VOL XVIII, No 4 [Spring 1991]

Politically Correct Nomenclature or, How to Win at Trivial Pursuit and Lose Friends

Marc A. Schindler, Gloucester, Ontario

As a child of the 60s, I remember starting a school year learning the names of countries a certain way in geography class, only to end the year with the old names scratched out, replaced by new ones as scores of former colonies became independent, with (usually) new names. Bechuanaland became Botwana, the Gold Coast became Ghana, British Guiana became Guyana, and so on. Now, a generation later, we seem to be going through another period when names are changing. As frustrating as this might be, it does have one advantage of providing plenty of ammunition for games of oneupmanship ! Personally, I like to keep my friends and associates properly informed and up to date and do not hesitate to correct them when they refer to, for instance, “Ivory Coast” (it is now PC to say Côte d’Ivoire, even in English), or “Burma” (which is, of course, Myanmar, capital city Yangon, not “Rangoon”). My friends—those who remain—rarely fail to thank me for this service.

Why do names change, and why do different people refer to the same place by different names? In spite of this neo-Puritan trends towards PC ‘politically correct’ nomenclature, with all the presure to conform that it brings, there are still sometimes perfectly good reasons for changing the name of a place. It is when the trend is carried to sanctimonious extremes that it becomes irritating.

The most widely-known example of PC name-changing in the U.S. is not that of a place-name but of an ethnic or racial group: Black Americans. In my youth the acceptable term for Blacks was Negroes or Coloureds. Coloured seems to have come to North America from South Africa, where it actually refers to mulattoes, or descendants of mixed race. Negro, from the Spanish/Portuguese word for ‘black’ seems to have been a euphemism, a softer term, and replaced the earlier term, Black. With the rise of Black consciousness and Black pride, Blacks challenged the need for a euphemism (the very use of which implies, of course, something bad or negative, which has to be rendered pleasant or acceptable). I can sympathize, therefore, with their rejection of the term Negro as a racist term. Lately the terms African-American and Afro-American seem to be gaining wider acceptance, although according to a recent poll most U.S. Blacks prefer the term Black; perhaps African-American is still too avant garde.

Just to add another wrinkle, the stylebook of the U.K.-based international news magazine The Economist makes the eminently sensible observation that not all Africans are black; “Africans may be black or white. If you mean blacks, write blacks.” Strictly speaking, then, according to The Economist, would a white refugee from Ian Smith’s Rhodesia now living in the U.S. be justified in calling himself an “African-American”? Somehow I do not think that that is what most Americans have in mind when they hear or read the term.

As another example, the indigenous people of the Arctic are, as far as I know, still commonly referred to in the United States as Eskimos; but for some time now the PC term in Canada has been Inuit, a term which affords great scope for PC snobbery, as it can be fairly complicated; the people are Inuit; the language is Inuitituk; and an individual is an Inuk. This attention to detail is, however, devotion to PC-ness above and beyond the call of duty, and in usual practice most educated or academic Canadians now use Inuit as a comprehensive adjective and noun. The reason Canada has made this change is fairly complex but has to do with a fine point of anthropology. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, “Inuit simply means ‘people.’ Inuit were earlier known by Europeans as ‘Eskimos’—a pejorative, roughly meaning ‘eaters of raw meat,’ applied to them by INDIAN groups. The language is called Inuktitut, or Inttituut, which is divided into six different dialects.” I suppose that no one would want to be known by a term that means ‘eaters of raw meat.’ However, that does not explain why the change seems confined to Canada. In fact, the term Eskimo is still popularly used. Two of Canada’s best-known popular history writers, Peter C. Newman and Pierre Berton, use the term almost exclusively in works they have written on Canada’s North. The publisher of The Canadian Encyclopedia, Mel Hurtig, is a well-known Canadian nationalist with leftwing political views and probably intends that his publication “lead” public opinion. There is also an academic distinction between Inuit and Eskimo, as explained by Alan D. Macmillan, a British Columbia professor of anthropology:

…inhabitants [of the Arctic] are the Inuit, who are distinct from all other Canadian native peoples. They belong to a linguistic stock termed Eskimo-Aleut (or ‘Eskaleut’), named for its two major branches. The Aleuts, on the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, are the most divergent. The larger branch, Eskimo, has a major division near Bering Strait. On one side, the Yupik comprise at least five separate languages in eastern Siberia and central and southern Alaska. On the other, the Inuit extend from northern Alaska to Greenland, including all of Arctic Canada. In Canada, the word ‘Inuit’ (meaning ‘people’; the singular is ‘Inuk’) has now almost totally replaced ‘Eskimo’ (generally, although perhaps erroneously, believed to be derived from a derogatory Algonkian term meaning ‘eaters of raw meat’). However, it must be remembered that not all ‘Eskimos’ are Inuit. Throughout their vast distribution, the Inuit speak a single language (Inuktitut), although a number of dialects are known.

Native Peoples and Cultures of Canada: an Anthropological Overview, Douglas & McIntyre, 1988, p. 240.

One could, therefore, simplify matters by saying that Canadian and Greenland—but not Alaskan or Siberian—Eskimos are Inuit. Although, as it so happens, according to Macmillan, at the first Inuit Circumpolar Conference, held in Barrow, Alaska, in 1977, Inuit from Alaska, Canada, and Greenland officially adopted the term Inuit for all peoples formerly known as Eskimo, despite linguistic differences. (Siberians were prevented from attending at that time for political reasons.) These two examples of name changes arose out of demands made by the ethnic groups themselves, for both Blacks and Inuit objected to previous terms because they considered them derogatory.

Two examples of name changes which I find harder to accept are the new names for what used to be called Ivory Coast and Burma. Côte d’Ivoire, of course, is the literal French equivalent of Ivory Coast, and in other European languages that country has traditionally been called by a name which is the literal translation of the term (e.g., Elfenbeinküste in German). So why insist on using the French term, when its literal meaning is identical to the traditional English name? It seems that the President-for-Life of Côte d’Ivoire, son Excellence Félix Houphouet-Boigny, is a confirmed and impassioned francophile, and seems intent on converting his agricultural nation into a sort of Paris-on-the-Guinea. He has erected, at enormous expense, a European-style capital city, Yamoussoukro, in the interior of the country, and furnished it with, among other things, an embarrassingly gauche, oversized Roman Catholic basilica rumored to be larger even than St. Peter’s in Vatican City—all this supposedly to serve the spiritual needs of the country’s francisized Catholics, who constitute no more than 12% of the country’s 11 to 12 million people. To make a long story short, I am convinced that the PC-ness of Côte d’Ivoire arises out of President Houphouet-Boigny’s desire to be seen as the leader of a linguistically and culturally French nation. Whether one chooses to use this term or the traditional term depends, I suppose, on how sensitive one is to the wishes of people (or of their leaders) regarding the way they are named.

Likewise with Myanmar, the name now used— at least in the non-U.S.-English-speaking world—for what used to be called Burma. The official name of the country in Burmese has, since independence from Britain, been Pyidaungsu Socialist Thammada Myanma Naingngandaw, so Myanmar, it seems, is simply Burmese for Burma. This is the same phenomenon as Côte d’Ivoire. But the current Myanmarese (do I venture where angels fear to tread by coining the adjective?) regime is a repressive one that liberal Western democrats view with distaste: one could say that they could give “Paradise” a bad name had that been the new name chosen for their sad little country.

In the case of Côte d’Ivoire and Myanmar, well read individuals and others who pride themselves on being up to date and informed (and therefore especially susceptible to “PC-itis”) will use the new terms, but with a certain amount of distaste. The degree to which they show their ambivalence shows their ability to walk the trendy pseudo-liberal tightrope of PC-ness. “I use this term, but knowingly, with reluctance” shows a certain intellectual virtuosity which is an entrance requirement for those who aspire to beatitude within neo-Puritanism.

The Gremlins of E.T.

Zellig Bach, Lakehurst, New Jersey

No, I am not referring to the Extra-Terrestrial but to Errors Typographical (also called typos, for short, or, in Britain, literals).

During the hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee Judge Clarence Thomas read a categorical statement denying flatly and absolutely the charges of sexual harassment against him, but he used the adverbial “uncategorically,” thus negating the very essence of his statement. For a man of his intelligence and lifelong habit of writing, such a slip of the pen—or tongue—readily suggests to a psychoanalytically trained eye or ear an ambivalence, if not a mental conflict, about the denial.

This episode reminded me of the “Wicked Bible,” so called because the word not was omitted from the Seventh Commandment, which read “Thou shalt commit adultery.” Would it not be P.C. (no, not ‘politically correct’ but ‘psychoanalytically correct’) to assume that the typesetter’s unconscious played a role in such a significant error? The “Wicked Bible” was published in 1631 by the official printer of the King of England, and he—the printer, not the King—was fined 300 pounds, an exorbitant amount of money in those days. The fine drove him to ruin. Was the punishment particularly harsh because the affair reminded everyone, including the King himself, that his Majesty behaved according to the “Revised” Commandment?

Of course, not every typographical error should be ascribed to a hidden unconscious motive on the part of the typesetter (or typist). Sometimes it is totally innocent and does not interfere, even for a second, with the flow of reading or comprehension. A plea on groups of insanity, in a newspaper report of a criminal trial, is promptly dismissed by the mind and substituted with “grounds.” Newspapers, particularly, are bound to have such innocent typographical errors because of the constant pressure of deadlines.

Sometimes a simple transposition of letters may make things more complicated. When a sentence in a research report read “the results of the experiment were nuclear,” I stopped to reread it, and smiled when I quickly discovered that it should have read “unclear.” Similarly, “density,” in place of destiny, is initially confusing until one deciphers, from the context, the true intent of the sentence. A lecture of mine was once described in a newspaper as “light-headed,” instead of “light-hearted” (unless the reporter was being mean-spirited…).

Some typos might be said to be “errors of similarity or familiarity,” when similar or more familiar words are substituted for the words in the manuscript. I should include in this category (the corrected words are in brackets) graduation recession [procession], Gamblers Anonymouse [anonymous], Third Rights [Reich], American Protective Drawing Institute [Projective], Postal Doctoral Institute [Post-], End Quiry [Inquiry], Clinical and Counter [Encounter], and similar misprintes. All these typographical errors could easily have been avoided by a careful reading of the galley proofs.

One group of typographical errors is much more serious than a single misspelled word. This occurs when a line or more from the original text is unintentionally skipped altogether, resulting in an incomprehensible, mangled style. I call it the propinquity error because if often happens when the typesetter’s eyes make an inadvertent visual jump from one line to a line or two below in the manuscript because the same word appears in both places.

On rare occasions a typographical error is uncanny. The obituary in The New York Times of the famous psychoanalyst Theodor Reik ended with the sentence: “His body was created.” Reik, who loved language, would have greatly enjoyed such a parapraxis.

At times a typographical error is made on purpose, as in advertisements or signs, to catch the eye of the reader or passerby. If it is a “good” one it may even become a conversation topic, the very hope of the intentional misspeller.

The nationally famous stores “Toys ‘\?\’ Us” use a child’s reversal of the letter R. Similarly, the title of the movie The \?\ussians Are Coming, The \?\ussians Are Coming, which plays games with a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet (which is not an r).

During the 1956 presidential elections the Hudson County Democratic Committee in New York erected a huge billboard sign high atop a gasoline station near the Holland Tunnel, which people driving into and out of Manhattan could not help seeing. The sign intentionally misspelled the name of the Democratic candidate and read: “On November 6 vote for Adlai E. Steviesion.” The caption under the picture of the billboard in The New York Times read: “Think! Sign atop a gas station near entrance to Holland Tunnel in Jersey City bears an intentional misspelling.” A Committee member stated, “the planned mistake paid off wonderfully and got more attention than if the name were spelled correctly.” Stevenson’s reaction is not known. Being a master of the English language and certainly a careful speller, he most likely would have shaken his head at this kind of childish electioneering.

During the 1988 presidential campaign both candidates, reading from prepared notes, made interesting slips of the eye: Governor Dukakis spoke of equipping aircraft carriers with modern “musicians” [munitions], and Vice President Bush said: “I hope I stand for anti-bigotry, anti-Semitism, antiracism.” These slips were essentially due to the similarity of the initial letters or part of the word, like the typographical errors of similarity or familiarity cited above, but probably also due to the immense fatigue and exhaustion brought on by a presidential campaign.

When one’s name is deliberately or even unconsciously misspelled, or when it is knowingly mispronounced, a person perceives it as a slap at his pride. One does not have to be psychologically sophisticated to see in it a deliberate discourtesy, an intended injury to his dignity.

Missing or misplaced punctuation marks naturally fall within the net of the E.T. gremlins. Read the sentence “Let’s eat, children” without the comma and see the difference it makes. There are many examples of how sentences with improper punctuation marks sound ludicrous. For example, a program chairman prepared in longhand a few laudatory introductory remarks about a lecturer: “… I bring you a man among men. He is out of place when among cheaters and scoundrels. He feels quite at home when surrounded by persons of integrity…” As if by a devilish design a number of errors in punctuation were made in the process of transcribing the prepared introductory notes, resulting in “Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you a man. Among men, he is out of place. When among cheaters and scoundrels, he feels quite at home, …” and so on [(“A Punctuation Parable,” VIII, 4, 16)].

Computer errors may not technically fall within the category of typographical print errors, but they are nonetheless mistakes, and can be quite costly. In July of 1962 the spacecraft Mariner I veered off course about four minutes after its launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and had to be blown up in the air. The reason: an inadvertent omission of a hyphen from the computer’s mass of coded mathematical ascent guidance instructions. The spacecraft was to transmit scientific observations about Venus from a distance of 36,000,000 miles. Its cost: ten million dollars.

Every word or combination of words carries within itself a potential E.T. bug. Even monosyllabic words are not immune, as when a doctor’s familiar words “say Aah,” while examining a patient’s throat, came out in print as “say Haa.”

On guard against such a potential E.T. viruses is an army of professional proofreaders who, like electronic inspectors at airports searching for concealed weapons, are supposed to weed out errors before the final printing. Proofreaders use a special set of marks, signs and symbols to indicate on the gallery proofs the required corrections—deletions, insertions, size or type of fonts (lower case letters, capitals, bold face), space notations (size of paragraph indents, missing spaces between words or extra spaces within words, type and length of dash), etc. To the uninitiated these marks to look like hieroglyphics of an ancient people. (See the entire p. 1081, Proofreaders' Marks, in the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, 1991.)

I had better stop here. While I am pointing out and correcting various typographical errors, the gremlins of E.T. may play a trick on me, mischievously introduce new errors, and attribute them to moe….

ETYMOLOGICA OBSCURA: Jeux d’Esprit

Anne Cutler, Cambridge, England

If the European Community has achieved nothing else it has produced one magnificent acronym: ESPRIT, the European Strategic Programme of Research in Information Technology. Indeed, there might well have been equal willingness in Brussels to launch a program in, say, Ichthyological Taxonomy for the sake of such a satisfying acronym.

Information technology was, however, the favored field, and the ESPRIT program was launched a few years back to promote European research of this type. Information technology, or IT, covers areas as diverse as automatic speech recognition and synthesis, telephone and other communications engineering, database management, human-computer interaction, and indeed computer science itself. Communication via computer is at the heart of IT. For instance, a much-used catchword of IT is “the paperless office”; It is supposed to replace all those filing cabinets and folders with a chip or two here and a CD-ROM there.

It is not much in evidence, however, in the actions of ESPRIT itself. For instance, paperless is emphatically not the first adjective that springs to mind to describe the office of an ESPRIT participant. The more typical ESPRIT decor is, in fact, wall-to-wall paper—much of it in curious Euro-colours like mauve and puce. The European Community has, in the few decades of its existence, established quite a reputation for generating paper output on a scale that no mere national government has ever aspired to: like every other Euro-initiative ever launched, ESPRIT generates Euro-text by the ream. This is rather depressing, because it suggests that there is no escaping the remorseless Euro-bumf generator even for a program with an avowed aim of paper reduction. However, in its own way ESPRIT had indeed made a small step towards reduction of the European paper mountain. Perhaps inspired by its own acronym, ESPRIT insists that each ESPRIT project, however complex its title, choose a single-word acronym by which it may be identified; and ESPRIT itself never refers to projects by their full names, but only by the acronyms.

Whole forests may be saved by this, as “Speech Processing and Recognition using Integrated Neurocomputing Techniques” turns to SPRINT, and “Correct Hardware Design Methodology: Towards Formal Design and Verification for Provably Correct VLSI Hardware” becomes CHARME. (These are real ESPRIT projects, by the way. They are participants in ESPRIT’s Basic Reasearch Actions, or BRA—a less conspicuous support system.)

A study of successful ESPRIT acronyms (i.e., the acronyms of grant applications which proved successful) suggests certain guidelines. The ideal acronym should resemble ESPRIT itself by expressing a concept with international acceptance. It should preferably be French in origin, since that may lessen potential irritation in Brussels at the fact that the acronym invariably represents an English word sequence. So a group which plans to build a Partially Automated Restricted-Access Voice Input/Output Network would do well to call it PAR-AVION. Likewise, a consortium studying Algebraic Methods In Expert Neural Systems might call their projects AMIPENS (though AMEX would also do quite nicely).

Just as the right acronym can be the key to a project’s success, so can an ill-chosen acronym lead to disaster. Perhaps that is what happened with my unsuccessful proposal for a Multiple Entry Reconfigurable Dialogue Editor (“This project stinks”— Referee A), or my Comprehensive Universal Labelled Database Enumerating System Architecture Concepts (“Will this work lead anywhere?”).

In fact the area of acronym selection is so important that it seems to me there is a technology gap here. Moreover, a project to fill it is just what ESPRIT ought to support. So I plan to call on colleagues throughout Europe to join a consortium which will design and build a Computational Human-Assisted Multi-Purpose Acronym Generator/Neologism Evaluator. All we have to do is think up an acronym for it.

EPISTOLA {Lee Levitt}

The article on Hindi words [XVIII,1] prompts me to ask if anyone knows the etymology of bungee ‘springy cord.’ I have always assumed that it must be Hindi because of its look, but I have no evidence of that. At this moment, the word is most commonly used for the elastic tether by which daredevils attach themselves to a bridge or building before leaping off into space, a sport that was graphically depicted in the opening scene of the movie, To Live and Die in L.A. My daughter tells me, however, that the terms was used at least ten years ago for the elastic cords used for tying schoolbooks to the luggage rack at the back of a bicycle.

[Lee Levitt, New York City]

[The dozen or so American and British dictionaries I checked are silent on the origin of bungee; though The Australian National Dictionary suggests that it is related to bungle ‘India rubber; an eraser,’ neither is given an etymology. A bungee consists of a number of strands of rubber bound together in a tough woven cloth covering. The term familiar to me from my sailing days is Shock Cord, for it is often used to relieve the strain on a mooring or anchor line. However, as Mr. Levitt’s daughter pointed out, it is usually found as a stretchy tie used to bind things up, as a reefed mainsail on its boom, light articles to a luggage rack, etc.—Editor.]

Learn to Spike Lunars

Robert Archibald Ford, Checotah, Oklahoma

Each time I visit Oxford, I walk past the Bodleian Library, pass under the Bridge of Sighs, and turn down the narrow lane that leads to Oxford University’s New College, treading the same path as the late venerable Reverend Doctor William Archibald Spooner. In my head and on my tongue, spoonerisms spring forth. I recall a childhood favourite from my father’s sparse joke repertoire: “Church usher to errant worshiper, ‘Mardon me padam, but you are occupewing the wrong pie. May I sew you to another sheet?’ ” Slips allegedly uttered by Spooner himself bring a smile: “Who has not felt in his heart a half-warmed fish to live a nobler life?” Transpositions come to mind that appear daily in the thoughts of every dedicated spoonerist: darking bogs, a lanely lone, the lissing mink. Each of these metatheses evokes a chuckle of delight.

The good Dr. Spooner, a kind man with white hair and cherubic face, served New College for a half century as distinguished scholar and able administrator. He denied having made the slips of the tongue that made him famous, and his contemporaries agreed that most legendary spoonerisms were invented by imaginative New College undergraduates. Eyewitnesses claim, however, that the concept began with Spooner’s twice-spoken chapel announcement: “The next hymn will be ‘Kinkering Kongs Their Titles Take.’ ” Others claim he once actually said: “…in a dark glassly.” A colleague recalled a discussion in which Dr. Spooner referred several times to “Dr. Friend’s child” when he meant Dr. Childe’s friend. Equally famous (though as an Irish bull) is his question of a former student shortly after World War I: “Was it you or your brother who was killed in the war?”

Spooner admitted “occasional infelicities in verbal diction” but became openly irritated when his name was associated with oral transpositions. When introduced as the “Dean of Kew Knowledge” at a college social function, he responded with outspoken displeasure.

In the six decades since Dr. Spooner’s death, the phenomenon of transposed sounds has found a firm place both in spoken and written language. A spoonerism, or more technically, a methathesis, is the transposition of letters, syllables, or sounds in a word or phrase. More often, they take an oral rather than a written form. Writers employ them, however, as a useful comedic device, and accidental faux pas occasionally appear in printed material.

Following exhaustive research and practice, I divide spoonerisms into two general categories based upon their structure and their function. Structural categories depend upon changes in the sound of words or upon their appearance in written form, particularly the effect upon spelling. Functional groupings deal with meaning, either overt or implied, both before and after transposition. Analysis of these groups enables one to determine what might be called “good” as opposed to “bad” spoonerisms. (Many critics maintain all are “bad”.)

Perfect or true spoonerisms are correct in both sound and spelling when transposed. Laborers are tons of soil, in place of sons of toil, not only sounds right and spells right, but has meaning in its revised form. The best spoonerisms produce an element of humor or irony, as this one does. Sound, spelling, meaning, and humor all combine to make great spoonerisms.

Partial spoonerisms occur when transposition produces only one meaningful word. A treckled spout in the lake for speckled trout is interesting, perhaps even amusing, but it lacks the satisfaction and punch of a true spoonerism. As one plays the transposition game, many partial spoonerisms come to mind, but they must be discarded quickly, if you me what I seen.

Auditory spoonerisms preserve the right sound when transposed, but require varied spelling when written. Thus, a spoonerized loose-leaf note book becomes boat nook, not “bote nook,” when written. Dr. Spooner’s proverbial half-warmed fish for half-formed wish has a totally different sound and meaning if written as “half-wormed fish,” requiring the spelling to be changed. Since sound and mental image are the keys to good spoonerisms, auditory types are most acceptable.

Visual spoonerisms appear to be correct in written form, but transposition produces the wrong sound. For example, when warm food becomes farm wood, the result is neither meaningful nor pleasing to the ear. Farm does not rhyme with warm, and the sound of wood differs greatly from food. While the term form wooed has good sound, it loses its effectiveness because there is no real meaning in the phrase. Strictly visual spoonerisms must be rejected.

Meaningless spoonerisms may be amusing in sound, but do not create real words. Spooner’s original Kinkering Kongs for Conquering Kings falls into this category along with the comment attributed to him that the story of the flood was “barrowed from Bobylon.” His apochryphal statement of compassion for the duff and demb brings a smile but creates no new meaning in the transposed words. Because they give great pleasure both to ear and mind, however, meaningless transpositions are acceptable, even relished, by all spoonerists.

Mirror spoonerisms occur when transposition simply reverses word order, usually with little change in meaning. In this phenomenon, the words rhyme. Thus, a great date becomes a date great. Mirror types are somewhat rare, seldom have new meaning, and usually are uninteresting. I recall a college dean who was addressed as Dean Greene to his face. Behind his back, however, irreverent junior faculty referred to him as the Green Dean.

Spoonerisms can be classified on a functional basis as either useless or useful. Useless spoonerisms produce correct words which, unfortunately, neither amuse not have current meaning. If a stack of plates is changed to a plaque of states, the result is, to say the least, puzzling. Plaque is a word, and states is a word, but no meaning attaches to the term since there is no mental connection. Useless spoonerisms must be avoided and characterize their creators as rank novices or amateurs.

Useful spoonerisms substitute a common or meaningful phrase for another when transposition occurs, as when “the movement was dealt a crushing blow” becomes “the movement was dealt a blushing crow.” Changing “there’s a cozy nook in my kitchen” to “there’s a nosey cook in my kitchen” not only introduces a totally new meaning, but also injects humor. Having achieved these desired results, a sense of satisfaction and well-being settles upon both speaker and listener.

A gratifying subset of the useful category includes the obscene spoonerism, either intentional or accidental. Transposition produces a vulgar term or phrase. Think what the clever spoonerist can do with “the painting is foul art,” or perhaps even better, fowl art. Could one resist tampering if Joyce had written “She was a bit of awful lass,” or if Shakespeare had penned “Thy chatter is but showful wit!” Obscene spoonerisms represent the pinnacle of spooner-type wit (or is that wooner-type spit?).

Making up spoonerisms is a pleasant form of addiction. The malady is similar to that of the clever little tune that becomes imbedded in the mind and demands to be hummed: the more one tries to forget, the stronger is the sense of impulsive and involuntary recall. Unlike other life-long addictions, however, the spoonerist incurs no cost, inflicts little pain upon others, and can engage in his or her passion anywhere at any time, greatly enriching the quality of life. No one ever recovers, but under the circumstances, who wants to? As I often say: “To spooner not to spoon?”

I’ll probably try dying!

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch …

William H. Dougherty, Santa Fe

After bragging about his three granddaughters, a rancher friend of mine said of his prolific son, “And of course he’s got that little ketch-colt in town.” A bit later at the same picnic when the same son’s pretty Hispanic wife joined us with a mess of beans she had cooked, she too talked about family, including the blond baby daughter she carried on her hip. “People ask me how come she’s so blond when the other two are so dark,” the young mother said, laughing, “but that’s just the way it turned out. I told Joe, I said, ‘Honey, honest, I didn’t jump the fence.’ ” Most of us with our British visitors had just come down off the mesa where Joe had been branding calves. In ranch lingo branding often implies vaccination, castration, and ear-marking as well. So the rancher’s sister yelled, “What did y’all do with those mountain oysters I fried up?”

“The what?” the lady visitor from Sheffield inquired.

“The huevos… You know, the balls,” the hungry American lady interpreted, giving up her attempt at delicacy.

I lived on a ranch in my formative years, and the terms, the jargon, at least in the Southwest of the United States, is not unfamiliar to me. But I am aware that stockmen’s vocabulary varies considerably around the English-speaking world, much more I imagine than, say, nautical, or culinary, or musical terms do. Once while my wife and I were spending a few weeks on my father’s ranch in Oklahoma, we left our Virginia house in the care of a former Foreign Service colleague who had just been fired for marrying an Australian woman without Departmental permission. Another friend, an American, phoned me at home then and was answered by the Australian bride. “Bill isn’t here,” she said; “he’s on a station in the bush.” Now, the Australian was quite angry over the firing of her husband, and probably she was being deliberately un-American on the phone to confound yet another stupid Yank. If so, she succeeded, as my American friend later told me, and, more interestingly to me, revealed by example how much terms in the same language for the same things (station = ranch; bush = country, sticks) in the same occupation can vary from place to place, at least when it comes to stock raising.

“Most of what you’ve just seen goes on in the UK too,” I remarked to our British visitors as we drove down off the mesa, to which the lady from Sheffield rejoined, “Oh, no, I don’t think so. I think we mark cattle with little tags in their ears. We don’t rope the calves either and throw them down.” On second thought, I had to agree that she was probably right. But the most repugnant part of the multiple operation we had just witnessed was the castration, and I remained sure that bull calves are made steer calves in Britain and are vaccinated. I wondered whether on British farms the common word for castrate was the same as here: cut. Presumably the other terms we had heard in use on the mesa, flank for ‘heave the roped calf onto the ground’ and hogtie for ‘truss it up with a pickin’ string' while the well-trained roping horse keeps the ketch rope taut, are not used, as the practices are not, in Britain. In fact, on many, if not most, American ranches nowadays all of these operations are performed in chutes rather than by roping calves from horseback and flanking and hogtying them. Also, increasingly brands are painlessly frozen, not burned, into the calves' hide. Even in the relatively primitive procedure we had witnessed, though, Joe had been so brisk and deft and the calves so nonchalant as soon as they got back on their feet that the business had not seemed so atrocious as one might think.

Here in the Western States, just as worldwide, ranch terminology varies from area to area. Everywhere in North America ranch vocabulary has drawn heavily from Mexican Spanish, since the industry largely evolved in Mexico and the border states, especially Texas. But even though as a boy I lived on a ranch right on the Mexican border, I remember being mystified by ranching terms that crept into Western songs from north of us, cayuse, for example. I wondered about the word coulee in the old song: “…they feed in the coulees and water in the draws…”

Ranch words of Mexican origin, besides ranch itself, are: rodeo, latigo ‘a long strap to fasten the cinch to a Western saddle,’ corral (a word I could not find in an English dictionary, except in its Afrikaans form kraal, when I needed to know how to spell it some sixty years ago), bronc(o), palomino, buckeroo (which I have heard used only in fun), and chaps, to list a few that come to mind. But most ranching terms, including such essential ones as cowboy, grass, pasture, fence, heifer, beef, boots, saddle, and so on, are obviously common English words of long standing. Some of the English words have taken on a special application in ranching usage. Take the verb cut, which in common ranch parlance has two meanings, the first as stated above being ‘castrate.’ The second meaning, not exclusive to ranch talk, is ‘separate,’ as in “Cut the deck (of cards).” On a ranch you might hear someone say, “Today we’ve got to cut those penned steers,” meaning perhaps ‘separate out the ones to be shipped.’ A cutting horse is a mount trained to separate certain cattle out from the herd or bunch.

What on most ranches in the Southwest is called a ketch (catch) rope is a reata in Mexican Spanish. Our word lariat comes from this Mexican word with the definite article prefixed and the final vowel dropped. In the northern Mexican states, especially Sonora, these ropes used to lasso animals from on horseback sometimes are—or anyway were— woven of strands of rawhide, which is elastic. If a big calf or steer was roped with one of these rawhide lariats attached solidly to the saddle horn, American style, and the roping horse came to an abrupt halt or sat back so that the roped animal hit the rope at a run, the lasso tended to stretch like a rubber band and then snap, possibly springing back to knock an eye out of the cowboy. Monolongual Mexican vaqueros witnessing the folly of such misuse of their implement would shout at the Gringos in excellent Desert Latin (as Spanish has been called): “Dale, dale!” Literally this means simply ‘Give to him’ but actually the advice offered was more like “Play him (like a fish).” The idea was that you had to hold the rope in your hand and reduce the tension to what the elasticity would tolerate. American cowboys, perhaps confusing the Spanish dale with English dally, began to understand, maybe at the cost of an eye or two, and in their own lingo called the rawhide lariats dally ropes. That, at least, was the etymology current in Southern Arizona, which was plausible enough to convince me. I have heard other explanations of dally rope in New Mexico that were too implausible to remember.

Another interesting word that American cowhands have taken from their Mexican predecessors, along with the thing itself, is chaps, typically truncated from the Mexican chaparreras, the word for protective leather leggings worn mainly by cowboys on horseback in thorny brush. The only time I have heard the American word pronounced with the usual English, or for that matter Spanish, ch sound was in a perfume ad on TV. By the people who wear chaps the article is invariably called as if spelled shaps. Two linguistic forces have shaped this word: the English-language tendency to reduce words to a single syllable (e.g., pram, sync, perk, Miss/Ms., etc.) and the law of open syllables that causes the first of two consonants that come together in a Spanish word to be dropped, most commonly in the case of ll, which prescriptively should be pronounced as ly but is much more often pronounced as y alone. The t element of the tsh combination represented by ch in Spanish, as in English, is not so commonly skipped as the first l of the double l combination, but it is often dropped, at least in northern Mexico; so what the Gringo cowboys heard was shaparreras, which they trimmed down to what was spelled chaps but pronounced shaps.

Drawing on occupational jargon for metaphors to enliven communication is a common way to color and illustrate language. And where a basic occupation centers on livestock, as in Biblical Judea or parts of the American West or the Australian bush, the stockman’s jargon is bound to be a main source of metaphors, whether the subject be marital transgression as in the banter at our picnic, or the Lord’s providing for His flock as in the Twenty-third Psalm, or national character as in “Waltzing Matilda.”

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Dictionary of English Place-Names

A.D. Mills, (Oxford University Press, 1991), xxxiii, + 388pp.

Place-names have many different “meanings.” We could all write down a list of names which are personally meaningful, recalling places where we have lived and loved. If ever I write an autobiography it will be in dictionary form: names of places and people defined in terms of private significance. For poets, humorists, and those blessed with fertile imagination, place-names can have other meanings:

Yes, I remember Adlestrop
—The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

Thus Edward Thomas begins the poem which enables us to join him in his railway compartment at the turn of the century. He goes on to fix that summer afternoon and the name Adlestrop forever in our consciousness. Poets, as Stephen Vincent Benét reminded us, can fall in love with place-names.

Humorists respond to them differently. I hope everyone is familiar with The Meaning of Liff, by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983). The authors decided that place-names spent too much time “loafing about on signposts.” They assigned definitions to the names which allowed them to “start earning their keep in everyday conversation.” Adlestrop, to them, was “that part of a suitcase which is designed to get snarled up on conveyor belts at airports. Some of the more modern Adlestrop designs have a special ‘quick release’ feature which enables the case to fly open at this point and fling your underclothes into the conveyor belt’s gearing mechanism.”

Reluctantly I have to admit that the reader has no right to expect poetry or wit in this latest Oxford place-name dictionary. The author is a highly reputable academic toponymist, and he is dealing with English, not American, place-names. Those who study New World place-naming are at a distinct advantage. They are mainly social historians, with many an anecdote to relate about why settlers from Europe transferred existing names. Scholars like A.D. Mills have to shift back several centuries and be linguistic archaeologists. They then have the difficult job of explaining the results of their researches to laymen.

What, then, has Mills made of Adlestrop? For him it is a place in Gloucestershire which had its name recorded in 714 as Titlestrop. By Domesday, in 1086, it had become Tedestrop. He therefore explains the name as “outlying farmstead or hamlet of a man called *Tætel.” In other words, as he says, it is an OE personal name plus the element throp. He adds: “The initial T- disappeared from the 14th century due to confusion with the preposition at.”

I think we should consider for a moment to whom Mills is explaining all this. I imagine that it is likely to be someone who happens to live in Adlestrop, a chap who has woken up one day and said to himself: “Adlestrop—that’s a queer sort of name. Why Adlestrop?” Having popped into his local reference library and taken this dictionary from the shelf, has all become clear to him? Is this entry as “clear and concise” as the blurb claims?

If our enquirer had at least some formal training in philology, it will have been crystal clear. He will have had no need to consult the Introduction to discover that Tætel’s name is preceded by *because it is “inferred from comparative [place-name] evidence and postulated to occur.” He will not have needed to consult the list of abbreviations to learn that OE stands for Old English, and that “old” in that context has a fairly specific meaning. He will have understood why the at confusion occurred. Though he would probably talk of living in Adlestrop he knows that that he gets off the train at Adlestrop. Not that he would think in such simplistic terms: his historical knowledge of prepositional usage would have made such reasoning unnecessary.

My point is that a more normal reader will have extracted far less from the entry—probably no more than that Adlestrop originally meant ‘someone’s farm.’ My further point is that to be totally successful, a dictionary of this kind requires far more than the academic skills of a place-name specialist. If such a work is really to do its job—tell the story of a place-name in simple terms to an average reader—a great deal of further thinking needs to be done by the editorial team about how the information is presented and for whom. Imagination on their part is required, even if it is not the imagination of the poet or humorist.

The information in this book would have been better presented in an entirely different form. Had it remained a traditional book, there would have been a strong case for listing separately the hundreds of names that consist of a personal name and common place-name element. Various other lists could have given the essential information about names based on words with meanings such as ford and wood. An index would have allowed names to be traced in alphabetical order. Separate articles could have dealt with the meaning of elements like throp and such matters as the loss of initial letters, owing to confusion of preposition and name.

A much better solution, however, would have been to publish this material as computer software. Surely the reference libraries to which people turn for such specialized information as the origin of place-names, as well as the individuals who are interested enough in such subjects to buy dictionaries, have access by now to personal computers? I should have been able to refer to the fruits of Mills’s labors by inserting a floppy disk into my machine. On typing Adlestrop I should have been presented with the early spellings and Mills’s interpretation. Had I needed it, a Help key should have brought an instant explanation of the symbol * and the abbreviation OE. There would have been a far fuller discussion of the preposition question in a separate paragraph, one that would have appeared on screen had I typed in a name, such as Elstree, where it was also relevant.

Academic reviewers of this dictionary will, as usual, write a great deal about whether the author was right to choose one postulated form of an Old English name rather than a slightly different one. I believe it would be wrong to confine the discussion to such matters. I am prepared to trust Mills’s scholarship and accept that he has explained to the best of his ability some 12,000 names. He has conscientiously done his job. His editors, in my view, have not. They have complacently chosen to update and marginally simplify Eilert Ekwall’s previous Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names. I see very little evidence that they stopped to think who would be interested in this specialized information, and how it could best be presented.

This is all the more disappointing since other sections of OUP, along with other publishers of reference works, have made great strides forward in recent years. Academic excellence has been maintained, but combined with good design, editorial flair, and original thinking. The editors of this book had an important part to play. Unfortunately, both for Mr. Mills and his average reader, they appear to have completely missed their opportunity.

Thames Ditton, Surrey

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Reception and Response, Hearer Creativity and the Analysis of Spoken and Written Texts

Graham McGregor and R.S. White, eds., (Routledge, 1990), x + 259pp.

In the early 1960s I wrote an article [WORD, XXVI (1966), Nos. 1-3, an offprint of which I shall be happy to send to those requesting it] in which I suggested that relatively accurate statistics on word frequencies could best be attained by factoring in the circulation and listenership figures of periodicals and radio/TV media used as sources of data about the words and phrases under investigation. While it is acknowledged that such a method would not work well for books, the idea was that the number of occurrencies of a lemma (a technical though convenient term for the ‘thing—word or phrase—under study’), multiplied by, say the Audit Bureau of Circulation sworn circulation of a periodical would yield a figure that could legitimately be called its Exposure. Obviously, such a number would be far too large to manipulate readily, so, using a formula familiar to statisticians, it was normalized to produce a simple decimal number of only a few digits which I called the lemma’s Exposure Index. The purpose of the exercise was to connect the frequency information with the language as it is used and perceived; in addition, the approach would serve to eliminate from consideration those materials which, though published, were little read, with a consequent low influence on the lexicon.

Frequency information on the language, of great usefulness to lexicographers and other linguists is sorely lacking: a study by Thorndike and Lorge in the 1930s yielded the Teacher’s Wordbook of 30,000 Words, but that had outlived its accuracy and usefulness by the mid 1940s. With the emergence of computer typesetting in the 1960s, it seemed likely that the analysis of large bodies of text from newspapers and periodicals (in particular) would be facilitated, for one of the greatest expenses was the cost of keyboarding the texts into machine-readable form so that they could be processed speedily and economically by computer.

Those who question why a large corpus of material should be needed for study ought to realize that the amount of language written and read, uttered and heard in a single day is unbelievably huge. In a given hour, the numbers of words spewed forth by the dozens of TV channels and AM and FM radio stations alone is unimaginable. While it is acknowledged that statistics can make allowance for using samples instead of an entire corpus for analysis, the prodigious quantity of lemmata (that’s the plural of lemma) requires an incredibly large sample. Then again, the statistics for a few thousand of the most frequent words—the, a, an, but, for, of, etc.—need not be derived again and again, and a few thousand such lemmata are usually eliminated at the outset. Still, that means that a reasonably accurate sample, as I suggested in 1961, would have to contain a billion—preferably, a billion billion—lemmata. In those days, computer storage and processing equipment were too primitive to accommodate such quantities. But today, the situation is quite different. Moreover, publishers are today generally less reluctant than before to make available to researchers the disks and tapes containing text.

As we all know, there is an enormous number of publications dealing with highly specialized areas. If a truly “unabridged” word study of the language were ever to be undertaken, such materials would have to be included. But for practical purposes, there is little point in including a lemma like hwālrād (a kenning, ‘whale-road,’ for sea) if only an infinitesimal portion of the population reads Beowulf or an article about it in a recondite learned journal.

Early in this century Funk & Wagnalls published dictionaries that contained a large number of Scotticisms, either out of habit or affection for the genre or because their lexicographers felt that every student who read Burns had to be able to find in the dictionary every word he used. These days, when all editions of Burns’s poems are annotated, with glosses for any “foreign” words, allowing such Scotticisms to occupy valuable space in general dictionaries is not considered economical, and only those likely to appear in crossword puzzles are included. Similarly, historical lexicography—the vocabulary of Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Richard Rolle of Hampole, the Holinshed Chronicle, etc.—has been relegated to footnotes in student editions or to specialized dictionaries. Of course, not all Scotticisms have been excised, and words like auld, land, and syne are probably still to be found in many dictionaries, but only because they are frequent. But these words are archaisms, obsolete words that are used for special effect or other reasons, as in popular quotations, like wherefore in “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?,” known to every schoolchild (and misunderstood by many, who think it means ‘where,’ while it really means ‘why’: it is retained in what for, dialectal whuffo'). The King James Bible, which contains many such archaisms, has preserved them for modern English; wherefore more commonly appears in the tautology whys and wherefores.

The book under review might well have included something on the subject of exposure in one of the essays collected within its pages, for much of the material selected by lexicographers as source corpora for citations is arrived at subjectively and impressionistically—though I hasten to allow that the subjective and impressionistic maunderings of a good, experienced linguist might well be worth a motherlode of statistics. The point is that Reception and Response is one of the few works that I have seen that tries to present a point of view from the perspective of the receiver of information, while paying attention to the semiotic aspects of language (that is, the elements embedded in communication that are not strictly concerned with language, per se).

The twelve articles collected under the general rubrics of Contexts of responsiveness, Listener response and communication, and Responsive readers have mixed success in dealing with the subject. The first, “Attending the hearing: listening in legal settings,” by Peter Goodrich, a lecturer in law, does not seem to come to grips with its subject—at least in an understandable way—till more than halfway through, notwithstanding its inclusion of much matter that makes good and interesting reading. Richard G. Tedeschi’s “Therapeutic listening” is a broad, though concise treatment of psychotherapists' reaction and receptivity to their patients. It is more an article on the behaviour of therapists than on language, so we can leave it. Deborah Cameron and Deborah Hills (“ ‘Listening in’: negotiating relationships between listeners and presenters on radio phone-in programmes”) have studied the output of LBC Radio, London’s “all-talk” station, which I have listened to with interest. After devoting (wasting?) about half their space on a penetrating analysis of how callers and presenters say hello and goodbye (or not, as is often the case with goodbyes), they finally get down to the substance of the calls. In a subcategory called “Extreme, outrageous and offensive calls,” the authors refer to “a new genre of phone-ins [in the US] whose whole raison d'être is for the presenter to pour abuse on those who call.” Those who have heard Bob Grant and others in the US are familiar with the pattern. What the authors fail to mention is that the treatment the caller receives sometimes depends on who the presenter is.

For example, Mike Allen (on LBC) is low-key, calm, and always gracious and polite, seeming to evoke no outrageous calls. Robbie Vinson [sp?], who runs Robbie Vinson’s Night Line and refers to himself in the third person, is often very unpleasant indeed, and some of the conversations cited in the article (especially one in which a caller was told that if he didn’t like Britain he should get out) smack strongly of his acerbic, dyspeptic, often rude manner. What presenters are missing is that listeners often tune in to hear all sorts of the things that other listeners have to say, whether they agree with them or think them mad, and it makes the presenter appear intolerantly bigoted to cut off a caller whose opinions are at variance with those the presenter might perceive to be held by the man on the Clapham omnibus. On the whole, despite the preliminary screening that callers are subjected to, mainly in order to eliminate cranks, drunks, and undesirables, those who do get through rarely have anything of moment to contribute, the presenters are notably unsympathetic in eliciting a fair exposure of their comments, and the listener is (too) often left with the feeling that the presenter has been too dismissive. The analysis in this article is interesting and well done, but I question whether it is an analysis of the listener, as only the caller and the presenter are discussed. To consider the caller a listener in this structure would be a mistake; as far as I can see, the comment on listeners is confined to the authors' “Conclusion”:

Radio phone-ins are speech events in which relationships between individual listeners, a notion of the “listening public” and the station as personified in the professional presenter are carefully negotiated.

I do not accept that, for once the listener has become a caller he is as much a part of the script, entertainment—whatever one might call it—as the presenter and is, in effect, no longer a mere listener. That is confirmed in the following:

Although it is the presenter who has ultimate control in the encounter—a control he may legitimate in terms of the interests of the “listeners out there,” their right to be entertained and to be protected from offensive views—the listeners who call in may challenge the norms he lays down in various ways, from dogged pursuit of a “personal relationship” with the presenter to equally dogged resistance to the “containment strategies” presenters employ. Listeners, like presenters, are aware of the linguistic and social norms which structure acceptable phone-in talk; yet they are capable of ignoring or subverting these and of attempting to renegotiate the rules of the game.

Lack of space precludes further comment on this interesting collection of papers, but I should like to add one observations. The phone-in programs have created a culture language of their own, one that is, curiously, common to both the US and the UK. It includes comments like I’m a first-time (or virgin) caller, I really enjoy your program (which alternates with You really have a great program tonight), and Thank you for taking my call. I have never fathomed the purpose of the first; the second is pure sycophancy; and the third is patently ludicrous, for if a presenter of a phone-in program refused calls it would not be a phone-in program.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: New Light on Boswell: Critical and Historical Essays on the Occasion of the Bicentenary of The Life of Johnson

Greg Clingham, ed., (Cambridge University Press, 1991), xix + 235 pp.

The Cambridge University Press has seen fit to honor the 200th anniversary of Boswell’s Life of Johnson with a collection of fourteen essays on the biographer and his subject. Only one of the contributors is at Yale, and the ghost of Frederick Pottle and his colleagues in the “Boswell Factory” should be delighted that there has been such widespread enthusiasm for the field they have ploughed for the past six decades. Professor David Daiches of Edinburgh leads off with a splendid introduction on Boswell’s ambiguities, writing about the biography that “the subject understood the biographer more profoundly than the biographer understood the subject.” True enough, but Johnson’s intellectual capacity was greater than Boswell’s ab initio. The remaining essays are organized into groups, four general essays on Boswell and eighteenth-century Scottish culture, four essays on contexts for the Life of Johnson, and five essays on features of the biography itself.

Thomas Crawford (Aberdeen) analyzes the rhetoric of Boswell’s letters to such friends as Andrew Erskine, John Johnston, and William Temple, a useful way to demonstrate how Boswell developed his literary skills. Richard Sher (New Jersey Institute of Technology) probes Boswell’s relations with both the Moderate and Popular wings of the Church of Scotland. Boswell’s ambiguities and internal contrarieties are neatly shown in his treatment of William Robertson, Principal of Edinburgh University, praising his literary skills but inveighing against his theology. Pat Rogers (University of South Florida) provides Boswell’s attitude to and use of Scotticisms both in writing and in speech; at one time, we are told, Boswell considered compiling a dictionary of words peculiar to the Scottish tongue. Joan Pittock (Aberdeen) undertakes the important task of evaluating Boswell as a critic. She points out that had he lived in this century he would have excelled as an interviewer, much like David Frost.

Boswell wrote a considerable volume of published work before he began the Life of Johnson, preliminary trials of strength. Thomas Curley (Bridgewater State College) uses his Account of Corsica as an example of a travel book in the same genre as Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey and Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy. It is also a tract on political liberty, and Curley quotes the epigraph from the Corsican rejoinder to a Pope in 1320: “Non enim propter gloriam, divitias aut honores pugnamus, sed propter libertatem solummodo quam nemo bonus nisi simul vita amittit.” [For we fight not for glory, riches, or honors, but solely for liberty, which no good man loses except with his life.] Gordon Turnbull (Yale) focuses on Boswell’s account of his defense of the sheep-stealer John Reid to illuminate Boswell’s sense of sympathy, one of a biographer’s necessary skills. Richard Schwartz (Geogetown) uses Boswell’s interview with Hume on his deathbed to explore Boswell’s own philosophy as well as his attitude toward death and the life hereafter. Susan Manning (Newnham, Cantab.) deals with Boswell’s episodes of melancholia, a trait he shared with Johnson, and his essays on it in The Hypochondriack.

The above essays set the stage for essays dealing directly with the Life. The first of these is an outstanding account of Boswell’s treatment of the famous quarrel between Johnson and Lord Chesterfield. John Burke (Alabama) reviews and analyzes other contemporary accounts and finds that Boswell’s is not only the most accurate but that he uses it to demonstrate Johnson’s character, whereas others were merely retailing literary gossip. Marlies Danziger (Hunter) takes up the question of Boswell’s authorial comments that are interspersed throughout the Life. Certainly he intrudes himself into the scenes, sometimes for sheer self-display, but also for a variety of other purposes, all of which are carefully examined. Paul Korshin (Pennsylvania) supplies a masterly analysis of Johnson’s conversation as recorded by Boswell, sometimes a bit long after the fact. It may be true that Boswell’s formal, highly generalized diction, quite possibly encouraged by Malone, is no longer to our taste, that is, not the diction of twentieth-century biographers; but if so, so much the worse for 20th-century readers of biography. Donna Heiland (Vassar) comments on other contemporary biographies of Johnson. She comments that Boswell presents Johnson as a divine figure with Boswell as his priest. “The paradox inherent in the concept of divinity incarnate is the epitome… of the dichotomy in Boswell’s portrayal of his subject. Boswell reveres Johnson, and at the same time manipulates him continually.” Greg Clingham (Fordham), the editor, modestly places his essay last. He attacks the complex question of “truth” vs. “authenticity” in Boswell’s portrait of Johnson, and therein lies the art of biography.

This is an exceptionally fine collection of scholarly essays, greatly to be valued by readers interested in Boswell and Johnson. Though some of the most opaque prose written today is by Ph.D.s in English Lit., these essays are largely free of that fault. Perhaps their clarity owes something to their subject. Both Boswell and Johnson wrote readable and lucid prose, and scholars who gloss their texts cannot resist their influence, which is all for the good. The contributors have, as Johnson advised Boswell, rid their minds of cant.

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

OBITER DICTA: Of that ilk, or kidney

Rev. J.A. Davidson, Victoria, British Columbia

In recent decades an ilk epidemic has afflicted journalists and broadcasters and ordinary people who like to fancy-up their language a bit. For instance, this from a newspaper:

Landers and her sister, Dear Abbey, and several others of their ilk…

Here is Sir Bruce Fraser in his revision of Sir Ernest Gowers’s The Complete Plain Words:

Ilk is a Scots word meaning ‘same.’ It is not a noun meaning ‘kind, sort, kidney.’ “James Sporran of that ilk” means ‘James Sporran of Sporran’; it shows that he lives on the estate that bears the family name and distinguishes him from his cousins, the Sporrans of Glenhaggis, and his distant kinsmen, the Sporrans of Upper Tooting. The schoolmaster who wrote to The Times about the damage done by the BBC by “Mrs. Whitehouse and her ilk” should write out fifty times, “I must not use words I do not understand.”

In 1934, the Third Edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary endorsed the Scots usage but reported that ilk is used vulgarly for “that family, class, or set.” The Eighth Edition (1990) gives this as the first definition for ilk:

colloquial, disputed use a family, class, or set (not of the same ilk as you). Usually derogatory, and therefore best avoided.

The second definition, which I need not quote here, is a quite inadequate one for the Scottish use of the word. Surprisingly, Chambers 20th Century Dictionary, edited and published in Edinburg, displays the same insensitivity, as does the Gage Canadian. However, Webster’s New World is quite responsive to Scottish sensitivity.

Having had this say on ilk, I am giving up the fight. I will not use the word in the now popular sense, but I will refrain from snarling at people who do. I remember, though, that many years ago the great Fowler declared that the non-Scots use of ilk is merely an example of Worn-out Humour.

However, when the noun is used adjectivally it can mean ‘each’ or ‘every’: Ilka lassie ha' here laddi. But if you were not born and raised in Scotland you should not fool with that one: I was not and I do not.

Perhaps it would be better, as Fraser seems to suggest, to use the phrase of that kidney. Apparently, this use of kidney came from the belief that the kidneys were a factor in determining a person’s temperament. Shakespeare had that in mind in The Merry Wives of Windsor: “A man of my kidney.” And both Fielding and Disraeli used the word that way in their novels. Both the Concise Oxford and Webster’s New World give as one of the meanings of kidney “temperament” and “kind, sort.” There seems a touch of worn-out humor in that—or perhaps merely of verbal cuteness.

OBITER DICTA: Beyond Compare

Laurence Urdang

In the usual meanings of positives, comparatives, and superlatives of English adjectives the gradations are taken to mean “—,” “-er/more —,” and “-est/most —,” the latter being the adverbs normally used to distinguish the comparatives and superlatives of polysyllabic words. Despite the fact that it is awkward to describe, there is nothing terrifyingly profound about this observation: all it means is that hot means ‘hot,’ hotter means ‘more hot, of a higher temperature than that designated by hot,’ and hottest means ‘most hot, of a temperature that is greater than that of anything else being considered.’ For polysyllables, like ignorant, we use more ignorant and most ignorant.

What is interesting is that the semantic pattern does not hold for old and older when applied to people: it seems that an old person is older than an older person, or, to put it the other way round, an older person is younger than an old person. Old in this context is more or less synonymous with elderly, which means ‘quite advanced in age,’ while older means ‘advanced in age (but not yet so advanced as to be called “old”).’ (Oldest does not enter this discussion.) I venture to suggest that the reason is that while an old person is merely ‘old,’ an older person is perceived as being older than a younger person (often the one who is talking) rather than being older than an old person. Clear? I thought not.

Which is younger, a young person or a younger person? Perhaps young/younger are not used in the same way. How old are “young people”?

The same sort of thing seems to be going on with low-class, which is ‘lower’ than lower-class, and with high-class, which is ‘higher’ than higher-class. The dictionaries I have checked are silent—improperly so, I think—on these senses.

Are there other similar anomalies in the language?

OBITER DICTA: Everything I Know

Laurence Urdang

Occasionally, one hears, She taught him everything he knows or He taught her everything she knows, curious expressions when you come to think about them; indeed, they state an impossible condition. On the other hand, She taught him everything she knows and He taught her everything he knows, though improbable, could make sense. The ambiguity probably arose from She/He taught her/him everything she/he knows (about something specified), in which the referent of the second She/he is ambiguous: common sense dictates that it refer to the subject of the sentence, not to the her or him, thus yielding the more reasonable She taught him everything she knows or He taught her everything she knows.

EPISTOLA {David L. Gold}

When error or conjecture is uncritically copied from one publication to another, it is often legislated into “fact” merely by virtue of having been repeated so often. The French word bistro/bistrot, for example, has countless times been attributed to Russian, although that is mere fantasy.

Creating “fact” merely by repeating error is particularly frequent when it comes to Yiddish and English: numerous times we read, without supporting proof, that English words like copacetic, derma (the food), kibosh (as in put the kibosh on), Cockamamie, gazump, gnof or (older English) gnoffe, guy (the person, not the rope), and shyster are from Yiddish. Indeed, proof is impossible in such cases, for the words were not derived from Yiddish.

Having recently exploded the myth about the supposed Yiddish origin of several of these words in articles in Jewish Linguistic Studies, I turned my attention to gunsel, in its various spellings. After five weeks of working on nothing but this word and thinking that every treatment of it in dictionaries and elsewhere had been located and evaluated, I sent the article to press. Now, to my dismay, Muriel Smith writes in VERBATIM [XVIII,2,23] that “the suggested definition [sic] is from Yiddish genzel, gantzel and/or German Gänslein, Gänzel ‘gosling, young goose.’ ”

Let the record be set straight: Yiddish has only gendzl ‘gosling.’ The e stands for the phoneme /e/, which in this word is pronounced like the e in ebb in all varieties of Yiddish. That vowel would not yield the first vowel of gunsel, hence a Yiddish origin for it is doubtful. Since this English word has no association with guns, it is not possible that English gun triggered (as some have suggested) an irregular sound change, resulting in an English vowel which the Yiddish one would not otherwise have yielded.

There is no Yiddish word “genzel” or “gantzel,” which Smith has copied, uncritically, from others. If Yiddish is the source of gunsel, someone will have to produce an etymon that is phonologically more likely than gendzl or, if that is indeed its etymon, explain the irregular sound change. A thread running through all these mistaken etymologies is that their supporters think that the only criterion in etymology is “if it sounds like x, then it must be derived from x.” That misconception can be seen on a grand scale in Isaac Mozeson’s The Word: The Dictionary That Reveals the Hebrew Source of English, which purports to show that about 22,000 (!) English words are of Hebrew origin. That book is so brimming with error that the title of the review of it in Jewish Language Studies [Vol. 2, 1990, pp. 105-83] sums it up neatly: “Fiction or Medieval Philology.”

“Truth’s a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out, when Lady the brach may stand by the fire and stink.” [King Lear, I, iv, 110-12].

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

EPISTOLA {T.L.A. Daintith}

You mention [XVII,3] the word gunsel as being a less common, old-fashioned term for ‘gunman,’ etc. Dashiell Hammett managed to slip the word into The Maltese Falcon [Alfred A. Knopf, 1965, p. 367], without explaining that it meant ‘homosexual’; he was, not unnaturally, very pleased when readers and critics assumed that it was actually a gunman or what-have-you. His original intention was merely to slip it past the censor, but the word took off.

[T.L.A. Daintith, Watchet, Somerset]

EPISTOLA {Clifford L. Wolf}

In reply to Milton Horowitz [XVIII, 2], gedunk originated in Harold Teen, a comic strip of the twenties, by Carl Ed, replete with cutie-pie flappers, porkpie hats, bellbottom slacks, and epigraphic yellow slickers and jalopies. It was indeed “something sold at a soda fountain or snack bar.” The place was The Sugar Bowl, owned and operated by Pop Jenks, if memory serves. The only reference I have that mentions the strip at all (The Penguin Book of Comics) is rather sketchy on detail. As I recall, the gedunk was a confection devised either by Harold Teen or his diminutive sidekick, Shadow Smart. It consisted of a ladyfinger dipped between bites in a mug of hot chocolate, hence gedunk.

[Clifford L. Wolf, Pacific Grove, California]

EPISTOLA {Donald R. Morris}

On my entry into the Navy in 1942, gedunk was already well established to refer to any ice-cream dish with toppings or additions. On entering the Naval Academy in 1944, I found that a small ice-cream bar in the basement of Bancroft Hall (immidiately under the main entrance and limited to upperclass midshipmen) was semi-officially known as “The Gedunk” (pronounced “gee-dunk,” with a hard g)—although the wares themselves were never called gedunks, but “chocolate sodas,” “sundaes.”

For origins, try Pennsylvania Dutch dunk for ‘dip,’ leading to such usages as dunders and dunkshot—which Chapman [American Slang] traces back to the 1920s. Gedunk is obviously a humorous application of the past participle of dunk—Crullers “gedunked” in coffee—and by the 1930s it was obviously well established in the Navy to refer to any concoction involving ice cream, and especially to establishments dispensing it.

Incidentally, dunk is not proper German, Dutch, or even Afrikaans for ‘dip,’ and to the best of my knowledge would not even be understood as slang in German or Afrikaans.

[Donald R. Morris, Houston]

[The Random House Dictionary, 2nd Unabridged, gives, for dunk: “1865-70, Amer.; < PaG dunke to dip, immerse; cf. G tunken, MHG dunken, tunken, OHG thunkōn, dunkōn. —Editor.]

EPISTOLA {Edwin A. Miles}

The following entry in Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner’s Dictionary of American Slang (1960) attests to the currency of gedunk prior to the 1950s:

*gedunk g’dong…*n. Sweets, dessert; esp. ice cream or pudding. 1946: “in addition to being shown the 16-inch turrets…the cadets were ‘shown’ chocolate sundaes from the ‘gedunk’ stand back aft.” N.Y. Times, Aug. 11 3/3. W.W.II USN use.

As a member of the crew of the U.S.S. Dixie in 1945, I can attest to the common usage of that word in the US Navy in the Pacific during WWII. The Dixie was a large tender that repaired and serviced combat vessels, mainly destroyers and destroyer escorts, at fleet anchorages, first at Ulithi and later off Leyte in the Philippines. Crews of those smaller vessels referred to the Dixie as a gedunk ship, because she had a refreshment stand where they might obtain delicacies like chocolate sundaes or gedunks. I never heard of pudding as a gedunk. And the gedunk stand on the Dixie was forward, not aft.

The American Thesaurus of Slang, by Lester V. Berrey and Melvin Van Den Bark (1943) defines gedunk as ‘to eat a sundae’ [p. 111 (94.11);p. 768 (824.3)]. Gedunk appears as a noun in the second edition of the Thesaurus (1953) as a synonym for ‘ice cream,’ suggesting it was derived from the earlier verb [p. 93 (91.23)].

… In spite of the alternate g’dong cited by Wentworth and Flexner, the noun gedunk—as spoken on the U.S.S. Dixie—was accented on the first syllable (as indicated in Webster III); how the verb was or is pronounced I do not know.

[Edwin A. Miles, Birmingham, Alabama]

EPISTOLA {David B. Guralinik}

The elderly proprietor (or overage soda jerk?) would often accompany his delivery of treats to the kids at the counter with the hortatory “Gedunk, my children, gedunk!” I never knew what he meant by that, but it seemed to me, a boy of about ten at the time, that gedunk was clearly a verb and in the imperative mood. I somehow imagined that it was a blend of dunk (a popular debate at the time concerned the propriety of dunking donuts in public) and Yiddish gedenk, the intimate singular imperative of gedenkn ‘to remember.’

[David B. Guralinik, Shaker Heights, Ohio]

EPISTOLA {Adrain Room}

Confusion worse confounded, I fear, over the origin of the Russian word for ‘railway station’ [“English Know-how, No Problem,” by Bill Bryson, XVII,4; EPISTOLA from Philip Weinberg, XVIII, 2]. First, the word is not vagzal but vokzal. Second, it was not adopted from the name of Vauxhall railway station, London. Third, it was not adopted from German Volksaal ‘people’s waiting room’!

What happened was this: Vauxhall Gardens were a famous London pleasure ground and “place of dalliance,” opened in 1660 (and known until 1785 as New Spring Gardens). They were named for their location in Vauxhall, south of the Thames. The gardens gained international fame, and when similar parks were laid out in continental Europe they were known generically as vaxuhall. In Russia, the word become associated with the existing zal ‘hall,’ so that vokzal meant ‘concert hall.’ One such hall was built at the railway station at Pavlovsk after that town was linked by rail with St. Petersburg in 1837. As a result, vokzal gained the much wider sense ‘railway station.’

The London Vauxhall Gardens closed in 1859, but the Russian word for ‘railway station’ has preserved their name.

[Adrain Room, Stamford, Lincolnshire]

EPISTOLA {John Brunner}

Mr. Bryson was over-hasty to condemn that bomber jacket in Hamburg as “gloriously meaningless” [XVIII, 2], for anyone who has spent time on a farm would recognize it as intended for people supplying chickenfeed to egg producers: what it bears is a good plain advertisement for the product. However, some of his examples come close to matching my own favorite from Japan: “Ivy League Spirit For Ever This Is My Personal Yokohama.”

In the same issue, Mr. McIntosh refers to a “route mauvais as the French have it.” If the French have it, it must read mauvaise; but if what he means is a road with a bad surface the term used is chaussée déformée. And has he not noticed that, e.g., “one in seven” is now a percentage?

OBITER DICTA [ibid.] “Stepped-up shoes” is not a Briticism, nor anything else as far as I am aware. We say “built-up” (as given—applied to heels—in the Collins Dictionary!).

And I sympathize with your remark on page 19: Brunner’s First Law of Authorship states: “In any given body of text there is at least one error that its writer has read straight past three times.”

[John Brunner, South Petherton, Somerset]

EPISTOLA {Alison Edwards}

Upon reading Don Sharp’s otherwise well-researched article on unmentionables [XVIII,2], I had the distinct impression that he had gone too far in defining that crucial word. I knew unmentionables simply as a euphemism for ‘underwear’; two dictionaries of American usage, one thesaurus, and one husband (from Mr. Sharp’s own state of Missouri) bear out that impression. Unmentionables thus underwent the perfectly logical semantic shift from ‘trousers’ to ‘undergarments.’ For most Americans, unmentionables probably does not cover (pun intended) the body parts beneath those undergarments and certainly does not include “curses and biological functions.”

[Alison Edwards, Jessup, Maryland]

[…Literally, a semantic shift? —Editor.]

EPISTOLA {Charles L. Nix}

Don Sharp’s essay [XVIII ,2] on the unmentionability of men’s trousers in the 19th century brought to my mind an advertising poem which my grandfather saw on the El in Chicago early in this century. For a long-forgotten brand of trousers, it went like this:

The pant hunter pantless is panting for pants.
He pants for the best pants the pant market grants.
But he panteth unpanted until he implants
Himself in a pair of our Plymouth Rock pants.

[Charles L. Nix, Fulton, New York]

EPISTOLA {William H. Berry}

In “The Past As Prologue,” by William H. Dougherty [XVI,3], the solecism like to of, as in The boy like to of killed hisself, is labeled as being limited to a region of Texas. I have encountered it in South Carolina and Georgia, and Thomas Wolfe puts it into the mouth of one of his characters in (I think) Look Homeward, Angel. I have assumed that it derivers from the French expression manquer faire ‘just miss doing, almost do,’ the primary meaning of manquer being ‘to lack,’ which could have shifted into colloquial usage as like. I cite this merely as a possibility, definitive proof being pretty hard to dig up.

[William H. Berry, Arnold, Maryland]

EPISTOLA {Joel A. Linsider}

David Galef’s “The Niceness Principle” [XVII,4] makes a persuasive case for the phenomenon it describes. At least one example of movement in the opposite direction comes readily to mind, however. One often hears the term splitting the baby used to describe the actions of a judge or arbitrator who has reconciled opposing positions by what is better described as splitting the difference. The reference, of course, is to King Soloman’s decision when faced by two women claiming to the mother of the same child. The Solomonic decision, to award custody to the woman who was willing to give the child to her rival rather than see it killed by being split between them was just the opposite of splitting the baby. Nevertheless, by some apparent converse of the Niceness Principle, the language perpetuates the notion that the baby was split and that a judge acts wisely in following that example.

Here is an instance of what Mr. Galef calls “false recall” acting not to smooth something out but to make it rougher than it ever was!

[Joel A. Linsider, Albany]

EPISTOLA {Milton Horowitz}

Until I read Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels I recalled the expression the naked truth as having derived from an old Roman fable (perhaps from Horace, around 50 B.C.) about Truth and Falsehood emerging from a swim together, Falsehood stealing Truth’s clothers. Truth, in the fable, would rather be naked than don the clothes of Falsehood, thus the naked Truth. I don’t find the story appealing, but it appears in all references on the derivation of the expression.

Compare that pale fable with the force of the words of Marcus, a student of the gnostic teacher Valentinus (c. 140 A.D.) who, Pagel writes, describes the vision that “descended upon him …in the form of a woman” who says to him, “I wish to show you Truth herself; for I have brought her down from above, so that you may see her without a veil, and understand her beauty.” Pagel then quotes Marcus on how “the naked Truth” came to him in a woman’s form.

I suppose it is possible that Valentinus repeated Horace’s metaphor in different, more dramatic terms a hundred years later. Or each was independently inspired to imagine Truth as an unclothed woman. From now on, I go with the derivation from Marcus, student of Valentinus the Gnostic. Has a VERBATIM reader any thoughts on the subject?

[Milton Horowitz, Jackson Heights, New York]

EPISTOLA {Linder Chlarson}

May I add a gracenote to the exchange concerning word processing spelling checkers [XVII,3]?

I make part of my living as a freelance in word processing and other computer applications. Some time ago I was creating a document for a client, using a program which I will not name to protect the guilty, although it was—and still is, by general consent (my own included)—the best of the pack. My client asked me to run “SpellCheck,” and I complied.

The program rejected the word practicalities and suggested “proctolitis” in its place, thereby neatly illustrating my contention that spelling checkers, as reliable aids to cleaning up one’s copy, are a pain in the ass.

[Linder Chlarson, New York City]

[My program, which also stops at practicalities, suggested “practicality, practicability, particulates, predictability” as alternatives.—Editor.]

EPISTOLA {Hobart Griffin}

Your article on the Reverend Walter W. Skeat [XVIII,1] was interesting midway through the first column on page 18; in the fourth paragraph of Skeat’s reply, the article becomes positively fascinating:

I certainly wrote one [an article] on wayzgoose …it appeared in the Phil. Soc. Trans. of 1890. …I wrote about the word to N & Q.

A little over a year ago I was on the verge of buying a C & P 12 x 15 press with power and joining the Amalgamated Printers Association. Everything related to the old-fashioned letter press seemed on the up-and-up except that no one knew the origins of wayzgoose, neither members of the APA nor the dictionaries available to me.

With your contacts in England you should have to access to relevant issues of the journals cited. Or, even better, perhaps you already know the etymology of wayzgoose.

[Hobart Griffin, Aiken, South Carolina]

[We have sent Mr. Griffin a copy of the entry for wayzgoose from the OED.—Editor.]

EPISTOLA {Caroline Feiss}

I take exception to Frank Abate’s use of the term bizarre in conjunction with the place name HumpTulips, Washington [XVIII,2]. Perhaps if he spelled it properly as one word—not two—he would see it as we do: a logical name of a river (and town) derived from the local native Americans.

[Caroline Feiss, Seattle]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Brewer’s Twentieth Century Phrase & Fable and Bloomsbury Dictionary of Phrase & Allusion

David Pickering, Alan Isaacs, and Elizabeth Martin, eds., (Cassell, 1991), 662pp. and Nigel Rees, (Bloomsbury, 1991), ix + 358pp.

One of the most popular books of the 19th century, (Ebenezer Cobham) Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable was widely accepted by the literati of the day. A monumental work first published in 1879, by the end of the century it had sold an astonishing 100,000 copies, an outstanding bestseller for those days. Attempts at updating it have been largely unsatisfactory, for they are marred not only by poor choices for addenda but mainly by the deletion of colorful, interesting, quaint, and charming older entries to make room for the new. Fortunately, facsimile editions of the original have been published, and copies of early printing crop up now and then at reasonable prices in the antiquarian book trade.

It is no small wonder that Cassell commissioned a new edition, one that would, presumably, do for the 20th century what the original had done (in part) for the 19th. I say “in part” because the original covered the literature, folklore, and culture of Britain from antiquity. Thus the present work, restricted to the 20th century, has a limited skein to unwind. Aside from that, the main attractions of the earlier Brewer were its eminent readability, its obscure references, its curiosities, and its browsability.

It is no fault of the editors that familiarity breeds contempt: most of the references in this edition occurred within the living memory of many of its contemporaries, which leads one to argue with some of the material. Also, there is something about the book that does not encourage the sort of browsing one associates with the original. It is the errors of fact that occasion the greatest irritation, however: many of them could have been caught had the book been subjected to a careful reading by a knowledgeable American editor, for, as will be seen, the preponderance of them occurs when the editors try to describe things American:

happening (1) US teenage slang…

I would argue that the term is not slang (slang words and expressions usually have a counterpart in the standard language) and it is most certainly not “teenage,” its origin having been in the theater.

Happiness is…Charles M. Schultz [twice…]

The name is Schulz.
…illusive nature of happiness…
The word is elusive.

*Happy…*widow of Nelson Rockefeller…

What a curious way of identifying a person.
Why is she in, anyway?

happy clappies

Should be labeled as a Briticism.

happy hour

Not only not limited to British pubs but it is very doubtful that the practice originated there, as the entry specifies.

trigger happy Over ready to shoot…World WarII…

Is “over ready” English? More probably from westerns or gangster movies of the 1930s.

hardball…some amateurs and children use a soft ball…

Professional women’s teams do, too. And the word is softball: it is not a “soft ball.”

hard dog US police slang of the 1980s for a dog owned by a criminal and trained to attack. Who makes up these entries?

hard sell…Salespersons using the technique… make dishonest or exaggerated claims for the product. …The practice is widely used by holiday timeshare companies who…lure people…to buy a share in a property, which most can ill afford.

Although the basic definition (‘aggressive marketing’) is essentially correct, the term refers to salesmanship, not the (broader) concept of “marketing.” There is nothing inherent in hard sell to imply dishonest procedures, and whether a customer can afford something he buys is totally irrelevant.

hard shoulder The raised roughly surfaced strip running along the edge of a motorway, which is used for emergency stops. It is illegal to use—or stop on—the hard shoulder for any reason that is not an emergency.

Ignoring the bad writing, it is wrong to say that the hard shoulder is raised: in fact, it is often the roadway that is raised above the hard shoulder, which, besides, is not necessarily roughly surfaced (though it might be paved in asphalt alongside a macadam roadway). And what relevance has a law in such a definition?

Hardy family An insufferable fictional family… In retrospect, perhaps, but when I was a lad, we never missed one of the films, and they were enormously popular.

Harlem toothpick… As a switch-blade knife it features in ‘Mac the knife,’ a well-known song by Kurt Weill…(1928).

Neither Harlem toothpick nor switchblade knife is mentioned in The Threepanny Opera. As it is the lyrics that are relevant, they were translated by Marc Blitzstein from Bertold Brecht’s original. The name is spelled Marc the Knife, who is a character in the Opera, not merely a song.

Hashbury…It involves a play on the word HASH, the smoking of which was central to the hippie lifestyle.

Most hippies smoked grass (marijuana), not hash (hashish), which was harder to come by and too expensive.

keep it under your hat…The US version was ‘Keep it under your stetson’.

Balderdash! The “stetson” version was a joking paraphrase.

hatikvah

Why not capitalized?

and that ain’t hay…it means: ‘don’t turn your nose up at that, it’s not to be ignored’. It was used as the title of an Abbott and Costello film in 1943.

It means ‘and that’s not insignificant.’ The correct title of the film was That Ain’t Hay.

Hays office…formed in response to growing public indignation at sexual boldness on the screen and the unsuitable behaviour off screen of some film stars, notably FATTY Arbuckle.

It is worth mentioning that the main characteristic of the Hays office censorship standards included forbidding the showing of a married couple in the same bed (fully clothed). Only certain (puritanical) segments of the public were indignant at the stars' behaviour off screen: most drank it up. In view of the fact that the entry for Fatty Arbuckle mentions that he was exonerated, the comment here is at worst libelous and at best unfair.

headhunt To seek out a person already in employment and offer him or her a post, usually at a higher level, in a company involved in the same kind of business.

Almost completely wrong (for the US): the person need not be employed; and neither the level nor the kind of business has anything to do with it. An executive of a steel plant might be headhunted to direct a company making airplane parts or computers. The emphasis is usually on recruiting executive talent.

A heartbeat away from the presidency…it is probably meant to focus the voters' attention on the [vice-presidential] candidate’s potential. Nothing of the kind. It is used to play on the fear of the people lest they elect a vice president unsuitable to become president, a position he might have to fill at a moment’s notice. The expression arose during Eisenhower’s administration.

Eat your heart out!…‘I can do as well as you can, mate’, or ‘It’s time to watch out, you have a rival.’

The phrase means ‘to be consumed by one’s own feelings of envy.'

the heat (1) Slang for the police. The term originated in US Black street jargon…

Not “jargon”—slang.

heavy (1) Slang from the HIPPIE and youth culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s for serious, important, or meaningful, e.g. a heavy date.

The term was in use long before hippies were a gleam in anyone’s eye; it is probably an extension from the theatrical term for the villain of the piece, later transferred to mean ‘serious, important.'

heavy hitter…

How can one have this entry without mentioning its metaphoric origins in baseballs?

heebie-jeebies (1) Slang for a state of apprehension and fearfulness.

Insert “nervous” before apprehension. In (2), for that read than.

*here we go, here we go, here we go…*to the tune of ‘Stars and Stripes for Ever’…

The title of the John Philip Sousa march is The Stars and Stripes Forever.

*High ho, Silver…*spurring on his grey steed, Silver.

In the first place, it is “Hi-oh, Silver.” In the second, the horse is white, not “grey.”

The book is riddled with such errors and misconceptions, apparently owing to the fact that no knowledgeable American editor was engaged to review. the material. It says, for instance, that The Three Stooges’ films “had a comparatively short life,” obviously unaware that they are still shown regularly on American television. (WSBK Boston runs them continuously on New Year’s Eve day every year.) It defines sting as ‘a robbery or con trick,’ when, in fact, the term refers to only one of several phases in a carefully orchestrated confidence game. The entry swat team should be shown as SWAT team, and it is not slang. And at cry all the way to the bank one reads “A later sarcastic version is laugh all the way to the bank.” The person who wrote that could use a review course on the meaning of sarcastic.

I am informed that this book has received uniformly favorable reviews and that it is selling like hotcakes. The reader may draw his own conclusions about the ignorance of critics and the gullibility of the public.

It is perhaps unfair to review the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Phrase & Allusion alongside the Brewer’s Twentieth Century: despite the similarity of the titles, the former is a slighter work; also, it consists largely of quotations and the titles of books, plays, films, and other written works traceable to them (and vice versa). The writting is better, however, it is generally more accurate (though it, too, misspells Charles M. Schulz’s name), and there is a little overlap. For instance, the name of the Abbott and Costello movie is (correctly given as That Ain’t Hay,) though it adds the suggestion that the film probably gave currency to the expression, which is quite far from the fact. The orientation of the two books is different: the interval of fourteen pages covered in the comments on the new Brewer (which includes 146 entries) occupies only eight pages in the Bloomsbury (which has 81 entries, both counts including cross references); of these, only about a dozen appear in both books.

The point of departure of Rees’s book is literary references, while that of the new Brewer is popular culture as reflected in catch-phrases. Provided that the user makes sure to double-check the information in both books and is not tempted to accept as gospel everything encountered in either work, both books should be considered useful additions to a reference library.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Lunatic Lovers of Language: Imaginary Languages and their Inventors

Marina Yaguello, transl. Catherine Slater, (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (US), The Athlone Press (UK), 1991.), xviii + 223pp.

Readers of science fiction have occasionally been exposed to invented words and languages used by extraterrestrials. Some of the words associated with sci fi were discussed by Dr. Stephen Hirschberg in “Zap the BEMs!—” [XV,4], but that article dealt with words and not languages, and, with a few exceptions, with words used by humans in some future time, not by extraterrestrials (either now or in the future). Some years ago I met a woman who was writing her master’s thesis on languages created by sci-fi authors, but she never sent me a promised copy (or, maybe I just dreamt the whole thing.)

Many writers avoid the language problem by introducing mental telepathy as the means of communication, which is just as well: human speech employs the available organs situated between the lungs and the face, and there is no reason to assume that fish-faced or vegetablelike or otherwise constituted extraterrestrials would be endowed with like equipment (any more than are many nonhuman creatures on earth), and they would thus be unlikely to use languages constructed for humans. The language of extraterrestrials merits only passing mention in Lunatic Lovers of Language, which deals with the development of artificial languages and with the search for language universals, characteristics that many (or all) languages share and that lend credence to the notion that there was only one original language from which the present stock has liverged. (Without going into the matter here, it must be said that universals concern themselves with underlying structures of language, not with superficial correspondences of the type that enable us to identify language families.)

The following passage will help to explain the slightly off-putting title and will impart to the reader a sample of the author’s humor, which I find engaging:

Just take a look at the lunatic in love with language the logophile, the inventor of languages. Sitting in his book-lined study, he collects great piles of information, he collates and classifies it, he makes lists and fills card indexes. He is in the clutches of a denominatory delirium, of a taxonomic madness. He has to name everything, but before being able to name, he has to recognise and classify concepts, to enclose the whole Universe in a system of notation: produce enumerations, hierarchies and paradigms. A lunatic ambition; yet there is something grandiose in it which you can’t help admiring. So much energy spent for so little result. I don’t believe any other fantasy has ever been pursued with so much ardour by the human spirit, apart perhaps from the philosopher’s stone or the proof of the existence of God; or that any other utopia has caused so much ink to flow, apart perhaps from socialism. [p.17]

Try as hard as they might, inventors of artificial languages have been unable to disbuse themselves of the ineluctable attraction of their own, native language or language family. Thus, for example, Zamenhof’s Esperanto is easy for speakers of Indo-European languages to learn (especially if they know some Latin or a Romance language): Zamenhof was a Pole who knew other European languages. But Esperanto is lingua incognita to the native speaker of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, or any other non-Indo-European language, notwithstanding its somewhat simplified structure, which aids in its rapid assimilation. Now that certain (very literate) people have taken hold of Esperanto and published novels and poetry in it, its chief function as a means of basic communication has been violated, and with the onset of its sophistication it has become more complex, thus defeating its original purpose. Esperantists are an eagerly energetic group who believer in Esperanto; as far as I know, there are no “native” speakers of Esperanto. If Esperanto is aspiring to become a “real” language, then it must begin to behave like one and, before long, it will begin to suffer the same “weaknesses” that natural languages suffer—polysemy and pleurisemy. Before you know it, you are saying to yourself, “Why should I bother to learn a whole new grammer and vocabulary of Esperanto when I can learn some sort of lingua franca (English or French, for example) which at least has an extensive literature to offer? Today, English, far from an easy language to master, has probably replaced French as the most universally used lingua franca. Yiddish serves as a lingua franca of sorts for Jews— whatever they may be—but it seems to be diminishing in that role and is, I understand, frowned upon by the Israelis (many of whom can now claim Hebrew as a native tongue).

This is a curious book. Those who might be encouraged by this brief review to read it ought to know that frequent recourse to Appendix II will clarify many of the author’s references—indeed, one would do well to read Appendix II after reading the Introduction. The author, a linguist, is often obscure, though it is impossible to know whether that is her fault or her translator’s. I was unsure, for instance, exactly how to understand the following sentence, which opens Chapter I, and which seems curiously unidiomatic (or, in my ignorance, perhaps it is poetic):

How it came about the the myth could take the place of history, and feed both fiction and utopia, that fiction in the form of dogma of various kinds could take the place of science, that science could progressively dominate fiction, that history, in eliminating myth, could itself become a science, at the cost of a ruthless battle between the imaginary and the real—a battle whose outcome, even today, remains unclear—this story reads like a novel: and in any case, doesn’t the word history itself, which designates a succession of facts through time, also encapsulate the word story: a tale, a fable, an imaginary account? [p.5]

I suppose that is English, but it is certainly anacoluthic, obscure, and viciously punctuated (after the British style, which can be destructive to both sense and grammar).

The flashes of wisdom should not be overlooked, however:

The same impoverishment of formal devices is found in examples of religious glossolalia, with an exaggerated tendency towards repetition, syllable reduplication, vocalic parallelism, open syllabification, excessive symmetry in contrasts, an impoverished inventory of sounds—whatever the mother tongue of the glossolalist. [p.100]

…and that appears in an analysis of Martian. Some of this would be quite funny if it weren’t so serious. The reader is encouraged to find out for himself. Trekkies please copy.

Laurence Urdang

OBITER DICTA: Definite Articles and Indefinite People

Laurence Urdang

Mr Austin Mitchell (left) with Racheal Garley, the model, and Mr Frank Field at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Center in London, yesterday, at the start of Challenge, part of a retail industry drive to buy British-made clothing and shoes.

So goes the caption of a photograph in The Times [n.d.]. Is this some sort of insider’s put-down? As there was no accompanying article, Messrs. Mitchell and Field were not further identified, so we can assume that they are “the” Mr. Austin Mitchell and “the” Mr. Frank Field, who, of course, are known to all at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre as key people involved in Challenge, or as boulevardiers famous for sporting British-made clothing and shoes. But pretty Rachael Garley (not “Miss,” “Ms.,” or “Mrs.,” mind you), whose name does not ring the bells in my head that are (w)rung by names like Marilyn Monroe, Margaret Thatcher, and Marie, Queen of Rumania, is identified as “the” model, as if she were being distinguished from the Rachael Garley who succeeded Sir Randolph Quirk as president of the British Academy and that other Rachael Garley whom we all know to be the (not “a”) power behind Boris Yeltsin or Saddam Husein. Or perhaps she is identified as “the” model just to remind us that she is an outstandingly unique and famous model, to be distinguished from what might otherwise be characterized as “a” model, which would make her just another one of the pack. In such cases, “the” is followed by a real or implied “well-known” or some equivalent thereof, to wit, (internationally) famous, beloved, notorious, undisputed, disputed, recently released (or Escaped), prize-winning, novelist, etc. Note the difference between the transposed form,…with the model, Rachael Garley, and Mr…., and the form as given:…with Rachael Garley, the model, and Mr.… Clearly, the first seems to call for “a model,” for the name, surrounded by punctuation becomes less significant; also, in that sequence the reader is not boxed into the corner of obligation where he must stand, face to the wall, if unaware of who this “in” personage might be. If a young person today were to encounter a reference to, say, “the madam, Polly Adler,” the question might well come up, “Who was or is Polly Adler?” in which case the reply would probably go something like, “She was A well-known brothel-keeper of the 1920s and ’30s in New York.” That is, the “the” would naturally and abruptly change to an “a,” (particularly in reference to New York, where it is acknowledged that brothel-keeping was endemic and madams’ fame universal). Had the reply been, “She was THE well-known brothelkeeper…,” that could have been interpreted as a put-down of the questioner, as if to say, “You stupid ignoramus! Everyone (else) in the world knows that she was the Brothel-Keeper Extraordinaire of New York!”

This approach is often used by “entertainers” who invoke strange names of strange people to demonstrate to an audience that they are au fait with the latest, though I am never quite sure “the latest what.” It is also the technique of the “in” joke shared between such entertainers and their audiences, though how “in” something can be when shared with thousands is debatable. I felt definitely “out” when I first heard a British audience applaud with chuckling appreciation at the mention of the name Val Doonican. For all I knew, the man who said it had made up the name and the audience was laughing because the name was funny, as they might well do when hearing a name like Kylie Minogue. It took me a while to understand that Kylie Minogue is the name of a real person. I also discovered that Val Doonican is the name of a real person. Though I have no way of knowing whether either name is genunine or assumed, it occurs to me that if one wanted to assume a name, more euphonious choices might present themselves. On the other hand, Kylie Minogue does have a certain je ne sais pas about it (as I once heard someone say). Certainly, it seems unlikely that someone would have to refer to her as “Kylie Minogue, the singer,” except for the benefit of the same people who need the reinforcement afforded by “Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister,” “George Bush, the president,” or “Elizabeth II, the queen,” as if to distinguish them from the local roofer, the itinerant hedge-trimmer, or the ocean liner. There are not a lot of prime ministers, presidents, and queens about—at least, not that we are exposed to continually in the media—and it would be a bit ludicrous to read about “Margaret Thatcher, a prime minister,” etc. On the other hand, till she becomes as famous as Thatcher or Elizabeth II, it seems to me that Rachael Garley ought to be referred to as “a,” not “the model.” To be sure, there are not a lot of Rachael Garleys, Val Doonicans, or Kylie Minogues about, either, for which we and they may be equally thankful.

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Thought housing is exploited (7)
5. Blunder in telecopy about college fathers (4,3)
9. Low quality explosives put into oceans (9)
10. Former spouses catching businessmen (5)
11. Runner veered holding rattle (7)
12. Hawaiian music maker taking shower in European republic (7)
13. Determined to eat good quality hot dog (6,5)
16. Diner employee ultimately ashamed to overturn an order (11)
21. Used a wheelbarrow left by front of toolshed to take something away (7)
22. Censure congressman prior to travel (7)
24. Send overseas for textile, found wanting time and time again (5)
25. Vegetable sweetener returned in back of a health resort (9)
26. True grounds for mutiny (7)
27. Severe skill used in bridge (7)

Down

1. Botch raising cat inferior to me (4,2)
2. Produces head of some puppets (6)
3. Winter athlete’s energy used in foolish risk (5)
4. One interrupting hinders people determined to lose (7)
5. Crack angler by the sound (7)
6. Discovered plateau near the desert’s middle (9)
7. Revenued received by devout prior
8. Pays out, acquiring American tables (8)
9. Server in saloon orders rats? (9)
10. Doctor dictates crucial exam (4,4)
11. Rush to take in part of a woman’s figure (8)
12. Remember to keep right to teach again (7)
13. Oakland team getting support and love at the right time (7)
14. Overlooked place for a soldier to obtain leave (6)
15. Not so great on homework (6)
16. Use a lot topping a coat (5)

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. GO(RE VID)AL (diver rev.).
6. S(C)HWA (wash anag.).
9. IN-VENTS.
10. C-LEAVES.
11. GE-NUS (rev.).
12. OUTFLANKS (anag.).
13. VIETCONG (anag.).
15. G(RAT)IS.
18. R(IS)ING.
20. DI(SPA)TCH.
23. CAR(GO SH-I)P.
24. PRO(U)D.
25. P.R.-EVENT.
26. INS-TALL (sin anag.).
27. SAT(I)E.
28.. ON THE MEND (hidden).

Down

1. GOING-OVER (hidden).
2. R(EVEN)UE.
3. V(END)S.
4. DISCO-UNT (nut anag.).
5. L(OCAT)E (taco rev.).
6. STEEL-TRAP (anag.).
7. HAVEN-OT (to rev.).
8. AP(S)ES.
14. CAN(TONES)E.
16. SCH-EDULED (delude rev.).
17. M-I-SPRINT.
19. SURF-EIT (tie. rev.).
21. TOO L-ATE.
22. G(H)ET TO.
23. COP(E)S.
24. PASTE (anag.).

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