VOL XXI, No 3 [Winter, 1995]
Wot’s de rite spellin', den?
Nigel J. Ross, The City of Milan School for Interpreters and Translators
It does not require much effort to read the title question as “What’s the right spelling, then?” though none of the words is spelled conventionally. English has a wealth of modified spellings ranging from wot and rite, comin' and ‘ad, yuh and gonna, snax and pleez, to thru and Xpelair. And although they may cause few problems for native English speakers, they can baffle foreigners. Where do we usually find these nonstandard forms? What purpose do they serve? When are they right and when are they wrong? Why do we usually read them so easily? There are many questions to be answered, so, ‘ow ‘bout takin’ a kwik look a’ sum o’ de main kindsa nonstand’d spellin'?
From the sheer numerical point of view, there can be no doubt that literature provides us with most examples of modified spellings, the vast majority in fact being found in dialogues in novels. Authors usually want to give readers an idea of not just what a character says, but also how he says it. In other words, they want to indicate how a character’s speech is delivered and how it may reflect social, cultural, or geographical deviations from standard forms. The author’s purpose is to give a more realistic presentation of speech, to provide a more vivid picture for readers.
Alongside other features such as nonstandard vocabulary (regional forms, slang, etc.), nonstandard grammar (we was, he don’t) and graphological features (imPORtant, im-per-fec-tion), modified spelling is an essential ingredient in many novels. The use of such modified spelling in literature is generally referred to as ‘eye dialect’ (see definitions in the Random House Unabridged and the Oxford Companion to the English Language). An author may omit letters, perhaps to show clipped gerund forms (singin', goin', whistlin'), to indicate dropped hs (‘ello, ‘adn’t, ‘ome), or lost final ds (husban’, tol’). Extra letters are sometimes added (hexpect, burg-u-lar, shuttup). Letters can be changed to mimic pronunciation, for example d may replace th (dat, dese, dem) or a may substitute a final ow (fella, sparra, tomorra). Sometimes words may be elided into forms such as kinda, twer, wodja, gonna, tellem, owsya. The possibilities are more or less limitless. Here is a fairly fertile example:
We done jest that. I cleant dat lantun and me and her sot de balance of de night on top o dat knoll back de graveyard. En ef I’d knowed of aihy one higher, we’d a been on hit instead.
[William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury]
Opportunities to modify spelling may be more or less limitless, but they may also be rather dangerous. If an author tries to make a fairly accurate transcript of, say, a regional accent by using a good deal of eye dialect, the printed version may end up with almost every word being altered. At this point, readers will be faced with a barrage of unusual letter combinations, a complex code that needs to be unraveled. The consequences may be disastrous, with readers forced to concentrate more on deciphering the words than considering their meaning, losing the thread of events. For many readers, certain sections of Wuthering Heights have always been an irritating puzzle:
“Aw sud more likker look for th’ horse,” he replied. “It’d be tuh more sense. Bud, aw can look for norther horse, nur man uf a neeght loike this as black as t' chimbley! und Hathecliff’s noan t' chap tuh coom ut maw whistle—happen he’ll be less had uh hearing wi' ye.”
[Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights]
To bring some order to this possible chaos, a set of unwritten rules has emerged for the use of modified spelling in direct speech in novels. The most important rule of thumb is to avoid overburdening readers with anything like a close transcript of what might actually have been said. Since readers are already using their imagination when reading a novel, a good writer must simply encourage them to imagine what a character’s speech may actually sound like by providing them with a smattering of eye-dialect “markers.” In other words, just a handful of well-chosen modified spellings indicating that a character’s speech is nonstandard should be enough to convince readers of the mock speech reality the author is trying to create.
Most authors therefore limit nonstandard forms to small sections of direct speech, and only rarely are major characters given much nonstandard dialogue. A sprinkling of dropped hs or modified conjunctions is often quite enough. Indeed there are certain common lexical items that are regularly subjected to this treatment, and readers have probably already seen them elsewhere or quickly become accustomed to them. This group includes conjunctions (an', ‘n’, ‘cos), prepositions (o’, ‘bout, b’tween), common verb forms (‘ave, spok’n, woz, wuz) and pronouns as shown in the table on the next page.
Other common lexical items that are often altered include elided verb forms (wanna, canna, dunno) and question words linked to verbs (wodya, owja). A pattern emerges here: the words that are written with nonstandard spellings are generally short words which carry little essential meaning and which are repeated often enough for readers to become familiar with them. They remind readers of a character’s way of speaking without distracting from what is actually being said.
When an author wishes to indicate a geographical or regional variety, a few key markers are again usually quite enough. The use of v instead of f (It’s a vine day) is almost enough on its own to indicate a speaker from southwest England; repeated t in place of the (It’s in t’ house) suggests a Yorkshire dialect; the use of e instead of a indicates a South African speaker (Shell I give you e hend); a long drawn-out aw rather than a shorter o suggests a southern US speaker (He’s gawn fishin’ with his dawg). Foreign speakers of English can quickly be identified with one or two key sounds: a v for a w suggests a German, a z for a th pin-points a French speaker. Likewise when English-based pidgins and creoles are written down, the phonetic transcriptions use a similar system of modified spellings to indicate pronunciation. Examples abound in the writings of authors from the Caribbean, West Africa, Oceania, and so on. We come across dialogue extracts such as:
“E better so. No be for umbrella we de roast for sun since waka come here dis morning.”
[Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah]
Most of the conventions established for representing nonstandard forms of English are applied to English-based pidgins and creoles when used in literature.
Writers can also use eye dialect to indicate social class or level of education. A common practice in novels is to show the speech of the lower classes or poorly educated with dropped hs and other truncated forms. A further device used to indicate a lack of education is incorrect spelling—what we could term “pointless spelling changes.” When an author writes what as wot, no indication of pronunciation is being given; the same is true for a number of other words (woz, skool, gon, sez, sed, ‘our, rite). In such cases the writer is using a phonetic spelling that reminds us of the incorrect attempts made by children or the uneducated at spelling these words.
But ‘wot’ as a modified spelling of ‘what’ is not restricted to novels. It regularly crops up in graffiti, in press advertising, in humorous publications, in signs. Its wrongness immediately attracts people’s attention and, at least as far as graffiti is concerned, it helps to set up a kind of anti-establishment bond. The proverbial writing on the school wall is “Down with skool!” When such spellings are used in signs and advertising for their eye-catching value, they are usually referred to as “sensational spellings.” A classic example is the much-quoted slogan “Beanz Meanz Heinz,” used in Britain. Advertisements along the roadside sometimes use sensational spelling to an extreme degree, especially in the US. The following table has some typical examples:
For similar reasons, trade names often employ modified spellings, particularly when two or more words are put together to make a brand name. Some examples are Accurist, Dabitoff, Dunlopillo, Kleenex, Kwiksave, Loctite, PlakOut, Playskool, Trufit, Westclox, Windolene, Xpelair.
In a few cases, a modified spelling can move into an everyday (standard?) area of usage. Though is frequently seen as tho, and through as thru in thru- way—the official spelling for many US state roads.
High spelled as hi is frequently found in compounds such as hijack and hi-fi. Swop, the misspelled form of swap has become so widely used that it is now accepted as a standard variant by most dictionaries. Similarly, few people—except perhaps some pedants—nowadays frown on certain alternative spellings, many of which has come about through misspellings. Some common examples are given in the following table:
Of course, some language purists object to all forms of modified spelling outside dialogues in novels. Leaving aside unintentional errors, spelling some people claim that in Dickens’ wot is acceptable, while almost everywhere else it is wrong. Such distinctions are hard to substantiate and deny the fact that alternative spellings can serve the purpose of being eye-catching or distinctive, or even creating a social tie. A comparison with some other languages, particularly languages with a largely phonetic spelling system—(German, Italian, Spanish)— shows that this range of nonstandard spellings is an added bonus that our quirky English spelling system has given to the language. It is often impossible for translators, for example, to transfer the implications and undercurrents suggested by modified English spellings into another language. The multiplicity of English spelling can therefore provide readers with a rich source of extra information that should clearly be looked on as a positive, enriching feature of the language. In the right place, a “wrong” spelling is often just the “rite” thing!
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“As I travelled the province, I found a bureaucratic quagmire stewing in the ugly built-in racism that is an echo of Canada’s colonial past.” [From a report by Barbara McLintock in The Province (Vancouver, B.C.), 13 May 1994. Submitted by J. A. McCormick, Port McNeill, B.C.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“…next I add these ingredients to the margarine. I don’t like to use those artificial things—I use real margarine.” [From a cooking segment on the Today Show, WDAF, F-19 February 1994. Submitted by Dr. Dorothy Branson, Kansas City, Missouri]
Expressions for Sexual Harassment: a Semantic Hole
Sol Saporta, University of Washington
At least as far as the media are concerned, sexual harassment, as well as related issues, like pornography, have now replaced both legalized abortion and equal opportunity as the central issues of the sexual politics of the ’90s, with the obvious political and legal ramifications.
It may be of interest, then, to consider the language in which this debate is normally carried out, an examination of which, I propose, will reveal something of the assumptions and limitations governing virtually all discussions of the issue.
Let me make my own ideological position explicit. Although routinely denied, it is not always clear whether what is being condemned is sexual harassment, or just sex. Or, put differently, one’s views of sexual harassment are inevitably intertwined with one’s views of “healthy sexuality,” and, as others have pointed out1, the current debate has been framed by the largely puritanical segment of the women’s movement.
Indeed, I would maintain that the language of sexual harassment reflects this ideological bias. To start, consider the expression to make sexual advances. Clearly the term has a formal (and legalistic) connotation which is hardly neutral. Although someone might reasonably characterize one’s own behavior as “flirting,” for example, it is unlikely that a person would report “making sexual advances,” except facetiously. The term usually appears expanded in one of two ways: univited sexual advances and unwanted or unwelcome sexual advances. The distinction is significant. What is an “invited sexual advance?”2 If A invites B to make a sexual advance, then A has made an “uninvited sexual advance”: any initial step is ‘uninvited’ by definition. To construe uninvited sexual advances as a form of sexual harassment is to condemn all sexual advances.
Unwanted sexual advances are rather different. Whereas uninvited sexual advances can be identified by both parties before they occur, unwanted sexual advances are presumably identifiable by one party only after they occur, i.e., when they have been rejected. The party receiving the sexual advance may know in advance that it is not wanted, but not the party making the sexual advance. Indeed, it seems likely that the behavior in question is more likely to be characterized as a “sexual advance” if it is rejected. One does not usually respond favorably to a sexual advance. Furthermore, invitations that are clearly nonsexual are rarely referred to as advances at all. To make advances means to make sexual advances. The word advances is itself emotionally charged.
But, to repeat, the people engaged in the behavior referred to rarely use such terms at all. So what terms do they use?
Well, to court or to woo someone sounds absolutely Victorian, whereas to seduce someone sounds morally reprehensible. Expressions like to come on to someone or to hit on someone, or to make a pass, being largely informal, seem to have a frivolous, or sometimes even a threatening connotation. Young people will sometimes talk of working (on) someone, which sounds exploitative. Even flirting implies a cavalier attitude which may be innocuous, but which also may connote a lack of sincerity.
I have been intentionally vague regarding the grammatical subject and object of these verbs. First, it is clear that heterosexuality is assumed, unless there is some evidence to the contrary. Furthermore, women do not normally court men, and although both men and women may flirt or seduce, a sentence like My neighbor hit on my friend out of context will typically be understood to refer to a male neighbor and a female friend, and not vice-versa.
There is a whole range of behaviors which are sexually ambiguous to a certain extent, almost by definition, a fact which is reflected in expressions like to ask for a date or to express an interest in someone, where the sexual interest is tacit, but not explict. Similarly, expressions like to (try to) connect with or to (try to) get next to someone may or may not express sexual intent
So, unless I have missed a range of expressions, the conclusion one can draw from the above is that the language we use to describe the initial attempts to establish sexual relations is either puritanical, or hostile, or frivolous, or ambiguous, hardly the range one would expect in an open, sexually healthy, egalitarian society. The “semantic hole” is itself a symptom of the disease.3
Language at Bay
Richard L. Champlin, Jamestown, Rhode Island
Much of Rhode Island fronts on Narragansett Bay, hence is called the Ocean State. Moreover, her language reflects this association in subtle ways. Take, for instance, the Rhode Islander who pointed to a sparrow hawk (birders prefer to call it a kestrel) and, perhaps being mindful the early colony’s questionable custom of profitable privateering, called it a privateer hawk. Would that be understood in Nebraska? Maybe not, but any Rhode Islander aware of his state’s predacious history would get the idea.
Block Island, awash in Rhode Island Sound, shares with Maine the term for double-ended vessels large or small. The wooden, lap-straked boats go by the name of peapods. Graphic to say the least, since their hulls were not only so shaped but were often painted green. Block Islanders, furthermore, have tossed their share of nautical expressions into the stream of Rhode Island consciousness, as when Harry Allen, ancient seafarer, reported on his visit to the doctor. Was Harry given a clean bill of health? “Clean as a quill,” came the reply. Again, when asked how his wife, who had been bound over to a nursing home, was faring, he lamented, “She’s been draggin' a fin.”
Narragansett folk might not have invented the term shift wedding, but they practiced the custom. When a widow, bereft of her husband, and deep in his debts, sought to marry anew, she must first slough off his obligations. To do this, she had first to appear at midnight before the justice of the peace clad scantily in nothing but a shift (a negligee). Next, if she lived in Washington County, she must proceed to Shift Corner, site of shift weddings, where three towns come together, and there step through all three towns to satisfy their inhabitants that she owned nothing but the shirt on her back. Then and only then was her new wooer free to marry this second-hand wife sans debts. Very convenient for a widow who had lost her first love at sea.
Everyone knows black flies, the pestilence of May taking away the pleasures of the merry month, because, as the fellow said with merry understatement, when black flies bite, they do attract your attention. But probably only in seagirt states do the insects go by the name buckeye flies. The explanation? The anadromous herring return each spring and course up the streams to spawn, streams such as Buckeye Brook in Charlestown. Herring? Yes, but locally called buckeyes, and their return coincides with the appearance of the unwelcome flies. But if you pronounced buckeye as they do in the Buckeye State, referring to the tree, you would be wrong: in Rhode Island this would be pronounced, as it was in England and Scotland in days of yore, “BUCKee.” Chaucer, after all, probably pronounced eye “ee” to rhyme with sea, as in “the smalle foules… slepen all the night with open ee.” That pronunciation has persisted here.
Pilots of the ferries on Narragansett Bay, like all mariners, had ideal opportunities to observe meteorological events such as sea turns and waterspouts. Captain Arthur Knowles and his First Mate Harold Sherman used a neat expression for the sky when a cool northwesterly breeze swept over the bay clearing out every vestige of cloud except those low to the southeast, where the warm water of the Gulf Stream condensed as a ragged range of billowy clouds. These the ferrymen called the lee set.
The euphonious word skilligalee came ashore in Narragansett bay as an alternative name for the marlin. Webster’s New International, however, defines skilligalee as a “worthless coin,” while the form skillagalee is defined as a “thin broth.” Any connection here?
Picture small boats on the bay, each manned by one fisherman tonging for quahogs (pronounced “KOEhogs”). The tongs consist of two long poles with rakes affixed and crossed at the nether end, rakes many-toothed, curved and facing each other so as to clench the catch of hard-shelled clams. The fishermen toil at this job, working the poles in and out, in and out, endlessly. It is muscle-building toil, this opening and closing of the poles, and it has earned for the tongs the name East Greenwich accordions. The only music they produce is the whistle of the tongers on the way to the bank.
To me the choicest of these maritime terms I have heard only once, but I was not a little pleased to hear it. Emory Bennett had been to a political convention at Warwick. He described the Governor Francis Farm where it took place, an idyllic farm on land gradually sloping to the bay and margined with what most of us would call a salt marsh. He called it a sea pasture, a term absent as such from the dictionaries. It brought to minds a phrase from Milton “seaweed their pasture” (Paradise Lost, vii, 404), except that Emory meant the wide expanse of tidal grass just up from the beach and inundated twice daily. This grass, incidentally, was called thatch locally, suggesting an early colonial use for it. Furthermore, it enhanced the term to hear Emory pronounce pasture “PASTOR.”
Let it not be said, then, that the smallest state has not contributed to the richness of the mother tongue.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“The Southeastern Georgia Alzheimer’s Chapter presents a dinner cabaret, ‘A Night to Remember’…” [Submitted by M. Cornog and T. Perper, Philadelphia]
On Beyond Zebra, or, the No-Longer-Roman Alphabet
Nyr Indictor, Chappaqua, New York
We speak of our twenty-six letter alphabet as the “Roman” alphabet, even though the Romans generally used nineteen of these letters. The letters I, U and W were created much later, while the letters K, X, Y, Z were used primarily in transcribing Greek words. These days the Roman alphabet is used for writing most of the world’s 3000-odd languages, and it is no longer really Roman any more. Take Hawaiian, for instance:
A a O o K ke N nu
E e U u L la P pi
I i H he M mu W we
' okina
Not only are such important letters as B, C, D, S, and T missing, even the order of the letters has been changed! And what is the apostrophe doing at the end? (It symbolizes a glottal stop.)
Other languages pepper their letters with diacritics. The Hungarian alphabet, even though it omits the letters q, w, x, and y, still boasts a whopping thirty-seven members: A, A, B, C, CS, D, E, É, F, G, GY, H, I, J, K, L, LY, M, N, NY, O, Ó, Ö, \?\, P, R, S, SZ, T, TY, U, Ú, Ü, \?\, V, Z, ZS. Pity the poor typographer who has to keep the four kinds of o and u straight! The phenomenon of digraphs (letter pairs) functioning as single letters is not uncommon; Spanish dictionaries routinely list Ch, Ll, and sometimes Rr as separate letters. Even English address books sometimes treat Mc as a separate letter, although that is a specialized instance.
Some of the weirdest additions to the no-longer-Roman alphabet are in languages that were first transcribed in the twentieth century. Zhuang, a Tai language spoken in Southern China, defies typographers by employing letters resembling the numbers 2 through 6 to indicate syllabic tone: \symbol\. Several languages of Southern Africa employ familiar non-alphabetic symbols, like ! and # to indicate the unusual click sounds. Also in Africa we find the curly-tailed \?\ and \?\ to indicate ingressive sounds.
Surprisingly, even the English language requires more than twenty-six letters to write. A glance at the Oxford English Dictionary reveals many archaic words written with the letters æ (ash), ð (eth), \?\ þ(thorn), \?\ (wynn), and \?\ (yogh). Ash is a ligature of A and E; there are many other ligatures, like fi and fl, that are not considered letters in their own right. Eth and yogh are graphic variants of d and g respectively. Thorn and wynn are borrowings from the Runic alphabet, once widely used in England and Scandinavia.
In general, new additions to the alphabet fall into the following categories: 1. letters with diacritics (ä, é), 2. modified letters (\?\, \?\), 3. ligatures (œ, æ, β, &), 4. digraphs (ch, sz), 5. numbers and modified numbers, 6. punctuation marks and other non-alphabetic characters (!, #, ‘), 7. letters from non-Roman alphabets (þ, \?\). It is surprisingly hard to think up any letters that do not come from these easily identified sources. One possible exception is the new name adopted by the popular singer formerly known as Prince. He has changed his name to \?\, a character of unspecified phonetic value, that (if I may be permitted to hazard a conjecture about this decidedly nonlinguistic symbol) seems to be a cross between the female sign \?\, the male sign \?\, and the Egyptian ankh sign \?\. Thanks to the magic of wordprocessors and do-it-yourself fonts, the typographers of many popular magazines have gamely incorporated this new word into their repertoire, sometimes in the possessive form “\?\’s.”
Mountain Talk
Raymond M. Kelly, Chester-le-Street, Durham
Since its inception in the early 19th century, mountaineering and climbing have evolved their own special language. A ‘way up a mountain or cliff’ is known as a route. Certain routes which are not necessarily the highest, longest or highest ones in the area are known as classics.
A pitch is ‘one rope’s length of a route,’ while the most difficult part is called the crux. There is always a belay or anchor point at the ends of each pitch. Utilizing one of these or using the rope to safeguard another climber is belaying. A psychological belay is one that would not support a falling climber. Loops of rope or tape, called slings, fitted with karabiners or krabs ‘metal snaplinks,’ are used for running belays or runners. These are placed on the rock face during the ascent and used to prevent the leader from falling too far. Slings can be slipped over points of rock, attached to pitons ‘metal spikes’ or chocked ‘fitted into cracks with shaped pieces of metal.’ These pieces are called chocks (small pebbles were originally used for this purpose) or nuts (the earliest metal chocks being nuts with the screwthreads drilled out). A ‘small chock on a thin wire sling’ is a baby on a wire. Pitons have various names, such as pegs, spikes, leepers, rurps, or bong-bongs. The leader carries this equipment on a set of krabs known as a rack.
Different ropes have names. The ‘climbing rope’ is the active or live rope. Coming from the rear of a climber’s harness it is a back rope; fixed at chest level to give the climber a rest it is a cow’s tail.
Faults in the face provide the means for climbing it. The easiest and safest method of ascending is to chimney up a chimney, a wide crack that is climbed in the fashion of a chimney sweep. Alternative names for this maneuver are bridging or foot and backing. Piles of stones (cairns or stonemen) are built on peaks and along cols (a saddle or pass). A ‘sharp rock ridge’ is an arete, sometimes only passable by going a chaval [à cheval], that is, ‘sitting astride the top as on a horse.’ A crack with one protruding edge can be laybacked ‘climbed by pushing with the feet while pulling with the hands.’ A prominent ledge is a mantelshelf which is mantelshelfd ‘climbed as if going onto a fireplace mantelshelf.’
Routes are graded in terms of height, difficulty, and exposure, the vertical distance below the climber. The grades are easy, moderate, difficult, very difficult or v. diff, severe, very severe or VS, hard very severe or HVS, extremely severe or ES, and exceptionally severe or XS. Holds range from friction through thin to jug handles. A large hold at the end of a hard pitch is often called a thank-God hold. A very small hold that depends on the friction between the climber’s boot and the rock is a smear. When the climber uses the inside edge of his boot on a very narrow hold, he is edging.
Over the years climbers have developed a system of calls. Tight rope means ‘take in any slack rope,’ while slake [‘slack’] means ‘let out a little more rope.’ The leader shouts “Taking in” when he reaches the top of a pitch and begins gathering in the slack. When the rope goes taut, the second answers “That’s me”; the leader will then belay and instruct the second “Climb when you’re ready”; the second says “Climbing,” and the leader acknowledges, “Aye, aye.”
Someone who is ‘taking risks’ is feeling brave, and when he falls, he is peeling. Any climber who comes to a stop through ‘lack of energy’ is bonked out. If this is caused by a ‘lack of food,’ he is suffering from hunger knock. A climber who is feeling nervous is being gripped.
Helmets which are now worn by almost every climber are dubbed bone-domes.
EPISTOLA {George C. Steyskal}
Brian Davis’s letter in VERBATIM [XX,4] was very interesting and dealt with a sad and serious situation in present-day use of the English language, viz., tautological modes of expression. But I do not agree with the statement in his first paragraph that one cannot enclosed an item anywhere but “herewith.” His solicitor could well have stated, “We have pleasure in enclosing—with a statement that we are mailing separately.” A field may also be enclosed in a barbed-wire fence and not in any way “herewith.”
I also take exception to considering “They gave us a number of donations” as tautological. The phrase a number of is one of several that are commonly used, at least in American English, with reference to indefinite numbers, each of which has a slightly different significance: a few, several, a great many, numerous, etc.
[George C. Steyskal, Gainesville, Florida]
[There is no dispute about the second point. With regard to the first, it must be noted that without specifying where an item is enclosed, it would usually be construed as accompanying the message, hence I should agree that enclosed herewith is redundant. As for fence enclosures, that is another sense of enclose.—Editor]
EPISTOLA {Thomas Barbour}
Regarding Brian Davis’s EPISTOLA [XX,4] and his list of tautologies, I believe that enclosed herewith is but a borderline example if one at all. My understanding is that when a check, for example, is placed within the fold of its cover letter, it is properly referred to as being enclosed—or enclosed herein. If an enclosure is not within the letter but separate from it in the same envelope, it is enclosed herewith.
Anyone with half an eye will be able to find as enclosure, whether it is in or with the covering letter; but it is my belief that, while adequate English can be readily understood, good English precludes, if possible, any misunderstanding.
[Thomas Barbour, New York City]
[We would not dare to disagree, but the distinction between enclosed [herein] and enclosed herewith seems a finicky needle’s-eye of pedantry, and it smacks of “reconstruction” of something that was never structured to begin with. Besides, the great difficulty encountered in finding checks occurs when they were not enclosed to begin with (or arrive unsigned).—Editor]
EPISTOLA {Malcolm Penny}
As usual, the latest issue of VERBATIM is stimulating to the point of making one laugh or grunt aloud, alarming fellow-passengers on the Sheringham train.
I think you are unfair to mock Carver about his derivation of raccoon. A raccoon scrabbling on the bottom of a stream is not, as you put it, “unnatural.” Away from the suburbs, shallow water is its natural feeding place, and “crabs and other tidbits” (why do we call them “titbits” over here?), which it finds by touch, are its natural food. The scientific name for the raccoon, Procyon lotor the ‘doglike washer,’ describes this behavior. The Algonquins had it right.
I write about natural history for a living. One book in particular resides on my desk as a regular source of inspiration: Edmund C. Jaeger’s Source Book of Biological Names and Terms, first published in 1944 by Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, Illinois. I have the revised third edition, 1959. Many animals were—and are—wonderfully well-named by taxonomists, following in Linnaeus’ footsteps: this book is the key to their wisdom, and often their humor. It brings scientific names to life.
Consider those who would give the gentle and intelligent killer whale a less pejorative name. They went to its binomial Orcinus orca (Linnaeus 1758) to find a softer synonym and chose “Orca.” Had they consulted Jaeger, they would have found that Orcinus is the adjectival form of Orcus; the Latin name for Hades. Although orca can mean a ‘dice box’ (or a ‘little barrel’), it also means a ‘kind of whale, the great killer,’ perhaps derived from Orcus. Surely it was in this sense that Linnaeus used it. Orca functions as a euphemism only because its true meaning is forgotten. More suitable would have been the name used by the Tlingit of northwest Alaska, who hold the animal in high esteem. They call it keet: not very euphonious, but friendly.
[Malcolm Penny, Dilham, Norfolk]
EPISTOLA {Alan Major}
I was interested in Ronald Verrall’s letter [XX,4] regarding hagas for haws, ‘berry/fruit of the hawthorn.’ If Mr. Verrall had crossed over the Sussex border into Kent, he might still hear a curious variant. In the Weald, haazes, the h dropped, is still used for haws. Occasionally, the close listener in autumn may also hear the pre-1939 generation call them harves. I am sixty-five, but when I was a boy living in the North Downland area south of Sittingbourne up to Maidstone, it was common to hear children calling haws arzey-garzeys, sometimes varied to azzy-gazzies. I haven’t heard this for many years and I fear when my generation has “crossed over” this description, like my generation, will be defunct.
[Alan Major, Canterbury]
EPISTOLA {Donald K. Henry}
The report below includes subscriptions in North and South America only.
In commenting on the report of the banning of a dictionary in Thailand [XX,4,20], you are reminded of the California teacher groups “who… campaigned to ban the Dictionary of American Slang…” Surely this is an injustice. All teachers' organizations here, most notably the American Federation of Teachers and the California Teachers Association, campaigned strenuously and successfully against the proposed ban, which was sought by assorted prurient-minded prudes and obscurantist political zealots only. (Although for the most part ignoramuses, these did know where to look for the naughty words.) Teachers have been made scapegoats for many social ills; it would be a service to acknowledge their occasional courage and virtue in opposing the flatheads of the world, rather than lumping them in with the fools.
[Donald K. Henry, Mill Valley, California]
EPISTOLA {Randy Alfred}
Some homosexual men may indeed use terms like divine, adorable, or mauve [XX,4,7 BIBLIOGRAPHIA], but that surely does not include all homosexual men. I, for one, can barely tell you which of the colors I dislike is mauve and which is fuchsia. I don’t like Garland or disco either. And never mind that it’s taken me almost 50 years to learn how to put a reasonable outfit together: I may be in danger of losing my gay accreditation.
My point, however, is serious. Sexual orientation does not confer taste, the lack of it, or a set of socially approved (or disapproved) styles or—more important—values. Your closing comment on the research suggesting homosexuality is gene-related seems well off the mark in this regard.
The entire drift of your article on sexism in language is that much sexual behavior is shaped by nature. Since the sexual orientation heterosexual is genetic, it stands to reason that the eternally recurring variant sexual orientation homosexual likewise has a genetic base.
Acknowledging that, however, frees no one from accepting responsibility for her or his behavior. Nor does the hypothesized genetic link explain the awesome variations within the different sexual orientations. Chromosomes do not exculpate the predators Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy, and they certainly cannot reductively account for the prose of Hemingway or Proust.
[Randy Alfred, San Francisco]
[My point about mauve was that it has no particular usage associations but that devine and adorable, among other words, are “associated with ways in which some women but probably no men (except those imitating women sarcastically, homosexuals, or interior decorators) express themselves.” I certainly did not say or suggest that all homosexuals or, indeed, all of any group of speakers use any particular word with any consistency. Being either homosexual or heterosexual, male or female, or fitting into any one of the myriad gradations between those extremes has nothing whatsoever to do with taste or values, and I did not imply that it does.
My closing comment referred to current research that attempts to show that homosexuality is gene-related, which I termed “fatalistic” because it would appear to relieve any individual of responsibility for his actions: as we learn from frequent press reports, defense attorneys are seeking exoneration for their clients on the grounds that although they committed the crime in question, it was circumstances—abuse when they were children is quite popular—that were responsible for their actions, and they should be let off.
I did not write anywhere that “much sexual behavior is shaped by nature.” I wrote: “one must be careful to distinguish between nature, in which we must recognize that there are differences between males and females, and bias, which ought not be tolerated.” I keep an open mind on the question of the genetic origins of heterosexuality and homosexuality. I regard efforts to stereotype or categorize people as futile as they are tedious.—Editor]
EPISTOLA {E.A. Livingston}
Re your recent OBITER DICTA [XXI,1], I’m sorry you did not delve further into the idea that the word black is on its way out. I hope not, though I have seen people of color, a far better descriptive term, being used more frequently. I do, however, pray fervently that the use of African-American would vanish completely. It is cumbersome and greatly misleading, and it sounds sycophantic. Whenever I hear a white person use that term I feel he is proudly intimating an obvious lack of prejudice. I draw an analogy between that and the time I heard my German landlady announce that she was going to a wedding between her niece and a “very nice Jewish boy,” suggesting strongly that “this German” harbored no prejudice towards Jews.
Whenever I see the term African-American, with its sixteen letters, in print twelve times in a single article, I wonder if the writer realizes how much space is wasting and how pedantic it all sounds.
Let me put a few cases, as the lawyer said to Pip, in Great Expectations: Suppose the following people came to the United States and became citizens:
a Moroccan Jew from Casablanca
a Rhodesian policeman
a Boer farmer from just outside Johannesburg
an Egyptian taxi-driver
Are they all African-Americans? The word is a hyphenated misnomer.
[E.A. Livingston, Glendale, New York]
[The problem lies in the fact that people lack a sense of history. Black, used by Americans, refers to Negroes; but (colonial) Britons have used it to refer to any dark-skinned people, particularly southeast Asians. People of color is an old facetious euphemism for Negroes: it is the plural of gentleman of color. Colored (man, woman, person, people, etc.) all seemed quite satisfactory and have been used by Negroes to refer to themselves. The picture is further confused by the term Cape coloured, South African English for a ‘person of racially mixed parentage.’ (But then, there was the old vaudeville (minstrel?) tune, My gal’s a high-born lady / She’s black but not too shady /…/ She ain’t colored—she was born that way… which would invoke great wrath today.) The problem with colored is that, taken literally, it can be used to refer to anyone who is not white. There is—or was—a US newspaper called The Afro-American, and there is a popular magazine called Ebony. As Mr. Livingston points out, African-American is—or can be—ambiguous and is a poor choice solely on that ground. The press in the US is virtually enjoined these days from identifying people by race in the text of articles, a practice that has extended to the banning of songs and spirituals like Ol' Black Joe. But that is got round either by showing a photograph or by making certain that we learn the subject’s name is Wong Fu, Takashimaya, Goldberg, O’Rourke, Nielsen, Gandhi, Rashid, Zbigniew, Molotov, etc., though one is less likely these days to be able to identify race, color, or ethnicity from certain names (like Livingston, for example). These are linguistic clues, and can be misleading: cf. Whoopi Goldberg. The problem lies not in the name but in the prejudices of bigots and in the perception of those who are discriminated against. Undeniably, there is prejudice against Negroes in many Western societies, and, as long as that prejudice exists, it will attach to the name of those against whom the prejudice is felt or practiced. Thus, we can be confident that as time passes, the term African-American will be exchanged for something else: perhaps Negro will again become the politically correct term. Other words, like darky, are taboo, leading to a change in the lyrics of Jerome Kern’s Ol' Man Ribber (now probably “Old Man River”).
Racial and religious slurs and epithets abound; sometimes those who use them are not even aware that they are offensive (like the term Hebrew for a Jew). Older dictionaries labeled the term Jewess as offensive, but I have heard Jewish women refer to themselves using the word, evidently oblivious to what lexicographers identified as insulting.
I quite agree that African-American is both cumbersome and undescriptive; I am also aware that many blacks do not use the term: Jesse Jackson uses black, and the NAACP has retained Colored People in its name. Not the smallest part of the problem arises between those who seek the general acceptance of anonymity in which any identifying reference is eschewed and those who stridently voice their ethnicity and race.—Editor]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“ ‘Blessing of the Animals’…Pets of all denominations welcome.” [From an advertisement by The Basilica of Saint Mary, “Your Downtown Catholic Cathedral,” in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, 27 September 1992. Submitted by Dean Durken, Saint Paul]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“DRUG USE IN SPORTS ON RISE, SAYS WHO: Use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports is rising and more must be done to stop it, the World Health Organization said.” [From the San Bernardino Sun, 20 March 1993. Submitted by J.B. Lawrence, San Berardino]
ANTIPODEAN ENGLISH: Of Surf and Such
Bill Ramson, Canberra
There are several customary formulae applied to words whose histories remain unclear. “Of unknown origin” and “origin uncertain” are blank walls beyond which few can go. “Perhaps” indicates the lexicographer’s wish to be helpful or to solve a problem or not to be beaten; “probably” a slightly firmer resolve or, more dangerously, tidiness of mind. But the fact remains that some hundreds of words that have entries in a standard dictionary remain etymological mysteries. And some of these are our everyday companions, whose credentials we do not doubt and whose very ordinariness leads us to take them for granted.
Take surf, the ‘swell of the sea which breaks on the shore and slides back’ with Arnold’s “slow, forgiving roar.” Surf is first found in 1685, on the coast of India and, bearing a strong resemblance to suff, found 100 years earlier on the same coast and with much the same meaning, may be presumed to be a variant form of the same word; it may also be assumed to be of Indian origin. In fact, as late as 1840, crossing the surf can be described as “an expression equivalent to ‘entering or leaving India,’ as a person is never supposed to venture across this tremendous barrier of the Coromandel coast, unless on such momentous occasions.” But, from the middle of the 18th century, this sense had been supplemented by a more generalized but at the same time more precise sense of the ‘mass or line of white foamy water caused by the sea breaking upon a shore or a rock.’ Surf in Australian English, of course, has this general meaning but is used mostly of the sea, and particularly the surf, as a place of recreation. It is earliest recorded in 1908, in a couplet Arnold would have been proud to claim:
The Manly maidens shoot the surf,
Or bake their bingies on the shingly shore.
In this sense, and with a host of compounds amplifying and asserting the recreational possibilities, we tend to think of it as our own and as an important part of our social history. But it is as much a part of international English as it is of Australian, as the provenance of the range of compounds suggests. So, to take only a selection of the more common terms, surfbathing dates from 1884, surfboard from 1826, surfboat from 1856, surfriding from 1882, and surf-swimmer from 1845, all long before the first Australian enjoyment of the surf is recorded in the early years of this century. What is our own and what light do the terms collectively throw on our society? First, surf as a verb [1913] seems to be an abbreviation of the now obsolete surf-bathe [1906]. And surf-bathing was not always respectable. As a writer in the Sydney Truth observed in 1912, “I think respectable people may go surf-bathing and still remain respectable, but people who aren’t moral and respectable do not become so by shooting the breakers and airing their figures on the beach.” Or, in the terms of a dialogue reported in the same journal. “ ‘Oh, Auntie,’ said the child, ‘what’s surf-bathing?’ ‘Something the savages do on boards,’ replied the aunt vaguely.” The difficulty lay in the garments worn and the degree of exposure they allowed. As a local government ordinance put it in 1902:
All persons bathing in any waters exposed to view from any wharf, street, public place, or dwelling-house in the Municipal District of Manly, before the hour of 7.30 in the morning and after the hour of 8 o’clock in the evening, shall be attired in proper bathing costume covering the body from neck to the knee. Any person committing a breach of this Bylaw shall be liable to a penalty not exceeding one pound.
The existence of surf beaches within the environs of Sydney—at Bondi, Bronte, Coogee, and Tamarama in the south and Manly to the north—meant that the battle of the beaches was fought in Sydney, and, when respectability was obtained, that it was in the terms of an activity very much associated with Sydney, surf-life-saving. Surf club, glossed as ‘lifesaving club,’ is first found in 1913, Surf and LifeSaving Club in 1915. The surf carnival [1914] was initially as much a public-relations exercise as a competitive occasion, the iron man [19??] unheard-of.
The earliest term for a swimmer who preferred swimming in the surf to swimming in the baths at, for instance, Coogee was surf-bather [1906]. This was soon joined, and ultimately replaced by surfer [1913], and the earliest quotation for surfer, being part of an account of “a surfer’s companion,” a dainty article intended to hold bathing suit and wet towel in a water-proof case, suggests that there was a potential market amongst the fraternity (a writer in 1919 saying emphatically that “Surf-Bathing is dangerous for women”). The surfer’s companion, incidentally, was irrefutably Australian, being made of dingo skin! The contemporary surfie [1962] at least partially replaces surfer in its turn though it invokes the image of the “monosyllabic cretin” who speaks two words of English—yeah and man—streaks his hair with Clairol, and, worst of all, drinks milk. In other words, a Bondi surfie, dated as it now is, is for many still predominant.
Frequenting the surf entailed sun-baking [1910], without fear of the consequences, and shooting [1912] waves, with the ambition of “scraping your nose, after a shoot, on the sand of the beach itself,” or cracking a beacher [1949]. Refinements of both activities have been made over the years, as body-surfing [1956] is distinguished from board-surfing (or board-riding), though the latter use of board, first recorded by Captain Cook in 1779, cannot really be claimed as Australian.
VERBUM SAP: Par for the Coarse
Robertson Cochrane, Toronto, Canada
When my eye came a cropper on the word ornariness in a headline in the (Toronto) Globe and Mail, I was pretty sure it was either a misspelling or an editor’s plain orneriness. Nearly all current dictionaries bore out my first suspicion. They gave the root word as ornery, admitting no variants. The exception was the Oxford English Dictionary, which listed four obsolete variants, including ornary which, as it turns out, is the most etymologically logical. The adjective, which now means ‘contrary or obstinate,’ was originally just a lazy pronunciation of ordinary. That is also what it meant. The earliest recorded use is an 1816 quotation from the Maryland Historical magazine: “The land is old, completely worn out, the farming extremely ornary in general.” An 1849 citation mentions a “one-horned cow, mighty onnery-lookin'.” By the 1920s, the spelling had regularized to ornery, and the meaning had degenerated to ‘disagreeable’ or ‘cantankerous.’ This pejorative development was not extraordinary, because the word ordinary had itself taken on a debased sense. Among the definitions listed by Samuel Johnson in his 1755 dictionary were, “mean, of low rank, ugly, not handsome.”
It is probably a characteristic of humanity’s eternal upward struggle that good enough is never good enough, and neutral terms like ordinary, mediocre, average, so-so, run-of-the-mill, and indifferent tend to take on negative connotations. A classic, of course, is coarse. This word seems to have popped up in the early 15th century, as an adjectival form of course ‘ordinary order’ or ‘normal manner.’ For three centuries there was no spelling distinction between the two, but the noun was pronounced with a long “u” sound (COORSE). The earliest uses of the adjective referred to fabrics, to distinguish ordinary or run-of-the-mill cloth from finer weaves. But even before that century was out, the sense had depreciated to denote inferior—not just average—quality.
When the vowel sound in the noun changed from long “u” to the same sound as in coarse, a need was evidently felt to have a spelling distinction so as to tell the two apart in print. Isaak Walton is the earliest known to have used the modern spelling when, in The Compleat Angler, he wrote of “the worst or coarsest fresh water fish.” Coarse has undergone a thorough pejoration; once it began to be used for people, in the sense of ‘unrefined’ or ‘indelicate,’ full stigmatization was probably guaranteed. Now it passes as a synonym for indecent, obscene, or gross (three words that have also gone through some downward sense development).
Ornery is one of a clutch of bristly words with odd and often controversial etymologies. Johnson believed that ugly, which was sometimes spelled oughly, derived from ouph, a variant of elf. Modern experts are satisfied that it grew from Old Norse uggligr ‘to be feared or dreaded.’
Cantankerous is even more moot. Ernest Weekley speculated in 1921 that because the earliest written uses are in Goldsmith and Sheridan in the 18th century, it might have been Irish in origin. Earlier, J. C. Hotten’s Slang Dictionary suggested it might be a corruption of contentious. Most dictionaries today accept the theory that it arose from a Middle English word conteck ‘quarrelling’ or ‘contention.’ The agent-noun would have been contecker and the adjective conteckerous. The latter, according to the currently accepted theory, became contankerous, and then cantankerous, influenced by cankerous and rancorous.
It is well known that once-ordinary words for farmers or people of low birth became debased through class contempt—knave, villain, boor, and churl are only a few examples. Surely is one of the very few words to result from the same process, but in reverse. In the mid 14th century, it was sirly ‘like a sir,’ or ‘lordly, haughty, imperious, arrogant, supercilious.’ The modern sense of ill-humored or rudely morose dates from about the mid-17th century, but the “u” spelling had taken over about a hundred years earlier, perhaps, one fancies, as an act of revenge by the churls.
If surly is a product of class contempt backwards, obnoxious is a thoroughly democratic error; everybody got it wrong. The main word noxious is the harmful or injurious one. Obnoxious means, or rather meant, ‘exposed or liable to harm, vulnerable.’ This sense is clear in John Evelyn’s French Gardener (1658), which recommends covering certain plants with straw in winter, “to secure them from the frosts, to which they are obnoxious.” This meaning is obsolete, but it hung on until late in the last century, even though the current sense of ‘offensive or highly disagreeable’ began to make inroads as early as c. 1600.
Perhaps the most vexing of all these crossgrained words is peevish. Oxford just throws up its hands and cries “Derivation unknown,” adding, “None of the etymological conjectures hitherto offered are compatible with the sense-history.”
Conjectured ancestors include the Lowland Scottish peu to ‘make a plaintive noise’ and the Danish piave ‘to whimper, whine or cry like a child.’ It may also be related to the bird pewit (or peewit), imitating its cry. Peevish, from which the noun and verb peeve appear to have been back-formed, has been used since the 14th century with a wide variety of senses, including ‘childish, silly, wayward, thoughtless, froward, uncouth, perverse’ (which some think is the source), and even ‘witty.’
A word with that many diverse senses is about as extra-ornary as they come.
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: German Loanwords in English: An Historical Dictionary
J. Alan Pfeffer and Garland Cannon, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), xxxiv + 381pp.
Now that Sidney I. Landau has become entrenched as Editor in Chief at Cambridge University Press in New York, we are begining to see reflexes of his expertise in lexicography and linguistics. The first two parts of this work, the third part of which is a dictionary of 5380 German loanwords in English, begins with a useful Introduction that provides the book with just the right setting, then goes on in Part I with An historical overview by semantic fields and, in Part II, with a Linguistic overview, which treats matters like Phonology and Graphemics, Grammar, Word-Formation Processes, Semantics, Naturalization, and Dialect. Part IV consists of an Appendix and a supplementary list of loanwords.
The dictionary section contains dates (where applicable), etymologies, and descriptive definitions. As is to be expected, most of the entries are scientific—that is, not particularly gemutlich; some may be disputable, as in the cases of words like geochemistry, geomedicine, geophyte, geoscience, etc., which are described as translations from German Geochemie, Geomedizin, Geophyt, and Geowissenschaft, respectively: unless such formation is acknowledged by an author in their first manifestations in English text, these (and others) could just as well have been English coinages and many are so characterized in English dictionaries. An outstanding exception is geopolitics, acknowledgedly from German Geopolitik, but even in that case there are antedating overtones from Swedish and French. Such things are arguable, and it is neither useful nor interesting to try to settle trivialities. But one is given to wonder about the treatment of Geiger counter, which we know is a radiation counter developed by the German physicist Hans Geiger (evidently working with someone named Müller, whose given name appears to have disappeared but who once shared the honors, as the former name of the device was Geiger-Müller counter): this is described as a translation of Geigerzahler [lit. ‘Geiger counter’] (replacing Geigerrohr [lit. ‘Geiger tube’]), but how it can be so analyzed, when the counter sense is inherent in the function of the device, and ‘Geiger’ can scarcely be said to be a “translation” of Geiger, is a little hard to justify. As the term arose only about seventy years ago, it is probably well documented. (W.) Müller crops up again in Geiger-Muller threshold (also called Geiger threshold), not listed in the book, and in Geiger-Muller tube (which is the heart of the counter).
Curiously, there are only 118 words pertaining to Physics among the loanwords cited, and one would have expected more. Geology, for instance, yields 318 terms, Mineralogy 857, Chemistry 687, and a surprisingly meager 37 in Pharmacology. Aspirin is, of course, of German origin but appears in the Medicine rather than the Pharmacology listings. Including Miscellany, there are 69 Semantic Fields listed, by category and alphabetically.
Although almost all dictionaries are organized alphabetically, there are many ways to look at lexicon, and the analytical categories set forth by Pfeffer and Cannon in this book are interesting and useful. Other semantic categories have been set forth by Roget; still others by March in his Thesaurus; and thematic arrangements have appeared in words like Picturesque Expressions, Allusions, and other books prepared by and under the direction of this reviewer. How interesting and useful it would be to see a substantial segment of “ordinary” English subjected to such treatment—and it is not difficult to imagine still more categories into which words could be divided.
If I have one cavil with the book, it is that there is no conceivable reason for the subtitle to use an before historical.
[Those who are aware of Loanwords Index and Loanwords Dictionary, by Frank R. Abate and this reviewer (Gale Research, 1983, 1985), should be reminded that those works are restricted to “Foreign Words and Phrases That Are Not Fully Assimilated into English and Retain a Measure of Their Foreign Orthography, Pronunciation, or Flavor,” to quote from the suitable of Loanwords Index.]
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Dictionary of Wellerisms
Wolfgang Mieder and Stewart A. Kingsbury, eds., (Oxford University Press, 1994), xix + 187pp.
Wellerisms are, essentially, what Americans would call Tom Swifties. For instance:
“Laugh that off,” said the fat man’s wife, as she sewed his vest button on with wire.
It gets worse—far worse. Not only are the puns atrocious (which is not a legitimate complaint, I suppose), but they are often obscure, many having been dredged up from collections that include 18th- and 19th-century examples:
“Bar that,” as the Sheriff’s officer said to his first floor window. [1841]
“I have risen from the bar to the bench,” said a lawyer, on quitting the profession and taking up shoemaking.
Pretty bad, eh? How about:
“I have to hear people talk behind one’s back,” as the robber said when the constable called, “Stop thief!” [1861]
It seems clear from the above that one must be seeking something other than amusement from collecting such material. Mieder and Kingsbury are highly respected par(o)emiologists (‘experts in the field of proverbs’ for those who have the RHD Unabridged, which does not list the word or any of its congeners), hence one would assume that such a collection is not entirely a waste of time. The Preface describes the book as “the first book-length collection of wellerisms in the English language”; unless reasoning man can find a way to put this information to good and useful purpose, it may well be the last. Proverbs can be interesting because they are a key to human wisdom and folly; wellerisms seem to have no redeeming qualities.
This reflects an admitted prejudice against the material, which is about as quippy and clever as the brick-wall comedians one must suffer on odd nights on obscure cable channels in the US. Further on in the Preface one reads that “major collections of wellerisms in some of the European languages are readily available” and the implication that what we have here is representative of the “rich British and American materials.” According to the OED, a wellerism is “a form of comparison in which a familiar saying or proverb is identified, often punningly, with what was said by someone in a specified but humorously inapposite situation.” It is on a par with the literal interpretation of idioms, as in the cartoon of someone puffing on a chain with the caption “Chainsmoker.”
There are many things about modern life—air conditioning (in particular), electricity, indoor plumbing, supermarkets—that make me grateful to be living in the latter half of the 20th century and not back in the antediluvian or “good old” days so often pined for, and one of them is the knowledge (gained from the Introduction) that American newspapers and magazines published numerous short lists of wellerisms during the 19th century. It ineluctably reminds me of the favorite execrable pun perpetrated by those who seem to be in the throes of learning English: “Let’s throw a little light on the subject,” said the man as he turned on the lamp. It is one thing to utter little truisms here and there during one’s lifetime, sprinkling them about like sesame seeds on a bagel; it is quite another to make a fetish out of collecting such tripe.
In my role as Editor, I must be scholarly and democratic, so I shall be happy to publish in a future issue of VERBATIM a rebuttal either from the editors of Wellerisms or from a champion of their cause. It may not exceed the length of this review: 580 words.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Dictionary of Idioms and their Origins
Linda and Roger Flavell, (Kyle Cathie Ltd, 1992, 1994), vii + 216pp.
This is a small book containing a few hundred common idioms with standard definitions, citations, and suggested origins; adding to its value are the twenty-two brief essays on various aspects of the formation and characteristics of idioms. Roger Flavell is a linguist, a scholar who has been interested in idioms for many years and was co-author of On Idioms, in the Exeter Linguistics Series. His chief occupation is teaching language teachers at the University of London.
It is odd to note that Idioms and Phrases Index (Gale Research Company, 1983), a compendious work indexing some 250,000 idioms and phrases, is missing from the rather eclectic Bibliography (where Logan Pearsall Smith, quoted at the beginning of the book, merits no mention either).
The treatment of idioms is pretty much standard, with the origins that can be found in other works repeated: but they are couched in user-friendly language. For me, the treatment has the redeeming feature of describing conflicting arguments about origins: too often compilers of such books feel obliged to take a position on one side or the other in pursuit of “the truth,” seldom attainable in matters of language. Each entry is illustrated by citations, many more up-to-date than one can find in other sources. More important, each offers—of special interest to learners of English—valuable usage notes. For example, at the devil to pay (and no pitch hot), the note reads, “Colloquial. The full form of the expression is no longer in use.”
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Cassell Dictionary of Proper Names
Adrian Room, (Cassell, 1994), xxix + 610pp.
It is hard to see what has got into the people at Cassell’s, for here is another book—this time a superior one—on which they have practised their onomancy: the original title (1992) was Brewer’s Names. At least they have not taken to changing the names of the authors of these books, and this one bears that of the estimable lexicographer and onomastician, Adrian Room. From the origin of Chaucer to that of Buffalo Springfield, Room covers them all. Although the jacket copy is appropriately dignified, twenty lashes to whoever wrote the release accompanying the book, which cites its appeal to “trivia buffs and curiosity seekers,” rather a down-market crowed compared to the higher echelons of literati to whom Adrian Room’s books usually appeal.
The treatments are brief but not skimpy: as usual, Room says much in a few words, and his terse treatments are welcome after the long-winded explanations of self-evident clichés one must wade through in reviewing. There are not a lot of such works available, especially ones as up-to-date as this one. Because general dictionaries either omit proper names altogether or, if they are included, give them short etymological shrift, Room’s book deserves to stand on the shelf alongside the best dictionaries in a reader’s library.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Everyday Phrases
Neil Ewart, (Cassell, 1994 [ppbk]), 162pp.
Originally published in 1983, here is another book in Cassell’s attempts at breathing a little life into what should have been left to molder on the shelf. Some of the explanations are downright silly:
Too many irons in the fire… The phrase refers to the blacksmith’s forge, where if the smith had too many irons heating in the fire at the same time, he couldn’t do his job properly, as he was unable to use them all before some had cooled off.
crocodile tears…When crocodiles open their jaws wide, tears are shed automatically from their eyes… from a natural reflex action.
It is undeniable that to have egg all over one’s face is an “everyday expression,” but is there really any justification to waste space on such a self-evident metaphor in such a small book?
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Twelve Days of Christmas: The Mystery and the Meaning
Thomas L. Bernard, illust. Scott Partridge, (University Press Division of St. Charles Place, Springfield, Massachusetts), 52pp.
Professor Bernard, who teaches at Springfield College, became intrigued with the lyrics to the Christmas song, The Twelve Days of Christmas, when he first noticed the virtual redundancy of partridge and perdrix, the Latin word for the bird, leading him to surmise that the words in a pear tree could well have been Norman French for ‘en a perdrix,’ or words to that effect. He allowed himself to succumb to the intrigue and, using his imagination and talent for research, traced out the other eleven days' worth of gifts as a solution to a conundrum.
Although there are several versions of the song, its earliest record is in a 13th-century manuscript in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. Bernard not only carefully documents his ideas about the various interpretations that might be given the curiously anomalous references in the song but suggests possible variants. At bottom, his conjecture is that the entire song relates to a pilgrimage to Jerusalem from England, where (two) turtle doves is interpreted as ‘de tour Douvres,’ whither one must go to cross to France, to ‘lors de Liban,’ yielding (eleven) lords a-leaping. Each step of the way the reader is increasingly persuaded that Bernard has taken the right road, but I shall leave the remaining details of the expedition to buyers of the book. The entire theory is so engaging, charming, and delightful that one hesitates to find fault with any one of it; doing so would be like denying the existence of Santa Claus.
Each of the Twelve Days is illustrated by suitably warm and friendly drawings by Scott Partridge (warranted personally by Bernard to be neither a nom de plume, de guerre, nor de chanson). The book, slightly less than 8½”× 11”, can be ordered directly.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: In Love with Norma Loquendi
William Safire, illustr. Keith Bendis, (Random House, 1994), xv + 349pp.
Like clockword—I mean clockwork, of course—Bill Safire’s books come down the pike, each inscribed with a friendly greeting from the man described as “the language maven.” One of the great advantages of having Bill’s articles in book form is that associated with them are the letters he has received from readers which rarely (if ever) appear in the newspapers where his column is syndicated. The names of these correspondents are indexed, enabling potential book-buyers to confirm their immortality before sacrificing their ill-gotten gains. Jacques Barzun should, accordingly, buy six copies.
Those who think that Safire writes only about politics from the Washington Bureau of The New York Times should be aware that he also writes a widely syndicated weekly column on language for the Sunday Magazine of the N.Y. Times. Lately, this column has been focused, a bit too frequently for my tastes, on the jargon that echoes within the Beltway—that is, insiders' Washington, DC, for the uninitiated. Another complaint is his detailed treatment of the semantics of a word, appropriate, perhaps, to synonym studies in dictionaries (but only too rarely well done there) but telling most readers more than they ever wanted to know about a given handful of terms. One more adverse comment, this time for whoever wrote the jacket copy: when Bill (or anyone else) mentions that long in the tooth was “first used in print in an 1852 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray” (p.287), it does not mean that Thackeray “originated” the phrase.
Accumulations of Bill Safire’s books (of which I think this is the tenth anthology of his language articles) afford us with articulate commentary on American usage in the last quarter of the 20th century. Other books, written with his brother, deal with other aspects of language; in addition to two novels, he has written five books on politics among which— curiously—is not included his Dictionary of Politics, entitled Safire’s New Political Dictionary in its later incarnations. I cannot repress a personal comment or two, for I have known Bill since the early 1960s, I when his Dictionary of Politics was edited under my direction at Random House. In the early 1970s, I wrote to The N.Y. Times managing editor, Arthur Rosenthal, suggesting that he consider a regular column on language (to be written, of course, by me). The idea was accepted, but not the author, for Safire was regarded by the Times as its “resident lexicographer,” the man properly qualified to do the job.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Cursing in America: A psycholinguistic study of dirty language in the courts, in the movies, in the schoolyards and on the streets
Timothy Jay, (John Benjmins, Philadelphia/Amsterdam, 1992), 273pp.
Language taboos seem to be persistent in American English—more so than in British English, where, although one cannot say that anything goes, one encounters more dirty language on television (in particular), especially after the so-called “watershed” hour of nine o’clock (which some are trying to put off till ten o’clock). In this comprehensive study, Timothy Jay, who teachers at North Adams State College, in Massachusetts, divides his subject into several subcategories: Cursing, Profanity, Blasphemy, Taboo, Obscenity, Vulgarity, Slang, Epithets, and Scatology. Although he defends these classifications by detailed discussion and definition, it is not easy to apply them, for the distinctions tend to be blurred. Blasphemy and profanity, for instance, are differentiated on the grounds that the former treats “(something sacred) with abuse, irreverence, or contempt,” while the latter “is an attack on religion or religious doctrine.” These are points too subtle to be readily grasped. The term taboo in linguistics means, simply, ‘proscribed by society as improper or unacceptable’ [RHD2], but Jay prefers the narrow, somewhat archaic, anthropologist’s definition that focuses on “supernatural” and “ritualistic” interdiction. The definition he accepts for obscenity is as alegal term, which he expatiates on to confusion. In the same way, he accepts a traditional definition of vulgarity—“language of the common person… not necessarily obscence or taboo”—but that is not the meaning most people would apply in the context of a book on cursing. The perception and usage of these terms is personal, and I, for example, prefer to use vulgar to describe current manifestations like Roseanne, Butthead and Beavis, and other television shows that exhibit crude situations encountered by rude people; drawings and graphic style, as in Butthead, some of the “artwork” in Mad Magazine, and many of the new cartoons on the television are extraordinarily vulgar and tasteless, without any redeeming quality.
It is likely that one’s taste deteriorates under the continuous barrage of vulgarity: many who today admire the dadaists, cubists, surrealists, hard-edge realists, nonobjective and abstract artists would have reviled them, along with a significant percentage of the population, had they been dalive when their paintings first appeared, just as staid, conservative critics condemned the impressionists and advocates of other nouvelles vagues. Is it that we gradually become accustomed to what we first perceive as trash—as vulgarity—and become inured to it, or that we come to understand and, if not enamored of it, at least tolerate it as a legitimate form of expression?
To be sure, one is no longer shocked at hearing hell and damn on radio or television or even reading it in the press, although both were taboo a scant twenty years ago. Programs and films that are broadcast on television after ten o’clock in the evening are no longer censored—even in the United States—for mentions of shit and piss, though fuck, which can occasionally be heard on British television, has not, as far as I know, made it to the American media. Still, it is worth pointing out that the shock felt was not at hearing these words but at hearing them on radio and television, where everyone knew they were banned. In other words, the context was inappropriate: as if one heard his priest say “Goddammit !,” despite the fact that one said it oneself whenever something went awry. The 1930s' Hollywood censors' ban on showing even a married couple in the same bed or a man putting on his trousers and zipping (or buttoning) his fly seems ludicrously prudish to us today. But the motivations of those censors, driven by powerful conservative religious groups, were quite different, and we ridiculed them even then because of their interference with the everyday facts of life. It is difficult today to find a film made in the past decade that does not contain what must be regarded as an obligatory nude scene, and in many instances such scenes have no integral part in the plot. To me, vulgarity means ‘bad taste,’ whether deliberate (as in the case of Roseanne) or unintentional (as in the case of crude drawings foisted on us as “art”).
The chief problem with these and other definitions is that some are based on semantics (the intent of the speaker and the understanding of the hearer), others on usage, and others on referents. In a subject where there are no fixed criteria of definition, it is unfair to criticize an attempt at classification: after all, we have been putting up with ambiguous definitions for the eight parts of speech for as long as anyone can remember, yet we find their occasional application convenient. In short, the perception of these terms is culture-dependent, and culture is akin to language in the sense that while a large number of people might be said to speak a language, we know that it is made up of a larger number of dialects which, in turn, are made up of a still larger number of idiolects.
To some extent, these social aspects of language are accounted for in Cursing in America, but the study is married by the lack of up-to-date data: some of the more interesting tables result from surveys done in the late 1970s, and one can be certain that things have changed markedly since then.
On the other hand, I found utterly fascinating the chapter Censorship, which describes—rather cursorily, I regret to say—several US court cases in which defendants were charged with various violations stemming from their use of bad language. In the case of the State (unspecified) vs. Dreifurst, more detailed comments is forthcoming, but it is difficult to understand whether the source of the exposition that follows is the author’s or a rewording and digest of the proceedings.
The writing is easy to read and colloquial (by which I mean it contains the classic solecisms that purists deride). Disturbing are the gaps in information: Appendix I consists of several lists of films from 1939-1960, 1960-69, etc., totaling 73 in all and showing for each the “Total number of [twenty-seven] Bad Words” as checked by an unspecified number of “film reviewers [who] were volunteers from a college psychology course on the topic of human communication,” scarcely a representative cross-section of the population. No comment is offered on the selection of the films. Other manipulations of the data are described in general but are not reflected in detail in the statistics.
On the whole, Cursing in America, while an interesting book, does not go very far in presenting a cogent analysis of the present situation or its history. The fault lies partly in the difficulty in securing funding for proper studies in the area; on the other hand, one cannot help feeling that studies that have been done could have been better conceived and organized. There is a miscellaneous Bibliography, which seems to include every linguistics book and article the author has ever read, and a pitifully poor Index, containing about seventy items.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names: Pronunciations for more that 23,000 Proper Names, Selected for Currency, Frequency, or Difficulty of Pronunciation, Including Place Names, Given Names; Names of Famous Individuals, Cultural, Literary, and Historical Names; Mythological Names; Names of People and Tribes; Company Names and Product Names; with Pronunciations Transcribed into the International Phonetic Alphabet and a Simplified Phonetic Respelling; and Including an Explanatory Introduction, John K. Bollard
Frank R. Abate and Katherine M. Isaacs, eds., (Omnigraphics, 1993), xxxv + 894pp.
The lengthy subtitle is given above because it is the most succinct way to describe the contents. An interesting additional bit of information is buried in Bollard’s Preface, to wit:
…[P]ronunciations were actually “proof-listened.” Through facilities made available by AT&T Bell Laboratories of Murray Hill, New Jersy, all pronunciations were actually heard using speech-synthesis technology.
That is probably the first time such a procedure has been followed.
The Introduction constitutes a brief but comprehensive course in pronunciation and a detailed description of the symbols used, both for English and for foreign pronunciations (like that of the Welsh ll-sound, the German ü-sound and ö-sound, etc.). The transcriptions are, mercifully, what phoneticians call “broad,” which provide the basic information needed to be able to reproduce the pronunciation, as compared with “narrow,” in which detailed phonetic features are reflected that are useful for specialists but clutter up the field for ordinary users. The so-called simplified respelling is what I usually refer to as the Moo Goo Gai Pan school of phonetic transcription, concoted for those too lazy to learn even the simplest rudiments of phonetic transcription (which used to be taught in high-school English Courses during the few hours spent on How to Use the Dictionary). The schwa is anathema in this pattern: uh substitutes for it. Still, the user must contend with macrons over some vowels and with the intrusive h, which crops up here and there in order to lengthen a vowel. Although it might be seen as commendable to make the interpretation of pronunciation symbols as easy as possible for the laziest users, I have little sympathy for the policy: in most cases, those who are too lazy to learn even the rudimentary respelling systems used in popular dictionaries (like the various college and desk dictionaries) are also too lazy to look up the pronunciation of a name or word, as is evidenced daily in the utterances of newscasters and announcers.
Of some complexity in English is the pronunciation of r: it disappears entirely in syllable-final and preconsonantal positions in some dialects of English (harbor /häb\?\/); in others, it is reduced to coloring the preceding vowel or diphthong (card /kä\?\d/) Cuba /ky\?\‘b\?\/); it crops up in words and phrases that are spelled without it (law and order /\?\/). I find Bollard’s superior \?\, used to transcribe both the “optional r” ambiguous. Also, he writes, “the r is not always completely dropped.” I would defy him to find any r quality in the British Received Pronunciation of air fare, etc. Admittedly, the r might be the cause of the “lengthening or prolongation of the [preceding] vowel without dipthongization,” as Bollard puts it (p. xxxii), but that cannot be said to be r-coloring, which we ought to restrict to a sound that has some resemblance to the pronunciation of r.
These are detailed, petty matters of individual interpretation, matters that should not concern those for whose use this book is intended. One could quarrel with occasional entry choices: Steinberg David, Canadian comedian, actor, is in but not Saul Steinberg, the artist, who is far better known— at least in some circles; we find Ralph Waite, US actor, but not Terry Waite, British hostage; Sir John Hicks, English economist who won a Nobel prize, is in, but Edward, the American painter, is more important. The syllabication of Modigliani is shown as \?\ rather than/, \?\ and the execrable) often-heard \?\ is not shown. The former Japanese prime Minister, Takeshita, is in, but, as I once observed, nobody pronounced his name /take\?\/ (with no stress at all, a difficult patterns for English speakers): he was called \?\, with a hint of a break before the final /t/. Whatever the “correct” pronunciation, no one could argue that in English the second is more “proper.” (What we need is an American politician named Takapouda).
The form of entry is not uniform: for instance, Pynchon Thomas,…; Park would lead a literalminded user to understand it to mean “Thomas Pynchon” and “Park Pynchon”; as the latter is a ballpark, it is probably Pynchon Park. Owing to the broad transcription, no attempt is made to duplicate the Arabic voice pharyngeal fricative qaf (as in Qatar).
There are not many sources that come readily to hand offering pronunciations of Tán Bó Cualinge. The choice of entry is eclectic: Kotex is in, but not Tampax (no pun); many common names whose pronunciations are unlikely to be in doubt are in also: Kennedy, Johnson (though the Swedish author ought to remain), John (with a French pronunciation shown), John Bull, John Doe (but not Richard Roe), Heston, Hicks, etc. Rembrandt van Rijn is in, but at Rijn one is directed to Rhine. I doubt that the Italian pronunciation of Rodrigo is /\?\/ rather than /\?\/ and there are inconsistencies between the Spanish pronunciation of Rodrigo and that of Rodriguez.
These details are not likely to affect the usefulness of the book, however, and it contains curious items like the pronunciation of Roh Tae Woo, S. Korean leader: /no\?\ te\?\ wu\?\/ following which it was deemed wise to put a “sic.” It seems that in the southeastern US words beginning with shr- are pronounced as if spelled sr-, something I never knew. This yields a string of entries, from Shreveport to Shrovetide, in which an additional pronunciation, labeled “esp. southeastern US,” is given; I understand Shreveport, Shriver and Shrove being given these variants, but who cares how people in the southeastern US pronounce Shrewsbury and Shropshire, which are English place names? Also, the preferred pronunciation of Shoreham, the English port, is shown as \?\, which is unlikely to be heard anywhere in England. The preferred British pronunciation of Connecticut, with the c before the t pronounced as k, is not shown, so why shown US dialectal variant pronunciations? On the other hand, Thor Heyerdahl’s name might be properly pronounced\?\, but I have never heard anything but “higher-doll.”
Many years ago, Cabell Greet, professor at Columbia University and widely recognized authority on phonetics, was consultant to CBS (as I recall) on pronunciations. He had his hands full fielding telephone calls from them during WWII, when newscasters were daily faced with the problems of how to pronounce the names of people and places like von Ribbentrop, Sidi Barani, Ploesti, and Irriwaddy. Little has changed, but Cabell is long gone, and newscasters (or broadcasting networks), if they want to learn how to pronounce a name properly can usually find out by listening to BBC World Service. They take a chance, not because the BBC is in any way not reliable but because they might not say the name on command. For them, for speakers who want to make certain they are using an acceptable pronunciation, the Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names will prove indispensable.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Happy Trails: A Dictionary of Western Expressions
Robert Hendrickson, (Facts On File, 1994), xiv + 274pp.
This is the second volume of Facts On File’s series, Dictionary of American Regional Expressions, the first of which, also by Hendrickson, was Whistlin’ Dixie, which we have not (yet) reviewed. Announced for future publication are dictionaries of New England, Mountain, and New York expressions. Hendrickson is a poet and a productive author of books on language, among them Literary Life and Other Curiosities (Viking, 1981), American Talk (Viking, 1986; Penguin, 1987), and the Facts On File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origin (FOF, 1987), the last of which was favorably reviewed in VERBATIM [XV, 4,27]. (Had we been sent a review copy of Whistlin' Dixie, we would have reviewed that.)
Hendrickson does his research carefully and he writes definitions that are eminently informative and readable, often including a useful quotation; his entry for hogan:
hogan A Navajo dwelling, usually earth-covered and built with the entrance facing east. “The Navajo hogans, among the sand and willows. None of the pueblos would at that time admit glass windows into their dwellings. The reflection of the sun on the glazing was to them ugly and unnatural—even dangerous.” [Willa Cather,Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927]
Admittedly, hogan is not one of the more interesting entries, and, inevitably, there are quite a few such. One problem the author had to grapple with was the very identification of a word or phrase as Western: hightail it, for example, refers to “mustangs, rabbits and other animals [that] raise their tails high and flee quickly when they sense danger. Trappers in the American West noticed this, over a century ago, probably while hunting wild horses, and invented the expression to hightail it, to leave in a hurry, to make a fast gataway.” Everything is plausible except the business about trappers: the expression could just have easily originated in the parts of America settled earliest, for deer exhibit the same behavior (and, indeed, their tails are called flags for that very reason); also, deer, antelope, and many other animals in Europe have “hightailed it” for centuries. I fear that Hendrickson relied too readily on the OED2e, in this instance, for that source mentions mustangs in its first quotation, from American Speech, Volume I, 1925. After a diligent search, I could find no earlier mention. Mencken (The American Language, Supplement Two, p. 138) refers to an article on Idaho speech; the AS article was written by a resident of Seattle (and mentions mustangs), but that is of no significance. It is just curious that what one might assume to be a fairly obvious coinage cannot be documented to an earlier date. One might contend that before 1925 writers were not writing much about the West; although the western was popular in motion pictures long before 1925, talkies did not arrive till 1926. Zane Grey (1875-1939) and James Frank Dobie (1888-1964) might have used the phrase in their writings, but evidence is lacking.
The entries make interesting reading, but one is given no indication of the frequency with which they occur and whether they are current. Do people still use a Jesse James as a metaphor for any (bank) robber? We also find a Bat Masterson and a Wyatt Earp. Do courting couples still use jimpsecute? Do cowboys call farmers plow-chasers? Many know the tale behind dead man’s hand (aces and eights, though their distribution is not specified).
Hendrickson cannot be held accountable for failing to trace many of the expressions to their source: even though many are not much more than a hundred years old, there is no way to document them. Still, I should be surprised to find that cosh ‘kill, mutilate’ is anything more than an extension of cosh ‘use a cosh [‘blackjack’] on.’ Other terms, like count coup and coup stick, look as if they were derived from French. Does a cowboy all the way down to his liver ‘a full-fledged 100% cowboy’ derive from the damage done to one’s liver by the jarring suffered in breaking horses?
These are questions that will have to be resolved by others. Hendrickson has performed a useful function in gathering the words and expressions in one place, but it would have been helpful had he given some indication as to how some entries were uttered. For example, 6666, The, name of a cattle ranch: was it six-six-six-six? double six double six? sixty-six sixty-six? And were (or are) the js pronounced like h in the scores of loanwords from Spanish? Happy Trails raises as many questions as it answers: I have trouble believing that gunsel is a “cowboy word for a braggart,” for which no evidence is adduced. Some of the terms are old, some are quite recent, but, in all fairness, it must be emphasized that no claim is made that any have been in use for a long time.
I am ambivalent about the book. It makes good reading and those who are interested in dialect dictionaries should add it to their collection. But it adds little to the scholarship about the West and, if it had a language, what it might have been. I fear that this is merely another in the long series of specialized dictionaries of questionable value published by Facts On File.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: *Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins
Nigel Rees, (Cassell, 1994 [ppbk]), 224pp.
This book first appeared in 1987 under the title, Why Do We Say… ?, and nothing has been done to it since except to put on a new cover and title and copyright pages: even the running heads on each page bear the original title. Bringing out a book with a changed title is not strictly kosher: caveat emptor.
Laurence Urdang
OBITER DICTA: Name-calling
Hilary M. Howard, London
St. Hilaire was a 4th-century French bishop. All those named after him were male, until the 1930s, when the fashion for uni-sex names exploded.
The even-handed, Continental use of Maria never caught on in Britain, but the dual Evelyn was already established, as was Leslie/Lesley. In America, Lee made no distinctions: Lee Radziwill, Remick, J. Cobb, and Harvey Oswald. There was a flood of Billies, Bobbies, and Bunnies, a short-lived attempt at a female Michael and, of course, Hilary.
By the time I reached the sixth form, one or two juniors were called Hilary, but I was a pioneer. Not always a comfortable position. Very soon after the War, I was sent on a “Friendship Exchange” to a Dutch family. They had three sons and a smallish house. The arrival of a pre-adolescent girl, inteligible to share a boy’s room, threw a spanner into the works (and probably confirmed beliefs in English eccentricity). They shared a surname with a notorious collaborator. In spite of the frantic bed-shifting, they were delighted to have an English guest to display.
Britain, not having been invaded, had no collaborators, unlike Norway, where Quisling gave his name to the whole breed. Not many people (male or female) are named after him.
OBITER DICTA: African Applications: To Z or not to Z
Thomas L. Bernard, South Hadley, Massachusetts
Z, as the last letter of the alphabet is one that is not high on the popularity scale in the English language. To an outside observer, however, Z seems to have particular appeal to the inhabitants of subequatorial Africa. In the toponymy of this region (especially recent national designations), Z seems to have been accorded a special place of honor unmatched elsewhere.
The changeover from colonial to “African” names has accentuated the use of Z and demonstrated its unique a^ppeal. For example, we now have the contiguous nations of Zaire, Zambia, and Zimbabwe[b1]:, countries that previously didn’t have a single Z to share amongst them. Also in this general geographic area flows the mighty Zambezi.
Recent reports in the popular press have hinted that a name change may be in the works for South Africa, with the possible remaining of that nation as “Azania.” This is the country that once went by the name of Zuid Afrika—an important and well-known region of which is Zululand (also known by its ethnic name of Kwa Zulu). Contiguous countries with South Africa are Swaziland and Mozambique. Further up the East coast is Tanzania, one of the constituent parts of which is the formerly independent island state of Zanzibar.
There are many African town names that contribute to this linguistic stereotype, places such as Zongo, Zumbo, Zawi, Zaria, Kolwezi, Mulobezi, Solwezi, Ulvinza, Mazabuka, Mwanza, Ngunza, Nzeto, Nyunza, and many others. Not many European-based toponyms in Africa fit in with the theme, but some that do would include Brazzaville, Luderitz, and Pietermaritzburg.
In concluding, and with apologies to Robert Frost, it seems that Africans in the subequatorial part of the continent would have been attentive to the observation he might have made that, “Something there is that doesn’t love a Z.”
OBITER DICTA: Escobarring
K. Narayana Chandran, Hyderabad
It is no longer news for the people of India when their media report that English is, again, under attack, for it has been part of Indian politics to denounce English in public forums but seek its socio-economic benefits in private. A language of “opportunity,” English is certainly the first preference of Indian parents who do not let their children go without it in their school curriculum.
Any attempt at imposing English on children, however, is met with very strong resistance. This applies even to the south Indian state, Tamil Nadu, whose intolerance of our official language, Hindi, is matched evenly by its predilection for English. The state’s capital, Madras, as a matter of fact, has an excellent track-record of having fostered English education and the publication of educational materials in English for more than 150 years. A month ago, however, a massive wave of anti-English protest swept across this state following a governmental directive urging students and teachers of schools to converse only in English on at least two days of the week. This directive, according to the state’s Director of School Education, was meant to improve the abysmal standards of English, both written and spoken, at the school level.
The Directorate had earlier supplied small handbooks in English for use in government-funded, Tamil-medium schools. Tamil zealots threatened statewide strikes and a demonstration before the Chief Minister’s residence seeking immediate withdrawal of the directive. (Interestingly, the Tamils who have renamed practically every public landmark, road, and bylane after their national and regional heroes and heroines prefer to retain “Poes Garden,” the name of the locality to which the Chief Minister’s official residence belongs.)
This ambivalence towards English is most discernible in the columns of such English national dailies as The Times of India, Indian Express, The Hindu, and The Hindustan Times. The Hindu, for example, with its headquarters in Madras, dutifully reported the anti-English protests but also carried in its weekend supplement for October 2, 1994, a note on “Escobarring,” by A. Sathyamoorthy, presumably a Tamil. “Variety and vitality of the English language is worthy of admiration,” begins this note. It goes on to play with some well-known words and situate them in familiar Indian contexts, mentions the language’s adaptability and resilience as borne out by its record of borrowings from such languages as Persian, Arabic, Tamil, and Sanskrit. Sathyamoorthy concludes his brief exercise with a suggestion that merits some attention by VERBATIM readers:
If English is playful can it be sporting too? Are there many words and phrases which have roots in track and field games…? Has it honoured sportsment?… If not why not start with a footballer? [Andrés] Escobar could be the lucky one. And a timely one too. This rising star of Colombia was shot dead outside Medellin. His sin was to deflect a ball to his goal…. Death was decreed as his wage. He was kicked off. [sic]
That was in the heat of the moment. In cooler times can we make amends? Can we immortalise him with a new word—Escobarring? It could mean tripping [up] your team or scoring a point against your colleagues[?]. Judas did that. Perhaps Brutus too….
Sathyamoorthy’s examples do not seem to convey Escobar’s unenviable distinction. His fatality brims with a far sadder irony than either Judas’s or Brutus’s. Escobarring may well be that rare sin of commission and omission all at once. One ought to recall, alongside, Escobar’s words, which closed his column in the newspaper that carried his obituary: “Until later, because life doesn’t end here” (quoted in Time, July 19, 1994, p. 39.).
EPISTOLA {L. Alan Swanson}
At the end of his article, “Some English Loanwords in Thai” [XXI, 1], Paul Blackford notes he has been unable to find out why the name for the Beatles in Thai is Sii Tao Tong ‘The Four Golden Turtles.’ I can’t respond to why Beatles was translated into Turtles, but Mr. Blackford may wish to note that the original name for The Beatles was The Golden Beatles. Paul McCartney advised in an interview well over twenty years ago that the word Golden was dropped because it was, in his words, “too clumsy.”
[L. Alan Swanson, Redding, California]
EPISTOLA {T.R. Weston}
Your review of A Dictionary of Fly-Fishing, by C.B. McCully [XXI, 1], refers to the “single turle, grinner, blood, needle, and nail—all knots used in tying files.” This is incorrect. The single turle is used to tie the fly to the leader tippet. The blood is used to tie two strands of leader material together. The needle and nail are for attaching the leader to the fly line. None of these is used in used in tying flies. I have never heard of a grinner, but have seen many on the face of a companion after landing a beauty.
[T.R. Weston, Shelton, Washington]
EPISTOLA {George Amberg}
This note concerns your remarks anent AWOL. My long-past military duty leads me to recall that the O stands for Official, and is not meant to be a part of without.
[George Amberg, El Cerrito, California]
[Similarly from Robert L. Glasser of Beverly Hills and a few other correspondents.—Editor]
EPISTOLA {Martin Wald}
As a lawyer, I agree with your correspondents [XX, 2] that not guilty does not mean ‘innocent.’ A verdict is not an absolution. But as a former reporter, I can provide some insight about the journalistic usage. The entry in The Associated Press Style-book for innocent says: “Use innocent, rather than not guilty, in describing a defendant’s plea or a jury’s verdict, to guard against the word not being dropped inadvertently.”
[Martin Wald, Washington, D.C.]
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Cassell Dictionary of Cynical Quotations
Jonathon Green, (Cassell (UK), Sterling Publishing (US), and Capricorn Link (Australia)), v + 330pp.
Considering the political climate the world over and the political individuals who make certain that into each life a little rain must fall, it would behoove all of us to become familiar with the quotations in this book, most of which seem apt at the moment:
POLITICIANS
When I was a boy I was told that anyone could become President. I’m beginning to believe it.
Clarence Darrow
Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.
Nikita Khrushchev, 1960
Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.
Charles de Gaulle, 1962
POLITICS
Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
Jonathan Swift,
Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1706
Politics are … nothing more than a means of rising in the world.
Samuel Johnson, 1775
The duty of the opposition [is] very simply—to oppose everything and propose nothing.
Lord Derby, 1841
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
Henry Brooks Adams,
The Education of Henry Adams, 1907
Politics, n. The conduct of public affairs for priyate advantage.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911
All politics are based on the indifference of the majority.
James Reston, 1968
I used to say that politics was the second oldest Profession, and I have come to know that it bears a gross similarity to the first.
Ronald Reagan, 1979
I could easily go on—and on, and on—but I would probably be violating the permission to reproduce text from a copyrighted work for purposes of review. Although some of those whose quotations have been collected here are tediously longwinded, most have been brief in their dismissal of much-cherished and much-criticized institutions—LAW-YERS, NEIGHBORS, HOLLYWOOD, PSYCHOANALYSIS, THE YOUNG—scores of categories are covered. This is truly a quotable book of quotations, many from more modern writers than one might expect to find in other sources.
It would be difficult to compile such a work without ready access to Mencken, Wilde, Shaw, and others of their sort. This book (the possession of which may become a substitute for reading it, to paraphrase Anthony Burgess in The New York Times Book Review) should appeal to anyone over the age of thirty who has developed a sufficiently mature sense of reality to become a cynic.
Laurence Urdang
Chin-banging: Tough English Words in Japanese Teen Slang
P. Constantine, New York City
Misuta Kôdo ‘Mr. Cord,’ sannadabichi ‘son of the “bitchy”,’ hando pampingu ‘hand pumping,’ fakku-mêto': visit a Tokyo high school, and you will quickly realize that much of the fast-flowing teen lingo is in actual fact English. Inventive puns and coded metaphors abound, and new words, phrases, and grammatical twists surface each year. What was naui “now”—‘cool, awesome, rad’—a year ago is suddenly annui—“un-new”— ‘definitely out, uncool, weak.’ Those who dare to use last year’s words find themselves ostracized by their clique-mates.
When teens congregate in tough inner-city schoolyards, their roughneck slang is called agotataki ‘chin banging.’ And each year, as a new generation of chins bang, ever more inspired English words surface: son-play, me-man, C.I.A., CD boy, cassette boy, super-candy, wrestling, bible game.
“But where do all these eccentric English words come from?” the confused observer might ask. The answer is that they are not English words but English-inspired words, inspired by expressions heard on television and by half-understood words picked up in English class, then bandied about with tilted semantics.
Son-play, for instance, is ‘masturbation.’ Take musuko ‘son,’ the standard Japanese slang word for penis, translate it into English, add play, and you have a sprightly and newfangled neologism. When tough modern girls say me-man, they mean ‘my vagina’: the me- part is from the English me (for ‘my’) and man is short for manko ‘vagina.’
The initials C.I.A. are a form of S.O.S., used by girls who are caught unawares by their period. The deceptive letters stand for Chotto Ima Are! ‘That just came!’ A CD boy is a boy who is one hundred per cent straight: CDs play on only one side; a cassette boy has bisexual interests.
Among the rougher teens, super-candy means a ‘good blow-job,’ and wrestling is a synonym for ‘violent and coerced sex.’
Tosuto (toast), another popular word of nebulous background means ‘jealousy’: toasting bread in Japanese is known as pan o yakeru; the verb yakeru ‘toast, bake, scorch’ is also used in standard Japanese for ‘jealousy’; the teenagers computed: ‘burning with jealousy … burning … burning bread … toasting … toast.
Another powerful source of new expressions is the English alphabet, where letters, alone or in secret configurations, are used to convey hidden messages:
AAS: Aitakute Aitakute Shigata ga nai. ‘I want to meet him, I want to meet him, what am I to do?’
TDK: Tende Dame na Ko. ‘totally gross guy/ girl’
HT: Half Think ‘One-sided love’
HB: Honto ni Busu ‘plug-ugly’
F: Feminine ‘Beautiful girl’
FM: Fuck Mate
SM: Sex Mate
M: Masturbation; Masochist
CS: Car Sex
IC: Instant Couple
BF: Boy Friend
GF: Girl Friend
New words can also be created by playing with metaphors. Fakku ‘fuck’ is used quite innocently to refer to a major frontal collision between two vehicles, while in the gentler kissu ‘kiss’ the cars just bump lightly. Bûmeran ‘boomerang’ is the dumped lover who incessantly keeps returning, and morumon ‘mormon’ is the active high-schooler with multiple girlfriends. Bonuresu hamu ‘boneless ham’ is a school girl with a figure like a chunk of boneless ham.
The metaphor comes in particularly handy when conversations turn to matters of delicacy. Tampons, for instance, can be delicately referred to with English words such as ‘tea-bag’ tiibagu, ‘cracker’ kuraka, ‘wireless microphone’ wairesumaiku, or ‘vanilla (ice-cream cone)’ banira. Another taboo subject, condoms, can be touched on with playful metaphors such as: ‘globe’ gurôbu, ‘raincoat’ reinkôto, or ‘cover for Mr. John’ jon-kun kaba.
An even more idiosyncratic trend has been to spawn new blends by using syllabus of Japanese words with English syllabus:
shite-bôi ‘horny adolescent’: Japanese shitê ‘wants to do’ + English bôi ‘boy’
orudo-busu ‘ugly old bitch’: English ‘old’ (ôrudo) + busu ‘plug-ugly’
gyaru-bôi ‘effeminate schoolboy’: gyaru ‘girl + bôi ‘boy’
gyaru-oyaji ‘girl daddy’: middle-aged man with the airs and interests of a teenage girl’
tero-ko ‘violent teen’: tero, English ‘terror’ + ko ‘child’
oran-kori ‘without a date’: oran ‘no one’s there’ + kori, the “-choly” part of melancholy
urutora-naon ‘a woman with large breasts’:
urutora ‘ultra’ + naon, a playful inversion of onna ‘woman’
masu-kagami ‘masturbating in front of a mirror’: “mas-” of masturbation (pronounced “masutabeeshon>”) + kagami ‘mirror’; it is also a fertile pun on the title of the medieval Japanese classic, Masukagami, “The Pillow Book,” by Sei Shonagen
bai-nara “Bye, see you later’: Bye + Sayonara; Sometimes pronounced “bayonara”
mesu-teriku ‘neurotic bitch’: mesu ‘female’ + the “-teric” of hysteric
The rapid spread of the American fast-food mania brought with it even more eccentric words of English extraction: nakkuru, short for snack-uru ‘to snack,’ chii-too ‘cheese toast,’ ai-ko ‘iced coffee,’ aitii ‘iced tea,’ and ai-mi-tii for ‘iced mint tea.’
Kentucky Fried Chicken appears in teen slang as Kencha no Furachin, which produced the verb kencharu, ‘to hang out after school at a Kentucky Fried.’ Hageru means ‘to go and get some Häagen Dazs ice cream.’ Denny’s was playfully changed into zudenii, and Mr. Donut became misudo.
The single most successful fast-food operation in Japan has been Macdonald’s. Since 1971 the chain has mushroomed nationwide into over 1200 stores. High-schoolers call Macdonald’s makudo, or makku for short, and eating the burgers is succinctly known as makkuru.
The most sensitive among this foreign batch of words is bible play, a clever metaphor imported into high-school slang from red-light clubs and porn tapes and magazines. Bible, pronounced BYEBURU, is a playful extension of baibu ‘vibe,’ short for vibrator.
The Japanese club crowd is astonished at the flash flood of new expressions that year after year pour out of the schools and surge through Tokyo’s trendy computer-game centers and fast-food hangouts. Even today’s twenty-somethings, still hot on the club scene with their flamboyant teen slang from the late eighties, find it hard to keep up with the latest waves.
One of the most inventive sources for neologisms is the cross-cultural pun: the expression that pretends to be English but is in fact Japanese. A white kick, for instance, is a ‘killjoy’: the teens took the Japanese shirakeru ‘to be a killjoy,’ split the word in two, and ended up with shira ‘white’ and keru ‘kick.’ Parkinson means ‘gullible, a push-over’: it is a contraction of pâ de kin o son suru ‘Losing money out of sheer stupidity.’
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Palm Desert employees charge that their manager created an atmosphere of hatred and tolerance.” [From the San Bernardino Sun, 21 December 1992. Submitted by J.B. Lawrence, San Bernardino]
Crossword Puzzle
Across
1. Proud at this, when given the bird. (7)
5. Maniacal, not one to rewrite a calendar. (7)
9. Put into twelve dozens perhaps to gain your attention. (9)
10. Plants, a hundred and one around the act. (5)
11. Here is the coldest in France. (6)
12. Stirred tea in Crete and other things! (8)
14. Young chicken mixers! (10)
15. Is the French the word for waterlogged land? (4)
16. Make a grab when nearly all;s at stake. (4)
18. Mix-up in trial sauna could create a wild revelry in Rome.
21. You must put a stop to this. (3, 5)
22. Sort of argument that could produce a lot of hot air. (6)
25. Most parts around me are damp. (5)
26. Four pairs make a reel gathering! (9)
27. Lack of care of Glen, etc. (7)
28. Sort of friend who could stop the bleeding. (7)
Down
1. Old leader of America pretends rum ain’t what it used to be. (9, 6)
2. Fishing to a certain degree. (7)
3. Sounds like the tramps, but musical. (5)
4. Cross and tell sort of makeup. (4)
5. Auditor, one who hesitates in the theater. (10)
6. Sort of turtle the newsman scoffed at. (6)
7. Puzzled Uncle in the U.S. gets to the heart of the matter. (7)
8. Murderer, victim, and other brother. All a long time ago. (4, 4, 3, 4)
13. Match burning in a tent could secure it. (10)
17. Goat having offspring, it’s a lie. (7)
19. It’s a disappointment, landing in a balloon. (3, 4)
20. Dump the digit, stealthily. (7)
23. Is the film crowd man waiting outside? (5)
24. Selfish images of oneself. (4)
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Viewed from a strictly humanitarian point, Mr. Bush’s aides said this week, the White House’s decision on Nov. 25 to commit troops to Somalia was forced by a steady decline in the country’s military and social condition that began in mid-October and reached a peak days before Thanksgiving.” [From an article by Michael Wines in The New York Times, 6 December 1992, page A-14. Submitted by Robert W. Harvey, Essex, Connecticut]
CORRIGENDA
In a review of The Endangered English Dictionary [XXI, 1,22], we misattributed authorship of Poplollies and Bellibones. As many readers probably know because the book is in their libraries, Poplollies and Bellibones is the work of Susan Kelz Sperling.
In David Galef’s “Sound and Sense” [XXI, 1], please note that the reference in “The Miller’s Tale” should have been to Alison, the wife of John the carpenter, not to the reeve’s wife; also, for “sussurus” read susurrus.
Internet Archive copy of this issue
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See, for example, Camille Paglia, “The Joy of Presbyterian Sex,” The New Republic, December 2, 1991, pps. 24-27, or Susie Bright, “The Prime of Miss Catherine MacKinnon,” In These Times, pp. 39-40. I feel obligated to add that, as someone accused of sexual harassment, my interest in these issues is not purely academic. ↩︎
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I take the approaches made by prostitutes to be classic examples of uninvited sexual advances. Whatever one’s views of prostitution, however, one would be hard pressed to seriously consider such behavior as a form of sexual harassment. Incidentally, a related linguistic usage, and one which I agree is pernicious, is illustrated by the allegation that certain persons invite offensive behavior— even violence—through, for example, their dress or appearance. The contradiction is clear. If neither dress nor appearance constitutes an invitation to make sexual advances, then it is difficult to see how the fact that sexual advances are uninvited should be sufficient basis for allegations of sexual harassment. ↩︎
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One obvious example of a “semantic hole” in sexual relationships is the often-observed absence of neutral terms for unmarried sexual partners. A colleague writes that his university is seriously considering the expression spousal equivalent. The caricature has now become the reality. ↩︎