VOL XVI, No 3 [Winter, 1990]

The Past As Prologue

William H. Dougherty, Sante Fe

The diary that Samuel Pepys kept from the the first day of 1660 till he thought he was losing his eyesight eight and a half years later can tell us a lot about how the English language has changed or remained more or less constant over the last three and a half centuries. There may be other sources equally rich in examples for comparison, but there can hardly be another that is at the same time so much fun to read and accessible. Moreover, the Restoration period when Pepys kept his diary is a good time to compare with ours, because by then the basis of modern English had been laid down by the Elizabethans.

For a mechanical and therefore objective lexical comparison I did a spelling check with my Q&A software on the first two paragraphs of Time’s August 7, 1989, cover story on anchor woman Diane Sawyer and on the slightly longer first entry in Pepys’s Diary, dated January 1, 1660. Except for proper names, the spelling checker stopped on two words in the Time paragraphs that were not in its lexicon: show-biz and credentialed. Likewise two words in Pepys’s entry gave pause to the checker, though they are not so much lost words as obsolete forms of words: hath and doth. I should add that where Pepys phonetically wrote then he meant than and that he used the adjective handsome to describe his financial condition, as we would rarely do today. Nevertheless, the spelling-check test provides some indication that English vocabulary has not discarded as many words over the past three centuries as one might expect. Our vocabulary has rather been swollen by these centuries of technological breakthroughs and social and political revolutions.

Though such words as betimes and whither and such forms as doth and hath have dropped out of ordinary usage, today’s English-speaking reader of average education can read most of the Diary without encountering any word that would send him to his dictionary. In fact, so rapidly does our vocabulary continue to expand by the addition of such technical neologisms as AIDS or star wars and such borrowings as zaftig and ayatollah that a reader of our day could well be more taxed to know the meanings of all the words in yesterday’s newspaper than to understand all of the Diary.

Besides the lexicon, grammar—especially syntax—has changed somewhat, too, though again not so much as to be incomprehensible to the average modern reader. On the one hand, Pepys’s English may seem slightly stilted or Biblical by modern standards, with frequent absolute constructions and the use of do as an auxiliary for affirmative verbs where no emphasis is intended, as, for example, in his entry for August 31, 1662, where he thanks “Almighty God, who doth most manifestly bless me in my endeavors to do the duty of my office—I now saving money, and my expenses being very little.” This casual use of the auxiliary do seems to be creeping back into English usage, especially among waiters for some reason, who are increasingly wont to announce, “As the catch of the day, we do have red snapper….” Ordinarily, though, in American speech the auxiliary do is reserved for negative or interrogative statements as in Don’t do it or Do you do it? or for emphasis, particularly in rebuttal, as in But I do do it! We have gained a handy distinction here. On the other hand, Pepys’s English, while familiar enough to us, may sound slightly nonstandard, as where past-tense forms and past participles are coalesced. Pepys writes, just as we might say but ought not write, “… running up and down… with their arses bare… being beat by the watch.” (October 23, 1668)

The progressive tense occurs in Pepys’s Diary, as for example in his entry for February 3, 1665: “She was dressing herself by the fire…and there took occasion to show me her leg”; but he uses it much less than we do. For us it has practically replaced the future tense, as when we say, “I’m going to town tomorrow.” Contractions are even rarer in the Diary but do occur, for example in his entry for September 9, 1667: “Says that Knepp won’t take pains enough…”

More surprising than evident but relatively insignificant differences between the language in Pepys’s Diary and our everyday language are the words and expressions that have persisted in English for more than three centuries without having ever gained full acceptance. For instance, take I when compounded with another pronoun or a noun in the objective case, as in: Between you and I…. Even educated speakers nowadays often use I in combinations where me is prescribed. There is an academic legend that this solecism is a hypercorrection forced into our American English when generations of schoolmarms pounded into the heads of generations of schoolchildren that they must not say me in such combinations as me and Johnny done it. Not so. Samuel Pepys, never confused by an American schoolmarm, invariably, so far as I have found, used I instead of me when the pronoun was combined with another pronoun or noun as the object of a verb or preposition. To cite a few examples: “… did take my wife and I to the Queenes presence-Chamber …” (November 22, 1660); “… who pleased my wife and I …” (December 27, 1660); “… Mrs. Sarah talking with my wife and I…” (October 20, 1663); “… if God send my wife and I to live …” (May 8, 1667); and “This morning up, with mighty kind words between my poor wife and I” (November 20, 1668). Pepys does not use they and its inflected forms as an indefinite singular pronoun nearly as commonly as we do in such constructions as “Everyone on their feet!”, but in his entry for March 20, 1668, he writes “… everybody endeavouring to excuse themselfs.” And in his entry for October 14, 1667, we find “… till they send for me” where the subject is no one in particular. Similarly, who in the objective case appears to have been on the threshold of acceptance into standard English for more than three hundred years. Pepys repeatedly uses the pronoun so, for instance: “… Burroughs, who I took in and drank with” (August 6, 1667). However, in his entry for August 7, 1668, we find: “… whom I was pleased with all the day…. ”As for lay for lie, whose force of usage has by now almost won acceptance into the standard language, we find in Pepys’s entry for June 22, 1667: “… found not a man on board her [a ship] (and her laying so near them was a main temptation to them to come on).” (Compare this with Kipling’s “Where the old Flotilla lay” where lay is the past tense of lie.)

There are also in Pepys’s Diary words and phrases that have been admitted to our standard language but that still sound a bit colloquial. This is me, which we find in his entry for October 31, 1667, has finally been accepted into standard English, though it took three centuries and Winston Churchill’s fiat to do it. When Pepys writes mad, usually he means angry, just as Americans do today: “… which makes our merchants mad” (February 9, 1664). Telling of annoyances on October 10, 1667, he twice writes: “… which did make me mad,” as well as: “I begun heartily to sweat and be angry …” Today this meaning of mad is more at home in American than in British English. The same can be said of certain other of Pepys’s locutions, for example the past participle gotten instead of got: “… who were by this time gotten most of them drunk” (June 2, 1666).

In general, one tends to find confirmed in the language of the Diary the relative conservatism of American as contrasted with British standard English. So far as dialects are concerned, I know British dialects too little to say. But there is in the Diary a locution that I have encountered only there, I believe in Shakespeare, and commonly, though less and less, in the speech of West Texas farmers: like(d) to … as in “That ol' boy like to of killed hisself” or in Pepys’s entry for April 14, 1660:“… the purser … had like to have been drowned had it not been for a rope.”

In the three hundred years since Pepys the general drift of English has been towards a Chinese kind of grammer with loss and confusion of inflection and with phrases used as words. A carelessness about inflection in Pepys’s day is shown above with the examples of the objective I and who. Rarer back then was the use of whole phrases as single words as, for instance: to quickly and efficiently do this job, where the verb and two adverbs are treated together as a so-called split infinitive marked by to, instead of the prescribed to do this job quickly and efficiently, where only do is the infinitive marked as such by to and modified by two adverbs. So it comes as something of a surprise to find a clause in the 1662 Diary that sounds like wording in a television commercial: “I saw the so much by me desired picture of my Lady Castlemayne….” (October 20). Pepys also has a tendency to omit subject pronouns, reminding one of television commercials: “Had a bowl of Whamo this morning. Feel great!” a trim, muscular type in a TV commercial might exclaim, sounding rather like Pepys when he wrote over three centuries ago, “Dined with Mr. Stephens…” (July 3, 1660) or “Lay long in bed…” (July 15, 1660).

Pepys’s Diary owes its eventual status as a classic to its candor and the author’s privileged position as an observer of Restoration England. But he did have a style of his own that should be taken into consideration in any evaluation of the language of his Diary. His English, as suits the dairy of so exuberant and impatient a man and a stenographer among other things, strikes us as almost telegraphic in its compression. It is doubtful that in conversation he would ever remark, “Up early …” or “Up betimes…,” the phrases with which he so often begins his dairy entries. But allowing that the language is well adapted to a stenographer’s very private diary and of its particular time and place, we find little that is obscurely archaic in its style. Despite such interesting differences as are noted above, the language of Pepys’s journal, however dated, is not generically unlike what we might expect to find in a secret journal kept by a yuppie bureaucrat of our times.

[Reference throughout this essay is to The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1970.]

A Few Words (235 To Be Exact) About the 1980s

Richard B. Elsberry, Wilton, Connecticut

Abortion, Acquisition. Ayatollah. Acid rain. Air Jordans. Arbitragers. ALF. Arafat. Arms control. Andrew Lloyd Webber. AIDS. AARP. Bud Light. Blush wine. B1. Billy Ball. Bran. Bimbos. Baby boomer. Bailouts. “Big.” Brat Pack. Bernhard Goetz.

Crocodile Dundee. Charles and Di. Corazon. “Cats.” Calvins. Camcorder. Classic Coke. Crack. Contras. CW. Chernobyl. Compact discs. Car phones. Colorization. Challenger. Couch potatoes.

Deal. Donald Trump. Deregulation. Deficit spending. Drugs. Everett Koop. ERA. E.T. Ewoks. Falkland Islands. Ferdinand and Imelda. Fitness. Fax. Fergie. Gene mapping. Grenada. Geraldo. Glasnost. Gorbachev. Gretzky. Greenpeace. Greenmail. Global warming. Ghostbusters.

Handguns. Hacker. Hostile takeovers, Home equity loans. Homeless. Hyundai. IRA. Indiana Jones. Iacocca. IBM compatible. Ivan Boesky. Junk bonds. Jim and Tammy. Jarvik heart. Joe Isuzu. Kitaro. Laptops. Larry Bird. Leveraged buyout. Luke Skywalker. Lech Walesa. “Les Misérables.”

MTV. Mujahedeen. Mike Milken. Muesli. Meese. Miami Vice. Magic Johnson. Merger. Michael J. Fox. Magnetic resonance scanner. Morton Downey, Jr. New Age. Noriega. NRA. National debt. Oprah. Ollie North. Ozone depletion. Prince. PC. Poison pill. “Phantom of the Opera.” Poindexter. PTL Club. Qadhafi.

Reaganomics. Rust belt. Range Rover. Rambo, John. Robin & Mike. “Read my lips.” Roseanne. Steroids. Stealth. Short Round. Sound bite. Star Wars. Stephen King. Steinbrenner. Significant Other. SDI. Tax reform. Thatcher. Tom Clancy. Tofu. Taipan. Terrorism. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. USA Today. Umberto Eco. Vanna. Willie Horton. Windham Hill. “Where’s the beef?” Yugo. Yeager.

Lest We Forget

Stephen E. Hirschberg, Elmsford, New York

“And now,” announced the quizmaster, “for the grand prize, including wealth beyond description, just three more questions. Remember you must answer promptly. First, explain E=mc².”

—“This is the equivalence of mass and energy, with c the speed of light. Simple ….”

“Correct. Now, what is the Hegelian absolute?”

—“The all-inclusive totality of reality. One must, of course, mention the schema of immediacy— negation—negation of negation….”

“Quite so. Now, the final question. How many days are there in May?” … [pause] … [BUZZ!] “… Time is up. I’m sorry. You lose.”

What happended? The unfortunate contestant simply knew his physics and philosophy, and recall was immediate. Since there is no logic to the lengths of months, he had facilitated memory of them with a mnemonic device. Before the answer could be given, he had to summon up a variation on the venerable theme—

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting February alone,
And that has twenty-eight days clear
And twenty-nine in each leap year.¹

—and time expired while the verse was internally recited.

My wife, probably to be difficult, points out a visual mnemonic for month lengths—something involving knuckles. Indeed, visual mnemonics were used by classical orators so they could speak without notes. Points to be made were assigned to various loci in a house. The speaker then mentally toured the structure while delivering the speech. Our use of “in the first (second, etc.) place” is an offshoot of this method. Because this is “The Language Quarterly,” further discussion will be limited to mnemonics using language.

Mnemonics actually are codes for associated, random facts. Their techniques of encryption may be divided into: reduction coding, which minimizes data to be stored (e.g., acronyms: reducing words to single letters); and elaboration coding, which strengthens weakly linked memory structures by adding material² (e.g., rhymes, and epi-acronyms: in which initial letters of words in phrases are the code). Having a mnemonic is no panacea. For example, to recover the Great Lakes one must first remember a mnemonic (HOMES, or, going west to east, “Sergeant-Major Hates Eating Onions”³), and then decrypt it. Alas, if Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior are nowhere in the brain, HOMES will not put them there.

Poetry is an ancient mnemonic device. The Biblical psalmist undoubtedly used the combination of the verse form and an abecedarius to remember Psalm 119, each of whose twenty-two octaves begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Though it is no Iliad, all young spellers know the rhyme mnemonic

I before E
Except after C
Or when pronounced A
As in neighbour and weigh

so well that they are destined chronically to misspell seizure. Ogden Nash’s orthographist’s mnemonic, of more limited utility, at least has no exceptions—

The one-l lama,
He’s a priest.
The two-l llama,
He’s a beast.
And I will bet
A silk pajama
There isn’t any
Three-l lllama.⁴

Mnemonics were life-preservers in the stormtossed educational seas of my youth. They rescued me in spelling (“The principal is your pal.”), physics (Roy G. Biv, or maybe Richard Of York Gains Battles In Vain⁵, for the order of the spectrum’s colors— Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet), and mathematics. (A quarter century after high school trigonometry, about all I can remember of it is the benevolent Indian “Soh-Cah-Toa”: Sine = opposite/hypotenuse, Cosine = adjacent/hypotenuse, Tangent= opposite/ adjacent, relating the lengths of the right triangle’s sides to the functions of its angles). In science class I learned the planets, by distance from the sun (“Mary Very Early Made Jane Some Unusually Nice Pies”—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto⁶), and the functions of living things (“Sensible Motorists Refrain From Driving Automobiles At Excessive Rates”—sensation, movement, respiration, food-taking, digestion, absorption, assimilation, excretion, reproduction). On a good day I could recite the hills of Rome (and would have suffered less had I known “Can Queen Victoria Eat Cold Apple Pie?”⁷—Capitoline, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, Caelian, Aventine, Palatine), and after four years of Latin could deal with calends (first of the month, right?). As for nones and ides, forget it. Had I but learned the rhyme—

In March, July, October, May,
The Ides are on the fifteenth day,
The Nones the seventh; all other months besides
Have two days less for Nones and Ides⁸

—I might be a classicist today.

Instead, I proceeded to that hotbed of mnemonics, medical school. [I wish to assure non-physician readers that their doctors do not, as a rule, think of patients' problems as word games. When memory fails, doctors actually look things up.] Suffice it to say, after the first thousand pages or so, the plot of Gray’s Anatomy wears thin, even for the most avid reader, and thence emerges the insight—“I can’t remember all this stuff.” In desperation, I learned such acrostics as novel (Nerve, Artery, Vein, Empty space, Lymphatic—inguinal structures, from lateral to medical) and bitem (appropriately, the muscles of mastication—Buccinator, Internal pterygoid, Temporalis, External pterygoid, Masseter); the abecedarius of lead poisoning (Anemia, Basophilic stippling, Colic, Dementia, Encephalopathy, Foot drop, Gingival pigmentation⁹); and two (What a waste of precious brain space!) epi-acronyms for the cranial nerves—the ancient “On Old Olympus' Towering Top A Finn And German Viewed Some Hops” (Olfactory, Optic, Oculomotor, Trochlear, Trigeminal, Abducens, Facial, Glossopharyngeal, Vagus, Spinal accessory, Hypoglossal), and the more popular “Oh Oh Oh To Touch And Feel A Girl’s Vagina—AH !” [Having passed anatomy, practising physicians usually refer to these nerves as I-XII.] Lively, preferably lewd, imagery was appreciated by students who kept company with cadavers all day. The bones of the wrist (Navicular, Lunate, Trique-trum, Pisiform, greater Multangular, lesser Multangular, Capitate, Hamate) were brought to mind by “Never Lower Tillie’s Pants, Mamma Might Come Home.” For those classmates with severe anatomy burnout (“I can’t remember anything!”) we devised the acronyms teon (Two Eyes, One Nose), and, for the joints of the arm, sew (Shoulder-Elbow-Wrist).

It is the consensus of mnemonists that the more bizarre, sharp, or humorous the image, the more effective the mnemonic. How can one forget Ohm’s Law, volts=Amps × Resistance, given “Virgins Are Rare.”¹⁰? Heteronyms, absent extraneous verbiage, reinforce the standard-daylight time changer, “Spring ahead, fall back.” Conversely, who remembers the bass clef lines and spaces (with, respectively, the insipid “Great Big Dogs Fight Animals” and “All Cars Eat Gas”¹¹)? The treble clef lines are only a bit more memorable (“Every Good Boy Does Fine” or “Every Grizzly Bear Digs Figs”¹²); its spaces' notes, at least, crisply spell face. Who knows how many musical aspirations have been dashed against the bass clef, for want of adequate mnemonics?

Coherent, grammatical sentences can make effective mnemonics because language structure is already in place in our minds. Witness, for the taxonomic division of living things, “King Philip Came Over For Gene’s Special Variety” (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, variety). On the other hand, I find this one for pi, coding digits by word lengths,

Now I sing a silly roundelay
Of radial roots, and utter, “Lackaday!
Euclidean results imperfect are, my boy…
Mnemonic arts employ!”¹³

more difficult to remember, with its tortured word order, than the twenty-one places of pi it yields.

Even the best mnemonics are not free of drawbacks. Rules or lists may change, thus rendering the mnemonics obsolete. A key religious figure in American history—st. dapiacl—gave us the presidential cabinet posts in order of their creation (State, Treasury, Defense, Attorney General, Postmaster General, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor), critical to answering “According to the Presidential Succession Act, who is ninth in line to the presidency?” Subsequent deletions and additions (Postmaster General, out; Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, in) would yield stdaiaclhhtee, not really the most pronounceable acronym, at least to speakers of English. Nevertheless, the good St. D., retired, is still occupying a good number of my cerebral neurons and synapses.

Worse is the half-recalled mnemonic. One may remember homes is a mnemonic, but forget what it is a mnemonic for. My personal albatross is the couplet “Eight ever/Nine never” which has to do with taking a fitnesse in bridge, and how many cards my side has in the suit; to my partners' distress, I forget the finesse—against the king, or against the queen—to which the rule applies.

Can we ever discard a good, though unnecessary, mnemonic, or are we forever doomed to have delayed responses as these jingles, on cue, run through our heads? Does a sea captain think “port,” or, rather, “port—four letters—same as left”? When he enters a harbor, does he know the red nun buoys mark the right side of the channel, or must the alliterative “Red right returning” come to mind first? Can property lawyers forget on each (Open, Notorious, Exclusive, Actual, Continuous, Hostile) when recalling the requisites for adverse possession (squatter’s rights, to us not of the bar)? Do speleologists remember which of those things in caves is which, without having to hear that little internal voice chant “stalactite—c—ceiling; stalagmite— g—ground”?

We collect and preserve mnemonics, however redundant, as insurance against embarrassing lapsus memoriae. They are not foolproof. According to Sir Edward Coke, “It is … necessary that memorable things should be committed to writing, (the witness of times, the light and the life of truth) and not wholly betaken to slippery memory which seldom yields a certain reckoning.”¹⁴ For those of us who forget to take the shopping list to the supermarket, let alone calendars and rosters of planets and cabinet posts, memory will have to do. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.¹⁵

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Stuff and Nonsense

Richard Lederer, Concord, New Hampshire

One of the wonders of the English language is that it contains so many words about words themselves. Among the most colorful and intriguing are those that describe the piffle, prattle, twaddle, and flapdoodle that people in all talks of life tend to spew forth. Here is a small start on a glossary of glossolalia, a demidictionary of drivel that lists the varieties of verbal obfuscation and explains the etymologies of these often playful terms.

Applesauce (an American variant is apple sass), which has come to designate a ‘camouflage of flattery,’ is excessively sweet, mushy, pulpy and insubstantial, and thrifty boarding houses serve an abundance of the stuff to divert awareness from the scarcity of more nourishing fare. A similar connection is made between senseless banter and baloney, eponymously descended from Bologna, the Italian city where workers turned out a type of sausage crammed with odds and ends from slaughter, including, some say, assmeat. It is but a short step from the cheapest ground cold cuts to cheap talk, and the same steps takes up from tripe, the walks of the first and second stomachs of ruminants,' to ‘worthless, foolish speech.’ Adding to the pile of verbal garbage is balderdash, which reaches back to the late 16th century and originally meant a ‘hodgepodge of liquors, such as wine mixed with beer,’ perfect for washing down a mishmash of pretentious and frivolous blather. Bosh looks as typically British as balderdash, yet it actually descends from the Turkish adjective bos ‘empty, useless.’ The word became popular in England in the early 19th century through the oriental romances and memories of James Morier, who enhanced his exotic tales with Turkish terms.

Spook etymology misinforms us that babble is a Biblical reference to Genesis 11.17, in which the people of Babel (Babylon) built a tower reaching to heaven and incited God to confound their language. The less romantic truth is that babble descends from the Middle English babelon and is probably of imitative origin, echoing the ba ba sounds typically made by infants in their repetitive chatter. Blarney and bunk, on the other hand, do hail from the names of actual places. Blarney refers to the Blarney stone, located in Blarney Castle, a few miles north of Cork, Ireland. Those who kiss the Blarney stone are reputed to be able to charm the pants off everyone ever after. Bunk is a shortening of bunkum, itself a respelling for Buncomber County, North Carolina, whose congressional representative once remarked that he was “only talking for Buncombe.”

Claptrap turns out to be a show biz metaphor for high-sounding but empty language. The word was originally a theatrical term for a showy trick or patch of high-flown, grandiose language that actors would use to attract (‘trap’) applause (‘claps’) from their audiences. Another rhyming reduplication, mumbo jumbo, is probably borrowed from a word in African Mandingo: Mama Dyumbo was a deity who helped husbands to bewilder wives whom they suspected of talking too much.

The poet William Cowper once wrote “philologists who trace/A panting syllable through time and space,/Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark/To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah’s ark.” Almost always, an etymological safari into any subject bags at least a few animals. A cock and bull story, for example, derives from ancient fables and medieval bestiaries in which cocks moralized, bulls expostulated, and a menagerie of other animals discoursed in human language. Cockamamie has nothing whatever to do with roosters, talking or otherwise. In 19th-century France, fashionable ladies applied increasingly elaborate beauty spots to their upper cheeks. This craze became known as décalcomanie, from décalc- (from décalquer ‘transfer a tracing’ + -o- + manie ‘mania,’ whence we get decalcomania (decal for short for the transfers), and the adjective cockamamie some say echoes the sense of florid but superficial embellishment. Hogwash, of course, is a designation for language as ‘worthless, disgusting, and unfit for human consumption, as pig slops.’

Puffy, bureaucratic verbiage if often called gobbledygook, a word credited to Texas congressman Maury Maverick, who compared the tortuous (and torturous) prose of Washington bureaucrats to the senseless gobbling of turkeys. Maverick made the word famous with a World War II memorandum denouncing the bloated language found in government reports: “Be short and say what you’re talking about. Stop ‘pointing up’ programs. No more ‘finalizing,’ ‘effectuating,’ or ‘dynamics.’ Anyone caught using the words ‘activation’ or ‘implementation’ will be shot.” Closely related to gobbledygook, but more malicious, is doublespeak. In 1973, the National Council of Teachers of English established a Committee on Public Doublespeak to help identify and stamp out evasive and obfuscating terminology slithering out of public sources, such as “uncontrolled contact with the ground” for “airplane crash” and “inoperative statement” for “lie.” Doublespeak is a blending of Double-talk and Newspeak, the insidious language of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

A number of loopily echoic words resonate with the nonsense of non-sense. Folderol (or falderal) is drawn from the meaningless syllables sung in the refrains of many English folksongs, “fol-de-rol-deray.” Tommyrot compounds tommy, ‘simpleton, fool’ (as in tomfoolery) and rot, ‘worthless matter.’ In his Second Browser’s Dictionary, John Ciardi suggests that “tommy is a variant of tummy, the sense shift having been from ‘stomach garbage’ to ‘brain garbage.’ ” And poppycock comes from the Danish pappekak, literally ‘soft poop’ or ‘baby poop,’ an appropriately scatological etymology for logorrhea.

That we have been able to come up with so many words to describe forked-tongued and muddle-headed language indicates that we may one day not just speak but communicate. That we have been so intelligent about identifying unintelligible persiflage gives hope that we may learn not just to talk but to say something.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“It’s Detroit sometime in the recent future, a city beleaguered by the sleaziest of criminals and defended by a police department that’s the subsidiary of a big corporation.” [From a movie listing for Robocop in TV Guide, Western Washington State edition, 20 August 1988. Submitted by Walt Sheldon, Bellingham.]

The Communication Ravine

Ruth Riedel, Palm Beach Gardens, Florida

For nearly eight years my husband and I worked in Papua New Guinea as teachers in a church school. (Call us “missionaries” to make it simple.) Of the 750 different languages in the country, we learned two. One was Melanesian Pidgin, which, besides English and Hiri Motu, is one of the official languages of the country. The second language we learned was Kâte (pronounced kaw-tay), an area language spoken by only several thousand people. Living and working overseas with people of another culture and language made us realize how complicated communication can be.

Speech is the most obvious form of communication. But using speech to communicate is more than “I said,” “he said,” or “they said.” Sometimes the words we use are the sounds of the communicating: whispering, cackling, prattling, chuckling, chortling, mumbling, grumbling. Other words suggest motives behind the speech: lying, gossiping, negotiating, plotting. Speech is certainly more than plugging in vocabulary words to express a thought. We had to learn nuances of meaning which were not found in dictionaries.

The Pidgin word tok by itself means “talk” and its synonyms, in both verb and noun forms. Whereas in English there are totally different words to express different aspects of speech, the word tok combines with other words to define various kinds of communication: tokaut ‘speak out,’ tok baksait ‘gossip,’ toktok ‘converse,’ tok mama ‘advise,’ tok hait ‘secret,’ tok tru ‘truth,’ tok nogut ‘foul language,’ tok giaman ‘lying,’ tok pait ‘argue,’ tok ples ‘local language,’ tok tasol ‘idea,’ tok nating ‘nonsense,’ tok isi ‘comfort,’ tok pani ‘joke,’ tok strong ‘emphasize.’

Voice intonation and body language complicate the communication process further. Using no words at all, you can express joy, sorrow, anger, disgust, skepticism, ridicule, criticism, fear, and many other emotions. Tone of voice, facial expressions, placement of arms, and body stance all contribute to nonverbal communication of feelings. In practical terms, we had to learn not only to choose our words very carefully, but to be aware of what we said in nonverbal ways. We occasionally used in English as a “safe” language for discussion or making decisions when there were no English speakers around. We were aware that they were reading the cues of intonation and body language to get an idea about how the discussion was going. We only hoped they would not misread the cues. We, too, tried to read their nonverbal cues when they spoke too quickly for us to understand or when they used an uncommon language with which they alone were familiar.

There can be, however, a danger in relying on a language for secrecy. One missionary told of the time his family went home to Germany on furlough. Their children did not realize others spoke German, but rather thought it was their family’s personal, private language. So one of the children, standing in a customs line in Frankfurt, shouted, “Look, Dad, see that great big FAT lady!?”

Even if you become skilled at controlling nonverbal means of communication, there are still other cultural assumptions and traditions you cannot know about without proper briefing. We had heard from missionaries in other countries that American ways of doing things may be insulting to the nationals. In India, for example, it is a great insult to offer your left hand in any way, even handing a clerk your money to pay for something. The left hand is considered the “dirty” hand, the right hand the “clean” hand. In Thailand, showing the bottom of your foot is an insult. This sounds easy enough to avoid until you consider how many times you cross your legs when sitting at meetings, on a bus, or in a restaurant.

In Papua New Guinea [PNG] women hiss and boo at other women who step across rows of food spread on the ground at the marketplace, for women are “unclean” and must take proper steps to insure the purity of the food being handled. Even symbolic contamination is taken very seriously. Boys at one of the high schools refused to eat the rice prepared for their meal: because one of them had seen some girls sitting on the bales of rice stacked in the school pantry, they considered the rice unclean and therefore inedible.

Much of what is appropriate in one country is not in another, and vice versa. In the U.S. the first questions we ask small children with whom we are confronted are: “What’s your name?” and “How old are you?” In PNG those two questions are the wrong questions to ask. The first question is inappropriate because names are private. The people believe that evil spirits can control you if they know your name. Most Papua New Guineans, therefore, have several extra names, depending on who needs to know (school, government, or church). But they have one private, hidden name which remains a family secret. The second question, “How old are you?” is one which might get you a puzzled look or a blank stare. Most adults, and nearly all children, neither know nor care when they were born. The parent might be able to tell you, “Now let’s see…she was born the year we had that big flood.” But as a practical consideration, age in years has nothing to do with anything. Children go to school when the parents and village elders feel they are ready for it. The passing of each year of one’s life is celebrated generally for everyone as Christmas finishes and the New Year arrives. The language even reflects this, for the Pidgin word for ‘birthday’ is Krismas. Besides, their concept of time is circular, not linear, so marking the passage of time is not as important as celebrating the return of seasonal events.

The phrase “communication gap” takes on new meanings in another culture. Our views about how well we are communicating are often misleading; a better phrase might be “communication ravine.” There is a classic case (and true, we are told) of a misunderstanding between a missionary and his cook. The missionary told the cook what to prepare for dinner: “Go out and catch that old rooster, pluck it, and put it in the refrigerator. We’ll cook it later.” Several hours later the missionary opened the refrigerator door only to find one very angry, naked rooster staring at him: he hadn’t told the cook to kill it first. Meanwhile, what do you suppose the cook told his family that night when they asked why he was so tattered and scratched: “You’ll never guess what that crazy missionary asked me to do today!”

Symbols are still another form of communication. Drivers use symbols all the time to know how and where to drive. Olympic games participants must identify symbols in order to find everything from locker rooms to Telex machines. Despite the growing use of internationally recognized symbols, each country has its own unique cultural and artistic symbols, which are baffling to outsiders. Many Papua New Guineans can look at the face of another Papua New Guinean—on the street or in a picture book—and tell you which part of the country that person is from. They know by style of face-painting and headdress where a singsing dancer is from, and they can look at designs on carvings or woven string bags and say where the work originated. Many of these designs and symbols tell stories of their people, and have meanings which are unknown to Westerners.

One missionary, who for years had lived and worked in a city on the north coast, told us of one enormous mistake made for just that reason. A group of expatriate engineers was called in to design and build a high school. The designers decided that the local people would like the school better if it had designs with which the people were familiar. So they chose from a “story board” (an elaborate carving showing the history of the people in that area) a symbol which was—to them—abstract. This symbol became the logo for the school, and was used on everything from school letterhead to the sign in front of the building. When the school opened, none of the students came. The designers were baffled and asked for advice from this long-time missionary. He took the problem back to the local village elders, who explained why the school was being boycotted: the logo chosen was from that part of the village history which described an enemy arriving to rape all the young women of the tribe. That symbol was the most repugnant part of their whole history, and it was an embarrassment to have it plastered on signs and papers all over town. To Westerners, it was a “neat” design; to the people, it was a symbol of great shame.

Conversely, we saw T-shirts imported, bought, and worn by people who had no idea what the symbols or words meant. One young girl wore a shirt with “MILK MILK” printed on it corresponding to the appropriate part of her anatomy beneath the shirt. A church elder who stood up to read the lesson in the church service wore a shirt that read “I do it every night.” Even had they known English, milk would seem a tame enough word; and it might likely refer to something as innocent as brushing one’s teeth or going to sleep.

Being a native speaker is still not enough in the game of communication. Because of historical, political, and economic ties between Australia and Papua New Guinea, there are many Australians living and working in PNG, and many Papua New Guineans who learn English as Australians speak it. So in shops and offices all over the country we encountered English, but not as we were accustomed to hearing it spoken. What would you buy if your neighbor gave you a shopping list asking for “capsicum, silver beet, mince, and jelly?” (She would expect green peppers, Swiss chard, hamburger, and Jell-O.) Or what if she offered your child a “cordial”? (All she would be giving him is Kool-Aid.) Or what would you think if the gentleman down the street said, “What a lovely baby! May I nurse him?” (He would only be asking to hold the baby.) If you were invited out for “supper” your hostess would serve cake and coffee, while an invitation to “tea” would be for the evening meal.

Translating can be a treacherous means of communication, too. Although we did not translate more than our own class notes or study materials for the students, we could sympathize with people whose sole job was translation. Literal translations have been troublesome to missionaries for years. In Chinese, the Biblical phrase, “Your sins were as scarlet; they shall be white as snow” simply does not work. Red is the color for weddings and celebrations; white is the color of death and mourning. Interestingly, the word for “white” [person] and “corpse” are nearly identical in the Kâte language: qangqang and \?\âng \?\âng, respectively.¹⁶

Key words presented some of the worst problems. “Grace” is almost impossible to translate because their cultural assumptions allow no possibility for a truly free gift. There is a basic suspicion that no kind of gift, earthly or heavenly, can possibly come without strings attached. The Kâte words mang jaung (literally ‘care from the heart/belly’) are not too bad a translation for ‘love.’ However, there are only two possibilities for translating ‘love’ in Pidgin, neither of which is satisfactory. One is laikim, as in “I love (i.e., ‘like’) cucumbers.” The other is givim bel, which literally means ‘give the heart/ belly,’ but which commonly means ‘to make pregnant.” Believe it or not, it is the latter phrase which has been chosen to translate the word ‘love’ as found in the Bible. Those sorts of translation difficulties leave room for a lot of explaining!

While we worked in Papua New Guinea the chances for miscommunication were myriad. Hard work, combined with luck, eventually bridged the ravines. We derived great pleasure from attempting to unravel the languages and their cultures, and we found that the desire to understand and to be understood comes early in life, remains long, and seems to be universal.

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Don’t Get Your Titles In A Twist!

Adrian Room, Petersfield, Hampshire

I don’t know about you, but I tend to get a touch irritated by book titles, encountered in the media and elsewhere, that seem slightly “deviant.” Deviant, that is, from standard English, or from what one is expecting. Some titles are catchy, and easy to remember, like H.G. Well’s Kipps (1905), or Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express (1978), and some are less memorable, such as Frank Moor-house’s Tales of Mystery and Romance (1977), or Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841). But at least they are reasonably straightforward and comprehensible.

What I am getting at are titles with skew spellings, rogue punctuation, and “weird and wonderful” names and words that are difficult to relate to anything meaningful.

Why, for example, does Bruce Chatwin’s highly readable collection of anecdotes and aperçus, What Am I doing Here (1989), have no question mark? Or come to that, why didn’t he call it What I Am Doing Here? What is the significance, if any, of this small deviation from the norm? And what was Stephen King up to, calling his novel Pet Semetary (1983)? Even Garrison Keillor’s lovely Lake Wobegon Days (1985) had me worried. Why should I make an extra effort to remember that the name of the “1001st lake in Minnesota,” as he describes it, is a twisted version of woebegone? The trouble with such “off” spellings and punctuations is that you really need to remember two extra things, on top of the little itself: first, that the title is “deviant,” and second, how it is deviant.

However, the fact remains that all through literrary titles in English there are such irritants, and I thought I might as well tackle the issue head on and see where the longstanding and popularly perpetrated snags lay. I offer my findings in the hopes that fellow readers and media followers will be able to see some light in this particular thicket, as I think I can myself discern now.

Let us take the matter of name spellings first, whether personal names or place names, real names or fictitious ones. Here are some classics: Smollett’s novel is Humphry Clinker (1771), not “Humphrey”; Richardson’s is Clarissa Harlowe (1748), not “Harlow”; Defoe’s is Robinson Crusoe (1719), not “Cruso”; Rider Haggard’s is Allan Quatermain (1887), not “Quartermain” or “Quatermaine.” (A slap on the wrist here to William Rose Benét’s The Reader’s Encyclopedia and Kenneth McLeish’s Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide, which respectively give the latter misspellings.) Also in this group, I would say, are Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1846), not “Weathering,” “Withering,” or any similar fancy, and, admittedly more trickily, Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1921), not ‘Chrome,” although of course the pun on this word is intentional. (Crome is the name of a house, just as Wuthering Heights is.) And we can conveniently add a couple of pause-causing poetic titles here, too: Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817), and not a jot otherwise, and Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott (1832), not “Shallot,” which makes the lady smack strongly of veganism.

It is only one small step from such pitfalls to those holding punctuational and related snares, the latter often involving the problem of whether a title is one word or two. The apostrophe has much to answer for here, as it does in everyday English. So let us note: James Joyce’s novel is Finnegans Wake (1939), not “Finnegan’s,” E. M. Forster’s is Howards End (1910) (another house name, by the way), not “Howard’s,” and, a potential double delusion, Shakespeare’s famous play is Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598), with two apostrophes. The first of these is the possessive, the second represents the vowel of is. (The Joyce title is typical of the author’s linguistically inventive but allusive style, and is actually a compound of two proper names: that of Finn MaCool, the Irish folk-hero, and Tim Finnegan, the hero of a music-hall ballad, who sprang to life in the middle of his own wake.)

Hyphens can cause difficulties, too. So Melville wrote Moby-Dick (1851) and John Buchan’s autobiography was called Memory Hold-the-Door (1940), but Robertson Davies wrote Tempest Tost (1951), with no hyphen. As for the “one-or-two-word” problem, Walter Scott wrote Redgauntlet (1824) and John Buchan (again) named his novel of Scottish adventure Huntingtower (1922).

While we’re about it, we should not overlook Coleridge’s poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), not “Rhyme,” or Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1811), not “Child,” or Ruskin’s Arrows of the Chace (1880), not “Chase.” Both Byron’s and Ruskin’s wayward words are directly related to their modern equivalents but have essentially historic spellings.

And there we have another whole river to cross, since some of the best-known literary works have retained their historic titles, complete with outmoded spellings and punctuations. Spenser is notoriously troublesome here, with The Shepheardes Calender (1579), The Faerie Queene (1590) and Mother Hubberds Tale(1591) among the greatest hazards. In a sense, it seems illogical that we have retained the historic spellings for Spenser’s works yet use modern spellings for the titles of plays by his contemporary, William Shakespeare. But perhaps it is just as well that we have A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600), not A Midsommer nights dream, as it originally was when first published, and Henry the Fifth (or Henry V) (1600), not Henry the fift. A later title, but still with “olde-worlde” spelling, is Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1653), which oddly enough, seems to present little problem.

What can cause a bout of head-scratching is deciding whether the definite or indefinite article is involved. One Shakespeare play that quite often goes wrong is The Winter’s Tale (1611)—“The,” not “A,”—while Jerome K. Jerome, giving no trouble at all with Three Men in a Boat (1889), followed it up by taking the same characters on a tour of Germany in Three Men on the Bummel (1900). The last word of this is the name of a river, so “A” is quite out of order. (Kenneth McLeish, once again hold your hand out!)

A sort of juvenile one-off here, spellingwise, is Daisy Ashford’s charming novel, written when she was only nine. The Young Visiters (1919). The authoress may be excused her youthful slip, but once she has made it, we are obliged to preserve it! Among the true deviants, the titles that are neither immediately nor even sometimes ever really meaningful (although they may become so during the reading of the book), are the mini-minefields of such as Lisa Alther’s Kinflicks (1976), Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast (1950), and Peter Carey’s Illywhacker (1985).

Of course, similar titular problems occur in areas outside literature, too. Vaughan Williams’s chilly symphony that developed out of his music for the “British hero” movie Scott of the Antarctic (1948) was actually entitled Sinfonia Antartica (1953), which seems rather perverse. And John Gay’s greatest but much more light-hearted work was called The Beggar’s Opera (1728), singular, not plural. Even more obviously in the world of musical (and visual) entertainment, it is worth noting that the Folies Bergè are spelled with the first word plural, but the second singular. (Editor of Everyman’s Encyclopxdia, write it out a hundred times!).

Well, I’m off to bed now, for good re-read of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962). At least, I think it’s “A”….

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The truck now has over 191,000 miles on it and has never had a major problem until recently. The timing gear broke in the front yard after coming home from the orthodontist.” [From the Letters column, Friends, March 1988. Submitted by Raymond Spong, Niantic, Connecticut.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“That dive was right on the edge of new exploration and new technology. Taking new technology into unexplored realsm of the earth is a once in a lifetime opportunity that I hope to repeat many times.” [From Underwater USA, July 1988. Submitted by Rey Barry, Charlottesville, Virginia.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Writing Systems of the World

Florian Coulmas, (Basil Blackwell, 1989), ix + 302pp.

[Note: This book may be ordered form any bookstore that has the wit to look up the publisher in Books in Print.]

Literacy and numeracy have come to the fore in recent years as major issues, not only (or even so much) in the Third World as in the industrialized nations. Leaving numeracy aside for the moment, those of us who have studied linguistics have usually been told that as language is essentially spoken, its written form is of lesser (or no) importance for the analysis of language. That is patent rubbish, of course, for it can easily be demonstrated that written language cannot be ignored for a variety of reasons: the more formalized versions of language that are reflected there, the relatively complex constructions that are accepted as normal to writing but would be difficult to construct viva voce and difficult to assimilate unless read, the preservation of fossilized forms—both words and grammar—made possible by written records, and so on. These and other features of writing have an undeniable effect on language, and it would be foolish to ignore them just because language is, at bottom, an oral means of communication. That is not to say that writing and speech should be measured by the same yardsticks, only that writing cannot be ignored in a proper treatment of language.

Writing has not been ignored entirely by writers on language, but its role has been consistently underplayed. Coulmas’s clear exposition of the history of writing systems traces the development of various kinds of writing systems—ideographic, pictographic, morphemic, syllabic, phonemic, and phonetic—through history, discussing them individually, describing how certain ancient scripts were deciphered, and presenting his cogent arguments for regarding at least some aspects of language through the analysis of writing. It is only through their written forms that we know anything at all about certain languages, and the written forms of others serve to confirm the findings of diachronic linguistics in positing the pronunciation and sources of long-dead tongues.

It is generally conceded that writing was invented because of the need to keep records as civilizations became more complex. Scholars generally agree that the use of a numerical marking system preceded attempts at developing methods for transcribing language per se; I find in accepting that fact some interesting implications for theories about how the mind works and, in particular, its capacity for abstracting. It must be emphasized, of course, that language preceded numeracy, but it is interesting to see how very early in man’s acculturation the ability to deal with the abstract notion of counting manifested itself and was then transferred into an encodable form. In its most primitive form, a record might consist of bits of clay similar in shape to those of the items being counted (for identification), the quantity of bits being equal to the number of items counted. Subsequently, the clay bits were replaced by marks (even as we make them today: \?\) with a picture of what was being counted (pots or sheaves of grain) incised alongside the count. Much later, to save space, the ‘\?\’ was to be replaced by a single symbol, say, ‘5.’ Meanwhile, the picture of the grain sheaf was itself to be replaced by a shorthand version, and that is where things begin to get complicated. I have already simplified Coulmas’s description out of all sensible recognition for the sake of brevity, but, while the time compression has been severe, I do not think I have distorted the facts.

For us who can read and count and take such matters so much for granted, it seems impossible to believe that it took more than 500 years (2500-2000 BC) for the Sumerians to reduce their cuneiform character inventory from 800 to about 500. As they were overrun and absorbed by the Akkadians by 1900 BC, even that might be viewed as a bootless economy. While it must be noted that the cuneiform system, based on a pattern of wedge-like signs impressed in clay by a specially cut reed stylus, served several Mesopotamian cultures for about 3000 years, it was used for writing several languages of diverse structures: Sumerian was an agglutinative language, in structure of the type of American Indian languages, Hungarian, etc.; Akkadian was a Semitic language, similar in structure to Hebrew; the Elamites spoke a language of which we know little, but it is interesting to note that about 1500 BC they changed from the script writing system they had been using to cuneiform, and in the “short” time of less than 500 years had reduced the number of symbols to 113. The Hittites, who spoke a language with some Indo-European characteristics, also wrote in cuneiform, as did the speakers of Old Persian, a true Indo-European language. Indeed, it was the trilingual (Old Persian, Elamite, and Neo-Baby lonian) inscription of Darius that provided the key for the decipherment of several ancient writings. Ugaritic, another Semitic language, was also written in cuneiform.

Cuneiform writing thus served different functions; that is, from its original use for pictograms, it became stylized to the point where the images were unrecognizable without decoding. As the speakers of various languages applied it to their needs, it became somewhat more sophisticated; the Elamites, for example, were able to economize on the number of symbols by assigning to most of them syllabic identity, a major step toward the development of alphabetic writing. In his description of writing systems Coulmas adopts the designations applied by W. Haas, namely, pleremic to describe the lexemic/morphemic level and cenemic to describe the syllabic/ phonetic/phonemic level. Although the author is quick to point out that these classifications are not mutually exclusive, even in the oldest extant writing that has been interpreted, they provide a convenient point of departure for descriptions of what is going on in a writing system. Thus, we might conclude that Egyptian hieroglyphics are largely pleremic, while our modern alphabetic system is largely cenemic, though neither is exclusively so.

One of the more fascinating subjects dealt with in this book is the decipherment of written languages. Those who have read the books by Leonard Cottrell and Michael Ventris and know about Champollion’s decipherment of the Rosetta Stone will find this chapter extremely interesting. It is worth noting that decipherment of such archaeological materials differs from modern code decipherment because for the latter we can assume that a modern language was encoded, while in the former there are often no clues to the nature of the language, to what extent it is pleremic or cenemic, where “word breaks” occur (if, indeed, the language had words as we know them in English), and, in many instances, even the order in which the symbols were recorded.

There is much in this book to inspire the reader. Those who advocate spelling reform are referred to the chapter on the alphabet, from which the following is quoted:

Etymological Spelling

In many orthographies purely phonemic representations of words are corrupted for the sake of graphically preserving their etymologies. For example, breakfast continues to be spelled with <ea> although the first vowel of the word is [\?\], because it is etymologically related to the verb to break. The <w> in acknowledge points to its etymological relation with to know. “Silent” letters such as <l> in folk, <k> in knife, or <w> in wrestle are etymological remnants rather than representations of phonological units. Silent <e> in English occurs in many affixes of Latin and French origin such as, for instance, -able, -age, -ance, -ate and -ative, and is therefore statistically associated with words originating from these languages.

Etymological spelling is common in learned words, especially words of Latin origin. Sign- in signal and paradigm- in paradigmatic are spelled phonemically, but as isolated words they contain a letter, <g>, which has no counterpart in the phonemic representation. Medicine-medical and righteous-right are similar pairs where the rationale for the spelling of the first lies in the relation with the second. In this way, the spelling of a word often relates to that of other words belonging to the same paradigm, or to its own history. The h-muet in many French words such as honeur, humeur, hôpital, humide, hiver, etc., is etymological, testifying to their Latin origin. In English, too, the spelling of the corresponding words can be regarded as etymological with the added peculiarity that they also exemplify the mechanism of spelling pronunciation, because they were borrowed for English from French rather than from Latin at a time when the <h> was no longer pronounced in French.

[pp. 170-71]

There are other arguments for preserving spelling mentioned by Coulmas, among them: paradigmatic similarity (e.g., for preserving the relationship between anxious and, anxiety and, in German, between Tag [tak] and Tage [tag\?\]); word representation (e.g., liaison in French); homograph avoidance in English (e.g., bear/bare, hair/hare) and in German (e.g., Wagen ‘car’/wagen ‘dare,’ Arm ‘arm’/arm ‘poor’); loanword identification (e.g., writing of words of Greek origin with <ch>, as in chronology, psychology, rather than <k> and with <ph>, as in philosophy, sophisticate, rather than <f>. If spelling reformers had their way, and spelling matched pronunciation, then the spelling would have to be different for each dialect of English. Such a situation did prevail in the earliest beginnings of the writing of Greek, in which can be seen the truest forerunner of the modern alphabet: as an artifact it is valuable to us as a key to studying ancient Greek dialects; applied to modern English it would contribute nothing more than utter confusion. Moreover, if such an approach were adopted, could we expect to see spellings change, periodically, as pronunciations changed?

Today, albeit with certain adjustments, we can read the writings of Shakespeare and, with somewhat more sophisticated adaptation, those of Chaucer, though they are, respectively, 400 and 550 years old. (We cannot always be sure we understand what we are reading, but that is another matter.) If we were to adopt a phonetic system of spelling, it is unlikely that our great-grandchildren would be able to read anything written in the 20th century. It might be argued that the writing should be phonemic, not phonetic, but phonemes change, too, though more slowly. As Coulmas points out, the alphabet is far from perfect; but were we to institute a “simplified” spelling system we would be destroying the very unity that the written language accords to the many millions around the globe who can read English.

Purists always seem bent on the preservation of an older stage of the language. Were that undertaken, we should soon find that the traditional form would become frozen in writing (and on the tongues of purists and pedants), while the continuously changing language of the marketplace moved onward. The term applied to this rather unhealthy situation is diglossia, which does exist in Sinhalese, spoken in Sri Lanka. Professor Coulmas:

Literary Sinhalese obtained its standard in the fourteenth century AD, and this standard is respected by the whole speech community. ‘The belief that [the] Literary [language] is superior, more beautiful, more logical and more correct prevails at every level of the society.’… This attitude is typical of diglossia. It implies that in a speech community where illiteracy is widespread a large part of the population has very little esteem for the only variety they speak…. [p. 195] [The quotation is from one of Coulmas’s many sources.]

There is, of course, no final word on this subject, but I should like to add one more brief quotation that strikes at the heart of the matter:

[W]riting is not, and never was, a means of transcribing speech sounds, but is rather an instrument of visually representing language by means of relating visual signs in various different ways which are more or less faithful to the speech sounds of a given language at a given time.

This review is not the place to take up the cudgel against purism or spelling reform, but I could not resist adducing such apt comments as can be found in this work.

I have seldom seen so clear an exposition of any complex subject as that presented by Coulmas. The text is punctuated here and there by tables showing the progressive development of selected symbols (as, for example, in Sumerian), the Devanagari syllabary (in which several modern and ancient Indian languages are written), the Hebrew, Arabic, and other alphabets, Chinese and Japanese writing, and attractive drawings showing the hieroglyphic (with sound values in English orthography). This is not to say that readers will be come away from The Writing Systems of the World with the ability to read the Bhagavad-Gita, the Analects of Confucius, the Koran, the Talmud, or the Book of the Dead, but they will certainly have a much better understanding of what it is they do not know, and pursuit of the available material cited in the fifteen-page Bibliography could prove very worthwhile.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Iranian Mutes Calls for Revenge Against U.S.” [Headline in The New York Times, 9 July 1988. Submitted by Robert R. Flamm, New York City.]

Blessed Be The Words That Bind

Rebecca Christian, Creston, Iowa

Tolstoy had something when he said that all happy families are alike, while every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. It seems to me that every happy family, like every pair of lovers, has a language all its own.

Little do some of the acquaintances who have had walk-on parts in the little dramas of my sister’s life and mine know that their names are a permanent part of our language. I was a gullible child, and so I was often befriended by major league liars. Try as my mother might to reason with me, I steadfastly believed that Betty Kurlinski had four million dollars to spend on Christmas presents. She also told me that each member of her family drank directly from his or her own half-gallon milk carton at meals, each personalized with a name in crayon. Thus, we call a whopper a kurlinski, which can also be used as a verb, as in, “He told me he had to work late— again—but I think he kurlinskied.”

I come by my gullibility naturally. My maternal grandmother had two childhood friends, Dovey and Lena, who fibbed continually. Granny’s parents had a chant I now use with my own credulous daughter: “Tis so if ‘tain’t so, if Dovey and Lena say so.”

From the neighborhood we grew up in comes the term a Billy Groves, used to describe a glutton, in remembrance of a fat boy who could be heard squealing for a second hamburger or another scoop of ice cream on summer nights when the windows were open.

A Bro Purvis is a libidinous clergyman, named after an evangelist who once whipped both of our husbands into a frenzy of desire when we were visiting a fundamentalist church with relatives. Brother Purvis strained the buttons on his vest as his face purpled and he growled (as Samson vainly resisting Delilah), “She tempts me, Lord! Oh, how she tempts me!” When the news about Jim Bakker hit the stands, we concluded he was a real Bro Purvis.

We call a rah-rah sort of person, stirred by maniacal devotion to a trivial cause, a Hawkeye Toilet Seat, a term that requires considerable explanation. My sister once dated a strapping young man who was a diehard booster of the University of Iowa, the sports teams of which are called the Hawkeyes. He picked her up clad head to toe in the school colors of black and gold, looking like a giant bumblebee. Such a rabid fan was he that his car horn played the Hawkeye Fight Song. When my sister’s husband heard this tale, he speculated that the old beau’s toilet seat played the same tune when he lifted it. You see, my brother-in-law Bill “gets it,” my sister’s words for the litmus test one uses for prospective friends. A person who gets it has humor, purpose, a sense of the absurd, and a strong world view. One of the gems Bill has added to our language is the phrase, “I wonder what the Sharps and the Ushkrats are doing tonight.” One rares back and uses this phrase when one finds himself in surroundings of unaccustomed elegance, such as sipping an aperitif in an elegant restaurant with a bevy of tuxedoed waiters dancing attendance. When my brother-in-law was a newspaper editor in a small town, there were two notorious families, feuding but frequently intermarrying, who often turned up in the police news. They were the Sharps and the Ushkrats, and once, a Sharp hanged himself in the county jail. Bill—a young editor torn between taste and sensation—decided to run a photo of the cell, complete with the Sharp’s dangling noose and a kicked-over chair. He thought the better of his decision when the papers hit the streets, and a contingent of Sharps marched into the newspaper office. Turned out they weren’t angry but proud, and had come in to buy out the rest of the day’s papers.

My sister’s marriage to Bill has “taken,” as she puts it; her first never did. I sensed that when I stood beside her in the receiving line at her first wedding, and she muttered under her breath, “This is a bluebird fly-up.” When my sister was a bluebird, about to fly up to become a Campfire Girl, she was beside herself with anticipation. Of course, the ceremony was not the transfiguring experience she had hoped. Thus arose the term bluebird fly-up for a disappointing experience. Vikki Carr’s song, “Is That All There Is?,” pretty much dismisses all of life as a bluebird fly-up.

Sissy’s first husband never got it, but he did leave her with a useful term, the big bubble, which he used—rather bitterly—to describe our sheltered upbringing. Now, at holiday family gatherings, my parents greet us gaily at the door with shouts of “Welcome back to the big bubble!”

Clotheshorses all three, my mother, sister, and I often use these occasions as an opportunity for a shopping spree. We refer to a garment that is both distinctive and frequently worn as a uni, short for both unique and uniform. Rare is the uni that can be bought off the rack; most are created from a mix of patterns by my mother’s clever needle. “I have vision,” she admits modestly as she selects sleeves from one pattern envelope and cuffs from another. Sometimes she’ll whip up a Brontë sister, which is an essentially somber dress with some feminine furbelow—a row of tiny covered buttons, perhaps—to hint that the wearer has hidden fires banked beneath her peplum. A slinky garment, on the other hand— the kind one might wear to a New Year’s Eve party—is called a Satan bow-dice. This colorful phrase we picked up at a fashion show narrated by a gentleman who was obviously unfamiliar with the pronunciation of satin bodice.

A Quasi Modo is a dress with the big shoulder pads that are currently ultra chic, but have an unfortunate tendency to slip, giving one a hunchbacked appearance. When we try a Quasi Modo on, we can’t resist drooling a little in the dressing room, and calling out “Sanctuary!”

Since my sister and I share a poor sense of direction as well as an intense interest in fashion, we have a tendency to get lost on the way home from our treasure hunts. We grew up west-siders who might as well have been in Paris when we crossed over to the east side of our city.

“What am I doing wrong?” I asked once when Sissy and Mom were chattering obliviously in the back seat on the way home from a shopping expedition.

“Oh,” Sissy answered with a certain irrefutable logic, “you’re coming the going way.”

I knew she meant I was headed away from our side of town. We still refer to a person who is lost, either literally or spiritually, as coming the going way. As one might suspect, this tendency to lose one’s bearings at the wheel can have unhappy results. Much to Bill’s consternation, the word collision isn’t part of Sissy’s vocabulary. Her car didn’t really hit that nasty old Cadillac, it just “nudged” it a little. Thus, dents are called nudgies, and major dents—the ones that require more than $500 to repair— are owies.

Dad would feel as if he were coming the going way on our shopping expeditions, but he manages to put a flair all his own in our family lingo. He loves having his daughters fetch for him. “Would ye bring me a cup of coffee with two cubes of sugar?” he’ll ask. Or, “Would ye bring me a toothpick?” Since all his requests begin that way, we’ve come to call people who work in the service sector—waiters, hotel bellmen, maids—wouldyes.

Dad’s also responsible for making General Custer a synonym for a transvestite. Once on a family vacation, he insisted on driving through a thunderstorm for 80 miles to reach a wax museum in Deadwood, South Dakota. Apparently there was a shortage of male dummies, because General Custer had red lips, boobs, and a luxurious, long blonde wig.

Much to dad’s dismay, we got the giggles as a guide provided highlights of Custer’s Last Stand.

When we started dating, a whole new jargon arose. Dad, who often dismissed our boyfriends as immature, called a good many of them pot-ringers, because in his estimation, they still had pot rings on their behinds. When a pot-ringer got one of us upset enough to weep and gnash our teeth, the storm that betook us was called a head-banger, from the unforgettable episode when I was stood up on prom night and banged my carefully coiffed head against the wall.

Now my own children are providing me with new linguistic seeds to plant. My parents make up for all the years of avoiding dental bills by putting dishes of candy on every available surface in their house when I bring my children back to the big bubble. Round, hard candies that a child could choke on are called choke babies, because when they were toddlers, my mother admonished my two older children that those could choke the baby. My six-year-old, Nicholas, recently gave a choke baby to baby George, watched him for a moment, and reported in some disgruntlement that choke babies don’t work.

Because Nicholas collects everything from spent batteries to flattened fauna, his nickname is junk Man, while baby George is called Wee Geordie after a character in a Welsh novel my father read. Kate, because of her la-di-da air, is Miss Fine Thing. Once we took Miss Fine Thing on a Sunday outing to the historic little town of Mantorville, Minnesota. We didn’t know until later that during the entire drive up, she trembled in fear of the unfamiliar destination. So now, an experience one regards with foreboding is a Mantorville. Not certain which direction I’ll be heading, I think of the afterlife as a Mantorville.

We always call Cedar Rapids, Iowa, See the Rabbits, because once, on my return from a business trip there, Junk Man asked with great excitement, “Did you see the rabbits?”

As we leave our little town to visit the city my folks live in, we pass a big green factory. Since the drive gives just enough time for the children to get a good nap and for my husband, Jeff, and me to talk or just think our own thoughts for a change, we always have the kids play silence when we get to the factory. Thus it is known not as Wellman Dynamics, but asthe shut-up place.

And what a fertile field for new jargon potty training has been! Jeff’s term for a child in the awkward stage between needing diapers and being reliable in big boys or big girls (real underpants) is a time bomb. When accidents happen, the victim never admits being soaking wet, but will concede to feeling the “least little bit dampish.” Our couch, fortunately upholstered in gold, has been the scene of many such accidents and is thus called Forever Amber. A deep reclining chair we bought at an estate sale his children held after an elderly gent’s death is called Dead Man’s Gulch. The dead part has a double meaning as the chair has unpredictable springs, and the mere shift of a haunch can project like a missile the visitor we have forgotten to warn.

In our family, scatalogical humor seems to bridge the generations. Perhaps the best time had by all was on an outing to the Minnesota Zoo, where a gorilla was eating vast handfuls of his own bright yellow feces. “Look, mother!” called an excited child. “That gorilla’s eating mustard!” When the kids refer to the results of a new recipe I’ve tried as gorilla mustard, I know it’s best to retire it. One mealtime chant the children are seldom allowed to make is “Eat every bean and pea on your plate.” This comes from a friend whose innocent grandma made that declaration every Sunday, not knowing what occasioned the sniggering from her grandchildren.

Discipline gives rise to even more lexicon. Jeff, a rebel of the sixties, calls kids who go limp in public by way of passive resistance war protestors. He also warns darkly that the child who does what another child has already been reprimanded for is in double trouble.

Though our family language is like a little tribal dialect—useless outside of its narrow confines—its value is inestimable to us. Every happy family’s language is different, but they all translate into love.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Hidden in the dining room breakfront, in a blueenameled box bedecked with handpainted flowers, Molly Darrah keeps the keys to 18 neighbors’ houses.” [From The San Francisco Chronicle, 10 February 1986.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Grilled in foil or alongside a ham, turkey or chicken, those who shied away from onions before will delight in their new found vegetable.” [From a Waldbaums Foodmart circular. Submitted by Mrs. Robert Ensher, Westport, Connecticut.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English

Paul Beale, ed., (Routledge, 1989), xxvi + 534pp.

This is an abridgment of the eighth edition of A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, by Eric Partridge, edited by Paul Beale and published in 1984. Born in 1884, Partridge died in 1979; Paul Beale has picked up the reins in an able manner and continues to charge ahead. This edition, though abridged, is said to contain much material not included in the 1984 edition, published in the US by Macmillan. Moreover, “it contains only terms known to have arisen in the Twentieth Century,” according to the Preface, but omits the military slang of the earlier 20th century. I am inclined to question the accuracy about the terms known to have arisen in the 20th century, for I found quite a few of much earlier date, but that can scarcely be an adverse criticism.

As in the case of most of Partridge’s books, the exception being Catch Phrases, which I didn’t think much of, this dictionary [CDS] makes good browsing fodder and resembles the earlier books in style sufficiently to satisfy those familiar with the format. Personally, I find it irritating to find entries with several definitions in which numbers are given to 2 and onward but not to I, a practice I simply cannot understand. Readers ought not be put off by the number of pages, for this is a large-format book with a fair amount of text.

The CDS, however, will not fill the needs of those looking for American slang, unless they are interested in those British slang terms that were borrowed from America (and elsewhere). With experience, one becomes accustomed to the arrogance of the British who consider the term English to be proprietary, with the understood meaning ‘British English,’ presumably implying that all other Englishes should carry a label, the only place where (real) English is spoken being Britain. As it happens, of course, there are more distinctive dialects of English in Britain than in North America, and anyone who has spent any time listening to them knows that some are mutually unintelligible. Linguistic chauvinism might be understandable were we discussing RP (that is, the Received Pronunciation of the prestige southern British dialect), but, if that is the case, in the present instance we must then be looking at a dictionary of “RP Slang,” whatever that might be. The value of the book is not diminished by its being about British slang, but, considering the percentage of the content that is attributable to American, Australian, and Canadian slang (mostly), that part of native British slang that does not emerge as derivative has an old-fashioned ring to it. It is, at worst, cruelly deceptive not to make it clear from the title (or a subtitle) that the book’s focus is British slang.

That having been said, let us turn to the content, at which point prudish readers might wish to turn to another page.

Without laboring the point (nudge! nudge!), the first entry one turns to is fuck, which, in keeping with the length and depth of the CDS, is what one might call a quickie entry (nudge! nudge!, though that sense appears under the entry quick one). I cannot claim proficiency in slang, but I do know that in addition to the ‘Scram!’ sense of fuck off, a common (US) sense is ‘gold-brick,’ which is missing (though covered here under fucking the dog). Is it missing because it is not used in that sense in Britain or because it was cut, and, if the latter, because it went the way of earlier 20th-century military slang? Unfortunately, there is no way one can determine the answer without having the 1984 edition to hand. If one had the 1984 edition, he might well resent having to buy this book rather than a briefer (and less expensive) Supplement.

One gets the strong impression that for those entries that are acknowledged as being of US, Canadian, or other origin the editor has very few, if any, citations, for most of the words and expressions are not traced back very far. For example, puddle-jumper is defined as RAF (1942) slang for a small communications aircraft; that might be coincidence, but it surely is of American origin, traceable back to the gear in which Uncle Don was wont to arrive for his radio program on rainy days in the early 1930s. On the cuff and off the cuff are in, with no American provenance mentioned and dated far too late (“since 1920s”): the term arose well before 1900, from the time when men wore (detachable) Celluloid shirtcuffs on which memos were conveniently penciled because they could be wiped off with a damp cloth. Without this explanation, Beale’s cryptic “Ex note scribbled on stiff shirtcuff” would give a laundryman nightmares.

Expressions like blow it out your ear (inaccurately described as “widespread in West N. Am.”) ought to be marked as “minced oaths” (for ear read ass). Disregard or ignorance of US slang has led to the treatment of Honkie as “since (?) mid-1960s in UK,” which tells little. Although the modern slang hickey means a ' “suction” kiss that leaves a mark,’ and not, thank God, as CDS has it, “raises a blister,” its original meaning was ‘skin blemish,’ and cosmetic makers in the US in the 1930s regularly used the word in their advertising (often with the implied sense ‘pimple’). And the expression gone with the wind antedated Margaret Mitchell’s book—indeed, she so named the book because of the cliché, not the other way round; a cursory check of my Bloomsbury Thematic Dictionary of Quotations (1988—nudge! nudge!) reveals its appearance in a poem by the British lyric poet, Ernest Dowson (1867-1900).

Golden handshake is in but not golden parachute.

Gofer is said to have been current in the US “since ca. 1970: Barnhart.” Beale can scarcely be held accountable for Barnhart’s scholarship, but I can say that I personally know the term to have been used in the early 1950s, and I did not then get the impression that it had been coined for my benefit.

I was pleased to see that Beale accepts the etymology of (British) po-faced as coming from po ‘chamber pot,’ disagreeing with Collins English Dictionary [Editorial Director: L. Urdang] which traces it to a modification of poor-faced. I never cared for that, on the grounds that I know of no British dialect that pronounces poor as [pou].

I had never noticed it before, but the reason that the old-fashioned bicycle was named the penny-farthing was that the large front wheel bore the same proportion to the tiny one at the rear as a (British) penny bore to a farthing. Apparently, everyone knew that but me.

Rhyming slang, of course, provides some of the best fun: it is a mystery to me how anyone who is unfamiliar with the origin of a given bit of rhyming slang can ever divine what it means. Bexley Heath, Hounslow Heath, and Hampstead Heath are all rhyming slang for ‘teeth,’ with the last often shortened to just Hampsteads. I suppose it has to be in your blood. One of my favorites (till I find another) is Chart and Evans for ‘knees.’ Beale writes:

RN. (Granville.) A rationalised form of chart an’ ‘eavens, itself incorrect for chart in ‘eavens. The semantic key is supplied by s. benders, knees— what you get down upon to say the Lord’s Prayer. ‘Our Father, which art in Heaven’—and strengthened by the second verb in the predominant construction and usage, ‘Get down on your chart ‘n ‘eavens and holystone the deck.’

The “RN” stands for ‘Royal Navy,’ the “s.” for ‘slang’ (but perhaps everyone knew that already). After such an exposition it is small wonder to me when I occasionally see, beneath The [London] Times crossword puzzle, “This puzzle was completed by 80 per cent of the contestants in 22 minutes” in a recent competition. Such a message is particularly dismaying when one is able to fill in only one or two words after an hour.

I suggest only that Beale stop at the point where he has identified the origin of a given expression as American and eschew the information found in some of the secondary sources he resorted to, for they are inconsistent in their accuracy. Despite my criticism of the inaccuracies of the US slang source material, if one focuses on the British material and takes the American with a pinch of salt, this book is very engaging and can provide anyone with many hours of happy, entertaining, and informative browsing.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“25 feared dead in Turkey attack.” [Headline in The Herald, New Britain, Connecticut, 6 September 1986. Submitted by Mayor William J. McNamara, New Britain.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Cassell Concise English Dictionary

Betty Kirkpatrick, ed., (Cassell, 1989), xvi+1552pp.

In September, 1989, preceding what has come to be known as the Waterloo Conference on the OED (because its first four annual meetings were held at the University of Waterloo, Ontario), members of the European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX) held a symposium on dictionary reviewing. By the time I decided to attend, the meeting was overbooked, and I could not get in. Besides Tom McArthur, editor of English Today, and Robert Ilson, editor of The Oxford Journal of Lexicography, I am not sure who of those attending were reviewers of dictionaries, but I think that I can probably say, without fear of contradiction, that I have probably written and continue to write more reviews of English dictionaries (and of other reference books and books on language) than most other people. Quantity, of course, does not make up for quality; yet, something might be said for experience. I am sure that I would have learnt something and regret having been turned away.

As I did not attend, I cannot say exactly what went on at the symposium, but I got the impression that one of its results was to be the issuance of guidelines for reviewers. Ha! —Well, maybe not “Ha!” I think that what the symposiasts might have discussed were criteria for assessing a dictionary, which they would like to see adopted by the media and given to reviewers assigned or invited to write about such books. There is no doubt that the quality of such reviews varies enormously. When assigning a book for review in other subjects, editors are usually rather careful to try to find someone who knows something about the subject of the book: it would be unusual to find a book on, say, archaeology reviewed by a rock musician and one on rock music reviewed by an archaeologist. But when it comes to dictionaries, editors appear to consider them fair game for almost anyone, and they often assign novelists to write the review.

There are novelists and there are novelists. I, for one, would not object to a dictionary review being written by an Anthony Burgess or a Kurt Vonnegut. On the other hand, a novelist is, presumably, ‘anyone who has had a novel published’; as we know, some of the most prolific novelists write as if they know little about the language, and it would be ridiculously unfair to have such a person review a dictionary. Dictionaries ought to be reviewed by professional lexicographers. Today, many professional lexicographers are seen to have axes to grind (because they work for competing publishers) and editors are reluctant to select them as reviewers because, for obvious reasons, they are seeking to publish unbiased reviews. Some of the dictionary reviews that have been published in the popular press have been bad—not unfavourable, just reflective of a lack of sufficient linguistic sophistication. It may be assumed that the reason for giving such writers dictionaries to review is that they are regarded as end users. But the same editors do not select ordinary readers to review novels, they pick other novelists or professional literary critics, in other words, reviewers who are competent to assess the work because they have a broad background in the literature and are recognized as knowledgeable about the genre.

On the same grounds, it is incumbent on editors to engage as reviewers of dictionaries lexicographers who are knowledgeable about the genre, not amateurs who occasionally look up one word to see how it is spelt or another to find out what it means. Because anyone writing a review of any book ought to be required to delineate the reasons for his approval or disapproval of its style and content, so any editor worth his salt should be able to detect in a properly written, professional review of a dictionary by a lexicographer any untoward bias and to reject such a review (or parts of it) out of hand.

There are many specialist fields represented in a dictionary—phonetics, semantics, morphology, phonemics, diachronic and comparative linguistics, symbology, typography, etc.—and the average dictionary user, whether he be a novelist or not is ill equipped academically to pass judgment on how a given dictionary has dealt with such areas. As I was not at the symposium, I can only assume that the symposiasts concerned themselves less (if at all) with the problem of trying to urge editors to engage professional lexicographers as reviewers than with the effort of trying to ensure that editors be provided with certain guidelines on How To Review A Dictionary, which they fondly expect would be passed on to the selected amateur reviewers thereby making them competent, professional reviewers, a forlorn hope at best.

The foregoing is not entirely irrelevant to my comments on the book at hand, for it would be unfair to review it as a dictionary, comparing it with other dictionaries. Rather, it constitutes what publishers call a “package,” that is, it contains a fair amount of lexicographic material but little or nothing that is original. Such books are derivatives of larger dictionaries in a publisher’s line, pared down to make them smaller and not directly competitive and priced lower. Oxford publishes a slightly smaller version which they call their Pocket English Dictionary, though one is likely to find himself in deep disagreement with his tailor if he wanted a pocket large enough to hold the book. Most major dictionary publishers put out Concise, Compact, Pocket, Vest Pocket, and other editions, grabbing for markets that are price-more than content-oriented. Generally speaking, the smallest general dictionary in which one can expect to find fairly thorough treatment of etymology, pronunciation, definitions, and a good coverage of the language in a wide assortment of entires is the so-called College or Desk dictionary. A bigger book usually needs a stand or its own spot on a desk or table, for it is too big and heavy to drag out of a bookcase every time it is needed. The two larger one-volume works available are The Random House Unabridged (with 315,000 entries) and the Merriam-Webstar Unabridged, Third Edition (with about 460,000 entries). I cannot properly count the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, because of its cost (about $2500) and its size (16 volumes); besides, it is not a work for everyday use but for scholarly application, being historical in nature.

In the context of the large number of dictionaries available (including all their different editions), the CCE is a serviceable work provided that one is satisfied with brief definitions of no great depth, and, essentially, a dictionary than can be used as a spelling checker. These days, spelling checkers are available to those who use personal computers, hence a dictionary for that purpose is of limited usefulness. One useful function of dictionaries till recently was that they showed syllabic breaks, enabling letter- and novel-writers alike to discover where to hyphenate words. Some word processing programs now offer such a feature—the one I use Framework III (Ashton-Tate), is not bad at all—and writers as well as compositors and publishers seem to care less and less whether a word is hypenated in an acceptable manner. The CCE does have price to recommend it, coming in at about half of what a college-or desk-sized dictionary would cost.

Inevitably, there are the inconveniences and the oddities: the pronunciation of masochistic or masochistically, thus depriving the user of the information that the stresses have shifted. To those who maintain, “Everybody knows that,” I reply that if that is the case, then why bother buying or publishing dictionaries—or, for that matter, anything else—at all?

Among the (odder) oddities: under make appears the expression to make water, defined as ‘to urinate; (Naut.) to leak.” These are both quite correct, of course, but their juxtaposition could create a curious confusion.

The general production of the book is poor: the paper has too much “see-through,” causing the type on the back of a page to interfere with the legibility; the type is too gray; the definitions are run into one another, with semicolons in place of definition numbers, making it difficult to distinguish senses and requiring one to read through a long entry before coming to the sense sought; it is almost impossible to discover where a new part of speech begins; subentries of idiomatic phrases and phrasal verbs are given the same prominence as headwords, making them easy to find but detracting from the headword treatment; and the substandard typography has created many loose lines which poor proofreading has failed to catch.

As the explanatory notes are rather thin on the ground, I am unsure what to make of the insertion of “n.pl.” into the middle of a definition:

golden…golden balls, n. the three balls, n.pl. displayed as the emblem of a pawn broker.

The entry golden handcuff,

n. …a payment or benefit given to an employee as an inducement to continue working for the same company.

raises the ludicrous (?) image of such a payment or benefit being paid by someone other than the employer.

The entry for golden-syrup give a cross-reference to syrup, where it is not mentioned; as I understand the style, this means that the two are to be construed as synonyms, which is not the case. Indeed, I believe that Golden Syrup [sic: no hyphen] is a trademark owned by Tate & Lyle for a uniquely treacly mixture.

The pages containing the un- words are a compositor’s nightmare version of a designer’s aberration.

The etymologies are too brief to be of any use.

One wonders what goes on in publishers’ minds: it seems quite obvious to me that if this were a good and serviceable inexpensive version of the dictionary on which it is said to be based, Cassell’s English Dictionary, then the publisher might well expect that after a time the user would feel himself ready for the larger book and would buy the larger Cassell’s. In the event, it seems unlikely that such an event would take place, for this book is a sad disappointment.

Laurence Urdang

Français ou plutôt à la française

John Alvey, Annandale, Virginia

The French have long complained about the pollution of their language by English. The following story shows how bad this pollution is:

The heroine of our nouvelle is Marie, a petite femme fatale from Paris. Her father was a parvenu who used to be a bon vivant and the enfant terrible of his clique but became a laissez-faire entrepreneur in the entrepôt business and then accepted a post as a chargé d’affaires, which entitled him to a UN laissez-passer, (working to improve detente, and rapprochement with the ancien régime), though he remained a bit of a roué, having an affaire with the au pair. Her mother, née Capet, was a grande dame, full of savoir faire and joie de vivre, who later became a clairvoyant and spent her time in séances and collecting naïf gouaches and objets d’art. For a while, they lived in a ménage á trois with the valet de chambre, but the valet was arrested as an agent provocateur, following a coup d’état manqué, which turned out to be a débacle. This became a cause cé-lébre among the émigré élite. His body was later found in a cul-de-sac and dumped in the morgue. An exposé in a newspaper revealed that he was the beau of a svelte coquette he had met aprés-ski and she gave him the coup de grâce by poisoning his créme caramel in a crime passionnel. Marie recently made her début as an ingénue in a risqué, avant-garde cinéma-vérité movie which used advanced montage techniques, was hailed as a tour de force and became a succés de scandale. Because of her parents’ character traits, she was brought up in a recherché milieu and spent most of her childhood in a crèche, playing with papier-mâché toys.

Her fiancé is going to take her to a discothéque and then onto a cafe, though she would rather go to a thé dansant. She waits for him in her boudoir, en deshabillé, wearing a negligée, through which her toile d’or lingerie, particularly her brassiére, can be seen. She is listening to a Chopin nocturne, while lying on a beige chaise lounge, sipping cointreau, eating canapés and reading a roman à thèse, currently in vogue. Her fiancé, François, a petit bourgeois in behavior, though considering himself the crème de la créme, is aide-de-camp to a general and has the rank of lieutenant, fancies himself as a raconteur and littérateur (having published a pastiche of vers libres and a catalogue raisonné of the works of Oliver North, which was hailed as a chef d’oeuvre), though his ambition is to be a Grand Prix driver. He is brought by his chauffeur, who acts as chaperon but they decide that he will be de trop and he takes French leave. François lets himself into the bijou little pied-á-terre with a passe-partout.

“Chéri, can’t we go to the premiere of that finde-siècle tableau vivant about clandestine intrigue in a commune?” Marie asks François, eyeing him through her pince-nez.

“I would rather go to the ballet and see that dancer do pas-de-deux and entrechats. Then down the boulevard to chez Georges. He serves delicious champagne and vol-au-vents and has a fine art nouveau collection.”

“But art nouveau is so passé. It is art déco that is à la mode.”

“That’s only for the nouveaux riches.”

“You have an idée fixe about art déco. Though, entre nous, I must agree it is mainly bric-á-brac.”

“En passant, how about a little divertissement?”

“None of your double entendres, please. It shows lack of etiquette. Perhaps we could go to a bal masqué?”

They finally decide to have a meal á deux at a chic cordon bleu restaurant. She puts on a crochet blouse she had bought at the boutique and a haute couture culotte skirt, decorated with moiré appliqués, which is the dernier cri, a suede coat and a beret, though François had asked her to wear her décolleté dress. She dabs some rouge on her cheeks and eau de toilette on her neck. They start off with an apéritif and some crudités. They decide to have the à la carte meal, following the recommendations of the maître d’ hôtel. She has pâté for hors d’oeuvre, while he has the soupe du jour with croûtons. For entrée she has the spécialité de la maison, coq au vin with pommes frites and aubergines and he has filet mignon aux fines herbes with courgettes and purée de tomate. They drink a carafe of Bordeaux with the meal. For dessert she has gâteau and a sorbet and he has marrons glacés, though, as he is rather guache, he commits a gaffe by eating them with his fingers and then spills most of them on his serviette. They finish the meal with gruyère and camembert. They conclude with a pousse-café for her and a cognac for him.

Afterwards they go to a son-et-lumière show at a nearby château, noted for its bas-reliefs, though spend most of the time in a tête-à-tête.

“Vis-à-vis our forthcoming marriage, you take it as a fait accompli,” she says, “but I feel our dalliance has reached an impasse. It is nothing but a charade.”

“My dear, you are merely troubled by ennui.”

“I give you carte blanche to do as you like and you go off and play the cor anglais with the concièrge. What a faux pas!”

“But you could almost say it was force majeure that drove me. A letter I collected from the poste restante contained a dossier about a précis of a roman à clef she had written, showing she was au fait with my manoeuvres in Iran which, if published, would ruin me. I had to keep up a good rapport with her.”

“I am sorry, François, our relationship is a farce.”

“Do you mean that this is adieu?”

“I do. I shall sell my trousseau tomorrow.”

“Have some nougat, then.”

“You are being very blasé about it.”

“It’s just that one has to handle these things with aplomb.”

“But, à propos, I thought I was your raison d’être, ever since you saw me au naturel. And all those billets doux you sent me.”

“You were, but since you started speaking in such awful clichés, à la française, I knew it would never work.”

“Oh, you and your witty repartees and bons mots. So, it’s no souvenirs?”

“Sans everything.”

“No more soirées?”

“No.”

“Oh, what a fête worse than death.”

It was her final cri de coeur.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“…more allegations of improper misconduct…” [From the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, 3 August 1988. Submitted by Alfred Strehli, Lubbock.]

EPISTOLA {E.J. Moncada}

Professor Norman Shapiro [XIV,2] makes a remark in his letter that I have often thought about, “the vagaries of eponymous celebrity.” Fine, indeed, for those whose names we now associate with useful, beautiful, or beneficial items. Perhaps nowhere are the vagaries of such namings more obvious than in the medical profession. Herein, names are most often associated with disease rather than deliverance. It may be argued that more diseases have been discovered than cures (It could hardly be the other way around, could it?) and that for this reason these gentlemen have, nominally, cocci for cousins and germs for germans. Perhaps. But could we not, for that very reason, more rigorously associate cures or treatments with their discoverers? Why must children be vaccinated? Why can’t they be Jennerated (ah, that devilish imp, Paronomasia, intrudes again). In reference to Mr. Shapiro’s vespasiennes. I wonder how many common, ordinary, garden-variety Frenchmen would associate these as tinkling symbols of a Roman Emperor. Anthony Burgess, in his Kingdom of the Wicked, remarks that Vespasian’s own contemporaries designated street urinals as “vespasians,” certainly a much more ignominous affront because of its timeliness. With reference to an analogous matter, I have seen references to a real Mr. Thomas Crapper, who was supposed to have designed our modern day lavatory. I have also read an equal number of disclaimers that pooh-pooh (as it were) the idea of such a named person ever having had anything to do with the creation of this necessary convenience (unorthodoxymoron).

[E.J. Moncada, Potomac, Maryland]

EPISTOLA {Christopher A. Colombi, Jr.}

I know I’m a bit tardy in my response to Helen W. Power’s mistaken feminist assumption in “Women on Language; Women in Language” [XV, 2]. But now that I’m once again a father in spring training with my daughter Jessica, who is insistent on continuing to integrate the Shaker Baseball League (SBL—formerly the Shaker Boys League), a hardball little league that will include her 10-year-old-male, and some female, equals, I find that I must correct Power’s mistake, caused by an obviously uniformed conjecture concerning our language as it is used in what was formerly an all-male game.

Chatter is indeed not a word used only to characterize what “females or nonhumans” speak (although some might have accused Yogi Berra of having the latter status in jest). Anyone who has ever spent any length of time in the field for any minimal amount of innings in the game of baseball, or along the bench in the dugout next to the baseball field—and that now includes my daughter Jessica and those like her who insist on playing hardball rather than what is still designated “girls' softball”—has heard that unique baseball language designed to get the goat of the opposition and/or to encourage the players on your own side. It is called “chatter” by Jessica’s manager (male), who attempts to teach his grade-school “persons of summer” the finer points of the game, and who often exhorts them from the sidelines, “Let’s hear a little bit of chatter, now,” to which Jessica and the males on the team readily and rapidly respond “Alright, keed, knock it down his (or her, when applicable, and the pitcher for the opposing team is also female) throat” in support of a teammate at bat, or “Hit it to me,” “Make him hit it onna ground,” “Punch him out (current jargon for exhorting one’s own pitcher to put out the opposing batter on strikes, known as a strikeout)” and suchlike.

Feminine word play? Try telling that to Jessica’s current favorite Cleveland Indian, third baseman Brook Jacoby. Chatter? Jessica understands that as part of the language of baseball, the all-American game for all Americans.

[Christopher A. Colombi, Jr., Shaker Heights, Ohio]

Verbal Analogies III—Measures

D.A. Pomfrit, Manchester

For centuries, people have been taking the measure of things. Here is a sampling of the things measured and the names for the process. See if you can make the Verbal Analogy by selecting the appropriate term or description from among the Answers provided. The solution appears on page 24.

1. free acid: acidimetry :: distance/line length by a staff: ?

2. chorometry : land surveying :: atmidometry : ?

3. universe : cosmometry :: time: ?

4. cyclometry : circles :: halometry : ?

5. fluid pressure : kymography :: altitude : ?

6. heliometry : distances between stars :: osteometry : ?

7. red blood cells : crythrocytometry :: low temperatures: ?

8. algometry : pain :: konimetry : ?

9. lung capacity : pulmometry :: compressibility : ?

10. stereometry : specific gravity of liquid :: galvanometry : ?

11. radiation : dosimetry :: angles : ?

12. pyrometry : temperatures + 1500°C. :: stereometry : ?

Answers

(a) Air impurities
(b) Baculometry
(c) Bones
(d) Chronoscopy
(e) Cryometry
(f) Electric currents
(g) Evaporation (in air)
(h) Goniometry
(i) Horometry
(j) Hypsometry
(k) Piezometry
(l) Salt crystals
(m) Volume/Dimensions of a solid

The Solution to Verbal Analogies III appears on page 32.

EPISTOLA {Galina H. Carter}

Lysander Kemp reminded me of a malapropism in Spanish which I created for myself. When I was eight my family moved from London to Buenos Aires. My mother, who believed that childen should learn languages as early as possible, dropped me into the local Argentine school where I absorbed Spanish by a kind of osmosis—except for one phrase. In school we sang a song the first line of which was: “En los patios de la escuela va cesando el gran rumor.” (‘In the school patios the great noise—“hubbub”—is ceasing.') I happily sang: “En los patios de la escuela va Cesandro, el Gran Rumor.” Who “Cesandro” was or why he was the Great Rumor, whatever that was, I hadn’t the faintest idea but obviously he was out in the patios while we were in class. It was very many years before, remembering this, I realized what I had been supposed to be singing.

[Galina H. Carter, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire]

Ipsissimum Verbum

Richard C. Casey, Darien, Connecticut

“…A huge dark zawn, its great cliffs reddish black and overhanging. On the shingle at the back of the zawn lay a crumpled black car and a bright pink fishing buoy, small as toys against the boulders. I walked around the rim of the zawn. …;”

Speaking of the one right word: three of 42 words of text, evidently zawn has no synonym? Context makes it general meaning clear, and specifics are not essential. But zawn isn’t in my household dictionary (Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate), or Webster’s Third New International Unabridged, or several quite specialized ones in the public library.

The same book repeats voe another unusual word not in my dictionary, defined by the Unabridged as “an inlet or narrow bay of the…Shetland Islands.” The entire book is about the Shetlands, and I accept the need for some ethnicisms, technicisms, and colloquialisms to establish credibility of persons, subject, or place. Nor was its use so overwhelming or constant, “inlet” or “bay” sometimes being substituted.¹⁷

Sometimes when a word is used frequently something else happens too, and a real mess results with a wrong word overused. Just such an incident a few years ago started me collecting these verbal oddities instead of stamps or seashells. A wrong though somehow plausible noun, consistently and repeatedly used throughout, distracted me from a quite good novel. Refectory ‘a monastery or college dining hall’ was used for rectory ‘the residence of a parish priest,’ first on page 148, twice on 151, once each on 152 and 153, thrice on 154, and so on, last near the book’s end on page 257. Eventually I concluded even the correct word would have become maddening from repetition, unrelieved by a synonym or circumlocution. The poor overworked noun was even used where neither it nor any alternate was needed. “I’ll be staying at the refectory [rectory] at” could surely be “at the church in” since only church mice and Quasimodo stay in the edifice itself, or “in St. Botolph’s parish,” as no one literally stays overnight in either a mere geographical area or a spiritual community. “The rectory gate was the second on the left…;. But, as she hesitated, the rectory door opened…. He led her into the rectory parlor.” All on page 154. Why not just gate, door, and parlor? Is a rectory so different from any other house—one or more priests and perhaps a housekeeper do live there!¹⁸

I have no real doubt that zawn is a legitimate and the correct word, but I question why such an apparently obscure one is used. Not that the practice is uncommon.

“The doctor stood back and appraised her with a comforting smile—. ‘Did you sense any warning just before the seizure—?’

‘Yes…a very odd smell…I noticed it once before. At a party the other night. No one else smelled it.’

‘An uncinate fit,’ the doctor said almost under her breath.

‘There’s a technical term for that too?’ ”¹⁹

Indeed there is, but it’s again obscure, and perhaps in a worse way. My household dictionary and the library’s Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd Ed. Unabridged both define uncinate only as “hooked, bent at the end.” Webster’s New Int’l 2nd Ed. Unabridged finally yielded; “uncinate gyrus…anat.; a subdivision of the hippocampal convolution containing olfactory association centers.” So the use was correct, but to what end?

Sometimes a word is not so obscure. “Grinning fiercely, Jo kept his listeners…ensorceled for as long as an hour.” My house dictionary defines ensorcel, matter-of-factly, “bewitch, enchant,” dates the word from the 16th century, spells it with one “1” or two, but doesn’t say why anyone would disinter it.²⁰ One book had “a caliginous haze,” “eyot of firm land,” and “cetaceous eye.” I had to look up two, and checked the last. Two of three were in the house dictionary. But why are they used in a mystery novel?!²¹

Occasionally an author gracefully defines a word: “bettas—you know, Siamese fighting fish.” But a few lines before: “syngoniums and pothos.” It could be accounted fortuitous that I knew what bettas were, but why choose to define that word in my household dictionary and not the first two? Both are in Webster’s Unabridged: evidently not uncommon plants.²²

Authors put in text definitions easily forgo-able by readers. A policeman suffers tension-caused muscle spasms his wife relieves by massage. “Nowadays it’s—his bad arm—. But formerly—it was frequent enough for him—to feel his back had been flogged, and she would tell him to—stretch out flat. That’s prone: supine is the other way round.”²³

Which leads me to: a prig “irritates by observance of proprieties (as of speech) in a pointed manner or to an obnoxious degree,” while a pedant “unduly emphasizes minutiae in the presentation of knowledge.”²⁴ What he tells us is true, but does it matter to his book?

Sometimes authors create words, maybe accidentally; twice in one book seems deliberate: “searched—across the rooves of New York” and “red tilted rooves of a town.” The same book has “I dreampt and I was the dream which dreampt itself.” Unless I’m missing a classical allusion, why is it not just dreamt? The dictionary says “hoofs, rarely hooves” but only “roofs”; perhaps we tend to pronounce it as “rooves.” As indeed I can, if I choose to, hear the “p” in “dreamt,” as in unkempt and tempt.²⁵

Then we have “every sort of forcep.” The singular is forceps; the plural forceps, or rarely forcepses. Not like some other usually plural nouns, scissor hold or cut, a wollen trouser, maybe even a lace-trimmed panty, but no sort of “forcep”!²⁶

Another offense is using verbs as nouns. “It’s only temporary disableds need assistance.” Scot’s speech explains the elliptical style, and the best fix might be, “Temporary cripples.” If one can’t abide “cripples,” perhaps “the temporarily disabled” might be both grammatical and still “in voice.”²⁷

Sometimes a writer simply uses the wrong word: “But it’s part of the character of an infinite recession that the final box is much too small to open or even see. And anyway, there isn’t one.” Indeed not in a recession; try an infinite regression! I am also dubious of “There is a lesion between hope and recollection, into which my spirit had slipped—.” Are lesions between things? Can you really slip into one?²⁸

Or consider: “Kate—explained—the scars —were the result of a car accident in which her hands had been pinched. This she did unblushingly, though both ‘accident’ and ‘pinch’ were retrospective aggrandizements, her hands having been quite deliberately slammed in a car door, twice each.” Someone ought to blush, because whatever they are, they are not aggrandizements, “things made to appear greater.”²⁹ “Retrogressive aggrandizements,” maybe, but that’s an oxymoron of another colour entirely.

Some errors are harder to see but just as surely mistaken: “I frowned at the coffee percolator, which —finally began to perk. I cradled the telephone between shoulder and ear, poured, and—took a sip of coffee.” What should but doesn’t follow is, “And then quickly spit out the colorless, tasteless gulp of hot water.” Coffee isn’t ready to drink when it begins but when it finishes perking. Our author evidently doesn’t make his own, or at least not using a percolator. It is a paranoid writer who even keeps secret how he makes coffee—shades of J.D. Salinger!³⁰

Complex situations create subtle errors. “Phyllis stood at the far end…. When Joanna spoke her name, she turned, reaching for a pair of hornrimmed glasses—setting them on the bridge of her nose—. She hurried over—then removed the glasses—which were for farsightedness—and plunked them back on top of her head.” And later: “When Joanna glanced back at her friend from the door, she saw that she had her glasses perched on her nose and was staring after her with worried eyes.” For implies purpose or explanation: glasses for ‘to achieve’ or for ‘because of’ [farsightedness]. Used about physical vision, farsighted and nearsighted are not gifts like quick-footedness or nightvision, or neutral like lefthandedness, but defects, each defined comparatively. Nearsightedness, the ability to see near things more clearly than distant ones, is basically defective vision of distant objects. Farsightedness is the ability to see distant things quite normally, but ipso facto, the inability to see near ones well. Why then does Phyllis put her glasses on to see things across the room and remove them when near the objects of her scrutiny? Because she is nearsighted, and her glasses ought to be for nearsightedness. Her eyes looked worried because she was wearing the wrong glasses! They were indeed for “seeing at a distance,” but that’s not what farsightedness means.³¹

Writers sometimes leave themselves open to inadvertent double meaning. In a detective novel: “I bought a Bud light to go with my sandwich and— did some ruminating while I ate.” Since cows also ruminate while eating, the issue is whether it is over the toughness of the case or of the roast beef, ham and Swiss, or pastrami sandwich.³²

It is even possible that sometimes the one right word may be two or more! “Tyranny is funny; not actual tyranny but the attempts of tyrants to cover up their tyrannousness.” My dictionary approves tyrannicalness, though I wouldn’t really use that word either. How about “oppressive tendency” or even tyranny once again?³³

An author may miss the mark with an expression. “Lorimer wondered whether the Chairman — had sent him out as a sort of stalking lamb, to see what reaction he would stir up.” Or perhaps a tethered parakeet, sacrificial tortoise, or Judas rabbit? It should be “stalking horse,” of course, of course!³⁴

“I shall simply talk quietly to old Harwell like a Dutch nephew….” Even if youngish Tim Simpson, the hero and speaker, could not readily speak to old Harwell like a Dutch uncle, the usual expression, why not just resist the temptation to make an (at best) bad pun?³⁵

Even in word-portraits of people, authors turn unhappy phrases: “His eyes seemed filled with spit and vinegar.” Hard to say what that means, except stinging eyes, and besides, using half of each of two clichés is simply spilt milk off a duck’s back on troubled waters: isn’t it “spit and polish” and “piss and vinegar?”³⁶

To end on an uplifting note: “For an hour the lecture was heavy with the importance of dream state, pulse and heart rate, vaginal tumescence and temperature change, rapid eye movement and the size and frequency of penal erection.” The word, clearly, is penile, from penis; penal comes from the lantin poena ‘pain or punishment.’ A prison riot is not a penile, but a penal uprising; and erections, unless some subtle word play about painfulness or punishment is intended, are not penal but penile.[^c21]

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What Gall

Joe Queenan, Tarrytown, New York

A Parisian advertising copywriter has been sentenced to eight years in prison for an ad campaign in which he premeditatedly employed an archaic tense of a verb that appears on the French Cultural Ministry’s Index of Officially Proscribed Franglaisms. He has also been sentenced to a concurrent eight-year term for using the verb in an anachronistic context.

Lucien Maître-Créche, a 48-year-old copywriter specializing in fast-food accounts, was found guilty by a jury of eight men and four women of deliberately using the imperfect subjunctive tense of the franglaism jumbo frankfurter in a series of ads posted in the Paris Metro system. Jumbo Frankfurter is a French corruption of the American expression jumbo frankfurter, and is used in French as a verb meaning, literally, ‘to eat a large hot dog.’

The expression is one of several hundred that the French government has forbidden in all official communications, as well as in all public advertising. Legal penalties vary according to the context in which the word is used, the gender (in the case of nouns), and the tense and mood (in the case of verbs). Thus, while it is a misdemeanor to employ the expression jumbo frankfurter in public discourse, to date only one person has been charged with the offense: a Libyan terrorist who asked for a large hot dog during his arraignment for blowing up an art museum in Dijon. Maître-Créche, on the other hand, was charged with a felony, punishable by a maximum prison sentence of 25 years, because the term was not used in “the ephemeral, innocuous context of speech,” according to the prosecutor, but in the “semi-non-ephemeral, culturally reverberative context of advertising.” He will begin serving his sentence immediately.

The cause of Maître-Créche’s legal troubles was a poster depicting Rabelais’ famous comic figure Gargantua staring forlornly at an empty hot-dog roll and sighing, “Que j’eusse bien aimé jumbo frankfurther aujourd’hui!” [‘Boy, I could have really gone for a big hot dog today!'] Officials at the Ministry for Cultural Recidivism, alarmed that the proliferation of the posters could create an unfortunate conception in the minds of French children that the imperfect subjunctive tense of the verb jumbo frankfurter dated all the way back to Rabelaisian times—thus lending the expression a certain historical pedigree—immediately ordered the copywriter’s arrest.

“Ce n’est pas une question de jumbo frankfurter ou de ne pas jumbo frankfurter,” said Ministry Director Gaston-Fenelon de la Rue Saugrenue. “Ici, en France, n’importe qui a le droit de jumbo frank-furter. Mais on n’a pas le droit d’apprendre aux enfants que, l’époque de Rabelais, les gens auraient jumbo frankfurter. Pas de question, Pepe.” [It’s not a question of having a big hot dog or not having a big hot dog. Here in France, anyone has the right to eat a big hot dog. But people do not have the right to teach our schoolchildren that back in the days of Rabelais people ate big hot dogs. No way, Jose.']

Sources say that Maître-Créche’s unusually stiff sentence resulted from a legal ploy that backfired. Once it became obvious that the case was being lost, the defendant’s lawyer blamed the whole flap on a printer’s error, maintaining that his client’s original ad copy depicted Gargantua speaking in the future tense of the verb: “Un de ces jours, on jumbo frankfurtera dans les coins” [‘One of these days, folks around here will be eating big hot dogs.'] The use of the future tense carries a $12,000 fine, but no prison sentence. But the printer denied the allegation, and as no copy of the mislaid print order was ever found, the jury decided that the copywriter had perjured himself.

A last ditch defense effort to portray MaîtreCrèche as a peasant ignorant of France’s tough laws on the use of such expressions backfired when the prosecution unveiled a book found in the defendant’s office entitled 108 Franglaish Expressions That Can Get You Put in Jail If You Use Them In This Country. [‘108 Expressions Franglaises Qui Pourraient Vous Poser des Problè mes Judiciaires dans Ce Pays.']

Experts on French criminal syntax say that Maître-Crèche was lucky that he didn’t use the future anterior tense, which is punishable by the guillotine.

The Long and the Short of It

David Galef, University of Mississippi

Polysyllables abound in today’s speech, and much has been written on the subject, from euphemisms—agencies that “facilitate” instead of give money—to downright deceit—one knows by now that “protective reaction strikes” are bombings. As with so many trends spotted by the linguistic police, however, this is hardly new. Ever since the Norman invasion, people have preferred to use the longer Latinate terms over the blunt Anglo-Saxon words: the general feeling, with some small basis, is that such diction shows a touch of class. A more puzzling phenomenon is the use of long forms for which quite similar shorter forms already exist. The general idea behind this trend seems to be that in length there is strength, even at the cost of accuracy. Examples, unfortunately, are all too easy to provide.

The usage of these words is easy to spot: they all have an extra syllable or two that adds little but excess bulk (for usage, delete and substitute use). Reporters at The New York Times, for example, often write of “subsidization programs,” when subsidy will do just as well. The suffix -ization, which indicates ‘process,’ is often in demand, since it makes one think something is actively being done. Other suffixes such as -tion, -ate, and -ment are equally popular add-ons. Thus, estimates turn into estimations, and television anchormen these days encapsulatethe news instead of encapsule it. This is a society that lives beyond its limitations rather than its limits. When forced, people take preventative measures instead of preventive ones. In some instances, the shorter forms have all but dropped from use. The phrase “he is in my employ” is now considered either old-fashioned or British: most people would automatically change the key word to employment.

The adjectival suffix -al is often slapped on words that already are adjectives. Why must people be ironical instead of ironic, or satirical instead of satiric? The -ate suffix, originally a harmless suffix to denote causative verbs such as substantiate from substance, is particularly pernicious. Not too long ago, the personnel department of a business would orient new workers (the word originally meant to point out where the sun rose; i.e., which way was east). Nowadays, of course, the overbriefed newcomers are orientated, a longer verb that sounds suspiciously like a back-formation from orientation. Similarly, derivate looks like an up-and-coming contender for derive. Proceeding analogously, a classmate of mine in junior high school once talked of improvisating, but somehow her neologism never caught on.

Often, such lengthening leads to subtle errors. Many people no longer form methods, for instance, but instead formulate methodologies. How much more comforting to have a methodology behind one than a mere method! The word methodology, however, really refers to the science of method itself, while formulate means to ‘reduce to a formula’ rather than to ‘shape.’ The words are apt for scientific testing, not for dealing with a simple problem— though of course that’s precisely the point: using these words gives a pseudo-scientific boost, a spurious exactitude. For this reason, perhaps, sociologists will talk of societal needs: social may sound too soft, too much like a bridge party. The same goes for specialty, which has yielded over the years to specialization. The curious point is that this trend seems to go against Zipf’s Law, which notes that syllables get trimmed off words over the years. Here, one may observe the opposite happening: when people wish to spruce up an old word, they add a syllable.

Admittedly, certain groups have their particular vocabulary. The legal profession is notorious for its polysyllabification (a self-descriptive term). One reads about the issuance of government regulations in place of their issue. In these regulations, hereby and herewith often crowd out the sufficient here; in fact, as an honest lawyer will tell you, these words are pro forma and could be omitted entirely. The Marx Brothers understood legalese quite well, augmenting “the first part” to “the first party,” which becomes “the part of the first party,” “the first part of the party of the first part,” and far worse in the course of an exchange in A Night at the Opera. The two part-icipants end, incidentally, by tearing out everything in the contract but the place for a signature.

In all fairness, many drafters of legal documents are probably just after terms without strongly positive or negative connotations. The addition of suffixes generally makes the word in question more abstract: use can smack of exploitation, while usage sounds more neutral. One can speak of part and party without reference to gender, race, and so on. Presumably, one should have a fine sense of discrimination in language to avoid discrimination in law.

Should one wish to begin syllable-hunting, one must also have a sensitive ear. Is aggression the same as aggressiveness, or, on the other side of the spectrum, is passivity the same as passiveness? The first is more the state, the second more the behaviour—but how about scarcity and scarceness? One runs into the same problem with the -ing gerund versus the -ation nouns: which sounds better, implementing or implementation, ratifying or ratification? In opting for the gerunds, one often saves a syllable or more, but the specific, continuous action of a gerund may not be so attractive to a society fuzzily focused on process.

Syllable-cutting, to its credit, promotes sharper thinking and concision—not conciseness—in speech.³⁷ A word of caution, however: as with forming palindromes or anagrams in one’s head, it can become a mania more likely to promote insomnia as one searches for additional examples, more grist for the linguistic mill. One oddity the syllable-cutter is bound to come across in his explorations is the twosome stemming from a common root. Sate and Satiate are perhaps the most blatant instance: the two are synonymous in most dictionaries, the form from the Latin satiare, ‘to satisfy.’ On the other hand, is rite the same as ritual? How about deprecate and depreciate, or cave and cavern? In fact, a large overlap links each twosome, or duo (or duad). English, which abhors a vacuum even more than Nature does, produced a plenum here.

Finally, one must be wary of elongation that carries with it a distinctly different meaning. The adulterer and the adulterator may both be reprehensible but should not otherwise be confused. Simple is one thing, simplistic another; the same is true of the two adjectives express and expressive. The words economic and economical share the meaning “of money management,” but the latter also means ‘thrifty.’ To shift fields: art movements, in particular, often identify themselves through the addition of a syllable to a word in common parlance. Formalist art is not the same as formal art, and though Joyce is a Modernist, he is no longer quite modern. As a syllable-cutter, I leave alone such distinctions and go on to easier prey, such as contest-draw versus contest-drawing. As for challenges, I am currently looking for a word that can be cut into two successively smaller forms.

Syllable-cutters may even adopt a familiar credo. Following the directive of William Strunk’s immortal “Omit needless words,” one may tape above one’s word processor, “Slash excess syllables.” I admit, at times I think, why bother? The pay is low to nonexistent, the number of scowls from others enough to darken any day. But then there are the occasional people who respond gratefully, who may even go on to proselytize to others the virtue in clearing away excess verbiage, token of muddled thought. It may be a thankless task, but it can lead to gracefulness—or rather, grace.

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SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Moped injuries are clearly one of the top causes of major head injuries in this area…some major fractures require amputation. The injuries sustained in the accidents may not permit the person to do athletics forever.” [From the UCLA Bruin, 23 November 1987. Submitted by John Paul Arnerich, Los Angeles.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“STATE PER CALL RATES FOR MICRO PRODUCTS …/HR If we go On-site to do the work. Time charged from Porthole to Porthole…/HR If machine is brought into State Depot like DOT or MATC. Minimum of (4) machines needing repair before calling. Time charged from Porthole to Porthole.” [From a company memorandum sent to customers by Sorbus, A Bell Atlantic Company, Madison, Wisconsin. Submitted by Neil A. Trilling, Thiensville, Wisconsin.]

Bumps, Grinds and Other Lewd (1389) Gestures

John H. Felts, Bowman Gray School of Medicine of Wake Forest University

Language is an enduring contest for dominion between ancient usage and demands for adequate expression of our modern quest for novelty. Survival of old phrases and definitions is encouraged by poverty and social isolation, which sustain traditions, linguistic and otherwise. Since such conditions are not limited by geography, old speech has been remarkably hardy in resisting as well as absorbing the new.

Non-Southern physicians coming into the South are often puzzled or amazed by the speech of their patients, and some publish lists of what they hear, without always appreciating its origin. Elaborate taxonomies and obscure explanations such as mispronunciation due to ignorance, malapropisms based on both ignorance and misunderstanding, and, for the dictated word, the technological dyslexia of typographical errors and poor grasp of the diction of the dictators of medical histories may be suggested. Lists of typographical errors, collected from hospital records, are often posted on bulletin boards and are occasionally published. Some rather startling and provocative associations result: Venus insufficiency, Phi Beta Capita, sin eruptions, positive throat structure (‘culture’).

Appreciation and survival of both typos and many common terms may be directly related to the nature and intensity of sexual reference. Take sin eruption and the variety of vulgar expressions for describing the pathological consequences of sexual encounters. The curious collector of Southern folk usages of this type need only consult the Oxford English Dictionary for enlightenment about the origin and the longevity of language. In the following paragraphs, the year of first recorded use given in the OED is indicated in parentheses.

Grind (1000) early attained its modern definition, to ‘rub against or to work into,’ but by 1400 its anatomical meaning—a ‘lower abdominal quadrant’—had given way to groin, our modern usage. Not until 1625 was groin identified as the seat of lust (1000). Grine (1400) was then a ‘noose, halter, or snare,’ as well as an obsolete form of grin, perhaps a pre-Columbian leer, and of grine as groin, a use still prevalent in Appalachia.

While bumps (1592) as ‘gestures of concupiscence’ (1340) are now automatically associated with grinds, our ancestors used many words to describe lumps (1475) in the skin. Wen (1000), boil (1000), and kernels (1000) as currently in “kernels in my grine,” are the oldest, but pimple (1400), rising (1563), bealing (1605), and gland (1692) are also still used to designate small nonvenereal masses. Cutaneous manifestations of venereal disease have been variously identified, early as bubo (1398), a ‘swelling in the groin or axilla.’ Thus the form of plague characterized by such regional swelling became bubonic to distinguish it from the pneumonic form. Later bubo came to refer almost exclusively to the inguinal swelling of venereal disease, along the way being corrupted to “blue balls” as in the colorful epithet, blue-balled bastard. Balls (1352) of course stand for ‘testes.’ The ‘inguinal lesion of primary syphilis’ is usually a chancre (1605). Its most descriptive competitor, haircut, not included in the OED, occurs only in males, blamed on being cut by stiff female public hair.

Since many venereal diseases, most frequently gonorrhea (1547), result in purulent urethral drainage, many vulgar terms for this phenomenon survive. Gonorrhea itself was first a word for the discharge before it came to describe the disease when bacterial causation was determined. Left on the street were such synonyms as gleet (1340), clap (1587), and running ranes or raines (1588). Gleet was originally described as a ‘slimy matter’ (1400), sticky or greasy, characteristically as ‘phlegm collected in the stomach, especially of the hawk.’ Phlegm eventually came to refer to mucus (1662) and to be hawked (1604) from the sinuses or lungs of people with respiratory tract irritation or infection. John Ray, the great English biologist and pioneer lexicographer, author of Collection of English Proverbs (first edition 1670, second edition 1678) and Collection of English Words (first edition 1673, second edition 1691), suffered severely from an ulcerative disease of his legs. He reported in 1704 that “part of the skin of one of my insteps by degrees has turned black and now as with the flesh under it it is rotted and corrupted…yet runs a copious gleet.”

Strain (1588), in the sense of ‘trickle,’ as a painful or slow urination came early to refer to urethral inflammation. Its precursor was the now quite obsolete strangury (1398) ‘slow and painful urination.’ In 1532 strain came also to imply compulsion, manifested in urethritis by urgency and frequency with scant flow. Thus evolution of meanings assumed by strain can be easily traced.

Some early words for sexual intercourse (1798) as congress (1589) persist although considerably modified in meaning. Service (1315) is another, although artificial insemination is inexorably driving the service of cows by bulls from the lea of language. It does persist in the service of Venus and perhaps in service stations with their birth control centers, offering condoms for coins, on a wall of their men’s rooms. Swive (1386), to copulate (1483) with a female, shares with swinging (1400), a sense of motion, the former deriving from swivel (1307), a coupling device which accounts for the swivel chair. The OED does not include swivel hips but many school teachers were once called, out of earshot, “Miss Swiviel Hips” and the thought expressed, “I’d like to have that swing on my porch.” the OED says nothing about swivet either, but in a swivet has meant ‘hot and bothered’ for generations in the South. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary does recognize in a swivet but neither its age nor derivation, citing Newsweek as its source. Swing (1400) ‘oscillatory or rotatory action of the body’ came by 1584 to imply ‘freedom of action.’ Both swiving and swinging require sexual vigor and inclination, since 1541 known as courage, so that “I got no courage” is more time-honored than “I’m impotent” (1615). Some refer to this difficulty as “losing my nature” (1386), and impotence recorded in the medical history often undergoes technological transformation to “importance,” as in “he complained of importance since he started to take medicine for his pressure,” also known as “the high blood.” Within the limits of marriage courage is necessary for a satisfactory “family life.” The OED is concerned about being in the family way, the natural consequences of a satisfactory family life, but not about the family life itself.

Non-Southerners struck by our quaint (1369) speech may fail to recognize linguistic fossils when they hear them and likewise to appreciate their value as signs of the movement of peoples and the viability of speech through the centuries.

VERBATIM makes an excellent gift, at any time of the year, for mature, intelligent people interested in language.

Paring Pairs No. 36

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). Dissolve the legislative meeting in favor of the scamp.
(b). Skeleton in Italian closet causes fireworks.
(c). Insects stranded for transportation.
(d). Severe lag in a bind.
(e). Approve his having served his time.
(f). Agree to shape of prisoner.
(g). Cannot deny prison business.
(h). Fellow gets short sentence.
(i). Goes with these types of recidivists.
(j). Know the body of principles has a moral sense.
(k). Force deceives entourage.
(l). Pardon between three and five who donate.
(m). Nemo’s center for misleading dragger.
(n). Approval of male factor’s gift.
(o). Disapproving way to censure Conservative.
(p). At bottom, favoring government.
(q). Shorten short story.
(r). Hydrothoracic drain in eastern U.S.
(s). Is entertainer of Britissue?
(t). Bum English capital melody: “You Could Do Erse.”
(u). Crazy purpose provides driving force.
(v). Bill sings well.
(w). It is not appropriate to be at small home.
(x). Fledgling medic sounds like routine order.
(y). Small department is proficient.
(z). One plank to be on transport.

(1). A.
(2). Apt.
(3). Beach.
(4). Beat.
(5). Board.
(6). Buggy.
(7). Con.
(8). Condemn.
(9). Conning.
(10). Cons.
(11). Curt.
(12). Dept.
(13). Derriére.
(14). Donation.
(15). Done.
(16). Firm.
(17). For.
(18). Form.
(19). Give.
(20). In.
(21). Intracostal.
(22). Lew.
(23). Loco.
(24). London.
(25). Motive.
(26). Pro.
(27). Rawls.
(28). Rogue.
(29). Roman.
(30). Scandal.
(31). Science.
(32). Sorts.
(33). State.
(34). Strict.
(35). Tale.
(36). Temporary.
(37). Tern.
(38). Tory.
(39). Tower.
(40). Train.
(41). Voice.
(42). Waterway.

Answers to Paring Pairs No. 35

(a). Buccaneer becomes rude beneficiary. (6,18) Coarse Heir.
(b). Norfolk utterances lead to weapons. (3,52) Broads Words.
(c). Why does drug company keep analgesic undercover? (7,36) Counter Pane.
(d). Slow movement at hospital corners. (44,1) Sheet Anchors.
(e). These endless corridors are real drags. (29,16) Long Hauls.
(f). You and I carry the burden. (33,51) On Us.
(g). Vegetarian rumor about the garden? (19,2) Herbaceous Boarder.
(h). These are associated with Homeric feat. (27,11) Leg Ends.
(i). The PM watches the ebb and flow. (12,49) EvenTide.
(j). Highlander befogged by this. (41,31) Scotch Mist.
(k). Play statues on occasion? (21,45) In Stance.
(l). Screamers can cause wrinkled brows. (17,28) Head Lines.
(m). Sounds to me like lopsided mixture of ninety degrees. (53,47) Wry Tangle.
(n). Make depressed in pitiful lair. (40,8) Sad Den.
(o). Speed with which Islamic rulers appear. (10,38) Emir Rate.
(p). Bury the citizen everywhere. (22,32) Inter National.
(q). Blacks. (23,42) Jet Set.
(r). Conserative, lewd vulcanologists. (26,50) Lava Tories.
(s). Remain on sinking ship, join Montgomery against Rommel. (9,37) Desert Rat.
(t). Phoney insect that makes a low noise. (20,4) Hum Bug.
(u). Celebratory beverage produces psychosomatic headache? (43,35) Sham Pain.
(v). Preserve composition of first-magnitude star. (5,34) Can Opus.
(w). Kindred wheelwright. (15,30) Felloe Man.
(x). Publicity at sporting events for hot dogs and beer? (13,14) Fan Fare.
(y). Expert at rhinoplasty. (25,24) Knows Job.
(z). Watch non-italic nervous disorder. (39,48) Roman Tick.

The correct answer is (46) Stand.

The two winners are Sean Devine, Black Rock, County Dublin, Ireland, and William Riker, Rochester, New York. Prize: Two drawings will be made, one from the correct answers received in Aylesbury, the other from those received in Old Lyme. Each winner will receive a year’s subscription to VERBATIM, which can be sent as a gift to anyone, anywhere, or may be used to extend the winner’s subscription. Please indicate a choice when submitting an answer, preferably on a postcard. See page 2 for address(es).

SIC! SIC! SIC!

At 7:35 a.m., Ron Steelman of National Public Radio said: “For the second time in two weeks a Galena Park school teacher was found murdered.” At 8:26 a.m., Sam Saucedo of Channel 11 News said, “For the second time in two weeks a Galena Park school teacher has been murdered.” [Submitted by Graciela S. Daichman, Rice University.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The University of Texas has been concerned about the attrition rate among undergraduates. About 37 percent of freshmen drop out of UT after four years. About one-third graduate after four years, and about half graduate after five years.” [From the Austin American-Statesman, 3 February 1987. Submitted by Michael B. Huston, San Marcos, Texas.]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Lulu takes in ex-Beatle’s confirmation (7,3)
6. Next-to-last- item from cash-and-carry store (4)
10. Story follows Chevrolet, French explorer (7)
11. Editor provided with cool building (7)
12. Broadcasting wild anti-hero (2,3,3)
13. Fuss with nurse’s dress (5)
15. Fellow communist re-called weapon in secret message (7)
17. Listening to cuckoo in hedge (7)
18. Ready to ride sleigh, keeping tag on (7)
21. Glib rebel flag waver (7)
23. Saw lawyer featured in Time (5)
24. Returned oddly humorous wrapping and letter? (8)
27. Was left taking final in physics (7)
28. Arrive to catch sweetheart in struggle (7)
29. Empty, meaningless talk repelled philosopher (4)
30. Determines to fiddle with Isaac Stern (10)

Down

1. Ultimately, black bear raised with antelope(4)
2. A friend at debut of military laser, for one (7)
3. Celtic pupil’s place: middle of nowhere (5)
4. Refuse to admit British into hangar (7)
5. Discover caribou near thicket’s center (7)
7. Voyage to refine oil from Mideastern port (7)
8. Tiny champions, most evenings (10)
9. “Part of light is failing,” I wail (8)
14. Creates ski jumps for winter athletes (3,7)
16. Complaints from salt mine working (8)
19. Bore gets to take first prize in lottery (7)
20. Victimizes well-dressed fellows taking train (7)
21. Mythical piper with smart splendor (7)
22. Is mad king upset with one from the holy land? (7)
25. Burning houses I’m shut in (5)
26. Oceans grasp in the sound (4)

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“German Filmmaker Leni Reifenstahl Sings With Doubleday.” [From Publishers Weekly, 4 November 1988. Submitted by Milton Horowitz, Jackson Heights, New York.]

Solution to Verbal Analogies III

1: Baculometry
2: Evaporation (in air)
3: Chronoscopy/Horometry
4: Salt crystals
5: Hypsometry
6: Bones
7: Cryometry
8: Air impurities
9: Piezometry
10: Electric currents
11: Goniometry
12: Volume/Dimensions of a solid

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. MA-STIFF.
5. PAR(APE)T.
9. SINE CUR(V)E.
10. PI-PER.
11. S-LAVISH.
12. DE(S)ERVE (VEERED anag.).
13. SU(C)RE.
15. RI(FLE SH)OT.
17. BART(END)ER.
19. MANOR (homophone).
21. C(HER)UBS.
23. ANNU(A)LS.
25. OCTET (odd letters).
26. A-MAR-YLLIS (rev.).
27. DERIDES (anag.).
28. MEDUSAS (anag.).

Down

1. MIS(U)SES.
2. S.(ANT)A.
3. IN(C)LINE.
4. FUR-THERED.
5. P-LEAD.
6. RIPOSTE (hidden).
7. PA(PER-TH)IN.
8. TOR-RENT (ROT rev.).
14. CAR(PEN)TER.
16. FI(RE ALA)RM.
17. BECLOUD (anag.).
18. EXUL(T)ED (DELUXE rev.).
19. M.(ON-EYE)D.
20. RESISTS (anag.).
22. S-CANS.
24. A-TLAS (SALT rev.).

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. Stevins MS (c. 1555), quoted in Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 3rd, ed., Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, ↩︎

2. Alan D. Baddeley, The Psychology of Learning, Basic Books, New York, 1976. ↩︎

3. Willard Espy, Another Almanac of Words at Play, Clarkson N. Potter, New York, 1980. ↩︎

4. “The Lama” in Ogden Nash, Free Wheeling, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1931. ↩︎

5. Alan D. Baddeley, The Psychology of Learning, Basic Books, New York, 1976. ↩︎

6. My son provides “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles.” From 1979 to 1999 Pluto is closer to the sun than is Neptune. ↩︎

7. Willard Espy, Another Almanac of Words at Play, Clarkson N. Potter, New York, 1980. ↩︎

8. John Barlett, Familiar Quotations, 13th ed., Little, Brown, Boston, 1955. ↩︎

9. Robert Bloomfield and E. Ted Chandler, Pocket Mnemonics for Practitioners, Harbinger Medical Press, Winston-Salem, N.C., 1983. ↩︎

10. Gyles Brandreth, The Joy of Lex, Quill, New York, ↩︎

11. John W. Schaum Note Speller Book One, Belwyn, New York, 1945. ↩︎

12. David Grambs, Words About Words, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1984. ↩︎

13. Willard Espy, An Almanac of Words at Play, Clarkson N. Potter, New York, 1975. ↩︎

14. Les Reports de Edward Coke, Vol. 1,p. 3 (1660) as quoted in Respectfully Quoted, Suzy, Platt, ed. Library of Congress, Washington, 1989. ↩︎

15. Lacking a mnemonic for it, I had to look up this quote from Virgil’s Aeneid, but perhaps some day it will be pleasant to remember even these things. ↩︎

16. The difference between the two ways of writing the “q” reflects a slight variation in pronunciation: “q” being an explosive kp sound, “\?\” being a voiced gb sound. ↩︎

17. Offshore: A North Sea Journey, A. Alvarez, Houghton Mifflin, 1986. ↩︎

18. Cold Heaven, Brian Moore, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983. ↩︎

19. Secret Understandings, Morris Philipson, Simon & Schuster, 1983. ↩︎

20. Boston Boy, Nat Hentoff, Knopf, 1986. ↩︎

21. The Body in Cadiz Bay, David Serafin, St. Martins, 1985. ↩︎

22. Plain Text, Nancy Mairs, U. of Arizona Press, 1986. ↩︎

23. Cold Iron, Nicholas Freeling, Viking, 1986. ↩︎

24. Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. ↩︎

25. Fragments of Light, Charles LeBaron, St. Martin’s, 1984. ↩︎

26. Life and Death on 10 West, Eric Lax, Times Books, 1984. ↩︎

27. The Tartan Sell, Jonathan Gash, St. Martin’s 1986. ↩︎

28. Straight Cut, Madison Smartt Bell, Ticknor & Fields, 1986. ↩︎

29. Friends, Russians and Countrymen, Hampton Howard, St. Martins, 1988. ↩︎

30. Lover and Thief, Arthur Maling, Harper & Row, 1988. ↩︎

31. Cavalier in White, Marcia Muller, St. Martin’s, 1986. ↩︎

32. Deadfall, Bill Pronzini, St. Martin’s, 1986. ↩︎

33. “What’s So Funny?” in Once More Around the Block, Joseph Epstein, Norton, 1987. ↩︎

34. Sandscrene, Ian Stuart, Doubleday, 1987. ↩︎

35. Whistler in the Dark, John Malcolm, Scribners, 1986. ↩︎

36. Treasure, Clive Cussler, Simon & Schuster, 1988. ↩︎

37. This example, I note, shows letter-cutting rather than syllable-cutting. ↩︎