VOL XI, No 3 [Summer, 1984]

Red Pants

Robert M. Sebastian, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

While writers whose business it is to be witty often fail to produce, grave authors occasionally are mirthful when laughter is farthest from their minds. From a lifetime of undisciplined reading with innocent pencil in hand and malice prepense in mind, I have gleaned a harvest of what I am pleased to denominate Red Pants items, a sampling of which follows. My designation derives from a splash of vivid writing in Francis Thompson’s * A Corymbus for Autumn* in which he proclaims how “day’s dying dragon” was

Panting red pants into the West.

In this trousers category, Thompson must share the limelight with Coleridge by virtue of the line in Kubla Khan:

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing.

Even Shelley may stake a claim, if only in the pajama division of this sector, thanks to his description in Epipsychidion of how

… the slow, silent night
Is measured by the pants of their calm sleep.

Since everthing is to be found in Shakespeare, it is not surprising that on at least two occasions the Board has contributed his own Red Pants nuggets. In Antony and Cleopatra (Act IV, Scene VIII, lines 14 et seq.) Antony commands the wounded Scarus to

… leap thou, attire and all,
Through proof of harness to my heart, and there
Ride on the pants triumphing.

And in Othello (Act II, Scene I, line 80) Cassio utters the fervent prayer that Othello might

Make love’s quick pants in Desdemona’s arms.

A variation on this theme occurs in Alba de Céspedes' The Secret (translated from the Italian by Isabel Quigly: Simon and Schuster, New York, 1958, page 1) where she confides that “I still had a whole afternoon before me to spend, and I used it to tidy up my drawers….” One may well wonder what Miss Stowe had in mind when, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Chapter 5), she narrates how “Mrs. Shelby stood like one stricken. Finally, turning to her toilet, she rested her face in her hands, and gave a sort of groan.” In this same vein, the mirthless Milton adds his bit to the general hilarity of nations when, in describing Mount Etna in Book I of Paradise Lost (lines 236-7) he penned

And leave a singed bottom all involved
With stench and smoke: …

And in Chapter VI of Vanity Fair, when Blenkinsop, the housekeeper, sought to console Amelia for Joe Sedley’s jilting of her dear Rebecca, Thackeray confides (indelicately?) that Amelia wept confidentially on the housekeeper’s shoulder “and relieved herself a good deal.”

Chuckles often emanate from the British employment of a term in a sense at variance with American usage. There is that oft-quoted example, near the opening of Trial by Jury, where Defendant asks, “Is this the Court of the Exchequer?” and having been assured that it was, Defendant (aside) commands himself to “Be firm, be firm, my pecker.” The British, of course, do not giggle at this bit of Gilbertian dialogue, since to them pecker means ‘courage,’ as in the phrase “to keep your pecker up.” Two of the more common examples of British-American divergence of usage are screw and knock up. In Vanity Fair (Chapter 39), the niggardly Sir Pitt was not nearly the aerial acrobat your American sophomore might fancy him to be when he “screwed his tenants by letter.” He was simply making extortionate exactions upon his wretched lessees. Similarly, when in Chapter XXXIV of the same novel, Mrs. Bute reminds her husband that “You’d have been screwed in goal, Bute, if I had not kept your money,” she was not speaking of pleasures deferred. In Bleak House (Chapter XXVII) Grandfather Smallweed, referring to Mr. George, warns Mr. Tulkinghorn that “I have him periodically in a vice. I’ll twist him, sir. I’ll screw him, sir.” In Kipling’s The Light That Failed (Chapter XIII), Torpenhow urges Dick to attend a party that night, “We shall be half screwed before the morning,” is his dismal sales pitch to Dick.

In Chapter VI of Vanity Fair, Thackeray reports on Joe Sedley’s drunken avowal to wed Becky Sharp the next morning, even if he had to “knock up the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth,” in order to have him in readiness to perform the ceremony. In Great Expectations (Chapter VI), we learn how “… Mr. Whopsle, being knocked up, was in such a very bad temper.” And who could blame him?

Many a raucous snigger has been sniggered from the pure-minded use of a word that suggests unmentionable parts of the human body. It does not take a too-wicked mind to read into such terms meanings of a lewd nature. Who can, for instance, blame a youth with but a mildly evil disposition from guffawing when he reads in Pater’s Marius The Epicurean (Chapter V) a reference to Apuleius' The Golden Ass noting that “all through the book, there is an unmistakably real feeling for asses …”? In Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (Chapter VII), one reads about a boy “cudgelling an ass,” and one goes back over the passage to reassure himself that it does not contain a typographical error for “cuddling.”

One may be indulged a giggle even though he is sure that Isak Dinesen did not intend an impropriety when she recorded in Out of Africa (Part V, Chapter 1) how “Fathima’s big white cock came strutting up before me.” And one is certain that Kenneth Rexroth, in his American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (Herder and Herder, N.Y., 1971) did not intend to hint at closet biographical matter when, in Chapter I, he wrote that “Whitman’s poems are full of men doing things together,” or, later in the same chapter, when he referred to “Whitman’s joyous workmen swinging their tools in the open air.” College freshman still read with flendish glee the first line in Canto I of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (and never mind the title!) that tells how

A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine.

In his poem Mr Nixon (from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley), Ezra Pound’s Mr. Nixon advises kindly

Don’t kick against the pricks,

although the identities of the latter are not divulged.

One is entitled to speculate on what outrageous proposal the narrator had made in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 2—Cities of the Plain (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff—Modern Library, N.Y., 1934, Page 90) to cause the Duchess to say, “Apart from your balls, can’t I be of any use to you?” There is a famous letter penned by Rupert Brooke to his friend, Edward Marsh, from somewhere near Fiji (p. 463 of A Treasury of the World’s Great Letters, Simon and Schuster, N.Y., 1940) in which he relates how he sends his native boy up a palm tree, where he “cuts off a couple of vast nuts …” (macho victim not disclosed). In the first chapter of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Miss Stowe offers a dialogue between Haley and Mr. Shelby, part of which goes, “ ‘Well,’ said Haley, after they had both silently picked their nuts for a season, ‘what do you say?’ ” In Bleak House (Chapter XXIV) Dickens may cause some readers to blush when he wrote of Mr. George’s blush that “He reddened a little through his brown.”

We must move ineluctably to a consideration of perfectly reputable words which, having acquired sexual connotations, cause adolescent—and often adult— hilarity, even when read by a person of only mildly prurient mind. In Forster’s A Passage to India (Chapter XXXI) a vivid picture is created by the sentence “Tangles like this still interrupted their intercourse.” Pages later (Chapter XXXVII), it is acknowledged that “He, too, felt that this was their last free intercourse.” Apparently from then on, it was going to have to be cash or credit card only. In The Bride of Lammermoor (Chapter V), we are informed that the heroine “placed certain restrictions on their intercourse,” a limitation that might have been more usefully set in that same author’s Rob Roy (Chapter VII) where we are told of the chance that the narrator and Miss Vernon might be “thrown into very close and frequent intercourse.”

A variation of this theme is found in Robert Browning’s The Flight of the Duchess (Section V):

—Not he! For in Paris they told the elf
Our rough North land was the Land of Lays,

even though it is generally acknowledged that Paris is número uno in this area of human activity.

More picturesque are the references to erections. An arresting one occurs in A Passage to India (Chapter XXI) in which Forster describes a small building as “a flimsy and frivolous erection,” while in The Mayor of Casterbridge (Chapter XVI) the Mayor himself “beheld the unattractive exterior of Farfrae’s erection.” A phrase can paint an astonishing picture for the reader.

Consider Dickens' sharp image in Bleak House (Chapter LIV) when he describes how “Sir Leicester leans back in his chair, and breathlessly ejaculates…. ” Or, in Nicholas Nickleby (Chapter XLVII), where that admirable novelist graphically portrays how old Arthur Gride “again raised his hands, again chuckled, and again ejaculated.” And in his short tale, Lionizing, Edgar Allan Poe is quite candid in describing the reaction of one of his characters: “ ‘Admirable!’ he ejaculated, thrown quite off his guard by the beauty of the manoeuvre.”

Alas for perfectly lovely words that acquire pejorative meanings over the years! Earlier in this century, pansy became a derogatory epithet to describe an effete male, thereby cheapening forever lines like Shelley’s noble image in Adonais (verse XXXIII):

His head was bound with pansies over-blown,

not to mention Poe’s odd allusion in For Annie:

With rue and the beautiful Puritan pansies.

Or, more slap-stickish, E.F. Benson’s action picture in Lucia in London (Chapter 8): “Georgie stepped on a beautiful pansy.”

Of more recent vintage is gay. Nobody used to snicker at Chaucer’s line (No. 5818) in The Prologe of the Wyf of Bathe, in which that harried dame asks:

Why is my neghebores wif so gay?

In his poem The Menagerie, one of William Vaughan Moody’s characters advises:

If nature made you so graceful, don’t get gay,

while in Othello (ah, the Bard again!) in his dialogue with Desdemona and Emilia on the praise of women, Iago refers to the kind that

Never lack’d gold, and yet went never gay.

(Act II, Scene I, line 150)

And what in the world is one to make of William Butler Yeats’s startling revelation in his poem Lapis Lazuli (from Last Poems) that

They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay.?

Indeed it is an amusing, albeit utterly wasteful pastime to pursue the quest for Red Pants examples. May good cess befall all such quixotically misguided readers! One caveat: never assume blithely that an odd word or suspicious phrase is as lubricious as it sounds. In The Bride of Lammermoor (Chapter VI) Bucklaw vows, “I will chop them off with my whinger,” and one feels quite let down when he learns that a whinger is but a whinyard, which is merely a short sword.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Turning a corner of the Mazza Gallerie into a women’s tennis store, I was startled to see … hordes of giggling high school girls … ” [From an article by Dorothy Gilliam in the Washington Post, 3 August 1987. Submitted by Cornelius Van S. Roosevelt, Washington, D.C.]

LIGHT REFRACTIONS

Thomas H. Middleton, Muskrats “R” Not?

If you are a fan of old-fashioned jazz—what is now known as “traditional” or “trad” jazz—you are familiar with one of the standard “jump tunes” of the genre—a tune most commonly called Muskrat Ramble. Even if you are not a fan, you must have heard it as least a dozen times. It is the one that goes, “Dah! Dah! Dah! Dah! da-dat-dat-dah! Da-de-da-de-da-de-dat-dat-dah ! da-de-da-de-da-de-dat-dat-dah!”

That’s it; sure; you’ve heard it.

I think I first bought a recording of Muskrat Ramble back in about 1940, when I was in my early teens. My memory is rickety, but I am sure my first recording was labeled MUSKRAT RAMBLE, and I think, though I am less sure, that it was played by the late “Muggsy” Spanier, who was, to my mind, one of the greatest of jazz trumpeters. Later, I got another recording of the same tune, this one by, I think, Mezz Mezzrow. The label said, MUSKAT RAMBLE. I thought that was surely the first time I had ever seen such an obvious typographical error in, of all things, a simple title on a simple 78-rpm record. (This, remember, was in my youth, and it was a time when typographical errors were called typographical errors, not typos—at least by kids in junior high.) Some time later, I got still another version of MUSKRAT RAMBLE, with still another version of the title. This time, it was MUSCAT RAMBLE. That, I thought, was really absurd. Not only had they left out the “R”; they’d changed the “K” to “C”. Now, it made no sense at all. On the other hand, I reasoned, if there were, in fact, some sort of cat called a muscat, perhaps it wasn’t so outrageous. I looked up muscat in my Webster’s and found that it is a ‘variety of grape.’ To name a ramble after a variety of grape seemed to me preposterous. I was young and, by today’s standards, at least, pathetically innocent.

During my time in senior high, and, after that, in the Army Air Force, I had other things on my mind (there was a war on, after all), and I didn’t give the MUSKRAT-MUSKAT-MUSCAT RAMBLE problem any thought.

Speaking of my time in the AAF, which was utterly undistinguished, I think I must make a confession. Now might be as good a time as any to reveal a theft I committed at an Air Force Base near Seymour, Indiana. It was winter and bitterly cold. The wind used to sweep across that damned airfield with what seemed an absolute determination to crystallize our bodies. One day when the wind chill factor was nearing absolute zero, I took shelter in the service club. There was the omnipresent phonograph, or Vic, short for Victrola, and the stack of records next to it. In those days, people as a rule did not take much care of phonograph records. Usually the records were taken from their jackets and loaded naked in stacks, where they picked up dust, scratched one another, and traded static electricity. I was shuffling through a stack of about fifty records, and I came across three Bessie Smiths. I played all three, and the few other G.I.s in the room, which was quite large—big enough for a fair-sized dance with a small orchestra—either paid no attention or asked me to put on something by Glenn Miller or Jimmy or Tommy Dorsey instead. Among Bessie’s numbers were Dying Gambler’s Blues, Sing Sing Prison Blues, and one I had never heard called Black Mountain Blues, which has the imcomparable lines,

Home in Black Mountain a chile' will smack yo' face;

Home in Black Mountain a chile' will smack yo' face;

Babies cry for liquor an' all the birds sing bass.

and

Goin' back to Black Mountain, me an' my razor an' my gun;

Goin' back to Black Mountain, me an' my razor an my gun;

Goin' cut him if he stan' still, goin' shoot him if he run.

I was, and still am, captivated by “Babies cry for liquor an' the birds sing bass,” and in the arrogance of my youth, I was certain that nobody else on the airfield either knew or cared who Bessie Smith was, nor would any other G.I. be enchanted by basso birds, so I turned thief. I can’t remember how I did it, but somehow I smuggled those records back to my barracks and got them home intact on my next furlough. I kept them in good shape until my last 78-rpm turntable died.

End of digression and back to MUSKRAT-KAT-CAT: Muskrat Ramble is credited to Edward “Kid” Ory and Ray Gilbert. “Kid” Ory played great jazz trombone. The only thing I know about Gilbert is that I find him listed as co-author of Muskrat Ramble.

About thirty years ago, when I was concocting an epicurean dish and saw that I had no sherry on hand, I went to the liquor store and bought a bottle of muscatel that was being sold for an absurdly low price and that I thought might be exactly right for my sauce. It wasn’t bad, The wine jogged my thoughts back to Muscat Ramble. Muscatel is made from muscat grapes, is sometimes called muscat, and, being relatively cheap and sweet and high in alcohol content, is the booze of choice for a great many wines. An old college friend of mine who celebrated his twentieth birthday—meaning twenty years of AA sobriety—a couple of years ago, tells me that when he was on the skids and riding the rails from drunk tank to drunk tank, the favorite terms for muscat were muscadoodle and Napa Valley smoke.

I made up my mind that Muscat Ramble was almost certainly the original name of the tune. My reasoning is that it is not likely that “Kid” Ory or Ray Gilbert had ever seen a muskrat, and it’s even less likely that they or anyone else has ever seen a muskrat doing anything that we would be likely to think of as rambling. Muskrats, according to my encyclopedia, look like giant rats, are found in and around the mudbanks bordering marshes and quiet ponds, have partially webbed feet, and do a good deal of swimming. They do not appear to do much rambling. Muscat, or muscatel, on the other hand, is found on skid rows all over the land. A guy with a bottle-shaped brown paper bag, damp and wrinkled at its upper end, has almost certainly been slugging down a sweet wine of high proof, and the odds are pretty good you would find it is a muscadoodle. After the guy finishes his Napa Valley smoke and has slept it off, he is looking for the means to get another muscat fix. Now he is on a ramble with his hand out and a pleading look in his roadmapped eyes. I suspect that that is precisely the song’s origin.

My theory is that the “r” got put in there simply because muskrat is a more common word than muscat. It is the same reason most of us, I assume, have heard, “He’s in the hospital with prostrate trouble.” Prostrate is a more common word that prostate, so prostrate is what we get. The “r” fits in naturally. I got a strange sort of corroboration from my good friend Rosy McHargue, who is now pushing eighty-seven years and has spent most of his life playing clarinet and sax with some of the best jazzbands—Benny Goodman, Red Nichols, Ted Weems, and a slew of others. Rosy, too, had seen the tune as Muskrat, Muskat, and Muscat. I asked him what he thought the original title was. He had known “Kid” Ory well, and he said, “You know, Tom, I’m not exactly sure. I once asked Ory about it and he said, ‘It’s m-u-s-c-a-t. Muskrat.’ So I think that’s just the way everyone said muscat.”

There you are. I find a muskrat ramble difficult to imagine visually. I picture muskrats wallowing about in the mire and paddling sluggishly through the water, but I wouldn’t call that rambling. On the other hand, a wino with an empty paper bag on a ramble to maintain his muscat level—now that has a touch of poetry. Maybe not in the same class with “all the birds sing bass,” but poetry, nevertheless.

EPISTOLA

As a nonexpert, although interested, subscriber to VERBATIM, it is “a bit mysterious” to me that the singular noun absence takes the plural verb are. I refer to the first sentence of your article about the Longman Dictionary [XV,1].

[[Mea culpa. — Editor] A subscriber, ]

EPISTOLA {Barth Healey}

Helen W. Power, in “Women on Language; Women in Language,” [XV,2] may bewail the insensitivity of the male. But she betrays her own elitist insensitivity when she describes a flight attendant as “the person who passes peanuts on an airplane.” I hope Ms./Miss/Mrs. Power never needs to draw on the considerable first-aid and emergency training that every attendant must master.

[Barth Healey, Pt. Washington, New York]

Antipodean Newsletter: Water, Water, Nowhere

George W. Turner

Leonard Bloomfield, having begun with a theory of meaning which emphasized the environment in which objects were present and named, had to add the obvious proviso that we sometimes mention what is not present. I have lately been reading accounts of the exploration of the western and northwestern deserts of Australia in the 1870s and I have become very aware of the effect absent necessities might have on the frequency of particular items in discourse. In the desert the missing necessity is water. As the explorer Ernest Giles put it, the explorer’s experience is a “baptism worse than that of fire—the baptism of no water.”

My impression was that in the journals of desert explorers the word water, alone or in compounds, and words relating to water, were unusually frequent. It is, I suppose, likely that people with little money must think of money more than the well-off do and that the hungry will dwell on thoughts of food and the thirsty on drink. Here was a chance to quantify such things. I decided to make a count of words relating to water in reports of desert exploration.

Taking quite at random a single page (page 7) in the journals of the Gregory brothers recording an early (1846) exploration of country east and north of Perth, I find the word water used fifteen times. Ten pages on (page 17), water occurs nine times but there are also the related words stream (twice), well (twice), pool, channel, and the circumlocution “essential element.” Two words, dew and shower, refer in the context to the presence of water; the rest are in contexts indicating its absence.

I tried another explorer, Ernest Giles. Taking page 17 again, I was reminded that Giles is rather given to semi-serious poetic diction at times, and we find him referring to the presence of water in the Finke River as “the stream purling over its stony floor” or, quoting some bygone poet, “brightly the brook through the green leaflets, giddy with joyousness, dances along.” Perhaps present water called for some stylistic celebration. Two hundred pages further on there is less exuberance in the circumlocution “that fluid so terribly scarce in the region,” and in three other references water is simply water. Giles is not always waxing poetic and may, like other explorers, be useful as a source for the history of Australian and general English. His use of the word tank to refer to a hollowed-out reservoir (“Gibson dug a small tank and the water soon cleared”) antedates the OED, for instance.

Since this linguistic-statistical study of an obsession might well prove to be an important contribution to psycholinguistics, I decided to make a larger sample of watery words, choosing the straightforward journals of Colonel Peter Egerton Warburton, who led an expedition across the western interior of Australia in 1873-4. In a randomly chosen sequence of ten pages (151-60 of the published journal) there were twenty-eight occurrences of the word water (eight of them in compounds), no page being without at least one example. In addition, there was a rich collection of words relating to water, not necessarily indicating its presence. “Hoping to find a lake” is included, though of course it doesn’t indicate the presence of water. Even words which are usually of more general reference are brought into relation with water in a text like this. Gum-trees or rocks (in areas of sand) appear as signs of possible water. Apart from these words and lake, words and phrases directly associated with thoughts of water and reinforcing the sense of obsession include pool, springs, drainage hole, clay hole, flood, channel, water-courses, water-hole, rock-hole, drink, drinkable, running water, stream, and native well.

The last two items merit comment. Stream is often said not to be used in Australia except in metaphorical ways, normally being replaced by creek. Warburton’s use: “sandbanks intercept the stream, which finally splits into narow water-courses and spreads itself over the plains, and so it ends as a creek” suggests a somewhat more complex relation between the two words. British-born explorers did not set out to write Australian English, of course. Gregory uses stream in the way normal in England; Giles consistently refers to gens in the hills of central Australia, though glen is not current (outside place-names) in contemporary Australian English.

The other name, native well is, as a later explorer David Carnegie, author of Spinifex and Sand (1898), points out, a misnomer. He believes native wells are essentially rock-holes (depressions in rock) buried in fairly shallow sand, which, when hollowed out by the natives, appear to be wells. This sort of misnomer leads Carnegie to suppose that “to the uninitiated no map is so misleading as that of West Australia where lakes are salt-bogs without surface water, springs seldom run, and native ‘wells’ are merely tiny holes in the rock, yielding from 0 to 200 gallons.”

Carnegie also describes namma-holes and soaks as sources of water. Soaks are shallow wells sunk near the base of an outcrop to tap an underground reservoir. Namma-holes have been variously described; to Carnegie they are depressions on the surface of rocks, often with a rounded bottom, where stones are often found, suggesting that the stones have something to do with the formation of the holes.

Some nostalgic early Australians deplored the loss in our speech of English country words, the glens and streams (alive, anyway, in the journals of explorers), coppices and brooks, woods, becks, and rivulets. Perhaps these words did not really fit. We might have done better with Arabic-speaking settlers. Wadi, for instance, would describe an inland creek rather well. Be that as it may, a later Australian visitor to English drizzle might feel nostalgic when thinking of the parched and thirsty but water-obsessed vocabulary developed in the drier areas of our sunburnt land.

Favorite Grammatical Game: Puzzling Pronouns

Douglas Greenwood, Barrie, Ontario

Here is a game just made to while away the hours on a commuter train with your favorite author, a perfect place to hunt for Puzzling Pronouns.

Fowler lists five instances where a careless writer can go wrong. There is really no excuse, Fowler says (not he says!), but here we give examples of his third case only, where “there should not be two parties justifying even a momentary doubt about which the pronoun represents.” And here the deluge of printed matter abounds with such specimens that one would suppose them to be the rule rather than the exceptions. It is a game that is like fishing in a barrel, but more stimulating mentally. I am not picking on the following authors; it is just a random catch.

In Thomas Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta, it is suggested by Ethelberta that she and some others go to see Milton’s tomb in Cripplegate church. Her suitor, Neigh, who had proposed marriage in a previous chapter, appears somewhat apprehensive at Ethelberta’s suggestion. This apprehension is observed by a Mr. Belmaine and mistaken by him for an indication that Neigh has been dragged into going to the church against his will “by his over-hasty wife.” One wonders whether the marriage had secretly taken place between the consecutive chapters! You see, it is Belmaine’s wife who was doing the dragging.

Somerset Maugham was a good and careful grammarian but now and then he slipped. In The Letter, a solicitor, Mr. Joyce, is approached by a Mr. Crosbie:

He spoke beautiful English, accenting each word with precision, and Mr. Joyce had often wondered at the extent of his vocabulary….

Sometimes I wonder about the extent of my own vocabulary, too, but really, not when I’m interviewing a client.

From The Once and Future King, by T. H. White:

Naturally it was Lancelot who rescued her. Sir Boss had managed to find him at the abbey, during his two days' absence, and now he came back in the nick of time to fight Sir Mador for the queen. Nobody who knew him would have expected him to do anything else, whether he had been sent away in disgrace or not—but, as it was thought he had left the country, his return did have a dramatic quality.

Not to say a quality of confusion—pronoun-cedly so.

From Oh What a Paradise it Seems, by John Cheever:

The size of Chisholm’s teeth, the thickness of his glasses, his stoop and the spring with which he walked all marked him, Sears thought, as a single-minded reformer. His marriage, Sears guessed, would have been unsuccessful and his children would have difficulty finding themselves.

No wonder — we’ve lost them already.

Mark Twain poses us a little mystery in Pudd’nhead Wilson: which knife does the killing? Quiet now. Lights, action:

I was asleep, but Luigi was awake, and he thought he detected a vague form nearing the bed. He slipped the knife out of the sheath and was ready, and unembarrassed by hampering bedclothes, for the weather was hot and we hadn’t any. Suddenly that native rose at the bedside, and bent over me with his right hand lifted and a dirk in it aimed at my throat; but Luigi grabbed his wrist, pulled him downward, and drove his own knife into the man’s neck. That is the whole story.

Well, was it Luigi’s knife or the native’s? If we had only that scene to go by we would never really know, and all because of a Puzzling Pronoun—or two!

Oh, it can lead one to a rhymed couplet:

He loves his brother and his wife,
Does he live a double life?

Give me my grammatical games any day to a crossword puzzle.

The Joys and Oys of Yiddish

Richard Lederer, St. Paul’s School

Rabbi Robert Schenkerman Temple Beth Jacob When Isaac Bashevis Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, he remarked in his acceptance speech:

The high honor bestowed upon me is also a recognition of the Yiddish language—a language of exile, without a land, without frontiers, not supported by any government, a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics.

There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of a frightened and hopeful humanity.

The word Yiddish derives from the German judisch ‘Jewish.’ The principal parent of Yiddish is High German, the form of German encountered by Jewish settlers from northern France in the eleventh century. Yiddish is written in the characters of the Hebrew alphabet and from right to left and enjoys borrowing words from Russian, Polish, English, and all the other languages and countries along the routes that Jews have traveled during the past thousand years. Journalist Charles Rappaport once quipped, “I speak ten languages—all of them Yiddish.”

Although Yiddish has been in danger of dying out for hundreds of years, the language is spoken today by millions of people throughout the world—Russia, Poland, Rumania, France, England, Israel, Africa, Latin America, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States, where, like the bagel, it was leavened on both coasts, in New York and Hollywood. It is spoken even in Transylvania: A beautiful girl awakens in bed to find a vampire at her side. Quickly she holds up a cross. “Zie gernisht helfen,” smiles the vampire. Translation: “It won’t do you any good.”

Most of us already speak a fair amount of Yiddish (Yinglish) without fully realizing it. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary lists about 500 Yiddish words that have become part of our everyday conversations, including:

cockamamy (or cockamamie) ‘mixed-up, ridiculous.’

fin slang for ‘five-dollar bill,’ from finf, the Yiddish word for ‘five.’

gun moll a double clipping of gonif’s Molly, Yiddish for ‘thief’s girl.’

kibitzer ‘one who comments, often in the form of unwanted advice, during a game, often cards.’

mavin ‘expert.’

mazuma ‘money.’

mish-mosh ‘mess.’

schlep to ‘drag or haul.’

schlock ‘shoddy, cheaply produced merchandise.’

schmeer the ‘entire deal,’ the ‘whole package.’

schnoz slang for ‘nose.’

yenta ‘blabbermouth, gossip; woman of low origins.’

… and so on through the whole megillah: ‘long, involved story.’

A number of poignant Yiddish words defy genuine translation into English:

chutzpa ‘nerve; unmitigated gall;’ a quality we admire within ourselves, but never in others. In his delightful study, The Joys of Yiddish (McGraw-Hill 1968), Leo Rosten offers two classic definitions. “Chutzpa is that quality enshrined in a man, who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. A chutzpanik may be defined as the man who shouts ‘Help! Help!’ while beating you up.”

mensch a ‘real authentic human being—a person.’ naches the ‘glow of pleasure-plus-pride that only a child can give to its parents’: “This is my son, the Doctor!”

oy not so much a word as an entire vocabulary, as Rosten observes: “can express any emotion, from trivial delight to the blackest woe.”

oy vay; oy vay in mir literally, “Oh, pain,” but, in its long or short form, can be used for anything from condolence to lament:

On August 6, 1945, the world’s first nuclear weapon was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Two hundred and eighty-two thousand human beings died and tens of thousands more were left burned, maimed, and homeless. [Albert] Einstein, whose letter to Roosevelt had initiated the American effort that resulted in the atom bomb and whose special theory of relativity formed its theoretical basis, heard the news on the radio. For a long time he could only find two Yiddish words traditionally used by Jews in such circumstances: “Oi vey.”

—The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes

tsuris the gamut of painful emotions—some real, some imagined, some self-inflicted.

Yiddish is especially versatile in describing those poor souls who inhabit the world of the ineffectual, and each is assigned a distinct place in the gallery of pathetic types: schmo, schmendrik, schnook, schmegegge, schlep, schlub, schmuck, putz, klutz, kvetch, and nudnik. Yiddish easily coins new names for new personalities: a nudnik is a ‘pest’; a phudnik is a ‘nudnik with a Ph.D.’ The rich nuances that suffuse this roll call are seen in the timeless distinction between a schlemiel ‘clumsy jerk’ and a schlimazel ‘habitual loser’: the schlemiel inevitably trips and spills his hot soup—all over the schlimazel. (And the nebbish is the one who has to clean it up.)

The Yiddish language, through its color, its target-accurate expressions, its raw idioms, and its sayings exudes a refreshing magic and laughter, mixed with sober thought, that has been handed down from generation to generation and from nation to nation. Yiddish never apologizes for what it is—the earthy, wise soul of an expressive people learning that life is but a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

Which reminds us of the zaftig ‘buxom, well-rounded’ blonde who wore an enormous diamond to a charity ball. “It happens to be the third most famous diamond in the whole world,” she boasted. “The first is the Hope diamond, then comes the Kohinoor, and then comes this one, which is called the Lipschitz.”

“What a stone! How lucky you are!”

“Wait, wait,” said the lady. “Nothing in life is all mazel [‘good luck’]. Unfortunately, with this famous Lipschitz diamond comes also the famous Lipschitz curse.”

The other women gasped and asked, “And what is the famous Lipschitz curse?”

“Lipschitz,” sighed the lady.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Women’s History of the Word

Rosalind Miles, (Michael Joseph, 1988), xvi + 288 pp.

Those who are not familiar with feminist writings may find it useful and interesting to consider a book, recently published in Britain, that is typical of the harsher brand of such works. The work in question offers nothing regarding language, so its review here is ancillary to the main function of VERBATIM. The feminist movement is very much alive in Britain, and the “Greenham Common Women” are probably largely responsible for much of the national sentiment against the Cruise missiles installed at an American base near that village. In Britain, as elsewhere, most books by feminist writers are reviewed by women, usually feminists. Men are seldom assigned to review them, possibly because the editor fears that they will be either ignorant of or unsympathetic to the issues raised, if not biased against them, or because the editor is a woman. Because writing an unfavorable review of a (bad) feminist book would be tantamount to treachery, such books are often unjustifiably praised, as was the case with this work by Rosalind Miles, which was well received on its publication in June.

According to the blurb on the dust jacket of this distinctly unpleasant book, Rosalind Miles is head of the Centre for Women’s Studies at Coventry Polytechnic, a lecturer, broadcaster, journalist, and author of several other books, including a “highly acclaimed” biography of Ben Jonson. One might like to believe that this gives her the cachet of authoritative scholarship, but the text does not bear out the promise.

For the most part, the book consists of a rewriting of history, from the dawn of time, with the purpose of demonstrating two main themes: the “fact” that women were responsible for all the important contributions to the advancement of civilization (as the development of agriculture, for instance), often despite the arrogance and stupidity of men; and the “fact” that women have long been subjected to domination by men. Miles suggests that such domination is a recent phenomenon—only a couple of thousand years old—for she points to the clear superiority of women in (primitive) religions and matriarchies, right on through to the Egyptian dynastic rulers. At one point, she gets so carried away with her thesis that she suggests that females were responsible not only for all of human evolutionary biology but for the very notion of counting (in order to keep track of menstruation) and, probably by the same token, astronomy. She quotes (and, presumably, accepts) another source which holds that “woman first awakened in humankind the capacity to recognize abstracts.” If you believe that balderdash, you’ll believe anything.

In the good old days, we were taught that the pyramids were built by tens of thousands of slaves. Recent speculation has it that they were not slaves but—what would one call them? — ordinary laborers. Here comes Miles, authoritatively quoting Diodorus, the Greek historian, who recorded (60-30BC) that “innocent women even swelled the ranks of pitiful slaves whose forced labour built the pyramids:

… bound in fetters, they work continually without being allowed any rest by night or day. They have not a rag to cover their nakedness, and neither the weakness of age nor women’s infirmities are any plea to excuse them, but they are driven by blows until they drop dead.” [p.49]

As the pyramids were already about 2500 years old when Diodorus wrote his World History, one is given to wonder what his authority might have been for such a vivid description. It is even less comprehensible how a modern researcher could accept it and have the effrontery to promulgate it. Miles’s book is riddled with many similar distortions, convenient omissions, and generalizations:

… Women have always commanded over half the sum total of human intelligence and creativity. From the poet Sappho, who in the sixth century BC was the first to use the lyric to write subjectively and explore the range of female experience, to the Chinese polymath Pan Chao (Ban Zhao), who flourished around AD 100 as historian, poet, astronomer, mathematician and educationalist, the range is startling. In every field, women too numerous to list were involved in developing knowledge and contributing to the welfare of their societies as they did so: the Roman Fabiola established a hospital where she worked both as nurse and doctor, becoming the first known woman surgeon before she died in AD 399. [p.52]

Earlier, on page 49, we learnt about Agnodice, “who lived to become the world’s first known woman gynaecologist,” in the fourth century BC. Clearly, this rosily checkered past was soon to be replaced, chiefly, it seems, as Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Confucian-Buddhist cultures flourished. It was not too bad early on, when, according to Miles, the seven Maccabean martyrs who “saved Judaism” did so only at the instigation of their mother. Miles continues:

In early Christianity likewise, women found not merely a role, but an instrument of resistance to male domination; in choosing to be a bride of Christ they inevitably cocked a snook at lesser male fry. Thousands of young women helped to build the church of God with their body, blood and bones when frenzied fathers, husbands or fiancés preferred to see them die by fire, sword or the fangs of wild beasts rather than live to flout [sic] the duty and destiny of womanhood. [p.63]

But the situation soon deteriorated:

Even St. Paul, later the unregenerate prophet of female inferiority, was forced to acknowledge the help he received from Lydia, the seller of purple dyes in Philippi. [ibid.]

This rewriting of history is punctuated by an array of four-letter invectives applied to males and by adjectives like brilliant, unusual, inspiring, and so forth to women. Citing a Judaic law-book of the 16th century which identified a woman for the days preceding, during, and following her period as niddah ‘impure,’ Miles has the lack of taste to write the following:.

As a final stroke, in a grim foreshadowing of what the future held in store for the Jews, the niddah had to wear special clothing as a badge of her separate and despised status. [p.83]

Here and there in this morass of misunderstanding, Miles treads on solid ground if one can agree with the eminent anthropologist Joseph Campbell. Campbell, known for his extensive analyses of the world’s mythologies, religions, and cultures, noted the marked bias against women emerging from Judaic concepts, later reinforced by Christian and Islamic doctrine. Most of the religions of the world connected woman with mother earth, fertility, and all the other progenetic and nurturing associations, and this was borne out in the cultures of the people. According to Campbell, the only godlike female figure in the Bible is the Virgin Mary, and she appears, identified as virgin, only in the Gospel according to Luke. As Luke was a Greek, Campbell suggested that Mary was a carryover from the paganism of the ancient Greek pantheon. Although this might help explain the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tendencies to subjugate women, treating them essentially as chattel, it does not account for a similar treatment accorded them in other cultures, notably that of Japan. It is not entirely clear whether Campbell was commenting on Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. as they once existed, conceptually, for it is unlikely that he could have ignored the treatment of women in the modern reflexes of the cultures adhering to those religous precepts.

Campbell held that the ancient mythologies and religions are allegorical and that there was no real distinction between gods and goddesses, who were given sexual identity when in human form only to make them more meaningful. With all respect, that seems a highly debatable issue and one far too complex for this discussion, though we can certainly trace a diminution in the role of female divinities (or divinity) when we come to examine Judaism and its congeners and progeny. Other debatable aspects are the questions of whether the debasement of women is a reflection of the theology or the ritual, whether the scripture of any religion should be understood allegorically or literally, and so forth. If there is something wrong, it behooves us to get at the roots of the problem, not to flail about wildly, for only after the source of a disease has been identified can one properly investigate its cure.

“History according to Rosalind Miles” blasts away at the symptoms in a misconceived notion that alleviating them will effect a cure of the disease. In this jeremiad, males are viewed as the “enemy,” and are so characterized throughout the book, which concludes with exhortations to engage the foe and a strident call to arms (though not men’s).

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Archaeology & Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins

Colin Renfrew, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), xiv + 346 pp.

[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection.]

Just when you thought it was safe to assume that we now know all we are ever likely to know about the past, someone digs another hole and unearths (literally or figuratively) some ancient artifact: one day it is a fragile scroll, found in a cave near the Dead Sea, that turns out to be pre-Biblical; the next day it is an entire terracotta army of Chinese soldiers: the next it is a skull, excavated from the Olduvai Gorge, that compels anthropologists (once again) to revise their guesses about the earliest stages of Homo sapiens sapiens vs hominids. Most of the relies from the past are gone forever, destroyed by the plows of countless generations of farmers, reduced to rubble by erosion, by conquerors, by prehistoric (and modern) urban developers, by fire and flood, and just by time. Many, we may hope, have not yet been found. The interest in man’s forebears did not become fashionable upon the publication, a few years ago, of Roots: on a far larger scale, we have been trying to discover all we can about the origins not of men but of man. Strange to say, however, that interest does not seem to be more than a few hundred years old: if the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Indians, the Chinese and other peoples were curious about their own prehistory, I have not heard of it. Perhaps the fascination with man’s past grew out of the obsession with ruins evinced by Romanticism; certainly, modern archaeology seems to have followed close behind, for the excavation of the supposed site of Troy took place only about 100 years ago. Perhaps it is just as well, for only by the means available to modern science are we now able to preserve some of the artifacts that we find and, through radiocarbon dating, determine their approximate age.

Archaeology is a popular pursuit, and its manifest results not only receive considerable publicity but can be seen in museums. Not so paleolinguistics, or the reconstruction of ancient languages. Even the remnants we have from early languages that had a writing system are relatively sparse: Classical Latin and Greek, Hebrew, and a few other languages are better documented than others; but for most all we have to go on are a handful of tablets here, a few inscriptions there, barely enough in many cases to allow us to identify the language, let alone draw any conclusions regarding its structure or meaning. Perhaps one day we shall find an Etruscan library, buried deep in the Italian countryside; but for the present, we have to make do with what we have, which is precious little. About languages that had no writing system, we know nothing at all. But some very clever comparative linguists, beginning in Germany in the 19th century, theorized about how the nature of the ancestors of the more modern tongues. In some instances, ancient languages have been decoded, some from multilingual inscriptions. The work of Jean Francois Champollion (1790-1832) in deciphering hieroglyphics from the Rosetta Stone was an astonishing accomplishment, for it enabled us to read the myriad writings of the ancient Egyptians on papyrus and in wall inscriptions and revealed an enormous amount of the knowledge we have today about their civilization, which lasted for about 2600 years. Another significant break-through was that of Michael Ventris (1922-1956), who deciphered the Linear B script found on Crete and identified it as an early form of Greek. From the standpoint of language, Ventris’s work was more important, particularly because it filled in a gap in our knowledge of the early states of Indo-European languages.

Many years ago, a linguistic scholar counted all of the languages then spoken of which he had evidence. The total was approximately 2800, but that is probably only a vague estimate: he undoubtedly missed some; some have sprung up since his time (modern Hebrew, for instance); and some have vanished. The exact count is unimportant and, at best, spurious, for it is extremely difficult to establish uniform criteria for what distinguishes dialect from language. Then, too, one must examine the techniques used to group the many languages of the world.

Linguists examining Classical Greek, Latin, German, English, Slavic, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Lithuanian, Iranian, Hindi, and the other languages of India and Europe found that there were correspondences among many of the common words. Some, like French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, had more in common with one another than they did with, say, German, English, Swedish, Danish, and Dutch, which, in turn, bore only a remote resemblance to Russian and Polish, on the one hand, and the two extant varieties of, say, Gaelic, on the other. One rapidly runs out of hands and must resort to fingers and toes, for after years of laboriously categorizing these languages, the number of different main branches (called families and subfamilies) came to about ten. Ingeniously, certain differences between families were explained by various phonetic shifts that (inexplicably) took place in one language group but not in another. Although certain other languages were geographically nearby, it was impossible to establish any resemblances between them, hence Basque, for example, is not classified as being in the same family with other European languages, nor are Hungarian and Finnish, both of which belong to their own group. At the conclusion of this vast exercise, done without the aid of computers, there emerged a pattern of familial relationships that linked together languages spoken, in earlier times, from Britain as far east as Chinese Turkestan and from India as far north as Lappland. Charts showing the chief languages and their derivations can be found in many dictionaries—inside the front cover of The Random House Unabridged, for example. Because linguists are constantly learning more and more about the relationships among languages, it is best to avoid using an older chart; for the same reason, it would be wise not to stake too much on the accuracy of even a current chart.

The languages discussed here are what are usually called the Indo-European family; similar family trees could be drawn for the Semitic languages, Sino-Tibetan, Japanese, Bantu, Malayo-Polynesian, and so on. Each is a distinct phylum; although there may be word-borrowing among them, lexicon is considered less important in the classification of languages than structure and grammar. It is important, too, to note that writing systems are irrelevant: for instance, Polish is written (today) using the Roman alphabet, but Russian, a related Slavic language, uses the Cyrillic; Yiddish, a Germanic language, is written in Hebrew characters; Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, which resemble one another rather closely in some respects, all use different alphabets; and early examples, utterly unrecognizable to untrained readers of modern languages, were written in cuneiform, quite suitable for writing on soft clay tablets with a pointed stylus, and hieroglyphics.

It would be nice to think that while linguists were working so hard to organize languages, they were working alongside the archaeologists who were providing the raw materials. But only rarely did they collaborate and, with few exceptions, their work was not correlated in a systematic way. Schliemann, who discovered the site of Troy, used the evidence in Homer’s Iliad to determine his digging site, where any ruins had long since disappeared from view. In many other places, the ancient sites lay buried—and still do—beneath modern cities: modern property owners quite understandably take a dim view of tearing down their buildings on the off chance that the remnants of an ancient town will be found several yards below. today, before a new building is erected in London, an archaeological team examines the cleared site for its archaeological significance. But there, as everywhere else, nothing can interfere with progress and, regardless of the finds and their importance, the archaeologist must eventually yield to the bulldozer. Notwithstanding, even the brief glimpses afforded by such investigations can provide some insight into civilizations that existed hundreds or, in some cases, thousands of years earlier.

Based on the sparse evidence available, linguists theorized about the earlier languages that had given rise to those attested. In other words, based on what they knew about a group of languages which were documented, they tried to imagine the language that they sprang from. In most cases, they dealt with words and functional elements, creating what are called reconstructions in hypothetical family prototypes called, variously, Proto-Latin, Proto-Greek, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Indo-Iranian, and so forth, the ultimate goal being to posit a single language called Proto-Indo-European. That is not entirely true, for linguists know too much about language to suggest that there ever was, literally, a single language from which all Indo-European languages descended. Nonetheless, it is convenient to think about the existence of a group of proto-dialects which can be referred to as Proto-Indo-European.

It seems only natural that once an original language, or Ursprache, was posited, the next step was to speculate on its source, or Urheimat. That is what Renfrew has tried to do. Essentially, he proposes that the parent of all Indo-European languages was itself born in central Anatolia, whence it spread eastward, westward, and northward, being modified by the influences of the languages with which it came into contact, till it ultimately emerged in its recognizable, modern manifestations which we categorize into Germanic, Hellenic, Italic, Indo-Iranian, Anatolian, Armenian, Celtic, Tocharian, Albanian, and BaltoSlavic.

I have no quarrel with Renfrew’s theory—notwithstanding the generally received wisdom that has placed the homeland north of the Black Sea region and the Volga steppes. It is difficult for the nonspecialist reader (like me) to assess the validity of his arguments, which are based on his contention that the language (and its congeners) were carried along by the spread of nomad pastoralism. Using the evidence available, Renfrew contends that the original Indo-European language, closely related to Hittite, separated after 6500 BC, with the IE languages of western Europe developing from western Anatolia and those of Iran, India, and Pakistan from the eastern division. The choice between the prevailing theory and Renfrew’s depends on whether one accepts a “wave” theory, first promulgated more than a hundred years ago by Johnanes Schmidt, a German linguist, or one of indigenous development. Pottery finds can be interpreted to support either the imposition of an elite culture from Turkmenia or a late development of the Indus civilization. Renfrew accepts the wave theory, and in the last two thirds of Archaeology & Language he sets forth his arguments in its favor. Unfortunately, the presentation of his linguistic argument, where the author is clearly treading on more speculative ground than in those parts dealing with outright archaeology, where he is on more familiar territory, is disorganized and repetitious. It is difficult to place all the blame on Renfrew, for his editor should have noticed the lack of coherence. The result is an argument that is persuasive but scarely convincing.

Nevertheless, good books on archaeology assimilable by laymen are not easy to find, and if the reader can tolerate its shortcomings and is not overly concerned about the precise birthplace of Indo-European, Archaelogy & Language provides an interesting march through the millennia of prehistory in seven-league boots.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Webster’s Electronic Thesaurus

Proximity Technology, Inc., 1987.

This software consists of two disks, one labeled Installation and Program, the other Synonym Linguibase, and a manual. The manual sets forth everything with clarity, and the program is simple to install, requiring only a few minutes. Only one thing made me a little suspicious when cranking up the system: in the descriptive text that appears on the screen, the word labeled is spelt “labelled”—decidedly un-American. However, I went ahead, and, since I was typing the text you are reading, returned to the beginning of the paragraph to see how some of these words would fare. I looked up the word preceding and was, after a brief moment, asked to type in the word, which I did. The screen bloomed forth with the following:

Query: preceding

1. adj being before especially in time or arrangement

There were also some other parts of speech: one definition for the preposition and three for the verb (participial) senses. I called up the synonyms for the adj and the following appeared:

Synonyms:

antecedent, anterior, foregoing, former, past, precedent, previous, prior

The way the program works is this: one uses the cursor to highlight a particular word for which synonyms are desired. It is similar, in principle, to finding a synonym in a synonym dictionary and then looking up its synonyms to find them. I am not sure why, but I expected the program to “network” in the same way. However, when I highlighted antecedent, what appeared on the screen was the same list of synonyms but with antecedent missing, and preceding had reappeared. If all this is too complicated to follow, let me summarize: you look up word X and get synonyms A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. You look up the synonyms for word A, and you get synonyms X, B, C, D, E, F, and G. Even the definition provided for the sub-listings is identical in wording to that of the word originally sought.

This is very economical of space and involves a clever computer ploy, but it does not provide a particularly useful synonym dictionary, for, as we all know, synonymy in language does not yield to the commutative law of mathematics; in language, “Things equal to the same thing are not (necessarily) equal to each other.” Perhaps the Proximity people thought that they had got round that little problem by giving the same definition for each of the items in the list; but we know that only very rarely are two synonyms bi-unique (which is another way of saying that if A = B, B does not necessarily always equal A), an ineluctable fact of language.

If a relatively limited access to a synonym dictionary is likely to be of use, then this package may be of service. It works with a hard disk or with a set of floppies and can be used with 29 popular word-processing programs. (That was the number listed when I received my copy; it might have increased.) It also has a few neat features, like suggesting a few alternatives if you happen to think that preceding is spelt “preceeding” (as many people do). It has a useful “Help” feature that can be called upon at any stage. Also, if you enter jump, you get the synonyms for that; but if you enter jumped, you get the (same) synonyms but inflected—including the variants leapt, leaped for leap. All in all, for a relatively primitive system, it is not too bad; but you would have to be in love with your computer to use it in preference to a far more complete books of synonyms available (especially The Synonym Finder, Rodale in the U.S. and Canada, Longman elsewhere, which offers more than 800,000 synonyms, more than three times the number listed in any other synonym book).

The blurb on this book/disk package reads, “Supplies you with 470,000 true synonyms for 40,000 entries.” My guess is that such a quantity might be reached if one counted all the permutations and combinations; in reality, though, there are probably far fewer actual words. Readers can judge for themselves the validity of this numerical legerdemain.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Family Words: The Dictionary for People Who Don’t Know a Frone from a Brinkie

Paul Dickson, illus. by Elwood H. Smith, (Addison-Wesley, 1988), 180pp.

In 1962, American Speech published “Family Words in English,” by Allen Walker Read, which was reprinted in VERBATIM Vol. I, No. 4, (1975). The article is a classic, probably the first on the subject to appear in a scholarly journal, though there are other informal references to family language, some of which are documented by Dickson in his Bibliography.

Family words and expressions crop up everywhere. Some are quite unique and their reporters cannot imagine their origin; others, like Penn Station, “what one family terms a child’s misinterpretation of a famous line or phrase,” are clear: the generic term comes from the Lord’s Prayer—“And lead us not into Penn Station.” Obviously, that works only for kids familiar with New York City. Other Penn Stations:

Our Father, which art in heaven, Harold be Thy name.

Land where the Pilgrims pried.

Bells on cocktails ring.

I pledge my allowance to the flag.

Gladly the cross-eyed bear
Onward Christian Soldiers,
Marching as to War,
With the cross-eyed Jesus,
Leaning on the phone.

…One nation, invisible…

…One nation, in a vegetable…

Many people know F.H.B. for ‘family hold back,’ an exhortation ensuring ample provender for guests.

This is not to suggest that Dickson’s book is a catalogue of bloopers, or what Amsel Greene (and Jack Smith) like to call pullet surprises. There are many interesting entries in Family Words which, as far as I know, is the first documentation of the genre. There are occasional hidden entries, as the list of diseases—among them the dread mohogus—under the entry for Fowlenzia. (In the VERBATIM family, some suffer from Fowler’s pip, an affliction affecting language fanatics who base a slavish purism on a literal interpretation of Modern English Usage.)

Family Words is useful and fun. Inevitably, some of the entries are more imaginative than others; Dickson will have his hands full if everyone responds giving private words. Please sent yours to the author, c/o Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA 01867, not to VERBATIM.

Laurence Urdang

EPISTOLA {Milton Horowitz}

A Midwesterner, Will Hays, Jr., who is proud of his knowledge of post-Civil-War history, tells me the following origin of shot, as in shotglass, absent from “Gunning for the English Language”:

Although we associate trench warfare with World War I, trenches were characteristic also of the Civil War. A scaffold was built so that a rifleman— who fired a single-shot, muzzle-loading shoulder weapon—could step up and shoot over the top of the trench. The soldier in charge would command, after each firing, that the rank on the scaffold step down and be replaced by the rank that had just reloaded, thus alternating ranks and sustaining the rifle fire.

That war, like others, produced disgruntled veterans and those more adventurous or more restless after military service. They moved westward to start a new life. The population increased markedly, with corresponding demands for goods and services, among them the need for saloons. Most new saloons were small and the bars short, accommodating with difficulty the many bunched up, in ranks, if you will, calling for whiskey. Many of the thirsty crowd were veterans, as were many of the bartenders. Thus, “Step down (or back) and give me a shot” was readily understood. I’ve not been able to corroborate this explanation, but I’ll never forget it.

[Milton Horowitz, Jackson Heights, New York]

EPISTOLA {Charles G. Mendoza}

Mr. Joseph Hymes' “Do Mistake—Learn Better” [XV,1] brought to mind the time a Japanese acquaintance told me of a friend of hers who decided to tackle the original English version of three books she had enjoyed while in Japan. She boldly marched into a bookstore and asked the salesclerk for a copy each of Hemingway’s The Sun Come Up Again and Throw Away the Gun and Steinbeck’s The Angry Grape. Is there a term for the errors that creep in while translating a passage back into the original tongue?

[Charles G. Mendoza, North Miami, Florida]

EPISTOLA {H. P. Mann}

Mr. Davidson’s observations on the Scottishness of Chambers 20th Century Dictionary [XV,1] bear out my own formed over sixteen years of using one. An odd sidelight on this came a few days after reading the article. Definitions under pet end with “Petting Party (coll.) a gathering for the purpose of caressing as an organised sport. (Origin unknown; not from Gaelic)” I think it hardly fanciful to discern a note of Calvinist disapproval in this curt disclaimer.

[H. P. Mann, Faversham, Kent]

EPISTOLA {Glyn Williams}

Although I greatly enjoyed Richard Lederer’s article, I fear that one of his paragraphs is a load of brass monkey balls.

The monkey on board ship was a lad employed to fetch supplies—powder and so forth—to the guns. The word might also have been used for a receptacle near the guns where powder and balls were kept. However, this receptacle would have taken the form of a wooden box or something similar. The idea of a metal stand carrying a pyramid of cannon balls so delicately balanced as to be affected by the tiny differential expansion of brass and iron does not bear thinking about in a heavy sea.

So what is the explanation of the phrase cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey? Well, the obvious one, I believe. Anybody who asks “Why a brass monkey?” is probably not aware that brass monkeys were very common household ornaments in England in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Originally, they were probably imported from India, but were later mass-produced in places such as Birmingham to grace Victorian and Edwardian mantelshelves. They can still be found today in so-called “gift shops.” Usually, they come in sets of three, one with its hands over its eyes, one over its ears, and one over its mouth: they were said to represent “See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil.” There were various whimsical variants.

[Glyn Williams, Sinfin, Derby]

EPISTOLA {David W. Porter}

I am sure I am not the first to point out Joseph Hynes’s, “Do Mistake—Learn Better,” [XV,1] mistakes in Japanizing English words, e.g., sei fu not “safe-o,” nain not “nine-o.” The possibilities for representing English with a language of only forty-seven syllables are not that numerous, and the rules are very consistent. The main problems are representing consonant clusters and word-final consonants. These difficulties produce such monstrosities as sutoraike for English ‘strike’—one syllable in English, five in Japanese.

Every Japan veteran has his list of favorite mistakes. Mine are the ones that are possible, but wrong, English. Adding the Japanese final vowels produces Gone with the Windo. Hypercorrection, where Japanese speakers learn that many final vowels do not exist in the American version of the tongue and so remove them, sometimes incorrectly, gives us the California cities of San Francisk and Sacrament. This process resulted in the sign reading Pizz and Coffee.

My absolute favorite of these semantic mistakes, however, does not come from the problem of sound. Japanese has a verb inflection which expresses causation or permission—in English, “to make someone or to let someone do something.” One day during a university English class, a very discomfited student, after frantic and obtrusive dictionary work, handed a colleague of mine a scrap of paper. On it was written this sentence: “Please make me go to the bathroom.”

[David W. Porter, Cape Girardeau, Missouri]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: You Could Look It Up

William Safire, (Times Books, 1988), x + 334pp.

As everyone in the world must know by now, William Safire writes a column in The New York Times Magazine called “On Language.” Considering the circulation of The New York Times on Sundays, his column is probably the most widely read commentary on contemporary English in the world; that places more than one uncommon burden on a writer: he must do his utmost to be accurate; he must try to select subjects likely to be of interest to his readers; and he must write well.

Those familiar with Safire’s editorial style, reflected in his political columns on the editorial pages of The N. Y. Times, may agree with me in the contention that when he writes about language he seems to be writing on his day off: I cannot put my finger on why, but “On Language” always strikes me as an excruciating effort to be cute. In part, that is attributable to the designation of his correspondents, who keep him informed on language that is not within earshot, as the “Lexicographic Irregulars,” an amusing reference the first time or two it was used but now beginning to cloy. More often than it might prove of interest to me, personally, Safire deals with insiders' language in Washington (where he is based) or with trivialities uttered by some politico.

As Andrew Norman wrote, in a letter published in this book on page 113, “You flit freely back and forth between prescriptivism and descriptivism.” But are not many of us guilty of that? We are descriptive of the usages we accept and prescriptive—perhaps proscriptive would be more descriptive—of those we do not like. At least Safire expresses an opinion; whether the reader agrees with him is another matter, as are the questions of his accuracy, which arise fairly often, and that of the suitability of his style, which, as far as I know, has not been broached before. It ill behooves me, excoriated recently as enamored of the “cheap larf,” to criticize Safire’s arch puns, which permeate—“enliven” is probably the word his editor would use—his articles, but I find some kinds of humor unsuitable for reading, however they might evoke a chuckle when uttered viva voce. A handful of examples, from the book at hand:

Therefore, I stand uncorrected. [p. 112]

…“Get your hand off my knee.” (That’s a mnemonic, pronounced knee-MONIC.)

Ize Right? [title, p. 114]

Juggernaughty but Nice [title, p. 115]

…slanguist…[p. 116]

Lex Appeal [title, p. 121]

Logue-Rolling [title, p. 123]

[on -logue vs. -log:] Some people prefer their logues sawed off…[p. 123]

But the Library of Congress wants to be non-U [in its spelling of -logue words]. [ibid.]

Writing containing such labored figures makes for hard reading. I am interested in what Safire has to say about language but find myself stymied: I get the feeling that he has deliberately created a minefield of interruptions in thought through which I must pick my way to the end. Notwithstanding the valuable role he plays in inspiring nonlinguists to think about language and in informing them about myriad facets of the subject, I find it hard slogging (or, as he would probably write, “sloguing”).

You Could Look It Up is the umpteenth collection of Safire’s columns and, like the previous collections, contains a selection of letters from readers. It is those that are so sorely missed in his column. True, there is an occasional mention in his column of a point raised by a correspondent, and the Letters section of the Magazine prints a comment from time to time, but an important feature of the books is their inclusion of far more writer-reader interaction than one might suspect from reading the column alone. For one thing, the letter-writers call attention to errors or misinterpretations and are largely critical. Safire cannot be accused of being copy-proud (except, evidently, of awful puns, as in “Ms. is deliberately msterious, but at least it is not deliberately msleading” and other mscegenations).

There is no gainsaying that Safire is one of the most influential writers on contemporary English, and it is essential that his books be in the libraries of all who are interested in the subject, regardless of their alignment with his opinions. For one thing, he documents many neologisms, an activity that endears him to many working lexicographers. From the sometimes cavalier manner in which he treats his subject, one wonders if Safire feels the burden of the responsibility he has toward his readers.

The publisher sent unrevised bound proofs from which this review was prepared; unfortunately, there was no proof of an index, but the publisher has assured me that there will be one in the published book, a rather essential ingredient of a work with this title.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Webster’s New World Guide to Current American Usage

Bernice Randall, (Webster’s New World, 1988), xviii + 420pp.

Here is a commonsense style book, useful to those who have the education and common sense to be in doubt about questions of English usage. It has some problems, if you want to be sticky about things: on p. xv we read:

…Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity does not say that E = MC² and in leap year MC³.

Indeed it does not. But it does say E = mc²; the version with the capital M and C is, essentially, meaningless to those familiar with the conventional symbolism used in physics.

While I acknowledge that it is not easy to know how to sort out the many topics to be covered in a usage book, most reasonable writers have taken a stab at writing an entry under a heading that seems a likely place to look, then have provided a detailed index. Not Bernice Randall. True, one can find different from, etc., in an entry so headed, but for absolute constructions one is referred to an entry called “Covered with onions, relish, and ketchup, I ate a hotdog at the ball-park.” If the user wants to find out about misplaced adjectives and adverbs, reference is made to the entry “Electric shaver for women with delicate floral design on the handle.” A search for only would be futile.

Perhaps the subject and treatment of usage need some lightening up, but I am hard put to agree that they are quite as frivolous and light-headed as this book would have us believe. Fun is fun, but those who might rely on such a book are quite serious about the information they are seeking, and it is unfair to play fast and loose with their sincerity. A sense of humor about a subject is born of a feeling of security about it, but security is the one characteristic often lacking among those who would use Current American Usage.

There is no doubt that Randall enjoys her work. But of what use is a long entry on spoonerisms? And of what use are the interminable examples, for instance, of the misuse of like for as, which draw out the entry to three pages? More than four pages are devoted to clichés (under the guise of “Lo and behold, it’s man’s best friend.,” which, being an exclamation, really ought to end in an exclamation point). The article on British/American English (“There’s no home like Eaton Place.”) is a good one, but, at six pages, its utility is questionable. In the matter of pronunciations of BrEng names, it is an old-fashioned fantasy of Americans that Brits go round saying POM-frit for Pontefract: most Brits that I have heard give the name a spelling pronunciation these days; and so with many of the old shibboleths. Of what relevance (to usage, notwithstanding the fact that the topic is interesting) is an entry on eponyms (“John Bull and John Hancock are not just any johns.”)? That is not, strictly speaking, a subject pertinent to the title of the book.

All of which is to say that the book is an interesting work on the language and contains accurate, though longwinded information about what it covers, “interesting and useful facts about American English.” Its only real faults are its title, which belies the content, the cutesy headings, and the lack of a truly detailed index: self-indexing does not provide coverage of sufficient detail. As a reference work on usage, it is far from complete: The Simon and Schuster Publicity Department could have used an entry on foreword/ forward (spelt “foreward” in the release accompanying the review copy).

A longish section, “Some Troublesome Idiomatic Prepositions,” and a “Glossary of Grammatical and Linguistic Terms Used in This Book,” followed by a list of “References,” sources associated with specific entries, round out the work.

Laurence Urdang

OBITER DICTA: Language Notes from Abroad

“Once more unto the breach for the warriors of 1’Académie Française in their uphill battle to preserve the purity of their native tongue. Examples of franglais which they find particularly monstrous are, I hear, to be condemned to a newly created “Musée des horreurs.” The first is “sponsor, sponsoriser, sponsorisation.” The academy also calls upon all French to send in further examples of “linguistic pollution,” observing ruefully that this is one museum which will be open 12 months a year. But the savants have passed barman, blazer, bobsleigh, and boycott as fit for inclusion in their new dictionary.” [From The Times, 15 January 1988]

OBITER DICTA: Letter to the Editor of The Times

Gershon Ellenbogen

Penny Perrick regrets (January 11) that “There is no word in English to describe that particular, special sort of pride that one feels in the achievements of one’s children.” But the verb kvell, which exactly expresses that emotion, is already (like other Yiddish loanwords, such as chutzpah, meshugga and nosh) to be found in the Supplement to the Oxford-English Dictionary.

If you think that the practice in some Muslim countries of amputating the hand of a thief is harsh, beware of participating in horse shows in England, where there is no capital punishment but the issue arises every few years:

A carriage and team of Cleveland Bay horses, driven by Mr Fred Pendlebury…[were] approaching the water obstacle during the cross-country section of the Harrods International Grand Prix when the leading pair became confused, turned back and became entangled with the second pair. Mr Pendlebury, of Smithills, near Bolton, Greater Manchester, was eliminated.

[From The Times, 16 May 1988]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Loose Cannons & Red Herrings: A Book of Lost Metaphors

Robert Claiborne, (W.W. Norton, 1988), 254 pp.

Readers should be familiar with Robert Claiborne’s earlier books, especially Our Marvelous Native Tongue: The Life and Times of the English Language. One might say that subtitling the present book “A Book of Lost Metaphors” is an example of a loose canon [sic] — unless metaphor is taken in its broadest sense—but one is unlikely to find red herrings here: the etymologies of a few hundred words and phrases are given, many not readily findable in standard works of reference. The rationale behind referring to them as “lost” arises from the author’s observation of an unfortunate state of affairs: because of an increasingly widespread lack of familiarity with the basic, structural elements of our culture—Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible, literature, and ordinary historical fact—people today are unable to discern the origins of terms like aphrodisiac, Achilles [sic] heel or tendon, meet one’s Waterloo, sow dragon’s teeth, and hand-writing on the wall, to name a few. There are many, of course, but unaccountably, they are not the focus of this book.

Claiborne investigates and reports on expressions like sow one’s wild oats, about which he tells us little or nothing: the modern Latinate designation Avena fatua came too many centuries after the original expression to have any relevance to it, so why bring up the information that fatua is Latin for ‘foolish’: it was also Latin for ‘wild,’ which might be more to the point. In any event, it is hard to discern, from the arch style affected in an attempt to make dull facts interesting, just what is the origin of sow one’s wild oats. In many entries, Claiborne labors the obvious, offering little or nothing we do not already know, could easily imagine, or for which the author offers no explanation. Among examples of the first are spit and polish, on the spot, on the square, stick one’s neck out, etc. Examples of the last include spill the beans, square the circle, stalemate, etc. Between these is an occasional flash of useful wisdom, much of it pretty well covered by other books of this type (which seem to be proliferating).

What is missing, for example, at square the circle, is the information that because the area of a circle is mathematically calculated using pi, which is irrational, there is no mathematical way of calculating the dimensions of a square with the same area as that of a given circle. But that does not mean that such a square cannot exist. As for stalemate, which is related to checkmate, would it not have been important to indicate that the -mate part has nothing to do with English, having been borrowed from checkmate which is a loanword from Persian (and has nothing to do with check, either).

Often, an entry offers nothing in the way of etymology and merely explains the meaning. Does any reader need an entry like this one?

straddle. When you straddle a horse, you’ve got one leg on either side of the animal. When a politican straddles an issue, he’s in much the same position.

Some speculative suggestions, as the derivation (or reinforcement) from Seidlitz powders for take a powder are sheer nonsense. Not all entries contain misleading, dull, or incorrect information, but those that do not are marked by a lack of originality.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Word Maps: A Dialect Atlas of England

Clive Upton, Stewart Sanderson, and John Widdowson, cartography by David Brophy, (Croom Helm, 1987), vii + 228pp.

Dialect geography, a branch of dialectology, describes certain features of the dialects of a language and their distribution. The field is about 100 years old. Most prominent among its earliest practitioners in England was Joseph Wright, who prepared the six-volume English Dialect Dictionary, which was published between 1898 and 1905; the best-known contemporary British specialist is Harold Orton. In America, work proceeded space during the 1930s, largely under the direction of Raven McDavid, Hans Kurath, and, later, Harold Allen; more recently, Lee Pedersen and others have investigated American English dialects. Between 1948 and 1961, fieldworkers based at the University of Leeds conducted the Survey of English Dialects, which studied 313 localities in England (which, as everyone ought to know, does not include Wales or Scotland). The present book is extracted from the two major works that resulted from the Survey, The Linguistic Atlas of England (1978) and A Word Geography of England (1974), both under the direction of Harold Orton, aided by Sanderson and Widdowson in the latter effort.

People generally seem to find dialect study interesting. One letter writer to The Times [21 June 1988] reported:

Our close neighbour… in Bere Regis, who was born in the village and who speaks with a delicious Dorset burr, always uses “I” instead of “me.”…

“Well, it makes company for I and company for she.” Another of his happy expressions is inner-wards, meaning ‘since,’ as in…“I chucked him out the door and he’s not been back innerwards.”

Another reported [same date]:

Let’s get it right. The Bristol for “me” is not “I,” but “oi.” When I was teaching there, the explanation invariably given by boys brought to me for scrapping in the playground was: “Ee it oi, so oi it ee.”

The 100 maps selected for representation from the Survey yield information on several hundred words, some of which are clear variants, others quite different lexical entities. For instance, Map 34 shows the areas, marked off by boundary lines, where the variants chimley chimbley, chimmock, chimdey, chimbey, and chimney occur. Map 33 shows the distribution of child (most of southern England) and of bairn (north of a slightly wavy line between Boston, on the Wash to the east, and Lancaster, on the west coast).

The authors have provided a brief introduction which is easy to follow, a list of suggested readings, and the names and addresses of the several institutions and societies in Britain where readers may indulge a more intensive interest in dialect study. The maps are clear, each occupying a full page, and the word information is well set forth on them. Where necessary, brief but not cryptic explanations are provided of any information that might seem to be out of the ordinary. I have only one nit to pick with the authors. In their description of isoglosses, they write:

These are drawn to run midway between localities which were shown by the Survey of English Dialects to use the different words or pronunciations which are the subject of the map

Although it is true that isoglosses, in effect, set off the various areas where a particular usage was recorded, more accurately an isogloss is drawn to connect sites either where speakers employ both usages or where speakers using one or the other live in very close proximity. Hence, the term isogloss, from iso- ‘same’ + gloss ‘word,’ to describe the line on a map where the terms are of equal distribution. Isoglosses are to dialect maps what isobars and isotherms are to weather maps, what isobaths are to geophysical maps of the oceans, etc. The authors are not alone in getting this wrong: it is incorrect in some dictionaries.

In those countries where dialect study is undertaken, dialectologists observe that there are today many factors militating against the strict maintenance of older dialect boundaries: the standardization of terminology as adopted by national periodicals, news services, radio, and television; the establishment of “prestige” dialects and, through the media, their promulgation; and the huge population shifts that have taken place, particularly in the U.S. since WWII. Such shifts have been somewhat slower in England, but seem now to be speeding up. There are many other, lesser factors at work, but taken together, all tend toward standardization, especially as the older speakers die off. In some respects, it may not be long before certain aspects of dialect geography will be largely historical. The importance of dialect is emphasized regularly in the press, where we read about people being killed, as in parts of India, because they use the wrong shibboleths.

This book is a good introduction to the subject (in England); those familiar with dialectology in America, and those interested in the study in England or, indeed, generally would be well advised to add Word Maps to their libraries.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: American Literary Almanac: From 1608 to the Present

Karen L. Rood, ed., (Facts On File, 1988), xi + 427pp.

This is an interesting, useful reference book containing information about the better-known writers of America. It is divided into eighteen chapters varying in length, each dealing with a different aspect of the authors and their works, among them,

Writers Related to Writers
Schooldays (which colleges and universities spawned which writers)
American Literary Pseudonyms
American Literary Title Sources
Literary Cons: Hoaxes, Frauds, and Plagiarism in American Literature
The Profession of Authorship:

Authors/Publishers/ Editors/Agents
Thrown to the Wolves: Reviews and Reviewers

These are supplemented by an extensive Bibliography and a detailed Index.

As can be seen from the chapter headings, some of the material is trivial, but nonetheless interesting for that. It is not at once apparent why the book is styled an “almanac,” but that is unimportant: there is no other book I know of that contains as much diverse information about American writers as this one. Its readability and organization make it suitable for browsing—even for reading straight through—so in that respect, at least, it does not resemble books in the “Oxford Companion” series. It contains many photographs of writers, some quite early; these enliven the appearance of the book but accomplish little else, unless one is interested in what Samuel Clemens looked like at the age of 15 (as a printer’s devil) or in the appearance of Hart Crane standing in the middle of a railroad track in Cleveland in 1916.

It is difficult to make any sensible connection between the lives of authors and their creations. A handful might have led colorful existences, some are objects of interest because they died early, committed suicide, were related to (other) famous people, and so forth; but such information seldom reveals as much about their output as do the creations themselves, and in certain cases one is probably better off not knowing quite so much.

This book appears to have been diligently researched and has much to recommend it as an adjunct to most libraries, public and private, large and small, general and specialized.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Faculty protest against apartheid at Cornell.” [TV news tease, WHEC, Rochester, November 1986. Submitted by Robert R. Dwelley, Rochester, New York.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“[the tenor] brings the opera to its climax in his final suicide.” [From a review of Handel’s Tamerlano in the July 1987 issue of Stereo Review. Submitted by David L. Miles, Charlevoix, Michigan.]

Paring Pairs No. 32

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

(a). Immersed in methyl alcohol and doing poorly.
(b). Woman, now married, formerly demonstrated. as(var.)
(c). Sin of omission committed under supervision.
(d). Afternoon refreshment canceled for golf.
(e). Extortion allows Arab leader to feather his nest.
(f). Crocheted cravats exhibit insensitivities.
(g). This gamboge mallet is for the birds.
(h). Turned on or off by his favorite rooster.
(i). Put on such very American marching airs.
(j). He favors a prime mover, and I can see his angle.
(k). Prison correspondent.
(l). Louise de la Ramée wins Franco-Russian approval.
(m). SOS on red-letter day.
(n). Yes, yes—sounds as if spiritualist is bored.
(o). Greek initial is silent, in psyche, darling.
(p). Pulse of the seven seas. sounds like the animals' neighborhood.
(r). Ancient Briton certainly sounds as if he’s made the scene.
(s). Spoon type sounds like power behind the Roman seer.
(t). Sounds like place for small bottles.
(u). Sounds like place for foul matter.
(v). Have a rep for planting wheat.
(w). Sample of Doll ad.
(x). Trace element of gadolinium.
(y). Tiny book: cut down or up?
(z). Big shot is stationary.

(1). Bean.
(2). Beast.
(3). Cock.
(4). Cruel.
(5). Da.
(6). Day.
(7). Down.
(8). Drawer.
(9). Gas.
(10). Gavel.
(11). Grain.
(12). Grow.
(13). Hammer.
(14). In.
(15). Ja.
(16). Light.
(17). Mach.
(18). Man.
(19). May.
(20). Micro.
(21). Navy.
(22). O.
(23). Off.
(24). Oui.
(25). Over.
(26). Pen.
(27). Pet.
(28). Phial.
(29). Pi.
(30). Pict.
(31). Pro.
(32). Q.T.
(33). Row.
(34). Run.
(35). Shake.
(36). She.
(37). Sheet.
(38). Sight.
(39). So.
(40). Solvent.
(41). Sure.
(42). Sybil.
(43). Tea.
(44). Tear.
(45). Ties.
(46). Tome.
(47). Tractor.
(48). U.S.A.
(49). Vile.
(50). Wed.
(51). Yellow.

Pairing 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. 31

(a). Friar’s grumpiness becomes a habit. (32,43) Monk Scowls.
(b). Pace of dungaree manufacture. (21,39) Gene Rate.
(c). Nationality of Curies' shining child. (20,37) French Polish.
(d). Where exhibitionists yield to burning desire. (18,35) Flash Point.
(e). Punk skunk from Gdańsk. (36,8) Pole Cat.
(f). Sting operation or vice squad roundup. (51,33) Whore Net.
(g). Be familiar with Mudville perfume. (27,25) Know Joy.
(h). Bedlam concentrated here. (34,22) Nuts Hell.
(i). Officer’s servant, scourge of the underworld. (3,30) Bat Man.
(j). Put another way, it’s only money. (7,31) Cash Mere.
(k). Put another way, to prefer Indian dish is to lead one to behave obsequiously. (11,15) Curry Favor.
(l). Have cereal with a flourish. (6,12) Bran Dish.
(m). Odd stress curbed means strengthening. (41,19) Rein Force.
(n). Harmless firework created by box man. (42,9) Safe Cracker.
(o). Are evergreens just a tub of lard? (17,26) Fir Kin.
(p). Which team are you on in America? (46,45) State Side.
(q). Tenets of a bitch. (13,29) Dog Ma.
(r). Stake you to demon drink? (24,1) Imp Ale.
(s). Denunciation of Siamese attack. (47,38) Tie Raid.
(t). Stagger in where hull comes round. (48,23) Tumble Home.
(u). Incubus now to get rid of everything bad. (44,14) Shed Evil.
(v). Her q.v. might be petulant or testy. (10,40) Cross Reference.
(w). Beneath which word do I find skivvies? (49,50) Under Wear.
(x). Administered at the demise of former cobblers. (28,52) Last Wrights.
(y). Succubus changes to harass you. (4,14) Bed Evil.
(z). Do those at the Tower sound like flower people? (5,16) Bee Feeders.

The correct answer is (2) Bad. The winner was George H. Amberg of El Cerrito, California. The European winner of No. 29 was Alistair Cockburn of Thalwil, Switzerland, and of No. 30 was Joan Smith of Miradoux, France.

EPISTOLA {Laura E. Washburn}

I would like to make a couple of comments on articles in the Autumn 1988 issue [XV,2]. Re the article on Cuthbert, Dickens uses intercourse to mean ‘communication between people’ in A Christmas Carol when Scrooge says “I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse” to the third Spirit.

I would think that the words grand and stretch would be known to more people than two of the words the author gives as being familiar (chippy and hootch).

Incidentally, I seem to recall reading somewhere that skins as slang for ‘dollars’ dates from frontier days when trappers used animal skins as currency, and is therefore much older than early 20th-century Harlem.

[Laura E. Washburn, Acton, Massachusetts]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Healer and I mend jerks taking in movies (8,3)
2. Confused, I give up one right (7)
3. Motorcycle part, driven fast, is overturned (7)
4. One taken in by vampire’s enticements (5)
5. Suggestion of a street bum (9)
6. I’d returned with ram and logs (7)
7. Changing bill clutched by stubborn one (7)
8. The woman returned call for varnish (7)
9. Colt, perhaps, in stable swallowing helping of corn (7)
10. Befuddled tradesmen got wiser (9)17 Window frames made from
11. Strip right in the middle of lean-to (5)
12. Mideast country turned me angry (7)
13. Sensible neighbourhood to house soldier (7)
14. Conjectures about grand homes for visitors (11)

Down

1. Asian nation involved in spouse’s plot (9)
2. Membership fee covers de- but of theme songs (5) in eatery’s wine bottles (7)
4. Refusal to pick question- able drug (7)
5. Magazine’s chief editor grabbing at contemplative fellow (9)
6. Audibly veto minor cuts (5)
7. Restrained dog geting onto furniture (6)
8. Hearing acquits fanciful band (6)
14. Uncomfortable material to titillate a seamstress (3-2-4)
16. Snake follows the course of regatta events (4,5) southern trees (6)
18. Prisoner mailed agreement (7)
19. Beethoven opera made slick if brought up (7)
20. Reportedly interferes with decorations (6)
22. Copying brooch in silver (5)
23. Weary sounds in mass

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“…the party consisted of Beckett, Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Harold Pinter, and the late Alan Webb.” [From The Times Diary, 12 May 1988, Simon Callow.]

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. DOUB(TAB)LE.
6. COPSE (anag.).
9. EXTRA (hidden).
10. SE(E)ING RED (DESIGNER anag.).
11. MARTIAL (homophone).
12. EY(E)BROW (BOWERY anag.).
13. DI(SPA)TCH.
15. F(LAY)ED.
17. A(WAR)DS.
19. DOORBELL (BORDELLO anag.).
23. CLE(A)VER.
24. S-IGNORE.
26. STRATAGEM (anag.).
27. AMEN-D.
28. SEMIS (anag.).
29. CONTENTED (hidden).

Down

1. DREA(ME)D.
2. UTTER (2 meanings).
3. TSARINA (anag.).
4. B-A-SILICA.
5. EL-EVEN.
6. C(ONCE)AL.
7. PORT(RAY)AL.
8. END-OWED.
14. S(NA)RE DRUM (rev.).
16. NOR-SEMAN (rev.).
17. AC(CO.‘S)TS.
18. DE-VOTES.
20. DO-G RACE.
21. O-VERDI-D.
22. T-RAGIC (CIGAR rev.).
25. OVERT (hidden).

Internet Archive copy of this issue