphiness becomes a habit.
(b). Pace of dungaree manufacture.
(c). Nationality of Curies’shining child.
(d). Where exhibitionists yield to burning desire.
(e). Punk skunk from Gdansk.
(f). Sting operation or vice squad roundup.
(g). Be familiar with Mudville perfume.
(h). Bedlam concentrated here.
(i). Officer’s servant, scourag of the underworld.
(j). Put another way, it’s only money.
(k). Put another way, to prefer Indian dish is to lead one to behave obsequiously.
(1). Have cereal with a flourish.
(m). Odd stress curbed means strengthening.
(n). Harmless firework created by box man.
(o). Are evergreens just a tub of lard?
(p). Which team are you on in America?
(q). Tenets of a bitch.
(r). Stake you to demon drink?
(s). Denunciation of Siamese attack.
(t). Stagger in where hull comes round.
(u). Incubus now to get rid of everything bad.
(v). Her q.v. might be petulant or testy.
(w). Beneath which word do I find skivvies?
(x). Administered at the demise of former cobblers.
(y). Succubus changes to harass you.
(z). Do those at the Tower sound like flower people?

(1). Ale.
(2). Bad.
(3). Bat.
(4). Bed. (5). Bee.
(6). Bran.
(7). Cash.
(8). Cat.
(9). Cracker.
(10). Cross.
(11). Curry.
(12). Dish.
(13). Dog.
(14). Evil.
(15). Favor.
(16). Feeders.
(17). Fir.
(18). Flash.
(19). Force.
(20). French.
(21). Gene.
(22). Hell.
(23). Home.
(24). Imp.
(25). Joy.
(26). Kin.
(27). Know.
(28). Last.
(29). Ma.
(30). Man.
(31). Mere.
(32). Monk.
(33). Net.
(34). Nuts.
(35). Point.
(36). Pole.
(37). Polish.
(38). Raid.
(39). Rate.
(40). Reference.
(41). Rein.
(42). Safe.
(43). Scowls.
(44). Shede.
(45). Side.
(46). State.
(47). Tie.
(48). Tumble.
(49). Under.
(50). Wear.
(51). Whore.
(52). Wrights.

Paring Pairs Prize

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

Answers to Paring Pairs No. 30

(a). Imprison Capone; keep him inside. (26,4) InternAl.
(b). Irish smartass actor. (15,20) Cunning Harm.
(c). Did sisters of father of founder of Oil State come from here? (33,8) Penn’s Aunts.
(d). Disappoint the comedian. (39,44) Stand Up.
(e). King’s rule over salad. (13,28) Cole’s Law.
(f). Had festive snack with Pygmalion. (18,42) Gala Tea.
(g). Aristophanes' garret comedy. (7,45) Attic Wit.
(h). Was Carver a property enthusiast? (19,32) Ground Nut.
(i). Lavatory bottle for the half-arsed? (16,27) Demi john.
(j). Charley’s sounded exuberant. (10,5) Boy Ant.
(k). Glue used to bind a book. (12,25) Case In.
(l). Suspended central European heretic. (24,6) Hung Arian.
(m). Superficial wave rider. (41,2) Surf Ace.
(n). 3 + Andreev’s 7 = 1 surfer. (21,43) Hang Ten.
(o). “Please Pay Here”—a password? (14,37) Counter Sign.
(p). Emergency communication by steampipe. (23,29) Hot Line.
(q). Vernal fashions at end of mooring. (38,29) Spring Line.
(r). Rodent’s occupation with shroud. (35,29) Rat Line.
(s). Cotton to French desserts assortment. (31,29) Mousse Line.
(t). Put former fashions in a row. (1,29) A Line.
(u). Bows to codswallop. (17,40) Fiddle Sticks.
(v). Feed story of New England state intravenously. (30,29) Main Line.
(w). Singleness of the unmarried gangster. (9,22) Bachelor Hood.
(x). Bench moonlighting. (36,29) Side Line.
(y). Plain Cockney widow’s pique. (3,29) Air Line.
(z). Cub stringer hopes to purchase this. (11,29) Buy Line.

The correct answer is (34) Polish. The winner was Mrs. Anne Byrne of Cape May, New Jersey.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Elena Nikolaidi Gives Distinguished Rectal.” [Headline above a review of a song recital in the Louisvile, Kentucky Courier-Journal, quoted in Medical Economics, 5 December 1960. Submitted by Alma Denny, New York City.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Condo living, the spread of AIDS through prostitutes and veterinary surgery.” [From a schedule of TV interviews in the Miami Herald, 4 February 1987. Submitted by Edward T. Howard, Delary Beach, Florida.]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Duplicate packing bill is open to question (9)
2. Scope made from wood (5)
3. Actor with no lines in next Rambo (5)
4. Fashion designer having capital of England in a rage (6,3)
5. Military general enunciated (7)
6. Bit of egg in Bowery drunk’s facial hair (7)
7. Hastiness of bath in canal (8)
8. Criticized G-man’s hiding place (6)
9. Commercials featuring combat medals (6)
10. Cathouse doorbell is out of order (8)
11. One breaking sharp chopping knife (7)
12. Head of Spain to pay no heed to man from Rome (7)
13. Start game playing gambit (9)
14. Change end of prayer with diocese’s leader (5)
15. I mess around in big trucks (5)
16. Fabric on ten teddy bears made comfortable (9)

Down

1. Imagined terror grips me (7)
2. Unqualified voice (5)
3. Artisan working for despot’s wife (7)
4. Bishop with a quartz church (8)
5. Train with even number (6)
6. Formerly dressed in Coolidge’s disguise (7)
7. Representation of sunbeam coming through door (9)
8. Gave money for tip, then was in debt (7)
14. Makes a hit featuring an upright musical instrument (5,4)
16. Scandinavian calls Reagan up (8)
17. Deeds showing company’s addresses (7)
18. Pledges to both sides of de- bate before ballots (7)
20. Party favor from track event (3,4)
21. Ring opera composer, at end of Siegfried, went too far (7)
23. Disastrous time before Ha- vana uprising (6)
25. Lover tries hiding in plain sight (5)

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Suicide won’t oure shyness problems.” [Headline over Beth Winship’s teen-advice column, Morning Union, Springfield, (Massachusetts), 9 January 1987. Submitted by Mrs. John E. Mann, Longmeadow, Massachusetts.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“On Modern Marriage' is a very badly written essay …and the reader wants to shout, Martial your thoughts!” [From a review by Carolyn See of Modern Marriage… by Isak Dineson, in the Los Angeles Times, January 5, 1987, Part V, p. 4. Submitted by W.O. Frick, M.D. Pasadena.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“I do not need a spelling checker, but I have found it extremeely useful… “[From an article by Laurence Urdang in VERBATIM, XV,1. Submitted by Peggy Riley, Livermore, California, et al.]

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. DAD-A.
3. ANAL-YTIC-AL (rev.).
10. C(UTTHR)OAT (TRUTH anag.).
11. PANIC (hidden).
12. NO(O)SE.
13. LAS(TRITE)S.
14. E(NAME)LS.
16. SH-ABBY.
19. LA(W)YER.
21. MASSEUR (rev.).
23. OVER-RAIN.
25. NO-MAD (ON rev.).
27. F(I.E.)RY.
28. IN CA-HOOTS.
29. NE(THERMOS)T.
30. REIN (homophone).

Down

1. DE(CAN)TER.
2. DITTO (hidden).
4. NOODLED (anag.).
5. LOT-USES.
6. TAPER (2 meanings).
7. CONSTABLE.
8. LOCUS-T.
9. TH(I)E-VERY.
15. A(BASEMEN)T.
17. AB’S-IN-THE.
18. TRADES IN (anag.).
20. REAL(IS)M.
21. MEN-ACES.
22. C-OFF-IN.
24. TH(YM)E (MY rev.).
26. MOOS-E.

Internet Archive copy of this issue