VOL XVIII, No 2 [Autumn 1991]

Speaking of the Unmentionables

Don Sharp, Springfield, Missouri

In the nineteenth century, the Age of Euphemism, the word unmentionables designated only one specific referent—men’s trousers. Not only was the mentioning of a man’s (or woman’s) leg taboo, but the garment covering it was also forbidden to be spoken of in polite conversation. In modern dialogue, which in no sense approaches the gentility of the perfumed puritanicals, the denotation of unmentionables has broadened to include body organs, curses, and biological functions. How clever it is, though, that metaphor, the great facilitating factor in the changing of word meanings, has carefully camouflaged the unmentionables of the current day.

Consider the following vignette, apparently void of any hint of an unmentionable:

Mrs. Eleanor Sutherland, the vivacious wife of the petroleum magnate, H. R. Sutherland, is hosting a midsummer patio brunch with her friend of many a social season, Grace Walthum, wife of Sam Walthum, considered by many to be the richest man in the state, in honor of Sandra Chapman, the young Illinois debutante and intended wife of Tom Weed, Republican candidate for governor.

“Girls, the treat for this morning is avocado finger sandwiches. Fanny made them for the first time last week, and H. R. thought they were simply sumptuous. Only today, she made them with German pumpernickel. I do hope you like them.”

“Oh, Eleanor, you must pencil this off for me on one of your personalized recipe cards. These are purely delicious. Don’t you agree, Sandra?”

“Indeed, I do. I might serve them as hors d’oeuvres for Tom’s political science seminar at the university next week.”

“You two are testimony enough for Fanny’s culinary powers, although I do detest her slicing the bread so thick. After finishing off the sandwiches, we’ll savor some vanilla mousse.”

“That’s a lovely centerpiece of bachelor’s buttons and cowslips, Eleanor. Wherever did you find such exquisite flowers?”

“Yes, and the cubicle you have them arranged in is just gorgeous.”

“Oh, Frank, the gardener, grew them on the front lawn. He’s hoping to have mistletoe by Christmas, and if the spring orchids don’t fizzle, Sandra can use them in her nuptial ceremony. By the way, Sandra, where will you and Tom honeymoon?”

“We’re going to spend two weeks in the Grand Tetons. Then we’re off to the ocean where Tom says he’s going to swim stark nude. Would you believe it?”

At this moment, there is a disturbing noise nearby.

“Jeepers creepers, Eleanor, what is that whirring commotion?”

“Why, Grace, look across the lawn to the orchard. It’s a feisty covey of flatulent partridges taking flight. Aren’t they beautiful, girls?”

“Tom’s greyhound would certainly think they were a beautiful sight.”

“My, how the time has slipped away. We must be going, Sandra.”

“Of course, we must, and Mrs. Sutherland, I have so enjoyed being a part of such a stimulating conversation.”

“Girls, it was my deepest pleasure. Please do come again.”

Actually, in the preceding dialogue, three ladies from the highest level of society can be cited for innocently mentioning the unmentionables in no less than twenty-plus instances, to wit:

Avocado was borrowed from Spanish and was originally spelled aguacate. The word’s origin is Nahuatl ahuacatl, a word meaning ‘testicle,’ because of the similarity of the shape of the fruit.

Pumpernickel was borrowed directly from German, a compound of pumpern ‘to fart’ and Nickel the ‘devil.’ The allusion could be to a hand slapping the loaf, thereby producing a deep, hollow, fartlike sound. On the other hand (pun intended), the root sense might be implying the bread is so hard to digest it would make the devil fart.

Pencil (as well as penicillin) was borrowed from Latin pēnicillus ‘paintbrush,’ a diminutive of peniculus ‘brush,’ which is also a diminutive of penis, which in Latin (also) meant ‘tail.’ Figuratively, a brush is a penis is a tail.

Seminar came through German from Latin sēminārium ‘plant nursery.’ The word’s ultimate origin is Latin semen ‘seed.’ Since the testicles are producers of semen, they are often referred to in slang as seed.

Testimony and detest are both based on Latin testis ‘witness, testicle.’ In the final analysis, a man can only witness to his virility by his testicles. The root sense of testimony, then, is ‘a laying of the testes on the evidence table’ and of detest is to ‘hate to the extent of losing one’s testicles.’

Vanilla, extracted from the seedpods of a tropical plant, was borrowed from Spanish vainilla, which denoted the flower, the pod, or the flavoring. Spanish had formed vainilla from vaina ‘sheath,’ a word it had borrowed from Latin vāgina ‘sheath for a sword.’ Later, vagina was borrowed into English and assigned its present meaning from the similarity of the functions.

Bachelor’s buttons, a term that denotes a plant with spherical-shaped flowers, was created as a metaphor of the male testes.

Cowslip is not “cow’s lip.” It is from Old English cūslyppe ‘cow manure,’ literally, ‘cow slip.’ The flower is aptly named, since it grows well in profusely manured pastures.

Cubicle is from Latin cubāre ‘to bend over in preparation for sexual activity.’ The word now designates a space so small a person might be required to bend over to enter it.

In its root sense, mistletoe is the ‘bird-shit plant.’ The word is cognate with Old High German mist ‘manure, shit, dung.’ The seed of the plant was dispensed in the dung of birds.

Orchid is from the Greek orchis ‘testicle.’ The flower was so called by Pliny the Elder because the double root resembled two hairy testicles.

Fizzle is probably from Middle English fisten ‘to fart.’ In 1532 the word is recorded with the meaning to ‘fart noiselessly.’

The Grand Tetons is a mountain range in Wyoming. They were coarsely named from their root sense, ‘big tits,’ from French teton ‘tit,’ because of their shape.

Stark nude is euphemistic for stark naked. The term was originally start naked (Middle English stert, from Old English steart ‘tail, ass’) and is preserved in redstart ‘bird with red tail feathers.’

Jeepers creepers is nothing other than a euphemistic cover-up for the curse Jesus Christ. The term was actually used as early as 1937.

Feisty, like fizzle, began as Middle English fysten, fisten ‘to fart.’ At one time, fysting curre referred to a stinking dog, and feist named a small dog of mixed breed.

Covey, like cubicle, is from Latin cubāre ‘to bend over for sexual purposes.’ The word came through Middle French cover ‘to incubate.’

Flatulent “having stomach gas” came through French from Latin flatus ‘a farting.’

Partridge came through Old French and Latin perdīcem, from Greek pérdīx ‘partridge,’ which is related to pérdesthai ‘to fart.’ The partridge is a “farting bird” because of the noise made by its being flushed.

Finally, the first element of greyhound probably means ‘bitch.’ Old Icelandic greyhundr is ‘bitch hound.’

Most will agree that euphemism is an acceptable means of avoiding the unmentionables, unutterables, inexplicables, ineffables, inexpressibles, and whatever else they have been called. While it is the function of metaphor to conceal the unmentionables, it is likewise the pleasurable business of etymology to expose them.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Every minute was more exciting than the next.” [From an on-camera interview with Linda Evans, commenting on “Night of 100 Stars” party in New York to promote “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous.”]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Best Place In Town To Take A Leak.” [From an advertisement of Conn. Auto Radiator, Inc. in a local television program guide, 19 August 1990.]

Wrenches in the Gorse and Bracken

Bob Swift, Miami

It began innocently enough, without guile on my part. We were traveling on an interstate through flat, scraggly country. Nothing seemed to grow at the roadside except dry, brownish, stalky, weedy brush.

“What’re those bushes, daddy?” a child whined.

“Gorse,” I said absently.

“Gorse?” said my wife, raising an eyebrow.

“Well, then, what’s that?” She pointed to a patch of equally depressing but bushier shrubbery.

“Bracken,” I said serenely.

I had, I now believe, been reading an English novel, or perhaps a Sherlock Holmes adventure, and so the words just popped out of my subconscious. You know, in English novels people and large hounds are always chasing about on desolate moors, amid gorse and bracken. I hadn’t the foggiest idea—and haven’t to this day—what gorse and bracken look like.

“Gorse and bracken,” my wife mused. “Ah yes, one of the great teams of the Golden Age of comedy. Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Gorse and Bracken.”

“Gorse and bracken, gorse and bracken,” chanted the children gleefully.

A bit farther down the road we halted for lunch at a roadside rest stop. My youngest pointed to a bird and said: “What’s that, daddy?”

Perhaps I was thinking of car repairs, for the engine had been making odd noises. Whatever the reason, without a blink I replied: “It’s a Wrench.” The lie came to my lips just as easily as to the lips of Joseph Goebbels. Then, to my horror, without waiting for another childish question, I pointed to a crawling caterpillar and said glibly, “Look. There’s a Squirm.”

I had embarked on a life of deceit involving the names of nature’s own flora and fauna. Perhaps I had an unconscious recollection of seeing, long ago, James Thurber’s delightful drawings of such creatures as The Dudgeon and The Barefaced Lie in his “A New Natural History.” If so, I didn’t make the connection for years, and prefer to believe that great minds,… et cetera.

Anyway, to my kids, all bushes became Gorse and Bracken. All birds were Wrenches. Worms, snakes, and such were Squirms. I didn’t disillusion them. Instead, I confess with shame, I found that merely misleading my children was not enough. Since I lived in South Florida, where real tropical exotica abound (poisonous toads, walking catfish, two-foot-long green lizards from Cuba, etc.) it was easy to flummox visitors.

“Gosh,” my brother-in-law said, peering apprehensively into the dark of my back yard, a subtropical jungle, “it sounds like we’re in Africa. What’s that … growly sort of chirping sound?”

“I believe that’s a Strike,” I said. “A bird related to the macaw.” Cupping a hand to my good ear, I added, “Yes, I’m sure of it. A common Strike. It has a predatory cousin, the Preemptive Strike.”

“Is that so?” my brother-in-law muttered, with some awe in his voice.

Visitors from the North always demanded a visit to the nearby tourist attraction, a lush, tropical paradise populated by trained parrots and alligators and colorful insects and such. So I took them.

“See that curious little beast over there?” I said, pointing. “That’s a Peccadillo. His armor, like a shell, over most of its body, and great long claws to dig in the ground. And there, climbing that tree— the big blue lizard, see it?—that’s an Orthodontia. The striped one—see it?—is a Pharisee. Or, wait, maybe that’s a Paraphrase. Whatever. It’s larger than the Stentorian at any rate.”

With practice, I became bolder, mixing in the names of real flora and fauna.

“A neighbor of ours used to own a ring-tailed coatimundi,” I said. “It would escape and climb our Ficus Benjamina. Look out, don’t step on the Bufo Marinus.” Then, without missing a beat, I continued:

“See those leafy things there? That’s Impetigo. The feathery thing is Implicit. And the vine growing beside it is Thorax. It’s sort of like poison ivy so don’t touch. You’ll break out in a rash. The flowering bush is Divertissement. And that bristly thing is a Septum. One variety of Septum has been genetically mutated by exposure to radon in the soil; it’s called the Deviated Septum.” Without a blush I eyed ground-hugging plants and reeled off their names: Hex, Ponder, Explicit, and Envy.

“See the ground cover with the yellow blossoms?” I said. “It’s Regalia.”

I was delighted to answer questions about butterflies, birds, and creepy crawly things:

“Yes, that’s an Utter Gall. And there in a row are a Sheer Audacity, a Wretched Excess, and a Cistern. I had hoped we’d see a Damnable Outrage but they usually hole up in the daytime; there might be one hiding there in that patch of Philanthropy. The orange one is a Flirtatious Glance and, look, the little one hiding behind that bed of Logic is the Furtive Glance. That one in the ferns is a Connubial Bliss. The fern itself is Lurch.”

Touring the tourist attraction’s aviary—in which the birds flew free while visitors strolled in a glass tunnel—I hit my stride.

“The big blue wading bird is a Shrift. The smaller one there is the Short Shrift. There’s a flock of Cognitive Verbs and a pair of Light-Hearted Banters. The one zipping around in circles is an Orbital Sander, and the drab little creature making those sad chirps is a Plain Brown Wrapper.”

At the nearby zoo, I was quick to point out the Utter Gall, a burrowing marsupial similar to the Unmitigated Gall, and the horned mountain dwellers, the Apex and the Pharynx. Back at home, sitting on the terrace listening to the evening sounds, I would invariably inform our visitors that many of South Florida’s indigenous species are scarce now.

“When we first moved here, a covey of Ruffled Grouch lived right over there in that hedge of Presumption, but no more. And Visage, Expletive, and Articulate used to grow wild. Now…” and I laughed harshly, “now only the garden catalogues have them. And Expletive has even been deleted from those.”

I suspect that many visitors were so overwhelmed with the tropical heat that they didn’t pay close enough attention. Or perhaps it was my habit of feeding them industrial strength Martinis before I began my nature lessons.

One of my visitors, however, listened solemnly to my spiel, then presented me with a card. It said:

Membership in the Indoor Bird Watchers is granted to those who have identified the following birds through the bottom of a Martini glass, while seated—The Extra-Marital Lark, the Great American Regret, the Morning Grouse, the After-Dinner Pee Wee, the Double-Breasted Seersucker, and the Rosy-Breasted Pushover.

I had been checked and mated at my own game. But that didn’t stop me. I remain addicted to my Miami vice, although torn by the knowledge that all over the country are innocent children, naive relatives, and perplexed winter visitors, all telling their friends and families about the wildlife I showed them in Florida.

Guilt can’t stop me, of course. Like any other addict, I can’t wait for my next fix. Come on down, y’all, I want to take you out in the yard and point out the Wretched Excess, the Ingratiating Manner, the Hesitant Smile, and the Sheer Audacity. There’s a Veritable Shambles right beside the front steps, and by the fish pond you can spot a Receptacle, an Incipient Quarrel, and a Fidget. And look up; there goes a Smote, circling in the air. I think it’s hunting an Apparent Hoax. See, there’s one now, crawling under that bed of Xerox.

EPISTOLA {A. George Koplow}

Laurence Urdang’s comments on “politically correct” language reminded me of a television interview on a network morning program the day after “Dances With Wolves” won several Academy awards. Live from the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, the (Anglo) interviewer was very careful to refer to “Native Americans.” The interviewees consistently referred to themselves as “Indians.”

[A. George Koplow, Rock Island, Illinois]

Cross-talk

David Galef, University, Mississippi

Searching for some refreshment in an unfamiliar town, I came across a luncheonette with this sign in the window: “HOT” COFFEE. I stared at the sign for a moment. Something about the quotation marks made the coffee suspect, the way a real estate agent will call a closet a “room.” Since I didn’t feel like drinking a tepid beverage, I walked until I got to a diner that served me an acceptable cup of java. There on the menu was listed “FRESH” EGGS. The purpose was obviously to highlight, to emphasize, but I would argue that these places are only hurting their business. Scare-quotes, as they are sometimes called, call into question the very words they assert.

These are examples in which the wording undercuts itself, yet without any apparent sarcasm. There are those who argue that it is simply a case of language calling attention to itself, as Steven Short noted in a letter to VERBATIM fifteen years ago. Other readers, such as Jon Mills and Pat Solotaire, showed outright suspicion of entrees like “Roast beef with ‘gravy’ ” and a liquid soap boasting “ ‘Contains No Phosphates!’ ” The basic meaning does not shift, but somehow its implications turn against it. The effect is generally unintentional, like two people talking at cross-purposes—so I decided to call this phenomenon “cross-talk.”

Soon after that, I discovered another kind of cross-talk, which has the insidious effect of undercutting not itself but all related instances. I was in the supermarket, buying dessert. “We use only the finest ingredients,” read the label on one ice cream brand. This seems like a simple statement, what the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin termed a constative utterance: a base level of communication, with no metaphor or secondary meanings attached. But consider the implications of the label: most other ice cream makers cut costs by using mediocre contents. The wording thus has an extended or connotative aspect to it, becoming what Austin called a performative utterance. In fact, many manufacturers use this kind of wording as a polite way of discrediting their rivals. The impact of this seemingly nonassertive language is such that the Federal Drug Administration has recently banned the “No Cholesterol” label on foods that never had cholesterol anyway. The unfair inference is that somehow the manufacturer has reduced the cholesterol, or that other brands still contain a lot of it. The increasingly common claims “All Natural” and “Fresh” have a similar effect and are also coming under federal scrutiny. But the investigation should really go beyond the supermarket: when a jewelry store that does ear-piercing advertises, “We sterilize all our instruments,” is it not hinting something unsavory about other establishments?

What accounts for the pernicious effects of cross-talk? Cross-talk seems to be a cousin of irony, giving a result opposite to what is seemingly intended. The difficulty arises in trying to say what kind of irony cross-talk resembles. Irony of statement, or sarcasm, seems close: exclaiming, “What a surprise!” over a drearily foregone conclusion, for example. But consider when a little child tells his father, “We’re going to surprise you with a birthday party tomorrow afternoon!” There is no irony of statement intended here, yet the sentence neatly defeats its purpose. A clue may be offered by dramatic irony, in which the audience knows what the speaker is unaware of. Does the cross-talk in the birthday-surprise announcement derive from the select audience, who knows that the speaker is sabotaging his meaning? Situational irony need not involve language at all, just an action that achieves the opposite effect of the intention. Maybe this is where the bulk of cross-talk belongs, though it needs an audience to apprehend it correctly, which makes it also linked to dramatic irony.

The truth is that cross-talk may at times resemble all three ironies, depending on the intent, audience, and effect. And since only irony of statement is deliberate, the effects of cross-talk range from accidental to purposeful. Praeteritio, that sly rhetorical device of mentioning what one is passing over, belongs to this category of cross-talk: “That goes without saying” covers up the obvious need to say it, and “I will pass over the topic of my opponent’s adultery” should be recognizable as the ploy it is. But then there are instances where the degree of dislocation is unclear. Does the common capper to a brief business conversation, “Let’s do lunch sometime,” signify an upcoming meal or a polite brushoff?

Let me illustrate the intricacies involved: I recently received a card from an academic journal acknowledging an essay I had submitted. They were holding it for further consideration. The last sentence read: “We assume, of course, that you have not submitted this essay elsewhere.” Is this sarcasm? Almost certainly not. Yet once again the implications run counter to the wording and tone. The urbane assume and of course finesse the real meaning of the sentence, i.e., “We are worried that you may have indeed submitted this essay elsewhere.” The message is all the more urgent because its mere presence hints that would-be contributors often do submit the same essay to more than one journal simultaneously.

The most perplexing species of cross-talk remains the unintentional reversal. In a recent advertisement for the luxuriously quiet Lincoln Town Car, Jack Nicklaus is trying to make a putt, but cannot because of the noise of the spectators. Through the miracle of television, all of them are crowded inside the car with the windows shut, resulting in utter silence. Nicklaus takes a swing: the ball rolls to the lip of the cup, where it stops. Suddenly someone inside the car sneezes, and the ball slips into the hole. It is a funny moment, but what does it imply? That the new car is not really quiet? That quiet is not always such a good idea, anyway? And do not both ideas run counter to the advertising pitch?

We may mean what we say, but do we always say what we mean? A friend of mine once tried to sell his old car by parking it in his yard with a sticker that read “FOR SALE: $300.” He couldn’t understand why no one showed any interest, until a passerby told him any car that cheap had to be a lemon. He promptly changed the price to $700 and sold it the next day. This story shows that interpretation is all important, as in cheap meaning ‘inexpensive’ to some people and ‘shoddy’ to others. To return to Austin’s distinction between constative and performative utterances: Austin eventually concluded correctly that there are no purely constative utterances. The simplest sentence, such as “I am a woman,” can have secondary meanings in certain contexts: for example, “I wish I were a man” or “Thank God I’m not a man.” In the broadest sense, then, any language is potentially cross-talk, given a suitable situation, just as any utterance may become ironic. Meaning is not as stable as we might like it to be.

At times, the simplest wording can cross up the reader. Last week, I was stopped at a traffic light with a sign underneath that read, “RIGHT ON RED AFTER STOP.” Since I live where right turns at a red light are permitted, first I did not think much about it. The sign just seemed superfluous. But then it occurred to me: why was the notice there at all? I stared at the sign for a moment, and I realized that the words in a way implied their opposite; that is, a right turn at a red light is not allowed in this district—except here. In the end, I spent so much time pondering the implications of the wording that I missed two traffic light changes, and cars started to honk behind me.

Here is a real cautionary tale. For years, a sign along Route 80 in New Jersey near the George Washington Bridge flashed a “BEST ROUTE” arrow to indicate the road with the least traffic. Savvy motorists soon realized that everyone took the route indicated and clogged the roadway—so the “best route” was probably the worst one. This raised a troubling question: if enough people were alive to the real significance of the sign, and so left the “best route” alone, would not the sign become trustworthy again? In that case, people would once again take the “best route,” which would once again call the sign into question … and the situation would rapidly escalate into a paradox.

Where does this leave us? To postulate that all language is two-faced runs counter to everyday reality, where people seem perfectly capable of talking to others without any slippage in meaning. Yet to examine even the simplest utterance is to enter a labyrinth of possibility. In literary criticism, deconstruction and reader-response models try to deal with this problem, deconstructionists pointing out the inherent instability of all language, reader-response critics insisting that all meaning resides in the audience’s interpretation. There are also moderates who believe, with some common sense, that these ideas are true up to a point. Perhaps a better way to put the situation is that language is potentially unstable, and that the audience is responsible for a large part of the determinable meaning.

Or maybe not. Cross-talk, after all, depends on some idea of “the real meaning” to achieve its contradictory effect: it is just that sometimes the meaning gets lost or misconstrued. Some years ago in our faculty lounge, one of my hazier colleagues got up to get another cup of coffee. “Would you like some?” he asked the woman sitting next to us.

“No, thanks,” the woman waved aside his offer. “I don’t drink coffee.”

“Really?” he said. “What do you do with it?”

At the time, everyone thought he was kidding. Looking back on it, I am not so sure.

---

Notice

We received a manuscript recently from Europe. It was inadvertently separated from any covering letter that might have accompanied it, and—a lesson to all writers— it has no name on any of its pages. Would the author of “Easy Does It” (about translating proverbs) please stand up?

—Editor

EPISTOLA {John Martin Brown}

I know I’m not among the first to call attention to Dr. Dal Yoo’s error published in your Summer issue—the one which attributes the “WIN” slogan to President Carter and the Democrats. The slogan was, of course, President Ford’s and the Republicans.

[John Martin Brown, The Woodlands, Texas]

EPISTOLA {K. Sinclair}

Donald McKay’s article “The Gaelic View of Heather” reminds me of Arden Carl Mathew’s short but pointed poem “The Death of Irish,” which I reproduce in full below:

The tide gone out for good
Thirty one words for seaweed
Whiten on the foreshore.

[K. Sinclair, Connah’s Quay, Deeside, Wales]

EPISTOLA {Philip Weinberg}

Bill Bryson’s enjoyable “English Know-how, No Problem” (Spring 1991) states that the Russian word for railroad station vagzal comes from Vauxhall in London. (Since the revolution, ‘Victoria’ would certainly be a no-no.) I always thought the term comes from the German Volksaal ‘people’s waiting room.’

[Philip Weinberg, Jamaica, New York]

Texas Prison Slang

David Stuart Schofield, Prisoner No. 334387

Some prison slang collected here at Huntsville, Texas, originated in riots or more limited forms of violence. Other prison slang words and phrases were possibly invented merely to confound eavesdroppers. A number of them might have been created by prisoners whose vocabularies were too small to accommodate the concepts, events, or situations named.

announcer, n. a rapist who caused a conception. See also disannouncer, disannouncement.

Army, n. a term for the Arian Brotherhood (neo-Nazis), sometimes used by its members.

click v. to fight with another prisoner or other prisoners: Those guys were really clicking.

commercials, n.pl. prescription medicine in the illegal drug trade.

disannouncement, n. an obituary. (The etiology of this and the following term is among Latin American prisoners, one of whom was still learning English. Seeing the “Announcements of Births” in a newspaper, he concluded that, by analogy, the “Announcements of Deaths” must be disannouncements.)

disannouncer, n. a murderer.

doughby, n., pl. doughbies. a roll or biscuit.

drive up, v. to arrive at prison: He just drove up today.

drive-up, n. a new arrival at prison: He’s a drive-up.

going off, n. losing one’s temper.

gringa, n. (1) the female equivalent of gringo, a term used by some of Latin American extraction to derogate North Americans. (2) an “Anglo” woman kept captive in the U.S. by one or more persons of Latin-American origin. The gringa is expected to perform menial labor so her captor (s) can make car and rent payments. The gringa does not herself get paid.

gyne, v. (pron. jīne) From gynecology. to have sex with a female. Context determines whether the event occurred between mutually consenting adults.

hallucinary, n. a prisoner who hallucinates.

hogging, n. (1) the begging by one prisoner for another prisoner’s property. (2) the theft by one prisoner of another prisoner’s property.

house, n. a cell.

jayroes, n. pl. a pair of old shoes with their backs mashed flat to turn them into slippers.

Look out!, interj. “Stop! Listen to me!”

ride, v. to use, without compensation, another prisoner’s property: I’m riding with you.

roach, n. cigarette butt.

road dog, best friend.

shank, n.phr. a crude, homemade knife.

short, n. a cigarette butt.

smork, n. the nickname given to one or more Caucasian prisoners who were slowly burned to death—and possibly eaten—by Negro prisoners during a riot.

spread, n. the pooled food of a group of prisoners who contribute food bought in the prison store for group feeding.

tithe, v. (rhymes with Smith) to pay off another prisoner or a phony religion or shaman under coercion or threat of coercion.

United Stakes of America, n. phr. a suggested agreement among prison gang leaders to redistribute the property of prisoners who are not gang members.

use, v. (1) to torture (someone). (2) to submit to torture by (someone). (To confuse eavesdroppers the active and passive senses are often interchanged; thus, “Who are you using?” might mean “Who are you torturing?”)

White House, n. phr. usually in the phrase in the White House, said of female visitors who were taken captive by the prison staff and detained to perform menial labor and to work as domestics in the Huntsville area, without wages or salary.

All the slang words collected here reveal aspects of prison life, which is never pleasant. Being behind bars is sometimes very dangerous, as evidenced by terms like shank, smork, gringa, and White House.

Becoming and being a prisoner is very expensive and requires a mandatory lifestyle that no one would want to experience. To avoid the opportunity to collect your own list of prison slang words, obey the laws of the land.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Penguin Dictionary of Abbreviations

John Paxton, (Penguin), 385pp.

This well-established work by a doyen of reference-book compilation—Paxton was the editor of The Statesman’s Year-Book from 1969 to 1990 and author of several other highly regarded works—is a vademecum mainly for British and, perhaps, European users. Although the book offers a good coverage of universal abbreviations, acronyms, and what are these days called “initialisms” in its 27,000 entries and “over” 37,000 definitions and goes into British material quite thoroughly, it is too sparse in its inclusion of American matter to make it of significant usefulness to American users, who should cleave to the De Sola dictionaries of abbreviations. Moreover, there are omissions that are criticizable even from the British user’s point of view; for instance, abbreviations of some important American scholarly societies and periodicals, likely to be needed by scholars in the UK, are missing: MLA is in for ‘Modern Language Association,’ but not LSA for ‘Linguistic Society of America’; PMLA, for ‘Publication(s) of the Modern Language Association,' known throughout the world, is missing as is AS for ‘American Speech.' ACLU ‘American Civil Liberties Union’ is not in, nor is ACL ‘Association for Computational Linguistics.’ Space was found, however, for U.N.C.L.E. ‘United Network Command for Law Enforcement’ (followed by “(television),” as if that explained this—what shall I call it?—obsoletism.

MADD ‘Mothers Against Drunk Driving’ is in (labeled “U.S.A.”), but D.W.I. ‘Driving While Intoxicated’ is not, nor is D.A.M. ‘Mothers Against Dyslexia.’ While the expanded forms are given, generally, with no comment beyond a useful contextual label (like “U.S.A.,” “television”), some have been given explanatory treatment: P.C. ‘…Plaid Cymru, Party of Wales, founded 1925 with the aim of obtaining dominion status for Wales’; P.B. ‘… Plymouth Brethren, Christian sect founded in 19th cent., fundamentalist in doctrine’; T.I.R. (seen everywhere in Europe on “juggernauts”) ‘Fr. Transport international des marchandises par la route, Intern. transport of goods by road. Customs agreement covering 26 countries allowing T.I.R. lorries to avoid customs until reaching final destinations.’ (‘Intern.,’ by the way, is not listed in the book as an abbreviation for ‘International,’ only int. and intl.) On the other hand, some entries that have historical value are in (like N.R.A., B.O.A.C.) but no indication that they are obsolete; W.P.A. has this listing: ‘Works Progress/Projects Administration (U.S.A.), begun in 1935 to provide work for needy unemployed’: one might assume that it is still functioning; at P.W.A., however, we learn that the ‘Public Works Administration (U.S.A.), New Deal Agency [sic], [was] estab. 1933 to create work and promote economic recovery, abol. 1943. A ‘U.S.A.’ label was evidently deemed unnecessary for D.A.R. ‘Daughters of the American Revolution, society of women formed in 1890 for patriotic and charitable purposes.’ Although the editor mentions pronounceable acronyms in his Preface, users would be at a loss to determine that UN and R.A.F. are not pronounced but that R.A.D.A. (Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts “RAHdah”), UNICEF, U.N.C.L.E., and Pan-Am are; worse, the showing of radar as RADAR (for ‘radio detecting and ranging’) and sonar as SONAR (‘sound navigation and ranging’) is in outright error. The entry for S. & M. lists only ‘Bp. of Sodor and Man.’

In short (excuse the pun), for one reason or another users in the UK would be better served by a better dictionary of abbreviations than this; US users should be alerted to the fact that the text is British, unedited for American spelling: for ‘decagramme, decalitre, decametre’ read ‘decagram, decaliter, decameter.’ This is a shame, for publishers in Britain are frequently heard to comment on the hugeness of the US market: in the circumstances, one might expect a publisher as knowledgeable as Penguin to make some effort to cater to such a promisingly lucrative source of revenue.

Laurence Urdang

EPISTOLA {David L. Gold}

Andrew Gray’s remarks on “nonsense about the German language” [XVIII, 1] reminded me of another myth widely held in the English-speaking world about German: it tends to have longer words than English does.

That impression, however, is correct only with respect to orthographic words. Thus, German Impulsquantumzahl may seem long to the English-speaker, but that is only because German uses closed compounds much more than English does. The English equivalent of this German word is spin quantum number. Were it to be spelled *spinquantumnumber or were the German word to be spelled *impuls quantum zahl, people would have other impressions, yet both words have exactly the same number of syllables (five) and letters (seventeen).

[David L. Gold, Oakland Gardens, New York]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

Today’s Quote: “The judgment that we can make given our information is that it’s not probable that there will be an impact on decision-making in Iraq over the course of the next months.—External Affairs Minister Joe Clark.” [From The Province, Vancouver, BC, 29 November 1990. Submitted by John A. McCormick, Port McNeill, BC.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Samuel Johnson in the Medical World

The Doctor and the Patient John Wiltshire, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), x + 293pp.

A frequent ploy in reviewing scholarly books is for the reviewer to chide the writer for not having written the book he would like to have read. What a pleasure it is to report that John Wiltshire of Melbourne’s account of Samuel Johnson and the medical aspects of his life is just the sort of exposition and analysis that this reviewer once considered writing and that Wiltshire has done it better and on a broader canvas.

Wiltshire starts with a review of Johnson’s own medical history: juvenile scrofula, poor vision in one eye, the famous “tics and gesticulations,” gout, asthma, a stroke with transient aphasia, and finally “dropsy” with death due to arteriosclerotic heart disease with congestive failure. Add to this an account of his recurrent attacks of melancholia, and the patient is clearly revealed. By his own statement Johnson was “a dabbler in physick,” and the reader is given a full account of Johnson’s medical readings and how he assimilated his knowledge for purposes of self-medication. Johnson’s doctors—Bathurst, Lawrence, Brocklesby, Heberden, and others—are not neglected.

In further chapters Wiltshire sets forth considerable useful information about medicine in 18th century England, its theories, its mode of practice. Judicious use of primary sources and an aptitude for a telling vignette combine to make these chapters useful and intelligible to a reader unfamiliar with the period. Wiltshire makes full use of Johnson’s own writing, especially the essays in The Rambler and The Idler, to analyze Johnson’s frequent, almost habitual use of medical ideas as metaphors.

A well-shaped chapter deals with the astronomer in Rasselas as an example of the man of learning whose actions are severely limited by a psychiatric problem. Unique in the annals of Johnsoniana is a full treatment of Dr. Robert Levet, an unlicensed practitioner who was a valued member of Johnson’s peculiar household, and Wiltshire’s close reading of Johnson’s elegy on Levet is welcome and commendable. The monograph concludes with a chapter on therapeutic friendship, dealing chiefly with Johnson’s attempts to steer Boswell into a more sensible way of life and behavior. These were only transiently effective because Boswell was less than candid to his mentor about his compulsive drinking and whoring.

Some minor cavils: Occasional paragraphs are devoted to the exposition and dismissal of various pseudo-psychoanalytic theories about Johnson’s personality, a waste of time and space because no Johnson scholar relies upon them. Also, the exposition of medical ideas about melancholia relies chiefly on the contribution of William Battie; the two Scotsmen, William Cullen and Robert Whytt, deserve equal billing for their contributions toward mid-18th century ideas on melancholia. But on balance Wiltshire’s book is sound and sensible, a distinguished contribution not only to Johnsonia but to the wider field of eighteenth-century studies.

[William B. Ober, Tenafly, New Jersey]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Have a Nice Day—No Problem!: A Dictionary of Clichés

Christine Ammer, (Dutton, 1992), 390pp.

From the standpoint of style, clichés are anathema: they are boring, repetitious, and reflective of poor writing. From the standpoint of communication, however, they are extremely important: for one thing, they provide relief from what could otherwise be a terrifyingly condensed onslaught of information. Study a well-written scholarly article; notice how compact it is. Succinct style presents no problem to readers, for they can reread a passage as often as necessary to assimilate it. Those who attend academic conferences soon come to dread the speaker who reads aloud a paper meant to be read in a journal: it is almost impossible to assimilate its information because none of the normal communicative devices used in viva voce communication are present—repetition being among them. Then, too, the speaker who maintains eye contact with members of his audience can readily detect lack of understanding or confusion (the “knitted-brow signal”) and, if a good speaker, can take an idea and phrase it in another way to make it more readily understandable. Clichés are the background noise of speech; attention spans being as brief as they are and the ability to sustain a prolonged period of concentration differing considerably among individuals (even if one assumes that the subject under discussion is of some interest to the listener), the insertion in speech of clichés acts to give the overworked cells a rest, however momentary, from overdosing on information.

Clichés in writing are another matter; depending on the style striven for, they might conceivably serve a function; as with everything else, overdoing them can create a long-winded, boring experience.

It is not easy to distinguish between clichés and what linguists call collocations—that is, collections of words that, while not unanalyzable idioms per se (like red herring, tall order, or take off in the sense of ‘satirize’), nonetheless seem to fall together with great frequency. Serve a function is such a collocation as are (from the preceding paragraph) from the standpoint of, provide relief, present a [or no] problem, as often [or any adjective/adverb] as, noun phrases like eye contact, lack of understanding, member of his [or any pronoun, name, or article] audience, background noise, and attention span. Those who have had experience with a person learning English as a foreign language are aware that a breakthrough seems to come as soon as the person starts using clichés and colloquial or slang expressions appropriately, even though the speaker’s pronunciation may still be far from a native speaker’s. It would seem that good control over clichés, especially, is coordinate with a speaker’s grasp of the idiom (in the sense of ‘spirit’) of the language.

A dictionary of clichés is an entirely different matter. I venture to say that there is hardly anything more soporific than being given the meanings of expressions that every native speaker knows quite intimately, from do an about face to yours truly (in this book). One could not compile such a book without giving the meanings, but the interesting and useful material here for the native speaker is what Christine Ammer has to say about their past and provenance. Thus, we learn that on the razor’s edge occurs in Homer and that mad as a hatter, which antedates Alice’s teaparty, “is thought to come from the fact that the chemicals used in making felt hats could produce the symptoms of St. Vitus’ dance or other nervous tremors.” As one might expect, many clichés are simply metaphors, some of which are transparent to us, others needing explanation. Thus, play ball with seems obvious; but mad as a hatter, though properly a simile, needs an explanation; play possum is meaningful only to those who have been told what it means or have had direct experience with the behavior of opossums. There are quite a lot of opossums where I live (not, I hasten to say, of the possum type meriting the affectionate attention of Dame Edna Everage), and one sees them most often after they have been killed on the road by a car. A contemporary might thus be inclined to imbue them with attributes that would give play possum a mysterious import. One might well wonder why some clichés have survived at all, considering their meaninglessness. The etymological game being what it is—(requiescat in) pace John Ciardi—I fully expect someone to come up with an origin for cute as a button that identifies it with the six adorable daughters of some 17th-century Londoner named Button or, just to make it more complicated, a corruption of the expression *acute as a bouton in which bouton means ‘stud with a sharp point’—in other words, originally equivalent to sharp as a tack.

Have a Nice Day contains useful information about some 3000 such expressions, and we must be grateful to Ms. Ammer for having come to grips with a very difficult area of language. My only criticism is that she often states that a given expression “first appeared” in a certain work, giving the citation. I cannot see how she can know that the expression was not already a cliché at the time of its appearance in print. In the case of have a good day, which riles many people, I submit that it is a revival, for its equivalent must have been in the language many years ago in order to have given rise to the shortened form (about which no one seems to get upset), Good day. On which note I bid you all a good day.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Wordspinner: Mindboggling Games for Word Lovers

Sterling Eisiminger, (Littlefield Adams, 1991), xii + 243pp.

Sterling Eisiminger, whose name may be familiar to VERBATIM readers as a contributor, has compiled several hundred quizzes that will undoubtedly boggle the minds of some. It has always seemed to me that we view the answering of questions of fact (like what a word means or what is its etymology) as either “easy” or “difficult” depending on whether we know the answer or not. In other words, if one does not know the date of the Flushing Remonstrance no amount of thinking, soul-searching, calculation, or any other mental activity is going to yield the correct response to the question, “What was the date of the Flushing Remonstrance?”; on the other hand, if you know that the date was 1657, one cannot say that the answer was “easy” or “difficult”: it is like asking a person his name. Some people have better memories than others, and we can admire those who, despite the extraordinary pressure of being under the klieg lights in a TV studio before an audience, are able to dredge up obscure information in response to quizmasters’ questions. But the accession of factual information from the recesses of the memory is not the same as answering questions that require rapid mental calculation or analysis. A very large percentage of quiz shows consist of testing the participants’ abilities to recognize familiar things, like identifying the pattern K—K —- —-K— as kick the bucket before too many letters have been exposed. There are several TV quiz programs in the UK and in the US in which the winners are those who are quickest at recognizing clichés, like come hell or high water, something that the rest of us spend a lot of time avoiding (though we can scarcely help knowing them). Yet, there are some who, believe it or not, do not possess even minimal control over this linguistic dross: within the past few weeks I heard one TV newscaster say “wheres and whyfors” and another refer to “a Herculanean task” (presumably the labor involved in giving birth to a volcano). [See, elsewhere in this issue, the review of Have a Nice Day—No Problem!]

That having been said (to coin a cliché), quizzes are for some people an attractive way to learn things while playing a sort of game, testing either themselves or others. In Wordspinner, some of the quizzes are mere vocabulary tests, though couched in light-hearted utterances; for example, at Graffiti II the reader is asked to define the underscored words in sentences like “Clark Kent was a transvestite” and “Vasectomy means never having to say you’re sorry,” though one could think of a lot of regrettable actions for which vasectomy would be a feeble excuse. Other quizzes “test” the knowledge of the reader’s knowledge of gay, black, or carnival slang, of the origins of certain words (topaz matches up with “Greek for ‘conjecture’ because they could only guess where it came from”), some of tautological clichés (like beck and —), others of nautical jargon, euphemisms, numerical allusions, Yankee dialect, and so forth.

The range of language is, of course, vast, and one should not treat with contempt those parts of the book that deal with matters considered “common knowledge”: those parts that seem recondite to one are common knowledge to another. The challenge is slightly mitigated in many instances by offering a listing of multiple choices from among which one selects the answer. If one needs a more difficult challenge, the choices can be covered by the hand.

There is no index, hence no way of retrieving information once encountered (except by trying to recall the “name of the game”). But that is not critical, for this is not a reference book. The 400-odd quizzes could serve well as a source for teachers who want to test their students' knowledge of different aspects of language. And while much of the material might seem simple to sophisticated readers of VERBATIM, its editor learned from Wordspinner that a marriage between a brother and the childless widow of the groom’s brother is called a leviratic marriage and that cut the green calabash is Gullah for ‘exaggerate.’ I am devising ways of working those into the conversation at the next cocktail party I am invited to, though that might be my last.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Because the statue has 42 arms, it is often called the Guanyin of the Thousand Arms.” [From China Today, November 1990, p. 15. Submitted by Charles G. Mendoza, North Miami.]

Lost Charisma

Marc A. Bernstein, Hartsdale, New York

What ideas would you expect to find expressed in a book by a liberal economist? Can a holistic approach to arthritis ignore important aspects of the disease? Should your teenager’s interest in a movement with a charismatic leader alarm you?

In everyday speech, the vocabulary of social science and philosophy can be misleading. Just as badly worn coins convey little information to the numismatist, their once-clear markings having faded with countless transactions, so some words convey little information because their meanings have been obscured by repeated and varied usage. Charisma is a good example. Writers use the word when it does not apply and do not use it in those rare instances when it does. Charisma’s unfortunate fate is the subject of this essay.

Today, it seems that charismatic figures are everywhere. Movie stars, athletes, politicians—any-one who catches the public eye—may enjoy the designer label. It is applied not only to individuals, but also, for example, to Richard Pryor’s humor, Gershwin’s music, and Lassie. Are the Ninja Turtles next? Charisma now means little more than dazzle, says Allan Bloom, and he is correct. But, what did the word once mean? And what difficulties do its current usage pose?

Two tributaries brought charisma into the English language, one theological, one sociological. The word comes from the Greek, more precisely, the Greek of the New Testament. Theologically, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, it is a “free gift or favor specifically vouchsafed by God, a grace, a talent.” In the Bible, it appears only in the Letters of Paul and occupies a particularly important place in I Corinthians. There, Paul discusses a number of spiritual gifts or charismata, including the gifts of miracles, healing, and speaking in tongues (divinely inspired but unintelligible speech). During the Church’s early years, these gifts must have captured the attention and imagination of many, for Paul writes to remind Christians that all charismata have a common divine source and that none is as important as love.

Writers using charisma or charismatic in this or related theological senses are not likely to err. Those using the term in its sociological sense, however, often go astray. This second meaning of the term entered English through, translations of the works of the eminent German sociologist, Max Weber. Writing in the early twentieth century, Weber used the term in his sociology of religion and sociology of authority:

The term “charisma” will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a “leader.”

Charisma, Weber argued, provided the basis for an intensely personal form of authority, dramatically different from authority based both on the impersonal rule of law (the modern type) and on the sanctity of tradition (the oldest type). Historically rare, charismatic figures, like Jesus or Mohammed, founded new faiths or, like Napoleon, won the unswerving allegiance of soldiers and citizens through military victory.

Today’s commentators make two errors when they use charismatic. First, they apply the term to inappropriate figures. Even though the word’s sociological meaning has changed (charisma is “the capacity to inspire devotion and enthusiasm,” according to the latest OED), someone like Henry Kissinger cannot merit the label. Calling such public figures charismatic devalues the word and strips it of meaning (meaninglessness certainly triumphs when writers see charisma in humor or music).

But users of the word make a second, more serious, error when they apply the term to virtuous figures only, as occurs often. An article in the February 1982 Good Housekeeping (“Charisma: Who Has It! How They Got It! How You Can Get It Too!”) mentions more than fifteen charismatic figures, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Lena Horne, all admirable individuals. Similarly, Ronald Riggio begins a recent book on charisma by enumerating eleven charismatic persons, all praiseworthy. After one hundred and twenty-five pages, we finally discover some demons. As a corrective, I suggest that someone begin a discussion of charisma like this:

Would you like to develop your charisma? Would you like to sway others? Would you like the power to drive nine hundred people to collective suicide like Jim Jones? Inspire others to murder like Charles Manson? Or, why not really go for it, and annihilate millions of innocents? Hitler did it; you can too.

Hitler, Charles Manson, Jim Jones—they represent charisma’s other side, one our commentators invariably ignore. When was the last time you heard a repulsive figure described as charismatic? In rare instances, an individual not universally admired, like Jesse Jackson, earns the label, but heinous figures are never “charismatic.” Weber, it is worth noting, had stressed the neutrality of the term:

[Our] sociological analysis will treat [demagogues and madmen] on the same level as it does the charisma of men who are the “greatest” heroes, prophets, and saviors according to conventional judgments.

Weber wanted to compare aspects of charismatic authority with aspects of his other two types of authority. He did not distinguish between villainous charismatic figures and virtuous ones because such distinctions, he felt, would muddy sociological comparisons. Weber obviously knew the term could apply to both. Modern commentators, however, will not attribute charisma to those they do not like. Consider the Ayatollah Khomeini. No political figure in the last two decades was more charismatic than he. His authority derived from intensely personal qualities; he ruled without the institutional supports we associate with national leadership; he inspired his followers and revolutionized his country. But to many commentators, Khomeini was a fanatic. Charismatic is thus used as selectively as neurotic. Neurotics are those whose behavior we find odd. If we like them, however, we speak of their idiosyncracies.

When we do not apply the term charismatic to figures like Khomeini, we trivialize them and we trivialize their followers. We label Iranian fundamentalists irrational or unstable because they are inspired by someone we do not like. But charisma is all about irrationality, and we have little reason to believe that the followers of Khomeini were less rational than the followers of, say, Jesus. In fact, as indicated above, the irrationality of the more spectacular charismata drew concerned comment from Saint Paul in I Corinthians. The rich etymology of charisma teaches us that great villains and great heroes can have strangely similar effects on their followers. Charisma should thus be used evenhandedly as well as selectively. Like other words from the lexicon of social science and philosophy (holistic, elitist, liberal, dialectic), it confuses rather than illuminates if used indiscriminately. The season’s hottest passwords must not triumph over clear communication.

Unraveling the American Place-Name Cover

Frank R. Abate, Old Saybrook, Connecticut

There is no part of the world where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous and picturesque as the United States of America. Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains (1892)

The fascination of American place names—their style and flair and what they reveal about the land and its inhabitants—has captivated writers, scholars, and other observers for more than 150 years. The evaluation of Stevenson, from a collection of essays on his travels across America, is not unusual. Stevenson, a native Scot, had traveled widely through Europe, the U.S., and the South Seas, so he speaks with some experience and perspective. Other notables who have praised American place names include Washington Irving (in an essay written in 1839), Walt Whitman, and Stephen Vincent Benét. The qualities most frequently commented on, perhaps, are originality, uniqueness, and sound. Consider the following categories of American place names, selected from the Omni Gazetteer of the United States of America:

Bizarre

Cheesequake, New Jersey
Jot ‘Em Down, Texas
Knockemstiff, Ohio
Attaway, South Carolina
Uneedus, Louisiana
Unthanks, Virginia
Toad Suck, Arkansas
Hump Tulips, Washington
Eek, Alaska
Idiotville, Oregon
Who’d A Thought It, Alabama
Zzyzx, California

Indecorous

Sugartit and Beaverlick, Kentucky
Crapo, Maryland
Superior Bottom, West Virginia
Suck Lick Run (stream in West Virginia)
Blue Ball (Arkansas and Ohio)
Pee Pee, Ohio
Shittim Gulch, Washington

Unimaginative

141 U.S. municipalities are named Fairview (43 different states); there are 47 Jackson Townships in Indiana alone; 1,365 streams are named Mill Creek.

Fanciful
Zook Spur, Iowa
Tyewhoppety, Oklahoma
Zu Zu, Tennessee
Tizzle Flats, Virginia
Utsaladdy, Washington

Sic! Sic! Sic! Smartt, Tennessee
Erratta, Alabama
Embarras River, Illinois

Frontier Americana

Lickskillet, Ohio and Tennessee
Gnaw Bone, Indiana
Turkey Scratch, Arkansas
Dunmovin, California
Rawhide, Mississippi
Cut and Shoot, Texas
Hoot and Holler Crossing, Texas
Horse Thief, Arizona
Jackass Flats, Nevada
Hell and Gone Creek, Oklahoma

American place names reveal the national character, as well as history and heritage. In addition, significant contributions have come from many Indian languages and dialects, as well as Spanish, French, and British sources.

It was in the 1920s that serious scholarship on American place names, characterized (unlike most earlier work) by thoroughness, objectivity, and linguistic training, began to be published on a regular basis. Among the scholarly pioneers was George R. Stewart, whose considered reflections are collected in standard works entitled Names on the Land (1945, revised 1958 and 1967) and American Place-Names (1970). Prof. Allen Walker Read, whose distinguished career now spans seven decades, contributed solid yet always thoroughly enjoyable papers, and in addition has given us the handy phrase “place-name cover” to describe how place names indeed blanket the country with richness, color, and texture. Other notables in this necessarily brief catalogue of American toponymists include Henry Gannett, working around the turn of the century, who compiled several state gazetteers and a still influential study on the origin of U.S. place names; H. L. Mencken, with several seminal chapters in his American Language (1936); and Kelsie Harder, whose Illustrated Dictionary of Place Names: United States and Canada (1976) remains the most reliable resource for place-name origins. A full record of work in this field can be found in bibliographies compiled since 1948 under the names Sealock, Seely, and Powell (the latest edition being Bibliography of Place-Name Literature: United States and Canada, Third Edition, 1982), supplemented periodically in the pages of Names, the quarterly journal of the American Name Society.

Toponymy is remarkable not only for the hundreds of talented contributors who have expanded the scholarship in recent decades, but also because it is not a formal academic discipline, at least not in the United States. There are no departments of toponymy, or even of onomastics that I know of, and no degrees are awarded in these fields. (Whether this is also true of other countries I cannot say. I have read that toponymy, gazetteers, and place-name surveys receive more formal attention in the U.K. and Europe.) American toponymy is carried on by people of all academic disciplines, and from many walks of life. With academia’s standard rewards of promotion and tenure not as readily accruing in this work, the study of American place names is by and large in the hands of true lovers of the subject (amateurs in the etymological sense, and dilettantes). What they say and write I have found to be characteristically stimulating and rewarding, not plagued by the turgidity that so often seems to be the norm in scholarly papers.

Place names became an official concern of the U.S. government in 1890. Confusion had reigned over mining claims, land surveys, assignment of post-office names, and exploration reports, and this created havoc and needless expense in bureaucracy, particularly in the government mapping agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey [USGS], the Army Corps of Engineers, and various other branches of the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Interior. In a move that, from a lexicographic standpoint, is decidedly un-American, the government set up an official board to rule on and standardize the use of place names, both domestic and foreign. The United States Board on Geographic Names was established by an executive order of President Benjamin Harrison in September 1890, and has been active ever since, publishing its decisions and issuing official gazetteers. This may be the only example in which an aspect of the linguistic practice of Americans has been regulated by government fiat.

On the other hand, it is largely because of this unusual intrusion of government that American toponymy has flourished as a field of study. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names has compiled and maintains a massive national database, the Geographic Names Information System [GNIS]. This computer file lists more than one million place names of all kinds (plus hundreds of thousands of variant forms): cities and towns, lakes and rivers, mountains and valleys, even facilities such as schools, parks, and cemeteries. The names themselves, along with precise locational data and identification by type, have been painstakingly keyboarded into machine-readable form from the most detailed USGS topographic maps, the so-called 7.5-minute series. Drawn to a scale of 1:24,000, each 7.5-minute map sheet or quadrangle covers an area of 8.6 miles north-to-south by about 7 miles east-to-west (the east-to-west distance varies depending on location, since meridians of longitude radiate out from the poles and are farther apart nearer the equator). At this scale more than 50,000 map sheets are required to completely cover the 48 contiguous states. Since it was intended to establish a standard, the GNIS is very regular in format and is compiled and maintained according to carefully prepared procedures. This daunting task is overseen by the USGS, specifically the Branch of Domestic Names, now under the direction of Roger Payne. Less comprehensive government files are also maintained by the Bureau of the Census (listing about 60,000 populated places), and by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, formerly the Bureau of Standards (a compilation, complete with numerical coding, of some 190,000 populated places, locales, and neighborhoods of all sizes).

The work is by no means at an end. Experts, including Mr. Payne, have estimated that there are more than 3,500,000 current place names in the U.S. Consider this figure in light of the fact that the largest English dictionary—now out of print—had 600,000 or so entries, including many obsolete forms. The highest estimates of the size of the English lexicon number far less than the number of place names in the U.S. alone. Were it possible to record and identify all of the current place names (the Place Name Survey of the United States, under the direction of the American Name Society, is attempting just this), still remaining would be hundreds of thousands of now inactive names, which are of no less importance to historians, genealogists, and the like. Full coverage would also require accurate pronunciations for each name, with sensitivity to local preferences (e.g., MAD-rid, New York, for Madrid, BER-lin, Connecticut, for Berlin, and PEER, South Dakota, for Pierre). It is perhaps understandable that those who undertake the creation of a complete record of American toponymy have chosen to deal with the estimated 3,000,000 named streets and highways across the land as a separate project.

Taken in this context, the recent publication of the Omni Gazetteer of the United States of America, despite its 1,500,000 entries, may properly be seen as only a first step, albeit an ambitious one. The editors of the book identified and acquired several government databases of place names, including, of course, the GNIS mentioned above. Owing to the marvels of computer technology, coupled with the foresight of the government programmers who set up the source databases and the expertise of present-day programmers who devised means of accurately consolidating several different sources, an enormous amount of data (140,520,000 characters of text) was integrated, sorted, and typeset in about six months. Automated as well as traditional checking and proofreading occupied the staff for the better part of a year. The final product is contained in 11 volumes, on more than 9,000 9-by-12-inch, 2-column pages. The set includes nine regional volumes, each listing the place names of the states or territories in a region individually. A one-volume National Index lists all 1,500,000 entries in a single A-to-Z sequence. The Appendices volume contains seven national lists of places such as airports, Indian reservations, and historic places. The Omni Gazetteer is a national gazetteer of the United States that is as comprehensive as possible. It is published both as bound books and on CD-ROM. Prior to its publication, such place-name information was only available in disparate sources, and often only on magnetic tape or in the form of computer printouts.

Having had the opportunity to sift through so many American place names in a relatively short span, those of us who edited the Omni Gazetteer were particularly struck by the great diversity in American naming practices, and what it suggests about the various eras and cultures that were a part of the settlement of the country. In New England, for example, towns are the primary division of government below the state level. Most of the land area in the six New England states is within town boundaries, and is primarily administered by the town governments. New Englanders, even if they do not live in an urban area, can almost always tell you the name of the town that they live in. As the name New England might suggest, many of these town names were transplanted from the British Isles. Bristol, Cambridge, Chester, Durham, Essex, Hartford, Lincoln, Litchfield, Manchester, Marlboro(ugh), Milford, Oxford, Salisbury, Winchester, Windsor, and Woodstock are town names that occur in three or more New England states. Apart from these, names of Indian origin (Kennebunkport, Naugatuck, Scituate), honorifics (Amherst, Franklin), and biblical names (Canaan, Rehoboth, Hebron) account for much of the rest. As one looks elsewhere in the U.S., the preponderance of British borrowings diminishes, and the purely American inventions increase in proportion, as do Indian, Spanish, and French-based names. The well-documented Indian influence is widespread. Spanish names are particularly common in the areas of long-lasting Spanish colonial influence, especially California and the Southwest. French names, of course, are common in the Upper Midwest (where French explorers and missionaries, and French-speaking trappers, left their mark), in states bordering Quebec, and in Louisiana.

The differing forms of administrative divisions in the states is also revealed in naming practices. For example, county government, significant in most of the U.S., is relatively unimportant in New England. In fact, Connecticut and Rhode Island have abolished county government altogether, and in those states the former county boundaries merely furnish a convenient way in which people can refer to a regional group of towns. But as one travels west and south in the U.S., counties are politically vital, and towns, in the New England sense, at least, almost nonexistent. (New England-style “towns” are found to some extent in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.) In many rural areas west of the Mississippi, where counties can be as big as New England states and cities are few and far between, people do not associate closely with a city, town, village, or any other such entity below the county level. Mail, of course, comes to a post office that handles rural route delivery, but those who receive such mail may not live in the place with the post office, and hence do not immediately associate with it. When asked where they live, such folks are more likely to say their county, then give a reference point and directions: “Our place is ten miles north of Baxter, off Highway 102, then left two miles on Route 47.” So despite more than 200,000 populated place names recorded in the Omni Gazetteer, there are still many areas of the country where the place-name cover is thin. Local informants, we hope, will allow us to correct and expand on the entries compiled so far.

Most of the examples above have been populated places, as these names tend to be more familiar to a broader audience. So we have not examined the bulk of the place-name cover, which is in the form of names for natural features. But perhaps VERBATIM readers can more readily allow the author the convenience of such specialization when they consider the issue from the viewpoint of a toponymist. As those who work in the field all too soon come to realize, most of the names have yet to be recorded, much less described; the greater burden lies ahead. With time and additional resources we might begin to see the fight at the end of the tunnel, perhaps in ten to fifteen years. All the while, of course, just as with all aspects of language, new names are coming into being, others passing out of use, each reflecting a bit of history or culture. Taken together, American place names are a unique primary source, a record of our cultural memory. The publication of that part of the record we do have, however imperfect, will still, we hope, give new impetus to this enlightening, often fascinating study by providing a foundation on which to build.

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The Omni Gazetteer is available in two editions, as eleven bound volumes and on CD-ROM. The first nine volumes cover New England, Northeastern States, Southeast, South Central States, Southwestern States, Great Lakes States, Plains States, Mountain States, and Pacific; the additional two volumes index all 1.5 million entries alphabetically and offer appendices with additional indexes. The price of each volume is $ 250; the complete (11-volume) set costs $ 2000. Floppy disks for each state are available for $ 125. For full details and a descriptive brochure, write to Omnigraphics, Inc., Penobscot Building, Detroit, MI 48226, or phone the toll-free number (800) 234-1340; the FAX number is (313) 961-1383.

—Editor

EPISTOLA {Milton Horowitz}

Having heard the term gedunk for the first time and queried its meaning and derivation in a recent conversation with Midwesterners, I decided to track it myself. Those who used the term mentioned it so cavalierly—to mean a ‘sweet or dessert,’ even the shop that sold it—that I supposed I’d have no difficulty looking it up.

Referring to dictionaries old and new, I found gedunk listed only in Webster 3, with that frustrating label “origin unknown.” I examined the Oxford English Dictionary (1977) and the Oxford Universal Dictionary (1955) and found no listing in either. Neither was the term cited in any of the many references I examined, until I saw Dennis Anderson’s “The Book of Slang,” Jonathan David Publishers, Inc., Middle Village, NY, 1975. There the definition was a “sweet treat or dessert,” no derivation. Webster gives “something sold at a soda fountain or snack bar.” After querying others, I learned only that the word was used in the U. S. Navy during the 1950s.

I’m stuck on the derivation, finding no hints at all. Because the word sounds to me German or Yiddish or Dutch, I tried dank ‘thanks’ or gedank ‘thought, idea’ but could not bridge the gulf between definitions.

I guess the use is American, not used perhaps until the fifties. Do VERBATIM readers know?

[Milton Horowitz, Jackson Heights, New York]

EPISTOLA {Bernard Kaukas}

As a new subscriber to VERBATIM I was sorry to miss the learned disquisitions on the grammatical use of the f-word. The apotheosis was reached, without doubt, in the western desert when a disconsolate squaddie who was peering through the mechanical entrails of his tank was asked by his oppo what was “up.” “I dunno,” he replied, “I think the f…g f…r’s finally f…gwell f…d.”

In the matter of the adoption of English in preference to German as the official American language [XVII,3], according to George Berlitz’s book, Native Tongues (Granada, 1983), Hebrew and French as well as German were suggested, with German favored for several reasons:

There were many German-speaking Americans in Pennsylvania and other states; Dutch settlers in New York and elsewhere could learn to use German easily; German would be easy for other colonials to learn, since it was basically similar to English; the Hessians, German troop levies “rented” by the British, were deserting to the Americans and many wished to remain in America.

[Bernard Kaukas, Ealing, London]

EPISTOLA {Muriel Smith}

There is support, in both the OED 2nd Supplement and the Dictionary of American Slang, by Wentworth and Flexner, for Tony Thorne’s definition, in the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang [XVII, 3], of ‘callow youth’ for gunsel. That appears to be the primary meaning of the word, whose suggested definition is from Yiddish genzel, gantzel and/ or German Gänslein, Gänzel ‘gosling, young goose.’ In the underworld, apparently, it came to be applied, contemptuously, to a whole range of people, mostly young: apprentice hobo, inexpert hoodlum, punk, nance, sneak, informer, and so on. In The Maltese Falcon, the Bogart character was probably using it as a general term of disparagement.

Ellery Queen, in In the Queen’s Parlour (1957), has a note on Dashiell Hammett’s use of the word. Hammett had a taste for trying to slip censorable words past cautious editors, and he succeeded with gunsel, which sounds innocent enough to anyone who never heard it before. When the book was coming out in Black Mask, in 1929, the editor presumably took gunsel to be a synonym of gunman, and in that sense it was very widely adopted by Hammett’s imitators, by the general public, and even, it seems, by the underworld.

[Muriel Smith, Holyport, Berkshire]

EPISTOLA {Alan S. Kaye}

Regarding J. B. Lawrence’s comments on my BIBLIOGRAPHIA [XVII, 4], I am obliged to set the record straight. I asked one hundred friends, students, and fellow linguists about the grammaticality of eclectic bounty. Not one felt that The New York Times erred in its usage. Mr. Lawrence is a prescriptivist and we linguists are descriptivist in orientation.

Turning to Mr. Lawrence’s remark that featherweight should precede lightweight, my listing them in the reverse order was done randomly and in no way implied how much a boxer or wrestler weighed. He, unfortunately, jumped to the wrong conclusion. My list was also merely indicative of the terms currently employed (five of them), and Bernstein’s Reverse Dictionary mentions the other major divisions as well. I could have listed the other terms too, but chose not to do so.

Finally, concerning the etymology of savvy, Mr. Lawrence should not believe everything he reads in sources such as Mencken’s American Language. In fact, I checked in another dozen English dictionaries, and they all state that savvy comes from Spanish sabe. These dictionaries are simply wrong on this point (as they are, I might add, on many other etymologies). No less an authority than Professor Robert A. Hall, Jr., of Cornell University, one of the world’s leading figures in Romance linguistics and historical linguistics, the author of dozens of scholarly books and hundreds of scholarly articles, states that it derives ultimately from Cantonese Pidgin Portuguese through Chinese Pidgin English (Pidgin and Creole Languages, Cornell University Press, 1966, p. 6).

[Alan S. Kaye, California State University, Fullerton]

EPISTOLA {B. G. Kayfetz}

I want to add my bit to the letters of Zellig Bach and Sol Steinmetz in respect to the mangled forms in Yiddish issued by the U.S. Census authorities. Though I’m not a U.S. citizen I feel personally offended that they treated the language in such a cavalier way. The form (which I obtained) was downright gibberish, corresponding to no idiom on earth. In spelling, grammar, and plain meaning it made no sense whatsoever. Surely they could have consulted with YIVO, whose name must have penetrated even darkest Washington.

I read Bill Bryson’s article “English Know-How, No Problem” with much interest and amusement. However, some of the words he indicates as listed by The Economist in 1986 are not by origin English but French (hotel, cigarette) or international (telephone). True, they may owe their worldwide currency and ubiquity to the fact that they were part of the body of English word export, but are they really words that originated in English or are they loanwords in English?

In your OBITER DICTA you translate hocking a tchainik as ‘gossiping.’ Isn’t it something stronger: ‘senseless chatter, needless noise, committing oral nuisance’? Uriel Weinreich’s dictionary gives “talking nonsense.”

Misha Allen of this city and I are, respectively, secretary and president of the AAA, the Anti-Aleichem Association. It is an organization that stands on guard against the practice by cataloguers, librarians, and critics and reviewers of truncating the name Sholem Aleichem and producing a (Mr.) “Aleichem.” This nom de plume, as is known, means ‘Peace Be Upon You’ and it strikes us as absurd to see him referred to as “Be Upon You” or Mr. “Upon You.” Even The New York Times is a frequent offender. I recently read Life After Death by the Canadian writer Tom Harpur. He makes reference to the eighteenth-century Jewish mystic Israel Baal Shem Tov and a paragraph later refers to him as “Tov”—a similar misunderstanding. Sholem Aleichem is a single expression and he who bisects it commits nothing less than literary homicide. I mention it now as we have just marked the 75th anniversary of his death and his name has been appearing here and there.

[B. G. Kayfetz, Toronto]

EPISTOLA {Jeremiah Rothschild}

To David L. Gold’s comments [XVIII, 1] on Leslie Dunkling’s review of A Dictionary of Surnames [XVII, 4, 11] I would like to add one remark: not only is the list of the author’s personal acknowledgments far longer than their bibliography of printed sources consulted (as Gold notes), but even if a certain work appears in the bibliography, that does not necessarily mean they relied on it.

Here is an example from my own field, Jewish family names: the bibliography lists Benzion C. Kaganoff’s A Dictionary of Jewish Names and Their History, but the few times this work is cited in A Dictionary of Surnames, a disclaimer follows immediately to the effect that no support could be found for Kaganoff’s explanation (at the name Gordon for instance).

It is not surprising that no credence was attached to Kaganoff. A review of his book in Onoma (23, 1, 1979, pp. 96-113) begins: “a disappointment, [which] can be recommended neither for the specialist nor for the novice…. The number of errors in citation and analysis is staggering…. Kaganoff is ignorant of most of the relevant literature.” (Further severe criticism appeared in Jewish Language Review 5, 1985, pp. 363-376 and 6, 1986, pp. 416-418).

[Jeremiah Rothschild, Cold Spring, New York]

EPISTOLA {Adrian Room}

It is not my normal practice to respond to unfavorable reviews of my books, since obviously a reviewer is entitled to his or her own views, attitudes and prejudices when assessing a work. One takes the rough with the smooth, like most things in life. But when a reviewer misrepresents what one has written, I feel a counter is called for.

The review of my Bloomsbury Dictionary of Dedications [XVII,4] made no mention of the fact that the quoted dedications are glossed or explicated. To ignore this fact is to treat the book as if it were a dictionary of headwords with no accompanying definitions or etymologies. The reviewer quotes five dedications (misquoting one) and merely says they seem to him “neither funny nor clever.” They are actually not meant to be either. But the whole point of the apparently trivial dedication by Mary Storr [“I dedicate this book to my friends”] is that the names of 200 individual friends follow, making the dedication something of a record. And when Roger McGough dedicates his poems for children “to those who gaze out of windows when they should be paying attention” he is punning on the title of the book, which is In the Glassroom (not Classroom, as misquoted: ironically, in view of the reviewer’s own article in the same issue on “Accuracy in Quotations”!).

It also seems odd to me that the reviewer should not be curious about the meaning of the strange name in the dedication “To my dear friend, Hommy-Beg.” It is when one discovers that the dedicatee was a Manxman, and that the words are Manx for ‘Little Tommy’ that one feels the nice sense of satisfaction that a detective must feel when he has at last unraveled a long baffling clue. But this gloss on the dedication is omitted in the review, leaving the reader no wiser than before.

Incidentally, the reviewer of A Dictionary of First Names, by Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, is wrong to state that “they choose to ignore Hugo.” They don’t: it is included as a variant of Hugh.

[Adrian Room, Stamford, Lincoinshire]

EPISTOLA {Norman R. Shapiro}

Permit me a few observations on Don Webb’s addendum [XVII, 2] to Harry Cohen’s “Jingo Lingo” [XVI, 4].

The former’s statement that “[t]he French words for junkie are toxoman and morphinman, neither of which merits official use” leaves me puzzled. I’ve never seen (or even heard) the words toxoman or morphinman, though I wouldn’t swear that no Frenchman anywhere has ever used them. There are, indeed, many words invented from pseudo-English with the suffix -man (e.g., barman ‘bartender’; recordman ‘record-holder’; and dozens of others), but I don’t believe that Mr. Webb’s two examples are among them. On the other hand, the common terms morphinomane and toxicomane (note spellings) not only “merit official use” but have been in the language for quite some time (ca 1900 and 1920 respectively), as have numerous other nouns—e.g. mégalomane, cocaïnomane, héroïnomane, éthéromane, etc.—ending in the similarly pronounced but very different Greek-rooted suffix -mane. (Belle Epoque specialists will recall the celebrated night-club-performer-cum-anatomical-wonder Le Pétomane, much admired for his ability—mirabile rectu!—to fart [péter] in near-perfect tune, unto every sharp and flat(ulence), and with great brio, and whose rendition of La Marseillaise is said to have been particularly memorable.) For that matter, the word junkie itself was even adopted into the French “in” slang of the eighties—le français branché— along with the less common addict, more often reserved for figurative use. An addict du foot, for example, is a soccer junkie.

While on matters Gallic I would point out, in regard to Don Sharp’s article in the same issue [XVII, 2], that, though not as addicted to the practice as American English, French is also given to creating words from letter abbreviations. Note, for example, such slang forms as bédé (from BD, bande dessinée ‘[sophisticated] comic strip’); elpé (from LP, i.e., ‘long-playing record’); and jité (from JT, journal télévisé ‘television news broadcast’). Along the same lines, though somewhat more involved, is the word pécu ‘toilet paper’ (from PQ, itself a punnish abbreviation of papier cul), which has also come to mean a pompous piece of writing, with the corresponding verb pécufier.

[Norman R. Shapiro, Wesleyan University]

EPISTOLA {Chris Franke}

Jack Orbaum [EPISTOLAE, XVII, 4] wants to make readers aware of what he calls a “mistranslation” in the Bible. He directs readers’ attention to the King James version of Isaiah 7:14: “Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son….” He also cites the New Testament passage in Matthew 1:22-23 which speaks of Jesus as the fulfillment of this passage from Isaiah: “Behold a virgin shall be with child….” He then cites modern translations of Isaiah which read “young woman” instead of “virgin.” He calls these “corrections of the original mistranslation.”

Mr. Orbaum is correct regarding the translation of the Hebrew word in Isaiah 7—the word ‘almah means ‘young woman,’ and also correct that the Hebrew word betulah means ‘virgin.’ However, in several respects he has either misinterpreted the data or has not taken into account the relationship between Old and New Testaments in regard to ancient translations.

1. The word ‘almah which appears in Isaiah 7:14 can be translated ‘young woman’ or ‘maiden’ or ‘woman of marriageable age.’ It is a general term and can refer to any young woman. While it is not a specific indicator of virginity, it is not used to mean. that the woman is no longer a virgin. In fact, Rebekah, the woman sought as a wife for the son of Abraham, is referred to as ‘almah in Genesis 24:43. Rebekah’s virginity was never in question and she was referred to as ‘almah, not betulah. Therefore, Mr. Orbaum is incorrect when he says that the Hebrew betulah “would have been used in the original had the young woman been a virgin.” The word ‘almah allows the possibility that the woman was a virgin.

2. That there is a relationship between Isaiah 7 and Matthew 1 is correct. The gospel cites the passage from Isaiah “a virgin shall be with child…” and considers it to be fulfilled in Jesus. But, is the passage in Matthew a “mistranslation?” Why does this gospel use the term virgin? Matthew’s gospel was certainly not influenced by an “original mistranslation” from the King James Bible!

There is more than one question here: Did the gospel of Matthew misquote the Bible? Which Bible was this gospel using as a source?

The New Testament community used a Greek translation of the Bible, not the original Hebrew. When the gospel writers read Isaiah 7:14 in the Greek, they read parthenos, the Greek translation of ‘almah. This term had a narrower range of meaning than ‘almah, and more specifically meant “virgin,” but it was within the range of equivalence for the Hebrew term ‘almah. The gospel writer did not misquote the Bible in this matter. The gospel writer read the Greek translation and related this passage, as well as many others, to Jesus.

3. The Greek translators of the Hebrew Bible some 300 years or more before the composition of the New Testament were not misquoting the Hebrew; they were doing the difficult work of translation from one language into another. As all of us who love words know, translators are not mechanics who simply replace a word in one language by another word identical in meaning. Translators are interpreters. They look for the word or phrase which will best bring to the audience of their time the text being translated.

Translators of the King James Bible had the same task as did the Greek translators centuries before: to make this ancient text accessible to the readers of their day. What texts did the King James translators use? They had Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible, and they used these in their work. The translators of the King James Bible were translating the Bible for a Christian audience; for them, the Bible consisted of the Old Testament and the New Testament. When they read the Hebrew and Greek texts of Isaiah 7, and the Greek text of Matthew 1, they had to decide which terms from the common language would best express what was in the ancient manuscripts. The adoption of the term virgin was not a mistranslation: it was a judgment of the translators based on the texts which they had before them and the audience for which the translation was intended.

Bible translators today as a general rule prefer to translate from the original languages—for the Old Testament (or Hebrew Bible), Hebrew and Aramaic, for the New Testament, Greek. However, when the reading is unclear or ambiguous, difficult or corrupt, the translator will turn to other translations or versions to see how ancient translators rendered passages in question. Bible translators today must also take into account their audience as they translate. The New English Bible is addressed to an English audience, the New American Bible an American audience. The New Revised Standard Version has as part of its translation agenda the elimination of language which has been made sexist by the limitations of English.

We must be cautious in our assessments of translations to be aware of the subtleties of translation before we too quickly attach the label “mistranslation.” That Christians and Jews have different interpretations of a number of passages in the Bible is apparent. The availability of many excellent translations today affords readers a chance to see how a variety of first-rate translators read and interpret ancient texts. Different interpretations by excellent scholars are far different from mistranslations. The modern translations of Isaiah which are cited above are legitimate translations; the King James translation is also a legitimate translation of Isaiah 7, not a “mistranslation.”

[Chris Franke, Moundsview, Minnesota]

EPISTOLA {Roy B. Flinchbaugh, Jr.}

It appears that I am becoming the champion of “mistranslations.” Some time ago I came to the defense of St. Jerome and his “mistranslation” which gave Moses horns. Now I feel compelled to respond to Jack Orbaum’s interesting letter [EPISTOLAE, XVII, 4] about the “mistranslation” of the Hebrew word ‘almah in Isaiah 7:14, which Mr. Orbaum says ought not be translated ‘virgin’ but ‘young woman.’

As readers of VERBATIM well know, it is simplistic to assume that there is but one correct translation of any given word. ‘Almah is no exception. It almost surely does mean ‘young woman,’ but it can also mean a ‘girl,’ ‘maiden,’ ‘bride,’ ‘youthful spouse,’ a ‘woman of marriageable age’ or ‘the age of puberty’ (according to Gesenius-Robinson, my trusty 1888 Hebrew and English Lexicon). It is not difficult to infer virginity from some of these usages (at least in Biblical times when virginity prior to marriage was expected of a woman). My old lexicon also points out, as does Jack Orbaum, that the customary word for ‘virgin’ is bethulah, not ‘almah.

That brings us to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament “said to have been made by 72 Palestinian Jews during the third century B.C. at the command of Ptolemy Philadelphus… this version of the Bible was used in Mediterranean lands during the time of Christ and the early Church.” (William Rose Benét, The Reader’s Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., 1968) The Septuagint translates ‘almah in Isaiah 7:14 as parthenos. Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament says of parthenos: “a virgin… (fr. Hom. down; Sept. chiefly for bethulah, several times for na’arah; twice for ‘almah …).” So we see that the Greek word “chiefly” chosen by the Septuagint scholars to mean parthenos is the word bethulah, which Mr. Orbaum stresses is “the Hebrew word for virgin.” But the Jewish scholars of the Septuagint also chose the word parthenos to translate ‘almah in Isaiah 7:14, where one might have expected a less specific word. It becomes very muddy. Gesenius-Robinson, by the way, translates bethulah as “a virgin pure and unspotted,” “a virgin just married,” and “a young spouse” (see Joel 1:8, where bethulah is translated by the Septuagint as nymphe, “a betrothed woman, a bride,” “a recently married woman, young wife”— Thayer). The Jerusalem Bible, in a footnote to the word “maiden” (as ‘almah is translated by them in Isaiah 7:14) says:

The Greek version reads “the virgin,” being more explicit than the Hebr. which uses almah, meaning either a young girl or a young, recently married woman.

A more recent commentary on Isaiah 7:14 may be helpful here, or may simply muddy the waters further. Carl Stuhlmueller, C.P., in “Psalm 46 and the Prophecy of Isaiah Evolving into a Prophetic, Messianic Role” in The Psalms and Other Studies on the Old Testament, 1990, writes:

… we return to Isa 7:14 and especially the Septuagint rendition of ‘alma. As is well known, this Greek text renders the word with the technical word for virgin, parthenos, not with what one would expect, neanis—young maid, the Greek word which is deliberately put in place here in the ancient Greek versions of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion. We suggest that the Septuagint sees the maid as Jerusalem, the virgin spouse of the Lord. The text of Isaiah, therefore, resounds with extraordinary richness: the mysterious, marvelous, fertile ways of new life, accomplished solely by the Lord through Israel’s faith.

Innumerable chapters and verses might be cited without a definitive answer and without convincing any one side of the debate that ‘almah unquestionably means, or does not mean, ‘virgin’ in Isaiah 7:14. It may be worth noting here that Martin Luther used the word Jungfrau to translate ‘almah, bethulah, and parthenos. Jungfrau, although referring almost exclusively to ‘virgin’ in present-day German, has the literal root sense of ‘young woman,’ or ‘young wife.’ The English word virgin itself comes from the Latin virgo, which can mean ‘virgin,’ ‘maiden,’ or ‘young woman’ and which reflects the same ambiguity as the other languages.

Translation cannot be an exact science, and so we may never know precisely what the author of Isaiah 7:14, or the author of Matthew 1:23f, meant. Isaiah’s authors (and there were most likely more than one) were poets. Matthew’s author(s) had an ax to grind and sought to prove a point by using a rabbinical-style proof-text argument. In either case, we must not expect these writers to use words as we should like them to have done. Some translators are poets or teachers, too, and we must not expect them necessarily to respond to words in our fashion, either. I would make a plea that we all be a bit more careful in our use of the term “mistranslation.”

It remains unclear to me on whom Mr. Orbaum would pin the blame for what he calls “the original mistranslation.” He seems to suggest that somehow we should fault the group of translators who produced the King James Version of the Bible, but, as we have seen, the confusion lies not so much with a group of sixteenth century English scholars as with the very nature of the art of translation. The Christian Church, nevertheless, chose to latch on to the concept of the Virgin Birth long before the sixteenth century (cf. Tertullian, who lived c. 160-240 A.D.) in any case, and we do not know whether the use of Isaiah 7:14 was to justify an already extant belief with a text, or whether it was to take an already accepted text and graft its meaning, as was then understood, upon the events of the Annunciation to Mary.

Ultimately, it seems, one’s reading here comes most likely from religious orientation rather than from “correctness” of translation. We agree to disagree and, meanwhile, enjoy the richness of languages and the art of playing among them.

[Roy B. Flinchbaugh, Jr., York, Pennsylvania]

Writing Maketh an Exact Man

William B. Ober, M.D., Tenafly, New Jersey

The title is taken from one of Sir Francis Bacon’s sententious essays one read as a schoolboy. As a writer, I wish it were true. But precision and accuracy are elusive virtues, and any number of pitfalls lie in the trail. Herewith is an account and plausible explanation of a few howlers committed by competent, experienced writers in books and articles I have read in recent months.

In her fine biography, Nora: The Real Life of Mollie Bloom (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1988), Brenda Maddox feels impelled to flesh out the account of Nora’s life, which revolved largely around her husband, by describing the decoration of their flat in the Square Robiac. The walls were hung with “family portraits (women in big bonnets and men in red hunting coats) and his reproduction of a Vermeer view of Ghent.” Alas, no: it was a street in Delft. Vermeer was born, lived, painted, and died in Delft. He never, so far as we know, visited Ghent, beautiful as it is. How did the geographical mistake occur? Maddox, far too young to have visited the Joyces in Paris, was relying on an account by Arthur Powers in The Joyce We Knew, who had visited the Joyces in the 1930s and who had mistaken the city. The point was not checked by the copy editor, probably an inexperienced B.A. in English Lit., underpaid by the publishers, and the lapsus appears in the text.

Faulty geography is the basis for an error in Peter Winch’s review of Hans Blumenburg’s Holenausgänge that appeared in the usually faultless Times Literary Supplement [October 13-19, 1989]. He starts with a bit of name-dropping, one of the minor sins of academic reviewers, to show his familiarity with the great names of 19th-century German philosophy, and continues with, “Johann Bachofen, colleague of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt at Zürich University…” Alas, Dr. Winch, who teaches philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana, has mistaken Zürich for Basel, where they were both members of the same faculty, ca. 1870s. Such inaccuracies in the opening sentence of a book review fail to inspire confidence.

At a different level of inaccuracy are some lapses in Robert Craft’s new book, Small Craft Advisories, a collection of clever essays on musical topics. Craft set himself up as Stravinsky’s amanuensis, and his apercus are well worth reading; but when he mislabels the tile of Philip Larkin’s Required Writing as Required Reading, he kills Larkin’s playful title. He also refers to Mozart’s first love, Aloyisia Weber, Constanze’s older sister, as Aloysius, creating a sexual ambiguity that even Peter Sellars did not dare hint at in Amadeus. Aloysius was the name of Sebastian Flyte’s teddy bear in Brideshead Revisited, but not the given name of Mozart’s first love. The error suggests sloppy proofreading.

More egregious are errors committed because the writer or speaker is ignorant of the facts. In a recent BBC Symposium on the ethics of genetic engineering [October 22, 1989], George Steiner, the Oxford pundit and master of the mandarin style, took the negative view, largely because the margin for error was too great. In addressing the question of antenatal treatment of congenital diseases, he claimed that had we been able to treat congenital syphilis, we would have lost the genius of Beethoven. This is simply untrue. Beethoven did not have congenital syphilis, a disabling disease that usually produces driveling idiots. Whether he acquired syphilis as an adult has been suggested and debated, but the evidence seems to be against it. But Professor Steiner’s rhetoric and video-camera style were so persuasive that it was easy to overlook the fact that his argument (or part of it) was based on a complete misstatement of the facts.

The same charge of ignorance can be leveled at Frederick R. Karl, whose biography William Faulkner, American Writer (New York, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989) has many fine literary insights. But we read medical information such as “At 1:30 A.M. on July 6, just seven-and-one-half hours after admission to Wright’s Sanitarium, William Faulkner died… The diagnosis was definitely coronary thrombosis, in which a piece of fat that has formed on the vein wall breaks away and blocks the passage of blood in the vein; the result, loss of blood flow, heart stoppage, almost immediate death.” Karl is a Professor of American Literature at N.Y.U., but had he checked with the Pathology Department he would have learned that coronary thrombosis occurs in arteries, not veins, a fact that many laymen without medical education know, and that it is not “fat” that forms on the wall of coronary arteries but atheromatous plaque.

Ignorance of anatomy was the cause of a gross error in an article I read in a travel magazine on a recent flight to Europe. Writing in Clipper Magazine, the Pan-Am house organ, Barbara Gibbons recounts her experience in drinking slivovitz during a recent trip to Yugoslavia: “A fiery plum brandy, its alcohol content ranges from 25 per cent (mekana, soft) to 55 per cent (ljuta, hot). Mine was ljuta, and it burned a path down my trachea to the pit of my stomach.” Unless Gibbons has an uncorrected tracheoesophageal fistula (hardly likely), her trachea is in continuity with her bronchi and lungs. If she aspirated slivovitz into her respiratory tract, she would be coughing from the time she wrote the article until today. One can drink slivovitz, even ljuta, with impunity, provided it goes down the esophagus.

Lastly, errors creep in because the writer is making up local color. This is not unlike reconstructing a supposed conversation and setting it down as direct discourse. In The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Family, Susan Tifft and Alex Jones describe the arrival of Mary Caperton, later the wife of George Barry Bingham, Sr., into Radcliffe: “In September 1924 Mary climbed aboard a train with Louise Burleigh and set out for Radcliffe. Once in Boston, the pair motored along the Charles River, where the trees were just beginning to take on their vivid autumn color, and then crossed into Cambridge.” Not so! They probably piled their baggage into a taxi either at South Station or Back Bay Station, drove out Commonwealth Avenue and Bay State Road, crossing the Charles at any of several possible bridges. But the trees along both sides of the Charles do not begin to turn color until mid-October. Registration at Radcliffe was usually between September 15th and 20th, but the authors are New Yorkers, and from some deeply suppressed latent hostility, New Yorkers usually manage to get it wrong when they write about Boston or Cambridge. Perhaps they don’t speak the same language.

Verba scripta manent, so goes the Latin tag, and the printed word carries weight, even when it is inaccurate. Even the graffiti in Pompeii carry weight and are subject to scholarly exegesis, though they were written in haste and there was no leisure to repent. If there is a moral to these anecdotes, it is that writers cannot be too careful. One recalls the advice given by the aged Martin Joseph Routh (1755-1854), President of Magdalen College, Oxford, to an undergraduate: “Always verify your references, sir!” Check and double check. That is why they put erasers on pencils.

There Just Isn’t a Word for It

John R. Cassidy, Fairfax, Virginia

When the devil gets the upper hand in me, I like to tease my Spanish and Spanish-American friends about some of the words their language lacks. I tell them that when a specific word for a thing or a function is lacking in a language it must indicate that the thing or the function itself is a concept that is either unknown or is considered unimportant.

Schedule, for example. Spanish doesn’t have a word for it. You can say timetable (horario), and you can proyectar something, or programar it. But that is as near as you can come to a one-word translation of the meaning. And I have noticed that it is no easier to find one word in Spanish that means schedule than it is to explain to a Spanish speaker the range of meaning in schedule in addition to that of timetable.

Speaking of meaning, you can’t say “Do you mean that?” in Spanish. You can say “Are you speaking seriously?” which isn’t quite the same thing. When you want to ask “What does that word mean?” you can ask “What does that word signify?” or “What does that word wish to say?” and thus take care of that meaning of meaning adequately. But if you want to pin a Spanish speaker down with the equivalent of this useful term in English, you are going to have to be content to ask him if he is being serious, even if he happens to be dying with laughter over what he has said.

Are these things clues to the Hispanic character and culture? I do not know, but they do provide material for some glorious arguments. There is no word for argument in Spanish, either, in that sense of the word. Argumento is a reasoning, or the plot of a story or play. If you had to find one word in Spanish for our special meaning you would have to choose among the Spanish equivalents of discussion, debate, or quarrel, none of which quite hits the mark.

Spanish has only one word for hope (esperar) but esperar also means ‘wait’ and ‘expect,’ and if the context is not clear the Spanish speaker will not know whether you are waiting for a bus, or expecting one, or simply hoping that one will come along eventually.

There is no exact word for drop in Spanish. For this term you need to use the word for fall, either with the auxiliary let (lo dejé caer ‘I let it fall’) or in the reflexive (se me cayó ‘it fell itself to me)’. Either way, who can blame you? In one case you did it purposely, and in the other the object did it to you.

To speak of earning something you must use a word that also means winning. The only word for chairman is presidente. Chairmen do preside, of course, but to the English speaker steeped in a tradition of civic committees and PTA the functions of a chairman go beyond simply presiding. To a Spanish speaker, apparently, the head of a committee presides, and that is it.

Spanish had no word for leader, and so eventually they borrowed ours, and can now often be heard to speak of a líder. On the other hand, we do not have a word for caudillo. The nearest we can come is probably boss or strong man, but these words do not encompass the full Spanish meaning.

Which brings us to the subject of words Spanish does have that English lacks. Lidiar, for example, is what a man does with a bull in a bullring, and to him the process is not in the remotest sense a fight. It is a lid, and if you do not understand that word you will not understand him.

It may surprise anyone whose mind’s eye sees the typical Hispanic as a man in a funny hat sleeping in the shade of a saguaro cactus to learn that Spanish can express with one word the concept of ‘getting up early in the morning.’ The verb is madrugar: madrugo (‘I get up early in the morning’); madrugas (‘you get up early in the morning’); madruga (‘he gets up early in the morning’).

We have borrowed simpático, but I somehow do not get the same pleasant glow from the word in an English context that it arouses in Spanish speech.

Street demonstrations in Latin America resound with simple cries we simply cannot duplicate in English.! Viva la patria! (‘Hurrah for the fatherland’?) !Mueran los demócratacristianos! (‘Kill the Christian Democrats’?) !Solidaridad! Poles would understand that, but not we English speakers.

In contrast to the rather standoffish attitude of the English language, Spanish is on familiar terms with the deity and things holy or revered. Why not name your son Jesus? Or John of God? You can name him Joseph Mary or Paul Mary, and nobody will think the less of him. And why not call your daughter Conception, or Sorrows (Dolores)? Or why not search the calendar of saints and holy days for names for the newborn? I have even heard of country boys named Circuncisión, but I have never met one.

We are hard put to bring into normal English the diminutive endings that tend to adorn Spanish discourse with such interesting furbelows: caballito, mujercita, amiguito, autito. There is no hesitancy about using even a double diminutive, as in chiquitito. Chico would be ‘little,’ chiquito would be ‘tiny,’ or perhaps ‘teeny-weeny,’ and chiquitito could only be ‘teensy-weensy,’ I suppose.

In his Growth and Structure of the English Language, Otto Jespersen noted how few diminutives English has, and how little it uses them. He thought that the use of diminutives “produces the impression that the speakers are innocent, childish, genial beings, with no great business capacities or seriousness in life.” Jespersen may have overstated the case, but there is no doubt that whereas no Hispanic male would hesitate to call a little pig a chanchito, few American men would care to be heard calling one a piglet.

Nor, at the other end of the scale, can we match the Spanish superlative suffix -ísimo, e.g., grandísimo, altísimo, bellísimo (rendered in English as the ‘biggest,’ the ‘highest,’ the ‘most beautiful,’ although for an exact equivalency one would use the other superlative form in Spanish, más grande, más alto, más bello). Nothing I have ever heard in English can match the breadth of lighthearted insult expressed by a Spanish wit some years ago who used the suffix with reference to the notoriously pampered, well-connected, well-heeled, well-placed brother-in-law (cu ñado) of Francisco Franco. He called the generalissimo’s brother-in-law el cuñadísimo.

When your language can do that, who cares whether it can schedule things or hope for them, or drop them?

!Viva el español!

If you move, please send change-of-address notice to the office nearer to you, either in Aylesbury or in Indianapolis.

The Power of Doubled Words

R.F. Bauerle, Ohio Wesleyan University

In a recent column on etymologies, Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and Defense Secretary Richard Cheney were cited for their use of willynilly (Atlantic Monthly, March 1990). Thornburgh stated that “he did not favor a ‘willy-nilly’ U.S. military commitment” in Latin America and Cheney “decried … ‘willy-nilly’ cuts in defense spending proposed by some lawmakers.”

By using willy-nilly rather than more formal terms such as “whether desired or not” (American Heritage Dictionary), they were turning to a minor word pattern in English called ‘reduplication,’ meaning a partial or complete duplication of a given word. Many languages use this doubling pattern, some extensively. Hawaiian, having only fourteen letters in its alphabet, resorts to doubling frequently. Some examples are lahi ‘thin, frail,’ lahilahi ‘weak’ (coffee, etc.) and wiki ‘hurry,’ wikiwiki ‘hurry up.’

Reduplication uses two devices that help make language powerful and memorable—rhyme and rhythm. Also, the usage level of English doubles is usually informal or colloquial; and when placed in a context of standard English, a double can make a sentence sparkle.

Among the several types of doubles in English, a rather large group ends both parts with the diminutive suffix -y or -ie. The group seems also to contain two similar sub-groups that produce opposite effects: those that diminish size and express endearment or amusement and those that diminish stature or worth and express disapproval or contempt. Among the first group are many children’s words— Georgy-Porgy, Henny-Penny, Turkey-Lurkey, kitchy-kitchy, lippity-lippity, piggly-wiggly. Among the second are fuddy-duddy, funny-money, hoity-toity, hokey-pokey, namby-pamby, shilly-shally, silly-billy, ticky-tacky, wishy-washy, and the double cited above, willy-nilly. The power gained through rhyme and rhythm seems to be directed by the diminutive suffix toward favorable or unfavorable meanings.

During the Watergate scandal President Nixon had to face an even more powerful combination, one that incorporated his own nickname in a double that ended with the negative diminutive -y. Whoever coined the term tricky-dicky must have sensed that the combination would hit hard.

Perhaps the two Bush administration officials, or their writers, were aware of objections to the positions attributed to them and decided to take the initiative, Thornburgh by distancing himself from those favoring a ‘willy-nilly’ commitment of troops in Latin America and Cheney by blaming members of Congress for urging ‘willy-nilly’ proposals to cut the defense budget.

OBITER DICTA: J—y … Bang!

David Stuart Schofield, Prisoner 334387

Those interested in the magic of onomasiology might note the following full names with the initial letter J and the terminal letter y seemed destined for fame and infamy:

Victims:
John F. Kennedy
John B. Connally
James Brady

Gunmen:
Jack Ruby
James Earl Ray
John W. Hinckley

Tragedies are not limited to the “J—y” phenomenon, of course. Consider Lee Harvey Oswald, whose “L—d” becomes LD, medical jargon for ‘lethal dose.’

EPISTOLA {Robert W. Thompson}

The article by Bill Bryson [XVII, 4] on the vagaries of English abroad unfortunately also serves to illustrate the lack of linguistic understanding which exists between our two countries.

Specifically, the first illustration given is “Full-O-Pep Laying Mash,” which is presented as if it were a nonsense phrase. In fact, of course, “Full-O-Pep” and many variations thereon were, and perhaps still are, common trade names of a variety of animal feed products. And laying mash, as any farmer knows, is a form of chicken feed so formulated as to enhance egg production. In the cited example, the feed manufacturer was even named—which should have been a clue to the author, although the terminal part of the phrase (1091 DS) admittedly baffles me.

One wonders whether the author is the Bill Bryson who wrote The Lost Continent—Travels in Small Town America. If so, the mistake is doubly surprising, as that BB was born (?) and raised in Iowa, then moved to England.

I am addressing this to you since I don’t have the address of the journal of original publication (The Independent), and hope that word may eventually drift back to England.

[Robert W. Thompson, Chicago, Illinois]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Controlling emissions at the source not only protects freshwater ecosystems, but also allows fairly rapid recovery of lakes’ indigent species…” [From “Science Watch,” The New York Times, 5 June 1990. Submitted by Frank R. Abate, Old Saybrook.]

Answers to Paring Pairs No. 41

Not only was there no extra word in No. 41, but the listings “So” and “Order” were inadvertently omitted as well. The ineluctable conclusion is that the culprit responsible for Paring Pairs must pay the price and be dismissed for gross negligence and incompetence. These puzzles have been appearing in VERBATIM for ten years, and it is time to move on to other matters.

(a). Screens three notes. (21,21,3) Re. Re. Do(s).
(b). Texas Street town. (9,21,3) La. Re. Do.
(c). Portuguese blues. (4,3) Fa. Do.
(d). Exhausted and loveless. (27,21,3) Ti. Re. D. (“loveless” Do = D.)
(e). Shy? But nothing’s missing. (27,12,3) Ti. Mi. D. (“nothing” is missing from Do = D.)
(f). Passage. (4,21) Fa. Re.
(g). Buried in endless murk. (12,21,3) Mi. Re. D.
(h). Mediocre. (,) So. So. (But So was omitted in error.)
(i). Moolah. (3,21,12) Do. Re. Mi.
(j). Want to see his etchings? (3,21) Do. Re.
(k). Angry. (*,21) So. Re. (So omitted in error.)
(l). Halfback accomplishes things. (3,21) Do. eR.
(m). Egotistical heroine. (12,12) Mi. Mi.
(n). Epitome of extinction. (3,3) Do. Do.
(o). Verbatim = 50 + reversal. (27,21,9) L. iT. eR. aL.
(p). Overdue improvement on the side. (10,20) Late. Rally.
(q). Cheese gavage in Mendip canyon. (2,7) Cheddar Gorge.
(r). Vessel’s propeller men. (24,23) Ship. Screw.
(s). Succeed in exam for bucolic Ph.D. (16,15) Passed. Oral.
(t). Railway pugilist unable to corner opponent delivers punch. (22,8) Round. House.
(u). Warsaw levy on totems? (18,26) Pole. Tax.
(v). Dahl, Poinsett, Fuchs, etc. (5,17) Flower. People.
(w). Send my wife a dozen roses. (11,**) Male. Order. (This time Order was omitted from the list.)
(x). Bricklayer’s graduation gift. (14,1) Mortar. Board.
(y). Patriotic gland. (19,25) Pro. State.
(z). Lady Luck? Can’t be! (13,6) Miss. Fortune.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

Through the use of ultrasound, University of Washington researcher… studies women who develop high blood pressure during pregnancy with the assistance of AHA-WA funds.” [From Heartlines, a Washington affiliate newsletter of the American Heart Association, Vol. VI, No. 2, 1988.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Movie: ‘Of Human Bandage.’ ” [From TV Supplement to the St. Petersburg Times.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Dr. Robert Stein testified that he put the eight separate pieces of Bridges’ body together in the alley and then pronounced Bridges dead.” [From the Chicago Tribune, 3 July 1986: 2,3. Submitted by M.C. Thomas, Chicago.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Osborne chased it around the back of the net, dug the puck off the sideboards and fired a pass to Poddubny, who beat Buffalo goaltender Tom Barrasso between the legs.” [From an AP story in the Danbury News-Times, 13 November 1986. Submitted by Ed Rosenberg, Danbury. Anyone would be a tender goalie in the circumstances. And was Barrasso so named for playing bottomless?]

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. BA(BOO)NS.
5. ANTES UP (anag.).
9. TO(AS)T.
10. ABS(T-IN)ENT.
11. REDUCTION (anag.).
12. EATEN (hom.).
13. BOWL-IN-G ALLEY.
17. MADE-MO(I)SELLE.
22. BUN-CO.
23. EN(CHAN)TER.
25. ARCHANGEL (hidden).
26. TEETH (anag.).
27. DA(STAR)D.
28. S-PRAYER.

Down

1. B(ATHROB)E.
2. BEAR D-OWN.
3. OPTIC (anag.)
4. S(HAD)ING.
5. A-R-SENAL (LANES rev.).
6. TRITENESS (anag.).
7. s(WE)ETS.
8. PO(TEN)T.
14. I-NAMOR-A-TA (rev.).
15. FL(UTTER)Y.
16. SE(ARCH)ER.
18. E(M)ERGED (DEGREE rev.).
19. OC-CULTS (CO.rev.).
20. A(BOAR)D.
21. ENACTS (anag.).
24. ALTAR (hom.).

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Turn left in error (7)
5. American, held back in tight grip, refuses to talk (5,2)
9. Feel awful about publicity when people are foolish (5)
10. Periods of memory loss need to punctuate drinking sprees (9)
11. Couplet rewritten eight times (7)
12. Secure pens are in Asia (3,4)
13. Go to bed behind place to reduce waistline fat (5,4)
15. Turned on crazy wanderer (5)
17. Audibly extol quarries (5)
19. Politically correct terms due to be retracted in wires (4,5)
22. Ill humor gripping true charmer (7)
24. A good deal to earn following legal profession (7)
25. They sweep around everyone in dance locations (9)
26. Like lambs, love ivy (5)
27. Passes strangely as sleep (7)
28. Government reestablishes fencing courses (7)

Down

1. Clergymen’s studies involving a company (7)
2. Excellent pies going up in flames (5-4)
3. Movie clip seems to show cloud (7)
4. Defer start of battle in story (5)
5. Michael Caine movie featured in chilly area fit for mining (9)
6. Singer Paul fled from capital of Turkey (7)
7. Go diving at south Caribbean island (5)
8. Stationed guards, I suggested (7)
14. Not concerned to run up debts (9)
16. Leatherneck holds up cheap newspaper spread (9)
17. Beverage bill picked up by Warsaw native (7)
18. Fathers hiding at takeoffs (7)
20. Hackneyed remake of Our Town (4-3)
21. Boy takes in poetry (7)
23. Rising with flight from Mediterranean island (5)
24. Stitch had foundation in conversation (5)

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