VOL XVI, No 2 [Autumn, 1989]

The 23rd Psalm and Me, or Has the Nightingale Become a Crow?

Grace Hollander, Ramat Ilan, Israel

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.

Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me: Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

— King James Version, 1611.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall want nothing.

He makes me lie down in green pastures, and leads me beside the waters of peace;

He renews life within me, and for His name’s sake guides me in the right path.

Even though I walk through a valley dark as death, I fear no evil, for Thou art with me, Thy staff and Thy crook are my comfort.

Thou spreadest a table for me in the sight of my enemies. Thou hast richly bathed my head with oil, and my cup runs over.

Goodness and love unfailing, these will follow me all the days of my life: and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.

— New English Bible, Drover, G., (Sir) W.D. Hardy, Oxford University Press, 1970.

Stupid me! I always thought that there was only one translation of the 23rd Psalm until the other day when I happened on the New English Bible (1970) and saw that “my head was richly bathed in oil,” “Bathed in oil”? Odd! I remembered “anointed.” Is anointing ‘bathing’? I couldn’t find such a definition in the thesaurus. I looked up the Hebrew word, dishanta. Found no ‘bathed.’ It bothered me, this image of a man having his head bathed in oil in a very French barber shop (where men have their heads massaged in oil to prevent baldness) instead of the image of the making of a king, like David, who was the anointed of God. Why did this translator feel he had to change “anoint his head” to “bathe his head”? Perhaps the translation comes from some very important commentator but it hardly creates a “sublime” image and surely does not achieve the quiver mentioned in John Brough’s translation of the Sanskrit poem:

Of what use is the poet’s poem,
Of what use is the bowman’s dart,
Unless another’s senses reel
When it sticks quivering in the heart?

Nor does the psalm sing as Henry Ward Beecher put it in “Life Thoughts,” “like a nightingale…of small homely feather singing shyly out of obscurity” filling…“the air of the whole world with melodious joy greater than the heart can conceive.”

What were the translators of the New English Bible thinking? The editors tell us, “The translators have endeavored to avoid anachronisms and expressions reminiscent of foreign idioms. They have tried to keep their language as close to current usage as possible while avoiding words and phrases likely soon to become obsolete”; a most ambitious and delicate program to attempt for the entire Bible. And how does it apply to the 23rd Psalm? Isn’t the metaphoric shepherd an anachronism to a television generation? And what of “anoint his head”? No one does that anymore—not even in England where there are still occasional coronation ceremonies. Are “waters of peace,” “valley dark as death,” “thy staff and thy crook,” current usage? I miss the translator’s search for the quiver and the nightingale!

That started my own search. What had other translators done with this “sunny little psalm” that “has dried many tears and supplied the mould into which many hearts have poured their peaceful faith”? (Maclaren in A. Cohen, The Psalms, 1945)

In From One Language to Another (1986) Jan de Waard and Eugene A. Nida decry the “clinging to old-fashioned language even though the meaning has radically changed” and as a deplorable example points to the retaining of “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” even though want no longer means to ‘lack’ but rather ‘desire’ and continues with, “Thus many persons understand this traditional rendering to mean, ‘The Lord is my shepherd whom I shall not want.’ Can you believe it? Can it be that these experts are wanting in judgment?

Perhaps it is because I am just one of the “ordinary readers with no special knowledge of the ancient East” [New English Bible, 1970] that I want more than anything else “a quiver in my heart” when I read the 23rd Psalm and confess to being rather shocked to find that “the Lord” is no longer my shepherd. Writes the translator [The Psalms, 1976]: “I abolished ‘the Lord’ but felt unwilling to call God, Yahweh. I know no one who actually prays in English to that name.” I know many who pray to the name “my Lord” and some who are “willing” to pray to their Father, to the Almighty, to the Eternal One. God’s ineffable name as told to Moses is unutterable [Exodus 6:3] so why make an issue of it? Why not choose the one that is closest to the nightingale? The King James Version chose “The Lord is my shepherd” and it sings! That liquid “L” sounded with that almost awe-full “-ord”, “LLL-AWE-RD” followed by the soft “sh” in shepherd and its “rd” alliteration with the “rd” in lord entwine this twosome in my soul. Isn’t that what “the Lord is my shepherd” is all about—entwining my soul?

Is it a better translation for me because each word is perhaps a trifle closer to the original Hebrew or to the original Ugaritic stem? When I read the psalm what I want is that quiver in my heart. Do I get it when “I shall not want,” four simple one-syllable words, swaying in iambic rhythm, with the shall sliding irresistibly into the breathy w of want calling up the memory of God’s “breathing the breath of life” [Genesis 2:7] and man becoming a “living soul” is “improved” to “I shall lack nothing” with its jagged k sound, its materialistic, vacuous nothing, or changed to “I have everything I need” to which “Well, whad-daya know!” can be the only response?

Recognizing that the King James translation is “The noblest monument to English prose” [Oxford Annotated Bible, 1962], many translators, in prefaces to their “new,” “modern” versions have written apologetics explaining why they felt they had to retranslate and how they proposed doing it.

In The Psalms, the translator writes in his preface, “I have tried not to substitute without necessity new English phrases for what was old and well-loved, but unity and modernization of language as well as the true meaning of Hebrew have often made changes inevitable.” Is “He will bring me into meadows of young grass” really any closer to the Hebrew than “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures”? Is not “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures” old and well-loved? Does the modern reader really lack the great “erudition” necessary to be able to understand a few old English words and forms—What about “My country ‘tis of thee”? — and is it indeed true that, in the rather awkward phraseology of the translator, “the language is not altered with doing without thou and thee”? Not altered? For my quiver I prefer doing with thou and thee! The loving yet formal thee and thou and the closing -eth syllable create a melody, a rhythm, a smooth cadence truly reflecting our beloved shepherd’s care, and ignite a feeling of intimacy with him, a mutuality of feeling that the -s ending completely wants—Excuse me! —lacks.

Just compare the overtones and associations of the psalm with the -th and the -s endings:

-s ENDING	OVERTONE	-th ENDING	OVERTONE
He makes me	‘forces me’	He maketh me	‘persuades me’
He leads me,	‘holds a tight rein’	He leadeth me	‘I follow willingly’
My cup runs over	‘a coffee cup om a dirty saucer’	My cup runneth over	‘fulfillment: a goblet, maybe a grail’

To my ears, restores my soul with its -z sound in the middle of the alliteration is irritating and divisive, while the -th in restoreth my soul smoothly slides along, bringing the alliterative -s’s together, etherealizing the restoring and uniting it with my soul. Besides the acoustically melodious vibrations of restoreth my soul, its imagery holds that transcendental ingredient, the soul, while refresh my being [1966], revive my drooping spirit [1969], gives me new strength [1970], renews life within me [1970], or renews my life [1979] are all soulless images arousing only mundane connotations.

“Keeping abreast of the times and translating into the language we use today are two slogans wisely adopted.” [Old Testament of the Jerusalem Bible, 1966]. What is so “wise” about it? The worshipers of the Golden Calf were keeping abreast of the times, and the language we use today is a Tower of Babel from which elegance and sublimity seem to be deliberately omitted. This translator has replaced “He leadeth me beside the still waters” by “To the waters of repose he leads me.” What are “waters of repose”? Are they abreast of the times? or are they the “language of today”? Since the translator may not “substitute his own modern images for the old ones” how can the shepherd metaphor retain its old-fashioned pastoral simplicity when its sense and the reader’s senses are jarred out of the authentic Bible-time setting and are forced into a frame of the “language we use today”? Seen any shepherds on Broadway lately or even mentioned in The New York Times?

Are not visual images-made-modern pedestrian, colorless substitutions? “Though I pass through a gloomy valley, I fear no harm” is like “Though I pass through Wichita on a rainy day on the way to California, I won’t have an accident in my automobile”; “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil” is no casual passing by but step-by-step pacing through life with death constantly threatening and the devil’s evil lure contemned, reminding us of Adam and Eve who, tempted by the devil, were enticed and ate from the tree of Good and Evil (not harm!) [Genesis 2:9].

Most of our modern translators seem to be allergic to or very much afraid of death or else have little real faith in the shepherd’s taking care of them as they walk through life to ultimate death. In the following outline of thirteen psalms translated since 1937, the preoccupation with darkness and the elimination of any reference to death is conspicuous. The Hebrew word circumvented and about which there is some commentary discussion is zalmaveth, zal meaning ‘shadow’ and maveth meaning ‘death,’ the combination translated in the King James Version as “the shadow of death,” a quivering image.

DATE	REFERENCE TO dark	REFERENCE TO death
1937	the darkest valley	eliminated
1964	valley of dense darkness	eliminated
1966	a gloomy valley	eliminated
1966	in total darkness	eliminated
1969	a valley of deepest darkness	eliminated
1969	Nothing lurking in the dark ravine	eliminated
1969	the valley of darkness	eliminated
1970	a valley dark as	death
1970	dark valley	eliminated
1971	valley of deep darkness	eliminated
1976	valley of the darkness of	death
1976	a valley overshadowed by	death
1977	the valley of	death
1982	the valley of deepest darkness	eliminated

Is it at all possible “to balance the lofty beauty of the heavily nuanced text with an easily understood English”? [Siddur Kol Yaakov, 1984] Is “I shall not lack” any easier than “I shall not want”? “tranquil waters” easier than “still waters”? a “valley overshadowed by death” simpler than the “valley of the shadow of death”? “tormentors” easier than “enemies,” and “long days” easier than “forever”? Just what is easily understood English?

Some translators have set themselves an almost transcendental goal — to answer the question, “What thought did the person who first recorded these words really intend to express?” [Jewish Publication Society, 1979] That is a thought to conjure with. What did David (or was it someone else?) intend when he wrote or sang the 23rd Psalm? How can we ever know exactly what he intended? And does it really matter? Whatever the original intention, however literally exact the translation, it misses, unless it sticks quivering in the heart.

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!

“A woman gave birth to two of her triplets a month after delivering the third, a rare occurrence, physicians said Thursday.” [From The Philadelphia Inquirer, 4 May 1988. Submitted by Stephen R. LaCheen, Philadelphia.]

The Ineffable F — r-letter Word

Benedict B. Kimmelman, Philadelphia

In an essay published recently in a history journal, the editor substituted “foul ups” for the correct term I had used in referring to certain incidents witnessed during army days. For quoting a Vietnam-era line of graffiti, “Fighting for peace is like fxxxing (my cryptic spelling throughout) for chastity,” the witty columnist Molly Ivins was blasted in a long letter to the editor of The Progressive. In contrast, we have the story about the ten-year-old who, caving in to the nagging of his ever-suspicious grandmother, admits that his grandfather did indeed let slip a “dirty” word (shmuck) on their fishing trip, but won’t quote it: “What I can tell you is that it rhymes with fxxx.” And there is the story of the touching letter in a shaky script from a ninety-year-old in the nursing home, thanking the community service people for the gift of the transistor radio with ear-piece that freed her from having to share the radio of her roommate, Mrs. Hamady, and now she can tell Mrs. Hamady “to go fxxx herself.”

My interest in the life and times of the word stems directly from a recollected bit of army business during World War II. In early 1942, a bizarre directive came down from on high, one of a kind in the memory of army “lifers,” or regulars. Issued by Lt. General MacNair, commander of all U. S. ground troops, it stated that less authoritarianism and greater courtesy must thenceforth characterize all orders to enlisted men, and it closed with “the day of the shouting sergeant is over.” It was to be read to all formations. Our regimental commander used the opportunity to append an order of his own to all company-grade officers to make special efforts “forthwith” to eliminate the use of obscene language in their commands.

As a junior officer in charge of an infantry medical detachment, this assignment was mine. On a muggy morning in Camp Livingston, Louisiana, the regular business of reveille completed by 6:30, I read out General MacNair’s directive.

“Any questions?”

“Question, sir!”

“Yes, Sergeant Willard.” This was an “old” national guardsman of 30, a barker, heart and soul of the outfit.

“May I say, sir,” shouting, “that when the day of the shouting sergeant is over, on that day the army will have died, sir!” preceded and followed by the snappiest salute in that man’s army.

“Thank you, Sergeant Willard. Now — any questions?”

Nothing but grinning faces. “I will now read the order of the regimental commanding officer. Subject: obscene language. To: All regimental personnel.” There followed a paragraph linking decent language and decent conduct. I wound up with, “You know what that means. From now on, the fxxx word is taboo ! Dismissed!” No questions solicited.

Perhaps three seconds of perfect silence. Then the dam burst.

“Taboo you, Thorp!”

“Where’s Taboo-up Metcalf?”

“You’re asking for it, Taboo-face!”

“Delgado, get this tabooing morning report to regimental!”

It became a party.

Nearly three years later, in January 1945, I arrived as a P.O.W. at Stalag IV B, in Muhleberg, East Germany, part of a battered lot of several hundred American soldiers trapped and finally taken prisoner in the Battle of the Bulge. Stalag IV B housed mostly British enlisted men, about seven thousand at the time, and though the camp never attained the notoriety of some other grim stalags, it entered the literature unnamed in Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel by Kurt Vonnegut. The portrayal of the camp and the reception by the British P.O.W.s, camouflaged though it is, is so vivid that on reading it when it appeared in 1969—and since—I have found myself transported back there, frozen feet and all.

…out marched 50 middle-aged Englishmen.

They were singing, “Hail, Hail the Gang’s all Here” …These lusty ruddy vocalists were among the first English-speaking prisoners to be taken in the Second World War. Now they were singing to nearly the last…The Englishmen were clean and enthusiastic and decent and strong…They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what Englishmen ought to be.

The Englishmen had never had guests before and they went to work like darling elves, sweeping, mopping, cooking, baking…

There was silence now, as the Englishmen looked in astonishment at the frowzy creatures they had so lustily waltzed inside…“My God, what have they done to you, lad? This isn’t a man. It’s a broken kite!

— Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade, Delta Book, Dell Publishing Co., 1969, pp. 80-84.

The take-charge British prisoners dazzled us, as they had Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim. Bedraggled, starving and exhausted after a final four days crushed in box cars, we were, I learned later, the most disheartening lot of ragmen they had seen in their more than three years of imprisonment. Responding in the tradition of trained British “ranks,” they radiated full responsibility, herding us to plank tables, scurrying about like a choreographed swarm of caterers. Their boots were polished and their worn tunics had all their buttons. These were the remnants of the defenders of Tobruk, Tobruk in the North African desert, in the year 1941, when the Allies were losing the war! To me, they were creatures from a lost planet, another world. They served us tea in “Klim” tins, and a cracker each. They indulged our incoherent questions and smiled reassurances. They returned us to life.

An impeccable, moustachioed Sergeant Major MacMahan, gaunt like all the others, wearing the beret and polished insignia of a Scots regiment, stood erect as a flagpole at one end of the barrack hut surveying it all, the angel in charge. To his deputy, carefully doling hot water from a canteen cup into a row of small tins, he snapped, “Mind the measuring now, there’s twenty-fxxxing-four to serve ‘ere!”

I heard it. Whatever my state till then, I knew I was not now hallucinating. That was the first I had ever heard the word used as a “bridge.” It was snapped out loud and clear, after the fashion of the proper British soldier, with none of the slurring so characteristic of the American using it as an adjective. (Compare “y’r fxn well told” with “you’re fxxxing well told, ole boy!”) I was in no condition to be charmed. But impressed—I was forever impressed.

After a few days, befriended and coached by these veterans of a different time and a different kind of war, most of us revived enough to make do behind the barbed wire in the blighted landscape. Assigned after some weeks to a few hours per week in the makeshift dental clinic in the prison revier or hospital, I took to busying myself during the great gaps of empty time by searching out and putting on paper British army-language specials, like mucker ‘partner,’ scoff ‘overeat,’ fluff ‘girl,’ skilly ‘meal,’ griff ‘rumor,’ duff ‘dessert.’ Most numerous and engaging by far were the novel (to me) uses of the ubiquitous, all purpose Anglo-American word fxxx.

Hearing of my hobby, the prison “editor” paid a visit. With a willing little group of helpers he periodically put out the prison “newspaper.” This was a wall poster containing innocuous camp news items, all painstakingly penned by hand. A new issue was unveiled to a hungry readership about once every six months. The suggestion by the editor, Eric Hurst, that I work up my lexicon on fxxx for the forthcoming issue was a great boost. I felt a sense of real purpose in mining for new specimens in conversations with these old “kriegies” (P.W.s) from almost everywhere in the world where the King’s and everyone else’s English and American were spoken. I was also the beneficiary of special contributions from numbers of users and listeners who had never previously felt the pull of scholarship.

Reviewing our completed lexicon, Hurst and his colleagues pronounced it a respectable body of work, acceptable for publication in the newspaper. It never made it, however. Just one week later, elements of Marshal Konev’s 1st Ukranian Army liberated the camp and to our great joy, the world of the prison newspaper ceased to exist for us.

Though the manuscript remained out of sight yellowing in a footlocker for 43 years, the work was never completely out of mind, recalled on occasions when some special item caught ear or eye. For example, there was the title of the popular British film of the 1970s, with Dirk Bogarde, I’m Allright, Jack (see Fuji-yama, Lexicon), and the name borne by a boutique in downtown Philadelphia, “Sweet Fanny Adams” (see Sweet Fxxx-all, Lexicon). Special mention should be made of the fact that there are some items in this lexicon similar to those in the classic Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, by Eric Partridge (8th Edition, 1984), which first appeared in 1937. Luckily for the lofty sense of purpose which infused and inspired us, none of us knew of its existence then. Except for the elimination of several redundant items, this is the lexicon produced in 1945.

Lexicon

Fxxx [Anglo-American]

Noun. 1. A lesser individual, usually male, undistinguished. Patronizing or pejorative: He’s just a simple (dumb) fxxx. Hello, little fxxx! (in response to “What do you say to a little fxxx?”, anecdotal.)

2. The sex act.

3. An item or transaction of little worth: a poor fxxx of an alibi.

Verb. 1. To betray, cheat, destroy, reject, ruin, sabotage, stymie, swindle, terminate, wreck: Churchill tried to fxxx the deal on the second front.

2. To engage in the sex act.

Derivatives:

Fxxx her, —him, —it, —them. [Anglo-American.] Declaration. Command or suggestion to defy, disobey, disregard, reject the claims of—. Dismissive, rather than condemnatory of—: Fxxx’m! What can a foul ball like that do to you?” Fxxx ‘em all, fxxx ‘em all,/The long and the short and the tall [Opening lines of a familiar song.]

See also final example cited under Fxxxin’, 1.

Fxxx! [Anglo-American] Expletive, oath, or exclamation expressing anger, disappointment, disgust, dismay, rage, as “damn!”, with emphasis: Fxxx! I forgot the password!

Fxxxin’, Fxxx’n [American], Fxxxing [British]. Pres. participle of fxxx.

Adjective, adverb. 1. Contemptible, downright, great, notable/notably, outrageous/outrageously, treasured, vexatious: A fxxx’n terrible [American], fxxxing dreadful [British], crime! You’re fxxx’n well told, Jackson! The sun came out in all its fxxxing glory. Went no place without his fxxx’n walkin’ stick. “Fxxx the fxxxing torpedoes, full fxxxing speed ahead,” as your bloody commodore once said.

2. Used as bridge or connector; new part of speech, to add power or point, enhance tonal quality. Also, damned, bloody: Twenty-fxxxing-four faces to feed. Blame it on your anti-fxxx’n-air-craft units, mate.

3. Participating in the sex act: If the Lord invented anything better than fxxx’n, He kept it for His-self. [Army aphorism. American.]

Noun. A crushing (humiliating) defeat, a drubbing, a fleecing, a loss, usually viewed from the receiving end: We took a right regular fxxxing at Tobruk.

Derivatives:

F’n, F’ing. pronounced “effin,” “effing.” Affected or effete form of fxxxin’, etc.

NFG. [American] Abbrev. for no fxxx’n good.

Phrase. Noun. An individual, situation or state without any redeeming features; hopeless, incompetent, utterly worthless: I’m NFG before my coffee in the morning.

Royal — [Anglo-American] Also, Double—, Double— in spades. [American.] Nouns. Embellished or emphatic forms of fxxxing.

Fxxx-all [British]

Compound noun.

Nought, empty, state of utter bankruptcy, total disappointment, zero: The desert is nothing but miles and miles of fxxx-all.

Derivatives: [British]

Fanny Adams, Sweet Fanny Adams. Noun. Euphemisms for fxxx-all.

F.A., Sweet F.A. Abbrevs. for fxxx-all: We had Sweet F.A. for air cover at Dunkirk.

Go for fxxx-all. Phrase. To be done for, finished, obliterated: Berlin will go for fxxx-all.

Fxxxer [Anglo-American]

Noun. 1. A male individual; one with some minimal identity; a bloke; a joe; faintly noticeable: The savvy little fxxxer managed to con the medics into a Section 8. [‘unfitness disharge’]

2. A frustrating object; a sticky or vexatious problem: The fxxxer in most P.W. escape plans is the calories.

Fxxxface [American]

Compound word.

Noun. 1. A fool, a joker, one not held in high regard or likeable: You can bet ole fxxxface won’t be on time. [‘won’t accomplish—'; ‘will fail’]

2. Greeting; form of address, semi-humorously or strongly contemptuous: What alibi now, Fxxxface?

Fxxxhead [American]

Compound noun.

A cheese head; an easily confused or misled individual; one “short on the dollar”; scatterbrained; [pejorative, not hostile, implication]: He’d be just fxxxhead enough to buy that line of who-shot john.

Fxxx me! [British]

Phrase.

Expletive. Announcement of confusion, perplexity, ignorance, as “Damme!” [British], “Search me!” [American]: Fxxx me if I know where we’re at!

Fxxx-off! [Anglo-American]

Noun (rare). A dodger, evader, shirker, one who is undependable: That full-time fxxx-off is geared to fly backward.

Verb. To escape, evade, fade, run, slink away, vanish, when needed: First incoming shell burst, that clown will fxxx off!

Fxxxup. [American.]

Compound noun. A botcher; bungler; disrupter; failure; one who is ill-coordinated; incapable, or ineffectual; an inept individual; a loser; a spoiler: That fxxxup is the boil on this outfit’s ass. Section 8 discharge is ordered for this incorrigible company fxxxup. [From a division surgeon’s formal report.]

Verb. To confuse; deface; disfigure; disorganize; entangle; make a mess of; snarl; tie up; ruin: To fxxx up the detail. [classic, American army]

Derivatives:

General fxxx up [American] Noun. G.F.U. (Abbrev.) An individual with a consistent or outstanding record as a fxxxup.

Janfu [American] Noun. Abbrev. for ‘joint army-navy fxxx up.’ A failed amphibious military operation considered badly planned and/or executed.

Snafu [American]

Noun. Abbrev. for ‘situation normal, all fxxxed up.’ An obviously ineffectual operation or dire predicament, cynically anticipated because typical; perfect opposite of OK.

Fxxx you! [Anglo-American] Interjection. Emphatic negative retort expressing condemnation, defiance, hostility, opposition, refusal, rejection: As civilians we’ll have to get used to using “No thanks!” in place of “Fxxx you!”

Derivatives:

40! Affected or effete form of fxxx you.

402! Anticipated response to 40.

Fujiyama [British] Phrase.

Acronym for ‘Fxxx you, Jack, I’m all right.’ Expression of sole concern for self at expense of partner or ally; abandonment, betrayal.

I’m all right Jack. Alternate form of Fujiyama.

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.]

EPISTOLA {G. B. Talovich}

The origin of the name Viêt/Yuéh [XV,2] is similar to that of Saxon. The name of this nation, first seen in the Shang dynasty oracle bones (2nd millennium B.C.), the earliest complete Chinese script known, is a pictograph of the yuéh ‘axe,’ which may be symmetrical or asymmetric, stone or bronze. As with many place names, the pictograph was later arbitrarily ornamented with various radicals—ì ‘a city’ or tz\?\ ‘walking, migrating.’ The form ornamenting yuèh with tz\?\ became accepted. The word thus formed coincidentally also means ‘to exceed, to pass, large, more, or O!,’ but I simply can’t figure out why anybody would translate it as ‘extreme.’

How did Měi-Kúo become Me Gook? I suggest some tin-eared grunt heard the Viêt Namese pronunciation of Mêi-Kúo, “M\?\-Quôć,” and that’s what he thought he heard.

[G. B. Talovich, Taipei]

EPISTOLA {Charles G. Mendoza}

Recent communications by Henn [XIV,3], Cragg [XV,1], and Powers [XV,2] on the origins of ‘Gook’ have led me to research the matter. While I agree with Cragg that “the word is extraordinarily derogatory” and can understand Powers’ confusion with Henn’s explanation, I still believe Henn has the best explanation for the origin of the word.

To begin with, Mr. Henn’s Mee Gook apparently is both Cantonese and Korean! As Powers correctly observes, the modern Chinese as spoken on the mainland and Taiwan has ‘Meikuo’ (pronounced Mā-gwō) as the word for the United States and that the two characters taken individually mean ‘beautiful country.’ However, Stimson and others have pointed out that Chinese phonology does change with time and that the Old Mandarin pronunciation for ‘country’ had a final “k” sound unlike modern Chinese as now spoken on Taiwan and the mainland.

The languages of the East Asian countries of Japan, Korea, and Vietnam were greatly influenced by the language of the Chinese. Also the “dialects” of China, such as Southern Min (Taiwanese) and Cantonese, to name just two, show varying relationships with the dominate tongue. It is by studying these various phonological relationships that Sinologists have come to better understand the ancient forms of Chinese; this is analogous to our studies of Indo-European. If we chart some of the pronunciations of the two characters the relationships become more apparent. (I give three versions of Modern Chinese though there are at least four or five transliterations currently in use.)

DICTIONARY OR SOURCE	LANGUAGE OR DIALECT	MEANING ‘beautiful’	MEANING ‘country’
Chen	Cantonese	mei	gwok
Nelson	Japanese	bi	koku
Tan	Taiwanese	bi	kok
Stimson	Middle Chinese	mj<###>	ku<###>k
Stimson	Old Mandarin	m<###>	kuiiq
Stimson	Modern	m<###> (mei)	kue (gwo)
(Chen)	Chinese	[mei]	[kuo]
Cragg	Korean	my	guk
Nguyen & Durand	Vietnamese	quoc

I have no Korean or Vietnamese dictionaries, but it seems clear to me that the guk of the Korean Myguk (Cragg) and the Vietnamese quoc are all derived from an earlier form of Chinese. (I have ignored all notations of tone since they would not affect the analysis. The Vietnamese example is from the word quoc-ngu which I understand to be the same as the Chinese Kuoyu = ‘National Language’)

It is at this point that another problem arises. Nelson gives no entry for bi-koku ‘beautiful country’ (‘The United States of America’). In fact the Japanese for ‘The United States of America’ is beikoku = ‘rice-country.’ This brings Amerigo Vespucci into the picture.

Consulting my Tz’u Hai (tz’u ‘word or phrase’ + hai ‘sea’ = “a sea of words/phrases”), I discover that the Chinese meikuo is actually short for mei-li chienho-chung-kuo. The mei from mei-li = ‘American’ and the kuo from chien-ho-chung-kuo = ‘firm(ly)-enclosing-all-nations’ = ‘United States.’ In Nelson, a few entries after beikoku, I read that Meriken means ‘American,’ that the character for ‘rice’ in this case is pronounced “Me” not “bei.” Backtracking to the Chinese dictionary I find that mei-li comes from ya-mei-lichia. In other words:

Amerigo (Italian) = Americus (Latin) thus to America [the New World] = Ya-Mei-Li-Chia (Chinese) = “A-Me-Ri-Ka” (one possible Sino-Japanese pronunciation) = “A-Bei-Ri-Ka” (Japanese). The first, third and fourth characters are the same in both Japanese and Chinese. The second characters differ. In Chinese it is the character for ‘beautiful,’ in Japanese for ‘rice or grain.’ The phonetic nature of Chinese (and Sino-Japanese) is demonstrated again! [See my letter in XV,2.]

Based on the above I believe that Mr. Henn is probably correct in attributing Gook to an East Asian Mee Gook, for all of the area by the time of the T’ang was culturally if not politically under the sway of the Central Kingdom (Chungkuo).

[Charles G. Mendoza, North Miami]

EPISTOLA {Jacob de Jager}

As a Dutchman living in Salt Lake City, I could not agree more that “English Is a Crazy Language” [XV,4]. I was born in Holland in 1923 and received my education there, including senior high school. Learning English grammar and building up a vocabulary was not the hardest part for me in school, but it was difficult to learn to speak English without a heavy Dutch accent.

In the city of Haarlem an English teacher by the name of G. Nolst Trenité, who also wrote articles under the pen name Charivarius, published a little booklet entitled Drop Your Foreign Accent. In it was printed a poem called “The Chaos,” which as students, we had to learn by heart for recitation in front of the class. That was a tough assignment, but very helpful.

Mr. Trenité has passed away, but I believe that his book is still used in Holland.

[Jacob de Jager, Salt Lake City]

EPISTOLA {G. Nolst Trenité (“Charivarius”)}

The Chaos

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye your dress you’ll tear,
So shall I! Oh, hear my prayer,
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, beard and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written).
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say said, pay-paid, laid, but plaid.
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,
But be careful how you speak,
Say break, steak, but bleak and streak.
Previous, precious, fuchsia, via,
Pipe, snipe, recipe and choir,
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery:
Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles.
Exiles, similes, reviles.
Wholly, holly, signal, signing.
Thames, examining, combining
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war, and far.
From “desire”: desirable—admirable from “admire.”
Lumber, plumber, bier, but brier.
Chatham, brougham, renown, but known.
Knowledge, done, but gone and tone,
One, anemone. Balmoral.
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel,
Gertrude, German, wind, and mind.
Scene, Melpomene, mankind,
Tortoise, turquoise, chamois-leather,
Reading, reading, heathen, heather.
This phonetic labyrinth
Gives moss, gross, brook, brooch, ninth, plinth.
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Banquet is not nearly parquet,
Which is said to rime with “darky.”
Viscous, Viscount, load, and broad.
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s O.K.,
When you say correctly: croquet.
Rounded, wounded, grieve, and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive, and live,
Liberty, library, heave, and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven,
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the difference, moreover,
Between mover, plover, Dover,
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police, and lice.
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label,
Petal, penal, and canal,
Wait, surmise, plait, promise, pal.
Suit, suite, ruin, circuit, conduit,
Rime with “shirk it” and “beyond it.”
But it is not hard to tell,
Why it’s pall, mall, but Pall Mall.
Muscle, muscular, gaol, iron,
Timber, climber, bullion, lion,
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, and chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor,
Ivy, privy, famous, clamour
And enamour rime with hammer.
Pussy, hussy, and possess,
Desert, but dessert, address.
Golf, wolf, countenance, lieutenants.
Hoist, in lieu of flags, left pennants.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rime with anger.
Neither does devour with clangour.
Soul, but foul and gaunt but aunt.
Font, front, won’t, want, grand, and grant.
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say: finger.
And then: singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, age.
Query does not rime with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post, and doth, cloth, loth,
Job, job, blossom, bosom, oath.
Though the difference seems little,
We say actual, but victual.
Seat, sweat, chaste, caste.
(Leigh, eight, height,)
Put, nut, granite, and unite.
Reefer does not rime with deafer,
Feoffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Dull, bull, Geoffrey, George, ate, late,
Hint, pint, Senate, but sedate.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific,
Tour, but our and succour, four,
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, guinea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria,
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean,
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion with battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, key, quay.
Say aver, but ever, fever.
Neither, leisure, skein, receiver.
Never guess—it is not safe:
We say calves, valves, half, but Ralph.
Heron, granary, canary,
Crevice and device, and eyrie,
Face but preface, but efface,
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust, and scour, but scourging,
Ear but earn, and wear and bear
Do not rime with here, but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew, Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, clerk, and jerk,
Asp, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation—think of psyche— !
Is a paling, stout and spikey,
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing “groats” and saying “grits”?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel,
Strewn with stones, like rowlock, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict, and indict!
Don’t you think so, reader, rather,
Saying lather, bather, father?
Finally: which rimes with “enough”
Though, through, plough, cough, hough, or tough?
Hiccough has the sound of “cup.”
My advice is—give it up!

[G. Nolst Trenité (“Charivarius”), ]

Richard Albert Wilson: The Canadian Scholar on Whom Bernard Shaw Tried to Grind His Alphabet Axe

J. A. Davidson, Victoria, British Columbia

More than half-a-century ago a book written by the Canadian scholar, Richard Albert Wilson (1874-1949), stimulated Bernard Shaw to write what was probably his major sally into alphabet reform.

Wilson was head of the English department at the University of Saskatchewan, and during the thirties he gave a course on the origin and development of language. Following good professorial custom, he worked his lecture notes into a book which was published in London in 1937 by Dent, under the title, The Birth of Language, with a subtitle, Its Place in World Evolution and Its Structure in Relation to Space and Time. I was in Wilson’s class during the autumn of 1937.

Wilson sent a copy of the book to Shaw as “an instalment of interest on an old debt.” Shaw read it and responded enthusiastically: “I urged as strongly as I could the reprinting of Professor Wilson’s treatise in a modestly priced edition baited for the British book market with a preface by myself: an overrated attraction commercially, but one which still imposes on London publishers.” In 1941 Dent re-issued the book as a Guild paperback at one shilling. This edition, of 50,000, baited with a 31-page preface by Shaw and a souped-up title, The Miraculous Birth of Language, sold out rather quickly.

In 1942 Dent issued a hardcover edition of the paperback, and that autumn I, a soldier in the Canadian Army, saw it displayed in a number of London bookshops. A bookseller in Charing Cross Road told me that he was amazed that such a dry book sold so well, especially in wartime. I reported this in a letter to Dr. Wilson: it seemed to amuse him, and he sent me a small fruitcake that Christmas. The new edition was widely reviewed in Britain. J.B.S. Haldane, the eminent biologist who was then in his heyday as a Marxist intellectual, was provoked by the word miraculous in the title to flex his dialectic muscles at it in a lengthy review in The Rationalist Press Annual for 1943: as I remember, he dismissed it as a nefarious supernaturalist plot. In 1946 the Guild paperback was re-issued, and in 1948 the Philosophical Library, New York, provided an American edition, with the Shaw effusion, and under the Miraculous title.

The preface begins with this characteristically Shavian sentence: “This book by Professor Wilson is one in which I should like everyone to be examined before certified as educated or eligible for the franchise or for any scientific, religious, legal, or civil employment.” (Over the years that has assured me that I was splendidly qualified—Wilson gave me a “B”—for my religious employment after my ordination in 1949 to the ministry in the United Church of Canada.) In the preface Shaw said that Wilson was not known to him when he received the book. He commented: “I learned that it (Wilson’s professorial chair) was at Saskatoon, a place of which I had never heard, and that his university was that of Saskatchewan, which was connected in my imagination with ochred and feathered Indians rather than with a university apparently half a century ahead of Cambridge in science and of Oxford in common sense.” (In 1914 Shaw had written that “high civilization is not compatible with the romance of the pioneer communities of Canada.”) After other introductory pleasantries Shaw confessed, “I had an axe of my own to grind; and I thought that Professor Wilson’s book might help me to grind it.” And grind it he did, vigorously and garrulously. The rest of the preface is a harangue on alphabet reform and has little to do with Wilson’s theories. (At times I have wondered how much of Wilson he had read.)

The new edition was widely reviewed. The Times Literary Supplement said bluntly, “Mr. Shaw’s preface ought not to blind the reader to the excellence of Professor Wilson’s treatise.” And a reviewer in The Fortnightly Review said this of the preface: “It sounds clear, like all that Mr. Shaw writes, yet it is less limpid than the flow of Professor Wilson’s exposition.”

After Shaw’s death in 1950 we were treated to the farce that resulted from the provision in his will that the income from the residue of his estate be used for twenty-one years on the design and dissemination of a new alphabet for the English language. That part of the will was declared invalid by a judge, and the interested parties, not wishing an extensive romp in the courts, agreed to a compromise whereby the sum of £8,300 was set aside for the development of the new alphabet Shaw called for and for the publication in it of Androcles and the Lion. (Not utterly irrelevant here are these words on page 32 of Shaw’s Everybody’s Political What’s What?, published in 1944: “…we allow private citizens to make fantastic, unjust, bigoted, or even spitefully wicked disposals of their possessions after their deaths by will, and give these wills the force of law.”)

Shaw called for a new alphabet for the so-called Received Pronunciation—the mode of speech we call “Oxford” or “B.B.C. English.” (At one time Shaw was chairman of the committee of the B.B.C. that was responsible for spoken-English standards.) That would have put most of the English-speaking world out in the phonetic cold, and would muck up written English. Speakers of General American would have made no effort to go along with it. We every-r-sounding Canadians would have been permanently confined to the linguistic bush. No r-rolling Scot, after generations of “Georrge” would condescend to “Gawge.” Shaw would not have liked the way Professor Wilson spoke—ordinary Canadian-English, the eastern Ontario kind, with every r sounded. Wilson was sensitive to the growing edges of language, and he rejoiced in the ambiguities of it because they are signs of life and development. Shaw, on the hand, had a strangely static understanding of language: he was downright parochial and more than a little snobbish about spoken English and how an alphabet should standardize it.

In the new edition of the book Wilson put this little note following the Shaw preface: “I am gratefully indebted to Mr. Bernard Shaw for the interest he has taken in the book and especially for his most generous action in taking the time from his crowded life to write so magnanimous and stimulating a Preface to it, without which this present cheap edition would not have been published.” As I read that I can hear the gentle irony in Wilson’s voice and I can see the twinkle in his eyes—and I can imagine his rubbing his hands a little over that final bit.

Then I ask myself this question: Who used whom to grind whose axe anyway?

Wilson’s book, after sales of more than 100,000 in its various editions, went out of print in 1949, the year of his death. In 1980 The Canadian Journal of Linguistics celebrated its silver anniversary with a substantial issue consisting of the whole of Wilson’s original edition of The Birth of Language, with a valuable introduction by Professor J.K. Chambers—and without the Shaw preface. Chambers, of the Department of Linguistic Studies at the University of Toronto, in the article on Wilson he contributed to second edition (1988) of The Canadian Encyclopedia, offers this significant comment: “Virtually unaware of the developing science of linguistics, Wilson espoused a more modern view than was then current, giving central importance to mentalism and language universals.” Wilson may yet come to be recognized as a pioneer in what perhaps can be called “philosophical linguistics.” His book is again in print.

EPISTOLA {James T. Herron}

In his treatise on words and expressions derived from firearms [XV,1], Richard Lederer was often correct in his selection of words but was often wrong as to their meanings and derivations. His knowledge of the terminology is probably not first-hand.

In the discussion of flash in the pan, the terms rifle and musket are used as if they were synonyms. A rifle is a ‘long-barreled firearm with spiral grooves [rifling] cut into the bore to impart a spin to the projectile.’ Musket refers to a military weapon. Although there were rifled muskets in the 19th century, most were of large caliber (.58 or .69) and were smoothbore. They were intended to be fired quickly; they were not intended to be very accurate. The rifle was more accurate but took longer to load and was more costly to make.

Lederer writes, “the flash of the primer in the pan of the rifle failed to ignite the explosion of the charge.” The pan is the part of the gunlock that contains a small quantity of fine gunpowder ignited by sparks produced by the flint shearing small bits of metal from the frizzen. A small hole bored in the barrel allows the charge to be ignited. It is the charge that is ignited, not the “explosion”; also, black powder does not explode: it burns.

The derivation and meaning of go off half cocked is far off the mark. The hammer, or cock, of the gunlock usually can be in one of three positions: down (fully forward and down); at half cock (partly back, to allow a flintlock to be carried with the pan closed or the percussion cap to be placed on the nipple of a percussion arm); or at full cock. In the half cock position, the trigger is not “partially back-locked,” whatever that means. To over-simplify the process, when the lock is moved to full cock, the trigger, a simple lever, moves another lever, the sear, out of the notch in a semi-circular internal lock part to which the hammer is connected. If the gun goes off from the half-cock position, the lock is defective. Lederer understood the expression go off half cocked to mean ‘futile gesture’ because the flintlock is unlikely to spark. The expression, however, derives from the percussion lock. If the main spring of the lock is sufficiently strong, the blow received by the percussion cap can set it off and the firearm discharges unexpectedly. Going off at half cock is dangerous, not futile.

Skinflint is not an American expression describing a parsimonious “gun toter” saving money by “skinning” his flint with his knife to avoid buying a new one. Flints are knapped (and not with a knife) to sharpen them. I have never heard the term skinning used for the process. References can be found for the term long before there was an American frontier, and it sounds as if someone made up this one.

Although hanging fire is defined as being the opposite of point-blank, the two are unrelated in the field of firearms: a hang-fire is a ‘delay in the ignition of the powder charge in a firearm’—not a benign delay but a serious, potentially deadly situation.

Heavens to Betsy! had better remain “source unknown.” The Brown Bess muskets were of British issue, though many were used by American troops during the Revolutionary War. Americans produced their own muskets, as well, but they were not the weapon of the frontier. That was the Kentucky or Pennsylvania rifle, a lighter, smaller-bored, more accurate weapon than the Brown Bess.

Hell will be cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey before the difference in the coefficients of expansion (or contraction) of brass and iron causes cannonballs “in a muzzle-loading battery on a battleship” to topple. The reference to battleship is an anachronism. As for the square brass monkey with circular depressions for stacking cannonballs, it would have to contract a great deal more than the iron balls to cause them to tumble. The coefficient of expansion relates the change in volume, area, or length to a change in temperature of one degree Celsius. The cubical coefficient for cast iron is roughly 0.000012; for brass, it is on the order of 0.000018. If we take a three-inch cannonball on a very hot day, compute its diameter on a very cold day (assuming a drop of 60° C.), and compare this to the contraction of brass for the same drop in temperature, while it is true that the cannonballs will have shrunken twice as much as the brass monkey, the difference for ten balls would be less than a sixteenth of an inch; the pile would not topple even if their diameters were twice as large. However, as cannonballs would career over the deck because of the motion of the ship, they were kept in crates or on racks, and the nice-looking pyramids were probably just for show, as at monuments.

Son of a gun probably is not nautical, and “the midship gun” used in the explanation doesn’t make sense. Also, women were not usually found on naval vessels except in harbor. The image conveyed by the author of prostitutes being carried as supercargo aboard fighting ships is false. Farmer & Henley, Slang and its Analogues, defines the term as “a soldier’s bastard,” although the nautical connotation occurs in a reference to The Sailor’s Wordbook, which refers to women who sailed with their husbands, not to loose women. F&H also defines gun as a ‘thief.’ This meaning of gun brings the phrase parallel with “son of a bitch” (bitch=whore), a derivation that seems more likely.

In the discussion of stick to one’s guns, Lederer states that “many a soldier was actually chained to his gun to ensure bravery.” I would like to know where that one came from. Artillerymen were, and are, very proud of their role in warfare. A gun crew was a skilled unit of, usually, more than ten men who spent a great deal of time practising loading, aiming, and firing their piece. Each man had a specific duty that had to be carried out efficiently, not only for effectiveness, but also for safety. A man chained to the gun (to ensure bravery?) would be of little use, especially after the recoil that followed firing.

The explanation for spike one’s guns is barely adequate. The spike was a metal rod driven through the touch-hole (also called the vent) into the bore of the gun. The spike was bent, either by driving it against the lower side of the bore or by pounding the part inside the cannon with the rammer, so that the rod could not be removed easily.

I think Mr. Lederer should have muzzled himself and committed battery upon those who gave him his information. Neither muzzle not battery is used with a connotation related to armaments. However, the American Heritage Dictionary includes in the derivation of muzzle the “Gallo-Roman musellum (unattested).” So, too, with “Gunning for the English Language.” Much of it should be qualified with “unattested,” a term etymologically related to the brass monkey’s spheroidal appendages.

[James T. Herron, Houston, Pennsylvania]

EPISTOLA {Sam Levy}

Lysander Kemp’s “Mrs. Malaprop in Mexico” [XV, 4] recalled my own struggles with Portuguese. I remember fondly one I repeated frequently one summer as I hitchhiked up the Portuguese coast. “How did you get here,” I was often asked. “Por baleia,” I responded, mistaking boleia the ‘lift one gives a hitchhiker,’ for baleia a ‘whale.’ I expect the image of being successively vomited up along the coast by a great fish amused the seafaring Portuguese.

The most embarrassing Portuguese malapropism I committed took place in Brazil, where terms innocuous in continental Portuguese have transmuted into dangerous slang. Newly arrived, I taxied to my office and found what seemed to be a queue by the elevators. To be certain it was indeed an elevator queue I asked the gentleman in front of me “se o senhor estava na bicha.” Bicha in Portugal means a ‘queue’; in Brazil, it is very crude slang for a ‘homosexual man.’ I had asked the gentleman, roughly, “Are you into homosexuality?” He looked away. The error was a bottomless source of merriment to my Brazilian colleagues.

[Sam Levy, New York City]

Backwords and Newances

David Galef, Oxford, Mississippi

Having lost my twenty-year-old Timex down a hotel drain, I found myself shopping for a watch a few months ago. The problem was that so many of the models I looked at had digital readouts without any soul. I wanted the timepiece I was used to, a normal watch, as I told the saleswoman, you know, with hands and—

“You mean an analog watch,” she said crisply, and led me to a nearby display. There I found a watch with hands that suited me, made my purchase, and left, but a question was still ticking within: analog watch? Presumably, the analog refers to measuring time by an analog, with hands and a circular face, rather than by the more scientific-looking digital system. There is precedent, after all, in analog computers, which compute by some analog such as discrete electrical voltages for numerical values. Or maybe analog computer used to be simply computer—we live in an age of technological complexity, I concluded, as I bicycled home that day from work.

The next week, my nephew asked for an acoustic guitar for his birthday. I won’t bother going into the conversation that ensued; suffice it to say that acoustic guitars are simply the non-electric type and derive their sound from the acoustics of the instrument itself. In the same way, manual typewriters depend on the full force of the fingers to create words, rather than on electric (or electronic) assistance. But where do these terms come from? The point is that these qualifiers were added only in retrospect, when the emergence of a new prototype made some distinction necessary. They aren’t quite neologisms to account for new technology, like cryogenics or LED. Rather, they come from new technology looking back on old technology—and I’ve decided to call them backwords. Backwords differ from back formations: the latter are words (often verbs) formed on existing words (often nouns) by severing an ending. For example, diagnosis was borrowed from a Greek word (which, incidentally, did not mean the same thing); two hundred years afterwards, the verb diagnose—a back formation—was coined.

Apart from documenting linguistic treachery, however, the collecting of backwords provides capsule views of man’s progress in a variety of fields. Mono sound equipment brings back the days when the phonograph rested in the den instead of in the home entertainment center, when quadraphonic might have been a malapropism for something in The Phantom of the Opera. Other backwords involve longer journeys in time: straight razors were the only razors around until the emergence of safety razors, which have in turn ceded precedence to the injector-blade and finally the twin-blade. The term live performance gained currency some time after Edison’s inventions. Similarly, the phrase recorded live, while it suggests the overtones of a concert rather than a studio performance, may still sound odd to an untrained ear (this may be termed sound mixing, in a double sense). The phrase live audience, if dwelt upon overmuch, suggests a ghoulish alternative. Fountain pen, dirt road, manual transmission, steam engine, hand-woven fabric, conventional weapons, general practitioner, natural childbirth, cloth diaper—these are backwords dating anywhere from the era of the jalopy to the nuclear age. They can, I suppose, be summed up in that slightly suspect word progress. Still, I must in all fairness note that I write with a Bic and drive an automatic-shift with perfect equanimity. The frame of mind for hunting backwords need not be disgruntlement.

In the gustatory realm, backwords are common: Fresh-squeezed orange juice and hand-dipped ice cream simply make the point that most juice and ice cream no longer come that way. Ditto for free-range chicken and draft beer. And then there are what sound like redundancies: French champagne is a hotly contested instance. The notice that a nation other than France could produce an effervescent wine and then have the audacity to label it champagne was the basis for a lawsuit rather than an etymological inquiry. On a more prosaic level, the terms plain yogurt, potato knish, and cheese blintz would have been considered tautological some years ago. Nowadays, when blintzes may be filled with anything from puréed walnuts to spinach, and yogurt comes in eighteen different varieties, plain has acquired its own distinction. The Coca-Cola company tried to capitalize on this distinction after the financial disaster of New Coke: buyers nostalgic for the old product could purchase Classic Coke in supermarkets. “Great original flavor!” is the boast of more than one food company trying to distance a product from its own later derivatives.

It is a puzzle why certain objects acquire backwords while others retain their names and it is the newcomers that are given qualifying labels. These days, video cameras are all the rage, but, as far as I know, no one has thought up a backword for the snapshot-taking type (still camera does fill the bill, but it remains for the most part a technical term). When automated tellers came in some years ago, no one thought to rename the human operators. Much further back, automobiles were first known as horseless carriages; no one called the carriages they replaced animal-driven vehicles (though someone might call them that today, or tomorrow). The governing principle seems to be inurement: when the new has sufficiently taken hold, it becomes a standard. At the same time, the old acquires the status of a curiosity, deserving of its own label.

Perhaps the best example of this paradigm is the touch-tone phone, which has so edged out the older models that two backwords were formed for the old type: rotary phone and dial phone.[^a1] On the other hand, cellular phones are still new enough to have their own novelty label. They are really radio phones, as opposed to a short-range instrument called a cordless phone that is at present a miracle of convenience and voice-distortion. Given time and improved technology, all non-radio phones may be branded as wire phones.

Often, the new meaning may be imposed on the old word without any change in the word itself. To distinguish them from backwords, they may be termed newances. Dishwasher (appliance, not restaurant supernumerary), tape (magnetic, not sticky), and car (automotive, not horse-drawn) are three ready instances of this shift, but there are countless others. In the field of computing alone are such newances as program, chip, terminal, printer, and so on; software is listed in the Merriam-Webster Second Edition (1934) as soft wares and defined as “dry goods.” In the realm of newances are also a series of verbs: call, from shouting to telephoning; see, from in the flesh to virtual image; fly, from avian to human; and drive, applied slightly differently to each new vehicle developed. And while xerography has provided both noun and verb newances for the word copy, Horace’s ut pictura poesis reminds one that picture, too, has newances coexisting with its age-old meanings.

Finally, there are the objects that, while still possessing one basic nomenclature, show marked potential for confusion and hence for backwords. A bicycle is no longer just a bike; it may now be a ten-speed bike, a mountain bike (now tagged as an ATB, or ‘allterrain bike’), or a stationary bike (also known as an exercise bike). The backword in the offing, already used by many, is road bike, though it usually means a ten-speed, which is now used as a noun. As for other areas with potential, have color televisions become standard enough to qualify all black-and-white models? Will the flood of decaff poured every day eventually lead to a diner in 1995 requesting a cup of caff? When will keyboard and word process do something to typewriter and type (if they haven’t already). Will the microwave revolution in the kitchen turn conventional cooking devices into “macrowave” ovens? Any proficient lexicographer should be an acute observer of modernity in all its aspects.

As with other etymological quests, the search for backwords and newances may become a consuming hobby. All one needs is a sense of history that exceeds one’s lifetime. Wood-burning stove and handwritten note are two recent items for the backwords collection. Carriageway, as it is used in Britain, is a good instance of a newance. Just yesterday, I passed a furniture store advertising “custom-made” cabinets. It occurred to me that custom-made anything is approaching the realm of the anomalous: another item for the collection. The one risk in collecting backwords is that it does tend to make one feel like an antiquity, possibly deserving of a backword oneself. Right now, I can’t think of such a label. Given time, however, history may provide me with one.

---

[a1]: The technical term, often so labeled on the base of the phone, is pulse-tone, as opposed to touch-tone, a distinction in signal transmission; nowadays certain telephones with buttons are really pulse-tone models that “dial” as each button is pushed.

EPISTOLA {Esther Lafair}

My ears (or should I say my eyes) pricked up upon reading Robert M. Sebastian’s “Red Pants” [XV, 3] wherein he cites, inter alia, Ezra Pound’s Mr. Nixon: Don’t kick against the pricks.

In The Acts of the Gospels, New Testament, 9:5, Jesus says to Saul (later Paul): It is hard for you to kick against the pricks. Later, we have Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.) in Agamemnon, 1. 1624: Do not kick against the pricks. The line appears also in Pindar, Pythian Odes II, 1. 174 and in Euripides, Bacchae, 1. 795 (cited in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 14th edition, Little, Brown and Company, 1968, p. 78).

But what I love is dear Samuel Beekett’s turning the whole thing round for the title of his first novel, More Pricks Than Kicks (1934). Mr. Sebastian has, of course, started me collecting my own “Red Pants” items. I do not know yet whether to thank him, for once one gets on a kick like this it can easily turn into a disease!

[Esther Lafair, Philadelphia]

Writing the Hard Way

Jonathan Bricklin, Staten Island, New York

It is a truly gripping story, told in lean, hard athletic narrative prose.

—N.Y. Times book review of Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, 1926.

What does it mean to call a prose style hard? What does hard add to lean in describing sentences like these:

We dined at a restaurant in the Bois. It was a good dinner. Food had an excellent place in the count’s values. So did wine. The count was in fine form during the meal. So was Brett. It was a good party.

The harder something is the less it is influenced by other things, the less it interacts. In the above paragraph, the first-person narrator, Jacob Barnes, gives the fact of a dinner, the experience of a dinner, and the value of a dinner their own self-contained moments. There is no syntactical relationship linking them. Longer sentences are mostly the same: a series of short sentences cut off not with a period, but with and:

I wondered if there was anything else I might pray for, and I thought I would like to have some money, so I prayed that I would make a lot of money, and then I started to think how I would make it, and thinking of money reminded me of the count, and I started wondering about where he was, and regretting I hadn’t seen him since that night in Montmartre, and about something funny Brett told me about him…

Even long sentences other than a series of short sentences strung together set forth only one discrete moment at a time:

Out in the center of the ring, all alone, Romero was going on with the same thing, getting so close that the bull could see him plainly, offering the body, offering it again a little closer, the bull watching dully, then so close that the bull thought he had him, offering again and finally drawing the charge and then, just before the horns came, giving the bull the red cloth to follow with that little, almost perceptible, jerk that so offended the critical judgment of the Biarritz bull-fight experts.

The various moments here are related only sequentially. Despite the intense interaction that exists between a bullfighter and bull, there is an avoidance of interactive conjunctions such as when, while, and as.

It is this very avoidance of interactive conjunctions throughout the novel that creates the hard style. Such conjunctions, when placed in the beginning or middle of a sentence, form clauses that hang suspended, awaiting definition from their relationship with what follows. Sentences which use such clauses are softer, more pliant. Not a boxer’s jab—coming at you from close range, with its full effect felt at once—but a dismount from a high bar. Virginia Woolf, for one, often used suspension to create a world of subtle interaction:

There were few mornings when Mary did not look up, as she bent to lace her boots, and as she followed the yellow rod from curtain to breakfasttable she usually breathed some sigh of thankfulness that her life provided her with such moments of pure enjoyment.

—Night and Day, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1948.

There is a moment of pure enjoyment depicted by the narrator in The Sun Also Rises which uses this same interactive syntax. Riding on top of a bus in the Spanish countryside, squeezed in among people whose language (Basque) he doesn’t speak, he turns his attention to the land around him. It is much like terrain he has described before, only now, for the first time, he does not break down the description into a mere series of self-contained, tightly held moments. As much as the words themselves, the syntax shows him to be relaxing into the moment:

As soon as we started out on the road outside town it was cool. It felt nice riding high up and close under the trees. The bus went quite fast and made a good breeze, and as we went out along the road with the dust powdering the trees and down the hill, we had a fine view, back through the trees, of the town rising up from the bluff above the river.

But for the most part, interaction between clauses is reserved for moments of consternation. The narrator does not let down his guard, he must be thrown off it:

Why I felt that impulse to devil him I do not know.

When I got up to go I found I had taken off my shoes.

While we were waiting I saw a cockroach on the parquet floor that must have been at least three inches long.

As all the time I was kneeling with my forehead on the wood in front of me, and was thinking of myself as praying, I was a little ashamed…

He offered the wine-skin to Bill and to me, and when I tipped it up to drink he imitated the sound of a klaxon motor-horn so well and so suddenly that I spilled some of the wine, and everybody laughed.

As I started to get on my feet he hit me twice.

She kissed me, and while she kissed me I could feel she was thinking of something else.

When I woke it was the sound of the rocket exploding that announced the release of the bulls from the corrals at the edge of town.

So select is the narrator in his use of such suspensions that the simple variation of the placement of a clause in two otherwise almost identical statements can be momentous. Look at the two phrases: “We met Cohn as we came out of church” and “As we came out of the door I saw Cohn.” Both times the narrator is with the woman who had had a brief affair with his friend Cohn and then dumped him. But the first time the narrator is not sure how the woman feels about his friend hanging around, whereas the second time he has just been told by her that Cohn’s presence “depresses me so.” The first time, then, he can plainly state “We met Cohn…,” but the second time the encounter is troublesome: he is caught in the middle between two friends. The mere suspension of the meaning of the sentence expresses the quandary. The encounter itself is not expanded or even commented on.

According to Wyndham Lewis, the voice of Jacob Barnes contradicts his own character because it makes a man of action sound passive:

This infantile, dull-witted, dreamy stutter compels whoever uses it to conform to the infantile, dull-witted type. He passes over into the category of those to whom things are done, from that of those who execute.

—Men Without Art, Black Sparrow Press, 1987.

But the hard style of the narrator, far from being an expression of passivity, is, in fact, a symptom of a man who is trying to avoid having things done to him—someone afraid to let go of himself, afraid to merge. The castrating war wound from which he suffers, barely mentioned in the novel, is merely the outward show of this inner disability, to which we are referred again and again. The narrator tells us that he has trouble falling asleep: he cannot give himself up to darkness. For one six-month period he never slept with the light off. “It is awfully easy,” he says “to be hardboiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is a different thing.”

Nor can he fall in love: he cannot give himself up to another. “She had been looking into my eyes all the time. Her eyes had different depths, sometimes they seemed perfectly flat. Now you could see all the way into them.” You do not need to ask what depth level his eyes were at as he was observing her. Throughout the novel he convinces us that he is drawn to a woman but not to love itself: “In a way,” he says of it, “it’s an enjoyable feeling.” The woman, however, knows better: “No,” she says, “I think it’s hell on earth.” And the narrator can’t dispute this, because what the woman feels when she is in love would be, for a hardboiled man, a living hell: “Love you?” she replies to his entreaty, “I simply turn all to jelly when you touch me.”

Giving himself over to hatred is no easier. After his friend runs off with this same woman his strongest statement is “I certainly did hate him.” Had he said “I hated him,” he would have been giving himself over to that emotion, throwing himself off balance; but the work certainly acts like a cane to prevent it. (Try saying, “I certainly do love you” without eyes that are perfectly flat.) He cannot even give himself over to jealousy. To be jealous of a person is to be open to another’s influence, to have one’s sense of self continuously challenged by another. The narrator is not jealous of the friend he “certainly did hate,” but only “jealous of what happened to him.” By dismissing the perpetrator he confronts only the act.

“Style,” according to Georges Louis, “is the man himself,” and part of what makes The Sun Also Rises Hemingway’s masterpiece is how much of himself he managed to get into it. He was never again to write as autobiographical a character as Jacob Barnes, never again to use a voice as tightly controlled. Yet the character, it seems, never left him. Even in his final moment, the hard style was there.

To take one’s own life is to take control of one’s destiny; but inevitably a moment must be faced, after the deed, in which what is experienced is loss of control. The longer the time between the deed and the moment of death, the more that loss—the giving up of oneself—is experienced. Hemingway did not just shoot himself. He leaned his forehead on the barrel of the rifle and only then pulled the trigger. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, loaded her dress up with stones and let the river carry her away.

Verbal Analogies II—Miscellaneous

D.A. Pomfrit, Manchester

See if you can make the Verbal Analogy by selecting the appropriate term or description from among the Answers provided. To make it harder, cover the Answers. The solution appears on page 24.

1. horn: cornucopia:: goat:?

2. lemon: poppy:: citric:?

3. distribute: cut:: dealer:?

4. USA: Hong Kong:: Dow Jones:?

5. hawks: goshawks:: falconer:?

6. 12: 8:: pica:?

7. sun: earth:: Copernicus:?

8. humans: blood:: Greek gods:?

9. California: New York:: Eureka:?

10. motion pictures: Oscar:: mystery novels:?

11. dawn song: aubade:: cradle song:?

12. Scotland: kilt:: Greece:?

Answers

(a) Amalthea
(b) A(u)stringer, Ostringer
(c) Berceuse
(d) Brevier (e) Edgar
(f) Excelsior
(g) Fustanella
(h) Hang Seng
(i) Ichor
(j) Meconic
(k) Pone
(l) Ptolemy

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The 55 mph speed is widely flaunted.” [CBS Evening News, 17 March 1987. Submitted by Dorothy Branson, Kansas City, Missouri.]

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.]

EPISTOLA {David Galef}

I have a few entries to propose for Richard Lederer’s Concise Dictionary of American Slurvian:

axe inquire. “I wanna axe you a question.”

cask variant of axe. “Cask you sumpin?”

pry most likely. “He’s pry not home, but you cask his sister.”

sup what is happening. “Sup, man?”

waddle interrogative contraction. “Waddle it be tonight, boys?”

[David Galef, Oxford, Mississippi]

EPISTOLA {Virginia Howard}

In his article, “American Slurvian” [XIV, 2], Richard Lederer issued a delicious challenge; however, some of the terms he claims are examples of Slurvian are highly suspect. “Formally” and “then” applied where “formerly” and “than” are intended are merely misuses. No lazy mouth here—if asked to put it into writing, the speaker would probably write the wrong words in the same context.

The citations of granite (“taking it for granite”) and intensive (“for all intensive purposes”) are embedded in clichés. I maintain that those two choices are merely misunderstood expressions, derived from trying to make sense out of auditory confusion rather than being the result of slouchy verbal vapors. The speaker probably thinks “taking it for granite” is correct, justifying it as meaning “as solid and stable as a slab of granite.” Similar faulty justification could be made for “intensive purposes.” In fact, such expressions may be perpetuated by others who hear the wrong version of the cliché, take it for granite, and, for all intensive purposes, use it as the genuine expression.

Mayan (as in “What’s yours is yours, and what’s Mayan is Mayan”) is another of Mr. Lederer’s more dubious examples. He maintains Mayan is a rare form of Slurvian created by adding an extra syllable. I maintain it is not Slurvian at all. It is regional dialect. How do we judge all as in “I need to get some all for my car”? All is Alabama dialect; is it also Slurvian? I would judge that it isn’t, no more so than Earl, as in “I need to get some Earl for my car,” as stated in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. I have heard milk pronounced “meowk” by one of my Georgia relatives, but I would hesitate to label “meowk” as an example of double-syllable Slurvian. That pronunciation can probably be traced to familial/regional roots, not to lazy mouth disease. In fact, I should doubt that a lazy mouth would bother to add an extra syllable. Wouldn’t the Slurvian tongue take the most slothful route, avoiding waggle where waggle is avoidable?

Before we Slurvophobian sleuths begin our hunt, some rules of the game need to be defined. I suggest that each Slurvian term should have one or more of the following characteristics to distinguish it from some other form of (mis) pronunciation:

1. Consonants and/or vowels are left out. Examples taken from Mr. Lederer’s list are “lining” for lightning, “lays” for ladies, “forced” for forest, “please” for police, and “torment” for tournament.

2. Vowels are squashed. Whereas “Mayan” is dialect, “mahn,” bearing a squashed i, could certainly be considered an impure Slurvian form of the word. “Whir” is pure Slurvian for where.

3. Combinations of sounds that ordinarily require movement from both lips and tongue are compromised so that all the work is done by only the lips or only the tongue. Consider the case of the three Sams—Sam Witch, Sam Ridge, and Sam Itch. Any way you slice it, the Earl of Sandwich was responsible, but only two of the three examples fit the Slurvian rule of swallow and squash. Sam Witch and Sam Itch are pure Slurvian. The lips took away the duty of the tongue by substituting an m for an n. But what about Sam Ridge? The tongue hoisted itself up and bothered to put in an unnecessary r. Wouldn’t Sam Ridge, then, be just plain mispronunciation? Sand Ridge, on the other hand …

4. Combinations of sounds requiring two or more consecutive tongue movements are distorted into one compromised sound. What are you doing becomes “Watch a dune.” How much easier for the tongue to splat itself against the palate and make a ch sound rather than make three more delicate maneuvers to form the sounds of a t, and an r, and a y.

Removed from cliché, could there be pure Slurvian words that have become exalted by repetition—perhaps an elevated Slurvian of the upper plane? “Bob wire” (for barbed wire) may qualify as elevated Slurvian. At first I was prepared to offer “sparrow grass” (for asparagus) as elevated Slurvian; I now retract the offer. Is it Slurvian or is it wondrous mispronunciation? It doesn’t fit the Slurvian, rule of consonant deletion. The tongue has added an r after the g; would a lazy tongue go to that much trouble? Like “sparrow grass,” “calvary” for cavalry, one of Mr. Lederer’s questionable examples of Slurvian, falls midway between pure mispronunciation and misunderstood expression, perpetuated by a massive misuse. A Slurv who knew the difference would say “cavry.”

Perhaps we Slurvophobes should be alert to three types of pure Slurvian; regular, elevated, and complete sentence. I offer the following examples of completesentence Slurvian:

I moan ohm; I mow Nome: I’m going home.)

Watch a dune: (What are you doing?)

Watch a Seine: (What are you saying?)

Whirred ego; Word ego: (Where did he go?)

Below are more examples of regular pure Slurvian, to add to the collection:

A myrrh can ‘from the United States’: “I can tell she’s A myrrh can …”.

ever ‘each’: “Bless us, ever one.”

fern ‘not A myrrh can’: “I have some fern currency.”

gum mint ‘ruling body’: “That’s against gum mint policy.”

pearl ‘more than one’: “What’s the pearl of hex?” (see VERBATIM XI, 3)

sits in ‘inhabitant’: “I’m an A myrrh can sits in, as opposed to a fern sits in.”

to mar ‘the day after today’: “I’ll think about that to mar.”

twin knee ‘one more than nineteen’: “Less play Twin Knee Questions.”

whir ‘in what place?': “Whir am I?”

yes D ‘the day before today’: “He’s gone today, but he was here yes D and will be back to mar.”

[Virginia Howard, Metairie, Louisiana]

EPISTOLA {Milton Horowitz}

I thought that VERBATIM readers may find interesting this example of how tradition can be made. Had I taken your advice months ago and referred to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, my research would have been easier. But by reviewing items I had gathered and after examining annotated Bibles, especially the Dart-mouth Bible, I arrived at the same derivation as Brewer’s.

Years ago, while sightseeing in Rome, I went to the church Pietro e Vinculo to see Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses. Although I had seen pictures of the sculpture, I was startled to notice for the first time animal or devil horns visible beneath the curly hair of Moses. And I became melancholy as I puzzled over Michelangelo’s reasons for what I supposed was an insult to the deliverer of the Hebrews and the Law Giver of the Western World. I groaned at the thought of Michelangelo’s succumbing to sixteenth-century anti-Semitism. Even though I work in publishing, it did not occur to me that a mistranslation or a typographical error could make its way into the Bible. Authors and publishers employ editors and proofreaders to give readers publications free of error. In spite of all efforts, errors get by, at least in first printings. I should have realized that early translations of the Bible from Aramaic and Hebrew into Greek and Latin, then into all the languages of the world, would be at least as vulnerable as modern-day publications.

In cycles of four years, in the Bavarian village of Oberammergau, a Biblical passion play attracts thousands of people. The next show is in 1990, I believe. In the pageant, Moses is costumed to display horns. Pleas of Jewish organizations asking for the elimination of the horns have not been heeded. It took a while, but I think I learned the source of those horns, which I now see in many Renaissance paintings of Moses, varying from cute little devil’s horns to those that look like horns of an antler.

Exodus 34:29, describes Moses descending from Mount Sinai after talking to Jahveh, or Yahweh (Jehovah). Understandably, after talking to the Almighty, one cannot expect to be the same again. So, when Moses came down from the mountain, “the skin of his face shone” (King James Version). St. Jerome, translating from the Hebrew and referring to the Greek, while preparing the (Latin) Vulgate, evidently mistranslated the Hebrew qaran to shine, for qeren horn and went on record with cornuta, horned: Quod cornuta esset facies sua. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable calls the translation “a blunder,” explaining that “the Hebrew for this shining may be translated either as ‘sent forth beams’ or as ‘sent forth horns.’ ” The Vulgate took the latter, and Michelangelo followed earlier painters in depicting Moses with horns.

Adding further to the wonder of it all is this translation (in Brewer) from the Vulgate: “His [Moses] brightness was as the light; he had horns [rays of light] coming out of his hand [not his head!]. That was about 1400 years ago. Now the horns are traditional.

[Milton Horowitz, Jackson Heights, New York]

EPISTOLA {Jeffrey Chamberlain}

In December 1977, VERBATIM published a letter I wrote containing some mock sociological “laws” I had collected of the Murphy’s Law type. That resulted in a literary adventure worth reporting, for since then the article has taken on a remarkable life of its own.

In January 1978, James J. Kilpatrick wrote a column in which he republished much of the letter and described the observations as “profound laws … among the truths we live by.” The column was syndicated nationally, with both VERBATIM and me mentioned prominently. I became a Nationally Quoted Authority In The Field. A few months later, the article was reprinted as the back-page humor article in the house magazine of a giant international corporation—for money. I was now Internationally Published and Professional, authorially speaking. Life was good.

Then Paul Dixon published The Official Rules, “the definitive, annotated collection of laws, principles, and instructions for dealing with the world.” All the original “laws” were there, and I was cited as “the authority” for Borkowski’s Law: You can’t guard against the arbitrary. It is named after a friend of mine who said it in a drunken stupor. Chamberlain’s Laws were also there, and so the résumé now included Scholar and Original Contributor to the Genre. I became sought after by hostesses. But the best was yet to come.

In 1986 I became a Sex Symbol, fulfilling a lifelong ambition, when Chamberlain’s Second Law was published in Cosmopolitan. The Law is itself a bit more prosaic: Everything tastes more or less like chicken. And by 1988, Chamberlain’s Second Law and Borkowski’s Law had become Xerox art—those unattributed photocopies of vulgarity and cheap wit that circulate around offices. This propelled me into the public domain and made me, of course, a Lawgiver and a Legend.

I figure that with a little luck I can be a Lion of Literature in just a few more years. Then I’ll give up my job and conduct motivational seminars.

[Jeffrey Chamberlain, Nassau, New York]

A Taxonomy of Epigrams

Michel P. Richard, SUNY at Geneseo, NY

“What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole: its body brevity, and wit its soul.” So said Coleridge in an epigram of his own. Nietzsche called them “thoughts out of season,” and Tagore his “stray birds.” They may be little nothings, but they are also full of pith and vinegar, if you’ll pardon the lisp. “I think, therefore I am” said Descartes, to which one might add: “I think, therefore I (epigr) am.” Epigramming is a form of word play (or thought play) which evolved from epitaphs on tombstones. Because of the material on which it was inscribed, the message had to be brief and literally to the point. “O rare Ben Jonson!” reads the poet’s inscription on his tomb at Westminster Abbey. What would you like to put on yours? Endings are a good place to start.

As Roger Wescott has shown (in a 1980 article), epigrams also evolved from proverbs and adages. The difference is that these earlier forms were inclined to take themselves seriously, while epigrams or aphorisms are more frequently reflexive and satirical. Even though some epigrams are rhymed, they are not to be confused with poetry, or even blank verse. Poems rely on narrative imagery to evoke feelings, while epigrams focus on contradictions to provoke thought. The explosive tension of the epigram serves to focus consciousness, while the opennness of poetic imagery serves to dilate consciousness.

In my own case, writing epigrams may be a congenital defect, since it was my father’s preferred style in several of his books. I started writing them in my teens, and in 1976 I launched a magazine called Thoughts For All Seasons: The Magazine of Epigrams [TFAS]. The first issue of Thoughts came out in 1976, a bicentennial year. The second issue celebrated George Orwell’s 1984. The current issue marks the bicentennial of the Bill of Rights and the French Revolution. It is also Pitirim Sorokin’s centennial. Our quincentennial issue will appear in 1992, and the general theme will be the discovery and rediscovery of America.

Sorokin has been called the world’s greatest sociologist, but he was also a master satirist. We live in a satirical age, after all, and epigrams are the perfect vehicle for social satire. Consistent with Sorokin’s cyclical theory of social change, our time bears an uncanny resemblance to the first century A.D. when a Roman named Martial was penning his epigrams. (“Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.” “You ask what a nice girl will do? She won’t give an inch, but she won’t say no.” “You’ll get no laurel crown for outrunning a burro.” “You puff the poets of other days, the living you deplore; spare me the accolade: your praise is not worth dying for.”)

Although epigrams are usually sorted into content categories, I am going to attempt a semantic and structural taxonomy. Although my classification system does not apply to all the epigrams I have seen or published, it does seem to include most of them. As we shall see, many epigrams fall into more than one category, but the categories themselves are conceptually distinct.

1. SEMANTICS

a) Satirical Definitions

The most systematic example of this form may be found in The Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce. The following examples, however, are all TFAS originals:

adult a fossil child.

anorexic a vegetarian who doesn’t eat vegetables.

condoms where the rich folks live.

consistency a form of ritualism.

deviance something in the eye of the beholder.

fate an unconscious choice.

grantsmanship a form of panhandling in which the participants are very well dressed.

marriage friendship put to the test.

nuclear family an explosive device.

obstetrics a system of religious belief based on the assumption that pregnancy is a disease and that natural birth must be prevented at all costs.

optimist someone who waxes his skis in preparation for the Nuclear Winter.

Zen the highest form of unconsciousness.

b) Comparisons

This type of epigram involves an association between things which have no apparent connection. For example:

Scatology and eschatology are often hard to distinguish, since they both deal with end products.

Olympics: triumph of the human spirit or tyranny of the performance principle?

Tell me what you remember of your life before birth, and I will tell you what to expect in your life after death.

In the primitive world there was human sacrifice. Now we have elective surgery.

It is natural to be concerned about what television does to children. But does anyone care what it does to the actors?

c) Counterpoint

Epigrammatists frequently take old saws and stand them on their heads, or give them a new twist which changes the meaning. Ambrose Bierce defined an adage as “boned wisdom for weak teeth”; the challenge to the epigrammatist is to put some teeth into it.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall be given safe seats behind the pillars.

Of course we should love our enemies. They teach us to be resolute, relentless, and resourceful.

[These are my three R’s.]

Power corrupts not only those who wield it, but also those who are subservient to it.

Children who are “seen and not heard” grow up to be dumb.

Better to give than to receive, because you get a tax write-off for it.

“A penny saved” is an indication of inadequate goal-setting behavior.

A prophet is not without honor, save in his own Rotary Club.

How do you know they are swine until they reject your pearls?

“Two heads are better than one,” especially if you are seeking employment in a circus.

If I have not seen far, it is because I stood on the shoulders of midgets.

It’s O.K. to search for the truth; just make damned sure you don’t find it.

2. STRUCTURE

a) Repetition

One of the characteristics of both proverbs and aphorisms is repetition of syllabic structure. If the onset of a phrase is repeated, we have alliteration:

Home is where the hooks are.

If chivalry is here, can chauvinism be far behind?

It takes two to tango, but any limp loner can limbo.

As the prig is bent, so is the prude inclined.

The deprived soon became the depraved.

When the nucleus of a phrase is repeated, we have assonance:

Be fruit flies and multiply.

The evil eye is the seeing eye which has been denied.=

When the coda is repeated, we have what Wescott calls “reliteration”:

Some say the world is evil, but I say it is oval.

And when both assonance and reliteration occur, we have rhyme:

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be” plays holy hell with the economy.

Perhaps it’s boredom that causes whoredom.

Instead of a Reign of Terror, we now have a reign of error.

b) Substitution

Substitution of sounds, syntax, or meaning also occurs in many epigrams. When two words have identical spellings but different meanings, we have a homonym:

An autoerotic is someone who fondles strange cars.

Teenage pregnancy ends in child labor.

To retire with a modicum of dignity, a little jack is necessary.

Where there’s a will, there’s a hopeful relative.

When two words sound the same but are spelled differently, we have a homophone. Obviously homophones usually need to be written in order to make sense, but let’s experiment with the following anyway:

Hebrew: a Jewish tea, favored by men.

Patience is for patients.

Female socialization is a case of guise and dolls.

I was browsing through Bartlett’s yesterday, and I found Pere.

All good carnivores begin meals by first muttering: “Let us prey.”

I regret that I have but one asterisk for my country.

Other substitutions do not qualify as either homonyms or homophones, but they are interesting nonetheless. Either a letter, or an entire word, or phrase may be substituted, as follows:

May the farce be with you.

A barfing dog never bites.

Every cloud has a silly lining. (forthcoming)

Beware of Greeks bearing Turks.

Condoms are a girl’s best friend. (forthcoming)

A wise man and his Moonie are soon parted.

Discretion is the better part of pallor.

Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice: Fetalists vs. Fatalists.

I almost became a born-again Christian but I was swept away by the tithe.

Do not ask God for anything; simply thank Her for what She gives us.

c) Transposition and Contraction

Finally, the words of a well-known saying may be transposed, or the entire phrase may be contracted to create new meanings:

Sure, time wounds all heels, but the good guys get their lumps as well.

He who laughs, lasts!

In Wescott’s view, the age of miniaturization has given epigrams a new lease on life. Look around you: they are everywhere. I understand that graffiti have been eliminated from the New York subway system, but we find them in abundance on T-shirts, bumper stickers, and bathroom walls, as well as in a variety of work settings. They are personal statements even if they are not original, and they are a way of talking back to the Establishment, that great generalized other which intimidates and bores us at the same time. Down with jargon! Long live the lapidary art of epigramming! Writing, after all, is one of the best forms of exercise, good for body and soul. But I would also like to think that there may be a few Martials among the contributors to Thoughts For All Seasons, and that their quips will continue to delight or offend long after they are gone.

Paring Pairs No. 35

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). Buccaneer becomes rude beneficiary.
(b). Norfolk utterances lead to weapons.
(c). Why does drug company keep analgesic undercover?
(d). Slow movement at hospital corners.
(e). These endless corridors are real drags.
(f). You and I carry the burden.
(g). Vegetarian rumor about the garden?
(h). These are associated with Homeric feat.
(i). The PM watches the ebb and flow.
(j). Highlander befogged by this.
(k). Play statues on occasion?
(l). Screamers can cause wrinkled brows.
(m). Sounds to me like lopsided mixture of ninety degrees.
(n). Make depressed in pitiful lair.
(o). Speed with which Islamic rulers appear.
(p). Bury the citizen everywhere.
(q). Blacks.
(r). Conservative, lewd vulcanologists.
(s). Remain on sinking ship, join Montgomery against Rommel.
(t). Phoney insect that makes a low noise.
(u). Celebratory beverage produces psychosomatic headache?
(v). Preserve composition of first-magnitude star.
(w). Kindred wheelwright.
(x). Publicity at sporting events for hot dogs and beer?
(y). Expert at rhinoplasty.
(z). Watch non-italic nervous disorder.

(1). Anchors.
(2). Boarder.
(3). Broads.
(4). Bug.
(5). Can.
(6). Coarse.
(7). Counter.
(8). Den.
(9). Desert.
(10). Emir.
(11). Ends.
(12). Even.
(13). Fan.
(14). Fare.
(15). Felloe.
(16). Hauls.
(17). Head.
(18). Heir.
(19). Herbaceous.
(20). Hum.
(21). In.
(22). Inter.
(23). Jet.
(24). Job.
(25). Knows.
(26). Lava.
(27). Leg.
(28). Lines.
(29). Long.
(30). Man.
(31). Mist.
(32). National.
(33). On.
(34). Opus.
(35). Pain.
(36). Pane.
(37). Rat.
(38). Rate.
(39). Roman.
(40). Sad.
(41). Scotch.
(42). Set.
(43). Sham.
(44). Sheet.
(45). Stance.
(46). Stand.
(47). Tangle.
(48). Tick.
(49). Tide.
(50). Tories.
(51). Us.
(52). Words.
(53). Wry.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“More than 2,900 dogs to flood Ryon Park during competition.” [Headline in the Lompoc (California) Record, 27 July 1988. Submitted by Arthur G. Heinrich, Lompoc.]

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.]

Answers to Paring Pairs No. 34

(a). Drama of canceled tie-breaker. (29, 26) Play Off.
(b). Catacombs where Mafiosi hide? (21, 46, 17) Italian Under Ground.
(c). Imp = -4; angel = +4. (27, 25) Opposite Number.
(d). Menial canine corpse. (10, 4) Dog’s Body.
(e). Lassie? You sound serious! (9, 42) Dog Star.
(f). Disgusting seer predicts gain. (16, 31) Gross Prophet.
(g). Kazachock of the prairie? (36, 43) Russian Steppe.
(h). Loving, conservative member of American Medical Association. (1, 44) A.M.A. Tory.
(i). Site of Aussie feather source. (11, 46) Down Under.
(j). Where to look for loser in the encyclopedia. (46, 9) Under Dog.
(k). The ultimate cause of insufficient prevarication. (46, 24) Under Lying.
(l). Acknowledgment by string section of applause as ship proceeds? (5, 48) Bow Wave.
(m). Audited textile course. (37, 20) Sat In.
(n). Creative rota for principled person. (19, 22) Idea List.
(o). Emile’s cheesy wife, Medusa? (15, 50) Gorgon Zola.
(p). Not a strike with poker. (23, 2) Low Ball.
(q). Diamond Jack requires sterilized trull for pinochle. (40, 32) Spayed Quean.
(r). Exorbitant leasing fee for engine of torture. (33, 34) Rack Rent.
(s). Entertaining result from cutting a rug. (12, 39) Floor Show.
(t). Vessel wooed by kings and queens. (6, 38) Court Ship.
(u). Recruiters of compositors, stonemen, etc. (30, 14) Press Gang.
(v). Upset at pass-through when upset. (45, 28) Turn Over.
(w). Employ completely and practically. (47, 13) Use Fully.
(x). Moll known for feminist activities. (49, 18) Woman Hood.
(y). Saw detective with British dessert. (41, 8) Spotted Dick.
(z). Choreography for nude Russian entertainment. (7, 3) Dancing Bare.

The correct answer is (35) Running.

Owing to various circumstances, we did not offer a prize for the correct answer to No. 34. From now on, we shall offer prizes for the first two answers drawn from the cards bearing correct answers. Each prize is a one-year subscription to VERBATIM, which may be sent as a gift or an extension of a subscription. Solutions should include any information we need to fulfill your order, should you win.

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Mother leading uptight dog (7)
5. King Kong breaking part of fort wall (7)
9. Cushy job, taking five to make math graph (4, 5)
10. A bit more than three divided by one who must be paid (5)
11. Head of state generous like a today (7)
12. Veered wildly, maintaining speedway’s top rate (7)
13. Cold in certain South American city (5)
15. Bit of gunfire and muscle used in revolt (5, 4)
17. He works in a saloon close to stock exchange (9)
19. State means estate (5)
21. Bears grabbing the woman’s darling children (7)
23. Head of academic dons cancels yearbooks (7)
25. Eight bobcats eat when every second counts (5)
26. Foolish sheep—one returning flower (9)
27. Eccentric desired kids (7)
28. Monstrous women assumed to change appearances (7)

Down

1. Young ladies trapping college perverts (7)
2. Deliverer of gifts from worker in South America (5)
3. Catcher initially enthralled by straight pitch (7)
4. Advanced and stole the ru- by (9)
5. Beg for starring part after play’s premiere (5)
6. Circular I posted advertising comeback (7)
7. Sheer suffering grips Australian city (5-4)
8. Rubbish lifted and torn in flood (7)
9. Cabinet worker for former President keeps ballpoint (9)
10. Smoke detector—company has genuine article (4, 5)
11. Eclipse could be unusual (7)
12. Was delighted by bit of topaz in very elegant mounting (7)
13. Wealthy doctor carrying on before watch (7)
14. Takes no part in sister’s trips (7)
15. Studies origin of spreading fires (5)
16. A sailor lifted reference book (5)

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Audi’s at reduced savings.” [An ad in The Hartford Courant, 6 July 1988. Submitted by Sidney Perlman, Hartford.]

Solution to Verbal Analogies II

1: Amalthea
2: Meconic
3: Pone
4: Hang Seng
5: A (u) stringer, Ostringer
6: Brevier
7: Ptolemy
8: Ichor
9: Excelsior
10: Edgar
11: Berceuse
12: Fustanella

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. CARO (USA) L.
5. T(R) OPIC.
10. AR (M) REST.
11. ADM-IRA-L (MAD anag.).
12. STA (I) R.
13. RUN (S ALON) G.
14. ME-SHED.
15. HOS(TAG)E.
18. BO (RED) OM.
21. B(HUT) AN.
24. IMP-ENDING.
26. WA(I)VE.
27. GRIM-ACE.
28. A(LIAS)ES (rev.).
29. DESI-ST.
30. PE(A GREE) N.

Down

1. CLAUSE (homophone).
2. RAM-PAGE.
3. UNEARTHED (hidden).
4. A(TT)IRED.
6. RUM-B-A.
7. PERSONA (hidden).
8. CO(LOG)NES.
9. L(A)UNCH.
16. SQUAW-KING.
17. A(BRIDGE)D.
19. REP-AIRS.
20. M(AID)EN.
21. BIG-NAME (anag.).
22. A-T ISSUE.
23. LESSON (homophone).
25. N-EARS.

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