VOL XVII, No 3 [Winter 1991]
Redundancy in Natural Languages
Steve Bonner, Germantown, Maryland
In this fast-paced age when information is digitized, faxed, uplinked, and downloaded, it is appropriate to consider natural languages from the point of view of information theory. That is, we examine the information content of text or messages and the efficiency with which that information is represented. The idea here is not to convert language into some sort of highly efficient, but inhuman, stream of ones and zeroes! That type of efficiency is fine for computers, but not for human beings. In fact, as we shall see, natural languages contain a fair amount of redundancy. While this does not provide us with the most concise form of communication possible, it is a form that is ideally suited to human experience, which, after all, is why it came to be as it is.
It cannot be denied that some words are simply longer than they strictly need to be. This is perhaps more noticeable in German than in English. In German, as new words are needed, they are often formed from smaller words already existing. Thus, we have the words Haupthandelsartikel, meaning ‘staple,’ and Autoreparaturwerkstatt, meaning ‘garage.’ If we were to construct a new vocabulary from scratch from the point of view of an extremely orderly, but over-zealous, cataloguer, we might have as the first two words in our dictionary AAAA and AAAB. We would continue in this manner until we reached our last two words, ZZZY and ZZZZ. Our dictionary would contain 456,976 words. This lexicon is of sufficient size to form a rich written language, such as German or English. In fact, we could associate to each English word one of our new words. Thus, the phrase To be, or not to be? might become THJL BDMN, OQRA NOOP THJL BDMN? (So much for pronounceability!) Of course, in this example, our two-letter words become four-letter words, which hasn’t helped keep things concise. But now there is no word longer than four letters. This game of re-cataloguing all our words undoes a natural process which occurs as languages evolve. This is the tendency to shorten frequently used words and to allow less frequently used words to become longer. This trend, known as Zipf’s Law, causes common words such as to, in, a, and it to be as short as they are. It would be unthinkable to replace these with ten-letter variants! In this way, language at least attempts to follow a path of least resistance, in which the effort expended in writing or speech is lessened.
Despite the economies of effort introduced by Zipf’s Law, natural languages nonetheless contain redundancies. One example is the indefinite article a in English. Many languages are inflected, which is also a form of redundancy, since English gets by nicely with little inflection. In English, the function of words within sentences is typically signaled by word order. The sentences I threw the dog the ball and I threw the ball the dog are not equivalent. Here, some of the semantic information is provided by word order, and not simply from the words themselves. In an inflected language, endings affixed to the words for dog and ball indicate which object is direct and which is indirect. Thus, it is possible to rearrange words as in the example above. The result may not always be idiomatic, but it will probably get the point across. Such flexibility allows for a greater degree of expression in poetry, for example. Thus, one has a romantic poem written in Latin in which the first line contains the words for man and woman on opposite ends of the line. By the end of the poem, the words have gravitated toward the middle of the line. It can even be argued that word forms used to show tense are superfluous, since Chinese has no notion of tense. A sentence may be in the past, present, or future, depending on context. One wonders how a person translating into Chinese would deal with unexpected or unpredictable tense shifts: Veni, video, vincam!
Not only does the degree of redundancy vary from language to language, but also from one writing style to another. One author might have a more loquacious bent than another. Neither author can be said to have the better style. A lengthy passage, if written well, can be more expressive and have greater effect than a simple, one-line statement of fact. On the other hand, brevity is what gives a pithy aphorism its strength. This is true of both poetry and prose. More so than prose, however, poetry tends to explore both extremes—the concise and the protracted. Poe, for example, used repetition in his poem The Bells to convey to the reader a sense of actually hearing the tolling of the bells, as though the sounds themselves were imprinted on the page. Somehow, it would not have been the same had Poe written simply that “The bells rang a lot.” Or “bells, bells, et cetera.” At the other extreme, some poets attempt to carefully choose words in such a way that the poem expresses a great deal in very little space. Thus, we have a verse form like haiku, in which the totality of the poem is condensed into only seventeen syllables. If only certain genres of prose could be as succinct! A never-ending meeting at the office could be completed in plenty of time for a coffee break. Presidential debates could begin and end with the introductory niceties, since very little of substance is ever said. The civilized world would be grateful indeed if lengthy advertising pitches were instead given in haiku:
Sudzo detergent
Clean white garments full of fluff
Buy many boxes
Notwithstanding certain benefits arising from compactness, redundancy actually plays an important role in the communication process. One is reminded of an experiment in which two subjects were placed in separate rooms and allowed to communicate only through a teletype. One person was given a box of parts to a wheelbarrow, as provided from the factory (“some assembly required”). The other was given the assembly instructions. The object was to successfully assemble the wheelbarrow. Sentences transmitted usually read something like Put bolt into L-shaped part. Such an imperative might elicit the response Which bolt? or Which L? Or perhaps the recipient of the message would insert some bolt into some part, only to find later that a needed part had already been attached. When the test is modified to allow phone conversation, the time required for assembly decreases dramatically. Phrases become more verbose and more redundant, but more communicative. With very little effort, it is possible to utter a terrific run-on sentence like, “Put the medium-sized brass bolt—not the one with the little black top, but the other one—into the sort of oblong L-shaped part with the green paint on one end, but first make sure that you have the axle pointed towards the side with the sort of wooden handle.” A person would not be inclined to type out such a message verbatim. More likely, he would remove occasional words deemed to be redundant. But in the process, the sentence would become less colloquial and less intelligible.
The presence of redundancy in language is perhaps best observed when the communication process breaks down. The fact that a deaf person can determine a spoken phrase by reading lips demonstrates that the information is simultaneously being conveyed in two different ways. Those with normal hearing can use visual clues to assist during the listening process. Thus, it is possible to pick out the necessary morsels of information in noisy surroundings, if facial expressions, gestures and other contextual clues are taken into account. But even in the absence of visual clues, the very sounds of human speech are overflowing with many times the volume of data strictly required to convey the message. Examining a graph of a simple speech component, such as the sound of a vowel, one sees a complex pattern of superimposed waves, having myriad peaks and valleys. When such a pattern is recorded and stored in computer-readable (“digitized”) form, it occupies an inordinately large amount of storage. This seems all the more wasteful, considering that the only useful information being conveyed in our example is a single vowel sound. This apparent redundancy, once again, proves to be beneficial. Conversing over a noisy telephone line would be impossible were it not for the complexity of speech sounds. When one of a hundred “sound peaks” is altered by an electrical pop or crackle, the sound of an E does not suddenly change to that of a U; it simply sounds like a “noisy E.” If, on the other hand, speech contained “just enough” data, but no more, then the alteration of just one peak (or bit) would change the sound (or character) entirely. A moderately noisy phone line would render messages as unintelligible gibberish (even those messages that did not start out that way!). For this reason, when computers “talk” to one another over communication lines in their highly efficient system of beeps, conventional phone lines are seldom used, owing to the high error rate that would result. In any event, computers must use an elaborate method of double-checking transmitted data, to ensure that no error is made. In other words, computers must introduce redundancy where none previously existed in order to communicate effectively.
Predictability is closely related to redundancy. If the recipient of a message (such as the reader of text) is able to predict the next word before seeing it, the word is apparently not conveying any additional information. In the following transmission, it is easy to predict the concluding letter: WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR AL. (The transmission has almost certainly not ended there!) On the other hand, only the most avid trivia buff could complete the sentence HARRY TRUMAN’S HAT SIZE WAS….. While it is very unlikely that the final word is giraffe, the correct completion of the sentence requires somewhat more insight. Similarly, the ability to infer the existence of an omitted letter or word (such as the indefinite article) is a form of prediction. It is hard to ascertain the missing word in the sentence After crash-landing on the planet Zartok, I saw the most enormous — I had ever seen! The word in question is probably not portfolio. But lack of familiarity with the planet Zartok precludes a more accurate guess. Although these examples deal with predictability based on semantic content, it is also possible to base predictions on patterns within the text itself. In English, a Q is almost never followed by anything but a U. Also, the letter E is the most frequently used letter in English. So if one had no other information whatsoever about an omitted letter, guessing that the letter might be E would probably be more reasonable than guessing X. And if the missing letter seemed to function as a vowel, the odds would be greater still. This is the type of predictability studied in information theory.
Effective communication must contain the “right blend” of redundancy (predictability) and new information (unpredictability). If a message is too redundant, it becomes tiresome. (This calls to mind a British comedy sketch in which an announcer speaks on behalf of the Society for People Who Say Things Twice Things Twice.) But as we have seen, if a communiqué has been compacted to maximize efficiency, the listener must strive to receive each and every morsel, a process which leaves no room for error. An analogy might be made with music. If, on first hearing, a piece of music is entirely predictable, droning on in endless clichés, then it lacks a certain creative spark, and is not enjoyable. Conversely, if the listener continually finds himself disoriented with each new note, unable to identify any underlying pattern or theme, then the piece seems merely a random collection of sounds and is equally uninteresting. Such a composition would no doubt leave the impression that the string section had suddenly caught fire.
Redundancy is itself a phenomenon worthy of study, independent of the study of language or music. The physicist studies redundancy in the context of order and disorder of physical systems. The disorder of a system is called its entropy. The laws of thermodynamics tell us that closed systems tend to become more disorderly over time. One such closed system is the universe itself. We find that pockets of heat in the form of stars and galaxies are spreading out and cooling down over time. Thus, we can imagine a time in the distant future when the universe will become almost uniformly cold, and very few temperature gradients will exist which could serve to provide a source of usable energy, such as the sun. Without being drawn into these difficult questions, which require many concepts and tools developed in information theory, suffice it to say that redundancy plays a central role in nature itself, and not just in language. As we have seen, redundancy is not the evil one might imagine it to be at first glance. Indeed, it is necessary for the very existence of language. But I repeat myself.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“And as for that better mousetrap, the X-terminator ($1) is humane—the mouse is trapped, not killed—and can be reused.” [From the Philadelphia Inquirer, 24 January 1990. Submitted by Berthold W. Levy, Melrose park, Pennsylvania.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Suspected extremists bomb shop in India.” [Headline from the Philadelphia Inquirer, 9 July 1990. Submitted by Dr. Oliver G. Ludwig, Villanova University.]
Little Waterloos on Europe’s Language Frontiers
Stanley Mason, Effretikon, Switzerland
The unification of Europe is a noble thought, but what are you going to do about the language frontiers? However bravely you sweep away customs barriers and encourage Europeans to move freely over the face of their continent, they will continue to come terrible and humiliating croppers at these invisible boundaries. My own experience bears this out only too painfully.
The first time I ever ventured onto the Continent from my home in the depths of Britain was when I went to work as a teacher on the Zugerberg, a hilltop in Switzerland, many years ago. I got out of the train at Zug, still half-dazed from a night trip across France, and what did I see in the sleepy square but a small tram in the window of which was a placard reading—unmistakably—Zugerberg hell. I very nearly turned tail and fled without further investigation. I even entertained the thought that the placard might have been put there by the diabolical pupils of the school I was going to, who were not at all keen on having a new English teacher. I was not to know that, since hell in German means ‘bright,’ this was merely an intimation to the townsfolk that although the town itself was plunged in fog, the sun was shining on the nearby heights.
Other travelers have no doubt suffered similar shocks. Those who travel to St. Moritz by rail, for instance, may well be shaken when, just before arriving in their dream resort, they stop in a station where a big sign tells them: St. Moritz Bad! Of course, everyone knows that St. Moritz isn’t really so bad, so they probably conquer their apprehensions and go ahead. But what about Bad Ragaz or even Bad Endbach? Many of those who visit country towns in German-speaking parts will be proudly shown the local Rathaus. They may well shudder at the thought that such a fine old building (actually a town hall) is rodent-infested. I feel even more deeply for those expectant mothers who, turning a corner on a small Swiss station in search of a public convenience, have been faced by that one brutal, laconic word: Abort! After all, wouldn’t WC serve the purpose just as well?
At this point the reader will notice that we are here on delicate ground, straight among words that may offend our most intimate sensibilities. When we meet them at a certain distance, we can usually manage to take the sting out of them. For instance, if a German botánist called Fuchs gave his name to a flower, which is therefore known as a fuchsia, we can elegantly get round the issue in English by pronouncing it “FEW-sha.” Or if there is a well-known pianist by the name of Kunz, we can avoid cataclysms in Yorkshire by calling him “KOONDS.” But when you run into such things in real life, head-on and with no warning, there is really no remedy: all you can do is face the inevitable with whatever fortitude you can summon. An evil fate of this kind befell a friend of mine from Gloucestershire who went to live in Germany near a town called Scheidt, the pronunciation of which proved to substantiate his worst misgivings. In the early days of his sojourn in the area, he tells me, his voice used to break with shame every time he went to a railway ticket counter to ask for a return to Scheidt.
But to get to my own experience. I had not been on the Continent long when I wanted to buy some nylons for a girl friend. The German word for silk stockings escaped me, but the English word hose promptly suggested itself to my mind. So I went into a shop selling ladies' lingerie and asked for Damenhosen. The girl behind the counter seemed slightly taken aback, and when she came and dangled some lacy panties before my eyes, I was taken aback too. Perhaps she thought I was a transvestite and had to be humored. In fact, I was seriously embarrassed, for I was still young enough to have a sense of shame.
On another occasion I was in town with two young Englishmen who had just arrived on the scene and did not speak a word of German between them. We were feeling peckish although it was only mid afternoon, so we decided to go and have a snack in a restaurant. The waitress, who spoke a little English, recommended a dish which happened to be in season. It turned out to be a paste made from sweet chestnuts which looked rather like a dish of worms. We were somewhat intimidated by the look of it, but we ate it—without enthusiasm, but with the stiff upper lip we had imbibed, so to speak, with our mothers' milk. An hour or so later we still felt peckish, so we tried another establishment. We decided that this time we did not want anything sweet, but rather something a little more substantial. As a precautionary measure I consulted the menu, and there my eye fell on the vermicelles. I explained to my companions that this must be pasta, a kind of Continental macaroni (in those days macaroni was about the only kind of pasta you ever saw in England, if we mercifully forget the incredible invention of spaghetti on toast). They were all in favor, and five minutes later we got our snack: it was that chestnut paste again, looking more like worms than ever. We felt that we had been tricked by a malicious fate. We sat there, unable to start on the stuff, wishing that we were in Timbuktoo, where we could at least have had camels' eyes.
The same malevolent powers also operate in the opposite direction. An Austrian lady of my acquaintance was interned in Yorkshire during the Second World War. One day she and her companions were allowed to go to the cinema in a nearby town. When they came out, they needed to go to the toilet, so they began to look round for a public convenience. They had hardly turned into the high street when their search appeared to be successful, for they found a door that bore the sign Closed. That, they thought, could only be the English for the German word Klosett. But they were disappointed—the door simply did not open. It must have been a Thursday afternoon, for all down the street there were Closed signs—but no means of getting in anywhere. They even began to suspect that the townspeople were playing a mean practical joke on them. By now they were nearly bursting—with indignation, of course—but there was nothing for it: they had to wait till they got back to their internment quarters. Continence, after all, is a virtue, or so say those who do not have it imposed on them.
Fortunately these linguistic snares land us in trouble only for a brief moment, ignominious as that moment may occasionally be. Being saddled with a wrong name is a more lasting curse. I was once called in to help a man whose brother had died in the United States, so that as next of kin he had to handle the correspondence. Knowing no English, he obviously needed assistance. He was called Schittli, which, believe it or not, is an absolutely good Swiss name. His brother, strangely enough, was not called Schittli. Having emigrated to the USA, he had discovered that the family monicker, however respectable in Appenzell, would never do in Pittsburgh. He had therefore had it changed to Hittli, which involved the sacrifice of only two consonants. Alas, it was not long before the shadow of a certain Adolf fell over Europe: Hittli was so near to Hitler that the likeness became, for an immigrant, decidedly uncomfortable. Poor Hittli took the only course open to him, and sacrificed a vowel. He died a Hattli.
The slings and arrows of the spoken language may prove even more perfidious in writing. When I took my first office job in Switzerland, I had a secretary who knew no French or English, so that I had to write letters in these languages by hand for her to type. One of the first happened to be to a French VIP, and she opened with full diapason: Nous avons l’horreur d’accuser réception de votre lettre…. Honour and horror are evidently very close in France. Another opening gambit read like this: Nous vous remercions de vos linges du 24 juillet…. On yet another occasion I had to write to a colleague by the name of Robert who had had the effrontery to criticize me, and I wanted to do so in a firm but studiedly polite tone. Once again, the catastrophe came pat at the very outset: Dead Bob….
Only too often the pitfalls awaiting the unsuspecting on the language frontiers are downright scatological. Why is it that the Dutch wince when first informed of the location of Zurich Airport? Why do the Italians almost choke with mirth when they overhear an American calling his girl friend “My pet”? And why did a German acquaintance of mine break into such coarse guffaws when he came across a passage in an English novel in which lovers were described as “lying among the furze”? Persons not conversant with the languages involved will probably have no answers to these rhetorical questions, but I feel sure they will prefer to be spared the obnoxious truth.
Sometimes, however, the obnoxious truth just cannot be suppressed, being explicit and official. Thus the inhabitants of one Swiss canton drive round with VD written in large letters on their number plates, leaving you to believe it or not. Similarly, fine-feeling English-speaking visitors to the Locarno region will freeze with horror when they see the initials of the Ferrovie Autolinee Regionali Ticinesi—the Ticinese Regional Railways and Bus Services—brazenly displayed on the local buses, and I once heard an Australian murmur that he had never seen anything quite as big and blue as that in his own country. Then there was the young man who had come over from Yorkshire to serve an apprenticeship on the Continent. On the day of his departure, he proudly showed me a ticket issued by a Swiss mountain railway. It indicated the price of a single trip: 1 Fahrt Fr. 9.50. He was taking it home to Yorkshire to prove to the locals just how high the cost of living is in Switzerland.
EPISTOLA {Dr. H.H. Macey}
You have published a number of letters refuting the idea that the difference in coefficient of thermal expansion between brass and iron is responsible for the balls/brass/monkey saying [e.g., EPISTOLA from James T. Herron, XVI,2]. May I as a humble physicist and, above all, a certified gas fitter, stir up a little mud in this matter?
All the arguments put forward assume an ideal fit in the original pile and one temperature change, with detailed calculations based thereon: therein, I suggest, lies the rub. The radius of curvature of the depressions in the monkey must have been greater than that of the balls or they would not pile in the first place. Given this, the bottom layer of balls would be pushed apart as far as possible by the weight of those above. The temperature rises; the brass expands more than the bottom balls, which are again pushed apart by the weight of those above. The temperature drops, but the weight of those above would prevent those in the bottom layer from returning to their original positions. Repeat this a number of times, even from day to night and back, and the pile becomes more and more unstable until possibly one cold spell causes collapse.
[Dr. H.H. Macey, Floreat Park, Western Australia}
Milestones, Footrocks, and Inchpebbles in the Historical Development of Formal Logic 1
Steven Cushing, Boston University
The study of formal logic was begun in ancient Grease, in order to make the machinery of reasoning operate more smoothly. The principal figure in this development was Dr. ‘Arris Toddle, who invented the Syllogism in Barbara, as well as those in Betsy, Patricia, and Harriet.2 This form of reasoning runs essentially as follows:
All men are mortal.
Socrates was a man.
∴ Socrates was mortal.
However, since Socrates was mortal, he must have died by now, so he is no longer alive and thus is no longer a man. It follows that he is now no longer mortal and thus will live forever. This establishes the immortality of the sole, as well as that of the heel, calf, ankle, and toe. A similar argument can be carried out for anyone at all, except, of course, for Barbara herself, who was not a man to begin with.
A refinement of this form of argument, worked out by Dr. Ross C. Knee, is the Barbara of Seville, which underlies much of the Seville Rites legislation of the 1960’s. These important practices grew out of a popular mass movement composed by King Martin Luther, the only man ever to be awarded ninety-five masters degrees, after writing as many theses3, and were inspired by the Seville Shepherds, who were led by Seville herself, a woman with six hundred ninety-three distinct personalities, all but at most a very few of which were entirely unaware of the existence of most but not nearly all of the remaining others.4 As in the case of Barbara, Seville’s reasoning can also be stated in the form of a syllogism:
All men are mortal.
At least two hundred ninety-five of Sevilles’ distinct personalities are men.
∴ Seville is suffering from a severe identity crisis.
However, since the men are mortal, the proportion of Seville that comprises them will gradually decrease, leading to here ventual recovery, just in time to die from other causes. This leaves Socrates the sole survivor, again establishing the immortality of the sole.
The next great development in logic was carried out by the Muddyville School, also known as The Skull Ass-ticks, when they played rock music on the side to make a living.5 These logicians specialized in the counting of angels, which they found more effective than sheep in anesthetizing their students. It is to these great minds that we owe the Fundamental Theorem of Formal Logic, which reads as follows:
Fundamental Theorem of Formal Logic:
(a) Exactly 2973 angels can dance on the head of a pin.
(b) Exactly 3874 angels can dance on the head of a needle.
(c) Exactly 264 angels can dance on the head of a two-penny nail.
Since angels tend to be of uncertain gender, neither Barbara nor Seville will have anything to do with them, so their status vis-à-vis mortality remains an open question. This is, in fact, the most important unresolved issue in all of formal logic, because of greatly inflated land values and a rapidly increasing angel population, both of which place dancing space at a premium.
Logic lay dormant for many centuries after being worked over so brilliantly by The Skull Ass-ticks, but it was finally rescued from angelic oblivion by Herr Professor Gottlob der Friggin', who proved that the morning star is not the same as the evening star, even though both are Venus.6 This invalidated the previously unquestioned Principle of the Substitutability of Identicals, which had been formulated by Leibniz in his battle with Figby Newton for recognition as the original discoverer of the infinitesimal calculus.7 This principle can be formulated as a syllogism, as follows:
Leibniz discovered the calculus.
Newton is not Leibniz.
∴ Newton did not discover the calculus.
However, Gottlob’s figgin' work showed that this argument was invalid, since Leibniz worked in the morning, Newton worked in the evening, and it was really Galileo that discovered the calculus while looking at Jupiter, not Venus, through his telescope. Galileo also disproved the principle that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, by dropping an apple and a watermelon off the top of a tower. It was this apple that gave Newton the idea of Universal Gravitation, when it landed conveniently on his head, and it was Universal Gravitation that suggested to Newton the concepts of the infinitesimal calculus. Exactly the same thing happened to Leibniz, except that he got hit by the watermelon and so was unconscious for several hours. This gave Newton time to get to the patent office and file his claim for calculus, before Leibniz could figure out what had happened.
Gottlob’s discoveries laid the foundation for a tremendous spurt of work in formal logic from the beginning of this century to the present day. First, Russell N. Whitehead managed to derive all known mathematics from logical principles, in contrast to previous mathematicians, who had derived it from illogical principles.8 This led to the famous Gödel theorem, which says that all mathematics cannot be derived from logical principles. Gödel proved this theorem by showing that every sentence in a logical language can be encoded as a statement about positive numbers. Since English is not a logical language, it follows that sentences in English can be encoded only in non-positive numbers and thus that English can make only negative statements about mathematics. Since the same is true of every natural language, it follows that mathematics makes no sense whatsoever and thus that it can be ignored for all practical purposes. This led Al Tarski to the discovery that logic itself depends only on the weather,9 as indicated in the following syllogism:
Snow is white.
Snow is white.
∴ Snow is white.
Since “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white, and since “snow is white” is true if and only if “snow is white” is true, it follows that “ ' “snow is white” is true' is true” is true if and only if “ ‘snow is white’ is true” is true. These discoveries resulted in the theory of models, the clothing worn by whom gradually shrank to zero, thereby enabling Abe Robinson to prove the existence of infinitesimals, with predictable consequences in the physiognomy of certain members of the audience.10 This reestablished the intersubstitutability of Newton and Leibniz, as long as it not snowing and Venus is still visible.
The most recent and, in many ways, the most exciting development in formal logic is the new field of fuzzy logic, in which precision is replaced with vagueness and truth with maybe and perhaps.11 This was invented by Lofty Zappa, who is also known, frankly, as the father of invention, because of his work on the logic of necessity. Rather than taking statements to be either true or false, fuzzy logic assumes that statements are true or false to some degree, so the Syllogism in Barbara, for example, would be reformulated as follows:
Socrates was more or less a man.
Most men are usually mortal.
∴ Socrates was most likely mortal to degree .86539.
Since the average lifespan in ancient Athens was 51.86 years, it follows that Socrates would have lived until he was 44.8791254 years old, if he had not developed a taste for hemlock. Unfortunately, his addiction to this controlled substance led eventually to his arrest on charges of drug abuse, thereby enabling Play-dough to counterfeit all of his ideas. It was in critiquing Play-dough that Toddle developed the Syllogism in Barbara,12 but this was where we started.
EPISTOLA {William A. Dimma}
I should like to correct three arithmetic errors in the article, “To Abbrev, or not to Abbreviate,” by Don Sharp [XVII,2].
First, a change from twenty-one letters (master of ceremonies) to two letters (M.C.) is a reduction of 91.5%, not 300%. A 100% reduction, incidentally, is a change from any positive quantity to zero.
Second, a change from two letters (M.C.) to five letters (emcee) is a growth of 150%, not 125%.
Finally, a change from thirteen letters (vice president) to two letters (VP) is a reduction of 84.6%, not 250%.
Words matter, but so do numbers.
[William A. Dimma, Toronto]
EPISTOLA {Henry J. Volker, Jr.}
Mr. Sharp’s arithmetic is painful to behold. Reducing the twenty-one letters of master of ceremonies to the two-letter M.C. in no way represents a 300% reduction in letter-load. It’s actually 90.47%, give or take. Similarly, reducing Vice President to VP is a reduction of 84.62%.
[Henry J. Volker, Jr., Boca Raton]
EPISTOLA {John L. Swift}
…If from thirteen (Vice President) to two (VP), the reduction would be 85%.
[John L. Swift, Brookline, Massachusetts]
EPISTOLA {Stephen Robert LaCheen}
…Reducing master of ceremonies to M.C. represents an 88% reduction, and reducing Vice President to VP represents an 85% reduction.
[Stephen Robert LaCheen, Philadelphia]
[I knew all that…. —Editor]
EPISTOLA {David L. Gold}
Leslie Dunkling writes [XVII,1], “In many Jewish families [belief that use of a living person’s name would deprive him of his soul] prevents the use of a relation’s name if the person concerned is still alive.” The belief is that giving a living person’s name would deprive him of his full life. It is found among all orthodox Ashkenazim and many of their descendants.
[David L. Gold, Oakland Gardens, New York]
French Leave
William H. Dougherty, Santa Fe
The title of Louis Malle’s movie Au Revoir les Enfants is usually untranslated in reviews and advertisements in the United States. When it is translated (as when an English translation follows the French title) it is rendered as “Goodbye, Children.” This translation is as good as any, but quite unsatisfactory. For that reason and because English is closely related to French (lexically anyhow, having borrowed a great portion of its vocabulary from French), the title can be left in the original as a title in Danish or Polish could not be.
Snob appeal may be involved here. It is wondrous the way French is able to maintain its position as the language of style and status, at least throughout the Western world. In such magazines as The New Yorker and Time French words and phrases appear with much greater frequency than bits of any other foreign language. The issue of The New Yorker for July 25, 1988, taken at random, had in its “Dancing” section on page 79 two whole sentences in French, untranslated. The issue of Town & Country for September, 1988, had a full-page advertisement for Sea Island Cotton entrely in French except for the American name of the company. John Updike’s novel S. has two or three brief business letters in likewise untranslated French. I suspect that American and British readers with some claim to international sophistication are flattered by the assumption of some ad writers and authors that a little French will not be Greek to them.
However, the short phrase Au revoir les enfants would resist translation even if it were desirable to put it into English. Only the first of its four words slips easily enough into English, as till. But English is the only European language I know that has no calque for the expression au revoir, probably because we have adopted this French phrase, like many others, intact, while other languages have the phrase calqued as: hasta la vista, a rivederci, do svidaniya, do widzenia, auf Wiedersehen, etc. At any rate, goodbye really does not translate au revoir, Adieu, also borrowed intact into English, would do as the French equivalent of goodbye, and vice versa; but that equivalence gets us nowhere with au revoir, except to point up the fact that goodbye does not mean au revoir.
I once heard a Frenchman in Madrid tell a couple of Spanish shop clerks a joke that illustrates the difference between adieu ‘goodbye’ and au revoir: At the Rio de Janeiro airport the planes of various countries were taking off one after another, and the terminal was crowded with passengers and with friends and relatives seeing loved ones off. An Air France jet took off, and the loved ones on the ground waved and shouted, “Au revoir! Au revoir!” Then an Iberia plane taxied away to shouts of “Hasta la vista!” And then it was the turn of a jet flown by a Brazilian airline with a notoriously poor safety record. As it taxied away to take off, the crowd more intoned than shouted, “Adeus! Adeus!” (Portuguese for adieu).
Since English lacks a calque for au revoir, it would be technically possible to make one, perhaps on the model of Joyce’s (or his Stephen Dedalus') “agenbite (of inwit)” for remorse: till the agenseeing. But of course such bitterly pedantic wordplay would be unthinkable on the lips of the plain-spoken priest whose words give the Malle film its title and some of its poignancy. And if agenseeing is too far-fetched and pedantic, so long is a shade too informal, slangy.
And what about the simple definite article in the title? Surely it should pose no problem. Au contraire, I suspect it is the most meaningful and untranslatable word in the four-word phrase. It is not strictly standard French before a common noun in the vocative case, but seems borrowed from the folksy language of camaraderie, the slang of street, barracks, and campus. One does not sing, “Allons, les enfants de la patrie….” In modern French novels about military experiences, however, one may find a soldier proposing to his buddies, “Allons, les gars….” In such usage the plural definit article seems to imply a sense of solidarity, of togetherness, of addressing not just any or all boys or kids or whatever but of specifying a particular group. Further, since les in this special usage has its origin in boyish slang, it implies masculinity, as guys might in English. In the title in question les might be translated by the pronoun you and the whole title as: “So long, you guys.” This translation conveys the meaning of the French title, all right, but is nevertheless unacceptable because such jaunty informality would be totally out of character for the priest whose warm yet solemn farewell at a tragic parting gives the movie its title.
Nor does enfants always mean ‘children,’ exactly. The New Cassell’s French Dictionary defines enfant in English as: “Child, infant, baby; son or daughter; descendant; citizen, native; (Law) offspring, issue.” Then some of the following examples given in the dictionary show that in some contexts the word does not mean ‘child’ at all: c’est un bon enfant ‘he is a good fellow’; l’enfant prodigue ‘the prodigal son.’ Moreover, some of the older students addressed by the priest in the movie are past childhood, though in priestly parlance anyone, even a nonagenarian, may be called a child. So perhaps children will do here, though arguably boys might be a nuance better.
It may be that French, because it so rich in connotation and nuance, is harder to translate than most languages. English has a much larger vocabulary, a fact that has been adduced to support the argument that French is inferior to English. But the larger vocabulary of English is irrelevant in two respects: much of this larger vocabulary is esoteric, exotic, pedantic, or otherwise as foreign to everyday English usage as Chinese; and whereas vocabulary is quantified by words, the expressive units of French tend to be phrases, such as chemin de fer, joie de vivre, and raton laveur. By the usual lexical reckoning one could say that French has no word for rail-road or raccoon.
Phrases, being more semantically complex than single words, are usually harder to translate. English too has its untranslatable phrases composed of words that are individually translatable. For instance, try turning these two into French or Russian: Is you is, or is you ain’t my baby? and Why’d you bring that old book I didn’t want to be read to out of up for? Generally speaking, a phrase or clause is difficult to translate in proportion as it diverges from the standard, or as some would say, as it is ungrammatical. To paraphrase Tolstoy paraphrasing Pushkin: All grammatical expressions resemble each other; each ungrammatical expression is ungrammatical in its own way.
OBITER DICTA: “If I were king…” I’d be in a subjunctive mood
We shall have to wait and see if the changes of Margaret Thatcher’s political fortunes are reflected in the language as spoken in Britain, for one might be tempted to infer that the assertiveness of her tenure was partly responsible for the demise of the subjunctive in contrary-to-fact constructions—at least in those perceived by her to be contrary to what she perceived as fact. Although it is not impossible to find a subjunctive in British writing of today, it is becoming increasingly difficult; indeed, in a book I recently completed for Oxford University Press, virtually all subjunctives were replaced by indicatives (which, because of the solecisms created in American English, occasioned my rewriting of the text to avoid the problem). British writers (among whom I number journalists, who, after all, probably write more English than most people) sometimes go to great lengths to avoid using the subjunctive, resulting in writing that jars what poor sensibilities might remain to Americans:
…[S]he cancelled all his interviews after two days and insisted he flew home… Cape dared suggest he travelled by train. [From “Books,” The Sunday Times, 28 October 90:8:9.]
This is not impossible to say, but it means ‘She insisted that he had already flown home [though it is unlikely that he had].’ “She insisted that he fly home” means ‘She wanted him to fly home,’ though whether he actually did or not would be revealed in a later chapter. Cape dared suggest he travelled by train conjures up an image of Cape (“his” publisher) having the effrontery to put forward the theory that the absent “he” absconded by rail. Had the subjunctive been invoked, these mysterious motives would have vanished in a trice.
Because we were an alien family, dad and mum were very keen that we learnt how to compose ourselves in this new society. [From an article by Magnus Magnusson in “Saturday Review,” The Times, 20 October 90:70.]
We advise that the above items are not used until the retailer or the company has been contacted. [Customer Safety Warning Advt. by Leisuretime Products Ltd, Sundial House, 89-93 Goldsworth Road, Woking, Surrey GU21 1LT, in The Sunday Times, 29 May 1988, B2.]
The practice is neither consistent nor universal:
It failed to be manufactured because she insisted it be made in Britain… [From an article by Joseph Connolly, The Times, 7 November 90:19]
Someone on the Isle of Wight complains that you couldn’t get the children off to bed if it were still light at midnight,… [From the op-ed column, “…and moreover,” The Times, 29 October 90:12.]
Although it has nothing to do with subjunctives, I cannot resist the temptation to reproduce the following sentence from an article by Sir Roy Strong, presumed aesthete and literatus, yet evidently victim of the universal virus that afflicts many users of English when they scent the proximity of like:
The paper used to smell in the same way that books from Eastern Europe still do today. [From the “Saturday Review,” The Times, 13 October 90.]
Whatever consolation it might afford Americans, the British are with them in their ignorance of the difference between fewer and less:
Maher points out that his Dillons flagship in Gower Street carries no less than 250,000 titles and his other bookshops average 25,000. [From “Books,” The Sunday Times, 21 October 90:8:9.]
And some have trouble with the sequence of tenses (not a trivial problem, I admit), yielding in this instance what might be called the “son-for-a-day” syndrome:
I now know them to have been Mr and Mrs Powrie-Smith, and a chap I take to have been their son. [From the op-ed column, “…and moreover,” by Matthew Parris, The Times, 27 October 90:12.]
OBITER DICTA: Several Types of Ambiguity: Minimalist Language
Laurence Urdang
Ted Bernstein, when he was assistant managing editor of The New York Times, published a house organ, “Winners and Sinners,” that offered kudos for the occasional “bright passage” or deft metaphor and cited questionable and nonstandard grammar and usage that appeared in the newspaper. Among the items that he enjoyed catching were the ambiguous headlines, which he dubbed “two-faced heads.” These are not very hard to find in newspapers (as of the headline writer (who is not, usually, the writer of the article) is to come up with something that is a telegraphically brief inkling of the substance of the article. Headline writers are often given to paronomasia (which they would probably call punning, as paronomasia, which would not fit into most headlines, is not in their vocabulary). Gleaned from the current collection:
1. Cost of food scares mounts. [The Times, 11 October 90:5]
I was not under the impression that horses worried much about the price of fodder.
2. PLO may supply Arabs with arms. [Ibid.:14] Arms is always ripe for ambiguity.
3. Children taken on £500 raid. [Ibid., 12 October 90:7]
The children were not captured on the raid: the story was about a father who had his children (and, as I recall, his wife) wait in the family car while he went off to commit a robery.
4. Students filmed in secret. [Ibid., 13 October 90:7] Filmed is here a past participle, not the past of an active verb. This grammatical ambiguity is a frequent source of confusion, one cleverly exploited by those who write clues for crosswords.
5. Prices fear as oil shortage puts pressure on refining. [Ibid., 11 October 90, p.31]
Prices is an unusual noun to find in attrubutive position before a word like fear (in contrast to noun/ verb ambiguities like drop, rise, increase, decline, etc.). In any event, it is still not clear why an oil shortage should put pressure on refining (one would expect the reverse) and why the prices resulting ought to rise (for fear would scarcely suggest ‘reduction’ except in a petroleum trade journal or oil company annual report).
6. Why You Want Sex Changes as You Age. [San Francisco Chronicle, 13 January 1990. Submitted by Randy Alfred, San Francisco]
Self-evident problem in which sex rears its head.
That is not to say that ambiguity is confined to headlines. In the following quotation, the reader may have difficulty in determining how far from his wife this ideal husband lives, why he isn’t bankrupt from feeding parking meters, and what circumstance might have afflicted him with muteness:
[Odette] lives in Walton-on-Thames with Geoffrey [Hallowes], a tall, courteous gentlemen retired from the wine business who seems content to write her letters, listen while she tells her stories, feed one’s parking meter, and altogether to be as attentive as a wife could wish. [The Sunday Times, 14 October 90:3:3]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Lithium was not effective in either depressed or non-depressed alcoholics in significantly reducing the numbers of subjects who were not abstinent, number of days of reported drinking, number of alcohol-related hospitalizations, severity of alcoholism, or severity of depression.” [From Drug Therapy, December 1989:61. Submitted by Morton Malkin, Brooklyn.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“There is no residency requirement for US Senate other than that the candidate be a resident of the state he is running from at the time of his election.” [From the Boston Globe, 1 March 1990:23. Submitted by Robert Loud, Lincoln, Massachusetts.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“The Brundtland report celebrated by many at Globe ‘90, while hard-hitting in its analysis of the global environmental crisis, is profoundly shallow in its prescriptions.” [From comments by Frank Tester, professor at University of British Columbia and York University, quoted in the Daily Oil Bulletin, 21 March 1990. Submitted by R.S. Lee, Calgary, Alberta.]
Instant Welsh
Michel Vercambre, Manchester
I broke imaginary eggs on the rim of a non-existent frying pan and made sizzling noises. I pretended to fill tumblers of ice-cold milk and to drink them with apparent delight. I beat the air with my arms and clucked like a hen and mooed deep and long. But the features of the old, old woman who had opened the door of the farmhouse half way up the mountain and who had answered my polite request for a few eggs and some milk with a steady flow of Welsh, remained blank. As blank as mine had been when she had been speaking Welsh. My miming must have been wanting as I got neither egg nor milk. But the humiliating thing was that I, relatively bilingual and with a smattering of a few other languages, have been able to make myself understood in most part of western Europe, but was thoroughly checkmated not sixty miles as the crow flies from Manchester… I decided to learn Welsh forthwith, there and then, without more ado.
Of course, it was not going to be plain sailing. I knew that. We—my wife, our three children, and I—had been invited to spend ten blissful days in an idyllic white cottage in the middle of a field near a couple of lakes in the depth of Caernarvonshire. The nearest village was a couple of valleys away; our neighbors were sheep and lambs. It was definitely known that a road-mender did sleep in a one-room cabin near the abandoned slate quarry. These were perhaps not the best conditions in which to learn the Welsh language, but what I lacked in amenities I thought I would make up in “ambiance” for there we would be for ten days, practically incommunicado.
My only tutor was one of those paper napkins on which are printed some hundred brightly colored pictures of objects and things in common use, such as bread, cheese, house, sea, sun, chair, etc., with the Welsh name above and the English underneath. You know the sort of thing. Very useful in its way no doubt, but rather limiting to someone of scholarly disposition.
It was then that Chance took a hand. Would you believe that I found in the rafters of our host’s cottage a dusty Welsh-English Dictionary compiled by W. Richards, L1.D., in 1890…? It was like reaching that peak in Darien. A whole new world was about to be revealed to me. And into this unknown land, this strangely melodious language, with its roots dating back to the time when the world was young, I set forth, with my paper napkin and my pocket dictionary compiled in 1890.
As I read on, picking out a word here and a phrase there, the personality of Dr. Richards began to appear. The aims of a lexicographer, these days, is undoubtedly to be as objective and exact as possible when dealing with concepts as intangible as the meanings of words. Dr. Johnson himself was roundly criticized for letting his prejudices interfere with his definitions. We do not go to a dictionary for opinions or for subjective judgment, and the more remote the personality of the compiler, the better. Dr. Richards obviously entertained a different idea of his mission.
His interests quickly became clear. That he was a theologian there can be little doubt, and anyone would have been able with the help of his dictionary to plough through a sermon on predestination or a debate on the difference between transubstantiation and consubstantiation. This in a POCKET dictionary, you understand. Dr. Richards must also have been interested in demonology, witchcraft, familiars, rhabdomancy. (You wish to know the Welsh for rhabdomancy? Well, another time perhaps.) Then there was Dr. Richard’s interest in diseases. Far from simply giving us the Welsh for rheumatism, he goes into details of the symptoms and I will spare you a five-line description of the scabs in a case of blue jaundice. If you should catch blue jaundice in Wales, I strongly advise you to have Dr. Richards’s dictionary at hand. (Incidentally, since jaundice means the ‘yellow disease,’ how can it be blue? But let it pass.)
Dr. Richards never stops astonishing us. You would think that the word bye-laws was not one which in a pocket dictionary would be given much space. But wrong you would be. Dr. Richards gives us a mini-treatise on the application of bye-laws in Scotland in the 14th century, which is not particularly useful if you are lost in a fog and, on knocking at the door of an isolated Welsh cottage, you are faced by an aged gentleman who has no English.
I fear that Dr. Richards did not have us in mind when he set to work, for he omitted to include such words as tomato, bathroom, cutlet, cauliflower, and railway station. Yet let no one say he was not a mundane man, for he gives us the Welsh for port, sherry, whisky, brandy, burgundy, claret, and even Rhenish wine. And do you know that there are ten words in Welsh for fashion? But none, apparently, for tomato, bathroom, cutlet, etc.
It quickly appeared, on perusing the Welsh-English section, that Dr. Richards’s English was somewhat idiosyncratic, for he gives us an English translation of a Welsh word, ‘to render prospective.’ I have pondered on this phrase, and the only person I can imagine using it is the secretary of the local branch of a political party who, having handed the Committee members a short list of would-be candidates, asks: “Which of these people shall we render prospective?”
Then there is the word arfogwl which apparently means ‘a dried skin on a post with pebbles in it,’ with no further explanations as to why it should be hanging on a post and why, in heaven’s name, it should contain pebbles. I therefore went out to try to find one in the hope that the object might reveal its raison d’être. I was not successful and I must warn would-be searchers that I very much doubt whether there is a dried skin with pebbles in it hanging on a post within three miles from Llanrust. They had better look elsewhere.
A closer study of the English-Welsh section soon brought to light the fact that not only did Dr. Richards know a large number of English words which do not appear in recognized dictionaries I consulted but that, clever man that he was, he was able to translate them into Welsh. Words like dishersion, extillation, restagnate, claricord, contramure, and, of course, discubitory. All these words look as if they meant something. The word discubitory took my fancy; neither Chambers nor Webster having been able to enlighten me, I consulted Dr. Richards himself, by the simple process of looking up in the Welsh-English section the Welsh word which Dr. Richards had given as the translation of discubitory in the English-Welsh section. I looked up therefore the word lledorweddle and was informed that it meant… ‘discubitory.’ However, there was an alternative definition: ‘partly lying down.’ This I took to mean ‘in a semi-recumbent position.’ I had it now, of course. Discubitory means ‘lying down whilst propping oneself on one’s elbow.’ This word has now taken its place in my vocabulary and I use it now and then nonchalantly in conversation. To date, no one has asked me what it meant.
To mark the centenary of this remarkable book and help revive interest in its author, I hereby undertake to hand over a prize of £100 to the first person who challenges me with the words: “You are Michel Vercambre the eminent scholar who discovered the meaning of the word discubitory and I claim the prize of £100.” The challenger must be carrying at the time a copy of Dr. Richards’s Welsh-English pocket dictionary. The 1890 edition.
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins
John Ayto, (Bloomsbury, 1990. Pub. in US as the Arcade Dictionary of Word Origins by Arcade Publishers (div. of Little, Brown), 1991), viii (unnumbered) + 583pp.
Although one might be led to believe that all dictionaries of etymology are alike, the truth is that they differ in a number of respects, and it is useful for those interested in language to have several types available. The OED, for example, has very long and elaborate etymologies, some of which might have been superseded (presumably in OED2e), which means you have to have the latest edition. Then, too, the OED does not always transliterate foreign scripts, which might put those who cannot read Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic, Thai, etc., at a disadvantage when examining cognates or loanwords. Some of the smaller dictionaries, from the MW-III and the Random House Unabridged on down through the college and desk sizes, contain etymologies reflecting up-to-date scholarship but these works may not be particularly user-friendly: after all, surveys have shown that etymological information is that least frequently sought by dictionary users, so it ill behooves publishers to devote a great deal of expensive space to it. In contrast to these standard works, John Ayto has compiled a very commendable, user-friendly book which is eminently readable (as is all of Ayto’s writing).
I do have a few reservations—(naturally! How could a reader identify an Urdang review if it did not have reservations?) First, I found the system of cross references inconsistent. In the front matter we are told that if “a related word is mentioned but no date is shown for it,…the word has its own article….” That is not consistently the case, though it would be too boring to cite examples. Second, (in the entry for albatross), Alcatraz ought to have been identified as the “former” prison-island (it is still an island, of course), and the generalization that ail is “virtually obsolete except in the metaphorical use of its present participial adjective ailing….” fails to take account of the common expression, What ails you/ him/her/it/them?, and fails to explain what is metaphorical about She is ailing. Third—though here we might not be dealing with Ayto’s decision as much as the publisher’s—it is simply not convenient to have a dictionary of etymology that excludes all bound prefixes and suffixes, though these are glossed, as required, when they are part of an entry. Fourth, I think it a mistake to merge under one headword words of distinctly different provenances (that is, homographs), as in gloss. And, finally, there are far too many typographical errors for a book of this sort: under absent: “4nt”; after: “millenium”; loo: “existance.”
Notwithstanding, there are many cogent observations, among them:
glitz… “Its fortuitous resemblance to a blend of glamour and Ritz contributes to its expressiveness.”
glass [The entire entry is a gem.]
know [A well-constructed short essay on its cognates.]
The chief virtue of the book is that it presents a great deal of information about word origins in highly readable form. Indeed, there is so much information buried in the entries that the publisher would have been well advised to prepare an index to afford users better access to the nether reaches of the language. Perhaps in a second edition…?
People often think that—at least by now—all the words in the language have been successfully and accurately etymologized. While that is true about the majority of words, it does not obtain for all the words and certainly not for many of the colorful parts of the language, notably slang and idiomatic expressions. For those words of doubtful origin (like dive ‘disreputable bar,’ jingo, rag ‘taunt,’ toy, etc.), Ayto presents the current wisdom, where available, and lets the user decide for himself from among the theories proffered.
For those seeking a well-written, up-to-date, etymological dictionary that sets forth its information in understandable English and is not riddled with the cryptic symbols and abbreviations found in the more ponderous, scholarly works, the Dictionary of Word Origins would be a good choice.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang
Tony Thorne, (Bloomsbury, 1990), vii + 583pp.
Tony Thorne is described (in Bloomsbury’s publicity blurb) as “former punk and hippie now turned academic,” which is all we know about him. His purpose in this compiulation “as well as reflecting current speech accurately… was to represent a fresh approach to the material itself.” [p. iv]
The slang described is of the period 1950 to 1990. That does not, of course, preclude slang of an earlier time if it is still in use, but it does eliminate obsolete slang, leaving about 5000 terms to be covered in about 15,000 definitions. The Introduction is businesslike, brief, and to the point, avoiding much of the repetitious academic maundering that often accompanies such works.
As Thorne is an Englishman, I trust him on British, Irish, Scots, and even Australian slang (though Australians may take exception). The real question is, How accurate is his coverage of American slang? He says he relied on four people, though whether they were informants or advisors or drinking companions (or all of the above) is not made clear.
Compared with American slang, which is strongly under the influence of New York and other big cities, Hollywood and showbiz in general, there is little British slang that comes from Yiddish. The other day I used the word megillah in conversation with an editor from Oxford University Press and he at once asked me what it meant. My instantaneous synonym (appropriate for the context in which I had used it) was screed, which he of course understood; I had to explain that megillah is Hebrew and probably entered (American) English via Yiddish. If an American had asked me what the word meant I would probably have accused him of being a hypocrite for pretending that he knew no Yiddish/Hebrew. So when I see an entry in shtuk/shtook/stook/schtuk labeled “British” in Thorne’s book, I at once get suspicious, especially when it is defined as ‘in trouble,’ shtuk “in its various spellings” is described as Yiddish for ‘difficulties,’ and there is a (good) entry for shtick, besides. The OED2e confirms my suspicions by offering “App. not a Yiddish word.” (My suspicions are that it comes from German Stück ‘play, act,’ leading to ‘thing, business, affair, what occupies one, problem,…trouble.') At in the bag, labeled “American,” one definition is
2a ruined, botched. The original image evoked is either of a corpse zipped up in a body bag or a gamebird in a poacher’s sack.
b demoted, in American police jargon. This is probably an extension of sense 2a.
The most common American sense of in the bag is ‘completed, done, consummated,’ and, while it ill behooves one to state categorically that ‘ruined, botched’ is not a viable definition, I have never encountered the expression used in that sense on either side of the Atlantic. Although I have no knowledge of it, sense 2a might be correct; if so, it is certainly based on body bags and not poachers, who are not the normal prey of American police.
Unfortunate is the omission of a comma to set apart daddy as a term of address in the illustration for heinie (American for ‘bottom’):
He hit me daddy—and then he kicked me in the heinie.
After reading ‘my’ for dialectal me, I was sent to look up daddy, defined as ‘a dominant inmate among prisoners’ and ‘an older and/or dominant male homosexual…,’ making a balls-up (which should have been labeled British) of the entry. Then we are told that heinie is “spelled as if it were Yiddish,” which shows how much Thorne knows about German spelling and pronunciation; the variant hinie is not shown (the word is, after all, a diminutive of behind: the heinie spelling probably cropped up during WWI in confusion with the similarly pronounced Heinie, a synonym for Bosch or Kraut, short for Hein-rich). At Hicksville it might have been fun to mention that it is a placename in New York (Nassau County) and in several other states. Honk, n. and vb., in all senses is not American in use or provenance, nor are honked, hoolie (also Irish?), hoover (up), horrorball, hum, hurl, and hurry up van/wagon, to list a number of words in a twelve-page interval. It may be consoling but scarcely exonerating for Thorne to learn that he is not alone in failing to label such matter accurately: some American informants are evidently not to be trusted or have become too sophisticated from traveling abroad or by associating with speakers of other dialects of English. The same kinds of inaccuracies occur in the opposite direction: that is, hook it for ‘play hookey’ is not British, and, because of its organization, humdinger is misleading:
humdinger n Australian a spectacular fart. This vulgarism is a specific usage of the well-known colloquialism denoting anything resounding or impressive.
The inference is that the colloquialism is Australian, which it is not. The entry also emphasizes the lack of uniformity of style of the book, with the dialect locales of some entries shown as italicized labels alongside the headword, of others associated with specific senses, and of others buried somewhere in the text. Style in dictionaries is not a nasty little detail: it is a quick way of categorizing information, and if a label appears in an unfamiliar place, its placement ought to convey to the user some special piece of information, not the fact that the book was carelessly compiled. In another example, goof vb, goofball n, goof off vb, goof-off n, and goof up vb are all labeled “American,” but not goof n or goofy, the latter of which could hardly be a “back formation” from goof, and is probably reinforced (if it is universal) by the Disney character. One can see how complex the information can become. I doubt that it is accurate to define gunsel as a ‘callow youth,’ a sense that probably rubbed off from the character played by Elisha Cook, Jr. in The Maltese Falcon: though he was referred to (by Bogart, as I recall) as a ‘punk’ and ‘gunsel’ and was portrayed as ineffectual, that does not justify a transferred definition: gunsel, probably from Yiddish, is a less common, old-fashioned term for ‘gunman, body guard, torpedo, hit man,’ and the like, simply a ‘criminal who carries a gun,’ and needs no (additional) pejorative treatment.
There are other infelicities in references to American culture and usage (e.g., what is “multi-coloured chewing gum” under gumballs?) and in narrowing the usage of lech/letch after/for/over/on to Britain. The latter reminds me of an exchange I once witnessed. In a context that was appropriate but not worth describing, a refined American lady was heard to exclaim with some surprise, “I didn’t know they had prostitutes in Poland!” In high dudgeon, the sophisticated Polish lady thus addressed replied, indignantly, “Did you think it an underprivileged country?!”
Bloomsbury have been publishing some very good language and reference books (including one by me) under the direction of Dr. Kathy Rooney, who deserves much credit for the over-all quality of the list. Thorne’s book contains some interesting and useful information, including much that cannot be found elsewhere (No, no, I don’t mean the inaccurate material). I fear that the author has trusted the advice and information provided by others, which were not always accurate. That, coupled with his inexperience in compiling so rigidly styled a work as a dictionary, has detracted from the quality of the work.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Mother Tongue: The English Language
Bill Bryson, (Hamish Hamilton [London], William Morrow [New York], 1990), 270pp.
Bill Bryson, an American who lives in Yorkshire, has written a spirited, engaging book about English. His style is light and entertaining, and I should be nitpicking at trifles were I to cavil at his rare sacrifices of accuracy for the sake of simplification. One example, not the author’s fault, is the comment, “The editors of the Random House Dictionary of 1966 decided, after considerable agonizing, not to insert any four-letter words.” As I was in charge of that edition, let me set the matter straight. There was no agonizing whatsoever on the part of the editors: every editor associated with the book wanted those words in. Jess Stein and I attended the meetings at which these sensitive matters were discussed and were invited to put our case, though we were fully aware that the ultimate decision rested with (particularly) the sales department. The sales director at the time (1965) was Lew Miller, as wise and experienced a marketing man as one could find in publishing; Bob Bernstein was president; Bennett Cerf was chairman of the board, and the other important directors were Donald Klopfer and Tony Wimpfheimer. After Jess and I presented our case, Lew Miller said he needed a week or so to think about the matter. Bennett was going out of town on one of his many lecture tours, while the final stages of reading proof proceeded in the reference department, of which I was director. Whichever way it was to go, we were ready to abide by Lew’s decision. About ten days later, Bennett returned and, encountering Bob in the corridor, asked him about the “four-letter decision”; “Shit and piss are in,” replied Bob, “Fuck and cunt are out.” Lew Miller’s decision had been a practical one: he felt it foolish to sacrifice the sales of many thousands of copies of the dictionary in the Bible Belt and other puritanical bastions of conservatism like Texas and California merely for the sake of a “couple of four-letter words.” (Those who think of California as a paragon of avant-garde thought may need reminding that the school-marms there succeeded in banning the sale of the Dictionary of American Slang, by Wentworth and Flexner, in the 1970s, by which time one might have thought that their moral fiber would have caught up with their professed modernity.)
John Ayto, editor of the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins, reviewed elsewhere in this issue, will not be happy to see his name misspelled “Ayton.” Also, in a section best described as “Webster-bashing,” Bryson fails to mention Joseph Emerson Worcester and his competing dictionaries, in some ways superior to Webster’s, and I cannot agree with the comment [p.150] that the simplified spellings advocated by Webster “would probably have happened anyway”—they didn’t happen “anyway” in Britain, where, despite the fact that many of the forms cannot be justified etymologically or any other way, the conservatives continue to heap scorn on American spelling. I think it misleading to describe the section A to Ant of The New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (the original title of the Oxford English Dictionary) as “a slim paperback book”: it was the first fascicle to be published and was not the “first of twelve volumes.” (The OED was originally published over a number of years in fascicles of various lengths which were sold by subscription, a method that is, alas, no longer practised.) These are details, I know, but that is no excuse for not getting them right, especially when the accurate information is so easily accessible.
I am willing to take Bryson’s word for many of the bits of information with which this book abounds, to wit, “Among the Xoxa tribe of South Africa the most provocative remark is hlebeshako— ‘your mother’s ears,’ ” the wisdom that “Some cultures don’t swear at all,” and the revelation that in Finland, “When you stub your toe getting up to answer the wrong number at 2.00 a.m.,” you mutter (shout?) “Ravintolassa!,” which means ‘in the restaurant.’ One hesitates to consider what the restaurants might be like in Finland, or, indeed, what the waiters say when they drop a tray, perhaps “Hlebe-shako !”
There is much to interest and amuse the reader in Mother Tongue, and I find it a pity that teachers do not use books like this to introduce students to the wonders and humor of language to reinforce what I hope is their own enthusiasm for the subject in place of the turgid texts they are stuck with.
Laurence Urdang
EPISTOLA {Richard N. Weltz}
I sympathize with Dr. Zellig Bach’s tale of the horrible Yiddish rendition of the Census Bureau form [XVII,2, “The Scandalous Yiddish Guide of the Census Bureau”], and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if many of the other foreign-language versions were equally awful. But I suspect that Bach’s imaginary scenario of how such a mess came to pass is probably off the mark. Judging by our own frequent experience with government agencies, federal, state, and local, the most common cause of bad foreign language publications is simply the practice of considering translation and foreign-language typesetting as if they were commodities and awarding the work to the lowest bidder—who is often incompetent.
Then, of course, since the agency has no capability to judge the quality of the work, the bad stuff gets printed and circulated. Fortunately, some government units (certain of which we are privileged to count among our clients) are smart enough to know better and do produce first-class work in foreign languages by engaging reputable suppliers.
[Richard N. Weltz, Spectrum Multilanguage Communications, New York City]
EPISTOLA {Benjamin H. Cohen}
I noted the references to tweeter and boomer or wow and hum in Harry Cohen’s article, “Jingo Lingo” [XVI,4]. I had expected to find tweeter followed by woofer and wow followed by flutter. I have no dictionary that records boomer as an audio electronics term but two that record woofer. I suspect that hum is used by those of us who can’t tell wow from flutter.
While reading OBITER DICTA in the same issue, I found myself in total agreement about the poor quality of the manuals that accompany computer hardware and software. But while improving manuals would reduce the number of telephone calls, the assertion that reduction by a factor of 10 could be achieved assumes that the users could actually be induced into looking at the manuals! Those who have actually answered telephone calls from users can tell you that if patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, then the manual is the last refuge of the computer user. A call to customer support comes well ahead of reading the manual, even when it’s good and well indexed. We often have to bite our tongues to lkeep from shouting, “f***** manual!”
Your assumption that your program’s spelling checker contains about 37,000 words because it contains about 223,000 characters is mistaken. Computer programmers are cleverer than that. The first spelling checker that I bought had a word list file of approximately 30,000 characters. It used a “hashing” technique, storing word roots, suffixes, and prefixes. In operation it would strip recognized suffixes and prefixes from words, check for the word root, and use rules stored in the program to determine whether the suffixes and prefixes were added correctly. According to the manual, the file compression techniques used the 30,000 character dictionary to list about 18,500 root words. When checked against a 42,000-word dictionary, the program was said to have achieved a 96% recognition rate.
[Benjamin H. Cohen, Niles, Illinois]
[In the early 1960s I designed a hyphenation program (for automatic typesetting) based on a logic of prefix-root-suffix combined with a table look-up (for anomalies: for instance, before analysis of a word ending in -ing, the word would be checked against a list including thing, bring, string, and other words that could not be hyphenated). Examination of the atrocious hyphenation exhibited by many typographers today is demonstration enough of the lack of interest in such affairs. Recently Americanizing a British text using the American spelling checker in my Framework III program, I discovered that the program is ignorant of American preferred spellings, like labeled vs labelled, traveler vs traveller, though it catches travelling. What boots it to point out that many Americans are likewise ignorant of those “preferences”? It seems redundant to point out that all offers I have made in the past to put Ashton-Tate on the right track regarding language (and manuals) have been ignored, though it is hard to say whether that is out of their arrogance, their ignorance, or their inability to read my letters.—Editor]
I read with interest the account of your experience with the Ashton-Tate word-processing program Framework III [XVI,4]. I was especially interested in the results you got when invoking the SUGGEST option in the program’s spelling checker. You were at a loss to explain the rationale for the program’s selection of rattans as an alternative for awakens.
In the late 1970s, I worked as a clerk in the medical records department of a large medical clinic. When I had the name of a patient but not his chart number, I checked with the medical records correction clerks. They sat at a computer terminals and would key in some kind of alphanumeric code that evoked many names. The name Wise, for example, also evoked names like Weese, Weiss, and Weisz, but also such unlikely variants as Waage, Wacha, Wahoske, Wick, and Woiak. When I became a correction clerk myself, I learned that the system behind this name-grouping was a filing system called Soundex. Soundex works mostly by ignoring the vowels in a name and assigning an alphanumeric code to the name based on the remaining consonants. Thus, Wise was given the Soundex code W200.
EPISTOLA {Raymond S. Wise}
I tried applying Soundex coding to the list of words in your article, but it was inadequate to the task, so I created an elaboration of Soundex. Below is [a selection from] the list of words in your article, accompanied by a number code; as will be seen, the words in each group have very similar codes. My elaboration of Soundex works according to the following rules: [Target means ‘the item to be coded.']
(a) Change each d or t in the target to c.
(b) Change each ng cluster to m.
(c) If the target begins with kn, replace kn with m.
(d) If the target begins with h, y, or a vowel, drop it and follow these rules.
(e) If the target begins with r or w, replace it with an l.
(f) Code the target according to Soundex rules.
(g) Replace the initial letter of the Soundex code with the appropriate numerical code from the Soundex code table.
Thus, for example, the target halogenating would go through the following changes while being coded:
halogenating (target)
halogenacing (rule a)
halogenacim (rule b)
alogencim (rule d)
logenacim (rule d, again)
L252 (rule f)
4252 (rule g)
Because the system is completely based on rules and ignores meanings, any word can be added to the spelling checker’s word list.
In Minnesota and Illinois, the first four characters of a person’s driver’s license number are the Soundex code of his surname. Not long into the movie The Blues Brothers, Elwood Blues Illinois driver’s license is shown on a police computer screen. It is obviously a phony, for it should begin with the code B420, but does not.
nucleic 5242
reawakens 4252
nutlike 5242
wakens 4252
knuckled 5242
rattans 4252
nickeled 5242
weakens 4252
nucleate 5242
reddens 4252
neglect 5242
weaklings 4245
nutlet 5242
walk-ons 4425
niggled 5242
walk-ins 4425
Bordeaux 1622
paradox 1622
unmanageable 5521
burdocks 1622
manageable 5521
broadax 1622
manageably 5521
birdseed 1622
inimitable 5521
birdhouse 1622
amendable 5521
bordellos 1624
unimaginable 5525
bureaux 1624
[Raymond S. Wise, Minneapolis]
[Mr. Wise did, indeed, include all the words in my article, but the list is too long to repeat here. He also enclosed information concerning the basic rules for Soundex, which can be found in Filing and Finding, by William Selden, Lura Lynn Straub, and Leonard J. Porter, Prentice-Hall, 1962, pp. 95-7. —Editor]
EPISTOLA {Thomas L. Bernard}
In a “melting-pot” country like the USA, we expect our tennis stars to have names of such diverse origin as Agassi, Capriati, Chang, Fernandez, Kirckstein, Mayotte, Navratilova, etc. Our perception of players from nations with more homogenous populations, however, is more orthodox, and we are inclined to be comfortable with the assumptions that Leconte ought to be French, Chesnokov Russian, Sanchez Spanish, Lindstrom Swedish, Sukova Czech, Haarhuis Dutch, etc.
Watching the French Open Tennis Championships in June 1990, I noted that there were players with the following last names, and readers are invited to guess at the country each represented: Boetsch, Champion, Herreman, Pierce, Van Lottum, and Winogradsky. The one answer for all is France!
At this writing [June 1990], there is a contender for the national leadership in West Germany with the name La Fontaine, while the prime minister of East Germany is De Maiziere. While these Germans are clearly of French origin, Eiffel and possibly Mitterand would appear to be etymologically German. But none of this is surprising in light of the name of the new president of Peru—Fujimoni!
[Thomas L. Bernard, South Hadley, Massachusetts]
EPISTOLA {Robert C. Scott}
Max Peterson’s review of The Language of the Law is splendid. David Mellinkoff’s criticism of lawyer language is lamentable. Rather than adopt a cant of guttural grunts attributable to our furry forebears, I suggest that we drag the populace toward an elegant tongue. Zounds! Would Mellinkoff banish such useful words as heretofore, theretofore, hereto, and therefor? Would we abandon the subjunctive mood, adverbs, Latin idioms, bon mots, and the like? How long can we tolerate such horrors as, “It’s me,” or “How are you?”—“I’m good”?
Years ago, by statute (§767.04, Fla. Stat.), Florida abandoned the time-honored BEWARE OF THE DOG in favor of BAD DOG… (I favor the alliterative CAVE CANEM, which would at least protect the literati.)
[Robert C. Scott, Circuit Judge, Seventeenth Judicial Circuit of Florida]
EPISTOLA {H. Stephen Straight}
In response to Richard Lederer’s call for submissions in a “most graceful and coherent eleven-word supersentence” contest [“The Glamour of Grammar,” XVI,4], I offer the following:
1 However painful, try 2 helping 3 prove 4 you’re 5 delighted 6 by supersentences 7 that prevail. (11 words)
1 Adverb clause
2 Gerund phrase
3 Infinitive phrase
4 Noun clause
5 Participial phrase
6 Prepositional phrase
7 Adjective clause
Using the same constituent-specifying numbers as above (to make it easier to verify my analysis), I offer the following, which would disprove Lederer’s claim that eleven words is the minimum:
1 Painful, try 2 helping 3 prove 4 supersentences 7 you’re 5 discusted 6 by prevail. (9 words)
The two objections I see with this would-be super-short supersentence are, first, the highly elliptical and not terribly idiomatic omission of any overt identification of the clausal status of the word painful, and second, the analysis of the thoroughly idiomatic three-word phrase, you’re disgusted by as an adjective clause containing a participial phrase and a rather elliptical prepositional phrase. Although I would defend this entry on the grounds that intelligible ellipsis lies at the core of the challenge, I could avoid the fairly strong first objection by restoring the clause-signaling however of my first entry:
However painful, try helping prove supersentences you’re disgusted by prevail. (10 words)
Those who find the second objection stronger than the first might accept another 10-word entry:
…Painful, try helping prove you’re delighted by supersentences that prevail. (10 words)
[H. Stephen Straight, SUNY at Binghamton]
[I am not at all sure that counting a contraction (you’re) as one word is fair.—Editor]
EPISTOLA {George M. Grasty}
“…[B]ack around 1776, German missed being the official American language by one vote.” [EPISTOLA, XVII,2:21] I am not a historian, but I had the impression that that idea had been laid to rest long ago. Has some historian recently discovered that the story is true, after all?
[George M. Grasty, Whittier, California]
EPISTOLA {Henry W. Hofstetter}
…I heard this many years ago on at least one other occasion from a very knowledgeable South African friend who explained that he could not cite a reference but regarded it as common knowledge. Occasionally I have asked historians and others about this without success, confirmation or denial. Two reference librarians were at a loss as to how to begin a search. It now occurs to me that perhaps you know the story or, at least, that you could give me a lead as to its origin.
[Henry W. Hofstetter, Bloomington, Indiana]
[A definite citation, of course, can be used to verify a fact. Not all facts are verified or verifiable. Because events that never occurred are, naturally, not documented, it is almost impossible to verify that something did not take place. Yet, rumors and “common knowledge,” however inaccurate, are sometimes a misinterpretation of an event that actually occurred and, therefore, can be traced to a fact, even though distorted; the best that can be wished for is to turn up something that might have given rise to the story (like the identification of the Parson Weems tale about George Washington’s honesty and the cherry tree).—Editor]
Paring Pairs No. 39
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). I, the less sensitive person, finished first.
(b). Bedlam concentrated here.
(c). Be mean and say how old she is.
(d). British officer’s servant, scourge of the underworld?
(e). Put another way, it’s only money.
(f). Put another way, to prefer Indian dish is to lead one to behave obsequiously.
(g). Have cereal with a flourish.
(h). Odd stress curbed means strengthening.
(i). Harmless firework created by box man.
(j). Are evergreens just a tub of lard?
(k). Which team are you on in America?
(l). Tenets of bitch goddess?
(m). Stake you to demon drink?
(n). Execration of man talk.
(o). Denunciation of Siamese attack.
(p). Stagger in where hull comes round.
(q). Incubus now to rid of everything bad.
(r). Her *q.v.*might be petulant or testy.
(s). Where do I look up skivvies?
(t). Administered at the demise of former cobblers.
(u). Succubus changes to harass you.
(v). Do those at the Tower sound like flower people?
(w). Dissatisfied customer’reaction is phony.
(x). Was it Miss Flagg who took the tonic at Salem?
(y). This gamboge mallet is for the birds.
(z). Friar’s grumpiness becomes a habit.
(1). Age.
(2). Ale.
(3). Aver.
(4). Bat.
(5). Bed.
(6). Bee.
(7). Bran.
(8). Cash.
(9). Counter.
(10). Cracker.
(11). Cross.
(12). Curry.
(13). Diction.
(14). Dish.
(15). Dog.
(16). Evil.
(17). Favor.
(18). Feeder
(19). Feint.
(20). Fir.
(21). Fit.
(22). Force.
(23). Hammer.
(24). Hazel.
(25). Hell.
(26). Home.
(27). Imp.
(28). Kin.
(29). Last.
(30). Ma.
(31). Male.
(32). Man.
(33). Mere.
(34). Monk.
(35). Number.
(36). Nuts.
(37). Raid.
(38). Reference.
(39). Rein.
(40). Safe.
(41). Scowls.
(42). Shed.
(43). Side.
(44). State.
(45). Tie.
(46). Tumble.
(47). Under.
(48). Wear.
(49). Which.
(50). Won.
(51). Wrights.
(52). Yellow.
*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).
Answers to Paring Pairs No. 38
(a). Feline a comfort to the immobilized. (8,1,46) Cat. A. Tonic.
(b). Feline part owed to disaster? (8,1,42) Cat. A. Strophe.
(c). Encountered an idea that is switched around. (22,1,44) Met. A. Thesis.
(d). He may be a petty officer but he makes out with the girls punting on the Isis. (5,43) Boat. Swain.
(e). Sounds as if Alexander’s father concurs in ornamental work. (var.) (29,2) Phil. Agrees.
(f). Mongolian youngsters who believe in mercy killing? (51,17,3) Youth. In. Asia.
(g). It looks as if kibitzer’s bottoms up. (7,17,40) Butt. In. Sky.
(h). Elfin uprising in cloud chamber. (6,25) Brownian. Movement.
(i). Ruler of precipitation. (37,24) Reigning. Monarch.
(j). Tiny colonial American soldiers. (23,21) Minute. Men.
(k). Paltry pirate. (31,30) Picayune. Picaroon.
(l). Egyptian priests rent loft for sacred writing. (16,4) Hire. Attic.
(m). Where the scenario is buried. (26,9) Movies. Crypt.
(n). Where French Ocean turns into Milky Way. (12,39) Gallic. Sea.
(o). Poisonous Ami de la Terre. (28,15) Paris. Green.
(p). Nervousness makes Italian sentimental. (38,45) Roman. Tic.
(q). Hull section a tulip? (50,14) Wine. Glass.
(r). Phenolphthalein in a tumbler. (47,14) Water. Glass.
(s). Queue for refreshment at end of joke. (35,20) Punch. Line.
(t). Vernal fashions at end of moor. (41,20) Spring. Line.
(u). Pace of dungaree manufacture. (13,36) Gene. Rate.
(v). Nationality of Curies’ shining child. (11,34) French. Polish.
(w). Where exhibitionists yield to burning desire. (10,32) Flash. Point.
(x). Punk skunk from Gdańsk. (33,8) Pole. Cat.
(y). Sting operation or vice squad roundup? (48,27) Whore. Net.
(z). Familiar with Mudville perfume. (19,18) Know. Joy.
Owing to a mixup, the answer to Paring Pairs No. 38 was not included among the numbered items listed in the Autumn issue. To counter cynics who might think the Editor would thereby avoid awarding the prize subscription, the winner was selected by drawing from among the answers received. In the US the winner was William Simon III, APO, New York. The winner abroad of No. 36 was John Kahn, London.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“ALL EQUIPMENT is permanently marked for identification. IF CAUGHT STEALING, WE WILL PROSECUTE!” [Sign in the audio-visuals materials section of the Norlin Library on the Boulder campus of the University of Colorado. Submitted by William Johnston, Boulder.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“The Kings Mountain Volunteers were the first to arrive at the home in the 12000 block of Skyline Boulevard at 12:50 p.m. and although three engines and 16 firefighters were called to the scene there were no injuries.” [From The Peninsula Times Tribune, Palo Alto, 2 April 1990. Submitted by Meryl Bach, Atherton, California.]
Crossword Puzzle
Across
1. Bears up in athletic activities (8)
2. Reportedly pursued virgin (6)
3. Rips off castles (5)
4. Rats in lair returning—forget I mentioned it (5,4)
5. Alarm about last of the cargo (7)
6. King confines holy man and thief (7)
7. Female with little clothing in driving mishap (4,4)
8. Drunk in bus station heading the wrong way (5)
9. Averages numbers going around room (5)
10. Everything going wrong in grove of treed in fall (8)
11. Expensive alien capsule (7)
12. Hound catches red comrade (7)
13. Airs jeans in the midst of casual shirts (9)
14. Frail grand-uncle’s wife (5)
15. Cruel fellow in the dumps—it’s strange (6)
16. Wife at her surliest, bearing down (8)
Down
1. Street abounding with conflict (6)
2. Part of plane fitting around wing (9)
3. Hosting dances when first spotted (2,5)
4. Hiker’s home, taking in eastern view (5)
6. Stubborn drunk trashed (4-3)
7. Quiet moonshine maker (5)
8. Field or adobe houses where riches can be found (2,6)
9. Excessively precise love poem with two lines (8)
15. Boost, if circling about (8)
17. Group of lawmen surrounding grand old inn (4,5)
18. Silly question is apparently verbatim (2,6)
20. Latest in Paris fashions: kerchiefs (7)
22. In the middle of feeling of terror about Missouri (7)
23. Good stringed instrument coming up for free (6)
25. In this fashion, cap is sturdy (5)
26. Batter grounded, we hear (5)
Crossword Puzzle Answers
Across
1. AS-LOPE.
4. BA(LANCE)D.
10. T(ON)IC.
11. ANCESTRAL (anag.).
12. M(ON)ARCH.
13. THIR(S)TY.
14. SMA (R-T ALE)CK.
17. B-RED.
19. B-UMP.
20. CRIME-AN WAR.
23. IN-TER(I)M.
25. LI(MITE)D.
27. FOR(TUNA)TE.
28. TO-PIC.
29. DESSERTS (rev.).
30. CORRAL (homophone).
Down
1. A(T TIM)ES (rev.).
2. LINEN (hidden).
3. PAC-K RATS (rev.).
5. A-SCOT.
6. AS-SAIL.
7. CORKS-CREW (ROCKS anag.).
8. DE(LAY)ED.
9. BACH-ELOR (ROLE rev.).
15. A-RMATURES.
16. CAME-LEER.
18. PAL-MET-TO.
19. BRIE-FED.
21. RADI(C)AL.
22. GROUSE (two meanings).
24. MEA(N)T.
26. TAPER (two meanings).
Internet Archive copy of this issue
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Preparation of this essay was supported, in part, by a grant from the International Society for Skeptical Humorism. I would like to thank Richard Trudeau, Sherlock Holmes, and Attila the Hun for helpful comments on an earlier draft. ↩︎
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See A. Toddle, “Never Metaphysic I Didn’t Like,” Chapter 1 of Physics: Friends or Enemas?, Athens: Slavers Free Press, for full descriptions and telephone numbers. ↩︎
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See K.M. Luther et al., Reformation and Information: Prolegomena to a Theology of Computational Processes, Wittenberg: Church Publishers (very) Ltd., for a complete list of Theses, with Index. ↩︎
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See S. Cushing, Quantifier Meanings: A Study in the Dimensions of Semantic Competence, Amsterdam: North-Holland, if you are having difficulty deciphering the sentence to which this footnote is attached. ↩︎
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See T. Aquinas, “Talking Heads and Ticking—s,” Rolling Stone, -842: 45-97, for relevant commentary. ↩︎
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See C. Ogden and I. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co. Also see C.C. Ogden and I.I. Richards, The Meaning of the Meaning of Meaning, New New York: Harharcourt Brace & Co. Also also see C.C.C. Ogden and I.I.I. Richards, The Meaning of the Meaning of the Meaning of Meaning. New New New York: Harharharcourt Brace and Co. Also also also see S. Cushing, “Not only only, but also also,” Linguistic Inquiry, 9:127-132. ↩︎
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See N. Abisco, Was Leibniz Crackers?, Cambridge, UK: Oxon, for a tasteful discussion of this topic. ↩︎
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Shocking as it may seem, Whitehead actually plagiarized the title of his major work, Principia Mathematica, from Newton, whose major work was also entitled Principia Mathematica. Newton, however, plagiarized his title from Machiavelli, whose major work, II Principe Mathematice, laid the groundwork for all future studies in quantitative political science. It was Machiavelli, in fact, who invented the notion of disinformation, on which all contemporary politics crucially depends. See note 3 for relevant discussion. ↩︎
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See A. Tarski and B. Dylan, Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows, Berkeley: Snow White & Dwarfs. Publishers. ↩︎
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See A. Robinson and E. Zakon, “A Set-theoretical Characterization of Enlargements,” in W.A.J. Luxemburg (ed.), Applications of Model Theory to Algebra, Analysis, and Probability Theory. New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston. ↩︎
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See B.R. Gaines, “Foundations of Fuzzy Reasoning,” in M.M. Gupta, G.N. Saradis, and B.R. Gaines (eds.), Fuzzy Automata and Decision Processes, New York: Elsevier North-Holland. Also see S. E. Robertson, “Nature of Fuzz: A Diatribe,” Journal of the American Society of Information Science, 29:304-307. ↩︎
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See J. Fonda, Barbarella: Queen of the Gal Axis, Hollywood, CA: Sexist Press, Inc., for the cosmic significance of all this. ↩︎