VOL XIX, No 1 [Summer, 1992]

Hocus Pocus

William Brashear, Ägyptisches Museum, Berlin

And [then] I stood on the royal stump and

blessed them in the sacred Altrusian tongue,

“Arooaroo halama rama domino, shadrach meshach

abednego.”

[Lake Wobegon Days, Garrison Keillor]

The thought of Uncle Louie speaking in tongues was fascinating… what if he stood up and said, “Feemalator, jasperator, hoo ha ha, Wamalamagamanama, zis boom bah!”

[Ibid.]

Exotic, strange-sounding, and unintelligible words, whether authentic and foreign or artificial and spontaneously made up on the spot, are an age-old and pandemic device for creating an aura of mystery, holiness, or magic. The use of genuine foreign languages is called xenoglossia. Familiar examples are the ancient languages, Latin, Coptic, Hebrew, and Greek, used in modern liturgies. However, the peculiarity of incantations and prayers is nothing new. It is attested in Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, and Latin religious and magical texts preserved on clay tablets, papyrus, parchment, gems, and strips of metal thousands of years old. In ancient Hittite religious texts Accadian words provide the mysterious, exotic sounds; in Latin it is Persian words; in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic; in Hebrew prayers Greek was used.

Glossolalia is the technical term for artificial languages, or “speaking in tongues,” as it is more commonly known. To cite just a few ancient examples, an Assyrian incantation for retrieving a fugitive slave begins with the following nonsense sequence: en ki-su-al-lu-ki…ki-ku-al-lu…ki na…gi-na-al-qi (Orientalia 23, 1954, pp. 52-53). An Egyptian spell contains this gibberish: edera edesana, ederagaha edesana, marmu edesana, emui edesana, degejana edesana, degabana edesana. Another one: paparuka paparaka pararura. (Ägypten and Ägyptisches Leben, A. Erman and H. Ranke, pp. 406-407). A spell in Latin for alleviating sore throat prescribes chanting: crissi crasi concrasi (Marcellus, XIV, 24); another for healing dislocated joints: motas vaeta daries dardaries astataries dissunapiter… huat hauat huat, ista pista sista, dannabo dannaustra …huat haut haut, istasis tarsis, ardannabon dannaustra (De re rustica, Cato, p. 160). The Babylonian Talmud recommends reciting baz bazia, mas masia, kas kasia, scharlai and amarlai…bazach bazich bazbazich to prevent skin rash.

Hundreds of Greek and Coptic magical texts from Egypt (dating from the 1st c.B.C. to the 11th c. A.D.) are replete with concatenations of voces magicae, some with up to a hundred letters, such as the more mellifluous: melibou melibau melibaubau, touchar souchar, nennana sennana, samousoum souma soume soumeia meisouat srouat… rouat, or the cacophonous: chuchbachuch bauachuch bakaxichuch bazabachuch bachaxichuch bazetophoth bainchoooch. (Psycholinguists like F. Trojan even trace relationships between word sounds and word meanings, the deep, dark vowels like o and u having an awesome, threatening, secretive nature on the one hand, and on the other the lighter ones like e and i often referring to the gentler, pleasanter things—whether in Indo-European or Chinese phonetics.)

Some of these ancient nonsensical magical words enjoyed exceptional longevity. Meriut, mermeriut in a Greek magical text of the 3rd c.A.D. reappear in medieval French Catholic and Eastern Syriac church liturgies as mermeut. Echoes of one Greek curse text written in the 3rd c. A.D. can be found in a Greek manuscript written almost 1500 years later. More recently, Goethe in his Reineke Fuchs (11. Gesang) wrote: “und sie legt' ihm die Hand auf Haupt and sagte die Worte” [‘and she laid her hand on his head and spoke the words’]: nekrast negibaul geid sum manteflih dnudna mein tedachs. Thus, Garrison Keillor’s boy narrator, with his arooaroo halama rama, is simply continuing a universal tradition, hallowed by generations of priests, magicians—and children—through the millennia.

There is no law against combining bogus, ad hoc, “foreign” words and the real thing in one breath, just as Keillor’s narrator does in his “Altrusian” blessing, juxtaposing what is obviously nonsense next to genuine Latin (domino) and Hebrew (shadrach, meshach, abednego). Likewise, in ancient Greek magical texts snippets of Egyptian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Coptic, and Babylonian words and proper names commingle in happy abandon with endless concatenations of gibberish, producing a veritable Babelian babble to challenge the ingenuity of Indo-European and Semitist scholars alike two thousand years later, as they wrangle with these more-than-sesquipedalian creations of Greco-Egyptian magical fantasy. For example, the Greek palindrome Aberamenthooulerthexanaxethreluoothnemareba, according to one philologist, is Egyptian for ‘Powerful One of the Waters, Thoth, God of Rain, O Sovereign: Rain of God, Thoth, of the Powerful Waters.’

Keillor, by incorporating the names of the three youths in the fiery furnace into his blessing, is merely following in the footsteps of some of his forebears in esotericism, the Copts of early Christian Egypt, who often invoked Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego alongside such fantasy figures as Thoulal, Moulal, and Boulal in their magical charms. (In all probability we owe to the Coptic Christians the invention, and to the Coptic magicians the dispersion, of the names of the three wise men, who make their first appearance, as Melchior, Thattasia, Bathesora, in Coptic magical texts in the 6th-8th c. A.D.)

Aside from the linguistic challenges they pose, these ancient artificial, noncewords, with their sonorous, cantillating, rhyming, and rhythmical variations on phonetic themes, have intrigued and fascinated scholars who try to divine the rules governing their formation. For example, variations on a theme involving homoiarcton and homoioteleuton (similar beginnings and endings; of. Keillor’s “feemalator,” “jasperator”) is a common device. A Greek magical spell for conjuring up a deity (7th-8th c.A.D.) begins with the following nonsense sequence, armapophar, astramuphar, astramuchur, and continues with a series of transmutations typical of magical texts. Taking off from armapophar, the author transmuted the beginning to astra- and the ending to -muphar. For the next variation he combined and retained astra- + mu- but then altered the ending to -chur. Later on one finds: Chla, Achla, Achlamu, Chlas!, showing variations on the theme Chla. Another jingle in the same text runs: otra peruth,… methor baruthar, eseluth with the obvious themes per-, bar-, -uth, -uthar, -ethor, setting the tone in this ancient version of a magical patter song or jazz scat.

Another theory is that this mumbo jumbo may represent a kind of ancient pig Latin which, if properly decoded, might actually make sense. Hidden anagrams might be lurking there, awaiting the alert scholar to come along and detect them. Taking the example cited above: otra perouth might be transmogrified Greek for o pater, therapeue ‘O Father, heal!’

Going a step further, linguists have noted the similarity between the sonorous sound manipulations of such artificial words in magical incantations and children’s game songs. Children—and, in earlier times, illiterates—often took snippets of liturgical texts which they had heard in church on Sunday, adapting sing-song versions of them for their own irreligious and irreverent use on Monday. According to some scholars, the universally known and applied designation for magic, hocus pocus, may ultimately derive from the Latin Eucharist formula and represent a muddled version of Christ’s words in the Vulgate New Testament [I Cor. 11.24]: hoc est corpus meum ‘this is my body.’ Likewise, abracadabra, it has been suggested, might stem from Hebrew habracah dabrah ‘pronounce the blessing.’

Children around the world hold these alliterative and rhyming nonsensical sequences in great respect and are careful to incant them with meticulous exactitude. Furthermore, they seriously believe their jungles are genuine foreign languages—for example, Chinese—and hallowed by hoary antiquity. While their Chinese etymology may be doubted, “that these rhymes are centuries old is not to be lightly dismissed.” I, and P. Opie (Children’s Games in Street and Playground, Oxford 1969, p. 44), the well-known example ene tene mone mei (Germany 1847), eena meena mina mona (England 1895), ina mina maina mau (Norway 1959).

In VERBATIM [I, 1 and I, 2], respectively, Roger Wescott and Paul Lloyd, discussed rhyming, rhythmical, or alliterative “word chains,” otherwise known as “coordinates” or “binomials” and “trinomials,” which exist not only in English but in other languages as well. For example: kith and kin, wrack and ruin; in German: mit Kind und Kegel, drauf und dran; in French: sain et sauf. Alongside such fixed combinations, which seem to adhere to their own rhythmic and phonetic rules, are the playful, nonsensical, purely rhythmical and melodious formulations, which distinctly recall the ancient incantatory cantillations characteristic of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman and latterday hocus pocus. In English: hunkydory, namby pamby, nitty gritty, higgledy-piggledy, heebie-jeebies, inky-dinky, itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny; in German: Kuddelmuddel, Techtelmechtel, Krimskrams, Simsalabim, Holterdipolter—to cite just a few.

These perhaps quondam ad hoc expressions, now part and parcel of our respective daily languages, adhere to the same general rhythmical and phonological rules as the nonsense words in the magical texts. Hans Winkler, the German Semitist, noted in 1935 that glossolalia, incantations, and children’s chants all display certain common tendencies, namely, 1) the repetition of a given motif (feemalator, jasperator; touchar souchar; astramuphar, astramuchur), and 2), the economical use of the vocal apparatus. Repeating a word or syllable or sound puts the least strain on the voice. Yet human creative ingenuity is not satisfied with repetition; it wants something new. Thus, once a pleasing motif has been discovered, the next least exerting is to reproduce it with a slight variation. Winkler discovered that the first element of binomials, whether nonsense or not, often begins with a laryngeal or velar phoneme which is formed in the back of the mouth (i.e., aspirated and unaspirated vowels). Taking the above examples, hunkydory, higgledy-pig-gledy, hanky-panky, hocus pocus, heebie-jeebies, hodgepodge, hokey-pokey, inky-dinky, itsy-bitsy, Holterdipolter, Hülle und Fülle, as can be noted, the second element tends to be a repetition of the first, beginning, however, with a labial (p, b, f, m, v, w). Winkler called this the “aleph-beth rule” and demonstrated its practically universal validity, citing evidence from both medieval and modern gaming rhymes in European and Semitic languages alike. Going a step further, he found that nonsense trinomials generally continue with a word beginning with a palatal (ch, g, j, k). As early as 1835, Richard Lepsius, the German Egyptologist, had pointed out the curious fact that the Hebrew alphabet contained no fewer than three groups of letters which adhere to this rule: 1) aleph, beth, gimel, daleth; 2) he, waw… heth, teth; 3) ayin, pe…koph…taw.

This evidently primordial phonetic series has continued to persist through the ages and is obviously as eminently appealing to Keillor’s youthful narrator today as it was to his forebears several millennia ago and half a world away. By initiating his glossolalic cant with beth-element words (feemalator, wamalama) and continuing with palatal variations on their respective themes (jasperator, gamanama) the boy is apparently responding to the same primal urge that motivated the anonymous creators of our alphabet to begin their artificial series of sounds with aleph, beth, gimel, and daleth—and not with something like zis boom bah!

EPISTOLA {Bernard Witlieb}

William H. Dougherty’s “Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch…” [XVIII,4] refers to huevos in its slang sense, ‘balls,’ not its literal sense, ‘eggs.’ The slang meaning is so prevalent that on a recent trip to Mexico I was given a breakfast menu on which eggs were referred to as blanquillos ‘little white ones’

[Bernard Witlieb, White Plains, New York]

EPISTOLA {Raymond Harris}

Adrienne Lehrer’s “Wine Vocabularly and Wine Description” [XVIII, 3] reminded me of a bogus word used by the distinguished British oenophile N. Kenne Grant, Chevalier et Baron du Vin. At wine tastings he is wont to comment quizzically that a wine is boutique. It is remarkable how many so-called wine experts agree with him!

[Raymond Harris, London]

A Toast: To the Tautology

Marc A. Bernstein, Hartsdale, New York

(From the Annual Meeting of the Society of Language Abusers)

Sociologists, military analysts, computer mavens, other distinguished guests: At this point in our annual meeting, we pay tribute to some verbal form that spreads confusion wherever it appears. Last year, you recall, we honoured the chain of consecutive nouns, to your enthusiastic applause.

Tonight, we lift our glasses to the tautology. Nothing comes from nothing, Lucretius argued two thousand years ago, and tautologists have proved him right. At once simple and inscrutable, the tautology promises more than it delivers. In the right hands, it can be disarming (“The speculation has no foundation”), profound (“Death leaves a gap in the social structure”), echolatic (“Exit access is that part of a means of egress that leads to an entrance to an exit”), hortatory (“If we do nothing to change this country, we shall remain frozen in the status quo”).

Some think tautologies nothing but verbiage, but how wrong they are! To Language Abusers mere wordiness deserves no special recognition: it is the good manners expected of those who sit at our table. The tautology stupefies, however; it makes readers shake their heads or gaze blankly at their pages. This is art we must celebrate.

Certainly, not all tautologists explore the form’s splendid possibilities. Yogi Berra, holder of the record for tautologies uttered in a single season, simply repeated the same words in a sentence (“It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”) Although some find this charming, Language Abusers prefer a style that more subtly pretends to convey two ideas while conveying only one. (“Poor assessment technology made enemy losses difficult to estimate”).

Our critics, of course, do not think Language Absures subtle. The quality controllers at VERBATIM and The New York Times claim that we are crude promulgators of error, little more than Flat Earthers of language. Admittedly, we take pride in confounding people, but we are never crude. Consider the form we honour this evening: the tautology causes confusion by stating an absolute truth.

Truthful, bewildering, remarkable—the tautology deserves a hallowed place in the pantheon of Language Abuse. Let us drink to its glory.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Ramiro Ramirez Garza, 39, of the 2700 block of Leary Lane, was arrested Thursday by police as he was threatening to commit suicide and to flee to Mexico.” [From The Victoria Advocate, 27 October 1990: 7A. Submitted by Rubin S. Frels, Victoria, Texas.]

Investigating the Racqueteers

Burling Lowrey, Washington, D.C.

So far as I know, students of so-called “racquet games” are not required to submit to examinations that might test whether or not they know what they are talking about; but I have a feeling the idea might be useful, for there is an incredible amount of misunderstanding and downright ignorance of which name refers to which sport. In short, these games have an identity problem. It is as if in a particular neighborhood one family were named Jones, another Jones-Smith, and a third Smith-Jones and, because of this peculiar set of circumstances, their friends spent most of their time trying to distinguish one family from the other instead of enjoying their company.

As an experienced practitioner of paddle tennis, squash, badminton, platform tennis, etc., over the past twenty years I have become convinced that a revised nomenclature for racquet sports is in order. Perhaps the only people who can define these activities precisely are those who write about them and those who are officials of national associations. Others, such as managers of retail tennis shops, coaches, and regular players (who number in the thousands) seem to be totally in the dark about such matters as the proper distinction between paddle tennis and platform tennis and whether the terms paddleball and racquetball are interchangeable. It is next to impossible to carry on an intelligent conversation about racquet sports because there is no terminology on which all can agree. By contrast, when one mentions hockey, baseball, or cricket, a clear picture comes to mind, and one is not compelled to waste his time agonizing over the meanings of words.

To begin with let us list some of the official racquet games, both ancient and modern, that may be defined in a standard dictionary or encyclopedia of sport: tennis; lawn tennis; squash tennis; paddle tennis; platform tennis; table tennis; paddleball; racquetball; squash racquets; badminton; and racquets. The most obvious characteristic of this list is that most of these games appear, at least, to be variations of the game of tennis, yet in reality they cannot be technically classified as such. A second characteristic is the lack of consistency in the origins of the terms. For example, some have derivations distinctly removed from the equipment used or the court on which the game is played. Badminton derives from the name of the estate in Gloucestershire where the game was first played in England; tennis stems from tenetz, an old form of tenez, from French tenir ‘to hold’; and squash, according to scholars, probably grew out of the “squashy” sound which the original soft ball made against the wall of the court. Interestingly, in spite of their obscure origins, these are the only three racquet sports whose names communicate something specific to the layman. The confusion comes with those games whose names emerged from the equipment used (paddleball) or from the peculiarities of the court construction (platform tennis). A tangential problem relates to certain ancient racquet sports approaching obsolescence (court tennis, racquets, squash tennis, for example) whose original clear-cut identity has become hazy owing to recently created sports, such as racquetball and platform tennis, which share some of the characteristics of the older games.

Let us examine the three terms court tennis, tennis, and lawn tennis. Of course, nothing should be done to change the label court tennis, which still refers to the archaic four-wall game played by Henry VIII in the 16th century at the Hampton Court Palace. However, it would seem that, because of recent developments in court surface technology, lawn tennis, which up to 1975 was an umbrella designation for a game played on a variety of surfaces, should be restricted to the few remaining clubs, such as Wimbledon, that maintain grass courts. Clearly, the term lawn, with its 19th-century connotation of society matrons batting a powder puff, should be deleted from the titles of all official national tennis organizations.

A more serious semantic problem is the ambiguity regarding paddle tennis and platform tennis. Here there is a yawning gulf of misunderstanding between the aficionados, who insist on a precise distinction, and the thousands on the fringes who sloppily apply the term paddle tennis to both sports. Some may consider this sheer perversity; however, I have a feeling that the fault lies with those two well-meaning gentlemen from Scarsdale, who, in labeling their unique game, neglected to suggest that it combines the skills of squash and tennis. Instead, they came up with the imprecise platform tennis, which, to the average person, simply means an ‘elevated court.’ The meaninglessness of this term is further illustrated by the fact that the elevation of the court has nothing to do with how the game is played. As sports historians are aware, the court was originally raised several feet above ground level in order to put it above the snow level. However, there is no reason why, in places where there is little or no snow, it could not be played at ground level, and, in fact, the later courts are so constructed. In short, remove the platform and a new term would have to be applied to distinguish the game from paddle tennis, which technically is simply a form of miniature tennis and might be better referred to as “mini-tennis.” As for platform tennis, changing the name to squash tennis is a possibility if we are willing to concede that the original four-wall game with this label is vanishing.

One way of putting some of these racquet games into sharper focus would be to minimize use of the words paddle and racquet. To the layman, terms like paddleball, paddle tennis, racquets, racquetball, etc., just fuse into a blur. No one seems to know if these sports are played on a court with a net, against a wall, or both. A suggested solution to the semantic confusion would be to sharpen the distinction between paddleball and racquetball. These games could be defined simply as ‘handball played with a paddle,’ the only difference being that paddleball employs a perforated wooden racquet and a large spongy ball, while racquetball, which is rapidly pushing both handball and paddleball into obscurity, employs a small strung racquet and a lively rubber ball. There is even a question as to whether or not paddleball, as defined above, should be considered a legitimate game, since a wooden paddle is inappropriate for the quick wrist action that the four-wall game requires. It seems reasonable to assume that racquetball will prevail and that paddle-ball will eventually lose its official sanction and will be confined to a few die-hard eccentrics.

Another minor variation on this theme is the vagueness related to squash, squash racquets, racquets, and squash tennis. All these games, of course, are basically the same in principle in that they involve playing a ball off four walls with a strung racket, the difference being in the dimensions of the court, the shape and size of the racket, and the size and make-up of the ball. For purposes of communication, racquets and squash tennis present no serious problem, as they are confined to a handful of exclusive clubs in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston and, regrettably, may soon pass from the scene. However, the interchangeable terms, squash and squash racquets require some clarification. Technically, there is no official game called squash: it is merely a convenient clipped usage. But perhaps some consideration should be given to separating squash racquets more precisely from those games from which it derives and with which it is often confused. The obvious method of doing this is to make the term squash official, thus eliminating the identity problem and giving the game the distinctiveness it deserves.

Finally, the one-wall paddle games need to be freed from ambiguity. The problem arose when people started employing the same wooden racket for playing indoor four-wall handball that they used outdoors against one wall. Both games have been referred to as paddleball, although the ambiguity of whether one is alluding to the one-wall version or the four-wall version must always be resolved. A solution is suggested in my comments on racquetball: racquetball, while officially referring to the four-wall game played with a strung paddle, would unofficially also include the same sport played with a wooden paddle; this would leave the term paddleball as the sole designation for the one-wall game.

Since other proposals for linguistic reform, such as phonetic spelling and an international language (Esperanto), have never got off the ground, it could be argued that we should forget such a minor matter as changing the nomenclature of a cluster of games played by only a small fraction of the population. However, times are changing and hope springs eternal. In my view the chief obstacle to clearing up this unfortunate onomastic mess is the inflexibility and conservatism of those who dominate the official associations of these racquet sports. Until these people can be convinced that communication is more important than blind adherence to tradition the nebulousness will continue.

EPISTOLA {Robert J. Powers}

Charles L. Nix’s amusing letter [EPISTOLAE, XVIII, 4] recalls doggerel his grandfather saw on the “El” in Chicago. His grandfather saw it, of course, on the L. (Chicagoans, I have learned, tend to get into a snit about New York imports such as “El.”)

[Robert J. Powers, Shreveport]

[The “L” you say! However Chicagoans spell it, the word is still a shortening from elevated (railway).—Editor.]

Join Me For a Spell

Bob Swift, Miami

A number of years ago a Miami Beach politician earned linguistic immortality, locally at least, by announcing at a city commission meeting that he had achieved the pinochle of success. Everybody laughed, but he just looked bewildered. I laughed, too, but I knew how he felt and why he confused a card game with a peak. At sometime, probably when he was a child or a young man, he had read the word pinnacle, figured out its pronunciation for himself, and forever after—although probably never using the word out loud—thought of it as pinochle.

Which of us is not guilty of the same crime—if crime it is? Which of us has not confidently used a word for years, and then found out (probably in public, to the sniggering of others) that it had another pronunciation altogether? I am not talking about simple preferences. I say tomato, you say tomahto. The television announcer says Ca-RIB-be-yan; I prefer Car-i-BEE-yan. I was raised (Southern for being brought up by one’s parents) where the train station, or depot, was the DEE-po. The Secretary of suhished to hear folks say DEP-o. The Secretary of duhFENSE may be introduced at the annual Army-Navy game, while the crowd is shouting to the players on the field, “DEE-fense, DEE-fense!”

Back in 1986, upon reading of a forthcoming astronomical event, I went out amongst the unlettered and announced in the voice of one who knew, “Halley’s Comet is coming!” I said it to rhyme with daily, Jack Haley (the Tin Woodsman in The Wizard of Oz) or Old Bailey (as in Rumpole of the Bailey). Why not? I had read about Halley’s Comet first, I suspect, as a youngster; seeing the word in print, but not having much occasion to shout it aloud (the comet coming around only once every 75 years), I formed its pronunciation in my mind and there it stayed. Imagine my shame when I heard a TV announcer declare that one should rhyme Halley with Sally, rally, and tally (as in Ho!). Then up popped a descendant of Edmund Halley, the man who discovered the comet; he said the family pronounces its name to rhyme with holly, brolly (as in umbrella), Good Golly, Miss Molly. I consulted a dictionary (about 40 years too late), and it sided with the TV announcers.

Another celestial word crisis arose when Voyager II began photographing the seventh planet. I approached an editor at my place of employment and shouted: “At last! We’ll get a look at Uranus tomorrow!”

“I beg your pardon,” she said somewhat stuffily. I had pronounced it yoor-ANUS, of course, as always. To my chagrin, all the TV anchors came on the air pronouncing it YER-in-us, making it sound as though it were part of a procedure designed to produce a specimen in a bottle. At this, I consulted the dictionary again and learned that while their version was preferred, a pronunciation similar to mine (yoo-RAY-nus) was listed as an option. Checking around, however, I found that a lot of people said it as I said it, so that, as headlines began to blare such threats as “Scientists Probe Uranus,” proctological jokes proliferated.

In a Miami Herald column I admitted my confusion about Halley and Uranus and added that I was guilty of even greater ignorance. For instance, I was well past 30 when I was reading an advertisement aloud: “Do you suffer the painful humiliation of psoriasis?” Fortunately, I did not, but I suffered humiliation enough when my listener pointed out that the word was not pronounced sore-ee-AY-sis. Again, I had first read the word as a grade schooler, assumed its pronunciation, never asked about it and never looked it up. Since we are on the subject of humiliation, here’s another: I suffered great anxiety for years after learning the correct pronunciation of anxiety, which I had glibly been pronouncing ANKS-ity.

My father insisted to his dying day that he would never live in “a God-damned condimonium.” He rhymed it with pandemonium; judging from the lawsuits which proliferate over condominium parking spaces, balcony barbecues, and pets pooping in the halls, he might have been right to use the neologism.

A high school pal of mine broke up a class by reading: “Roman women built fires in their brassieres.” “The word is braziers, William,” said the teacher. A college friend admitted that he had only recently learned that a female sheep was not an EE-wee.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“But critics have since questioned the need for the United States to maintain the 45-square-foot military base [at Guantanamo, Cuba]—whose day-to-day mission, officers say, is primarily Naval fleet training.” [From Conservative Weekly, 2 October 1991. Submitted by John Biddle Lawrence, San Bernardino, California.]

Etymology as Educated Guess

Craig M. Carver, Dictionary of American Regional English

So spectacularly successful were the philologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in working out the lineages of words that the typical dictionary user takes etymology for granted. This is made clear to me every time someone discovers that I am a “word man”—that I am an editor on the Dictionary of American Regional English and write a column about word histories in the Atlantic. Inevitably, I am presented with a favourite lexical curiosity and asked where it came from. This reveals two assumptions: that I am a walking dictionary and that the word’s history will of course be known.

Etymologies can be divided into two types. The first involves words whose histories lend themselves to philological principles or “rules” of linguistic change. These rules describe the systematic transformation of a prehistoric Indo-European root into Latin then French then into English or into a Germanic form then into English. There is, for example, no uncertainly about the derivations of matrimony and mother, both from the Indo-European *matter meaning ‘mother,’ the former through Latin and Norman French and the latter through a Germanic root.

The second type amounts to what Leonard Bloomfield calls a “residue”—words that cannot be accounted for by neo-grammarian formulas. The histories of these words are generally more recent, rarely reaching back to to proto-language, and are anomalous in some way, deriving, for example, from a historical incident or the name of a person. They are also often slang or colloquial in nature and therefore tend to be poorly documented. These etymologies rise out of the gray area of word derivation that employs educated guessing and cultivated Sprachgefühl.

A large number of the etymologies in the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) fall into this latter category. The evidence for a given dialect expression is often very meager, and a good guess at the etymology is about all that can be expected. For example, a single Georgia informant used fatpoke meaning a ‘fat person,’ which one might reasonably guess derives from analogy with slowpoke, or it may also be an r-less pronunciation and figurative use of fat pork, a dialect name for ‘fat back’ or ‘salt pork.’ A Tennessee informant used dog weather for ‘hot, rainless weather,’ which may derive from the expression dog days referring to dry August weather. Knocked for a feather meaning ‘greatly surprised’ could be a humorous blend of knocked for a loop and knocked over with a feather, just as fleazy is perhaps a blend of flea and sleazy. To go on a bilge or drinking spree used by three Northern informants is perhaps an alteration of to go on a binge, or perhaps a punning alteration, or perhaps a pronunciation variant, with l substituted for n, as in chimney/chimley. For lack of evidence, all of these derivations are essentially guesses.

Even where there is more evidence of a world’s usage a good guess at the etymology is about all that can be made. Foot as an interjection expressing irritation (“Oh, foot, I’ve lost my glasses again”) is a Southernism first recorded in a 1953 issue of The New Yorker. It might originally be from the obsolete interjection Christ’s foot!, though the latest citation in the OED is dated 1662. Or it may be from the French interjection foutre! ‘Fuck it!'

The Southern word for a “temper tantrum,’ hissy (“She had a hissy when I told her she couldn’t go”), first recorded in 1934, has three plausible derivations. It could be a hypocoristic or baby-talk form of hysterical, or it might be from the imitative word hiss; or perhaps it is a variant of another dialect term, jesse, meaning a ‘severe scolding,’ which is probably from a Biblical allusion. In any case, these explanations are really only educated guesses.

There is also the learned guess, as in the etymology for groundhog, the Midland name for the eastern woodchuck, which may be a calque from Dutch aertoercken, and archaic variant of aardvarken, literally ‘earth pig’; or hieronymous, a euphemism for the posterior, which may derive from Greek hieron osteon, the name for the sacrum; or the southern Appalachian expression to come out of the little end of the horn meaning ‘to be unlucky,’ which is probably an allusion to a “reverse” cornucopia.

Because the historical record is typically spotty at best, the DARE editor usually has to deal with a larger ‘gray area’ than the editor of a general dictionary. For example, in working on the etymology for ofay, a derogatory term for a white person used by urban black speakers, I discovered three possible etymologies—all problematic. The most popular explanation is that ofay is pig Latin for foe. But there is simply no tradition or precedent in Afro-American culture for the use of pig Latin. Another version, propounded by H.L. Mencken, among others, claims that it is from French aufait meaning ‘mastery’ presumably introduced via New Orleans. But none of the early citations locates the word in Louisiana and the semantic development from the French is very difficult. An African source is often suggested. Yoruba ofe meaning ‘a charm enabling one to jump very high or disappear’ and ‘to disappear’ was proposed by Frederic Cassidy, Editor of DARE, but the semantics are very problematic. Alternatively, a 1932 article in the journal Africa claims an Ibibio word, Afia, meaning ‘white or light-coloured’ is the African source. But this cannot be confirmed. The late appearance of ofay in print (1925) casts doubt on its African origin. By contrast buckra, also a derogatory term for a ‘white person,’ is first recorded in 1787 and is probably from an Efik word meaning ‘he who governs’ and ‘white man.’

Not just dialect words, but a great many of the so-called “residue” words in standard speech have conflicting etymologies. This has become very clear to me when written the “Word Histories” column in the Atlantic over the last three years. Recently in that column I discussed the origins of the ubiquitous teen usage, dude meaning ‘fellow.’ We know that dude first appeared in 1883, probably in connection with the “aesthetic movement.” Oscar Wilde, the high priest of this movement whose adherents cultivated eccentricity in dress and affectation in speech and manner, came to America in 1882 on a lecture tour and presented in the flesh the image of an aesthete. Dude might have been coined to refer to Wilde and his imitators. Eric Partridge suggests that it is coined from dud an ‘article of clothing’ altered to incorporate attitude with reference to the dude’s self-conscious manner or pose. C.T. Onions proposed that dude derived instead from Low German dude a ‘foolish fellow’ shortened from duden-kop a ‘lazy fellow,’ literally ‘drowsy head.’ In this sense, the development of dude would be like that of fop. Again we see etymologists struggling with uncertainty and the educated guess.

Often I try to include several proposed versions of a word’s origin in the “Word Histories” column. This seems to encourage word buffs to take a stab at their own versions—a popular pastime if the many letters I receive are any indication. When I missed a good alternative guess at the origin of cold turkey referring to a drug addict who quits abruptly, I received numerous letters from would-be etymologists correcting me. I had argued, as does the unabridged Random House Dictionary, that to quit or go cold turkey probably developed from to talk cold turkey, a variant of to talk turkey, that is, to speak bluntly about something unpleasant. The underlying or transitional concept is presumably unfeeling abruptness. The most authoritative of the letters I received countering my explanation of “cold turkey” came from an M.D. who said that “the expression alludes to the ‘gooseflesh’ or ‘duck bumps’ that appear on the skin of persons withdrawing from addiction to opiates. The nodular appearance is that of the skin of a plucked, uncooked, cold turkey.” This sounds very plausible, though impossible to prove. However, these are not mutually exclusive explanations. The phrase could have come from “to talk cold turkey” and was transferred to drug withdrawal because the underlying image of a horripilated naked turkey was memorable.

I have written about many other examples of disputed word histories in A History of English in Its Own Words (HarperCollins, 1991) that illustrate the role of the educated guess. But if etymological uncertainty perplexes and frustrates scholars, at the popular level it makes writing and reading about word histories fun. Playing with the words of “uncertain origin” is like solving a puzzle: at its most imaginative but speculative worst, it amounts to a guess founded on assumptions and other guesses; and at its best, it is the formulation of a plausible solution based on a handful of genuine if limited clues that in the end also amount to a guess, albeit an informed and educated one.

EPISTOLA {Michael Emond}

“Abusing the King’s English [XVIII,3] reminded me of two lines that could be interpreted in a way that the Bard might not have intended. Friar Laurence says to Romeo:

Go, get thee to thy love as was decreed Ascend her chamber—hence and comfort her.

[Romeo and Juliet, III, iii, 146-7]

If the decree is a reference to the wedding vows, could he not be directing Romeo to consummate the marriage?

[Michael Emond, Granville, New York]

EPISTOLA {Gary Muldoon}

Robert M. Sebastian does a good job of “Abusing the King’s English” [XVIII,3]. Permit me two other quotations from the Bard:

On dieting: “Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt.” [Hamlet, I, ii, 129]

On intercourse: “‘tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished.” [Ibid., II, i, 63-4]

[Gary Muldoon, Rochester, New York]

Of “Coat-wearers” and “Kekiongas”: Native American Culture and “Indian” Nicknames

David L. Simpson, Homewood, Illinois

Athletic team nicknames have delighted and inspired U.S. sports audiences for more than a century. Yet today a few of them—specifically those associated with American Indian tribes—find themselves at the center of a surprisingly bitter controversy. According to critics, tribal team names set Indians apart from the rest of humanity—romantically projecting them into the mythic past (along with Trojans, Vikings, Pirates, and the like) or else degrading them to the cartoonlike level of Mud Hens, Golden Gophers, and other fabulous beasts. In effect, a living people is reduced to a bold-faced caricature. Native Americans, for their part, have objected less to tribal nicknames per se than to the tom-tom-thumping pregame pageants and war-whooping halftime shows they so often give rise to. Such spectacles, they contend, make a lurid mockery of their tribal rituals.

Are tribal team names (such as Braves, Redskins, Seminoles, etc.) truly demeaning to red Americans? Or do they, as their supporters maintain, actually preserve the heritage of native tribes? Despite its air of implausibility and apparent unreality, this issue is more than just a tempest in a teepee or a war over words. Instead, it raises serious questions of racism and bigotry and, by treading in the area of sports, cuts at the heart of some of our best-loved cultural institutions. Ironically, it also touches on an important aspect of native culture, for nicknaming has long been a familiar custom—and even a cherished tradition—among North American tribes.

Indeed, from the eastern forests to the Rockies, from the Everglades to the Great Lakes, American Indians have long been renowned for their love of rollicking nicknames. Eastern tribes, for example, used to delight and amaze early colonists with their resonant and evocative names—names that, when translated, turned out to have much of the broad humor and graphic wit of European-style nicknames. Often comical (Sleeping Rabbit, Turkey Leg), occasionally thrilling (High Hawk), and sometimes bizarre (Rectum), Indian names generally tried to capture in a concise way the individual warrior’s unique personality and style.

In addition to having colorful personal names, Indians exchanged actual nicknames too. According to anthropologists, the practice originated as a superstitious form of self-protection and disguise. The first nicknames were apparently primitive aliases. In the belief that knowledge of another person’s real name gave one magical power over that person, early tribal members often concealed their true names beneath protective layers of pseudonyms. Even today, nicknames sometimes serve as a protective shield (as Fats, for example, might protect an obese person from even worse insults). Like an inoculation, a nickname is a minor injury that wards off more serious harm. And though it would later evolve into a kind of sport or game—a playful pastime in which braves showed off their flair for wisecracks and verbal whimsy, native nicknaming was still predicated on the idea that an apt name can, almost literally, capture a person’s inner spirit. Indian nicknames, in short, mingled old superstitions with tongue-in-cheek sophistication. To this day, for example, we cannot be sure whether it was primitive fear or mischievous humour that inspired a famous Indian woman to introduce herself to white people by her nickname (Pocahontas, which provocatively suggests ‘Wanton Valley’ or ‘Wild Place’) rather than by her demure real name, Matowaka ‘Snowflake.’

Once he mastered the art, the Native American fired his mirth-tipped arrows at friend and foe alike. And while he scored some memorable bull’s-eyes on his fellow red men (for example, the Mohawks— ‘man-eaters’—were given their blood-thirsty epithet by enemy tribes), he nevertheless reserved his choicest zingers for the invading whites.

The Algonquian tribes called the first white settlers Coat-wearers in gentle mockery of the stranger’s curious garb. Did not these savage Newcomers (another popular epithet), bound up in their tight-fitting sleeves, buttons, and collars, appreciate the superior comfort and versatility of blankets? Bluecoats, the common Plains Indian nickname for U.S. cavalry troopers, expressed similar sartorial doubts out west. At the same time, the cavalry officer’s sabre, a much-coveted battle trophy, gave rise to the alternative nickname of Long Knives, a sobriquet that combined light-hearted jeering with wary respect. Tribes in Canada and along the Great Lakes called Jesuit missionaries Black Robes in yet another nickname related to outlandish apparel. A recent movie makes the name seem ominous but the Indians probably considered the priests more ridiculous than sinister. Since tribal members preferred to make brightly colourful fashion statements and generally wore only custom-designed originals, they regarded uniform clothing, particularly of a dark and somber hue, as exceedingly odd.

After the Civil War, the reorganized U.S. Army contained a few all-Negro regiments. The Indians called these black men Buffalo Soldiers apparently because their woolly hair reminded the red men of buffalo fur. The troopers, for their part, enjoyed the epithet and accepted it as a good-natured tribute.

In a particularly fanciful metonym, the Narragansetts referred to the Puritans as Wood-burners.

Observing the Englishmen cut down entire forests to obtain firewood, the Indians reasonably concluded that a shortage of fuel must have driven these wancomplexioned visitors to their shores. Had this cold-natured tribe, the Indians wondered, used up every last twig, tree-stump, and stick of firewood in Europe and come to the New World in search of more?

Although white Americans have tended to ignore or downplay this joyful side of native culture, the fact remains that boisterous name-calling and irrepressible nicknaming was at one time as popular among the so-called Six Nations and five Civilized Tribes as among Big Eight or PAC Ten football fans today. Contrary to the views of sentimentalists, a people long conditioned to satirical, hard-edged personal names like Stumbling Bear, who have suffered for five centuries the misnomer Indians and who once merrily referred to whites as Long Noses and Palefaces, are hardly likely to be mortified by Redskinsor devastated by Braves. Although currently considered the most glaring of all Indian team names, Redskins actually predates its New World usage by some twenty-five centuries or so. The ancient Greeks first coined the term and applied it to the ruddy inhabitants of the eastern Mediterranean. They called this people Phoenicians (from Greek Phoinikes, ‘Red Ones’ or ‘Crimson Men’) on account of their sunburned skin.

An interesting consequence of this aboriginal foundness for nicknaming is that several of the oldest and best-known Indian team names can trace their deepest roots—and in some cases their actual origins—to the exploits and linguistic customs of Native Americans themselves. Though the exact date of their birth is uncertain, team nicknames originnated in the United States sometime before the Civil War. They were in any case in popular use well before they were officially adopted in 1871 by the original members of the National Association of Professional Baseball Players, the world’s first fully professional baseball league. A charter member of the organization picked the name Ft. Wayne Kekiongas and thus became, for better or worse, the first American sports teams to adopt an Indian nickname.

Kekiongas was apparently chosen more for its poetry and local color than for any drollery or satire at the expense of Native Americans. To this day historians are unsure what those resonant syllables actually mean. It had originally been the name of a vast Miami village that used to stand between the Maumee and St. Joseph Rivers near present-day Ft. Wayne. The entire village was reportedly destroyed in 1790 during the Northwest Indian wars. According to local legend, Kekionga means ‘Blackberry Patch,’ presumably an apt description of the Ft. Wayne area at the time red Americans first settled there. A more colourful and allusive translation, however, is ‘Place of the Clipped Heads,’ a reference to the tribe’s well-known fondness for bold, highly decorative punk-style haircuts. If this eymology is correct, Clipped Heads was the tribe’s own self-styled nickname, and the Ft. Wayne Kekiongas (or “Bare Scalps” as we might call them today) in essence preserved a tradition of verbal humor and nameplay that the Miami themselves had cheerfully begun. The Keks, by the way, won America’s first official major league ballgame, 2-0 over the Cleveland Forest Citys. Unfortunately, the team folded—financially and competitively—later in the season.

In 1900 the National League’s Boston Braves became the second major league team to adopt a tribal nickname. The team had previously been known by the memorable designation Beaneaters, which, in a curious way, might also be considered an Indian nickname. That is because long before it became a popular name for a resident of Boston, warlike tribes had used Beaneaters as a derisive epithet for peace-loving agrarian Indians.

Perhaps the most famous—and certainly the most improbably begotten—of all tribal team names made its official major league debut in 1915. At that time owners of the American League Cleveland Naps, faced with the defection to Philadelphia of the team’s inspirational player-manager, the eponymous Napoleon “Nap” Lajoie, held a city-wide contest to select a new nickname. The surprise winner was Indians. According to press-box history and grandstand legend, the name was a belated tribute to Lou “Chief” Sockalexis, the first Native American to play professional baseball. Sockalexis, a full-blooded Penobscot, played right field for the old Cleveland Spiders of the National League. During the years 1897-99, he and his identically monickered teammate, Charles “Chief” Zimmer, helped the Spiders maintain a league-wide reputation for rowdy, dust-raising, bowl-‘em-over baseball. Indeed, the two “Chiefs” practically personified Spider baseball during that period—which could be the reason why opposition hecklers started referring to the ballclub as a bunch of “wild Indians.” After a while, Cleveland fans grew accustomed to the epithet and began using it themselves, gradually converting it into an unofficial nickname.

Fond memories of those free-spirited Spider teams were apparently running through the minds of Cleveland residents when the 1915 nickname contest was held. At any rate, Indians somehow won out—inspired, supposedly, by a rough-and-tumble, crowd-pleasing red man whose exciting playing career was unfortunately cut short by a series of scrapes, off-field misadventures, and episodes with the bottle. Ironically, Cleveland Indians, a name of no joy among red people today, may be the only shrine and surviving legacy of this memorable Native American.

For most of this century, tribal names have been the most popular nicknames in American sports. In recent years, however, their number has begun to decline, most by having succumbed to inevitable changes in taste and fashion, a few by having fallen victim to the Black Robes of political correctness. One unfortunate casualty of this trend is Hurons, until recently the vibrant and storied nickname of Eastern Michigan University and a name rich in authentic Indian lore. Deriving from an old French word, huré, meaning ‘bristly’ or ‘stubbled,’ the epithet was originally coined by French fur traders, hard-living, robust fellows who trapped and hunted in the vicinity of the Great Lakes. The Frenchmen applied the term to the Iroquois inhabitants of that region on account of the Indians’ barbarous appearance and rough-cut hair. In effect, the name was an ironic compliment, a friendly jest passed from one scruffy and uncouth people (the traders themselves were hardly known for their dainty manicures and designer coiffures) to another. And the Indians appreciated it as such. Before long they were proudly calling themselves Hurons ‘Roughnecks’ or ‘Rugged Ones’ and the nickname stuck. It has served as a semi-official tribal designation ever since.

Nicknaming, it seems fair to conclude, is an activity that has long delighted and entertained all Americans—white, colored, hyphenated, and just plain—and the fiercely contested clash over “Indian” nicknames appears to be largely due to overzealous activism and misdirected social reform. A sense of humor has been notably absent from the battlefield. Yet humor, as Native American author Vine Deloria, Jr., once observed, is absolutely vital to both the continuation and appreciation of Indian culture:

When a people can laugh at themselves and laugh at others and hold all aspects of life together without letting anybody drive them to extremes, then it seems to me that people can survive.

[Custer Died for Your Sins, Vine Deloria, Jr., Macmillan, 1969]

Here is good advice indeed for Clipped Head and Coat-wearer alike.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“When multiplying a newton by a meter, for example, MicroMath automatically displays the result in jewels.” [From MacWeek, 3 February 1992, p. 17. Submitted by Tony Waters, Catonville, Maryland.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“An engine fell off a commuter airplane before it crashed into a farm field last week, killing all 14 people aboard, investigators said Tuesday. It wasn’t clear whether that caused the crash or was just another sign the plane was in trouble.” [From the San Bernardino Sun, 18 September 1991. Submitted by John Biddle Lawrence, San Bernardino, California.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Wilbur J. Witzel, 42, of San Jose, who pulled a fallen woman from train tracks June 11, 1990, as a commuter train rapidly approached.” [From a list of Carnegie heroes in the San Francisco Chronicle, 1 November, 1991, p. B8. Submitted by Randy Alfred, San Francisco.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language

Richard W. Bailey, (University of Michigan, 1991; Cambridge University Press, 1992), xi + 329pp.

Anyone interested in the English language ought to read this book; furthermore, it is a reasonably safe prediction that it will prove readable, enjoyable, and informative. From the perspective of a professor of English at a noted American university (Michigan), Richard Bailey, a former president of the American Dialect Society who has long been active in English linguistics and associated with lexicography, has provided a historical view of the development of the language that concludes with a realistic assessment of its present position among the languages of the world.

The chapter headings offer succinet clues to Bailey’s approach: English Discerned; Emergent English; English Abroad; World English; English Transplanted; Postcolonial English; English Improved; Imaginary English; English Imperiled; and Proper English. To gain access to much of the material presented one would have to ransack innumerable recondite sources; certainly, it would be difficult to select and organize it so effectively and palatably. Bailey writes well. One of the structural features to be particularly savored in each chapter is the author’s system of broaching his subject, describing it lucidly, then illustrating the attitudes (“images”) perceived by citing passages from prominent commentators. These extracts, which are in chronological order, have been well selected for clarity and interest; neither cryptically brief nor tediously long, they accurately reflect the opinions on, for example, World English—the spread of English and its emergence as a lingua franca—dating from 1846 to 1990; comments on Proper English are reflected in extracts dating from 1711 to 1986.

Throughout, Bailey properly maintains the clinical view of the scholarly observer, and I could find little evidence, even in the selection of extracts, indicating where his personal preferences lie.

Each of the chapters in Images of English could stand on its own as an outstanding essay. People who are concerned that the vibrant vitality of English is diminished by its aberrant spelling, reliance on idiom, and inconsistent, ambiguous grammar may derive consolation (but little pleasure) from the attempts to codify the language as described in English Improved. Notwithstanding my personal speculations about the author’s sentiments on the “improvements” discussed, from spelling reform to the reasonable/unreasonable acquiescence to the pressures of feminism, I could find nothing that interferes with his even-handed, detached description of how people feel about English. Many consider themselves qualified to offer opinions about the English language in its multifarious manifestations, but, as far as I am aware, no one has, till this book, taken the trouble to engage in a comprehensive, comprehensible review of those opinions. That is not to say that Bailey has remained coolly aloof from his subject, for everywhere the reader can sense the affectionate warmth he brings to his subject. The book concerns itself, above all, with the attitudes and opinions of others: though demonstrably capable of the most uninvolved, scientifically analytical dissection of an attitude, Bailey never slips into careless, autoschediastic, personal commentary.

Unencumbered by footnotes, Images of English offers a good, but not overlong list of References, an Index of Names, and a Subject Index. My only cavil is with the compositor’s (editor’s, and proofreader’s) apparent ignorance of the accepted hyphenation of the word English: after, not before the -g-.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language Used as Shield and Weapon

Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, (Oxford University Press, 1991), xii+263pp.

Although this book contains much excellent material, it suffers from a most serious shortcoming, probably to be laid at the door of the publisher rather than the authors: it lacks an index of words and phrases (which might have fit neatly into the thirteen blank pages at the end). The text is organized into ten chapters titled “The Lexicon for Bodily Effluvia, Sex, and Tabooed Body-Parts,” “Euphemisms in Addressing and Naming,” “Taboo Terms as Insults, Epithets, and Expletives,” and so on; without a word and phrase index, access to particular expressions is denied, thus reducing the usefulness of the work.

It ought to be self-evident from the subject matter that those who are squeamish about seeing “naughty” words in print should avoid reading the book, which is a longish monograph—the best and most comprehensive I have seen—analyzing the ways in which English speakers deal with taboo words. The treatment is clinical and contains much useful ancillary information concerning usage, dialect, and etymology (loo, crapper), detailing the results of considerable research, all of which is presented along with the authors’ commentaries and speculations. It is curious, though, to find so few references in the Bibliography to articles that have appeared in, for instance, Maledicta, the main repository of scatological analysis, and to such articles as Allen Walker Read’s “You Know What,” in American Speech (reprinted in VERBATIM II, 3) and Sidney Landau’s “sexual intercourse in American College Dictionaries” [I, 1].

But to go back to the beginning, I think it is agreed that euphemism is the deliberate substitution of a socially acceptable, or “laundered” term for one that is considered taboo (for any reason at all—because it is inappropriate to a given situation, irreligious, antireligious, deprecatory, insulting, impolite, indecorous, subversive, unpatriotic, slanderous, prejudicial, and so forth). The cultural perception of what is taboo changes, from the Victorian avoidance of a word like leg, to the current sanction of television advertising of gear for the incontinent and menstruating, to the blatant public discussion of rape, incest, and other actions formerly anathema. The authors define a euphemism as

an alternative to a dispreferred expression, in order to avoid possible loss of face: either one’s own face or, through giving offense, that of the audience, or of some third party. [p. 11]

The dispreferred expression may be taboo, fearsome, distasteful, or for some other reason have too many negative connotations to felicitously execute Speaker’s particular communicative intention on a given occasion. [p.14]

The terms used here are not immediately transparent: if by communicative intention is meant ‘denotative purpose, the information the speaker wishes to convey,’ unless one views communication in the broadest way, it would seem to me that the definition confuses denotation with connotation; that is to say, whether an expression is euphemistic, neutral, or taboo is a matter of connotation, and the fact that a speaker avoids shit for defecate, move one’s bowels, etc., is purely a connotative matter: denotatively (communicatively?) they all mean exactly the same thing. I can conclude only that that communicative intention is used to mean both denotation and connotation: but if that is so, then it would seem that the contrast implicit in euphemism is lost. Moreover, “loss of face” is entirely irrelevant: if what is meant is embarrassment, then why not call it that? This curious aspect is further explained in these terms: “lest Speaker lose face by offending Hearer’s sensibilities” [p. 12]. I am not persuaded that a speaker who offends a hearer’s sensibilities directly suffers loss of face: loss of face could come about only by some retaliatory action of the hearer’s.

Turning to dysphemism, the authors provide the following definition:

an expression with connotations that are offensive either about the denotatum or to the audience, or both, and it is substituted for a neutral or euphemistic expression for just that reason. [p. 26] Dysphemisms, then, are used in talking about one’s opponents, things one wishes to show disapproval of, and things one wishes to seem to downgrade. [p. 27]

In the first part, I am not sure that one can say that there is anything “offensive” about a denotatum: Is there anything inherently offensive? Is not the offensiveness invariably—virtually by definition—in the minds of the audience? In any event, even these criteria are abandoned later on in the book (e.g., in the chapter on “Bodily Effluvia”) where, for example, john, jakes, bog, crapper are said to “tend to the dysphemistic,” whatever that means. What I am getting at, to paraphrase the infinite wisdom of Pigs is pigs, is that shit is shit, and there is nothing dysphemistic about it (unless used “in talking about one’s opponents”)—that is, it is the context that determines whether it is dysphemistic, which is again dependent on whether it was the intention of the speaker to use a taboo word in place of socially acceptable one. In other words (to keep on explaining this simple but hard-to-articulate point), in order for an expression to be dysphemistic it must be the intention of the user to employ it to an insulting, derogatory, or otherwise offensive purpose.

In a book dealing with a subject of this sort one must be extremely careful to cleave to rigid definitions of the key terms (euphemism, dysphemism, taboo, etc.) and not deviate from them. Yet revenue augmentation is described as a euphemism “except when it is used by the government to mean ‘raising taxes,’ which is taboo.” Taboo is here employed in its loosest sense, quite a different one from that demanded by the context of the book, and it would have been better to have described raising taxes as a term that is “politically inexpedient” (itself a useful euphemism).

Nowhere could I find any comment on language levels and the fact that euphemisms are seldom used in certain contextual situations (e.g., among close male friends, in a bar, in a team changing room, in a prison). Those who leave a social gathering to use the toilet usually say, “Excuse me”; it might, depending on the gathering, be acceptable to say, “I have to powder my nose,” “I gotta go (and when you gotta go, you gotta go),” “I have to pee,” “I have to take a leak/piss/crap/shit, etc.” but who cares enough about a person’s temporary disappearance to want to know its details? Also absent is comment on the borrowing of terms as dysphemisms (or as euphemisms): for example, gurry is a neutral term for the gut(s) (or, if you prefer, entrails) of an eviscerated fish, but it becomes cynically dysphemistic when used, as it is in medical slang, to refer to human organs or parts removed in surgery.

The authors might also have discussed the deliberate use of taboo words for their shock (or humor-inducing embarrassment) value by so-called “x-rated” comedians, especially performers like the American Lenny Bruce and the British Jerry Sadowitz and Kevin Bloody Wilson: some of that humor can be heard on British television, where some of the studio audience are evidently easily convulsed by the mention of words like shit and fart.

The most common forms of dysphemism occur in the many terms used against ethnic and religious groups, which need not be retailed here. As the authors point out, the taboos among speakers of English occur mostly among terms for death, God, fear, sex, lust, and bodily parts, to which one should add bodily functions and, perhaps, disease.

Euphemisms & Dysphemisms contains a vast amount of valuable material, much of which is admittedly hard to classify with any precision, for it depends so much on context. But that is not an excuse for not trying.

It is worth noting that the authors are both Australian, and it cannot be denied that their views— like anyone’s—are influenced by their linguistic experience and environment and by their age. (From their photograph, they would appear to be in their thirties.) A British, Canadian, or American investigator of the same age or older or younger would be bound to produce different descriptions and different conclusions.

Laurence Urdang

EPISTOLA {Henry W. Hofstetter}

Anent “Beyond Compare” [OBITER DICTA, XVIII, 4], let me throw another clod in the churn. My brother Carl is 81 years old; my brother Edwin is 73; and I am 77. Carl refers to me as younger brother, but I say that I am his older brother; Edwin calls me an older brother; but I insist that I am his younger brother, a three-way disagreement. However, because of our oldness, we all agree that the perplexity should soon resolve itself.

[Henry W. Hofstetter, Bloomington, Indiana]

EPISTOLA {Phil Martin}

Referring to the review of Reception and Response [BIBLIOGRAPHIA, XVIII, 4], I note the Editor’s problem of understanding what is in the minds of some who phone to radio call-in shows. Let me see if I can elucidate:

Caller says, “I’m a first-time caller”; the Editor comments that he has never fathomed the purpose of this statement. To get a caller (or a reader) to participate for the first time indicates a growing audience. The host (or editor) is made to feel good by this, whether or not admitted publicly. Though this caller has not called before, he is not a new listener. He has learned enough about how broadcasting works to know that the statement pulls just a little extra attention from the host.

Caller says, “I really enjoy your program” or “You really have a great program tonight.” Pure sycophancy, you say. More nearly the opposite. US magazine readers, for example, used to be so single-minded that Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, and few others were all they needed. In today’s more anarchic times, nobody can count the numbers of magazines needed to do the job. Radio is the same. Whatever subject a radio host picks, he has targeted some listeners, lost others. The caller in this instance is really saying, “You targeted me tonight, and if you know what’s good for you, pick subjects like this more often, or I’m outta here.”

Caller says, “Thank you for taking my call.” Editor says that is what the host is supposed to say. But the reference is not necessarily to that particular call. Sometimes all the lines are occupied. The host can read on his computer screen an indication, provided by the person who screens the calls, of what a caller wishes to talk about. More often than not, the host has only limited time: maybe a dull caller can be disposed of quickly; on the other hand, an interesting caller might merit being continued after a break for the news or a commercial. Sometimes, a caller has been holding on for 40 minutes or more before getting in his quick remark, with the news only 29 seconds away.

Imagine getting to express one’s views to thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands. The caller who says, “Thank you for taking my call,” is the gentle and courteous kind of person one should have more respect for. And thank you for taking my letter.

[Phil Martin, Largo, Florida]

[I am sure that, like me, there are readers who appreciate Mr. Martin’s well-reasoned demystification of what seems to have become a private language. As a frequent writer of letters to The Times and an occasional writer to other periodicals, all of which receive a great deal of mail, I can understand the points made. But, as the letter itself makes clear, one does not write “Thank you for publishing my letter” in such correspondence, and the approach still smacks to me of smarminess.—Editor.]

EPISTOLA {John Walker}

Jack Orbaum comments on the King James Version’s “mistranslation” (Isaiah 7:14) of the Hebrew almah as ‘virgin’ [XVII, 4]. He fails to make explicit that the portion of Matthew he quotes (1:23) is not just an identical “mistranslation”: Matthew’s use of the Greek parthenos is the KJV’s authority for the choice of word.

Bible writers have, presumably, a latitude of interpretation denied mere translators. However, Matthew did not have to stretch the language here. A better English match than ‘young woman’ for almah is ‘maiden,’ which, while it narrowly means only ‘young woman,’ certainly connotes virginity. (See, for instance, Ronald Knox’s translation of the Vulgate Latin. Many languages have this ambiguity.)

Lacking the authority of either Isaiah or Matthew, most of us might well remember that while the goal in writing is to avoid ambiguity, the goal in translation should be to replicate it.

On another point, James II of Scotland was king in the mid 1400s. It was James VI of Scotland who became James I of England in 1603. James VII (of Scotland) and James II (of England) became king in 1685 and was overthrown in the same year.

[John Walker, Washington, D.C.]

EPISTOLA {David Gomberg}

Further to the letter of Muriel Smith [XVIII, 2] regarding gunsel, perhaps her taste and discretion prevent her from quoting Queen more directly. “In the Queen’s Parlor” specifically refers to Hammett’s use of gunsel and describes him as meaning it in the “catamite” sense. He also mentions “a boy kept for unnatural purposes” in quoting from a pamphlet, “Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction,” by James Sandoe, as his source. I thank Don Herron of Glen Ellen, California, the author of The Dashiell Hammett Tour, City Lights Press, for finding these citations.

[David Gomberg, San Francisco]

EPISTOLA {Daniel Weinstock}

Politicians can be such easy targets, but I thought that VERBATIM readers might appreciate this statement by former Attorney General Edwin Meese during an interview on WBEZ, our local affiliate of National Public Radio:

One of the purposes of the primaries is for members of political parties to sort out their differences in the areas in which they agree.

[Daniel Weinstock, Chicago]

EPISTOLA {Julianne E. Turé}

At last, what may be the definitive condemnation of “politically correct language” for the nonsense that it is! [OBITER DICTA, XVIII, 1] I, for one, am proud to be an unreconstructed linguistic traditionalist. My generic-pronoun usage is defiantly masculine, my descriptions are bluntly factual, my Holy Trinity is and always will be Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, world without end. Amen.

The idiocy inherent in the hypersensitivity plague may perhaps be seen in an example which occurred to me while reading this morning’s sports page. The Chicago Bears football player, William “Refrigerator” Perry is a large gentleman whose weight is variously estimated at between 350 and 400 pounds. His ancestors came from Africa. The censors of the moment would have us refer to Mr. Perry as (to use examples from OBITER DICTA) a “non-slim African American adult male.” This description may be utterly inoffensive, but it is also so lacking in color or character that a sports-page editor would reject it instantly.

If this drivel carries through to its logical conclusion we will have to stop writing and speaking altogether, for there will not be a single noun or adjective that will not be deemed offensive to some group, and if we cut speech down to simple verb forms we will end up sounding like a nation of boot-camp drill instructors: “Come!” “Sit!” “Add!” “Pay!” “Write!” Nor will there be any grunts in this boot camp, because the Sir or Ma’am in Yes, Sir/ Ma’am will be deemed exclusive and taboo; someone will probably take offense at Yes or No, for that matter.

It seems to me that the political correctness movement is a natural descendant of the recurrent spasms of prudery that have assaulted our language over the centuries. The Reverend Dr. Bowdler is no doubt chortling in his grave.

On another subject, lest a reader be misled into assuming that Skeat was a bishop by the facetious heading, “The Invariably Right Reverend Walter W. Skeat [OBITER DICTA, XVIII, 1], it should be pointed out that Right Reverend is the customary title for that rank in the Anglican Communion.

[Julianne E. Turé, Malden, Massachusetts]

EPISTOLA {Randy Alfred}

“Entitling” books and other works is an inferior usage, which I was surprised to find in VERBATIM [XVIII, 2]. It means no more than the shorter word, titled. This usage muddies the distinction between two perfectly good words with their own meanings, and I see no justification for it. I call this practice “Cosellism,” for sportscaster Howard Cosell, who was always willing to use a bigger word that seemed to mean the same as a smaller, even if it didn’t (which was often). Cosell apparently legitimized the habit for millions of Americans; from a recent issue of a San Francisco weekly newspaper:

Agnos and his family were gathered in the glass empaneled room at the back of the hall.

[Randy Alfred, San Francisco]

[Entitle and title, as transitive verbs meaning ‘give a title to,’ appear to be coeval, both given their earliest citations in the 14th century in the OED. Thus, one is given a choice between them, a choice that might be dictated by the style, meter, and rhythm of a sentence or by personal preference. Context, of course, enables us to distinguish between this and the other meaning of entitle, ‘give (someone) a right’; it is hard to see where the two meanings would conflict. A similar notion surrounds the word till, which many would suggest is a somehow less formal shortening of until, the shortening of which is properly written ‘til. As it happens, the original form was till, with until being formed from unto ‘up to’ + till. The citations in the OED, which are rather thin on the ground for early 13th-century (Middle) English, show the two forms to be of virtually contemporaneous origin.—Editor.]

EPISTOLA {John Harrison}

Robert Archibald Ford’s article, “Learn to Spike Lunars” [XVIII, 4], on the late Dr. Spooner of New College, Oxford, reminded me of two, doubtless apocryphal spoonerisms attributed to him. One was nonverbal: on seeing his wife off at the railway station, he is reported to have kissed the porter and tipped his wife sixpence. The other was made to an errant undergraduate whom he rusticated with the stern rebuke, “You have hissed my mystery lessons, you have tasted three worms, you must leave by the town drain.”

“Beyond Compare” [OBITER DICTA, XVIII, 4] does not mention a problem I had as a boy in referring to the younger of my two old brothers. Could that tedious description be abbreviated to “my younger brother”? My eldest brother must have suffered the same dilemma in reverse.

[John Harrison, Edenbridge, Kent]

EPISTOLA {Bernard Kaukas}

“To the Foot of the Letter,…” [XVIII, 3] demonstrates the author’s conviction of the superiority of English over any other means of expression, an attitude best exemplified by the explanation given by an Englishman to his continental colleagues over dinner in Paris. Holding up his dinner knife, he proceeded as follows:

Now, Jacques, you call this une couteau; you, Fritz, call it ein Messer; we call it a knife. He paused to allow them to digest this information, then said very slowly, “And, when you come to think about it, that is exactly what it is.”

[Bernard Kaukas, Ealing]

EPISTOLA {Elsa H. Sagasti}

“To the Foot of the Letter,…” [XVIII, 3], though interesting and amusing, contains some misunderstandings. A pierna suelta does not mean ‘to sleep like a loose leg’ but ‘to sleep with loose legs,’ i.e., completely relaxed. La horma [not “herma”] de su zapato does not mean ‘encountering the shoestring,’ since horma means ‘shoemaker’s last,’ that is, the wooden form on which shoemakers build—or used to build—shoes. In other words, it means that someone is encountering something or someone that is an exact fit, and the author need not be “astounded by the funny logic.”

[Elsa H. Sagasti, Arlington, Virginia]

EPISTOLA {Emilio Bernal Labrada}

In “To the Foot of the Letter,…” [XVIII,3] the following errors seem to stand out:

“It makes beautiful.” That is not Spanish, but French (Il fait beau). In Spanish, the expression is hace buen tiempo, the literal version of which would be ‘it makes good time’ (tiempo being the word for ‘weather’ as well as ‘time’).

Y no tengo pelos en la lengua. The expression does not begin with the conjunction y ‘and’; moreover, the concept of “not having hair on one’s tongue” does not exactly mean ‘I’m telling what I think’ but rather ‘I’m telling it like it is’ or ‘I’m not beating about the bush.’

Equador. Please! The country’s name is spelled Ecuador.

Hacer vaca. In this case, ‘to play hooky’ has nothing to do with a cow: vaca is short for the word for ‘vacation,’ that is, if you’re not in school you’re creating a vacancy, a void.

Dar zapatetas. This is not ‘to give shoe slaps’; it is a ‘jump for joy accompanied by a slap on (the upper part of) the shoe.’

Sin ton ni son. This is rendered as ‘without tone or sound.’ Ton is not the word for ‘tone’: it is not even a standard Spanish word, being a nonceword in this expression, mainly for rhyme and euphony. Son means ‘sound,’ to be sure—but in French! In this context, it means ‘beat, rhythm.’ The expression means, literally, ‘without rhyme or rhythm,’ bearing in mind that, paradoxically, ton rhymes with son.

En menos de lo que un gallo makes no sense in that form; it should be en menos de lo que canta un gallo.

[Emilio Bernal Labrada, Falls Church, Virginia]

[Mr. Labrada’s comments on additional items are covered in other letters.—Editor]

EPISTOLA {Ann Hopping}

“To the Foot of the Letter,…” [XVIII,3] is delightful. But there are a couple of errors. Encontrarse con la horma [not “herma”] de su zapato should be ‘to find the last to one’s shoe, or to meet one’s match.’ Basquear is probably derived from Celtic waska ‘oppression’; una basquería ‘a dirty trick’ might be from Basque, although the word for the Basque language is vascuense (eúscaro in Basque), and one would expect the Spanish spellings of words relating to the Basques to begin with a v. I do not know about pato, as in ser el pato de la boda: ducks are usually considered objects of sympathy, as in pagar el pato ‘to pay the duck, be blamed for someone else’s misdeeds’ or hacerse pato ‘to make oneself a duck, play dumb’ rather than “be the life of the party.” “Cervesa” should be cerveza, and “sopentón” should be sopetón.

There are so many variations in usage from country to country in Latin America that it is difficult to keep track of them. I have lived in Mexico and Chile and have traveled extensively in Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay, remaining constantly on guard lest an expression acceptable in one country slip out in a country where it is not acceptable! In Chile, gasfiter has been adopted and is used to mean ‘plumber’; a ‘watchman’ is wachiman or guachiman; and I was temporarily baffled by a headline referring to an event taking place at the Guay, which turned out to be nothing more than the ‘Y[MCA]’!

[Ann Hopping, Silver Spring, Maryland]

[Readers’ attention is drawn to articles on the subject touched on in Ms. Hopping’s letter: “Never Ask a Uruguayan Waitress for a Little Box: She Might Apply Her Foot to Your Eyelet,” by John Cassidy [X,1]; “Mrs. Malaprop in Mexico,” by Lysander Kemp [XV,4]. Other comments appear in various EPISTOLAE.—Editor.]

EPISTOLA {Enrique Lerdau}

“To the Foot of the Letter,…” [XVIII,3] set me to thinking about a related subject: anglicisms in Latin American Spanish. Many have become so naturalized as to sound sometimes Castilian, sometimes indigenous, as if they belonged in Quechua, for example. A great many words in Quechua begin with hua- or gua- (used interchangeably), so when the hacienda owner tells his Indian quachimán to keep a sharp lookout on his nightly rounds, neither may realize that the word derives from watchman. And when Mami is persuaded that daughter needs a new sweater and buys her a chompa, neither may think of the long departed Englishwomen whose jumpers brought the word into the language. What is one to make of the plumber listed in the yellow pages under gasfitero (‘gasfitter’) or the restaurant menu that lists aristú (‘Irish stew’) as the main course and budín for its ‘pudding,’ not to mention Chilean onces (‘elevenses’): ‘afternoon tea or coffee.’

A confusion of a different kind underlay the former Lima café San Sussy: there is no such saint in either the old or the expurgated Calendar of Saints, but there is Frederick the Great’s famous castle Sans Souci (‘without care’).

[Enrique Lerdau, Kensington, Maryland]

[Mr. Lerdau’s comments on items in the subject article are covered in other letters. —Editor.]

EPISTOLA {Graciela S. Daichman}

“To the Foot of the Letter,… [XVIII,3] is very amusing, but it contains a number of mistranslated Spanish idioms. To begin with, al pie de la letra would be better rendered as ‘at the foot of the letter.’ Here are the others:

encontrarse con la horma [not “herma”] de su zapato ‘to meet one’s match by encountering the shoe tree of one’s shoe’

trabalenguas ‘tongue jammer’ from trabar ‘to jam or lock’

Qué mosca te ha picado? needs the accent on qué buscar tres pies al gato does not sound right;

buscarle la quinta pata al gato ‘to look for the cat’s fifth leg’ is very common with the meaning ‘to look for trouble’

dar calabazas is properly ‘to give pumpkins’ (plural) echar una cana al aire ‘to toss one gray hair in the air’ (not just ‘gray hair’)

ne chicha ni limonada should be ni chicha…

andar de la Ceca a la Meca ‘to dash or chase about’

(Meca ‘Mecca’; Ceca literally ‘mint (the plant)’ but more likely just an echoic nonsense word prob. a rhyming reduplicative); similar to from pillar to post.

[Graciela S. Daichman, Rice University]

EPISTOLA {John Ellison Kahn}

William B. Ober’s article, “Writing Maketh an Exact Man” [XVIII,2] was enjoyable not just—as in all his work—for its quirky insights and elegant style, but also—uncharacteristically—as an exercise in irony. The very title is a small masterpiece of ironic wit, being a misquotation rather than an accurate transcription from Bacon’s essays. As one of the finest Two Cultures researchers around— medical specialist and literary historian—Dr. Ober is certainly qualified to censure the under-investigated assertions, careless citations, and flawed proofreading he detects in the work of fellow scholars… and make himself a hostage to fortune (to mis-cite Bacon in my turn) when doing so. Committing slip-ups of one’s own, in other words, while brashly reproving the slip-ups of others, would tend to undermine one’s moral position somewhat.

Dr. Ober has cleverly circumvented this danger. By adopting the ironic stance and deliberately infiltrating many of his own whimsical inaccuracies into his critique, he in effect preempts at once the charge of tu quoque. Consider how he balances that opening irony with a corresponding subtlety at the very end of the article. President Routh, we read, advised an undergraduate, “Always verify your references, sir!” A brief verifying of one’s references reveals that the wording here is again misquoted and, furthermore, that the recipient of the advice was almost certainly no longer an undergraduate.

Dr. Ober strews a variety of such booby-traps along the trail: the teasing reference to Peter Sellars’ participation in Amadeus, for example, and the characterizing of George Steiner as the Oxford pundit. My own favorite coup d’ironie occurs in the paragraph on Robert Craft’s lapses: “He also refers to Mozart’s first love,” Dr. Ober notes with regret, “as Aloysius,” instead of Aloysia, that is (or “Aloyisia” as the article cunningly renders it!).

Ironists run a continual risk: if they nudge too hard and use too broad an irony, they risk sounding facetious; if they stay deadpan and use too subtle an irony, they sound in earnest and risk being taken literally. Swift’s “Meditation upon a Broomstick,” for instance, impressed the Countess of Stanford as deeply pious instead of hilariously parodic. Perhaps Dr. Ober, too, if I might venture a criticism at this point, has edged beyond the critical angle of irony, cutting it too fine in his approach and thereby risking a literal reading. Certainly I, for one, was taken in at first by his solemn academic tone and groaned at the prospect of having to write a moralizing corrective—“Even Ober nods,” “Physician, heal thyself”—spare us!

What saved me from falling into that trap was the sudden recognition that he would never be so presumptuous as to write an article exposing the inadequacies of his peers' researches while at the same time allowing half a dozen comparable lapses of his own to remain unheeded and unweeded in the exposé itself. Fortified with that realization, I went back to the text and saw at once—even in the title— that the straight-faced phrasing of the article was really just a ruse, and that an ironic reading was the only one possible.

A footnote to the verify-your-references anecdote may interest readers, since the two participants in that famously anticlimactic exchange (Martin Joseph Routh, then aged about 92, and John William Burgon, then about 34) are celebrated for other reasons. Here, first of all, is the full story (accurately quoted, I hope), as recalled by Burgon some 35 years later:

I ventured to address him somewhat as follows:

“Mr. President, give me leave to ask you a question I have sometimes asked of aged persons, but never of any so aged or so learned as yourself.” He looked so kindly at me that I thought I might go on. “Every studious man, in the course of a long and thoughtful life, has had occasion to experience the special value of some axiom or precept. Would you mind giving me the benefit of such a word of advice?” He bade me explain, evidently to gain time. I quoted an instance. He nodded and looked thoughtful. Presently he brightened up and said, “I think, sir, since you care for the advice of an old man, sir, you will find it a very good practice” (here he looked me in the face) “always to verify your references, sir!”

Routh is still notable as one of the great British eccentrics. He became President of Magdalen College, Oxford, in his thirties and, since there was no compulsory retirement age in those days, clung to that office until his death, in 1854—at the age of 99! His tenure of 63 years as head of an Oxbridge college must be a record. He remained very much an 18th-century man right through the middle of the 19th century: he always wore a wig in public and simply refused to believe that such a thing as the railways could possibly exist. Perhaps his most engaging eccentricity was the way he reared his dog: he apparently brought it up to think of itself as a cat, to the point where it even used its paws to wash its face.

As for Burgon, who later in life became Dean of Chichester, he retains a tiny niche in the history of English literature for two immortal lines of poetry he composed in 1845, much quoted and much admired ever since. They come from his poem “Petra,” which won him the Newdigate prize at Oxford:

Match me such marvel, save in Eastern clime— A rose-red city, half as old as time.

[John Ellison Kahn, London]

[Corrections also received from, among many, David Miles, Charlevoix, Michigan; Seán Devine, Blackrock, Co. Dublin; Raymond Harris, London. —Editor.]

EPISTOLA {Muriel Smith}

The review of Have a Nice Day [BIBLIOGRAPHIA, XVIII, 2] cites cute as a button as a cliché of unexplained origin. It looks like the Americanization of bright as a button by somebody who missed the point—the juggling with the two meanings of bright ‘mentally alert’ and ‘physically shining.’ The button envisaged would be the polished brass type, traditionally made in Birmingham, which was fashionable at certain periods and standard on British Army uniforms until 1939. American examples of this type of witticism include, from George Jean Nathan’s Monks Are Monks (1929), as bored as an oil-well and as swell as the mumps.

Lewis Carroll provides a classic example: in Through the Looking-Glass, the White Knight relates how he fell into his own helmet and “it took hours and hours to get me out. I was as fast as—as lightning, you know.” When Alice objected, “But that’s a different kind of fastness,” he replied, “It was all kinds of fastness with me, I can assure you!”

[Muriel Smith, Holyport, Berkshire]

EPISTOLA {Gennaro Avolio}

I noted with interest the discussion of the word bungee [XVIII,2]. The Editor’s memory matches mine with regard to the use of the fabric-covered elastic for yachting and the use of the term shock cord. However, my familiarity with the material goes back farther. Prior to World War II, light aircraft, such as the Piper Cub, used the material, referred to as shock cord or bungee cord, for the landing-gear spring. This system can be seen on aircraft of World War I vintage, but I do not know what term was used then. I am sure that a search of the appropriate literature would reveal its early use, for the rubber bands broke frequently, something pilots would complain about when writing their memoirs.

Also, in old photographs of glider flying one can see that the method used for launching was to have a group of men stretch a long bungee attached to the glider, which was held in place by others. When the anchor men released the glider, it flew into the air like a model airplane launched by a rubber band. The captions of such photographs often refer to this as a bungee launch. While this does not help with the question of the source of the word, it goes further to indicate that bungee did not originate with the current fad.

[Gennaro Avolio, Irvine, California]

[Similarly from Robert J. Powers, Colonel, USAF (Ret.), Shreveport, who adds that his Random House Dictionary of the English Language “properly defines the word… but has the accent on the wrong syllable. It was invariably [bunJEE] throughout my career…always in the combination bungee cord. …[It] served to secure—open as well as closed—a variety of things, parachute packs and hatches among them.” I have never heard any pronunciation but [BUNjee].—Editor.]

EPISTOLA {Terrence Keough}

R.F. Bauerle’s “The Power of Doubled Words” [XVIII,2] mentions the reduplication tricky-dicky, applied to President Nixon during the Watergate scandal. The present Canadian Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, because of his tendency to change his public position on such things as the universality of social programs, is widely known as Lyin'-Brian. In the 1970s, Prime Minister Trudeau was overheard using the f-word in the House of Commons, but when asked about it later, he claimed that what he had said was fuddle-duddle. The country was generally amused (though not deceived) by this humorous explanation. In fact, one of the less reputable wine producers immediately named one of its abominable sparkling wines fuddle-duck. No reduplication there.

[Terrence Keough, Victoria, B.C.]

EPISTOLA {Dorothy Branson}

Bob Swift (“Wrenches in the Gorse and Bracken” [XVIII,2]) should read A Political Bestiary, by Eugene McCarthy and James J. Kilpatrick, Op Ed, 1978. This book included, with wonderful drawings, such wildlife as The Untouchable Incumbent, The Viable Alternative, The Running Gamut, The Qualm, The Budgetary Shortfall, and The Gobbledegook. I cannot imagine how they could have missed Swift’s Utter Gall, Preemptive Strike, and Sheer Audacity. Perhaps those are so common in Washington as to be overlooked.

Frank Abate (“Unraveling the American Place-Name Cover” [XVIII,2]) missed a few choice names: there is a village (though without a post office) named Obtuse, Connecticut; many know about Truth-or-Consequences, New Mexico, named for an old quiz show. For years I used “Toadsuck, Arkansas” as a generic term for any town out in the boonies; then I discovered that there really is a Toad Suck, Arkansas!

[Dorothy Branson, Kansas City, Missouri]

EPISTOLA {Dudley F. Church}

A possibly apocryphal story from Herman Oliver’s Gold and Cattle Country concerns a local prominence once called Squaw Tit (not all of the pioneers being missionaries); the Geographic Board decided the name was too earthy and, wishing to retain a semblance of the original appellation changed the name to Squaw Butte; when the map came out with the new name, the final e was unfortunately omitted. Another Squaw Tit graced the Cascade Range; the U.S. Board on Geographic Names ignored the name and called it Mt. Washington; everyone assumes it honors George.

[Dudley F. Church, Bend, Oregon]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Stands in public transportation heading west, then south (4)

3. Some refuse to walk beside big, clumsy fellow in battle (10)

10. Clique pouring rum (2-5)

11. Doing wrong taking a piece of jewelry (7)

12. Beau interested in holding back bouquet (9)

13. Girl built by the sound (4)

15. Legendary king practices catching sly eccentric (7)

17. Climax features grand scheme (7)

18.Escort onto the dance floor or to a duel in confusion (4-3)

21. Pirate’s bouncing walk (7)

23. Youngster has right to run (4)

24. Uniform-colored egg was at saloon counter (5,4)

27. Clients crumpled form let- ters (7)

28.Greek character embraces impolite Canadian leader (7)

29. With energy, got drunk and made oneself the center of attention (3-7)

30. Fool grabs first pit of vipers (4)

Down

1. Sip liquid before church cer- emonies and religious songs (10)

2. Homeless person happy to be surrounded by harbor (3,4)

4. Petitions for a review of Pennsylvania’s rising tolls (7)

5. Begins assorted toffees (4,3)

6. Secret agent beheaded by European nation for arson (9)

7. Joining head of public broad- casting (7)

8. Supply a Latvian city (4)

9. Fair ball after call for assis- tance (2-2)

14. Revolutionary saboteur—he is in the neighborhood (10)

16. Fast auto wound around sea town (6,3)

19. Accept a salute, with love (5,2)

20. Best eating: croissant and tart (7)

21. Loose silt absorbed by the prickly flower (7)

22. Greek hero is intrinsically superior to you and me (7)

25. Story-telling uncle beheaded birds (4)

26. Doris Lessing describes key (4)

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“[Jessye] Norman was in high dungeon, according to the gossip.” [From The Boston Globe, 17 February 1992. Submitted by Thayer S. Warshaw, North Andover, Massachusetts.]

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. M(IS)USED.

5. FA(U)X-PAS.

9. SEA (MINES)S.

10. EXE(C)S.

11. UNNERVE (hidden).

12. UK(RAIN)E.

13. B(ASSET-H)OUND.

16. COUNTERMAN-D.

21. DETRAC-T (carted rev.).

22. REP-ROVE.

24.EXILE (textile minus t’s).

25.A-SPA-RAGUS (sugar rev.)

26. T-REASON.

27. SP(ART)AN.

Down

1. ME-SS UP (puss rev.).

2. S-PAWNS.

3. SKI(E)R (riskanag.).

4. D(I)ETERS.

5. FISSURE (homophone).

6. UNEARTHED (hidden).

7. P(REV)IOUS.

8. S(U.S.)PENDS.

13. BE(TRAY)ERS.

14. ACID TEST (anag.).

15. BUSTL(IN)E.

17. RET(R)AIN.

18. A(PROP-O)‘S.

19.FOR(G)OT.

20. LESS-ON.

23. PARK-A.

Internet Archive copy of this issue