VOL XXI, No 1 [Summer, 1994]

The Lamps of Speech

Martin Bennett, Riyadh

Proverbs are the lamps of speech, boasts an Arab saying. The words of night are coated in butter: laments another, as soon as day shines upon them they melt away.

Contradictory as life itself, sometimes pointing out a general truth, as often undermining it, Arab proverbs have been gathered and annotated since the ninth century AD. The small Arabic library where I work contains a shelf-full, the volumes numbered one to twelve. Whittling these down to a single article recalls the saying He tried to carry two watermelons in one hand, which in turn recalls the man who tried to tile the sea. Instead, I shall attempt here only a selection of a selection, suggesting some themes and functions along the way. After all, Grapes are eaten one by one and Hair upon hair makes a beard.

Proverbs may be considered as a rough guide to local customs, traditions in a nutshell. To understand a people, acquaint yourself with their proverbs, or as another proverb puts it, Customs are the fifth element of the world. Of these customs, hospitality and generosity among the Arabs have pride of place. The generous heart does not grow old; The house that receives no guests receives no angels; A rich man who is ungenerous is like a tree without fruit; or, more succinctly, Food for one is food for two; One cup of coffee, forty years' friendship.

Yet if hospitality is celebrated, its pitfalls are also charted. He ate the camel and all it carried, pithily describes the over-eager guest. Guests and fish after three days start to stink, or even An unwelcome guest lingers like the British Empire. To avoid such asides, remember to Speak straight and sit crooked; or again, After the passing of incense there is no sitting, the message here echoed by a telling rhyme lost in translation. [ba\?\ad al a\?\uuD la taq\?\uuD]. Do not let it be whispered of you, You smile at him, and he brings his donkey. Which goes to show that for every proverb for proclaiming in public, there are a couple more for muttering in private.

Another subject high on the proverbial agenda is the family. My brother and I against my cousin; my cousin and I against the stranger is a frequently translated example. Families, as the proverb suggests, should be closely knit. They should also, according to most proverbs, be large: There is no light in the house without children; Nobody knows when a man without daughters dies. Or concerning the elderly, A house without an elderly person is as a garden without a well. Motherhood is also highly praised: When a man’s mother is at home, his loaf of bread is warm; The mother of a mute understands what he says.

So far so good. Aimed in the opposite direction, we have, Sell your mother and buy a rifle, or the even less wholesome, Relatives are scorpions, [aqaarib \?\aqaarib] rhyme twisting the arm of truth. Similarly, countering the commendable If you don’t have an old person in the house, buy one, we have the less generous In time of famine the old have teeth and What the devil accomplished in a year, an old woman may accomplish in an hour. Children are the stairway to Paradise is challenged by The child of one day had already learned how to annoy its parents, while undercutting the standard injunctions to marry we have A man with two wives becomes a porter. The existence of many opposites suggests that proverbs perhaps once came in pairs, to be swopped in a sort of verbal wrestling, one vying with another or sometimes combining with it, the idealistic and the skeptical in balance: The man without children has a hole in his heart; the man with children has a heart like a sieve; Your family may chew you, but they will not swallow you.

Proverbs can be equally ambivalent when it comes to friendship. Straightforward enough is The neighbour before the house, the companion before the road [al-jaar qabl ad-daar, ar-rafiiq qabl aT-Tariiq], friendship and rhyme going hand in hand as in He who loves you will chew pebbles for you, your enemy will count your faults [Habiibutak yamDugh lak azzalaT wa \?\aduuka ya\?\ud al-ghalaT]. A proverbial second opinion, however, is found in Don’t pray for your friend’s good fortune, lest you lose him. Or again, See two people in harmony, and one person is bearing the burden, or the still more skeptical Beware of your enemy twice, beware of your friend a hundred times.

Yet the most Machiavellian proverbs pertain to government, Acton’s view of power echoed with a vengeance: Always stroke the head you want to cut off warns one medieval example. The victim is murdered, the funeral is attended, confides another, the grisly humor continuing in The sound of footsteps does not disturb the severed head. Advice on the policy of divide and rule is contained in When the cat and mouse make peace, the grocer’s store is lost. Advice on not underestimating the opposition is seen in He who makes light of other men will be killed by a turnip. On the need for firm government: One rug can accommodate twelve dervishes, but no kingdom can accommodate two kings. The pitfalls of negotiation are described in He who gets between the onion and its skin will be rewarded by its stink, while an observation on rhetoric, as true of the House of Commons as of the Abbasid court, goes, Everything is cut short except a long speech. For use by ministers of finance there is If meat is dear, patience is cheap.

For those in the middle echelons of government comes a whole portfolio of sayings on the perils of ambition. Climb like a cucumber, fall like an aubergine; Stretch your feet only as far as your blanket allows; No tree has reached the sky; The foot that is too swift must be cut off; He who eats the Sultan’s raisins must give him dates, or, put another way, A man without cunning is like an empty matchbox.

The great mass of proverbs, though, are for the lips of the governed, those proverbial underdogs. A streetwise realism prevails, if not downright subversion: One lie in the Sultan’s head impedes a dozen truths; There’s no security in three things: the sea, the Sultan, and time. Expectations are generally low in accordance with When you make your bed on the floor you don’t fall out. When speaking out is perilous—— Who should tell the lion that he has bad breath?; Complain to the bow and it will send an arrow——other means are required: When you have a favor to ask of the dog, call him “Sir”, or, summing up the nature of hierarchies down the ages, The prince’s dog is also a prince. Deference is not the only means: Money delivers the djinni bound, assures one; two others snigger that A bribe (a) takes down the judge’s trousers, (b) unwinds his turban. If economy with the truth is one proverbial option——Never tell the truth unless you have one foot in the stirrup—— as a general policy that is not without dangers also: The rope of untruth is short.

Safeguarded by their anonymity, proverbs have a way of reaching awkward home truths shunned by other texts. Leave the moral high ground to poets, sultans, and the powers that be: Keep away from trouble and sing to it, suggests one saying; but most warn that trouble will come anyway. In the timeless land of proverbs Murphy’s——or, if you will, Abdullah’s——Law rules: Start selling turbans and people will be born without heads; If a peasant were made of silver, his balls would be made of brass. In the same vein, I went to Damascus to rid myself of worries; Damascus was full of worries, or, in a phrase, One grape, a hundred wasps. The Almighty might provide the dervish with a kitchen, but conversely He sends almonds to those without teeth.

All this might be depressing, until we remember how proverbs also have an inbuilt skepticism about themselves. Better a neat lie than a sloppy truth hints how rhyme, that proverbial standby, can get the better of reality. Proverbial truth is nothing if not many-sided, experience winning out over language for its own sake. The tongue of experience is truest, confirms one with due humility: Ask a man of experience and not a physician. Throughout the individual is given his due, experience seen as a sort of leveler: There is no tree the wind has not shaken; He whose hands are in water is not like him whose hands are in fire; or, taken a stage further, An imbecile can manage his own affairs better than a wise man the affairs of other people.

Perhaps it is in the light of this that we should understand the saying, Seek advice from a thousand men, ignore the advice of a thousand more, then return to your original decision. The limitations of languages are again brought home in A thousand curses do not tear a tobe [‘a shapeless, shirtlike garment’]; or, most majestically of all, in The dogs bark, the caravan passes. Behind the telling proverb is a salutary regard for something infinitely more powerful. If I have regretted keeping quite once, I have regretted my speech many times over, another proverb admonishes in my left ear, while at my right there whispers in Arabic and then in English: idhaa kaana al-kalaam min fiDDah fa as-sukuut min dhahab: If speech is silver, silence is golden.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Wandering around the transformed city of Bergen, Norway in search of old haunts, I felt like Gulliver waking from a long sleep.” [From “Going Home to/Retour à Bergen,” by Helga Loverseed, in Empress (C.P. Airlines magazine), May—June 1986:52. Submitted by Mrs. G.H. Montgomery, Westmount, Quebec.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Cemetery buries crime victim every 2 days.” [Headline from San Bernardino Sun, 3 June 1991. Submitted by anon., who observes, “You can’t keep a good man down.”]

Stress

Mary M. Tius, Portland, Maine

To paraphrase the German proverb: it’s the stress that makes the meaning. Hyperbole, perhaps, but consider the following:

1. a big red house

2. a big red house

3. a big red house

4. a big red house

5. a big red house

In the third and fourth phrases, a comparison with other kinds of house is implied and, in the last, with other kinds of building. Each version conveys a slightly different and easily distinguishable meaning. In like manner, “a French teacher” is one who teaches French; “a French teacher” is a citizen of France who teaches something; “a grave-digger” is a cemetery employee; “a grave digger” is a solemn archaelogist or perhaps a single-minded dog with a bone; and “a head shrinker is not “a head-shrinker” but a chief launderer of woolens.

Sometimes a change of stress does not alter the meaning. British speakers or, at least, those heard on BBC often emphasize certain phrases differently from their American cousins. Thus, to BBC announcers, President Clinton’s residence is “the White House,” while, to Americans, it is “the White House”; and I once heard a BBC announcer say “Prometheus Bound” when an American would have said “Prometheus Bound.” As far as I can discover, hono(u)r-bound and north-bound are stressed in the same way on both sides of the Atlantic, that is, by both groups of English-speakers (not the same as English speakers).

Recently, in Maine, a television advertisement for a large paper company ended thus: “X Company: Caring about the state we’re in.” Normally, the primary stress would fall on caring with a secondary stress on state. By stressing state, with a secondary stress on in, the advertisement gave—or tried to give—the impression that X Company, however it may be viewed by environmentalists, really cares about the State and the state of Maine.

Another, nationally aired series of advertisements relied on some wordplay achieved by wrongly stressing the first word of the name of a breakfast food whose pseudo-colloquial garble I will not dignify by quoting. Ordinarily, in the phrase nut and honey, both nouns would bear equal emphasis. In the advertisement, the first was stressed, yielding, “Nothing, honey.” Ah, well. A kind of rapture of the deep seizes writers of advertisements when they try to plumb the public’s tolerance of inanity.

The confusion caused by such differently or wrongly placed emphasis in a phrase is likely to be short-lived and on a level with unfamiliar prounciations such as congratulatory, conjure, contemplate, disciplinary, laborat’ry, and vagary. Nor is communication really disrupted even by those new, semiliterate Americanisms: communicant, consultant, defendant; counselor, elector(al), juror, where the schwa (as a in above, e in her) has been replaced by broad (-ant) or rounded (-or) vowel sounds. Other, often dialectal aberrations such as insurance and influence are also readily understandable. The same, however, cannot be said either of the recent and increasingly common affluence, barely, if at all, distinguishable from the similarly mis-stressed effluents, or of defuse, when a failure to place nearly equal emphasis on both syllables leads to the word’s being mistaken for the verb diffuse.

In recent years, according to The Oxford Companion to the English Language, “The BBC Pronunciation Unit” has made some changes in its recommendations to broadcasters, who are now being advised, among other things, to stress the first instead of the second syllable of controversy; the second syllable of dispute as both verb and noun; and the first syllable of cervical, instead of the second (with -i- as in nine). Presumably, urinal (-i- as in nine) is now also stressed on the first syllable. I suspect that the new policy, rather than being a reflection of changes in the speech of literate Britons, is a nod—or perhaps a resigned shrug—in the direction of overseas English speakers, since the new pronunciations conform with those of at least some overseas speakers, among them, Americans.

Yet, with the exceptions of affluence, defuse, and, for Americans, the now-disapproved cervical, these examples of difference in stress can be said to be no more than small blips in the smooth flow of ideas. Far more confusion is being caused by the insidious loss of second-syllable stress in words that are both verbs and nouns. Of course, there are words that are pronounced and stressed exactly alike in both syntactical uses: accord, control, decree, dismay, et al.; but these words appear to be in the minority. More numerous are those transformed by first-syllable stress from verbs to nouns or, less commonly, to adjectives. Examples are:

abstract consort impress purpose

address contest object record

compact contract pervert subject

compress frequent purport suspect

Sometimes, even these verbs may be stressed on the first syllable by way of contrasting two actions or conditions, as in, “it has decreased, not increased.”

While such distinctions have no effect on our understanding of the written word which has punctuation to help it, in speech they are useful pointers to syntax and meaning—or could be, if only speakers would make phrases like the following distinguishable:

agency’s combat agencies combat

chemist’s compound chemists compound

driver’s permit drivers permit

pollster’s survey pollsters survey

Even when one is not given to viewing every change in language with fear and loathing, it does seem that any loss of clarity—especially on the part of politicians and of those who are the principal purveyors of information—ought to cause some alarm. It may be symptomatic of such losses that today the adverb of choice is clearly, used even more often than the hucksters' Free!, and, since clarity of expression and thought is seldom evident, this frequent repetition of clearly can be seen as a kind of mantra, a prayer that begs our indulgence, asks us to take the wish for the deed, and, what is far worse, seeks to convict us of ignorance and stupidity should we look elsewhere for enlightenment.

Slang from Greyfriars

Bel Bailey, Clacton on Sea

Eighty years before the “Dead Poets' Society” was filmed, another master was shaping the vocabulary of schoolboys. This was the unique Charles Hamilton, alias Frank Richards, Martin Clifford, Owen Conquest, Winston Cardew, and many other pen-names. Truly he has been called the world writing champion but now is most remembered for his creation of Billy Bunter, the Fat Owl of the Remove.

Turn through the pages of his comics, “The Magnet” and “The Gem,” and the dated charm of their schoolboy slang lives again. Copies even found their way into the trenches of the First World War, so Frank Richards (his favorite name) stamped generations of boys from 1908 to 1940 and even later when the tales were turned into books, up until the last Bunter Story appeared in 1960, shortly before Richards' death.

Although his school tales were spun around public schools many of his young readers went to State schools but still read his matchless prose with delight. 200,000 copies of “The Magnet” were sold weekly throughout the British Isles. Even George Orwell was moved to comment on the phenomenon:

The year is 1910 or 1940 but it is all the same. You are at Greyfriars. There is a cosy fire in the study. The king is on the throne and the pound is worth a pound. Over in Europe the comic foreigners are jabbering and gesticulating. Lord Mauleverer has just got another fiver and we are all settling down to a tremendous tea of sausages, sardines, crumpets, potted meat, jam and doughnuts. Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever.

F.R. captures the youthful slang of that innocent era when life consisted of countless exclamation marks. Bunter is much given to apprehension—Oh crikey!, Oh jiminy!, Oh lor'! or when an even worse fate is expected, Yarooh! Harry Wharton’s favorite Great pip! influenced many young readers, while Oh crumbs!, or What the thump?, or Oh my hat! were all typical expression in the ’20s and appear in P.G. Wodehouse novels also, as both influential writers had a vivacious approach to slang. Key words of that era are cheery, chums, and breezy, all much used by Frank Richards. His own favorite expression was “All is calm and bright.”

Few writers of school tales were as erudite as this shy scholar, who once wrote a Bunter tale in Latin, which was printed in an issue of The Times Educational Supplement in 1960. The richness and variety of his own vocabulary was a good influence on that army of young readers. Mr. Quelch, form master of the Remove, was a beast, but a just beast, a phrase echoed by many schoolboys of that era. He was as sharp a Latin scholar as F.R. himself and clearly had an effect on the vocabulary of his foolish and absurd pupils, especially in the insults they exchanged with each other, copied by their readers. You spoofing sweep! You frabjous ass! You fat duffer!

Mr. Quelch would describe the chubby Bunter as have an extensive circumference, and more verbal riches were supplied by Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, the young Nabob of Bhanipur, who acts like a cheerful Greek chorus. Is it a go? asked Bunter. The go fulness is not terrific chuckled the young Nabob. The goodfulness of the riddance is great but the cheekfulness of the idiotic Bunter is preposterous! This amusing mix of fractured English and an excellent vocabulary was enjoyed and copied by young readers who relished the ridiculous.

The pages of F.R.’s schoolboy stories were peppered with Cave! and Ware breaks! The jolly old bean’s got his jolly old back up, so one sees how smoothly these stories prepared the readers for the transition to Wodehouse and encapsulated the idea of the laid-back Englishman in the idiom of that time. Ripping, whopper ‘lie,’ nunky for ‘uncle,’ take a pew ‘seat,’ on their jiggers ‘bicycles,’ playing the goat, a measly solicitor, cad, and rotter, and similar expressions were all part of typical schoolboy slang before World War II, and F.R.’s tales are brimming with them.

As one fan, now elderly, recalled, “Errand boys were able to enter through the ‘Gem’ and ‘Magnet’ into a new world where the talk was of fivers and tenners, motorbikes and gold watches—things they had never encountered at that time,” so their horizons as well as their vocabularies were extended.

Bunter’s long-awaited postal order was a joke every boy understood, but Frank Richards was clever enough to adapt his use of schoolboy slang to the changed times. Before World War II he would write that Bunter couldn’t care a straw, but in his later novels he changed this to couldn’t care less, so his ear for dialogue stayed tuned into very old age.

The code of schoolboy honour remained steadfast, as did the erudite smattering of French and Latin phrases and quotations from the Bible and Shakespeare that made Frank Richard’s school tales educational as well as entertaining. The recent resurgence of interest in his stories in modern reprints and broadcasts shows that this archaic schoolboy slang is still perfectly recognizable and acceptable to a new generation as we near the 21st century. That gap between the charismatic master of the “Dead Poets' Society” and the prolific Frank Richards is narrower than one might think.

Some English Loanwords in Thai

Paul Blackford, Bangkok

The strangest example of a loanword I have encountered in Thai is half-English, half-Italian musically derived: dedsmollay. At first I took it to be French because of its sound, but actually it comes from the Dean Martin song That’s Amore, which enjoyed enormous popularity here. If you recall, “When the moon hits your eye like a great pizza pie/That’s amore.” Thais chose to hear dead for that and corrupted ‘s amore to smollay; thus dedsmollay has been a common slang word for ‘dead’ for thirty years or so!

Thailand is the only southeast Asian nation to have avoided colonization by a western power, so there are significantly fewer English loanwords in Thai than there are French in Lao, Vietnamese, and Khmer, English in Malay and Burmese, and Dutch in Indonesia’s various languages. That is not to say that Thai has been slow or reluctant to adopt or assimilate words from other languages, but they are mostly Sanskrit/Pali, Khmer, and Chinese. The first English loanwords date from perhaps 100 years ago, exhibiting steady growth since then with a truly spectacular spurt over the past twenty years, predictably in the fields of science, business and economics, politics, fashion, pop culture, and so on.

Here are a few of the more interesting ones I have come across. As in all languages, the older a loanword, the less recognizable it is, so I start with some of these and then move on.

bam a pump.

bok the game of poker.

engerhon non-imbibed alcohol.

godang warehouse. [from godown]

gok tap/faucet. [from stopcock]

heema snow. [from the Himalayas? Thailand never experiences snow; indeed, it is such an alien concept that, if shown a postcard of a snow-covered landscape, working-class Thais say it looks delicious rather than beautiful. Strictly speaking it is not an English loanword.]

(rote) may city bus. [rote means ‘land conveyance’ and may comes from mail. The first van- (and I suppose vaguely bus-) like vehicles common in Bangkok were used for mail delivery. Also rote tua ‘tour bus,’ rote air ‘air con bus,’ and rote cote ‘coach’]

reet wreath.

satoh to store.

dan ton.

goolud gross.

lah yard. Now used only for cloth.

lim ream.

loh dozen.

aksairt abscess.

bar beer outdoor beer bar. No prizes for guessing that adjectives follow nouns in Thai!

bartendee female bartender. [Dee is from lady]

(riak) bip bip to page someone. Riak means ‘to call.’

cheque spring bounced cheque.

choke up shock absorbers.

dy blow-dry.

Erawit Elvis.

giff shop novelty items such as plastic vomit, whoopee cushions. [from gift shop]

(reua) loh rowing boat. Also reua yort [from yacht] used in the sense of ‘luxury cruiser.’ A sailboat in Thai literally and rather charmingly translates as ‘a boat with a leaf.’

lingmote remote control device.

Robin Hood illegal immigrant worker.

(khon) serb waiter or waitress. [Khon means ‘person’ and serb, is from serve.]

(nak) sing lunatic drivers in flash motors. [Nak means ‘person’ and sing comes from racing]

sow bow walkman. [from sound bound. I have not been able to unearth who coined this or if it is exclusive to Thai.]

(jai) sport to be a good sport. [Jai means ‘heart.’ Numerous Thai expressions use jai, e.g., khaojai, ‘to understand,’ literally ‘to enter the heart.']

tomsin tonsils.

v.d.o. phonetic rendition of video. Often spelled in Latin rather than Thai characters.

fen boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, minor wife, lover. [from fan ‘enthusiast’]

toot any male homosexual. [from the film Tootsie in which Dustin Hoffman dressed up as a woman. This is odd because transvestites are openly accepted in Thai society, and male homosexuals are not considered—as they are by some Japanese housewives I have met—as wanting to cross dress.]

gay king dominant partner in a male homosexual relationship.

gay queen partner who assumes the feminine role in a male homosexual relationship.

lb lesbian. Also ledbian and bian.

dee partner who assumes the female role and appearance in a lesbian relationship. [from lady]

torm partner who assumes the masculine role and appearance in a lesbian relationship. [from tomboy.] Also used in the English sense of a girl who climbs trees, picks scabs, disdains frocks, though less so nowadays.

sexy bom sex symbol. Probably an elided mix up of sexy, sex bomb, and sex symbol (/sek/sy/m/ bon/) because l is not a final consonant in Thai and if encountered in a loanword becomes n (or in this case m as bomb is also a loanword).

Thus, the present writer is addressed in Thai as Mr Porn!

I should like to end with a mystery—nothing to do with loanwords at all but fascinating nonetheless. The Thai name for the Beatles is Sii Tao Tong ‘the Four Golden Turtles.’ So far I have been unable to find out why but I live in hope.

OBITER DICTA: Politically Correct Linguistic Paranoia

Laurence Urdang

On Sunday, 11 July 1993, John McLaughlin, in signing off his television program, The McLaughlin Group, apologized for having used the word welsh in the sense, “cheat by failing to pay a gambling debt; go back on one’s word” [RHD Unabridged] in an earlier program. Presumably, the Welsh lobby had gone after him in the mistaken assumption that the word derives from the word Welsh ‘of, pertaining to, or characteristic of the people of Wales.’ The RHD precedes that etymology with “perh.,” meaning, obviously that there is some possibility of that derivation; the OED etymology is “Origin unknown.” Examination of the scores of senses listed in the OED for Welsh, n., reveals that virtually all are either entirely neutral or complimentary; the two possible exceptions are welshcomb ‘comb one’s hair by using one’s thumb and fingers instead of a comb’ and Welsh cricket ‘louse.’ Of the latter type many examples could be listed on the order of Irish pennant ‘untidy loose end of a rope.’ The RHD labels the term “(sometimes offensive),” which does not mean that it is offensive occasionally but that it is offensive to some people (presumably Irish). Have the French raised an international brouhaha at the UN about the French disease? Have the British applied to the International Court of Justice about the English disease? Have adherents to Judaism worldwide taken offense at Jew’s harp? Hardly, though Oxford University Press went through a bad patch some years ago because of the subentry Jew down ‘bargain down in price,’ notwithstanding its notation marking the use as offensive.

In America they tell Polish jokes; the same jokes are told in England about the Irish; very likely, they crop up amongst the Serbs about the Croats, amongst the Croats about the Serbs, and amongst the Muslims about the Serbs and the Croats. Recently, the head of the California Bar Association delivered an address at the annual meeting decrying jokes about lawyers, suggesting that a man who had raided a law office and killed some people in it had been inspired or spurred on by the derisive attitude toward lawyers that “lawyer jokes” fostered. Oddly, it was in the same McLaughlin program referred to above that this issue was raised and promptly ridiculed as ludicrous: one can assume only that McLaughlin felt more pressured by nationalistic and ethnic interests than by lawyers.

VERBATIM ran an article, “Politically Correct Nomenclature, or, How to Win at Trivial Pursuit and Lose Friends” [XVIII, 4], by Marc A. Schindler, that delved into the subject, particularly with regard to the use of Inuit for Eskimo, though I note that the trade name, Eskimo Pie, has not been changed to Inuit Pie; also, it seems unlikely that the French ice cream confection, Esquimau Gervais, has been hailed into court. When I was a lad, the word nigger was taboo in the US, but it was used freely till recently in Britain (meaning ‘any dark-skinned person’): the word Negro (with a capital N) was carefully used instead. Then, at about the same time when colored was anathematized (despite the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which has still not changed its name), black was legislated by that community of speakers to supplant Negro and colored, though I cannot recall any riders requiring a capital B. (Cape Colored—or, more properly, Coloured—is retained in South Africa with a specific denotation of a “person of mixed European and African or Malayan ancestry” [RHD Unabridged], in which one must read White for “European” and dark-skinned for “African or Malayan.”) There cropped up, here and there, objections to the use of black to describe things other than good and pure, and Black is beautiful became the catchword of the day. Is it my imagination or do I detect intimations that black is on its way out? In a perfect world, there would be no need to refer to people by their skin color: many years ago newspapers agreed to omit mention of an individual’s color, but they got round that by showing a photograph; today, television newscasters avoid irrelevant mention of skin color, but they seem almost relieved to be able to show a picture of someone being arrested and of looters and rioters.

Gone is the time when one might make a reasonably accurate guess at a person’s race or nationality by his name; today, when blacks who do not adopt Arabic names or names like Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones might be named Kelly or Murphy, Jews born as Greenberg change their name to Monteverdi or Vermont, Hirsch to Cerf, and so forth, and people with Slavic and Italian names either change its spelling in an attempt to get people to pronounce it as closely as possible to the original (e.g., Kovalsky instead of Kowalski) or keep the spelling and change the pronunciation because they get tired of telling people that Modigliani is properly pronounced [\?\môdē\?\lyänē] (or, Anglice, [\?\môdē\?\lyänē]) and not “muh\?\diglee\?\ahnee,” that Castagno is easily pronounced [kästänyô], or that the Polish name Zajac is pronounced [\?\zäyäntz] rather than “Say, Jack”: after all, there might still be some old-timers who remember the film actress Signe Hasso as well as words like sign, assign, consign, condign, malign, deign, feign, reign, etc., hence know that in a medial -gn-, the -g- is not always articulated. I number such items among the Perils of Literacy: it is mainly since they learned to read that people have begun to change the standard pronunciations of words and names according to their spellings, a dangerous bit of mischief for a language like English.

Any restrictive tampering with language in America immediately prompts a knee-jerk reaction invoking the First Amendment, which it would not be inappropriate to quote here:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Is it only in America that special interest groups have learned to lobby for preferential treatment and attempt to legislate the language? The recent change in Miami by which Spanish is allowed alongside English as an official language is seen by some as a Balkanization of the cherished “melting pot”; but those holding that view who support it with the claim that the 20th-century immigrants have assimilated culturally and speak English are wrong: many speak little or no English, and most make every effort they can to retain the cultures of their respective native lands, including religious observances. One might be led to think that it is always open (silly) season on the language in the US; but we cannot ignore the seriousness of religious taboos on some aspects of language and writing, as the fatwah issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini on Salman Rushdie because of a book. In a macabre way, one might take heart from the news that books could still be perceived to have such an impact; my own cynical view is that had it not been for the attention drawn to it by the fatwah, Satanic Verses would not have had much effect and would have been long forgotten by now. In other countries, people kill each other over language.

There are a lot of offensive words in the language, but far worse are the offensive ways in which people put those words together to express offensive ideas.

“Schindler’s List” of Ashkenaz’s Names

Marc A. Schindler, Spruce Grove, Alberta

Back in the mid-80s, when Keneally’s book Schindler’s List first came out, an eerie experience happened to me. I was intrigued by the book; over and above the coincidence of names, to be sure, but having the same, relatively rare name as the book’s protagonist led to a forceful lesson in the power of Name.

I happened to buy the book at a bookstore in New York’s Laguardia Airport. I paid for it with a credit card, and when the clerk saw my name on the credit card, her eyes widened. “Mr. Schindler, please—let me shake your hand!” I was very embarrassed and could feel my face flush. I protested that I was no relation to Oskar Schindler, but this did not seem to make any difference to her. “I’m Jewish,” she explained, “and it’s enough for me to touch the name.”

Ironically, given Oskar Schindler’s role in saving the lives of Jews in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the name is not exclusively a gentile German name. Some months ago, the chief rabbi of conservative Judaism in the U.S. wrote a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal commenting on a review of the Spielberg movie—the rabbi’s name is also Schindler (again, no relation!). On several occasions, while applying for visas to a certain Middle Eastern country, I have been asked to provide a baptismal certificate, presumably to determine whether I was Jewish or Christian, which happens to play an unofficial role in the entry practices of that particular country. About a decade ago a European airplane was hijacked by Middle Eastern terrorists, who tried to identify Jews among the passengers by the names in their passports, on the theory that those ending in -stein or -berg were clearly Jewish. A German-speaking stewardess, drafted into an interpretive role by the terrorists, played a heroic role by insisting that all of the Germanic-sounding names were really “pure” German, not Jewish.

Is there in fact such a thing as a Jewish name? More specifically, are there unique or typical names borne by Ashkenazi Jews from central Europe? Aside from nobility, most inhabitants of German-speaking central Europe started taking family names in the Middle Ages. As in Britain, these names fell into various categories (the following is not meant to be exhaustive, just illustrative):

occupations: English - Weaver, Cartwright, Smith, etc. German - Weber, Rademacher, Schmidt, etc. patronyms: English - Johnson, Roberts, etc. (patronyms are not as common in German)

place names: English - Churchill, Washington, Lincoln, etc. German - Adenauer, Hindenburg, Waldheim, etc.

personal characteristics: English - Small, Black, Lionheart, etc. German - Klein, Schwarz, Liwenherz, etc.

However, at the time that commoners started taking names, Jews were forced to live in special ghettoes. Depending on the nature of the local liege lord, that was partly for their own protection and partly so they could be controlled. The restrictions of the ghetto were not only geographical: inhabitants were usually restricted in the trades they could engage in. Crafts were usually not allowed, since the craft guilds excluded Jews; but Jews were allowed to engage in banking (and related industries, such as pawnbroking), mercantile pursuits, and long-distance trading.

As the symbol of the pawnbroker was the three gold balls (ef. the family arms of the Rothschilds), Goldstein (‘gold stone’) became a popular name for pawnbrokers or bankers (often there was little difference between the two trades). Krämer was a small-scale merchant, the prefix Mandel- usually indicated a trader in almonds, and Bernstein is the German word for ‘amber,’ a semiprecious stone traded along routes which stretched from the Middle East up through Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania.

Schindler, on the other hand, was a guild craft. The English cognate would be ‘shingler,’ or ‘shingle-maker,’ and the word originally comes from the Latin scindere, meaning ‘to split.’ One thinks of splitting a cedar wood block to make what we would call shakes in English. However, the Schindler not only made shakes, he also built and surfaced the entire roof of a house; so in my opinion, the name really corresponds better with the English surname Tyler. As a guild craft, roofing would normally have been closed to Jews during the era when surnames came into use amongst the guild classes. Indeed, in the book Schindler’s List, there are two persons named Schindler: Oskar Schindler, the protagonist, who was a Catholic Sudetendeutscher (ethnic German from Bohemia or Moravia); and a Brigadier Schindler, an official with the Wehrmacht procurement office in Berlin (who one presumes was not Jewish).

About ten or twelve years ago, when I started traveling in the course of my business (as international business manager for a medical company), I would often look up Schindlers in local phone books and write them to see if we might be related. I underestimated the commonness of the name. When I grew up, on the Canadian Prairies, my teachers were mostly WASP and had a hard time spelling or pronouncing my name. I thought that my name was unique and exotic, like those of my fellow ethnic German- and Ukrainian-Canadian classmates. It came as a surprise to find that there are Schindlers in almost every large city of the world I have visited, including those in Europe, Australia, South Africa, and even Latin America. Starting about five years ago, I started seeing the little white service wagons of the Schindler Elevator Co., a Swiss company, zipping around downtown Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal.

I engaged in many Briefwechsel with Schindlers (and Shindlers) from London to New York to Melbourne to Cape Town and found that many were, in fact, Jewish. Most of these have anglicized (or yiddishized) their names, to Shindler. As one London Shindler told me, “The German language has nothing but bitter memories for us, so my father adopted the English spelling when we moved here after the War.”

How this exception to the rule occurred is impossible to determine, but it is not really difficult to imagine that it could easily have happened over the course of centuries of inter-marriage. I have often wondered what might happen if, during one of my visits to the Middle East, I should become the object of interrogation by someone with, shall we say, an urgent political agenda. Would he look into my trousers to determine my religion? He would have a problem, of course, because most North American gentiles of my age bear the visible signs of the Covenant of Abraham. How would I explain that while many Jewish names may look German, they are not really German.—No, I mean, they are German, or, rather, they took certain German names, but there are exceptions, you see …

I just hope I can convince him my name’s really French.

ANTIPODEAN ENGLISH: Tassie Terms

W.S. Ramson, Australian National Dictionary Centre Canberra

It grieves Tasmanians that the Island State [or Flyspeck or Speck] is sometimes left off the map of Australia, yet no one visiting the former convict colony can be untouched by the tangible pervasiveness of the past and the importance attached by Tasmanians to activities and events which, in mainland terms, are long gone. Part of this impression comes from the state’s increasing dependence on tourism and its readiness to dress up the differences in ways likely to appeal to tourists from overseas and from other parts of Australia who feel they have moved with the times. The very word convict is more prominent in everyday spoken English than it is in, say, Sydney, with compounds like convict brick, convict building, convict garden, convict piner, convict relic, and convict settlement. Terms that have validity only in a historical context abound: carrying gang, Dumb cell, Model Prison, probation gang, and separate prison, or the place name Isle of the Dead, all of which appear currently in literature prepared for the tourist trade. So does the former name for the colony, Van Diemen’s Land (so named by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman), or its facetious variant, Vandemonia (former Tasmanian convicts being known on the mainland as Vandemonians).

Convict piner indicates both a retention of and a transition from the past. A piner is and was a timbergetter who specialized in Huon pine, a conifer producing an attractive and highly valued timber, once used for boatbuilding but now protected and employed mainly in the manufacture of touristy artifacts. Pining was unequivocally an occupation. The piner once lived in a badger box, a makeshift shelter named in allusion to the wombat’s capacious hole in the ground (the wombat being known uniquely in Tasmania as a badger, to which it bears a passing resembalance). This highlights the retention of terms belonging to the past that have been given a new and artificially maintained currency as part of the Holiday Isle’s tourist-oriented self-promotion. The apple industry provides another example: apple chewer is explicable as a sign of plenty, but apple carver is the fruit of a somewhat desperate attempt to provide entertainment; and Apple Island or Isle is part now of a deliberately created nostalgia for a past in which there was once a thriving export industry.

There is a plenteousness of natural resources. The proprietorial use of the adjective Tasmanian— found in compounds like Tasmanian kingfish, Tasmanian pink-eye (a potato), Tasmanian scallop (the shellfish, not, as in New South Wales, a slice of fried potato), and Tasmanian red (an apple)—plays on an ostensible difference in the island produce, as does the much more audacious hijacking of Atlantic in Tasmanian Atlantic salmon (farmed Tasmanian salmon). Names of apples like cleopatra and democrat, of potatoes like bintje, black derwent, and kennebec, carry a Tasmanian stamp (in Australia at any rate), as does the mutton bird (the shearwater, Puffinus tenuirostris)—which has given Tasmanian English the verb mutton bird or in its abbreviated form bird, as well as lexical oddities like dizz (‘cook a mutton bird’) for those foolhardy enough to contemplate such a feat.

The indigenous flora and fauna likewise have been carefully marketed to tourists as different: the Tasmanian tiger (now probably extinct) lives in legend and forlorn reaches of the remotest parts of the island, the Tasmanian devil (a carnivorous marsupial of undeniably fierce appearance) in tired zoos and nature parks where nonexclusive animals like the kangaroo and koala share the honors with a remarkable range of diminutive marsupials genuinely peculiar to Tassie, which have added value in an age that cultivates the notion of wilderness. Again the tourist trade looms with its advertisements for “cabins, complete with queen-size bed and spa bath, and all with spectacular river or wilderness views.”

But there are genuine regionalism lurking in both the written and the spoken language: corinna (an Aboriginal name for the Tasmanian tiger), mariner (a corruption of the Aboriginal merrina for a seashell used as a physical ornament), quoib (an Aboriginal term for a wombat), and wing-wang (again an Aboriginal term, this time for a fiery piece of lighted bark thrown by Aborigines). All of which seems narracoupa ‘very good’ considering the strenuous efforts made during the Black War of 1831 to disperse the Tasmanian Aborigines. And there are spoken examples of British regional dialect survivals: the litmus test for a Tasmanian native is the pronunciation and use of rum-un an ‘eccentric.’ Indicative also is familiarity with pocket, originally a ‘measure of hops or the bag in which they were carried,’ now used exclusively of potatoes, and nointer a ‘scapegrace or mischievous person.’

Tasmanian English, then, presents an interesting face to the outside world, partly the face of a genuine regional dialect nurtured by the stability and comparative isolation of its population, and partly a construct of the tourist industry, which harnesses both the new and the old to create a viable contemporary image.

VERBUM SAP: The Media Is the Message

Robertson Cochrane, Toronto

I have few data to support me, and my stamina are not up to long, tedious research, but I have a hunch that media—the main agendum on many a pedant’s plate these days—is well on its way to becoming a standard singular noun, except perhaps among hidebound literati and intransigent intelligentsia on various university campi, in style books, and in other blessed receptacles of holy semantic writ. My hunch also tells me that there are more people who use media as a singular noun than there are people who write bristling letters to the editor insisting on its immutable plurality—which is to say, a lot.

The media itself/themselves has its/their needle stuck in the old monaural groove. Most style books stoutly maintain media is a plural noun, period. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage admits the existence of an alternative but dismisses it as a subversive plot: “Media—still a plural, despite persistent efforts to turn it into a singular.” It adds, with smug ivory-tower certainty, “The singular is, of course, medium.” The British Broadcasting Corporation’s Style Guide is also stuck in the mud. Its diktat on media says this: “Plural. ‘The media sometimes display (not displays) a sensational approach to events.’ Remember also that data, criteria, and phenomena are plurals. But the plural of referendum is referendums, not referenda!” The (Toronto) Globe and Mail Style Book not only holds media’s plurality, but includes within its wide network “books, periodical publications, radio, TV, advertising, mass mailing.” How did they overlook town criers?

In a recent Globe and Mail column, a magazine critic was taking pot shots at a gun-supporting U.S. publication called Women’s Self Defense. Among his targets was a cover-story headline that read: “How the Media Encourages Violence, Yet Discourages Women from Owning Guns.” “The magazine,” he tut-tutted, “is full of similar grammatical mistakes.” I could detect no other solecisms, so I assumed he was taking aim at the use of the singular verb with the noun media.

What these dauntless defenders of the status quondam fail to detect is that a linguistically fascinating, and utterly inevitable, semantic change is occurring—has already occurred, really—beneath their very proboscises (or proboscides for the classically rigorous). The result of this evolution is that there is now both a plural media and a singular media, and each means something different. The legitimate and widely recognized singular meaning was illustrated recently in the Globe and Mail, despite the Style Book’s taboo. The paper’s television critic began a story this way: “It is a mean, cold morning down at CHCH-TV, where the media has been invited to risk its collective life on the icy highway from Toronto to Hamilton [to preview a series premiere].” The sense is clear and logical here. This media does not include book publishers and junk-mail pushers, and no reader would take that meaning. It means simply “the news media,” or what used to be called “the press,” used as a collective singular as early as 1797 (See OED press n., 14). The press served the purpose well, as long as it involved only “print” media. When radio and television joined the club, some new collective handle was felt to be needed. The public, in its wisdom, opted for the nettlesome media, first used in this sense, to anyone’s knowledge, in a 1923 article in Advertising & Selling called “Class Appeal in the Mass Media.” In the same magazine, the singular medium appeared, but so did the singular media. And ever since, the purists have been more concerned about bad Latin than good English.

The language has a way of sorting out awkward situations, such as those created by the rather tortured “proper” examples in the first paragraph. Data, still in transition, is usually singular outside academic and scientific settings. Stamina (plural of stamen), has been singular since the early 18th century when, like media, it developed a new sense. Agenda (which once had the singular agend in English) has been treated as one since the turn of this century. Literati and intelligentsia retain their snooty classical endings because it looks good on them and other pseudo-cognoscente. Campi is a joke. Bacteria has just about completed its evolution to singularity. Criteria and phenomena, heard everywhere as singles, are encountering stern opposition from people who take care to speak of a grafitto, but never say a confetto. Many of them also talk of octopi, unaware that the “correct” Greek plural is octopodes or that the accepted anglicized one is octopuses, the simple English plural -s or -es, as in thesauruses, campuses, formulas, indexes, and memorandums.

Mediums would have made sense, but usage dictated the plural media. And, certainly, it is still a plural in such senses as “various media are on display at the art show.” But media unmistakably has also taken on a monolithic unitary sense. I am happy to let the usually conservative American Heritage Dictionary have the last word: “As with the analogous words data and agenda, the originally plural form has begun to acquire a sense that departs from that of the singular [medium]; used as a collective term, media denotes an industry or community.”

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Contemporary English: Word Lists

Tadeusz Piotrowski, (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego, 1993), in two volumes: Part I, The Reverse List 151pp., Part II, The Forward List 139pp.,

[Those interested in ordering should write for information to Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego / pl. Uniwersytecki 9/13 / 50-137 Wroclaw, / Poland.]

In the early 1960s, while I was directing the compilation and editing of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language-Unabridged Edition, it occurred to me that it would be extremely useful to have a listing of a large number of English words alphabetized from the right—that is, listed in normal spelling order but with words ending in a followed by those ending in b, and so on, to those ending in z. My primary purpose was to facilitate the examination of suffixes and desinences. It was a simple matter to find words beginning with prefixes like anti-, pre-, pro-, un-, etc., but finding those that ended in -able, -graph, -ity, -ous, etc. was an entirely different matter. There was no problem identifying the obvious ones, but the less common ones were a bit more elusive.

As Random House was unable to fund such research, I approached someone I knew at Air Force Intelligence, at Griffiss Air Force Base, in Rome, New York, with my proposal, suggesting that such an analysis would yield useful results for cryptanalytical research. I was summarily turned down in a peremptory letter that questioned the possible usefulness of such an enterprise. I was consequently a little surprised—and pleased—to be phoned a few months later by one A.F. Brown, a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Pennsylvania, who told me that he had been called in by Air Force Intelligence and given the job of preparing just such a list. It was at the suggestion of the agency that he was getting in touch with me, as he had no notion of how to go about the work. We met in my office some time later, and, being far more interested in the results than in who did the work or got the credit, I set forth for him the procedures that would yield the list. Although nothing was committed to writing, I gave Brown to understand that all I expected in return was a copy of the resulting work and an acknowledgment of my help in his Foreword. Several years later, the work was published in eight quarto-sized, thick volumes, one set of which was duly delivered to my office. The Foreword was totally devoid of any acknowledgment, however.

The first three volumes contained listed solid words, all in capital letters, alphabetized from the right, with codes for each indicating which one or more of some eighteen sources that had yielded them. The fourth volume listed hyphenated forms in the same way. The next four volumes contained the same listings as the first four, but these were alphabetized normally, from the left. The sources were (mainly) the Merriam-Webster Unabridged, Second Edition, and, in addition, as number of other specialized medical, scientific, and other dictionaries. I understand that an attempt had been made to persuade Merriam to allow the use of the entry lists for the Third Edition, but they refused. I cannot recall the exact number of items in the lists, but my impression is that it was approximately 750,000. [As far as I know, the information is still available from the National Technical Information Service, Alexandria Virginia, U.S.A., either in microfiche or as an enlarged machine copy of same.]

As this work is not mentioned in Contemporary English: Word Lists, one must assume that its existence was unknown to the author; but that should not put off those who have need of a list that is not only more up to date but is also more selective and, on the grounds of frequency, probably more useful. Hyphenated forms (heaven-sent) and multi-word units (old wives’ tale) are conveniently included in a single listing; though these are alphabetized word-by-word (putting black sheep before blackberry, taxfree before taxable), the list is short enough so that these are readily found in the Forward part. I missed black hole, which is widely used as a popular metaphor, and was a little surprised find reported speech, Excellency (presumably only a form of address), and sandwich course. Different forms of the same word are listed, e.g., exact, exactly, and exactness, exaggerate, exaggerated, exaggeratedly, and exaggeration.

Is it vain of me to suggest that the author might have found it useful to have had at hand my Suffixes and Other Word-final Elements of English (Gale Research Company, 1982)? It lists 1545 word-final elements, many of which are not represented in the book under review. One might well counter that words containing those elements are therefore not common enough to merit inclusion, but is that suffi- cient reason to omit -mane words (balletomane), -bund words (moribund), and all words ending in -phobe or -phile? I believe that to create a truly useful work, even acknowledging its restrictions, the author should have considered matters other than raw frequency, the criterion applied for “use in the classroom or at home.” For instance, I am not entirely sure what purpose is served in long lists of words ending in -ly that are adverbs formed on adjectives: a formula would not only have sufficed but would enable some words, like kindly and friendly, to have been especially marked. Introducing a formula to cover -ize/-ise variants (and some others) would have freed up space for more important inclusions.

Of the three suggested uses for the books— teaching or learning English word formation, employing the list as a source of frequently used words, and having available “only items actually found in English texts, without the—often delightful—oddities one can find in larger dictionaries”—the last seems to me the most telling. There are 23,163 items listed; those who argue about the size of native speakers vocabularies would be hard put to find any words or phrases that are not familiar and could very likely extend the list without difficulty. If semantic criteria were applied to homographs (which appear only once), like saw, and to polysemic items, like take up, take in, etc., even the most naive speaker could expand the list considerably.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Dictionary of Fly-Fishing

C.B. McCully, (Oxford University Press, 1993), 280pp.

About a dozen years ago, when looking through a mail-order catalogue of sports clothes, I noticed a section offering fishing flies and became intrigued with their names—names like Cree Sedge and Greenwell’s Glory. In a desultory way (I admit), I tried to discover more about the names, with an eye toward compiling a work on the subject. I did manage to acquire a catalogue or two on fishing flies— one, I recall, was from Leonard’s—but the entire project slipped away from me to be replaced by other matters requiring more immediate attention. When I saw the present work (in a British catalogue of sports clothes), I sent away for it.

I should explain that I fished—though not “seriously”—when I was about ten years old at summer camp, where we caught mostly sunfish; I once caught a lake bass, which we grilled on an open fire and ate: only those who have eaten fresh-caught fish know the difference between them and the store-bought variety. Some forty years ago, several friends persuaded me to join them on a party-boat to go fishing off Rockaway Beach, near New York City. The day was sultry, without the slightest breeze to create even a suggestion of a cat’s paw on the surface of Sheepshead Bay; I caught about twenty-odd fluke, which just lay there, scarcely my notion of game fishing. As I had caught the most fish that day, I won a bottle of scotch, but my friends’ wives viewed with some alarm our return bearing among us about fifty fluke, all of which needed cleaning and, of course, either eating or freezing. I have avoided fishing since.

No self-respecting reader of books can consider his education complete without having read Izaak Walton. More recently, I have seen fishing competitions on television, happy to see that the fish were returned to the waters whence they have been taken. Most recently, I saw on BBC-TV a most enchanting film about two men who had gone fishing for “monster” carp on a lake at a private estate somewhere. It was quite beautiful. One might think that watching other people fishing is like watching the grass grow; it cannot compare for action with The Terminator, yet it is far from boring—especially if one is watching an edited version and does not have to sit on shore or in a boat for hours on end— and that particular program, punctuated here and there by fishing lore, was dreamily engaging and peaceful, well calculated to remove one’s mind from the cares of the day.

The literature of fishing goes back a long, long time. As I know little about it, I shall not attempt to expatiate on it here. The present book, although it is called a dictionary, contains much ancillary encyclopedic, folkloristic, and fishloristic information, most of it carefully referenced to sources, which are documented in an eight-page bibliography. (My only criticism of it is that the listing for the fifteenth-century Treatise of Fishing with an Angle appears as the first item, under “Anon.”: it ought to have a cross reference under Treatise, where I had sought it in vain.)

Typically, an entry begins with the etymology of the headword, e.g.:

baggot From a verbal participle, bagged, meaning ‘big with young, pregnant.’ (Sir Perceval, 1400: ‘The mere was bagged with sole.')

In many entries, the etymologies are far more replete: that for barb covers twelve lines of text.

It would be more accurate to say that the terms are explained, rather than defined; opinions are given, techniques are discussed (carefully distinguishing between dry fly-fishing and wet), and the style is easy. The entries on mayfly¹, mayfly², and mayfly³, the first being any “up-winged insect,” the second the “true mayfly,” and the third, the “stonefly,” cover four full pages; more than six are devoted to sea trout; more than ten to nymph fishing. Mirror and window goes into a fish’s view of the world. Line drawings illustrate the single turle, grinner, blood, needle, and nail—all knots used in tying flies.

This book is a true pleasure to read, whether one’s experience with fish is limited to the occasional accompaniment to chips, to Dover sole véronique, or to standing hip-deep in an icy stream at dawn. It cannot be compared with a dictionary, per se: its headwords serve more as a point of departure for McCully to hold forth on the myriad aspects of an activity—I hesitate calling fishing a “sport”— which he evidently knows and loves so well.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Dictionary of Australian Underworld Slang

Gary Simes, (Oxford University Press (Australia), 1993), lxxviii + 225pp.

This dictionary combines two glossaries of underworld slang which were compiled by two prisoners in New South Wales in the middle of the twentieth century. It is more than a slang dictionary: Simes’s own lexicographical analysis of the terms is detailed and impressive, and he also provides a fifty-two page essay on the history of the literature and language of crime and the underworld.

The first glossary was compiled in 1944 by Ted Hartley, who was imprisoned as a conscientious objector in 1943 and 1944. Simes discovered this glossary in 1989 among the papers of the Australian novelist Kylie Tennant at the National Library of Australia. Tennant came into contact with Hartley through the Conscientious Objectors’ Union, requested the glossary from him, and used it when writing her novel Tell Morning This. Given Hartley’s stand as a conscientious objector, it is not surprising that his more expansive glosses often extend into sociological commentary.

The second and longer glossary (containing 726 entries), called The Argot, was compiled in 1950 by a long-term prisoner known only as Thirty-five (from the custom of referring to a prisoner by the last two digits of his official number). Although the existence of the glossary was known, especially because Sidney Baker cites some terms from it in the 1966 edition of his The Austrialian Language, most of it has been unpublished until now. Thirty-five had been a school teacher, but the reason for his imprisonment is unknown. A revised edition of half of The Argot also exists. The revision includes material collected in the period 1950-55, but written up at a later date after Thirty-five was released from prison. (The manuscript is dated October 1975.) From his commentary it is clear that Thirty-five, when compiling his glossary, had access to a number of books, including Partridge’s Slang To-day and Yesterday and the 1945 edition of The Australian Language. His more expansive glosses focus primarily on lexicographical matters, including some etymological speculation. Thirty-five wrote a Preface to The Argot (included by Simes as an appendix), and he makes some interesting observations about the kind of material he collected.

Each entry in the dictionary consists of up to three parts. The first is a blend of the headwords and definitions from the three manuscripts (Hartley’s, Thirty-five’s 1950 compilation, and Thirty-five’s revision), indicating by date which manuscript is being used. The texts are edited conservatively, so that spelling or typing errors are allowed to stand. The second part is Simes’s lexicographical commentary on the material provided by Hartley and Thirty-five, often giving information about the origin of the term, whether it is Australian, whether it is otherwise unrecorded, and so on. The third consists of illustrative quotations (where available) from other texts, mostly from Simes’s own files.

Some of the material is international underworld slang: hoist ‘steal,’ beak Brit. ‘magistrate or judge,’ chiseller swindler,' dip ‘pickpocket,’ the rap the punishment, blame, etc.', screw Brit. ‘prison guard.’ Some of it is Australian underworld slang: fruit for the sideboard ‘easy pickings,’ tank a ‘safe,’ track ‘prison warder who carries contraband messages or goods out of or into a prison for a prisoner.’ There is much previously unrecorded material: button up ‘cease betting, or lower one’s stakes considerably when one is winning’; kipping ‘masturbating’; sappho term of endearment used between lesbians, hence derisively addressed to passive homosexuals. There are a few remnants of pig-Latin, as in oofterpa for Poofter ‘homosexual’ and opsca for cops. At times, Thirty-five offers examples of the extended use of this slang, as when describing a theft from a prostitute’s client:

A smartie will talk his cheese into going to the rubbidy and dudding some pervy old mug into lumbering her. When they both have the tweeds down, the smartie will front up, work the mug over a little for lumbering his missus, and then shoot through with the bint and the mug’s willie.

Some areas of lexical density reflect the social structure of all-male prisons: most of the terms for women are pejorative, there are numerous terms for heterosexual sex, and an abundance of terms for the penis. In his Preface, Thirty-five argues that the pejorative attitudes towards women derive from the criminal’s “assessment of every woman according to her eligibility as a mistress” (p. 222), whereas Hartley, discussing the use of cunt comments: “Probably this latter expression unconsciously carries with it the contempt for femininity that most prisoners & soldiers and others feel when forcibly shut off from the other sex. In this connection it is saddening to observe the slow but certain deteriation [sic] in prisoners, some with fine feelings, until their fiancees are spoken of as chromos and their wives as c-nt” (p. 161). There is an obsession with homosexuality: cat ‘passive homosexual,’ hock ‘prisoner who is out to engage in homosexual practices,’ honey b-m ‘passive homosexual,’ whitewash someone’s kidneys ‘commit pederasty on.’

The glossaries include material which is not specific to the underworld or to prisons. There are terms from general English: make a balls of ‘muck up, bugger up,’ bang ‘intercourse,’ outsider ‘horse (dog) starting at long odds.’ There are general Australian colloquialisms: put the acid on ‘put the hard word on,’ battler ‘one who struggles (honestly) for a living,’ bint ‘girl,’ blot ‘posterior or anus.’ Anyone who has surveyed the special language of a sub-group will be aware of the problem of whether one should include only words specific to the sub-group. Thirty-five obviously feels that these terms which are not specific to the sub-group have assumed a special place in the ‘argot,’ or are used intensively in the underworld or in prison. Hartley is also aware of the issue, and he includes imbecile with the comment: “A common term of contempt in gaol, used particularly of the warders.” Rhyming slang is a feature of colloquial Australian English, but it appears to have been especially intensive in the underworld and in prisons at this time.

A valuable feature of this book is Simes’s lengthy introduction devoted to “The Literature of Crime” and “The Language and Lexicography of Crime.” Simes traces crime literature from the first beggar-books, the German Die Betrugnisse der Gyler (c. 1450) and Liber Vagatorum (c. 1510), and similar texts from France, Spain, Italy, and England, through the criminal biography, fictionalized accounts of crime and the underworld, and finally the detective novel. An interest in the language and lexicography begins with the earliest texts, which usually include glossaries, or explanations of the special language of beggars, thieves, and so on. Simes gives a full account of these glossaries, and then turns to the development of dictionaries of underworld slang from the 17th century to the present. There is detailed attention to English, American, and Australian material. This survey and its bibliographical material will prove an indispensable guide to any lexicographer interested in underworld slang. The one omission I note in the Autralian material is Marcus Clarke’s “Sketches of Melbourne Low Life. 4. The Language of Bohemia,” which appeared in the Australasian in 1869. This article gives a brief history of underworld slang and an extensive listing of underworld terms in use in Melbourne in the 1860s.

The scholarship that has gone into this book is exemplary, and the book will appeal to the general reader as much as to the lexicographer.

Bruce Moore, The University of New South Wales

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics

Herbert C. Morton, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), xv + 323pp. + Index, etc., (reviewed from uncorrected proof).

At the time of publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961), commonly referred to as Webster’s Third (but in these pages, for the sake of brevity, as MW3 or MWIII), I was director of the reference department of Random House, preparing what was later to be published as The Random House Dictionary of the English Dictionary - Unabridged Edition. It was therefore entirely inappropriate for me to comment on either the MWIII itself or the furor raised by its critics and supporters. More than three decades later I readily recall my opinions about both at the time, opinions that have changed little over the years: there was no doubt that the MWIII deserved criticism, but those benighted, self-appointed guardians of the language who were heaping vituperative imprecations on the Dictionary (and its editors) were criticizing it for the wrong things.

To be sure, I agreed—still agree—with those who believe that the comment about ain’t, “used orally in most parts of the U.S. by many cultivated speakers esp. in the phrase ain’t I,” was not reflective of the facts: I knew many cultivated speakers in most parts of the U.S., and the only time I ever heard them say ain’t was in jocular contexts or in virtual quotations, like She ain’t what she used to be. I must admit that my evidence was entirely impressionistic, but Gove provided no statistical support for his contention, either. My chief criticisms, however, were of a more general nature. The biggest was that Gove had gone his merry way in producing what he considered to be a lexicon of the language but with little thought for those who were to use it: no one could call the MWIII “user-friendly” (certainly not in 1961, when, as far as I know, the expression had not yet gained currency):

1. HEADWORDS. The practice of entering proper names and adjectives with lower-case initials I found off-putting because they were normally encountered with capitals. To take a random example, there is some question about the accuracy of description of a word like macedonian: it appears in six main entries, the first three of which bear homograph numbers. The first, “belonging or relating to Macedonia,” has “usu cap” as does the third, “a follower of the bishop Macedonius …,”; but is there substantial enough evidence for these forms being spelled with a lower-case m to warrant such treatment? I doubt it. It is far more likely that the preponderance of evidence would show that an entry with a capital M might—conceivably—warrant a comment like, “rarely lower case.” Only the second entry, a noun including the senses “native[s] or inhabitant[s]; descendant; and language[s],” shows “cap.” Where Gove’s researchers came up with such highly detailed information about the distribution of such forms is hard to imagine. Certainly, there is no principle involved in such a distribution. Of the other main entries, macedonian cry or macedonian call, macedonian-persian, and macedonian pine, each shows “usu cap.” As all of these entries are conventionally capitalized in normal English, it is difficult to fathom the rationale for the treatment, and 5 CAPITALIZATION, in the Explanatory Notes, reveals nothing useful.

2. PRONUNCIATIONS. Another area of confusion for the user is the treatment of pronunciation. While it must be acknowledged that pronunciations occupy a great deal of space—owing largely to the dialectal variants and the precision with which they are represented—most American dictionaries are satisfied to show major (American) dialect differences and to rely on detailed variants to be the product of a judiciously selected key word in the pronunciation key (a subject I do not have the space to go into here). But the entry for investiture in MWIII shows, for example:

\-t\?\\?\ch\?\(\?\)r, -,ch\?\ , -,ch\?\(r), -t\?\\?\t\?\, t\?\\?\ty\?\-\

[I think that the inferior dash beginning the third pronunciation must be an error.] Counting the internal variations, that is seven variants merely for the last two syllables of the word: to see how the first two are pronounced, one must go to the preceding entry, investitive. It does not get any better, either. If you want to know how to pronounce homozygote, all that is given is

\“+\,

which is not only cryptically unhelpful, but means that the user has to filter back five columns to see how homo-words are pronounced, then on to zygote to see how that is pronounced. In other manifestations of this curious, cumbersome style are

nouak.chott \\?\nwäk\?\shät, n\?\wä-, -sh\?\, (=\?\)=\?\=\

sad.du.ce.an \|==|sē\?\n\.

Such information might be appropriate to a reference work for phoneticians, dialectologists, and other linguists, but its usefulness and meaningfulness in a dictionary for ordinary dictionary users is not immediately apparent.

[Let me clarify what I take to be user-friendly in a dictionary: most users pick up a dictionary occasionally to check a spelling, pronunciation, definition, etymology, or other information (like usage and synonymy). For some, “occasionally” means several times a year; for a few, it means several times a week. One can hardly expect to become steeped in the recondite style of a dictionary in such brief encounters, especially since they might well be for entirely different purposes. Thus it is user-unfriendly of a dictionary—any reference book, in fact—to exhibit a style so involved as to be virtually unassimilable save by a dedicated, experienced few: except for the arcana, dictionary style should be revealed transparently to anyone picking up the book, and no one should be required to take a course in dictionary navigation or to spend half an hour adjusting his eyes to read reams of six-point type.]

3. DEFINITIONS. One of the most difficult areas to assess in a dictionary is the quality of its definitions. Several philosophies of defining prevail—not too abstruse to go into in VERBATIM, but a not entirely appropriate aside here—and the style cleaved to by Gove attempts an approach that is progressively restrictive or expansive, depending on the nature of the word defined. It works much of the time, particularly for highly denotative ostensive objects; but it creates ludicrous results when applied to simple things. One of the examples frequently cited of the worst reflexes of the style can be seen in the main definition of door:

1 a: a movable piece of firm material or a structure supported usu. along one side and swinging on pivots or hinges, sliding along a groove, rolling up and down, revolving as one of four leaves, or folding like an accordion by means of which an opening may be closed or kept open for passage in or out of a building, room, or other covered enclosure or a car, airplane, elevator, or other vehicle.. b: a similar part by which access is prevented or allowed to the contents of a repository, cabinet, vault, or refrigeration or combustion chamber

It is not difficult to understand how such a definition could be constructed from a collection of citation slips; what is hard to see is how, once it was written, someone who had any sensitivity for English style and communication could have let it get into print. Another example occurs at hotel:

2 a: a house licensed to provide lodging and usu. meals, entertainment, and various personal services for the public : INN b: a building of many rooms chiefly for overnight accommodation of transients and several floors served by elevators, usu. with a large open street-level lobby containing easy chairs, with a variety of compartments for eating, drinking, dancing, exhibitions, and group meetings (as of salesmen or convention attendants), with shops having both inside and street-side entrances and offering for sale items (as clothes, gifts, candy, theater tickets, travel tickets) of particular interest to a traveler, or providing personal services (as hairdressing, shoe shining), and with telephone booths, writing tables, and washrooms freely available

One is tempted to comment on further amenities (e.g., free parking, porters to carry one’s luggage, B-girls, hookers, house detectives) and on further restrictions (there are few hotels in large cities that make “washrooms freely available” even to hotel guests outside their rooms, lest some wretch needing to use the facility wander in off the street); but would anyone insist that the presence of shops be restrictively incorporated in the definition of hotel?; would a native speaker of English refer to restaurants and other public rooms as “compartments for eating, drinking, dancing,” etc.? Indeed, there is no definition of compartment in the MWIII that fits the sense to which it is stretched in the definition of hotel.

I could go on (and on) with other criticisms, but the purpose of this essay is to review Herbert Morton’s book, not the MWIII, regardless of temptation. In general, Morton tells the story of Noah Webster and his legatees in a straightforward, sympathetic, but not entirely unbiased manner. To be sure, the facts are present, awry in only once instance, which I shall come to later. In most cases, it would be difficult, without substantial knowledge, to confute some of the information presented. I knew Govenot well, I hasten to say, but, from Morton’s account, neither did anyone else. I found him a rather dour, lugubrious individual, and even the author of Webster’s Third finds it difficult to recount many tales exemplifying his humanity, any a sense of humor. If sobersidedness make not an attractive man, it certainly need not have affected Gove’s proficiencies as a lexicographer. But G. & C. Merriam (as the company was then styled) was not Philip Gove, and some of the less savory practices of that organization’s salesmen during the late 1950s—always vigorously denied as company policy by executives—inevitably rubbed off on those who one hopes were innocent of such activities.

Morton’s history of the company is probably reasonably accurate, though one should note that its sources could scarcely be said to be unbiased, most being company records and either present or former employees. All the complimentary critiques are well attended and quoted; the adverse are given equal time, as it were, but not treated with much respect. As I suggested above, they should not be paid much heed, being either the result of misconception, ignorance, lack of understanding, just plain bigotry and prejudice, or—surely later on during the dictionary controversy of the 1960s—the mere business of parroting others' Webster-bashing.

Were I accorded the space allowed the author of Webster’s Third to argue each point with which I take issue, this would not be a review but another book, and I have rambled from the main purpose already. Yet, there is one bald misstatement of fact in the book that cannot go unassailed. Morton writes:

Especially noteworthy was the 1972 International Conference on Lexicography in English, a landmark event that attracted foreign as well as American scholars and practitioners.¹ Originally proposed by James Sledd in 1968, the conference was organized by Raven I. McDavid, Jr.

In the Opening Remarks referred to, Raven McDavid did not actually give Sledd credit for suggesting the subject conference but the idea, of another one. McDavid’s further description of the origins of the New York Academy of Sciences [NYAS] conference are a curate’s egg of fact: the facts remain as recorded (I trust) in the files of the NYAS, to wit: In the mid 1960s, as a member of the NYAS (and, as far as I know, the only person associated with the conference who was a member before, during, and after it), I approached the Executive Director of the NYAS, Eunice Thomas Miner, suggesting a conference on lexicography in English. At that time, there was no recognition in the Academy of the existence of linguistics, which fell somewhere among the various psychology and sociology stools. I was turned down, but not entirely discouraged, and decided to return to the fray several years later, when I had more time.

I approached the Academy again after leaving Random House, in 1969, and, the climate and directorship having changed, received more encouragement. Still, it was made clear to me that because I was not on the staff of a college or university, I should have to find someone who was and who would support my case. I got in touch with Frederic G. Cassidy, of the University of Wisconsin, now widely known as the editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, whom I had known in the early 1940s. Cassidy came to New York and met with the board (and me). It subsequently developed that he was too busy to take on the burdens of the chairmanship of the conference but suggested McDavid, whom I knew, as I had engaged him in the early 1960s as a consultant to the Random House Dictionary. McDavid agreed to become involved, came to New York, and brought Audrey Duckert (of Amherst, Massachusetts) into the picture as his associate.

Thereafter, I worked closely with the NYAS to gain the participation of linguists and lexicographers in the United States and abroad and to further the purpose of the conference. In McDavid’s Opening Remarks he refers to some of my (later) work in these words:

The committee of the Present-Day English Section of the Modern Language Association] then coopted Mr. Laurence Urdang, a professional lexicographer and the envoy to the Academy of the other group; he had been particularly helpful with practical suggestions, and in getting financial support from publishers…. To …Mr. Urdang goes credit for negotiating with the Academy….

Notwithstanding, my claim to prior inspiration remains. Also, considering that the costs of the conference were borne almost entirely by the NYAS (with contributions from the Center for Applied Linguistics, G. & C. Merriam Company, Holt, Rinehart & Winston of Canada, Limited, Laurence Urdang Inc., Longman Group Limited, Scott Foresman and Company, and Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd.), McDavid’s casual reference to the Academy’s organizational and other help, while not atypical, is a bit of a low blow.

None of this has much to do with Webster’s Third, the book or the dictionary, and I should say that anyone who has an interest in the documentation of such things would be well served to obtain a copy of it (the book); it is well written and interestingly set forth. Considering its subject matter, one should more surprised at its occasional even-handedness than shocked at its bias.

Laurence Urdang

---

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles

Lesley Brown, ed., (Oxford University Press, 1993), Volume I: xxvi + 1876 pp., Volume II: viii + pp. 1877-3801.

First, let us look at the statistics (as presented on the back of the dustjacket of the New Shorter [NSOED]): 500,000 definitions; 96,600 headwords; 7.5 million words; 25,250 variant spellings; 83,000 illustrative quotations; 7300 sources of quotations (including VERBATIM and 5900 individual authors, among which appears the name of your proud editor). American dictionaries based their counts on “entries,” a generously defined, arbitrarily artificial term cooked up between the G. & C. Merriam Company and the US Treasury Department during the 1930s (when that governmental department was responsible for purchasing, a function now performed by the General Services Administration). An entry in US commercial dictionary parlance means every headword (that is, main entry set flush left, often in larger boldface type); every inflected form; every run-on entry (the self-evident boldface words consisting of the headword plus a productive ending like -tion, -ly, -ness, etc.); list words (those beginning with a common prefix of transparent meaning like

inter-, re-, un-, etc., that are merely listed at their approximate alphabetical place, without definitions or other lexicographical information); every variant (counted only once); and every change in a part of speech. In a typical college dictionary, which might have, say, 85,000 headwords the entry count (which is prominently displayed in the jacket blurbs) is about twice that, or 170,000. In the US, publishers do not generally advertise the number of definitions in their dictionaries but flaunt their entry counts. At a rough guess, the NSOED contains about 200,000 such “entries,” or some twenty per cent fewer than the Random House Unabridged [RHDU], the popular dictionary nearest in size.

It must be stressed, however, that although the NSOED might include fewer headwords—it has no biographical and geographical entries, for example—it generally accords each entry fuller treatment. There are, as we shall see, other differences; but on the most superficial level one might observe that the NSOED offers more information about fewer words, which may well prove an enticement to those who already have a largish dictionary (even the RHDU).

Although the Preface describes the content and provenance of this new edition, it is disappointing that no statement of purpose, no fundamental linguistic or lexicographic principle is anywhere set forth. Reference is made to the OED, of course, but the present work could scarcely be said to reflect the same philosophies. Notable is the term illustrative, used to describe the quotations accompanying the definitions: aside from their mixed success in serving to illustrate, quotations served a somewhat different purpose in the OED (and, indeed, in their application in some other dictionaries): they were the source matrix from which the definitions were derived.

It is worth reminding ourselves that the NSOED is a British dictionary, although that might not be a particularly intrusive factor in its use, for variant spellings have been given ample coverage. But it does affect the pronunciations, which, given in the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet, are (as usual for British dictionaries) for the prestige dialect called Received Pronunciation [RP]. In RP, Athanasian is pronounced /a\?\n/, while Americans would pronounce the final syllable /\?\/; curiously, that is shown as a variant pronunciation under Asian, Asiarch, and Asiatic, and it is hard to see why it was omitted from Athanasian; perhaps the NSOED editors have the inside skinny (a sense that is in, along with solid coverage of other neologisms, slang and standard). It is not made clear why the standard IPA transcriptions [ai] or [ai] was not used for the vowel sound in I, why, might, etc.: the NSOED shows /\?\/.

As in other British dictionaries, headwords are not syllabified, so one cannot use dictionaries in England to determine where a word may be conventionally hyphenated. Typesetters in England seem to know that the words Eng-land and Eng-lish are so hyphenated, a practice that has eluded many American compositors and proofreaders, including those working for some of the “best” publishers. In the early 1970s. I devised what I thought was a useful system for showing syllabification of boldface words in the Collins English Dictionary: places where hyphens could occur were marked by a tiny plus sign (except for spelling hyphens, which always permitted end-of-line hyphens); places that marked syllable breaks but where hyphenation was avoided, were marked by a centered dot:

pit·y, cit·y, moth·er-in-law, etc.

pho+ne+mics, de+ter+mi+na+tion, in+ter+cit·y, etc.

The Collins is a British dictionary, but, despite the fact that some compositors clambered over one another to acquire the computerized lists of such words showing the breaks, others paid the information little heed—particularly Collins Publishers— and the marks were omitted entirely from the Second Edition of their dictionary.

Preferred American convention is, naturally, not reflected in the text of entries: British spelling obtains. But the preferred American convention of writing as two words an adverb-adjective combination when the adverb ends in -ly is also violated: British practice calls for widely-spread, closelyrelated (which appear under Athapaskan), while standard practice in the US would write these as two words, hyphenating only modifying adverbs not ending in -ly: well-known, well-thought-of, easygoing. (These rules change if the combination appears in predicative position.) Elsewhere, Briticisms might be felt to intrude in definitions, with words like dustman, dock-porter, etc., appearing here and there. Differences of a more serious nature occur when definers use words less familiar than the entry being defined: roasting-jack for “mechanical spit”; tenuity for “thinness”; invest for “award” are a few examples. Not all US variants are entered; for example, greenkeeper is an entry, but greenskeeper, the American form, is nowhere to be found. As mentioned, the pronunciations are British: the variant pronunciation of controversy, in which the stress is on the (shortened) second syllable, is shown, but that is not heard in the US; neither is the given pronunciation of intermediary, which ends \?\ in BE but /\?\/ in AE. Although there are r-dropping dialects in AE, they do not predominate, as in BE \?\, etc. for card. The common BE pronunciation of respite is /\?\resp\?\t/, one not commonly heard in AE—in fact, one that smacks of a spelling pronunciation to an AE speaker; the pronunciation /\?\resp\?\t/, standard in AE, is only a variant in BE (but one I have never heard).

Emphasis in definitions seems sometimes askew:

interloper … 2 A person who meddles in another’s business (esp. for profit); an intruder.

The problem here is in the use of business: in a definition, one would expect the literal sense, not the (more colloquial) sense of ‘affairs’ as met with in mind your own business, none of your business, etc. Yet if one applies that criterion, the definition is too narrow, particularly with the emphasized mention of “profit”), and it would have been more accurate to have put the general sense, “an intruder,” first.

It must be noted that definitions are ordered historically (as the title of the NSOED implies), not by frequency. Thus, the first definition of interlude refers to a short dramatic piece performed between the acts of the miracle plays, and the common modern sense of ‘interval’ is not met with till definition 2. That is merely a fact—many American dictionaries follow the same theme, notably, the MWIII.

Were space available, many other strengths and weaknesses of the NSOED could be enumerated in detail; but it would be more useful to offer an overall assessment and to suggest where this dictionary might fit into a library, personal or institutional. The NSOED is an impressive, extremely usable dictionary for those sophisticated enough to know how to use it, by which I mean not only Americans: those who have an earlier edition would be well served to replace it with this one. Also, the preceding comments leveled against coverage of American English should in no way affect those who care little about how Americans use the language, for, in many respects, the NSOED is simply a superior dictionary. I must express a prejudice, however, for the benefit of all who have a personal computer with a CD-ROM and who have the wherewithal to acquire the OED2e on CD-ROM: there is nothing like it in terms of ease of access, speed, convenience (as compared with hoisting one or more volumes of the OED2e or NSOED every time one wants to look something up). For casual use, it would be extravagant to go to such an expense; but for anyone who does even the most informal research into the lexicon of English, the CD-ROM version is essential and indispensable: certainly, no library in the world has any excuse for not having it.

The problems of binding a 3800-page book are formidable, but it can be done, and I believe that OUP customers would have been better served by being offered a one-volume edition (perhaps with a needed lectern of its own), enabling the NSOED to compete more readily with the other main contenders among large dictionaries, the MWIII and the Random House Unabridged.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“A father who underwent a sex change no longer has to wear male clothes to visit her son.” [From The (Montreal) Gazette, n.d. Submitted by Margie Golick, Montreal.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“One of nine women will get breast cancer as well as many men.” [From the Los Angeles Times, 30 August 1992, page E7. Submitted by Sylvia Bursztyn, Van Nuys.]

OBITER DICTA: Swinging, Swaling, Swedging

Richard L. Champlin, Jamestown, Rhode Island

In his poem, Birches, Robert Frost describes a custom among country boys of climbing birch trees to the very crown, so high the tree can no longer support them but bends over submissively and lowers them to the ground. Frost calls this custom swinging birches, and the one who practises it, a swinger of birches. Though the custom was not universal, back in the days when youngsters still invented their own entertainments, enough of them swung the limber birches for it to be a common pastime. I even have found a Ukrainian native who remembered swinging birches.

But being widespread, the game apparently earned other names depending on locality. In the rural Rhode Island towns of Foster and Glocester (Providence County) two other names for the pastime have surfaced. Asked if he had ever climbed the trees and let them return him to the earth, John Holdsworth of Foster exclaimed, “Oh, I’ve swaled hundreds of ‘em.” Swaled? Another oldtimer, Henry Hawkins of Glocester likewise speaks of swaling birches, adding that it did not always work out as one hoped it would: sometimes the 15-20-foot gray birch would tip part way down only to falter, leaving the climber dangling halfway, a predicament, indeed. There is no going back.

As a noun, swale rolls off the tongues of countrymen frequently enough, and means a ‘tract of wet ground,’ as in the geological term describing rolling prairies that have swells and swales. But swale as a verb harks back to English usage of an early age. The OED2e suggests Shropshire as the source of the verb, and it cites an 1863 quotation that bears out our meaning: “The great plumed hat flapped and swaled over my eyes.”

As if that were not variation enough, another Glocester dweller, Walter Battey, refers to this custom as swedging birches. Swedge? I recognized the verb swedge as meaning ‘bend or spread left and right the teeth of a handsaw that had become too straight through much use, and hence caused the saw to bind.’ A tool called a swedge soon remedies this ailment. The term swedging a birch thus seems to have sprung from this bending action. Such are the imaginative borrowings of the English language. OED2e lists swedge as a variant of swage and suggests that swage, in turn, is an early form of swag a ‘swaying or lurching motion.’ In support, the dictionary offers this quotation dating circa 1530: “that the fruit may not … disfigure the Tree by swagging it down with weight.”

Do these obscure verbs, swale, and swedge, have a future? Only time will tell, or only as long as youngsters swing, swale, or swedge birches.

OBITER DICTA: Objectively Speaking

Lawrence Bush, Accord, New York

I had been cruising the club for less than an hour when I bumped into Roger. After exchanging a few pleasantries, he lowered his voice and asked, “What do you think of Martha and I as a potential twosome?”

“That,” I replied, “would be a mistake. Martha and me is more like it.”

“Oh? You’re interested in Martha?”

“I’m interested in clear communication.”

“Fair and square,” he agreed. “And may the best man win.” Then he added, with a sigh: “Here I thought we had a clear path to becoming a very unique couple.”

“You couldn’t be a very unique couple, Roger.”

“Oh? And why is that?”

“Martha couldn’t be a little pregnant, could she?”

“Say what? You think that Martha and me…”

“Martha and I.”

“Oh.” Roger blushed and set down his drink.

“Gee, I didn’t know.”

“Of course you didn’t,” I assured him. “Most people don’t.”

“I feel very badly about this.”

“You shouldn’t say that. I feel bad …”

“Hooray, Roger!” Martha herself wafted towards us. “Seeing you, the evening gets interesting.” She rested a hand on his shoulder. “Who have you two been gossiping about, hm?”

They were obviously well-matched.

I excused myself at once, left Roger in Cupid’s hands and went over to check out another participle I’d noticed dangling by the bar. On my way there, however, I was charmed by a collective noun (foreign, I thought) having a singularly bad time in the middle of the dance floor with a profoundly intransitive verb.

“Pardon—may I cut in?”

Her partner looked past tense, indeed, completely overwrought, and gratefully stood aside. At first, the lady met my preposition with declension, but in a short time we were conjugating magnificently, even recklessly. “Ooh, you are the definite article,” she sighed.

“Dvandva,” I whispered, knowing that she would understand.

It was pluperfect—until I signaled for her bill. When the maître d’ brought it over, I nearly split an infinitive: the syntax alone was astronomical!

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The hijacker hid a pistol in his hat that only fires blanks.” [From New York Newsday, 12 February 1993. Submitted by Benjamin M. Steiner, New York.]

OBITER DICTA: Classic Problem

Laurence Urdang

Typical among the words over which purists agonize, Fowler-type authorities dither, and about which lexicographers write usage notes are the classic/classical pair. As in most such cases, the question is easily answered by looking up the definitions of the words in a dictionary substantial enough to offer example contexts. The problem, as in most usage matters, is that those who fail to distinguish between classic and classical, infer and imply, like and as, etc., are blissfully unaware that any question exists: consequently, not being unsure of anything, they never bother to check. One is moved to suggest that it is the responsibility of teachers of English to implant in the subconsciouses of their students a soupçon of suspicion that there might be something questionable about a number of words and constructions in the language. These days one despairs of the teachers, for they, too, seem totally oblivious to style and traditional practice. This is borne out by a Sunday Times article [13 March 1994] about a survey showing that fewer than half of entrants to university were capable of identifying to which part of speech words in a handful of very simple sentences belonged.

The classic/classical distinction has become manifest in Britain with the recent establishment of a new radio station, Classic FM. Radio 3, the longstanding BBC station that has broadcast classical music for many years, has not been replaced by this commercial parvenu, but it should be noted that Radio 3 broadcasts classical music, while the new station is engaged in a different enterprise. Not only is Classic music not always classical, but there is an utter lack of sensitivity in the selection of music played: Anitra’s Dance could well be preceded by Schoenberg and followed by Scarlatti or O Sole Mio sung by Tagliavini. One night, I tuned in and heard an extraordinarily cacophonous piece that sounded like souls groaning in hell alternating with dissonant organ music; as I could not believe what I was hearing, I continued to listen; I was tortured for about half an hour but persisted, as I wanted to hear the title in order to make certain that I would switch off if anyone ever threatened to play it again. Unfortunately, I have forgotten the title (and composer), but a reader might recognize it from my reasonably accurate description.

Radio stations that play classical music might be criticized for allowing Telemann to be segued by Tchaikovsky, but that is, surely, a sophisticated criticism. This listener’s knowledge of and taste in classical music is not very sophisticated, but the sequences broadcast by Classic FM serve to demonstrate the worst features of the differences between classical and classic. Yet, perhaps predictably for those who have a cynical view of public taste, a recent [March 1994] newspaper report reveals that Classic FM has a regular weekly audience nearly two million greater than that of Radio 3.

While on the subject of British radio, about a year ago, the radio station Jazz FM was establishd in London, purportedly to play Jazz morning, noon, and night. From the music played, it would appear that all music not classifiable as classical is considered to be Jazz, requiring a new definition of jazz to be considered by (British) lexiographers.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“While she won’t admit it, [the character] clearly is a woman in denial.” [From a play review in The Berkshire Eagle, 16 June 1992. Submitted by Norman R. Shapiro, Wesleyan University.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“ ‘Me and another student got up and started teach— ing class ourselves,’ [Sandra] Baker said of a business English class in which she said the instructor missed three weeks of classes.” [From the Chicago Sun-Times, 25 February 1993, page 14. Submitted by E.J. Mattimoe, Chicago.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

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

ETYMOLOGICA OBSCURA: The Origin of llama

Enrique Lerdau, Kensington, Maryland

[VERBATIM XX, 3, 16] On Lima’s (Peru) main square stands an equestrian statue of General San Martin. Sculpted into its pedestal is, inter alia, the figure of a woman holding a torch. But the torch does not emit a flame: instead a surprising little llama stands on its tip. My theory for this oddity is that the artist misunderstood his commission; in Spanish llama means flame, while in Quechua it is the name of the furry beast.

OBITER DICTA: A Primrose by any Other Name…

John Timson, Manchester

The spring flower we call the primrose (Primula vulgaris) is native to Britain and presumably has had English names as long as the language has been spoken in the British Isles. However, primrose is a relatively recent name for the flower, being first recorded only in the 15th century, and no Old English name for it is known. It is possible that before the 15th century both the primrose and the cowslip (Primula veris) were regarded as one and the same and called cowslips [Old English cuslippe]. Since where the two species grow near to each other they hybridize freely giving rise to intermediate forms, the need for two names might not have been apparent in earlier times.

The word primrose is often believed to be derived from the Latin prima rose ‘first rose.’ There is, however, an alternative derivation, since, in Middle English, earlier than the first record of primrose, the plant was known as primerole or saynt peterworte. Primerole probably derives from the Old French primier ‘first,’ with the diminutive suffix -ole, implying smallness.

The remarkable ability of most species of Primula to hybridize with ease whenever they meet has further confused the English names of the primrose and its close relatives. The hybrid between the primrose and the cowslip (Primula veris x vulgaris, sometimes called Primula variabilis) is known as the oxlip. Usually it is called the common oxlip because it occurs quite frequently, but purists prefer to call it the false oxlip since there is a third species, Primula elatior, now found only in the eastern counties of England, which is, for them, the true oxlip. To add to the confusion the true oxlip is also known as the paigle, a name which, in the past, has been rather indiscriminately applied to several wildflowers including buttercups. In some country areas of England paigle (or pagle, or pagyll) is still the local name for the cowslip. It may be derived from the Old English paegle or paegel ‘winecup.’ This would be most appropriate, since around the time paigle came into use cowslip blooms were used to make a very popular country wine.

Shakespeare knew of primroses (Cymbeline), cowslips (The Tempest), and oxlips (The Winter’s Tale), and presumably the difference between them although there seems to be no way of knowing which oxlip he meant. Wordsworth was, perhaps, less well informed when in his Peter Bell he wrote:

A primrose by a river’s brim

A yellow primrose was to him,

And it was nothing more.

It might have been a primrose, although they usually grow in woods and under hedges. A cowslip is rather more likely since they grow in meadows or, of course, it could have been an oxlip. Peter Bell should have taken a closer look.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Endangered English Dictionary: Bodacious Words Your Dictionary Forgot

David Grambs, (W.W. Norton & Company, 1994), xiv + 264pp.

David Grambs’s name should be known to word buffs, for he has written several books—this is his sixth—about the English language. He has been active in lexicography for a number of years, originally on The American Heritage Dictionary, more recently on The Random House (Unabridged) Dictionary, Second Edition.

This book, the title of which suggests that it might deal with dictionaries, is a dictionary of difficult, unusual, often obscure, obsolete words, a combination of Poplollies and Bellibones, by Mrs. Heifetz, and The New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood … Words, by this reviewer (recently published in a revised, British edition by Bloomsbury under the title, Dictionary of Difficult Words [plug, in case you missed it]). Both kinds of books have been around for many years: indeed, the latter type preceded general dictionaries that treat the broad spectrum of the English lexicon, for it was thought unnecessary to provide definitions and other information about words familiar to anyone who spoke English. Nowadays, of course, it is felt that a general dictionary ought to describe the lexicon of the language (as far as space permits), which is why modern dictionaries devote so much space to entries for words like the, a, and, run, jump, and play.

The entries in Endangered can be divided roughly into two classes: those one knows and those one does not. Among the latter are some engaging terms that word lovers are likely to add to their writing (or drop into casual cocktail-party conversations), and, in some instances, might actually fill a need. My favorites among these, which are not found in the present work, are tally and leman, which mean a ‘person with whom one cohabits without benefit of matrimony.’ The struggle that spawned POSSLQ, significant other, partner, and other miscegenations and ennuiisms could have been avoided by resurrecting these terms, though leman, owing to its -man ending, might not make it through the stultifying morass of today’s political correctness.

Many of the rare words in the book are synonyms that have dropped out of the language for one reason or another, the main one being that they were not used. For many, it might be impossible to find evidence for their existence outside the single quotation in the OED or similar source, and they might have been nonce coinages. Their rarity is attributable to what linguists refer to as the economy of language, which is akin to the physical law stating that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Most of the time, two (or more) words that appear to be “pure” synonyms semantically tend to diverge in application or distribution (e.g., windpipe/trachea), in frequency (e.g., niveous/ snowy, lutaceous/muddy), or in connotation (maternal/motherly). [This matter is discussed at some length in the Introduction to my Oxford Thesaurus.]

Notwithstanding, many people derive enjoyment from wallowing in peculiar, curious, and unfamiliar words, which often provide a source of amusement. The selection of such words is likely to be personal, reflecting the tastes and proclivities of the compiler, hence one is hard put to quarrel with the choices. These and other factors are well set forth by the author in his Preface. It is important to mention that all words in Endangered are pronounced (using the Moo Goo Gai Pan system), all are accorded succinct, clear definitions, and all are provided with example contexts.

In the last hundred pages of Endangered an attempt is made at a reverse dictionary, yielding a more or less elaborate index to the dictionary section. Such reverse dictionaries as exist (Bernstein’s Reverse Dictionary having been a popular example for many years) work well for those users whose word sense coincides with that of the compiler. Ted Bernstein’s book never worked well for me, but I might not be a fair touchstone in such matters. In Grambs’s book, the single-word synonyms work fairly well, but, as elsewhere, the system breaks down when trying to anticipate where a user ought to look to find a word: not everyone is likely to choose the same “reverse” concept. The problem has been anticipated by using more than one synonym and by providing entries under both. For example, laziness or sluggishness: SEGNITY appears both under laziness and sluggishness; thick-lipped: LABROSE appears also under lips, having thick. Still, no system could work perfectly for all users.

Those who enjoy word play—which includes certain puzzle solvers who seem to need all the help they can find that is not already provided by dictionaries, special puzzlers' reference books, thesauruses, etc.—should find Endangered a useful, welcome addition to their libraries. Those who simply harbor an abiding affection for the language and like having fun with it will want to acquire the book for delectable browsing.

Laurence Urdang

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. In a short drink, I’d find an unpalatable taste. (7)

5. Ass is on the run to a shipping magnate. (7)

9. Skeleton found right in the coal. (5)

10. I claim pun is a mix-up about town. (9)

11. It could have you in stitches. (10)

12. Part of their breakfast comes back as cheese. (4)

14. Hold the short sentence for a snappy saying. (11)

18. There’s no honor in 14 to add to disaster (11)

21. Sort of work that is very decorative.(4)

22. You’ll not see much of the game from here, but you should know what’s happening. (10)

25. When he does this to the car, sounds as if he should need these on. (9)

26. The silver in vise is common practice. (5)

27. The medal I’m circulating is giving me a problem. (7)

28. She’s a poor maid, yet not at night. (7)

Down

1. Measures used in chest expansion. (6)

2. Writer, not a Pharisee. (6)

3. A long one could bolster up your cause. (10)

4. Short protest meeting back at the end of the road, rising to a peak. (5)

5. Belonging to you, the Queen’s redberry shows it belongs to you. (9)

6. Your worst enemy goes over the road. (4)

7. Rupert lost his head in the brass instrument, and had to pay dearly for it. (8)

8. Chemically aged and plated. (8)

13. Do you major in this primary reading room?! (5, 5)

15. Atlanta Rugby Union scrum has only eight members!(9)

16. You’ll certainly get the hang of it here. (8)

17. Note the real evidence produces an exquisite property. (8)

19. Alas I’m turned out like a sausage. (6)

20. Stick he read wrongly. (6)

23. Ended with no top on, it helped the pain. (5)

24. It’s not my leather, it’s a fake. (4)

SIC! SIC! SIC!

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

Answers to Anglo-American Crossword No. 67

There was an error in the diagram for Puzzle No. 67, for which we apologize: the blocking square in the middle of 17 down should be moved one square to the left.

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. Organized by Raven I. McDavid, Jr., and Audrey R. Duckert, the conference was held June 5-7, 1972, in New York City. The proceedings were published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 211 (1973). The origins of the conference are described in McDavid’s opening remarks. Gove did not participate in the planning or appear on the program, although two of his colleagues gave papers, Woolf on defining and Artin on pronunciation. ↩︎