VOL XX, No 4 [Spring 1994]

Wordplay

Gary Egan, Ballina, County Mayo

Scan any newspaper at random and a predilection for punning headlines is immediately discernible. Take today’s Star (“Britain’s Brightest Daily”), for example: Fireman’s Burning Ambition; Ivana Comes Up Trumps; How To Save Yourself a Packet With Seeds… Go upmarket and read the same story, but with a better class of pun, i.e., Survey Claims Legalization of Cannabis Has Resonant Grass Roots Support. Or, in a Guardian supplement, perhaps, a pro-feminist piece entitled Must The Chauvinism Go On? In similar fashion, a title like Opera Buffoonery assumes a greater degree of sophistication in its readers than, say, Ossie Determined To Earn His Spurs. (Many English readers will be familiar with Tottenham Hotspur, even if they have never visited White Hart Lane, but fewer will have come across the term opera buffa, let alone whistled Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio from the terraces.)

Staying with the quality rags, in addition to the headlines, the articles themselves frequently feature puns. It is not unusual to encounter an art review which opens like this: “Given its penchant for all things scatalogical—of which Duchamp’s urinal might be said to form the centrepiece—maybe The Museum of Modern Art should be re-named ‘The Cistern Chapel’…” Or to see Coppola’s Dracula castigated thus:

For once the lupine ferocity of critics who went for the jugular and left teeth-marks all over their reviews may be excused. The box-office takings are a (vam) pyrrhic victory, a triumph of hype over discernment.

[1-2-1 Review]

For the writer of the sportive essay, wordplay is so common as to seem almost a basic requirement. Take this excerpt from an essay on dogs, for instance:

When it comes to sucking up to humans, dogs take the biscuit. One of their least fetching characteristics is their willingness to retrieve sticks.

[“Have Dogs Backed the Wrong Horse,” 1-2-1 Review]

Or a piece deploring the seamy sex-scenes perpetrated by modern novelists:

They have no truck with plot (unlike the movie moguls of Hollywood’s Golden Age who selected plots with the trucker in mind), but they dutifully trot out the same knackered old descriptions of copulation. The reader is treated to a blow-job-by-blow-job account of the hero’s sexual conquests but, despite the plethora of climaxes, there’s a certain lack of suspense: the reader just knows knickers will be shed in the twist of the tale.

[“Writers & Sex,” 1-2-1 Review]

Despite, or perhaps because of its domination of newspaper and magazine headlines, the pun has tended to receive a bad press in more exclusive literary circles. Charles Lamb, for one, dismissed it as “a pistol let off at the ear, not a feather to tickle the intellect.” The standard dictionary definition of the pun is something of a put-down: “the use of words to exploit ambiguities and innuendos for humorous effect,” as in the comic verse below:

Instead of flushing whenever it’s mentioned,

we should salute its cisterns' unsung melodies

for—no matter how execrable a state it’s in—

a W.C. puts bums on seats.

If only as much could be said

for alternative comedians' lavatory humour.

[“A Paean to the W.C.,” 1-2-1 Review]

‘I’m sorry,’ she replied, ‘I know your pride is colossal

And I confess: a multiple orgasm in Basle’d be capital—

But how can I be sure the ecstacy-waves will be tidal?

[“Erections Are Universal,” 1-2-1 Review]

Or comic fiction:

Eustace Hewitt emitted the sort of sound a theatre

critic makes when tearing a bit-player’s performance to pieces.

[“People Behave Differently in the Dark,”

‘U’Magazine

English Literature has acknowledge its great satires and comic masterpieces, to be sure, but rarely without a certain reluctance; rarely without giving the impression that comedy, however clever, is in dubious taste. Comedy, acutely aware of this, often appears to be on the defensive where its art is concerned, hence the old adage about every comedian hankering to play Hamlet (another compulsive punster). It is as if some literary élite has decreed that Literature shall be elevating, edifying and, above all, serious. Comedy’s gut-instinct, by contrast, is that nothing is sacred.

But when a writer puns, it is not always purely for humorous effect. It is necessary to examine the context in which the wordplay occurs. What happens, for instance, when a domestic tragedy is depicted in this way:

Branded by ex-hubby (ex-All-Black & Oxford Blue)

With a hot iron as a lasting token of his esteem,

Leaving Muggins to raise a crop of Enid Blighters—

Crew-cutted & permanently gutted—on a pittance.

[“Personal Column,” Outposts Poetry Quarterly]

In this case the wordplay is unsettling. A “Straight” description of domestic violence (minus the wordplay) might have been less effective. As it is, the reader’s sympathies are engaged unexpectedly; taken by surprise, he feels compelled to reappraise the subject matter in question.

It has been noted that comedy’s gut-instinct insists that nothing is sacred. Literature can cope with this, to a point—but even the politest suggestion that language itself is not sacred causes it enormous anxiety. Wordplay has the temerity to draw attention to language’s vulnerability. Puns are essentially disruptive; gremlins loose in linguistic infrastructures, they goose a hitherto Sphinx-like text and wink back at the reader. Anti-puritan in spirit, wordplay is less interested in making sense of the world than finding pleasure in it, wary of words when they fall afoul of play. However, the dangers ensuing when writers take sanctuary in game-playing are undeniable:

An unco-ordinated woman in her early forties cantered down the porch steps to greet her. A flighty satin evening dress and long thoroughbred nose snubbed the chilly December dusk.

[“Baby,” Passages]

Was that thoroughbred nose always there, or did it only turn up when the writer hit on the verb Canter? Is the writer straining at the bit to say something about life—or to do something with words? But for those who demand Emotion Before Trickery, it might be pointed out that emotions are often tricky and human nature is usually game.

Puns may be a symptom of language in collision, but who can say that collision is not in collusion with a chaotic cosmos? Being practically untranslatable (watch a Marx Brothers’ film with French subtitles sometime), puns effectively scotch the myth of universality. Yet it could be argued that wordplay complements a tragic perspective by its tacit recognition of the fragmented, ambiguous nature of reality. It may be less threatening to linguistic prejudices to believe that every word has a reliable signification, to deny it the right to attach itself to other suppressed meanings, but it should be borne in mind that words are inherently protean and only autocrats resent ambiguity. If it is disconcerting, this may be for the same reason that nudity is found to be disconcerting: it alerts readers to the parts convention attempts to conceal (perhaps that is what is meant by detractors who dismiss wordplay as primitive). The pun’s strip-tease shows tantalizing glimpses of language in the buff. That people are irritated or offended does not mean wordplay is trivial or objectionable, only that the dignity of some readers is easily overthrown.

News headlines have brought wordplay into disrepute by their crass application of it: too often the distorted one—dimensional summary of events, political or otherwise, contradicts the ambiguity signified by the punning title. Far from being vulgar or frivolous or both, wordplay is a complex literary device permitting a richer response to language. Skillfully deployed, the pun does not bandy words, but bandages together (it arises, after all, from a linguistic accident) disparate meanings. Its vivacious, sometimes pugnacious presence warns the reader against taking the text at face value. In short, it is anathema to those who would “skip” because it causes them to pause and reflect.

But there is a difference between a writer pushing words around and a writer being pushed around by words: a difference between the writer who makes language jump through hoops and the writer who jumps through hoops for language: a difference between a pirouette by Pavlova and Pavlov’s conditioned reflex. In other words, the pun makes compulsive reading—but it needs watching.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

Dastardly Deeds Disclosed at Suffolk School! An inspection team from the Ministry of Education threatens to close Summerhill, a progressive school founded in 1921 by the Scottish educator, A.S. Neill. “While pupils’ behaviour was generally good, the inspectors noted that their ‘free use of colloquial language’ … would not be tolerated in conventional schools.” [From The Times, 10 February 1994, P.6.]

Barbarians: Babbling, Bearded, Bizarre

Mary M. Tius, Portland, Maine

Foreigners, like babies, babble, say, “Ba, ba, ba,” or “Bar, bar, bar,” instead of speaking clearly. Thus we may infer from the cognates of Middle English babelen: Low German babbeln ‘to babble’; Old Norse babba, Latin babulus ‘babbler’; Greek barbaros ‘foregin, rude, ignorant’; Late Greek babazein ‘to speak inarticulately’; Sanskrit balbalā ‘stammering sound.’ To these might be added L balbus ‘stammering,’ Skt barbara ‘stammering, non-Aryan,’ and Gk barbarizein ‘to act or speak like a barbarian.’ Originally, the Greek words referred primarily to speech, as in the Homeric barbarophōnos ‘speaker of a foreign language’; and even birds, because their songs were incomprehensible, might be, at least metaphorically, barbaroi ‘barbarians.’ Only after the Persian Wars, when the Persians were the barbarians, did the word take on the contemptuous sense of ‘ignorant, rude, slavish.’

The Greeks, like the Egyptians and Hebrews, divided the world into two groups: Us and Them. For Greeks, the two groups were those who spoke intelligibly (Greeks) and those who did not (non-Greeks). Both the word and the attitude were borrowed by the Romans and, until the Greek language and its literature were widely cultivated and known by Romans, they called themselves barbarians. Later, during the Augustan Age, L barbarus described only those tribes that lacked Greek or Roman accomplishments and, when these had spread, the word was then confined to the Teutonic tribes.

It may seem logical to assume that L barba ‘beard’ derives from L barbarus, but there is, we are told, no evidence for this. It derives either from Old Slavic barda or Old High German bart, though the OED states that any kinship between Old English beard (cognate with OHG bart) is, on phonetic grounds, doubtful. Beards, however, would not always have been “foreign” and “barbaric” to Romans, any more than to Greeks. The Homeric heroes were bearded, as were Greeks in general until after the time of Alexander the Great, who might have started the trend when the ordered his troops to shave lest their beards provide enemies with convenient handholds during close combat. At about the same time, that is, around 300 BC, Tomans, too, ceased wearing beards and, by the latter decades of the Republic, were generally clean-shaven and with hair cut short. The first Roman known to have been shaved daily was Scipio Africanus (237-183 BC). By contrast some Gauls, presumably warriors, still (according to Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century AD) wore short beards and also treated their hair with lime to make it stand up fearsomely like a crest or mane.

Some Teutonic tribes continued to wear beards, as is shown by the Latin name for one of the Suebian tribes whose home, during the first century AD, was in what is now northwestern Germany. The barbarian Langobardi or Longobardi ‘Long-beards’ migrated southward in the 4th century AD and, in 568, invaded the area north of the river Po. There they remained in control for more than two centuries, and the modern name of that region, Lombardy, reminds us of their enduring presence.

Some of those barbarians who shaved off their beards continued to wear moustaches. The statue of the Dying Gaul shows one such, evidently with hair limed and “fearsome.” The Gauls' wearing of moustaches without beards was considered by Romans to be the height (or depth) of “barbarism.”

Both Latin and Greek had more than one word for beard: Gk génys ‘jaw, cheek, chin; beard,’ geneiás, géneion ‘beard, chin, cheek,’ and pōgōn ‘beard’; L barba ‘beard’, and mentum ‘chin, beard.’ Both languages lacked a precise word for moustache, perhaps, because, when all men wore full beards, a word for a part of the beard was not needed. In Latin, the cumbersome phrase for moustache was barba (or barbula) Labri superioris ‘beard (or beardlet) of the upper lip’; but one dictionary (Smith and Hall, English-Latin Dictionary, American Book Company, 1871) cites an obscure word from Quicherat’s French-Latin Lexicon, itself quoted from the 7th-century gramarian, Isidorus Hispalensis: orum ‘moustache (described as being peculiar to the Goths).’ If this word really was in use at any time, it would seems to have been a derivative of L os, oris ‘mouth; face’ and to show an evolution like that of Gk géneion ‘beard’ from génys ‘jaw, chin,’ as well as that of Doric Greek mystax (also, b\?\stax), mystákos ‘the upper lip, the moustache,’ a word closely related to Attic Gk mástax, mastákos ‘jaws, mouth; mouthful, morsel.’ The Doric word was in use when Theocritus Bucolicus of Syracuse was writing his pastorals (272 BC); it apparently remained in continuous use throughout the centuries which saw the dissolution of the old Roman Empire and its gradual transformation into that later version of it known as Holy and Roman (although, along with Voltaire, few would not be inclined to consider it either the one or the other). The Doric word, too, was transformed into Modern Gk moustáki and gave Italian mostaccio ‘moustache, face, snout,’ mostacchio ‘moustache,’ and Spanish moustache. English moustache (from Middle French moustache) and mustachio (from the Italian or Spanish) did not appear in print until the latter part of the 16th century.

Nearly four centuries after Homer wrote of the “long-haired Achaeans,” Herodotus (in the Histories, Bk VII, 209) reported that, before the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BC), a Persian scout was surprised to see the vastly outnumbered Sprtans combing their long hair instead of preparing for battle. This, the Spartan Demaratus explained to his employer, Xerxes, was the custom among Spartans when they were about to risk their lives. After the Persian wars, the Spartans (but not the volatile Athenians) continued to wear their hair long, adhering to tradition as befitted their rigidly conservative nature.

Looking westward, we find that the Gauls of Gallia Cisalpina (‘Hither Gaul’) had been forced to cut off their long hair as a mark of submission to Rome. When, in 49 BC, after 173 years under Roman rule, they were granted Roman citizenship by Julius Caesar, Transalpine Gaul, a region of fierce warriors and fearless horsemen, was still Gallia Comata (‘Long-haired Gaul’) and did not lose its independence and submit to Roman rule until the reign of Augustus (27-12 BC). For the war-loving Gauls, as for the Spartans and other peoples throughout much of recorded history, abundant hair, it seems, symbolized power and strength. (Samson’s, we recall, resided in his hair, and one wonders if the Roman gens Julia chose its surname, Caesar, because L caesaries flowing hair, bush head of hair; hair of the beard' had once denoted virility and martial prowess.)

The idea that hair is evidence of strength and vigor survives, if somewhat dimly, in NGk agrios ‘wild, savage,’ often used to describe hair that is abundant and curly or wiry. Pointing in the reverse direction—that is, not from wild-to-hair but from hair-to-wild—are certain words and expressions in Modern (or New) Greek that derive from Gk mallós ‘lock of wool; lock of hair’ MGk malliá means ‘hair of the head (plural)'; malliaró is ‘hairy (neuter)'; but glōssa Malliarē (literally) ‘hairy or shaggy language’ is used to mean ‘unrefined, rude, coarse speech.’ On May Day, young people repair to the fields and hills and other secluded sports to gather wild flowers and to dally. This is called “catching the Malliarē,” understood to mean ‘the hairy (female) one’; but her “pursuit” on May Day, which gives rise to many a coarse jest and many a risqué remark, is surely a survival of ancient orgiastic festivals and practices either in honor of Maia (as the earth goddess was sometimes known) or of Artemis, one of whose titles was, according to Robert Graves (The Greek Myths), “The Lady of the Wild Things.”

Hair, then, symbolized—for some, still symbolizes—strength, vigor, “wildness,” and was long considered an appurtenance of warriors. Consider now the word bigot which entered English from MF bigot ‘bigot, hypocrite,’ of obscure origin, according to Le Robert. Webster’s Third International Unabridged tells us that OF bigot ‘Norman’ perhaps derived from “(assumed) OE í God ‘by God’ ”; but there is the Spanish hombre de bigote ‘moustached man, man of spirit’; and one is led to speculate both that Normans wore moustaches and that the meaning of bigot changed in a way similar to that of Basque bizarra ‘beard,’ which, in Portuguese and in Spanish, came to mean ‘handsome, brave.’ The OED mentions dialectal F bigearrer ‘to quarrel’ in connection with F bizarre which at first meant ‘brave, soldier-like’ and, later, ‘odd, fantastic.’ Le Robert (after Littré) notes that the word entered French from It bizzarro ‘capricious’ from bizarro ‘brave.’ So it seems that facial hair, the evidence of male adulthood, at first signified strength and warlike qualities; then, those same qualities carried to an extreme; and, finally, shorn of martial connotations, mere eccentricity.

Just who were those people who appeared in Greece in 1250 BC, those Dorians, who gave their word for moustache to most of Europe? They were the people who, in 1100 BC, burned Mycaenae and, before another century had passed, had succeeded in destroying the entire ancient culture of Argolis. Feared and loathed as having no respect for civilized conventions such as the inviolability of heralds and of the sacred places and their priestesses, the Dorians settled in a region, Doris, which included Corinth and Sparta, and, among other places, on the coast of Asia Minor and in colonial areas, such as southern Italy and Sicily. Their reputation for daring, endurance, harshness, rude strength, and severity survives to this day. In English, Dorian and Spartan still mean harsh, severe, strict; and Doric is the name of a rustic dialect of English. That these “barbarians” whose invasions brought about the Dark Ages of ancient Greece should also have given us their word for moustache seems perfectly in keeping with the ancient and widespread view that hair, whether of the head or of the face, signifies brute strength.

OBITER DICTA: Madam, I’m not Adams

In a curious move some years ago, the British government forbade the broadcasting of the voice of Gerry Adams, head of Northern Ireland’s Sinn Fein. There is no ban on transmitting his image on television, but the audio portion of any statement he makes is blacked out. In recent months, during the negotiations between the British government and the various factions in Northern Ireland, there have been occasions when Adams has “spoken” on television (and, of course, radio), and, because of the ban, an actor (with an Irish accent) has been engaged to lip-synch Adams’s speech. This creates an odd effect, for the broadcast is preceded by the announcement, “The voice you hear is that of an actor speaking the words of Jerry Adams.” On television, a notice to that effect sometimes appears on the screen. The majority of people have no idea of what Adams sounds like, so now everyone thinks his voice is that of the actor who reads his speeches and comments. Perhaps Adams is speaking in Irish Gaelic (he could do Erse!) and we are merely listening to a translator. For that matter, those of us who have watched and listened to Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Chou En-lai, and just about anyone else whose speech is translated for broadcast have not the slightest idea of what those speakers’ “real” voices sound like. Nor, I daresay, does it make any difference. The result is not unlike the old bit of nonsense that Shakespeare’s plays were not written by him but by someone else with the same name.

What possesses the government to persist in this charade is not known, but it must be one of the silliest manifestations of censorship ever devised by the devious human mind and effectively puts Adams on the same level with political figures speaking their native languages in Bosnia, Libya, China, and any other country.

OBITER DICTA: Murdering the Language

In February, 1994, a French jury convicted a gardener, Omar Raddad, of the murder of his employer on the evidence of a note she left saying, “Omar m’a tuer.” There is a furor over the conviction because those who knew the victim as a precise grammarian, insist that—even in her death throes—she would have written, “…m’a tué.”

OBITER DICTA: A Clutch of Clichés

Laurence Urdang

To be filed along with between a rock and a hard place is the unutterably boring What goes around comes around. A close contender in the current redundancy sweepstakes is It was déjá vu all over again.

Speaking with a Horse Voice

Alan Major, Canterbury

Most of the English counties had dialect words and terms which were used with regard to horses. My own grandfather, who was a ploughboy on a Kent farm when ten years old, told me that even at that age he could control his team of horses by words alone, and that was by no means uncommon. The use of reins was necessary in situations where few words were spoken; but the men who used horses for various tasks and talked to them knew the horses would learn to obey their voice and move to do what was required, even without the use of reins.

The horses also got used to the tone of voice of their particular ploughman, carter, or waggoner, so that if they were sold and moved to another farm, with a different man to command them, or were taken to a different region of the country where another dialect was used, the horses had to be taught again and learn the new words of command and the way in which these were given to them.

First, perhaps I should state the names of the horses in a team of four. These were the fore-horse, the front horse in the team; the pin-horse, the second horse of a team (also called in Lincolnshire, Shropshire, and Somerset); the losh-horse or lashhorse, the third horse; and the rod-horse, the fourth horse. Sometimes a horse on its own in the shafts or rods of a wagon or cart was also known as a rodhorse. There was also a gradation among the men who worked with horses on a farm. The first man was the waggoner, who worked with a horse or horses and a wagon, the highest rank attained; he also had charge of the first and best team of horses when required for a task. He was assisted by his first mate, also a skilled horseman. The second man had charge of the second team and was also assisted by his second mate. A large farm would also have a third and fourth man if many horses were used. There was also a yard man who looked after the horses when in the farmyards and an allworks or odd man who did all of the less enjoyable tasks with horses in yard, stable, and elsewhere. A carter was a man who used a horse and cart on a farm, estate, in towns, cities, and elsewhere to carry or cart or transport a load of goods, etc.

There was an order for moving along a road or country lane when leaving a farm. The first man would lead with his team, the second man next, and so on, each walking at the head with his own horses.

But let us return to the words of command they used. Gee up! was and still is universal in use throughout the English counties, to a horse about to move off or if faster movement was required, regardless of the type of horse it was—wagon horse, cart horse, plough horse, or just a horse being ridden for pleasure. This word may have its origin in the term gee-gee used by generations of English children for a horse and slang among racing enthusiasts. Whoa! or Whoh!, pronounced “woe,” was commonly used to command a horse to halt.

There were numerous words used to make a horse turn to the left or nearside. In Kent the command Why! was used; in Sussex Thow wee!; in the East Anglia region of eastern England, including Essex, Come here!; in the West Country it was Come here!, too, but in the Midlands region it was Come back!; in Somerset the command was Come hither!; in Devon, Come in!; in Cornwall, Hold in!; in Hampshire, New Forest area, it was Come hither!, too. In Lincolnshire Horve!, Horve up!, or Hove up! was the command, while in Yorkshire Harve back! or Worve! was uttered; in Lancashire and other areas of northwest England it was either Come hither!, Away!, or Ar wither! In Sussex Woot! was also the command to ease off to the left. In Kent another command word used to turn to the left was Mether!.

Equally there were many words of command to make a horse or horses turn to the right or offside. In Kent it was usual to say Wai! or Whoot!; in Sussex Gee woot! was used; in Hampshire, Gee wut!, while in Cornwall, Somerset, and Gloucestershire it was Gee off! The curious Wug off! was used in Devon and Wog off! in Dorset. West Sussex horsemen used Hold off!; in Berkshire and Hartfordshire it was Het!, while in Norfolk it was Wordee! and Wheesh!, Suffolk and West Norfolk also having Gee oh! In the Midlands, Lancashire, Yorkshire, and a large part of northern England Gee back! was used. The Cumbria region including the Lake District had Gee again!; in Lincolnshire, Heat back!

In southern Scotland and the bordering English counties Hup in! and Hup reet! were used, while Hip! was used in east Scotland and Haud off! [‘Hold off!'] in central Scotland. Some of the English words also found their way into use in Scotland, perhaps by horsemen who had moved jobs or even gone with the horses. The Wheesh! command of Norfolk was used in northern Scotland.

No man working with horses who had any sense or experience spoke harshly or shouted the commands. They had a great respect for their horses and spoke to them gently, knowing they would get the best response by this method. Some of them often spoke to their horses for hours as a working friend rather than a dumb animal.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Here we have the classic cart-and-horse situation,’ [Lawrence Corey, professor of medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine said. ‘Which came first?’ ” [From The Washington Post, 4 July 1990:A3. Submitted by Fox, Alexandria, Virginia.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“A defense lawyer in Wednesday’s court case against three people for roughing up a Park Ranger July 4 was heard to say, ‘If the hand were on the other foot….’ ” [From The Cape Codder, 27 July 1990. Submitted by Edward T. Howard, Delray Beach, Florida.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Girls, Boys and Language

Joan Swann, (Blackwell, 1992), ix + 261 pp.

A man’s perception of the subtleties of language prejudice is probably somewhat bent, no matter how hard he might try to develop a sensitivity to them. I often have difficulty understanding what writers on the subject are going on about and, succumbing to prejudice myself—however unwittingly and unwillingly—I tend to accuse them of conducting a witch hunt (for imaginary witches, of course) and of seeing chimeras under the bed. I think that my perceptions have changed since I was first exposed to the vehement, sometimes vociferous vituperations of Casey Miller and Kate Swift, whose Words & Women [reviewed III, 2] and Handbook of Nonsexist Writing [XV, 2] were—I cannot resist— seminal works in the field. It bothers me to see what I regard as perfectly legitimate objections to sexist prejudice alongside silly trivialities. For example, Swann quotes a passage from Robin Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place in which the woman uses the word mauve: Lakoff writes, “if the man should say [mauve], one might well conclude he was imitating a woman sarcastically or was a homosexual or an interior decorator.” I cannot tell whether the passage is cited as an illustration of something that is true or untrue, for Swann goes no further than setting it alongside other quotations (which are reflective of anti-female prejudice). Are we to take the comment about mauve as anti-female prejudice? We are not told. Personally, falling into none of Lakoff’s three categories, I can only presume to accuse her of having a provincial view about the word mauve, which I would use without hesitation were it appropriate, especially in referring to the 1890s. But there are words and expressions (divine, adorable, for example) that are associated with ways in which some women but probably no men (except those imitating women sarcastically, homosexuals, or interior decorators) express themselves.

Another thing that irritates me about the writings on sexist language is that they are all polemical, insisting that what has taken thousands of years to evolve—modern English, a reflex of Indo-European, with its roots (right or wrong, for better or for worse) in Western culture—be changed overnight, as by edict.

Compounded with that is an essential mistake, namely, that because women deserve treatment equal to that of men (which I consider an undeniable given), they are the same as men. Women are simply not the same as men, as anyone who has ever seen a woman and a man can testify. Furthermore, whatever might be accomplished in letting them do whatever they like to make them look more like men superficially, it is highly unlikely that childbearing and insemination will become androgynous activities or that we shall see an epicene race of human beings in which sexual differences are eradicated.

Moreover, most women do not (yet) think the way most men do: that is not intended as a criticism, merely as a factual observation, possibly attributable in part to the way females are raised. Whether rearing practises are, as feminists would have it, owing to male domination or to females’ innate nature is academic. The point that seems to elude many feminists is that the object of nature is to procreate, an ineluctable fact that determines physical characteristics in most species and, in human beings, might by now have evolved into a set of determiners in which lust is strongly influenced by language. Sex is the name of the basic game, not sexual equality or inequality, and language is an extremely important way in which seduction is worked. To change all this involves supplying the entire cast on the stage of life with a new script, requiring them to play roles quite different from those they have played all their lives, that are traditional, and that are a reflex in our society and behavior of the same sort that makes a peacock spread its tail, a whooping crane do its ballet, and the baboon develop a technicolor bottom.

The author cites an episode in which John McEnroe, the tennis player who is not known to mince words, was expelled from “an exclusive London club” for using obscene language, evidently to a woman. Swann characterizes the event with these words:

Not only should women themselves not swear, they’re often thought to need protection from swearing by others.

I have no brief about women swearing, but the situation dealt with the appropriate use of language (of any kind) in a certain situation, and there are rules of demeanor and politesse which some of us choose to follow; it is difficult to see what Swann is getting at: can she be suggesting that it is perfectly all right for a man to have been offensive to a woman because women have equal rights to be insulted or offended? Such an attitude is ludicrous: women demanding equal rights to be (verbally) ill-treated?

Swann discusses language in teaching, bringing to the attention of insensitive male readers like me typical manifestations like, “If it takes three men two days to dig six holes…” The revised form can be contemplated: “If it takes three women two days to dig six holes…”; “If it takes three people …”; it seems unlikely that the preferred form would be, “If it takes three women two days to knit three scarves …” Other subjects dealt with include, for example, aggression among boys: one might be correct in thinking that such matters are behavioral and cultural, but, for all that, they cannot lie outside the realm of language, which reinforces them. It is probably politically incorrect for boys to play cowboys and Indians these days, but one would have to stretch the imagination to ponder such a game in which a woman was relegated to rustlin' up some pancakes off the ol' chuckwagon. Serious issues are identified by Swann, though the reader not steeped in the subject might find the approach overbearing. The treatment is coherent and well set forth, but the result desired is not clear: Is it equality, and, if so, what does that mean? Is it a completely epicene approach to teaching, and, if so, what does that imply for the teaching of history? Equal time for Boadicea and Joan of Arc vis-a-vis William the Conqueror, Napoleon, Washington, Hitler, and Stalin? Regardless of the reason or the retrograde righting of wrongs, men outnumber women in the history of accomplishment in virtually every area of human endeavor; in literature, one is sore put to equate Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn with Pippi Longstocking; Miss Marple is easily overwhelmed by Inspector Alleyn, Sherlock Holmes, and Bulldog Drummond. Feminists might argue—quite properly—that women’s low profile is attributable to their repression, but that does not change history. How are we to release ourselves from this horrible overburden of culture that permeates everything? It cannot be easily campaigned or legislated out of existence without inducing mass amnesia. Is that what is sought?

One might concede that things have been going in the wrong direction since before we came down out of the trees. But one must be careful to distinguish between nature, in which we must recognize that there are differences between males and females, and bias, which ought not be tolerated. I know the difference, but I often have trouble identifying which is at work. One is moved to believe that if English had grammatical instead of natural gender, life would be much simpler for us all; yet it is hard to believe that the women in cultures that speak such a language enjoy unalloyed equality.

If the fatalistic implications of suggestions that homosexuality is gene-related turn out to be true and that behavior is governed by genes, then we can be consoled by the knowledge that we need no longer accept responsibility for anything we do (or say): the quasi-Freudian notion that “My daddy and mommy made me do it” may turn out to be irremedial fact rather than theory, which might put all psychologists, psychotherapists, and psychiatrists out of business.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire

Alexander Beider, (Avotaynu, Inc. 1993), xxiii + 760 pp.

Until the end of the 18th century most European Jews bore no family names. The names transmitted from generation to generation (and still used in religious rituals) followed the Biblical model X ben Y ‘X, son of Y’ for males and X bat Y‘X, daughter of Y’ for females. During the Middle Ages vernacular names, nicknames, and honorific names became widespread, but they were not strictly family names; for one thing, they were not usually hereditary. It was legislation mandating the adoption of surnames by Jews, introduced in 1787 by the Austrian Emperor Joseph II, that set the pattern of surnaming followed by most Jews of European descent to the present day.

Thus, before the 19th century, Russian Jews were generally called by their given names and patronymics that ended in -ovich or -evich (e.g., Mordekhaj Izakovich ‘Mordekhaj, son of Izak’). Following the annexation by Russia of eastern Poland between 1793 and 1815, the necessity of accounting for the masses of Polish Jews that suddenly became Russian subjects and hence potential taxpayers led the Czar to issue an edict in 1804 ordering every Jew to assume a fixed hereditary name that must be used in all transactions and records. The surnaming process was implemented by local Jewish authorities, who created various categories of surnames; however, there is evidence that many names were chosen by the individuals who bore them.

The study of Jewish surnames began as a scholarly pursuit about a hundred years ago. Interest in the field expanded after World War II as part of the worldwide search by dispersed Jews of their genealogical past. Currently, Jewish onomastics continues to be driven by the need to retain one of the last links of contemporary Jews to their ancestry. Alexander Beider’s A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire is an outstanding exemplar of the intensive research being done in the field. It also sets the highest standards for any future work on surnames.

A Russian-born Ph.D. in mathematics, Beider spent six years in the 1980s researching his subject in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Paris. He systematically scoured 19th- and early 20th-century Russian and Jewish registers, records, dictionaries, and other sources, including lists of voters, gazetteers, and tombstone inscriptions. These sources covered the entire region of the Pale of Settlement, an area to which Jews were confined after the partition of Poland (1772-95) that included the present-day Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Lithuania, and part of Latvia. The author also searched photographs of notable Russian-born bearers of Jewish surnames, such as the writer Isaak Babel, the Zionist leader Golda Meerson (Meir), the painter Marc Shagal (Chagall), and the violinist Yascha Kheifets (Heifetz). The publisher, Avotaynu, Inc., is a leader in the field of Jewish genealogy; its varied publications, including an international quarterly, attest to the recent burgeoning of general interest in an area of research hitherto reserved for specialists.

[Sol Steinmetz, Random House]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Do You Speak Estuary?

Paul Coggle, (Bloomsbury, 1993), 106pp.

[Readers outside the UK may send £5.99 or its equivalent (e.g., US$9) to Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd, 2 Soho Square, London W1V 5DE, England, adding 72p (US$1) for surface delivery.]

Observers and critics of the language have occasionally expressed their consternation at expressions like There you go, when uttered by a waiter or waitress placing a dish before them in a restaurant, No problem, when You’re welcome might have been anticipated, and other clichés that seem to have gripped the unimaginative minds of the younger generation. The more ancient among us (observers) are inclined to offer the consolation, “This, too, shall pass …,” but that is of little comfort to those whose sense of security is affected by change of any kind. A view that is at times dispassionate and occasionally bordering on the enthusiastic is put forth in this book by Paul Coggle, described as “a Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Kent at Canterbury and occasional lecturer and commentator on the growing trend of Estuary English.” The book is deceptively packaged in the guise of a frivolous paperback by a publisher fast becoming known for a prolific output of language books of great variety (including some of my own).

As Coggle explains,“the term Estuary English was coined in the early eighties by David Rosewarne… [H]e described Estuary English as a ‘variety of modified regional speech. It is a mixture of non-regional and local south-eastern English pronunciation and intonation.’ The estuary referred to is the Thames estuary … [including] the inhabitants of North Kent and South Essex.” The term is not unfamiliar to me, but I was glad to have a definition for it. It would be impossible to describe here all the characteristics of the dialect—one should acquire the book for that information. Suffice it to say that many of its chief features, like the substitution of a glottal stop for all medial dental sounds (d and t), the replacement of the final l-sounds by what phoneticians call a “dark l,” which sounds more like a w: Paul, bell, and fault sound like Pauw, beuw, and fauw, and the intensification of a y-glide, especially after t, into a sh-sound, yielding stshewpid for stupid and stshew for stew.

This is not an exhaustive catalogue of the modifications, some of which make it extremely difficult for even a native Brit to understand what is being said. Television performers like Jonathan Ross are often totally incomprehensible to native speakers of British English; those who think they understand Scouse, Cockney, Estuary, and other dialects because they (like me) have lived for many years amongst the natives, should be condemned to listening to Frank Bruno interviews, Rab C. Nesbitt sitcoms, and episodes of Eastenders. Listening to Ross and others of his persuasion (including Rory Bremner and RP speaker Clive Anderson), one gets the impression that an essential ingredient of communicating the message is to articulate carefully the unimportant things, then deliberately mumble, as quickly as possible, the punch lines. I never had trouble understanding the Two Ronnies, but I find a great deal of British TV comedy leaving me glumly sober, while the audiences fall about clutching their sides.

The approach of Do You Speak Estuary? is somewhat facetious, but for all that, it carries a useful message, one treated from the point of view of the RP speaker in Does Accent Matter?, by John Honey [XVI,1,10]. The only error I noted was that quick and slow are classifiable only as adjectives, suggesting that they do not occur as adverbs (p. 69).

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A History of English in Its Own Words and American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography

Craig M. Carver, (HarperCollins, 1991 [hardcover], 1992 [paper]), x + 275pp. and Craig M. Carver, (University of Michigan Press, 1987), xiii + 317pp.

Craig Carver’s name should be familiar to readers as author of “Etymology As Educated Guess” [XIX,1,10], an article that provoked several EPISTOLAE. Dr. Carver is associated with the Dictionary of American Regional English [D.A.R.E.] as Managing Editor (from the blurb on his 1987 book) and Senior Editor (from the 1992 paperback): the blurb on the 1991 edition says that he “writes a column on word histories for The Atlantic … and was a consultant for The American Heritage Dictionary and The Random House Dictionary (2nd edition).” We have reported from time to time on the D.A.R.E. in “How Do You D.A.R.E.,” in which readers' help in searching out evidence for recondite Americanisms has been sought. We have been remiss in failing to review his excellent book, American Regional Dialects [ARD].

I first encountered the term bear claw, applied to (the shape of) a piece of Danish pastry, in New York City about twenty years ago (or, possibly, earlier), when it struck me as a curious metaphor for New Yorkers to be using, for their familiarity with bears' claws was likely gained from looking at them in a zoo. ARD pinpoints the origin of the term in California, which is reasonable enough, but it fails to comment on its frequency in the east. By the same token, although easterners (and others) associate sourdough bread with the western US, it is not a term outside their active vocabularies. On the other hand, a term like catch colt ‘the offspring of a mare that is unintentionally bred,’ which the naive guesser might think came out of Wyoming or, possibly, Kentucky, was traced to central New York State (for we must not forget Saratoga Springs). ARD is highly recommended to those whose interest in American Regional English is not serious enough to extend to the purchase of the D.A.R.E. (of which three volumes have thus far been published by Harvard’s Belknap Press) and to those who might not be able to afford it; to those who do buy that work, the ARD is an invaluable adjunct to it.

In A History of English in Its Own Words, Carver has divided the development of English into six periods, from the Old English (450-1150) to the Technological Century (guess when); for each he has selected a number of interesting words to which he has given full etymological treatment, discussing not only their semantic histories but their cultural appropriateness and function. (Perhaps I am stating the obvious, but it is the history of English vocabulary that is the focus of this book, not the history of its grammar.) The order is neither chronological nor alphabetical in the Old English chapter, which is understandable because, as the author suggests in the Introduction, dates are unreliable for a long period for which little evidence is extant. On the other hand, I am surprised to see loophole dated 1591, for castles were pretty much on their way out by then. The reason, of course, is that the OED gives 1591 as the date of its first citation. This again emphasizes a serious problem: we can safely allow that loophole is much older than 1591, and the OED citation must be understood to mean only that 1591 was the date of the first quotation found—it was very likely not the date the word was coined and first used: people were using words long before they were put to parchment, and we must carefully stress that when discussing dates for all but a handful of words whose dates of origin have been unqualifiedly reported, like lawrencium.

Principles of etymology are not, however, Carver’s brief. I found some of the etymologies a bit hard to take, but then I feel that way about a lot of etymologies. The practice in this book is to set forth, where appropriate, the several origins postulated for a word without expressing an opinion about their validity. The entry cold turkey [p.223] is an example. From the context of many quotations given in the OED2e, it is obvious that the sense of talk turkey has changed: in earlier incarnations it meant ‘use high-flown language,’ quite different from its common use today to mean ‘speak frankly, directly, and unemotionally.’ The OED2e cites a Daily Express quotation to the effect that ‘talk frankly’ is intended for talk cold turkey, but, without additional evidence, I doubt the accuracy of the journalist who wrote that: too often have I seen instances of a writer’s taking an unfamiliar idiom and incorrectly describing its form, its meaning, or both, and I think this might be just such a case: he mixed up talk turkey with cold turkey. Also, quit or go cold turkey is not limited to the abrupt quitting of drug-taking but includes any habit-forming substance: it describes suddenly quitting smoking, drinking, and could be applied (at least metaphorically) to dropping one’s current squeeze. It is difficult to see how the (apocryphal to me) talk cold turkey could have had even a remote effect on quit cold turkey.

The DOA [Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles, University of Chicago, 1951] lists quotations for a (slang, obsolete) sense, “A fit or spell of intoxication”; an 1866 quotation [ibid.] shows turkey bumps for what we today would call goose bumps or goose pimples (horripilation to the tender-minded); although the DOA defines cold turkey as “extreme matter-of-fact plainness,” one of the quotations given is “He had gone to Henry Gottrell ‘cold turkey,’ and with authority from the department,” which looks very much like the ‘suddenly, without warning or preliminaries’ sense of the phrase, not the ‘plain-talking’ sense. One must be careful in dealing with the word turkey, for, as Greenough & Kittredge remark in Words and Their Ways (1901, p. 331), “Welsh rabbit' is merely a joke, like ‘Cape Cod turkey’ for codfish,” quoted in the DOA along with other examples at Cape Cod and, for Marblehead turkey, at Marblehead. The (wild) turkey was in such abundance in the northeastern US as to have become proverbial in the 19th century, cropping up in numerous similar references, often of a jocular nature: Cherokee turkey (bald eagle), Colorado turkey (wood ibis), prairie turkey (sage grouse), Taunton turkey (alewife; spring herring), water turkey (snakebird). The wild turkey, which was never successfully domesticated, is of a variety different from the Mexican species, which has been in domestication for four hundred years.

The sense of turkey applied to a flop was simply ‘dud, damp squib,’ so its application to ineffectual, inept people (that is, naive but not necessarily stupid, as Carver has it) is an easy shift. Carver remarks that the turkey “has suffered bad PR and is widely regarded as a stupid, ugly bird.” In order to verify that opinion, I pursued the question with a local turkey farmer, who told me that turkeys are possessed of keen hearing and are extremely wary; wild turkeys are reported to be very hard to catch. Their domestic cousins, being forty to fifty per cent heavier, are somewhat sluggish in comparison, and their reputation for stupidity is not undeserved: although turkeys are today bred indoors, formerly, when bred outdoors, they were known to stare skyward in a persistently heavy rain, mouths open, till they drowned; also, the presence of a dog or other animal in their pen, particularly at night, panics them to the point where they pile up atop one another, suffocating others. At the risk of being besieged by the turkey lobby and charged with the offense of unfairness to the birds, I readily agree that such behavior should be perceived as tantamount to stupidity, which is just as well, for none of us could tolerate the notion of eating an intelligent animal at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Proverbially, geese are stupid, too, chickens are scared, cocks are proud, pigeons are easily victimized, and many other members of the animal kingdom (including insects, arachnids, etc.) are identified with fallaciously pathetic attributes like wisdom, slyness, ugliness, spiritedness, etc., full lists of which may be sought in dictionaries of similes. To say that turkeys have had a bad press is like saying that foxes have been maligned as sly and wolves as sexually aggressive, while owls have enjoyed favourable treatment as being wise and stallions as spirited.

The purpose of the preceding exercise is not to show up Carver’s more-or-less standard treatment of cold turkey but to demonstrate that etymological research must not be merely skin deep: it should be subcutaneous, intramuscular, and visceral. Certainly, the entries selected as illustrative of the theme of this book are very apt, and each section is introduced by a perceptively written descriptive essay. But here and there one detects what I must describe as a second-hand approach to the language. For example, in giving the origin of racoon, Carver writes, “… the Algonquian word ärä ‘kun from ärä ‘kunem, literally ‘he scratches with his hands,’ which probably alludes to the raccoon’s habit of scrabbling for crabs and other tidbits on stream bottoms.” Anyone familiar with racoon’s habits— which, I daresay, cannot have changed much in a few hundred years—knows them to be unbelievably resourceful in the way they open closed containers, untie ropes, and generally use their paws as adroitly as we use our hands, so we need not rely on observations of them in subaqueous venues, unnatural and difficult at best.

A History of English in Its Own Words gathers together a great deal of the available scholarship about the 750-odd words discussed, and Carver has a facility for presenting information in a palatable and understandable form. Those not already possessed of a copy of this book would find reading and having it worthwhile. An index completes the book, but there is no bibliography.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Make your homecoming a memorial one.” [From the South Dakota State College Eastern. Submitted by Jim Swanson, Madison, South Dakota.]

VERBUM SAP: Speaking of the Ineffable

Robert Cochrane, Toronto

Some French philosopher—I forget whether it was Descartes, Voltaire, or Marcel Marceau—once observed that when someone says needless to say, you can bet your bottom sou that what follows is something that the speaker feels very much needs to be said. Judging by the response to a weekly word column I write for the Globe and Mail, this apparent contradiction between phrase and purpose impels some literal-minded readers to the very precipice of apoplexy. “If it’s needless to say,” they write, “why say it?” The question is, of course, rhetorical. And so is the phenomenon against which they fulminate. It goes without saying (he said, proceeding nevertheless to say it) that there is a technical literary term for these effable unmentionables. It is paralipsis, Greek for ‘passing by omission.’ There is also a variation known as preteritio—known, that is, to people who get really deeply into this sort of thing and speak a lot of Latin so that ordinary people cannot understand what they are saying, needless or otherwise. Ordinary people just call it silly, not to mention ludicrous, to say nothing of absurd. But there is method in this apparent madness. With apologies to the 19th-century Scottish poet Alexander Smith, “it is not of so much consequence what you do not say, as how you say it.”

To appreciate the rhetorical effectiveness of the device, try walking up to the gang at the water cooler and saying, “it goes without saying …” or “at the risk of beating a dead horse….” Then clam up and walk casually away. Do you think they will continue their causerie as if you had not enigmatically interrupted? No, they will pursue you as a pack of starved schnauzers in whose midst you have dangled a tantalizing T-bone.

“What goes without saying?” they will bark, “Which dead horse?”

It need hardly be added that, whatever the literal meaning of paraliptic phrases, both utterer and utteree fully know there is more to come. Far from being superflous appendages, the words that usually follow needless to say really need to be said. In fact, they are accorded emphasis by the parenthetically cavalier treatment.

It is probably unnecessary to state that it is not a new trick. If the Greeks had a word for it, it is probably stating the obvious to assert that the Greeks used it. St. Paul certainly did, as Tom McArthur points out in the Oxford Companion to the English Language. The apostle, in his epistle to the Hebrews (11:32), asks, “And what shall I say more?” Then he goes on for another nine verses, or 185 words, which in paraphrase go something like this: “Time does not permit me to mention Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, etc.”

Paralipsis was formally defined as early as 1586, in a book called The English Secretorie, by Angel Day. We use it, he wrote, “when in seeming to ouer-passe, omit, or let-slip a thing, we then chiefly speake thereof.” Chaucer used the device liberally. And it was not beneath Addison, Butler, Thackeray, Reade, and Dickens, let alone (another one!) that stalwart of plain spade-calling, George Orwell.

Nor is it only an English idiom-syncracy. French has, among other expressions, cela va sans dire, which we borrowed word-for-word to make “it goes without saying.” Germans use es versteht sich von selbst (literally, “it makes itself understood’) or the shorter but still mouth-filling adverb selbstverständlich. Italians handle it with va da sè che. At this very moment, people all over the world are saying things that ostensibly do not require articulation. The Scots have two terse equivalents. In Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, there is this: “I hate fords at a’ times, let abe when there’s thousands of armed men on the other side.” Abe is an early form of the infinitive to be, and let abe translates to ‘let alone’ as in “not to mention.” Samuel Crockett’s novel The Raiders, an 1894 saga about smuggling, has this sentence: “No doubt he had many a sin on his soul, forby murder.” Forby is an obsolete English preposition and adverb that meant “beside” or “besides, ” but in Scots has the broader sense of “not to mention.” Both abe and forby still occur in Scotland and Northern England.

Preteritio is subtly more devious than paralipsis, in that its users feign silence while actually mentioning things that should not be spoken of. It can be demonstrated by this hypothetical hustings rhetoric: “I could list all the shady deals my opponent has been involved in. But it would take far too much time, and I don’t want to get down into the gutter with him. So I won’t even mention them.” Needless to say, he already did.

The point is that there is no point in trying to make literal sense of these expressions. And please do not bother to write and thank me for this advice. In fact, don’t mention it.

Westward Ho

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

Perth, the capital city of Western Australia, is some three thousand kilometers away from Sydney. Most of the country that lies between the two is sparsely populated desert, to the extent that inhabitants of WA, or sandgropers as they are jocularly known, refer to people from the eastern States as T’othersiders, and vice versa. There is a real sense of a divide. Nonetheless there is not a recognized dialect of Australian English that is Westralian—any more than there is a recognized dialect of Tasmanian, to take the other State which appears to be similarly distanced and effectively isolated from the more heavily populated region of southeastern Australia. Indeed, the conventional wisdom is that Australian English is remarkably homogeneous and that there are very few local features of either vocabulary or accent—and certainly none of grammar or syntax.

What evidence there is of lexical regionalism is largely anecdotal and there seemed, therefore, to be a case for mounting a reading program which would attempt to locate and use regional sources to both test the water and, if nothing else, broaden the citation base of the next edition of the Australian National Dictionary, which in retrospect, was rather skewed toward the metropolitan east coast. Newspapers were an attractive source, being both an immediate record of the colloquial register and of verifiable provenance, and the Centre therefore began, in 1987 and with the support of the Australian Research Council, to plough its way through a range of regional newspapers. The West Australian results are the first to be edited.

To give a short answer first, there are still no Australian dialects. But what does emerge from even this preliminary analysis is a set of lexical preferences that provides an image of a part of Australia not replicated elsewhere. This can be demonstrated simply by listing a number of real estate terms for an increase in the size of a lot or block of land, as add on, add on block, build up proposition, farm build up, or topping off property, in all of which standard terms are used with a specific application which they do not have elsewhere in Australia. More significant groupings occur in areas of socio-historical importance in the West. There are, for instance, numerically more Aborigines in the West than on the east coast and they impinge more on aspects of the life of the community. So the number of compounds employing Aboriginal as a distinguishing epithet is noticeably greater and their character less marginal. The concern with Aboriginal welfare gives rise to terms like Aboriginal cottage parent, Aboriginal enclave worker, and Aboriginal police aide which, though transparent, require recognition.

This pattern of a growth of compounds representing an area of special interest within the State is a recurring one. The population is small and scattered. Distance is a fact of life, as the matrices of compounds formed on words like isolated—for instance, isolated child, isolated grave site, isolated pharmacy, and isolated school—and remote—for instance, remote community, remote resident, and remote site—demonstrate. Industrial practices have been developed in an attempt to overcome the tyranny of distance. The familiar figure of the flying doctor is joined by the flying padre and the flying solicitor; workers operate on a fly in/fly out basis; the originally US company town (or closed town) generates the natural opposites free town and open town, and a mobile labor force is accommodated in transportables and demountables.

Dry climatic conditions and the consequent importance of water produce terms like run-off block [somewhat perversely a block on which water gathers]. A safe area is one with a good rainfall; drought proof water means ‘permanent water’; a licensed bore needs to be defined by context. There is the predictable bunch of miscellaneous terms like busy bee for the more conventional working bee, faction for a sports team not, as elsewhere in Australia, a dissident political group, rumble step for a speed bump, and skimpy for a scantily clad [female] barattendant. And there is a greater proportion of words of Aboriginal origin, including many names of the State’s prolific and unique flora and fauna, like cherabin, koonac, or marron (all Aboriginal words for freshwater crustaceans, some of which are now farmed).

Individually these do not, either contemporarily or historically, amount to very much; their strength is rather in their mass and in the way this provides a gloss on the West Australian experience. As the fruits of an exercise in historical lexicography the 750 words examined are part of a “para-dialect” the existence of which can only be confirmed or denied by a comparable exercise in lexicography, which might then attract the energies of a traditional dialectologist.

EPISTOLA {Burling Lowrey}

Gerald Eskenazi’s piece on the imaginative word-coinages among professional athletes [XXI, 1, 22] prompted me to reflect on the changing nomenclature in tennis.

Bill Tilden’s “big” game inspired the expression, cannonball serve. That has been replaced by power serve, which can be measured in miles-perhour by a serve-speedometer. The infusion of technology into tennis is evidenced by the name Cyclops, given by the players to a device that can determine electronically if a ball is in or out. Since the players are rather skeptical about the accuracy of this gimmick, the reference to Polyphemus seems appropriate. In other words, the players think that the device can never duplicate the 20-20 vision of a normal human being.

As prize money in tennis begins to reach the stratosphere, thus reducing the motivation of the top players to go all out, one hears more frequently the expression tank or tank job, meaning, of course, that a player “threw” a match. Most sports fans know that tanking derives from the boxing expression take a dive, but it is not clear how tank got transferred into tennis lexicon.

In the 1970s, Harold Solomon’s tennis opponents became so frustrated at trying to outlast him from the baseline that they invented the term moon ball to describe his high-trajectory returns. Moon ball is still applied to any attempt at breaking up an opponent’s rhythm in this fashion.

Although it is not a player’s coinage, western grip has had a peculiar history. It simply means that a player holds the racquet parallel to the ground and grips it from that position. It was considered inelegant and freakish when Bill Johnston, a contemporary of Bill Tilden’s from California, used it in eastern tournaments, and it remained so until Bjorn Borg revived it in the 1970s. In spite of Borg’s winning ways, tennis purists still regard the western grip as having the same relationship to good tennis as leprosy has to good health. Other tennis grips are the Eastern and the Continental. Oddly, none of these words has anything to do with the referent— the manner in which one grips a tennis racquet.

[Burling Lowrey, Washington, D.C.]

EPISTOLA {Brian Davis}

Recently I received a letter from my solicitor which included the following—“…and we have pleasure in enclosing herewith…” and it occurred to me that one cannot enclose an item anywhere but “herewith.”

Accordingly, I began to make note of all examples of tautology gleaned from magazines, books, television and radio. They came thick and fast and I packed up after a couple of months. Nevertheless, a list which may amuse your readers.

We are looking ahead to the future.

The demand situation we are currently experiencing now…

The first initial days of this investigation…

We are always surprised to find something unexpected.

The enemy were surrounded on all sides.

The country of origin which they came from… never been previously possible before

The packed hall is very crowded tonight. the latest up-to-date information

They gave us a number of donations.

People certainly do have a nostalgia for things of the past.

She decapitated the heads of several flowers. their first debut

They did it not as well formerly as they used to in the past.

It was diverted elsewhere. inaccessible to get to

This is a continuing plan into the future. perched above the main factory underneath an assortment of different kinds

Fill up those few empty seats which are still available.

This is what happened in the past a few years ago. the post natal period after the baby is born

We are near several large towns and not very far from any of them.

a local business woman in this area

I’m in constant pain the whole time.

They share rooms together. businessmen exporting abroad where they all sing in unison together

The above are about ¼ of the whole list!!

[Brian Davis, Stroud, Gloucestershire]

EPISTOLA {Ann Hopping}

Somehow, I missed Bernard Witlieb’s EPISTOLA [XIX, 1, 3] on the use of blanquillos for huevos in certain parts of Mexico and New Mexico, but I would like to add my two cents' worth. The use of blanquillos for huevos is common in Mexico City. (I suspect that this is a reaction to government’s attempt to enforce sex education in the schools in the early thirties. The clergy was violently opposed, and any term which related to sex in any way was considered “sinful”). While one buys blanquillos by the dozen in supermarkets and by the kilo in the regular market, everyone orders huevos rancheros for breakfast, including the somewhat confused American lady tourist who blithely ordered “Un ranchero con dos huevos.”

As one travels northwards to Mexico, huevos becomes the preferred term, and is generally used from Jalisco north. I don’t know about usage in New Mexico.

Actually, there are a number of words used in northern Mexico for which there are either euphemistic or variant terms in Mexico City, viz. panocha—piloncillo, tomate—jitomate. I can’t resist recounting what happened to my father one time. He was familiar with the northern usage of panocha for a cone of raw sugar. In Mexico City the term refers to female private parts (fpp), so when he asked the stout woman vendor if she had any panocha, the woman angrily replied “Si tengo, pero no pa' Usted, cabrón!” Needless to say, my father was so abashed he didn’t buy raw sugar under any name.

When I was in the foreign service in South America, I noticed changes in word usage, some of which could be very embarrassing for the unwary. For example:

Argentina Brazil Chile Mexico Peru

avocado palta abacate palta aguacate palta

caja ‘box’ fpp¹ — box box box

concha fpp ladle fpp shell — ‘shell’

pico ‘peak’ — mpp² peak peak

pinga ‘cane — pinga — — mpp liquor’

On another matter, I very much enjoyed K. Narayana Chandran’s charming folk etymology on the origin of the word cashew. Although India is the leading producer, the cashew nut (Anacardium occidentale) is of New World origin. Food critic Raymond Sokolov in his column “A Matter of Taste,” in an article entitled “A Serious Candy,” Natural History, August 1982, states “…the Brazilian origin is clear. Many of the world’s vernacular names for the cashew descend from the Amazonian Tupi word acajúr, [the Dominican Republic’s] cajuil, the Portuguese cajú, the English cashew.” The Portuguese introduced cashews to their colonies at Goa and Mozambique.

[Ann Hopping, Fresno]

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EPISTOLA {Wilbur Pritchard}

I read in a recent issue [XX, 1] the brief article by Hubert Pritchard entitled “Whatever Happened to Frank Beriberi” with amusement and noted to myself that I had often commented on that earmark of medical jargon, the use of exotic words, especially from other languages, for ordinary things: tibia for shinbone, laceration for cut, hemorrhaging for bleeding, and anus for asshole in Latin (the modern Italian ano is distinctly vulgar). A physician will never use a normal word if a more esoteric version is available, clearly to establish his membership in the Club and to exclude the laity. Mathematicians, dealing only with each other and not with a frightened public, do the reverse. Words like set, group, ring, field, ideal, continuous, and prime, not to mention derivative, integral, and analysis are all in everyday usage but have exquisitely specialized meanings in mathematics.

I read the item along with the others in that issue, enjoying it particularly because it struck a sympathetic chord, without noticing that my brother had written it till my wife, also an ardent reader of VERBATIM, brought it to my attention. There may be something congenital in the fascination with the language. Perhaps there is a gene.

[Wilbur Pritchard, Bethesda, Maryland]

EPISTOLA {Ronald Verrall}

My mother, all-but 92, now blind and in a residential home, lived here with me for eight years and more until her needs became more than I could cope with. Daily, until recently, I took her for a quarter-hour walk around the block in this country area. Towards the end of her stay with me, when her sight was fast failing, she would comment as we passed remembered landmarks.

In the autumn a year or so ago, as we passed a hedgerow, she asked what the hagas were doing. Had they begun to turn color? I asked her to repeat. She asked what she had said that I did not understand. I said that it had sounded like “hagas.” Well, she said, that was going back a bit and added that her mother had always called hawthorn berries hagas and she too, had done so as a child. Her mother, a farmer’s daughter from Hampshire, was born about 1860. I wondered if it was a local dialect word but, being fascinated by words, I searched my dictionaries and there, sure enough, under haw in Chambers was “O.E. haga”.

Nothing very remarkable but it appealed to my fancy that, perhaps, at age 72, I am the last person to have heard such an ancient word used in casual, everyday conversation. A link with the past.

[Ronald Verrall, West Sussex]

EPISTOLA {David Orzech}

In an amusing article on the vagaries of colloquial Hebrew [XX, 3], Alex Berlyne mentions inter alia, the curious phenomenon of Israeli speakers, who, in borrowing from other languages, frequently “abbreviate a two-part noun and then proceed to discard the wrong half.” His examples include such Hebraicized words as kvacker, for ‘Quaker Oats,’ kottej for ‘cottage cheese,’ tep for ‘tape-recorder,’ and kountri, for ‘country club.’ Other examples which come to mind are kasseta for ‘cassette player,’ trenning for ‘(athletic) training suit’ and kash for ‘cash register.’

The explanation for this peculiar practice is really quite simple, however: Whereas in English the adjective usually precedes the noun it modifies (a red rose), in Hebrew grammar the order is reversed (as it is in many other languages, for example, Spanish). Thus, linguistic logic would indeed dictate to retain the first noun and lop off the second.

[David Orzech, San Francisco]

EPISTOLA {Peter D. Rankin}

David Galef’s welcome exploration into “The Pause That Refreshes” [XX, 2] covering virtually every blighted well, uh, um, oh, ah, and er extant, does omit what is arguably the most omnipresent pause that outrages: Huh?

It is that teeth-gnashing stall for time to formulate a reply that is becoming endemic, burdening the questioner with the task of posing the query again while affording the “huh?-er” an opportunity to mull an answer. One solution: if an elevator full of people who heard the question only too well were to turn on the “huh?-er” in an en masse reprise of the question. Alas, the “huh?-er, ” if chastened at all, might merely turn to that equally, if not more irritating and ear-gouging line of stall tactic: a paroxysm of insane, off-key laughter…at nothing.

[Peter D. Rankin, New York City]

EPISTOLA {David Bernklau}

Regarding Tom Treasure’s OBITER DICTA [XX, 2], his hypothesis that good is no longer “good” is supported by much anecdotal evidence. For example, it has become unusual to hear someone say not too good; instead we usually hear not too great. Unfortunately, the traditional excellent-good-fair-poor ordinal Likert scale has been replaced by scales that are much less well defined, such as that given by Dr. Treasure.

With respect to average, it is usually not the appropriate word to use because it is not well defined. For example, in the expression the average person, it would probably be better to use typical instead. (Note: In statistics, average could be used for arithmetic mean, median, mode, et al., whereas median, the typical value, is the average Dr. Treasure is referring to when he writes “…half of any group …must be ‘below average’ by definition.”)

The interquartile range, the difference between the values at the 75th and 25th percentiles (or equivalently the 3rd and 1st quartiles, hence the phrase), has received much more attention in recent years as a measure of dispersion because, like the median (or 2nd quartile), it is a resistant statistic, that is, it is not affected by extreme values, or outliers, as the mean and standard deviation are. These concepts are part of a relatively new approach to statistics known as exploratory data analysis, or EDA, founded by John Tukey of Princeton University in the late 1970s and appearing in practically every current introductory statistics textbook. (Briefly, EDA is used to explore data at a preliminary stage rather than to confirm conclusions.) With it have come many neologisms. For example, the interquartile range, as defined above, is the difference between the values represented by the ends of the box in a boxplot, which comes from the original neologism box-and-whisker diagram. In such, the middle fifty percent (that is, the values from the first to third quartile) is represented by a rectangle (the box) while the values in the lower and upper 25 percent are represented by connected line segments (the whiskers). (In a nutshell, the minimum and maximum values and the values of the three quartiles, the so-called five-number summary, are marked in the diagram.)

Just as the boxplot summarizes a set of data, a stemplot, originally a stem-and-leaf diagram, displays the data. I would expect both of these words to appear in common dictionaries soon, just as scores of others from the field of statistics (most not mutually exclusive from their common meanings) already do.

*[David Bernklau, Brooklyn] *

War and the OED

Gerald Nelson, Survey of English Usage University College London

It is reasonable to assume that the number of neologisms produced each year within a single generation is more or less equal. That is to say that within a period of fifty years, for example, we can expect to find approximately the same number of new words, phrases, and senses being generated each year. Over longer periods, of course, an unequal distribution may reasonably be expected. In periods of intense social and political change, more new words and new senses will be produced than in periods which are, by comparison, more “static.” Of course, we cannot expect dictionaries, especially those compiled manually, to record the same number of neologisms for each year or to reflect exactly the fluctuations in their production over longer periods. Nevertheless, the Oxford English Dictionary has been remarkably successful in both of these areas. While it does give comparatively greater coverage to the nineteenth century than to any other, its overall coverage of the history of the English language is an impressive achievement. For this very reason, however, it is all the more surprising to find significant fluctuations within very short periods in the number of neologisms which it records.

Using the CD-ROM edition of the OED, it is possible to produce figures for the total number of new words and phrases, as well as new meanings of existing ones, recorded for each year covered by the dictionary. These figures give the total number of citations for which the corresponding date is the earliest recorded. Below are figures for the years 1900 to 1930.

1900 6,002
1901 5,834
1902 6,628
1903 5,436
1904 5,570
1905 5,021
1906 4,658
1907 4,612
1908 5,061
1909 5,468
1910 3,803
1911 4,025
1912 3,146
1913 3,296
1914 3,097
1915 2,615
1916 3,043
1917 2,343
1918 2,447
1919 2,834
1920 3,941
1921 3,794
1922 5,343
1923 4,487
1924 3,780
1925 4,073
1926 5,132
1927 5,290
1928 5,486
1929 4,399
1930 5,925

The figures show that the recording of new words, phrases, and senses fell dramatically during the period of the First World War and reached its lowest figure in 1917. The figure for 1917, in fact, is the lowest for any year this century. Although the figure begins to drop at around 1910 and does not rise dramatically until 1922, a closer look at some average figures will show the decrease during the war years much more clearly. For the ten years before the war, the average number of citations is 4,575 per year, and for the war years themselves, this figure drops to 2,709, a decrease of 41%. After the war, the figure rises to an average of 4,030 per year for the period 1919-28.

Let us now look at the same figures for the Second World War to see if a comparable trend can be observed.

1930 5,925
1931 4,982
1932 4,765
1933 4,850
1934 5,782
1935 5,077
1936 5,769
1937 5,599
1938 5,291
1939 4,962
1940 5,007
1941 3,906
1942 4,391
1943 3,416
1944 3,529
1945 3,797
1946 5,129
1947 4,276
1948 5,165
1949 5,467
1950 4,966
1951 5,795
1952 5,199
1953 5,213
1954 4,567
1955 6,835

Once again, the figure drops during the war years and rises again afterwards, though in this case the size of the decrease is considerably smaller. For the ten years before the war, the average figure is 5,243 per year; for the war years, it drops to 4,143 per year and after the war, for the period 1945-55, the average rises to 5,353. During the Second World War, then, the decrease was 21%, compared with 41% during the Great War.

Clearly both wars had a considerable impact on the recording of new words and phrases, though that of the First World War was the most dramatic. That is particularly ironic, since we may expect that during both wars more, and not fewer new words and meanings were produced. One obvious explanation for the decrease may be that the many readers who contributed slips to the OED had far more pressing commitments in times of war. In the case of the 1914-18 War, the phenomenon may be further explained by the fact that the OED was undergoing its own period of crisis. Many of James Murray’s assistants and printers went into military service, and before this, two of his most able consultants had died, Walter Skeat in 1912 and Robinson Ellis a year later. Murray himself died in July 1915. These setbacks meant that the final volume, planned for publication in 1917, did not appear until 1928.

Clearly the combination of external and internal crises played a large part in the producing the uneven coverage observed. One factor that we might expect to have been significant did not, in fact, play any role in the decrease: contrary to expectations at the time, book production during the War did not fall significantly. Despite a brief decline at the start of the conflict, the number of new titles published in Britain remained steady at approximately 8,000 per year. So those readers who did have the time and leisure to submit citations were not short of source material.

Looking at the sources for just one of the war years, 1917, it becomes clear that a small number of contemporary works yielded a high proportion of the citations recorded for that year. By far the most fruitful source was An Airman’s Outings, by the pseudonymous “Contact” (Alan John Bott), which was the source of citations for aerobatics, Blighty bullet, flying speed, leave-list, and super-hero, among many others. Other commonly used sources were A.G. Empey’s war novels, Over the Top and From the Fire Step, T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, D.H. Lawrence’s Look! We have come through! and, a particularly rich source, Harrods General Catalogue. As we might expect, the new words recorded for that year were for the most part to do with warfare, aeronautics, and technology. They include ammo, ballistics, barrage, Boche, munitionettes, shell-bursts, toffee apples, WAAC, and zero-hour.

We do not know whether these sources were read during or after the war, but we do know that a large number of the citations for 1917 were not submitted until many decades later. These were taken from the personal letters of major literary figures, which did not become publicly available, in most cases, until the 1960s. These include the letters of Wilfred Owen, published in 1967, Ford Maddox Ford (1965), E.E. Cummings (1969), Aldous Huxley (1969), and Wyndham Lewis (1963). This suggests that reading for the OED, at least for the war years, was not retrospective in the true sense. Readers in the 1960s were submitting citations from recently published works. They were not examining sources published during the war, many of which, according to the figures, have never been read as sources of neologisms.

The figures show that the years 1914-18 are comparatively under-represented in the OED. It would appear that the recording of neologisms is significantly hindered by the very circumstances that produce them. In his book, A War Imagined, Samuel Hynes referred to the Great War as a “gap in history.” On the basis of the figures shown here, we might add that it also produced a gap in the OED.

OBITER DICTA: Deselecting debriefers

J.A. Davidson, Victoria, British Columbia

During the Second World War pilots of aircraft going on missions were briefed before departure, and on return were debriefed or subjected to debriefing. The earliest use of debrief given in the big Oxford is from early 1945. But apparently it was not until the early 1960s that these terms came into general use when they were applied to the interrogation of American astronauts after space flights and the security instructions then given to them. (When I first became aware of these words I wondered if those astronauts were having their underpants removed for some arcane scientific purpose.)

These words quickly became popular among bureaucrats in both the public and private sectors and among journalists with the with-it urge. Perhaps apprehensive mothers now debrief their adolescent daughters when they come home from dates. I have no objection to being questioned by someone who has a right to question me, but if he were to say that he wished to debrief me I would recommend to his superiors that he be deselected or dehired.

Not all the new de- words bother me. Defroster surely is better than “frost-control device.” And dehumidifier seems appropriate. But I get the shudders when I hear or read dewax, and de-escalate, and de-flea (of dogs), and de-accession (which is what a museum or art gallery does when it disposes of some of its treasures.) A few years ago I nearly swallowed my bubble-gum when in a rather ponderous article in Esquire I came across detraditionalizing. A few months ago I saw in our neighborhood supermarket two wines, a red and a white, glorying in the name, “Carl Jung”: their labels assure customers that the contents have been de-alcoholized.

Basil Cottle, a Welsh scholar in English language, wrote in his book, Names, “St Lucy had lovely eyes, and was deoculated.” He added, gruesomely, “her symbol is her two eyes on a saucer.” The big Oxford gives deocular as an obsolete word meaning “Not using the eyes; blind.” And it has the verb deoculate, a nonce-word, one coined for a special occasion—in this case, in a letter from Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth.

The theologically inclined will, of course, know about demythologizing, which came into use around 1950. That sort of thing can get out of hand, and more recently I came across these in a theological journal: de-eschatologizing and de-kerygmatization. De-ideologizing seems to have a sociological flavor.

Here are some recent coinings that might prove useful. To delawyer is “to eliminate the need for a lawyer’s services in a legal proceeding,” Deaestheticization seems to be “the artistic removal of aesthetic qualities from art.” De-man in Britain has meant “to reduce the manpower in an industry,” whereas in the USA it means “to deprive of manhood or virility; emasculate.” One should be very careful in using that word. It, of course, should not be confused with degender and desex, synonyms having to do with the removal of sexist references in writing and speaking.

Schadenfreude

Sam Brearley, Crawley Down, West Sussex

Another foreign word has crept into our English language, its use noted in recent newspaper articles. The word is German Schadenfreude, for which there is no English equivalent, probably because we never needed one. In translation we use a phrase to define it: ‘malicious pleasure in the misfortune of others.’ The word is now included in the new dictionaries of English. The British attitude is changing towards it, undoubtedly owing to the popularity of program like Beadle’s About, a derivative of Candid Camera but marked by more deliberate provocation of the victims.

I had many experiences of schadenfreude as a P.O.W. in Germany in 1941, but I never knew the word or its meaning until I came home in 1945, when it became self-explanatory.

In 1941, I was one of a group of sixteen P.O.W.s working on a farm in Austria; we were billeted in the village schoolhouse. At five-thirty each morning we were despatched to our respective farms. My farm was situated at the end of a long, straight road about a quarter-mile from the village crossroads, well in sight in daylight, but not at five-thirty in the morning in November.

One particular morning, as I turned the corner at the crossroads, I saw to my dismay all lights were blazing in my farm-house and in the one across the road, where a middle-aged couple, the Tschisecks, lived with their small daughter. Their small-holding consisted of hens, ducks, and the usual pig. Tschiseck was a Hungarian ex-P.O.W. from World War I who worked at the local flour mill. A few weeks earlier the family had spent their savings and bought their first cow in calf. How proud they were when they showed it to me the day it arrived.

But this morning something was obviously wrong as my boss, farmer Alois, never rose until about seven. Usually, when I arrived, I had another hour or so to nap in the warm cowshed until he showed up. It looked as though I was going to be denied that pleasure, but I thought maybe the calf had been born, so I forgave it.

When I arrived, Alois’s wife met me in tears. As she sobbed her way through her explanations of the night’s tragedy, I managed to understand enough of what had happened. Apparently, Frau Tschiseck’s cow had been off-color for a week, would not eat, lay about moaning, and could not get up. My boss, Alois, was called over to give his expert opinion of the problem—after all, he had two cows and one bull so must know all about such things. He spent most of the night on his diagnosis and eventually came to the conclusion that there was nothing else for the poor cow but to put her out of her misery and by cutting her throat. So he did.

Nothing now could be touched until the local Burgomaster and the area’s Chief Veterinarian from Graz could come to investigate. The news spread quickly and farmers and families from around the area came to offer condolences to the brokenhearted couple. As the morning passed, a crowd of thirty or forty sympathizers assembled in sad little groups in our farmyard, discussing in solemn tones the night’s tragedy.

About mid-day the vet arrived to perform the post-mortem and to decide with the Burgomaster on the destination of the meat. I was up in the hayloft collecting fodder when I heard a commotion down in the yard. I looked out through a gap in the loft wall at the incredible scene below: screaming with hysterical laughter, several of the people were rolling about in helpless, uncontrollable mirth. I quickly went down to find out the cause of all the merriment. After much questioning, I at last gathered that it was the vet’s decision that my boss, Alois, need not have done what he did to end the cow’s suffering as it only had excessive wind.

That exhibition was Schadenfreude with a vengeance.

The Uses of Lexicography

According to a Reuter/AP dispatch published in The Independent [6 July 1993], Longman’s Dictionary of English Language and Culture was banned in Thailand “after it provoked government and public protests by describing Bangkok as a city known for its prostitutes.” (Lewd, paronomastic etymological asides based on the very name of the city are hereby interdicted.) The dictionary describes the city as “known for its Buddhist temples and as ‘a place where there are a lot of prostitutes.”

Della Summers, head of reference publishing for Longman, issued a statement that “fell short of promising that Longman would delete the offending reference,” for which we award her a VERBATIM Hurrah! She did go on to say that the dictionary would be revised (for which read “updated”) at least once a year, so it remains to be seen whether Longman will knuckle under. I would venture to say that it all depends on how many copies of the book they expect to sell there.

Although the circumstances are not identical, the incident puts one in mind of the California teacher groups who several years ago campaigned to ban the Dictionary of American Slang, by Wentworth and Flexner, because it contains dirty words. Because they did not want to be reminded of the graffiti scrawled on the walls of their schools? It can be demonstrated again and again that it takes the public a longish time to become accumstomed to changes, particularly if they are abrupt; but that after a while the bluster of the bluestockings is forgotten and, when later recalled, regarded as silly, prudish, and quaint. Considering the foul language one encounters in the films that emerge from Hollywood (which is, I believe, still in California), pronouncements of shock concerning words that appear in a dictionary that only the already corrupt—teachers, linguists, lexicographers—are likely to use appear to be out of order. Owing to the output of dirty movies from that western exclave, it has been suggested that its name be changed to “Calipornia” [ < Gk ‘beautiful prostitute’].

Although I am aware, as a lexicographer and publisher, that there are a great many dictionaries sold almost everywhere, I am likewise aware that they are rarely opened, especially by those who need them the most. That is attributable to many things—chiefly poor educational standards and the arrogance of ignorance, too often regarded as a civil right—and it is likely to be a shortcoming difficult to correct. People who have dictionaries phone me to ask the meaning of a word; others phone with a question about usage, also covered in laboriously compiled Notes in modern desk dictionaries. There is a big difference between mispronouncing a word and articulating it as the speaker of a certain dialect would, yet people—particularly in the audible media—arrogantly announce, “That’s the way I say it. You understood what I meant, so what difference does it make?” Many linguists not only concur in this view but advance and support it. One day in September [1993] a news presenter in Hartford was heard twice to say “massectomy” for mastectomy. Is that all right? Maybe a future linguist will point to the incident as the first sign of the disappearance of the medical t after s in American English and write a dissertation on the subject. More recently, [on Tomorrow’s World, March 1994] a BBC reporter presented a story about a new tsetse fly trap being used by the Masai, in Africa, in which she consistently referred to the “TETsee fly.” Is it school-marmish of me to feel that because of their exposure, people in the media should take upon themselves an extra burden of responsibility to ensure that pronounciation and grammar employed by them and the people they employ hew to some acknowledged standard? The Times [14 March 1994] published the results of a report that showed “an increase in the number of pre-school children with difficulties in speaking or in understanding speech.” That comes as no surprise: a few years ago, a young couple, neighbours of mine, had a baby. During the boy’s early life, their notion of entertaining him was to make noises at him in imitation of police and ambulance sirens. As I was the unwilling auditor of the music, I bought them a book of Grimm’s fairy tales, gave it to them giftwrapped, and suggested that if they did not read or speak English—any language—to the boy, he would grow up making noises like a siren (which might be all right for a girl). They ignored me, of course, and I am now treated to periodic siren concerts as the boy (and his younger brother) communicate with their parents in siren song.

One is moved to wonder at the virtual lack of influence enjoyed by dictionaries (in particular, reference books more generally, and all books universally), especially in light of the huge numbers in which they sell. The problem extends to accuracy in all matters cultural, pop and otherwise. Recently, a participant in what purported to be an intelligent discussion program commented that Andy Warhol had said, “everyone would be famous for fifteen seconds.” Warhol actually said fifteen minutes, but the inaccuracy and absurdity of the slip slid past the moderator and the others on the panel (probably because they were typically more interested in what they themselves were saying than in listening to the others).

I cannot comment on the Bangkok situation, not only because I am not a frequenter of brothels but because I have never been to Bangkok and have no plans for going. Were I to go, however, I would assume that if I were not interested in brothels, it would not be incumbent (there’s that pun again!) on me to visit them; on the other hand, if my sole reason for travelling were to visit all the brothels in the world, I should certainly be in debt to the Longman dictionary for the very sort of information I was seeking. Perhaps Longman have struck upon a new use for dictionaries and a way to make people use them.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“You’ll have the specific facts you need to analize your markets.” [From a direct mail piece of Commodity Research Bureau, August 1990. Submitted by Dimitri Raftopoulos, Fort Lee, New Jersey.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“After the jury convicted a rapist in circuit court last week, Judge Ted Coleman sentenced him to prison ‘for the rest of your natural life with credit for the 34 days already served.’ ”[From Column World, by Bob Morris, in The Orlando Sentinel, 19 November 1986. Submitted by Richard E. Langford, DeLand, Florida.]

OBITER DICTA: On the Oxo Cube to London Jim Brown

Tony Day, Petersfield, Hampshire

Although not an East Ender by birth I’ve learnt a lot about the area having had my Ronnie Biggs in Arc just down the Frog and Toad from friend for a cucumber of years. There’s plenty to do in the area and it’s easy to jump on a struggle and strain or an Oxo cube to London Jim Brown. Make sure you’ve got your Grey Mare. For a Horse and Cart, you can watch the Yuletide Logs at the Hackney Belt and Braces and shout on the Cherry Hog on which you’ve National Debt your last Ayrton Senna or even your Dicky Dirt.

Not one for a National Debt even though you could Nose and Chin a Ken Dodd? Never mind! You can always go to the Box of Tricks; even though it’s not Buckshee, you can get a Cow and Calf or, from an adult film, see a few Mods and Rockers ignoring the Box of Toys from those who are Brahms and Liszt. Out of the Box of Tricks and into the Rub-a-Dub-Dub for a Fusilier, a Chalky White, a Gay and Frisky, or even a Vera Lynn and Philharmonic. Not too many, mind you, or you’ll fall in the Bread and Butter and risk a spell in a Flowery Dell where it’s sure to be Potatoes in the Mould.

Hungry? Well, you can still get your Mother Kellied John Peels or a Smack in the Eye but what’s better than some Andy McNish and Lucky Dips with Uncle Fred and Cough and Splutter washed down with a Dog and Pup of There You Are?

Tired? It’s back to the Gates of Rome, then, for Bo Peep in your Uncle Ned. Custard cream well for there’s more to do (and tell) tomorrow.

Confused?—well it’s all written in English but probably makes more sense like this:

Although not an East Ender by birth I’ve learnt a lot about the area having had my lodgings in Finsbury Park just down the road from Mile End for a number of years. There’s plenty to do in the area and it’s easy to jump on a train or tube to London town. Make sure you’ve got your fare. For a start, you can watch the dogs at Hackney Races and shout for the dog on which you’ve bet your last £10 or even your shirt.

Not one for a wager even though you could win a large packet of money? Never mind! You can always go to the cinema; even though it’s not free, you can have a laugh or, in an adult film, see a few breasts whilst ignoring the noise from those who are drunk. Out of the cinema and into a public house for a beer, a light ale, a scotch, or even a gin and tonic. Not too many, mind you, or you’ll fall in the gutter and risk a spell in a cell where it’s sure to be cold.

Hungry? Well, you can still get your jellied eels or pie, but what’s better than some fish and chips with bread and butter, all washed down with a cup of tea?

Tired? It’s back home, then, for a sleep in your bed. Dream well for there’s more to do (and tell) tomorrow.

Somehow, I think I prefer the first version.

ETYMOLOGICA OBSCURA: Kili: A Word from Kerala’s Newspeak

K. Narayana Chandran, University of Hyderabad

When a large number of words from one language are adopted into a native wordstock, their assimilation often yields interesting results. Clean is a common enough word in India even for those who do not use English for everyday communication. Cleaner a ‘person who does cleaning’ is less commonly used, but in the South Indian states the word is applied to an apprentice-driver or an assistant to a lorry-/truck-driver. The driver’s helper not only cleans the lorry but performs a whole lot of odd jobs, from minor contingent repairs and stepneywork to illegal substitute driving for short stretches on the national highways. A cleaner eventually graduates into a pukka driver.

In Kerala, the cleaner is commonly referred to as kili, the Tamil-Malayalam word for ‘bird.’ For the Malayalee, kili is evidently a shortening for the English cleaner, but it also combines a host of subliminal associations of a cleaner’s agility, resourcefulness, nomadism, and above all, avian perceptions of trouble or danger on desolate highways—qualifications that endear him to his master.

While many borrowed words from English are apt to be mispronounced or misspelt in Indian languages, only very few words, like the Malayalam kili are so consciously shortened and nativized by their users with such apparent knowledge of semantic rules and functions. Kili is a good example of “newspeak” in Jonathan Green’s sense (Newspeak: A Dictionary of Jargon. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986). The Malayalam word both “remembers” and “forgets” cleaner in its new semantics of associational logic.

OBITER DICTA: Stuttering

David Shields, Seattle

Four locutions are exceedingly popular among a certain group of well-educated, highly self-conscious people. One involves the use of the word about. Things are never said to be “about” something; they are always said to be “not about” something. For instance, This isn’t about your parents. What it is about, on the other hand, is never articulated, without the risk of acute embarrassment. To say exactly what something is about suggests an inability to entertain contradiction.

Another term is hilarious. Almost everything is said to be hilarious. Never anything even slightly funny. Hilarious is shorthand for ‘exquisitely painful’ or ‘emblematically mordant.’ Sometimes something sad happens, someone pronounces the occurrence “hilarious” to someone unfamiliar with this other, more sophisticated meaning of hilarious, and the person describing something as hilarious when it is not is greeted with a quizzical expression or a sock in the mouth.

The third expression, used when the speaker is searching for the right word, is I want to say…; the substituted word never even remotely resembles the word the speaker is looking for, and the speaker is always someone who worships at the altar of the sound of his own voice.

The final expression is even more popular than about or hilarious or I want to say…: whenever any kind of calamity occurs—a water-main break, an earthquake, a hurricane, a volcano eruption, passengers spilling out onto the tarmac after a plane crash— it is always, always said to be like a movie.

Titillating Titles

Allison Whitehead, Rainham, Essex

Whilst glancing over the contents page of a magazine recently, I came across an entry for an article entitled “Frozen Stiff.” Intrigued, I searched for the article in question, which turned out to be concerned with cryonic suspension ‘the freezing of human bodies after death, so that they may be brought back to life sometime in the future.’

This example lends considerable weight to the theory that a title acts as the first line of any piece of writing, be it a magazine article or a full-length novel. The title “Frozen Stiff” served its purpose well, by giving a good indication of the contents and tone of the text which followed—entertaining, yet informative. It also serves as a good example to introduce us to the fascinating subject of titles as a whole; and particularly in the case of books, subtitles as well.

What makes a good title? In nonfiction at least, opinions differ as far as style is concerned, but there are essentially two fundamental requirements which all the best titles adhere to. Firstly, a title should be capable of grabbing the readers’ attention, making them want to explore the piece further; secondly, it should have some bearing on the subject matter of the piece.

This, however, is where opinions differ. How much information concerning what is to follow should the title give away? Personally, I favor the more ambiguous style, which leaves something to keep the imagination occupied whilst the eye explores the piece in further detail. This style of title can be very effective at catching the browser in the bookshop, especially where magazines are concerned: an eye-catching title on the cover of a publication can lead to extra sales.

As a supporter of the ambiguous approach, I myself have created many titles along these lines. One of the best headed an article I wrote for a camping magazine, giving advice on how to identify wild animals from the tracks they leave behind. After some considerable thought I came up with “Who Are You Sharing Your Campsite With?” Not a Nobel prize-winning title (especially for grammar), but undoubtedly better than my first attempt, “Tracking Down Tracks.”

The ambigous or punning title is a fairly recent phenomenon. It is certainly far younger than the more straightforward approach adhered to for some centuries, one that leaves little to the imagination about what follows. Titles such as The Reverse Dictionary, The Book of Facts, and The Dictionary of Omens and Superstitutions proliferate on bookshelves across the country, backed up by supportive subtitles in a similar vein. Such denotative titles and subtitles are most often found in nonfiction and reference books of all types, to which they are appropriate.

As far as fiction is concerned, ambiguous titles play a much larger role, though they are by no means commonplace. Straightforward titles that emphasize a place or person in the story can be very attractive, such as Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, Jane Austen’s Emma, and Arthur Hailey’s Airport. Ambiguous titles such as Barbara Taylor Bradford’s Hold the Dream and Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely attract the attention equally well, while the definite article can contribute to a very powerful title, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which has an old-fashioned ring to it, and Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.

Alliteration offers an attractive opportunity: books like Pride and Prejudice and Pilgrim’s Progress are ideal examples.

Creating titles is something of an art form in itself. Perhaps there is a market for a book entitled “Titillating Titles of the Last Century.”

Answers to Paring Pairs

(a) Abrupt complaint shortens mongrel’s end. (Curt Ailment)

(b) Short order is redundant. (Two Eggs)

(c) Pertaining to Roget’s reptile? (The Saurian)

(d) Labour of Rabin and Arafat. (Peace Work)

(e) Envisage this command. (About Face)

(f) Poverty-stricken sub-continental Cockney. (‘Indi Gent)

(g) Insignificant, sweet Conservative. (Nougat Tory)

(h) Greasy kid stuff makes adolescent smart. (Brilliant Teen)

(i) Elastic span is not duplicate. (Rubber Bridge)

(j) Sounds as if homosexual has financial clout. (Urning Power)

(k) Joist, not a laser. (Light Beam)

(l) Small after gun used in severe pursuit? (Stern Chaser)

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

(n) Nonagenarian uses clepsydra. (Old Timer)

(o) Sibling chiefs known for flour and water. (Roux Brothers)

(p) Old trombone sounds like baggy bottom. (Sack But)

(q) Sweet remnant sounds like baggy bottom. (Baggy Ass)

(r) Broth remains for cleaner of casseroles. (Pot Liquor)

(s) Collapsed at routine of Nigerian comedian. (Hausa Cards)

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

(u) Magnate marked by large bruise. (Big Wheal)

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

(w) Serious Aussie understands cryptic message. (Grave Digger)

(x) Sailor is knowledgeable about his craft. (Seaman’s Hip)

(y) Annoying piper’s voyeuristic kid. (Piquing Tom)

(z) Unfaltering homosexuals on the stair. (Steady Gaze)

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

(bb) Add Chinese dumpling to reach vague total. (Dim Sum)

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

(dd) Little kid deserts toupé. (Rug Rat)

The correct answer to the puzzle in the Winter 1994 issue was (51) Suite. The prizewinners are John J. Murphy, of Eliot, Maine, and John Kahn, of London.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Fifty Years among the New Words: A Dictionary of Neologisms 1941-1991

John Algeo, ed., (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 257 pp.

The first citation for nylon in the American Speech collection is 1941; according to the Random House Dictionary Unabridged, Second Edition, its earliest use was in 1938. As Random House was not collecting citations till the mid 1940s, in the preparation of the American College Dictionary, it would appear that the information in the RHD2c has been derived from the OED, which gives 1938 as the date of its first citation (from The New York Times). I may not be looking in the right place in the RHD2e, but I was unable to find any acknowledgment in its pages to the OED, though in the Preface to the Second Edition [p. vii] acknowledgment is made to the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and to the Dictionary of American Regional English—though as projects, not as copyright works. Does this mean that R. W. Burchfield has still more ammunition for the guns he has loaded against what he calls “plagiarism”? It is well known that facts are not copyright; though the wording in which they are couched certainly is copyrightable, a date, per se, could not fall into that category. One is left to draw his own conclusions. Perhaps acknowledging a source of information, though not required by law, would be the nice, polite thing to do, and such acknowledgment, which usually appears in infinitesimally small type in a place where no one but a lexicographer, publisher, publisher’s lawyer, or other troublemaker might look, would in no way diminish the reputations of truly good works (like the various dictionaries published by Random House and others).

The foregoing has only marginal relevance to the book at hand, which is an amazing work. Following a lengthy, illuminating, and thorough study of neologisms by John Algeo, one that is not ony synchronic but delves into the history of the “Among the New Words” section of American Speech, is a Glossary of all the words treated; this also serves as an index, citing chapter and verse where the original entry can be found in the reproduced articles that occupy the last 190 pages of the book; between is an alphabetical listing of the many contributors. The articles are reprinted in full, in reduced but clearly legible type, from the first, April 1941, to the last included (Winter 1990) just prior to the preparation of this book.

This book is a word-lover’s dream come true. Browsing through the Glossary reveals a lifetime of lexicon, one is reminded of words that have come and gone (corrigan [after “Wrong-way” Corrigan, the errant pilot], sitzkrieg, Herrenvolk), and—most amazingly—those that have come and stayed. In the latter category one is surprised to learn that words that seem to have been there “always” were coined only fifty years ago: (air-raid) alert, blacktop, blitz, bra, brass hat, burp, car hop, curvaceous, lay an egg ‘fail,’ fellow traveler, fuddy-duddy, G-string, leg up ‘boost,’ newsworthy, prototype, and winterize. These are selected from the very first “Among the New Words,” prepared by Dwight L. Bolinger, who also noted the increased use of the suffix -er in the sense of ‘someone or something associated with’ the noun to which it is suffixed, like first termer, party-liner, and rank-and-filer.

John Algeo, with his wife Adele, is now in charge of this valuable and interesting archival section of American Speech, a scholarly periodical published by the University of Alabama Press. It should be emphasized that not only American English is included, though the collection is preponderantly so.

Cambridge delights us with such a publication: making it available in paperback (8½"×11") at such an affordable price leaves few with any excuse for not owning a copy.

Laurence Urdang

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. As fabulous a man as Poe. (5)

4. To flatter round the note for a flower! (9)

9. A laboratory flower could be used for a vase. (9)

10. A pick-me-up scale. (5)

11. Apply caution with money or

12. Sold in Do-It-Yourself shops, are they useful for weight watchers? (8)

14. Confused Australian could cause wild revelry—by God! (10)

16. Made a guess with the dag- ger. (4)

19. Thrash with a cane and come out in spots. (4)

20. Freda’s hatpin, not as twist- ed as the explorer. (10)

22. Usually found by company medal only. (8)

23. Where collar is used for breeding. (2, 4)

26. & 2. Down. Three R’s in goats can beat the skins. (5, 5)

27. Story about an arrival in the nation. (9)

28. Sort of speed rate that is critical. (9)

Down

1. An East Asian girl, not in French Revolution, but Russian! (9)

2. See 26. Across.

3. Just the ticket for the train-spotters. (8)

4. There’s trouble without the Queen, not just for one of us. (4)

5. Lamp, lamp procession! (10)

6. Do a stretch, not in prison.

6. Do a stretch, not in prison. (6)

7. Marked off on the road, round the rent, but happy. (9)

8. Put steps as an afterthought around the winner. (5)

13. White house in Morocco! (10)

15. Eastern men, in tents, what slum dwellings. (9)

17. Do you get ‘owls of delight at this farmers’ function? (4, 5)

18. Dirt acts awkwardly to put you off. (8)

21. Shy Old Testment Egyptian leader was a sly dog. (6)

22. Made better, even when dead. (5) likely to pollute. (5)

25. The Queen, the French, the German King! (4)

SIC! SIC! SIC!

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

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. 1fpp—female private parts ↩︎

2. mpp—male private parts ↩︎