VOL XX, No 3 [Winter 1994]

Cynical Definitions and Funny Phrasebooks

John Kahn, London

In a previous article, “Lexicographic Quirks and Whimsy” [XIX, 2, 9], I glanced briefly at one tangential topic, the Cynical Definition and hinted very vaguely at another, the Foreign Phrasebook. Both of them merit a more thorough airing. First, the Cynical Definition.

Dr. Johnson could hardly have been the first to perfect the CD (Cynical Definition, sometimes Curmudgeonly Definition), and he was in fact very sparing in the use of it in his dictionary of 1755; but he did bring it into some kind of prominence. Here once again, as a reminder, are two of the best-known of his CDs:

patron… One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.

oats… A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

So familiar has this kind of joke become that one accepts it almost as a miniature literary genre. Flaubert in his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas could be sure of a proper reader-response when defining actress as “the ruin of young men of good family,” and even a serious modern feminist work, A Feminist Dictionary, by Cheris Kramarae and Paula A. Treichler (Pandora Press, 1985), can venture the occasional CD without risking a charge of trivialization, as when defining dinner as “an activity which precedes washing the dishes,” and quarantine as “a popular remedy for the disease of feminism.”

Perhaps the very structure of a dictionary definition lends itself to cynicism. In its terse, almost epigrammatic, capturing of a complete item of knowledge, it has a thumping decisiveness that is the cynic’s stock-in-trade—not open to qualification or negotiation, not interested in seeing the other side or opening out the discussion.

As a form of humor, the deliberate CD has never struck me as being of the highest, thigh-slapping quality. When one encounters H.L. Mencken’s “definition” of self-respect as “the secure feeling that no-one, as yet, is suspicious,” does one find it funny or just sententious (after all, it can be found in a 1916 book of his entitled Sententiae); when Burt Bacharach says “A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the word you first thought of” (in a work called Facetiae perhaps?), does one grin or grimace?

At all events, such definitions have a tendency to accumulate into a critical mass demanding publication in newspaper or magazine columns and eventually in book form. The columns, to start with: here are examples from two British publications. First, from one of Miles Kington’s “Moreover” columns from The Times (London) in 1981:

confrontation: That dramatic stage in a series of negotiations where both sides refuse to meet the other.

taboo: A subject or topic, like cancer or death, that is so sensitive that people talk about it the whole time.

Then, from the British periodical The Oldie, Mike Barfield’s column “Dictionary for our time”:

carbonation Process that renders liquids drinkable to the young.

churchyard A place where teenagers can smoke undisturbed.

credit Debt.

It was a series of such columns, beginning over a century ago, that eventually led to the best-known, and possibly the best, of the books: Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary (first edition published in 1906). His definition of the word cynic itself strikes a typical note: ‘a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.’ This kind of thing quickly palls when browsed en masse, of course:

caviler n. a critic of our own work bore n. a person who talks when you wish him to listen

self-evident adj. evident to one’s self [sic] and to nobody else.

But his book is saved by an occasional masterstroke that takes one’s breath away—

cur n. the lowest rank in the hierarchy of dogs

liberty n. one of imagination’s most precious possessions

—and an occasional touch of poetry:

courtship n. the timid sipping of two thirsty souls from a goblet which both can easily drain but neither replenish.

Many more such books have followed. The 1980s alone spawned at least three of them in Britain. One is lamentably corny, Beelzebub’s Beastly Barbs, by “Dick Diabolus” (Diabolus Press, 1982). Here is a duly insipid taste:

claustrophobia n. The horror of chambers

barrister n. One you pay to defend you in court, but who invariably acts for the prosecution at your trial.

A second, The Wit’s Dictionary by Colin Bowles (Angus and Robertson, 1984), is partly eclectic (quite good), partly original (quite hopeless). Here are some typically deplorable examples of the original material:

subversive… rocking the boat yourself and telling everyone it’s a storm

tooth fairy a gay dentist

chimpanzee God’s first draft of a politician

The third is pretty good—The Cynic’s Dictionary, by Russell Ash (Corgi, 1983-4). It is divided into thematic sections: “Books,” “Sex,” and so on. Here are extracts from two chapters, to give you a feel of the book. First, from “Advertising”:

Compact Small

Economy size Small

Gentle; mild Dilute; ineffective

Medium size Small

Save! Spend!

Then, from the “Lonely Hearts” chapter:

Bored Boring

Committed Possessive

Companionship Easy lay

Quite attractive Quite revolting

Writer Unpublished writer

Youthful Old, but infantile

An old trick, true enough, but all still fresh.

Finally, to restore the transatlantic balance, here are some examples from another American volume, Dictionary for the Disenchanted, by Bernard Rosenberg (Henry Regnery, 1972). The book lobs material exuberantly though indiscriminately into the general target area of 1970s American life and politics. The result is a mix of damp squibs, civilian casualties, holed holy cows, and admirable direct hits. Here are some examples, to be classified as you think fit:

Credibility Gap The growing suspicion that once in a while the Administration may not be lying.

Foreign Aid Popularly defined as taxing poor people in rich countries for the benefit of rich people in poor countries.

Mainliner 1. Formerly, a Philadelphia gentleman. 2. Now, anyone’s son or daughter.

Man A biodegradable but nonrecyclable animal blessed with opposable thumbs capable of grasping at straws.

Pessimist Same as optimist, but better informed.

Winding Down… Expanding, enlarging, extending, and otherwise cleverly ending an interminable war.

Wisdom The recognition that things are worse than they were but better than they are going to be.

To turn now to the subject of the Funny Phrasebook (or FP).

Apocryphal though it may be, the statement “My postilion has been struck by lightning” is far from untypical for the left-hand-side (mother-tongue) material in phrasebooks. Here are some cue-sentences from the “Robertson Method” Spanish phrasebook, reprinted as recently as 1971 (in Spain):

The plane is going down. We are arriving.

I advise you to move your jaw, as if you were chewing, so as to avoid trouble with your ear drum, and to button your life belt.

We have already landed.

This material does not shrink. It has been previously damped.

I’ll take these four.

I want a rather typical shirt, as a souvenir.

Give me half a dozen vests, too, please.

Give me some bananas, but not too ripe.

I want firm ones, to take with me on a journey.

These medlars are very sour?

The water melon looks refreshing.

What of the right-hand-side (target-language) material in phrasebooks? Monty Python’s misleading phrasebook for Hungarians—when buying a box of matches, for instance, say the words “My hovercraft is full of eels,” and when asking directions to the railway station, say “Please fondle my buttocks” —is unlikely to have a real-life counterpart (unless Jimmy Carter’s Polish interpreter has been compiling a Polish one). But the real, non-Pythonic world has occasionally come up with at least a pale imitation. Time magazine reported such a one in the early 1980s, the official Russian-English phrasebook for Soviet visitors to the U.S. Here are some of the scintillating English responses and requests that its Russian-speaking readers were encouraged to make.

On arriving in the capitalist West, if anyone should ask you how you enjoyed your flight, you should say: “Flying in the TU-114, I felt myself excellently.”

To the waiter taking your order in a restaurant, you might say typically: “Please give me curds, sower cream, fried chicks, pulled bread and one jelly fish.”

If taken ill, explain to the doctor that you are suffering, as the case may be, from “a poisoning, a noseache, an eye-pain or quinsy.”

At the clothes store, you might ask for “a ladies' worsted-nylon swimming pants.”

And among the instructions you might wish to give at the beauty salon are these: “Make me a hairdress… sprinkle my head… I want my hair frizzled.”

About 35 years earlier, an Italian-English phrasebook published in Florence apparently came to the attention of W.H. Auden. It must have been compiled, fairly hastily, to aid communication between Italian civilians and the newly arrived American and British troops. One particular entry in the FP so impressed Auden, it seems, that he was moved to bring it to the attention of a wider public:

Posso presentare il conte. Meet the cunt.

Perhaps it is simply that republican feeling was running high in Italy in 1945, in the wake of the liberation.

Just as Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary is the touchstone for all books of CDs, so the exemplar for all FPs is the 19th-century Portuguese-English phrasebook compiled by “Pedro Carolino” (pen-name of one José da Fonseca) and widely reprinted under the title English as She is Spoke. It is too well-known (see VERBATIM, VII, 4, 1) to merit much discussion here. Just a brief extract or two, as a reminder of its flavor:

The Walk

…It seems to me that the corn does push alredy.

You hear the bird’s gurgling?

Which pleasure! which charm!

The field has by me a thousand charms.

Are you hunter? will you go to the hunting in one day this week?

Willingly; I have not a most pleasure in the world.

From the house-keeping

I don’t know more what I won’t with they servants.

I tell the same, it is not more some good servants. Any one take care to sweep neither to make fire at what I may be up.

For me, I sweep usually my room my self. It all right; the means to be served well is to serve himself.

How the times are changed! Anciently I had some servants who were divine my thought. The duty was done at the instant…

To conclude with a CD of my own:

sports commentator A broadcaster who has studied English at the feet of Pedro Carolino.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“They were wheeling away the stretcher to where a cab was coming to take her away from the stadium. The TV lights were still in Joyner-Kersee’s face, the face that had been buried in the track less than an hour before. She kept smiling at the cameras and sat there, standing tall.” [From an article by Phil Hersh, datelined Tokyo, in the Chicago Tribune, n.d. Submitted by George R. Clowes, Flossmoor, Illinois.]

Unmasking the Metaphor

Larry Tritten, San Francisco

Research conducted last year at the Institute of Metaphoric Analysis, Guesswork, and Exploration (IMAGE) in Sandra Linda, California, has shed new light on a matter that has concerned scholars of language and the prolix ever since man first began to laugh at things he said. Dr. William “Bill” Gomeral, a professor of Silly Languages, working on a grant provided by NAT (National Association of Talkers), tracked the fabled metaphor to its phenomenological lair, thereby revealing its conceptive source.

Research in this area has been sparse. In 1919 two Oxford dons (Donald Hunter and Donald Fisher) spent several weeks intensively investigating the metaphor, but without reaching any conclusion that could be expressed in precise literal thought or writing. There is also a record of a Wilkes Nettleton, a Philadelphia lexicographer, publishing a small tract in 1854 in which he claimed credit for original insight into the psychological nomenclature of the metaphor; unfortunately, this was written in the form of a rebus and since Nettleton was such a poor artist (a friend wrote that “his stork was scarcely distinguishable from a gate-leg table”) nobody could figure it out.

As common as the metaphor has been to human speech and writing, we have known very little about what makes it tick. The simile, on the other hand, as Dr. Holland Dill demonstrated in his polygraph, Service With a Simile (Boarding House, 1951), and its less coherent sequel, A Myth of an Inch Is As Good As Simile (Onan & Sons, 1953), is clearly the product of a unique blend of slapstick impulse and sublimated lunacy. The nature of the metaphor has been more elusive.

In order to appreciate Gomeral’s findings, one must be familiar with his basic ideas. To begin with, he distinguishes between natural and unnatural metaphors. Natural metaphors are “those metaphors created in the roseate heat of joyous cerebration,” and unnatural metaphors are those created when one has the blues. He also defined urban and rural metaphors, this as a result of “blazing a path through a wilderness of rudimentary perception to a metropolis of high-rise conception.” An urban metaphor is quite apparent, e.g., “the neon jungle,” “the Big Apple,” etc. And so is a rural metaphor, e.g., “the Corn Belt,” “pig-headed,” etc.

By isolating natural and unnatural and urban and rural metaphors, Gomeral was able to create a working model of the naked image—just as Bohr’s atom provided a working model in physics (though originally Bohr mistakenly included the crouton next to the proton and neutron). With this model, Gomeral began to extrapolate boldly, wearing for luck a parti-colored thinking cap his mother had made for him. During an intraview with himself (i.e., soliloquy) induced by hours of reading e.e. cummings (i.e., E.E. Cummings), he came to the conclusion that “metaphors are the cinammon of the cerebrum’s spice box.” That Gomeral was so impressed by the quality of his own thought that he started wearing a cape and calling himself Captain Perception is neither here nor there. What is here, as well as there, is the fact that a circumlocutory course of extrapolation led him to the creation of the super-metaphor, which he called the megaphor. The first of these (“a prostitute with a heart of fool’s gold”) was, admittedly ridiculed by many scholars who consider literacy indispensable to self-expression—and the megaphor remains as vague as a fleeting glimpse of a big-footed jackrabbit; but as a nexus in Gomeral’s causal link of insights the megaphor was a vital concept. “I never metaphor I didn’t like,” Gomeral said in a weak moment, elucidating the influence of the megaphor, and promptly had his subscription to Writer’s Digest canceled by the magazine’s editor.

Like all pioneers of perception, however, he persisted in perceiving and soon began to forge his way toward illumination. He locked himself up in his libraratory,* surrounded himself with books of poetry and hard-boiled private-eye novels, and studied metaphors for days on end as well as nights upended. “The first thing I realized,” Gomeral wrote, “was that metaphors are something akin to bluebirds in the aviary of language. Given that, it followed that a mixed metaphor was a sort of predator, a vulture of the poetic ethos. Yeah!”

Gomeral made a list of several hundred metaphors from classical and modern literature, studied them, and finally came to the conclusion that most people think that other people look like birds and dogs. Then, working from the premise that every metaphor is somehow connected with the collective unconscious, he taped hundreds of hours of cocktail- party conversation. He played the tapes over repeatedly, picking out metaphors and making two separate lists—of those he had heard before and of those he considered original. The latter he studied exhaustively, singing them, pronouncing them alout until he was “blue in the voice and could almost taste the syllables,” even playing them backwards on the tape recorder. It was during this period that he named a new daughter Candy, and during this period, too, that he enlisted the assistance of three fledgling linguists from the University of Florida—Lupe Del Rio, Novella Taormina, and Minerva Hymettus (whom he nicknamed, respectively, The Satin Latin, The Vermilion Sicilian, and the Chic Greek). With the help of this trio, Gomeral made his breakthrough. But, unhappily, it was also at this juncture that his grant expired and words failed him. For days Gomeral remained speechless. When he did speak again, it was to utter his now famous, “E=MC 2 ” (i.e., Expression equals Metaphors times the speed of Conversation squared). Months earlier he had errantly hypothesized that Elucidation equals a Master of Ceremonies doubled—but nothing had come of the theorem. Now, in little more than a fell swoop, he had found the heart of the mystery.

Gomeral’s findings are just now beginning to affect academic thought (east of the Mississippi), but it is expected that after next Spring they will have made their way as far west as Deadwood. Gomeral, sadly, recently expired after a fall from a library ladder while reaching for a copy of Strunk and White’s What’s in a Name? His last words, spoken with a kind of intoxicated fervor according to witnesses who were looking for his wallet at the time, were, “Purple ain’t nothing but blue with a doctor’s degree!” The community of arts and science will miss Gomeral. His kind are well done.

This word was refused creditability as a bona fide neologism by Dr. Heathcote Tarsus, Professor of New Wave Linguistics at the Cincinnati School of Neotopical Jargon.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“…the underground parking garage will probably never see the light of day.” [From University of Toronto Magazine, Summer 1990. Submitted by Gordon B. Thompson, Etobicoke, Ontario.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“He could not shake the dread feeling that he and all the others who had been involved in those projects were sitting on a bomb that, sooner or later, would explode in their faces,” [From The Acting President, by Bob Schieffer and Gary Paul Gates, E.P. Dutton, p. 273. Submitted by Barbara R. DuBois, Socorro, New Mexico.]

Beyond Blue Chips, Bulls and Bears

Nigel J. Ross, Milan

A recent issue of The Economist carried an article about European currencies entitled “Anchor Away?” The first paragraph ran as follows:

Europe’s currency markets are awash with nautical metaphors. Earlier this year it looked as if the French franc would sink in another round of speculation against members of Europe’s exchange-rate mechanism (ERM). Rather than joining earlier castaways such as the pound and the lira, the franc clung to the wreck. So successfully, in fact, that following the Bank of France’s cut in interest rates on June 21st, politicians have begun to talk of the franc as the new anchor of the ERM. Given the performance of the D-mark, Europe’s existing mooring, such talk is premature. [June 26th 1993]

The currency markets may have suddenly become full of nautical metaphors, but the language of economists, financiers, bankers, business people, and financial journalists has been characterized by a variety of imagery for a long time. The blue chips, bulls, and bears of the stock exchange are the classic examples, though perhaps the phenomenon only really becomes apparent to insiders when there is a spate of similar metaphors. But let us take our cue from The Economist’s sudden realization and look a little closer at some other areas of figurative language used in economics and finance.

One of the largest categories of metaphors that we find in written and spoken economic language must surely be the array of images relating to transport. This vast category can be subdivided into sea, land, and air transport. Starting with the sea, takeover bids are launched, markets can be buoyant, a company can be floated, profit levels can sink or dive, a firm can navigate through difficult waters or be submerged by debt, and so on. As The Economist rightly says, the language is “awash with nautical metaphors.” Land-based transport is perhaps not such a fertile breeding ground for figurative language. Nevertheless, we find interest rates free-wheeling, share prices making a U-turn, companies moving into the fast lane or into top gear, expansion plans being given the green light, to give but a few examples. Air transport, on the other hand, seems to be a much richer source of images. An article in Time tells us that the dollar is flying high, cruising for a fall, sailing to a round of records, breaking the (sound) barrier, surging, and likely to make a long-awaited descent, all in one short paragraph! (“Coping with the Superdollar,” Time, March 9, 1987). When comparisons with aircraft are not used, ideas relating to space travel may be found, such as launch pad, countdown, blasting off, soaring, rocketing, higher orbits, re-entering, plummeting, etc.

A second large category, closely related to transport, is that of children’s playgrounds and fun fairs. Not only is the actual equipment often referred to—swings, chutes, see-saws, helter-skelters, and big dippers, for example—but the associated movements are also very commonly mentioned: slide, dip, spiral, upswing, downswing, to-and-fro, downslide, and see-saw effect.

Movement is the main key to these two categories. Economists, financial experts, and investors constantly keep their eyes on the fluctuations of profits, losses, turnovers, currencies, and share prices, which tend to make the same movements (up, down, ahead, backwards) as means of transport and children on playground equipment. Notice, however, that road vehicles cannot move up or down vertically, and this perhaps explains why they are not quite so frequent in metaphors (similarly there are few references to roundabouts). A rather supercilious reason that has been put forward for these and other groups of images is that they reflect the lifestyles of the majority of successful economists and business people— frequent fliers, boat owners, the sporting type, married with young children.

Although road vehicles cannot go up or down vertically—at least not under their own steam— they can go up inclines and down declines. Hills, mountains, and the landscape provide another rich source of imagery. We come across verbs such as climb, rise, mount, descend, fall, slither, and so on. Many of these verbs also refer to people, who can also move up an down by jumping, leaping, hurdling, dropping, tumbling, etc. When economic trends are represented in diagrammatic form, the resulting graph can often be reminiscent of a mountainous landscape, and we therefore find a series of metaphors relating to peaks, summits, precipices, plateaus, troughs, heights, and slopes (not forgetting the favorites, upslopes and downslopes). Are economists regular skiers, too?

The business world is, of course, a very competitive environment, and there is a huge category of metaphors pertaining to fighting. A large part of the figurative language of competition used in economy relates more specifically to war and battles. A company may mount an attack on the market share of another company, making incursions or inroads into an opponent’s camp. The victim may attempt to rebuff the attack, or might withdraw or retreat from the onslaught. In the stock market there are predators and raiders, but speculative aggression may be warded off—the list is again almost endless. Some examples of interesting slang imagery relating to fighting as well as other fields are to be found in Kathleen Odean’s stimulating essay “Bear Hugs and Bo Dereks on Wall Street” (in Ricks, Christopher & Michaels, Leonard, editors, The State of the Language, University of California Press, Berkeley, & Faber and Faber, London, 1990).

Fighting does not always imply full-scale wars, however, and there is plenty of fighting imagery that relates more directly to personal combat and even to some of the more violent sports such as boxing and wrestling. A country’s economy may be reeling from the blows inflicted by inflation, which hits many companies and may be said to have a stranglehold over government economic policy.

The effects of fighting generally include nervousness before and injuries after. It should come as no surprise, therefore, to find that states of health and well-being form our last two major categories. Economic nervousness is often referred as a state of unease, tension, or a case of the jitters, particularly in relation to share prices or exchange rates. Metaphorical states of health that are found in the economic world include ailing companies, a healthy economy, weak demand, swollen borrowings, a bout of inflation, an economy that is suffering from a relapse or making a recovery, and so on.

These are just some of the main areas that supply the figurative language for economic and financial language. Other secondary categories of relative importance include the weather and natural disasters, agriculture and growth, circus acts, etc. The range and more especially the frequency of metaphors in this sectorial variety of English is probably greater than in any other field.

Why does economy and finance use so much imagery? Leaving aside spurious reasons concerning life styles, the answer probably lies in the rather arid, repetitive nature of the subject matter. Economics is a rather abstract science, and concrete imagery can help to bring it down to earth, adding a touch of color. Likewise, the financial world concerns itself continuously with prices, results, and rates constantly going up and down, so much so that it would become linguistically boring if variety were not added through imagery.

Figurative language has been used widely in economy and finance for at least a couple of centuries. Proof of this can be found in the many metaphors that were so over-used in the past that their original metaphorical meaning has been lost, leaving us with “dead” metaphors. Boom is an eloquent example—hardly anyone nowadays would think of a loud explosion when an economist contrasts an economic boom and a slump. Other common “dead” economic metaphors include stocks, turnover, crash, parent company, and bond. But to most people the best known are the classic examples, blue chips, bulls, and bears, which are simply the tips of a huge figurative iceberg.

OBITER DICTA: Foreign Accents

Robert M. Glick, Upper Montclair, New Jersey

I have managed to master the French language sufficiently to feel very much at home in France. My accent, I am told, is excellent. I adapt well to local variations: in Normandy, accent and vocabulary shift slightly from what I use in Paris. The switch from quatre-vingt dix-sept to nonante-sept in Belgium is automatic. I live the life of a native speaker, and no one questions me.

But, oh, the foreigner I feel when I set foot in an English-speaking country other than the US! Never do I attempt a British accent. It seems to be totally unnatural, affected, and obviously phony, although trucks become lorries and elevators lifts with almost no effort. Having family in Australia, I have begun to master quite a bit of the new vocabulary; but my cousins are recent arrivals from South Africa, and the differences between South African and Australian English can be striking. With my American English thrown in, conversations occasionally become almost as difficult as they are in a foreign language! I exaggerate, of course, but still—we sometimes wonder if we’ve got our jumpers and jerseys and sweaters straight.

In Latin American I never did manage all the vocabulary distinctions in Spanish as I crossed borders: I needed to be reminded constantly that what was perfectly acceptable in Chile could not be said in Peru. My occasional obscenity was forgiven, as it had come from a foreigner.

I have picked up much language and language-related information in my travels over the years, yet I still imagine myself unable to confront the ultimate challenge: the local version of “Wheel of Fortune,” a TV game show I stomach with difficulty. Imagining how it might be played in difficulty countries (where it does, in fact, exist) is intriguing.

In the Czech Republic we might hear:

“I’d like to buy a vowel, please.”

“Sorry, there are no vowels.”

Or in France:

“May I buy an accent aigu?”

Think of the fascination of such a game in the Hawaiian version:

“Is there a K?”

“Yes, there are seventeen Ks.”

“I’d like to buy a U.”

“There are 23 Us.”

But then what else would one expect from a language that boasts names like Kalanianole, a language of only twelve letters, five vowels and seven consonants (h, k, l, m, n, p, w) and where O’ahu looks as if it belongs in Ireland and MacAdamia nuts might seem to be used for paving the roads in Scotland.

I shall try to assimilate all I can as I come into contact with new languages and dialects, though my limited knowledge of Tunisian Arabic does not help me at all in Egypt, and German friends continue to chuckle at my Viennese expressions. (Wait till I hit Bavaria!) I have found that any attempt to communicate in the language of a country is greatly appreciated and always fun, even if, on occasion, the laughter may be directed at you.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Volunteers must take 48 hours of sexual assault training.” [From the San Bernardino Sun, 26 September 1992. Submitted by J.B. Lawrence, Van Nuys.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Medical Consultant… in a growing company which manages medical malpractice.” [From an employment ad of Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions, Inc., in the Boston Globe, 21 June 1992. Submitted by Adam G.N. Moore, Squantum, Massachusetts.]

EPISTOLA {John Brunner}

Permit me to add to Mary Tius' fascinating list of “wandering words” [“Vestiges,” XX, 1], one that has long impressed me: p-t-. Consider Provençal pissaladière, Italian pizza, Greek pit(t)a, Turkish pide, and Hindi chapatti. Once at a conference in Moscow I mentioned this to an Armenian (the Armenians boast of having the oldest surviving language), who told me the same root occurs in the Armenian for ‘stew.’ I can’t help wondering whether it’s truly ancient and originally meant just ‘food’…

[John Brunner, London]

VERBUM SAP: My Tainted Ain’t

Robertson Cochrane, Toronto

That was a short and shirty battle of words— and wordsmiths—a few months ago, was it not? In case you missed it, it was an unusual, quite public, and inevitably indecisive skirmish between Merriam-Webster Inc., the doughty doyen of U.S. dictionary publishers, and Houghton-Mifflin Co., the parvenu producer of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. The bone of contention was, of all things, that old symbol of solecism, ain’t.

Doyens do not traditionally go looking for trouble, and, true to form in this instance, it was the younger wordmonger who picked the fight. And while ain’t was the ostensible casus belli, the affair was really an unseemly flare-up of the long-standing cold war between the prescriptivists and the descriptivists. I have no intention of re-hashing here the pros and cons of the pre-and de-sides of the-scriptivist squabble, but the brief controversy did raise some interesting side issues. The flash-point was a guerrilla press release, issued by Houghton-Mifflin, in which it virtually accused the venerable vocabularians at Merriam-Webster of condoning the indiscriminate use of ain’t. This was roughly the lexicographical industry equivalent of Pepsi-Cola claiming Coke contains carcinogens.

American Heritage pointed out that its own new (third) college edition terms the use of ain’t “nonstandard,” the most damning label in its pharmacopoeia. It added that the 10th edition of the all-time best-seller Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary “disagrees, suggesting ain’t is O.K.” Leaving aside the tricky question of how the Webster’s, published in May, could “disagree” with the American Heritage, not yet published at the time of the kerfuffle, let us examine just how licentious the Merriam Webster usage note is.

“Although widely disapproved as nonstandard and more common in the habitual speech of the less educated, ain’t … is flourishing in American English,” it says before listing 12 fairly current examples of its use. This strikes me as something short of downright aiding and abetting.

The American Heritage College Dictionary, not content with slapping a skull-and-crossbones sticker on ain’t, adds the stunningly brash declaration that the word “has by now acquired such a stigma that it is beyond any possibility of rehabilitation.” Well, it ain’t necessarily so, and I adduce the curious case of the word occupy as evidence that lexicographers should never say dead.

This unremarkable verb and its derivatives have a most extraordinary history. It originally meant to seize or take possession of something forcibly, a sense that survives in military contexts and some university presidents' offices. Other, weaker, senses developed, covering ownership of a plot of land, a job, and having temporary squatter’s rights to an airplane privy. Some time before the middle of the 15th century, somebody used occupy as a synonym for copulate. This early perversion might have been a soldier’s euphemism for rape, since that atrocity was a normal concomitant of any military occupation. The sexual connotation caught on, and by the end of the 16th century, occupy was rarely used in polite company without raising eyebrows or causing sniggers or blushes. The degradation was so pronounced that Shakespeare remarked on it through the voice of Doll Tearsheet. “A Captain!” she exclaims scornfully about Pistol’s ill-gotten new rank, “God’s light, these villains will make the word as odious as the word occupy; which was an excellent good word before it was ill-sorted.”

It was so ill-sorted that it became almost extinct. In a footnote to its entry for occupy, OED2e says the disuse of the word in the 17th and most of the 18th centuries is “notable.” Against 194 quotations using it in the 16th century, OED has only eight for the 17th (outside of the 1611 Bible), and only 10 for the 18th, all of them in the last 30 years. It is used only twice by Shakespeare, and not at all by Milton, Pope, or Gray.

So for more than a century and a half occupy was a victim of what might be called coyness interruptus. In our time, intercourse is under a similar cloud, requiring a modifier such as “social” in order to avoid a carnal connotation. But occupy’s eclipse was all but total, and its return to respectability may be the greatest comeback in English word history. What is more, the vulgar sense has vanished, quite reversing the historical tendency in which pejoration prevails.

Houghton-Mifflin’s sabre-rattling may have been little more than an unseemly publicity stunt. And it worked. After all, Merriam Webster spent a hefty $2.5 million to promote the 10th edition, while Houghton-Mifflin enjoyed widespread media coverage with just the stroke of a press release. But then, Webster’s shared that exposure.

The argument remains that the American Heritage banishment of ain’t goes beyond prescriptivism into downright dismissivism. Is it possible that this handy, happy-go-lucky word, so much a part of the American heritage, might be banned entirely from future editions of the American Heritage? The editors could do worse than consider the wisdom of that eminent philosopher/philologist Lawrence Peter (Yogi) Berra, who said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” And as some other sage grammatically agreed, is it not the truth!

ETYMOLOGICA OBSCURA: The Evolution of boggart

John Timson, Manchester

In Cornwall there were pixies, in Scotland brownies, and in Ireland leprechauns, all originally, perhaps, the local pagan spirits of earth and air, of the woods and waters. In the north of England they were called boggarts, a name said to come from the Anglo-Saxon bar-gheist, meaning ‘gate-ghost.’ An alternative derivation is from bogle or boggle, a name for a goblin which may also have given rise to the later bogey. Bogle may in turn derive from bug which, before it had insect, bacterial, or electronic eavesdropping associations, meant ‘ghost,’ as did the Welsh bwg.

In many of the north of England boggart legends they were simply mischievous spirits which amused themselves by playing childish pranks such as rattling chains or making sudden appearances. Over time, however, some boggarts becames less pleasant as the word came to be applied to the haunting spirits of murdered people or the harbingers of a death in the family. The distinction between a local, naughty but largely tolerated spirit and an unquiet, feared ghost became blurred.

In some places children were frightened away from dangerous ponds by being told that in them lived a water-boggart, Jenny Green-teeth, whose presence beneath the water was shown by the common duckweed (Lemna minor) floating on the surface. In Warwickshire this led to the word boggart being used as a local name for the duckweed.

Local names for dog’s mercury (Mercurialis perennis) in Yorkshire were boggart-flower and boggartposy. Why this plant should have been associated with boggarts is not clear. A rather far-fetched explanation is that the plant is named after the Roman god Mercury, who was later sometimes identified with spirits such as Robin Goodfellow and Shakespeare’s Puck and hence with a kind of boggart. Perhaps a more likely explanation is to be found in the fact that the plant is highly poisonous: it is called adder’s meat in Hertfordshire. Boggarts in Yorkshire may have been suspected of using it in their evil doings.

Today boggarts seem to be extinct even in Lancashire, where at one time there was hardly an old house or hall without its resident boggart. Their disappearance was locally ascribed to the coming of the Industrial Revolution, it being believed that boggarts could not endure the noise of the shuttles in the mills and steam engines on the railways. So now the word, almost extinct, is remembered here and there in place names like Boggart Hole Clough, at Blackley, Manchester, once believed to be the home of the local boggart.

The Franglais Blues

Martyn Ecott, Epalinges, Switzerland

Loanwords crop up regularly in every language, usually for the convenience and to the total indifference of native speakers. They are adopted as naturally as neologisms, most frequently when the concept or object they describe is also imported, (another being for reasons of snobbery). Thus décolleté usefully (albeit somewhat modestly) describes something the French initiated.

Just as many French words are used in English, the French have eagerly adopted many English words that aptly describe phenomena brought to them from the English-speaking world, though not with the wholehearted consent of all native francophones. In 1634 the French set up the Académie française as guardian of their native tongue. Its primary aim might not originally have been to protect the language from an invasion of foreign vocabulary, but over the centuries many have seen this as one of its more important roles.

More than any other language, English exerts a fatal attraction on the French. To an extent, some typical English parts of speech are used in a way that we would never imagine possible, one of the most surprising being the application of the -ing suffix (which is, of course, Germanic).

As if the naturally imported loanwords did not suffice on their own, the French have a habit of modifying English words to make new ones and even invent words with a suspiciously English look about them. The Académie vainly struggles to protect its people from the onslaughts many consider to be deliberate provocation on the part of their cross-channel neighbors, but it is fighting against a rising tide. If the population itself is not prepared to put into practice what its betters preach, there is little that can be done to keep out these foreign invaders. The Académie’s attempts to introduce a Gallicsounding word each time an English one appears to be taking root most often prove futile: not only are its inventions unlikely contraptions that the general public refuses to use, but often are total nonsense to those who are not aware which loanword the official coinage is supposed to replace.

The occasional success only underlines the many failures. Baladeur was welcomed as a replacement for ‘walkman,’ while commercialisation has never been fully accepted to mean ‘marketing,’ sometimes being a synonym, and sometimes merely one aspect of it. (Other synonyms were also proposed, but to my knowledge none has general acceptance.)

Despite a high frequency of English loanwords, which might lead one to believe that the French language must be getting easier for Anglophones to learn, the foreign student of French cannot drop his vigilance. To a native speaker the seemingly familiar words can certainly be confusing. Gallic guile has made sure that many English-sounding words have a distinctly French taste, to the point where they are incomprehensible to English speakers, whether spoken or written. An illustration:

A friend of mine, let’s call him Marc, was finishing his work for the day. He consulted his agenda ‘diary, appointment book’ to check whether he was keeping to his planning ‘schedule.’ His listing ‘computer printout list’ helps him keep track of his customers and is used by his secretary for un mailing ‘despatch of letters; mail drop.’ He picked up his brake (Brit. shooting brake) Brit. ‘estate car,’ US ‘station wagon’ from the parking (-lot) and drove home. It had been raining so he had to avoid un aquaplaning ‘skid’ on the slippery surface. Marc is a bit of a youpie ‘yuppie’ and has to ensure he is keeping his standing ‘social status.’ He has his own box ‘private garage.’ His home, too, is standing ‘conferring status,’ as is his wife who regularly has he lifting facelift' to make sure she is sufficiently liftée to face up to his friends. She does not want to be snobée ‘looked down upon.’ He himself goes in for a brush**ing ‘blow-wave.’

Their house not only has a sizable living (-room), but also un dressing (-room). For dinner he will put on his smoking ‘dinner jacket, tuxedo,’ though he really prefers to be in by driving the kids down to a snack (-bar), un fast (probably un MacDo) for un big (-Mac) or un cheese (-burger) with French (-fries). If the kids have been good he might buy them un pin’s (no, not possessive in French!)—un badge would be too passé. Sometimes a magnet’s ‘fridge magnet,’ (again not a possessive) might be given away. The kids are very hip hop (they like “rap” music) and spend most of their time on their skate (-board). But their parents do not mind. Anything, as long as they do not se shooter ‘take drugs,’ not just shoot up like some children their age. But, unlike other children, they do have une nurse ‘nanny’ to look after them.

By the end of the week Marc is completely stone ‘dog tired,’ so he just wants to get away from it all. Saturdays and Sundays the family spends time at le week-end ‘weekend retreat, holiday home’ by the sea, and the bobtail ‘Old English sheepdog’ gets more exercise than in town. Marc gets his exercise by putting on his baskets ‘training shoes’ and probably un training or un jogging ‘track suit’ and goes out for un footing ‘a jog.’

In the meantime, his wife pops along to the local self ‘self-service market’ for her favorite: un cake (only ever fruitcake). To work that off, she gets her exercise down at le fitness ‘gym.’ She also wears baskets, but with un body stretch fluo ‘fluorescent elasticated leotard.’ During the warm-up, she will wear un sweat ‘sweatshirt.’

This is far from an exhaustive list. Some may be passing phases, but others are already too widely used to go out of fashion very easily, in particular in the absence of a suitable French equivalent the populace itself is likely to find acceptable. It is all enough to make one wonder if it is French that needs to be protected by the Académie or English!

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Isms: A Compendium of Concepts, Doctrines, Traits, and Beliefs from Ableism to Zygodactylism

Alan & Theresa von Altendorf, (Mustang Publishing, 1991), 335pp.

The first thing that I thought a bit odd about this book was the authors' failure to make any mention of-Ologies &-Isms, a book of mine, the first edition of which appeared in 1978, the second in 1981, both published by Gale Research Company: one would think that anybody researching the subject of -isms would find at least one of those in a library. This book is certainly not in the least an imitation of -Ologies & -Isms: its definitions are far more encyclopedic (where that is appropriate), and, in general, chattier and more interesting than in my book, in which the intention was to keep them as brief as possible. It also has many cheerful illustrations.

If the book is to be faulted at all, it must be for its lack of an index, particularly the kind of index that might help someone looking for myrmecophilism find it by looking up a reference to ants. Also, I have a built-in aversion to reference books that capitalize every headword, leaving the user in a dilemma as to whether to capitalize Ibsenism: after all, malapropism, which is named for Mrs. Malaprop, is spelled with a small letter, as is spoonerism, why not Ibsenism? Unfortunately, the authors do not distinguish between the style of Arminianism and Asceticism. The free-hand style of the book allows the authors to deliver themselves of a pageful of political opinion on Militarism, and their biases are seen in entries for Welfare Statism, Historical Materialism, and Fundamentalism, among others. To give an idea of the level of some of the comments, Fundamentalism includes the vital and relevant information that fundament means ‘buttocks.’

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Language of Stephen Crane’s Bowery Tales: Developing Mastery of Character Diction

Alan Robert Slotkin, (Garland, 1993), xxi + 150pp.

This book deals with an interesting and often useful part of fiction writing, namely, the uses of dialect and of eye dialect, defined in the Random House Unabridged (1966) as “the literary use of misspellings that are intended to convey a speaker’s lack of education or use of humorously dialectal pronunciations but that are actually no more than respellings of standard pronunciations, as wimmin for ‘women,’ wuz for ‘was,’ and peepul for ‘people.’ ” Written forms like chewin' are useful in both accurately transcribing the pronunciation used by a speaker in a story and in commenting about his use of the language. President Clinton drops the final g in most of his speech, but he is quoted in the press in full regalia.

Slotkin’s book is not intended as a breezy review of Crane’s novels, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother, and of several short stories: it is a thorough analysis, much of it in narrative style, most of it readable and readily understandable, of the techniques employed by the writer in conveying the spirit behind the speakers. Writers would be well advised to read this book for, although it was probably far from the minds of the author and the publisher that it would ever be put to such (practical) use, Slotkin’s work would prove very enlightening to the serious writer, aiding him not only in appreciating and fine-tuning his own technique but in alerting him to the various techniques a writer must employ to take advantage of all resources. It is consoling to learn that at least one of the stories, “Uncle Jake and the Bell-Handle” (1885), remained unpublished till 1969—though one hastens to add that it was written when Crane was only fourteen.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Bad Language

Lars Andersson & Peter Trudgill, 202pp. Basil Blackwell, 1990.

Peter Trudgill’s name is widely known in Britain (at least), where he is Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Essex; I am less familiar with the name of Lars Andersson, who teaches linguistics at the University of Gothenburg, but that is probably my fault, as he is co-author of Logic in Linguistics, a popular university text.

As I confess almost daily to linguistic prejudice on the grounds of inartistic, poor style and inarticulateness, chiefly as demonstrated by those who are responsible for teaching others and for writing and speaking in high-profile contexts, this book might be said to be directed at me, for it deals with negative attitudes toward language use: most of my attitudes toward language use are negative. This is an important book, one that ought to be read especially by those who disagree with its points of view. Instead of taking issue with the matters raised, it would be more revealing and useful to list the chapter headings: Introduction: Who Gives a Damn?; 1, Good or Bad?; 2, Attitudes; 3, Swearing; 4, Slang; 5, Sort of Meaningless?; 6, Right or Wrong?; 7, Bad Accents; 8, Change or Decay?; 9, Bad Language and Education; 10, Moral. My complaint about the Moral is that it says little more than, “There’s nothing either good or bad: thinking makes it so,” a truism that all except the most devout can accept. The one topic I was unable to find is appropriateness, the lack of which is the source of much of the prejudice certain speakers encounter: we do not expect four-letter words to appear in a presidential address to the Congress or in the Queen’s at the opening of Parliament, but their use in the changing rooms of football teams does not seem out of order. Have we not the right to expect more ordered, carefully worded, well-thought-out, and sophisticated organization of language in formal situations? Should not the newsreader for the major CBS affiliate in Hartford, Connecticut, be able to pronounce mastectomy instead of saying “massectomy” (as she did (twice) on July 14th) and to know the difference between lie and lay? Have we not the right to expect some measure of refinement of expression from those who expect our respect?

Such may not be a popular view among linguists in the closing years of the 20th century, but it does, I think, express the opinion of a far greater number of users of the language—even those who may not regard their own speech as unflawed—than can be mustered by those who pay lip service to language liberalism but rarely talk that way themselves because “it is not their idiolect.” As I have written many times in these pages, there is nothing inherently evil in the use of nonstandard language, and the inability to express oneself artistically is not reprehensible. The linguist may view all aspects of language clinically, but when he accepts the ambiguity stemming from a misplaced modifier as equivalent to the clarity of a properly worded sentence, we have a standard against which the linguist’s performance must be judged. Essentially, it comes down to the fact that we do not mind having linguists around to theorize about language and write recondite articles in obscure journals about the arcana of language— we simply do not want them teaching language to our children.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Lane Bryant … The Catalog for sizes 14-54. America’s largest fashion selection.” [Cover text from Lane Bryant’s Spring 1993 Catalog. Submitted by Dorothy Branson, Kansas City, Missouri.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“During this, the ‘Year of Arts in Education’ in Connecticut, budget cutbacks have reeked havoc with many school arts programs.” [From “From the Station Manager,” by John F. Berky, in Applause, Connecticut Public Radio Newsletter, August/September 1991. Submitted by Edwin A. Rosenberg, Danbury, Connecticut.]

Paring Pairs

The clues are given in items lettered (a-dd); the answers are given in the numbered items, which must be matched with one or more items for a solution. Items may be used more than once. When all the matchings have been completed, one numbered item will be left over, and that is the correct answer. The solution will appear in the next issue.

(a) Abrupt complaint shortens mongrel’s end.

(b) Short order is redundant.

(c) Pertaining to Roget’s reptile?

(d) Labor of Rabin and Arafat.

(e) Envisage this command.

(f) Poverty-stricken sub-continental Cockney.

(g) Insignificant, sweet Conservative.

(h) Greasy kid stuff makes adolescent smart.

(i) Elastic span is not duplicate.

(j) Sounds as if homosexual has financial clout.

(k) Joist, not a laser.

(l) Small after gun used in severe pursuit?

(m) Stop fooling! Let waxy insect turn into a dog.

(n) Nonagenarian uses clepsydra.

(o) Sibling chiefs known for flour and water.

(p) Old trombone sounds like baggy bottom.

(q) Sweet remnant sounds like baggy bottom.

(r) Broth remains for cleaner of casseroles.

(s) Collapsed at routine of Nigerian comedian.

(t) Spy’s deception revealed in book’s blurb.

(u) Magnate marked by large bruise.

(v) Koplik’s spots ill-advisedly migrate from throat to chest?

(w) Serious Aussie understands cryptic message.

(x) Sailor is knowledgeable about his craft.

(y) Annoying piper’s voyeuristic kid.

(z) Unfaltering homosexuals on the stair.

(aa) Monument to swindling dragger and seat of sub-operation.

(bb) Add Chinese dumpling to reach vague total.

(cc) Entry card to small gambling den is spade deuce.

(dd) Little kid deserts toupé.

(1) About.

(2) Ailment.

(3) Ass.

(4) Bag.

(5) Beam.

(6) Bee.

(7) Big.

(8) Bridge.

(9) Brilliant.

(10) Brothers.

(11) But.

(12) Cards.

(13) Casino.

(14) Cereous.

(15) Chaser.

(16) Conning.

(17) Cover.

(18) Curt.

(19) Digger.

(20) Dim.

(21) Eggs.

(22) Face.

(23) Gaze.

(24) Gent.

(25) Grave.

(26) Hausa.

(27) Hip.

(28) ‘Indi.

(29) Light.

(30) Liquor.

(31) Little.

(32) Move.

(33) Nougat.

(34) Old.

(35) Ova.

(36) Peace.

(37) Piquing.

(38) Pot.

(39) Power.

(40) Rash.

(41) Rat.

(42) Roux.

(43) Rubber.

(44) Rug.

(45) Sack.

(46) Saurian.

(47) Seaman’s.

(48) Steady.

(49) Stern.

(50) Story.

(51) Suite.

(52) Sum.

(53) Teen.

(54) The.

(55) Timer.

(56) Tom.

(57) Tory.

(58) Tower.

(59) Two.

(60) Urning.

(61) Wheal.

(62) Work.

Prizes: Two drawings will be made from the correct answers, one in Aylesbury and one in Old Lyme. Each winner will receive a year’s subscription to VERBATIM, which may be sent as a gift or used to extend a subscription. Postcard replies are preferred, giving only the word that does not match. See page two for proper addresses.

Antipodean English

W.S.Ramson, Australian National Dictionary Centre, Canberra

The Summer 1993 issue of VERBATIM carried a review of the Australian National Dictionary [AND] by George Turner, who for some years ran a column on Australian English in VERBATIM. There is an appropriateness then in this issue carrying the first of a new series of articles, which will be based on material held by the Australian National Dictionary Centre in Canberra.

But first a word about the Centre, which was founded in 1988, Australia’s bicentennial year, and is now, following a review of its operations, embarking on its second five-year period. The Centre is jointly founded by the Australian National University and Oxford University Press Australia and is bound by the terms of the agreement to devote half its time and resources to research and half to dictionary production, the latter at Oxford’s behest. Inevitably, the first few years of the Centre’s existence have been experimental and, publishers being what they are, it has been difficult to strike a balance between the competing claims on staff time. The publication record of the Centre reflects this, in that it has produced substantially revised editions of the Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary and the Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary in successive years, as well as an Australianization of the Oxford Guide for Writers and Editors and a usage guide in Nicholas Hudson’s Modern Australian Usage. This is a formidable accomplishment considering that the Centre has a full-time staff of only two and is dependent otherwise on part-time staff members and “outside” editors who come in on contract or whose work on Australian English is done independently and published under the aegis of the Centre.

The major “research” activity is very different from editing, as anyone who has been involved in either would know. The primary activity of the Centre is data collection, the primary aim the compilation of a second edition of AND which is scheduled for publication in 1998. And data collection, fundamental as it is to the existence of the Centre, is proving very hard to sustain. The principal agency for research funding in Australia is the Australian Research Council [ARC] and this body has recently manifested a lack of sympathy for data collection and given priority to project-oriented research— with the result that the reading programe so crucially important to the Centre’s viability has fallen further and further behind. Moreover, attempts to enlist ARC support for an Australian corpus, which was to have been modeled on the British National Corpus, have so far failed.

But all is not gloom. The annual bibliographies are still being compiled and the sources located read, though the resources that can go into this are limited. This is mainstream, second edition program, which is costly and which does not readily show results. Also, following the completion of AND, and reflecting the belief that the source material on which it was based had an inevitable eastcoast, metropolitan bias (the major libraries being in Canberra and Sydney, and their holdings reflecting this) the Centre began reading regional newspapers, particularly those from Western Australia and Tasmania, the two most distant and isolated States. This raw material is being keyed in a form compatible with the incomings program at Oxford, and one of the most exiciting developments is our ability to pool resources with the lexicographers in Oxford, taking advantage of their American reading program, among others.

Clearly one of the great benefits of having material in a standard form is its transferability but, equally clearly, the actual collection of data is still most practically done by conventional means and is enormously labour-intensive. We are hoping that publication of work in progress will provide a further demonstration of the Centre’s credibility and attract additional funding from other, as yet untapped sources. To this end a glossary of Words from the West is about to be published, and Tassie Terms follows hot on its heels. Another projected field in which publication might act as a stimulus— and in which the Centre has considerable holdings—is that of sporting terminology, in particular the vocabulary of that most arcane of games, Australian Rules.

The Centre is also publishing Bruce Moore’s Lexicon of Cadet Language, a study of the language of the last all-male intake at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, which is bound by its very nature to give a certain degree of notoriety to the Centre. Watch this space!

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Descriptionary: A Thermatic Dictionary

Marc McCutcheon, (Facts on File, 1992), xi + 476pp.

All of us have been plagued at one time or another by questions like, “What do you call the skeletonlike frame on which a sculpture molds a figure?,” “What is the word that describes sailing with perceptible forward motion although it seems that there is a no wind at all?,” and “What is the name for the gymnastic somersault with a half twist?” followed by another somersault with a half a twist? The answers are armature, ghosting, and half in half out. Marc McCutcheon has supposedly provided us with yet another way of wrenching information from the language that it does not readily yield up: people are always yearning for a “reverse dictionary,” and such books have been around for years. It is difficult to evaluate them because their usefulness depends very largely on whether the user’s mind works in the same way as the compiler’s. Thus, for example, I could never make much sense out of Bernstein’s Reverse Dictionary, for, although Ted and I were good friends, our thought processes were not the same, and I would tend to look up a word I wanted in a completely different part of his book from where it was listed.

McCutcheon’s Descriptionary is like a collection of specialized glossaries. There are no illustrations; there are twenty major headings (like Environment, Animals, Human Body and Mind) and more subheadings than I cared to count (thirty under Environment, eight under Animals, fifteen under Human Body and Mind). None of them is very long, so one need not look very far through the entries and definitions to find that “removal of a kidney” is called a nephrectomy. That is all very well, and the convenience of having such glossaries cannot be overemphasised. But let me offer an illustration of the kind of problem I encounter: on the back of the dust jacket some copy editor (presumably) has suggested that “With the flip of a page through Descriptionary, any racetrack layman can transform a dull paragraph like this—”…“into a professional sports report like this—….” The two paragraphs show the following substitutions: chalk horse for “favourite”; card for “racing program”; field for “horses”; fast for “dry, hard”; an armchair ride for “without the jockey ever having to whip him”; and homestretch for “last leg of the race.” Wondering if that could possibly work, I tried to find the appropriate section in the table of contents. I looked for “Horseracing” under Sports; it wasn’t there (among the 31 subglossaries listed), but a further search revealed “Thoroughbred Racing.” It is fortunate that the list of subglossaries is short, for it would not have occurred to me to look for such a heading, though I readily concede it makes sense. Turning to the section, it became immediately apparent that I would have been unable to make the substitutions suggested: in the first place, terms like favourite, racing program, and horses are not entries in the glossary, and one would have to find them by reading the entire glossary from start to finish to see in which definitions they occur. There is no Index, and neither the subglossaries nor the main sections are in alphabetical order, which is irritating and unforgivable.

I was put off by the front of the dust jacket, too: a cartoon character is shown wondering what the name is for the white crescent-shaped area at the base of a fingernail. Assuming that the word might be listed in one of the several subglossaries under Human Body and Mind, I looked there. The word— lunula, by the way—is nowhere to be found. Is this the publisher’s symbolic way of giving, readers the finger? In general, coverage is extremely uneven.

The fact that the person who wrote the jacket copy had only a fanciful idea of the uses to which the book can be put does not necessarily diminish its usefulness. There are other errors, however. Athwartship is not used in the same way as abeam, and abeam does not mean “at right angles to the vessel,” which is a poor definition at best; thus, at square-rigged, the definition is awkwardly unidiomatic: “having foursided sails set abeam or athwartships.” There are other faults, not the least of which is the use of the for a or an in definitions, which, were McCutcheon not credited with other dictionaries (which I have not seen) would brand him an amateur lexicographer. “Jejunem” is so misspelled under ileum, “pudenal block” is shown as an entry (p.99), and the same terms with slightly different definitions appear in different places (e.g., under Organs and Glands (p. 69) and under Digestive System (p. 79).

Whether one should acquire the Descriptionary or not will depend on how frustrated and desperate one becomes at not being able to find the word that is at the tip of one’s tongue.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Even-Steven and Fair and Square: More Stories Behind the Words

Morton S. Freeman, (Plume (Penguin), 1993).

Here is still another popular book of etymologies. One must assume that publishers are catering to an unfulfilled demand for such works. It is a damned shame that the publishers haven’t the intelligence to get responsible, knowledgeable linguists to check the validity of the information put forth by amateurs. I have great respect for Leo Rosten both as a writer and as an informed observer of the language; but that does not make him an etymologist, and many of the word origins proposed in his books are fancy, not fact. That his Foreword appears at the front of this book is no indication that he has, necessarily, put his imprimatur on every etymology it contains, but he ought to be more careful.

The problem with amateur etymologists is that they accept as true the etymologies that seem the most interesting. Often, a professional etymologist at a loss for an explanation of the origin of a word or phrase will offer his speculation as to how the term arose; scholars are careful to qualify such proposals as hypothetical. People like Freeman not only accept such speculations as gospel, they take it upon themselves to embellish the stories. In his Introduction (“Read This First”), Freeman states unequivocally, the origin of kangaroo:

Captain James Cook, in 1770, asked the native Australian aborigines for the name of the two-legged marsupials that were jumping all over the area. He was told kangaroo, which name he noted in his log. What he failed to realize was that in the Australian native language kangaroo meant “I don’t know.”

The likelihood of such a tale does not seem to concern Freeman: it is as plausible as a story that the inhabitants of Capistrano had no word for swallow or that there is no word in French for sex. A similar origin is cited for llama. Neither of these is corroborated by the OED2e or by any other responsible dictionary. On the other hand, the alternative name indri, for a kind of Madagascan lemur, did have its origin in the native word ‘Look!,’ used to call attention to the animal but taken by the hearer to be the name of the animal. Have you heard the one about the aliens who landed in Schropshire and, seeing a nubile wench feeding the chickens in a farmyard, asked the farmer what she was called. “Bugger off!” shouted the wench’s protective father, which is why bgrrrf is the Martian word for ‘nubile wench’ (there are no vowels in Martian).

A term on which I have spent some considerable time is horse latitudes. An etymology is not given in the OED2e, though attention is drawn to the speculations set forth in the quotations. The old story was about the Spaniards having jettisoned horses into the sea when becalmed and no longer able to water them. That is arrant nonsense. Freeman has dredged up that origin from an older source and embellished it, without citing the source. He continues by citing other theories, including its being a translation of Golfo de las Yegas [sic for yeguas], ‘Gulf of the Mares.’ This hotchpotch appears, in one form or another, in several books.

Other infelicities abound: under hors d’oeuvers we learn that “there is no English synonym” for the term; a few lines further on we read, “Hors d’oeuvres are appetizers.” He makes the mistake of quoting John Ciardi (a better poet than an etymologist) in the matter of know the ropes, to which Ciardi objected because he was under the impression that true nautical types (as typified by modern yachtsmen, who have a fetish about it) never call ropes anything but lines. That is utter rubbish. Moreover, a recent film about the Danish training vessel, Danmark, a full-rigged ship, mentions that the trainees are expected to know the names and functions of each of here 450-odd pieces of running and standing rigging soon after signing on; know the ropes has an obvious, straightforward, literal origin and it is distracting to have the weird mental aberrations of dreamers introduced merely to confuse.

There nothing new in this book, including a manifest filtering mechanism by which the reader might be spared old wives’ tales and other sources of misinformation and guided to a likely description of how a term originated. Ordinary mortals who are too intimidated to write books about DNA molecules ought to keep their hands off word origins.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Technobabble

John A. Barry, (MIT Press, 1991), xv + 268pp.

It is disappointing to see MIT Press publishing a book of such indifferent quality. Barry writes breezily and spiritedly, but his journalistic style is better suited to the computer magazines for which he toils than to a book, which requires not only good organization but familiarity with the kind of research needed to get at the facts. This is not a dictionary; though there is a brief glossary at the back of the book, the text concerns itself mainly with a discussion of terminology and of various aspects in the development of the computer. Some of what he writes is accurate, some is simply wrong: for example, babble and Babel are not (always) homophones [p. 4]; the name of the company that typeset the first edition of the American Heritage Dictionary [AHD] (1969) was Inforonics, not “Infonics” [p. 29]; the slavish copying, throughout, from the Random House Unabridged [RHD], Second Edition [RHD2], of dates (most of which had been slavishly copied from the dated citations in the OED and other sources) and accepting them as gospel denotes extreme naiveté. His criticism of the AHD’s showing “a person who computes” as the first definition of computer is entirely in keeping with the facts of the day, notwithstanding the appearance of computer-composed on the copyright page; on the basis of frequency, the word would not have merited its own entry a dozen years earlier, when it would have been a run-on to compute, with a self-evident sense. Even in 1966, when the first edition of the RHD was published, the first sense listed for computer was “one who computes.”

The book is a mixture of fact, half-fact, and omissions. How can one discuss microcomputers without mentioning the Osborne and its developer? How can one pretend to be presenting information about typesetting in terms that reveal complete ignorance of hot-metal systems and their terminology and without mentioning the Lanston Monotype?

Perhaps this is the kind of book that appeals to the people whom Barry is writing about, but the racily written text is so jargon-ridden, so overloaded with the kinds of semi-literate, obtuse puns and silly jokes favored by the inhabitants of Silicon Valley (who, with all their genius for developing microchips and making them do incredible things, were unable to write a coherent manual that anyone but another idiot-savant could understand) that I was unable to get beyond the halfway mark (where one finds sections headed Getting Serviced [p. 124] and Gimme That Realtime Religion [p. 125]). There might be a place in the world for a computer engineer’s jokebook, but it never occurred to me that MIT press would be its publisher.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Geranium ‘John Elsley’—A lovely prostate ground cover.” [From among “Most Recent Offerings” by Wayside Gardens, spring 1992 catalogue. Submitted by Florence Madison, Westerly, Rhode Island.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“…the underground parking garage will probably never see the light of day.” [From University of Toronto Magazine, Summer 1990. Submitted by Gordon B. Thompson, Etobicoke, Ontario.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“ ‘This is where the rubber hits the road,’ said Lyle Wray, executive director of the Citizens League and a member of the Minnesota Milestones advisory committee. ‘This is the kickoff, not the end product. We’re throwing down the gauntlet, telling all the key sectors to let us know how we’re doing.’ ” [From the Minneapolis Star Tribune, 17 December 1992, page 2 Be. Submitted by Dean Durken, Saint Paul.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA:

A Dictionary of American Proverbs

Wolfgang Mieder, Ed. in Chief, Stewart A. Kingsbury and Kelsie B. Harder, eds., (Oxford University Press, 1991), xviii + 710pp.

Proverbs Are Never Out of Season: Popular Wisdom of the Modern Age

Wolfgang Mieder, (Oxford University Press, 1993), xviii + 284pp.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs

John Simpson, Jennifer Speake, eds., (Oxford University Pres, 1992), xiii + 316pp.

The Cassell Book of Proverbs

Patricia Houghton, (Cassell, 1992 [A World of Proverbs, Blandford, 1981]), 152pp.

Sufficient unto the day on which this review is being written, the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs offers up Barnaby bright, Barnaby bright, the longest day and the shortest night, not exactly what I would call a proverb—more of a saying commemorating St. Barnabas' Day, the longest day of the year: today is June 21st, but, as the Oxford book tell us, that was June 11th in the Old Style calendar.

We all “know” what a proverb is, but investigators of the genre never tire of trying to define it. To be sure, there are synonyms—adage, saying, saw (only encountered, in my experience, in crossword puzzles), aphorism— for proverb, but their examination yields little that enables one to discover useful differentiate among them. The subject of definition is treated at some length in chapter 2 of Proverbs, in which fifty-five are listed. Many of these refer to “wisdom,” and, while it is true that many proverbs contain wise advice couched in metaphor, many are mere truisms couched in metaphor. Thus, drawing examples from the Dictionary, there is little doubt about the advice lurking behind the truism, Too many cooks spoil the broth, but Brighten the corner where you are cannot be said to offer much wisdom, however cheerful the notion might be. Proverbs suggests that the distinction between proverbs and proverbial expressions is useful to maintain; that is, A fool and his money are soon parted is a proverb, but That’s the way the cookie crumbles (…ball bounces, etc.) is a proverbial expression. Some proverbs are attributed to particular cultures. A picture is worth 10,000 (or 1,000) words I have always heard preceded by something like, “According to the Chinese saying.” The occasionally contradictory nature of proverbs—He who hesitates is lost vs. Look before you leap—has been entertainingly discussed by Professor David Galef in “How to Gain Proverbial Wisdom” [XIX, 4].

Then there are puns and facetious rewordings of old standbys, like A fool and his mother are soon parted, All work and no play makes jack (in which one must be familiar with the old-fashioned sense of ‘money’ for jack), and Early to bed and early to rise makes sure you get out before her husband arrives, are popular, if rather obvious takeoffs.

One of the more interesting aspects of proverbs is their universality, a subject not discussed in the Dictionary—it is, after all, a reference book, not a commentary—but commented on in Proverbs. Though universal in spirit, it is interesting to see how they differ in expression: the American saying, Don’t count your chickens before they’ve (or they’re) hatched was previously Don’t sell the bearskin till you catch the bear (or words to that effect).

Margaret M. Bryant, a major linguist of the 20th century, was the moving spirit behind the collection of some 150,000 citations for North American proverbs, a task carried on over a forty-year period. Miss Bryant, who will celebrate her ninety-third birthday in December, may be truly honoured by the publication of the first of the works listed here; except for a fleeting reference in the second book, she scarcely receives mention there. But that is not to diminish Mieder’s contributions, for he has written extensively on proverbs, and the bibliographies in both volumes fairly bristle with his books and papers.

One ought not be undecided about these first two books; choose them both: the Dictionary is pretty much what its title says it is, a record of 15,000 American proverbs, with data on where they were recorded. A valuable reference book, it contains historical information on earliest appearances: for example, Money is the root of all evil is traced to Aelfric’s Homilies (c. 1000). I was unable to find whatever might be the English translation of Pecunia non olet (‘Money doesn’t stink’), and I looked in vain for an explanation of a proverb I never quite understood, which I have heard rendered as a descriptive remark, He keeps a dog and barks himself, but which is rendered here as No sense in keepin' a dog when doin' your own barkin' with the variant I will not keep a dog and bark myself. It is traced back to 1583 and, to have lasted that long, it must be meaningful to someone. Likewise, the deeper meanings of others eludes me: The dog doesn’t get bread every time he wags his tail, The dog has four legs, but he does not run on four roads, The saddest dog sometimes wags its tail, all of which strike me as having been found in fortune cookies. I am not alone in my ignorance, apparently, for a researcher who asked eighty Texas students for the meanings of A rolling stone gathers no moss received different responses, a result regarded by Mieder (in Proverbs) as demonstrating the universal applicability of metaphor; others might have different interpretations.

Proverbs, a readable book, contains a great deal of interesting information on paremiology, and ought to be in the library of anyone interested in language. A Dictionary of American Proverbs, which is more of a reference book, belongs in the library of those whose interests combine language, culture (and its history), and dialect.

The Concise Oxford, on the other hand, compiled under the direction of the redoubtable John Simpson, Co-editor of the OED2e, groups quotations of variant forms of the same proverb together, detailing their sources, enabling the user to see the kinds of adaptations that writers, philosophers, and other users have made. This book also provides an account of the origin of Pecunia non olet, tracing it to a remark of Titus, son of Vespasian, whose fame lingers on as the eponym of the vespasienne, a French public (street) urinal. Though it is not exhaustive, the Concise Oxford contains a lot of interesting and useful information.

As for the Cassell Book of Proverbs, it is a small book that lists proverbs by ten major categories (including “Proverbs from Many Lands,” not a category, strictly speaking), which have subcategories. Sources are given in a desultory way (“Shakespeare” without chapter and verse), and no (successful) attempt has been made to trace the proverbs beyond the best-known author where they can be found. If I knew its price, I might suggest it as an inexpensive, superficial, alternative introduction to the genre, but I found it pretty thin on the ground compared with the others.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Welsh Dictionary

Edwin C. Lewis, (Hodder & Stoughton, 1992) 256pp.

In The Gentleman’s Magazine for May, 1796, p. 424, the following lines on the silkworm are given as a specimen of the peculiar structure of the Welsh language:-

O’i wiw wy i wan ê â

Ai weuau o' i wyau ê a weua

Es weua ei wé aia

Ai weuau yw ei ieuau o iâ.

Two translations are added. The first is:-

(Sprung) from his native egg, he begins to weave,

And weaves his web from his intestines;

He weaves his web of winter,

And his webs are as bands of hoar-frost.

The second, which is called a “literal translation,” runs as follows:-

From his peculiar egg he goes to weave,

And from his eggs he weaves his webs;

He weaves his winter webs,

And his webs are yokes of ice.

Gravelly Hill, Erdington.

Benj. Walker.

—Notes & Queries, 10th S. iv. (Nov. 11, 1905),

p. 392.

This addition to the Teach Yourself series contains more than 16,000 headwords, according to the back-cover blurb, which also gives a clue to those uninitiated in its Byzantine, albeit Celtic grammar: “words listed under all their mutated forms;… a brief introduction to Welsh grammar, including a summary of the main rules of consonantal mutation.” The Random House Unabridged, I note with some relief, defines this sense of mutation as, “(in Celtic languages) syntactically determined morphophonemic phenomena that affect initial sounds of words.” Less technically put, that means that in certain contexts, words change their form. The same could be said about English this, which contains three phonemes (sounds that are significant grammatically, semantically, or both), /o/, /I/, and /s/, when the context is singularly, and which “mutate” to /symbol/, /i/, and /z/ when the context is plural. That is not to suggest that the Welsh system is simple, merely that it does not interfere with children aged one and a half learning the language. (Is it not amazing how those tiny Chinese, Japanese, Javanese, and Welsh children can learn their strange languages!) An example from Welsh states that adjectives, which usually follow the noun they modify, undergo soft mutation after a feminine noun: bachgen bach ‘a small boy’ /merch fach ‘a small girl’; tarw du ‘a black bull’ /buwch ddu ‘a black cow.’ As these mutations work profound changes on the spelling, one can imagine the problems presented to the lexicographer: English dictionaries list forms like ‘took, went, and saw with cross references to their infinitive forms where their main entries appear. But in Welsh, where the initial letters of many words depend on their grammatical environment, the alphabetizing problems are complex. Thus, although most of the words listed under l + vowel are cross-referred to words beginning ll-, many are referred to words beginning with gl-; a handful—including lamp ‘lamp,’ lôn ‘lane, road,’ lwc ‘luck’—that have their entries at l- appear to be loanwords. The entire alphabet is listed as a running head on each double-page spread that does not include an initial: a, b, c, ch, d, dd, e, f, ff,g, ng, h, i, j, l, ll, m, n, o, p, ph, r, rh, s, t, th, u, w, y. Listings are further complicated because some words change spelling in the middle, e.g., pennawd ‘heading, headline’ becomes penawdau in the plural, ffon ‘stick’ becomes ffyn in the plural. Consequently, twice as many pages are devoted to the same number of headwords in the Welsh-English section as in the English-Welsh part.

Just to add a little further intrigue, adjectives undergo four degrees of comparison: positive, equative, comparative, and superlative. Equative refers to descriptions of things that are equal. As this is a dictionary, not a grammar, such information is set forth only briefly in an appendix of a couple of dozen pages, tempting one to become more familiar with some aspects of a Celtic language. If I may be permitted my horrible pun of the year, one could do Erse, but Welsh might be more politically rewarding.

Stopping here and there in thumbing through this short lexicon, it is easy to see that despite what seem anomalies to those unfamiliar with Welsh, especially with its spelling, it is clearly an Indo-European language: pysgotwr ‘fisherman,’ ffyddlon ‘faithful, loyal,’ brawd ‘brother’ are evidently cognate with familiar I-E roots.

It is certainly not recommended that one try to learn a language—or even to make untoward assumptions about it—without studying its grammar, but even a fleeting acquaintance with a language is better than none, and most people are likely to be drawn more by lexicon than by grammar. If this dictionary can move one to go further, it will have fulfilled a function its compiler and publisher would be unlikely to have anticipated.

Laurence Urdang

OBITER DICTA: A man bethumpt with words

J.A. Davidson, Victoria, British Columbia

Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1880) was a man “bethumpt with words”— to use a phrase from Shakespeare’s King John. He was a scholar and churchman of great versatility. For a time he was Dean of Westminster and later Archbishop of Dublin. While at Westminster, he delivered in 1857 a paper to the Philological Society, “On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries.” That probably was the first call for the developing of the massive dictionary we known as The Oxford English Dictionary.

I have on my shelves a book containing two series of lectures Trench had given on the English language. On the Study of Words and English Past and Present. In the second of them he presented a list of words which distinguished writers had used, words he wished could be expunged from the language. Here, then, are a few examples from the list of words he reprehended.

Jeremy Taylor (1613-67), theologian and devotional writer, used ferity, “the quality or state of being wild or savage.” And stultiloquy, “foolish babbling”; and clancular, “secret, private, clandestine.”

Richard Baxter (1615-91), renowned Puritan cleric used pervicacy, “steadfastness, stubborness, obstinacy.” Oliver Cromwell also used that word. (Many years ago I did some work in the life and thought of Baxter: I think he was at times quite pervicacious.)

The great John Donne had facinorous, which has been defined as “Extremely wicked, grossly criminal, atrocious, infamous, vile—said both of persons and their actions.

Issac Barrow (1630-77), yet another cleric, used the adjective lepid: “Pleasant, jocose, facetious, amusing, charming, elegant.” It has the adverb lepidly, and the noun lepidity: “facetiousness, wit.”

Ludibundness, which means “simple playfulness,” was used by Henry More (1614-87), a Cambridge philosopher. He also used mulierosity and mirificent.

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82), physician and author, liked luciferously, an adverb from the adjective luciferous— “brings, conveys, or emits light; affording illumination.”

Francis Beaumont (1584-1616), dramatist, perpetrated pauciloquy, “speaking but little, sparingness of speech.”

And one more cleric, John Hacket (1592-1670), used lucrepitous, “eager for gain”: it comes from lucre, as with “filthy.” He also liked eluctate, “to struggle forth.”

All the definitions I have given for these words are in the big Oxford. Trench, one of its instigators, had called for their removal from the language many years before work on it began.

I have now got that out of my system, and I shall not bethump anyone again with such atrocious words. By the way, Samuel Johnson defined bethump as “To beat; to lay blows upon”: he described it as “a ludicrous word.”

EPISTOLA {Robert M. Dickie}

Alex Berlyne’s article “Dickey Ticker” [XIX,4] has considerable personal relevance for me. The Shorter OED dates the use of dickey as a slang or colloquial term for ‘sorry, poor, unsound’ to 1812 and suggests it might have originated in the phrase, “as queer as Dick’s hatband.” Whatever its origin I can personally vouch for its continued usage, for I am reminded of it wherever I go. For years I have endured, with a forced smile, “original” jokes about “looking rather dickey this morning,” and “feeling a little dickey,” with its double entendre, is even worse. However, my sense of humour was severely tested on a visit to my brother in Australia a few years ago. Obliged to attend a Perth hospital, owing to temporary problems with what Monty Python dubbed “the naughty bits,” I was mortified to hear members of the medical staff referring to my case, with obvious glee and in decidedly unmedical terms, as “Dickie’s dickey dickey.” It is no wonder my brother has since changed his name to Snow.

[Robert M. Dickie, Riyadh]

EPISTOLA {Stanley Mason}

David Galef [“What a Cliché!,” XIX, 3] listed an impressive muster of mutilated sayings which reveal how careless people are with the rich legacy of their mother tongue. I was surprised, however, at his trying to explain It’s never too late to mend as a combination of two less familiar locutions. It is, surely, a long-standing proverb in its own right, and is given as such, for instance, in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

A maltreated phrase which Galef doesn’t mention but which has been getting my goat for many years is between the devil and the deep blue sea. It refers to the predicament of being trapped between two equally fearsome alternatives, rather like Scylla and Charybdis, and the pleasant-sounding deep blue sea is here obviously out of place. I imagine that it has been transplanted into this context as an echo from the children’s rhyme:

Down at the bottom of the deep blue sea,

Catching fishes for my tea…

The correct form of the expression, however, is between the devil and the deep. Possibly the fact that the term the deep has rather gone out of circulation today explains why some people feel they have to add a little (misplaced) embroidery.

[Stanley Mason, Effretikon, Switzerland]

EPISTOLA {W.H. Stevenson}

The Spring issue of VERBATIM sends me, belatedly, to the keyboard. First, you were right about British telephones—you are being told that you were mistaken! In larger towns which had several exchanges there were three-letter prefixes and four-digit numbers (famously, at one time, WHItehall 1212 for Scotland Yard). At manual exchanges, asked for by name, the number could be anything from one to five digits. In the late 1960s the letters were gradually replaced by three-figure prefixes, so much less memorable than the letters. Even now the simplicity of the U.S. system—area code + local code + number (xxx xxx xxxx)—has not been achieved in the UK. My sister’s number used to be Kirkby Malzeard xxx; with automation the number becomes 07658 xxx; only recently has it became 076 565 8xxx. I don’t agree that the numbers “are written solid”; they are written all sorts of ways, but the tendency is towards “xxx xxxx,” as in America.

The American retention of letters is excellent and practical. Because our phones rarely show letters on the keypad, we can’t follow suit, but there is a relic of the letter system hidden in our area codes (as I wish we would call them). Though the dials in Britain and America were arranged slightly differently, it is no accident that Birmingham is 021, Edinburgh 031, Glasgow 041, Liverpool 051, and Manchester 061. There is still a clear correlation between many place-names and their dialing codes.

On a different point: a thunderbox was not a chamber-pot, but (in colonial usage) a galvanized bucket inside a wooden box which formed the toilet seat. I shall not discuss the meaning of the term. The bucket was removed from the outside through a bolted hatch by the night-soil man. Another colonial usage, taking up Donald Schmiedel’s contribution [XIX,4,] was rest-house. These were not “rest homes,” but an early colonial form of motel. A string of these simple but convenient places, usually built on the most picturesque site available, was set up for the use of District Officers, waterworks engineers, doctors, etc., on tour. In later years, they were available to the general public, until, in the 1970s, they fell into disuse under competition from more luxurious hotels.

[W.H. Stevenson, Acharacle, Argyll]

EPISTOLA {Enrique Lerdau}

The distinction [between not guilty] and innocent] seems a valid and useful one to me; it is one that exists principally in the legal mind and so is an example of specialized usage, and ordinary speech and writing habits tend to overlook any difference.

In a criminal case, a verdict of not guilty does not mean that the jury found the accused innocent, but simply that the prosecution failed to prove its case “Beyond a reasonable doubt.” A jury does not have to believe that a defendant is innocent in order to return a verdict of not guilty. Regardless of the jury’s belief concerning the guilt or innocence of the accused, a verdict of not guilty should be returned if the case against the defendant has not been proven. Belief in the accused’s guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt” is necessary to convict.

In the nonlegal sense, I doubt if there is much of a distinction between innocent and not guilty. To a lay person, guilty simply means that the person committed the crime, innocence that he did not. Jurors—and people in general who make up juries— may naturally think that the purpose of a trial is to determine whether the defendant committed the crime or not. That is not so: the guilt has to be established by the prosecution “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Technically, not guilty does not mean ‘innocent’: a person can be both actually guilty of a crime and (found) not guilty, though he would certainly not be innocent of the crime. We have the presumption of innocence, not the “presumption of being not guilty”: that is something for the jury to decide. Although the guilt or innocence of the accused is the obvious central moral or philosophical issue at a criminal trial, the ultimate legal concern is to determine whether or not the prosecution has met its burden in proving the guilt of the accused beyond a reasonable doubt. “Not proven guilty” might be a better way of putting it.

In recent years, in place of the legally correct words guilty or not guilty, “guilty or innocent” has appeared more and more in thought and language. In books, films, newspapers, and television shows, jurors are said to be deliberating on the “guilt or innocence” of the accused. One who is found “not guilty” is all too often reported in the press as being “innocent.” The extent of the confusion is shown by the fact that even judges, in their instructions to the jury, have stated that the jury’s task is “to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused.”

Felix R. Rosenthal’s Schüttelreime [EPISTOLAE, XIX, 4,23] brought to mind a family tradition. The pianist Artur Schnabel was a friend of my maternal grandmother’s family; her husband (not my grandfather) was first violinist of the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, and when Schnabel came to Hamburg, he often stayed with them. He was, apparently, far prouder of his Schüttelreime than of his piano playing; one of his most subtle ones goes like this:

Am Anfang war der Schnabel nur

Das Ende einer Nabelschnur.

Once, he gave as a birthday present to one of the children Herman Hesse’s Peter Kamenzind, which he inscribed:

Ziemen mag der Kamenzind

Manchem schönem, zahmen kind.

A non-Schnabel four-liner in the more robust tradition illustrated by Mr. Rosenthal is:

Gibt mir die Wirtin Speck and Ei

So geh ich in die Eck und Spei;

Doch wenn sie mir gibt weisse Bohnen

Dann Kann ich nicht mehr bei sie wohnen.

I have tried to adapt the form, which is more demanding than the simple spoonerism, to the English language, but with unsatisfactory results, owing either to my own limitations or to the nature of the language. Do any readers have suggestions?

[Enrique Lerdau, Kensington, Maryland]

EPISTOLA {Adrian Room}

In his article on royal posts [“The Titled Proletariat,” XX, 1], John Ayto says that “curiously, in the area of the visual arts, the sovereign retains the services of an expert practitioner only in his or her capacity as monarch of Scotland.”

This is not the case, since the Queen has in London, at St. James’s Palace, a “Director of the Royal Collection” who coordinates the work of the three subordinate posts “Surveyor of The Queen’s Works of Art,” “Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures,” and “Librarian of the Royal Library.” (Traditionally he also holds one of these posts himself.) There is also an “Adviser for The Queen’s Works of Art” and a “Senior Picture Restorer,” among others. (These days, too, the Royal Collection Department has a “Computer Systems Manager.”)

It is also not true to say that “the only royal functionary now with direct responsibility for animals” is the “Keeper of the Swans.” The Royal Mews Department has a “Veterinary Surgeon” to attend the royal horses and the royal corgis if necessary.

Incidentally, although there is a “Royal Chef” in the Master of the Household’s Department, he is the only functionary with a title prefixed “Royal.” The “Flower Arranger” is not so graced.

[Adrian Room, Stamford, Lincolnshire]

EPISTOLA {Mike Gautrey}

I greet the publication of a third edition of Judith Butcher’s Copy-Editing: The Cambridge Handbook [BIBLIOGRPHIA, XX, 1] with markedly less enthusiasm than I would that of a fourteenth edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, truly the copy editor’s handbook.

This is not my reason for writing, however, which is rather to take up the point about whether or not a distinction exists between dependant and dependent. According to Laurence Urdang, Ms. Butcher suggests that the former is a noun and the latter a verb. Unless the author has taken leave of her senses since publishing the second edition of her book, what I suspect she actually asserts is that dependant is a noun and dependent an adjective. Mr. Urdang, true to the definitions in the Random House Unabridged and the Collins English Dictionary (Editorial Director: L. Urdang), considers dependant to be a “mere spelling variant.”

But at least in British usage, the dependant- noun, dependent-adjective distinction is widely accepted. It may not be in the OED2e but it is in the COD, and it is indeed commended by the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors (together with others like enquiry/inquiry and programme/program). As Editor of the International Social Security Review, I know that it is one respected by specialists in my field, and I can depend on both words cropping up at least once an issue. Time for other eminent lexicographers to take it on board?

Now, if I have managed to retain readers’ attention, may I ask them to turn it to another arcanum? Namely, the explanation for software manufacturers' insistence on inserting capital letters into the middle of their product names—WordPerfect, PageMaker, MultiMate, PagePlus, WinCheck and so on—or perhaps I mean their insistence on running the component words of their product names together without a word space (WordSpace?). Either way, it seems a conceit which is baffling to the undersigned, as well as to the dependants of

[Mike Gautrey, Geneva]

EPISTOLA {R. Campbell James}

David Gomberg [XIX, 4,21] falsely attributes the invention of Tripes á la Mode de Caen to Herb Caen, the San Francisco journalist. Caen, born in 1916, surfaced on the California scene as a student at Sacramento College in 1934 (from Who’s Who in America). Long before this, Phileas Gilbert discussed the already so-named dish in his books La Cuisine Tous les Mois (1893) and La Cuisine (1925). There are probably numerous earlier citations, but these are what I have at hand.

Mr. Gomberg is correct that Trader Vic’s did develop a tripe dish: it was first served in the 1930s to the noted bibliophiles George Templeton Crocker and John Howell, who were asked to name it. One of the two—and it is not known which, as descendants of both claim it for their own—came up with the felicitous “Tripes à la Mode de Caneton.”

There was a duck dish named after Herb(es) Caen, inspired by him, and invented at that great but, alas, short-lived restaurant Les Becs Fins, in 1952, noon, on April first. It was called Caneton Fines Herbes. For several years on the far righthand corner table (Caen’s own) a plaque documented and commemorated this feat.

Sadly, the plaque, the corner table, and Les Becs Fins are no more….

[R. Campbell James, Newport, Rhode Island]

OBITER DICTA: Chinese Puzzle

Laurence Urdang

The average citizens of what are never called “first world countries” believe that they are continually bombarded by junk mail, called bumf [for ‘bum fodder’] in England. But those who are in business are the unwilling recipients of an unbelievable number of catalogues, magazines, direct mailshots (the trade term), and other importunities on a daily basis. Rarely, one of them shows a flash of brilliance; almost unexceptionally, they are poorly executed visually, ungrammatical, boring, or, commonly, all three. Considering the amounts spent on their creation and production, one might think that they ought to be better, but that is not my focus for the moment.

Once in a while a mailing piece arrives that makes the others pale in comparison. I have always found the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue a source of entertainment (and have been known to buy an occasional item from it). That catalogue, for those unfamiliar with it, contains, among its useful, serious offerings, a veritable storehouse of weird contraptions: a $10,000 golf cart with built-in shower, a $100 bottle-cap that sets off an alarm if one of the kids gets into the bourbon, a $29,000 beach-cleaning buggy for screening the sand in your child’s sandbox, and so forth.

In what can be characterized only as a desperate attempt at improving the balance of trade in their country, a Taiwanese company sent their Gift Housewares Accessories Buyer’s Guide to (I assume) scores of thousands of prospective customers in the US, among which, for some unaccountable reason, they numbered VERBATIM. Novelty catalogues are a novelty in themselves: pens with the company name on them, memo pads with risqué drawings, key rings equipped with a (needed) nose-hair clipper—we have seen them all. Decades ago the Times Square Hotel in New York City gave away mementos in the form of a plastic comb with a shoe-horn at one end, and one could easily recognize surplus goods when a nail file with a button hook at one end was part of a gift kit.

It takes a lot of imagination to dream up these strange devices, and one is given to wonder what the Taiwanese geniuses who created some of the following could have been thinking of the taste and sanity of their prospective customers (or of their customers' customers):

Phallomèetre

Soft electronic crazy axe and hammer (with glass breaking sound)

Fragrant pens

Coffee-making-type Pen: When the part for making coffee gets hot just by holding it with your hand, it will move up and down, just like real coffee.

Vacuum cleaner in shape of fountain pen

Letter opener with quartz clock

Barbecue ash tray “Fun to smoke”

Telephone shaver

Ball shaver

VW tissue dispenser

These ingenious gadgets are not the products of one company, for the catalogue (from 1991) is evidently a cooperative venture, and the various manufacturers are identified, in most cases, with the wares offered:

Arty Enterprise Co., Ltd.

Best Sibling Corporation

Family Tree Int’l Corp. (gumball machines)

Fugiboo Industrial Corp. (hand-wrapped flowers)

Mean An Company Ltd.

PoGo Industrial Co., Ltd. (golden and silver hair brushes)

Shiny Fixture Ltd. (halogen lamps)

Ta-choo (quartz clocks)

When I was a lad, I was completely beguiled by Japanese water flowers, tiny clamshells that one dropped into a glass of water and watched while they slowly opened and a beautiful paper flower unfolded before one’s (very) eyes. As a matter of fact, I am still beguiled by them, but have no idea if they are still made and, if so, where to find them.

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Western men, sound like bulls. (7)

5. Get Reg. warm, and in a tur- moil, with a biological dispute. (4, 3)

9. Sounds like your middle, it’s useless. (5)

10. After a soft start, share the ration around the four and still suffer hardship. (9)

11. Raw soldier, like a crow that is. (6)

12. Capital, French lamb and Vi- chy water, you can hold a candle to it! (8)

14. Do English firemen hang their hose up on this? (9)

15. Sounds like a bit of quiet, but only a bit. (5)

16. Snake changes inside the co- conut kernel. (5)

18. Isis tapes, when wrapped round, can stop bleeding. (9)

21. Equal all across for error in astronomical measurement. (8)

22. Fall into this when not issued properly. (6)

24. Level meal for an invalid, no doubt! (5, 4)

25. This carriage can get you down safely. (5)

26. Tea leaves lose as in mix-up and lift up. (7)

27. Pass this on the way through Italy. (7)

Down

1. Traitors who turned round in the “cod wars.” (7)

2. Follow the setting sun on the fantastic filly, and finish up on the Bristol Channel. (6, 5, 4)

3. Mark with a dagger, there’s no scar! (7)

4. Bribes used as a mushy food. (4)

5. We all dig the aria about the blanket flower. (10)

6. Girl coming up the street could find her way with this. (4, 3)

7. Bushman wintered around in Africa and gave us this problem. (5, 4, 6)

8. Sort of rounder than a liter- ary circle. (7)

13. I ran a needle, without a point, awkwardly into his arm to give him this stimulant. (10)

16. Put a top on a pie, and cover from head to toe. (7)

17. “At” goes back to back round most of the land in Georgia. (7)

19. A eulogy however diverse, always contains a true bit. (7)

20. This chap’s job is a snip. (7)

23. There’s no buts about this counterfoil. (4)

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Spend less in our floral dept.” [From an A&P flyer.]

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