VOL XIX, No 4 [Spring, 1993]

Dickey Ticker

Alex Berlyne, Jerusalem

Despite their reputation for distrusting polyglots, it is by no means unusual for Englishmen to be bilingual. Schoolchildren all over the British Isles speak the local dialect at home and in the playground but switch to Received English—the language of BBC announcers, Whitehall, the great universities and the public school—once the school bell has sounded.

Some time ago, Peter Trudgill, a lecturer in linguistics at Reading University, deplored the fact that “many kids get the idea that their own language is incorrect and even inferior,” and as a result become alienated from at least two of the Three Rs. Though snobs and the stuffier sorts of pedagogues are toffee-nosed about regional dialects, poets such as Ted Hughes have acclaimed the organic way they have of “fitting the syllables/To the long swell of the land.”

The critics of dialect often single it out as “lazy” speech, citing for example the Lancashire ‘em for them. Yet ‘em is a far older English word—derived from old English—them them, which is a Scandinavian import. In Northamptonshire, Jeremy Seabrook reported in The Unprivileged that his mother would use terms that appear in Chaucer but have long vanished from Received English. Deploring his lack of appetite, she would tell him, “It’s no wonder, with all them mullocks you’ve been eating,” unselfconciously employing a word you can find in “A Canon Yeoman’s Talé.” Americans will appreciate the irony of the scornful British rejection of “I guess,” a term that was good enough for the author of The Canterbury Tales.

The difficulty of communicating across these regional and class barriers is considerable. Received English is an essential part of the cultural baggage of the Cornishman or the Highlander who refuses to be confined to some sort of parochialism for life. Oddly enough, the more unworldly sorts of academics run the risk of this self-imposed isolation because their particular “dialect” renders them incapable of being understood outside a very restricted circle. Professor Edgworth of All Souls, according to Robert Graves, tended towards this kind of sesquipedalian speech. Loitering by the college gates, he once greeted T.E. Lawrence, who had just returned to Oxford after a visit to London.

“Was it very caliginous in the Metropolis?” he asked.

“Somewhat caliginous,” Lawerence replied gravely, “but not altogether inspissated.”

Toward the end of the Seventies, it gradually became apparent that Britian’s National Health Service was suffering from a breakdown in communications. More than half the hospitals’ staffs were immigrants, mainly from India, Pakistan, and the West Indies, who were experiencing difficulties in understanding the natives. The problem, however, was not what one might have expected: the misunderstandings did not occur because the immigrant’s English was poor. On the contrary. They were quite capable of telling a British colleagues, “We’ve carried out a bronchoscopy, inserted an endotrachial tube, provided assisted ventilation, and positioned a catheter in his bladder to monitor his urinary output.” What they could not fathom was the British version of the same procedures: “We’ve bronched him, tubed him, bagged him, and cathed him.” The confusion was even greater when immigrant physicians failed to understand the patients who attended their surgeries. Eventually, the situation was recognized by the Ministry of Health and passing an examination in English—of a sort—became a condition of employment.

Most of the candidates boned up on the subject with the aid of Joy E. Parkinson’s Manual of English for the Overseas Doctor, a book that enjoyed a brisk sale at the beginning of the 1980s. The manual explained that “to understand your patients you must be able to understand the colloquial and idiomatic expressions they use and you must be able to speak to them in a simple way so that they’ll understand you.” The almost universal ignorance of medical nomenclature among English laymen and their dependence on euphemism is even the basis of corny old jokes, like the one about the two old biddies who spotted a haulage contractor’s truck bearing the slogan “We Guarantee To Move You, Anytime, Anywhere.”

“I’ll give it a try, Gertie,” one told her friend. “That Ex-Lax doesn’t do me any good at all.”

A few common examples of the sort of misunderstandings that cropped up repeatedly in the examination room show how wide the gulf could be between the patient and the general practitioner:

“It’s me waterworks, doctor,” a patient suffering from some disorder of the urinary tract would complain to an uncomprehending physician who thought he had been mistaken for a plumber.

“I’ve always had trouble with me tubes” could be especially misleading in the case of a female patient, for she would almost certainly be referring to a history of chronic lung disease and not tubes of the Fallopian variety.

One would also have to forgive the Indian subcontinent’s most highly trained cardiologist for failing to recognize that “It’s me dickey ticker, doctor”—which sounds as if the patient requires the services of a watch-repairer—is an allusion to longstanding heart disease.

One begins to get some idea of the extent of the problem reading Parkinson’s list of just a few of the colloquial expressions for pregnancy: Away the trip (Scottish working class), to be caught, to be expecting, to be having a baby, to be in a delicate condition, to be in an interesting condition, to be in pig, to be in pod, to be in the family way, to be in the pudding club, to be preggers, to be so, to be up the pole, to be up the stick, to catch on, to catch the virus, to fall for a baby, to have a bun in the oven, to have a touch of the sun.

Medical practitioners born and bred in the United Kingdom are just as guilty as their patients of spreading these opaque synonyms, abetted in their case by a fondness for a special kind of baby-talk that is supposed to reassure the patient: “We’re just going to pop you into the operating theatre and have a little peep in your tummy.” One particularly outrageous example of a coy euphemism crops up in Diane Johnson’s The State of the Language. A London gynecologist was explaining her impending hysterectomy to an understandably concerned patient. “We’re taking out the cradle,” he told her, “but we’re leaving in the playpen.”

Sussex Speak

Bel Bailey, Clacton-on-Sea, Essex

Old Sussex dialect is sadly dying out, save in the remoter villages, where the oldest inhabitants still speak it naturally. That is a great pity, as Sussex rustice were once famous for their amusing knack of adapting words to suit their own requirements. For example, a touch of the old brown crisis would mean an ‘attack of bronchitis’ and I mises would be Sussex shorthand for ‘I surmise or guess.’ Typical of the county is still the arbitrary pronounciation of the letters “ee”: sheep is often pronounced as “ship” and week as “wick.”

The use of the double plural is another old Sussex feature, as in the verse,

I saw two ghostesses

Sitting on postesses

Eating their toastesses

And greasing their fistesses

Weren’t they beastesses?

Back in 1904, E.V. Lucas in his Highways and Byeways in Sussex, noted that the Sussex dialect changed markedly from east to west and that the demarcation line between the two was the lovely Adur Valley—where even the breeds of sheep changed! If one hears the old Sussex dialect at all now it is usually found in the rural hinterland of the county between Battle (of 1066 fame) and Health-field, or that fine open stretch of country twixt Chichester and Midhurst.

The old West Sussex tendency is to add an extra syllable to monosyllabic words, so cow becomes “cayoo,” or fowl is pronounced “fewoll.” In East Sussex respectively these would be “kew” and “fewl.” The true “Sussexer” has problems with the letter h, so one old traditional dish is the “Plum ‘eavy,” the highway is naturally the “ighway,” etc. In East Sussex th is often pronounced as “d,” so that the, them, and that become “de, dem, and dat.” Due to the old Sussex dialect the village folk could quickly divide all those they met into the sheep and goats: the homelings were the natives and the comelings those who had come into Sussex from another county.

Frequently heard old expressions include Shennagoo for ‘shall not go,’ and Drackly for ‘straight away, directly.’ High praise is tidy middling and middling is ‘very fair’! Purdnye means ‘almost.’ Darngurt is Sussex speak for ‘anything very large,’ as this county is naturally given to emphatic statements. An overdressed woman may be summed up as “looks like a sow saddled” and any impossible task calls forth the comment “I can’t suck flour and whistle!” “Leaves back’ards up’ards, it’s going to rain” was a favorite saying of the ancient Sussex shepherds. The cowman driving his cows up Steyning High Street would call “Coup, Coup, Coup, coom along,” as did generations before him.

A scolding woman was said to give her husband “a dish of tongues,” and the old Sussex bachelor often gave crisp reasons for staying single: one went on record as saying “Mesel, I ain’t no marryin’ man, fer I can’t see naun in givin’ ‘arf yer grub away ter get t’ other ‘arf cooked. I does me own.”

Counting words in Sussex were often used by agricultural workers. The sheep were counted in pairs, thus, “One-erum, two-erum, cockerum, shuerum, shitherum, shatherum, Wineberry, Wagtail, Tarydiddle, Den = 20.”

Many writers have collected gems of Sussex dialect down the years, like Rev. William Parish and another cleric, Rev. Edward Boys Ellman, both before World War I. Parish discovered some amusing differences, as when a Sussex girl cries, “Oh! do adone” she means “Go on” but if she says, “Adone do,” she means “Stop at once!”

The ladybird was called Bishop Barnaby by Sussex children, as in the old rhyme

Bishop, Bishop Barnaby

Tell me when my wedding will be,

If it be tomorrow day,

Open your wings and fly away.

Broom dasher was the traditional Sussex description of a roughly dressed or roughly behaved person, and someone of low intelligence was described as chuckle-headed, a term not unfamiliar to Americans. To be *fair clemmed * meant to be ‘very hungry, cold, or miserable.’ A typical county boast still often expressed is “Sussex won’t be druv” and anyone contrairy is reckoned to be ‘obstinate.’ Darn ma wig is a humorous expression of surprise. Frouden means to be ‘afraid’ or to be “frit,” whilst ‘feeling ill’ was once expressed as “I be gellish ornary today.” Goistering was a curious term for ‘loud feminine laughter’; a ‘bad worker’ was called latchety: his excuse might well be, “Old Laurence has got hold of me today!”

Time and time again the dry Sussex sense of humor breaks through. The sadly defunct Horsham to Steyning railway line was called the “linger and die.” My obedience was a mother’s reference to her first-born child, and a ‘ditherer’ was called a mess-pot. Nineways for Sunday meant a ‘bewildered expression’ and is a good example of the originality of thought behind many of the county sayings.

The folklore of the county is particularly rich and this too gives colorful phrases. The Miller’s glory refers to the sweeps of the windmill set in the sign of a cross, said to bring luck to anyone in the village getting married. A shim means a ‘ghost’ or just a ‘glimpse of someone.’ Pharisees ‘fairies’ are also deep in Sussex folklore, while ‘something too complex to understand’ is called wigwams for goose’s bridles. Long Rope Day refers to the old Brighton or Hastings custom of skipping for luck on Good Friday. January butter is the name for the mud it was thought lucky to bring into the house on one’s feet on January 1st.

Of all the English county dialects I suspect that Sussex is the richest in its allusions, but I may well be prejudiced in favor of my beloved South Downs. To conclude, here is a snippet of the conversation of an old West Wittering woman, who lived near a scientist:

such a nice, still man, only he’s always losing

his recollects…. He disremembers everything.

Why the other day he was in a tarrible stodge

‘cause he mus’ catch the London train, an’

prensly there he was back again. He most-in-ginral

goos along reading an' a whiffle of wind

blew his book an he disremembered what he’d

gone for!

The Language of Past Money

Alan Major, Canterbury

On February 15th, 1971, Britain introduced decimal currency. The familiar pennies, halfpennies, sixpences, half-crowns, florins, etc., in circulation were replaced by New Pence. Into our language came a new description, a “pee” two “pees,” and so on, according to the price charged, for decimal currency, but out of use went the nicknames and slang terms used in Britain for the previous currency. This had previously happened in Australia, which went over to decimal currency in 1966. The Australian Jockey Club even advised bookmakers and gamblers to avoid using money slang: quid, spin, brick, and pony for £1, £5, £10, and £25, on Australian racecourses.

In Britain tenner, tanner, bob, oncer, guinea, quid, and other terms were in common use in conversation when purchasing an item. It is interesting how some of these names and slang money names arose.

The name tanner for a sixpence coin was first used at the beginning of the 19th century. The reason is obscure but may come from the gypsy word tano or tawno meaning ‘little,’ as it was a small coin compared with others then in circulation. It may also be so called for the same reason it was called a Simon. A legandary joke concerns St. Peter’s “banking transaction” when he “lodged with one Simon, a tanner.” Another name for the sixpence was sprat, which probably came from a cross between this word and sprazianna, the Cockney rhyming slang for a sixpence (tanner).

A shilling coin was called a bob. Again no certain meaning is recorded though it is believed to have been first used when Sir Robert Walpole was Prime Minister of England in the 18th century.

The name of the small silver threepenny coin, known as the threepenny joey or just joey, had the origin in another small coin, a fourpenny piece or groat. The latter was issued in 1836 on the advice of Joseph Hume, a Member of Parliament. Hume’s idea was for a convenient coin to pay for short cab journeys. The dissatisfied London cabmen did not like it. Until then they were usually given a sixpence, the nearest single coin to the amount of the fare and few people hiring the cab bothered to ask for the change. When the fourpenny groat was introduced passengers handed that over and the cabbies were down twopence on each journey, so they nicknamed it Joey and frequently spat on it in disgust before pocketing it whenever one was given to them in payment. It was last struck for currency use in 1855. But in 1845 a silver threepence had been reintroduced and after the disappearance of the fourpenny joey, the nickname was transferred to the threepenny joey.

The two-shilling coin was known as a florin, named after a medieval gold coin from Florence, Italy. This was called a florin (from the Italian fiorino ‘little flower’) because it bore a flower, a lily, the badge of the city.

Cockney slang for a half-crown coin was tusheroon, tossaroon, or tosheroon, a corruption of another slang term for this coin, madza caroon, a corruption of the Italian mezzo ‘half’ corona ‘crown.’

The term guinea, which had a value of twenty-one shillings, arose because the first guinea coins were minted in 1663 from gold brought from the Guinea region of West Africa. But the guinea was not always valued at twenty-one shillings: from 1663 it varied from twenty shillings to thirty shillings; its value was not fixed at 21 shillings till 1717. Guineas ceased to be minted in Britain in 1813, but continued until decimal introduction, as a term used in pricing goods and services.

Quid, dating from the 17th century and shown as “of obsure origin” in the Oxford English Dictionary, means a ‘pound,’ originally a note, now a coin. However, it was first used by criminals as a slang term for a guinea as long ago as 1688. The terms nicker for a one-pound note and half a nicker for a ten-shilling note are New Zealand expressions that arrived in Britain, and they were also widely used by counterfeiters in the underworld. They also called their forged half-crowns large whites and forged shillings small whites. Half a bar for ten shillings was first used by gypsies in the 19th century. The word bar for ‘pound’ might have originated from the Romany word bauro ‘big and heavy.’ Cockneys also used to call ten-shilling notes gennets, the origin of which I have been unable to trace.

Sovereign and guinea coins have been called bleeders, Jemmy O’Goblins, glisteners, Janes, harlequins, jingleboys, yellow boys, red rogues, megs, shiners, rainbows, and thick ‘uns.

In racing slang a pony is £25, a monkey £500, a cow £1000, plum £100,000, and a marigold £1 million. It is probable that pony was used because it is a small horse, and racing gamblers thought £25 was a small sum with which to bet.

It should also not be forgotten that in the rural languages there are also words referring to coins, money, etc. In my own county, Kent, Borrow Pence is an old word for ancient coins, probably those found in barrows or tumuli, another being Hegs Pence, a third being Dwarf’s Money, though the last was more frequently used in the coastal ares. Scimminger was the name for a counterfeit coin, while Bargain Pence was ‘earnest money,’ a low-value coin given on striking a bargain, making a deal at a market, or in similar circumstances. Bald Pates is almost self-explanatory, being a name used in Kent rural areas for silver Roman coinage ploughed up, found in barrows, etc., and possibly referring to the poor design or baldness of the effigy on some of the coins.

How to Gain Proverbial Wisdom, or It Takes One to Know One

David Galef, University of Mississippi

Proverbs, those self-contained nuggets of folk wisdom, can be addictive. I know: I once had an aunt who had a saying for every occasion. She was a short, plump woman with iron-gray hair in a bun, and she liked nothing better than putting in her two cents’ worth. She was a dilatory walker, with always the same quip: “Slow and steady wins the race.” Reading that the government was going to raise taxes, she thumped the newspaper and intoned, “You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.” If ever asked to explain one of her rare periods of quiet, she would reply, “Still waters run deep.”

My aunt’s visits were infrequent during my childhood, and it was only after her husband died and I was in high school that she began seeing my parents on a regular basis. I tolerated my aunt and her proverbial wisdom until she began applying it to her nephew. Hearing that I regularly went to sleep after midnight, she lectured me: “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” When I took a trip to Atlantic City and gambled away the amount I had intended, she warned, “A fool and his money are soon parted.” She even found fault with my studious habits: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

It is hard to counter a proverb: they have all the plodding force of a mule-driving peasant, earthy and inevitable. So when my aunt related gospel like “Blood is thicker than water,” I could think of no answer but a sullen nod. That is, until one day when I was helping my mother fix dinner for a family occasion and my aunt came into the kitchen. She asked how she could help, and when I protested that we had everything under control, she placed her hands on her hips and told me, “Many hands make light work.”

“Too many cooks spoil the broth,” I murmured. My aunt opened her mouth to reply, but nothing came out. It was a momentous occasion. Several weeks later, I was complaining about having to buy a new suit, and my aunt happened to be within earshot.

“Clothes make the man,” she informed me. I considered her point.

“You can’t judge a book by its cover,” I replied. So much for the wisdom of the ages. After that, my aunt was a lot more careful what she said around me, like a burnt child that shuns the fire. But eventually she reverted to her old proverbial ways. On one occasion, I had spent half my allowance on an expensive pair of sneakers, and when she told me I should have bought a cheaper brand, I simply betmoaned my small stipend and wondered if I would ever amass any significant sum of money.

That was her cue. She wagged her finger at me.

“Let me tell you something, young man. Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.”

“Oh?” I admit I was semi-prepared for this. I had checked out a collection of proverbs from the library and was becoming rather well-versed in them.

“What about ‘Penny-wise, pound-foolish’?”

My aunt thought about this for a moment.

“I think,” she said finally, “you are being deliberately provoking.”

I weighed the justice of this remark, but could not be bothered to adjust the scales. If my proverbial aunt was going to advise me, I was bound to devise some counter-stratagem. Luckily, the world of proverbs, sayings, adages, maxims, and plain old saws is various enough to say anything you want. Since they are meant to cover all of life’s vicissitudes from cradle to grave, they are bound to collide at times, sometimes obliquely, sometimes head-on. I pressed this knowledge to my advantage. My next opportunity came soon enough. I was complaining that I could not find a girlfriend. (I complained a lot in those days, a habit many proverbs warn against.) Apparently, I protested loudly enough for my aunt to take note because she tried to console and scold me in that double tone that proverbs have. She put her hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t fret so much,” she said. “A boy’s best friend is his mother.”

“A boy’s best friend is his dog,” I retorted, “but I can’t see myself asking Jessie out on a date, can you?”

My aunt just shook her head and sighed. A year later, after I actually had a girlfriend and was worried about summer vacation when she would be away, my aunt passed on this pearl of wisdom: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

I was growing more educated and this time quoted Shakespeare back. “Out of sight, out of mind.” (Unfortunately for my love-life, my proverb turned out to be the right one.)

My aunt gave an annoyed tsk. “I give up on you,” she said, and left the room.

Of course, she never quite conceded defeat: hope springs eternal in the human breast. She continued to quote at me, and I requoted back. But as she got older, her steel-trap memory turned into a steel sieve, and she became almost touchingly uncertain of her words. I recall to my credit that, when she was despairing of ever doing anything more with her life and muttered, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” I cheered her up by flatly opposing her: “It’s never too late to learn.” She died in her eighty-third year, and though only her name and dates adorn her headstone, I often think of inscribing an addendum: “A little advice goes a long way.”

My aunt did not leave behind much in the way of possessions. What I am left with is a list of proverbs for all occasions, which I hereby bequeath to the reader along with my own contradictions:

Strike while the iron is hot. — The more haste, the less speed.

The best things in life are free. — There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Repent before it’s too late. — It’s never too late to mend.

Look before you leap. — He who hesitates is lost.

Never back down on what you believe in. — Cut your coat according to your cloth.

Don’t rock the boat. — The squeaky wheel gets all the grease.

Seek and ye shall find. — Don’t go looking for trouble

The more haste, the less speed. — Strike while the iron is hot.

Every cloud has a silver lining. — It never rains but it pours.

The first shall be last. — To the victor belong the spoils.

Two heads are better than one. — If you want something done right, do it yourself.

Always plan ahead. — Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.

Money is the root of all evil. — Money makes the world go round.

Opposites attract. — Like breeds like.

Never bet on a sure thing. — A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Actions speak louder than words. — It’s the thought that counts.

Use a carrot instead of a stick. — Spare the rod and spoil the child.

The meek shall inherit the earth. — Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Do unto others as they do unto you. — Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Monkey see, monkey do. — Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

One cannot step into the same river twice. — Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Beauty is only skin-deep forever. — A thing of beauty is a joy

Wisdom comes with age. — There’s no fool like an old fool.

Make hay while the sun shines. — Take time to smell the roses.

Honesty is the best policy. — Don’t wash dirty linen in public.

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. — Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Seeing is believing. — All that glitters is not gold.

As you sow, so shall you reap. — Virtue often goes unrewarded.

People are the same the world over. — To each his own.

Of course, just because these sayings cross each other up does not mean they are incorrect; they simply suit different occasions. Literature, which is now my profession, teacher the importance of context. For instance, Polonius' spate of proverbial advice that ends “To thine own self be true” is not all bad. It is just that, to employ a proverbial expression, he does not practise what he preaches. And Hamlet’s turns of phrase are more intriguing. Or at least I thought so years ago when I identified with youth. Nowadays, I feel an odd kinship with Polonius. In fact, I have felt lately as if I were employing more proverbs in my own speech, maybe turning into my aunt—like aunt, like nephew. This would be a fine turnaround for someone whose first interest in language was as a proverb-basher. Somewhere in the background I can hear my aunt’s reaction to this confession. Or as she might put it: She who laughs last laughs best.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“We can’t make good grammar great. But we want to make flawed writing acceptable.” [Lance A. Miller, in the Wall Street Journal, September 29, 1983. Submitted by Robert O. Vaughn, West New York, New Jersey.]

Thunderboxes and Chuggies

Daniel Balado-Lopez, Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire

In semantic terms, the words in the above title belong to a specific domain in the English vocabulary with which every member of the human race achieves intimate familiarity. The naked terms for such a traditionally taboo subject as “the toilet” have always proved too much to bear for polite society, which hastily covered the bare-cheeked shame of them with a blanket of euphemism. The domain is a prolific nursery of such linguistic fig-leaves, and as a result (contrary thing that human nature is) has also fostered many ribald versions. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is an almost inexhaustible supply of paraphrases and synonymous terms in this field, ranging from the most tasteful euphemism to the most flagrant vulgarity. While most of these bear testament to the wonderful versatility of the English language and the rich vein of humor that runs through our culture, some necessitate etymological investigation in order to uncover their roots and, in some cases, to explore changes in meaning. Most, indeed, defy precision in the attempt altogether.

Six hundred years ago, toilet designs, though crude, were what we might term today latrines (the Middle English word was laterin from Latin latrina): planks of wood with circles cut into them, placed over a ditch. Conveniences for the wealthier sections of the community (i.e., those who could afford high-rise property) consisted of straight-drop or long-drop privies. The word privy is one of the earliest euphemisms used in England; an anonymous writer at the turn of the fifteenth century advised “whanne he sitteth at privy he schal not streyne him-silf to harde.” It is derived from the French word privé and the Latin privatus, both meaning ‘private,’ and this is the specific sense in which the word entered the English language. The earliest euphemisms documented use of the word in this original sense of intimacy or familiarity between people dates from 1225, and privy council (a small group of advisers to the monarch) from 1300, when Edward I established it. It is not surprising, semantically speaking, that the word widened its meaning so quickly since it naturally lent itself (as did closet) to the description of a solitary place, one where people performed lavatorial functions.

Privy and closet are examples of euphemism by metonymy, which is the substitution of the name of an attribute of a thing for the thing itself: a toilet is a private place, therefore a privy. Similarly, Bombay furniture (a style combining European forms with Indian ornamentation) provided the metonymic euphemism The Bombay; the Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the name is possibly attributable to the Bombay chair, wherein chamberpots were placed, as it was common in the past to have one’s chamberpot concealed in a piece of furniture, which could then be proudly displayed. The name close-stool, which makes an appearance in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well of 1606 and John Florio’s Montaigne of 1603, was also inspired by the furniture in which it was cased, as was commode.

If one is to go by Florio’s use of close-stool, it seems interchangeable with another, less notorious, term for a privy, the ajax. In the sixteenth century, an Elizabethan courtier, Sir John Harrington, invented a water-closet with a flushing system and wrote a book on the subject entitled A Metamorphosis of Ajax, published in 1596. The word, however, seems to have existed before that, as Shakespeare uses it, also in close conjunction with close-stool, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, c. 1593, and it achieved an entry in Cotgrave’s Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues of 1611. Its exact origin is unascertained, but it is likely to have been a variant of jakes (with the indefinite article preceding it). Jakes is also of unknown origin; the most common suggestion for its roots is in the proper name Jacques or Jack, which is not unbelievable when we consider other examples such as jerry and john. Shakespeare uses jakes confidently in King Lear (c. 1605):

My lord, if you will give me leave, I will tread this unbolted villain into mortar, and daub the wall of a jakes with him.

Eric Partridge, in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, suggested that the word dates from 1530 and was standard English until about 1750, when it became a colloquial term. The word was also very much alive in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the dialect of southwestern England, where it had come to mean any type of filth or litter, according to Elworthy’s A West Somerset Word-Book. Patridge also says that the term is now obsolete, but to this day the blocks of toilets at my old school, St. Edmund’s College in Hertfordshire, are affectionately known as “Jakes Tower.”

The origin of jerry, like so many of these terms, can only be guessed at. It is slang for chamberpot and, like jakes, could be the familiar variant of a proper name (Jeremiah or Jeremy). It is supposed, however, that it is an abbreviation for jeroboam, which started off life as a large bowl for holding wine [I Kings xi. 28/xiv. 16]; the addition of the suffixes -y, -ie, and -ey to the main stem of a word have always been popular ways of forming diminutives. Jerry first appeared in Hotten’s Dictionary of Slang in 1859, defined as “a chamber utensil.” In An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, Ernest Weekly suggested an even earlier association with the word jordan, a medieval alchemist’s vessel and, later, a chamberpot. All these are feasible surmises by the process of metonymy. Perhaps it hails from a shortening of jerry-shop (c. 1851), a term used to describe a low beer-house. As the chamberpot is a great friend to those with bibulous tendencies, jerry might have become a pet-name for it.

The etymology of the word loo is perhaps the greatest mystery of all in this field of vocabulary. The word first gained general usage in Britain during World War II, and possibly came about as a result of fraternizing with French troops, perhaps as a corruption of l’eau (water) or lieux d’aisance (Water-closet), or even as a derivation of the cry (Garde á l’eau!, given to warn passerby that someone above was about to slop out (the anglicised form, gardyloo !, occurs in this context in a novel by Tobias Smollett as early as 1771). Also at that time, rustic laborers in Italy used to have the number 100 painted on their privy-doors; to go al numero cento was an accepted idiom of the day: indeed, children used to have fun replacing the last zero with a one after the privy had been used. The number 100 is not dissimilar in appearance to the word loo, and there were plenty of servicemen from the U.S.A. and England in Italy from 1943 onwards.

Among the more incredible explanations (as recorded by Adrian Room, A Dictionary of True Etymologies) are a derivation from ablution or luliana [Daily Telegraph, 13 September 1968] and even from hallelujah, as prompted by a caption to a cartoon by Du Maurier in Punch [22 June 1895], which read “Now we’ll begin again at the Hallelujah, and please linger longer on the ‘lu’!” A more promising story to note is that of a corruption of the word lee: for those working in the country, a place for relieving oneself was always chosen out of the bite of the wind, that is, in the lee.

Terms such as toilet and lavatory have, like privy, undergone pejoration over the years (that is, their meanings have acquired depreciatory connotations). The original meaning of lavatory was simply a vessel for washing: in his 1382 translation of the Bible, John Wycliffe talks of washing feet in “a brasun lavatorie” [Exodus xxx.18]. Similarly, to perform one’s “toilet” in 1681 was “the action or process of dressing or of washing and grooming” [OED]. An unclear sense-development of this word is mapped out in the OED, but it seems to concede that the modern sense of lavatory originated at the start of this century: the (British) Army and Navy Stores catalogue of 1926 lists a lavatory paper-holder as one of its items, but it was probably earlier: The Illustrated London News reported in 1860 that each ward of the new Florence Nightingale School of Nursing had “its own bathroom, lavatories and closet.” While toilet and lavatory have discarded their original meanings, terms such as bog retained their original meanings (‘a marshy place’) as well as being understood in Britain as a slang synonym for a toilet; it achieved an entry in Hotten’s dictionary as early as 1864 as “a privy as distinguished from a water-closet.”

Terms which border on the vulgar tend to be onomatopoeic: examples include chuggie, duffs, dubs, biffy, honk, and thunderbox. The last example (Eric Partridge tells us) is a nickname for a chamberpot originating in India c. 1870, and is “derived from the noise therein caused].” By far the most numerous group of terms is that which contains words only with a localized meaning. It would be impossible to compile a definitive glossary for this group, but a few examples follow: the heads (naval colloquialism, dating from the late nineteenth century, said to be from the location of the latrines on a ship); the longs (pet-name for latrines at Brasenose College, Oxford, from c. 1870, so-called because they were built from funds donated by a certain Lady Long); and greenhouses (Ulysses, Book VIII), James Joyce’s personal slang for the public toilets after the color of their paint. It is this group that ensures steady growth in this most malleable domain of the English vocabulary, for the resources of the human imagination are limitless.

Windy English

Geoffrey Wagner, Grenada

For the best part of half a century I have lived on and off in a Windward Island of the now largely ex-British Caribbean. The semantic of these former Crown Colonies is individual and anarchic, bearing in mind that academically, if no longer psychologically, they remain anglophone. Schoolchildren are guided into, first, “O” and, then, “A” Levels, corresponding to the School and Higher Certificates of my own English youth; these are set from Cambridge and incline, to my mind, to an all too often condescending leaning to local idiom-worship, from which most BeeWees want to free themselves. Northwards, the Leeward Island moving up through Antigua to Jamaica are today locked into American television, while southwards the Mona, Trinidad, campus of the University of the West Indies duplicates any run-of-the-mill American municipal college, at least in its language aspects, being blessedly innocent of any courses in Anglo-Saxon or Middle English.

The small pocket of Windward Island semantic, if such it can be called, has nothing to do with the patois of adjacent French islands. Obviously the short-lived French conquests in the region left behind words and names; here a crazy man is foo [for Fr fou] or, if you want to insult him, a crapaud ‘toad,’ while on our little island resolutely British placenames (Grenville, Victoria) nestle beside villages like Perd-mon-Temps, La Tante, Crochu. The fact remains that no bush local understands French or wants to. I am roughly familiar with researches into this semantic by old friends, like John Groome of Grenada or Frank Collymore of Barbados, but find use of the living language hereabouts best shown in the work of the late and much lamented Shiva Naipaul, younger brother of V.S. (who declines to use his knighthood). Set in the fictional Cuyama (clearly Guyana), Shiva’s A Hot Country is a West Indian masterpiece, even though islands characterize the community and Guyana (formerly “BG,” or British Guyana) is mainland. Far from inclining to French, these natives cleave to British schoolboy slang, a hard-dying lingo.

Take nicknames. Nearly everyone I know has (=does have) a nickname in the Windwards, where the Prime Minister of St. Vincent is “Son” Mitchell (evidently the first-born of an “inside” marriage), while my builder is “Sonny,” not an easy name for a New York liberal to summon him by. Still more difficult to use with the confidence of a local is my gardener’s sobriquet—“Black Man.” A career in an ultra-liberal New York city college inhibits my calling out, even in the friendliest manner, “Come, Black Man.” (Too, our locals refer unashamedly to nigger hair which, to date, I cannot.) So most nicknames are the inheritance of boyhood features or facial characteristics, e.g., Chubby, Porgie, Moon, Snail, Speedy (apparently his opposite), Peg-Leg, and the like, all delineating good friends of mine. Rastas have their own system.

There is little linguistic ruling available here, however attractive BeeWee speech rhythms may sound to the casual tourist. There is no authentic dialect in the ex-British Caribbean, not even in the sense of a pejorative corruption of a parent tongue (as in Pennsylvania Dutch, for instance). It is simply sentimental to propose the contrary, as do the sophisticated proponents of multiculturalism, like George Lamming in Barbados. What mostly characterizes Windward Island speech could be called a kind of linguistic laziness, and this has considerable charm, as a lot of laziness can. A typical morsel of such speech plucked from Shiva Naipaul’s The Chip-Chip Gatherers: “I tired hear you say that.” The meaning is perfectly clear. The speaker is simply abbreviating from “I am tired of hearing you say that,” and expressing character (and class) by doing so. This is not to deny that there is an ingrained poetic in BeeWee—I have been offered a smile of whiskey (who could refuse?), directed to a beach where the water he weep over the rock, and told I feels a little bit much more better, thanks. The last is the typical local double (or triple) comparative, but it does not establish a linguistic.

Take the idiosyncrasy in the use of personal pronouns, that of the lack of, or reluctance to use, accusative and dative cases or even the possessive. Why bother? One form can do the job. We will do just as well for us or ours. Thus a Windward Island might say, “They take we jobs from we.” In Grenada of the revolutionary 1979-83 interregnum, Prime Minister Maurice Bishop was “We Leader.” Or, from Shiva again: “The moment we get we children off we hands we leavin' here. They does bramble we.”

None of these rather charming locutions is represented orthographically (in government documents and the like), yet one prevalent curiosity has always struck me, namely the dropping of the final g from participles. Sitting brimmin' up a smile of white (perhaps even a grin of such rum) over a seascape of beauty, a Windward Islander told me, “I viewin'.” This duplicates precisely the U huntin'-shootin' -fishin' locution of my British youth, and could be another reason for calling West Indians the last Englishmen left around.

Nevertheless, some elements of Windward speech can be regularized into a sort of grammar, particularly in verb tenses. The constantly surprising ubiquity, in stores, dockyards, garages, banks, of the King James version of the Bible may account for what seem to visitors to be odd usages, variations often coming over at first as error; the universal use of the conditional would for the future will can lead to serious confusion, e.g., in legal documents. A comparison of the present tenses of the verb to have and to be yields the following reversals:

STANDARD BEEWEE

I have I has

he/she has he/she have

we have we has

you have you has

they have they has

STANDARD BEEWEE

I am I is

he/she is he/she are/am

we are we is

you are you is

they are they is

Of course, these variants are regarded as errors by the Cambridge examiners, but it will be a sad day when they are expunged from the West Indian scene, since they make a response to shades of reality unavailable in middle-Atlantic BBC. So do, surely, BeeWee intensifications, doubling the epithet; a Windward Islander may call a fruit sweet-sweet, one adjective not sufficing to express feelings about it enough. Sweet-sweet is much more sweeter than very sweet, is it not?

Television has recently begun to inundate these incompetent but lovable little islands, embarrassing colonial deposits now handed over to sink or swim in independence. CNN and the BBC are already busy ironing out indigenous language rhythms in the interests of the “global village.” In an article (“The Use of Lallans for Prose,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LI, No. 2, April, 1952, pp. 212-225), I tried to show, elsewhere, this happening to Braid Scots, the Doric, or “Lallans” in Scotland. But in that case a linguistic amalgam cohered early and was only pushed back northwards after having established a local literature (Dunbar, Henryson). Nor did it have to fight television. Alas, Windward Island English is far more vulnerable to standardization.

VERBUM SAP: ‘Ard Lines

Robertson Cochrane, Toronto

“Maybe I’m a dullard, but…” the letter-to-the-editor writer began, then with nimble argument demonstrated that he was anything but. I was induced to read his piece, however, not so much by the trusty rhetorical device of self-deprecation as by that fusty word dullard. It seemed to wear a thin, fuzzy coat of mildew, as if summoned for this rare duty from a cobwebbed trunk in the attic of obsolescence.

It got me thinking about other words that end in -ard, a process that inevitably involved hours of dictionary delving. Unaided, I could conjure up only ten, not counting backguard and blow-hard which, while conforming to the pejorative pattern of the -ard words, were not formed as the others by the simple suffix addition. My list, after dullard, counted dotard, bastard, buzzard, coward, dastard, drunkard, laggard, lollard, niggard and wizard. Of those, only the last would be taken today with equanimity, although wizard was not always complimentary. The delightful and certainly disparaging canard also occurred to me, but I had already decided to limit my quest to personal epithets.

And what a rich lode of dormant invective I tapped! The OED2e lists about five dozen -ard words to describe people of unsavory character or underdeveloped intellect, and all but the handful above now languish in dusty disuse. Virtually all of them are derogatory, and some of them are so mordantly mean that I can only lament their loss—perhaps to a precursor wave of today’s political correctitude? The next question was this: What was it about the -ard ending that appealed to our badmouthing forebears?

Some time between the 8th and 12th centuries, German-speakers began honoring heroes and other eminences by adding -hard to their names, to denote ‘hardy.’ The practice carried over into Middle High German and Dutch, where it developed a sarcastic edge and became generally derisive. The French adopted the habit as an intensifier of musculine nouns, proper and improper, and this too became mostly pejorative, as in mouchard ‘sneak’ or ‘informer’ (from mouche ‘fly’), and froussard ‘coward’ (from frousse ‘fright’), and bastard, a trenchant abbreviation of fils de bast ‘pack-saddle child.’ The practice jumped the Channel, as did many things French, after the Norman Conquest. At first the English were content with unalloyed borrowings, but then began tacking the invidious -ard onto purely English words, producing the likes of drunkard, laggard, and sluggard.

Before long, there were many, both imported and home-grown. They fell into three main categories: words for fools, idlers, and wastrels; for people with other undesirable or downright anti-social attributes; and for those with some physical disability.

In the first category were babelard or babillard for ‘babbler’; lubbard for ‘big, stupid lout’ (from which came landlubber); caynard ‘lazy dog’ (ultimately from the Italian cagna ‘bitch’); losard ‘rake’ or ‘profligate’ (from Old English losel ‘one who is lost to perdition’); and the mellifluous but contumelious musard, whose sin was day-dreaming.

Even more to be censured were the peevish and fretful fretchards, the penny-pinching misards and muglards, the parasitic, hypocritical sycophants known as papelards (after Italian pappalardo ‘one who eats bacon fat’), the pilfering pillards, the pusillanimous snivelards, the deceitful trichards, and the loathsome loners called unkards.

More persecuted than censured were citizens who fell short of contemporary standards of physical perfection. They included the sparsely coifed ballard, the squinting, weak-eyed blincard (who could also be ‘one who deliberately ignored reality’), the hobbling mendicant limpard or clochard (from French clocher ‘to limp’), the stammering mafflard, and the scallards and scabbards who suffered from some skin disease.

A sub-species of -ard word, if not of humans, might be labeled “political.” In this charming group we find Dynamitard, an explosive 19th-century. French radical leftist; Dreyfusard, erstwhile bleeding-heart supporter of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly convicted of treason in 1894 and exonerated in 1906; Cagoulard (from French ‘wearer of a monk’s cowl’), a member of a sort of 1930s French Ku Klux Klan; and Communard, an adherent of the Commune of Paris, a group that took over the municipal government of the French capital and played a leading role in the post-revolutionary Reign of Terror. Members of a rebellious 16th-century French faction were called Guisards because of their extravagant get-ups; the word has become a common, if rarely used, noun for a masquerader or mummer.

This by no means exhausts the store of sleeping slurs that once formed an ‘ard core of popular insult. I could go on, but given the space constrictions, that would be foolardy.

EPISTOLA {Sally Turner}

The horse in Brewer’s Twentieth Century Phrase and Fable [XVIII, 4] can only be referred to as “white” if it is a Lippizaner. Otherwise, snowiness notwithstanding, it is “grey.”

[Sally Turner, Orchard Park, Hull]

EPISTOLA {Stanley Mason}

The discussion of Spoonerisms [EPISTOLAE, XIX, 2, 17] should, I feel, not be closed without mentioning at least a few more of the classic examples of the genre. Thus Spooner himself is supposed to have referred to Cambridge as “a muddy bleak place.” When the first motorized vehicles appeared on the roads he opined that “Automobiles are all very well, but for pure pleasure give me a well-boiled icicle.” In my own family Spoonerisms flourished luxuriantly for many years, and we hardly spoke of the weather, for instance, without invoking their oblique charm: “It’s rotting with Spain,” or perhaps more frequently (it was in the English Midlands, which as Hilaire Belloc said “are sodden and unkind”): “It’s roaring with pain.” Some of our visitors must have been rather put off when my six-year-old daughter announced to them before dinner: “We’re going to have parrots and keys.” But even further back, in my own schooldays, the Spoonerism celebrated many triumphs. We would ask each other, for instance, what was the difference between a bon mot and a fart. The answer was that the bon mot is a shaft of wit. While on this subject, I may as well quote another of these prize questions: What is the difference between a warhorse and a carthorse? The answer is, to Spooner’s eternal glory, that the warhorse darts into the fray.

[Stanley Mason, Switzerland]

EPISTOLA {Annette Jere}

I learned in Botswana that plonk means ‘purple liquid, origin not known.’ STP is a step lower: ‘screw-top plonk.’ These definitions might have emerged from extensive trials.

[Annette Jere, Lund, Sweden]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Dictionary of South African English

Jean Branford (with William Branford), (4th ed. Oxford University Press, 1991) xxi + 412 pp.

The appearance of a fourth edition of this dictionary [DOSAE] within thirteen years of the first is an indication of its popularity as well as of its scholarly significance. The current edition was partly motivated by the recent political changes in South Africa, which resulted in the unbanning of organizations, individuals, and books. For the lexicographer this opened up the possibility of new words (e.g., the last apartheid ruler, P.W. Botha had officially outlawed the regime and white minority rule) and, more important, of new citations.

Of all the countries in which English is a significant first language, South Africa is perhaps the most complex socially and linguistically. While English is currently the most important language, it is the first language of only a small proportion of speakers: according to official estimates for 1989-90, English, with two million first-language speakers, is well behind Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Tswana, and North Sotho. Furthermore, English is not the only “colonial” language of the territory, for since 1948 the ruling Afrikaner nationalists have promoted Afrikaans as an essential language for advancement in the public service. Finally, segregational laws in the country have tended to polarize the dialects of English along partially ethnic lines. Lexically speaking, this has tended to produce fragments of South African English, rather than a general, roughly homogeneous variety.

Such a multilingual environment—and the picture is made still more complex by other immigrant languages like Malay (no longer spoken), Indian languages (e.g., Hindi and Tamil), as well as indigenous languages of the Khoi and San families now extinct in South Africa—makes the lexicographer’s task at once difficult and stimulating. The DOSAE is in some respects a reflection of the contact history of South Africa, played out in terms of the English lexicon. In its pages can be found linguistic traces of the former rivalry between Boer and Briton, the naming practices of the Khoi and San (Hottentot and Bushman in former terms), racial conflict (derogatory terms like Boer, Kaffir, and Hottentot each have more than a page devoted to them), the political discourse of the apartheid regime, and the counter-discourse of the resistance movements. The more positive side of language and culture contact does show up, however, in the numerous terms for food and drink, entertainment, the landscape, terms of endearment, forms of address, and words of approval. It is also through this and earlier editions of the DOSAE that one learned, to one’s surprise, of the South African provenance of words like off-load ‘unload,’ bottle store ‘liquor store,’ butchery ‘butcher’s shop,’ and bond ‘mortagage bond.’

According to the Branfords’ own calculations (made in 1988) the source languages for items in the DOSAE were 48 per cent Dutch/Afrikaans; 29 per cent English (i.e., neologisms); 11 per cent Bantu languages, and 12 per cent “other.” The high proportion of Afrikaans words has frequently been singled out for comment by critics. Some of the items in this category are words of long standing (since the introduction of English in the Cape in the late eighteenth century) that have often passed into international English: trek, veld, laager etc. Other uncontroversial Afrikaans items include political and culinary terms widely used in South Africa, e.g., apartheid and biltong ‘strips of sun-dried lean meat.’ The majority of Afrikaans items, however, are those which appear in written English sources, but rarely in colloquial South African English (even as spoken by Afrikaners). The authors themselves mention that “some Afrikaans critics of earlier editions of this text felt that many entries were not really South African English.” (They responded by reducing the number of such entries and by marking others as borderline cases).

There is certainly a need for words of Afrikaans origin that recur in English texts (often for “local color” effect) to be glossed somewhere: a reference work like the DOSAE might be more convenient for readers than an Afrikaans or Xhosa or some other dictionary. Likewise, it might be necessary for novices to gloss non-English words that recur in bilingual road signs and other public notices: apteek ‘chemist,’ links ‘left,’ and the now obsolete blankes ‘whites (only)’ might be truly informative for the overseas visitor. (To be consistent, the DOSAE would have to indicate the word for ‘left’ in all languages that appear in road signs in different parts of the country—Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho and Tswana).

In their entry for slegs ‘only’ the authors quote an amusing anecdote in this regard:

‘Slegs Only’ A visitor’s guide to S. African English. “What are slegs?” a puzzled visitor from overseas asked me. He had been driving along in a hired car and had suddenly found himself entering a lane marked SLEGS ONLY. “But how is a visitor expected to know that?” he demanded after I had explained its meaning [that it was a bilingual sign]. “With the population divided into Whites, Coloureds and Blacks, how am I to know that ‘Slegs’ isn’t another race group?”

Slegs is one of the relatively few items marked in the DOSAE as Afrikaans, rather than English. I would argue that this particular signpost does not occur frequently enough in the book. For example, as this marking is absent in the entry, tweetalig ‘bilingual,’ we must infer that the authors now consider this to be an English item. Yet, the citations they give afford a clue to the real status of this and numerous other items in DOSAE: “This wall chart, attractive … and tweetalig nogal [‘bilingual, what’s more’], is to be distributed to all hospitals….” and “ ‘Four years in the charge office as a fraud detective. That was where I learned to speak Afrikaans’ She is heel-temal tweetalig [‘totally bilingual’] and … studied art in Scotland.”

Surely we are dealing with code-switching here —the use of words and phrases from two languages within the same speech event for stylistic effect, with an audience that is capable of appreciating the play on words. Many of the Afrikaans words in DOSAE are similarly illustrated from examples involving bilingual word play by creative writers. The problem for the lexicographer is that code-switching is open-ended: almost any word or phrase from the one language can be interpolated into discourse from the other. It is also in practice difficult to decide between the process of borrowing (which dictionaries must concern themselves with) and code-switching. This is not a problem peculiar to DOSAE; rather, it is one of the strongest challenges facing lexicographers of a vast number of languages in the twenty-first century, as English continues to spread, influence, and be influenced by languages all over the world in situations of intimate language contact.

On the whole, I recommend DOSAE highly for anyone wishing to get to grips with English in South Africa. Visitors as well as locals who are faced with a barrage of acronyms in everyday usage will find many of them glossed in these pages. DOSAE shows attention to detail, provides extensive definitions with detailed cross references, has broad phonetic transcriptions and, above all, provides delightful illustrative sentences from historical and contemporary sources.

Rajend Mesthrie, University of Cape Town

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Indexing Biographies and other stories of human lives

Hazel K. Bell, (Society of Indexers, 1992), 42pp.

[SI Publications Officer, 26 Draycot Road, Wanstead, London E11 2NX, UK.]

Every literate person has had experience with indexes and knows that there are good ones and bad ones. It often astonishes me that publishers—at whose door such shortcomings must be laid—can put out books that contain a huge amount of valuable information, then effectively deny access to it by providing, in the worst case, no index at all and, in many instances, an improverished index. As one who has prepared indexes of great variety, I recognize the many problems that one can encounter; still, these are not insurmountable, and there is no excuse for producing a work of some complexity without accompanying it by a thorough index. The important thing is the notion of thoroughness: the indexer must try to anticipate and provide for a variety of users’ needs in an index; users do not seek the same sort of information, and the effort must be made to imagine the uses to which a particular work will be put, then to provide the users with as many access points to the information as can reasonably be expected. On more than one occasion in these pages have I lamented the absence of an index (or of a useful, usable one) in a book that contains much valuable information.

Probably the greatest offenders were those who produced the earlier manuals accompanying computers and software: many of us had the experience of reading through a manual the first time only to find, later, on seeking the format of a certain command, that there was no index, that the index had not been updated to conform to the latest (looseleaf) version of the text, or that the item sought was not listed; the only solution was to go through the entire text, laboriously turning each page to find the lost information. Today’s manuals are much improved, but they still rely on the users' knowledge of the jargon of the computer trade, and much frustrating time is still spent trying to find a given bit of information (while trying to imagine what a computer programmer would be likely to have called it because he was unfamiliar with the jargon of writing, editing, styling, composition, or the other arts and crafts associated with publishing).

I have had considerable experience in preparing indexes—some simple and straightforward, some highly detailed and sophisticated—for a wide variety of books. As I have dealt mainly with texts that were in machine-readable form, I have been able to develop techniques for extracting an index from a text, especially if the text is consistently styled typographically. In other words, if information type “A” is consistently set in italics, type “B” in bold-face italics, type “C” in small capitals, and type “D” in boldface roman, if type “E” always appears in single quotation marks, and so forth, one can use this information to extract discrete categories of data for a variety of purposes.

Not all text is so highly stylized, and the present work deals with biographies, autobiographies, and fiction, which offer little opportunity for automatic extraction because the subjects suitable for indexing are often paraphrases of the words used in the text. Mrs. Bell cites this example from Elizabeth Longford’s biography, Byron (Hutchinson/Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1976):

Byron, George Gordon, 6th Lord:… his courtship and marriage, 60-79

Byron, Annabella, née Millbanke, wife of B. … vicissitudes of her marriage, 71-7

Mrs. Bell comments that the term vicissitudes does not occur in the text (and, I daresay, courtship and marriage do not occur as chapter headings, either).

This booklet contains many fascinating insights into the art of indexing, including, for example, the observation,

… while authors can be subtle and discreet in their writing, indexers have to condense their implications to a blunt label—HOMOSEXUAL TENDENCIES, for instance; we cannot hint in indexes. [p. 19]

As this is a rather specialized work, we cannot devote the space to the full description that it merits among those who pursue its concerns. Those who are involved in indexing and are unaware of the existence of the Society of Indexers would be well served to join. Information regarding membership (which includes a subscription to The Indexer, published semiannually) can be obtained by writing to the Society of Indexers, 139 The Ryde, Hatfield, Herts. AL9 5DP, England. The Indexer is also the official journal of the following affiliated societies; information about membership can be sought at their respective addresses: American Society of Indexers, P.O. Box 386, Port Aransas, TX 78373, USA; Australian Society of Indexers, GPO Box 1251L, Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia; IASC (Indexing and Abstracting Society of Canada, P.O. Box 744, Station F, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4Y 2N6.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A History of the English Language

Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, (Routledge, 1993. (Published by Prentice-Hall in the U.S.)), xiv + 444pp.

Too often, the best books of the past are cast aside to be replaced by nothing more than a rehash of them, frequently rifling earlier material on the legalistic grounds that it is out of copyright. To those wont to steep themselves in the writings of the 19th century, a period marked by an emergence of scholarship and of the broad dissemination of knowledge, plumbing the delights of those writings not only for their content but for their controlled and mannered style yields great satisfaction. One must be especially grateful to those who, rather than cast it aside as old-fashioned or outdated, undertake to modernize a classic, a policy that too few publishers pursue.

For me and scores of thousands of other students of language and literature, A.C. Baugh’s book was the primer, the basic grammar on the history of English. Long before the invention of the cliché user-friendly, that was an apt description of the Baugh, a work to be relied upon for substance, accuracy, readability. Later, it became a useful reference, always handy on a nearby shelf, to which one could turn in those irritating lapses of memory of the niggling detail.

The first edition of Baugh’s History was published in 1935; because so much has happened to English since then, it is fitting that its history be updated, not only to reflect more recent developments in dialect, lexicon, grammatical theory, and the universal adoption of the language as a lingua franca, but also to revise scholarship in the light of later research that either elaborates or confutes information that is now more than half a century old. Although I was surprised to note (on the title page) that this is the fourth edition of the work, ignorance of the second and third editions must be put down to my own failing. The present editor, Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, has exercised restraint in meddling with Baugh’s original text, having focused mainly on those areas—dialect, modern grammatical theory, and, generally, the work of later scholars—that could not have been treated in 1935. It is suggested that the next edition include a more comprehensive section on dictionaries, perhaps of lesser importance in earlier times but increasingly the chief source of information about language for most people, reflected in a recent report that more people own a dictionary than a Bible.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Dictionary of English Place Names

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

This book, already reviewed in VERBATIM [XVIII, 4], is now available in the United States.

OBITER DICTA: Act of Worship…

Tim Hopkins, Luton, Bedfordshire

Now that everyone has had the chance to listen to the Beatles' I Saw Her Standing There, it is time to take a deeper look at the meaning of the lyrics. Sometimes a more critical and profound analysis can be unexpectedly rewarding.

Let us look at the first line:

Well, she was just seventeen

A girl has recently had a birthday; there may be—though we cannot be sure—a veiled reference to her now being old enough to drive a motorcar.

The second line:

You know what I mean

is pure emphasis. The writer is in some doubt as to whether the listener has paid sufficient attention to the first line. “Concentrate,” he appears to be saying, “every word counts.”

The third line:

And the way she looked was beyond compare implies that the girl’s appearance was unique. It is impossible to say what she is like, because she is like nothing else.

In line four,

How could I dance with another?

we are introduced to the dilemma caused by the girl’s singular looks. Other girls cannot be contemplated as partners: this is a poignant predicament.

But there is hope in lines five and six:

Oh, when I saw her standing there,

Well she looked at me

Is there a chance that the girl reciprocates the boy’s admiration? Is this “looking” the means by which the boy may be induced to request the girl’s company on the dance floor? Is she perhaps as enamored of him as he is of her? And if they do meet—and we sense they will—can their relationship endure? The answer is in verse two, which we shall be looking at tomorrow. Please stand for the hymn….

OBITER DICTA: Is it doable, do you think?

J.A. Davidson, Victoria, British Columbia

Not long ago in an article on word-processing I came across the word doable. I could not remember having seen it before—but, then, my memory for words frequently lets me down these days. I wondered how it is pronounced. And what does it mean?

So to the dictionaries. First, to my trusty Gage Canadian, which defines it as “that can be done” and gives the pronunciation as [doo-uhb’l]. The same definition and pronunciation are given in Webster’s New World and in the recent edition of the Concise Oxford. I then went to my 3rd edition of the Concise Oxford (1934): it does not give the word, which caused me to think that it probably is a recently fabricated one and that I should not worry about it. Surely, I thought, the OED Supplement will have something on it. Nothing. So to my magnifying-glass edition of the unsupplemented one. It had doable, with the same definition and pronunciation given in those other dictionaries, with this additional definition, practicable. It also gives a second definition: “Capable of being ‘done’ or victimized.” The earliest instance of its use given is “A law … which is doable”—from 1449.

All this sent me into intense research into the word do. Dr. Basil Cottle, a scholar at the University of Bristol, in his useful little book, The Plight of English, devotes nearly four pages to it, describing it at the beginning as “a deplorable little syllable.” The emphatic use of do has long been used in our language. Samuel Johnson deplored the superfluous, emphatic use of do, as in “I do love”: he considered it “vitious.” We all use the emphatic do, and that is not always undesirable: “I do believe … ”; “I do so want to see her”; “Do have a drink.” The Gage Canadian gives 15 distinct definitions for do, along with 10 common idiomatic phrases using it. The abridged edition of Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Historical Slang gives more than five columns to idioms beginning with do, from do a beer to do you see the green in my eye?

Then there is How do you do?—which actually is not a question but a genteel response between persons who have just been introduced to one another. Quite different from it is How are you doing?, although the grammatical difference seems slight. Do is a remarkably versatile verb. You can do your washing. Or the Rocky Mountains. Or your income tax. Or your thing.

And there is the simple interrogatory do: Do you see what I mean? Do you have the time? (That apparently is North American; the Brits, one of them told me, say Have you the time?)

“I lisped in numbers …”

A recent news item in The Times [November 1992] published in the international press presumably to call delighted attention to the obtuseness of the chief of police of Dearborn, Michigan, concerned an officer who was suspended for three days to “seek psychiatric help” in disabusing himself of his obsession for writing the figure 7 with a bar through it to distinguish it from the figure 1, a disambiguating practice long followed in Europe where it is the practice to write “1” to look like the left half of an upward-pointing arrow. The incident reminds me that for some time I have intended to comment on the way numerals are said in the UK and in the US, though I am not entirely sure whether the subject is properly linguistic, cultural, or categorizable into some other area of behavior. In any event, I cannot recall ever having seen any comment on it (but then I do not read books on the teaching of English as a second language).

In Britain, when a numeral is repeated in, say, a telephone, credit-card, house, or other number, the word double is used to describe it: thus, for instance, the VERBATIM telephone in Aylesbury, 395880, would be uttered as, “three, nine, five, double-eight, oh” (or “zero,” but “oh” is more common). If there are three identical numerals in a row, as in 267444, they would be read as, “two, six, seven, four, double-four”; four sevens in a row would be, “double-seven, double-seven.” Occasionally, I have heard a string like 666666 expressed as, “treble-six, treble-six,” but “double-six, double-six, double-six” is probably more frequent, and “six, double-six, six, double-six” can be heard. A recent radio advertisement contained the number 888777, read as “eight, double-eight, seven, double-seven.” The exception that I have noted is in the naming of “0800” (free) numbers, where the practice in Britain follows that in America: “oh, eight hundred.”

This style takes a little getting-used-to; I find that when I say, out of habit, “three, nine, five, double-eight, oh,” to Americans, they hesitate ever so slightly before fully understanding. Gone are the days when one picked up the old upright phone, was greeted by an operator, and told her—it was always “her”—the number one wanted; with that antediluvian routine went such memorable tunes as, “Hello, Central? Give me haven, for my mother’s there.” (One might also observe that, despite inflation, other American telephonic archaisms persist in the culture, like, “I put a nickel in the telephone to dial my baby’s number,” “It’s your nickel,” etc.

Readers outside North America may not be aware that American telephone dials (now pads) still retain alphabetical sequences from the days when local telephone numbers contained names, like PEnnsylvania Six, Five Thousand and BUtterfield 8 (usually so written): everyone knew that the first two letters of the name were to be dialed—PE 6-5000, BU 8-. In its infinite wisdom, the telephone companies long ago abandoned words for numbers, having perceived that there were some number combinations (like 95) could not be readily yielded by familiar names. The letters were, however, retained on the instruments, and North American telephones group them this way (wisely, there is no Q):)

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
0

ABC
DEF
GHI
JKL
MNO
PRS
TUV
WXY
Z

Also, in those days, the zero could not occur among the first three digits, and today, in North America, it cannot be the first digit (in contrast to Britain, where all dialling codes (US: area codes) begin with a zero, as, I believe, do all international codes, universally. In my memory, European telephones have never had letters, but I am sure that I will be quickly corrected by readers if I am wrong.

There must have been confusion—perhaps it persists—about the alphabetic O [oh] and the numerical 0 [zero], for the telephone companies often made a special point of emphasizing which was meant: I assume that they have statistics on the number of wrong numbers dialed when one was substituted for the other. But in these days of all-digit telephone numbers, the tendency, particularly among younger people, who seem to get confused about such things, is to make certain that the word zero is used, rather than “oh.” I admit that zero does remove any ambiguity in North America; but, without letters on telephones, how could it arise in Europe?

Ever resourceful, Americans quickly recognized that they could use part or all of their “telephone letters” as a mnemonic. For example, a dealer in stolen automobiles with the telephone number 468-2277 could tell customers to dial “HOT CARS”; a psychiatric clinic with the number 578-6887 could tell patients to phone “5, R U NUTS” (or U R NUTS); dial “PLUMBER” (758-6237) if you have a leak, “COLLEGE” (265-5343) to register for extention courses. “PASSION” (727-7466) to satisfy cravings, “KWIKFIT” (594-5348) (but not “ZIPPER,” because a number cannot start with a Z or zero) for emergency tailoring services, etc. Indeed, Omnigraphics, a company in Detroit, has published a fat book, Phonames, that lists all the possible four-letter combinations in numerical order and, for those who might persuade their local telephone company to change their number to coincide with a desired word or command, alphabetically as well. I understand that the US Coast Guard emergency number was to have been changed to 746-5464 (“SINKING”), but it was decided that it might be too late by the time the call went through. In an earlier issue of VERBATIM writers have commented on what have come to be called “bacronyms,” names of companies, products, charities, and other institutions that have been chosen solely because their acronyms yield words that are pronounceable, meaningful, or both. Here we have the numerical equivalent.

It will be noted, that the grouping of the numbers differs from country to country: the US retains xxx-xxxx, presumably as a hangover from the old days of telephone name-calling; in Britain, the (older) five-digit and the (newer) six-digit numbers are written solid: xxxxx(x); on the Continent, six-digit numbers are written in sets of two: xx-xx-xx. Newer seven-digit numbers in Britain are written xxx-xxxx, as in the US. Which of these patterns has a better mnemonic advantage it is hard to say. Does anyone use xxx-xxx?

The literal-minded among us have fastened on the inaccuracy of the retained word dial for what many now have on telephones. The noun presents no real problem, for the term (number) pad already exists to describe the calculatorlike array. But pad proves unsatisfactory as a verb. Press seems to have been pressed into service: but “I put a quarter [or ten-pence (or “ten pee”)] in the telephone to press my baby’s number” just does not seem to have the old ring.

---

“… [A]s Judges shelter their knavery by precedents, so do scholars their ignorance by authority: and when they cannot reason, it is safer and less disgraceful to repeat that nonsense at second hand, which they would be ashamed to give originally as their own.” John Horne Tooke, Epea Ptepoenta, or The Diversions of Purley, Part I, Second Edition, London, 1798, p. 120.

In response to a reader’s complaint that his restaurant reviews were becoming “increasingly pretentious,” with “descriptions of the … food … sublimated to [his] profound architectural knowledge and appreciation of interior design,” Jonathan Meades, the subject reviewer of The Sunday Times suited the word to the action:

I admit to an interest in architecture and interior design. But then so do many restaurateurs. I do not, however, allow the sublimity or bathos of a setting to blind me to the attributes of its kitchen. Points are awarded for cooking— although the cooking, bad or good, is often not so fascinating as the tectonic or social aspects of a particular place. Making an inventory of a menu is a task for guidebooks. Me, I write only about what I’ve tasted.

The “average reader,” who might require a dictionary, and the “normal customer,” with an antipathy to pig’s head and sweetbreads, strike me as being the putative gastro-brothers of Toniben’s “ordinary working man” or “the man on the Clapham omnibus.” These epithets grow ever more presumptuous, ever more patronising in the context of an ever more factional, furcated society. Whose palate and attitudes other than my own could I possibly use?

As some readers are aware, the teaching of English to schoolchildren in England has been undergoing great upheaval of late: the National Union of Teachers, the largest in the UK, recently voted overwhelmingly (nine out of ten) to boycott a compulsory English test for 14-year-olds by refusing to mark, administer, or “invigilate” [‘proctor’] them. John Patten, the Education Secretary, is, according to The Times [4 February 1993], “said to be anxious for standard English to be introduced without endangering regional variations.” Ian Small, headmaster of Bootham School in York, “a specialist on English in the leading independent schools,” is quoted as saying, “Thousands of English teachers have been working their socks off to encourage youngsters to write well and effectively, and if all that work was in vain, it will be a great pity,” a footling remark in the circumstances. The Times reports that the new curriculum will include a reading list of classic works, and “children will be expected to use capital letters and full stops [‘periods’] correctly by the age of seven, commas by 11, apostrophes and speech marks by 13, and colons and semi-colons by 16.”

OBITER DICTA: innocent vs. not guilty

“ … for the first time a prime minister had used the word ‘innocent’ rather than ‘not guilty’ when referring to the victims [killed in 1972 in Londonderry in the ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre]….”—The Times, 22 January 1993, p.5.

Perhaps one of our readers steeped in legal lore would care to comment on whether there is a legal distinction between these terms or whether the distinction resides solely in the minds of lay speakers.

OBITER DICTA: Man does not live by bread alone

In a letter to The Sunday Times [21 February 1993], a reader in Leicester called attention to “a bit of a cockup” in which an article on the delights of Sardinia recommended a certain dish. “He wrote about ‘pene frattau,' which means ‘penis with sheep’s cheese, tomato, and eggs.’ I hope he meant pane frattau.”

OBITER DICTA:Cliché of the Year? […so far, anyway]

[From the Letters section of The Times.]

“During the recent Commons debate on the second reading of the National Lottery Bill,… playing fields in general, and level playing fields in particular, were referred to no fewer than 100 times.

As chairman of the national association dedicated to the protection (and improvement) of playing fields, I am delighted they feature so prominently in the rhetoric of politicians, but concerned that our charity derives no direct benefit from the extensive use of what seems to have become the most popular cliché of our times.

Would MPs, and others, consider making a small donation to this association every time they use the term ‘level playing field’ as a figure of speech?

Yours faithfully,

Gyles Brandreth

(Chairman),

National Playing Fields Association,

25 Ovington Square, SW3

February 2 [1993].”

OBITER DICTA: Small Thing

Laurence Urdang

For many years I was under the impression that John Dryden had inveighed against the ending of a sentence with a preposition, and I have included mention of it now and then in my writing. The interdiction is meaningless for English grammar (or style), having been carried over from Latin, where a preposition must accompany the word it is connected with syntactically and semantically; like the caveat concerning split infinitives, which cannot be split in Latin because, as in most other Indo-European languages, they are single words, unsplittable nuclei, unlike the atom,

A few months ago, a colleague wrote saying that he had encountered my mention of it but had been unable to find any reference in Dryden’s writings. At the time I did not reply, because I did not have the time to search for it. Now that I have found it, I cannot remember who queried me about it, but I might as well present the information once and for all in these pages in case anyone else wishes to know. The source is “The Defence of the Epilogue, or, An Essay on the Dramatic Poetry of the Last Age,” published in 1672 with Almanzor and Almahide, or, The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards, which had been roundly criticized, especially for its language.

A synchysis, or ill-placing of words, of which Tully so much complains in oratory.

The waves and dens of beasts could not receive

The bodies that those souls were frightened from.

The preposition in the end of the sentence; a common fault with him, and which I have but lately observed in my own writings.

What all the several ills, that visit earth, Plague, famine, fire, could not reach unto, The sword, nor surfeits, let thy fury do.

Dramatic Poesy & Other Essays,

John Dryden, Everyman’s Library,

J.M. Dent, 1912, 1950, p. 100.

The quotations are from Catiline, by Ben Johnson, whom Dryden held in very high regard, “a most judicious writer.” Dryden, if not a purist, was certainly a traditionalist and a precisian in language:

To begin with Language. That an alteration is lately made in ours, or since the writers of the last age (in which I comprehend Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson), is manifest. Any man who reads those excellent poets and compares their language with what is now written, will see it in almost every line; but that this is an improvement of the language, or an alteration for the better, will not so easily be granted. For many are of a countrary opinion, that the English tongue was then in the height of its perfection; that from Jonson’s time to ours it has been in a continual declination, like that of the Romans from the age of Virgil to Statius, but Quintilian himself so much complains, under the person of Secundus, in his famous dialogue de Causis corruptae Eloquentiae.

But, to show that our language is improved, and that those people have not a just value for the age in which they live, let us consider in what the refinement of a language principally consists: that is, either in rejecting such old words, or phrases, which are ill sounding, or improper; or in admitting new, which are more proper, more sounding, and more significant.

The reader will easily take notice, that when I speak of rejecting improper words and phrases, I mention not such as are antiquated by custom only, and, as I may say, without any fault of theirs. For in this case the refinement can be but accidental; that is, when the words and phrases which are rejected happen to be improper. Neither would I be understood, when I speak of impropriety of language, either wholly to accuse the last age, or to excuse the present, and least of all myself. Ibid., p. 97. [Italics not mine.]

It is interesting to observe that Dryden, born only fifteen years after the death of Shakespeare, should a mere forty years later regard him as being of another age: clearly, three centuries ago people had quite a perception of time different from our own, largely, I believe, brought about by our more thorough documentation of the past hundred years in books, newspapers and other periodicals, photographs, films, and, more recently, videos.

He comments on the errors in the writings of the great masters that are cited today either in a derisory tone or as an excuse for our own shortcomings:

[A]ll writers have their imperfections and failings: but I may safely conclude in the general, that our improprieties are less frequent and less gross than theirs…. [M]alice and partiality set apart, let any man who understands English, read diligently the works of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and I dare undertake that he will find in every page either some solecism of speech, or some notorious flaw in sense; and yet these men are reverenced, when we are not forgiven.

Ibid., p. 98.

Lest the reader think of Dryden as a stuffy purist, here he is on neologisms:

As for the other part of refining, which consists in receiving new words and pharases, I shall not insist much on it. It is obvious that we have admitted many, some of which we wanted, and therefore our language is the richer for them, as it would be by importation of bullion: other are rather ornamental than necessary; yet by their admission, the language is become more courtly, and our thoughts are better dressed. These are to be found scattered in the writers of our age, and it is not my business to collect them. They, who have lately written with most care, have, I believe, taken the rule of Horace for their guide; that is, not to be too hasty in receiving of words, but rather to stay till custom has made them familiar to us:

Multa renascentur quae nunc cecidere, cadentque;

Quae nunc sunt honore in vocabula, si volet usus,

Quam penes, arbitrium est, et jus, et norma loquendi.

Ars Poetica, 70-2.

[Many words which have now fallen out of use will be reborn, and many now prominent will disappear, if usage, which owns the right to decide, and the law, and the canons of speech, so choose.]

For I cannot approve of their way of refining, who corrupt our English idiom by mixing it too much with French: that is a sophistication of language, not an improvement of it; a turning English into French, rather than a refining of English by French.

Ibid. p. 101f.

(The 17th-century sense of sophistication was closer to ‘smacking of sophistry.')

OBITER DICTA: Description/Proscription/Style

Laurence Urdang

As we have observed in these pages on numerous occasions, the professional linguist’s avowed position with regard to usage is similar to that of a medical doctor’s in relation to a patient: both are charged with the responsibility of observing the phenomena they encounter without expressing qualitative opinions about them. That is, the doctor is not supposed to express his loathing or disgust at the manifestations of some horrible affliction, nor is it deemed proper for him to assume an accusatory posture reflected in expressions like, “What a fool you are for having exposed yourself to the Malay waste-away !”

The analogy is not entirely apt, however, for the patient cannot always be held responsible for catching the disease and might not be able to do anything about its cure, while the person who misspells a word, utters grammatical solecisms, or uses infer for imply has resourse to remedial measures. In many cases, it must be acknowledged, the speaker or writer has not been exposed to the opportunities that would enable him to distinguish between what is regarded as standard usage versus nonstandard, hence, it might be said that he is not responsible for using nonstandard English. But, surely, someone must accept the blame, and that someone ought to be the person who employed what we have learned from innumerable cop shows on television to call the perp.

The cable television service in the Old Lyme, Connecticut, area is (apparently) forbidden to transmit certain programs because the transmission rights have been preempted by another station. In such circumstances, a message appears on the screen that explains, in quasi-legalistic terms, why the viewer is looking at the message instead of the program. Among the words used is pursuant, which is spelled “persuant.” This message has been appearing on the screen with that misspelling for the past two years (or more), and the cable company maintains that the card bearing the message is provided to them with the proviso that it be transmitted as is. Because the notice appears almost every evening on at least one channel and remains on the screen for at least thrity minutes on end, its exposure is far greater than that of a fleeting utterance by a newscaster or a similar written message that appears only fleetingly. One cannot help thinking that an entire generation of viewers—assuming they are able to read at all—is growing up learning how to misspell pursuant. Pursuant is a legal term, of course, not one that drops readily from the lips of the housewife or casual observer of the rock ‘n’ roll scene on MTV. Thus, with some justification, one might well ask, “Who cares?” And there are always those who will accuse me of being a purist, which I do not think I am. On the other hand, I try not to be a linguistic slob, either.

If one asks a professional linguist why he doesn’t say things like “He don’t” or spell pursuant “persuant,” the reply is likely to be, “ ‘He don’t’ is not part of my speech pattern,” and “I simply do not spell pursuant that way.” One may accept that sort of statement at face value; in my view, it would have been more accurate (and honest) to say, “I wouldn’t be caught dead saying ‘He don’t,’ ” etc.

Last evening (26 November) I was watching Biography on the Arts & Entertainment network. In the course of the program, which was about the British royal family, there appeared on the screen a number of titles identifying the person or place pictured. In one such title, Prince Andrew’s father-in-law was identified as “Furguson”; in another, the site of Prince Charles’s wedding was identified as “St. Pauls [sic] Carhederal [sic].” Aside from the fact that the program was rather poorly done, how are we to react to this sort of thing? Should we throw up our hands, saying, “Anyone can make a mistake” or “What difference does it make?” or “You are the one to talk: look at all the mistakes in VERBATIM”? As for the last, I would protest that the A&E network has resources far beyond those available for the proofreading of VERBATIM. The first is merely a vapid truism. But what about the second?

I am moved to offer some armchair psychological analysis. For many people, their ability to relate to reality is inexorably tied to their control of language, the greatest common denominator of our understanding of the real world. (Berkeleian philosophers need not waste their time writing me on this subject.) For such people, we might say that their very grip on reality depends on their control of language: it is their “security blanket,” the corners of which they chew with everlasting self-satisfaction and in which they wind themselves for protection against the hostile forces that would shake the foundations of their traditionalism. If their language is threatened, they are threatened. Put another way, the acceptance of nonstandard language to replace the comfortable protection offered by linguistic purism amounts to moving the goalposts in a game that they have been playing for their entire lives according to a different set of rules.

As readers of these occasional notes on English are well aware, British standard usage now condones the use of the indicative where the subjunctive formerly reigned and, to mention just one other obvious phenomenon, the use of the plural pronouns of reference for what have traditionally been regarded as singular referents (as in Everyone should bring their book to class tomorrow). The two changes are different, of course: the former marks a final succumbing to the relentless forces of the indicative: the weakening of the subjunctive might be regarded as a rejection of the tolerance of uncertainty on the part of the speaker, perhaps a product of the late-20th-century obsession with the facts, resulting in insecurity when faced with doubt, with low probability, or with contrary-to-fact situations. The issue of pronoun agreement might be laid at the door of the feminists’ misguided interference with the forces of language, resulting in a nervous rejection of the masculine pronoun as the neutral one; but, in truth, the sustenance of the singular nature of words like each, everybody, everyone, etc. is probably pedantry, for sense and logic are not sacrificed by changing them to plurals, with the added benefit of avoiding the dreaded he/his/him, regarded by feminists as the bearer of the stigma of male machismo. In many cases, the paraphrase, All students should bring their books to class tomorrow, and similar pluralizations will conveniently turn the trick without distorting the meaning.

One is led to considering the establishment of a hierarchy of the heinousness. For instance, I have a very low tolerance for spelling errors and grammatical solecisms in letters of application from those soliciting work: job applicants who are too careless to correct the capitalization of “california” and the spelling “Britian” get short shrift, though I am more tolerant of those using presently for now. A great deal can be determined from a personal interview—somewhat more complicated with an applicant a thousand miles away—but dialect differences must be accounted for, too. For instance, the British use the word machismo (but pronounce it, almost invariably, as if it were a loanword from Italian, with a -k-where the Spanish has a -tch-). Yet macho is uttered with a -tch-, possibly to distinguish it from one of the pronunciations of the word for a variety of shark. The OED2e is not tuned in to this pronunciation of machismo, showing only the -tch- pronunciation; the Longman and the newer Oxford Concise show both, but with -tch- first; only the Collins, of those British dictionaries I checked, shows the -k- pronunciation as prevalent. One professional British lexicographer told me, categorically, that no one uses the -tch- pronunciation in Britain, where it would be regarded as wrong or pedantic. If he is right, then those who show it at all are merely genuflecting in the direction of the purists.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Proceeds from sales of carved ducks go to handicap children.” [A sign in a Greek pizeria in Peabody, Massachusetts. Submitted by Nell Wright, Lynnfield, Massachusetts.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Hot Cod Pieces are Perfect for Little Soldiers.” [Headline in The Australian, March 27, 1985. Submited by Dr. H.H. Macey, Floreat Park, Western Australia.]

EPISTOLA {Dorothy Branson}

Responding to Douglas S. Dodge’s article on binomial nomenclature, “Why All Living Things Have Latin Names” [XIX, 3,44], it would be appropriate to point out that bacteria also have genus and species names, adjudicated by a separate International Code of Bacterial Nomenclature. Some years ago a Congressman introduced a bill to change the genus name of the bacterium Salmonella, which includes the species causing typhoid fever and other diseasecausing species. He thought it gave offense to the salmon industry, and he proposed to right this dreadful wrong.

Microbiologists laughed and laughed: in the first place, nobody but the official committee on nomenclature is authorized to change a bacterial name; second, Salmonella is recognized internationally, not just in the U.S.; and third, the bacterium was named not after the fish but after an American bacteriologist, Daniel E. Salmon (1850-1914).

[Dorothy Branson, Kansas City, Missouri]

EPISTOLA {R. Campbell James}

Ornithorhynchus (not, as printed, “Ornithorhyncus”) anatinas is a hybrid of two binomials: the first is the accepted Ornithorhynchus paradoxus, the second, the earlier (by one year) Platypus anatinas, which was discarded because it had already been used for a genus of Coleoptera (beetles). Perhaps the final word on this should be Oliver Herford’s poem (from This Giddy Globe, George H. Doran, 1919):

My child, the duck-billed platypus

A sad example sets for us.

From him we learn how indecision

Of character provokes derision.

This vacillating beast, you see,

Could not decide which he would be—

Fish, flesh, or fowl—and chose all three.

The scientists were sorely vexed,

To classify him so perplexed

Their brains that they with rags at bay

Called him a horrid name one day,

A name that baffles, frights, and shocks us,

Ornithorhynchus paradoxus.

[R. Campbell James, Newport Reading Room, Newport, Rhode Island]

EPISTOLA {David Gomberg}

Further to the letter of Douglas S. Dodge [XIX, 2,18] regarding tripes á la mode de Caen, please note that the Caen referred to is not the French place name but the name of the San Franciscan writer and journalist, Herb Caen. The dish in question in his invention, first prepared at Trader Vic’s restaurant.>

[David Gomberg, San Francisco]

EPISTOLA {Cosima V. Lyttle}

John Kahn’s article, “Lexicographic Quirks and Whimsy” [XIX,2,10], which touched on the definitions of animals in early dictionaries, reminded me of one of my favorites, from Edward Phillips’s New World of Words (1720):

APOSTA, a creature in the island of Tobago, in America, so much in love with men, that it often follows them and delights to gaze on them.

Nathan Bailey modified it to:

APOSTA, a creature in America, so great a lover of men, that it follows them and delights to gaze on them.

[Cosima V. Lyttle, Decatur, Georgia]

EPISTOLA {Donald E. Schmiedel}

John Kahn’s article sent me back to my old English-Russian Illustrated Dictionary (A.G. Yelisseyeva, Ed., 2nd ed., Soviet Encyclopedia, 1964), in which each word is illustrated by examples in both languages. My favorite is:

REST-HOME, I spent my vacation at a rest-home.

[Donald E. Schmiedel, Las Vegas]

EPISTOLA {Berthold W. Levy}

Your breezy note on street names [OBITER DICTA, “Name Withheld,” XIX,2,20], suggested certain categories that might lend more pizzazz to the scene. As the result of observation over a period of many years of driving through or past suburban residential developments within a half hour of my home, I have induced principles of street taxonomy, by sheer inference, that demonstrate that streets in such places are designated by:

(1) Surnames of friends or business associates of the developer which, for some reason tend to be less than euphonious—at least in my universe: Unruh, Hoffnagle, Gilham, Solly, Alburger, Napfle, Knorr, Borbeck.

(2) Given names of family members of the developer or his friends, primarily to celebrate wives and children: Christopher Drive, Lee Lynn Lane, Arthur, Marvin, Jane, and Elizabeth Road, Delia and Alexis Lane, Andrew [and] Shelly [Street].

(3) Names of trees, presumably to memorialize those that the developer has just caused to be chopped down: Maple, Birch, Walnut, Sycamore, Ash, Beech, Spruce and Locust Street/Roads/Avenue/Lane.

Of course these principles do not account for all the streets in a particular development and do not necessarily apply in all developments, but I cannot be responsible for a developer’s ignorance of my findings or for his aberrant conduct in disregarding them.

[Berthold W. Levy, Melrose Park, Pennsylvania]

EPISTOLA {Allan Beattie}

The comment about street names reminded me of a punning name in Ohio for which credit must probably go to the Ford Motor Company. Several years ago they built a transmission plant near Cincinnati and had to make a new access road, for which some genius chose the name, Front Wheel Drive.

[Allan Beattie, Luxembourg]

EPISTOLA {Sydney Abbey}

I was intrigued by Leslie Brunetta’s description of Italian surnames, “Frailty, Thy Name is Bevilacqua” [XIX,2,1], in particular of Bevilacqua and Bévivino. It recalled a meeting, some years ago, of the Journal and Publicity Committee of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada.

It was revealed that the editor, Bill Drinkwater, had been hired by Dr. Boivin, of the Board of Directors. At that point, someone remarked that “The fact that Dr. Boivin hired Mr. Drinkwater surely must tell us something about the two predominant linguistic groups in this country.”

Boileau is also a common French name. Yet, despite the existence of English names like Winthrop, Windsor, Winston, Winchester, etc. appears to reveal vestigers of a one-time thriving English wine industry, one has yet to come across a Mr. Drinkwine, surely a deficiency in English as a world language.

The comments on street names [XIX,2,20] recalls that I live on Nepean Street, but the mailing label of my New Yorker subscription persists in showing it as NE PEAN (suggesting “Northeast Pean”?), despite attempts to have it corrected. On the other hand, that error comes in handy when I receive junk mail, for I now know who is selling my name to the distributors of such mail.

[Sydney Abbey, Ottawa]

EPISTOLA {Frederic G. Cassidy}

A correction to the statement in Leslie Brunetta’s article, “Italian Amerigo is simply Henry in English.”

Amerigo is from Old German Amalricus (Latinized form), from amal ‘work’ + ricja ‘rule’; it was introduced into England at the time of the Norman Conquest. In the Domesday Book (1086) it is Amalricus, and such forms as Amauri, Amery, Emery developed later.

Henry is from Old German Haimirich, Latinized as Henricus, from haimi ‘home’ + ricja ‘rule.’ On phonological grounds alone the first elements indicate different roots.

The foregoing is chiefly from the Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, E.G. Withycombe, Oxford University Press, 1947.

[Frederic G. Cassidy, Chief Editor, Dictionary of American Regional English]

EPISTOLA {Felix R. Rosenthal}

I missed two classic spoonerisms in XVIII, 4: the one that spells the difference between a game cock and a shysters lawyer (a game cock clucks defiance), and the difference between a lady in the bath and a lady in the church (the latter has a hope in her soul). I am writing to add to Mr. Douglas S. Dodge’s contrepèteries, as he requested [EPISTOLAE,XIX, 217]: after smoking France’s favorite cigarette for the first time: “Qu’est-ce que c’est une Blauloise Gueue? Ça sert de mèche.”

If Mr. Dodge managed to twist the subject from spoonerism to contrepèteries, allow me to expand the game to a third language and bring on “Schüttelreime,” the delightful German equivalent. Schüttelreime range from a simple Du bist / Buddhist to such awesome four-liners as the following one that deals with the ultimately end of two small, overly noisy bulldogs:

Weil die beiden Moppel dort

Gar so grässlich zwiegesungen,

Hat zu einem Doppelmord

Der Besitzer sie gezwungen.

… or the one that takes place in the town of Gossensass after a heavy rain:

Ein Auto fuhr durch Gossensass,

Und zwar durch eine Sossengass’

Sodass die ganze Gassensoss'

Sich auf die Insassen goss.

… and finally the righteously indigiant one about an ill-mannered youngster at the Spanish court:

Unerhörte Finten, das!

Schüttet er ein Tintenfass

Über alter Tanten Füss!

Schikt such für Infanten dies?

I trust that Mr. Ford, who started it all by Spiking Lunars [XVIII, 4, 6] is not going to take umbrage at the turn of this multilingual coda.

[Felix R. Rosenthal, Sausalito, California]

EPISTOLA {Harold Newman}

Do you have a Department for or an Anthology of Bilingual Puns? Here is one of my own spontaneous creations, uttered while dining at a French restaurant: the menu item oeuf russe was described by the waiter as a ‘hard-boiled egg having its yolk chopped, seasoned and restored into the cooked white.’ I ordered it and it was served as a half white, duly stuffed, prompting me to exclaim, “A half an egg is not an oeuf.”

[Harold Newman, New Orleans]

[In my (vast) culinary experience, the term is oeuf à la Russe, and it consists merely of a hard-boiled egg, cut in half lengthwise, served with a mustardy mayonnaise sauce and, if one is lucky, a caper or two. The stuffed egg dish is described, within the cordon culinaire that I frequent, as deviled egg and is usually associated with canapés served bugget style at picnics, and similar al fresco affairs.—Editor]

EPISTOLA {Jacob de Jager}

In Mr. William Brashear’s “Hocus Pocus” [XIX, 1, 1], the “nonsensical magical words” from Goethe’s Reineke Fuchs, “nekrast negibaul geid sum manteflih dnudna mein tedachs” make sense when the words are read backwards (with some anagrammatical liberties):

Schadet niemand und hilfet, Man mus(s) die Gläubigen stärken, which freely translates into ‘Harm nobody and help, one must strengthen the believers.’

[Jacob de Jager, Salt Lake City]

EPISTOLA {Helen King}

I enjoyed David Galef’s “What a Cliché!” [XIX, 3, 1] and offer for the archives Jacqueline Adams’s They’re both tarnished with the same brush, uttered on a recent CBS Nightly News (February 1993).

[Helen King, Dallas]

EPISTOLA {Gary Muldoon}

Additions to the list of “What a Cliché!” separate the wheat from the shaft and green behind the ears.

[Gary Muldoon, Rochester, New York]

EPISTOLA {George Kell Reid}

“What a Cliché!” recalls the mixed metaphors quoted in The News [Boca Raton, June 8, 1992], attributed to a University of Florida professor of political science, Walter Rosenbaum:

Because Florida is on the leading edge of the graying of America, this study raises new concerns about a growing gulf between young and old and the possibility of a national “backlash” against the aging.

Karen Marcus, Chairwoman of the Palm Beach County Board of County Commissioners, issued a directive at a meeting in June 1992 (evidently a good vintage year for mixed metaphors) in which she said,

…so that you don’t need to spin your wheels until you have something to sink your teeth into.

At the same meeting, the lone male commissioner noted that something “would open up a whole ball of wax.”

*[George Kell Reid, Boca Raton] *

EPISTOLA {Harry Cohen}

Alex Berlyne, in “Front Back-axle” [XIX, 3, 29], finds it beyond understanding how the Hebrew word pony (which he believes to be borrowed from ponytail) has come to stand for ‘fringe’ or ‘bangs’ in the sense of ‘hair combed forward over the forehead.’ However, in German, French, and Dutch, pony (or pony hair) has always signified that hairstyle, even long before the ponytail came into fashion. Pony is not a shortening of ponytail but an immigrant in its own right, and undoubtedly the older of the two.

[Harry Cohen, Brussels]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Bubble gum essentially con- taining peanuts, perhaps (7)

5. Fool accepts penny increases (7)

9. It’s eaten by light brown giant (5)

10. Stupid to hug mother, in a manner of speaking (9)

11. British writer confiscating policeman’s computer printer (4, 4)

12. Minister in start of play with bad lighting? (6)

14. Startle crazy running back (4)

15. You can beat them without getting hit back (5, 5)

18. Again listens to Pacino’s practices (10)

19. Reflecting, discusses' flight (4)

22. Clear flimsy identification (6)

24. Again look intently at a road- side stop (4, 4)

26. Conductor to study in Isra- el’s capital (9)

27. Brother to live in brick house (5)

28. See cinders flying (7)

29. Full houses, we worried (7)

Down

1. Breaking chalet’s locks (7)

2. Became hot before difficult experience (2,7)

3. Champ goes around one German city (6)

4. Hastily reads about ever- green trees' meager quality (10)

5. Eager to help to get victory (4)

6. Monet going around, er, with honor (3,5)

7. Mentions attack is mis- directed (5)

8. Dispatches involving com- pany subordinates (7)

13. Stops holding painting tool for jokes (10)

16. Support me in motion at the very top (9)

17. Suffer a fixation, holding back payment for riding (4, 4)

18. Time taken by casino worker raised in the same family (7)

20. Separate checks are back (4,3)

21. A kid relaxed (2,4)

23. Litter surrounding top-rate plateaus (5)

25. Scandinavian in full hotel (4)

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Sarasate had the fastest fingers ever to set foot on stage.” [From “St. Paul Sunday morning,” MPBN, May 12, 1985. Submitted by Charles Bolté, Dresden, Maine.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

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

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Born in Minden, Neb., in 1886, she was one of five children of a Congregational minister, who also ran a grain elevator, and his wife.” [From the Northglen-Thornton Sentinel, 3 July 1986. Submitted by Hugo G. Rodeck, Northglenn, Colorado.]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. MAN-A(GEM-E)NT.

6. P(L)OT.

10. S(CH)WA.

11. TEA L-EAVES.

12. H-AUTEUR.

13. IN CAS-E.

15. U-PENDING.

17. DEVO(U)R (roved rev.).

19. HEAR-TS.

21. MALAR-KEY. (alarm anag.)

24. SONATA (hidden).

25. DI-PINTO (i’d rev.).

28. A-DAP-TABLE (pad rev.).

29. A(D)MEN.

30. N-YET.

31. P(RIO)RESSES.

Down

1. MIS(THOUGH)T.

2. N(EH)RU (rev.).

3. GO(A-HE)AD.

4. MA(TURIN)G.

5. NIACIN (hidden).

7. LI(VEST-O)CK.

8. TES-T (set rev.).

9. RESCUE (anag.).

14. GREYHOUNDS (anag.).

16. ELAB-ORATE (bale rev.).

18. SAN D-I.E.-GO.

20. TRA(I)TS (rev.).

22. AP(PEAS)E.

23. H-ARBOR.

26. NAMES (hidden).

27. PA-IN.

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