VOL XVII, No 1 [Summer 1990]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Language of the Law

David Mellinkoff, (Little, Brown and Co., 1963), xiv + 526pp.

The thesis of this work is that most legal communication can and should be expressed in ordinary words; the sub-text is that, although “the law is a profession of words,” most lawyers do not know much about them and very few are interested in learning more. After a short introductory section, half the book is devoted to a history of legal language.¹ and the other half to a critical analysis of its usage. The latter half will have more appeal to the average lawyer, unscholarly primate that he is; but the language-loving lawyer, which many are and all ought to be, will be entertained as much as edified by the eventful chronicle of the forging and tempering of the tools of his trade. Of all specialized vocabularies, that of the law is not only the most commonly used but by far the most eloquent and alluring. For that reason, and because they will relish the author’s excoriating criticism of the shamanistic rhetoric employed by lawyers to intimidate them, lay people who are addicted to the lore of words will find the book as a whole not less fascinating than do the practitioners.

The first half is a piece of scholarship par excellence, so closely packed and fully realized that no summary can begin to do it justice. I shall try to reduce its gist to a few paragraphs of my own words.

The history of the legal language of the English-speaking common law countries and the history of the English language are indissoluble. The Celts, those ancient invaders from the continent who managed to survive the Roman occupation and resist the Latin tongue, contributed one word—whiskey— having legal significance but were driven, along with their reverse-order speech, into the nooks and corners of the British Isles and France by the fierce Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, wielding their broadswords and brutish monosyllables. The Law impressed a special meaning on many Anglo-Saxon words—manslaughter, sheriff, theft, hearsay, bench (judge’s), strike (motion to), landlord, freehold (in land), and herein—which they retain to this day. From the Viking raids and settlements a few Norse words of Teutonic ancestry survive with technical legal definitions: gift, loan, sale, bond, and law itself.

When, in about the year 596, King Æthelbert promulgated a written Anglo-Saxon code of law, a little cloud of Latin was rising from the sea. The Celtic tongue, later to be overwhelmed by Anglo-Saxon, contained only a few Latin words, most of them place names and none of legal import, outlived the occupation. But the speech of the Anglo-Saxons themselves had brought to England a sprinkling of Latin words picked up in their trade with the Romans.

At almost the same time that Æthelbert pro claimed his code, St. Augustine and his followers arrived in England bringing Christianity and Latin, and within a hundred years the conversation was complete. Latin, through the clergy, was widely introduced to the native idiom and took a strong position in the law well before the Conquest. After the Conquest English remained robustly alive during a period of bi- and trilingualism: the invading Normans spoke a French dialect which became for a time the language of the kings and the nobility, while contemporary English was spoken by the indigenous population; Latin was the language of record and of the law in general, and so it remained for about two centuries after the Conquest, with English as a close second. English fastened upon foreign words with gusto, transforming and anglicizing them to lend grandeur and subtlety to the vernacular. The upper classes were familiar with both French and English, the cultivated classes with Latin as well. Although a statute of 1362 required pleadings to be in English and records in Latin, French became the principal language of the law and of legal education, and so continued for 200 years, although Latin remained the standard for the “all-important” writs. “There was nothing written in English of immediate practical value to the practising common lawyer or law student.” But the use of English spread and, by the end of the 14th century, knowledge of French was “an accomplishment.” Indeed, the hallmark of authenticity was put on it by Chaucer, who seemed to be preparing it for Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, and the other Elizabethans, and for Donne, Milton, and Dryden. Still, French words in vast numbers, both of the law and of common speech, continued to be embraced by English and, by 1800, the law itself joined that embrace, retaining French and Latin only for technical terms.

With the advance of literacy that came with printing and the use of Latin as a scholarly lingua franca, Bacon and Milton wrote in Latin as well as in English. The lawyers, already educated in Latin as the learned tongue, incorporated it almost completely into their writing and in large part into their oral usage. To this day, long after Latin has ceased to be the principal medium of written legal documents and records, lawyers cling to and defend against all comers unnumbered words and phrases in that ancient tongue, under the persuasion, justified or not, that they enrich the legal vocabulary with precision, permanence, and dignity.

Anticipating our contemporary Plain English laws, strong voices were raised in the 17th century against the use of foreign tongues as a kind of black art to mystify the uneducated and cheat them of their rights. Every man, they said, ought to be able to understand the law and act on his own behalf. In 1650 and again in 1713 Parliament passed laws (written almost entirely in derivatives of French or Latin) requiring that all court proceedings be in English. Both laws were bitterly resisted by the bench and bar, and because of such pressure the later one was eviscerated before it went into effect by an amendment allowing the continued use of customary words. This was an age of exiguous technicality in English as well as Latin and French, an age when the failure of a syllable lost the cause. “The land law was on the move—in a solemn progression of rules and technical evasions. This was the day of the ingenious conveyance, the computers of the infinite, logical word slicers, dealers in metaphysical wraiths….” The law was “encased in a hard shell of fixed pattern, its language determined by forms and the deadweight of precedent.”

American colonists, particularly hostile to lawyers and their mumbo-jumbo, tried at first simply to eliminate the profession. When that failed, they turned to the do-it-yourself approach, creating a lively demand for self-instruction books of the Everyman His Own Lawyer kind, foreshadowing the present-day will- and estate-planning kits. Despite lawyers' renunciations of such efforts as “chimeras of ignorance and folly,” the public continued—and continues to this day—to yearn for simplicity.

Law language, it is generally agreed among lay people (with a few eccentric lawyers concurring), is verbose, pompous, archaic, and obscure. Applying his premise that it should agree with ordinary speech, Professor Mellinkoff examines the reasons lawyers rely on for the difference.

The lawyer’s first line of defence is precision, his bounden duty to lay down his words so that they may never be misunderstood. For this he must use the finely turned jeweler’s tools of his craft, not the carpenter’s saws and hatchets of common idiom. But, says the author, the steeling grip of lawyers on their stilted language is in fact the result of fear. “ ‘Leave us alone. Don’t change. Here we stay till death or disbarment.’ ” When lawyers say precision they think they are saying exact meaning; but what they are in truth saying most of the time is exactly-the-same-way—that is, the traditional way (to have and to hold), the way of precedent (“cause of action”), and the required way (as by statute). Such usages may also be exact meanings, and thus, truly precise, but they are not necessarily so. Lawyers' stand-bys such as aforesaid, forthwith, hereafter, hereby, herein, hereinafter, and even the ubiquitous said are condemned by the author as “tricky, ducking, bobbing words,” “flabby words,” whose only claim to precision is their traditional use, not worth saving. He also takes whacks at those old chestnuts and/or and ss. Under the heaviest duress, such as the threat of boiling in ink, lawyers might relinquish all these; but they will fight to the bitter end and finally die at the barricades before surrendering their whereases. Never mind that, the author says; Whereas is consistently vague, meaning variously ‘the fact is,’ ‘although,’ ‘considering that,’ ‘on the contrary,’ and ‘that being the case,’ with many shadings in between. Generally appearing as the final whereas is the most fatuous and utterly redundant one of all: “WHEREAS the parties have orally agreed to the terms of such sale and desire to reduce their agreement to writing, Now THEREFORE…” The lawyer is also habituated to doublets and triplets like fit and proper; force and effect; give, bequeath and devise; null and void, and rest, residue, and remainder. These seem to me among the less reprehensible, for they are understandable to ordinary people and are objectionable mainly on the grounds of repetition rather than obscurity. More legal documents than ever before contain laundry list of such terms, many from the computer’s memory bank, often imparting false profundity and reassurance to the client like the chant of the auctioneer but under cold analysis shriveling to redundancy and confusion. Never mind all this, the lawyer will cling to them like the drunkard to his bottle.

The reader is told that there was once justification for the term natural life—e.g., “…sentenced to serve for the rest of his natural life…,” “…to my wife Nancy for and during her natural life”— based on the civil death of a felon and also upon the state of civil death assumed by a monk upon his abnegation of all worldly concerns, but that the phrase as now applied is “outrageously redundant.” These words are so universally employed in deeds and wills that the absence of natural might cause a reviewing lawyer to question the authorship. The criticism is nonetheless valid, though this rejected phrase might come again into play where some sort of life, as after brain death, is prolonged by totally artificial means.

In targeting esoteric words used by lawyers in place of ordinary ones under the pretense of precision, it seems to me that the author is wasting ammunition on words like reasonable, substantial, and satisfactory. They are words of ordinary speech, with which juries are quite comfortable, and lawyers are as aware as everybody else that they are imprecise. The law’s reasonable man, from the tribal wisdom of a person who is honest and sensible, is an image that can be called forth in the mind of every man. Substantial performance is something a great deal more than driving the first nail and a little less than driving the last one, and it survives as a useful tool to prevent injustice by technicality. Reasonable doubt may be a “sow’s ear,” but the jury understands that the judge is telling them to be damned sure the defendant is guilty before they hang him. These words express concepts that cannot be drawn with straightedge and compass: their flexibility is essential to their function. The subjective satisfactory, and ordinary word rather than a legal one, is a trouble-maker and should be avoided.

Lawyers are mad folk in general, but their madness crescendos, according to Professor Mellinkoff, in their “consuming passion for precedent.” Mesmerized by the “ritual phrase” stare decisis, they delve into that shelf-devouring monster of confusion known as Words and Phrases and come forth with “language that the profession accepts as precedent,” thus investing such terms as accident and proximate cause with a false precision. Accident is indeed elusive of enduring definition, but a lawyer may find it very useful to discover a purported definition in a case of his own jurisdiction decided upon facts resembling those at hand. Most lawyers accept proximate cause as a necessary term of art and will consider the author’s treatment of it as “concise gibberish” for which you can “get a definition at any supermarket” as rather severe. It embodies a concept difficult to define: the necessary nexus between the act and the injury. We cannot go back to Adam’s Fall (where we sinned all), certainly; neither can we require that the safe fall directly on the plaintiff’s head. Foreseeability, unmentioned by the author but indispensable in the application of proximate cause, narrows but does not close the gap. The jurors, again, are free to move within a fenced area. Lawyers will understand that the author is inveighing against precedent only as a false pretense for fake precision, but an innocent layman straying into these pages might well take it from the broad-gauged blasts that the whole doctrine of precedent is a grand illusion, a sort of pseudo-science like astrology, in which lawyers and judges count the angels dancing on the point of a needle:

From faltering beginnings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries… [t]he heaped-up precedents of the substantive [my italics] law swarm with trivia, with differences without substantive distinction, with repetitions that centuries ago attained the rank of platitude.

For the benefit of the uninitiated let me say that lawyers, deluded or not, overwhelmingly believe that with the exception of constitutions and of statutes enacted by legislatures (and rules under them), precedent is what the law is made of in the United States; that the law existed before written language in the tradition of “customs that runneth not to the contrary” and continues to thrive in the printed decisions; that the statutes themselves remain unsettled until rounded out by precedent; that precedents may become so venerable as to become platitudes but may also be as fresh as the undried ink on today’s appellate court decision; and that when a lawyer searches for as recent a decision as he can find, in a jurisdiction as near as possible, on facts as close to his client’s case as possible, never overruled or modified, and pronouncing the law as clearly as possible, he is doing what he should be doing and might well be guilty of malpractice for failing to do so.

As an instance of the gross imprecision of precedent the author cites a Kentucky case in which, despite the heavy-drinking insured’s answer, “Never,” to a question in a life insurance application as to the use of spirits, the court held the policy valid. But as I read the quoted extracts from the opinion, the court’s reasoning was not at all based on a definition of the word never but on a well-established precedent holding that to void the policy the misrepresentation must be such that had the company known the truth it would not have issued the policy. “No insurance company would have rejected the risk on this ground,” said the court. An effete northerner might challenge the court’s finding that the insured’s frequent use of alcohol was not material to the risk, but this was in Kentucky, where bourbon was invented and is regarded as considerably less harmful than iced tea.

The witness’s oath as required by statute and as everybody knows is the sing-song “to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Redundant and imprecise, says the author; the whole truth is a “metaphysical distinction,” and he cites the much-derided Words and Phrases. Well, perhaps. But consider this:

“Did you write the letter?”

“No.” [His secretary typed the letter and signed his name to it.]

“Did the policeman stop the car?”

“No.” [The policeman held up his hand and blew his whistle and the driver then stopped the car.]

Unless a skillful cross-examiner brings out all the facts, a lying witness may avoid a perjury conviction.

If legal language were to be stripped of ordinary English, repetition, tradition, precedent, and requirement, there would still remain, Professor Mellinkoff begrudgingly concedes, “a nubbin of precision” from its terms of art. These “technical terms with specific meanings” are a “mere sprinkling,” as seldom found as “nuggets in a salted gold field.” A neat metaphor, but I would have added, “also as precious.” In addition to the author’s examples of lease, landlord, tenant, and surrender, I would submit escrow, holograph, joint tenancy, tenancy in common, precatory subrogation (none of which is mentioned in the book), and the invaluable per stirpes, all terms of art far more precise than any ready equivalent in backyard English. Phrases like mutually agreed and were intermarried are plainly pompous rather than precise, as are removed for ‘moved,’ determine for ‘terminate,’ and many more.

“As precision is the loudest virtue of the law, so wordiness is its noisiest vice.”

Brevity is a saving grace, but only if it coincides with precision and intelligibility. Voir dire is short and precise and intelligible; in my opinion, this distinction can be claimed by many other terms of art, including tort, fee simple, easement, mens rea, and prima facie case. And/or is short but confusing, and proximate cause (according to the author) is short but unintelligible.

How truly does the author say that “every mechanical aid the law has seized upon to make itself more available has increased its bulk”! And this mushroom cloud has expanded at least a hundredfold since the book was written. The Frankenstein computer with its handmaiden word processor have spread before the lawyer a feast of gustatory delights beyond the dreams of his voracity. Luscious paragraphs of whereases, corporate powers, trustees duties, and events of default can be mined from these monster quarries to be fitted, with no other purpose than to encumber lean documents that already perform their function. These machines are pampered by de-personalizing everything they are fed, converting Carl or Clara to husband or wife or simply to spouse, my son Frank and daughter Kate to my children, and Lewis and Clark to the Lessor (the singular of course including the plural and the masculine the feminine or even the neuter, should a party be of undetermined sex).

Professor Mellinkoff traces the verbosity of lawyers to the historical influences of primitive ritual, bilingual duplication, and payment by the word; certainly their Latin and French gave them a running start over competing professions. But some would say that, spurred by their own vanity and their clients' impressionability, they would have reached the pinnacles of pomposity without having to resort to these ancient rites. As “wholesale dealers in words,” the author maintains, lawyers are masters of “planned confusion.” Witness the lawyer’s addiction to it would seem, it may well be, and the like. But I should have thought that lawyers could have learned these and other “one-legged subjunctives” from congressmen, cabinet ministers, and television talk-show guests who demonstrate extraordinary proficiency in such equivocations.

In the beginning the law was the word itself, not the abstraction that gave it birth. Therefore, words must be durable, it was believed, lest a change in a word change the meaning of the law. A subtle concept, convincingly explained by the author. To be durable without writing the law had to be rememberable, and the lawyer’s penchant for repetition comes from an outmoded attachment to mnemonic devices. Assurance of rememberability in written law rests in the artful remarks (usually witty and nearly always metaphoric) of such rare jurists as Lord Bowen and Justice Holmes: “…the state of a man’s mind is as much of a fact as the state of his digestion”; “A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged: it is the skin of a living thought….”

In the office as in the courtroom legal language is intended to impress laymen. Sometimes expectations must be met. “Sir Leicester,” the author quotes from Bleak House, “appears to have a stately liking for the legal repetitions and prolixities as ranging among the national bulwarks.” If the contract prepared for the client lacks the usual flourishes, he may feel that he is paying for something he could have written himself. On the other hand, many clients appreciate plain wording.

Also, legal language endures to “unite the priesthood,” that the “discipline [may] not be made common among the vulgar.”

Three more reasons might have been added in support of a language of the law distinct from common speech. First, “To Impress the Client,” discussed under Durability, should not be limited to that category.

Second is “To Persuade the Judge or Jury.” The good lawyer, always mindful of Holmes’s definition of the law as “the prophecies of what the court will do in fact and nothing more pretentious,” will ask himself when drafting any instrument, “How will this hold up in court?” Indeed, this reason overrides all others. The judge is but another lawyer, seldom one of the more erudite, and he might be more amenable to the old familiar tunes than to start minimalism, however pure or precise. In jury trials in most states the complaints and answers stating the parties' claims and denials are read to the jury as part of the instructions, can be quoted by the lawyers in argument, and may be sent to the jury room. The lawyer serves his client by employing his most impressive language: the collision was one of “great force and violence,” the injuries “severe,” the pain “excruciating,” and the mental anguish “extreme.” He is being paid for persuasion, not simplification.

The third addition would be “Style,” pure style. Surely lawyers, no less than other artisans, are entitled to their little conceits, a grace note here, a furbelow there. When I was young at the bar I heard with delight an old lawyer, who could have played Dickens’s Mr. Tulkinghorn, speak grandly of the court of nisi prius (pronouncing it NICEY PRY-US), an utterly obsolete Latinism for the simple trial court. Just as any speaker may, for the sake of euphony (or vanity) flourish an occasional eminence grise or mirabile dictu, may not a lawyer plume himself now and then with an ab initio or even a mutatis mutandis, not to “unite the priesthood” but to savor his own sonority, as a bird sings also for itself?

The book as a whole is most praiseworthy. The first half, unique and unfaultable, will fill a huge gap in the knowledge of all lawyers who are not far more scholarly than any I have ever known. The writing in 0both halves, though lean and muscular—the author falls prey to none of the ills of turgidity that he so lavishly dispraises—is polished and witty, spiced with revealing anecdotes and sparkling detail. In those few cases with which I have ventured to disagree, I have felt that the author’s argument was unworthy of his art.

As for the impact on the profession, one must, with a sigh, agree with Professor Mellinkoff that “gratuitous literary advice … is received with profound indifference” and that “the hardest words of lay critics from Swift to date … have been ignored with aplomb.” In this era of lawyers unprecedented wealth and power, few of them will expend many of their precious minutes listening to admonitions on their language. Still, there are always the “ ‘passionate few,’ a stray lawyer here and there” according to the author, who will fight on in the courtrooms and in the ivory towers, at the bar and in the barrooms, in the law journals and reviews for the good word, and they will never surrender.

Max C. Peterson, Hartford City, Indiana

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BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Longman Pronunciation Dictionary

J.C. Wells, (Longman, 1990), xxviii + 802pp.

This long-needed book will be welcomed by the linguistic community and by learners of English. General dictionaries show pronunciations, it is true, but not in the depth displayed in this work [LPD], rarely with its precision, and almost never with both American and British pronunciations side by side.

The immediate questions that arise are Which American? Which British? The dialect selected for American English is General American, that spoken by the largest number of speakers (those who do not distinguish among Mary, marry, and merry); that selected for British English, as one might expect, RP [Received Pronunciation], “widely regarded as a model for correct pronunciation … what is used by BBC news readers (hence the alternative name, BBC pronunciation).” As far as the first is concerned, it does not bear the same relationship to American English that RP bears to British English: the pronunciation pattern of the educated speaker in the northeastern US probably retains much of its former status and prestige. Having listened to BBC news readers for many years, I am inclined to regard BBC pronunciation as an archaic or obsolescent term (unless one restricts the designation to news readers on BBC World Service). Certainly, the majority of British English speakers do not pronounce English in the RP pattern, and there is increasing evidence that if they aspire to do so, they are meeting with little success. But this is not a book of descriptive phonetics; it is for the learner who aspires to speak the “best” English he can, and the selection of these two dialects would be hard to fault.

The pronunciation system used by Wells is “broad IPA,” with a few modifications. It is largely phonemic, but there are enough refinements to make it unique. Wells calls it “LPD.” I found only one transcription to quarrel with: by showing \?\ as the symbol for the General American sound in both lot/odd and start/father, Wells leads one to conclude that General American (like RP) drops r-sounds in syllable-final position. But that is not the case in General American, as the entry for start start bears out. There is some confusion in the key, where the spelled characters represented by the phonetic transcription are underscored, and the form for General American start should have been start, not start. Moreover, most American dictionaries make a deliberate distinction between the sounds in odd/lot and start/father, with the former often displaying some rounding or, at worst, closer to \?\ than to \?\. The treatment of nurse and stir, which show \?\ for RP and \?\ for General American is closer to the mark.

When I worked on the setting up of the pronunciation system for the Random House dictionaries, I examined sound spectrograms of words that middle, total, sudden, servant, father, standard, etc., that some phoneticians transcribed using syllabic \?\, \?\, and \?\. What I found was that the syllabics occurred only when the preceding sound was a dental or alveolar (d or t); when it was a velar (k or g), there was enough time for a speaker to release a sound which was more like a full schwa than a syllabic. Indeed, though it is a matter of degree, I find it difficult to pronounce a word like organism with a syllabic Z\?\ at end rather than a z\?\m. This is the way organism is transcribed in the key; but the text itself shows a full schwa, which indicates that perhaps Wells vacillated on this point himself.

LPD lists more than 75,000 words, including proper names. The boldface headwords, alas in sansserif type (making it difficult to read words like Pilling, pillion, pilliwinkle, Illinois, etc., because the lower-case i resembles lower-case l, which is hard to distinguish from capital I), are followed by pronunciations printed in blue, with variants in black, an expensive but worthwhile idea that works if you are not reading in a dim light. General American pronunciations are easy to find because they are separated from RP by double vertical bars. Pronunciations that are considered incorrect (like “fith” for fifth) are preceded by an exclamation point in a triangle; (!) indicates that a pronunciation so marked is different from what the spelling might lead one to expect (as in Beaulieu ‘bju\?\li and Beauchamp \?\bi\?\t\?\\?\\?\m); (*) is ‘a warning that the British and American pronunciations are different in an important and unpredictable way’ (e.g., baton \?\bætan - \?\n ¦¦ b\?\\?\ta\?\n). Useful notes abound, e.g., at Mercedes, “The pl of the tdmk is pronounced the same as the sing, or with -i\?\z”; and, passim throughout, results of a poll taken among 275 British English speakers, e.g. “casual\?\kæzu\?\l -ju; \?\kæzju; \?\kæ\?\\?\l—BrE poll panel preference: \?\kæ3- 77%, kæz- 23%.” Separate treatment is given, in situ, to prefixed and suffixes, and detailed discussions of compounds and phrases, connected speech, neutralization, and other phonetic matters and language environments that affect pronunciation appear in their appropriate alphabetic places. Each spelled sound is discussed at the beginning of its alphabetic section, digraphs being treated at the beginnings of the sections for their first letter.

In sum, there is a wealth of information succinctly presented in the pages of LPD which learners, linguists, and lexicographers will be mining for many years to come, including the pronunciation of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllandysiliogogogoch.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“…EXTERMINATING: We are trained to kill all pets …” [From an ad in TV Hi-Lites (Flushing, New York), December 27-Jan 2, 1988. Submitted by Dennis Wepman, Bronx.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: What’s In A Name?

Leonard R.N. Ashley, (Genealogical Publishing Company, 1989).

This is a general book about names, in scope if not in style reflecting the varied articles that appear in Names, the journal of the American Name Society. Those articles are normally written in language meant to demonstrate to the world that the writer is an academic; this book reflects more the style of a classroom teacher, a mixture of objective and subjective comment. For those who know their name books, it falls somewhere between Basil Cottle’s Names (1983) and my own Guinness Book of Names (4th edition 1989).

I mention the latter merely to make it clear that I am the author of a rival book which covers very similar ground, and that any comments I make must be judged against that background. Like Professor Ashley, I have also been immersed in name studies for at least twenty years. His book has not been written for people like me, and its real impact will have to be judged when it gets into the hands of those intended readers who are not already onomastic freaks. Presumably, much of the book’s contents will be as fresh to such readers as it is familiar to anyone who already knows his names. That is not meant to be a sneer. Anyone writing a book of this kind is obliged to go over certain common territory. It is how you go over it that matters—how entertainingly, how clearly, how elegantly, how accurately.

In the present case I have some worries about three of those criteria. Having come across reviewers who quite clearly did no more than glance at the book concerned—one of them once wondered in the pages of VERBATIM why I had called two chapters of a book “What’s In A Name?” though the second chapter was actually “What Is A Name?”—I decided to give this book a careful reading. Perhaps it is not meant to be read in that way. Consider Professor Ashley’s opening paragraph, traditionally the one which an author reads and corrects most often. He begins: “From the beginning people had to have names to identify themselves. At first, one was enough. There are cultures in which one is still enough, but generally, with increases in population and refinements in civilization, there arose a need for additional designations to identify the members of a society. To a given name like John or Mary was appended a second name, usually an inherited family name. With the advent of this ‘last name,’ which came to be known as a surname (from the French surnom), given names came to be called ‘first names,’ or, because we can have more than one, ‘forenames.’ ”

The casual reader might let that pass: I find it difficult to do so. Surely that opening sentence, as it stands, is ambiguous? “Had to have a name” rather than “names” would have been better, and “in order to identify and refer to one another” would have avoided the ambiguity of “themselves.” People usually know who they themselves are. The need for an additional personal name (in Europe rather than “generally,” and not before the tenth century) arose more because of the spread of a particular kind of naming philosophy than an increase in population or a refinement in civilization. The Anglo-Saxons did not allow the duplication of personal names within a group. There may have been superstitious reasons for this, connected with name-magic beliefs whereby the use of a living person’s name would deprive him of his soul, but the practical result was that everyone was conveniently identified by a single name.

When the Normans conquered England they introduced their own philosophy of allowing the same name to be borne simultaneously by many members of a group. This was not necessarily a more refined philosophy, merely a different one. The name-magic belief in this case was that a child named after an admired figure might cause some of that person’s qualities to be passed on to the child. That belief is of course still common today, though for that matter so is the other theory. In many Jewish families it prevents the use of a relation’s name if the person concerned is still alive.

For at least three hundred years the “additional designations” that the Norman philosophy made necessary were not “inherited family names,” but by-names, which applied only to those who bore them. Thus a John Smith in the Middle Ages really was a smith by trade. His son might be a Johnson, his grandson a Large because he happened to be a generous fellow. When surnames did become hereditary they were always, not “usually,” the second names that went with the given names.

Professor Ashley implies that “last name” was the early term “which came to be known as a surname.” Surname was the original word: last name is decidedly modern. Surname was indeed an adaptation of French surnom, but the Normans called it that because in Latin it was a super nomen, an ‘extra name.’ Without this explanation, the information that surname is from French surnom seems to me to be of very little interest.

The term forenames is to be preferred to given names or first names, says Professor Ashley. But it isn’t. Given name is clearly preferable if one wishes to distinguish between a name bestowed by the parents in any culture and one automatically inherited. Forename fails to help with the problem of those countries where the given name is always placed last. First name is useful when discussing western cultures, since it is usually the “call-name,” as some languages would describe it. As for the statement that we should use forenames “because we can have more than one,” what on earth is wrong with “given names,” or “first name and middle names”?

I know that Professor Ashley’s intended reader will not nit-pick in this way, but I can only react to his book (and to each page) as I find it. To me it matters that in his second paragraph, for example, he says that “to John, Mary, Peter, Matthew and Christopher the Puritans added, for girls, Prudence, Constance, and Charity, and for boys, Increase, Preserved and Learned.” That misses the point entirely. The Puritans substituted such names for the others because they did not believe in honoring, as they would have put it, Popish saints. In a very general sense the Puritans can be said to have added a few names to the stock which modern parents draw upon, but the author obviously did not mean that. He was not trying to tell us that names like Increase, Constance, and Learned are now in general use thanks to the Puritans.

In paragraph three we are told that “the Dare family named the first white baby born in Virginia Virginia, not a conventional name in the late sixteenth century but hardly daring considering the religious association. Indeed along with a slew of native British names that the English colonists transported to America, the traditional biblical names would dominate US birth registers well into the twentieth century.” As Professor Ashley knows, the state was named in honor of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, and not for the Virgin Mary. As for the “daring” aspect, had the child been named Virginia in a Puritan community, it would certainly have been very provocative. The Puritans would definitely have seen the name as having religious associations, or Roman Catholic associations at least, and would have objected to it strongly. Finally, the names which dominated US birth registers until fairly recent times were specifically Old Testament rather than merely “biblical” names. It is that which characterizes Abraham Lincoln, Noah Webster, and the like.

One does not necessarily expect literary elegance in a book written by an academic, but there is no need to be clumsy. Professor Ashley writes: “I cannot pretend to do justice in one section here to a subject that George R. Stewart almost failed to cover adequately in his Names on the Globe.” That turns out to be a backhanded compliment, but Professor Stewart himself, an author who showed us all what could be done by way of literary style in his Names on the Land, would never have written such a sentence. Another Ashleyism, a few pages later: “The book was rendered pretty useless pretty soon by name changes.” That’s pretty awful, I’m afraid.

There is no index to What’s in a Name?, which is as extraordinary as it is infuriating. The thinking behind that may be the same as that of another author I recently came across, responsible for a little Dictionary of House Names. When I pointed out mildly that it was usual for a dictionary to be in alphabetical order, she said that with such an arrangement readers would merely look for their own house name in the bookshop, and then not bother to buy the book.

Even she, however, did not have an entry saying something like: “There’s a house on the corner of Aragon Avenue with an interesting name, but I’m not going to tell you what it is.” On page 218 Professor Ashley writes: “There’s an old formula for finding out the name of your personal angel but I won’t trouble you with it. In addition, I’ll wager your priest won’t give it to you.” To that I can only say, as they do on this side of the Atlantic: “Thanks a bunch, professor.”

Thames Ditton, Surrey

EPISTOLA {Lawrence E. Padgett}

The reference to Slurvian [XVI, 2] was the first I had ever heard of it, and as the word is not to be found in my 1966 Webster I assume that it is of rather recent origin. On the evidence of the examples quoted, I also wonder whether it is necessary to construct an artificial sublanguage out of the garbled forms that inevitably arise when a language is used by lazy, slipshod, and semi-literate speakers. These forms are not restricted to America, they come into being wherever English is used—or rather abused—as some of the following comments will show.

Not far from where I grew up in the English Midlands there were villages in which “air” sounds were regularly replaced by “err.” A local preacher who came to our chapel greatly amused us by describing the encounter of a prophet with a “burr,” a word that kept recurring in his sermon. This was simply a bear, but the pronunciation was different in the Bloxwich area, as it is in other English dialects. If a Bloxwich boy wanted to ask “Where did he go?,” he would say “Whir-dee-go?,” just like the “Whirred ego” quoted, with a little word-window-dressing, by Virginia Howard. Yet you could hardly call a Bloxwich boy a Slurvian.

Some of the other examples Virginia Howard cites are simply misunderstandings of the sounds heard, something that inevitably occurs, especially among children and semi-literates, wherever words are spoken. “Taking it for granite” is a case in point. This is the same mechanism as is operative in the famous case of the child who heard the hymn “Gladly the cross I’d bear” and thought the adults were singing about “Gladly, the cross-eyed bear”. When as a little boy I listened to my parents talking about breeds of hens, I would certainly have written “Rhode Island Red” as “Row-Dylan-dread.”

Another category is formed by the replacement of unfamiliar-sounding names by something more familiar. Thus a Dame Jeanne (a big fat-bellied bottle) became a demi-john in English, “God encompasseth us” became the Goat and Compasses, and the girasole (sunflower) artichoke became the Jerusalem artichoke. The “sparrow grass” Virginia Howard mentions used to be—and probably still is—common usage in the English Midlands for asparagus.

Other examples cited are probably owing to foreign influences. “Forced” for forest would hardly be surprising among German settlers, for Forst is a German word for forest. More intriguing is “meowk” for milk. In the Bernese dialect of Swiss-German, the l is replaced by a rather indistinct u sound, so that the German Milch becomes Miuch (with “ch” as in “loch”). About the nearest American equivalent would be “meowk,” so it would be interesting to ascertain whether Bernese farmers might not have settled in Georgia at some time.

Garblings and imbroglios are going on all the time in English, not only in America or in Slurvian but wherever the lingo is spoken. This reminds me of the worst pun I ever heard. I was sitting with a friend in a restaurant when he noticed another friend at the far end of the room. He wanted to convey a message to him, and as there was too much background noise to do so by shouting, he tried to mouth his message. But the other failed to get the gist of it. After he had tried three times in vain, I suggested in my usual helpful way: “Why don’t you try it in Hindustani?” My friend shook his head and replied: “He wouldn’t Hindustanit if I did.”

[Stanley Mason, Effretikon, Switzerland]

EPISTOLA {Harold Mann}

I am beginning to find it irksome to have to point out every few years that Thomas Crapper did indeed live and that the company he founded lasted until about 1928. He was the subject of a biography entitled (I regret to say), Flushed with Pride. On the wall of my bathroom is a page reproduced from The Contractor’s Compendium of 1892 which illustrates and describes three products of Crapper & Co.’s works, situated in Marlborough Road, Chelsea. This reproduction is sold at the Gladstone Pottery Museum, Stoke-on-Trent. Marlborough Road is now, I suspect, a street, to distinguish it from its namesake by St. James’s Palace.

The word crap, however, is derived from the Old Dutch Krappe, according to Chambers Dictionary. One authority attributes the invention of the flushing WC to Joseph Bramah, in 1782; it is said that the quality of his work made his name a symbol of excellence and I have heard the expression, “That’s a bramah,” so used. On the other hand, Eric Partridge derives this usage from the Hindu deity via British army slang.

In this town there are two drain covers bearing the words “T. Crapper & Co., Sanitary Engineers, Marlborough Works, Chelsea.” Cast-iron evidence.

[Harold Mann, Faversham, Kent]

EPISTOLA {Amy Stoller}

I was puzzled by Rebecca Christian’s mention in “Blessed Be the Words That Bind” [XVI,3] of “Vikki Carr’s song, ‘Is That All There Is?’ ” I have never appreciated the popular tendency to credit songs automatically to performers or recording artists or both, not all of whom are composers or lyricists and not all of whom perform exclusively songs of their own composition.

“Is That All There Is?” was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and made famous in a late ’60s recording by Peggy Lee. Thus it is correct to refer to the Leiber and Stoller song, “Is That All There Is?” or to the Peggy Lee recording of “Is That All There Is?”, but not to “the Peggy Lee song, ‘Is That All There Is?’ ”

Vikki Carr’s most popular record (also in the ’60s) was of a song whose refrain began, “Let it please be him.” Unless she wrote it, however, it was not her most popular song.

[Amy Stoller, New York City]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“One thousand marijuana plants have been seized in a joint police investigation near here Monday.” [From the Kitchener-Waterloo (Canada) Record, 6 October 1987. Submitted by Susan Montonen, Kitchener.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Anglish-Yinglish: Yiddish in American Life and Literature

Gene Bluestein, (University of Georgia Press, 1989), xiv + 135pp.

Yiddish has found a cozy niche in English during this century. A slew of words like mavin and chutzpa, phrases like the bottom line and the whole megillah, idioms like eat one’s heart out and need it like a hole in the head, formative elements like shm-(fancy/shmancy, value/shmalue) and -nik (spynik, noshnik) have become common coin in colloquial English, especially in the United States. No book on current English is complete without some account of Yiddishisms. The popularity of the subject seems to have generated a cottage industry in publishing: I would venture a guess that apart from dictionaries and grammers, more books about Yiddish have been published in the United States in the past twenty-five years than about any other minority language used in this country.

A recent products of the Yiddish mill in Gene Bluestein’s Anglish-Yinglish: Yiddish in American Life and Literature, a title that misleadingly suggests a scholarly work. This impression is reinforced not only by the publisher’s being a university press but by the declaration in the Introduction that “This study is concerned with the function of Yiddish in American life and literature.” No such study, however, appears in the book. Instead, following the Introduction and constituting the book’s main text is a glossary of some 335 terms entitled “Anglish-Yinglish Dictionary.” This, clearly, should have been the book’s title. On the other hand, perhaps the author deliberately refrained from using this title, since he is not a professional lexicographer and his “dictionary” has every mark of an amateurish piece of work.

People without lexicographic training who undertake to compile a dictionary run the risk of committing innumerable blunders of the kind that only the seasoned professional knows how to avoid. In tackling the field of Yiddish. the compiler runs the additional risk of plunging into a discipline that requires extensive knowledge of Yiddish, Hebrew, and English linguistics, etymology, and lexicology. According to the description on the book’s cover, Gene Bluestein is a musician, folklorist, and literary critic who teaches English at California State University at Fresno. A lexicographer and Yiddish scholar he is not. That he is, indeed, a literary critic and folklorist is demonstrated not only in the generally intelligent and informative Introduction, but in two short appendices, one of which, subtitled “The Jew as American,” analyzes rather well Philip Roth’s novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, while the other, titled “The Revival of KLEZmer Music,” discusses lucidly a contemporary aspect of Yiddish folk music. It is regrettable that these fine pieces are marred by the intrusion of an inferior “Anglish-Yinglish Dictionary.”

In the brief Preface, Bluestein defines Anglish as “Anglicized Yiddish… which turns Yiddish words into colloquial English (as in shmo),” and Yinglish as “Yiddishized English, … which gives English words and expressions the qualities of Yiddish syntax and intonation (as in ‘a Heifetz he isn’t’).” Even if one were to accept this peculiar nomenclature, the distinction it is supposed to draw is hardly significant, since these types of formations are only two of the many characteristics of Jewish English (the collective terms for all the varieties of English used by Jews). The very terms Anglish and Yinglish invite scholarly derision as being both facetious and inaccurate. To worsen things, the author is not even consistent within the framework of this distinction. Most of the entries in the “dictionary” are not labeled either Yinglish or Anglish, and for good reason, as they do not fit into either category. For example, adeSHEM, defined as “a Hebrew euphemism for the Tetragrammaton”; kakuh-MAYmee, about which the author says “not Yiddish but it sounds like it,” misspelling the actual English word as cockamaimy.

The entries are a mishmash run riot. They include formal Jewish-interest terms (Ladino, YHVH), irrelevant non-Jewish names (Prufrock—yes, T.S. Eliot’s—an entry that runs on for two and a half pages), the name of just one Yiddish theatrical figure, Boris Tomashefsky, Hebrew literary works (Zohar), nonce formations (money/shmoney, which takes up two pages), misspelled place names to indicate mispronunciation (BRANzvil, for Brownsville, a section of Brooklyn), Yiddish words that are never used in English (FUHLKStimlech ‘folksy,’ guht ‘God,’ ich starb ‘I’m dying’), encyclopedic terms (black Jews), and nonexistent words (who-er “defined” by the author as “Not exactly Yiddish, but the New Yorkish pronunciation of whore”).

The equally whimsical nature of the “definitions” defies description. A nonce word, aKOOSHerke, is defined as “Friddish for midwife,” from which one is to gather that “Friddish” (which is nowhere explained) stands for a French-Yiddish mixture. Under bris ‘circumcision’ sixteen lines are quoted from Genesis 17 where a simple reference would have sufficed. The Yiddish word KETSele (not used in English), meaning ‘pussycat,’ is cryptically “explained” as a “term of endearment and the source of all the current pussycat titles with their sexy connotations.” Go figure.

The pronunciations are indicated in a confusing and inconsistent “newspaper-style” key. For example, the symbol “uh” is shown in the key as representing schwa, yet throughout the book it is used to represent the vowel sound in English ball or raw (BUHbe ‘grandmother,’ puhGRUHM ‘pogrom’). An English word like allrightnik is rendered as allRAITnik to make it seem Yiddish. And so on.

The “dictionary” has one saving grace: many of the entries are illustrated by citations from the works of writers like Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Allen Ginsberg, Bernard Malamud, Chaim Potok, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. It is a pity that the author (and his publishers) had not enough good sense to submit a draft of the “dictionary” to one or several Yiddish scholars for scrutiny and criticism. A fine collection of citations using Yiddish-origin words is buried under a rubble of dross.

Sol Steinmetz

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: What’s the Word That Means …?

George Schlager Welsh, Ph.D., (Algee Books, P. O. Box 16681, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1989), xii + 321pp.

I once told myself that I would not look any further into a book or article that quoted Lewis Carroll’s tired old Humpty Dumpty quotation about words meaning what he wants them to mean. Such a policy is unfair, of course: one should not be prejudiced against a person’s magnum opus just because he has a tiresome taste in quotations. People are forever discovering such quotations for the first time and should not be excoriated for it by a dyspeptic, curmudgeonly reviewer. Reviewers are supposed to have—or pretend to have—open, inquiring minds, and a boring quotation maketh not a boring book— necessarily. Alas, I should learn to follow my instincts.

I suppose that there is a category of reference book called the reverse dictionary. There is no denying that such a work, which would enable a user to find the word or phrase he is seeking by looking up a meaning, would be quite useful. I have a number of ideas for preparing one in machine-readable form for use in a computer, but I shall not reveal them here. The way printed versions of such books function is for the user to look up associated information. The main problem with them is that they rely on the compiler’s ability to anticipate with some accuracy the associative contextual framework of the user. Within the relatively limited amount of information a bound volume of 320 pages can provide, it would be difficult to anticipate the user’s mind set with sufficient allowance for elaboration. The books of this kind that I have tried to use have frustrated me: I never can find what I am looking for.

But I am sufficiently open-minded to forget what I might be looking for—some bit of lexicographic esoterica, no doubt—and settle for something I consider to be much simpler and not readily derivable from an ordinary dictionary. As we all know, if we knew the word we were looking for (and knew how to spell it) we should not have to resort to reverse dictionaries. Trying to be fair, I cooked up a test or two. The first (to which most of us know the answer, I suppose, but that makes it no less legitimate) is, What is the nautical term for the left and right sides of a boat? One cannot discover the answer by looking up left or right in an ordinary dictionary, of course. Unfortunately, neither left nor right (nor port nor starboard) is in, and I should have to hang around yacht clubs to get the answer. I had spotted some obscure terms (like widdershins under counterclockwise) when skimming through the book, so I thought Dr. Welsh might have concentrated on those. He did to some extent, (though deasil was not in, so I sought in vain under shadow for antiscian, which is about as obscure as one can get. The other day I had a letter from someone who wanted to know the name for the accent over the r in Dvořak, which happens to be among the two or three things I know. As Welsh’s book has a list under PRONUNCIATION, I looked there, to no avail. (It is called a haček or hachek or haček, pronounced HOTchek.)

I cannot find it in my heart to fault Dr. Welsh for his failure: he probably tried out his ideas on friends who might well have been able to find what they were looking for. I am convinced that there is a way to do this kind of thing, but a book is not it: the kind of associative information required to find even the simplest thing is likely to vary considerably from user to user, depending on orientation, education, age, and other factors; including a large variety of ways to access the same information would be very uneconomical in book form, especially when high-speed computers with large memories are so readily available. The problem is less one of simple (!) lexicology as one of information theory and psychology. I might add artificial intelligence just to make it harder, but why make the issue more confused than it is already? This book does not work for me.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Punching the Clock: Funny Action Idioms

Marvin Terban, illus. by Tom Huffman, (Clarion Books, 1990), 63pp.

This is the idiom book for kids from 8 to 12 years of age. Clarion is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin, publishers of The American Heritage Dictionary [AHD], so there is some responsibility behind the book.

The illustrations are colorful (green and black, to be specific) and invariably illustrate the literal senses of idioms, which are by nature figurative: in other words, the illustration for raise the roof shows someone lifting the roof off a house. Get it? Pretty puerile stuff, you might say, but don’t lose sight of the fact that it is intended for puerō and puellās.

Terban, who appears to be Henny Youngman’s nephew (“Take this book—Away!”) but could scarcely be blamed for that, teaches at Columbia Grammar School, a prep school in New York City. According to the evidence offered, he has been using materials like those in the book to teach children about idioms. I find it odd that children need to be taught about idioms, but that is another matter.

If anyone from the staff of the AHD had a look at this material I should be disappointed, for there are some ambiguities. For instance, (28) throwing her hat into the ring has: “In America in the early 1800s, a man challenged another man by throwing his hat into a ring.” What ring? What king of ring? If a boxing ring, why not say so? (47) batting a thousand: “Baseball players have batting averages based on the number of times they hit the ball when they’re up at bat.” It seems to me that if you are going to explain something, explain it all: doesn’t hit require the modifier “safely”? And how is thousand explained? If an average is the total number of times a batter hits a ball safely divided by the number of times he is at bat, even if he gets a hit each time, that average is 1, not 1000, and some kids might need an explanation. (51) punch the clock: “Some business have time clocks by their front door.” Do they?

I am being pedantic and hypercritical, but it does seem that a book of only 63 pages could have been done a little more carefully. the book is pleasant enough, would certainly not do any harm, and might very well encourage youngsters to think about language.

Laurence Urdang

EPISTOLA {Dudley F. Church}

Michel P. Richard’s article, “A Taxonomy of Epigrams” [XV,2], strummed a responsive chord. With the aid of the Random House Dictionary I have compiled the following diagram indicating the definitions for combinations of pairs of words, each with a different meaning, involving variations in spelling and pronunciation.

	PRONOUNCE	SPELL	MEAN
heteronym	different	same	different
homograph	different	same	different
homonym	same	same	different
homophone	same	different	different

Examples:

heteronym—Lead me to your lead mine.

homonym—I cannot bear to see a bear in my bed.

homophone—(Exclusive of a homonym) A well-liked doctor has both patience and patients.

In the November 1988 issue of Smithsonian, Felicia Lamport held forth on the delights of heteronyms. She also had the temerity to state that at 49 the list was close to a close. Challenged by her article, I started my pursuit, enlisting my wife Phyllis, her friends Mickey and George Ann Garms, their friend Cosme Harmon, Cosme’s friend, George H. Warfel, his daughter Ann D. Halsted, and Ann’s sixth-grade class. Below is the list of heteronyms compiled by Mickey as of August 11, 1989, including my later additions, quart, proceeds, comfort, and axes; Cosme has come up with entrance, and George Warfel suggested wicked, and contract.

To our immeasurable sorrow, Mickey died suddenly on November 9, 1989, and we wish this letter and his list of heteronyms to serve as a memorial to him.

agape
ana
axes
bass
bow
bower
buffet
comport
compound
console
content
contract
does
dove
entrance
excise
glower
hinder
intimate
lead
lineage
lower
moped
number
peaked
permit
primer
proceeds
pussy
recover
release
resort
row
sewer
shower
slough
sow
supply
tear
tower
wicked
wind
wound

[Dudley F. Church, Vancouver, Washington]

EPISTOLA {Mike Harris}

I am writing primarily to correct and update Benedict Kimmelman’s article on the eff-word [XVI,2].

The “popular British film of the 1970s, with Dirk Bogarde, I’m Allright Jack,” was, in fact, a popular British film of the late 1950s, I’m All Right, Jack, and Dirk Bogarde, who was off in Hollywood being Liszt in the abysmal Song Without End, wasn’t within 3000 miles of it when it was being made.

Further to Mr. Kimmelman’s lexicon, I offer a few Australian examples:

fxxxable [Anglo-Australian] Adjective. Sexually desirable.

fxxxwit [Australian] Noun. Incompetent person; nincompoop. You’d have to be a right fxxxwit to print almost every column filler more than once in a small circulation magazine.

fxxxwitted [Australian] Adjective. Foolish; stupid. A fxxxwitted attempt at scholarship without doing thorough research.

clusterfxxx [Australo-American] Noun. Collective incompetence, usually by those in authority, bureaucrats, officers; esp. of edicts and recommendations the practicality of which is doubtful, decisions made by committees, etc. Only a clusterfxxx like the Joint Chiefs would approve an invasion plan that didn’t take out the television and radio stations as priority targets. (To which a British sympathizer might reply, Absofxxxinglutely !”)

Get fxxxed! [Anglo-Australian] Interjection, verb. Negative reply to an unwelcome suggestion. If he thinks I going to print his fxxxwitted letter, he can get fxxxed!

[Mike Harris, Palm Beach, New South Wales]

EPISTOLA {Raymond Harris}

In reference to Benedict Kimmelman’s article, I should like to submit a polite euphemism in frequent use.

When people try to push ahead of a queue at a bus stop or in a shop, one would politely say to the person, “Get in the far queue.”

There is also the famous story of the Fukawi Pygmy tribe who frequently got lost in the jungles of Africa; in order to ascertain their whereabouts, they would stand on another’s shoulders to peer over the long grass, crying, “Where the Fukawi?”

[Raymond Harris, London]

EPISTOLA {Devorah L. Knaff}

Having been a student for interminable years (and thus having been forced to memorize a great many quite useless facts), I enjoyed Stephen Hirschberg’s “Lest We Forget.” He is right in saying that the mnemonic he lists for pi is cumbersome. The one I have always used seems easier to remember than either his version or the numbers themselves and is certainly less tortuous. It works as his does, coding digits by word lengths:

Sir, I send a rhyme excelling

In sacred truth and rigid spelling.

Numerical sprites elucidate

For me the lexicon’s dull weight.

I have no idea who wrote this version, which I picked up from other students as an undergraduate at Rice University.

[Devorah L. Knaff, Riverside, California]

EPISTOLA {Rick Turkel}

Stephen Hirschberg’s essay brought back to mind a number of mnemonics from my college days as a chemistry major. Chemists, like physicians, are faced with learning long lists of things, in our case trivial (that is, not systematic) nomenclature for various homologous series of chemical compounds. In most cases there is little in the structures of these compounds to hang a name on, since many of the names derive from the natural sources from which the compounds were isolated.

We remembered the trivial names from the first nine linear dicarboxylic acids (oxalic, malonic, succinic, glutaric, adipic, pimelic, suberic, azelaic, sebacic) with the initialized mnemonic, “Oh, my sweet green apple pie sounds absolutely swell.”

There are eight possible arrangements of the hydrogen and hydroxy groups along the chain of a simple, six-carbon sugar molecule. To remember these, we had, “All altruists gladly make gum in gallon tanks,” yielding allose, altrose, glucose, maltose, gulose, idose, galactose, talose. This mnemonic also yields the correct structures, if one can manage to remember the proper alternations of the Fischer projections used to represent their configurations in two dimensions.

A different kind of mnemonic is used for remembering the difference between stalagmites and stalactites: “Mites grow up.”

[Rick Turkel, Columbus, Ohio]

EPISTOLA {Norman R. Shapiro}

Two items caught my eye in a recent number [XVI,2]. The first is Jonathan Bricklin’s attribution to one “Georges Louis” of the observation that “Style is the man himself” (p. 18). Now, it may just be that someone by that name—a Frenchman, one would gather from the spelling “Georges”—uttered those words or foreign equivalents thereof. But I think it more than likely that Mr. Bricklin is referring to the famous French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclere, count de Buffon, better known to literary history simply as “Buffon.” The oft-quoted citation is from the Discours sur le style, his acceptance speech delivered before the Académie Françcaise on August 25, 1753. As here, it is usually wrenched a little out of context. Buffon did not mean that man paints an autobiographical portrait by his style. Rather, that of all the things an author might describe, all are extraneous to him except for his style, which is his alone, and hence his only possible passport to literary immortality:

La quantité des connaissances, la singularité des faits, la nouveauté même des découvertes, ne sont pas de sûrs garants de l’immortalité…. Ces choses sont hors de l’homme, le style est l’homme même.

[The number of things known, the curiosity of the facts, the very novelty of the discoveries are no certain guarantors of immortality…. These things are outside of man, while style is man himself.]

The second item, on a lighter note, is one of Michel P. Richard’s homophonic epigrams: “I regret that I have but one asterisk for my country” (p.22). It reminded me of a little jingle that I read years ago in some college (alleged) humor magazine and which I rescue here from a well-earned oblivion:

Mary had a little plane In which she used to frisk. Now wasn’t she a silly girl Her little *!?

[Norman R. Shapiro, Wesleyan University]

Needless to Say

Peter Sypnowich, Toronto

It goes without saying that the duty of the writer is to explain. In the modern world, there’s no denying that everything can in fact be explained. The best prose, therefore, is prose that imposes order. Thus are readers made secure, and, more important, thus is life made simple. Nothing, it is clear, could be more self-evident.

Yet some writers strive instead for eloquence. That is, they try to produce memorable work. But they do so, unfortunately, at the risk of confusing their readers. To start with, their writing is often rhetorical or even evocative. It contains statements, consequently, that allow varying interpretations; inevitably, anything that affects a reader’s feelings is bound to produce an unpredictable response. Furthermore, such writers at times resort to humour. Accordingly, they display cynicism, or alas, lead the reader into ambiguity and paradox. Worst of all, these writers sometimes will communicate surprise or wonder. The result is to arouse a sense of mystery. In sum, the effect of such writing is to portray human existence as something vague and complex. More than that, it can actually complicate matters further. On top of all this, we have the unhappy fact that eloquent writing is indeed sometimes memorable, compounding the problem.

In contrast, the effective communicator creates certainty. He or she does this, it is evident, in two ways. First, he rules out irrelevant or erroneous thoughts in the reader. Second, he continually supplies answers. In short, he maintains command, investing his exposition with all the authority that he can muster.

The goal, then, is omniscience. Admittedly, most writers are in reality not omniscient. Not yet, at any rate. But nevertheless, it is within the province of any writer to make a definitive statement on a specific point. This, surely, is sufficient. After all, omniscience can be cumulative. Over time, manifestly, a multiplicity of small omnisciences will add up to total omniscience. It is as if in recognition of this, perforce, that increasing numbers of writers are looking for a way to produce airtight, irrefutable prose. And it is no accident that the English language provides just such a method. I refer, of course, to syllothetics.

The syllothetic system had its origins, no doubt, in the rule followed by the authors of university monographs and government position papers. To wit: first tell them what you are going to say, then tell them what you are saying, and finally tell them what you have said. A sound practice, unquestionably. But it was observed that readers could be effectively directed sentence by sentence. That is to say, the meaning of a sentence could be signaled—and thereby validated—by the use of a sentence adverb such as moreover, indeed, or however. Essentially, the thrust of the sentence was communicated in advance. In this way readers knew what a writer was going to say before he said it. In a sense, the readers said it themselves.

To be sure, the technique of qualifying sentences with modifiers is nothing new. For instance, many writers had sorted out their expository works with such expressions as incidentally, on one hand, and for example. In addition, others had followed the practice of enumerating their sentences with first, second, and third, or next, then, and finally, or all of these. More noteworthy, some had reinforced their statements with, on the one hand, such key words as significantly, symbolically, and thankfully, or, on the other hand, such indispensables as unfortunately, unhappily, and alas. Most significantly, it should be noted, many had gone so far as to advance statements in the form of a premise or a given, e.g., it need hardly be stated, obviously, and of course of course.

Be that as it may, the foundations of modern syllothetics were cemented, as we now know, with the systematic use of but at the beginnings of sentences. There can be no doubt whatever that with this development logical exposition could thereby become relentless. It was discovered—and this should no longer be any cause for wonder—that a sentence containing however could also begin with but. Moreover, but could appear directly in front of nevertheless. But this development reached its zenith with the use of but as a topper conjunction (see the beginning of this sentence); the topper but does not in reality indicate a contradiction, for it always appears at the start of a sentence which is, truth be, in harmony with preceding sentences, but rather it tops the previous statements by pointing unerringly to that which is promised by contradiction, namely illumination. Let’s be frank. It was the logical force of but, in the end, that began to supply the dynamism of syllothetics, enabling it to combine, as it does, the undeniable energy of the syllogism with the indisputable power of the theorem.

In consequence we have, in syllothetics, a veritable arsenal of instruments that serve to produce coherence and logic in modern prose. For example, there is not only affirmation by demonstration (ergo, hence, therefore, accordingly, but there is also documentation by postulation (it can be assumed, we can suppose) and also validation by synthesization (basically, in truth, in a very real sense) as well as verification by substitution (that is to say, in other words, in short). Similarly, there is not only confutation by disputation (on the contrary, notwithstanding, however, nevertheless), but there is also negation by concession (despite, although, allowing that) and also, not least, refutation by capitulation (it might be argued, it would be easy to conclude).

Syllothetics, it can be seen, is inexorable. Either we have corroboration by escalation (moreover, on top of that, above all), or we have devaluation by declination (worse, worse still, worst of all). On one hand we have substantiation by association (similarly, in the same way); on the other hand we have invalidation by differentiation (quite a different matter, we cannot compare, something else again).

It is hardly necessary to add that syllothetics possesses the capacity to transcend logic. Who can deny it? We have, happily, induction by intuition, the inference that goes beyond mere fact (one cannot avoid the suspicion, it is difficult to shake off the conviction), and also, thanks be, attestation by clarification, the proof that is superior to mere evidence (even so, still, in any event). Plainly, we are in the presence here of higher truths: look at ratification by approximation (for the most part, as it were, broadly speaking); witness the revelation of amplification (conceivably, it may even be, it would not be too much to say).

This brings us, willy-nilly, to the infinite utility of syllothetics. It is a system, broadly speaking, that is impervious to criticism. Certainly it is no passing fad, dependent on vogue words, for despite its infancy it employs such age-old terms as alas, albeit, perforce, and withal. Nor it can be taxed with pedantry, demonstrably, for on occasion it makes use of colloquial expressions like for starters, likewise, for sure, and no doubt about it. Above all, though some people might think otherwise, it definitely does not involve clichés. On the contrary. For one thing, a cliché can be defined as an imaginative expression which through repetition has lost its imaginativeness. But syllothetics, in contradistinction, shuns the imaginations altogether. More to the point, syllothetics deploys a vocabulary of unparalleled variety. In fact there are well over one hundred syllothetic modifiers. And what is more, additional ones are coming into use every day. Hence the recent discovery, by some writers, that it is possible to syllothesize every sentence.

It is true that there are rational writers, seemingly logical, who make little or no use of syllothetics. They feel, it would seem, that coherence can be obtained without it. They would say, undoubtedly, that one sentence follows another. But the question is, how closely? In syllothetics, it must be pointed out, an expression such as naturally or in other words not only introduces a sentence but also refers to the previous one. The effect is that at every step syllotheticians have their feet in two sentences, as it were. And by looking backward at all times, it need hardly be added, they appear to be going nowhere of interest. Naturally, nothing is more reassuring to a reader. Nothing, in other words, is more conducive to acquiesence.

It can be argued, you will object, that such a progression is slow, and that, concommitantly, very little is being said. But this objection, however, misses the point. True, syllotheticians aim high; in a word, they seek not merely to persuade but to convince. Still, the fact that their goals are essentially modest. Let it be remembered that they make no declarations. They restrict themselves to deductions, basing them on references, citations, or precedents, which is a different matter altogether. They may, perhaps, list variables, or, on occasion, identify options; at most, they will establish parameters. But, it must be emphasized, they do not express anything. They articulate, which is something else again. Nor, what is more, do they ever describe. They delineate, which is something entirely different. So it should come as no surprise to be told that, basically, syllotheticians are at bottom unconcerned about how little they might have to say.

It would not be too much to say that it does not at all matter what may or may not be contained in syllothetic sentences. The content lies, rather, in the articulation of the logical relationships between them. But make no mistake about it, that is enough. For, clearly, although it is the writer’s duty to explain, the very fact that everything must be explained means, indisputably, that in due course everything will in fact be explained. Ergo, the less said the better.

Already, it is becoming very difficult to deny— all available evidence points to it—that the day is surely coming, withal, when there will remain, truly, no mere coincidences about which one cannot avoid a suspicion or shake off a conviction, when clearly everything will incontrovertibly support a thesis or conversely stand in direct contrast to it, and, overriding all this, there will as a result be not the slightest doubt in our minds about one inescapable conclusion, namely the dawning realization that, there being nothing more to say on the subject, as it were, we therefore will no longer hesitate but rather will necessarily feel compelled to state the obvious. Indeed, we would be remiss in our duty if we failed to mention it. Needless to say.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Dictionary of Love

Comp. Gil Friedman, (Yara Press P. O. Box 1063, Arcata, California, 1990), xiv + 166pp.

This is not a proper dictionary but a compilation of 600 quotations about love, companionship, etc. … “from the profane to the profound divided into 191 categories by more that 300 authors, philosophers and celebrities including Kahlil Gibran, Bertrand Russell, Erich Fromm, Mother Theresa and Zsa Zsa Gabor,” as the cover tells us. How can 600 quotations make up 166 pages you ask? Well, the quotations actually make up 134 pages, with pages 137-155 devoted to an Authors’ Index, 157-163 to a Bibliography, and 164-166 to a (continued) list of permissions acknowledgments. The front matter contains an alphabetical listing of the 191 categories. Perhaps the reader can tell that this is not my kind of book, but if one is a writer of Valentine’s Day greeting cards, or eschews the “From Poopsie to Woopsie” approach in advertising in The Times, or just has to collect everything that mentions love, then order the book directly from the publisher. My favorite: “When Woodrow proposed to me, I was so surprised I nearly fell out of bed.”—The second Mrs. Woodrow Wilson. Of course, we are not told whose bed.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Language Maven Strikes Again

William Safire, (Doubleday, 1990), xiv + 447pp.

It is probably safe to say that Bill Safire is the most prolific of modern writers on American English; it is very likely true that he is the most prolific writer on language in general. His articles, “On Language,” have appeared weekly (except when he was taking a holiday) in The New York Times Magazine since 1979. As American language buffs know—even those who do not take The New York Times—he is a fearless commentator on every aspect of English who has gathered behind him not only an army of admires but a cadre of contributors, dubbed “the Lexicographic Irregulars,” who send him citations, comments, and queries. I call him “Bill” partly because most people do and partly because we have known each other since about 1967 when his New Language of Politics was edited under my direction at Random House. Although he is not a professional linguist, Bill knows a great deal about language and, notwithstanding some of the comments he makes in his column, is very sensitive to it. He is a very good writer, too, though I sometimes find his arch approach unnecessary and a bit annoying: he seems in a perpetual pursuit of the pun, an affliction not entirely unknown in these hallowed halls. However, I have the same criticism of Philip Howard’s commentaries on language published, from time to time, in The Times and, formerly, in these pages, and I can only attribute attrition among VERBATIM subscribers to that and other weaknesses in myself.

Because of the enormous variety of the pieces collected here, the anthology is virtually impossible to review. It doesn’t, of course, deal with every aspect of language, but it does cover a very broad spectrum. In fact, anyone who pretends to have an interest in language and who has a library of worthwhile works on the subject must have all of Safire’s language books in his library. This is the sixth, to which must be added Words of Wisdom and Good Advice, which he wrote with his brother, Leonard Safir. The indexes are quite good, though not as exhaustive as one might have wished; yet one is likely to find what he is looking for without difficulty. Moreover, the books are attractively set out, which adds to their readability. Even the title design is clever: it is shown on the jacket (over his photo, which the wretch clearly got his son to pose for), cover, and title page as,

William Safire
Language Maven Strikes Again.

It is a pity that the articles are not provided with the dates of their publication, though it is not difficult to understand why the publisher might be reluctant to do so. Yet, when I read that a subscription to VERBATIM costs $10.00, while I am grateful for the plug, I realize that the piece must have appeared quite some time ago. A certain amount of updating might be in order, perhaps by enclosing in square brackets subscription rates in effect at the time of publication of the book. Occasionally wrong, not only is Bill not reluctant to admit his errors, he may be one of the few who literally profited from their mistakes by compiling a book containing many of them: called I Stand Corrected (Times Books, 1984), it actually contains other matter, too.

To a subject that is treated in the most turgid fashion by linguists and with unusually irresponsible scholarship by many other commentators, Bill Safire brings just the right, literate, human touch, often funny, ever lively, and always friendly, informative, and entertaining.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Power and the Word: Language, Power and Change

Roger Andersen, (Grafton (Div. of Collins), dist. in No. Am. by David & Charles, 1990), 315pp.

In his Preface, the author offers, “My purpose in writing this book is quite simple: to draw together and make accessible some of the academic and other reading that I have done in the past few years.” In this aim, he has succeeded quite admirably, though one might be given to wonder what, if anything, he reads for amusement. There are many extremely abstruse notions in linguistics, and if any one might find useful a brief summarization [sic] of many of the linguistic philosophies of the past 150 years, this is a convenient, minimalist approach. I say “minimalist” because the ideas are watered down, then doubledistilled, then compressed, then encapsulated. Because linguists are atrociously bad writers, in most cases, this would be a merciful deliverance from the agony of wading through their texts at first hand were it not for the unfortunate fact that Andersen is a pretty boring writer himself. Also, it would have been useful (and not necessarily munificent) to have provided such a book with a reasonably replete index. Alas, that is also a barebones affair. I was unable to find Wittgenstein in the Index, but I would not lay odds on his having been omitted from the text.

The book is uneven, here summarizing an important scholar’s work in a paragraph or two, there devoting one entire chapter to women’s English and another to black English, both rather disproportionately trivial in the general scheme of linguistic theory. Missing is coverage of more important areas of linguistics, like computational linguistics, mechanical translation, lexicography, language analysis by computer, and some others. But that may merely be reflective of my own interests, or does not reflect the author’s readings, or, probably, both. Well, one cannot have everything, and, as I sometimes maintain but rarely believe, a book should be reviewed for what it contains and not condemned for what it omits.

If you are a professional linguist, you can pass this one by, unless you teach and need a crib for your students. If you are a student of linguistics (in any sense of the term), you might find it convenient to have this book to save your running to the multivolume encyclopedia or the original text (if you have it) in order to see what B. F. Skinner and Noam Chomsky were on about. Had it been more complete and better done, the book might have served as a survey text for linguistics, a work that is sorely needed. The linguists who write books seem invariably to be scholars who are touting their own points of view, some of which are recondite, to say the least. Surely there must be a teaching linguist out there, somewhere, capable of putting together a cogent, readable text that discusses not only the field of linguistics but its various theories and their interrelations. Unfortunately, there has not been a good (bookwriting) linguist who was also a good writer of expository prose since Otto Jespersen, the Santayana of linguistics, and he died in 1943.

Laurence Urdang

EPISTOLA {David Galef}

I admire Stephen Hirschberg’s mnemonic tricks [XVI, 3], but he has left out an important postscript to the Ogden Nash poem about the one-I lama and the two-l llama. When Nash gets to the three-l lllama and concludes there isn’t any, he amends himself in a footnote: “The author’s attention has been called to a type of conflagration known as the three-alarmer. Pooh.” I suppose this just supports an old adage: footnotes are forgettable.

[David Galef, University, Mississippi]

EPISTOLA {Lawrence E. Padgett}

I have recently met two phrases that I cannot find in the sort of reference books that might be expected to define them if they are, as the author I was reading implied, recognized political or economic terms. The first, sobornostic collectivism, is said to refer to a Leninist school of thought; the second, agathistic distributism, is called “a theory of economic nationalism.”

Sobornost is a word used by some Russian Orthodox theologians, and there is, or was, a philosophic position called agathism. (The curious are directed to OED2.) Collectivism is part of the common vocabulary now, and distributism was a movement that enjoyed Chesterton and Belloc as its chief advocates. I am however, unable to see much meaning in those two-word phrases. Can any reader of VERBATIM offer information about them?

[Lawrence E. Padgett, Baltimore]

OBITER DICTA

Laurence Urdang

People often ask me how they can “improve” their vocabularies and what books I can recommend as aids. My invariable reply is that the only genuine way to increase one’s vocabulary is by reading, reading, reading. It may not be an immediately obvious fact, but it is significant that the people who ask the question—strangers, who telephone me—are quite articulate, from which I deduce that one must have reached some proficiency in language before becoming aware that there might be some deficiency. I can get by in a couple of other languages, chiefly in reading, not speaking them, but feel that I cannot afford the time to improved my control of other languages at the expense of my continuing efforts to learn what I can about English. That is, of course, a purely personal view and should under no circumstances be construed as an adverse comment on the study of foreign languages. But there is a difference between learning about them and trying to gain fluency in them: I think I know a fair amount about many languages in which I have no speaking or writing ability; however rewarding fluency in them might be for aesthetic reasons (to read their literature, for example), one has just so much time…; those who need them for practical reasons, should not be deterred or discouraged by these remarks, nor should those who wish to study them for any other reason. The study and acquisition of foreign languages, living and dead, is both intellectually and practically rewarding. By the time I graduated from college, I had studied Latin and French for eleven years, Greek for four, German and Old English for two, Lithuanian and Sanskrit for one, and had established a passing acquaintance with Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish. I can get by in French (after I have spoken it for several hours), but I do not speak much Latin, partly, perhaps, because of the paucity of conversational companions. I bring this up not to vaunt any great accomplishments but to emphasize that I am the first one to encourage the study of foreign languages. I simply draw the line between studying them and learning them: learning a foreign language is extremely difficult, and most of those who are truly fluent in a second language have been brought up in bilingual (or, sometimes, trilingual) situations.

I raise the matter of foreign languages in connection with vocabulary partly because familiarity with Greek and Latin and French and German is particularly useful in establishing an intimate relationship with the English language. I have often been told that English is a difficult language to learn, but, as a native speaker, I have no personal opinion about that. I do know, however, one person who acquired English relatively late in life and whom I consider to have a better command of the medium than most native speakers. That person is an exception; indeed, she has a younger sister who acquired English at the same time who has difficulty expressing herself. These examples may serve to confirm what we all already suspect, that there is a spectrum of natural ability for language, with the gifted at one end—presumably, our poets, writers, lawyers, politicians, teachers, and so forth—and the less gifted at the other. The former possess Sprachgefühl ‘a sensitivity for language; language sense’; from among the latter I exclude pathological cases. In that connection I am constrained to express my skepticism about the accuracy and wisdom of diagnosing everyone who has difficulty learning to read and write as being afflicted with dyslexia: learning is sometimes difficult—I had terrible trouble with history when I was a student—and it is wrong to attribute a large percentage of failures and difficulties to some disorder rather than to the (possible) failings of a teacher or, more often, to a simple lack of interest and motivation in the student.

Fortunate are those who have been raised in a reading household or have acquired a thirst and opportunity for reading early in life. Fortunate, too, are those who were given the opportunities of being exposed to teachers who were not too busy or lazy to assign weekly essays and to mark them for style as well as for grammar and mechanics. For the manipulation of language as an art one must first view it as a craft, and the acquisition of any craft cannot be accomplished without effort: one does not become a writer by sitting around thinking about it or by saying he is a writer when someone asks, “What do you do?”; one is a writer by virtue of the fact that he writes, with no regard whatsoever to publication.

In this connection, it is not the quantity of vocabulary that marks a good writer but the quality. When people ask me about increasing their vocabularies, often suggest that they read The Growth of the Soil, by Knut Hamsun. Hamsun, a Norwegian, won the Nobel prize in 1920 and is seldom talked about these days, though, as far as I am aware, his books are in print; in any event, they are available from the library. Hamsun wrote in Norwegian, of course; I do not know who translated Growth in the edition in which I originally read it (which I think was Modern Library), but as a teenager I was terribly impressed by the writing. The story is unimportant—some bucolic tale—but the writing is extraordinary, and I must assume that while the art of the original remains, no small credit is due to the translator. What makes this book such an exemplary piece of work is that I doubt it contains many words of more than one syllable (so to speak). It is consequently a model of clarity as well as of simplicity and an abiding lesson to all who think that increasing their vocabularies will make them more articulate.

It is interesting to note that one of the most successful vocabulary books bears the title, It Pays to Increase Your Word Power, that is, not something like “It Pays to Increase Your Vocabulary.” In other words, memorizing a slew of arcane, recondite sesquipedalianisms is not what gives one the edge, it is knowing how to use the language one already possesses. “Use a word five times and it is yours” is a slogan that is occasionally seen blazoned across mail-order advertising. It conjures up the picture of someone boning up on his “word for the day” just before attending a cocktail party and then awkwardly trying to steer the conversation in such a way that he can insert a word like paradigm, paragon, or parameter.

Those who wish to sharpen their language skills are best advised to read and write, and to do both as much as possible, perhaps trying to emulate an admired writer. If it is felt that some guidance is needed, then they should hire a tutor—there ought to be plenty of good ones available everywhere. Attending writing classes is a possible alternative, but those vary so in quality as well as purpose that an individual’s needs might not be met. Finally, they should not view editors as their tutors, submitting their writings in the hope of critique: however good they might be as editors, they are not necessarily good teachers and are usually focused very specifically on the demands of their publication.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“An investigation found the employee occasionally slept on duty for almost five years.” [From the York (Pennsylvania) Daily Record, 12 January 1987. Submitted by Margery H. Freas, York.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“No detail is too small to overlook.” [From an advertisement for a lawn product on KCMO-TV, Kansas City, Missouri, 20 April 1988. Submitted by Dorothy Branson, Kansas City.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The podium erected in front of building A was surrounded by a semicircle of spectators on wooden chairs.” [From Doctors by Erich Segal, p. 316. Submitted by Eugene P. Healy, Madison, Connecticut.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Asked about social needs, Burdette said, ‘Our safety net has a lot of holes in it.’ ” [From the Parkersburg (West Virginia) News, 30 October 1986. Submitted by Glade Little, Parkersburg.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Our special tunic lets you breastfeel discreetly anywhere….” [From The Right Start Catalogue, June 1988. Submitted by Ruth Riedel, Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.]

Paring Pairs No. 37

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). Opposite the middle of one ray.
(b). Embarrass at the party.
(c). Mollusk resembles one sausage.
(d). Gets turned on by cars.
(e). Impervious to monarchy by wets.
(f). Gifts of alertness.
(g). Curb or strengthen the monsoon?
(h). Prize for precipitate horsemanship goes to — ?
(i). Shetland pony for Robert E. Lee’s dad?
(j). President’s supporters from the Kalahari.
(k). Thievish E.T.
(l). Beige artist?
(m). The least result from a cunning trial.
(n). Bury the slothful joggers, they are intruders.
(o). Start of old college song looks like a lively Latin number.
(p). Make reservation to express disapproval of regent.
(q). Intravenous Scandinavian creeper.
(r). Source of celestial cheese.
(s). Dilute what is left before Miss Moffett finishes.
(t). Change oneself for a friend.
(u. Slave galley may cause a tough problem.
(v). Claim to have seen two chimeras.
(w). Far below they burden those who consider feathers.
(x). Pan decoration from the waist down.
(y). Before they need fillings, people come dangerously close to this.
(z). What weapon is offered by warmongering son of a piper?

(1). A.
(2). Alter.
(3). Auto.
(4). Baloney.
(5). Bash.
(6). Beam.
(7). Below.
(8). Boo.
(9). Bush.
(10). Carious.
(11). Champion.
(12). Double.
(13). Down.
(14). Ego.
(15). Erotic.
(16). Fingered.
(17). Force.
(18). Fur.
(19). Guy.
(20). Hard.
(21). Hawk.
(22). Horse.
(23). Integer
(24). Inter.
(25). Ivy.
(26). King.
(27). Light.
(28). Lopers.
(29). Men.
(30). Milky.
(31). Mind.
(32). Of.
(33). Pre.
(34). Present
(35). Proof.
(36). Rain.
(37). Raining
(38). Rein.
(39). Ship.
(40). Sly.
(41). Swedish
(42). Tan.
(43). Test.
(44). Tom.
(45). Vision.
(46). Vitae.
(47). Water.
(48). Weigh.
(49). Whey.

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).

Verbal Analogies V—Divination

D.A. Pomfrit, Manchester

Throughout their existence on earth, people have sought ways to predict future events. Below is a small sampling of the strange methods employed. 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. shoulder blades: omoplatoscopy:: mice:?
2. molybdomancy: molten lead:: ichnomancy:?
3. eggs: oomancy:: snakes:?
4. gyromancy: walking in a circle:: genethlialogy :?
5. clouds: nephelognosy:: fingernails:?
6. dactyliomancy: finger rings:: astragalomancy/cleromancy:?
7. axheads: axinomancy:: keys:?
8. crithomancy: grain strewn on corpses of sacrificial animals:: empyromancy:?
9. neighboring of horses: hippomancy:: moon:?
10. scyphomancy: cup:: scatomancy:?
11. ashes: spodomancy:: coagulation of cheese:?
12. uromancy: urine:: pessomancy:?

Answers

(a) Astrology
(b) Cleidomancy
(c) Dice/Knuckle-bones
(d) Excrement
(e) Fire and smoke
(f) Footprints
(g) Myomancy
(h) Onychomancy
(i) Ophiomancy
(j) Pebbles
(k) Selenomancy
(l) Tyromancy

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. DIN(G-A-L)ING.
6. S(P)LIT.
9. B(EGG)ARS.
10. PAR-SNIP.
11. TATT(L)ER.
12. SINCERE (hidden).
13. D(R)EAD.
14. EPIC-ENTER.
16. MES(QUITE)S.
19. A-SCOT.
21. S.A.-USAGE.
23. L.A.-STING.
25. ENIGMAS (anag.).
26. TORN-A-DO.
27. E(N)DED (DEED anag.).
28. LAD-EN DOW-N.

Down

1. DEB(U)T.
2. NIGH-TIE.
3. AVA-I-LED.
4. IN-S-URGENT.
5. G-APES.
6. TOP SECRET (anag.)
13. DAM-A-SCENE.
15. INSUL(A)TED.
17. STU(DIE)D.
18. UNARMED (anag.).
19. ALSO-RAN (hidden).
20. CHIC-AGO.
22. E(A)SEL (LEE’S anag.).
24. GROWN (homophone).

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“That dive was right on the edge of new exploration and new technology. Taking new technology into unexplored realms 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.]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. In secrecy clergymen practise conservation (7)
5. Hack into horse-that’s gruesome (7)
9. Verne novel on a cold day in hell (5)
10. Part of newspaper about deliberate fire in minister’s home (9)
11. Mister Spock’s first appeal (7)
12. Uncertain, but I nod excitedly (2,5)
13. In a trunaround, Mrs. Peron took back promises, leading to decline (12)
17. Arranges to whip up Sacher tortes (12)
22. Basically, one with the skill (2,5)
23. Hostile jingle? (7)
25. Switch places-that is most absurd (9)
26. Lifting the foot (5)
27. Key grasped by crazy fool (7)
28. Start of day is embraced by crazy sunworshipers (7)

Down

1. Foolishly desiring best seats at the fights (8)
2. News reporting finished in jail cell (8)
3. Wheels run over back of teddy bear (5)
4. Agent in Rome overturned Caesar (7)
5. Socialist sextet turning to stock market (7)
6. Two people, coming up through hay, look troubled (5,4)
7. Dine in English tavern, raising pound (4,2)
8. Prevent subsidized housing deeds (6)
14. Citizen taking a train in story (9)
15. Begins bugging the French actresses (8)
16. Like finest rings made of hazardous material (8)
18. Kept circling globe with the rash fellow (7)
19. Simple box, colored light brown (7)
20. Light wood on front of maple tree (6)
21. Photos capturing college cries (6)
24. Cast ballots five to nothing, supported by Senator Kennedy (5)

Solution to Verbal Analogies V

1. Myomancy.
2. Footprints.
3. Ohpiomancy.
4. Astrology.
5. Onychomancy.
6. Dice/Knuckle bones.
7. Cleidomancy.
8. Fire and smoke.
9. Selenomancy
10. Excrement.
11. Tyromancy.
12. Pebbles.

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. In his Preface the author disarmingly tells us that “the footnotes are for reference only” and that “anything worth saying has been said in the body of the text.” But so provocative is the text itself that I found myself irresistibly drawn to those generally annoying tag-alongs in search of the sources. I shall indulge in only this one footnote. In this writing, legal means ‘pertaining to the law,’ rather than ‘lawful’; layman means ‘non-lawyer’ (including the feminine); he, him and his include the feminine; and Anglo-Saxon means ‘Old English.’ All quotations are from the author unless otherwise indicated. ↩︎