VOL XVII, No 4 [Spring 1991]

The Niceness Principle

David Galef, University, Mississippi

This is an essay about language and false recall. I am interested particularly in how recall distorts to smooth things out, to alter the old, harsh meanings into new, pleasant forms reminiscent of Hallmark greeting cards. I call it the Niceness Principle. Let me illustrate.

Last year, I taught an introductory literature course in which I assigned E.E. Cummings’s poem “next to of course god america i.” It is a short pastiche and parody of jingoist sentiment, swatches from a patriotic after-dinner speech at the local Elks Club, perhaps. I pointed out how Cummings was making fun of super-patriotism and saber-rattling, and we discussed the split between Cummings’s and the speaker’s point of view. I got some intelligent responses, as well as some incredulity. Some of the students could not accept that Cummings was impugning the flag. When it came time for the midterm, several identified the poem as “God Bless America.”

This is a good case in point, I think, because it exposes how the Niceness Principle works: people find a particular meaning unpleasant, so they unconsciously change it to something more comfortable. They make it nice—just as nice itself has changed from a word meaning ‘niggling’ to a word meaning ‘pleasant’ and applied to everything from ice cream to sexual partners. Unfortunately, this is hardly just a foible of youth; rather, it seems endemic to cultures that have shied away from the abattoir and the baseness of human behavior. In certain cases, the new meanings have become so ingrained in the language that the old ones have been totally effaced. Here are some nasty examples:

The Greek myth of Pandora’s box is one that most of us recall vaguely: though Pandora was told not to open that box, of course she did—at which point all manner of evils flew out, making our world one of pestilence, famine, death, and destruction. The consolation for all this lay at the bottom of the box: hope, the precious quality that would help mankind through it all. Or so I had been taught. It was not until I took a classics course in college that I was told the original reading: the worst evil of all was at the bottom—hope, which feeds men illusions, which renders them blind to reality, which thrives on lies. And, in fact, this reading is far more in keeping with the ancient Greek temperament. So much for historical accuracy.

Our culture seems to like taming the Greeks. Rough edges are planed away; disturbing elements are omitted. Readers of Plato’s Symposium, for example, may recall Aristophanes' absurd myth of creation: men and women were originally egglike creatures with eight limbs, and one head but two faces. They were quite powerful, and in order to nullify any threat they might pose to the gods, Zeus cut them in two. From then on, concludes Aristophanes, people sadly roamed the earth, looking for their lost halves. When the two halves meet, they embrace, and this is love.

Ask any nonclassicist who has read the Symposium, and you will get this basic recollection. But in Aristophanes' description, only one type was cloven into male and female, the original hermaphrodites. The two other types were male-male and female-female, and they account for homosexual love. This is no coincidence, since the Symposium portrays homosexuality as useful and ennobling. How curious, then, that nine out of ten readers of this work happen to forget this part of Aristophanes' myth.

The Romans provide more fodder for the Niceness Principle through Vergil, who wrote in his Eclogues, “Omnia vincit amor” ‘Love conquers all.’ Generations of romantics (including the wife of Bath) have interpreted this to mean that love will triumph over war and poverty, even over strict parents and curfews, but this is a fuzzy reading of the military metaphor Vergil intended. The image Vergil pursues is that of a commander forced to surrender, beaten by an all-powerful passion. Take a normal, clear-eyed individual, Vergil implies, subject him to love, and it will transform him into a physical wreck who cannot sleep and cannot eat because of his obsession. The ancients had a point.

There is an etiology behind all this. In Freudian terms, the Niceness Principle is often equivalent to the defense mechanism of reversal, in which the individual transforms the situation into its opposite, usually as a retreat from unpleasant emotions. Other defense mechanisms, such as repression and selective forgetting, may also take part. The question remains: is this simply a human foible, or have we as a culture grown ever more fond of sanitizing and sweeping under the carpet? Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents suggests an answer: as civilization “progresses,” it removes itself further and further from harshness and crude emotions. The emotions still exist, however, and the psychological price we pay for the repression is in neurosis and other civilized ills.

The Greco-Roman tradition is not the only happy hunting ground for the Niceness Principle. The Bible provides a wealth of material for misinterpretation and faulty recall, though it often requires nice readers for this to happen. In Genesis 19, for instance, most believers see Lot as a pious man living in the midst of the wicked city of Sodom. When two angels come down to see him, he protects them against the evil crowd of men who wish to molest them sexually. Lot is thus the good host, who will allow no harm to come to anyone under his roof. What many people forget, or omit, or simply never heard of, is that Lot offers a sop to the crowd: his two virgin daughters. Take them, he begs, instead of his guests. Whether this reflects the inviolable rule of hospitality, the undeniable misogyny in the Old Testament, or that angels have higher standing than humans is open to question. But the question cannot even be asked when the details are mislaid.

This is not to say that the Western tradition has a monopoly on Niceness. The Japanese proverb “Inu ga arukeba, bo ni ataru” ‘A dog that walks around will find a stick’ illustrates this nicely. Modern sources translate the proverb as something like “Seek and ye shall find,” with the stick as a bone or reward. The original meaning is harsher and more in keeping with traditional Japanese culture: the stick is used to beat the dog, who should not have poked around. In other words, “Curiosity killed the cat.”

Fairy tales have also come in for their share of Niceness. The folklore the Grimm Brothers unearthed was full of beheadings and torture; the stories were both amusements and cautionary tales. They certainly did not all end happily ever after. The classic “Little Red Riding Hood,” for instance, was told to me as a child in the Nice version: after the wolf swallowed the grandmother, he got into bed and waited for Little Red Riding Hood to come. When he sprang out at her, she fled screaming. A nearby woodsman came and cut open the wolf with a hatchet, freeing the grandmother. Not so in the original: “What big teeth you have,” says Little Red Riding Hood. “The better to eat you with,” says the wolf, and gobbles her up. End of tale.

Shakespeare, at a remove of four centuries, provides a hapless hunting ground for nice misinterpretations, either through misquotation or quoting out of context. A typical example is the often-repeated “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” The pleasant drift is nature reminding us that we are all in this world together—but this was not what Shakespeare intended, especially in his most satirical and pessimistic play, Troilus and Cressida. The line itself is spoken by the wily Ulysses attempting to persuade Achilles to return to battle. The argument he uses is that people tend to praise what is recent: “That all with one consent praise new-born gauds” is the line that follows, and the implication is clear— that this is what links mankind, this tendency to focus only on the new and conveniently forget the past. It may be merely a coincidence that this is what quoters of Shakespeare are doing when they use this line incorrectly.

Other examples abound. To choose one from the movies: in Casablanca, there is the famous line, “Play it, Sam,” as Rick tells the piano man to play what Ilsa remembers as their song. Not only is the line usually misquoted as “Play it again, Sam,” but the sentiment itself is misunderstood as a nostalgic glow. In fact, it is painful for Rick to hear the music now, and the only reason he tells Sam to play it is for Ilsa’s sake. An etymological analogy is useful here: nostalgia really means the ache or pain of return, but most people think of nostalgia as pleasurable recollection.

Transmutation of tales, legends, and sayings are not the only effects of the Niceness Principle. It sweeps words in its passage, as well. Awesome once meant ‘terrible’; now it means ‘great,’ and terrible is reserved to describe airline cuisine. Whatever happened to a terrible strength? Great was also once a frightening word. Even bad means ‘good’ nowadays. It is worth noting that some good words over time have acquired a bad reputation, such as square (going from ‘honest’ to ‘dull’) and criticism (moving from ‘appraisal’ to ‘denigration’). But in general we seem to lighten up meanings rather than darken them.

I do not mean to sound like a hidebound traditionalist. Language is a living, changing phenomenon, and it is no use railing against shifts in meaning, which are bound to occur. And avoiding unpleasantness is often a reasonable aim. But as an English professor who tries to teach the spirit of literature, I have a vested interest in accuracy. I cannot help lamenting what I see as distortion. And memory is important. Fuzzy recall indicates a disregard for history. Or, as my uncle once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to misquote Santayana.”

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“That is a mute point now, of course, with Holyfield’s victory over Douglas.” [From the Las Vegas Review-Journal/Sun, 27 October 1990:1C. Submitted by Richard Wynn, Bullhead City, Arizona.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

Coming in on a wing and a prayer: “One observer in Nevada was quoted as saying the shape of the aircraft was ‘like a mantra ray.’ ” [From the San Bernardino Sun, 2 October 1990. Submitted by J.B. Lawrence, San Bernardino, California.]

English Know-how, No Problem

Bill Bryson, Yorkshire

In Stockholm there is a chain of fast-food restaurants where you can get, along with a fairly high risk of heartburn, what must rank as the ultimate in culinary oxymorons: a hamburger called a Mini Big. If that sounds a trifle too indecisive, you may choose from such offerings as a Cheeseburgare, a Baconburgare, a Big Dream, or something called a Big Clock. All these names are English, more or less. It appears that in Sweden these days, as in the world generally, people not only increasingly speak English but also eat it.

And they wear it. Anyone who has traveled almost anywhere in the world in the past couple of years will have noticed that young people everywhere sport T-shirts, sweatshirts, and warm-up jackets bearing messages that are invariably (1) in English and (2) gloriously meaningless. Recently in Hamburg I saw a young man in a bomber jacket that stated on its back: “Full-O-Pep Laying Mash.” In slightly smaller letters, it added: “Made by Taverniti Oats Company Chicago USA 1091DS.” In Tokyo, a correspondent for The Economist sighted a T-shirt proclaiming: “O D on Bourgeoisie Milk Boy Milk.” The words, one supposes, were chosen from an unabridged dictionary by a parrot with a stick in its beak. What is even more alarming is that these bewilderingly vague sentiments have begun appearing in the English-speaking world. In a store on Oxford Street in London I saw a jacket, made in Britain, that announced in large letters: “Rodeo—100 per cent Boys for Atomic Atlas.”

What do these strange messages mean? In the literal sense, nothing, of course. But in a more metaphoric way they do rather underscore the huge, almost compulsive appeal of English in the world. It is an odd fact that almost everywhere on the planet products are deemed more appealing and sentiments more powerful if they are expressed in English, even if they make next to no sense.

English words are everywhere. Germans speak of die Teenagers and das Walkout and German politicians snarl “No comment” at German journalists. Italian women coat their faces with col cream, Romanians ride the trolleybus, and Spaniards, when they feel chilly, don a sueter. Almost everyone in the world speaks on the telephone or the telefoon or even, in China, the te le fung. And almost everywhere you can find nightclubs and television.

In 1986, The Economist assembled a list of English terms that had become more or less universal. They were airport, passport, hotel, telephone, bar, soda, cigarette, sport, gold, tennis, stop, OK, weekend, jeans, know-how, sex appeal, and no problem. As The Economist put it, “The presence of so many words to do with travel, consumables, and sport attests to the real source of these exports—America.”

There is no denying that the English language, quite apart from its utilitarian purposes, holds an odd, almost quaint fascination for many foreign speakers. I have before me a Japanese eraser that says, “Mr Friendly Quality Eraser. Mr. Friendly Arrived !! He always stay near you, and steals in your mind to lead you a good situation.” It is a product made in Japan solely for Japanese consumers, yet there is not a word of Japanese on it. Coke cans in Japan come with the slogan, “I feel Coke & Sound Special,” while until recently a Japanese company called Cream Soda marketed a range of products with the exquisitely inane slogan, “Too old to die, too young to happy.” Some of these products betray a rather comforting lack of geographical precision. A Japanese carrier bag showing yachts on a blue sea had the message, “Switzerland: Seaside City.” Another carried a picture of a dancing elephants above the legend, “Elephant Family Are Happy With Us. Their Humming Makes Us Feel Happy.” In Naples, there is a sporting goods store called Snoopy’s Dribbling, while just off the Grand Place in Brussels you can find a boutique called Big Nuts, where a sign in the window intriguingly offers, “Sweat, 690 francs.” Closer inspection reveals this to be merely a Belgian truncation of the English sweatshirt.

Usually English words are taken just as they are, but sometimes they are adapted to local needs, often in quite striking ways. The Serbo-Croatians, for instance, picked up the English word nylon, but took it to mean a kind of shabby and disreputable variation, so that a nylon hotel is a ‘brothel’ while a nylon beach is where nudists frolic. Other nations have left the words largely intact but given the spelling a novel twist. Thus the Ukrainian herkot might seem wholly foreign to you until you realize that it is what a Ukrainian goes to his barber for. Similarly, unless you heard them spoken you might not recognize ajskrym, erebeta, and kontaklinser as, respectively, Polish for ice cream, Japanese for elevator, and Swedish for contact lenses. The champion of this dissembling process must surely be the Italian sciacchenze, which is simply a literal rendering of the English shake hands, although the Swahili word for a traffic island, kiplefti (keep left) runs it a close second.

This practice of taking English words and hacking away at them until they emerge as something more like native products is particularly rampant among the Japanese, who have borrowed no fewer than 20,000 English words—at least ten per cent of all the words in common use there. (It has been said, not altogether jokingly, that if the Japanese were required to pay a license fee for every English word they used, their trade surplus would vanish.)

Occasionally, the Japanese stretch the borrowed words to fit more comfortably to their pronunciation—as with productivity, which became in Japanese purodakuchibichi—but for the most part they use the same sort of ingenuity miniaturizing English words as they do in miniaturizing tape recorders and video cameras. So word processor in Japan become wa-pro, personal computer becomes masu-komi, and commercial is unceremoniously shorn of its troublesome consonant clusters and shrunk to a terse monosyllable: cm. No-pan, short for no-panties, is a description for bottomless waitresses, while the English words touch and game have been fused to make tatchi geimu, a euphemism for sexual petting.

Sometimes, English words are given not only new spellings but also entirely new meanings. In the last century the Russians, for reasons that no one now seems quite sure of, took the name of a London railway station, Vauxhall, and made it their generic word for all railroad stations: vagzal. In much the same way, the Japanese word for a fashionable cut suit, sebiro, is a corruption of Savile Row. More recently, the French borrowed the English slang words jerk and egghead but gave them largely contrary meanings—namely, an egghead in France is not a brainy person but a dimwit, while jerk is a term of praise for an accomplished dancer—though at least they respect the spellings.

Occasionally borrowers of English words use them to create new words. The Japanese have lately appropriated the English word mansion, respelled it manshon, and used it to signify not a large single dwelling but a high-rise apartment building. But because the syllable man also means ‘ten thousand’ in Japanese, they have coined a further word, okushon, based on their word for ‘one hundred million’ oku, because that implies greater luxury still.

This practice of adopting an English word and then using it as the basis for forming other words quite unknown in English is more common than you might expect. The Germans, in particular, are adept at taking things a step further than ever occurred to anyone in English. In Germany a young person goes from being in his teens to being in his twens, a book that doesn’t quite become a bestseller is instead ein steadyseller, and a person who is more relaxed than another is relaxter.

A final curiosity of borrowing is that the words sometimes lose their emotional charge when conveyed overseas. The Dutch, most notably, have adopted an English expletive too coarse to reproduce here (though if I say, “hits the fan” I expect you’ll be with me), but they use it as a mild and largely meaningless epithet, roughly equivalent to our gosh or golly or even just hmmmm—to such an extent, I am told that they must now take special care not to startle English-speaking visitors. Oddly enough, a century ago we did much the same thing with a rude Dutch term, pappekak, which we anglicized into the anodyne poppycock.

Of course, not all these borrowings are free of charge. The English language has become a very big business indeed. Globally, the teaching of English is worth £6 billion a year; in Britain alone it is the sixth largest source of invisible earnings, worth £500 million a year.

Some people are naturally better at mastering English than others. In the 1970s, according to Time magazine, Soviet diplomats were issued with a Russian-English phrase-book that included such memorable phrases as this instruction to a waiter: “Please give me curds, sower cream, fried chicks, pulled bread and one jellyfish.” When shopping, the well-versed Soviet emissary was told to order “a ladies' worsted-nylon swimming pants.”

If there is one thing we should be worried about in the English-speaking world it is not that we are doing poorly at learning other people’s languages— though that is worrisome enough—but that we increasingly pay so little attention to the competent use of our own. Sir Randolph Quirk put it succinctly when he wrote, “It would be ironic indeed if the millions of children in Germany, Japan, and China who are diligently learning the language of Shakespeare and Eliot took more care in their use of English and showed more pride in their achievement than those for whom it is the native tongue.”

We might sometimes wonder if we are the most responsible custodians of our own tongue, when we reflect that the Oxford University Press sells as many copies of the Oxford English Dictionary in Japan as it does in America, and a third more than in Britain.

Ethnic Slurs and the Avoidance Thereof

William H. Dougherty, Santa Fe

Back in 1978, when Dick Cavett had his talk show on PBS, I heard him interview Alfred Kazin on his program. Kazin had just had published an autobiography titled New York Jew, and was probably on television to plug the book, apropos of which he and Cavett had more or less this to say:

D.C.: Why did you call the book ‘New York Jew’? I mean, some people might consider that title… uh, a little provocative.

A.K., smiling, amused: Well, the title pretty well sums me up. I happen to be a Jew who has identified himself in the New York intellectual environment.

To my mind Dick Cavett’s question remained intriguing, not so much because Kazin failed to answer it fully as because I wondered why the question had occurred to Cavett in the first place. Indeed, New York Jew does somehow seem to have an almost hostile overtone. Why? Are we so imbued with anti-Semitism or hypersensitivity to it that any direct reference to Jews, particularly culturally intensive New York Jews, touches a raw nerve? Some months after the interview I asked a friend of mine, a Jewish professor emeritus of English who was originally from New York (albeit the state, not the city), what he thought about the matter. He replied something like this: “Hmm, well, yes, but isn’t it a little blunt, a little hostile to call anyone by a bare ethnic noun? Suppose we saw a German we knew walking toward us. And then what if one of us said to the other, ‘Here comes that German.’ There’s a nuance of put-down, almost hostility there. If we liked the guy and had nothing against Germans generally, we’d probably say something like ‘Say, here comes that German fellow… that young German guy… that old German gentleman.’ ”

I have tested my professorial friend’s observation in a number of real and imagined situations involving several ethnic or national categories and have found it to be correct. The unmodified noun for an ethnic group or nationality does imply a certain hostility or contempt or, especially on the lips of a member of that group, a nuance of defiance, as in Kazin’s case. Prouder or more arrogant people are apt to fling the bare noun at you, almost as if to add, “And you’d better believe it!” A snooty Brit may staunchly declare, “I am an Englishman,” where a more modest denizen of England would be more likely say, “I’m English,” employing the adjective rather than the noun. There seems to be a kind of semantic quality that makes adjectives softer and gentler than nouns and makes of them softening agents.

In some cases the adjectives and nouns for ethnic groups are formally identical, as for example German, Swiss, or Russian. But to soften the ethnic term in such cases it can still be used adjectivally, as in the example already given or in: “A Russian guy once told me…” Perhaps particularly where the noun and adjective are identical in form, if not function, colloquially a blunt noun is invented, such as Dutchman for German (n.), Russky for Russian (n.), Jap for Japanese, or Chinaman for Chinese (n.). Conversely, plain nouns for ethnic groups or nationalities are sometimes replaced with adjectivally softened terms like Colored Folks, African Americans, or Native Americans.

If adjectives soften ethnic terms, nouns can harden them. This function can be demonstrated by comparing the noun Jew with the adjective Jewish in context. When someone says, “That Jew business is new here,” he isn’t saying quite the same thing as “That Jewish business is new here.” Because of the abomination and shame of anti-Semitism, you tend to respond more sensitively to language reflecting attitudes toward Jews, which is why jew down is both derogatory and offensive while gyp or welch on are relatively innocuous. But the hardening effect of plain nouns can be detected with regard to other peoples. “That Swede church” isn’t quite the same as “That Swedish church.”

The ethnic terms that seem bluntest or most indelicate are sometimes simply what people call themselves. Chinaman is nothing but a calque of zhongguo ren, morpheme for morpheme Chinaman, and Polak is simply Pole in Polish. And sometimes ironically or defiantly people will call themselves by names intended to be pejorative or downright insulting, as when African Americans call each other nigger or Jews of Odessa call one of their folk heroes Poltorazhida ‘Yid-and-a-half.’

When a people has been dealt with shamefully, there is reason to dissociate it from its former identity by giving it a new name. The niggers and darkies (where again the primarily adjectival word is the less offensive) of slavery became the Negroes and Coloreds of Jim Crow and are the African Americans and blacks of today. Blacks, of course, are usually no more black than whites are white. The misnomer must be acceptable because the parallelism implies equality between the folks so designated by adjectives of color.

Newcomers to the American Southwest where there is a large population of Latin Americans often ask, “What do you call these people?” Hispanic, though currently the best answer, isn’t entirely satisfactory because the term lumps together people who are about as alike as, say, Tahitians and Haitians. Forty years ago, before a sizable emigration from Mexico into New Mexico, in this state the Spanish-speaking element of the population carelessly called itself mexicano, as some of the older Hispanics still do, though New Mexico had not been part of Mexico for more than a century and then for only about a quarter of a century after New Spain became the Mexican Republic. Anglos usually referred to the Spanish-speaking element as native or, again in a kind of leveling parallelism, as Spanish, never as Spaniards, on the model, probably unconscious, of Anglo, short for Anglo-American. Hispanics who prefer to emphasize cultural ties with Mexico, especially la Republica Azteca, as most in New Mexico definitely do not, may prefer to go by the name of Chicano, which implies political as much as national or ethnic identity.

There are nationalities and ethnic groups so confident, so satisfied with themselves that ethnic epithets either bounce off them like pebbles off an elephant or are adopted as amusing or even ornamental. What do you call an American or Australian to insult him? Yank and Aussie have been tried but to no avail. WASP started off with a pejorative nuance, it seems to me, but has been accepted so smugly by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants that the term has been appropriated by some people it doesn’t fit, for instance Americans of German or Irish descent who may be agnostics of Catholic background. Where Americans are called gringo, they tend to be more amused than offended by the epithet.

Then there are peoples too alien or exotic to the mainstream of the dominant culture to have prompted an attitude expressed in language. American Indian tribes seem to fall into this category. One says indifferently, “He’s Navaho,” or “He’s a Navaho” as most people do not say indifferently, “He’s Jewish,” or “He’s a Jew,” though in the case of the Indian the noun seems somehow more natural and no less friendly. This indifference does not, however, extend to particular kinds of Indians. Squaw, papoose, and maybe even brave are no longer used, except humorously (Smile when you say that!) or, again, defiantly. The boys' basketball team of the Indian School in Santa Fe call themselves the Braves, and the girls' team is called the Lady Braves. There is likely a touch of humor here. In my experience the most endearing characteristic of American Indians generally is their keen sense of humor.

When it comes to sensitivity to ethnic or national designations, the bulk of Americans seem to be indifferent to nuance. We as soon say, “I’m an American” as “I’m American” or jauntily “I’m a gringo” or proudly “I’m a Yank.” Are we made impervious by a shell of arrogance, numb by self-satisfaction, or tolerant by the wild ethnic diversity in which most of us live?

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The suit was filed by two men and a woman who said it was unfair and illegal to allow women in skirts into the Florentine Gardens nightclub for free on certain nights while forcing men and women without skirts to pay a cover charge.” [From the Los Angeles Times, 15 November 1990:B-2. Submitted by Amrom H. Katz, Los Angeles and by several other readers.]

You Say Tomato…

Craig Brown

Yesterday a friend rang to say that she had just got back from Majorca, only she didn’t say Majorca, she said “MEEYORCA.” I asked her how MADGE-ORCA was, and she said MEEYORCA was lovely, and so the conversation went on. Neither of us mentioned the discrepancy in pronunciation, but equally neither of us would budge from what we knew to be right. In an open court, I would have explained that my great-aunt lived there for twenty years and never stopped calling it MADGE-ORCA, and even if I gave up calling it MADGE-ORCA I would instead call it MALLYORCA, and not the odd in-betweeny MEEYORCA. But our conversation never reached the open court, so she must have replaced her receiver thinking me hopelessly ignorant.

Pronunciation today makes fools of us all. One only has to listen to MPs, particularly on the Conservative benches, to note what a squidgy state it is in. Recently David Waddington pronounced a particularly grim terrorist act “D’STAARDLY.” I had imagined the pronunciation of dastardly was restricted to two choices: either a long or else a sharp first a. Yet here was the Home Secretary offering a third.

Such oddities emanate largely from Tories who are midway through performing their own plastic surgery on their vowel sounds. I always felt sorry for Cecil Parkinson when he was Trade and Industry Secretary as “inDUStry”—the “DUS” rhyming with bus—was one of the few words that gave him away. Mrs. Thatcher, too, pronounces various words in an idiosyncratic manner. “M-gnificent” she says, perhaps over-compensating for fears that her “a” will be too northern by removing it entirely.

Things were not always so. A regional accent has only recently come to be seen as a bar to advancement in politics. Many of the statesmen in history to whom actors ascribe smart southern accents were in fact proudly northern. The memoirist Richard Monckton Milnes recalled a dinner at which Mr. Gladstone sat in the place of honor. Gladstone liked to chew everything thirty-two times, so he spent the meal largely in silence. At last, he seemed ready to say something, and his fellow guests leant forward in anticipation. Picking up a nut, he said, “It is many years since I ate a Brazilian NOT or indeed a NOT of any kind.” Similarly, the posh long “a” in grass (and indeed class) was originally an affectation by courtiers in imitation of George IV: until then everyone in the country had pronounced class to rhyme with lass.

Nowadays, the shifting sands of pronunciation claim many a victim. As a Catholic, I was brought up to say Mass with a long “a”—“MAARSS”—but I have recently been finding myself in such a minority that I am at present attempting a Waddingtonian transition towards Mass with a short “a.” At the moment, I am stranded awkwardly in between, and I’m sorely tempted to struggle back to my original point of embarkation.

There is a successful pop ballad called “Lady in Red” that worries me every time I hear it because the singer, Mr. de Burgh, has to struggle through three lines ending with the words chance, dance, and romance. As far as I can recall, he pronounces chance with a sharp “a,” and dance with a long “a,” and then he finds himself in the disastrous position of having to pronounce romance with a long “a,” too. These are troubled times.

Those at the top of society have not helped matters by their tendency to inverted snobbery. Princess Anne says “EETHER.” King Edward VIII used to irritate his father, George V, by pronouncing lady as “LIDY” (to rhyme with tidy), and when he became Duke of Windsor he further upset everyone by following his wife’s pronunciation of Duke as “DOOK.”

A week or two ago, I heard Lord Carrington pronounce graph as “GRAFF,” with a sharp “a.” Presumably Lord Carrington knows what he’s up to, but let us hope that Mr. Waddington did not hear him. Having spent most of his working life trying to graduate from “GRAFF” to “GRAFF,” it would be awful if he now had to make the arduous journey back to square one.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader

Deborah Cameron, ed., (Routledge, London, 1990), xxi + 260pp.

This is the book that gives you chapter and verse to refute all those linguistic reactionaries who cannot see why there is all that fuss about using he and man to mean a ‘person of either sex.’ The debates that Deborah Cameron illustrates are fundamental to everyone’s use of language whether they be female or male—how it is used, how it is perceived and received by speakers and readers of both sexes, how it can on the one hand bolster and on the other break down attitudes and prejudices, and how it can create new awarenesses.

The Feminist Critique of Language brings together a wide range of views and approaches to its subject, ranging from the conservative linguist Otto Jespersen and the author Virginia Woolf writing in the 1920s to contemporary critics. One of the main strengths of the collection is that it does not just put forward one view, it maps out the debate allowing different views to be stated and then criticized or revised. The eighteen essays and extracts and the perceptive introduction reveal the range and depth of the debate about feminism and language.

Cameron divides the book into three main sections. The first, “Speech and Silence,” has Woolf as its starting point and includes Cora Kaplan on “Language and gender” as well as two French extracts from Annie Leclerc on “Woman’s word” and an interview with the leading French psychologist Luce Irigary entitled “Woman’s exile.” These essays explore the notion of women’s “silence” and the utopian quest for a specifically female voice in culture. Much of the real meat of the book comes in Part Two, “ ‘Naming’ and Representation.” Dale Spender’s quasi-Worfian views on “man made language,” published in 1980, are counterbalanced by the perceptive 1981 review of Spender’s book by Maria Black and Rosalind Coward. Muriel R. Schulz’s 1975 essay on the semantic derogation of women leads into a discussion of compiling a Feminist Dictionary against the grain of the authors' view in predominantly male lexicography.

One of the main strengths of this collection is that it makes available to specialists—students of literature for instance—material which would otherwise have been extremely difficult to get hold of. This applies in particular to essays such as Anne Bodine’s on “Androcentrism in prescriptive grammar: singular ‘they,’ sex-indefinite ‘he,’ and ‘he or she.’ ” First published in 1975, this dryly written paper provides much of the analytical information needed to counter the stereotypical “hysterical fuss” reaction. Bodine analyzes the ways in which (male) grammarians (both descriptive and prescriptive) have since the seventeenth century sought to establish he as the sex-indefinite pronoun despite evidence that actual usage consistently contradicts that. It is a pity that the most recent material in the collection appeared in the mid 1980s. In answer to Anne Bodine’s point, both the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and the Collins Cobuild Dictionary use they and their as the non-gender-specific pronoun/adjective (which the reader probably noted also in the first paragraph of this review).

The Critique has an amusing slant, too. One of the most telling and effective exposés of the entrenched nature of sexism in language is Douglas Hofstaedter’s pseudonymous parody “A person paper on purity in language,” written as a supposed debunking of “silly prattle” about racist language. He uses white and black in the place of man and woman in examples such as chairwhite, Frenchwhite, whitepower, whitehandle, oneupwhiteship, and so on. Through such strategies and telling adaptations of quotations like “All whites are created equal,” “One small step for a white, one giant step for whitekind” Hofstaedter’s short piece becomes a cutting revelation of just how deep-seated are not only sexist but racial prejudices in language.

The final part of the book, “Dominance and Difference in Women’s Linguistic Behaviour,” examines how women actually use language, tackling such areas as gossip, “tag” questions, and conversational gambits. I found this the least satisfactory section in that the necessarily short extracts could not provide sufficient detail.

Cameron deliberately excludes some of the more familiar work which is available elsewhere. So this collection contains texts that are more marginal than would he ideal for students who may read nothing else on the subject. It also means that some important names, such as Julia Kristeva and Toril Moi, are omitted. Her thematic structure also slightly defuses the impact of the debate. By beginning with Virginia Woolf instead of some of the more linguistically oriented material (Bodine, Lakoff, and so on), she does not immediately establish the ground to be broken. A chronological structure would have directly juxtaposed Jespersen with Woolf and then enabled the reader to find a way through the developments in the debate, giving a more coherent picture of the broadening issues.

A stimulating and entertaining collection, The Feminist Critique of Language acknowledges and reflects the range of the debates about women and language, not only today but since the 1920s. It should be included in student reading lists, but it also deserves to be prescribed reading for those who feel themselves to be concerned with language—across the spectrum from the (hopefully diminishing) ranks of the “hysterical fuss” brigade to already committed feminists.

Kathy Rooney

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Bloomsbury Dictionary of Dedications

Adrian Room, (Bloomsbury, 1990), xiv + 354pp.

There are those who collect all sorts of collectables, including, apparently, dedications. Adrian Room, a well-known and proficient lexicographer and compiler of all sorts of collectables has produced a book that some might find enormously entertaining, or useful, or both, but which I find somewhat tedious. I find nothing interesting, entertaining, or useful about any of the following, which are fairly typical of the fare:

To Love and Courage.—Margot Fonteyn, Autobiography,

To the unsinkable Dolly, who has a big brain under that big yellow wig, and a big heart under that big chest, this book is respectfully dedicated.—Leonore Fleischer, Dolly, 1987.

I dedicate this book to my friends.—Mary Storr, Before I Go…, 1985.

To Mary, without whose constant encouragement and advice this book would have been finished in half the time.—Geoffrey Payton, Payton’s Proper Names, 1969.

Dedicated to those who gaze out of windows when they should be paying attention.—Roger McGough, In the Classroom, 1976.

These seem to me neither funny nor clever, but there are so many of the type that I get the feeling that I may be the odd man out, the one person in the world who finds Thomas Hardy excruciatingly boring: I have a sneaking suspicion that there are many like me but they are too embarrassed to admit it.

I have had a book dedicated to me by my sister. I haven’t looked, but I would guess that it just says something like “For Larry,” which seems just right. There are some interesting older dedications, like Machiavelli’s 32-line toadying exordium to Lorenzo the Magnificent in The Prince. (In Italian it probably ran longer.) But not all of the oldies are goodies: Edmund Spenser’s dedications of his (nine) books vary from one-liners to some very sleepy sycophancies many times that length. It must be remembered that many successful authors of yore were supported by patrons, and praising a wealthy and powerful individual in the days before democracy became popular was simply a matter of expediency. Besides, only the worst ingrate would fail to acknowledge to largesse provided. Today, when commercial considerations put the publisher into the role of the patron—despite the fact that advances are repayable, risks are taken—acknowledgment of an editor’s (artistic) contribution may be relegated to the closing lines of the author’s foreword, which often grudgingly suggests that the work was produced in spite of rather than because of the person cited. But such acknowledgments do not qualify as dedications in the sense generally understood and in the book at hand in particular.

Occasionally, the identity of a dedicatee has remained a mystery for years, with speculation bandied back and forth endlessly in Notes and Queries. Evidently, Bram Stoker’s dedication of Dracula (1897) was such a one:

To my dear friend, Hommy-Beg.

Had I ever noticed that, I cannot say that it would have kept me awake nights wondering and worrying who Hommy-Beg might be: I would assume it was a nickname for someone close to Stoker, possibly a private nickname known only to the two of them, and I would have continued to nod off. It turns out to have been Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine, Stoker’s friend; although the significance of that revelation eludes me completely, it might well have won some bookworm a beer.

Dedication-collecting may be like stamp-collecting (which I never understood, either). If one likes this sort of thing, there is no keeping him down, I suppose, and if one must have a collection of dedications, I suppose it ought to be Adrian Room’s.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Bloomsbury Dictionary of First Names

Julia Cresswell, (Bloomsbury, 1990), 248pp.

This is a well-written, though fairly standard alphabetically arranged reference book on given, or first, or, as they like to call them in Britain, regardless of the religion of their possessors, Christian names. It seems to be the product of a publisher’s decision that such a book should be on every well-rounded reference list, but as a work viewed in the larger context of onomasiology, it breaks no new ground as far as I can tell and offers nothing not already covered by the works of Leslie A. Dunkling (for one). Which is to say that if you already have a fairly comprehensive dictionary of first names—this one claims 1500 “names defined”—you do not need this one; on the other hand, if you have none and want a good one, this one is likely to be as good as the best and better than most.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Dictionary of Surnames and A Dictionary of First Names

Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, Special consultant for Jewish Names, David L. Gold, (Oxford University Press, 1988), liv + 826 pp. and Patrick Hanks, and Flavia Hodges, (Oxford University Press, 1990), xxxvi + 443 pp.

Both of these books will find a place on the shelves of any good reference library. They contain a great deal of information that has been intelligently collated. The surname dictionary, in particular, becomes the best available work on the subject; the chief value of the first name dictionary, for me, lies in the Supplements, which deal with Arabic names (by Mona Baker) and with the given names of the Indian Subcontinent (by Ramesh Krishnamurthy).

The awkward fact about the surname dictionary is that a great many people will consult it in vain for information about their own names. It contains entries, says the Introduction, “for most major surnames of European origin, as well as for many rarer ones.” “Major” in this context means names like Smith and Jones, frequently found in any telephone directory. Such names must of course be included, though the people most anxious to discover something about the original meaning of their surnames are invariably those who bear the rarer names. The authors say that if they came across reliable information about rarer names, they wrote entries. In other words, if someone else had done the research in what appeared to be a scholarly way, they took advantage of it. That seems to me to be a sensible approach, since the only way properly to investigate a surname is to go back through the male line as far as possible, noting the various spellings of the name, where the family was living in past centuries, and so on. Being asked to make a judgment about a surname merely on the basis of its modern spelling is rather like being asked to give the meaning of a word such as pain without being told whether the word is English or French and without knowing whether the word should really be spelled pane.

I have been using the surname dictionary regularly and usually feel satisfied with the information presented; but there are criticisms to be made. Recently, for instance, I was wondering about Boffin, a name that obviously appealed to Charles Dickens. Hanks and Hodges say that it is an English name of unknown origin but hint that it may be an anglicization of Welsh Baughan (found also as Vaughan), a diminutive of Baugh, ultimately from bach ‘little.’ A general comment on the treatment of the Welsh ch sound in English would have been useful, but I personally accept that theory. I wonder, though, why the Baughan (and Vaughan) entries do not mention that bach was an epithet that distinguished a son and father, a kind of Welsh equivalent of junior. I also have my doubts about how ordinary users of this dictionary will cope with its metalanguage. Linguistic boffins have no problems with a statement like “dim. of BAUGH, from W bychan, hypocoristic form of bach little.” But try that on an ordinary member of the public, the kind of person who will presumably consult this book in a library, and add in for good measure the last line of the Baughan entry which reads: “Cogn. (of 1): Corn.: BEAN.” Acting on that last hint, I looked at the Bean entry. I found suggestions that it is a “metonymic occupational name,” an English nickname or an anglicized form of a Gaelic personal name meaning ‘life.’ There was no cross reference to Baughan, however, nor a mention of Cornish byhan/vyhan ‘little.’

Genealogical information is occasionally added to the surname entries, but only when the families concerned are “important” according to a very traditional definition of that word. People well-known in the entertainment world, such as Frankie Vaughan, are definitely not mentioned. Under the entry for Howard, therefore, we are given notes on the noble house of that name, along with the possible derivations of the surname. The “noble” theme is continued in the first-name dictionary. Readers are there told that Howard represents “transferred use of the surname of an English noble family.”

Entries like that for Howard in the Dictionary of First Names hardly encourage me to take the main body of the book seriously. The absence of hard statistical evidence about the use of first names in the English-speaking world is also very worrying. Such evidence is vital for many reasons. It enables sensible decisions to be made about which names should be included in a work of this kind. Hanks and Hodges include Hrothgar, for instance, because it occurs in Beowulf and was borne by a vice-chancellor of Oxford University at the turn of the century. I do not consider that a sensible inclusion, especially when they choose to ignore Hugo, which has been regularly if infrequently used in Britain and the US since the 1860s.

Statistical evidence also indicates the reason for a name’s use. It is absurd to suggest that Howard has been used in modern times because it is the surname of an aristocratic British family. The popular use of the name in the US in the 1870s must have been in honor of Oliver Otis Howard (1830-1909), since the surnames of Civil War officers were often used in baptism. American bearers of the name, such as Howard Hughes and Howard Keel, later made the name well known to British parents. Hanks and Hodges totally ignore such American influence, though the evidence for it is overwhelming.

The authors' respective treatment of Howard as a surname and Howard as a first name is perhaps symbolic of the different qualities of these two dictionaries. Surname interpretation mainly requires good philological skills, which Hanks and Hodges supply. First names call for a frequent delving into areas of nonacademic, popular culture and recent social history, as well as a certain amount of linguistic judgment. The student of first names needs an enthusiastic and genuine interest in the behavior of ordinary human beings. Whatever else is in this Oxford Dictionary of First Names, it lacks that basic enthusiasm. It is much the poorer for it.

[Thames Ditton, Surrey]

OBITER DICTA: Five Postscripts to “The Scandalous Yiddish Guide of the Census Bureau”

Zellig Bach, Lakehurst, New Jersey

1. William Safire published an entire column under the title “Counting Census Mistakes” (“On Language,” The New York Times Magazine, April 15, 1990) in which he enumerated a number of errors in both the Census Bureau instructional Guide and in the census form itself. He found misplacement problems, mistakes in parallel structures, improper use of commas, wrong or missing prepositions, incorrect use of reflexive verbs, etc. “The Census Bureau,” he wrote, “has had 10 long years to get its forms straight.” And all this about its English!

2. Yoysef Mlotek, Cultural Director of the fraternal Jewish organization, the Workmen’s Circle (“der arbeter ring”), published in the New York Yiddish weekly Forverts a sharp attack on the outrageous illiteracy of the Yiddish translation of the Census Bureau Guide (April 20, 1990, p. 16). In a letter to the Census Bureau he asked “whether other foreign language translations of the Guide were similarly entrusted in such incompetent hands.”

3. I sent a copy of my article [XVII, 2] to the Census Bureau. After a delay of more than seven weeks I received a reply from Mr. Allan A. Stephenson, Assistant Division Chief for Outreach and Program Information, Decennial Planning Division. He wrote:

… To find a contractor to translate Assistance Guides in 32 languages, we required the foreign language expertise to be at least at the 3/3 level as rated by the Foreign Service Institute or a recognized equivalent. Communication Technical Applications, Inc. [which no longer exists] provided the translator for the Yiddish Guide… a native Yiddish speaker with expertise rated at the 5/5 level.

Mr. Stephenson further apologized for any inadvertent offense that the Yiddish translation may have caused, assured me that “in light of your comments” the Guide will no longer be distributed—an empty assurance since the count is over—and that the Bureau will be interested in my views about materials prepared in Yiddish for the year 2000 Census.

One may seriously question his characterization of the translator of the Yiddish Guide as a “native Yiddish speaker” (see below). Besides, it is axiomatic that there is a basic difference between spoken language and written language, and it is highly fallacious to assume that a native speaker, even with a fluent command of his language, can ipso facto intelligently write in it, let alone translate from or into it.

4. I spoke twice on the telephone with the translator of the Yiddish Guide. He was born in the United States and received his education in public schools. In his childhood a Hebrew teacher would come to his home for several hours a week. He never went to a secular Yiddish school where Yiddish was taught as a basic subject and where other subjects as well were taught in Yiddish. I had guessed correctly that his parents spoke Yiddish, and that that was the main source of his knowledge of the language. In the course of our lengthy telephone conversations I could not detect a sense of informed literacy about Yiddish as a language. It also became clear that the Yiddish of his parents was not standard Yiddish. He never wrote or published anything in Yiddish, and he seemed to have used as aids in translating the Guide Alexander Harkavy’s Yiddish-English Dictionary and Uriel Weinreich’s Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary. Needless to say, translation by dictionary is the crudest and, if one may say, the cruelest form of translation.

5. Maurice Samuel introduced to the English-reading public, in his book The World of Sholem Aleichem, the quintessential Yiddish-speaking Tevye, the dairyman who addresses himself even to God in Yiddish. (He is the main character of the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.”) And in his book In Praise of Yiddish (p. xiii), Samuel wrote about the presumed absence of any rules in the language:

It is gratuitously assumed that Yiddish … can dispense with strict forms and usages, that part of its appeal is supposed to lie in a happy-go-lucky grammatical and syntactical laxity which makes error impossible and everyone knowledgeable. Nothing could be further from the truth. [italics added]

EPISTOLA {Sol Steinmetz}

In connection with Dr. Zellig Bach’s article, “The Scandalous Yiddish Guide of the Census Bureau” [XVII,2], I thought your readers might like to know that in mid December of 1990 I received a call from an official of the Census Bureau asking me whether I concurred with Dr. Bach’s negative comments on the Yiddish Guide. Having seen the Guide, I replied that I indeed agreed fully with Dr. Bach’s assessment. I explained that the Guide was riddled with atrocious spelling, syntactic, and semantic errors. Though printed in the traditional Yiddish/ Hebrew alphabet, most of the words were misspelled, as though the writer had never seen a Yiddish dictionary; the syntax was garbled almost beyond recognition; the lexical content made little sense.

The Census Bureau official informed me that the translator had been approved by Communications Technical Applications, Inc., a private contractor, whose word on the expertise of the translator the Census Bureau tacitly accepted. The official admitted that at least in the case of Yiddish the Census Bureau had erred in relying on this contractor. He added that in the light of Dr. Bach’s and my comments “we will no longer distribute this Guide.” In a subsequent letter he added that “we will keep … your name on file for the year 2000 census. If we prepare materials in the Yiddish language, we would be interested in your comments.”

I hope to live to the year 2000 to help with the Yiddish Guide. I am sure that Yiddish will still be around, surviving its detractors, as it has for a thousand years.

[Sol Steinmetz, Executive Editor, Random House Dictionaries]

EPISTOLA {J. B. Lawrence}

I must take issue with both of the BIBIOGRAPHIA by Alan S. Kaye [XVI, 4]. In his review of Words That Make a Difference, he praises a sentence from The New York Times describing the miscellaneous junk in a harbor as “eclectic bounty.” If these items were in a collection that I put in my front yard, eclectic might be the word; but what is missing from the harbor’s variety is the element of choice: eclectic come from the Greek legein ‘to choose or pick.’

In the same piece, he traces savvy to Portuguese, which might be correct, but Mencken’s American Language derives it from the Spanish sabe. Professor Kaye’s nuance word is, at a guess, a suggestion from a word-processor’s spelling checker which was derailed by nonce word.

His review of Bernstein’s Reverse Dictionary indicates that he (and whoever revised Bernstein’s book) are behind the times on boxing weight classes: featherweight should precede lightweight, [and other principal divisions have been ignored].

[J. B. Lawrence, San Bernardino]

EPISTOLA {Henry I. Crist}

Is monotheism an inadequate word to describe basic beliefs set forth in the Old Testament? Recently, while browsing through the dictionary, I came across the word henotheism, defined as “the worship of one of a group of gods, in contrast with monotheism, which teaches that only one god exists.” If many of the people of the covenant believed that Jehovah was the supreme god among lesser gods, were they henotheists, rather than monotheists? Harper’s Bible Dictionary suggests, “Even Moses, whom we may regard as the founder of the religion of Israel, was more probably a henotheist than a monotheist.”

The distinction is a neat and illuminating one. I wonder why henotheism is not as common a philosophical designation as monotheism. It seems to be a way station between polytheism and monotheism, a useful concept that provides a missing link in the evolutionary process.

The root hen ‘one’ is found in hendiadys, a rhetorical figure labeling expressions like nice and warm, instead of “nicely warm.” It is also found in hendecasyllable, hendecagon, and hendecahedron.

[Henry I. Crist, Melbourne, Florida]

EPISTOLA {Jack Orbaum}

Milton Horowitz wrote about a mistranslation of a word in the Bible which was ostensibly responsible for Michelangelo’s putting horns on his sculpture of Moses [XVI,2]. Another mistranslation which has probably had a much greater influence on the Western world is that of the Hebrew word almah, which means ‘young woman’ but was translated as ‘virgin.’ The King James version of Isaiah 7:14 reads “Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son….” Matthew 1:22-23, in the New Testament, describes the birth of Jesus, referring it back to Isaish, saying, “Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold a virgin shall be with child and shall bring forth a son….”

The Hebrew word for virgin is bethulah, which would have been used in the original had the young woman been a virgin.

In the New English Bible, which was the subject of another article in the same issue of VERBATIM, the passage from Isaiah reads, “Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign. A young woman is with child and she will bear a son….” In the translation of the Holy Bible according to the traditional Hebrew text, published by the Jewish Publication Society of America, Isaiah 7:14 reads, “Assuredly, my Lord will give you a sign of His own accord! Look, the young woman is with child and about to give birth to a son….”

These 20th-century corrections of the original mistranslation cannot, of course, undo the implications that have resulted from translating almah as ‘virgin’ instead of ‘young woman.’

[Jack Orbaum, Sarnia, Ontario]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: American Grammar

Carl Mills, (Peter Lang, 1990), xi + 475pp.

Although this is essentially a textbook, it is lucidly written and presented and can be commended to those who have been less than satisfied by earlier attempts to provide a clear exposition of Chomskyan grammar. It is readable, but that compliment must be taken in the context in which it appears: a grammar could scarcely be classified as a “good read” in the same sense as a novel. Also, it should be understood that American Grammar, while it happens to deal with illustrations from American English, describes the grammar of most of English: the title derives from the association with America of the particular kind of grammatical analysis described: except for a few anomalous differences, the grammars of the major dialects of English are, of course, uniform.

This is not the place to launch a commentary on the shortcomings and virtues of the various theories of grammar (or grammatical theories) that have been proposed; suffice it to say that no one of them provides all the answers to all the myriad questions raised by language. Certainly, Chomsky’s theory, which denies behaviorism, makes one wonder if there cannot be certain aspects of language that depend on behavior (without requiring one to accept all facets of behaviorism). “Traditional” grammar, with its eight parts of speech, has proved woefully inadequate to the task of describing how language works, so something is clearly needed. Much of Chomskyan grammar is very boring and mechanistic, with its transformational rules and deterministic reflexes.

For me, some questions about grammar are still more comfortably answered by traditional theory, though I draw on transformational grammar when it suits me—any port in a storm. To hold that psychology—even physiology—has no relationship to grammar seems overbearing to me, for experience has a great deal to do with how we use and understand language, which I consider highly associative.

However, I should not enter the argument here: all theories have their strong and weak points, and transformational grammar appears to have fewer weak ones. I am interested in meaning, which is treated as badly by Chomsky and his followers as it was by the structuralists who preceded them. As Carl Mills writes, linguistic competence includes knowledge of phonology and syntax but not semantics, a view of Leonard Bioomfield’s that created many difficulties:

At the other extreme, some linguists in the late 1960s and early 1970s argued that almost all aspects of meaning in language ought to be explained by semantic rules in the grammar. Not only the meanings of words and the meanings of sentences, as most linguists define sentence meanings, but also the appropriateness of the uses of sentences, the functions carried out by sentences, and numerous other facets of what we call “meaning” have been proposed as part of the native speaker’s linguistic knowledge…. [W]e … note that adopting this view … ultimately may be equivalent to Bloomfield’s view that no aspects of meaning belong in grammar. [p. 363]

I think it patently silly to waste time trying to decide whether the Lexicon (note the capital L) of English is conceived of as a list of words or as a list of morphemes (meaningful elements that may stand alone or combine to form words) with a set of rules governing how the elements operate. The question is trivial, for the systems need not be mutually exclusive, nor need they exclude phrasal sets like Shut up! and kick the bucket and red herring which do not yield to immediate constituent analysis. It may be hard to believe, but in the 1960s some linguists advocated a stochastic approach to grammatical analysis—that is, one in which each word was analyzed on its own, without reference to what preceded or followed—an approach that even the merest intelligence ought to have rejected.

Grammar is a formidable term to many, largely because of their associations with it from their schooling, either in learning a foreign language or in learning more about their own. It is far from an easy subject, but it can be an interesting one, particularly to those who enjoy seeing how such an extremely complicated phenomenon as language is (and can be) put together to work. Carl Mills has written a useful, understandable, understanding, and informative introduction to the subject.

Laurence Urdang

One for the Road

K. H. McIntosh, Canterbury

Words are, generally speaking, old. Roads— or, at least roads with motor traffic on them—are relatively new. Hannibal’s elephants did not have to give way to oncoming traffic (there was none) and cries of “Mush, mush” are presumably all that has ever been required on polar ice-caps to urge on Eskimo dogs. Words on road signs, though, have the worst of both worlds, and the old certainly does not redress the balance of the new.

Today’s travelers on today’s roads have to make do with a sort of compressed-speak where speed is of the essence and brevity the soul of economy. Or should it, perhaps, be that the essence is of speed because if the road sign cannot be seen and understood at a distance of a hundred yards at a speed of 80 miles per hour then it might as well not exist? The message has to be short and simple, like STOP. Expand this to STOP CHILDREN and the first ambiguity creeps in. (In France this sign—showing two small children hand-in-hand—reads with Gallic simplicity PRUDENCE.) As it happens, the opposite of STOP isn’t GIVE WAY nor, as Americans advise even more seductively, YIELD. A visiting Englishman I know told me that the road sign he enjoyed the most in New York State was the one that advised him to SQUEEZE SOFT SHOULDER. No trouble at all, he said. As for LAY-BY … it was a pleasure, especially after FAST LANE: or should it have been the SLIP ROAD? It would be as well to avoid LOOSE CHIPPINGS anyway.

It is undoubtedly the single words that leave most to the imagination: DIVERSION (Watch the birdie?), CROSS (Buns, hot?) and RAMP (If you can’t beat them, join them?); but it is the CROSSINGS which bring their own crop of double meanings. HEAVY PLANT CROSSING must surely mean ‘the biggest aspidistra in the world’ while FARM CROSSING recalls the sad pre-war dust bowl joke of the American prairie:

“Seen Farmer Brown lately?”

“No, but his farm went by about an hour ago.”

Ironically enough, a LEVEL CROSSING is usually quite bumpy but PASSENGERS MUST NOT CROSS THE LINES is more important (it takes hours to unravel them.)

Needless to say, the law comes into all this although the police don’t CAUTION AIR BRAKES very much and BEWARE SLEEPING POLICEMEN hardly raises a “Ho! Ho!” down at the station any more. On the other hand, POLICE PATROL VEHICLES ONLY is something motorists have long suspected, and POLICE SLOW purely a matter of opinion. PEEL OFF is very dated now though.

Was it, perhaps, the early use of the word CIRCUS that led to the involvement of the animal word in the naming of pedestrain crossings? ROUNDABOUT with its fairground connotations has superseded CIRCUS but ZEBRAS, PANDAS, and PELICANS still have their CROSSINGS. To confuse matters still further there are road signs in Africa marked ELEPHANT and HIPPOPOTAMUS CROSSING which mean just that. There is one in a busy American street which reads TURTLES CROSSING—they are on their way to lay their eggs. Those English naturalists who help roads cross motorways are no doubt even now awaiting the scrivener. Watched, I daresay, by CAT’S EYES.

DISABLED PARKING PLACES conjure up a nice version of a handicapped car park while MOTORCYCLE BAY SUSPENDED has overtones of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. DECEPTIVE BENDS is open to any construction you care to put upon it (“Don’t forget the diver, sir, don’t forget the diver” as they used to say in ITMA all those years ago). The only new verb to emerge would seem to be CONING (“ices, chocolates, cigarettes”?) which must take quite a bit of translating into the vernacular of friendly countries—perhaps the LOLLIPOP LADY will help, especially if it’s a case of a ROUTE MAUVAIS as the French have it.

GRIDIRON isn’t torture any more but some sympathy must be felt for the London clergyman whose route from church to crematorium takes each funeral cortege through a road junction conspiciously marked DO NOT ENTER BOX UNTIL YOUR EXIT IS CLEAR. I am told he has never yet felt able to point the moral. (Perhaps he’s the same vicar who labeled the way to his church BRIDAL PATH.)

ROAD WORKS usually crop up immediately before an obstruction—and the road does not work at all; while FLOOD is presumably just the place to see a stream of traffic. Then there is the sign ONE IN SEVEN at the top of the hill. Can there be only six more like it, or is that just auto-suggestion?

Perhaps the best sign of all, though, is the one with no words at all, universally known as “Mae West Ahead.”

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“He says when he first became vicar of Trinity Church, its congregation was ‘very elderly and old-fashioned’ but now it was an active all aged congregation.” [From the Henley Standard, 9 February 1990:15. Submitted by Kate Ashbrook, Henley-on-Thames.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Other planned features of the store:… About 100 more employees, on top of the 125 to 150 new sales consultants hired in August.” [From the St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch, March 1990. Submitted by Dean Durken, West St. Paul, Minnesota.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“ARE YOUR TALENTS BEING WASTED? … You could be selected to manage small tasks, make beds, pass water, wrap silverware, call games, read, decorate, do craft projects….” [From the Post-Tribune, 13 August 1990:17. Submitted by Ed & Katherine Schedler, Jefferson City, Missouri.]

Bad Language and Big Bucks

David Robinson

Words that, barely a quarter of a century ago,would have resulted in instant arrest for insulting behaviour can now be overheard any time in Knightsbridge, Oxford Street, and any school playground in the country. On stage and screen they are even harder to escape.

This week a reader wrote, noting that out of a dozen plays he had seen which are currently running in London, he had been startled by language that he rated “obscene” in no fewer than ten. Here is a profound change from the time, not so long ago, when the Lord Chamberlain, the British Board of Film Censors, and the American Production Code ensured that the language of entertainment was far more purified than that spoken by most of its audiences.

In the silent-film era, language did not concern the censors, apart from occasional complaints at some vulgarity in subtitles. Talking pictures led to precise provisions in the American Production Code: “Pointed profanity [this includes the words God, Lord, Jesus, Christ—unless used reverently— Hell, damn, Gawd], or every other profane or vulgar expression, however used, is banned.”

For four decades the ruling was strictly followed on both sides of the Atlantic. It was a major sensation throughout the English-speaking world when, in 1939, David Selznick exceptionally prevailed upon Will Hays, the architect of Hollywood censorship, to permit Clark Gable in Gone With The Wind to utter his famous valediction to Scarlett O’Hara, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Selznick pleaded to Hays, with a touch of irony, perhaps, “I do not feel that your giving me permission to use ‘damn’ in this one sentence will open up the floodgates.” He was right: as late as 1955 the expressions Good Lord and damn were forbidden in the James Dean film, Giant. Yet proscription is ever the mother of invention. W. C. Fields fooled the Production Code with imprecations of his own devising, such as “Godfrey Daniel!”

In literature, the liberation of language began earlier than in films. In 1949 Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead narrowly escaped prosecution in this country because of its persistent use of the word “fugging.” Throughout the fifties the word which Mailer only suggested made more and more appearances in American novels, though it was regularly cut out of the English editions until 1959. In that year, the Obscene Publications Act first introduced a defense of artistic merit. The next year the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover brought four-letter words into public debate. Meanwhile, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office finally gave up its centuries-long censorship of the stage. On television, Alf Garnett (the original of America’s Archie Bunker) gave bloody such currency that the British Board of Film Censors allowed the word in Billy Liar (1963), with an A certificate.

The X certificate gave the Board new latitude. In 1967, bugger was permitted in Up the Junction. In the early 1970s, certification of the films of Andy Warhol introduced a truly comprehensive vocabulary. Today it is hard to think of an expression that has not been heard on the screen.

The modern vocabulary marks a singular linguistic revolution. The words proscribed by the old production codes were swearing or profanity in the true sense, with purely spiritual connotations in their reference to the Deity. While this form of searing has lost the force it once had, the essence of all the new words of emphasis is physical. They divide roughly into three groups. One, generally the mildest, includes rectal/excretory expressions.

The second comprises synonyms for the male and female genitalia. These—apart (in Britain) from the more infantile words such as dick and prick— retain the greatest power to offend and are the least used. In most common use are the words in the third group that originally define sexual acts. It is not uncommon for the word fuck and its derivatives to appear thirty or forty times in a police movie; in GoodFellas, the count would certainly be well over one hundred.

The anomaly of this prodigal use of language that would once have been generally regarded as unacceptably obscene is that, even today, it in no way coincides with the usage of the great majority of the audience—any more than did the excessive puritanism of the old production code. Thus, many people who go to the cinema encounter language to which they are not accustomed in daily life. Even though such language is much more a feature of American than British films, in the United States there is a majority to whom this mode of speech is quite alien.

Is all the language necessary, then? The American film trade would argue that it is. The bourgeoisie and the Bible Belt are not after all the most profitable audience; the public that is wants strong sensation, which they will to an extent measure by the language in which the films are couched. Moreover, since the public tends to prejudge movies by their classification, the film distributors aim for those classifications that promise the strongest fare while admitting the largest age range. In Britain this is the 15 certificate; in the US the PG13. Often there is a contractual obligation on film-makers to achieve a PG13, for which the minimum requirement is one use of the obscenity fuck. It is perhaps significant that even in the supremely “family” film Memphis Belle an attentive ear will detect the single requisite usage.

The level of language affects the extra-theatrical careers of films. Airline versions must have all the strong language excised. In this country, video versions, likely to be viewed at home, are sometimes more stringently classified by the BBFC than the original films. American television is generally much more puritanical than Britain’s in reediting films for transmission. British television has its own rules. BBC 1 and ITV will generally show films uncut after 10 pm; BBC 2 and Channel 4 after 9. When films are shown before those hours there is a danger that the viewer might be confused by abrupt cuts and bleeps. For the first time on Christmas Day the BBC censored a film classified as U by the British board, when a shit was removed from E.T., which followed the Queen’s speech.

Does language matter? James Ferman, Secretary of the BBFC, points out that it is only in the English-speaking world that such strong taboos have been built up around dictionary words and that this country shares with South Africa alone its extreme anxiety about “bad” language.

The most serious result of the proliferation of this comparatively restricted vocabulary is the impoverishment of writing. For hack screenwriters, sexually based words have become a kind of shorthand to represent insult or anger, while rectal/ excretory words more generally are used to get an easy laugh. As inevitably as Pow!! or Wham!! in comic strips, a comedy crash or fall has to be accompanied by a cry of Shee-it!

With use, the words have rapidly lost most of the shock value they once had. To be effective, writers will soon have to start looking for imaginative alternatives. Perhaps we will one day be startled again by Godfrey Daniel! or even the kind of creative flights to which linguistic prohibition could inspire O’Casey.

OBITER DICTA: Accuracy in Quotations

Laurence Urdang

The style manuals are explicit in their directions regarding the citing of others' writings. But I have been unable to find any recommendations regarding the quotations of oral material, though such quotations are very common in newspapers and other periodicals that deal with current affairs and, especially, with “the world of” entertainment and “celebrities.” (The quotations marks are intended to emphasize criticism of the practice of all the media to devote an inordinate amount of time and space to the interviewing and promotion of actors, singers, and other entertainers, most of whom have nothing to say and who make their living uttering words created by others. Articulate artists, writers, musicians, lawyers, scientists, teachers, historians, etc. are almost totally ignored by the media unless they can be identified as “newsmakers.”)

The style problem is fairly simple to describe. If an American writer quotes a British speaker as saying, “Honor thy father,” it would be arrant nonsense for some pedant to say, “If he is British, he did not say that. He said, ‘Honour thy father.’ ” And, in a recent article by Peter Stothard in The Times Saturday Review [27 October 1990:11] about Dianne Feinstein, the California politician, she is quoted as saying, “California does not want to swap one grey pinstripe suit for another grey pinstripe suit,” in which it would be silly to point out that, as an American, she would have said “gray,” not “grey.” On the other hand, the same article quoted George Bush as having said, “I kicked some arse last night” in his debate against Geraldine Ferraro in the 1984 campaign for vice president, and we all know that Bush does not say arse. In reference to Feinstein’s adversary in the recent campaign, Pete Wilson, an anonymous taunt is quoted as “And what about Wilson’s new blue Paul Newman contact lenses? And his stepped-up shoes?” As the taunter was an American, why is he using the Briticism stepped-up shoes? Admittedly, its meaning is transparent, but Americans do not use expressions like stepped-up shoes.

Some idioms do need translating. If such an idiom occurs in a direct quotation it ought to be left the way it was, then explained, even though the rhythm of the writing be disturbed. In live interviews that is not always easily done, especially when the interviewer is unfamiliar with an expression and is too embarrassed to admit it. In a recent television interview a British actor was recounting an anecdote in which he used the idiom the penny dropped, which means ‘I saw the light, came the dawn.’ A momentary flicker of perplexity on the interviewer’s face showed that he had not the slightest idea of what the speaker had said, but he blandly continued without missing a stroke.

I am reminded of an incident that took place some twenty years ago, when I first began visiting Britain regularly and was unfamiliar with nonliterary Briticisms. Several of us were locked in a long and tiring discussion of a project’s costs, which I considered to be realistic and the others thought expensive. Finally, a bit exasperated, I blurted out what I thought would be the metaphor that would settle the issue, saying, “If you want to make a penny, you’ve got to spend a penny!” Although those present were too polite to split their sides and roll about in hysterics, they were obviously amused, for, as was explained to me, I had picked the wrong metaphor: spend a penny is a Briticism for ‘go to the loo,’ or, as they say in America, ‘the bathroom.’ (It might not be inappropriate here to point out that, in addition to this British idiom, the only other major contribution made to culture by pay toilets was the invention, in Scotland, I understand, of limbo dancing.)

Struggling back to the subject, I should suggest that in quoting spoken material, mere spelling of the order of honor/honour, traveler/traveller, paneling/ panelling should follow the style of the medium, wherever it is published. The speaker’s words should never be changed; that is, arse ought not be substituted for ass or vice versa and, if an explanation of an unfamiliar word or phrase is required, it ought to be supplied, even if this must be relegated to a footnote. In this particular case, it is doubtful that anyone reading The Times is unaware of the meaning of American ass. Another alternative, not always possible, is to avoid entirely the passage containing the problem word or phrase. Perhaps the best choice is to use indirect discourse: Bush said that he had kicked some arse in his debate against… Almost anything is preferable to putting into people’s mouths things they did not say.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Dictionnaire de Franglais: Plus de 850 mots et locutions de langue anglaise courramment utilisés dans les médias, la conversation ou la correspondence française d’aujourd’hui et leur traduction en français,

(Guy Le Prat éditeur, 5, rue des Grands-Augustins, Paris, 1980) xx + 175 pp. (includes four-page photocopied typewritten supplement 1983).

There has come into my possession the above book from which all sorts of interesting information may be gleaned—information, moreover, not to be had from any other source. Most readers of VERBATIM would, I am sure, have been as intrigued as I was to discover that a yeoman is “an English landowner often having municipal functions”; that in tennis a ball is net “when it touches the top of the summit [sic] of the net separating the two sides”; that a starting block has “compartments in which race-horses are put before the off so they can all leave simultaneously”; and that brick is the English for “a sailing-ship with two masts”¹—taking part, maybe, in a lofing match: “in a sailing-boat regatta, the action of one of the participants consisting in an attempt to bring one of his rivals head to the wind.”

We are, of course, in the magical domain of Franglais, where it is virtually impossible to tell whether the given definitions accurately represent the way English words and phrases are employed by the French or merely reflect one person’s valiant but ill-founded guesswork: in other words, whether such massive incomprehension is individual or collective. Let us explore further and see if we can decide.

After the regatta one would presumably adjourn to a bostel “a hotel built on the water’s edge, intended for amateurs of navigation,” otherwise ship lovers. Fans of sport in general might then bet on a favored hurole-racer or watch a bout at walter—“in boxing, medium weight about 65 kg.”—or visit a skating-ring, conceivably in the company of a W.A.S.P. “a female auxiliary in the army”; or play at horse shop “a game that consists in trying to place, by throwing it from about ten meters, a horseshoe around a post,” clad (if female) in something suitable, like a mode smash “a type of light feminine costume, specially intended for tennis-players and easily permitting all movements”; or simply relax at gin-rommy.

Data concerning transport abound. One may travel in a break “a car of which the rear can be opened to load goods” or in an airliner affected by the jet-stremon which is “found at a great height in the stratosphere,” presumably by members of jetsociety “a group of socially prominent personalities.” If one is not too old one can enjoy a railway scenic “a little train used as an attraction for young people.” (If one is too old, one must beware of lying “spontaneous and inexplicable recollection of youthful memories forgotten since long ago, above all involving elderly persons.”) On returning to base one parks one’s car in a motor-home—where else?

Questions of business and commerce are not neglected in this guide, from the most basic rural matters (pick-up “agricultural equipment for the collection and storage of lucerne, hay, etc.”—the hay being made, no doubt, from ray-grass “a sort of English turf”) to the abstractions of high finance. A tresaurer will doubtless be interested to hear of a High-Flyer “a stock of the future,” even though he must beware of being misled by a racketter, involved in “the possibility of obtaining money by means that are often illegal.” He would be better off joining Dinner’s Club “an association whose members have a certain economic solidarity.”

Clothing and fashion receive due attention, as well. Given the figure, one might don slooghies “tight-fitting trousers and loose jacket of imitation leather worn by up-to-date young people or young girls” and baskets “sports shoes of cloth with rubber soles.” A man, naturally, could also get himself a hair clean “a man’s haircut exposing the ears and nape,” while a woman might prefer a Catogan “a small bun ending in a tuft of hair.”

The conclusion is inescapable. Franglais is a collective phenomenon, like fog or an epidemic, but the person who compiled this volume has made a noteworthy individual contribution, epitomized by his assertion that Union jack means “the different countries composing the British community.” So much for my publishable opinion; save for a few closing remarks the rest must be on the records, which is here defined as “part of an interview, a speech or report of a meeting not made available to the public and retained in the archives.”

One suspects that this volume must be the work of its publisher, Guy Le Prat… concerning whom I am obliged to assume that, as they, say in the vermouth advertisements, you do pronounce the t. At any rate he has dropped more than one brick. The grand tradition of Pedro Carolino is not dead.

[John Brunner, South Petherton, Somerset]

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BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Word Power Made Easy: The most effective vocabulary builder in the English language

Norman Lewis, (Bloomsbury, 1990), xiii + 514pp.

Why is it that I seem to be able to find typographical errors in others' works but seldom in my own? The first thing I spotted in this British edition of a book that has enjoyed enormous success in North America for some forty years, was “opthalmologist,” a common enough spelling error but, because it is spelt correctly elsewhere, merely a typo. I started looking for signs that it has been suitably Briticized. Sure enough, gynaecologist and paediatrician were so spelt in a section called “How to talk about doctors.”

As the book has been around for a long time, it probably works for many people, despite the fact that it violates my principle that the only legitimate way of increasing a person’s vocabulary is through reading, reading, reading (and then writing, writing, writing). There is no doubt that the book is very well presented, well written, and well organized; moreover, it offers good, sound, accurate information about the lexicon of English. Whether one can put that information to the appropriate use of building up vocabulary is moot; indubitably, some can, and one never knows till one tries.

Laurence Urdang

OBITER DICTA

Unbeknownst to many but historians and other researchers, librarians, older Britishers, those who rummage about among antiquarian books, and other eccentrics are the periodicals published in Great Britain and, to some extent, in America from the seventeenth century onward. We all know about The Tatler and one or two others and might even have read essays from them by Addison and Steele. But many people interested in such things have never heard of Gentleman’s Magazine, Notes and Queries, The Edinburgh Review, Century Magazine, and others that provided intellectuals with a worldwide communications network on such diverse subjects as Shakespeariana, Danteiana, the origin of visiting cards, the etymologies of words like punch, noyade, and ha-ha, amendments and emendations to the Dictionary of National Biography, showers of frogs, pub names, usage and grammar, ancient customs, superstitions, law, dialecticisms, rhyming slang, and the longevity of horses. Notes and Queries (then a weekly, more recently a quarterly published by Oxford University Press) carried, appropriately enough, a department called Queries and another called Replies, and the perseverance and loyalty of readers can be judged by the fact that in some instances, the interval between a Reply and a Query might be more than a quarter century. One of these—indeed, it might be able to claim credit for having the longest record of continuous publication anywhere in the world—was Gentleman’s Magazine, a monthly, published from 1747 till early in the twentieth century. I derive enormous enjoyment from reading through back issues of such periodicals, a rather formidable prospect when you consider that each year makes up two volumes of about 400-odd pages each. Let me give you some idea of the content in the following extracts:

In the issue for February 1822 there appeared the obituary of Thomas Coutts, aged 87, “the well-known banker in the Strand. In the next issue, under “Anecdotes of the Late Thomas Coutts, Esq.,” appeared the following:

The late Mr. Coutts was the youngest of four sons of John Coutts, esq. merchant at Edinburgh. … The following account of Mr. John Coutts and his family were [sic] communicated by the earl of Dundonald to the editor of the Morning Post, in refutation of anecdotes published in a pamphlet, entitled “Life of Thomas Coutts,” &c.

“Mr. Thomas Coutts married a daughter of Sir John Stuart, of Allan Bank, in Berwickshire, and Sir John Stuart’s mother was a daughter of Mr. Ker, of Morrison, in the same county; and Mr. Ker’s mother was Miss Grizzle Cochrane, daughter of Sir John Cochrane, second son of William, first Earl of Dundonald.

“A singular circumstance attended this Lady, which may not be generally known, but deserves to be recorded as an almost unexampled instance of female heroism and filial affection. I cannot exactly ascertain whether the fact I am about to relate happened before or after her marriage with Mr. Ker, of Morrison—I rather think it was previous to that event.

“Sir John Cochrane, being engaged in Argyle’s Rebellion against James the Second [of Scotland—that is, James I of England], was taken prisoner after a desperate resistance, and condemned to be hanged. His daughter having noticed that the death-warrant was expected from London, attired herself in men’s clothes, and twice attacked and robbed the mails (between Belford and Berwick), which conveyed the death-warrants; thus, by delaying the execution, giving time to Sir John Cochrane’s father, the Earl of Dundonald, to make interest with Father Peter (a Jesuit), King James’s Confessor, who, for the sum of five thousand pounds [something like $5 million today], agreed to intercede with his Royal Master in favour of Sir John Cochrane, and to procure his pardon; which was effected. Her great granddaughter, Miss Stuart of Allan Bank, married the late Mr. Thomas Coutts’s father, and brought him four sons—Peter, John, James, and Thomas. [Mr. John Coutts (the father) died July 29, 1761.]

[The Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1822]

The 1890s were marked by the publication, in fascicles [“parts”], of what is now called The Oxford English Dictionary but was then referred to, variously, as The New English Dictionary [N.E.D.] and The Historical English Dictionary [H.E.D.]. As only the earlier letters were gradually becoming available, it is amusing to note, in the correspondence published in Notes and Queries, Replies evoked by Queries that direct the questioner to stop wasting space in N. and Q. and go look up the answer in the N.E.D.

The editor of the N.E.D., J.A.H. Murray, often asked readers for help, particularly for dialect information about certain words and expressions and occasionally commented on Queries.

A sampling of some of the language topics considered and debated included:

pronunciation of water, golf, iron

origin of infra dig, take the cake, blackball, sand hog, Dutch courage, hoodlum(ism), horse latitudes, flotsam, jetsam, apple-pie bed/apple-pie order, jingo

whether none is singular or plural

condemnation of awful and awfully, preventative, taxidermist, transpire, of Latin and Greek sources for new words (e.g., telephone), lengthy (as an Americanism)

spelling reform

mnemonics

names

nicknames (e.g., Poet of the Poor (George Crabbe), Attic Bee (Sophocles), Madman of the North (Charles XII of Sweden), Manchester Poet (Charles Swain), Great Prussian Drill-sergeant (Frederick William I), etc.)

pseudo-French (e.g., double entendre, nom de plume, à l’outrance, en déshabille, laissezfaire, levée)

A typical exchange:

Over the entrance to the baths at Spa are the words: “Pentru Barbati.” Will someone tell me what language that is? Strange to say, they do not know either at the baths or at the hotel.

—8th S. IV, Oct. 14, ‘93:308

Pentru barbati sont deux mots de la langue roumane; ils signifient “pour hommes” (for gentlemen).

—8th S. IV, Oct, 28, ‘93:308

Here is Murray:

As several correspondents have written to me asking if I really wrote the words “an historical,” as printed in my guery on ‘Corduroy’ last week, I hope that I shall be allowed to say that I did not. I wrote, as I always do, “a historical,” which I consider to be better modern English, though many scholars prefer to retain the archaic “an historical,” just as some preachers retain the obsolete “an holy” and “an house,” which they find in the Bible of 1611.

—8th S. I, Jan. 16, ‘92:46

I could go on, but space is limited. If readers would (or would not) enjoy the inclusion of occasional extracts from such sources, many of which demonstrate that the concerns of people interested in language more than a century ago were often the same as those besetting us today, they should please let the Editor know their wishes.

OBITER DICTA

“Then there was the problem a Geological Survey fieldman had in proposing the name of a quadrangle map in New Mexico. Since quadrangle maps are named for the most prominent feature on the map, he had difficulty trying to explain his choice of name. He sent the following report to the office:

The Sherman quadrangle is named after the town of Sherman. There is no town by the name of Sherman. The chief center of population of the Sherman quadrangle is called Dwyer, but the post office at Dwyer is called Faywood Post Office. Faywood Post Office used to be located at Faywood, but since Faywood no longer exists, it was moved to Dwyer. It is not possible to name the Sherman quadrangle the Faywood quadrangle because there already is a Faywood Station quadrangle adjacent to the Sherman quadrange. Faywood Station is, of course, the station of the town of Faywood, which no longer exists. In the days when it did exist it was located in the Sherman quadrangle, about three miles east of Faywood Station.

As was mentioned above, there is no town by the name of Sherman. This is because the town of Sherman is really called San Juan. However, because there is another town by the name of San Juan somewhere else in New Mexico, they had to call the post office Sherman Post Office. It was named after Sherman. San Juan is not in the Sherman quadrangle, but about a mile north of it.”

[From “The Mountain Was Wronged: The Story of the Naming of Mt. Rainier and Other Domestic Names Activities of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names,” by Donald J. Orth, Names, Vol. XXXII, No. 4 (December 1984).]

OBITER DICTA: Colloqs and Infs

Millions of people own dictionaries. Some actually use them. In various surveys conducted by dictionary publishers over the past years, it has emerged that the main use to which people put dictionaries is to find the correct spelling of a word; the next most frequent use is to determine the meaning of a word; determination of pronunciaton, etymology, synonyms, usage notes, and any other paraphernalia offered comes low on the list.

As I have observed on numerous occasions in the past, dictionaries are rarely consulted by those who need them the most. In order to consult a reference book, one must first acknowledge either ignorance or insecurity, neither of which is either a crime or a reprehensible condition: many people are very certain about things about which they are dead wrong, thus never look them up to check their accuracy. On the morning of 9 September 1990, in a report on the Bush-Gorbachov meeting in Helsinki, a reporter on CNN (the US Cable News Network) referred to the conference using a term that could only be spelled “tête-à-thé,” which might have been some strange metaphor meaning ‘head in the tea’; or perhaps it was an oblique reference to China or to hocking a tchainik ‘gossiping.’ In any event, as it was being read from a script and not delivered off the cuff, I classified it as an illiteracy.

Recently I was editing a manuscript of a dictionary in which the lexicographer labeled irregardless an illiteracy, and I suggested that a less critical, more clinical term might be nonstandard. Readers might disagree, but I felt that regardless is more, so to speak, in the public domain than an expression like tête-à-tête, which one might classify as an “intellectualism” and, certainly, a more pretentious term than get-together or meeting. If one is going to be pretentious, one ought to get his pretences properly in a row. The anti-intellectual version of tête-à-tête is its English translation, head-to-head, which sounds somewhat vulgar to me and carries with it more the sense of ‘confrontation’ than ‘intimate encounter.’ (Another example of an anti-intellectualism is the expression between a rock and a hard place— that is “a rock” and not “Iraq,” regardless of current events — which I take to be a corruption of between Scylla and Charybdis, neither of which is easy to pronounce from its spelling. More examples of anti-intellectualisms, while not exactly “welcome,” will be reported on as received.)

Linguists (and lexicographers) try to avoid “loaded” terms in the labeling of words and senses in dictionaries. Taking a detached view is more “scientific” or “clinical,” regardless of what the individual scholar might feel: one would scarcely expect a doctor, diagnosing a victim of some revolting affliction, to accuse the patient of having a “disgusting disease.” By the same token, the sober observer of language ought not allow his emotions to get in the way of his cool evaluation of the facts (as he sees them), and a label like Illiterate has pejorative overtones and undertones inappropriate to the detached, scholarly view.

Years ago, lexicographers used the label Colloquial to designate words and senses that were at a language level somewhat below that of formal usage but not so low down and dirty as to be considered Vulgar or Slang. A word like Goody!, Great!, piddling, or tart up would fall into this category, though the kind and quantity of terms included depend largely on the prudishness of the person doing the labeling. Vulgar, which really means no more than ‘unrefined,’ is rarely encountered in modern dictionaries as a label because people have taken to designating four-letter words as vulgar, illustrating the semantic process known as pejoration ‘depreciation,’ the opposite of melioration. Today we should probably consider labeling Great! as Vulgar a bit harsh. Because dictionary users became accustomed to seeing words and senses of which they disapproved (in formal contexts) bearing the Colloquial label, the word colloquial began to undergo pejoration itself. By the early 1960s, when the labels to be used in The Random House Dictionary were being reviewed and discussed, we decided to drop the Colloquial label used in The American College Dictionary in favor of Informal, a practice followed by most English dictionary publishers from that time until now. Colloquial means nothing more than ‘used in colloquy, or conversation’ and is thus no more than a high-flown term for conversational, which, as far as I know, carries no stigma. (Slang is far too complex a notion and label to discuss here and will be treated at another time.)

Why lexicographers have not used Conversational or its abbreviations, Conv. or Convers., I cannot say: perhaps some have and I am not aware of it. My own observation is that Informal might be undergoing its own round of pejoration — these things sometimes go in cycles — and, in a reference book I recently completed, which will be published by Oxford University Press in the autumn of 1991, I have chosen to return to Colloq. As the book is in machine-readable form, should the publisher decide, in a generation’s time, to switch back to Informal, the change can be readily accommodated by performing a simple substitution program on a computer, and all the Colloqs will become Infs before you know it.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“During our entire marriage of 44 years, plus a few preceding years of courtship, I could count the number of times Walt was stopped by a policeman while driving on just three fingers of my left hand.” [From Lil Phillips’s column in the Cape Cod Times, 19 November 1990:11. Submitted by Laura W. Neville, Cotuit, Massachusetts.]

Paring Pairs No. 40

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). Jailbird’s position sounds egotistical.
(b). Spartan homeland for tatting fiend?
(c). Sounds like place for fabric.
(d). Becomes rowdy if hackles are raised.
(e). For many people, what’s left is used.
(f). Testosterone is the evil-doer.
(g). Sounds as if airline serves rotten meat.
(h). Sheriff’s deputies in musical westerns admit of law is worth having.
(i). Hindu adder appears during autumnal estivation.
(k). Big gun turns out to be suave drag.
(l). Mermaid’s hideout on Staffa?
(m). Lascivious cleric going off in all directions.
(n). Insufficiently specific rule might prove dangerous.
(o). Time’s founder’s standard.
(p). One Celt attends race meeting wearing tie.
(q). Detour leaves me cold.
(r). Strong inclination for the swan song.
(s). Souvenir holder for rice wine.
(t). Drink somehow resembles Irish jingle.
(u). I have one man as my broker.
(v). Parentage of godfather.
(w). WC Conservative who supports Magma Charter.
(x). This demi-john is for parking valet.
(y). Charles’s wife, shorn, emphasized that she was under tension.
(z). To be familiar with the savate is not an insignificant accomplishment.

(1). A.
(2). Bag.
(3). Beech.
(4). Bore.
(5). Boy.
(6). Cannon.
(7). Car.
(8). Carry.
(9). Cave.
(10). Chant.
(11). Con.
(12). Demon.
(13). Di.
(14). Drawer.
(15). Factor.
(16). Faille.
(17). Father.
(18). Feet.
(19). Fin.
(20). Gal’s.
(21). Gent.
(22). Hand.
(23). Hood.
(24). Indian.
(25). Keep.
(26). Know
(27). Lace.
(28). Lapsed.
(29). Lava.
(30). Lime.
(31). Loose.
(32). Male.
(33). Mean.
(34). Neck.
(35). Off.
(36). On.
(37). Pen.
(38). Posses.
(39). Rake.
(40). Rickey.
(41). Rough.
(42). Sake.
(43). Scot.
(44). Seat.
(45). Second.
(46). Sing.
(47). Smooth.
(48). Stressed.
(49). Summer.
(50). Tory.
(51). Turn.

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. 39

. The correct answer is (19) Feint.

(a). I, the less sensitive person, finished first. (35,50) Number. Won.
(b). Bedlam concentrated here. (36,25) Nuts. Hell.
(c). Be mean and say how old she is. (3,1) Aver. Age.
(d). British officer’s servant, scourge of the underworld? (4,32) Bat. Man.
(e). Put another way, it’s only money. (8,33) Cash. Mere.
(f). Put another way, to prefer Indian dish is to lead one to behave obsequiously. (17,12) Favor. Curry.
(g). Have cereal with a flourish. (7,14) Bran. Dish.
(h). Odd stress curbed means strengthening. (39,22) Rein. Force.
(i). Harmless Firework created by box man. (40,10) Safe. Cracker.
(j). Are evergreens just a tub of lard? (20,28) Fir. Kin.
(k). Which team are you on in America? (44,43) State. Side.
(l). Tenets of bitch goddess? (15,30) Dog. Ma.
(m). Stake you to demon drink? (27,2) Imp. Ale.
(n). Execration of man talk. (31,13) Male. Diction.
(o). Denunciation of Siamese attack. (45,37) Tie. Raid.
(p). Stagger in where hull comes round. (46,26) Tumble. Home.
(q). Incubus now to rid of everything bad. (42,16) Shed. Evil.
(r). Her q.v. might be petulant or testy. (11,38) Cross. Reference.
(s). Where do I look up skivvies? (47,48) Under. Wear.
(t). Administered at the demise of former cobblers. (29,51) Last. Wrights.
(u). Succubus changes to harass you. (5,16) Bed. Evil.
(v). Do those at the Tower sound like Flower people? (6,18) Bee. Feeders.
(w). Dissatisfied customer’s reaction is phony. (9,21) Counter. Fit.
(x). Was it Miss Flagg who took the tonic at Salem? (49,24) Which. Hazel.
(y). This gamboge mallet is for the birds. (52,23) Yellow. Hammer.
(z). Friar’s grumpiness becomes a habit. (34,41) Monk. Scowls.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“I’m sorry I never got to meet him while he was alive.” [Leonard Maltin on Andy Devine, from Entertainment Tonight, TV program, 20 February 1989. Submitted by Emilio Bernal Labrada, Falls Church, Virginia.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“ ‘It’s hard to get medical aid if you’re HIV-infected in many areas.’ ” [A quotation from Dr. Richard J. Howard from The New York Times, 11 November 1990. Submitted by Ron Tyler, Didsbury, Alberta.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The main auditorium of the Midland Center for the Arts proved the effectiveness of its acoustical design as the phrases of Feltsman traveled to the back rows where your reviewer sat, totally intact.” [From the Midland Daily News, 15 November 1990. Submitted by Lawrence H. Brown, Midland, Michigan.]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. k pens failing, with saliva left (4-4)
5. ace to draw in poker game at ten (6)
9. ngle insect returned for citrus fruits (8)
10. umber for odd man out (6)
11. aise levee at rocks (7)
12. ontribute something that’s disgusting in overthrow (5,2)
13. housands heading west to get distant rural homestead (5,4)
15. lso called a yacht back (5)
16. ushes caribou back south (5)
18. ompany nurses with year high from cooking ingredient (4,5)
21. tailor ultimately takes in five collars (7)
22. ithstand the stocking deterioration (7)
24. inema careers for block seller (6)
25. ollection with a title: back issues (8)
26. reek character leads small revolution (6)
27. ecure in position, in addition to holding a job (8)

Down

1. Two articles in Vogu dummy (7)
2. Tribal ancestor carrying spear (5)
3. These people embrace modern music treatment (7)
4. Sources of capers invovling range (11)
6. Doctor put me right with a vegetable dish (7)
7. Bolder bread line (9)
8. Second in command, with court work for army animal? (7)
12. Photographers turned with crude sign (11)
14. Seriously, I get close home (2,7)
16. Authenticity is found kingdom (7)
17. Support us in disgrace (7)
19. Firm pasta unchewable in the middle (7)
20. South American nation’ editor read thoroughly (7)
23. The woman gets close to misanthrope (5)

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. S(UP)PORTS.
5. CHASTE (homophone).3
10. ROOKS (2 meanings).
11. NE(VER MIN)D (den rev.).
12. FR (E)IGHT.
13. RU(ST)LER.
14. F-L-AT TIRE.
16. TOPED (rev.).
19. NO(RM)S.
21. CO(LLA)PSE (all rev.).
24. UPSCALE (anag.).
26. B(R)OTHER.
27. TE(LEVIS)ES.
28. G-AUNT.
29. SAD-IST (it’s anag.).
30. FEATHERS (hidden).

Down

1. ST-RIFE.
2. PROP(ELL)ER.
3. ON SIGHT (anag.).
4. TEN(E)T.
6. HARD-SET (anag.).
7. STILL (2 meanings).
8. EL DORADO (hidden).
9. O-VERSE-LL.
15. IN C(RE)ASE.
17. POS(T HOU)SE.
19. IN QUOTES (anag.).
20. S-CRAVES.
22. A(MO)NGST.
23. G-RATIS (sitar anag.).
25. SO-LID.
26. BASTE (homophone).

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. On the other hand, this is not Franglais, either: according to Petit Robert it has been standard French since 1782. ↩︎