VOL XXI, No 2 [Autumn, 1994]

Plane Speaking

Steven Cushing, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts

Nothing underscores the subtle complexities of language more strikingly than the miscommunications that occur among pilots, crew members, and air traffic controllers. An experienced flight instructor reports noticing considerable power on, just before touching down, while checking out a pilot in a small airplane. He had thought he was saying Back— on the power, with a stress on Back and a pause before on, but he was interpreted by the pilot as having said Back on—the power, with the stress on on and the pause after it. A pilot who had been instructed to maintain 7000 feet and who was then told,

traffic at ten o’clock, three miles,

level at 6,000, to pass under you,

responded, We have him, and was then challenged by the controller when he was observed descending through 6800 feet. The pilot had misconstrued the phrase level at 6,000 imperatively, as an instruction for himself, meaning ‘[Descend to and remain] level at 6,000,’ rather than understanding it declaratively, as it had been intended, as an assertion about his traffic, meaning ‘[The traffic is] level at 6,000.’ On January 25, 1990, an aircraft over Cove Neck, New York, ran out of fuel, and 73 of the 159 persons aboard died in the resulting crash, including the three crew members in the cockpit. The flying pilot had instructed the copilot Digale que estamos en emergencia and the copilot had responded Si, senor, ya le dije; but what he had actually radioed to the controller was We’re running out of fuel. The specific English word emergency is required in the aviation protocol to convey to the controller that the disaster is imminent, but the copilot failed to use that word, even though the pilot had used its exact Spanish equivalent in telling him what to say.

As I show in my book Fatal Words: Communication Clashes and Aircraft Crashes (University of Chicago Press, 1994), these examples are representative of a wide range of accidents and near misses in which language misunderstandings or omissions have played a contributing and sometimes central role. An instructor reports responding to the tower calling traffic by saying I got it, with the intended meaning ‘I see the traffic’ but being interpreted by his student as meaning that the instructor was now flying the aircraft. In similar incident, a copilot reports that the landing field was in sight by saying I’ve got it, with the result that the flying pilot let go of the controls. The sentence Maintain runway heading is interpreted sometimes as meaning that the pilot maintain the heading indicated when lined up on the extended center line of the runway and sometimes as meaning that the pilot take a heading after liftoff to keep the aircraft traveling on that line. In some situations this difference can lead to a conflict between aircraft in a cross wind after takeoff. At an airport at which Local Control and Ground Control were combined, a construction vehicle, B1, called, At the localizer road to proceed to the ramp. A controller, knowing that B1 had called but not sure what the request had been, replied B1, Ground, Go Ahead and then proceeded to talk to aircraft while waiting for a reply. B1 misinterpreted the phrase Go Ahead as referring to his driving, rather than his speaking, and was halfway down his normal route of travel before the controller realized what had happened.

Homophony and, more commonly, near-homophony, in which different words or phrases sound exactly or nearly alike, can be just as problematic as syntactic ambiguity. For example, the sentence Pass to the left of the tower is ambiguous because left can mean either the speaker’s left or the hearer’s left; but further confusion is also possible, because left can sound very much like west. A pilot reports practicing short field landings in a small airplane as a student when his instructor said Last of the power, meaning to ‘reduce to zero while flaring.’ However, the pilot thought the instructor had said Blast of power, fearing an imminent stall. The result was confusion and a longer landing. A pilot who was observed on radar to be somewhat higher than called for and flying in the wrong direction turned out to have misheard a clearance for a Maspeth climb as a clearance for a massive climb. Maspeth is a fix in the New York metropolitan area, but the pilot was unfamiliar with the local geography. An outbound pilot who was told to receive his clearance from the Center when he was on the deck misheard this as off the deck and proceeded with his takeoff, consequently finding himself head-on with an inbound aircraft. In another incident, one widebody airplane barely missed colliding with another after landing, because the pilot heard Hold short as Oh sure in response to his asking the controller May we cross? in reference to a runway.

An international carrier inbound to the United States was handed off to a new Center after the captain had read back the clearance Cleared to descend to two zero zero, cross two zero miles south of XYZ at two two zero and the First Officer had set the altitude selector to 20,000 feet. To the initial contact from the flight, Leaving two two zero for two zero zero, the new Center responded, Were you cleared to two zero zero? The Center claimed later that the clearance had been only to 220, that is, 22,000 feet, but the crew had understood otherwise. A Captain who was flying with an assigned altitude of 10,000 feet while being vectored for a landing on runway 27L thought he heard the copilot say Cleared to seven, took this to mean Cleared to seven thousand feet, and started to descend. The copilot had really said Cleared two seven in reference to the runway. Confusions between the identical sounding to and two almost led to a mid-air collision, when a pilot misheard Climb to five zero as Climb two five zero, putting him on a collision course with another aircraft that was just fifteen hundred feet above him; it did lead to a fatal accident, when a pilot, in another incident, read back the instruction Descend two four zero zero as O.K. Four zero zero and then proceeded, without correction from the controller, to descend to four hundred, rather than twenty-four hundred feet.

To is not the only preposition that can kill. On March 27, 1977, the pilot of a KLM 747 radioed We are now at take-off, as his plane began rolling down the runway in Tenerife, the Canary Islands. The air traffic controller mistakenly took this statement to mean that the plane was at the take-off point, waiting for further instructions, and so did not warn the pilot that another plane, a Pan Am 747 that was invisible in the thick fog, was already on the runway. The resulting crash killed 583 people in what is still the most destructive accident in aviation history. The KLM pilot’s otherwise perplexing use of the very nonstandard phrase at take-off, rather than the more standard phrase taking off, appears to have been a subtle form of what linguists call code-switching, a process in which bilingual or multilingual speakers inadvertently switch back and forth from one of their languages to another in the course of a conversation. In the KLM pilot’s case, what linguists call the present progressive aspect, which is expressed in English by a verb’s -ing form, can be expressed in Dutch by the equivalent of at plus the verb’s infinitive. Perhaps because of fatigue or the stress of having to work in conditions of no visibility, the Dutch-speaking pilot switched into the Dutch grammatical construction while keeping his words in English, as required. The Spanish-speaking controller had no clue that this was going on and so interpreted the at in the most natural way, as indicating a place, the take-off point.

Code-switching can take place even within the same language, when different dialects or variants are available. On February 17, 1981, at John Wayne Orange County Airport in Santa Ana, California, Air Cal 336 was cleared to land while Air Cal 931 was cleared to taxi into position for takeoff, but the controller then decided that more time was needed between the takeoff and the landing and so told 336 to go around. The 336 Captain resisted this instruction by having his copilot radio to ask for permission to continue landing, but he switched from technical aviation jargon to ordinary English and used the word hold to express this request. In aviation parlance, to hold some action always means to ‘stop’ what you are doing and thus to ‘go around’ in a landing situation; but in ordinary English hold can also mean to ‘continue’ what you are doing and thus to ‘land’ in such a situation. The resulting confusion led to 34 injuries, four of them classified as serious, and the complete destruction of the aircraft by fire, for Air Cal 336 landed with its landing gear retracted, the Captain having finally decided to follow instructions to go around, but too late to do so.

There are technological means of ameliorating miscommunications in the aviation setting, as I discuss in Fatal Words, but there are broader lessons to be learned from these examples. Not only pilots and controllers, but people in general need to learn to be more mindful of their own language use and to be willing to use more words to get meanings across. We all need to learn to listen with more care and to ask for clarification, rather than assuming that we already know what is going to be said to us in advance.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Available for priv parts” [Legend on the marquee of a cocktail lounge in Waltham, Massachusetts, Christmas-time 1992. Submitted by Phyllis C. Doherty, Bedford, Massachusetts.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“ ‘I don’t mind having my feet to the fire. It focuses everybody’s mind,’ Mr. Doroniuk said of the short time frame. ‘My problem is I’ve got so many balls in the air.’ ” [From the (Toronto) Globe and Mail, 13 January 1993. Submitted by Douglas C. Greenwood, Barrie, Ontario.]

What Is Dementia?

Martin G. Netsky, M.D., Atlantic Beach, Florida

Dementia is a term often used by laypersons and by medical personnel, both of which have employed the word in different ways at various times. The resulting confusion is furthered by inconsistencies among definitions in medical dictionaries and textbooks. A survey of source material was therefore undertaken to provide a history of the word and of how its use has evolved.

Dementia derives from the Latin, de- ‘away or from, ‘and ment-, root of mens ‘mind.’ The OED incorrectly attributes the initial use of dementia to Philippe Pinel in 1806: the word was first used in an English text in 1592 by Richard Cosin, Member of Parliament, in defense of the hanging of a conspirator against the monarchy. Cosin defined dementia as “…a passion of the minde, bereaving it of the light of understanding…” The word first appeared in an English medical dictionary in 1775. George Motherby (A New Medical Dictionary) said it was “madness, or a delirium” and used the same definition for insania. Dementia, insanity, and madness were synonyms throughout most of the 19th century. Robley Dunglison in his series of medical dictionaries (1833—1903) echoes medical thinking of the time when he says of dementia “in common parlance, and even in legal language, this word is synonymous with insanity… It is characterized by a total loss of the faculty of thought.” Medical use of “madness” then disappeared, but the word was retained by the laity. In the 1900s, insanity also faded from the medical vocabulary, and it is now used by lawyers and judges when deciding on responsibility for acts committed while mentally deranged: “not guilty by reason of insanity.”

Modern understanding of the meaning of dementia began in 1892 with A Dictionary of Psychological Medicine, by Daniel Tuke, where it was defined as “a state in which manifestations of mind are to a greater or less degree absent in consequence of disease or decay of the brain itself. It is always an acquired condition, and as such is to be distinguished from amentia, which is either a congenital state or one closely connected with that period.” Tuke’s definition has a remarkably contemporary sound. It recognizes degrees of the syndrome rather than the previously described total loss of mentality. The condition is attributed to “disease or decay” of the brain and is acquired. Tuke also commented on reversibility and dismissed acute dementia as “really instances of Melancholia cum stupore.” In the late 19th century he listed nineteen forms of dementia, from acute and accidentalis to senile and toxica.

The meaning of dementia frequently changed in the 20th century; the word lost popularity in the 1940s and ’50s. Selected definitions from Dorland’s Medical Dictionary illustrate some of the shifts:

1917, 9th ed.: Insanity characterized by loss or impairment of intellect, will, and memory.

1941, 19th ed.: A generic designation for mental deterioration, less frequently used than formerly, except in the term dementia praecox.

1957, 23rd ed.: A general designation for mental deterioration.

1974, 25th ed.: A generic designation for mental deterioration; called also aphrenia, aphronesia, and athymia.

1981, 26th ed.: Organic loss of intellectual function, called also aphrenia, aphronesia, and athymia.

1988, 27th ed.: [DSM-III] An organic mental disorder characterized by a general loss of intellectual abilities involving impairment of memory, judgment, and abstract thinking as well as changes in personality. It does not include loss of intellectual functioning caused by clouding of consciousness… nor that caused by depression… Dementia may be caused by a number of conditions, some reversible, some progressive…

Each definition has deficiencies. “Will” (1917) is difficult to determine, and was soon abandoned. If dementia means only “mental deterioration” (1941 to 1974), it is not separated from neuroses and psychoses. The word organic (1981) addresses this problem. The three synonyms cited in 1974 and repeated in 1981 came from a lexicographer whose mind was fixed in an earlier (19th) century. The 1988 quotation of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III) returned Dorland’s Medical Dictionary to the 20th century: DSM-III is the standard psychiatric manual defining mental disorders.

In the 1940s and ’50s, dementia was seldom used except for types of schizophrenia, e.g., dementia praecox, or catatonic and paranoid dementia. Psychiatrists during that time officially replaced the word dementia with chronic brain syndrome, a useless phrase now almost completely abandoned.

Let us examine critically some representative definitions of the word dementia to illustrate the complex nature of the term and to marvel at the diversity of words used to define this single concept:

Lishman, Organic Psychiatry, 1978: An acquired global impairment of intellect, reason and personality but without impairment of consciousness.

Global, meaning ‘all aspects of intellect,’ is used by many medical authors, but is incorrect. The decay is not global at onset; discrete disorders of mention may dominate the clinical picture in midcourse; and even in the final stages cognitive impairment may be selective. Maintained consciousness is accepted by modern authors as necessary to the definition, but nothing is said here of the cerebral origin of dementia, its organic nature, or its degree of permanence.

Butterworths Medical Dictionary, 1978: A form of mental disorder in which the cognitive and intellectual functions of the mind are prominently or predominantly affected; invariably a symptom of organic cerebral disease, and as a rule, impairment of memory is one of the earliest symptoms. Dementia necessarily implies some degree of permanent change; totally recoverable confusional states in which cognitive changes are prominent are thus excluded.

Cognitive and intellectual are synonyms for the faculty of knowing (OED): use of both words is redundant. Of the mind is unnecessary—where else is knowing located? Impairment of memory is a frequent early symptom of Alzheimer’s dementia, but not necessarily of other types. The concept of irreversibility arose from initially equating all dementias with senile dementia. Toxic and infectious dementias can be halted or reversed, as illustrated by the effect of penicillin on dementia paralytica, the cerebral form of neurosyphilis. It is therefore incorrect to state that some degree of permanent change is implied for all types of dementia.

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual DSM-III-R), 1987: The essential feature of Dementia is impairment in short-and long-term memory, associated with impairment in abstract thinking, impaired judgment, other disburbances of higher cortical function, or personality changes. The disturbance is severe enough to interfere significantly with work or usual social activities or relationships with others. The diagnosis of Dementia is not made if these symptoms occur only in the presence of reduced ability to maintain or shift attention to external stimuli, as in Delirium; however, Delirium and Dementia may coexist… an underlying causative organic factor is always assumed… Dementia may be progressive, static, or remitting…

Emphasis on memory loss does not take into account dementias other than Alzheimer’s. Insistence on severity eliminates mild cases of dementia or instances where a mildly demented person is able to manage when little intellectual ability is needed. All mental and physical disorders may “interfere with work or usual social activities,” hence these losses are not diagnostic of dementia. The assumption that a causative organic factor is always present is not proved in rare cases. Complete studies including autopsy may occasionally fail to disclose the cause.

The definition of dementia has changed often since it was used by Richard Cosin in 1592, and it will continue to change as new information becomes available. Any definition, therefore, must be tentative, but it should not contain outmoded concepts, as occurs too often in medical dictionaries. Current meaning may be sought in articles published in recent medical journals, but authors are contentious, and judgment must be used.

Dementia is not a single symptom but a syndrome, a group of symptoms and signs that occur in different combinations depending on the site and nature of changes in brain tissue. It therefore cannot be properly defined in a few words. A synthesis of current uses of the word would include the following concepts: an acquired syndrome of mental deterioration without loss of consciousness; onset often uncertain; early changes from normal to abnormal frequently imperceptible. Furthermore, dementia is chronic and usually progressive, but it may be static or reversible. It arises secondary to structural or biochemical alterations of the brain, hence its medical description is organic. Dementia is characterized by changes in personality and behavior with disturbances of orientation, memory, abstract thinking, and judgment. Altered cerebral function may also result in disordered language and difficulty in movements requiring dexterity.

It should be noted that individual symptoms may occur in normal persons at various times and that memory commonly declines in normal old age. Popular and medical use of dementia first associated it with senility but since World War II has linked it predominantly with the type first described by Alois Alzheimer in 1907. Alzheimer’s and multi-infarct dementia, the result of multiple small strokes, are currently considered the most frequent causes of dementia. The devastating and untreatable effects of senility and of these two types of dementia excite horror and pity. Other causes of dementia, however, although less common, can be treated effectively and reversed. These conditions include thyroid deficiency, mercury poisoning, infectious diseases such as neurosyphilis and meningitis, nutritional disorders, including pellagra and pernicious anemia that involve deficiency of elements of the vitamin B complex, and chronic alcoholism. Unfortunately, AIDS is a recent addition to the list of causes of dementia that lack an effective treatment.

The True Meaning of Christmas

Leo Stages, Orpington, Kent

Mistletoe and festivities, holly and ivy, peace to the world, commerciality… Just what is the meaning of Christmas? This is a question asked all too often these days. A little research soon reveals the true meaning of the season of good will to all men.

The word Christmas derives from the late old English Christes mæsse, meaning the ‘mass of Christ.’ That is easy enough to follow, but digging a little deeper into the meaning of Christmas leads us to a strange anomaly. Mass has its roots, as already noted, in the old English mæsse which itself derives from the written Latin missa which means ‘send, send away, or dismiss.’ The earliest occurrences of the word being used to refer to a religious service are to be found in the epistles of Saint Ambrose and the itinerary of Silvia of Aquitania in the last quarter of the fourth century, when it was applied to matins and vespers; however, in its most eminent sense, mæsse was used to denote the Eucharist.

Some etymologists believe that missa at first denoted the solemn conclusion of a religious service, the words Ite, missa est ‘Go, it is the dismissal’ being uttered at the end of the ceremony but later applied to the service itself. And it is here that the anomaly can be seen; in its most rudimentary form, Christmas means ‘Christ’s dismissal,’ quite the opposite of its meaning of ‘Christ’s birth’ today.

The angel may well have sung The First Noel, but what exactly is a Noël? A Noël originally was a ‘canticle or song sung at Christmas time in country churches in France,’ but it soon became a general term for a ‘Christmas carol.’ The English word nowel is closely related to Noël, although there is a slight difference in meaning: nowel was a word shouted or sung as an expression of joy to commemorate the birth of Christ. Both words derive from the Latin nātālis ‘birth.’

Another term used to describe Christmas is Yule. Yule has its roots in both Christianity and paganism. In Old English the word \?\eól was used to mean ‘Christmas Day or Christmastide.’ It corresponds to the old Norse jól which was a heathen festival lasting twelve days, from December to January. It was this festival that was adopted by the Christians and later became known as Christmas, hence the twelve days of celebration around the Christmas period.

Christmas is known as the Festive Season. The time of year when we remember the poor and needy by spending wallets full of money and gorging ourselves on turkey, sage and onion stuffing, and Christmas pudding. Indeed, the word festive comes from the word feast which derives from the Latin festa which was a ‘feastal ceremony.’ Festa itself derives from festus which probably, according to etymologists, had the same root as feria ‘fair.’

Such is the true meaning of Christmas. It is exactly the same as it means to us now: twelve days of ceremonial feasting. Maybe Christmas has always been the most commercial time of year, and it is just our perception of it that has changed.

Reading Non-Sequentially: The Peculiar Kanbun System

Nyr Indictor, Chappaqua, New York

European languages are written from left to right, Hebrew and Arabic from right to left, Chinese and Japanese may be written vertically, and Ancient Egyptian was written multidirectionally. The word boustrophedon is used to describe inscriptions that run “as the ox ploughs” (left to right, then right to left, and back again). Despite the wide range of directional options, all writing systems have one thing in common: they are intended to be read in the direction they are written. Actually, there is one significant exception to this rule, a written language used in Japan called kanbun.

Kanbun \?\ \?\ is essentially Classical Chinese (wényánwén \?\ \?\ \?\) as read by Japanese scholars. It began as a decoding system in which the reader learned to read texts from China as though they were Japanese, and developed into a way of writing employed by Japanese themselves.

In the Kanbun system, special punctuation enables the reader to convert phrases presented in Chinese order (usually subject-verb-object) to Japanese order (usually subject-object-verb), and to supply missing inflectional endings to produce something approximating Classical Japanese. For example, let us consider the phrase:

Mandarin English translation

\?\ shào young

\?\ nián year

\?\ yì easy

\?\ lăo old

\?\ xué study

\?\ nán difficult

\?\ chéng accomplish

The Mandarin Chinese speaker from Beijing would read this from top to bottom (it may also be written left to right) as shàonián yì lăo, xué nán chéng, and understand it to mean something like “It is easy for a youth to grow old, but harder to complete one’s studies.” Speakers of other dialects would pronounce the characters differently but would associate the same meaning with the sentence. A Mandarin speaker from Chengdu would say săonián y\?\ nào, xüó nán cén, while a Southern Min speaker from Amoy would say siàoliân \?\ ló, hák lân sêng.

The Japanese speaker, educated in Kanbun would punctuate this sentence with the aid of the symbol:

Japanese pronunciation

\?\ shō

\?\ nen

\?\ yasu(ku)

\?\

\?\ o(i)

\?\ gaku

\?\ gata(shi)

\?\

\?\ na(ri)

The symbol indicates that the character above it is to be read after the following character. Parentheses indicate inflectional endings not found in Chinese, inferred by the Japanese reader. The text would thus be read shōnen o(i) yasu(ku), gaku na(ri) gata(shi), which retains the meaning of the original, as much as any translation can.

Note that some of the Japanese readings are very similar to the Chinese original: shō, nen, and gaku are etymologically related to shào, nián and xué (originally gak). On the other hand, the readings o(i), yasu(ku), na(ri) and gata(shi), are unrelated to Chinese lăo, yì, chéng, and nán. Characters are either pronounced in a “Japanized” version of the Chinese (on reading), or else a synonymous Japanese word (kun reading) is read in place of the Chinese word. The choice of which reading to use for a specific character is determined by context.

Sometimes, for additional clarity, kanbun writers will add the inflectional endings to the right of the line, using phonetic symbols called katakana:

\?\ Shō

\?\ nen

\?\ yasu

\?\ \?\

\?\

\?\

\?\ gaku

\?\ gata

\?\ \?\

\?\

Of course, to get from Chinese to Japanese word order, a simple transposition of two characters may not suffice. More complex reordering may be indicated through punctuation as well. A sequence of \?\ signs means that the text so marked is read in reverse order:

\?\ 1

\?\ 5

\?\ [Circles represent any character,

\?\ 4 and numbers indicate

\?\ 3 the order in which they are to be read.]

\?\ 2

In addition to the symbol, there are two other devices for indicating that characters are to be read out of sequence. First, the characters - ichi, “one” and=ni, “two” may be used:

\?\ 1

\?\ 4

\?\ 2

\?\ 3

\?\

Note that these numbers may be used more than once in a long phrase:

\?\ 1

\?\ 2

\?\ [The first occurence of = follows the first occurence of -,

\?\ 3 etc. That is, the application of

\?\ 4 the reversals must be consecu-

\?\ 8 tive, without overlapping or nesting.]

\?\ 6

\?\ 7

In cases where reversals overlap, or nest, a second pair of characters is used, namely, \?\ ue, “up” and \?\ shita, “down.” Here are two examples:

\?\ 7 \?\ 8

\?\ 1 \?\ 3

\?\ 4 \?\ 1

\?\ 2 \?\ 2

\?\ 3 \?\ 6

\?\ 5 \?\ 4

\?\ 6 \?\ 5

\?\ 8 \?\ 7

In general, the reordering markers are easily understood; the main source of ambiguity relates to the choice of on or kun readings, and, if a kun reading has been selected, the choice of inflectional endings intended. Not surprisingly, this arcane system of reading contrary to written order takes years to learn and has fallen out of fashion in recent decades. While there are still many people who can read kanbun texts, very few can actually write them. In the nineteenth century, however, kanbun was still widely used, and it is interesting to note that some of the first European language instruction books written in Japan employ similar systems for “reading” English and other languages in Japanese!

A Balance of Trade

William H. Dougherty, Santa Fe

I was amused and bemused by Martyn Ecott’s The Franglais Blues [XX, 3]. My bemusement led to my wondering how many English words in the story of youpie Marc, where the vocabulary has been selected to illustrate the relentless incursion of English expressions into modern French, were borrowed into English from French, either the Old, Anglo-, Middle, or Modern language. Here is a copy of Martyn Ecott’s little story, with the Franglais expressions left in italics but with the English morphemes originally borrowed from French underlined in the mainly English text. My etymological authority is the Random House Dictionary of the English Language.

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

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

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

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

In this calculatedly selective text I count only a few more Franglais words or morphemes, forty-four, than English morphemes originally, in most cases centuries ago, borrowed from French, forty by my count. However, of the sixty-six words in the closing paragraph of the article, where the language is not artificially loaded, I find seven words derived from French, including Académie, which is French, but not a single word of Franglais, nor would any Franglais expression appear in the paragraph were it translated into French. The current balance of trade may be in favor of English, but overall it is clearly still heavily in favor of French.

As Martyn Ecott cleverly demonstrates, francophone purists have reason for alarm; the flow, absolute flood of vocabulary from French into English, once resulting in a kind of hybridization, has lately been somewhat reversed, depositing in the elegant French language such grotesque neologisms as un pin’s or hip hop. Certainly, though, most of these freaks will be dislodged and swept away by the passage of time while those already rooted in the French language, like smoking and week-end, have become naturalized and no longer jar in the Gallic ear. The real threat to the French language is not that some faddish expressions and technical terms are invading French. No, the real menace, already almost a fait accompli, is that English will replace French altogether in science and technology, commerce, and international communication. At the present rate, French, which still appears along with English in my American passport and which sometimes still fills full-page ads in The New Yorker, may wind up like Greek—a language providing access to the roots of world culture but hardly worth learning for the conduct of mundane affairs.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“At Terrace [a restaurant], Chef Ossama Mickail and owner Nada Bernic stepped in after the death of Mrs. Bernic’s husband and savored its best aspects.” [Caption of a photo in “Restaurant Review” in Crain’s New York Business, 21 December 1992, page 10. Submitted by Jim Hatch, New York City.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“…Please bare with us and I think everyone will enjoy themselves.” [From the Harvard Heights Apartments tenants’ letter, n.d. Submitted by Dorothy Branson, Kansas City, Missouri.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Columbia Guide to Standard American English

Kenneth G. Wilson, (Columbia University Press, 1993), xv + 482pp.

A reader, a former student of the author’s at the University of Connecticut, recently called this book to my attention, and I am pleased that he did, for it gives advice on a number of issues—6500, according to the jacket blurb—that is stalwart, which is to say, advice with which I agree.

Before getting into that, I feel compelled to reiterate my perpetual complaint about the prospective users of such books: in order to look something up in a reference book of any kind—dictionary, thesaurus, usage book, encyclopedia—a person must either acknowledge that he does not know something or, at least, have doubts about the information he already possesses. Not everyone can always be sure of everything, but it has always seemed to me that one of the functions of education is to implant doubt in a student’s mind: in other words, it is not so important that he remember, a dozen years after leaving school, what a dangling modifier, split infinitive, agreement between the number of a subject and its verb, etc., might mean, but the process of education should have created a (minor) circuit in the brain of the pupil so that when a certain situation is encountered later on, he acknowledge a nagging suspicion that there might be something wrong and that it would be best were he to look it up in an authoritative source to see what is written there by people who know such things. Had the semi-educated computer experts who gave us “programmed, programming, and programmer” labored under any doubt about their ability to spell according to standard American practice, they might have looked it up in a dictionary or other source and got it right.

The proliferation of printed media and the amount of text appearing on television screens these days requires a lot of writers; the problem is that writer is these days construed in its minimalist sense of a ‘person who is literate’: that is, a ‘person who knows how to write’ but by no means necessarily a ‘person who knows how to write.’ As the standards slip in the marketplace, so they move on down the slippery slope in the education place, with older, wiser, more dedicated, better educated teachers gradually but ineluctably replaced by those who have not a scintilla of enlightenment regarding the meaning of contrary-to-fact condition, comma splice, or double genitive. The result is that quality and art of expression continue to deteriorate, and we are left with “performers” who spend five or ten minutes to deliver a three-minute weather report on television, housewives and househusbands who delight in revealing intimate, revolting, and highly suspect details of their childhood on national television, and channels devoted entirely to charlatans perpetrating psychic rubbish.

Kenneth G. Wilson is clearly of the old school (or, to make him seem younger, I should write “older” school). His advice, couched in language that reflects the tolerance of one who has spent years correcting English themes, flows from an enviable intimacy with, confidence in, and control of the language.

Entries range from grammatical matters (like agreement between various elements that ought to agree), to questions of syntax (like the placement of adjectives), to matters of semantics (like the discussion of adequate), to the meaning, usage, spelling, inflection, and pronunciation of a large number of words and phrases that might be confused (adduce, deduce; plural/singular status of addendum, agenda; spelling of practice, practise; plurals of words ending in -o, etc.). I agree with Wilson’s comments almost entirely, but he fails to criticize severely enough those who say “i.e.” and “e.g.” (rather than confine their use solely to writing), and, in general, he seems to avoid condemning poor style; also, the pronunciation system he employs may be a little crude for this sort of book, being derived from the Moo Goo Gai Pan school of phonetics.

On balance, though, it is a relief to see a well-rounded, sensible approach to the questions of grammar, usage, and other aspects of language Wilson covers. Would that we could do something to induce people to use it!

Laurence Urdang

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!

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

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The New York Public Library Writer’s Guide to Style and Usage

Paul Fargis, ed. dir., Andrea J. Sutcliffe, ed., (HarperCollins 1994), ix + 838pp.

This welcome work is directed toward writers and editors who have the wit to harbor doubts about their infallibility (which ought to include just about anyone worthy of consideration as a professional). As I have said on numerous occasions, books that inform are of no use to people who think that they know it all, for it never occurs to them to look up the standard American spelling of words like programed, programing, and programer.

But let me interrupt: what is a frontispiece? I always thought it was a full-page illustration at the front of a book. I checked in the RHD Unabridged and found that definition. What made me check was a reference in the editor’s Preface to names “listed on the frontispiece.” Sure enough, on the page facing the title page is a list of, among other things, the contributing editors. Maybe I was out of date with my understanding of frontispiece, so I looked it up in the Writer’s Guide itself. Sure enough:

A frontispiece is an illustration that appears opposite the title page. If there is no frontispiece, this page may contain a list of the author’s other works or information about other books in the series.

New to me. I checked in what I consider one of the best authorities on books, Glaister’s Glossary of the Book, by Geoffrey Ashall Glaister, University of California Press, 2nd edition, 1979. Glaister’s has:

an illustration facing the title-page, either printed with the prelims or separately pasted and guarded into a book.

From the wording, it is obvious that Glaister is British, and either frontispiece might not be used that way in Britain or perhaps this is a new sense of frontispiece not in use in 1979. I checked in MWIII and in the OED2e: neither yielded the definition sought (though the OED2e has a definition, labeled obsolete and obviously not the meaning sought, “the first page of a book”). That may not seem an auspicious beginning, but we must not despair, for an authority—if one is needed—must be lurking somewhere: either we have not found it or we must recognize the Editor’s right to Humpty-Dumpty meanings into existence at a whim.

The foregoing is not very important, but it does show what can happen when a person keen on words is let loose.

A few of the names on the so-called frontispiece are familiar, particularly that of Priscilla S. Taylor, consultant editor to the Editorial Eye (or to EEI, in Alexandria, Virginia) and editor of the Phi Beta Kappa Newsletter, a person of formidable qualifications and one whom I trust.

The Writer’s Guide is divided into five parts, Usage, Grammar, Style, Preparing the Text, and Production and Printing. There is an annotated bibliography, which lists my Oxford Theasurus but fails to include notice of the myriad illustrative sentences it contains. I trust that I shall be forgiven for skimming over the Usage chapter, partly because much of it is cut and dried and the parts that are not confuse the issue of avoiding prejudice with political correctness, a subject that gives me dyspepsia. (It is beyond me, for example, why people in eastern Asia should be offended by the word orient, which is no more than a reference to the place where the sun rises.) I shall also skip Grammar, which seems quite straightforward and predictable. Scattered here and there are helpful vignettes that focus on ancillary matters—SPOTTING A RESTRICTIVE CLAUSE, THE HISTORY OF THE SEMICOLON, etc.

In the chapter on Style, I expected to find under punctuation a fuller treatment than that afforded: I looked in vain for two things, the wisdom offered regarding serial commas (whether or when the second comma is required or desirable in A, B, and C, and what the position is on the use of a comma following etc. in the middle of a sentence). I found neither, nor did I find the common editorial term serial commas in the Index, which seems a little thin. It seemed best not to try to go through the book systematically but to dip into it here and there. Good advice is given about hyphens and adverbs ending in -ly preceding adjectives: were I being pernickety, I should say that the word “modifier” is not necessarily applied only to words that precede a noun, and that the rules change when a modifier is in apositive or predicative position, as in a well-known man vs. a man well known for his generosity. Would that it were possible to distill the vagaries of English compounding into a five-page table: the editors are forced to offer comments like “equal titles of functions” (equality is not always easy to decide), “words go together naturally” (naturally for whom?), etc., and even then to include a column of exceptions. (If you want my advice, settle on one large dictionary as a standard and look up any compounds it contains, following it slavishly: your writing is more important than whether vice president has a hyphen or not. However, that does not apply as consistently to editors as to the authors of what they are editing.)

I disagree with the suggested treatment of fractions, in which we are told to write two-thirds, three-eighths, etc. Nonsense! Two thirds and three eighths are exactly the same in construction as two thousand, three millions, and four birdhouses. Third and eighth are perfectly legitimate nouns in English and do not conform to the convention that requires eighty-six.

In the section on Computers, I was particularly interested in reading a vignette on spelling checkers (p. 695), made to appear ludicrous, and on scanning (p. 705). I agree that no nonparsing checker could find the error of writing ewe for you, wile for while, bin for been, or sum for some. Such errors—but not halve for have—are unlikely if the text was written by a literate person. In any event, I have found that spelling checkers do find typographical errors that result in nonwords (like fulkly for fully), which result from fast hunt-and-peck typing. As far as scanning goes, I have been shopping for a flatbed scanner because there are many sources I am now using that I should like to have in machine-readable form for sorting and other processing. The hand-held scanner I have used is very tricky and sensitive, and, as the Writer’s Guide admonishes, creates as many problems as it solves; but I am going to pursue the subject nonetheless, hoping that a useful balance might be struck in which less time is spent correcting than in initial keyboarding plus correcting.

In the chapter on Typography, information that appears in an illustration (p. 730) is somewhat misleading, for the inference is that small capitals are the same height as x-high letters of a given font. That might not have been the implication, for small caps are usually sixty per cent of cap height (though there is no standard). In the example shown, a sansserif face, the x-height of the characters is quite large; in different faces, the x-height to cap-height ratio varies, as does the small-cap height. I have my own notions of typographic design which are likely to be at odds with those of many designers, and I have seen fit to comment on particularly heinous examples of design encountered in reviewing. This is not, however, the place to embark on a disputatious wrangle leading nowhere. Suffice it to say, I find nothing serious to quibble with in the basic advice given, though I would caution against using the Guide as a quick course to typographic design.

The Writer’s Guide contains a huge amount of useful information, and if one does not already have a style manual, it might be as good as another, though many would argue that nothing could equal (let alone surpass) the Chicago Manual of Style. If one has become accustomed to a particular manual, the temptation is to stay with it: it is like a comfortable old shoe; even when a new edition becomes available, the information appears in approximately the same place and in a familiar format. Things are changing, though, and I am a little surprised that I have heard nothing about the availability of a style manual integrated with the software of a word processing package.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang

H.E. Lighter, Editor, J. Ball and J. O’Connor, ass. eds., (1994), Volume I, A-G, lxiv+1006pp.

To refer to the publication of the first volume of the HDAS is “long-awaited” would be to give away no secret, for many linguists have long been aware of Jonathan Lighter’s announcement of his project several years ago, and it was Stuart Flexner’s coup to grab it for Random House.

In his substantial Introduction, Lighter treats several aspects of his subject, from What Is Slang? through Slang in Its Cultural Environment, Some Features of Slang, The History of Slang, Influences on Slang: Military and Civilian, Slang in Other English-Speaking Countries, to Motives for Using Slang and a final word, History of the Project, the last revealing that the editor’s initial interest in such a project went back to 1968. The Introduction is followed by a Bibliography with useful, brief annotations; the following pages are occupied by the usual paraphernalia involved in a Guide, etc.

So many reviews of the HDAS will have been published in the press by the time this appears that most of our comments will seem redundant. Still, it is useful to note a few things that journalists are likely to overlook or pay little or no heed. For instance, it is worth noting that although the Dictionary of American Regional English, edited by Frederic G. Cassidy, serves as a source for Lighter, it is not listed among the titles in the Selected Bibliography. It is not in the slightest way suggested that picking up citations from other works is in any way curious or reprehensible—anyone would be a fool to research any subject without relying on the scholarship that has gone before—but one would have expected the DARE to be found among books like Farmer and Henley’s Dictionary of Slang and Its Analogues, Chapman’s New Dictionary of Slang, Wentworth and Flexner’s Dictionary of American Slang, and the others listed.

A dictionary is a reference book, not a text, and, with few exceptions, its purpose is to provide a reliable source of information about the words and phrases one looks up. It is not a text whose purpose is to teach users words that they do not already know. Yet the writing of a review puts a different complexion on the use of a dictionary, and I have often remarked that the most useful, realistic reviews of such works can be written only after one has lived with the subject book for many months, using it all the while. It is thus with some of the reference books that I have edited: users have told me that although the style of a given work was unfamiliar to them at first, they made the effort to master it and were rewarded by information (and its treatment) not available from books previously used.

For many, slang and its treatment—however clinical—is taboo, for it is loaded language, not so much with the expected four-letter words (of which there are only a handful) but with racial, religious, and ethnic slurs, which are both derogatory and offensive and are shunned like the plague by liberals. A high percentage of slang consists of such matter.

Like other reviewers who have not had the leisure to become acquainted with the HDAS gradually, I am compelled to browse through, snatching at pieces here and there. Because of a recent criticism I was recently moved to express concerning the spelling of flack for press agent, I looked it up and found it under flack, where the fancied etymology is quoted from Better English ([June 28] 1939):

That alert weekly, Variety…is trying to coin the word “flack” as a synonym for publicity agent. The word is said to be derived from Gene Flack, a movie publicity agent… A Yiddish word similar in sound means “one who goes around talking about the other fellow’s business.”

The editor’s comment is, “the Yiddish word referred to is unkn.; the closest words available are unlikely on various grounds.” I have known the term for most of my life, and its source was never a mystery to me; still, I must allow that, like others, I am not immune to succumbing to the trap of believing in the infallibility of a “fact” that is simply not so. My own etymology, which seems painfully obvious, is revealed if one acknowledges that the proper spelling is flak, which at once clarifies the etymological origin: flak. The metaphor is too transparent to waste the space for an explanation.

I confess to being less gregarious than the rest of the population: much of my contact with the world comes through periodicals, radio, and television. Consequently, I am known to vent my spleen with a hearty “Caramba!,” a loancurseword not to be found in the HDAS. Neither is the (so-called by puzzlers) “minced oath” Egad!, which was uttered by a blimpish comic-strip character whose identity I am too lazy to look up. These interjections could be considered marginal slang; but they are not so labeled in dictionaries and do not meet Lighter’s criteria. On the other hand, egg in the good/bad egg context is in, and I should not expect many dictionaries to label that sense (in contrast to the ‘aerial bomb’ sense, which is slang) anything but Informal or, depending on their style, Colloquial. Still, the labeling in dictionaries is not only erratic but internally inconsistent. The Random House Unabridged - Second Edition labels fuck as Vulgar, but none of the definitions given for that term in the dictionary itself seems to fit. The label for cunt is Slang (vulgar), and the distinction is lost on me. My vote would have been for Taboo for all such terms (and these days there are fewer and fewer). The pattern of labeling at shit in the RHD is quite arcane. (I ought to mention that, as Managing Editor of the First Edition of the RHD, such matters fell into my purview, but only shit (labeled Slang (vulgar)) was entered in that book. I cannot recall the reasoning behind the label, over which we agonized for many hours, but it means nothing to me now.)

Noteworthy are shifts in language levels. Dingbat, in the printing sense of a ‘typographic ornament’ [like the open book symbol at the end of this review], was once slang but is now standard English. Cook, in the sense of ‘juggle (the books),’ was once standard but is now slang. It would be interesting to find more of these.

Humility is a desirable attribute of those who deal with language, and it ill behooves purists and precisions to turn their noses up at “vulgarians” and others who fail to preserve the language in its supposedly pristine condition. People who cleave to such attitudes may also scorn slang, but they are very often unaware of the true “pristine condition” of the language or of the origins of words that are standard in contemporary speech. Such people should be advised that much, if not most slang is metaphoric in origin and that much of it can be quite subtle. True, there is not much subtlety in calling a gun a cannon, a ship a canoe, or an incompetent prizefighter a canvasback; but that a canoe inspector is a gynecologist is not immediately obvious, that Cement City might be thought picturesquely oblique for a cemetery, and that chain lightning is certainly as descriptive as rotgut for cheap potent liquor cannot escape anyone’s notice. When overworked, such images cloy, which is why slang is constantly shifting and why some of its elements (like neat and keen) are occasionally recycled—why waste a good word? It must also be said that the 20th century more than any earlier time has seen the accumulation of a more detailed documentation of life, as anyone knows from the plethora of scratchy, saccadic, often soundless images thrown on our television screens: a series on American gangsters, for instance, repeats radio broadcasts of the 1920s and 30s, bringing to us vividly not only the pictorial images of the day when, to modern youth, everyone wore black and white clothing and makeup but the words and accents of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Huey Long, Walter Winchell, and others who epitomize the era. Such language ought not be allowed to go to waste; it is ripe for recycling.

What is also brought dramatically to the attention of a reader of the HDAS is the relatively large number of words and expressions that have remained current in the language over the years. Some have been retained by becoming standard, often because there is no other convenient or adequately descriptive standard term for the same thing, like Charley horse for a leg cramp; others are genuinely standard words but were applied in a slang context, like chassis for a woman’s body; many are not frequent enough to have bored their users sufficiently to drop them, like chew out for scold; some might have been dropped by those who are in, only to be picked up by the squares to make themselves appear to be in, like cheeba for (a) cannabis (cigarette). Many have little use today but are colorful, like Chicago piano or typewriter for machine gun. Some have experiential reference for some people but are obscurely metaphoric for others, like catbird seat ‘vantage point,’ which is often treated as arcane but which is meaningful to anyone who has seen the way a catbird alights on a tree branch from where the surrounding territory can be surveyed for provender or predators.

As one might expect, I enjoy reading dictionaries, but some make more interesting reading than others. The HDAS should serve not only as superb documentation of an aspect of the language too often left to amateurs among whom most professional lexicographers, including me, must be counted but also as an engaging colorful source of the pleasure to be derived from revelation and reminiscence. Further volumes are eagerly awaited.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Ship to Shore: A dictionary of everyday words and phrases derived from the sea

Peter D. Jeans, illustrated by Ross H. Shardlow, (ABCCLIO, 1993), xxi + 425pp.

Those of us who deal with the lexicographic side of language are well aware of what Jeans characterizes as “the astonishing debt that our idiomatic speech owes to the nautical language of the past.” (Preface, p. ix) There are the obvious examples— come adrift, go overboard (about something), get under way, even skyscraper—but there are far more common words and expressions that have a far more subtle, less direct connection with maritime affairs, some of which I shall come to. The only quibble I might have with Jeans’s statement is with his use of astonishing, for English was born and nurtured on an island culture that depended heavily on the sea for food, commerce, and transport. Perhaps what is astonishing is the increasing distance, chiefly during the past century, that landlubbers have put between the sea and themselves: knowledge and awareness of such matters now rests largely among naval types, those yachtsmen who enjoy the leftover jargon of the sea, and a handful of eccentrics, like Jeans, a few others I could mention, and me. My own connection stems from a lifetime of sailing, a brief stint in the WWII US Navy, and an abiding lexicographic concern for terms nautical, the last of which is manifesting itself in the preparation of a historical nautical dictionary.

Jeans, an Australian as his spellings confirm, has ferreted about in the language to uncover words and phrases that have—and might have—some nautical provenance. He has not always been successful, but, undaunted, he soldiers on. In a random browse through the book jerry-built caught my eye, mainly because, recalling it as a reference to buildings ashore, I was surprised to find it among nautical words. Jeans does not deny that—indeed, provides his own quotation from the Pall Mall Gazette of February 15, 1884, (not listed in the OED2e) to support the architectural reference—but he persists in offering the opinion that because the word is used in association with buildings in Liverpool, “this makes it … likely that the word is of nautical origin.” That is imaginative but unsupported by the evidence, and I fear that Jeans has stretched a point. My suspicions aroused, I found that a number of entries had neither a nautical origin nor, perceivably, any nautical connection: jingo, offered as “probably a Basque word,” acquires a nautical connection because “Basques were among the earliest organised whalers in Europe, and as harpooners their expressions would have carried some weight with other seafarers.” That is a fancied nautical origin at best. Kedgeree, “a vegetable curry, popular with seamen,” has, notwithstanding tarry appetites, not the remotest connection with matters nautical; kickback is shown by the OED2e to be a 20th-century coinage, and there is not evidence to suggest it ever had anything to do with maritime affairs; and kite, for which the OED2e includes a 7th-century quotation for the (original) bird sense, found a metaphoric application to sail not much before the middle of the 19th century.

I must say that I was quite disappointed to find the foregoing examples; alas! there are many more. Of course, there are genuine nautical expressions as well, some of which have been given thorough treatment: I have not seen elsewhere as complete a discussion of loggerheads, but it is offset by the very inclusion of mind your p’s and q’s, about which Jeans writes, “the phrase is not nautical in origin.” If not, then why is it here? Why is space devoted to entries like misfire, Morse code, muster, nickname, nip ‘short drink,’ nous ‘brains,’ slate, etc.? Either the author lost his way or, as often happens, the (original, probably Australian) publisher was dissatisfied with a shorter book for which less could be charged. As it is, the book is greatly bulked up: its wide hanging indentions, large type, ragged-right setting, open spaces make for an attractive package; the illustrations are pretty and, in some cases (various sails), useful, but many of them are gratuitous and purely decorative (helm, scrimshaw, five pages of different rigs).

Consequently, I did not expect much when I looked up my favorite entry, horse latitudes, for which Jeans repeats the conventional theory (to the effect that the Spaniards used to throw starving horses overboard when they were becalmed, which I maintain to be an incredibly poor fiction); he also brings in Golfo de las Yeguas ‘gulf of mares,’ which I have been able to find, with the help of the Royal Geographical Society, only inland in Spain. Jeans mentions “one modern authority,” whose identity I should like to know, who “makes the intriguing suggestion that horses aboard sailing ships often had to be lifted overboard into the sea to relieve their thirst,” a theory that even Jeans regards as “ludicrous.”

There are four appendices: Nautical Prepositions (many of which would be classed (also) as adverbs by a grammarian); Changed Spellings and Corrupted Word Forms; Nautical Terms Related to Human Anatomy; Nautical Terms Derived from the Land. There is also a Bibliography of sorts: the OED was, but the OED2e was not consulted; Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable was, perhaps somewhat uncritically; and, among works that either fail to reflect the latest scholarship, are not pertinent to the task set, or are just plain awful, the following are listed: Wilfred Funk’s Word Origins and Their Romantic Stories, (a 1978 reprint of a 1950 work); Universal Dictionary of the English Language (1897); a modern selection from Johnson’s Dictionary (1755); Partridge’s Origins (1977), a work long criticized for its errors; and Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language (1965), which is a $15 reprint, cursorily updated, of the 19th-century Ogilvie edition of Annandale’s Dictionary. Some of these are useless and inaccurate, others are picturesque but useless. In all, aside from the dictionaries, Jeans lists twenty-eight books plus fifteen of Patrick O’Brian’s novels; no mention is made of the Mariner’s Mirror, the journal of the Society of Nautical Research, or of other essential source materials. Nautical language deserves more respect. By contrast, the bibliography for my historical nautical dictionary already numbers close to 285 works. Readers should not for a moment think that my adverse criticism of Jeans’s book has anything remotely to do with my own: the two are of entirely different purpose and scope, and I would have welcomed any help or new insight into some of the problems and questions that vex anyone trying to deal with such an elusive subject as nautical language.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Through the use of ultrasound, University of Washington researcher … studies women who develop high blood pressure during pregnancy with the assistance of AHA-WA funds.” [From Heartlines, a Washington affiliate newsletter of the American Heart Association, Vol. VI, No. 2, 1988.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“A woman gave birth to two of her triplets a month after delivering the third, a rare occurrence, physicians said Thursday.” [From The Philadelphia Inquirer, 4 May 1988. Submitted by Stephen R. LaCheen, Philadelphia.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“… photographs of the very, very young girls with which Peter Altenberg, poet in prose, lined the walls of his room at the Graben Hotel.” [From Art View, by John Russell, in The New York Times, 29 June 1986. Submitted by Linder Chlarson, New York City.]

Sound and Sense

David Galef, University of Mississippi

Two women in the supermarket were talking about somebody else’s child. “And then,” said the first woman, “after all the money she gave him, he asked for another five dollars!”

“Tisk tisk,” said the second.

I know because I was five feet away and I heard her. Only after I had ferried my cart to the next aisle did I figure out what she meant: tsk tsk, that half-pitying, half-disapproving sound made by pressing the tongue against the upper palate and teeth and sucking in slightly. She had obviously read the expression tsk tsk somewhere, and this was how she concluded that it should sound. Or her mother had made the mistake and passed it on. The British often spell it tchah, and I wondered whether some British matron in Harrod’s wasn’t even now saying “cha” for the same reason.

The alteration of tsk to “tisk” is like the back-formation of certain words. Someone comes up with a spelling to approximate a sound, which someone else eventually reads, mispronounces, and thus turns into a new sound. Over the years, the new sound may acquire its own distinction: a dignified gentleman announcing Ahem! to gain attention, rather than actually clearing his throat, or someone cackling Yukkety yuk yuk! at a lousy joke.

Onomatopoeia adds zest to language, from aagh! to zzz …, but somewhere between print and enunciation, the exact equivalence between sound and sense can get lost. In fact, I recently heard someone pronounce zzz … to mimic sleep, and it sounded nothing like the faint sussurus that the word implies. There are linguistic terms for these sorts of sounds, from bilabial implosives—a kiss becomes a smooch—to dental or alveolar stops—tut tut, scolds the cautious professor. In a few rare instances, one can actually see the transmogrification at work. The childish exclamation peeyoo!, for instance, probably stems from a distorted rendering of phew!, just as another air-and-spit expression of disgust was once rendered as pfui! but gradually turned into fooey!, which is both easier to read and pronounce. A near relative, the mucus release known as something like huk-ptui, has similarly eased into the accipitrine hawk patooie. The polite forms may still be hem and haw, but the polite forms are from a bygone era. Others have supplanted them.

In fact, the amount of back-formed onomatopoeia devoted to sounds of human manufacture is astounding. People now exclaim whew! after a close call, or humph or harrumph when impatient. But these sounds are meant to be said in haste and slurred slightly, so that whew comes across as a half-whistled expulsion of breath, not a precise word with the wh of what and the ew of ewer. The same is true of humph, a nasal snort of derision rather than something akin to what a camel has on its back. When you become disgusted, the sound from your throat sounds like a gathering of phlegm, variously rendered as ugh, yuk, or Mad magazine’s famous yecch—but often when people repeat those sounds, what comes out is ug, yuck, and even yetch. Ick also belongs somewhere in there. Certain aspects of revulsion, such as eeeuew! (a guess as to the spelling), still have no agreed-upon form.

Other spelled-out bodily reactions range from eructation to fright, though admittedly people sometimes over-pronounce the sounds for a humorous effect. L’il Abner’s Gulp! might have shown that his heart was in his throat, but these days when someone says gulp, it is more likely tongue in cheek. Gasp! says someone is more amused than scared. Yikes, yipes, eek, and eep now function similarly, the last two originally mimicking the response of someone encountering a mouse in a darkened kitchen. In fact, the sheer pronunciation of the letters in sounds like the lip-smacking yum yum or the postprandial urp and sigh provokes a chuckle.

Laughter itself has its own onomatopoetic codes. Ha-ha, he-he, or hee-hee may be the closest spelled-out equivalents, with te-hee as a feminine version, dating back to the laugh that Chaucer assigned the reeve’s wife in the Miller’s Tale. Hardy har har is the hearty masculine equivalent, a guffaw compared to a titter. But retro-punk culture now dominates the arena of cachinnation, with Beavis and Butthead’s heh-heh … heh-heh … echoing from MTV to the schoolyards. The only appropriate response is boo-hoo.

Comic books also contribute a lot to this fracas. Much comic-book onomatopoeia comes from the fights of good guys versus bad guys, specifically the sound of fists against bodies. Bif and bam were early favorites, followed by an off! Then newer impacts came along, pow and kazowie, and in this age of electronic armaments, whoosh and zap have replaced the standard artillery bang bang and rat-a-tat-tat.

Bloosh, spotted in both X-Men and Superman, is the sound a body makes when hitting the water and sinking. Fzzssh and fwwwp indicate sudden appearance and disappearance (or materialization and dematerialization) in Captain America comic books. And while Archie comics are still using the old standbys of crunch and swish, the heavier impacts of action comics have gone beyond boom and kablooie to ktoom, bdoom, and even skrakataboom for the detonation of an entire building. Similarly, the old elastic collision of boing sounds tame compared to the clash of metal on metal: bladang. Of course, these words appear simply as large colored letters within a given frame, but if you have ever read a comic book to a young audience perched on your lap, you have had to figure out a pronunciation key. Luckily, since most comics are aimed at those with unsophisticated reading skills, most of the onomatopoeia inside is spelled the way it sounds. The one puzzlement is how to pronounce comic puzzlement, variously spelled as ??? or ?!

Beyond the realm of human ken lie animal sounds, a fine mess for most people. Again, the villain is precise pronunciation: with the possible exception of Little Orphan Annie’s dog Sandy, no mutt barks arf. The same is true of woof and bow-wow, though all dogs can be heard to approximate these sounds. If only dogs could spell. Cats only vaguely cry meow (James Joyce bravely tried mkgnao), hapless pigs have the choice of only oink or ooee, horses bray neigh and mules hee-haw. The rooster crows cock-a-doodle-doo, which for anyone who has spent time on a farm is a sad travesty of the deep, throaty ur-ur-ur-ur-urrh! In other countries, animals are similarly saddled with precisely imprecise sound effects, such as gnaf-gnaf for a French poodle, or wanwan for a Japanese akita.

Of course, these vile approximations are not always the reader’s fault. The ruminative uh, which most people can faithfully reproduce, used to be spelled as unh, in an attempt to get in that glottal effect, but all it did was mislead youngsters into pronouncing an n where none was intended. Some old novels similarly have characters expressing surprise by hanh? in the days before the ubiquitous huh? Pepsi-Cola’s famous Uh-huh! commercials have made bare assent into a ringing affirmative, though no one has yet done a similar campaign on uh-uh.

Nowadays the unh or ungh combination tends to convey exertion or being stifled. But then, Americans have always had trouble with ch and gh. Blame the Scottish and their Loch Lomond, or the English language that produces such sentences as “The tough cough ploughs him through.” This may be one reason, besides orthographic brevity, that American English has changed doughnuts to donuts and hiccough to hiccup.

Even sounds that should be simple to execute, such as ah, and oh, have hidden traps. Is it eh as in pest, or eh as in pay? It depends on whether you are in Canada or Britain. When ah is drawn out to ahhhhhh!, it evokes deep satisfaction, but spelled as aaaaaah!, it is more a sign of fright. In the same way, people often try to convey a drawn-out oh by writing oooooh, which should be another sound entirely, with the u of tube. Maybe those who want to prolong oh by more than a breath should learn to write ohhhhhh.

Perhaps the logical endpoint of onomatopoetic spelling is eye-dialect, as in wimmin for women, gotcha for got you, and so on. Victuals, still the “correct” spelling, has yielded an alternate version spelled vittles. Will solder spelled as sodder come next (for the American pronunciation)? It would be a shame to lose the etymology buried in the original spelling, though it would be a boon for easy pronunciation. Or maybe some sounds will never have absolute phonetic accuracy bestowed on them, as in ring—or is it rrring, or some other sound altogether? Can a sudden intake of breath be shown as hi, or does that monosyllable have too friendly associations? Mood and personal intonation also play a part in many sounds: is oops meant to be ups, ups, or whoops? And what should one make of the rappers’ cry, “Whoomp!—there it is!,” when they spot a woman with big breasts?

Questions multiply quickly—sproing. What really is whir meant to imitate? Where does wow come from? How does whoosh! manage to maintain its phonic integrity? Is the u in buzz really necessary? Gaak is often used for gagging, but gag itself was originally onomatopoetic, which raises the thorny issue of how much language was all imitative at one time. In place of answers, a thoughtful hmmm … will have to suffice.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“… Lewis’s sparse prose gives her tale the mysterious inexorability of an ancient saga. For many years I have seen her name championed by other writers in lists of ‘neglected authors’: now I know why.” [From book catalog, A Common Reader, Spring 1993, page 65. Submitted by J.B. Lawrence, San Bernardino.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“ ‘Incredible’ is too conservative an adjective. They are unbelievable!” [From a sportscast on Channel 4, 6 January 1993. Submitted by Dorothy Branson, Kansas City, Missouri.]

How Manieth?

O. Abootty, Kerala, India

I am very fond of the English language, to which I took a great fancy when I was twelve years old. It is no exaggeration when I say that I prefer English to my native tongue, Malayalam, the language spoken by the people of Kerala, a southern state in India, the language which has entered the pages of the Guinness Book of Records as the longest palindromic language in the world. To tell the truth, it is the little knowledge that I have of the English language that has made me what I am now. Had it not been for this knowledge, I would not have been a teacher, a writer, an English language columnist and an author.

I know that English has merits and demerits. Not all ideas that arise in my mind in my own tongue can be expressed in English as well because not all words, phrases, sayings, and usages in my mother tongue have English equivalents. It was when I was a high-school student that I became convinced of this fact for the first time.

A classmate of mine came to me one afternoon with a question. As I was the best student in English, he expected a correct answer. What he asked me was, “How can we ask a question in English that elicits an ordinal number as answer?” Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the US; try to form a question to which the answer is “the 16th.” I was— still am—at a loss for an answer.

When, seven years back, I started writing an English language column entitled English Corner in a well-known Malayalam magazine for students and candidates, it became evident, from the letters of my readers, that most of them wanted to know how to ask such a question. I had already learnt that although there is no idiomatic way in English of asking such a question, it is very common in Malayalam and also, I think, in other Indian vernaculars. Unlike English, those languages do not distinguish between order or position.

As a consequence, we have found our own ways of asking such questions in English. I have collected the following ones:

1. What is the rank/position/ordinal number of Bill Clinton as the President/among the presidents of the US?

2. What is the chronological/numerical order of Bill Clinton as the President/among the presidents of the US?

3. Which of the presidents of the US is Bill Clinton?

But none of them is really acceptable as idiomatic to English speakers. The second one would be acceptable to them if it is changed into “Where, in the numerical order of the presidents of the US, does Bill Clinton come?”

Sir Randolph Quirk, the most famous British grammarian, says that the ordinal question can be obliquely asked in English like this: “How many presidents were there before Bill Clinton? But such a question does not satisfy us. Our answer to that question will be the total number of former presidents.

I have recently come to know that it is correct in colloquial British speech to ask “What number president of the US is Bill Clinton?” In my estimation, this question is undoubtedly the best solution.

Recently, a reader of my column sent me a letter asking me whether it would be correct to use “How manieth” to form an ordinal question. “How many” yields answers with cardinal numbers like five, ten, fifteen: How many children have you? I have five. Then, what about using “How manieth/ How manyeth” for an answer that contains an ordinal number like fifth, tenth, fifteenth? Unfortunately, “How manieth president of the US is Bill Clinton?” does not exist in English.

Do you know any other good ways of asking such a question in English? If you do, please let me know of them so that I can include them in my next book on enjoyable English. I will give you credit. Please send your letters to O. Abootty/ K.T.82/ Cannanore City- 670 003 / Kerala, India.

AUTHOR’S QUERY

In Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the expression he saw with his heels. Does anyone know of other appearances of the phrase?

Matthew J. Bruccoli

2006 Sumter Street

Columbia, SC 29201-2157

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

Alan & Theresa von Altendorf, (Mustang Publishing Co., 1991, 1993), 335pp.

As the authors acknowledge in Notice to Readers, Part 2, “almost any word can become an Ism.” “Rather than turn this into a 12-volumes set,” they continue, “we decided to limit the words included to those noted in one of our source dictionaries or used in a recent book, magazine, or newspaper.” All the more surprising, then that they missed, among the available sources, -Ologies & -Isms, Urdang, Laurence, Gale Research Company, published in three editions (1978, 1981, and 1986). Considering the fact that there are not a lot of books dealing with isms, one might have expected the Altendorfs to have found that one.

Still, that has nothing to do with the present work, which focuses on isms alone and is far more thorough in its detailed treatment and explanations of the nature of isms not treated in -Ologies & -Isms. The selection does not exclude ordinary language, for Goldwynism, hermaphroditism, iotacism, opportunism, optimism, and toadyism are included among the scores of entries. I am not sure whether to categorize the first three of the preceding as “Concepts, Doctrines, Traits,” or “Beliefs,” but no matter. The definitions are quite good and straightforward, despite the facetious tone of the prefatory matter and the illustrations. It seems that the authors enjoyed their labors, and they have produced a work which I consider a valuable, useful addition to anyone’s library.

Laurence Urdang

OBITER DICTA: SIC! SIC! SIC!

Readers who have submitted SIC!³ items, never to see them again are owed an explanation. We do not use items that are simply errors: they have to be funny or, to clarify that point, the Editor has to find them funny. Some slips that pass in the type might send their clippers; into paroxysms of hysterical laughter, but if they have no effect on the Editor, they are consigned to oblivion. Submitters should include their names and addresses, so that we can properly acknowledge their eagle-eyed acumen. Also, we must have the name of the periodical or call letters of the radio or TV station and the date of perpetration. The name of the program for radio and TV citations is essential.

SIC!³s are usually saved up for typesetting in batches. Because they are used as fillers, they might not be used for some time, depending on how long they are and on filling needs. If they start looking a bit hoary, we discard them on the grounds that there are always new ones appearing, and, these days, language changes are so rapid that a usage might have become standard by the time a five-year interval has passed.

To those whose SIC!³s we have not used, our thanks for sending them. To all, please understand that SIC!³s arrive in such profusion that we cannot acknowledge their receipt.

Laurence Urdang

OBITER DICTA: Reflections on Unitedstatesese and other-eses

J.A. Davidson, Victoria, British Columbia

Arnold Toynbee, distinguished philosopher of history, in his old age wrote about his having learned “about the difference between the American language and my native Unitedkingdomese.” He said that as a young man recently out of Oxford in 1911 he encountered Americans other than the few highly educated Rhodes scholars he had met at Oxford. He then became aware of the significant differences between the two Englishes and of the increasing dominance of American English. He told about this in his book of reminiscences and reflections, Experiences, which was published in 1969, seven years before his death:

England was now in a minority in the English-speaking World. The majority of the people whose language was English were now living in North America; and North American English had become the standard form of the language. It was irrelevant that English had been spoken in England long before America had been heard of in Europe. History never stands still; and this had reduced my Unitedkingdomese dialect to the status of being a bizarre provincial “brogue.”

Toynbee’s dialect actually was Englandese: Scotlandese and Irelandese are quite distinct from that dialect. And Unitedstatesese had become a linguistic reality before the thirteen American colonies had rebelled and declared their independence. Soon after the American Revolution several of the founding fathers of the new nation advocated establishing an academy, similar to those of France and Sweden, to standardize and, in effect, enshrine an official American form of English. The academy was not established. Soon after the independence treaty between Great Britain and the United States had been signed in 1784, Noah Webster, then in his mid-twenties, issued his book, Grammatical Institute of the English Language. This was the first of the several books which made him a leading authority on Unitedstatesese, and in some ways a creator of it. His most important work, The American Dictionary of the English Language, was published in 1812.

Today—as English-speaking people in all parts of the world should be aware—there are several distinct dialects in American English. The predominant one, which in itself has sub-dialects, is conveniently called General American. Experts estimate that about two thirds of the American people, living on about 80 per cent of the land area speak this dialect—or with this accent, if one prefers that term. (The terms are not quite synonymous, but in this context they can be taken as such.) Recently a polished, precise form of General American has come to be called “Network Standard”: it is the speech of many of the prominent announcers and commentators on national television.

General Canadian English—Canadese?—is closer to General American than it is to any of the British Englishes, but it is distinct from the American ones in some spellings, usages, and pronunciations and in a few peculiar intonations.

Borrowings

Mary M. Tius, Portland, Maine

Borrowed words fill gaps in a language for which they were not designed, much as if one were to take pieces from one jig-saw puzzle and use them in another which happens to be missing a few. Or, to use another simile, they are like shrubs transplanted to an alien climate: sometimes the shrub loses its spreading habit or becomes dwarfed; sometimes it expands luxuriantly, taking up more space than when on native ground; occasionally, it keeps its original shape and size.

These were some of my reflections as, more than a decade ago, I watched the evening news broadcasts and accompanying advertisements. By then. I had lived in Greece for more than two decades and was aware of the many English words also at home there; but now, I was struck not just by the large number but by their use in “official” Greek. Until then, I think I had assumed that only the everyday speech of the “man in the street” and the very demotic Greek of some magazines and newspapers had incorporated these borrowings. In the space of a few weeks, I jotted down several hundred English loanwords, most of which could be grouped under the headings of Entertainment, Food, Games and Sports, Technology, and Transportation.

Predictably, Hollywood has given a good many words to Modern Greek. Cowboy, detective, gangster, thriller, western—all refer to film categories, though gangster (or, rather, gangsterism) can be many kinds of coercive behavior, even schoolyard bullying. Picnic, rock, striptease, and video have entered Greek with their meanings intact, rock considerably narrowed, confined as it is to rock music. Camping, however, is a place, not an activity, and cocktail party has shrunk to koktél, while show and star refer only to the theater.

In the area of food, bacon, bar ‘where drinks are served,’ cake, cornflakes, cornflour, custard powder ‘pudding mix’ to Americans, ketchup, popcorn, and rum have retained their English meanings. Baking powder has been shortened to mpékin; Quaker oats is kouáker; American style potato chips are tsíps; and anyone who orders tóst in Greece will be served not toast but a grilled cheese sandwich. Sántouïts itself—two thick chunks of bread with nothing between them but a thin slice of cheese or salami—is not exactly what Americans have in mind; and, although there are snákmpar in Greece, there are no snák, for the very good reason that Turkish meze was in use long before snackbars arrived on the scene.

But perhaps the greatest number of loanwords has been provided by games and sports. Some have been trimmed: basketball, to mpásket. Others are unaltered: baseball, football, golf, jogging, ping pong, soccer, surfing, tennis, volleyball, water polo. But bridge, foul, goal, (team) manager, match, out, and rally have, in Greek, none but the meanings pertaining to games and sports. A record-breaker or -holder is a rékorntman (or rékorntgouman), no doubt coined by some enterprising sports repórter or spíker (speaker ‘announcer’).

Technology and transportation have yielded computer, laser, transistor, and watt, all unchanged in Greek, as are bulldozer, ferryboat, tunnel, and yacht. Pullman, however, is a ‘large, long-distance bus’ most of the time (occasionally, a ‘city bus’), and station-wagon has lost its wagon.

Allowing, as always, for a difference in pronunciation, many other words are perfectly recognizable and many acronyms, too (BBC, CIA, FBI, FOB, NASA, NATO, UFO, et al.). Nevertheless, the usage of some recognizable words can certainly muddle conversations between foreign English-speakers and Greeks. Flirt (Gk. phlért) is no longer a ‘person who indulges in harmless dalliance’ but a ‘lover, male or female’ or the ‘love affair’ itself (more often than not, illicit); hula hoop means ‘leotards’; nylon is the transparent kind of plastic; shocking, used as a plural noun (Gk. sókin), means ‘off-color or risqué stories’; and Texas, as in the sentence, “It has become texas”, means ‘out of control, maniacally chaotic and violent’ (though this may be an idiosyncratic use by a small group of people).

Words that are or become nouns in Greek are assigned articles indicating gender, and some words are also inflected like Greek nouns; but the majority, become uninflected neuters, which, anyway, have fewer inflections than feminines or masculines, so that a change in the article is often the only indication of case and syntax. One inference to be drawn from this might be that the choice of neuter is inevitable since the gender of most English nouns is inscrutable. Another inference might be that the same tolerance displayed by Greeks in their dealings with resident foreigners—at any rate, American and European ones—has been extended to English words which are, as noted, largely exempted from the strictures of Greek grammar and allowed to retain their alien habit. A third—perhaps only a corollary to the second—might be that the longer a borrowing remains in use, the more likely it is to be treated like a native. Recordwoman, if it was not a nonce word and is still in use, may be an example of this: though obviously feminine, it was uninflected, whereas lady, a Greek resident of much longer standing, has acquired all the inflections of a feminine noun. Further evidence is that the many Turkish loanwords, in use for centuries and with no obvious preponderance of one gender, are, with very few exceptions, fully inflected, as are Italian musical and nautical terms, likewise of long standing. In short, it seems that a process of naturalization has been and may still be at work.

If, in the future, Modern Greek continues to be as hospitable to English words as it has been in the recent past, there are likely to be more and more neuter nouns with few inflections or none at all, at least until the new words have put down roots. Still, because these borrowed, aberrant words represent relatively rare infractions of the time-honored rules of grammar, I doubt that matters will ever reach the point where literate Greeks would be driven to gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair by Greek equivalents of barbarisms such as to you and I and Us teachers are …. Such trials and temptations to mayhem are reserved for the literate—and hapless— speakers of English.

Living with Fossilized Ears

Alan Fisk, Stowmarket, Suffolk

I returned to England in 1989 after spending 17 years in Canada. Since then, I have had to do almost as much readjusting to this changed England as I did when I moved to Canada for the first time. I expected many details of daily life to have changed or to be unfamiliar, but I was not prepared for the alterations in the pronunciation of words which had occurred in such a relatively short time. I have also noticed a sharp acceleration in the decline of dialectal usages, less in pronunciation than in vocabulary: I find that many people in my own county of Suffolk, for example, no longer know dialect words and expressions that were universal currency as recently as the 1950s.

Some quite common words have undergone striking changes. I am still waiting for somebody to explain to me just how and when yoghurt, which had always been pronounced YOH\?\gert, mysteriously metamorphosed into YOG\?\ert. At first I suspected that some television advertising campaign had caused the change, but then I remembered that the Blue Band Margarine commercials of the 1950s and 1960s never did succeed in reviving the old pronunciation of margarine with a hard g.

It seems that nobody calls the police any more; they dial 999 for the pleece. If houses sink into the earth, the cause is no longer subsidence, pronounced SUB’sidence, it is subSIDE\?\ence, an obvious back-formation from the verb subside. The inhabitants of my own home county of Suffolk used to be noted for pronouncing the word wholly to rhyme with bully, just as Elizabeth I would have done, while everyone else rhymed it with holy. I keep hearing it pronounced as HOL\?\ly. How did this start?

It is possible that radio and TV announcers are to blame, although the Blue Band example shows that TV is not accepted as an authority on pronunciation, when the purchasers of the product kept on calling it “marjoreen” in spite of the manufacturer’s instructions to the contrary.

TV and radio announcers seem to obey changes in pronunciation rather than initiating them. I find myself often confused by the accelerating trend towards adopting back vowels in diphthongs to replace front vowels. I was baffled for quite a long time by a conversation on a bus, in which someone announced that because the cool autumn weather had arrived they were going to buy a kite. I was trying to speculate on how a kite could keep you warm when I finally realized from the context that they were planning to purchase a coat.

This particular alteration in pronunciation seems to have been widely accepted. Many people now seem to live in a hice rather than a house, and this pronunciation is by no means confined to Royalty and the aristocracy, speakers of the famed Received Pronunciation Plus. The BBC announcer Michael Buerk is an invariant user of this diphthong for what was formerly a low back diphthong. He stumped me when reporting that the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov had been “shited dine” when trying to speak in the Soviet Parliament. Sakharov had of course, been shouted down. It would be an interesting experiment for phoneticians to ask Michael Buerk to recite the line how now brown cow.

There seem to me to be numerous explanations for these phenomena. The continuing drift from back vowels to front vowels is surely no more than the continuation of the Great Vowel Shift, which began in the fifteenth century. Like the building of the Alps and the Himalayas, it is a process that is so slow that we cannot perceive it happening.

Another factor, not quite as old although not a novelty, either, is the pressure of the speak-as-you-spell movement first described by the Fowler brothers in Modern English Usage. The pronunciation of place names has been tending to conform to their written appearance ever since the coming of the railways, and I notice that the letter t is now always sounded in Hertfordshire, as is the letter l in Colchester. The speak-as-you-spell faction have definitely won a final victory over the Fowlers when it comes to the word conduit. The pronunciation KON\?\dewit has now established itself as the standard form, and there is no point in trying to revive KUN\?\dit. The same applies to untoward: the once-correct pronunciation unTOE\?\erd is dead and might as well be buried.

Now of course conduit and untoward are not words common in everyday conversation, so it is hardly surprising that when people have to say them for the first time they guess the pronunciation from the spelling, always a dangerous procedure in English. It is a puzzle, though, that the verb conflict should have had its stress changed to CON\?\flict so as to conform to the stress in the noun conflict.

One important lesson to be learned from these changes is that the expected tendency of recordings to stabilize pronunciation has not in fact happened. When sound recording was first invented, many people, remembering how the invention of printing had frozen grammar in its Renaissance forms, thought that recordings would do the same for the spoken language. I can remember that as late as the 1950s many people conscientiously pronounced glue as “glyoo,” and went to the office wearing a “syoot.” I have not heard suit pronounced that way for decades.

One might look ahead a hundred years to imagine the squeaky English pronunciation of the late 21st century, all front vowels, and with a heavy rhythm caused by habitual stressing of the first syllable in words. Perhaps Old English sounded something like that.

My French mother, who has lived in English-speaking environments since 1947, still uses the French pronunciations and expressions from that period, to the great amusement of her younger relatives. I find it fascinating to observe the parallel changes in English pronunciation, particularly so because everyone I ask assures me that no such changes have taken place and that everyone has always called yoghurt YOG\?\ert. It is strange that a back vowel has displaced a diphthong there: I would have expected “YIE\?\gert instead. Where is there a Ph.D. student, some latter-day Grimm, who will propound the laws by which our pronunciation is still evolving?

EPISTOLA {Peter Rankin}

“Titillating Titles,” Allison Whitehead’s engaging exploration of schools of titling [XX, 4], cautions against titles that give the game away. However, it has been postulated that the best titles are those that manage to embrace an entire plot (without, of course, tipping the ending).

Titles that reveal (without giving away) the are of the plot are typified, quite randomly, by: Witness for the Prosecution, Don’t Look Now, Beware of Pity, Deliverance, Portnoy’s Complaint, Crime \?\ Punishment, The Informer, A Doll’s House, Hunger, Pygmalion, The Ransom of Red Chief, Before the Fact,— once started, the list is endless.

Supreme at this art are Austen, Dickens, Conrad, James ‘n Wharton, Trollope, Collins,… and there are many, many more of these not so “terribly strange bed”-fellows.

Name titles, a category Ms. Whitehead supports, present an even greater challenge: to delineate plot trajectory via. a name. It can be done. Think Rebecca. Or try Hedda Tesman. Parse Cousin Bette. Encompass Anna Karenina: while not as revelatory as War \?\ Peace, that title is every bit as sweeping in a related arena: do not forget that the eponymous character departs the book some fifty pages before it ends, leaving her name as a metaphor for the deadly effects of society’s conventions, as Tolstoy saw them, on the soul. Thus, the title becomes equally appropriate as an umbrella for Anna’s story, its consequences on her contemporaries, and the novel’s preoccupation with the agrarian defection from that society of (Tolstoy’s stand-in) Levin.

Subtitling, also encouraged by Ms. Whitehead, can conspire magnificently with a plot-revealing title: “A Novel Without a Hero” says it all; “Or, The Modern Prometheus” tells us what Mrs. Shelley had in mind; “A Tale of the Christ” prepares us for more than chariot races, and so on.

Opening lines of a novel, play, or short story can also reveal plot schema.

Punning titles, I would suggest, as titillating as they may be, have become an editorial addiction of popular magazines. If they are not fed to us with restraint, they can soon render us dangerously overgorged on pop corn.

[Peter Rankin, New York City]

EPISTOLA {Roy B. Flinchbaugh}

When I first read [in XX, 3, BIBLIOGRAPHIA that A Dictionary of American Proverbs contains data on the recording of the proverbs and that “it contains historical information on earliest appearances: for example, Money is the root of all evil is traced to Aelfric’s Homilies (c. 1000),” I assumed that the original statement, “The love of money is the root of all evil,” was not being traced back there. That, clearly, would have produced a date nearly a millennium earlier, for it is a quote from the New Testament (I Timothy, 6:10, KJV). I supposed that since the quote is given as “Money is the root of all evil,” the editors of the Dictionary were tracing back the American misquotation-as-proverb that one usually hears.

When, however, I looked up Aelfric in The Reader’s Encyclopedia (Benét) I found:

Aelfric, called Grammaticus, or ‘the Grammarian’ (c. 955-c. 1020). English clergyman and scholar, a prolific writer in both Latin and Old English…. Concerned with the revival of learning, he wrote a Latin grammar and Latin-English glossary.

Surely, this man could not have mistranslated Radix malorum est cupiditas as ‘Money is the root of all evil’! He might have translated it “Cupidity is …,”“Avarice is…,” or even “The love of money is …,” but never “Money is …”! The Old English word for cupiditas is gitsung ‘avarice, greed,’ a word not easily confused with feoh ‘cattle; property; money.’ Having no copy of Aelfric’s Homilies available to me, I am unable to see exactly what this cleric and grammarian wrote c. 1000, but I will lay you dollars to doughnuts (low colloq., ca. 1920, Partridge) that “the Grammarian” is not the source of the misquote qua proverb, “Money is the root of all evil.”

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

[As far as the English quotation is concerned, one would expect it to be traceable to the Tyndale or King James Version, not scripture of “a date nearly a millennium earlier.”—Editor]

VERBUM SAP: To Verb or Not to Verb

Robertson Cochrane, Toronto

Language, like water, tends to seek the path of least resistance—not, I think, because tongues are naturally indolent, but because their owners are instinctively efficient. Nowhere in English is this human impulse to simplify and streamline more evident than in the formation of verbs.

One of the oldest, tidiest and least ambiguous methods of verbification is to take a noun and put it to work, either by adding a prefix or suffix as in simplify in the paragraph above, or by merely activating an unadorned and unaffixed substantive, as in streamline. When the Anglo-Saxons wanted a word to express the activity of traveling in a ship powered by wind in sails, they saved themselves a lot of breath by forming the verb sail. When they wanted to moor the ship, they dropped a heavy object attached to a line, and they termed this anchoring, because the object was called an anchor (rather ankor, anker, or ancre), When it was time to return to terra firma, they chose a short, appropriate noun to describe that action, to land.

Through the easy and logical expedient of converting nouns to verbs, our linguistic forebears established a tradition that has continued through every age. Probably somewhere in the English-speaking world, a noun was verbified yesterday. And undoubtedly today it is being greeted with gasps and sputters of incoherent outrage.

Why is such a time-tested device viewed with such utter revulsion? In an article in the September 1978 VERBATIM [V,2], Prof. Noel Perrin explained the technical reasons behind the verbification of other parts of speech—why, for example, we breafkast and lunch, but do not dinner. He did not, alas, illuminate the inexplicable horror with which modern English speakers regard this venerable practice.

What brought the phenomenon to mind was the recent publication of a new BBC Style Guide for News and Current Affairs Programmes. It was written, or at least endorsed, by Tony Hall, Managing Director of Current Affairs, and is for the most part a reasonable exposition on the need for plain English. But in a chapter entitled—make that titled— “Americanisms,” the manual betrays both an unseemly nationalistic bias and an ignorance of the history of its own language.

While admitting that some Americanisms, such as teenager, babysitter, know-how, gimmick, stunt, commuter, and blurb “add vigour and dynamic expression to the language,” the book draws the line at diaper, drug-store, and sidewalk (for which the English have the patently superior nappy, chemist’s and pavement), and at “the American habit of turning nouns into verbs (to hospitalise)” [sic].

Mr. Hall may be pleased to know that the OED does not list “hospitalise.” On the other hand, he may be surprised to learn that it does contain “hospitalize,” a verb with no stigmatizing labels like “orig. U.S. slang” or “U.S. colloq.” In fact, all six illustrative citations, dating from 1901, are from British sources.

As is usual with such quasi-official language arbiters, the BBC guide falls into the deadly snare of inconsistency. Tut-tutting the fixation of “newspaper sub-editors” on short words like probe and row because they fit in headlines, it adds, somewhat pompously: “These words usually hype the story, and that is never our job.”

Hype? Egad, sir! This one is labeled by Oxford as “U.S. slang.” What is more, it is probably a verbified short-form of hypodermic (needle) or hyperbole, both of which are nouns! The next thing we shall hear is that Mr. Hall and his colleagues use such noun-verb abominations as film, record, tape, schedule, plan, program(me), screen, air, monitor, and view.

This erratic neophobia is by no means restricted to those blessed and sometimes smug beneficiaries of Received Standard English. Benjamin Franklin, a Yankee, returned home after nine years in France to find an infestation of nefarious noun-verb weeds, including advocate, notice, progress, and oppose. In a 1789 letter to Noah Webster, he pleaded: “If you should happen to be of my opinion with respect to these inventions, you will use your authority in reprobating them.”

Harper’s magazine in 1955 rebuked a government official for using re-think, and another publication pilloried the “monstrous” verb unfreeze in 1933. In 1859, the Edinburgh Review excoriated “another party, who are [sic] striving to debase the language by introducing the verb ‘to wire’ instead of the word hitherto used, ‘to telegraph.’ ” That writer’s puritanical heirs today rail against the verb fax, even though they likely think nothing of cabling, telexing, or the dialing and ringing involved in telephoning.

Certainly, some verbifications sound sappy. I admit I did a double-take when I read that a New Jersey Nets basketball player, accused of rape, said his involvement with the woman never got beyond “conversating.” Oxford would probably call that “an ignorant back-formation,” as it does the useful and unambiguous enthuse. But Oxford provides no reliable guidance in the whole matter. It labels the well-established verb contact, meaning to figuratively get in touch with a person, as “U.S. Colloq.,” even though it has citations going back to 1927. The much newer (1962) transitive verb access, as of a data base, bears no such oblique opprobrium in Oxford, even though it induces epidemic apoplexy among the self-appointed sentinels of linguistic correctness.

What are the criteria? William Safire took a futile stab in 1980, opining that “when the purpose of turning a thing into an act is trendy brevity, or chicspeak [!], the practice is bad style.” He mentioned to host, to enthuse, to critique, and to author among these “affectations.” But what has intent to do with it, even assuming you can accurately impute motive? I argue that all four of Safire’s examples, no matter how vile the coiner’s design, serve useful purposes. Certainly, to critique fills a gap left by the pejoration of criticize, and in any event is not new, having appeared in 1751.

Safire’s prissy and presumptuous subjectivity is exemplified by the experts in the public relations department of Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Each year since 1976, they have published a “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use or General Uselessness,” and each year news media across the continent gleefully and unthinkingly report their edicts—which this year included the fairly innocuous verbs skyrocket and spearhead. These may be overused, and they are certainly noun-verbs; but they most decidedly are not “non-verbs,” as the LSSU P.R. pundits declared.

So one knee-jerk reaction begets another, and our peculiar penchant for verbal infanticide—or infantile verbicide—continues. It is probably bootless to beseech that the noun-verb nay-sayers withhold snap judgments at least until a new, verb’s utility has been duly usaged.

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. A tomboy had no end of trouble with the Doctor, this caused a mighty upheaval. (4, 4)

5. Poor sad emu is cheered up. (6)

9. Plays a backward role to the composer, to a fine degree. (8)

10. Go wrong at a mistakes list. (6)

12. Scandinavian, now in gear, and on the move. (9)

13. Get these cards for the future. (5)

14. Scratch the face and do this for life. (4)

16. C.I.A. lost, broke up and were resigned! (7)

19. The more the merrier for this proposition. (7)

21. Step out of line and become a nuisance. (4)

24. Singers heard in the final Toscanini concert. (5)

25. Frightened, like Lot’s wife. (9)

27. Mongoloid scale? (6)

28. Fillers for the car. (8)

29. This cover sounds like a bit of toast. (6)

30. Squashed metal, or one of the Old Time press agents. (8)

Down

1. Very much a white man. (6)

2. Outsize vehicles, much Sought after in Hollywood. (6)

3. Make a note of Papal letter. (5)

4. Pass out in the heathland, and be more changeable in mind. (7)

6. Races of distant runners. (9)

7. Faulty stone, popular in Ireland. (8)

8. To lead is to suffer a heart throb. (8)

11. Responsibility shared between you and me. (4)

15. He’s a wizard with suits. (9)

17. It’s the main thing that separates these Crosswords. (8)

18. I hear the heart of Heavy Hydrogen is because of little Ronald. (8)

20. Worry about the poem! (4)

21. Drop under the hole, that’s the drawback. (7)

22. Repaid back the baby’s underwear. (6)

23. U.S. inventor not clearly seen side-on. (6)

26. Food for a computer. (5)

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Due to the fact that the patient is an extremist and is responding poorly to fluids, the patient will be taken immediately to the operating room, where exploratory laparotomy will be done.” [From a July 1986 hospital chart review. Submitted by John Williams M.D., pathologist.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Every minute was more exciting than the next.” [From an on-camera interview with Linda Evans, commenting on “Night of 100 Stars” party in New York to promote “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous.”]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“In keeping with Hershey’s commitment to excellent products, please call us if this product does not meet your expectations….” [From the text on a pint container of Hershey’s Chocolate Milk.]

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