VOL XI, No 4 [Spring, 1989]
Zap the BEMs! Onward, Space Cadets!
Stephen E. Hirschberg, Elmsford, New York
— The bumper sticker reads, “Beam me up, Scotty.
There is no intelligent life on this planet.”1
— Trying once more to attract the ear of Marvin the daydreamer, his teacher says, “Earth to Marvin. Earth to Marvin. Come in, please!”2
— After my infant son has done one of those cute things that portend a definitely-not-ordinary childhood, my mother-in-law asks, “What would Mr. [sic] Spock say?” Without a beat missed, my wife, her sister, and I—alleged adults all—reply, “Live long and prosper.”3
If these vignettes strike sympathetic chords, then science fiction’s words, phrases, and lore have permeated your thought and language.
This will not be a discussion of the science fiction (SF) dialect, which is certainly a legitimate one, given the millions of fans for whom blaster, phaser, warpdrive, cyborg and the like are familiar terms. It will, rather, treat those words and phrases, created in SF, which are now in common non-SF use.
There has been no entirely satisactory definition of science fiction: all proposals seem to exclude some work which individual readers would include in the genre. It has been suggested that SF include only those stories which would be invalidated without their scientific content;4 that fiction which concerns science, scientists, and the impact of science on humans;5 that which explores alternate existences (whether future, extraterrestrial, or only in characters' minds) based on facts and logical progression via scientific method.6 As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote of hard-core pornography, so do I of science fiction: “I shall not attempt further to define the kind of material …embraced within that short-hand description. …But I know it when I see it.” The sources cited here as SF have been classed as such by at least one reputable critic.
One alternate existence, the ideal state, was considered by the ancients (e.g., Plato’s Republic and Aristophanes' The Birds). However, it is Sir Thomas More’s speculative work of political science and sociology—Utopia (from the Greek ou- ‘not’ + topos-‘place’)—which became, generically, the impossibly perfect place. The looking-glass image of utopia—dystopia—has provided more numerous additions to the English lexicon. Aldous Huxley excerpted words from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (“How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,/ That has such people in ’t.”) for the ironic title of his dystopic novel. The phrase brave new world is now synonymous with a nightmarish, technically advanced society. George
This essay was selected as the First Prize winner ($1,000) in the Sixth VERBATIM Essay Competition.
Orwell constructed an alternative future in his vision of the totalitarian state, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The work has given English a small lode of unpleasantries: the title itself connotes a society marked by government terror and propaganda destroying the public’s consciousness of reality (the OED Supplement also accepts 1984 and 1984-ish as adjective forms); that government’s official language, Newspeak, now indicates the propagandistic or ambiguous language of, among others, politicians, bureaucrats, and broadcasters (“revenue enhancement” for “tax increase,” etc.); the twisting of minds to the capacity to accept the validity of utterly contradictory opinions or beliefs, or double-think; the book’s head of state, Big Brother, implies an apparently benevolent, but really ruthless, omnipotent, and omniscient state authority.
Taking an uncomfortably short speculative step was Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 film, “Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” The title character of this dark comedy seriously considered plans for and the “beneficial” results of nuclear holocaust; such contemplation is strangelovian.
Robert A. Heinlein envisaged a more optimistic future in his 1961 novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. Its Martian-reared main character advocates advancing the empathic capability of the human mind so humans can grok ‘embrace others with profound, intuitive understanding.’ It is not clear why Heinlein chose such an unpretty word for such a beautiful concept (maybe it is euphonious to the Martian auditory apparatus); it has, nevertheless, caught on.
Monsters have had starring roles in SF from its early years. The archetypal uncontrollable creation-gone-amok is Frankenstein’s monster, commonly familiarized to Frankenstein by the incognizant who thus disserve Mary Shelley’s Baron Frankenstein, the monster’s creator. The Baron may have been misguided, but at least he was not so mad a scientist as to experiment on himself. That lack of insight was shown by Robert Louis Stevenson’s good Dr. Jekyll (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886), whose impressive bodily transformations to his evil alter ego made Jekyll-and-Hyde descriptive of persons who alternately demonstrate good and evil behavior.
The recurrent motif of time travel came to the fore in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), considered by some the first work of true SF. The Wells prototype, a controllable time-space traveler, is used allusively by historians and forecasters (C. Day Lewis, in “How Poetry Began” (1944), wrote “To find this out, we’ll have to jump into a Time Machine, put its gear lever into reverse, and race backwards through many thousands of years into prehistoric time.”). Einsteinian relativity theory, with its absolute maximum speed limit (the speed of light), might have put an end to such speculation had it not also included the concept of curvature of space. It was then but a small step to the space warp, permitting faster-than-light (FTL to SF pros) travel by straight-line shortcutting across the curves of space. Except for its origin, in the British Interplanetary Society Journal, space warp has been restricted to fictional use. (After all, you can’t have a good intergalactic war when the next galaxy is, at the speed of light, 2,200,000 years away.) Not so its cousin, time warp (fathered by Walter M. Miller in 1954: “They showed me a dozen pictures of moppets with LTR-guns, moppets in time-warp suits, moppets wearing Captain Chronos costumes….”); originally another FTL, or time-travel device, it has entered standard English, designating any sensation of time travel, time discontinuity, or suspension of time’s progress. Time-travelers need not be scientists or super-heroes. In the 1934 book Music Ho!, Constant Lambert noted “The most successful time traveler of our days was undoubtedly Serge Diaghileff.”
The catchwords of the classic science fiction era were space and robot. Citations in the OED Supplement for space technology terms yield a Who’s Who of SF: spacefaring (Poul Anderson, 1959); spacer ‘spaceman’ (C.M. Kornbluth and Isaac Asimov, both in 1958); spaceship (by John Jacob Astor, son of the fur trader, 1894, C.S. Lewis in 1928, Arthur Clarke in 1951); space-flight (Arthur Clarke, 1949); space sickness (Clarke, 1951). The moment of launch into space, blast off, was created by Ray Bradbury (1951) in Silver Locusts: “You could smell the hard, scorched smell where the last rocket blasted off when it went back to Earth.” Slang’s space cadet ‘an eccentric, especially one who is stuporous or out of touch with reality’ evolved from “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet,” a 1950 television series depicting the adventures of a 24th-century cadet in the Solar Guides, the interplanetary police force keeping order in the Solar Alliance.
The properly dressed spaceman (Thrilling Wonder Stories, 1942) must have a space suit (from the pulp Science Wonder Stories, 1929) for his rendezvous with the aliens, of whom many are BEMs (bug-eyed monsters) or LGM (little green men). (Scientists currently searching the radio frequency spectrum for signals indicative of extraterrestrial intelligence refer to their goal—positive intelligent signals—as LGM.) Alas, such close encounters have not generally been friendly.
The battles between men and aliens have featured manifold armament. Authors extrapolated from Roentgen’s 1895 discovery of x-rays and wrote of the heat-ray (H. G. Wells in War of the Worlds, 1898), and disintegrator rays (George Griffith’s The Lord of Labour, 1911), not to mention ray-guns and blasters. The weight of this fictional weaponry has popularized the death ray from its pulp SF origins to serious contemporary consideration as laser technology has advanced. Weapons engineers have tried to euphemize and deromanticize the terminology: death rays are called “beam weaponry,” and the U.S. antimissile defense system is SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative), despite the public acceptance of the catchier Star Wars (from the 1977 SF film). We also should recognize SF as the source of zap, which is used as noun, verb, and interjection to indicate ‘sudden power’ (n.), to ‘kill in a burst’ (v.), or the ‘sound effect for sudden destruction’ (int.). The OED Supp. traces the word from an episode of the comic strip “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century” written by Philip Francis Nowlan in 1929—“Ahead of me was one of those golden dragon Mongols, with a deadly disintegrator ray…Br-r-rr-r-z-zzz-zap.” —to its most notorious use (cited in American Speech in 1962), “The jokester, pretending to be a creature from outer space, pointed his cosmic ray gun (finger) at his friend’s genitals and exclaimed, ‘Zap! You’re sterile.’ ”
The Czech playwright Karel Ĉapek was the creator of robot a ‘machine which replaces a man’ in R.U.R. (for “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” 1920); the word is from the Czech robota ‘forced labor.’ Though Čapek conceived robots, it is Isaac Asimov who nurtured them into fully developed SF characters. While doing so, Asimov furnished English with robotic and robotical, roboticist an ‘expert in their production and operation,’ robotics the ‘science of their design and function,’ and roboticized ‘rendered mechanical.’ His laws of robotics, which govern the relations of robots with humans, were deemed by the OED Supp. editors to be of such significance that they are cited in their entirety.
As technology advances, life imitates art. Appropriate words are adopted from fiction. Those remote control arms with which laboratory personnel handle toxic, radioactive, or infections substances are called waldos (from Robert Heinlein’s Waldo, 1942): the title charcter, Waldo F. Jones, who has a crippling disease, invents these devices to amplify the strength of his wasted mucles. Not yet a reality, but often seriously discussed, is terraforming ‘aitering an extracterrestrial body to make it capable of supporting Earth’s life forms.’ )The word and concept are Jack Williamson’s, from a 1942 story, “Seetee Ship.”) In less commom use, but a wonderful word all the same , is corpsicle, Larry Niven’s term for a person frozen at death for future reuscitation and repair (“The Defenseless Dead,” 1973). When we read of the ongoing search for grav- ity-carrying subatomic particles—gravitons—and anti-gravitons, we should recall that Arthur Clarke wrote of antigravity as a propulsive force in 1946 (Across the Sea of Stars”).
I could go on, but my ansible (FTL message receiver) is displaying a rpiority-one hyperspace is urgently required to mediate some tiff between local mutant reptillians and the invading rebel positronic androids. The matter transmitter has warmed up. My copilot and astrogator have arrived. So long, Space Cadets! We’re off to save the Galaxy!
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Serious crime down, but murders increase.” [From the Rocky Mountain News, Denver, Colorado, 11 May 1988. Submitted by Jeff Lovill, Westminster, Colorado.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“We consider pornography to be a public problem, and we feel it is an issue that demands a second look.” [From a speech by President Ronald Reagan on 21 May 1984. Submitted by John Paul Arnerich, Los Angeles.]
The Cryptic Toolbox
Harry Cohen, Brussels
Seventy-five years ago, the daily New, York World presented its readers with a new kind of puzzle that consisted of a grid and a list of clues. The Word-Cross, as it was called, started its existence as just another little Sunday supplement feature, with no pretensions to permanence. Yet it was to become the progenitor of the now ubiquitous crossword puzzle. The make-up of the grid has undergone various modifications in the course of time but the rules of the game have remained unchanged. As for the clues, they were called “definitions,” and that indeed is what they were.— Or were they? On closer inspection, classic clues appear to be divisible into three groups. First, there are synonyms, like rooster for COCK. Admittedly, there is no such thing as perfect synonymy, but the meanings of many pairs of words are close enough for this term to be used in the context of a pastime like crosswords. Second, a clue may name a class of objects which includes the answer, like bird for COCK. A more specific class, e.g., male bird, makes solution easier, whereas a more general class, e.g., animal, would complicate the puzzler’s task. The third group comprises definitions proper. Such a clue for COCK might read: adult male of the domestic fowl.
Crossword puzzles soon become very popular in America, and perhaps even more so in Britain. But someone must have felt that all this was too simple for our overtrained brains. Straightforward definitions (of all three varieties were gradually replaced by play on words, ambiguous phrasings, jumble games, and other verbal pranks. A clue for COCK might thus come to read: number one in the pecking order dominates hens and crows (a quizzical statement, unless the word crows is read as a verb) or even: creature with a cow’s head and a bullock’s rump found in a coop (first letter of cow plus last three letters of bullock).
The uninitiated may find these examples too bizarre for words. Still, the idea has caught on so well that most British newspapers now offer two crossword puzzles each day. One is in the classic style, commonly labeled “concise” or “quick.” The other is of the newer, playful genre, often referred to as “cryptic”; but this designation is by no means universal. (A well-known American language journal prefers the term “Anglo-American.”) In some countries, puzzles of this type are called “cryptograms,” a name we shall use from here on. This article is an attempt to catalogue the main tools currently applied by cryptic puzzle-makers and solvers.
A cryptogram clue can be a simple pun, like
A. A message that goes from pole to pole (8 letters) = TELEGRAM
In most cases, however, it consists, as the previous examples suggest, of two elements, each hinting at the answer in its own way. This construction makes sense since each hint by itself is generally so vague or open-ended that it evokes more potential answers than a puzzler’s brain can handle. Two such hints, however, have only a few possible answers in common, so that the solver can concentrate on them and pick the most probable one. This quest for the correct answer rests on intricate mental processes which require no elaboration. Our purpose here is rather to devise a classification of the various types of clue elements (CEs) currently in use.
Let us start with the three groups of clues encountered in the classical crossword puzzle: synonyms, superordinates, and definitions. Here are some examples of their cryptic counterparts:
B. A writer or two (5) = TWAIN
The first CE (A writer) indicates a class to which TWAIN belongs; the second (two) offers a synonym of another possible meaning of the answer.
C. One who counts and recounts (6) = TELLER
The two CEs are telescoped. Each of them defines a separate meaning of the answer.
These are really old-time clues in new apparel; once wise to the system and having enough vocabulary entries in one’s head (or a thesaurus handy on the shelf), it is not too difficult to decode them and arrive at the answer. The going gets tougher, however, as the two meanings of the answer move further apart:
D. This landlord is quite a character (6) = LETTER
The mechanism is clear: landlord = LETTER, (‘one who lets’), and character = LETTER, but the two LETTERs differ in both meaning and origin. (Note that some double-dealing has also gone on with the word character!) A third layer of camouflage is added in:
E. Straight commotion (3) = ROW
The two ROWs differ in pronunciation as well as in meaning and origin.
Just as disorienting are clues where the two meanings of the answer belong to different word classes:
F. A more successful gambler (6) = BETTER
To mystify solvers even more, puzzlers may use words in an uncommon but perfectly legitimate sense, especially by attributing to certain words ending in -er the quality of agent noun. Bloomer (for ‘flower’), butter (for ‘ram’), or even flower (for ‘river’) are recurrent examples, but solvers must always be on the alert for new traps of this type:
G. More than one anesthetic (6) = NUMBER
All of the above techniques rest, in one way or another, on the meanings of words. They make up the class of Semantic Clue Elements. Another class, equally important in cryptoland, is that of Graphic Clue Elements. Here, the object of play is the written form of the answer, or, more precisely, the letters of which that form consists. The best known member of this class is undoubtedly the anagram:
H. Victim of injustice could be grounded (8) = UNDERDOG
The words could be which precede the anagram grounded have a special function. They inform solvers (if they get the message!) that an anagram is lurking nearby. Indeed, convention requires that anagrams (and all other Graphic CEs) be accompanied by such flags. On the other hand, the cryptogram composer is free to conceal these signals in all sorts of phrasal hocus-pocus:
I. Overturned vote overturns all votes (4) = VETO
Some other anagram flags are broken, strange, unorthodox, maybe, kind of, and a source of. There are dozens of them, and new ones are being concocted every day.
Many anagrams spread over two or more words:
J. Brave Tim changed quarterly (8) = VERBATIM
These are particularly tricky when short words, like articles or pronouns, are involved:
K. An event is organized for Italians (9) = VENETIANS
L. You can’t take it with you—neither can I, unfortunately (11) = INHERITANCE
A subvariant of the anagram is the inversion:
M. On reflection, the parts will hold together (5) = STRAP
On reflection is a flag to indicate that parts is to be read backwards. Other inversion flags are coming back, returning, and going West. Purists admit these only for answers that run horizontally in the grid. For the “down” words, they prefer turning up, traveling North, etc.
It is worth noting that the first element of clue M. consists of the four words On reflection the parts. The comma, correctly inserted between reflection and the, may mislead, but such punctuational conflicts are considered perfectly legitimate, or even a piquant little feature. We shall return to this point later.
Another type of Graphic CE is the acronym:
N. The leaders of the unassuming Royal Knights Society can be a source of delight (5) = TURKS
The leaders of is a flag intended to draw the solvers' attention to the initial letters of the words following it, where the answer lies for the taking. The most common flag for acronyms is, as one would expect, initially.
The acronym does not stand by itself in the crypto repertoire. In fact, it is the key member of a whole family of Graphic CEs, all with their own specific flags to indicate whether the answer is to be composed from last letters, middle letters, or other word fragments. An idea of the way they work has been given in one of the introductory examples (the cow-bullock creature).
A relatively new graphic technique is the sandwich. The letters of the answer are left in their original order but spread over two or more words:
O. Lakeside city located inside the embankment or on top of it (7) = TORONTO
or contained in a single word:
P. A small capital in Czechoslovakia (4) = OSLO
Besides inside and in, common sandwich flags are part of and some of.
As the above clues demonstrate, a Graphic CE should be accompanied not only by a flag but also by a Semantic CE. This conventional rule also holds for the members of a third class, the Phonic Clue Elements. These are based, just like the traditional pun, on homophony:
Q. Critique, one hears, of a theatrical entertainment (5) = REVUE
Somewhat more involved is:
R. It sounds in one sense (or in none) like simplicity (9) = INNOCENCE
Phonic CEs are not very often used, probably because all suitable flags (I hear, it sounds, say, etc.) are so obvious that they threaten to give the game away. In the above tour d’horizon, not all aspects of clue setting have passed in review. Nothing has been said about the artful ways in which abbreviations, chemical symbols, Arabic and Roman numerals, musical notes, etc., may be used in clues. Hardly any attention has been paid to one-element clues. (There are even one-word clues, some of them particularly witty.) No examples have been given of answers that consist of more than one word. More important, no mention has been made of the possibility of chopping the answer into convenient pieces which are separately represented in the clue by anagrams, synonyms, etc.
Just one real-life example:
S. European city, home of the first person without perverse words (9) = ?
Solution:
words = terms (synonym)
perverse = flag for anagram
anagram of ‘terms’ = MSTER
the first person = ADAM
without = outside (!)
ADAM outside MSTER = AMSTERDAM
Clue syntax deserves a more thorough examination than space permits; but perhaps it would be best to comment on some aspects of the ethics of compiling clues.
The first commandment in the puzzlers' bible reads: Thou shalt not waste words. A well-constructed clue comprises only words necessary for conveying, in a deceptive way, the information solvers require to find the answer. Adding fillers to distract them is considered unfair. As for the answer, it is better to avoid very learned or rare words unknown to all but a few lexicographers. The idea is to test the solvers' skill in deciphering clues rather than their familiarity with the recondite recesses of the lexicon. (This being said, one British publication does offer a special obscure-words puzzle, probably for the benefit of glossarial masochists. Little wonder it appears under the name of Mephisto.)
On the other hand, it is admissible, as we have already seen, to throw solvers off the scent with an occasional comma in the “wrong” place. The same holds for other dividers, such as colons, dashes, hyphens, and blanks. Likewise, a bit of juggling with apostrophes, quotation marks, and capitals is permitted, always on the understanding that no punctuation or spelling rules are infringed. And it goes without saying that clue texts may be arranged in such a way that, at first sight, certain words appear to belong to a different inflectional form or word class than is actually the case when the clue is unlocked. In fact, this is an essential part of the fun. This feature has already been demonstrated in the very first example (the cock that crows) and also in clue F. Clue J offers two further instances: at first reading, changed is suggestive of being a past tense but after analysis it is identified as a past participle (serving as an anagram flag); likewise, quarterly shifts from adverb to noun.
Let us end with a specimen in which several of the above techniques are represented:
T. Part of his imprint appears in absurd Anglo-Saxon rules, word for word (6) = ?
Solution: Replace in the second element (rules word for word) the last three words by their synonym “verbatim.” Well, who rules VERBATIM? His name (= part of his imprint) appears in absurd Anglo-Saxon.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Mereu stayed with 50 of Angius' 400 sheep, dressed in dirty and ragged canvas clothing and shoes with holes.” [The Des Moines Sunday Register, 6 December 1987. Submitted by Margo Heilman, Des Moines, Iowa.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Robert Dole is way ahead, followed closely by his wife, Elizabeth Dole.” [Heard on WEEI-AM, Boston, Massachusetts, on 13 July 1988. Submitted by Ginny Crouse, Bookline, Massachusetts.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Visitor, Joe Smith, Jr., age 17, fell in front of the hospital. He was treated in E.R. and released. Mr. Joe Smith, Sr., was notified who is a patient in room 622A due to his son’s age.” [A security guard’s accident report. Submitted by J. Crane, Pennsauken, New Jersey.]
Money of the Realm
Peter K. Oppenheim, San Francisco
One of the privileges of national sovereignty is the right to name your country’s money, or to rename it when the old name has acquired unpleasant associations. The tourist struggling at each border crossing with exchanging one country’s money for that of another and trying to fix values may not have the time then to wonder why a country’s money is called what it is. [Because so many languages are involved, the names that follow are as used in English language publications of the International Monetary Fund.]
Money originated in the form of coins. For many countries the current names of what is now mostly paper money are based on characteristics of the old coins or refer to the fact that the weight of a silver or gold coin was often an indication of its value. The pound sterling (the money of the United Kingdom), for example, apparently derived from a pound weight of silver pennies of the Norman period which had a star on them (Old English: steorling ‘coin with a star’). The concept continues through the Spanish word for ‘weight’: peso (Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Philippines, Uruguay); its diminutive: peseta (Spain), and the same word in Portuguese: peso (Guinea-Bissau).
The association of money names with other weights is common: ouguiya (Mauritania) means ‘ounce.’ Kyat (Burma) is the name for a measure of 16.33 grams. Baht (Thailand) is a weight of 15 grams. Drachma (Greece), which literally means a ‘handful,’ is a weight of 3.2 grams. Dirham (Morocco, United Arab Emirates) derives from drachma.
As in the United Kingdom, the currency names of other economically powerful countries have long historical roots. Franc (France) goes back to a 14th-century coin inscribed “Francorum rex,” ‘King of the Franks.’ Dollar (United States and some other countries) derives from the German Thaler, a coin of the 16th century which was minted in silver from a mine in Joachimsthal. The word dollar was used in 17th-century England to refer to the thaler and became the official name of the United States monetary unit by an Act of the Continental Congress, on July 6, 1785.
Denarius, a coin of ancient Rome, evolved into dinar, the name used by many countries of the eastern Mediterrean which were once part of, or near, the ancient Roman Empire (Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, Tunisia, Yugoslavia). Denarius was the source of the abbreviation d for the former English penny. Shilling, another coin in the predecimal pound sterling may take its name from the Roman coin, solidus, worth about 25 denarii. It is the money name in Kenya, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda, and, spelt Schilling, in Austria. Metical (Mozambique) was a former Arab unit of currency. Dobra (São Tomé and Prín-
cipe), meaning ‘double,’ is the name of a former Portuguese gold coin. Pataca (Macau) stems from a 17th-century Spanish and Portuguese coin, the patacoon. Kina (Papua New Guinea) originated from shell money used for centuries by people along their coast; the cedi of Ghana means ‘small shell’ after the former use of the cowrie shell for money. The complete panel of cloth formerly used for money is the meaning behind dalasi (The Gambia).
Mark was a common term used throughout Europe for a weight of silver or gold, usually about eight ounces. The name was adopted by Germany in 1875 for a coin to replace the thaler. The Germans retained the name even when its monetary value sank so low that currency reform was necessary. It was the reichsmark that suffered through the hyperinflation of 1922-23 when the cost of mailing a letter went from one reichsmark to 40 billion in 17 months. The rentenmark, secured by the industrial and agricultural resources of the country, was introduced in limited amounts to stabilize the currency. (This was the creation of the German financier and Central Banker, Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht.) The name continues in Deutsche mark (West Germany) and mark (East Germany). When Brazil reformed its economy several years ago, the former name of its currency was changed from cruzeiro to cruzado, the meaning ‘little cross’ to ‘crusade’ being of less importance than the similarity of the names in Portuguese.
The names of some kinds of money are associated with the metal originally used or some related feature. ‘Gold’ is the meaning of guilder (Netherlands) and ztoty (Poland). The Sanskrit for ‘wrought silver’ is the basis for rupee (India, Pakistan, Seychelles, Sri Lanka), rupiah (Indonesia), and rufiyaa (Maldives). Birr (Ethiopia) means ‘silver’ and was the name used beginning in the 18th century to designate the Maria Theresa thaler, an Austrian coin which circulated in countries around the Red Sea. Ringgit (Malaysia) means ‘serrated, milled,’ a characteristic of the edging on coins. Kip (Laos) means ‘ingot.’ Ruble (Russia), which literally means ‘stump,’ might have denoted a piece cut from a silver bar.
Some countries name their currency to honor people famous in their history: bolivar (Venezuela) for the liberator of South America, Simón Bolívar; sucre (Ecuador) for Antonio José de Sucre, chief lieutenant of Bolívar and liberator of what is now Ecuador at the battle of Pichincha in 1822 near Quito; colón (Costa Rica, El Salvador) for Christopher Columbus; balboa (Panama) for Vasco Núñez de Balboa, discoverer of the Pacific Ocean; lempira (Honduras) for the 16th-century Indian chief who is a national symbol of liberty and valor for resisting the Spanish advance; and córdoba (Nicaragua) for Francisco Hernández de Cór doba, first acting governor. Both Balboa and Córdoba were deputies of the Spanish governor in Panama, Pedro Arias Da\?\ila, who subsequently executed them. The regional characteristic of using the same idea as a basis for selecting a currency name is apparent from these South and Central American neighboring countries.
It is true also in Scandinavia where the money name is crown: krona (Sweden, Iceland), krone (Norway, Denmark). The only non-Scandinavian “crown” is koruna (Czechoslovakia). Regional patterns emerge elsewhere: in northern Asia the money names mean ‘round, circular’: yen (Japan), won (Korea), tugrik (Mongolia), and yuan (People’s Republic of China). In the last, the currency name is actually renminbi, ‘people’s money,’ with the unit of account being the yuan. The meaning ‘royal’ appears as riyal (Saudi Arabia, Qatar), rial (Iran, Oman, Yemen Arab Republic), and further south as lilangeni (Swaziland).
History and myth provide another source for names. Shekel (Israel) was a Babylonian weight which became the coin of the Hebrews. [Exodus 30:13 “This they shall give…half a shekel after the shekel of the sanctuary: (a shekel is twenty gerahs) and half shekel shall be the offering of the Lord.”] Taka (Bangladesh), literally ‘money,’ derives from tonka of the old Persian language which was the money of the 16th-century Mughal empire in circulation in what was then Bengal. Inti (Peru) was the sun god in the ancient Peruvian religion; Peru’s previous money was sol, Spanish for ‘sun.’ Rand (South Africa) is the now common name for the witwatersrand, the site of the great gold fields found in the late 19th century and the original source of its wealth.
For most countries the easiest source of a name for their money has been to take that of another country, either because of proximity and association with a strong economic country or because of a former colonial relationship. Thus, Belgium, Switzerland, and Luxembourg use franc; Canada and The Bahamas choose dollar.
The name dollar is used by sixteen more countries: Australia, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Brunei, Fiji, Guyana, Hong Kong, Jamaica, Liberia, New Zealand, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Taiwan, Trinidad and Tobago, and Zimbabwe. As the East Caribbean dollar, it is used by several small countries who do not have their own money: Antigua, Dominica, Grenada, St. Christopher and Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent.
The name pound is used by Cyprus, Egypt, Ireland (as punt), Lebanon, Sudan, and Syria. Lira (Italy, Malta, Turkey) is a contracted form of the Latin word for ‘pound’ libra. Mark traveled as markka to Finland.
The names franc and guilder spread only to their former colonial areas. The franc appears in Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, French Guiana, Guinea, Malagasy, Rwanda, and as a common currency of the CFA (Communauté Francaise Africaine), comprising Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Mali, Niger, People’s Republic of the Congo, Senegal, and Togo. Guilder is used in Netherlands Antilles and Suriname.
Money has also derived its names from things or animals. Lev (Bulgaria) and leu (Romania) mean ‘lion.’ Escudo (Portugal, Cape Verde) means ‘shield.’ Quetzal (Guatemala) is the national bird and guarani (Paraguay) the name of an Indian tribe. Forint (Hungary) means ‘flower,’ pula (Botswana) ‘rain,’ austral (Argentina) ‘southern,’ and kwanza (Angola) ‘first.’ Kwacha (Malawi, Zambia) means ‘dawn’ in reference to the “dawn of freedom.” Tala (Western Samoa) is derived from dollar, while pa’anga was selected by Tonga. As reported in The N.Y. Times, “Tonga has decided against calling its new decimal currency unit the dollar because the native word tola also means a ‘pig’s snout,’ the ‘soft end of a coconut,’ or, in vulgar language, a ‘mouth.’ The new unit…has only two alternative meanings—a ‘coin-shaped seed’ and, not surprisingly, ‘money.’ ”
When no other source seems suitable, nations name their money after the country. Naira (Nigeria) is derived from the country’s name as is probably Vatu (Vanuatu). More direct is afghani (Afghanistan), leone (Sierra Leone), and the ultimate in directness, zaire (Zaire).
English Is A Crazy Language
Richard Lederer, St. Paul’s School
English is the most widely spoken language in the history of our planet. English has acquired the largest vocabulary and inspired one of the noblest bodies of literature in the annals of the human race.
Nonetheless, English is a crazy language. In the crazy English language, the blackbird hen is brown, blackboards can be blue or green, and blackberries are green and red before they are ripe. To add to this insanity, there is no butter in buttermilk, no egg in eggplant, neither worms nor wood in wormwood, and no ham in a hamburger. (In fact, if somebody invented a sandwich consisting of a ham patty in a bun, we would have a hard time finding a name for it.) And we discover more culinary madness in the revelations that English muffins weren’t invented in England, French fries in France, or Danish pastries in Denmark. In this weird English language, greyhounds aren’t always grey (or gray), a ladybug is a beetle, guinea pigs are neither pigs nor from Guinea, and a titmouse is neither mammal nor mammaried.
Language is like the air we breathe. It is invisible, inescapable, and indispensable; yet we take it for granted. But when we take time to explore the vagaries of English, we find that hot dogs can be cold, darkrooms can be lit, nightmares can take place in broad daylight, midwives can be men, hours—especially happy hours and rush hours—can last longer than sixty minutes, ice cubes can be noncubic, tablecloths can be made of paper, silverware can be made of plastic, most telephones are dialed by being punched (or pushed?), and most bathrooms don’t have any baths. In fact, a dog can go to the bathroom under a tree—no bath, no room—it is still “going to the bathroom.”
Why is it that a woman can man a station, but a man cannot “woman” one, that a man can father a movement, but a woman cannot “mother” one, and that a king rules a kingdom, but a queen does not rule a “queendom”? A writer is someone who writes, and a stinger is something that stings. But fingers do not “fing,” grocers “groce,” hammers “ham,” or humdingers “humding.” If the plural of mouse is mice, why don’t we live in “hice”? One tooth, two teeth; so why not one booth, two “beeth”? One index, two indices—one Kleenex, two “Kleenices”? If someone rang a bell, why don’t we say that she also “flang” a ball? If she wrote a letter, perhaps she also “bote” her tongue. If the teacher taught, why isn’t it also true that the preacher “praught”? If she conceives a conception and receives at a reception, why didn’t she grieve a “greption” and believe a “beleption”?
If a horsehair mat is made from the hair of horses and a camel’s hair brush from the hair of camels, from what is a mohair coat made? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? If pro and con are opposites, is congress the opposite of progress?
In this confusing language of ours noisome doesn’t mean ‘noisy,’ meretricious is anything but meritorious, penultimate is less ultimate than ultimate, but invaluable is more valuable than valuable.
No wonder that we English speakers are constantly standing meaning on its head. We delete negatives and say, I could care less, when we really mean, ‘I couldn’t care less,’ and we add gratuitous negatives and say, I miss not seeing her, when we really mean, ‘I miss seeing her.’ Any book that keeps us literallly glued to our seat actually keeps us figuratively glued to our seat, a near miss (which is a’collision') is a ‘near hit,’ something that falls between the cracks would in reality land on the planks or the concrete, a big traffic bottleneck is a ‘small bottleneck,’ and a hot cup of coffee is really a ‘cup of hot coffee.’ We get up in the morning and put on our shoes and socks and then go back and forth. No, we put on our socks and shoes and then go forth and back.
Because English speakers seem to have our heads screwed on backwards, they constantly misperceive their bodies. They fall head over heels in love when we really mean heels over head in love. If they are disappointed or afraid, they try to keep a stiff upper lip when it is the lower lip they are trying to control. They complain that things are being done behind their backs, but nothing can be done “in front of their backs.” And they try to avoid doing things ass back-wards when ‘ass backwards’ is the only way that anyone can do anything.
Sometimes you have to believe that all English speakers should be committed to an asylum. In what other language do people drive in a parkway and park in a driveway? In what other language can the weather be hot as hell one day and cold as hell the next? In what other language can quite a lot and quite few mean the same thing, as well as loosen and unloosen, ravel and unravel, passive and impassive, flammable and inflammable, shameful and shameless (behavior) and What won’t he do next? and What will he do next? In what other language are overlook and oversee opposites but a slim chance and a fat chance the same? Why is it easier to assent than to dissent but harder to ascend than to descend? Is it really true that if you decide to be ‘bad forever,’ you have chosen to be bad for good, and if you are wearing only your right shoe, your right one is left. Right?
When the sun or moon or stars are out they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible. A piece of cloth that wear may be the same as a piece of cloth that won’t wear. Trimming a tree may involve cutting it away or, especially around Christmas, adding to it. When we wind up a watch, we ‘start’ it, but when I wind up this disquisition, I shall ‘end’ it.
Does it not seem just a little bizarre that we can make amends but never just one “amend”; that no matter how carefully we comb through history, we can never discover just one “annal”; that, sifting through the wreckage of a disaster, we can never find just one “smithereen”; and that we never contract a single “heebie-jeebie”? Which reminds me to ask a burning linguistic question. If you have a bunch of odds and ends and you get rid of or sell off all but one of them, what is left?
What do you make of the fact that we can talk only about the nonexistence, never the existence, of certain items and concepts? Have you ever run into someone who was “combobulated,” “chalant,” “sheveled,” “gruntled,” or “gainly”? We all know people who are no spring chickens, but where, pray tell, are the people who are “spring chickens”? Have you ever met someone who was “great shakes,” who could “cut the mustard” and “do squat,” who “was your cup of tea,” and whom you “would touch with a ten-foot pole”? Do you know anyone who is a “slouch” or “would hurt a fly”?
If the truth be told, all languages are a little crazy. As Walt Whitman might proclaim, they contradict themselves. That is because language is invented, not discovered, and, as such, language reflects the creativity and fearful asymmetry of the human mind. In his essay “The Awful German Language,” Mark Twain spoofs the confusion engendered by German gender by translating from a conversation in a German Sunday school book:
GRETCHEN: Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
WILHELM: She has gone to the kitchen.
GRETCHEN: Where is the accomplished and beautiful
English maiden?
WILHELM: It has gone to the opera.
Twain continues:“a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female—tomcats included.”
Still, you have to wonder about the crazy English language, in which your house can burn up and burn down at the same time, in which you fill in a form by filling out a form, in which you add up a column of figures by adding them down, in which your alarm clock goes off by going on, and in which you first chop down a tree—and then chop up a tree.
Foreign Correspondents
William H. Dougherty, Santa Fe, New Mexico
It all began with Lenin. The Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union, and journalistic expertise devoted to these supremely important phenomena of the twentieth century began with Vladimir Ilich Lenin. But as far as American journalism is concerned, that pronouncement is not quite correct, because more often than not American journalists began and for an embarrassingly long time continued not with Vladimir or Ilich (as the founding Bolshevik is sometime affectionately called, peasant-fashion by his patronymic) but with Nikolai Lenin. The error flawed the record beyond newspaper reporting. For example, The Columbia Encyclopedia, in an edition last copyrighted in 1940, has an appropriately long entry for “the founder of the USSR” under Lenin, Nikolai. How this mistake came about in the first place no one is certain. Lenin did use the pseudonym N. Lenin, among scores of others, and maybe a self-styled authority assumed that the N. stood for Nikolai, a name that may have been suggested by that of the Russian emperor. In European continental usage the letter N, corresponding to X in the English-speaking world, is sometimes used for a name an author does not wish to reveal. At any rate, the mistake, trivial in itself, tended to discredit a good deal of American reporting about the Soviet Union among people who knew better. After all, if the bourgeois press could not get even Lenin’s name right, how reliable was it about anything else in the USSR?
Decades later the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was assumed by Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev. By then Kremlinology had matured and the American press had all of Khrushchev’s names right, though there were several ways to transliterate and pronounce them in English. To the horror of some Western readers, however, he was at least once quoted out of context as having threatened to “bury” America. And he did say that. But the Russian verb he used in a sentence that was more a bellicose boast than a threat was pokhoronit', which means ‘bury,’ all right, but in the sense of the verb in “we burried Grandma last week.” When Nikita Sergeevich bragged that the USSR would bury the USA, he meant that technologically and economically the Soviets would leave us in the dust, would be around for our funeral, not that they would put us six feet under.
If our press would attain true excellence in selecting English expressions to correspond to Russian originals, it should exercise more care about designating the Soviet Union as “Russia” and Soviets as “Russians.” Russia, now the RSFSR (for Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic) is only one of several Soviet republics, which are more like states of the United States than what we generally mean by “republic,” and Russians (sometimes redundantly called “ethnic Russians”) make up only about half of the population of the USSR. So referring to the USSR as “Russia” is a mistake on the order of calling the United Kingdom or Great Britain “England.” However, the boundaries of the tsar’s empire, for centuries known as “Russia,” were approximately the same as those of the Soviet Union; it was occasionally known as “the Russias,” as in the formula “Tsar of all the Russias”; thus, this particular confusion comes naturally. Gorbachev himself is said to have had to apologize while making a speech in the Ukraine when he referred to the Ukraine as “Russian.” This faux pas might be likened to the Queen of England’s saying in an address before Welsh miners, “As we here in England well know …”
The problem of drawing a distinction between Russians and citizens of the USSR has been solved by borrowing the word Soviet into English as an adjective or a noun meaning a person and not an institution, except rarely as in the designation Supreme Soviet. In Russian Sovét means basically ‘counsel’ and ‘council’ and by extension ‘assembly’. It never means a ‘citizen of the USSR’ or any other kind of person in Russian, though its adjectival derivative sovetskii can be used substantively alone or followed by chelovek ‘person,’ to mean a ‘Soviet person.’ So the English word Soviet corresponds to both the Russian noun sovét or much more often to the Russian adjective sovetskii in their many inflected forms.
Currently two Russian words are challenging correspondents, among others, to find English equivalents: perestroika and glasnost'. The first of these Gorbachevian buzzwords can be handily calqued into English as ‘restructuring.’ Glasnost', though, is more difficult. As a calque it would come into English as vocalness, which is no word. It is not a new word in Russian. The 1935 edition of the four-volume Tolkovyi Slovar' Russkogo Yazyka (‘Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language’) defines glasnost' as: “Accessibility to public discussion and evaluation; publicity.” I can think of no single English word that quite corresponds to this definition. Publicity perhaps comes closest. But since both perestroika and glasnost' from our point of view do not mean ‘restructuring’ and ‘publicity’ generally, as the English words do to us, but rather refer to reforms specifically initiated by Gorbachev, the Russian words, particularly glasnost', are usually borrowed into English unaltered (except in pronunciation). There are, of course, precedents for this sort of intact borrowing: pogrom, ukase, intelligentsia, and muzhik for example. And in the same way Russian speakers have helped themselves to our sex, jazz, lynch, and business.
Apropos of Gorbachev—and Khrushchev too for that matter—those es in their names pose a problem of phonetic correspondence. Though usually written in Russian like any other e, just as in English, they are pronounced like os. Sometimes in textbooks for children and beginners such es are marked in Russian with two dots over them; they are sometimes transliterated into English as os, so that occasionally you will see the spelling Gorbachov, which in my opinion is preferable. Then another variant in transliteration is -ov/-off, -ev/-eff. The name ending in double f for what in Russian is invariably v is seldom seen nowadays; but a few decades ago or in documents or books written then you might have seen the two Soviet leaders' names transliterated Gorbacheff or Gorbachoff
Lite/Light
Barbara Hunt Lazerson, Illinois State University
For approximately a thousand years, the word light has been used to describe beer and wine containing less alcohol than regular beer and wine:
c 1000 Ags. Voc. in Wr.- Willcker 282/6 Melle dulci, leoht beor. (Oxford English Dictionary)
c 1000 Sax. Leechd. III. 122 Drince leoht wyn. (OED)
Currently, however, many a denizen of the United States regards light (also spelled lite) as a label that indicates that a beer is lower in calories than its nonlight counterparts.
and Khrushcheff or Khrushchoff. I have seen both the -ov and -off transliterations on the same page of a book. The reason for this variation is that when the Cyrillic letter that represents our English v-sound is final in a word, as in the nominative case for Gorbachev, it is unvoiced and sounds like f (or ff for good measure); when an inflectional ending is added, as in Gorbacheva (the genitive case), that same letter is voiced, like v.
Such variations in transliteration are practically endless, and hardly any variation can be called an error, though consistency is obviously desirable. The most troublesome inconsistencies in transliteration seem to be owing either to the human tendency to conceal doubt behind abundance or to multiple naturalizations as the name migrates across Europe. For instance, in English the name of the Russian composer is usually spelled Tchaikovsky and sometimes as Tschaikovsky or Tschaikowsky where three or four English letters are used to represent a sound represented by a single Russian letter and more normally by only two in English, ch. The name Chaliapin was first transliterated into a French spelling Chaliapine; later, when most of the family moved to the United States, the e was dropped to Anglicize the spelling. This was a confusing half measure, however; the initial ch remained as in the French spelling, representing a Russian letter borrowed from the Hebrew alphabet for the sound represented in English by sh. As a result, many Americans innocently mispronounce the name of the great operatic bass and his descendants. A certain Tennessean, who became a good friend of Boris Chaliapin, the Time cover artist, got off on the wrong foot when he heard the artist’s name as Charley Apin. Since Boris was too polite to correct the Tennessean, and others who knew better found the mistake too amusing to rectify, that one American friend called Boris good ol' Charley Apin as long as the friend lived.
The roots of the ‘reduced calorie’ meaning of lite/light go back to 1967. In that year Meister Brau Inc. of Chicago initially marketed Meister Brau Lite, a reduced-calorie beer. Women were targeted as the primary consumers; but the beer, which was promoted as a diet drink, was not very successful. In 1972, Phillip Morris, Inc.’s Miller Brewing Co. acquired the Lite beer label in a buyout of Meister Brau Inc. Miller Lite was introduced to test markets in 1973; and the first Lite commercial, which featured Super Bowl hero Matt Snell, aired in July of that year. The tenth Lite commercial, which featured linebacker Dick Butkus, was shot in May 1975 just as Miller Lite was going national.
Miller Lite commercials were designed to convince young males that it is all right to drink light beer. Consequently, these commercials, which, according to Video Storyboard Tests Inc., are among the most popular ever to be shown on television, have featured former athletes (e.g., Bubba Smith, Bob Uecker, and Rosie Grier) and celebrities (e.g., author Mickey Spillane, drummer Buddy Rich, and comedian Rodney Dangerfield). The original theme of these commercials was: “Everything you always wanted in a light—and less.”
During the early years that Miller was convincing the public that tough guys do drink light beer, other breweries remained skeptical. Because they thought light beer had a wimpy image, they stayed out of the light beer market for a while. When other breweries finally did enter the market, most of them used the spelling l-i-g-h-t: Bud Light, Coors Light, Michelob Light, Natural Light, Old Milwaukee Light, Stroh Light. The reason for this was simple enough: Miller Brewing Co. owned the trademark Lite, which it had purchased from Meister Brau Inc. in 1972. However, brewer Paul Kalmanovitz, owner of Falstaff Brewing Co. of Omaha and General Brewing Co. of Vancouver, Washington, challenged Miller’s exclusive right to Lite. In July 1982, a U.S. District Court jury in San Francisco ruled that Lite was just an alternate spelling of Light. As a result of this decision, Lite may now be used on the label of any beer to indicate that it is a reduced-calorie beer.
According to The Wall Street Journal (April 20, 1988) light beers represent approximately 22 percent of the $13 billion beer market. The popularity of reduced-calorie beers has resulted in the inclusion of the following definition of lite/light in The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Unabridged Edition: “13. (of alcoholic beverages)… (esp. of beer and wine) having fewer calories and usually a lower alcohol content than the standard product.”
Not all light beers are created equal, however. Some have fewer calories than others: Michelob Light, 134 calories per 12-ounce serving; Stroh Light, 115; Budweiser Light, 108; Miller Lite, 96; Pabst Extra Light, 70; and Pearl Lite, 68. As we can see, Michelob Light has almost twice as many calories as Pearl Lite. In fact, Michelob Light has one calorie more (i.e., 134) than Heidelberg regular beer (133 calories).
Since 1978, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms has been involved in rule-making regarding the use of lite/light as a label for alcoholic beverages. Jim Ficaretta of the BATF has stated that, according to the current ruling, if lite/light in the sense ‘reduced calorie’ is applied to a malt beverage, the label on that product must contain a statement of average analysis with regard to calories, carbohydrates, fat and protein. If lite/light simply describes a characteristic of the beer (e.g., taste, body, color), no such statement is required. The last word on this matter has not been written, however. A decade after it first became involved in the lite/light issue, the BATF, with several
proposals on hand, is still working on rule-making with regard to the use of lite/light as a label for malt beverages, wines, and spirits.
The barons of beerdom are not the only merchants to have produced reduced-calorie ingestibles. A plethora of reduced-calorie foods are also available for the weight-conscious among us. Where food products are concerned, however, no one has ever held the exclusive right to lite. Therefore, both lite and light have been freely used in the names of products: e.g., Prince Light Spaghetti, Aunt Jemima Lite Syrup, Thank You Light Pie Filling, Whitman’s Lite Chocolates, Wonder Light Buns, and even Alpo Lite Dog Food. Such products often have one third fewer calories than their nonlight counterparts, although that proportion might vary.
Health-conscious Americans are concerned not only with calories. They also want less caffeine in their coffee, less salt in their pickles, less sodium in their salt, no sugar added to their canned fruits, and less tar in their cigarettes. Consequently, those merchants who pander to and even help create our wants and needs have provided us with, to name but a few, the following lite/light products: Manor House Lite Coffee with one third less caffeine than regular coffee; Piper’s Farms Lite Kosher Dills with 50 percent less salt than Piper’s Farm regular dill pickles; Morton Lite Salt with half the sodium of regular table salt; Libby’s Lite Pears, Peaches, Mixed Fruits, and Fruit Cocktail, all of which have no sugar added; Pall Mall Light 100’s with one third less tar than “the leading filter king-sized cigarette.”
Gregory Weismantel, president of Manor House Foods, has stated: “Lite is perceived by consumers as a name of a product that has less of a negative ingredient” (Chicago Tribune, November 4, 1981). His statement foreshadowed a new definition of lite/light that six years later appeared in Random House II: “12. low in any substance, as sugar, starch, or tars, that is considered harmful or undesirable: light cigarettes.”
Lite/Light, when applied to a food, may refer to the product’s taste, color, or texture rather than to the number of calories or the amount of fat, salt, sugar, or cholesterol it contains. For example, in 1982, Frito-Lay introduced Light Corn Chips, which were thinner and crispier than Frito-Lay’s regular corn chips but which had just as much salt and a few more calories than the regular product. In order to avoid confusion, Frito-Lay subsequently changed the name to Crisp ‘N Thin Corn Chips. Not all manufacturers of food products are as concerned about customer confusion, however. Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) has observed: “[Food companies] strain the limits of the English language and our patience by overusing words such as… light. The more we distort the language, the less the consumer can understand the product” (Chicago SunTimes, October 19, 1986).
In an effort to shed some light on the use of lite/light, Rep. Cooper introduced in February 1986 a bill that would have limited the use of lite/light to products that have one third fewer calories, one half less fat, or three fourths less sodium than regular (i.e., nonlight) products. This bill was lost in the legislative shuffle, however, and, as of this writing (October 25, 1988), has yet to be passed in spite of having been reintroduced in 1987 and 1988. The bill, which, in its current form, would require a product labeled lite/light to have one third fewer calories, one third less fat, or one third less sodium than regular, nonlight products, will have to be introduced once again in 1989. Perhaps the fourth time will be a charm.
Potables, comestibles, and smokables are not the only products to bear the lite/light designation. In 1982, Hallmark introduced a series of greeting cards that contained puns. They were called LITE and were described as being “a third less serious than regular greeting cards.” This description was, of course, an allusion to the solecism that has been used to promote Miller Lite: “Lite has a third less calories than their regular beer.” In 1986, the Johnson’s Wax people introduced Glade Light, an aerosol air freshener with less than half the perfume of regular sprays. In the same year, Jhirmack introduced Lite Shampoo, Lite Conditioner, and Lite Mousse, which are designed to clean, condition, and style one’s hair without build-up.
The use of lite/light has extended beyond product names. In such cases, the term may be used in a descriptive sense to indicate that something is less intense than its nonlight counterpart. Often, however, lite/light is used humorously, or even caustically.
Low-impact aerobics have been called lite aerobics. In music, there are Lite Rock and Lite FM. Book editor Henry Kisor used the term Lite Mystery to refer to a book “with only half the calories of a regular whodunit” (Chicago Sun-Times, July 24, 1987). Regarding The Harvard Lampoon parody of USA Today, publisher Joe Armstrong declared, “We’re kind of like USA Today Lite” (USA Today, September 15, 1986). Newsweek Lite is what one critic called People Weekly (Chicago Tribune, January 20, 1988). Picture Week, which died after two extensive market tests by Time Inc., was called People Lite by some skeptics at Time Inc. because the publication was designed for those who think there is too much to read in People (New York, January 6, 1986). The television show West 57th was called “CBS’ lite news show” by People’s TV critic, Jeff Jarvis (People Weekly, September 9, 1985).
Lite College is what Stanley Mieses proffered the student who “seeks an education that is tasteful without being fulfilling [and] degrees [that are] based on a curriculum that is one third less challenging” (The Atlantic, October 1983). The Lite Fight, which consists of “a simple opener and a swift final blow,” is what columnist Judy Markey offered the couple who want to save time with a pared-down version of the “fundamental, tedious, classic argument” (Chicago Sun-Times, July 10, 1986).
In the political arena, Gary Hart, who tried so desperately to emulate the late John F. Kennedy, was called “the Kennedy lite candidate” (Chicago Tribune, January 20, 1988). Robert Dole had the title New Dole Lite bestowed upon him because he was perceived to be “less acerbic [and] more personal [sic]” than he previously had been (Time, November 16, 1987).
A metaphor for our time. That, according to some behavioral scientists, is what lite/light has become in the years since the first Miller Lite commercial aired in July 1973. These concerned sociologists and psychologists maintain that we Americans want not only beer that is low in calories, cigarettes that are low in tar, and foods that are low in substances such as salt, sugar, fat, and cholesterol; we also want reduced-effort cures for our ailments, reduced-work jobs, and reduced-commitment relationships. That is why these specialists in human behavior have declared the 80s to be the Lite/Light Decade.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“State of Washington charges for certified birth, death, marriage or disillusions….” [From Connecticut Society of Genealogists Newsletter, November-December 1988. Submitted by Dorothy Branson, Kansas City, Missouri]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Audi’s at reduced savings.” [An ad in The Hartford Courant, 6 July 1988. Submitted by Sidney Perlman, Hartford.]
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Crime Dictionary
Ralph De Sola, (Facts On File, 1982, rev. ed., 1988), xiii + 222 pp.
This is a revision of the 1982 dictionary reviewed in the Autumn 1985 [XII,2] issue of VERBATIM. The price has increased from $10.95 to $24.95 and it would appear that four pages have been added. I commented then that Mata Hari and Judge Roy Bean were both in but that Doc Holliday was missing: Holliday is still on vacation and now the old Bean has joined him. I commented then that French vache ‘cop’ had been omitted from the foreign supplement: it is still missing. The entry for big boy tomato, on which I had commented, is no longer there, though big boy ‘heroin’ is there.
It is difficult to compare the two editions. Though the dust-jacket blurb promises that 1500 new terms were added, it is not easy to see where, and if, in order to fit them in, hundreds of entries were deleted, that diminishes the value of the book. There is no reason to assume that a 1982 book of 231 pp. selling for $10.95 should yield a 1988 book of 550pp. at $24.95, but one might have expected more: in light of the information that inflation over the past six years has averaged about 3%, one might expect the same book to cost as much as $13.95 today, even allowing for a 1.7% increase in its length (4 pages). For $24.95 we ought to have the 1500 new entries and the old ones besides (revised, as necessary). If you have the 1982 edition, I see no justification for buying the new one merely to line the publisher’s pockets.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Dictionary of Gambling & Gaming
Thomas L. Clark, (Lexik House Publishers, 1988), xxii + 263pp.
The language of gambling and gaming might be classified as a blend of slang and jargon: the former seems almost obvious; the latter cannot be denied because there are so many technical terms involved. The author, Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Nevada (Las Vegas—where else?), former president of the American Dialect Society, erstwhile field researcher for DARE and contributor to many journals (including VERBATIM, mentioned on p. xiii but ignored by whoever wrote the dust-jacket blurb, presumably because it was not deemed to be among the “important” ones), has spent many years compiling this dictionary. The book is done “on historical principles”—that is, it relies for its defining and other evidence on citations drawn from a great many sources—and it is all the more interesting for that.
The ordinary entry is structured to show the headword or phrase, in boldface, followed by an italicized part-of-speech label, followed by the definition, then the source or sources. The really good stuff shows up, though, when citations are given, for many of them are lively:
“A” card, n. A certificate issued by a law-enforcement agency indicating security clearance for a casino employee. See also 50 CARD and SHERIFF’S CARD.
1963 Taylor Las Vegas 100. No inside man can work on the Strip without the county’s “50” card, or downtown without the city’s “A” card, signifying clearance.
1983 Clark Oral Coll. We used to call a work permit an A card, but since Metro was formed [Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, combining city and county police], we just call it and the fifty card a sheriff’s card.
one hand on the dice, n. phr. In bank craps, a command from the stickman or boxman to a player to pick up and throw the dice with a single hand. Compare NO DICE and NO ROLL. 1984 Martinet Oral Coll. The house doesn’t want a shooter to use two hands in handling the dice. It’s too easy to pull a switch. If somebody uses two hands, like cupping the hands and blowing on the dice, the stick or somebody will yell, “one hand on the dice, shooter.” If there’s anything suspicious about the move, the stick will kill the dice [stop the dice while they are rolling] and shove them to the boxman. He has to say “no roll” quickly so there won’t be a beef.
second dealing, n. The act of dealing a card other than the top card on a pack.
1891 Hoffman Baccarat. There is, however, an expedient familiar to conjurers as “changing a card,” which, with a little modification, is extensively used by the cardsharping fraternity under the name of “second dealing.” The result of the sleight is that the dealer, while apparently giving the top card in the usual way, actually gives the second card instead of it.
Clark relies to some extent on oral collections, his own and that of Thomas A. Martinet, which have been built up over the years. One is tempted to envision Clark, “wired,” hanging about in gambling dens; but anyone familiar with the casinos around the world knows that those glittery palaces could scarcely be so characterized. Damon Runyon’s ghost (or the ghosts of some of the personnel who “worked” his novels) will not be in evidence here.
According to the Dictionary, a chute is the name for the slot (over the drop box) through which the dealer pushes the money paid for chips at a gaming table. According to Monte Carlo folklore, it was a slide, accessible only through a trap-door, that emptied out into the Mediterranean far below: the bodies of gamblers who had taken their own lives after losing the family fortunes were dispatched through the chute into oblivion. What happens to bodies in Atlantic City, Las Vegas, and other gambling hells is not revealed in this book, but one can be sure that those who run the establishments do not take kindly to losers who ask for their money back, explaining that they did not know that they were playing “for keeps.”
There have been other dictionaries on the subject: Clark lists the important ones as Sources at the end of this volume. But this work is probably the best of them all. The Dictionary of Gambling & Gaming is not a gamble, and anyone putting down his $48 will be betting on a sure thing.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Bloomsbury Good Word Guide
Martin H. Manser, ed., (Bloomsbury, 1988), xiii + 271pp.
Some very talented people have brought their knowledge to bear on everyday questions and problems of language in this book: Martin Manser, whose Penguin Wordmaster Dictionary was favorably reviewed here [XIV, 2]; Betty Kirkpatrick, editor of Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary; Jonathon Green, compiler of the Thesaurus of Slang, Newspeak, and a Dictionary of Jargon (soon to be reviewed here); and John Silverlight, who writes a language column in The Observer, which I have not seen. From such a formidable team, one should expect a good Good Word Guide.
This book suffers from the essential problem shared with all other books of reference: however sound the advice they give, it is useless and meaningless if it is not looked up. That might seem too much of a truism even for me to express, but let me explain. Many people feel that educational systems everywhere have deteriorated to an unconscionably low level and that students are no longer taught (in particular) English grammar and usage the way they once were. In the “good old days,” when the system was presumably better, many books on usage were also published, so one must conclude that although students then might have been “exposed” to grammar and usage, they did not learn it. Yet, one does have the (possibly romantic) impression that even though grammar and usage were not properly learned, at least enough of a subliminal impression of them was retained by students to lead them to doubt a construction when they encountered it, driving them to check it in a Fowler or some other work. What I am getting at is that more and more people today seem to be less and less aware of any but their own way of using the language, either because they are no longer exposed to the writings of great authors, or because they are not taught grammar and usage and style, or both. The only way students can be taught to improve their use of any language is by compelling them to use it, chiefly by requiring of them on a regular basis, preferably not less often than once a week, a piece of writing which is gone over carefully for usage and grammar to ensure a compatibility with a standard to be devoutly wished for if not achieved. After five years or more of such exercise, even if the individual cannot recall the difference between imply and infer, at least it is likely that whenever a choice is encountered a small bell will ring somewhere in the recesses of his mind, recalling a long-forgotten paper for which the grade might have been reduced because of a failure to know the difference. If this were a Rube Goldberg contraption, this recollection would remind the writer of the grease spot on page 2, caused by his having eaten a Big Mac, the memory of which conjures up such a vivid image that the writer opens his mouth to take a bite, and a string attached to his lower jaw releases a mouse, the sight of which arouses a cat which chases it, causing the mouse to squeal, awakening a midget who stretches, tripping open a trapdoor; through the trapdoor falls a usage book, sliding down a chute into the hands of the writer.
Would that life were so simple!
There appears to be nothing remaining to prompt people to use usage books—indeed, reference books of any kind. In a time when professional writers write things like, “Neither Lord King nor Sir Colin Marshall … were available for comment…” (and worse), one cannot accuse them of having made an error of judgment because that implies an awareness of choice; in order to have a choice, one must know of alternatives, and I am ineluctably drawn to the conclusion that people write the way they do because they know of no alternative.
Those who publish usage books seem to believe that sometime, somewhere, there will be people who, when they use neither, will immediately rush to their Good Word Guide to find out whether it takes a singular or a plural verb. That, as we all know, is a forlorn hope (to abuse a Dutch cliché): those who “know” that when two or more people or things are the subject of a verb you have to use were, not was, regardless of the context, are like those who “know” (like the people at Elizabeth Arden) that millennium is spelled with one n, who “know” that it is Parmagiana, not Parmigiana (like the people at Burger King), and who have no doubt that baking soda, baking powder, washing soda, and ice-cream soda are all the same thing. The cause would appear to be lost when one takes note that the only pronunciation recorded in British dictionaries for machismo is “makizmo,” as if it were derived from Italian: even a spelling pronunciation would have been preferable.
Given the nature of the publishing business today, it is probably not at all surprising to see another usage book (bearing in mind that the Fowler is being updated by Robert Burchfield), though, if you believe all the foregoing palaver, no one will ever refer to it. All that having been said, it must be acknowledged that as long as people buy books, publishers do not really much care whether they are read, used as doorstops, or for propping up a sagging curio cabinet.
Turning to the Introduction, written by Betty Kirkpatrick, we read, “There is a school of thought prevalent mainly among older people which seeks to impose a kind of restriction on language that is not imposed on other areas of life.” [p. v] I guess that “older” means ‘anyone older than Kirkpatrick,’ which I happen to be; but, while it is a matter of fact (and of record) that I do seek to impose restrictions, they are directed against inept, ineffectual, inaccurate language and poor style. Moreover, who says I don’t seek to impose restrictions on other areas of life? I despise bad art, hypocrisy and other forms of dishonesty and, in general, execrate any policy or behavior that interferes with the rights and freedoms of others.
Having relegated conservatism and old fogeyism to one another, Kirkpatrick asks [p. vi], “Should we say it wasn’t I or it wasn’t me; between you and me or between you and I; different from, different to, or different than; less bottles of milk or fewer bottles of milk?” (In my own recommended usage, when it comes to milk, it makes no difference; but if you are talking about beer or gin, then neither is acceptable.) What does that word should mean? Smacks of old fogeyism, does it not?
Further down page vi: “Where a supposed alternatives is in fact wrong this is clearly stated.” Wrong? Who is the old fogey now, Kirkpatrick? Again and again we read about “the careful user, who wishes to use English correctly and congently” in contrast to “the run-of-the-mill user, who frequently sacrifices care and correctness in the interests of speed.” To impute such sacrifices to a desire for speed is not only a misinterpretation of the evidence but a curious thing to say, for those who are in a hurry are scarcely likely to stop everything, pick up this (or any other book) to check something, and then resume their headlong plunge into the solecistic abyss. Are not the “run-of-the-mill users” really just “the careless users, who [as they would probably say] could care less about using English correctly and cogently”?
The most attractive thing about this book is the writing, which, for the most part, is simple, clear, straightforward, and readable. In short, the book is “user-friendly.” It is essentially a British work for the British market (or for people who want to use English the way the British do). The entries cover spelling, pronunciation, grammar, punctuation, usage, buzz words, and subsets of all of those. The advice is direct (if old-fogeyish):
Alternative should not be used in place of alternate. [Deceptively] is frequently misused….
[D]espite of is incorrect, and it is never necessary to precede either despite or in spite of with but. To avoid mistakes, remember the a in aircraft and hangar.
…And so on. In other words, one gets the impression that the convervatism criticized on page v was promptly forgotton on page vi. Inevitably, I have some suggestions and criticisms to offer:
It would have been useful, when discussing the spelling of gynaecology, to have added a word on its pronunciation.
A note on custom (Brit.) versus business (U.S.) might prove helpful.
At the entry for bi-, the definition of bicentennial as ‘every two hundred years’ omits mention of its more commonly encountered use as a noun (along with bi-centenary) meaning ‘two-hundredth anniversary.”
A note on annual would have been useful to criticize the usage “First Annual Competition.”
There are some typographical errors, as in the second pronunciation of dinghy, where the roman “i” should have been in italics. The bad hyphenations, apparently performed by a (feeble-minded, misprogrammed) computer and not reviewed by a (knowledgeable) proofreader, are inexcusable in a book of this kind: “buc-ket” (at -ful); prop-osed (at irony); “sing-ular” (at kind of); “trad-itionally” (at or); “ostentati-ous” (at ostensible), etc. The worst and most embarrassing—if these sorts of things can still embarrass publishers — is “spel-ling,” which occurs at Americanism and again at your or you’re?, from which it is picked up for reproduction on page xi of the front matter.
The writing falters in the entries for imply or infer? and centre on or centre around?
A funny thing or two happened in the pronunciation key: the distinction is made between r as the symbol for the initial sound in rim and rr for the medial sound in marry. Although these are different sounds in many British English dialects, they are not only allophonic but in complementary distribution (that is, they never exchange places), hence do not need separate symbols. Also, the editors have avoided the schwa \?\, preferring to resurrect the antediluvian system used by Merriam-Webster in the Second Edition of their Unabridged (and since abandoned by almost everyone). Even in the “ah-OO-gah,” or “moo-goo-gaipan” school of pronunciation, the unstressed vowel is rendered by a uniform symbol, usually “uh.”
At and/or we read, “cotton and/or nylon socks, for example, means ‘cotton socks, nylon socks, and socks made from a mixture of cotton and nylon.’ ” To me, it means, ‘cotton socks, or nylon socks, or both’: there is nothing inherent in the example even hinting at the existence of socks made of a nylon and cotton mixture.
In the matter of Celsius versus centigrade, the point is not that they are “identical” (which is ambiguous for ‘very similar’ and ‘the same thing’), but that they are the same thing: the scale formerly called centigrade was renamed in 1948 to honor Anders Celsius, the 18th-century Swedish astronomer who devised it.
Information on American usage is treated inconsistently and, as the book is for the British user, might well have been eliminated altogether.
There is no entry for free gift, just as obnoxious in Britain as anywhere else English is used.
An entry on this or that? would have been in order, chiefly to cover its usage as a pronoun or pronominal adjective of reference.
In the entry for former or latter? the advice is given to write, “The killer left…in a stolen car; this [not the latter] was later found….” I do not consider that good writing.
As for the English word forte ‘strength,’ it is not the feminine form of the French adjective fort ‘strong’ but an English “feminization” of the French noun fort ‘strength.’ The pronunciation “for-tay” is an illiteracy, scarcely attributable (as given here and in various dictionaries) to a confusion with the musical direction so pronounced because that is a loanword from Italian: those who know about musical directions are not likely to blunder that badly.
If enough people buy this book, it will soon need a second printing which, it is hoped, will include some of the foregoing (not these) recommendations.
Laurence Urdang
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Free lays to the first 50 people!!” [From an invitation to a “Blue Hawaii” Beach Party in Staff Bulletin No. 31, p. 6, of the Madison Area (Wisconsin) Tech College. Submitted by Mary Louise Gilman, Hanover, Massachusetts.]
Scrubs Wormwood for Gall
According to the EFL Gazette [June 1988], a judge in Birmingham, England, was outraged that a Pakistani, resident in Britain for 23 years, had the effrontery to be so ignorant of English as to need an interpreter in court; he sentenced the culprit to two years’ probation with the condition that he learn the language.
One of the worst decAIDS in memory, the theme song of the ’80s ought to be
Every little breeze
Seems to whisper “lues.”
OBITER DICTA: Bardoubling
Robert D. Anson, Midland, Texas
When Imogen rhapsodizes on the immensity of her love for her banished husband she insists it is beyond beyond. For many years I have been captivated by that phrase, created by the doubling of a fairly ordinary preposition/noun, now magically employed in just that relationship. This expression of infinity produces a stunning effect, one not likely with two or three discrete words. Shakespeare has coined an expansive image out of the minimum arrangement of this simple word. And beyond beyond describes the poet himself, in his surpassing power of imagination and his unparalleled gift for language.
Thus inspired, I dreamed up a new word game. For the moment, call it “Doubling.” The player who has devised a ‘double’ provides to the others a definition, whereupon they try to respond with the precise double. Example: what has the cobbler when only one shoe form remains? Obvious answer, his last last. Or, last exam? Why, final final, of course. A verb/noun entry: to tough out a storm, that is, to weather weather. More doubles, minus definitions, are: cozy cozy, March march, short short, fair fair, and so on.
Our rules for playing are: capitalized words or proper names are allowed, but redundant entries are not; slick slick does not qualify. Nor do hyphenated phrases, such as go-go, no-no, which are merely intensification. The two words must be identical in spelling, but not in capitalization. However, players might well make their own rules.
This game was invented as ‘More matter for a May morning’ when my wife and I drove last month from West Texas to Hamilton, Montana, a goodly distance, be assured. The scenery was not always breathtaking, so a new word game (verbal, no paraphernalia) was needed to keep us awake. To honor the source of its inspiration, should we perhaps entitle it “Bardling,” or how about “Bardoubling”? Robert D. Anson
According to The Times [19 May 1988], Maria Tandy immigrated to Britain from Gyomaendrod, Hungary, in 1938 to work as a servant. Within a short time, her employer had been sent to India, costing her the position, and she learned of the death of her mother. The shock was severe enough to strike her dumb, and she was committed to a London hospital. When she recovered her power of speech, her English was so bad that she could not make herself understood, and she languished in the hospital for almost 40 years—till recently, when the hospital began to make arrangements to close and move her elsewhere. An interpreter was called in, investigated her background and story, and discovered that some of her sisters still lived in Hungary. Miss Tandy, now 78, will rejoin her family to live out her years.
EPISTOLA {John A. McCormick}
To Mr. Sebastian’s most enjoyable article, “Red Pants” [XV,3] may I presume to add “The Lay of the Last Minstrel?”
[John A. McCormick, San Josef, British Columbia]
EPISTOLA {I. Switzer}
The definition of schmeer [XV, 3] in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary is wrong—or at least incomplete. Schmeer is a Yiddish verb meaning ‘to apply an ointment or lubricant’ and is commonly used as a slang term for ‘bribe,’ no doubt because a bribe is seen as lubricating the wheels of bureaucracy. I cannot imagine how it has come to mean the ‘entire deal, whole package.’
[I. Switzer, Palm Springs]
EPISTOLA {Abigail Ann Martin}
Certainly VERBATIM is one of the most literate publications in the English-speaking world today. Because of that, I was surprised (and a little shocked) to find the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin referred to as “Miss” Stowe in Robert M. Sebastian’s amusing article, “Red Pants.” Surely every student of American literature knows that Harriet Beecher Stowe was the sister of the famous clergyman Henry Ward Beecher and the wife of Dr. Calvin Stowe, another eminent divine.
[Abigail Ann Martin, Port Angeles, Washington]
[Similarly from Col. Robert O. Rupp, Colorado Springs.]
EPISTOLA {Cynthia Cragin}
I am surprised that to my knowledge, there has been no published response to ETYMOLOGICA OBSCURA [XIV,4] with regard to the weasel. Surely there is someone else alive besides myself who was taught the dance as a child and was told that the weasel was part of a stitching and weaving machine. During part of the dance, partners did weave in and out. In another part, the two head dancers skipped down the inside of a double row and back outside, exchanging places with the next in line, thus “popping the weasel.”
The following words would seem to indicate that the weasel was a part of a sewing machine:
A penny for a spool of thread,
A penny for a needle.
That’s the way the money goes—
“Pop!” goes the weasel.
Up and down the village street,
Up and down the teasle… etc.
The teasle is also part of a stitching machine. I don’t recall the “monkey” part of the verse, but this could be the mechanism which “popped” the weasel by checking the stitching and reversing the machine to start a new row. Frequently, the thread broke at this time and the machine had to be rethreaded.
[Cynthia Cragin, Greeneville, Tennessee]
Favorite Grammatical Games: Legerdemain in Two Senses and False Scents
Douglas Greenwood, Barrie, Ontario
In front of a cozy fire on a winter’s night in the library of one of John Cheever’s country houses, on the beach at Waikiki, even on a New York or London commuter train, finding Legerdemain in Two Senses and False Scents can be fun and games for all, and all you need is (usually) some printed matter or even just an inventive mind.
In Fowler’s Modern English Usage one of the more intriguing entries is Legerdemain in Two Senses. Under that heading he points out the sneaky way in which one word is often two-faced in the sense that its first meaning gets switched when it is used the second time in a sentence. For example, here is one that I have slightly titivated:
Mark had now got his first taste of women, and it was a taste that was to show many developments.
Fowler points out that the taste Mark got first was an ‘experience’; the taste that showed developments was an ‘inclination.’ (It was a first taste of print that Mark gets in Fowler, if you are wondering about that titivation.) The technical name for the device is polyptoton.
In other words, what happens is something like the legerdemain of a magician’s now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t. Did you catch my alls in the first paragraph, by the way? Let’s look as a few other choice specimens I have bagged:
It is dangerous to mess around with Ouija boards … and it is dangerous to condone them.
The first dangerous means ‘harmful,’ while the second means ‘irresponsible.’
Pretty girls finish first, which is pretty unfair to others.
The pretty pousse café is pretty hard to pour.
In the last two examples an adjective switches to an adverb. An ultimate epitome of the case: “She’s pretty pretty.”
Sixty-five is just as safe as fifty-five, so it’s safe to allow the faster speed.
Or to give equal time, as it were:
55 is safer than 65 mph, so it is safer to keep the limit at 55.
There is a nice touch of political legerdemain here, you’ll note, when the first safe(r) changes before our very eyes from having a physical connotation to a socio-political one.
There is a lovely example in Fowler about government, which shows how slack political phraseology can turn out to be (we just dropped a False Scent—no comma between the qualifiers of phraseology— see below) a black beast in any era; obviously the beast was rampaging even in Fowler’s golden days. We’ll bring things up to date by presenting his example in modern dress:
Many third-world countries are virtually subject to our American democratic government, but such government has generally been held back by Congress from taking any decisive action.
Sounds fair enough, surely? Ah, but you see there is a subtle quick-change there, and, these days, we should wonder whether it was intentional or just imprecise grammar. The first government really means ‘governance’ while the second means ‘governing body.’ True, there is an acceptable synonymity here but it is not to be used in the same sentence. And how about:
We must indeed all hang together, or… we shall all hang separately.
Such sloppiness can indeed become rich fare for the Supreme Court.
Now we come to those delightful False Scents.
They are sly. By all means read Fowler’s delightful statement of affairs about False Scents—he generates a wonderfully, though quite unwitting, humorous cameo of writer and reader virtually calling each other fools. The reader wins because he is right—it is up to the writer to ensure that the reader should not be given any False Scents. Here are two additional ones to the four examples Fowler gives that cause a reader to go down the wrong track in a sentence, ending in a sort of double-take:
Arthur found, after taking a wrong turning and going right past the house, and having looked for it carefully the day before, that he had left his pen and briefcase at home.
And we all thought he was going to find his dream house—or perhaps a million-dollar baby in a five-and-ten-cent store. Or as Fowler would (perhaps) say, Arthur found a noun clause instead of a good solid common noun he could mortgage or marry.
Leaning forward, with her hand shielding the strong sunlight from her eyes, she was looking, Arthur thought, particularly beautiful and poised.
We are beginning to get angry with Arthur. We all thought she was looking for him at least; certainly not for a mere predicate adjective.
Watch for more Favorite Grammatical Games in following issues of VERBATIM.
Brahman or brahman?
Pratapaditya Pal, Los Angeles, California
For several generations the Sanskrit word brahman (pronounced BRAAHMAN, the first vowel sounds as in the English word father) has been used in the English language. Until a decade or so ago it was spelt brahmin, which is now given as an alternate spelling, and has survived in such expressions of common occurrence as Boston Brahmins. While every literate American may not be familiar with the expression, those who are will know that a Boston Brahmin refers to the aristocrats or first families of Boston such as the Cabots and the Lodges. My concern is not with the meaning of the expression but with the persistent capitalization of the word.
Derived from Brahma ‘the First Principle or Supreme Being of some Hindu philosophical systems such as Vedanta,’ a brahman is primarily a person who believes in Brahma, or Brahman. By extension brahman came to mean a ‘member of the sacred or sacerdotal caste,’ as Webster has it. In order to avoid confusion I shall henceforth spell the word without capitalization to denote the ‘caste’ and with a capital to imply ‘the Absolute.’ This in fact is the crux of the problem. When we use the word Absolute with a capital “a” we know that it has a very specific application. It is high time that brahman be so spelt when the caste is implied, reserving Brahman when ‘the Absolute’ is meant. This will not only help the reader to distinguish between the two meanings but will conform to conventional capitalization in the English language.
The error was originally made by the British in 17th-century India. Not only were the brahmans the best educated Hindus they met, but also, more important, it was soon realized that among the Hindus the brahman was a much more “sacred” group than say the molla is among the Muslims, the rabbi among the Jews, or the priest among the Christians. From time immemorial the brahmans of India had insisted upon their social and spiritual superiority. In many of the common Sanskrit prayers a brahman is invoked or imprecated along with the gods. To do reverence to a brahman was to do reverence to Brahman, for a brahman was not simply the intermediary between man and the gods: he was a god.
Confronted with this attitude and somewhat awed, the British acknowledged their respect by capitalizing the word. But what is even more curious is that they also capitalized the expressions for the three other castes, viz. kshatriya ‘martial class,’ vaisya ‘farmers and merchants,’ and sudra ‘menials.’ It is remarkable that this anomaly still persists, even in many modern sources.
The English-speaking world, expecially Great Britain, Canada, the U.S.A., and even India claim to be the bastions of democracy, which clearly should not recognize caste or class distinctions. Is it not ironic then that they should still perpetuate so blatant a fallacy? Compilers of our dictionaries should stop capitalizing the words for the four Hindu castes and retain the custom only for Brahma or Brahman when it implies the Absolute. Not only will it avoid confusion among users of dictionaries, but it will restore the preeminence of Brahma or Brahman while reducing the brahmans to the status of the rest of us mortals, where they really belong.
Harare (Reuter) - A Latin greeting from the Pope brought Zimbabwe’s Parliament to a halt when the Justice Minister, Mr Emmerson Mnangagwa, objected to the use of what was not an official language. [The Times, 30 September 1988]
On January 12th, 1989, Carole Leonard, who compiles a chatty column for The Times of items picked up on the Rialto in The City, reported that a “reader in Surrey” (not, for a change, “Disgusted,” Tunbridge Wells) received a tax form with the instruction “Send the cheque and payslip unfolded to the Collector in the envelope provided.” “I looked inside,” wrote the mystified reader, “but couldn’t find him.” A few pages on, the Scots Law Report carried the headline, “Causing death by reckless driving of person unborn at time of accident.”
EPISTOLA {John R. Cassidy}
Maxey Brooke’s article, “Texican” [XV,2], was an interesting comment on a phenomenon that must fascinate anybody who loves words. Who would have thought that a word like quirt, which I had always associated with hounds and stirrup cups, came from the Spanish for ‘rope,’ or ‘string,’ cuerda. The meagre sources I have at home bear out that origin, however.
I hope Mr. Brooke will forgive my picking a couple of nits. He implies that chile and tamale are Mexican words that have passed into English usage. They may be Texican in that form, but in the original Mexican they had to be chile and tamal (chilis and tamales in the plural, of course.) Chile is the country, and even the most ignorant Mexican would not call one tamal a tamale.
The word transfers work in the opposite direction, too, of course. Witness the Mexican and Central American use of parquear ‘to park,’ instead of the more traditionally Spanish estacionar. A dancing in Buenos Aires is a rather low-class nightclub. For wrestling, or what is loosely called wrestling in the United States and Latin America, the people of the Southern Cone of South America went to the English catch-as-catchcan. If you are familiar with the difficulty Spanish speakers have with dentals and fricatives when these are not separated by vowels, you can understand that the task of producing a string of sounds like that tends to stop a conversation, if not the speaker. So it was soon shortened to catchascan, and then ultimately to catch, leaving the t in the written form, although it is foreign to Spanish orthography. So in Buenos Aires, if you want to inform somebody you are going to the wrestling matches, you say “Voy al catch.”
I guess people are a little nutty if they take a delight in these things.
[John R. Cassidy, Fairfax, Virginia]
EPISTOLA {G. Sharman}
David W. Porter [XV,3] tells us that the Japanese “produce such monstrosities as sutoraike for English ‘strike’…” Sad to say, he is doubly wrong. In baseball, the transliteration is equivalent to sutoraiku; in labor relations (an earlier borrowing) to sutoraiki.
As for Gone with the Windo, he errs in leaving Gone with the untouched and his Windo would correctly be Uindo. Others of his assertions are not amenable to brief correction.
[G. Sharman, Hollywood]
EPISTOLA {P.S. Falla}
Mr. J.A. Davidson should not adopt the pronunciation of scone to rhyme with ‘bone’—at any rate not because Victoria, where he lives, is “veddy English.” That pronunciation is a shibboleth, or rather sibboleth, in English English in terms of “U” and “non-U”—as John Betjeman noted years ago in his cautionary poem How to Get On in Society, which ends:
Milk and then just as it comes, dear?
I’m afraid the preserve’s full of stones;
Beg Pardon, I’m spoiling the doileys
With afternoon tea-cakes and scones.
(The first line of the poem, in case anyone wants to read more of it, is “Phone for the fish-knives, Norman.”)
Mr. Davidson misquotes Gowers, who does not say that the Scottish pronunciation is ‘skawn’ (which would rhyme with ‘dawn.') What he gives is ‘sk\?\n’—with a ‘short sign’ over the o—rhyming with ‘don,’ which is socially correct south of the Border as well as north.
[P.S. Falla, Bromley, Kent]
EPISTOLA {Arthur E. Woodruff}
A friend showed me VERBATIM [XIV,3] in which I noted the paragraph on page 2 about names for subatomic particles. Actually, the word quark is in the OED as a verb meaning ‘croak,’ with 19th-century references to frogs, rooks, and herons. This seems more relevant to Joyce’s use than the German word for ‘curds.’ This was missed by Tindall in his Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake and McHugh in his Annotations to FW, while Glasheen has it in her 3rd Census.
Much could be said about particle names. SUSY (pronounced as spelt), or supersymmetry theory, is prolific. Each known elementary particle is associated with a hypothetical complementary particle (recalling, surely unintentionally, “sosie sesthers,” (FW, p.3): SUSY = ? French sosie = ‘twin’). Most Joycean are slepton (partner to the leptons) and wino (partner to the W boson) … as well as squark. There’s lots more in the field (or not in it), such as techniquarks, glueballs, and ghosts (which are not really there).
[Arthur E. Woodruff, Middletown, Connecticut]
EPISTOLA {Donald R. Morris}
Further to “Do Mistake—Learn Better” [XV,1]: During the Vietnamese conflict, the country was filled with mangled English-Vietnamese-English translations, especially in correspondence between assorted offices of the two nations. The overwhelming majority of the confusion stemmed from the fact that the only “complete” bilingual dictionary readily available to the Vietnamese was a two-volume monstrosity by a French professor in the 1920s. I cannot answer for his command of Vietnamese; his grasp of English was, to put it mildly, feeble and slippery.
The Central Intelligence Agency was widely known as the “Inside Detective Bureau”; we eventually started to use it ourselves. A phrase commonly used by Vietnamese commands to describe what they were doing to North Vietnam was “foil up their dark schemes.”
I had a Mrs. Ban assigned to me as a translator; she spoke exquisite French and fluent—if somewhat stilted—English. On one occasion I asked her to translate a document into Vietnamese describing the modus operandi of the Soviet Illegals program. It was then passed to a Vietnamese office, which a week later returned it, politely reporting that they couldn’t make head or tail of it. I took a paragraph at random and passed it to another translator, asking him to render it into English, and the problem became immediately apparent.
The original contained the sentence, “The Soviet Illegal, blending with the populace, is free of the unwelcome limelight cast on the personnel of the Soviet embassy by the local security forces.” What came back was, “The police threw a burning citrus tree at the Slavic bandit, who was disguised as a crowd; they missed him but hit the Russian ambassador.”
I called for Mrs. Ban and told her I would read the document to her, paragraph by paragraph. She was to ask any questions she wanted to, and when she understood the passage, she was to render it freely into Vietnamese, without attempting to make a verbatim translation. It worked beautifully.
In the course of the first session with Mrs. Ban, the word cipher came up; she did not understand it. I started to explain, and then noticed a copy of The Saturday Review on my desk. “Here,” I said, turning to the Literary Cryptogram. “This is a cipher. It’s a short quotation from some well-known author, with his name. For every letter, another one has been substituted, so you can’t read it. You have to puzzle it out.”
She picked up the magazine, inspected the cryptogram, frowned, nodded, and left the office. She was back within fifteen minutes with the correct solution inked in over the mono-alphabetical cipher. I was stunned.
“Mrs. Ban,” I said, “Very few Americans could work that out without being taught how to go about it. Would you mind explaining how you did it?”
“Sure. You say name is well-known author. Name is XQ PLRZADLTRQTXF. I look at first name, two letters. Only American first names with two letters are Ed and Al, and you got no famous writers in America or England named Ed or Al. So I think maybe particule—“De” or “La”—hey! Maybe “La Rochefoucauld !” And, yes, ls, as, os, and us all come out in right place. So I write in up above, and rest is easy. Fun! You got more?”
I gave her a raise on the spot.
[Donald R. Morris, The Houston Post]
EPISTOLA {Ben Kayfetz}
In “The Joys and Oys of Yiddish” [XV,3], Messrs. Lederer and Schenkerman put the word cockamamy (or cockamamie) at the head of a list of Yiddish words found in English as published in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. I have spoken Yiddish since childhood, have a fairly wide reading knowledge and acquaintance with various levels and styles of the language, but have never come across a word or phrase resembling cockamamy. It simply has no meaning in that language. Leo Rosten may list it in his book, The Joys of Yiddish, but he fails to make a positive identification. As for gun moll, there was no phrase in the Warsaw or Odessa underworlds like “gonif molly.” If I am not mistaken, the word moll is a well-rooted native word in English going back at least as far as Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. The gun part derives plainly from the English gun.
As for schnoz, it does sound Yiddish, there does exist a verb schneitzen ‘to blow one’s nose,’ and the shn- combination does connote something to do with the nose; but there is no word shnozzle in Yiddish, only noz or, in the alternate dialect, nuz. Phudnik is not a Yiddish word but was clearly formed on the Yiddish root -nik, which also occurs in Slavic. I don’t know where the -sh sound arose in nebbish, but in all eastern European dialects of Yiddish the word is nebbikh or nebbakh, with a velar fricative sound that is rendered as -sh by speakers who find that easier to pronounce.
[Ben Kayfetz, Toronto]
EPISTOLA {Edward J. Martinson}
Concerning Thomas H. Middleton’s “Muskrats ‘R’ Not?” [XV,3], according to the album cover of my LP, Ory’s Creole Trombone (Good Time Jazz, L12004), the origin of the name of “Muskrat Ramble” was at the session at which the newly composed tune was first recorded. As the musicians were leaving, a record company representative asked the name of the new piece, which Kid Ory had not yet named. Lil Armstrong, who was the pianist for the session, improvised the answer, “That’s named ‘Muskrat Ramble’; isn’t that right, Red?” (Red was Kid Ory’s nickname.) Ory replied, “That’s right.” I remember that Lil Armstrong was quoted on the record sleeve as giving this explanation; although I still have the LP, the sleeve was destroyed some years ago. The blurb went on to explain that at a subsequent time some record company executive decided that “Muskrat Ramble” was too inelegant a title and changed its name on future pressing to “Muskat [or Muscat] Ramble.” My LP, from the 1950s, gives the title as “Muskrat Ramble.”
[Edward J. Martinson, New York City]
EPISTOLA {W.H. Buell}
As always, it was a delight to read the new VERBATIM. It is even more fun, though, to catch our omniscient editor in a small blooper. The comment on square the circle in the review of Loose Cannons & Red Herrings [XV,3] misses the point when it states, “…there is no mathematical way of calculating the dimensions of a square with the same area as that of a given circle.” This classic geometrical problem requires that one start with a given circle and construct a square of the same area, using the straight-edge and compass, the only tools permitted the geometer.
The mathematician, on the other hand, can calculate the dimensions of such a square, to any desired degree of accuracy, using simple algebra. You can quibble, of course, that such an answer can never be perfect, but that has nothing to do with the problem of squaring the circle geometrically.
[W.H. Buell, Los Angeles]
[Similarly from Iraj Kalantari, Macomb, Illinois, and James G. Wendel, Palo Alto.]
EPISTOLA {Robert J. Powers}
Pace Webster’s Third [XV,3], but including the word cockamamie in a Yiddish lexicon is questionable, as is the definition given. As a youngster in The Bronx in the early 1930s, I would occasionally take my windfall of a few pennies to the local candy store and buy a strip of cockamamies, ‘comic-style cartoons in brilliant colors, each about an inch by an inch and a half, transferable to forearm or forehead by wetting,’ preferably with saliva to make things agreeably messy. As we grew older we came to realize that cockamamie was merely a child’s distortion of decalcomania. Later, cockamamie came to mean ‘cheap, sleazy, gaudy, trashy, junky’—but never “mixed-up, ridiculous.” I’ll accept the word as a Bronxism, but not as an exclusive property of the Yiddish language.
[Robert J. Powers, Shreveport, Louisiana]
EPISTOLA {David Gold}
Maxey Brooke writes [XV,2] that English tamale is from Spanish tamale. There is, however, no such Spanish word. Rather, two explanations may be offered for this English word. My explanation is that English-speakers borrowed Spanish plural tamales (whose singular is tamal), from which they back-formed a new singular, tamale (i.e., the division into morphemes in Spanish is tamal-es whereas English-speakers took it to be tamale-s). English has both frijol and frijole, the latter of which may be explained in the same way: English-speakers borrowed Spanish plural frijoles (whose singular is frijol), from which they back-formed a new singular, frijole (again, the morpheme division in Spanish is frijol-es whereas certain English-speakers took it to be frijole-s). English frijol, on the other hand, is derived straightforwardly from the Spanish singular.
A different explanation of tamale was offered in American Speech 48, 3-4, 1973, p. 292: “Just as the American recalls that French words should be stressed on the final syllable, he recalls, or thinks he recalls, that all Spanish words should end with a vowel: sombrero, señorita, noche and so on. These items are all in the singular. Thus, by analogy, many Americans make tamale, instead of the correct tamal, the singular of tamales…. By the same analogy, equipal, the splint and leather patio chair so popular in Mexico, becomes equipale….”
The second explanation is possible, though numerous Spanish words end in a consonant and I don’t know how the two explanations could be verified. The least one may say is that no English dictionary published through 1987 gives a fully correct etymology for tamale or frijol(e).
An English noun which is definitely back-formed from a plural is blints (often misspelled “blintz”). Yiddish has (singular) blintse/ (plural) blintses, hence blints is an English innovation. Interestingly, whereas tamale and frijole have acquired a nonetymological vowel, blints has lost an etymological vowel. In general, back-formation of new singulars from plurals is a sign that the plural is textually more frequent than the singular (indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary lists only frijoles and no singular form whatsoever for English).
After the new singulars emerged in English, new plurals were formed. Although English tamales, frijoles, and blintses, as now usually pronounced, appear to be derived from Spanish tamales, Spanish frijoles, and Yiddish blintses, they are actually innovations, formed in English by the addition of English -s (in the first two cases) or -es (in the third) to the innovative English singulars. This is proven by the fact that the English plurals are pronounced with [z] and not, as in the case of the Spanish and Yiddish plurals, with [s]. That is, since Spanish or Yiddish [s] > English [z] would be phonologically unlikely here, -s and -es in the English plurals are the native English plural allomorphs rather than Spanish- or Yiddish-origin allomorphs. Only among the few people who pronounce the English plurals with [s] are these words derived from the plurals used in Spanish or Yiddish. Generally, these are people strongly influenced by one of these two languages.
Brooke’s derivation of machete from Spanish macho ‘male’ is a folk etymology: the two words are unconnected and the correct etymology may be found on pp. 746-750 of vol. 3 of Joan Corominas and José A. Pascual’s Diccionario critico etimológico castellano e hispánico (Madrid, Gredos, 1980).
[David Gold, Haifa]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“German Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl Sings With Doubleday.” [From Publishers Weekly, 4 November 1988. Submitted by Milton Horowitz, Jackson Heights, New York.]
Mrs. Malaprop in Mexico
Lysander Kemp, Harwichport, Massachusetts
Mrs. Malaprop is so English that I thought her “nice derangement of epitaphs” was a glory peculiar to our language. But then I lived in Mexico and soon knew better. The first Mexican malapropism I heard, or recognized as such, was spoken at Chole Durán’s refreshment booth in the plaza of Jocotepec, Jalisco. Doña Faustina was bringing Chole up to the minute, and in the course of her gossip she mentioned that her niece Socorro had been grávida but was now aliviada. Two young farmhands were also at the booth, drinking in the prattle with their Pepsis. When Faustina left, one of them asked the other, “Have you ever been grávido?”
“Just once, when I was ten. But my mother bought me some pills and I got over it.”
Chole tried not to laugh, but she laughed. When she explained to us that grávida means ‘pregnant,’ the farmhands loved the joke, their Indian eyes bright with amusement. One of them explained that they thought grávido was a more educated form of grave, which means ‘gravely ill.’ As for aliviada, it means being ‘alleviated or cured.’ When a child is born, it is as if the mother had recovered from a disease.
After that, with my ears attuned, I heard malapropisms on all sides, and even recognized that I committed them myself. For a while, I confused ejote ‘string bean,’ elote ‘corn on the cob,’ and olote ‘corncob’ (I fired the water heater with dried corncobs). Poor Lola, who cooked and cleaned for me, had to divine what I meant when I asked for corncobs as a dinner vegetable or remarked that we were almost out of string beans for the water heater. I was also guilty of asking her to serve a pork chop in adobe rather than adobo. The latter is a sauce related to the mole that Moctezuma served to Cortés. The former, of course, is a mud of another color.
Even so, I never blundered as badly as the dowager staying at the little Hotel La Quinta. She was on a diet that forbade dessert and coffee, so she left the dining room before the other guests. When she reached the doorway she always turned, gave a stately nod, and said, “Excusado.” Obviously she thought she was saying, “Excuse me,” and no one could find the courage to tell her that excusado was a euphemism for what we call, among other things, the john.
In the back yard next to mine, young Mateo sometimes raised his voice in malapropistic song. On one occasion, what I heard over the wall was his version of “Siete Leguas,” a ballad about Pancho Villa that begins:
Seven Leagues was the horse
That Villa liked best.
But Mateo changed leguas to lenguas, which means ‘tongues,’ literally, or ‘languages.’ Was this remarkable horse a polyglot? No wonder Villa esteemed it. On another, Mateo warbled “Ojitos de capulín,” a familiar mariachi song. A capulín is a small, shiny-black fruit, and the title means that the girl’s “little eyes”—the diminutive of affection, with no hint that she was beady-eyed—were dark and lustrous. In Mateo’s version, capulín became chapulín, which means ‘grasshopper.’ So she was not beady-eyed, but bug-eyed.
Small children are often malapropists, especially when they have to memorize texts they cannot understand. My sister, when small, asked our parents if we lived in America. On being assured that we did, she asked why they told her in school that we live in Tizzavy. It turned out that she was referring to “My country, ‘tis of thee….”
Lola’s daughter, Teresa, was almost as inventive, and again it was the Lord’s Prayer. In Spanish it begins, “Padre nuestro que estás en los cielos, santificado sea tu nombre.” Teresa changed cielos to celos and santificado to santo pintado, so that in Biblical English it comes out something like, “Our Father which art in jealousies, painted saint be Thy name.” The first reminds me of “I the Lord thy God am a jealous God,” and the second is not as far-fetched as it seems. Although santo means ‘saint,’ a santo as an object means a religious figure carved of wood, covered with gesso, carved in detail, and then painted. Teresa might have been thinking of the patron saint of Jocotepec, El señor del monte ‘The Lord of the Mountain,’ a nearly life-sized santo of the crucified Christ that is believed to have been found in the branches of a tree in the mountains south of the village.
Finally, Lola, too, was a malapropist. I bought a packet of Burpee’s zinnia seeds in a pharmacy in Guadalajara, and when the plants bloomed I asked her what they were called in Spanish. “Normalginas,” she said. Next day, showing them off to my landlord, I was gently told that the correct word was “damasquinas,” with its exotic evocation of damask and Damascus. When I asked him what “normalginas” meant, if anything, he said that Normalgina was the trade name of a Mexican analgesic much like Anacin.
I decided to try it the next time I felt grávido.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Major Ronald Ferguson, father of the Duchess of York, has told the staff at his polo club that his daughter would not enter a private London hospital where she will give birth until Thursday.” [From the Detroit Free Press, 8 August 1988. Submitted by Mrs. William Kienzle, Southfield, Michigan.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Wednesday, September 2 will be declared a Monday for purposes of class attendance. This designation of Wednesday as a Monday is for the first week of Fall semester only.” [From the University of Southern California catalogue. Submitted by Scott McCarty, Long Beach.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“…more allegations of improper misconduct …” [From the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, 3 August 1988. Submitted by Alfred Strehli, Lubbock.]
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Complete Plain Words
Sir Ernest Gowers, rev. Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut, (Godine, 1988), xxiv + 288pp.
[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection.]
For years I have engaged in the often useful habit of reading Forewords, Prefaces, Prolegomena, Introductions, and other bits that appear at the beginnings of books. It is a practice to be recommended for one or more of several reasons: one can often be spared reading through a boring, badly conceived, or abominably written work; one can determine quite readily why the book was written and what its argument, or point, might be, then read the text to judge whether the author’s purpose has been carried out. Such front matter (as it is more commonly called in the U.S.), or prelims (so called in Britain), is usually written by the author (or one of them). There is a Preface to this book, written by the estimable Janet Whitcut, which I shall get to in a moment. First, though, is an essay, “What’s the Usage?,” by the inestimable Joseph Epstein, editor of American Scholar, professor of something at Northwestern University, and self-styled pseud. I hadn’t noticed who had written the essay till I encountered the following, barely three paragraphs into the writing:
It is closer to the truth to say that woolly circumlocutions, psychobabblous phrasing and sentiments, and language used as if it were a game of horseshoes (in which one expects points for being close) offends me.
Well, they offends me too, especially when they appears in the lead essay of a book on style and usage and particularly when it are a book of this quality. I saw little point in continuing reading Epstein when I was sure that matters could only improve by turning to Gowers, Greenbaum, and Whitcut, all of whom could be relied on to make subjects and predicates agree in number.
Putting outright, downright grammatical solecisms aside, it would be pertinent to reiterate my own attitude toward usage: as a linguist, I regard usage clinically and would no more criticize a writer or a speaker of any kind of English for “mistakes” than a doctor would criticize a patient for contracting appendicitis or the Malay waste-away; on the other hand, as a writer (albeit a poor one), I attend to matters of style (which includes usage and grammar, of course), not only in others’ writing but my own. As readers are quick to point out, my attention to such matters occasionally wanders, for which I offer no excuses. Yet the sense of discovery in finding Epsteinisms is undiminished, though any glee is mitigated by the feeling of embarrassment undoubtedly shared among David R. Godine, respected publisher, and Greenbaum and Whitcut, respected colleagues and friends.
The first edition of The Complete Plain Words, an edited amalgan of Plain Words (1948) and The ABC of Plain Words (1951), appeared in 1954; an edition revised by Sir Bruce Fraser was published in 1973; the present work, published by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (stolidly called “Her Britannic Majesty’s Stationary [sic] Office” on the copyright page) in 1986 to celebrate its bicentennial, is a revision of Fraser’s edition. As Whitcut carefully indicates in her Preface, chapters 3-14 and 18 are “almost pure Gowers…. In this third edition ‘we’ generally represents Greenbaum and Whitcut….” I spent some time ferreting about in the new material and am pleased to report (as I suspected) a sane and sensible approach (in chapter 15) to such topics as “The trend towards informality” (the language, even in Britain, is loosening up), “The objections to sexist language” (“Present usage is unstable. …[O]fficial writers [ought] to take evasive action.”), “The influence of science and technology” (“[I]nput has become an overworked vogue word… [as has] user-friendly….”), “The influences of other varieties of English” (in which one can find good examples of so-called Americanisms that were formerly British).
The authors pull no punches, characterizing one government memorandum as “spoilt by carelessness, clichés and flaccidity,” another as “rather stilted… [but] by no means outrageous,” a third as “verbose or stilted,” and a fourth as “containing wording and punctuation that is clumsy, ambiguous, and redundant.” For each of five specimens selected for analysis and comment, Greenbaum and Whitcut offer not only criticism but cogent suggestions for improvement. The sixth and seventh selections, one expository, one narrative, merit the authors’ praise: “good” and “graceful” are used in the comments; other adjectives are clear (structure), manageable (sentence length), appropriate (vocabulary), delicate (shifts of language level), and vivid.
The final chapter, 17, consists of a checklist of “words and phrases to be used with care.” The inevitable old chestnuts are here—infer/imply, appraise/ apprise, etc.—but most of the 250 or so entries in these 70-odd pages deal with matters of style, word selection, and the avoidance of pompous or meaningless clichés. For instance,
Accordingly Prefer so or therefore.
According to You can replace ‘According to our records’ by ‘Our records show’….
Condition (noun) If you mean rule, says so.
…and so forth. Some of the entries are longer than these, but not many. Missing is the horrid at this point in time, but that probably occurs more in speech than in writing. For a short list, it is a good one.
Of course, there is not much point in having any list unless people use it, which brings me to my main criticism of speakers and writers of a “certain” age (say, under 40) and education level. To put the matter differently, I could write an essay called “The Perils of Literacy” or “A Little Literacy Is a Dangerous Thing.” Much of the ineffectual use of language is traceable to the fact that although many people want to improve their language, they are completely unfamiliar with the help available to them. How, for example, are people to know whether to use infer or imply if they are totally unaware that any problem exists? For generations, people have pronounced the word KONtr\?\v\?\rsee; then, some odd body came along saying k\?\nTROV\?\rsee, and the faith of many speakers was shaken. If they had looked it up in a dictionary, which lists the pronunciation(s) used by a majority of speakers, k\?\nTROV\?\rsee would never have surfaced.
To be useful, The Complete Plain Words and other books like it must be read through. Then, when people are about to use infer or imply, a small voice should whisper, “I seem to recall that Gower [or Fowler, or some other work, including every medium-sized dictionary] had something on that,” occasioning a quick look-up that would resolve the question at once. But if people are not humble enough to doubt their own control over the vast complexities of the language and if, to boot, they are ignorant of the content of even the most basic available resources, then any hope of their learning how literate people express themselves is lost.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: One Who Goes Everywhere: The Ubiquarian’s Dictionary
Susanna Cuyler, (B. Rugged Books, 11 So. Adelaide Ave., Highland Park, NJ 08904).
Information specialists, psychologists, brain specialists, and anyone else who wants to get into the act have all speculated on the way the mind works. To be persuaded about the myriad possibilities, one need only visit a library. Tucked away in one corner is a collection of books on how to improve your memory, most of which offer different techniques. None suggests plain rote drilling: all suggest a pattern of association, some alphabetical, some psychological, some numerical, and so forth. Each has validity for the “kind of mind” a person has. Susanna Cuyler’s book begins with the suggestion “Make up a sentence, say it aloud. For example, Ablaqueate (to loosen ground around roots): ‘Absalom, come up from the lake and help me ablaqueate.”’ That might work for you, but I would forget the sentence (especially Absalom, my main association with the name being with Chaucer’s ribald Miller’s Tale).
Memorizing words is not the point of this book which, in addition to two titles, has a subtitle: “A literary distillation of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Webster’s International, and Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure and Preposterous Words.” The book is a list of words, with remarkably succinct definitions, that have captured the author’s fancy for one reason or another. Some are interesting and have a curiosity value (spaneria ‘a scarceness of men’), others, if learnt, would present some difficulties in fitting into most conversations (umber ‘sundial pointer’s shadow’). Like any written work, this one could stand some improving (urbicolous ‘urban domiciled’ could, less awkwardly have been ‘city-dwelling’).
It is not often useful but frequently great fun to have at hand a short, attractively packaged list of weird and wonderful words to carry about in your pocket. If you agree, send $10 to the address at the top of this review. If the photograph on the back cover, of an extremely attractive lady swinging, Tarzan-like, through the jungle, is of Ms. Cuyler, send your order in quickly, for she appears to be in sad need of a wardrobe.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Facts On File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins
Robert Hendrickson, (Facts On File, 1987), 581pp.
This is a good book and an interesting book. According to the author’s Preface, it covers some 7500 words and phrases, and its great fault is that it lacks an index. That is to say, there are about 4000 or so main entries, the rest of the terms being discussed within the entries; unless they begin with the same letter or words, the user will be unable to find them without an index. For example, tsar, tsarina, etc., are discussed at czar, but there is no cross reference in the Ts for the tsar words and, if you didn’t think (or know) to look under czar, you would think them missing. Publishers ought to learn that they cannot always anticipate the needs of users of books and that indexes are almost invariably an aid in finding things.
My other complaint is about compositors (and proofreaders) who set loose lines because they do not know how to hyphenate the word they have carried over to a following line. Today, compositors rely far too much on the automatic hyphenation programs packaged with their computer typesetting systems. A typical example occurs (as one might expect) at the entry for deipnosophist where a line that normally contains about 50 characters (plus spaces), has been printed with only 34 characters (plus spaces), mainly, apparently, because no one knew where to hyphen Deipnosophistai, the first word on the next line. This rather ugly phenomenon occurs here and there in this otherwise attractive book.
Back to the contents. General dictionaries give etymologies, albeit brief ones, of most of the words they list and fulfill a useful, if limited function. Extensive works, like the Oxford English Dictionary offer far more elaborate information, including, where appropriate (and available) valuable comments on the origins of sense development. Etymological dictionaries do pretty much the same, though for the most part they, like the OED, eschew information about multiword entries, idiomatic phrases, and such. Then there are books, like Funk’s A Hog on Ice and my own The Whole Ball of Wax, that treat the origins of particular kinds of expressions and, occasionally, words. Hendrickson’s book, EWPO for short, covers some standard, single-word entries, some oddities, a number of phrases and expressions, and a good selection of items not covered by most of the other books.
Much of what appears is well established; some of it is speculative, some taken from unreliable sources, and some at variance with the accepted scholarship. For instance, Allen Walker Read’s widely accepted etymology of O.K. is just the reverse of Hendrickson’s—the O.K. of oll korrect was adopted by Van Buren (“Old Kinderhook”) as a campaign cry, not the other way round. At horse latitudes, the author has picked up the theory that it comes from “golfo de las yeguas, ‘gulf of the mares,’ which was the Spanish name for the ocean between Spain and the Canary Islands and compares the supposed fickleness of mares with the fickle winds in these latitudes.” As far as I have been able to determine, golfo de las yeguas is a complete fiction, for there is no evidence for any such designation in any gazetteer that I could find nor at the Royal Geographical Society. Besides, the horse latitudes referred to were in the doldrums, which occur west, not east of the Canaries. I comment on that in Ball of Wax.
My current theory runs as follows: the Sargasso Sea, a region northeast of the West Indies, is characterized as an area of relative calm and an abundance of sargassum, an entangling seaweed. As such seaweeds thrive in the Gulf Stream, they are generally called gulfweeds. In all likelihood, the region was originally known as golfo del mar in Spanish, that is, ‘gulf of the sea,’ and was so entered on charts. English speakers who used the charts read mar as mare ‘female horse,’ which was later generalized to horse. Another possibility is that the origin was French golfe de la mer or latitude de la mer, French mer being quite close in sound to English mare, which was later generalized to horse. A third possibility is that the waters were populated by manatees, which might have been likened to horses, not too farfetched a suggestion when one considers that sailors are said to have imagined them to be mermaids. The theory that the horse latitudes were so named because mariners becalmed there threw overboard the horses they were transporting because they died of thirst or starved seems almost impossible: in order for such an event to have given rise to horse latitudes it would have to have recurred many times, and it is hard to believe that 16th- and 17th-century mariners were so improvident as to have allowed that to happen very often. Thus, I cannot accept Hendrickson’s origin for horse latitudes, though, to give him his due, he only copied the etymology from other sources, the OED included.
A baker’s dozen of other matters:
-
At Hore-Belisha, the information is given that the pedestrian crosswalk signals are “often called Hore-Belishas”; in my experience, the term is usually Belisha beacon.
-
At heliotrope, some might miss the point without the information that Apollo was the Greek god of the sun.
-
At guerilla: the usual spelling is guerrilla. (It comes from Spanish guerra ‘war.')
-
Perhaps the mystery of the origin of the verb goose might be cleared up by examining the opening chapter of Gargantua, by Rabelais.
-
Under gibson cocktail, it is not made with a “pearl onion” [Ugh!] but with a pickled pearl onion.
-
I have serious doubts about the purported origin of flea market and its dating to Dutch colonial days.
-
The change from numble pie to umble pie to humble pie, attributed to “some anonymous punster in the time of William the Conqueror,” was actually due to the same influences that changed a napron to an apron in the first instance and to the characteristic weakening of the initial h in English, heard today in an historical, an hilarious, etc.
-
Coffin nail is a later allusion to ‘cigarette’: in its earlier metaphoric life it referred to anything that might serve to drive one to an early grave; indeed, some early Western saloons sold tokens bearing the words “coffin nail” stamped on them which were good for a shot of redeye.
-
Humongous is given as “a term for a huge, monstrous person”: it merely means ‘huge, monstrous’ and, as far as I know, has nothing to do with wrestlers or, necessarily, people.
-
At hung higher than Gilderoy’s kite the author glosses kite as ‘body’; it is actually a word for ‘belly.’
-
There is a theory that the curious expression (from the Bible), It is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle results from a misreading of the original: the original, it is said, has a word meaning ‘rope,’ not ‘camel,’ which makes sense (to me). I cannot insist that Hendrickson accept the theory, but he ought at least to have acknowledged its existence; instead, we are told that ancient Middle Eastern walled towns had a rear gate called the Needle’s Eye through which a camel could pass only if kneeling down. How camels move forward while kneeling is not explained—perhaps, pace Seattle—that is (also) the true origin of skid row.
-
Comments like “The cuckoo was so named for the one-note song it repeats over and over” came from someone who has never heard the bird’s disyllabic call.
-
At Eggs Benedict we learn that Oscar of the Waldorf concocted the modern dish on the inspiration of a Samuel Benedict who ordered something similar as a hangover cure. Oscar is credited with having introduced the use of English muffins to the recipe in 1894, which I find somewhat anachronistic as they (being neither English nor muffins) did not exist before the mid 1920s.
A glance at the “Most Frequently Cited Authorities” reveals the possible source(s) of some of these aberrations: Partridge’s Origins and Shipley’s Dictionary of Word Origins are two of the most notorious sources of misinformation on etymology. Moreover, Slang and Its Analogues is attributed to John S. Farmer and W. E. “Hurley,” the latter’s name being, properly, Henley. It would appear, then, that Hendrickson has combined his sources for any information he could glean, repeating indiscriminately his choices of that which is most colorful. If you have occasion to refer to this work, it would be well to keep in mind that it can be relied on for picturesque etymologies but not, necessarily, accurate ones.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Kangaroo’s Comments & Wallaby’s Words: The Aussie Word Book
Helen Jonsen, illus. John Colquhoun, (Hippocrene Books, 1988), 168pp.
This useful book is divided into three main parts: pages 21 to 130 consist of eight chapters of text dealing with various aspects of (Australian) life and flora and fauna; there follow two glossaries-cum-index, one in which Australianisms are translated into American English, the other listing American words and expressions with their Australian equivalents; both give references to the chapters in which they are treated. The difficulty with the reference system is that one cannot tell where to find Chapter 4, say, till he leafs through to the end of 3 or the beginning of 5. It would have helped to have given the chapter numbers in running heads at the book’s foredge.
Another objection is that the terms identified as Australian are not, necessarily, exclusively so. For example, serviette, scone, sheila, sister, Smarties, spanner, spot on, squash, starkers, just to pick a handful, are Briticisms; although the author makes that clear, it seems odd that the words and expressions that are direct borrowings from British English are not individually identified as such. That, however, is not the purpose of the book, so it might seem carping of me to bring it up. Also, as the author acknowledges, “This is not meant to be a definitive lexicon of Australian-English,” a true enough statement even without the extraneous hyphen.
Although the text makes clear the nature of things like sausage rolls (“minced (ground up) sausage meat wrapped in pastry, fried, then kept warm for takeaway”), the Glossary identifies them as “takeout snack,” which would mislead the casual reader (of the Glossary) to infer that all takeout snacks are called sausage rolls.
These criticisms having been made, Kangaroo’s Comments is nonetheless an interesting, rather well-done guide to the Australianisms it covers, and travelers down under would be well advised to use it. It might also prove useful to those who cannot understand Paul Hogan’s films (or commercials).
Laurence Urdang
Verbal Analogies I—Miscellaneous
D.A. Pomfrit, Manchester, Manchester
Remember proportions? “Ten is to five as twenty is to ten; 10/5 = 20/10; 10:5:: 20:10, etc.?” Complete the analogies in the sets given below by selecting the appropriate term or description from among the Answers provided. The Solution appears on page 32.
1. birds: ornithology:: voting/election trends:?
2. crown for king: metonymy:: blade for sword:?
3. chance: aleatory:: charity:?
4. Oxford: Oxonian:: Jerusalem:?
5. poison: toxiphobia:: train travel:?
6. run: walk:: cursorial:?
7. human speech: formal public worship:: linguistics:?
8. lying under oath: perjury:: influencing a jury:?
9. dreams: beard:: oneiro-:?
10. across: trans-:: friction:?
11. open spaces: childbirth:: agoraphobia:?
12. sea: tide:: lake:?
Answers:
a) Eleemosynary.
b) Embracery.
c) Gressorial.
d) Hierosolymitan.
e) Liturgics.
f) Pogono-.
g) Psephology.
h) Seiche.
i) Siderodromophobia.
j) Synecdoche.
k) Tocophobia.
l) Tribo-.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Iranian Mutes Calls for Revenge Against U.S.” [Headline in The New York Times, 9 July 1988. Submitted by Robert R. Flamm, New York City.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Murphy wanted the Eagle’s Nest to resemble Birches Garden—the high-altitude restaurant in Austria where Adolf Hitler hid at the end of World War II.” [From the York (Pennsylvania) Daily Record, 17 February 1988. Submitted by Roy B. Flichbaugh Jr., York.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“The truck now has over 191,000 miles on it and has never had a major problem until recently. The timing gear broke in the front yard after coming home from the orthodontist.” [From the Letters column, Friends, March 1988. Submitted by Raymond Spong, Niantic, Connecticut.]
Paring Pairs No. 33
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). Lassie-shaped bacteria?
(b). Pirate pollutes the environment.
(c). Parents, etc., of Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Teddy, and Yogi.
(d). We hear it’s a Hindu god’s film technique.
(e). Sounds like a creepy reactionary orthodontist.
(f). Transport via pneumatic elevator.
(g). Nagging engine noise.
(h). Embrace attacker and create mischief.
(i). Conservative under the volcano turns into the ladies’ known as Lou.
(j). Bowling champion zig-zags down the edge.
(k). Walesa’s jumpy about place where union funds are kept.
(l). In charge of making really good eyeshade.
(m). Professional sportsman sacrifices his life for another.
(n). Lilliputian film.
(o). A man’s pronouncement media.
(p). Psammead into earl—or vice versa.
(q). Men are important element among miscreants.
(r). Use reamer for one-armed bandit?
(s). Ghostly cadre.
(t). He tells toupee jokes in semaphore.
(u). Sets your sights on new stove.
(v). Associate gangster joins the fraternity.
(w). Criticism of actors proves emasculating.
(x). Aware of den of iniquity into which you plunge headlong.
(y). Kinky curt greeting via radio.
(z). Played at son et lure?
(1). Air.
(2). Bears.
(3). Brother.
(4). Car.
(5). Cast.
(6). Cine.
(7). Coarse.
(8). Collie.
(9). Crew.
(10). Dead.
(11). Dentist.
(12). Dicta.
(13). Dive.
(14). Eerie.
(15). Factor.
(16). Finder.
(17). Form.
(18). Four.
(19). Hood.
(20). Hugger.
(21). King.
(22). Lava.
(23). Lift.
(24). Light.
(25). Machine.
(27). Mugger.
(26). Male.
(28). Music.
(29). Nose.
(30). Pin.
(31). Ping.
(32). Pole.
(33). Rama.
(34). Range.
(35). Rating.
(36). Rays.
(37). Ringer.
(38). Sand.
(39). Short.
(40). Skeleton.
(41). Slot.
(42). Subject.
(43). Super.
(44). Tory.
(45). Vault.
(46). Visor.
(47). Wag.
(48). Wave.
(49). Wig.
(50). Witch.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“One thousand marijuana plants have been seized in a joint police investigation near here Monday.” [From the Kitchener-Waterloo (Canada) Record, 6 October 1987. Submitted by Susan Montonen, Kitchener.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Thank you, dead Ricardo….” [A caption in the program of the Eighth Annual Mardi Gras Bal Magnifique of Greater Los Angeles, 4 February 1967. Submitted by John Paul Arnerich, Los Angeles.]
Answers to Paring Pairs No. 32
(a). Immersed in methyl alcohol and doing poorly. (14,40) In. Solvent.
(b). Woman, now married, formerly demonstrated. (var.) (36,50) She. Wed.
(c). Sin of omission committed under supervision. (25,38) Over. Sight.
(d). Afternoon refreshment canceled for sake of golf. (43,23) Tea. Off.
(e). Extortion allows Arab leader to feather his nest. (35,7) Shake. Down.
(f). Crocheted cravats exhibit insensitivities. (4,45) Cruel. Ties.
(g). This gamboge mallet is for the birds. (51,13) Yellow. Hammer.
(h). Turned on or off by his favorite rooster. (27,3) Pet. Cock.
(i). Put on such very American marching airs. (39,48) So. U.S.A.
(j). He favors a prime mover, and I can see his angle. (31,47) Pro. Tractor.
(k). Prison correspondent. (26,18) Pen. Man.
(l). Louise de la Ramée wins Franco-Russian approval. (24,5) Oui. Da.
(m). SOS on red-letter day. (19,6) May. Day.
(n). Yes, yes—sounds as if spiritualist is bored. (24,15) Oui. Ja.
(o). Greek initial is silent, as in psycho, darling. (32,29) Q.T.Pi.
(p). Pulse of the seven seas. (21,1) Navy. Bean.
(q). Café sounds like the animals' neighborhood. (2,33) Beast. Row.
(r). Ancient Briton certainly sounds as if he’s made the scene. (30,41) Pict. Sure.
(s). Spoon type sounds like power behind the Roman seer. (34,42) Run. Sybil.
(t). Sounds like place for small bottles. (28,8) Phial. Drawer.
(u). Sounds like place for foul matter. (49,8) Vile. Drawer.
(v). Have a rep for planting wheat. (12,11) Grow. Grain.
(w). Sample of Doll ad. (44,37) Tear. Sheet.
(x). Trace element of gadolinium. (9,16) Gas. Light.
(y). Tiny book: cut down or up? (20,46) Micro. Tome.
(z). Big shot is stationary. (17,22) Mach. O.
The correct answer was (10) Gavel. The winner was Nancy Haines, Dover, Delaware.
Note: Clue (x) should have read “gallium” (for “gadolinium”). Sorry.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“It’s Detroit sometime in the recent future, a city beleaguered by the sleaziest of criminals and defended by a police department that’s the subsidiary of a big corporation.” [From a movie listing for Robocop in TV Guide, Western Washington State edition, 20 August 1988. Submitted by Walt Sheldon, Bellingham.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“In Cleveland, pollution along the Cuyahoga River was so bad 20 years ago that the river caught fire. Now pleasure boats from nearby marinas must dodge freighters on their way to nightclubs and restaurants along the banks of the cleaned-up river.” [From the Chicago Tribune, 9 May 1988. Submitted by John B. Mullen, Barrington, Illinois.]
Crossword Puzzle
Across
1. Turnout at ballet about ten (10)
6. Reportedly hoist beams (4)
10. Most recent breaks in each poultice (7)
11. Crazier club story (7)
12. Dense revolutionary’s de- mands (5)
13. Badger is by its very na- ture adorable (9)
14. Nothing short of cunning to catch rascal (6)
16. Crimes against state upset senator (7)
19. Selling for company before con game (7)
21. Feeling sick in front of boat—swell (6)
23. Catches ten different fishes (9)
25. President ultimately pow- erless in a pinch (5)
26. Red spy captured by moth- er (7)
27. Fellow with take out order (7)
28. Had a sheer stocking run (4)
29. Constant pursuit of mate consuming play backer (10)
Down
1. Swiss porter clasps brooch (6)
2. Essays about old disasters (9)
3. Bring up attack outline (5)
4. Wasting a prize (7)
5. Kitty maintains strip club (7)
7. Game piece coated with gold for so long (5)
8. Doctor’s children suppressing desire (8)
9. Interior like the realm of the spirit world (8)
15. Pathetic tip involving broken nag (8)
17. Pottery shop features new article (9)
18. Yelled and scared me badly (8)
20. Giant pig holds tail up (7)
21. Appoints a bishop, elevating man at first? (7)
22. They go up mountains right into the heavens (6)
24. Gowns to steam (5)
25. Tighten present, perhaps (5)
Solution to Verbal Analogies I:
1. :Psephology.
2. :Synecdoche.
3. :Eleemosynary.
4. :Hierosolymitan.
5. :Siderodromophobia.
6. :Gressorial.
7. :Liturgics.
8. :Embracery.
9. :Pogono-.
10. :Tribo-.
11. :Tocophobia.
12. :Seiche.
Crossword Puzzle Answers
Across
1. MEDI(CINE MA)N (I MEND anag.).
9. UNCLE-A-R.
10. SI-DECAR (rev.).
11. BA(I)T’S.
12. FORETASTE (anag.).
13. DI-ARIES (I’D rev.).
15. MU(TAB)LE.
17. SHE-LLAC (CALL rev.).
19. FIR(EAR)M.
21. SMARTENED (anag.).
23. SH(R)ED.
24. EM-IRATE (ME rev.).
25. LO(GI)CAL.
26. GUES(THOU)SES.
Down
1. MA(CHINA)TE.
2. DUE(T)S.
3. C(A-R)AFES.
4. NO-STRUM.
5. M-EDIT(AT)OR.
6. NICKS (NIX hom.).
7. CUR-BED.
8. FRIEZE (FREES hom.).
14. ILL-AT-EASE (hidden).
16. BOA-T RACES.
17. S-ASHES.
18. CON-SENT.
19. FI-DELIO (rev.).
20. MEDALS (MEDDLES hom.).
22.. A(PIN)G.
23. SIGHS (SIZE hom.).
Internet Archive copy of this issue