VOL XX, No 2 [Autumn 1991]

Some Fundamentals of Fundamentalism

J.A. Davidson, Victoria, British Columbia

Here is the definition for fundamentalism given in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary:

a militantly conservative movement in American Protestantism originating around the beginning of the 20th century in opposition to modernist tendencies and emphasizing as fundamental to Christianity the literal interpretation and absolute inerrancy of the Scriptures, the imminent and physical second coming of Jesus Christ, the virgin birth, physical resurrection, and substitutionary atonement… a movement or attitude similar in a significant respect (as literalism or strict adherence to traditional beliefs) to the American religious fundamentalism (Muslim; in education stresses the three R’s).

The Oxford English Dictionary gives this:

A religious movement which orig, became active among various Protestant bodies in the United States after the war of 1914-1918, based on strict adherence to certain tenets (e.g. the literal inerrancy of Scripture) held to be fundamental to the Christian faith; the beliefs of this movement.

(As a matter of fact, the movement began around the turn of the century.)

Collins Dictionary of the English Language (Second Edition, 1986) offers this precise definition:

1. Christianity (esp. among certain Protestant sects) the belief that every word of the Bible is divinely inspired and therefore true. 2. Islam. a movement favouring strict observance of the teachings of the Koran and Islamic law. 3. strict adherence to the fundamental principles of any set of beliefs.

I have more difficulty writing on fundamentalism for a language journal than I had in writing on it for religious periodicals whose readers, whatever their theological slant, would know what the contentions and contumacies are about. I am a retired minister in the United Church of Canada, Canada’s largest Protestant denomination. Like most of the so-called main-line churches in the English-speaking world, its ministry is preponderantly not fundamentalist—literalistic, that is—in its approach to the Bible. I am not a fundamentalist and I have never been one.

Fundamentalists, generally, hold that those who first put the various books of the Bible into manuscript form did so directly from dictation by God’s Spirit in an almost stenographic way that is taken as guaranteeing “the propositional errorlessness” of the original manuscripts, as someone has put it. This leads to the assumption that subsequent translations and versions have a high degree of inerrancy. (This theory would seem to require that all translators and copyists and editors and compositors be as infallible as the original writers.) The principle of inerrancy necessarily entails using language in ways rather different from those used in ordinary discourse—even in narrow religious discourse of those who are not inerrantists.

The other approach to biblical interpretation is that of historical and literary criticism. Biblical criticism is simply a matter of rigorous examination and positive appreciation as it applies historical and literary methods to the Bible. This position has predominance in most of the main-line Protestant churches and in the Roman Catholic Church.

The critical approach is not something fabricated during the past century or so. In the fourth century, St. Chrysostom, an influential theologian, said that it was impossible to maintain the literal infallibility of the Gospel records. Martin Luther was not a literalist, and he said that the books of Esther and James should not be in the Bible. T.A. Kantonen, an influential theologian in American Lutheranism, declared bluntly that “Luther will not fit into a fundamentalist straitjacket.” That can be said also of John Calvin. In 1889 the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland—not a notoriously liberal body—voted to allow a view which did not claim verbal inerrancy for the Bible.

A key question here is this: Do all parts of the Bible purport to be factual history? Some editions of the King James Version of the Bible give dates, generally on the top margins of most pages. This kind of dating is in no way reflected in the early biblical manuscripts and versions. Apparently—in English use, anyway—it goes back only as far as 1650, 39 years after the King James Version was issued, when James Ussher, an Irish archbishop, somehow calculated that the creation took place in 4004 B.C. You can, of course, question the accuracy of Ussher’s dating without necessarily rejecting the general historicity of the Genesis stories. But that in no way resolves the issue between what appears to be the biblical teaching on creation and modern scientific theorizing on the origin of the universe.

The creation stories in the first three chapters of Genesis are the ground of the challenge of the Creationists (as fundamentalists sometimes call themselves) to those who accept scientific views of the creation of the world. These stories come from the time when the Hebrews were beginning to speculate on the meaning and purpose of their lives. They go right to the center of concern about the nature of human existence and fundamental anxieties about life’s deepest realities. They do not purport to be either science or history: that was not the intention of their writers and editors. These stories are expressions, in imaginative and poetic language, of truths that cannot be adequately expressed in simple descriptive prose. They are “myths”—as the word is used in a special way by scholars. Arnold Toynbee said that “Mythology is an intuitive way of apprehending and expressing universal truths”: that points to the nature of the creation stories in Genesis.

These stories neither prove nor disprove any scientific theory, and they are neither proven nor disproven by any scientific theory. An English theologian, Alan Richardson, put the concern in this way: “Treat the story of the Creation as a literal description of what happened ‘in the beginning’ and you are landed in every form of absurdity; regard it, on the other hand, as an attempt to express in temporal pictures a truth about something beyond time, and it is at once filled with religious meaning.”

We who are in the liberal-critical camp believe that the Bible can be taken with utter seriousness without its having to be taken literalistically. It is not possible to use literalist canons of study without, here and there, striking disparities and puzzles which can be taken care of only by abandoning strict literalism for some other manner of interpretation. Here are a few instances of this.

“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.” (Genesis 9:6. In this article I am using the Revised Standard Version of the Bible.) That text has been presented as a biblical mandate for capital punishment. Some people slap it down as if it were the ace of trumps, settling the issue once and for all for anyone who takes the Bible seriously. Another text occasionally used in this way is, “Whoever strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death.” (Exodus 21:12)

But the issue is not to be left at that. For instance, just five verses on from the Exodus one quoted above, we find this: “Whoever curses his father or mother, shall be put to death.” Would anyone care to say that this passage points to how, because the Bible tells us so, we should deal with rebellious youth? In Leviticus we find this instruction: “Let all the congregation stone him.” (24:14) Burning was also used as a method in capital punishment: it was the mandatory punishment for a priest’s daughter found guilty of prostitution.

And who will argue in favor of polygamy and genocide because Solomon had a thousand wives and Samuel destroyed the Amalekites and hewed Agag to pieces?

Then there is the troublesome issue of homosexuality. In Leviticus, at 18:22, we find this: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” But, then, still on Leviticus, just a few pages over, at 20:13, there is this augmentation: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them.” St. Paul briefly condemned homosexuality in three of his letters, but he used considerably more space to deal with the utter dreadfulness of women not having their heads covered in church.

How do fundamentalists pick and choose among these and other items of ancient Israelite law and New Testament teaching? On what basis can they determine which ones should be binding on them and which ones can they ignore? Who decides? And by what principles? It does seem peculiar to take some of these biblical rulings with utter literalness, on a highly selective basis.

Fundamentalism, whatever else it may be and represent, seems to present a peculiar way of using language that can be confusing, even disquieting for those who know little or nothing of its fundamentals.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

The witness “had a substantial degree of education and training in prostitution and may even be possessed of some skill.” Such testimony “would be very helpful to jurors who are not usually engaged in such matters.” [Memorandum opinion by Judge Knox on the qualifications of a lay witness in UNITED STATES V. WALKER, 495 F. SUPP. 232 (1980). Submitted by V.P. Collins, M.D., Houston.]

Literally,…

Richard W. Bailey, The University of Michigan

Literally is a word that has developed a sense that takes the denotation and reverses it. “He is literally higher than a kite,” we say, without causing any but the most literal minded to look skyward. Literally in such sentences means not ‘literally’ but ‘metaphorically.’

Our century will be remembered as the one that invented relativity without really believing it. “Throw me the baseball” does not cause us to take too seriously the idea that the baseball changes its mass as it accelerates; we can live in the old-fashioned world of constants and certainty even though we ought to know better. In the same way we get along all right thinking that meaning is referential. “Throw me the baseball” gets us ready to catch it, even though no reader of this page thinks I am going to chuck the ball right now. Language, we are pretty sure, is all metaphor with occasional baseballs shooting through it.

But of course language is not all metaphor, even though Saussure (or rather his posthumous editors) declared it to be a free-standing system in which everything hangs together—with meaning clustered culturally around the perimeter. Our conviction that language means something is on exactly the same relativistic foundation as is our physics.

Academic linguistics, like academic science, undermines the cultural beliefs we bring to normal experience—normal here meaning the folklore we acquire from our folks. Both are creatures of modern skepticism—skepticism here meaning the suspicion (or maybe conviction) that things are not what they seem. Academic linguists do not readily assent to the idea that the sentence God is love is very different from the sentence God is dead. Both sentences, they say, predicate an attribute of a set of semantic features; few of them penetrate to the question of how one sentence or the other (or neither one) might be “true.”

When biology and geology in the Victorian era began to undercut the Biblical authority for creation and evolution, the pious found consolation in language. Richard Chenevix Trench was Dean of West-minister and later Archbishop of the (Anglican) Church of Ireland. Within etymology he discerned the divine spark. In 1851, he declared that “words often contain a witness for great moral truths—God having impressed such a seal of truth upon language, that men are continually uttering deeper things than they know.” By looking closely at the evolution of words, people could penetrate into the remote past and (almost) see the divinely-inspired act of naming. (Of course God did not create language in the Genesis account; Adam did, and God approved.) Trench’s great idea for a new dictionary of English—which James Murray composed and we know as The Oxford English Dictionary—was a way of keeping one’s eye on ontology and glancing at teleology at the same time. Quite a feat for the inspection of mere words.

Trench’s conviction that language might provide a glimpse of the divine was eroded and eventually washed away from respectable ideas about language, and our century decided that all languages are equally good, all equally ancient, all equally deserving of study and respect. Such tolerance did not sit comfortably with the idea that humankind is the ultimate end of creation and we ourselves at the pinnacle of civilization. Even linguists who studied “exotic” languages were not, like escapees from Plato’s cave, inspired to change their tongues.

Now comes the flowering of late twentieth-century fundamentalism. Fundamentalism—whether Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or Buddhist—finds its authority in texts, and how one reads their language is “a litmus test separating true believers from outsiders, who betray their true colors by their refusal to accept literally.” (These are the words of Martin E. Marty who directs the great fundamentalism project at the University of Chicago for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.) Fundamentalists make a “litmus test” of text, and the meaning of literally often occasions dispute, sometimes violent dispute.

Only the rockiest of rock-ribbed fundamentalists takes literally all the injunctions of the Hebrew Bible. Leviticus (20:9) offers a test: “When anyone reviles his father and his mother, he must be put to death.” Only fanatics, surely, would take this as a litmus text, yet the Rev. Marvin Gay, Sr., may have had it in mind when he gunned down his son, the singer Marvin Gaye. The secular law could not encompass and uphold this particular rule from sacred law. Mr. Gay was convicted and punished. If this text cannot be taken literally, which ones can?

Less specificity gives more elbowroom for literalism. Take, for instance, Daniel’s prophesy (11:49): “At the time of the end, the king of the south will make a feint at the king of the north, but the king of the north will come storming against him with chariots and cavalry and a fleet of ships.” Until very recently, American fundamentalists have offered this prediction as an explanation of the Cold War, but now old literalism is looking for new interpretation in geopolitics.

Fundamentalists are more inclined to take figurative texts figuratively, partly because there are even fewer rules for reading them. From the Reformation forward, Christians have taken the sensuous “Song of Songs” as an elaborate metaphor for their church, including the belief that the bride’s gorgeous body is not that of a literal woman but merely a metaphor for something else.

“In the beginning,” opens the New Testament book of John, “was the Word.” Words are still there, inviting, but not compelling, belief. Belief is as irresistible as physics, and, like physics, grounded in imagination. Belief comes not in the text but through it, just beginning, as the French say, “literally”: au pied de la lettre.

The Pause That Refreshes

David Galef, University of Mississippi

When I mentioned to a colleague that I wanted to write an essay on pausers, she asked me what they were. I found that they were not so easy to define. “Well,” I began, “they’re what you might call, um, conversational breathing spaces. You know, little words or phrases to give you time to think.”

She looked narrowly at me. “You mean like well and um?”

“Um, yes, exactly,” I said, embarrassed. This demonstrates the first lesson of pausers: they are often glaringly apparent in another’s speech but undetectable to us in our own. To listen for one’s own pausers is like shining a light into an unlit room to see what the darkness looks like. It is illuminating, but the subject under examination disappears. This suggests another point about pausers: they are fragile, spur-of-the-moment insertions, an indubitable part of speech patterns but not of planned-out speech.

Any list of pausers is bound to be idiosyncratic, based on the chance nature of overhearing and recall. Still, most people recognize a few of the more common ones: well, uh, and the variants um, oh, ah, and er. All are marked in the dictionary—if there at all—by the slightly damning label “interj.,” devoid of the status accorded to nouns, adjectives, and verbs. As syllables whose meaning resides entirely in their immediate contextual usage, their very definition is somewhat evasive, often placed in parentheses: “(used to express doubt, hesitation, deliberation, or interest)”; in essence, an uncertainly defined word often used to express uncertainty.

Doubt, hesitation, deliberation, and interest cover quite a wide ground, however, and it is not surprising to find that almost everyone uses these humble words at one time or another. “Uh, I really hadn’t thought about that question.” “I think they’re probably, well, lost.” “Oh, really?” Eking out thought, they generally appear at the start or the middle of an utterance, rarely at the end. Stalling for time is not their only motive, however: some people use them to soften the impact of a statement, to hedge against their own utterance. One could thus divide pausers into stallers and hedgers, bearing in mind that the uses of speech are myriad, and other categories undoubtedly exist.

Many pausers are vowel-sounds or nasals, demanding little articulation, though an intriguing question is why these syllables and not some others: “Yim, really?” “Ab, I don’t know.” Onomatopoeia is not a sufficient answer: imitative of what—the thought process itself? How do hmm and huh mimic revolving an idea in one’s head? It is noticeable that many pausers use something like the schwa sound. Perhaps this neutrality blends in best with whatever comes before or after. In any event, they are distinguishable in a vague way. Oh seems placid, uh and um more groping, ah somewhat higher-class or perhaps British. Er has never seemed properly approximate to any sound people make, at least not to my ear. And yet it used to be the main pauser in written dialogue, though it now like a quaint activity: either and haw also seems now like a quaint activity: either mimetic writers have discarded these words in favor of the way people really speak, the way certain Yiddish words in English are now spelled more phonetically, or people used to articulate their words differently, including their pausers.

Some pausers enjoy a vogue only for a while or are associated with certain age-groups. The stillubiquitous like and you know started out as teen-speak but have become such verbal tics that language pundits have devoted whole articles to condemning them. Anyone who has endured strings of sentences broken up by these interjections can understand the impulse to condemn, though to rage against these syllables is to miss the point: these are pausers of a sort, words of hesitation or mediation, and other people simply have other pausers. The maddening aspect may simply be that like and you know are words in their own right and therefore more hearable, as opposed to an uh that almost blends into the next word. Like can become a cliché in a way that uh cannot. To support this distinction: well, another pauser that is also a word, has a similarly annoying effect when over-used this way; so do see and okay.

In fact, one class of pausers consists of entire phrases: the trio I must say, I daresay, and I mean to say, for instance. These are chiefly British or old-fashioned American. The mystery-writer Willard Huntington Wright, better known by his pen name S.S. Van Dine, endowed his Oxford-educated detective Philo Vance with the pausers I say and don’t y’know, the last not entirely rhetorical since his interlocutors usually didn’t know at all. Presumably, these words gave him more time to wax articulate about the case at hand. The observation “He hasn’t been, I must say, much of a sport about the whole thing” sounds as if it belongs on a cricket field. I mean to say, however, has been shortened to a form fast becoming universal: I mean. The applicability of this two-word pauser cum qualifier is so tempting that this whole paragraph could be rewritten to include it in every sentence—at the start and end of almost every sentence, I mean, and at the heart of all of them. I mean, it can replace everything from i.e. to for instance, and in the ever-expanding world of jargon it is frequently evoked in an attempt to clarify. In this sense, it indicates the opposite of the doubt and hesitation served by the fuzzy ohs and ums. Indicating deliberation and restatement, it replaces the common pausers in fact, of course, and so, which in our era may seem too linguistically assertive. For perhaps the same reason, ahem and harrumph seem dying breeds, perhaps associated with the decline of the Big-Boss. Those in authority are known for clearing their throats to express displeasure or restore order; subordinates clear their throats to temporize. But people tend to conflate the two and have moved away from sounds with such peremptory associations. Or maybe people still clear their throats but do it more discreetly.

Intonation is key. Ahem may be self-effacing, accompanied by a downcast look, but Ahem! is the voice of authority. The woolgathering oh… is not to be confused with the querulous Oh? or the stab of surprise Oh! One can dither along with well … or sail decisively along with Well! The suprasegmentals of stress, pitch, and length come into play: Hmmm is just not the same as Hm!

The type of speech also affects the use and frequency of pausers. In an article several years ago, The New York Times reported that college lecturers with a lot of abstract material to convey relied on uhs and ahs more often than speakers conveying merely factual information. This makes perfect sense: the more difficult it is to put something into words, the greater the strain on the speech center. For the same reason, certain scholars rely on i.e. in the middle of a sentence, though e.g. has never caught on in spoken speech, and abbreviations such as op cit. or idem. remain footnote fodder.

When pausers betray uncertainty, however, ums and ahs are eschewed. Politicians meeting the press, for instance, often respond to reporters' questions by repeating the question as a lead-in: “Why do we have galloping inflation? Let’s look first at the deficit…” Depending on the delivery, this tactic is either rhetorically effective or parrotlike. Others rely on catch phrases, a comfort to many but an annoyance to those who feel that groping is more sincere than glibness. Pausers may thus indicate a truly thoughtful speaker.

Still, one would not see the pausers in a transcript of the speech. Newspapers and magazines routinely clean up their subjects' quotations. As one reporter I questioned about it noted: “It makes the sentences drag. In fact, when writers want to make a person look inarticulate, all they have to do is leave in those monosyllables.” This raises the question of how accurate newspaper sound-bites are. When the Times reported on a recent case of libel from misquotation, for weeks afterward a lot of newsworthy quotations ran warts and all: “I, um, ah…” As my source remarked, the effect was not naturalism but awkwardness.

And this is just English. Other languages have their own pausers. The French fall back on eh bien ‘well’ or the lamer euh. The Germans waffle with order ‘or’, and the Spanish will prolong a sentence indefinitely with iii… The Japanese mutter eto, ano ne, or sometimes enunciate a drawn-out ne…, similar to the French n’est-ce pas. When “Yes?” and “no?” punctuate a conversation, someone is translating a foreign pauser into English. In fact, a dead giveaway of a foreign speaker, no matter how suave the accent, is the use of non-native temporizing. Whether a different culture’s pausers reflect different thinking, on the other hand, is questionable. One could draw up an international list of pausers and probably find the same psycholinguistic needs being met: the urge to waffle asemantically, to qualify a meaning, or even to break (or set up) a rhythm.

Gestures or body English often accompany and sometimes replace the verbal context of a pauser: a shrug, a tilt of the head, a slow rotation of the hand. Pausers need not even be discrete entities. In all languages, one can simply draw out the last syllable of a word as a pauser. Ellipses may be read as such: if this sentence trails … one way of reading it is to elongate trails till it fills the gap. Ellipses populate the writing of Modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, particularly to punctuate streams of consciousness and the pauses between semi-articulated thoughts. Like the pregnant pauses in Harold Pinter’s plays, however, they occasionally speak louder than the words around them. The universal pauser in this regard is silence. As a Japanese friend of mine once commented, “Americans think that when we say nothing it really means nothing. They are mistaken.” Laboratory scientists ought to be familiar with this phenomenon: negative results are nonetheless results.

We ought to cultivate a better ear for pausers. They are like caesurae in poetry, permitting a mental or physical breath before the speaker goes on. On occasion, I have conversed with speakers so adept that they used no speakers at all, and the effect is slightly airless, with a precision that sounds almost rehearsed. In the realm of formal speech, pausers suggest informality. What type suits you may indicate something about your personality, whether harrumphing or hemming and hawing. To end with a tautology: your pauser is whatever you habitually use to create a pause, for whatever reason. Well, there is nothing wrong in that.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“My son grabbed [the skunk] and got the load intended for the dog as well as a bite through the web of his hand. We kept him for a year or so in a box with a chicken wire cover and sides. When it got cold he went into semihibernation coming out two or three times a week for food. He took his bedding and closed the front of the box except for a small hole to go in and out. He had a beautiful pelt, thick and velvety. I could pet him when he was eating but at no other time. After a year or so we turned him loose and he took off across the fields.” [From a letter from William McClelland to The Conservationist/NYSDEC, January-February 1992, page 48. Submitted by Jon B. Jolly, Seattle.]

OBITER DICTA: All Joined-Up

Catherine Traynor, Glasgow

I have to confess, I have caught the highly infectious “joined-up” word disease. I daren’t whisper it to my colleagues for fear of ridicule. For months, I’ve felt the symptoms coming on. There was the furtive, under-the-desk word search in my dictionary whenever a pupil asked me to spell a word. I knew it wasn’t “joined-up” but something told me I had to check it, just incase. See what I mean? I’ve got it bad now. Then there was the hypnotic effect of jotters full of “joined-uppers” which I had to unjoin with a vertical dash. Gradually, I lost track and began to doubt my control of English.

It all began with one word. Well, two, really: alright. Now, alright may be all right for some, but I’ve been fighting it for quite a while now. When it began to appear in some newspapers, I thought to myself, is it all right to write alright? No, came the answer. I’ll keep returning it to its dignified form. I’ll stem the tide, I thought. That was fine until Neighbours starting using it in its substitutes. Pupils cast this up to me daily. I had to stand by ground, explaining that Neighbours was Australian and hardly the best judge of English as she is spoken. I kept on correcting and have, so far, managed to keep all right in two pieces. No doubt, I am positively Neanderthal, but I see no reason to change because common usage dictates.

My fall from correct spelling did not arise solely from alright, which was only a symptom of the “joined-up” syndrome. It came on gradually. Infact—there it is again—I can remember seeing an advertisement in a magazine which used anytime. I was confused. Surely the expression was any time? I saw it again, about a week later, but I kept to the adjective and noun relationship of “any time.”

Then, there was the exam script marking I took on last spring. A rash of “joined-uppers” spread over the papers. I worked frantically with my red pen, vertical marking whole pages in an effort to separate those wedded words. I’m not a spoil-sport—I’ve done it again—but I couldn’t allow this unbridled effrontery to take over. There they were, flaunting it across the pages, coupling all over the country, the shameless aswell, intime, ontop, infront, beable, allnight, alot, incase, and, of course, alright.

By midnight on the last diet of marking, I was surrounded by every dictionary of the English language ever printed in my efforts to seek confirmation that they were wrong and I was right. Used red pens blitzed by waste basket. I began to look for the “joined-uppers” as a manic hunter stalks his prey. I scored my red pen with glee over the offending word. Gone were the vertical marks; instead, the horizontal score was circled in red. I even added a question mark in several instances—outside the circle, of course. Holes appeared where I had acted over-zealously, but I was sure the Chief Examiner would thank me for the purge of the papers.

Since then, I have been relatively calm, restricting my jotter marking to the vertical separator and continuing to snub the uncouth alright. My under-the-desk word searches became less frequent and I felt my confidence returning, until one day I looked up at the blackboard and saw that I had written anytime. Quickly, I grabbed the duster, but it was too late. They’d noticed. Now, they’re all doing it because they think it’s alright by me.

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. FISTFIGHT (rev. hidden).

6. PAT(H)‘S.

9. WEN-T APE (new rev.).

10. A(US)TRIA.

11. S-WARM.

12. TOPDRAWER (rev.).

13. OCEANS (anag.).

14. DE-FIANCE.

17. FOR-ESTER (trees anag.).

19. CA(R)NAL.

22. E-PAULETTE.

24. AC-T UP (rev.).

26. T(H)INKER.

27. IN(H) A BIT.

28. RIDES (hidden).

29. DETER-GENT.

Down

1. FAWN (two meanings).

2. S(ANT)A FE.

3. FRA(GMEN)TS.

4. GUES(T)S.

5. TRAMP-LED.

6. POSER (anag.).

7. TH (ROW) IN.

8. STAIRWELL (anag.).

13. OFF-(CENT)ER.

15. IN A LATHER (hidden).

16. BETTE-RED.

18. REA(DIE)D.

20. NOTABLE.

21. RES(IS)T.

23. LI(K)ES.

25. PET-IT.

EPISTOLA {Burling Lowrey}

The letter to The Times, written by Giles Brandreth [XIX, 4, 18] seems to confirm the widespread belief that the level playing field metaphor, as applied to political discourse, is indeed the “Cliché of the Year.” I say this because Washington politicians always fall back on this figure of speech when they feel that their opponents are distorting their views.

The level playing field metaphor, in fact, is replacing the leading American political cliché of the Eighties: comparing apples and oranges. Of course, it would be simpler for the debater to say, “That is a false analogy,” but in our current political atmosphere, that is too highfalutin and does not carry much vote-getting appeal.

I should note that the habit of American politicians to begin their sentences with, “The fact of the matter is…” in debate is coming up strong and may soon threaten the high place now held by level playing field. I once heard a congressman, within a period of five minutes, begin twelve sentences with The fact of the matter is. Interestingly, this opener rarely introduces a fact: more likely it precedes an opinion, as in “The fact of the matter is we need to have universal health coverage.”

[Burling Lowrey, Washington, DC]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: James Boswell: The Life of Johnson and The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary: 1746-1773

Greg Clingham, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), xviii + 131pp. and Allen Riddick, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), xiii + 249pp.

Despite the fact that Boswell’s Life of Johnson has always been ranked with Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and Plutarch’s Lives as a model for the genre, those concerned mainly with linguistics and with lexicography view it chiefly as a means of access to information about a lexicographer. It is important to note that although Johnson was the “hero” of Boswell’s biography, Boswell is scarcely regarded as second fiddle: it is with good reason that he has emerged as a major writer of the period. Clingham’s book, the price of which belies its size, delves into details about Boswell and the Life that are interesting historically and biographically but demonstrate on one hand Boswell’s ability to recount accurately details of conversations that took place years before and, on the other, his artistry in fictionalizing certain events for the sake of embellishing them. In this context it must be recalled that Boswell met Johnson in 1763, that Johnson died in 1784, and that the Life was not written till the 1790s; even though Boswell kept notes, one can imagine what a prodigious effort it was to reconstruct the attitudes, nuances of expression, and other minuscule details of tone and color so characteristic of the Life when the events took place as much as thirty years earlier.

Clingham provides two chronologies, the first of Boswell’s life, the second of “Some of the principal scenes and conversations in the ‘Life.’ ” The second identifies fifty events, giving the date, place, people present, subject(s) of conversation, and page number in the Life for each. In the first, one is reminded of some of the important works published in the period: Richardson, Pamela; Fielding, Shamela; Pope, New Dunciad; Young, Night Thoughts; Fielding, Joseph Andrews; Richardson, Clarissa; Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws; Smollett, Roderick Random; Fielding, Tom Jones; Gray, ‘Elegy wrote in a Country Churchyard’; Hume, Enquiry Concerning Principles of Morals; Johnson, Dictionary; Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality; Voltaire, Candide; Macpherson ‘Ossian’; Sterne, Tristram Shandy; Rousseau, Social Contract and Emile; Percy, Reliques of Ancient Poetry; Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England; Goldsmith, Vicar of Wakefield; Sterne, Sentimental Journey; Goldsmith, ‘Deserted Village’; Burke, Thoughts on the Present Discontents; Smollett, Humphrey Clinker, etc.—and that was only between 1740 and 1770! Could the paltry output of a contemporary interval measure up against those three decades?

In spite of its deceptively narrow scope, the treatment is thorough and scholarly; the author’s genuine affection for his subject emerges, a feeling that is contagious and makes one want to pick up the Life to read it or, having learned what one has missed, to reread it. It is most reprehensible that Clingham’s book lacks an index, though a useful bibliography is provided.

The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary is filled with revelatory information, fascinating to anyone interested in dictionaries or lexicography (which is another way of saying that I liked it but others might find it less than riveting). For example, lexicographers have long made a show of gathering citations (used interchangeably with quotations) for a given word, laboriously sorting them into their different senses, studying the various sets so produced, and deriving one or more definitions from them. For years I have protested, especially to the editors of the OED2e, that if one examines the quotations for a given sense in that work (or, indeed, any other), it would be demonstrably impossible for anyone not already knowing the meaning to divine a definition from the proffered evidence. In response I have usually heard a weary explanation that the quotations appearing in print in the OED (and, presumably, its successive supplements) are only a small, selected fraction of those in the files. That may be the case, but, as a professional lexicographer for many years, I do not believe it. Well do I recall reading and rereading not only paragraphs of text but chapters and even entire books in order to grasp the meaning of a given term.

The Mathematical Theory of Communication, by Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver (Univ. of Illinois Press), was published in 1949, but nobody except specialists paid it much heed till the late 1950s, when, suddenly, the information experts, who were busy threatening us with an “information explosion,” fastened on the word entropy, and everyone who had anything to do with information theory (which included even me, at least peripherally) had to use the word at least once in every talk or paper to demonstrate being au fait with the current jargon. I shall not go into the intricacies of the definition, which can be found in every up-to-date dictionary, except to say that a comparison of those definitions does not yield anything that a layman can understand, either easily or with effort. That is not a criterion of defining, believe it or not, for a moment’s consideration should reveal that there are many highly specialized terms that have become public catchwords, hence must be listed in dictionaries; yet one needs a specialized background to understand them. Entropy is one such term; theory of relativity, which has been bandied about for more than half a century now, is certainly another. In looking up a word in the dictionary, the user expects to understand its definition—at least well enough to be able to use the word in conversation, writing, or some appropriate context. It is extremely doubtful that anyone could derive any useful understanding from the definitions of entropy and theory of relativity without having been exposed to a crash course in physics and, especially in the case of entropy, in thermodynamics. The definition I wrote for entropy, which appeared in the 1966 edition of the Random House Unabridged and the College Edition (1968), has evidently been considered either incorrect or inadequate, for an entirely new definition appears in subsequent editions. I shall not labor the point further except to note that I read Shannon and Weaver’s book at least three times before being able to make any sense out of the application of the word entropy, borrowed from thermodynamics, to information theory. I did finally understand it, I think, and I believe I still know what it means, but the definitions I read are at variance with my understanding and with each other.

Lest I lose sight of the reason for raising this matter, let me return to the citation/quotation issue by pointing out that if one must read a book, even a short one—the Shannon and Weaver was, as I recall, only about 150 pages in length—in order to derive the meaning for a term, lexicographers and dictionary publishers are in deep trouble.

They can take heart, however, from Allen Reddick’s surmise that

…the entry headings, etymologies and definitions, according to this account, were written down before the quotations were collected. [p. 30]

[The account referred to is one written by “W.N.,” not otherwise identified, that appeared in a letter in Gentleman’s Magazine for December 1799.]

VERBATIM does not accord the luxury of space needed to demonstrate the validity of my argument, so readers are invited to study the quotations for almost any definition of any entry in the OED for proof of my contention. It must be emphasized that, unless the definition is wrong, there is nothing wrong with regarding the quotations as illustrations of the entry word in use; more to the point, in the OED, many may be regarded simply as evidence of the early appearance of a word in print, for whatever value one might place on that. If there be any fallacies inherent in citation collection, they must be laid at the door of those in the Philological Society who dreamt up the scheme. The system is excellent as far as it goes, but it is often misapplied by people who take the earliest citation as evidence that the given term was “invented” by the author of the quotation, ignoring entirely the paucity of extant early writings and the fact that any of the terms might have been used in spoken English (of whatever vintage) for generations before appearing in print.

Johnson was aware of this shortcoming and others, including blatant personal prejudice:

“When I published my Dictionary, ” Johnson explained to Thomas Tyers, “I might have quoted Hobbes as an authority in language, as well as many other writers of his time: but I scorned, sir, to quote him at all; because I did not like his principles.” Hester Thrale recorded: “I have heard Mr. Johnson say myself that he never would give Shaftesbury [Thomas] Chubb or any wicked Writer’s Authority for a Word, lest it should send People to look in a Book that might injure them forever.” One of his favorite writers, Samuel Clarke, is not quoted because of his anti-Trinitarian positions. [p. 34]

On the absence of spoken citations:

“…to reach the colloquial without the opportunities of familiar conversation, is very difficult. By reading great Authors it cannot be obtained, as books speak but the language of books.” [p. 35]

These days, for better or for worse, books can no longer be accused of speaking “but the language of books,” and, if necessary, we can resort to written transcripts of much of the matter uttered viva voce on radio and television. There is no shortage of provender in that department.

Reluctant though I am to raise the issue again concerning allegations of improper appropriation of the work of others brought against me some years ago by Mr. Robert W. Burchfield, erstwhile editor of the OED Supplement—a charge, incidentally, totally without foundation, as, if he had taken the trouble to discover, either the matter was in the public domain or the owners of copyright matter had been paid for the right to use it—I am moved to quote the following, in reference to Johnson’s Dictionary:

…[T]he entries under the first two letters and the beginning of c, replete with cross references, generous, lengthy definitions, extraneous encyclopedic information (as in the full discussions under AMBER and AMBERGRIS, or the fifty-three line entry under AMMONIAC, all taken from Chambers’s Cyclopedia) are noticeably different from the sparer ones which come afterwards. [p. 40]

Space does not permit a fuller treatment of this well-written study, and it is commended to nonspecialist readers as well as scholars. There is an Index, the notes are easy to find at the back of the book, and scholars and bibliophiles will find the three appendices, which deal with the source materials in the British Library, particularly useful and interesting.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Cruel and Unusual Puns

Don Hauptman, illust. by Arnie Levin, (Dell, 1991), 137pp.

Properly speaking, which very few of us can be accused of doing, this book consists of spoonerisms that can be regarded as puns if one stretches a point, though this is not the place to enter into an argument about the nature of puns. Hauptman is a smart feller (as he might say) and has pulled together a collection that is bound to amuse devotees. Fully twenty per cent of the book is taken up by the Introduction, but that is all right, for the Introduction is riddled with all sorts of wordplay. The emphasis must be on play, for it is one thing to tolerate twists of logic, another to tolerate contorted language, as exemplified by the following:

Jack the Ripper’s grandmother had a minor behavioral problem of her own. Armed with a switchblade, she attacked visitors to a London public lavatory. Terrified citizens called her the old woman who shivved in a loo.

Many may complain that I am being too finicky in objecting to shiv as a verb and to the fact that a loo is any lavatory, not necessarily a public one. But, as readers of VERBATIM are only too well aware, even worse examples have been perpetrated in these pages. In the context of this review, I cannot resist releasing one that already requires some historical perspective to understand:

Tourist: Why are you chewing on your mukluk, Gooneeweetuk?

Goonee: ‘Cause it’s the only shoe my mother lets me gum.

That, to me, is a cruel pun; it unusualness depends on whether one has heard it or not. That one and all the following are original with me, but that does not mean they have never been uttered before. My own preference is for spontaneous puns, those that crop up in the course of conversation and are not recited, like jokes.

1. Someone was telling me about a Jewish family in India that had converted to Hinduism, and I commented, “I guess that’s a case of deva ju.”

2. Landmark Commission notice to owner of two important historic buildings: “A plaque on both your houses.”

3. What could be sadder than driving a Saab over depressed sewers?

4. In Britain, when a telephone operator makes a connection for you, she says “You’re through,” before you’ve had a chance to say one word!

5. Definitions:

common scents—body odors

crewelwork—sadistic needling

lighthouses—castles in the air

serial port—computer connection for grain shipments

row boat—vessel for caviar

bag dad—male derelict in Iraq

6. Great classics:

Rebecca of Donnybrook Farm

The Flying Dustman

The Man on the Flying Tapis

Olive or Twist (bar manual)

7. Folk etymology is the kind of scholarship that relates sackbut with bagasse.

8. “He has water in the chest cavity; it’s called hydrothorax.”

“Oh, is that anything like the Intercostal Waterway?”

9. He: “You look in the pink tonight.”

She: “Actually, I’m inviolate.”

10. Wrigley was known as a man who would stick by his gums.

11. She didn’t consider him worth her wiles.

12. Degeneration of Vipers—result of inefficient vindshield cleaning

13. Preventive dentistry is a precarious business.

Still, many of the items in Hauptman’s collection are very funny, though some are neither puns nor spoonerisms. One gets the impression that he has collected a lot of jokes from Playboy, New York Magazine, and other sources and tried to find a common denominator for them in a title. There is a rich mine of linguistic humor here, and one should pay attention to the material not to the title.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Acronymania

Don Hauptman (Dell, 1993).

Any English speaker who does not know by now what an acronym is has been out in the desert with his camel a bit too long. Still, we hear the term misused: an acronym is an abbreviation, but not all abbreviations are acronyms; that is, an acronym is a pronounceable sequence of letters (which might, but do not, necessarily, form a recognizable word) made up of the initial or beginning letters of a name or phrase. Thus, by my (admittedly arbitrary) standards, ASAP is not an acronym because it is customarily pronounced [ay ess ay pee] and not [ay sap]. AWOL is an anomalous example: if it stands for Absent WithOut Leave, then the O is hard to describe, for without is one word. Sometimes, acronyms are made up of parts of words, as in Nabisco, from National Biscuit Company, radar, from radio detecting and ranging, and scores of others. Laser is a “perfect” acronym, formed from light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation—provided that it is agreed that “prepositions, articles, and other particles do not count.” Hauptman also cites nimby ‘not in my back yard’ and Wasp ‘white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.”

However useful and important the interpretation of abbreviations, acronyms, and what have come to be classed as “word-initial elements” might be, they are amply covered in extensive works that have been published (and periodically supplemented and updated) by Gale Research Company. Such works are necessary, particularly to those who dabble in the nether reaches of research and have to understand references to PMLA, TESOL, and other arcana. Except for such practical purposes, the usefulness of a short book devoted to “the fascinating world of acronyms and abbreviations” lies beyond my ken and is about as exciting as learning that a hive of bees has been trained to hum “God Save the Queen.” In the pages of VERBATIM have appeared comments on acronyms: the word acronymania appears in “Prep School Slanguage,” by Richard Lederer [IX,4]: Spring, 1983], but I cannot say whether he coined it. More recently, comment has appeared in these pages—the exact reference eludes me at the moment—concerning bacronyms, that is the coining of a phrase or name solely in order to ensure its yielding a catchy, suitable acronym. Among these are (surely) HOWL ‘Horror/Occult Writers League,’ NOW ‘National Organization for Women,’ SET ‘Society for the Eradication of Television,’ and many others too boring to mention.

When we are reminded that the Peruvian Indians save up their entire life’s production of nail parings and carry them about in a little bag round their necks, we can believe that people will collect anything, so one must conclude that there is a market for a book of this kind. I do not wish to be counted as a part of it.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: If I Had a Hi-fi, and Other Palindromes

William Irvine, illustr. by Steven Guarnaccia, (Laurel (Dell), 1992).

Just when I thought I had got past the ancient Biblical Madam, I’m Adam and the historically poetic Able was I ere I saw Elba and A man, a plan, a canal—Panama!, Irvine perpetrates another collection that succeeds in contorting the language as badly as the awfullest puns. One cannot fault the author’s ingenuity or that of an illustrator who has the creative effrontery to mirror (if that is the right word) the palindromes in drawings. They are all admirable for their cleverness, but I often wish they meant something: very few of them do, except in the most cryptic way. The title is an example; past the title, the first few to assail the sensibilities are Name tag gate man; Roy, am I mayor?; Pets nip instep, and Some men interpret nine memos. One cannot argue that these are not clever, but they seem to me palindromic equivalents of the Chomskyan Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. The only one that makes sense is Cain, a maniac.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Barbadian Dialect

Frank A. Collymore, (Barbados National Trust, 6th edition, 1992), vii + 120pp.

Bajan—word lovers may compare Cajun for a linguistic parallel—is the more familiar name for both the native Barbadian and his folk-speech, “Barbadian Dialect,” or the dialect of English spoken in Barbados. This Caribbean island sometimes calls itself “Little England,” partly because English landownership never ceased since the first settlement in 1627; then notable waves of poor-white population were added, with Irish deportees as bond-servants after Cromwell’s campaigns (c. 1650) and the Battle of the Boyne (1690), and Scots deportees after Monmouth’s Rebellion (1685).

One of the few territorial names OED originally permitted in its listing and the only one in the English language, as far as I am aware, to be converted into a verb (1655) is to Barbadoes a convict from Britain (as the most condign of punishments). And the resulting poor-whites were labeled in Barbadian dialect through the centuries in many ways, of which Collymore, probably himself a descendant of one of them, lists many: backra, buckra, ecky becky, poor backra, redleg, spawgee; but he neither indicates the derogatory status of these names nor makes any effort to offer etymologies. These two features characterize the little book. It is a friendly, folksy tour through the Bajan vocabulary on which Collymore takes the reader as if walking fondly around his backyard, through wild flowers, weeds, prickle plants, or whatever, chatting about them as he goes—conkie and coo-coo, favorite national dishes dear, no doubt, to the bellyologist ‘glutton’; the palang-palang of the hecklers at a cricket match, who might afterwards fire some rums (like shots) until perhaps pistoratically drunk; the eczemas (usually plural) which might disimprove ‘get worse’; and so on.

However, it must not be supposed that Barbadian Dialect is just a book of lexical tidbits, though it is certainly not a book for professional linguists, if the serious-sounding title suggests that. Collymore first presented the work in 1955, and it went through five editions in his lifetime (the fifth in 1976; he died in 1980), because both the Barbadian public and large number of tourists found it both enlightening and entertaining. Both these facts and the innovative idea of such a publication in 1955 are a credit to Collymore, who was a high-school teacher, poet, short-story writer, actor, and editor of Bim, the Anglophone Caribbean’s first and still surviving literary magazine. A number of now well-recognized writers of the English-speaking Caribbean, including 1992 Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott (of St. Lucia) owe their first public recognition to him. If the average Bajan is unlikely to have heard of Victor Hugo, one only has to tell him Hugo was the Frank Collymore of France and he will immediately recognize that Hugo must indeed have been Somebody!

Collymore modestly acknowledged his as an “amateur approach” at the beginning of his 1955 Introduction, and called his work Notes for a Glossary of Words and Phrases of Barbadian Dialect. That full title, which appeared on the cover of the first four editions, is still on the title page of this posthumous sixth edition; so if there is any blame for a possibly over-pretentious cover title of a book now selling as Barbadian Dialect, it is to be laid at the door of The Barbados National Trust, which saw predictable profit in such a title while adding its tribute to the island’s literary patron saint.

Moreover, this sixth edition is not in fact a new edition. It has added nothing to the fifth except a better typographical presentation with printing errors corrected, I understand, and a glossy cover bearing a shorter title. But the book remains Collymore’s original work, and there is something to be said for that in emotional terms; for any attempt to add to and re-present the information in modern lexicographical method would almost surely wipe out the chattiness of entries like

domestic The foreigner might think that two yards of domestic was a facetious description of an unduly tall maid-servant; but the word is still used to mean cloth used for the lining of men’s clothes. The S.O.E.D. states: “home-made cotton cloths 1622 esp. in U.S.”

doris Police van, Black Maria. The couple of these motor vans used by the Police Force (circa 1938) were nicknamed Mae West and Doris, the former after the screen star and the latter after the first woman to be taken to the main-guard in the van.

The casualness of the etymological suggestions thrown in, as seen above, is another advantage that formal treatment would have removed.

Collymore admits in his Introduction that etymologies lie in an area beyond his reach, as does the connection of dialect with details of settlement history. So although he identifies and illustrates dialectal particularities like bonny-clabber ‘clotted milk’ or the usage of self, screel to ‘shriek,’ or the usage of body, he fails to identify the first pair as being of clear Irish pedigree and the second pair as being clearly Scottish (though there is a mild hint at body).

What, then, is the book’s interest? On opening it at almost any page, it is not difficult to see the teacher at work. Take page 68, where he shows that meat, meeting, melts, mill, Mistress look English but are traps of local usage, that mice, like nerves, silvers, etc. are Bajan plural forms with singular senses, and that Bajan usages of mostly, neither, next, etc. are dialectal though surely unsuspected as such by the user, as his citations (with explanations) readily indicate.

Finally, there are a number of special articles in which the author strives to enlighten particularly the Barbadian speaker in the peculiarities of his language. These are treated as block capital entries. A few examples: COMPOUND REDUNDANTS (e.g., boychild, sparrow-bird, rockstone), ECHO WORDS (what linguists call ideophones: bam!, bruggadung!, daddaie!, plax!, etc.), PRONUNCIATION, illustrating peculiarities of the local use of pitch and stress to differentiate between meanings of the same word (e.g., brother ‘genetic relative,’ and bro-ther ‘member of a religious sect,’ etc.).

It is a good thing that Collymore was not a trained linguist or he might never have done this friendly, amateur piece of worthwhile lexicography; and it is a good thing that his natural modesty and caution produced a little book, easy to publish, easy to buy, and easy for any word-lover to enjoy.

[Richard Allsopp, Caribbean Lexicography Project]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: More Anguished English

Richard Lederer, illustr. Bill Thompson, (Delacorte, 1993), 192pp.

If you liked Anguished English and Get Thee to a Punnery, also by Lederer, you will probably enjoy this collection. In his earlier books Lederer asked readers to send him examples of the sorts of linguistic distortions he collects—many of which are hilarious—and the present book seems to be a listing of those received, provided with occasionally witty continuity for the necessary context. Get ready to send in your contributions, for “Even More Anguished English” is already on the drawing boards.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Guinness Book of Words

Martin Manser, (second edition, Guinness Publishing, 1988), 192pp.

Suitably for a book in the Guinness line, this one opens with a chapter titled World Word Records, an engaging potpourri of facts and trivia, short glossaries of flash business terms, and other things that people often talk and wonder about, like how many words there are in English, what is the frequency of the letters in various kinds of writing, what is the longest word, and so forth. Other chapters deal with curiosities of English, dialect, interesting and unusual etymologies, eponyms, slogans and graffiti, word games, euphemisms and other stylistic subjects, and style and usage. The book makes no pretense at being a work of depth, but it succeeds in compiling in one convenient place the answers to questions people ask most often. There are little quizzes vignetted here and there, and the entire spirit of the book is light and friendly without being airy. It contains a bibliography, which wisely includes VERBATIM and a number of books familiar to our readers. The index seems detailed, but, without dwelling on it, I failed to find an entry for “longest word.”

Martin Manser is an English lexicographer and general all-round word man, and this book, published in the UK, may not be available in the US. If it is, it can be found by asking any self-respecting bookshop clerk to check in a current Books in Print. By this time, a Third Edition might be available.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Et Cetera, Et Cetera: Notes of a Word-Watcher

Lewis Thomas, (Penguin, 1990), 197pp.

Lewis Thomas, scholar-in-residence at Cornell University Medical College, is best known as the author of The Lives of a Cell and The Medusa and the Snail. In each of the forty chapters of this book he has strung together many of the modern words that linguists have identified as correspondences traceable to the same or similar forms in ancient languages, mainly Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. It is Word for Word (Edward C. Pinkerton, VERBATIM Books, 1982) written for popular consumption, though no acknowledgment is made to that work in the bibliography, while full credit is given to the Root Section at the back of The American Heritage Dictionary (1969) and to Erik Pokorny’s Indogermanisches Worterbuch (A. Francke, 1959). There are just so many ways in which one can say that a given word goes back to some antediluvian form or that some prehistoric reconstruction yielded a word spelled differently in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German, and English and (usually) meaning something quite different, and Thomas, an adroit writer, has not only plumbed them all but has come up with new and imaginative ways to describe the semantic changes that have occurred. Although linguists agree that Indo-European roots are hypothetical reconstructions which are accordingly, conventionally marked with a precedent asterisk, Thomas treats them as if they were real words, that is, attested forms, dropping the “inconvenience” of the asterisk. Why clutter up a perfectly good book with a constant reminder that one is dealing entirely with theory?

One of the biggest problems faced by specialists in comparative linguistics is not finding attested forms in the ancient languages that, according to the rules of the various sound changes, are identifiable as cognates, but making some sense out of their semantic connection. To gloze over such irreconcilable problems, the author comes up with obfuscating prose like this:

There are some words we simply won’t have around the house, not because of their nastiness— although some of them qualify for that word (questionably derived from an even nastier-sounding root nizdo, a bird’s NEST, by way of Old French nastre, something strange and bad, Middle English nasti, NASTY, not a good word for the birds’ nests in our tree), but because they don’t mean at all what they are trying to say, and contain mendacious roots. [p.60]

If that is at all revealing of the semantic connection between nasty and a bird’s nest, it has gone past this reader. The passage quoted is not typical of the overwritten style of this book. How are we to understand this?:

OLEAGINOUS is an ONEROUS, OOZING word.

And I don’t much like the turn of language that inserted OGLE into speech. I can’t stand the sight of the word, much less its oily sound. I don’t need reminding that it came from the root okw, EYE, and I’d as soon forget the Germanic derivative oog. [p. 63]

I have little patience for writing that sacrifices accuracy for effect, creates confusion in its wake, and resorts to arch sarcasm when confronted by ignorance (in the sources). Fans of Thomas might disagree, but a little of this goes a long way for me. There is an Index and an unredeeming bibliography.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Great Sermon Handicap

P. G. Wodehouse, (English, Phonetic English, Latine, Français, Español, Italiano, Portugues (Brasileiro), Românâ, Català, Rhaetoromansch, James H. Heineman, 1989.), xiv + 169pp.

[This book is Volume I in the publisher’s series devoted to translations of Wodehouse; those interested are invited to write for further information to James H. Heineman, Inc., 475 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022.]

It is difficult to imagine the occasion on which a reader of a piece of writing in, say, English, would normally have any reason to read the same story or novel in any other language, let alone eight other languages, with a phonetic transcription an added fillip, but Heineman has seen fit to gather these together, and comparing them is not only fun but educational. It would require someone far more competent in the various languages than I do comment in detail on the treatments accorded the material, but there are certain features that even the most naive appreciate. A few typographical errors popped up before my eyes in a quick scan of the Portuguese and the Italian versions, though whether those are faults in this edition or in the originals I cannot say. (I note, with pleasure, that the Italian version is credited to my teacher at Columbia University, Olga Ragusa.)

The phonetic transcription is nothing more than an exercise, and the Latin translation is just fun; we can dismiss them as such, but that does not diminish their utility, and it may be worth noting that the Latin is the only translation to render some of the proper names into Latin equivalents: “W. Dix (Little Clickton-in-the-Wold)” becomes Gulielmus Dix, e Clicktonio Minore in Salibus, “Jeeves” Jaevi, etc.

By way of background, the publisher provides a useful Foreword, which includes the following information:

Works by P. G. Wodehouse have appeared in 19 languages including English… no fewer than 32 titles have been published in Finnish, 37 in Danish, 38 in Norwegian, 41 in German, 54 in Spanish…, 67 in Dutch, 70 in Swedish, 86 in Italian, and close to 100 in English both in Great Britain and the United States.

Heineman poses the question in everyone’s mind, whether

Wodehouse’s multi-lingual and international readers are entertained equally and in the same way by Bertie Wooster and Jeeves; Lord Emsworth and the Empress of Blandings;…,

to which he replies,

I would rather doubt it, for not two of us react entirely the same way to a threat, a story or a relative, especially if they were bounced off us in a multiplicity of languages.

I think that is (rather) missing the point, for it is quite unlikely that any ordinary reader would be exposed to Wodehouse in more than one language. Although Wodehouse spent his declining decades in America, he is regarded as the quintessential British writer, and the peculiarities of his characters as well as their quirky eccentricities are perceived by people round the world as British, with only a small number viewing them as anything but typical of the common, garden-variety Brit: if pressed, these readers might acknowledge that although some of the antics described are fictional, the British people of the social stratum of Bertie Wooster are accurately described as going about calling each other “Old Bean,” exclaiming “Rather!,” “I say!,” and “Wot?” at the slightest provocation, and habitually finding themselves about to marry the wrong person. Let me not be the one to disillusion anyone.

It is difficult for me to believe that a Frenchman or Italian, reading about people named Cuthbert Dibble, Orlo Hough, and Spettigue from places like Fale-by-the-Water and Gandle-by-the-Hill has the same connotations from the names themselves as the English reader. Does the given name Bingo have the same associations for a resident of the Tyrol, speaking Rhaetoromansch, and for a denizen of the Pyrenees, speaking Catalan, as it does for a native speaker of English who lives in Paris, Texas, or in Tring, Hertfordshire? I may be wrong, but I doubt it. Still, such linguicultural barriers have been either surmounted or ignored in the past, and we have no motive in suggesting that certain readers of Wodehouse in certain languages might be missing something.

By the same token, of course, English speakers are unable to appreciate Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, and even Wordsworth, not only because of the chronological language gap but, more tellingly, because of the culture gap; fully understanding Goethe, Dante, Rabelais, and Cervantes for one who knows them only in English is likewise hard to imagine. Yet, we are all the better for whatever scraps we can glean.

Certainly, Wodehouse occupies a unique place in the affections of many, and it is at the very least amusing to contemplate the reflexes of his zany characters once more, especially in Brazilian Portuguese.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism

Thomas Mallon, (Penguin, 1989), xiv + 300pp.

According to Black’s Law Dictionary (West, 5th ed. 1981), plagiarism is:

The act of appropriating the literary composition of another, or parts or passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and passing them off as the product of one’s own mind.

To be liable for plagiarism, it is not necessary to exactly duplicate another’s literary work, it being sufficient if unfair use of such work is made by lifting of substantial portion thereof, but even an exact counterpart of another’s work does not constitute plagiarism if such counterpart was arrived at independently.

The Random House Unabridged (1966) gives:

the appropriation or imitation of the language, ideas, and thoughts of another author, and representation of them as one’s original work.

In the 1987 edition, the definition has been modified to read:

the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work.

Although plagiarism is adjudicated under civil law, copyright infringement is another matter:

Criminal infringement. Any person who infringes a copyright willfully and for purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain is subject to a fine and/or imprisonment. Copyright Act § 506.

…

Remedies for copyright infringement include injunctive relief, impounding and disposition of infringing articles, and recovery of actual damages and profits. In lieu of actual damages, the federal Copyright Act provides for statutory damages which will vary as to whether the infringement was willful or unintentional.

—Black’s Law Dictionary, op cit.

It is not the function of VERBATIM to wrangle over legal language and certainly not over the law, but it would seem to me that the functional word is unauthorized: if an author (or publisher, etc.) has made a legal contract to acquire the rights to another’s work and if the agreement does not call for an acknowledgment to appear in the subsequently published work, then it is questionable whether plagiarism actually occurred; further, if the work appropriated is out of copyright (hence in the public domain), does publication of it in part or in its entirely constitute plagiarism? Finally, does mere acknowledgment to a prior source remove the burden of proof in plagiarism?

Unlike copyright infringement, plagiarism falls into civil, not criminal law: in other words, one party must bring suit in civil court against an alleged perpetrator, for one cannot call the police with the right to demand an arrest. Such cases can be difficult to prosecute and adjudicate and, in many cases, because the plagiarist seldom gains enough from his act to make winning worthwhile, not many suits are filed. To many, plagiarism is an unprincipled, immoral, rather than a criminal act. Certains acts of “plagiary” are obvious: modern adaptations of classics—Man of La Mancha, West Side Story, etc.— would not commonly be characterized as plagiaristic. In academia, the functional word is not authorized but acknowledged: scholarly journals bulge with three types of articles: the most common (and, for the purposes of our commentary here, irrelevant) are those in which the writer totally ignores earlier writings and research and blithely proceeds to set forth ideas that he honestly believes to be his own; the rarest, by far, are those that are truly original; and the type that are almost as common as the first mentioned are those in which the writer has gathered together an enormous number of quotations from other authors (which yield the extensive bibliographies that so impress heads of departments, tenure committees, and envious colleagues too lazy to perpetrate the same fraud), stringing them together by means of concatenating sentences that are his only original contribution. This is a good place to mention that I was put off from writing a doctoral dissertation at Columbia University when I found seven or eight almost identical dissertations on Monk Lewis in the special library there: what boots it to try to come up with original research when all those doctorates—and God knows how many more across the country—had been awarded for what can be described at best as “derivative” work, with no cross-acknowledgments; that discovery took place in 1950, and it is hard to imagine how the files might have swelled since then. Mallon delves [pp. 89ff.] into academic plagiarism, chiefly by students.

This acknowledgment caper is essentially what R. W. Burchfield, editor of the OED Supplement, prefers to the outright appropriation of matter from uncopyrighted sources (like the OED). The reason is simple: many of the quotations in the OED are of definitions—some of them not very good—that have been published in copyright sources. These do not constitute only quotations; in many instances, in place of a definition, the OED offers “See Quot(ation),” referring the user to a definition that has been copied from the source indicated. Does that make it all right? Using my OED on CD-ROM, I found 20,583 occurrences of “See quot. [date]” and 8 of “See quotation [date].” Work on the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, under the direction of William Dwight Whitney, was under way at the same time as the compilation of the OED was going on, and the editors of the latter (shamelessly?) copied entire definitions from the former: there is no doubt that the OED was thereby enhanced and improved, and, in general, I think it ridiculous to be enjoined from copying an occasional definition from another work—particularly if it is out of copyright or if permission has been given—especially if there is no other way of wording something simply. (The smaller the dictionary, the shorter its definitions, and it will be found that there is little or no difference between many of the definitions in the various paperback dictionaries on the market today: there is no space to accommodate a prolix circumlocution that would avoid a direct copy.)

Such copying might be justified, even for the OED, were the lifted definitions uniformly clear, accurate, and informative, but they are not. There is minimal justification for the OED definition, “a Levantine sailing-vessel” for caique, defined in the Random House Unabridged as, “a single-masted sailing vessel used on the eastern Mediterranean Sea, having a sprit mainsail, a square topsail, and two or more other sails.” Some might argue that the second definition is encyclopedic, but the counter-argument is that the first lacks the differentiae by which the caïque is distinguished from many other “Levantine sailing-vessels.” Similar criticisms could be leveled at definitions for catamaran, cutter, drifter (the sail sense is missing), schooner, etc.

But I digress. Like many who have commented on “imitations” before him, Mallon, who writes in an easy, readable style, seems to regard the older examples he adduces of plagiarism as the quaint subjects for literary anecdote, while he bears down very hard indeed on Charles Reade (1814-84), English author of The Cloister and the Hearth, who evidently borrowed much of his material from the continent, and seems to take particular delight in the “scandal”—best characterized as the nonevent of the year—surrounding Jacob Epstein’s Wild Oats, published in 1979. Chiefly because revelations concerning plagiarism seem to lend themselves to the style, Mallon’s style turns bitingly sarcastic as he delights in repeated references to the author’s parents and cites passages, quoted from an article by Martin Amis in The Observer of October 19, 1980, of Epstein’s text side by side with comparable ones from Amis’s The Rachel Papers, published in 1974.

Senator Joseph Biden’s borrowings from a Neil Kinnock speech, which did little to enhance his political career, are mentioned, but about twenty per cent of the book is devoted to a detailed and somewhat longwinded account, with numerous, often extraneous asides thrown in by Mallon, of the suit brought by Anita Kornfeld against CBS, Lorimar Productions, and Earl Hammer for plagiarizing Falcon Crest from her book, Vintage. (Hamner is a writer whose novel, The Homecoming, was the source for a television film which yielded the series, The Waltons.) After a long trial in which she was represented by Melvin Belli’s office (but not by Belli himself), Mrs. Kornfeld lost, evidently to the disappointment of Mallon.

I have spent almost fifty years in publishing, and, unless I have been asleep for most of that time or a conspiracy has deliberately kept the news from me, I am under the impression that plagiarism cases are relatively rare. To confirm my wakefulness and the absence of a conspiracy, I phoned William Koshland, a long-standing colleague, now Chairman Emeritus of Alfred A. Knopf, and he could think of only one or two cases, agreeing that they are far from common. Apparently, that is not the case in Hollywood, probably because more money is involved. In any event, the failure to bring suit is not necessarily to be construed as proof that plagiarism does not occur: unless a book turns out to be bestseller, with film and television rights sold, it hardly behooves one to try to collect damages from an empty purse.

There is a tense, itchy irritation about this book that gives the reader the feeling—probably without justification—that the author is being unfair to those he criticizes. There are occasional, nonintrusive footnotes and more ample notes at the back, though the presence of those is not indicated in the text by interruptive superior numerals; there is also a longish Bibliography (though, as a note warns, not every item in it deals with or is suggestive of “unoriginality”), and a good Index.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Regardless of anything to the contrary in this booklet, if your medical insurance terminates for any reason including death, you…may elect within 30 days…to continue such medical insurance…. [From Group Insurance for 1-14 Employees, Consolidated Group Trust, The Hartford, p. 70.]

EPISTOLA {Jerry McCarthy}

If Europe includes Britain, then we certainly did have letters on our telephone dials—and until relatively recently. They were distributed according to the following pattern:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

ABC DEF GHI JKL MN PRS TUV WXY OQ

The O is very sensibly on the zero, removing the possibility of confusion. We did not have a Z, but we did have a Q, also on the zero.

In the days when there were letters, our “area codes”—that is dialling codes—consisted of O (zero), two letters (associated with the place name), and a random number. For example, Maidstone was 0MA2, Maidenhead was 0MA8, and Ascot was 0WW0 (where WW was for Wentworth, a nearby village where the exchange was actually sited). Certain services took advantage of convenient lettering: the speaking clock was TIM.

With the introduction of all-figure numbers, about twenty years ago, codes subsequently assigned had no reference to the letters. However, the older codes still bear a ghostly memory of their original form: Maidstone became 0622 and Reading, 0734. I recently noticed that letters are reappearing on telephone instruments now for sale in Britain, and they seem to follow the American pattern.

[Jerry McCarthy, Workingham, Berkshire]

[Years ago, in New York City, one could dial the mnemonic HUSBAND (487-2263) to get the “talking clock” (a colorful term not used in the US, as far as I know). Why that worked was always a mystery, as the number advertised for this service was MEridian 7-1212 (637-1212). The instruments now for sale in Britain are probably those manufactured to cater for the large US market in privately owned instruments.—Editor.]

EPISTOLA {Paul W. Lunkenheimer}

Arriving in Berlin sixty years ago, faced by a telephone without a dial, I called a friend by asking the operator (in my schoolboy German) for “Z, H, three, six, eight, two, please.” “I am sorry, there is no such number. Please check the directory,” was the operator’s response. I checked the directory, and there was the number, “ZH 36 82.” After staring at the numbers, I noted the spaces—or did Wotan come to the rescue? I called again: “Z, H, six and thirty, two and eighty, please.” The call was completed immediately.

[Paul W. Lunkenheimer, Wayne, Pennsylvania]

EPISTOLA {Roy B. Flinchbaugh}

Allow me to question the statement made by David Gomberg in an EPISTOLA [XIX,4,21] that tripes à la mode de Caen is the invention of “the San Franciscan writer and Journalist, Herb Caen” and was “first prepared at Trader Vic’s restaurant.” Au contraire ! A quotation from The Hundred Glories of French Cooking, by Robert Courtine (originally published in France as Cent Merveilles de la Cuisine Francaise) makes it clear that this is a French dish:

A feast of tripes à la mode de Caen is indeed junketing and revelry, brotherhood in merriment and best friendship. They have tripe of sorts elsewhere, too, sometimes of the very best! But it’s not the same thing…Let us stick to the real tripe, the tripe of Rabelais, les tripes à la mode de Caen…

Could Mr. Gomberg be so completely wrong, or is he simply pulling our leg in order to make a disparaging remark about Mr. Caen’s writing?

On another subject, I should like to challenge the statement made by Geoffrey Wagner in “Windy English” [XIX,4,10]. Mr. Wagner writes, “There is no authentic dialect in the ex-British Caribbean, not even in the pejorative corruption of a parent tongue (as in Pennsylvania Dutch, for instance).” Oh, Mr. Wagner, you have hurt me to the quick! Pennsylvania Dutchman that I am, I must hasten to point out that Pennsyfawnisch Deitsch is not a corruption, let alone a pejorative one, of its parent tongue. Even though some elements are borrowed from other languages, it is, nevertheless, an authentic dialect of German derived from the dialects spoken by the original Pennsylvania Dutch settlers from the RhinePalatinate and Baden-Württemberg in the 18th century. During WWII, German prisoners of war who were assigned to work on farms in south central Pennsylvania were able to communicate well with anyone who spoke Pennsylvania Dutch. Those in Germany today who speak the Swabian dialect can recognize kindred spirits in their Pennsylvania-Dutch-speaking brethren. Even people in Thuringia and Saxony to whom I have spoken my very limited “Dutch” were able to identify it as a German dialect and to understand it. Please, Mr. Wagner, we Pennsylvania Dutch are also part of that rearguard action against, as you so felicitously put it, those who are “busy ironing out indigenous language rhythms in the interests of the ‘global village.”’

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

EPISTOLA {Peter A. Douglas}

In his Funk & Wagnalls Modern Guide to Synonyms (1968), S. I. Hayakawa’s example of the use of innocent contradicts your statement in The Dictionary of Confusable Words [US edition: Facts On File, 1988; UK edition: Dictionary of Differences, Bloomsbury, 1988] and presents the word in a legal context: “the word is often used…to denote lack of guilt for a wrongful act: pleading innocent to a charge of disorderly conduct.” I suppose he is right: this is too often the way the word is used, though only lawyers and those of us captivated by words will raise any objection!

By the way, I think that the reference in The Times quotation is confusing. The use of not guilty when referring to victims would have been rather odd and would have carried an inappropriate legal connotation. What are “not guilty victims”? Innocent victims is the usual cliché, and the connotation is accurate; the important legal distinction offered by not guilty seems to have little relevance in this instance.

[Peter A. Douglas, Albany, New York]

[To remind readers of the original wording: “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].” In all fairness, “when referring to” does not necessarily entail an exact substitution in context, so any reference, even in paraphrase, would prove the wording valid.—Editor.]

EPISTOLA {Ralph Slovenko}

The verdict not guilty means that the prosecutor has not proven a case beyond a reasonable doubt. It is not a finding that the defendant is innocent. In Scottish law, there is a verdict not proven

[Ralph Slovenko, Professor of Law & Psychiatry Wayne State University]

EPISTOLA {Benjamin H. Cohen}

You invited readers steeped in legal lore to pontificate on the distinction between innocent and not guilty [OBITER DICTA, XIX, 4,18]. In a criminal case the prosecution is obliged to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the defendant committed the crime charged. If the prosecution succeeds to the satisfaction of the jury, the jury is to return a verdict of “Guilty.” If the prosecution fails to carry its burden of proof, the jury must return a verdict of “Not guilty.” The jury may be convinced that the defendant is guilty, but conclude that the prosecution has not carried its burden of proving him so. Not guilty does not mean ‘innocent.’ Since the defendant is not obliged to prove that he is innocent, there is no verdict of “Innocent.”

In Scotland there is a third verdict, “Not proven,” which more accurately expresses what is meant by a “Not guilty” verdict.

[Benjamin H. Cohen, Niles, Illinois]

[Similarly from Laurence A. Spelman, New York City.]

EPISTOLA {Sylvia Khan}

In “Windy English” [XIX,4,5], Professor Wagner notes doubling and intensifications in Windward Islanders speech, giving the example sweet-sweet. Surely this is a speech habit translated from Hindi/ Urdu, e.g., meetah-meetah ‘sweet-sweet,’ garumgarum ‘hot-hot,’ the languages of the many East Indian immigrants.

[Sylvia Khan, Los Angeles]

EPISTOLA {Thomas L. Bernard}

I beg to differ with the conclusion arrived at by Sydney Abbey [EPISTOLAE, XIX, 4,22] that “the existence of English names like Winthrop, Windsor, Winston, Winchester, etc. appears to reveal vestiges of a one-time thriving English wine industry….” Granted there are some names (e.g., Winyard) in which the win- does refer to wine, that is certainly not the case in the four examples provided. The etymology of win- in these names suggests, respectively, ‘friend, windlass, friend, market.’

[Thomas L. Bernard, South Hadley, Massachusetts]

EPISTOLA {Patricia Joralemon}

“I Lisped in Numbers” [OBITER DICTA, XIX,4,16] reminded me of one of my favorite jokes from the 1930s:

Man is asleep in bed. Phone rings in next room. He goes to pick it up.

“Hello?”

“Is this double-two double-eight?”

“No, this is two, two, eight, eight.”

“Terribly sorry to bother you. I must have the wrong number.”

“Not to worry. I had to get up to answer the phone anyway.”

[Patricia Joralemon, Livingston, New Jersey]

VERBUM SAP: Niggles in a Haystack

Robertson Cochrane, Toronto

The short but fascinating history of the Oxford English Dictionary, at the front of the first volume of the Second Edition, provides a modest affirmation of humanity’s—and the OED‘s—fallibility. It allows that after 120 person-years of proofreading and probably the most intensive electronic checking, double-checking, and cross-checking in publishing history, the text of OED2 was still susceptible of a “residual error-rate” of 1 in every 250,000 characters. The 350 million characters on 21,500 pages comprising the complete 20-volume set make a formidable haystack in which to find these minuscule misprints. But Bradley Crawford, a Toronto lawyer who specializes in banking law, pricked his finger on one recently while browsing in the entry for indebted. Mr. Crawford politely informed Oxford of his discovery, thus:

Dear Sir: I believe there is a typo on page 838 of Volume VII… where one of the meanings of ‘indebted’ is given as ‘in dept’. I assure you, I take no pleasure in drawing this to your attention. It is at most a trivial blemish that all will understand and forgive. One thought, however, continues to trouble me: the scholarship and reputation of your work are so great, the probability of error so small; do you consider there is any risk that ‘in dept’ will now become acceptable usage, apparently being sanctioned by the most respected authority on our language?

Within a sesquifortnight (nonce-word, invented for this nonce), Mr. Crawford received an equally courteous reply from Oxford, over the signature of John Simpson, Co-Editor, Oxford English Dictionary. He also got a free etymological opinion.

Thank you for pointing out the typographical error in the OED’s entry for indebted, which we shall endeavour to correct at the next opportunity… As to your second question, whether ‘in dept’ will now become an accepted usage, it must be touch-and-go! The b in debt is itself an unnecessary letter, and originally did not form part of the word at all. The oldest records show det(t)e and similar forms as the Middle English spelling. The b was artificially introduced on analogy with the Latin debitum. So there is certainly a precedent for the respelling. On balance, however, I feel that the occurrence… is not likely to have more effect on the language than the 1,917 other occasions in the Dictionary on which the word is spelled correctly.

Considering the 250,000-to-1 odds over-all, debt with one error in 1,917 fared rather poorly. But this niggle and whatever other typos there may be are mighty small molehills beside the mountainous masterpiece that is the OED2e. It is, to be sure, an unfinished masterpiece, and always will be. The Second Edition, after all, was mainly an electronic merger of the “Murray” dictionary, completed in 1928, and the subsequent Supplements. The editors updated where the need cried out, and they did add 5,000 new items. But a lot, as they say in the short history, remains to be done.

There is much in the style… the punctuation, the capitalization, the definitional terminology, and the spelling (within entries and even of some headwords) that calls for modernization. Many current words are illustrated by a latest quotation from the first half of the nineteenth century… Recent examples ought to be supplied for every sense that is still current.

That is especially true of words near the top of the alphabet, naturally the earliest worked on by James Murray and his associates in the 1880s. The freshest quotation for attitude, as a frame of mind, is from 1876. Staler yet is the supporting material for bathe in its basic sense; the most recent citation is from Jedidiah Morse’s American Universal Geography of 1796.

Edward Wilson of Worcester College, Oxford, found another niggle in the haystack, which he described in the March, 1993, Notes and Queries. He was researching a 16th-century use of the participial adjective fucking, which appeared in a scrawled graffito in the margin of a copy of Cicero’s De Officiis, called the Brasenose Manuscript. The anonymous notator expressed enmity for the scribe, John Burton, Abbot of Osney, Oxford, by scribbling “O d fuckin Abbot,” the d presumably a short form of “damned.” He conveniently added the date 1528 to his rude scrawl, thus authenticating a written use of the profane intensifier that antedates the OED’s earliest citation by 40 years.

But that is not what needled Mr. Wilson. He noted that the OED2 unabashedly lists, defines, and supports the “four-letter word” (first recognized by Oxford only in the 1972 Supplement). But, he adds, the Second Edition contains a “verbatim reprint from the original (1897) volume III of OED” for the intensifier damned, with the anachronistic comment, “Now usually printed ‘d——d’.” That the OED2 perpetuated this prissy Victorian propriety, yet ignored the fact that fuck and its derivatives are still often euphemized by dashes in print, Mr. Wilson describes as a “reprehensible failure.”

If so, it will—along with other shortcomings or long-in-the-tooth text—be remedied when the new Supplements start hitting the streets. The first one is due this summer, at which point the haystack-hunt can, and no doubt will, begin all over again.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The Baths is a dying institution. Last year, we refunded money to 86 people who died.” [From the Daily News Magazine, March 1987. Submitted by John D. Cooke, New York City.]

Hand-me-downs

Mary M. Tius, Portland, Maine

Borrowed words for cloth and clothing seem always to have been common in English. Some are not much used: aba, chimere, jallaba, simar, tarboosh, zimarra, for instance. Some, though they are a part of everyday speech, have not been thoroughly domesticated: anorak, batik, kimono, parka, poncho, sarong—all still speak, as it were, with the trace of a foreign accent. Others are unlikely to be identified as aliens except by wordsmiths (and VERBATIM readers). Such are cotton, dolman, gingham, robe, shawl, stole, as well as camisole, gown, and jumper.

The etymological information provided in Webster’s Third New International Unabridged tells us that camisole entered English from French, was probably from Old Provençal camisolla, from camisa ‘shirt’ from LL camisa, camisia ‘shirt, thin dress,’ probably of Germanic origin, akin to OE ham ‘undergarment,’ hama ‘cover, skin,’ hemetha ‘shirt,’ and to Skt śāmulya ‘woolen shirt.’ We are not told if there is also a connection with Gk heima ‘garment,’ chlamyd-, chlamys ‘cloak, mantle,’ Per jāma ‘garment.’

Old Provencal was not the only borrower of LL camisa. Old French changed it to chemise, which was taken unaltered into Middle English. Spanish camisa also entered English unchanged but gave a second word, camis or camus ‘light loose robe.’ In Arabic LL camisa became gamīs, kamís ‘long shirt’ and was taken into English as camise ‘light, loose, long-sleeved shirt, gown, or tunic sometimes worn as an undergarment,’ and Modern Greek has hypokámiso ‘shirt.’ Turkish câme ‘cloth wrap, garment,’ gömlek ‘shirt,’ kumas ‘cloth’; Arabic kumash ‘cloth,’ hamlat ‘woolen cloth, plush,’ which became MF camelot, ME cameloit ‘camlet’—all seem to be collateral kin. Could Amharic shamma ‘chamma, a cotton, toga-like, usually white garment’ also be related?

A glance at gown leads us back to ME goun, MF gone, goune ‘gown’ from LL gunna ‘fur or leather garment.’ Modern Greek goūna means ‘fur’; Ir Gael gúna, ‘dress’; W gwn, ‘that which is stitched’; Hindi ganī, gonī (>E. gunny) from Skt gonī ‘sack’ probably comes, says Webster’s, from Dravidian, akin to Kanarese gōni ‘sack’; Skt guna means ‘thread, strand, quality’: the similarities of sense and sound hint that these words, too, are related to LL gunna.

Jump ‘loose jacket; an underbodice’ is, Webster’s tells us, probably an alteration of jupe, as is jumper. When we look at jupe, we find that it entered Middle English as juype from OF jupe ‘man’s coat or tunic’ from Ar jubbah ‘coat, garment,’ which also gave MF jupon, ME iopoun, iupone, iopon ‘jupon, a tight-fitting padded garment worn under armor; a late medieval jacket similar to the surcoat,’ ME gipoun ‘gipon, jupon,’ as well as jibba and jubbah. Turkish cübbe, cüppe ‘robe, gown,’ OIt giubba ‘jacket,’ MHG schube ‘outer garment,’ and Russ shuba ‘fur coat’ are all kin. What about Dolpo Tibetan chuba ‘sleeveless tunic’? Surely it, too, is a member of the family? And can it be that Ar suf ‘wool’ which gave Turkish sof ‘fine wool, camlet’ is also one of the clan?

Languages, like large, burgeoning families, receive hand-me-downs from relatives and strangers indiscriminately. Sometimes they shorten a hem or a sleeve, sometimes, add a collar, cape, or flounce; and sometimes, after transforming flour sacks into furbelows, topcoats into tunics, they return the altered garment to the giver.

What’s “In” a Kentish Saying?

Alan Major, Canterbury

There are many nationally used proverbs, sayings, maxims, saws, quatrains, adages—call them what you will. Traditional, sometimes trite, they embody commonplace experience or obvious truism, in a brief, frequently inelegant collection of words. Most of the English counties have their own local examples. Kent, in southeast England, is no exception.

There are several types. The first refers to county places for some particular reason; the second to rural subjects throughout the county; the third to human actions, characteristics, or thoughts. The origins of most are lost in time, handed on by generations of Kentish men and men of Kent (and women, of course). Who first uttered them and why is unknown. Perhaps a local or rural sage said something apt about a situation or event to another person who learnt it, repeated it, and so it became embedded in the dialect. When considering the total of sayings, which number several hundred, there must have been a lot of rural sages about in centuries past!

First, some of the county places. Something that was definite or certain was said to be As sure as there’s a dog in Dover. The dog is not the canine animal but refers to dogfish (dogs) formerly landed in great quantities at Dover. A northeast wind in May makes the shotver men a prey. Shotver men were mackerel fishermen using shot-nets at Folkestone and Dover; it was said a northeast wind was good, enabling them to catch the shoals of mackerel. The Isle of Thanet (still referred to as an isle though for centuries it has been joined to the Kent mainland) was renowned as a place of low rainfall in the past as in the saying When England wrings the island sings.

A couple who had been married in Finglesham church were living as man and wife but were not married, owing to the fact that there is no church at Finglesham (near Deal), only a chalk quarry, where couples went for casual amours. Born down Ryarsh sandpit marked someone as illegitimate. Someone planning to do something foolish was said to be setting up shop on Goodwin Sands, rural wit concerning the risky nature of such a venture and referring to the unstable shifting sands off the Deal shore of Kent.

It is possible that some of the sarcastic sayings were created by rhymesters elsewhere, for there was much rivalry between villages, and it was traditional to taunt inhabitants of other places and to warn visitors going there of what to expect. Some of the sayings, however, had a grain of truth in them. Sutton for mutton, Kirby for beef, South Darent for gingerbread, and Dartford for a thief most likely refers to Dartford Fair where the unsuspecting became victims of pickpockets. He that rideth into the Hundred of Hoo besides pilfering seamen shall find dirt enow. Hoo Hundred is a peninsular between the river Thames and river Medway and in the past was notorious for thieves and deserting seamen from the ships at Upnor, Chatham, etc. It was also a marshy, foggy area, and the roads were thus muddy. Other examples are Proud Wingham, Wicked Ash, and Lazy (Lousy) Sandwich; Surly Ashford, Proud Wye, and Lousy Kennington hardby; He that will not live long let him dwell at Murston, Teynham, or Tong (formerly low-lying areas in North Kent); Kill’em, Cart ‘em and Bury ‘em, a saying referring to Chilham, Chartham, and Canterbury. Other oddities are Go to Monks Horton where pigs play on the organ. Being a rural area perhaps at some time in the past pigs got into or were even housed in the church, so the saying arose. Hucking glass bridges where rats run on tiptoe supposedly refers to the number of ice-covered puddles that formed on some of the local roads in winter months. I am totally defeated by the origin of You’ve got no calves like the Pluckley girls and have to wear straight stockings.

The second group concerns sayings with common sense behind them being spoken, while others seem to have less reason for being used. When a sheep baas it loses a bite which may mean that people who talk too much or fail to concentrate on the task at hand may miss an opportunity. The condition of soil is indicated by Where clads [‘clods or lumps of earth’] prevail the turnips fail. Anything that was satisfactory was Near enough for hog shearing. The lengthy time its seed takes to germinate was referred to in Parsley goes nine times to the Devil before it appears, now used elsewhere.

Local to the Tunbridge Wells area is It won’t happen till the moon comes down in Calverley Road, meaning something that is virtually impossible. Also local, to West Malling, is that when standing in the center of the village If you can hear a train it’s going to rain. Still in use is Out Will’s Mother’s Way, meaning ‘somewhere else, in the distance, on the horizon’: “It’s coming up black for a thunderstorm and looks as if it’s already raining Out Will’s Mother’s Way.” Who Will’s Mother was is unknown, but there are several similar expressions, with word variations, used in other English counties. In Gloucestershire the expression is It’s dark over Our Bill’s Mum’s Mind.

Christmas and a little before, the apple goes and not the core; Christmas and a little later, the apple goes and the core comes after. This means that before Christmas apples were plentiful and so only the flesh pulp and not the core was eaten. After Christmas when apples were scarce the consumer was glad to eat the entire apple, core included. Half the wood stack and half the hay and half the winter has passed away is self-explanatory. A curious saying is When the sage blooms there will be mischief and misfortune, heard in the area of Appledore, on the Romney marsh. Unless allowed to do so sage does not often bloom because household requirements for sage keep the shoots cut short. Why sage should be thus accredited and how it originated is unknown, but there was one anecdote about an old man who saw that the sage in his garden had flowered and told his daughter to cut them off, but before she did so he met with an accident and was killed.

The third group, concerning human activity, is the most numerous. To be in a state of jitters and nervous was to be all in a tremor and a trot. To feel exasperated was to feel like going up to Heaven in a trug basket. To feel irate and annoyed was to feel like jumping up in the air and hanging by nothing. A similar saying is Enough to make anyone jump into the middle of next week. A variant of the latter had a different meaning: when someone is suddenly startled and jumps with fright it was said It was enough to make me jump into the middle of next week. A pocket in which something cannot be found was A pocketfull of dead hopes, which also described a hopeless desire or task. Road or shape was used in conversation to mean that something or someone would arrive by one means or another, somehow, eventually—“I suppose he’ll get here by some road or shape.” Anyone who was looking for something unsuccessfully was said to be groping about like a blind hen looking for a worm in a hedge. Another curiosity I heard from an old man when referring to a young child who was just toying with its dinner: He wants that as much as a toad wants a side pocket. Lastly, A whistling woman and a crowing hen Are neither good for God or men, for which a possible explanation is that a woman who whistles acts like a man and is unfeminine, making it seem likely that she would dominate her husband.

OBITER DICTA

Tom Treasure, M.D., St. George’s Hospital, London

Just as we run from one euphemism to another to replace the fifteenth-century privy [“Thunderboxes and Chuggies,” by Daniel Balado-Lopez, XIX, 4,7], so we put layer upon layer of adjectives as the “pursuit of excellence” becomes the norm.

According to a working document in our College, we are encouraged to use the following gradings in the assessment of trainees:

(a) Excellent The trainee is performing at a very high standard in clinical work and in research, and gets on well with colleagues, patients and ward staff.

(b) Very good This covers most trainees, particularly in their early years of training. As skills improve it may be possible later on in training to grade them as excellent.

(c) Good This means average. The trainer would be expected to counsel the trainee and see if help is needed.

(d) Weak This means that the trainee is definitely in need of help. It is questionable whether a trainee given this grading in the first or second year of higher training should be allowed to continue.

Note that ‘Good’ is the third grade of four. To help us, the designer of the grading system reminds us that good means ‘average’! In fact, we already know from common usage that average has come to mean ‘poor’ or ‘substandard.’ So good means ‘below par’ (to find another paraphrase), which a third grade out of four seems to imply.

In common usage it is unpalatable to be told that one is “average,” let alone “below average,” yet half of any group under consideration must be “below average” by definition. A more usable definition of average performance might include the 50 per cent between those ranking above 75 per cent and the lowest ranking 25 per cent. Statistically, that is called the interquartile range and is a convenient way of summarizing the characteristics or dimensions of average members of a group. Another way, used in science, is to take the central two thirds (a “standard deviation” above and below the mean), which includes the majority and the most representative of the sample population. Need there be any shame in being amongst them? But from the scale given above we read that the term covering “most trainees” (having already designated the top set excellent) is very good, so now the average can expect to be called very good.

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Mad maniac, not into pollution. (13)

10. Take the wrong route, and finish up in this space. (5)

11. Be vulgar and above the line with this. (9)

12. Guy who takes the blame in Autumn. (4)

13. Play for time in the market place. (5)

14. Type of spoon without a head can do it. (4)

17. Spirit, drunk by David after killing Goliath perhaps?! (3, 5)

18. Argue after the sheep’s return, get stuffed, and make a meal of it. (6)

20. Funny cat I hear causing a disruptive commotion. (6)

22. Lead found precisely in the past. (8)

25. Being taken to this can mean trouble. (4)

26. A repair could put it right. (5)

27. Blood curdling fool. (4)

30. Can you get credit on the current nobleman? (2,7)

31. Be right with this and you’re all square. (5)

32. You can get this by sticking together, or from a gaunt oil giant. (13)

Down

2. Get the bunting out, it’s not oral. (7)

3. Thanks to the Royal Navy for giving us a mountain pool. (4)

4. Don’t say no to money, without a note it’s boring. (8)

5. There’s a doctor in the river, he’s so agile. (6)

6. I hear the sea bird can get round a corner. (4)

7. Funnily enough, it’s the tenth, not the eighth, and not a fraction. (7)

8. Trick the fruit and turn the allotted amount, for an arrangement of parts. (13)

9. Hardy, and often found under this. (9, 4)

15. Be suspect if you’re under this. (5)

16. Esquire turns up in the laurel tree, he’s crackers. (5)

19. Soft thin weight, suitable for whales. (8)

21. There are ants running around in a beaker, like a wild horse. (7)

23. Lively movement, a lively roll for example. (7)

24. The most important loses an equal quantity. (6)

28. Mersin is inside, nicely. (4)

29. Can go after, or before the horse. (4)

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