VOL XXII, No 1 [Summer, 1995]

Politicking with Words: On Ideology and Dictionary Meaning

Ashok K. Mohapatra, Sambalpur University, Orissa

To Polonius' query, “What do you read, my lord?,” my answer would have been “Words, words and their final meanings” if I had played Hamlet in the latter half of the 18th century, with Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary in my hand. I would have taken in good earnest the definitions of those entries that people usually quote for gratuitous pleasure but dismiss as crotchety. In the mid-19th century, however, I should have replied, “Words, words and their provisional meanings,” with reference to the opposite and, at times, equally crotchety definitions of the same entries, reading Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) on the stage. On the second occasion I would have grown somewhat circumspect about dictionary meaning not simply because Johnson and Webster diverge so widely, but because meaning per se is determined by relative historical and ideological conditions.

It is a commonplace that dictionary is the mark of authority and the standard. That the standard is collectively agreed upon through convention and practice is another truism. But collectivity can be a problematic concept since it does not cover all in society as far as fixing the linguistic standard is concerned. Given that society is heavily stratified into classes and ranks, all those living in it do not have a uniform level of literacy and the same degree of access to the process of linguistic standardization. As this process is controlled by the culturally and politically dominant group or class, the ideology of dictionary adapts itself to the dominant ideology at all points of time. Since wide acceptability is the goal of ideology, it makes its cultural and political agenda invisible and makes itself look “natural” and “objective.” The giant publishing houses in England and America turning out hundreds of dictionaries of various sizes and kinds always regard objectivity and fidelity to actual usage as ideals and marketability as the end. In practice, indiscreet lapses from objectivity do occur nonetheless, and the market suffers occasional setbacks. A few years ago, an edition of Longman’s English dictionary had included in its definition of Bangkok, a city “with a lot of prostitutes.” Provoked by this, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and the leading bookstores there decided to boycott the dictionary.

Another event that clearly illustrates how ideological conditions determine meanings of words in a dictionary occurred when the twentieth edition of the Duden dictionary came out. This was the first all-German dictionary to be published after the unification of the two Germanys. In those days, the definition of capitalism, among many others, read in conflicting ways in the Duden dictionaries in East and West Germany, which was natural considering their opposed political and ideological dispositions. In English translation they are as follows:

a social formation based upon exploitation of the labourers through private property and production means

[East German Duden Dictionary]

Then Webster goes on to hint at the notoriety of the Tories by tracing the word Tory back to an Irish word meaning ‘robber’ or ‘bandit.’ As for Johnson, he believed it to be a “cant term, derived…from an Irish word signifying a ‘savage.’ ” Here Johnson confers on the Tories the distinction of being the true representatives of English politics and religion, although one should not forget that the Whigs, too, believed in the constitution of the state equally well and used the same rhetoric for their own publicity. But Webster’s role in this context was only to tarnish the image of the Tories and brighten that of the Whigs.

Johnson dismissively defines Whig as “the name of a faction” and spitefully remarks that the term derives from whigamore denoting “people from south-west counties of Scotland, whose poverty drove them to rise against the court and Scottish royal authority etc.” Webster, on the contrary, stubbornly maintains that the origin of the word is “unknown” and shows the Whigs in a favourable light by presenting them as “the advocates of popular rights” during the English Civil War and as “the friends and supporters of the war and principles of revolution” during “the revolution in the United States.”

In 18th century England, Tories and Whigs were engaged in a battle of rhetoric, each group claiming monopoly of the custodianship of constitutional democracy and national tradition. In America, similarly, the Federalist party and the Republican Democratic party were contesting with each other for the exclusive title of “friends” to the constitution of the United States in the 19th century. Thus polarization in politics had led to proliferation of partisan political meanings. Claims and denials as well as vilification of the opponents and self-glorification characterized political discourse both in England and America at different times. Johnson and Webster took up political positions that turned out to be antagonistic irrespective of the gap in space and time. For each one of them the dictionary was a site of political struggle clearly signifying ideological underpinnings.

Ideology surely informs meaning. If meaning appears neutral, as it does in the modern dictionaries, it is only so following the dictates of objectivity, an ideology in itself, and the politics of invisibility.

economic and social order whose driving force is the individual earning profit

[West German Duden Dictionary]

After the unification, the West German definition predictably featured in the new dictionary, displacing the East German counterpart. Also, many words and usages exiled from East Germany now found a place as free citizens in the world of linguistic glasnost, which this dictionary represented. A few of them are Republikflucht ‘leaving the country illegally,’ meinungs freiheit ‘freedom of opinion,’ Wettreise ‘journey around the world,’ Freizeit ‘leisure time,’ and Stasi ‘secret police.’ Indeed, the changing socio-political and historical conditions determine origin, currency, and extinctions of words as well as their meanings. Conversely, the words and meanings determine these conditions.

To return to Johnson and Webster, we may cite pension, Tory, and Whig as illustrative samples of a good many politically charged entries. In Johnson’s Dictionary, pension is defined thus:

In England it is generally given to a state hireling for treason to his country.

In Webster’s American Dictionary, it reads:

An annual allowance of a sum of money to a person by government in consideration of the past services, civil or military. Men often receive pensions for eminent services on retiring from office. But in particular, officers, soldiers and sea men receive pension when they are disabled for further services.

Johnson’s terse and narrow definition reveals his Tory opposition to the Whigs, who normally were the government. In his time they were seen as “arms of a growing and ever more intrusive governmental institution,” to quote Robert De Maria, Jr.’s “The Politics of Johnson’s Dictionary,” [PMLA, Vol. 104, No. 1 (Jan. 1989) p. 65]. But Webster’s elaborate and labored definition is an argument for pension. In the 1780s there had been a nation-wide protest against grant of pension by the Congress to officers who had served in the Continental Army during the American War of Independence. The Convention of the protesters at Middletown, Connecticut, demanded repeal of pension. Webster rose to its defense and contended that the social unrest had been caused by a misrepresentation of the word. People did not distinguish between pension granted as a provision for old officers and pension granted for the purpose of bribery for favor and support. He maintained that pension was half pay for ex-officers.

Tory is defined in Johnson’s Dictionary as

One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the Church of England.

It contrasts sharply with Webster’s definition:

The name given to an adherent to the ancient constitution of England and to the apostolical hierarchy. The tories form a party which are [sic] charged with supporting more arbitrary principles in government than the Whigs, their opponents. In America during the revolution, those who opposed the war, and favored the claims of Great Britain were called tories.

Horse Words in a Motor Age

Ralph H. Emerson, South Glastonbury, Connecticut

The replacement of animal power by motors has vastly changed social life in many ways; yet language is conservative, and horse words have survived the loss of horses very well, remaining in the general vocabulary to be widely used without horsey associations even among people who have nothing to do with horses. Many of these words are used figuratively, and others have simply transferred their meanings to modern objects and conditions, especially those having to do with rail and motor transport.

Our most basic expressions for transportation are traceable to horse imagery. We drive motor vehicles as we once drove horses; indeed, until 1900, the very question “Can you drive?” meant “Do you know how to drive horses?” We ride in vehicles as we ride horses — even the word road is rooted in ride. Street is from the Latin via strata, a paved road, a phrase whose own history mirrors the relation of ride and road: via ‘road’ is cognate not only with our way, but with a whole set of Latinate words suggesting movement: vehement, convey, and even vehicle itself; just as way is related to wag and wagon.

We can scarcely talk about motor vehicles without using words that originally applied to horse-drawn ones. Vehicle itself is Latin vehiculum a ‘carriage’; and even the early automobilist heard his machine called a horseless carriage, just as the early railroader heard his called an Iron Horse, which of course drew carriages of its own. (Apt names, actually: a chuffing steam train starting or stopping really does sound like an excited horse; and the earliest railway carriages, like the earliest motorcars, looked very much like their horse-drawn counterparts, having been built by the same craftsmen.) Train recalls the image of a pack-train, a string of the packhorses who carried much of Europe’s freight before good roads; and the very strength of machinery has long been measured in horsepower, significantly shortened simply to horses.

Car, the plainest of our motor-vehicle words, has a complicated history. Originally Celtic for wagon, it was borrowed into Latin and thence Norman French as carre, yielding not only the verb carry and its abstract carriage, but also cargo, charge, chariot. (Cart and coach are not related to it, the first being Anglo-Saxon and the second named for the Hungarian city of Kocs, an early manufactory.) Early modern English used car poetically for the chariots of the sun and planets, as in Milton’s image of a maritime sunset in Comus: “And the gilded car of day / His glowing axle doth allay / In the steep Atlantic stream.”

In Victorian America, car was quickly applied to railway carriages, whence boxcars and passenger-cars, and also to tramways, first to horsecars and then to electric-cars, otherwise known as trolley cars, or streetcars, or simply cars (whence carfare). Until the early 1900s, to ride the cars meant to ‘take a tram,’ and the man in the cars was used as sobriquet for an ‘average person,’ like the man in the street. When automobiles were introduced, someone coined motorcar. When this in turn shortened to car, the word assumed its modern sense, which soon overtook all the others.

Most other vehicle words transferred their meanings from horse to motor with less fuss. Rig once applied to wagons; so did truck and its British counterpart lorry. Farming implements like plow and hayrake have kept their old horse-drawn names, and so have most utility vehicles, like fire engine, Black Maria, paddy wagon, ambulance, and delivery van—the last clipped from caravan ‘living wagon,’ which survives in full in England to mean a ‘camping trailer.’ Bus is clipped from omnibus, which means ‘for everybody’ in Latin: it was a slang term for the horse-drawn public transport of the early 1800s. The cab of taxicab is from cabriolet, a light passenger cart; and hack is hackney coach, a ‘coach for hire,’ hackney or hack being ‘a hired horse’ and by extension ‘anything shoddy and overused,’ whence hack-word and hackneyed phrases. Liberal ‘generous’ yielded livery stables, which hired out horses as to-day’s livery services hire out taxis and limousines.

In describing mechanical contrivances, the Germans continue to use their word Wagen to mean ‘car,’ as in Volkswagen; and American English has the compound station wagon, originally a horse vehicle for fetching people at train stations. The British call station wagons estate cars, but they refer to freight cars on a train as goods wagons (borrowed into French as plain wagon, also used in wagons-lits, the sleeping cars on old trains like the Orient Express). Carriage and coach are also rail terms now; but the British still use dual carriageway for the kind of road Americans call a divided highway, and coach remains in use both as a euphemism for a ‘longdistance bus’ and somewhat bizarrely as the name for the ‘cheap seats on an airplane.’ French gives us porte-cochère, originally a porch under which one entered a coach. We modernize this in the loan-translation carport.

With horses, wagons carry freight and have four wheels; carts may carry anything but have two wheels. A passenger vehicle is a carriage; if it has four wheels and is light and cheap it is also a buggy, and if heavy and enclosed, a coach. (Sleds are wagons with runners, and sleighs are carriages with runners, though the British use sledge for both.) Two points stand out about these words. First, many are still used in their own right, but in trivialized senses: little red wagons for kids, go-carts and golf carts and shopping carts (all more than two-wheeled, though, called shopping trolleys in Britain), Olympic bobsleds and sleds for coasting down hills, dune buggies for zooming around beaches, and even baby carriages and baby buggies. Second, the suggestion of ‘towing’ has vanished in the modern uses of these words, except in the train senses, for we call anything towed behind a motor vehicle a trailer. We even have horse trailers for transporting horses — putting the car before the horse, so to speak, though I have never heard anyone mention the irony in this.

Most of the old names for vehicles' constituent parts persist in our newer machines too: wheels and tires and axles and brakes and springs, of course; but also the collective name for all this stuff, the under-carriage now applied to cars and trains and even airplanes! (The undercarriage was also called the gear, whence landing gear.) Steering wheels and steering itself were originally boat words, and hubs and spokes persist in metaphors and bicycles more than in cars (except for hubcaps). But cartwheel was kept as a nickname for a silver dollar, and it also charmingly describes a playful whirling jump.

Many names also survive from the body of a carriage. Many carriages had folding tops, exactly like convertibles. The oldest enclosed coaches originally had two passenger seats facing each other, an arrangement preserved in the compartments of European trains; but later coaches often had only one enclosed seat, as if the coach had been cut — or in French, coupé. Coachwork still means ‘bodywork’; and at least in America the luggage compartment at the rear is still called a trunk (it once really was a trunk, as you can see in pictures of old coaches and even old motorcars). The horn is the literal and figurative descendant of the post horn, the spiral horn that was carried by a mail coach to announce its arrival in a village and whose image is still the post office symbol in much of Europe. The strangest survival is dashboard: on an open carriage this is a small vertical shield by the driver’s feet, and like the fenders over the wheels, it keeps mud from being dashed up as the horses go.

When we say that luxurious little stores serve the carriage trade, we commemorate the coachmen who waited in the cold while the very rich shopped, for only the very rich could afford to come in carriages of their own. If the public wished to travel, they could take stagecoaches, which employed an extra man besides the driver called a guard, who was armed to protect the vehicle from bandits. In England the office survives figuratively on trains, where the guard corresponds to the American conductor or trainman. In America we retain the notion more colorfully when we say someone is riding shotgun on a project, ‘acting as a troubleshooter.’

Coach in the artistic or sports sense is an abstraction of the ‘vehicle’ sense; for as the OED explains, an instructor was thought to “convey” his students toward mastery. Team, now also a sports word, is rooted in tow, and originally referred to the set of horses used to draw a vehicle. A four-horse team is called a four-in-hand, and this has given its name to a necktie knot (the narrow kind, not the wide Windsor knot). A man who drives team is a teamster, a word preserved in the name of the American truckers' union.

Following a trend we hop on the bandwagon, the gaudiest wagon in a circus parade. Giving up alcohol, we are simply on the wagon, the water wagon that sprinkled down dusty dirt roads in summertime. You can’t do business from an empty wagon — an empty peddler’s wagon—and if you heed the advice of the other Ralph Emerson, you will hitch your wagon to a star. Fixing someone’s wagon is teaching them a lesson, and pipe up about grievances: the squeaky wheel gets the grease, because a wagon’s hubs rotate directly on the axletrees and squeak if they are not greased constantly. Taking something away, we cart it off; and scandals fester until the tumbrels roll, the executioner’s carts of the French Revolution. The ordinary French cart, the charette, bedevils architects, who charette when they finish drafting in a great hurry at the very last minute. An office doing this is said to be on charette — literally ‘on the cart,’ as if everyone were stuffed in and frantically working away till the very moment they clattered up to the client’s door!

Leaning into the collar is working hard: imagine a horse straining against the collar to pull a heavy load. The leather eye-patches sewn to the sides of the halter (blinders in America and blinkers in England) keep a horse from shying by narrowing vision to the road directly ahead, the sense implied when we say that someone does something with blinders on or has a blinkered viewpoint. In tandem is often used to mean ‘simultaneously’ or even ‘side-by-side,’ but a tandem hitch is actually one or two horses ranged one in front of the other, in a single line, with tandem originally going back to a Latin pun. On the other hand, a troika — three political powers working together — harks back to a Russian hitch of three horses abreast.

We coax balking people like reluctant draft animals with carrot and stick, get them back into harness after a holiday, yoke them to co-workers like oxen, drive them hard as part of a team. Companies even keep stables of lawyers or designers or whatnot. Marrying, we get hitched, like harnessed horses; and we even try to harness wind and sun and people’s enthusiasm. We whip up enthusiasm too, as a horseman whips up his team to get them going. And horsewhipping once settled many public arguments, since whips were commonly carried on errands so they would not be stolen from the parked buggies. An old catalogue from the Wadsworth Atheneum Gallery in Hartford even read: “Umbrellas, Parasols, Canes and Whips to be left at the head of the stairs.”

Of course, the buggy whip is rare enough today to be a byword for anything hopelessly outmoded — the buggy-whip industry being singled out with a particular chuckle — and horse-and-buggy days has become the byword for a whole lost era.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The city streets are being decimated,' by illegal dumpers, DiClaudio told the judge.” [From The Philadelphia Daily News, page 10, n.d. Submitted by Steve LaCheen, Philadelphia.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The goods on garlic:…Garlic shots are a vicious measure of garlic-flavoured liquor.” [From The Globe and Mail, 20 September 1991. Submitted by Kurt Loeb, Downsview, Ontario.]

Chunnel Vision

Gary Egan, Ballina, County Mayo

The desultory dialogue recorded below is a verbatim rendering of the sort of conversation one might overhear on Eurostar as it chunders towards London. As well as their duty-free plus, the two English speakers have a selection of French vocabulary to declare. Many of these words and phrases are here, even as we speak, but largely confined to literary/academic circles. With the advent of the Channel Tunnel, however, we may expect a Gallic idiom to enter common usage as the century itself chunders towards the year 2000…

Scene - A Eurostar coach. ARTHUR sits next to TIMOTHY, who looks rough.

ARTHUR: Not quite the rendezvous with Destiny the brochure claims, perhaps, but still—where once there was a watery impasse, now there’s Anglo-French rapport and a Eurotunnel. And very fin de siècle it is, too.

The train pulls out of La Gare du Nord.

ARTHUR: (sighing) I’m always sad to leave. No matter how prodigious your joie de vivre, partir c’est mourir un peu, don’t you think?

TIMOTHY: (blinking) Pardon?

ARTHUR: Ça ne fait rien. One too many nuits blanches, eh? The spirit is always willing, but for the flesh — especially under the eyes — they can be something of a bête noire…I bet you’ll miss the grub, though.

TIMOTHY: Only the bread. Those baguettes are real bargain-stretchers — and you can use them as bâtons on the Métro, too.

ARTHUR: But what about cordon bleu? Didn’t you dine out while you were over?

TIMOTHY: Burger King on the Champs Elysées, mostly.

ARTHUR: I’m talking about haute cuisine, not les bas fonds! I think you’re missing something. I had myself some amazing blowouts…I particularly remember some pâté de foie gras I sampled. It made all the pâté de foie gras I’d tasted previously seem mere pastiche. It was a tour de force. Shame the wine — a parvenu Chardonnay — proved to be a weak link.

TIMOTHY: I’m strictly a snacker at the best of times — I prefer vignettes to full-coursers. I did try a crêpe suzette once, but it tasted like paper. I’d rather spend money on a film than —

ARTHUR: Ah, a film buff. Tell me: when is a director simply a director and when an auteur?

TIMOTHY: Hey, I’m just a filmgoer. Call me passé, but if a movie has a decent plot and credible characters I go home happy.

ARTHUR: But after Godard’s riposte to the raconteur, no rapprochement is possible between —

TIMOTHY: To be honest, a lot of the films recommended by the critics make me feel more like a voyeur than a spectator —

ARTHUR: Of course — a contemporary film narrative (if it can properly be called a narrative) puts voyeurism under surveillance.

TIMOTHY: I see… They’re never short of a nude or two, that’s for sure, but for my money there are too many longueurs. But I’d sooner a film than an art gallery any day. You never know what might turn up as an objet d’art, do you? …Or maybe you do.

ARTHUR: If you mean that succès de scandale where the artist showcased a border-control barrier with a Cupid’s arrow and “Naomi Campbell 4 The Elephant Man” scrawled on it —

TIMOTHY: No, it’s just that I find all those objets trouvés so recherchés. The attitude behind them — ça me fait chien.

ARTHUR: Are you au fait with Jeff Koons?

TIMOTHY: Koons? The name rings a bell… Yes, I’m nearly sure somebody answering to that name tried to flog me a vacuum cleaner once. I remember because the price he was asking was so outré.

ARTHUR: Funny you should say that because there are those who consider him a traveling salesman manqué. But for others he’s vital link with a tradition of impertinence dating back to dada in general and Duchamp’s urinal in particular. Like yourself, I have reservations about objets trouvés: I don’t think they become aesthetic simply because they cease to be functional. For me, Koons is the latest manifestation of je m’en foutisme. In short, so much blague. Duchamp’s urinal was a pis aller after which there should have been silence, broken only by the occasional gurgle from the cistern.

TIMOTHY: I’m partial to water-colors myself and a bit dubious about anything since the Impressionists, who might justifiably have prophesied, “Aprés nous, le déluge”…

ARTHUR: I share your wariness, to a point. Too many modern artists have a penchant for leaning over backwards to tease critics, but forget all about I’homme moyen sensuel who, more often than not, likes his pictures in comics.

TIMOTHY: Bien sûr. Where are the punchlines in painting?

ARTHUR: Well, Picasso’s work combines austere geometry with ebullient jocularity: even his most tormented images can seem like jeux d’esprit. Contours are broken and illogical simultaneous viewpoints gleefully entertained. But see the way he negotiates the crévasses and avalanches of the image’s fragmentation — quel éclat! His was a brush with lawlessness on its side; a brush as sure-footed as a chamois—

TIMOTHY: But a bit of a bounder in his private life, by all accounts. Revenons à nos moutons, however —

ARTHUR: Revenons à nos moutons, if it’s punchlines you’re after, look no further than that quiff on Picasso’s La Femme dans le jardin or the sculptures in —

TIMOTHY: Maybe au fond I’m just a philistine, but I can never quite convince myself that artists obsessed with the naked human form aren’t pornographers, by any other nom de plume. I know loose morals are de rigeur for la vie de Bohème, but —

ARTHUR: Pornography may be risqué, but it takes no chances, aesthetically speaking. It’s a question of style —

He raises a hand to quell TIMOTHY’S protests.

ARTHUR: I know — but what is style? Bon ton? Flair? Panache? Aplomb? Verve? Chic? Élan? The trouble with all those terms is they associate style with élégance and ignore its jolie-laide dimension. Any discussion of what constitutes style must encompass tributaries as diverse as the lavatory humor found in Gargantua & Pantagruel and the exquisite diction presiding over Belinda’s toilette in The Rape of the Lock. À propos of this diversity of styles, it might be remarked that diversifiers have often been discriminated against by critics, who would have would-be Renaissance-men specialize; they throw a cordon sanitaire around respective artistic endeavors with a rapidity and thoroughness that is most unhealthy. Any genre-hopping is strongly discouraged. And if these pogo-stickers are acknowledged at all, it’s their fate to be fêted in one medium and disparaged in others, although they may (like Wyndham Lewis, say) have been accomplished in more than one. In this way, first-rate peripatetic artists are consigned to the pantheon’s banlieux rather than its 7th arrondissement.

TIMOTHY: I wouldn’t know about that, but I think the work should speak for itself. Any critiques are de trop.

ARTHUR: Certainly the work should speak for itself, ç a va sans dire. Despite the plethora of synonyms for it, style continues to elude definitions with finesse. It’s maybe three-fifths savoir-faire douched with two-fifths je ne sais quoi—if that’s the mot juste. I’d say, “le style, c’est l’homme,” but look at Eric Cantona —

TIMOTHY: What, you mean the Manchester United ace given to contretemps with footballing authorities and fits of Gallic pique?

ARTHUR: I was thinking more of the Rimbaud scholar whose arabesques cause defenses to wobble like blancmanges. How can we reconcile the boorish drop-kick aimed at the Crystal Palace fan in the stands with Eric’s suave skills on the pitch? He’s been banned till October so the rest of the season will be a real saison en enfer for him — he’ll have plenty of time to write a dissertation on everybody’s favorite poète maudit. For me, Rimbaud never graduated from being an enfant terrible to become a major poet; he only compounded the cliché inaugurated by Villon, that is, combining absinthe-fueled dissipation on slender means with a vacillating devotion to his art. He wound up trading it in for gunrunning and died of a gangrenous tumor, but chacun à son goût, as one amputee said to another.

ARTHUR’s monologues are taking effect; TIMOTHY feels quite drained.

TIMOTHY: I think I’ll nip out to the buffet-car—

ARTHUR: I’d approach the French onion soup with a soupçon of distrust, if I were you.

TIMOTHY: Thanks for the warning. It was nice listening to you…Adieu.

ARTHUR: Pas du tout — we must do it again sometime.

But next time TIMOTHY resolves to fly. OK, so on a good day Chunnel is faster than flying on a bad day, but the monologues on Air Liberté are shorter.

No Boys Named Sue, But…

Hilary M. Howard, London

The most popular name in my (all-female) class at school was Ann/Anne. There were four or five of them. Also two Susans and one Suzanne. To even think of using any of the variations for a boy would have raised both a laugh and an eyebrow. Which is the whole point of the song “A Boy Named Sue.”

Yet some centuries before there was a boy named Anne: the full-bearded face of Anne de Montmorency 1493-1567, soldier, courtier, Constable of France, gazes from his portrait with supreme aristocratic confidence. Head of a powerful clan, winner of wars, adviser to kings, father of five (legitimate) sons, he was also, reproves the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “irascible” and a “ruthless authoritarian.” It deplores his “scorched earth policy” and “ruthless crushing” of a peasants rebellion. Just the ungentle times in which he lived? Or something to do with his name? Did he, like the mythical “Boy Named Sue,” continually have to prove himself? His godmother was Anne, Duchesse of Brittany and Queen of France (twice). Anne, from the Hebrew Hannah ‘God-favored’ and reputedly the name of the Blessed Virgin’s Mother, has always been popular with European royalty. The derivative Nancy, although used for girls at least since the time of Queen Anne (d. 1714), is not found for ‘catamite’ until (says Partridge) about 1810. It therefore seems unlikely to be in any way connected with the excessively macho Constable.

We had no female Michaels nor even a Michal, although they were not unknown. John Barrymore’s long-suffering wife was Michael Strange. “Miss” Michael Learned delighted TV viewers in The Waltons. Did she have to battle with her agent in the early stages of her career?

Also high in the female popularity stakes in 1940s' England were Shirley and Alison: Shirley Temple reigned supreme and Charlotte Bronte’s heroine gave intellectual respectability. Originally a Yorkshire place and surname, it had mainly masculine associations for centuries. Alison, the Gaelic form of Alice, actually means ‘son of Alice.’ The only other Gaelic name widely acceptable to the middle classes that I remember was Deirdre. Fiona lay in the future, together with Karen, Sinead, and a host of others, all unequivocally female.

In the school were two red-headed sisters, Carol and Noel (not “Carole” or “Noelle”). Were they the daughters of a clergyman who surely admired neither “Carole the Cad” one-time King of Romania, nor Noël Coward; but perhaps yearned for sons?

There was a Vivien who could be comforted by sharing her confusing name with a major star, Vivien Leigh. Some boys carried the fanciful variant Vyvian.

The Leslies were more fortunate, for their sex was distinguished by the spelling. This was before Humphrey Bogart muddied the waters by calling his daughter Lesley after Lesley Howard. It has been suggested to me that this name has lost a great deal of its popularity for girls due to its diminutive, Les, too easily confused with lez (for lesbian), which seems a pity. It has a pleasing sound once used by the poet Burns with his Bonnie Lesley, and its French form is immortalized by the delightful Leslie Caron.

Howard’s character Ashley in Gone With The Wind is now unisex. In 1989 it was recorded as the second most common girl’s name in the US. Indeed, in the less tradition-bound atmosphere of the New World, dual-purpose Kellys, Caseys, Beverleys, Madisons, and Dales abound.

It seems that just as English spelling in general became more formalized with the spread of literacy, so the gendering of names also became more defined. For example, I have an 18th-century ancestress shown in contemporary records as both Christian and Christina — never, until an inaccurate 1920s' copy of the family tree, as Christine.

The use of surnames as given names is worthy of note. The patronymics of powerful tribes such as Howard, Clarence, Cecil, Percy, Douglas, Bruce, Tudor, and Stuart are all seen as masculine. Yet Cecil was initially a girl’s name. One of the poet Edmund Spenser’s (d.1599) most poignant elegies commemorates Douglas Howard Georges, the wife of Arthur Georges. Similarly, the mystic, Lady Julian of Norwich (1342-post 1416) took her masculine name from the Chapel of St. Julian where she had her Hermitage. (Surely not from the apostate emperor?) It is true that from the earliest times she was also known as Juliana, and all variants of this great Roman clan name have always been popular, from a former Queen of the Netherlands to the delicious Julienne soup, named after a female cook. The apparently straightforward transference of clan names can, however, lead to confusion. The Irish practice of bestowing a maternal grandparent’s surname upon a first-born son, gives us Joyce Carey (the male writer). Joyce Carey (the actress) more likely got her name from an adaptation of joyeuse. Much the same thing occurs with Lucy (often Latinized to Lucius), another surname, but when used for girls more likely to be from the popular saint, or for its meaning, ‘light.’

This ambiguity could have extended to Rose, coming either from the flower or from the Teutonic for ‘horse.’ Yet the only male Rose I can discover is the nickname of the unlovely villain, Rose Noble, in Dornford Yates’s 1930s' thriller Blind Corner. Perhaps there is a “Boy Called Rose” somewhere in the States? There was after all, that male Carmen Cavallero, conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, whose unusual name never failed to intrigue British television interviewers. His successor as a transatlantic purveyor of popular classical music was André Previn, whose French first name is also occasionally used for girls, without a qualifying extra e.

Still in America, “Sydney” is (according to Collins Dictionary of Babies' Names) “predominately female,” though an American authority queries this. Whether it originates with the French Sidonie or the British Viscount Sydney who gave his name to the Australian capital, is problematical. Certainly Nancy Mitford’s mother was so called, and in the 18th century Sid was even a generic term for ‘girl.’ From the days of the heroic Sir Philip (d. 1586) Sydney (d. 1586), this has been a popular name, transcending class barriers: Dickens' Sidney Carton; the comic actor, Sid James; “Sid” of the huge government advertising campaign when privatizing British Gas.

Privileged families are not a European prerogative: American Cabot, Lodge, and Winthrop appear to have been largely used for boys, but Lee is generously even-handed: J. Cobb; Harvey Oswald; Remick; and Radziwill. Transported by the Gulf Stream, it has even landed on my eldest grandson. Whether this widely popular use has anything to do with any close association with the General Robert E., the distinguished Virginian family, or even the foundress of the Shakers, is perhaps unlikely; it is just a very nice name.

Most names seem to drift from male to female (perhaps reflecting a deeper trend). Not so Evelyn. In the form Aveline, it was introduced by the Normans. Female until the 17th century, it became a surname and was then widely, but not exclusively used for boys, generally of the upper or professional classes: Evelyn Baring the banker; Evelyn Henderson, brother of a 1930s' British ambassador, and, most famously, Evelyn Waugh. His first wife, together with the mystic Evelyn Underhill, kept up the female usage. A slightly differing pronunciation sometimes distinguishes the gender. At about the same time that Aveline/Evelyn crossed the Channel, it became acceptable to christen children Mary. Previously thought too holy for mortal use, once established, there was no stopping it: Marie; Mairi; Mair; Ria; Marise; Moira; Marietta; Marion (or Marian). Nor, in Europe, was it confined to girls: Carl Maria von Weber; Eric Maria Remarque; Howard Marion Crawford. And, in America, (See Here Private) Marion Hargrove.

Once across the Atlantic, however, doubts set in. The French Constable Anne Montmorency bestrode French history without apparent difficulty, but it was feared that no Marion could ride tall in the saddle however rugged his appearance. So the studio chiefs repackaged their discovery, Marion Wayne, as John. Could he, by the remotest chance, have been the inspiration for “A Boy named Sue”?

Proper Words in Proper Places

Rosemary Bowmer, Dursley, Gloucestershire

Latin is a language as dead as dead can be.

It killed the ancient Romans — and now it’s killing me.

I daresay there is truth in the rhyme we chanted at school with such feeling. In our language, dead words are continuously discarded. There is considerable replacement, mostly of high technology words and changes of meaning. As new processes are discovered, there must be a vocabulary to match.

Some of these dead words are delightful. Here are a selection of measurements used when England was totally agricultural:

broad and narrow oxgang the amount of land that could be cultivated by an ox, between eight and ten acres

fardel (farthingdeal) 1/4 acre

landyard Somerset measure for a rod

math the amount of crop mowed

nook corner of a square, small triangular field

quarentena a furlong

A furlong was an eighth of a mile and a rod four and a half yards in pre-metric times when I started school.

The ancient field names are bizarre:

assart land converted into arable

bawn Irish dialect for fortified or cattle enclosure

booly Irish: temporary enclosure where itinerant herdsmen keep their animals

cockshoot/cockshut clearing through a wood

pightel small enclosed plot

pingle Midlands: paddock

spong Midlands: narrow strip of land

wong a portion of unenclosed land

Even nowadays one comes across dialect words whose meaning is obscure. On coming to live in Gloucestershire, I was puzzled by tump, daps, and shrammed (‘hillock,’ ‘gym shoes,’ and ‘cold’) just as, no doubt, many visiting the north are confused by skinch and clarty. Clarty is such a suitable word to describe ‘sticky with mud.’ Skinch is used in childhood games to call a truce, usually with crossed fingers.

There was a huge vocabulary, now dead, concerning ancient roads. Borstal was a ‘hill path,’ chare an ‘alley,’ chimin a legal term for a ‘road’ (<French chemin?), and leet was a ‘crossroads.’

Years ago, while on the Parochial Church Council, the owner of a cottage adjacent to the churchyard, had problems with the church wall bulging onto her path. A humorless secretary entered this event in the minutes as “The bulging of Miss B’s back passage.” If only he’d had the correct word, this uncomfortable event could have been referred to as a tewer, a Midlands term for ‘alleyway.’

Coins and taxes had their own vocabulary too. An angel was a ‘coin worth 6/8 (34p) in 1464.’ A dandiprat was a 16th-century ‘coin worth 1½p,’ and a testoon was ‘5p.’

Pavage, pontage, avenage, beaconage, and furnage were taxes or tolls for, respectively, paved roads, bridges, rent in oats, upkeep of beacons, and the use of the lord’s oven. Childwite was the ‘fine paid by the father of a bastard.’

The British have always been free with their use of nicknames, which, being descriptive, are useful to historians. As the population grew, Christian names became insufficient for identification purposes. A man’s trade became incorporated — Smith ‘blacksmith,’ Cooper ‘barrel maker,’ Gardener, Farmer, and the less obvious, Pinder ‘keeper of the pound,’ Parker and Hayward ‘officers responsible for the care of game and of fences.’ Place names often have developed in the same way. It is not difficult to see how Sevenoaks, Newcastle, and Coldharbour developed.

Sometimes spelling changes obscure the meaning. Deptford started life as a Deep (Depe) Ford (across the River Ravensbourne). Hounds Ditch is supposed to have been a great pit where hunting dogs, kenneled in the area, were thrown when dead. Smithfield was originally Smethe ‘smooth’ field, flat enough for local fairs and markets.

Over the years, meanings change. Generations of children must have puzzled over “Without a city wall”, from the hymn,

There is a green hill far away,

Without a city wall…

[C.F. Alexander 1818-95]

As used here, the meaning of without ‘outside’ is archaic, as in the well-known stage line, “The carriage awaits without.”

It is difficult to believe that treacle was once a wild animal, that cheater was a rent collector (more credible), and that a publican was a public servant. (Publicans and sinners were not people who kept pubs). A gossip was a ‘sponsor at a baptism.’

Recent word changes are snuff an ‘illegal film’ and gay. I, for one, mourn the unhappy mutilation of meaning. In my youth, one said Goodbye ‘God be with you’ on parting. Nowadays, we just say Cheers, an all-purpose word used indiscriminately.

All in the Family

Jerome Betts, Torquay

When the National Trust brought out a Country Craftsmen Happy Families children’s card game some years ago, the names, such as Mr. Reed the Thatcher, were neatly matched to the occupations. This has been the tradition since 1851, the year in which the firm of John Jaques of Hatton Garden, London, commissioned John Tenniel, the Punch cartoonist and future illustrator of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, to design the eleven families of four members each in their highly successful and long-lived “juvenile pastime.” The main change by other makers has been that while the original family names had a clear alliternative link with those of the jobs, this has not always been observed in later versions.

The Jaques families were nearly all tradespeople, in mid-Victorian terms, and even the doctor was given the title “Mr.” to fit the format. The names were Block (barber); Bones (butcher); Bun (baker); Bung (brewer); Chip (carpenter); Dip (dyer); Dose (doctor); Grits (grocer); Potts (painter); Tape (tailor); Soot (sweep). A twelfth four-card family, drawn by Lewis Carroll’s niece Irene Dodgson, who married John Jaques III, was included in the game during WWI and lasted till just after WWII. This was Mr. Mug the Milkman, depicted with slopping-over pail and hand-bell, who maintained the alliterative pattern. A majority of the names still work today, though Block, Chip, Dip, and Grits might well be opaque to modern children or taken in a different sense without the accompanying illustration. Perhaps, too, Mr. Bung would be a football manager in recent times.

In the versions that abandoned the alliterative connection, it was possibly easier to give a satirical slant to the names, as with Mr. Sand the Grocer, probably alluding to the same suspicions of adulteration in the trade voiced in G.K. Chesterton’s verses, “The Song Against Grocers”:

He sells us sands of Araby

As sugar, for cash down…

The format was taken up for advertising purposes, with “families” of dogs and personified cigarette brands and was given an ingenious verbal twist in the 1950s in a large Happy Families set produced by the drug firm Wyeth to publicize a cough linctus. All the families had names related to types of cough. There was thus the Bark family of dog breeders, the Hack family of woodcutters, the Hoarse jockeys, and the knife-grinding Rasps.

Exposure to Happy Families at an early age perhaps leaves us ever afterwards sensitized to apt matches — or mismatches — of name and profession, which may be why they seem so easy to spot. Among the many treasured examples that have come my way are Mr. Scales, a deep-sea fisherman, Mr. Main, a plumber, Mrs. Bridge, a dentist, Mr. Hewitt, a forester, and Mr. Down, a demolition contractor, who even manages to alliterate. But a name may also connect with the bearer’s work in a less fortunate way. A glance through the largest occupational group in my local Yellow Pages turns up farmers with suitably evocative names like Bale, Bull, Sheaves, and Steer, but others called Blight and Greed. No doubt Farmer Blight can stand it, and has got used to the jokes produced by a not altogether happy conjunction of name and business. He may be taking some pleasure in the possible recent discomfiture of the previously appropriately named Farmer Veale, in the wake of the campaign against live calf exports from the United Kingdom. Similar thickness of skin may be required by a friend’s accountant, who is a Crook, and physicians called Blood and Coffin.

So familiar is the phenomenon that it was capitalized on in the late 1980s by the small community of Dartmouth in Devon to raise money for the town’s swimming pool. Two separate sets of Happy Families cards were published using authentic local business people’s names of both the congruent and clashing kinds, such as Mr. Drew the Artist, who helped with the production, Mr. Pillar the Builder, and Mr. Killer the Chemist.

Despite the total symmetry of farmers actually called Farmer, most names which either historically relate to a trade or merely suggest one to us through some association are carried by people in completely different occupations. In this way Mr. Shepherd may be a jeweler, Mr. Glover a carpenter, Mr. Bridle a joiner and not a harness-maker, and Mr. Fudge an estate agent rather than a confectioner or politician. There are several Bakers who are butchers by calling and may even draw attention to it with advertisements highlighting Bakers the Butchers, though I have yet to record a Butcher trading as a baker. I shall continue to look out as well for a Smith who actually works as one.

On Good Terms

Richard L. Champlin, Jamestown, Rhode Island

The shift away from agricultural life progresses apace. With this shift also fades the rural idiom that accompanied it. All the more reason, then, to focus on this idiom as seen in colorful terms before it drops below the horizon.

Near the highest elevation in Rhode Island in the woods stands a heap of rocks, a marker, about six feet high surmounted by a flat, upright slab adding another two feet to its height. Such a marker goes by the name merestone (also meerestone or mear-stone). According to the OED2e that term harks back to a Saxon text dating from 956 AD. A millennium later when I asked a nearby resident about the land marker, although he had not seen it, he without hesitation called it a merestone. Few others knew that term, although John Holdsworth added that it turns up in old deeds. For me it served as a milestone prompting me to collect rare words.

What would you call a low, narrow strip of land, for instance, a flat stretch running between a hillside and a brook? Answer: a slang. Webster’s Third calls it dialectal. OED2e offers a quotation dating from 1610: “There runneth forth into the sea a certaine shelfe or slang, like unto an out-thrust tongue.”

The Auchincloss family dwelling, Hammersmith Farm at Newport, R.I., originated on the drawing boards of architect R.H. Robertson, and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. The plan as executed included a barrier, a ha-ha, to prevent livestock from straying too close to the dwelling. Though now in disuse, it consists of a trench three feet deep, on sloping land, with a retaining wall on the uphill side. This ha-ha was constructed so as to be completely invisible to the occupants of Hammersmith Farm. The ha-ha is probably encountered more often now in crossword puzzles than in the landscape.

Five likely dictionaries omit the word tug as it is used locally. Block Islander Ellsworth Lathan assured me that his fellow-islanders refer to peat, once widely used for fuel, as tug. To them “winning” peat consists of digging tug from bogs and hauling it out to dry before burning. Who knows, perhaps the arduous haul gave rise to the term tug? Peat bogs, where tug lies waiting, occur in the lowest land around. Hence it comes as no surprise to find in the town of Exeter a lowland called Tug Hollow. In such places, too, is found bog iron, sometimes concentrated enough to deflect compasses. Bog iron has found its way into the dictionary (viz. Webster), and so, too, should tug.

Rhode Islanders have been ridiculed for their eccentric pronunciation, leaving rs out of words or adding them at random. Witness the bumper-sticker that reads, “In Rhode Island Drunk Drivers get Court.” Or the native son who quoted the Bible phrase “the law of the Lord” in such a way that it came out “the lore of the Lawd.” Something like that happened when a tried-and-true Swamp Yankee pointed to a tree with an abnormally wide-flaring bole, saying, “It’s a churn-buttered oak.” That needed unscrambling. Churn because like a butter churn the tree flares widely at its base. Since churns are associated with butter, the word butted, which is what he meant to say, became converted into buttered. As a term, churn-butted has identical twins, swell-butted and the more graphic bell-butted.

While considering boles, butts and churns, let’s take the word haggle. Of course, you may say, it means to argue over a price, hopefully to whittle it down to size. That is literally what my friend, Leon Peckham, meant when he spoke of haggling a stick of wood. And that is exactly how the Century Dictionary defines it: variant form of heckle “to hack; to cut or chop.” Further, OED2e supports this with its definition, “to make cuts, hack.” Leon was right.

Leon’s father had a sawmill where he frequently spoke of dozy wood, a term seldom used on Times Square. As the OED2e delicately puts it, “of timber or fruit in a state of incipient decay.” Akin to dozy is the term wany (or waney), used to describe a board as cut at the sawmill, imperfect because it ran into bark of the log from which it was cut.

Once again from the sawmill or more correctly the planing mill, the term pickwick in the following sense has nothing to do with Dickens. When knotty pine panels are installed, their boards nailed side by side form quirky joints. These may be simple V-shaped grooves or more fancy ones such as a molding with an ogee curve. The plane was equipped with a pickwick, a sharp distinctive cutting edge to gouge out the desired groove, and the term came to be applied to the wood as well as the tool. Pickwick comes to us from the age of oil lamps: when the wick burned down too low to give a good flame, it had to be raised, often by use of a sharp-pointed instrument designed expressly to do that, a pickwick. Was a pickwick, then, the prototype of the sharp-profiled attachment on a plane?

After lumberjacks snaked the logs out of the woods, one log behind another, linked by chains and horse-drawn, they set aside some logs to be hand-hewn. Before hewing with the broad ax, they first scored the logs at intervals to prevent deep, damaging cuts. This scoring process they called skaffing, and the marks so made, skaffs — at least so my informants tell me. Webster, however, defines skaff as a “saw kerf,” labeling the term “colloquial New England.” Granted, saws leave kerf marks, uneven ridges which are straight if they came from the old up-and-down saws, circular if from the later circular saws. But kerf marks on milled timber are hardly the same as skaffs on hewn logs. Perhaps the term varied from place to place and in different ages.

Hay poles as a term would never win a popularity contest with computer terminology, but lest we forget, they were poles used in pairs by two men, one out from with a pole in each hand, the other, holding the opposite ends, bringing up the rear, and carrying bales of hay cut by scythe from the hummocks of a bog. Making the poles of light-weight poplar reduced the overall burden. Horses were of no use in swamp or swale, but hay poles did the trick.

On a dairy farm, if the farmer overworked the same bull in breeding cows, the cattle would at length become too inbred. In such a case Willoughby Young would observe, “There’s too much snipper in the stock.” The nearest I could find to that in a dictionary was in the Century, which defines a snipper-snapper as “a small, insignificant fellow.” The OED2e defines snipper as a “cattle dealer on a small scale.”

The term dandling board means a ‘seesaw.’ This one came to me from a countryman with a remarkable name, Resolved Waterman, who pronounced his first name with three syllables. Solvey, as everyone called him, kept Holstein oxen and Suffolk sheep. Nothing unusual about that, except that he trained them to perform on a dandling board at county fairs or before other awestruck audiences. It seems doubtful that Disneyland would carry on this tradition.

Colorful names from the plant and animal kingdom are rife. A few examples follow: dipper duck for the ‘pied-billed grebe’; jakes for ‘young male turkeys’ (their elders are toms); loopwood or witch hobble for the ‘hobblebush’ (Viburnum alnifolium) because the stems bend over and grow roots at the tips creating a loop that can abruptly trip a hiker in snowy woods; pippin, not for the apple, but for the ‘tangy, red berry of wintergreen’ (Gaultheria procumbens); pugger for ‘ferret’; quong-queedle for the ‘bobolink’; rain crow for the ‘cuckoo,’ often heard before rain; scoke (or skoke) for ‘pokeweed’ (Phytolacca americana) of Massachusett Indian origin; skipper for a ‘young deer’; and finally an imaginative one, whippoorwill shoes for the ‘lady’s slipper orchid’ (Cypripedium acaule).

In the kitchen the baker before baking her bread must make the dough gaumy, by which she meant moist enough. OED2e calls gaumy a rare word and offers the alternate spelling gormy. One wonders how gaumy the dough was that Thoreau mentions when he tells us that his mother left a bowl of dough overnight to rise, only to find the cate the next morning comfortably enthroned on the dough. We trust she rose to the occasion.

If a forest fire ravaged the trees leaving them twigless and limbless, the above-mentioned Willoughby Young would call them dead staddles. Country people understand this; city people do not.

Members of the Kenyon family are so numerous in Rhode Island that one of them commented, “If you lift up a stone in Hope Valley, Kenyons will go scuttering off in all directions.” Picturesque, and the meaning is perfectly clear.

Finally, Willoughby, who was my mentor in matters of country language, explained the term scythe rifle. He had shown me his boiling spring, a spring that boils up from the depths and also bubbles. He and his folks used to collect the sand from a boiling spring to make scythe rifles. This tool was used for sharpening scythes on the hayfield in hot July. A scythe rifle consisted of a stick of wood flattened on two sides like a paint paddle, then smeared with Le Page’s glue and sprinkled liberally with the dried sand from a boiling spring. So said Willoughby. Pleased with my new knowledge, I paraded if before another old-timer, John Lester Brown, who caught me up short. “That’s the new way of doing it.” quoth he. The old way was to take a flat stick, hickory was good, and jab it with an ice pick hundreds of times, spread beef tallow over the pits, and finally sprinkle boiling spring sand on and work it in. “That,” he concluded, “would last two or three years on the hayfield.” Surprisingly even Ralph Waldo Emerson Knew about scythe rifles. In his essay on Prudence he remarks, “…what is more lonesome than the sound of a whetstone or mower’s rifle when it is too late in the season to make hay.”

The words or terms included herein comprise a mere cross-section, a sampler of the language of rural America, these coming only from the smallest state. The people who use them use a language far richer than that of simple Basic English. Old words fade out. New words take their place. But isn’t that the difference between a dead and a living language?

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Whenever there is something that is a concern to me, I peddle my butt up there,' [Taborsak] said, referring to the senate chamber…” [From The News-Times (Danbury, Connecticut), 19 May 1991. Submitted by Edwin A. Rosenberg, Danbury, Connecticut.]

OBITER DICTA: A Discouraging Word

Milton Horowitz, Jackson Heights, New York

A few months ago, when I installed and turned on my new computer, the name of the startup program that appeared on the screen was not “Macintosh HD,” as the manual assured me it should be, but Balagan. Nowhere in the manual (and I searched repeatedly) was this term cited. More frustrating, Balagan allowed me to proceed nowhere.

New users of newly bought software are especially vulnerable when seeking help. They are easily persuaded that their inability to work with the computer lies not with hardware, software, or any ware. “The fault, dear computer user, is not in our wares but in ourselves,” to coin an expression for computer salespeople. To get rid of Balagan, change the name, I was told, to any name you want. I might have replied that that program by any other name would be as sinister. For a time, balagan was the most discouraging word in my vocabulary. Store staff finally took back the computer, grudgingly. There weeks later, they gave it back, de-balaganized somehow. They wouldn’t say.

Was there in the store, I asked, a mischievous employee, a Mr. or Ms. Balagan, who playfully infected my machine with a computer virus (whatever that is)? Among the many I queried, merriment at my discomfort was evident.

Last week, I started a book, The Hope, by Herman Wouk. Imagine my frisson when, after only a few pages into Chapter 1, I came upon this exchange between characters:

“What’s happening?”

“Utter and complete balagan! That’s what’s happening !”

The author helpfully dropped this footnote:

Balagan. In modern Hebrew, mess, foulup, snafu, fiasco. A loan word from the Russian, used in Israel with extraordinary frequency.

I congratulated myself. I was evidently correct. Balagan was planted in the computer to foul it up. Having read enough fiction for the day, I turned to the New York Times. In the Arts and Leisure section, I was drawn to a headline about the Holocaust. The article, datelined Florence, Italy, described a documentary about the legacy of the Holocaust called— you guessed it—Balagan. The film takes its title, the article said, from the Hebrew word for ‘chaos.’

Can English be far behind? Announce the coming so that VERBATIM readers can say “I know, I know.”

You can have your cake and eat it

R. Millar, Church Crookham, Hampshire

There is a notion favored by the bureaucrats in Brussels that products should not be named after a place or sound like some original thing such as champagne or cheddar cheese unless they come from that place. The obvious one is of course the humble Brussels sprout, although I am unsure if this little green monster should have a capital to denote it’s capital. I don’t care for sprouts much, and don’t buy enough of them to worry about their correct form of address.

This subject often arises in pubs and restaurants where food is served. Food is the most obvious subject, but the range of everyday things which might at some time have to be renamed is extensive. First, there are obvious and widespread things like Eccles cakes, Lancashire hotpot, Cornish pasty, and Welsh rarebit. This is part of a much longer “geographical” list of foodstuffs which can be expanded to include some sublime candidates such as Turkish delight, French toast, Indian tonic water, chicken Maryland, and Tiger nuts, although the last might defy such easy categorization. Bombay duck (which is some sort of fish) seems to be like a double fault, but just think of all those dishes on the menus of your favorite restaurants. Does Bombay alloo come from Bombay? Is the Madras flown in specially that day? Where is Vindaloo?

Another (rather dubious) category is anatomy with tennis elbow and housemaid’s knee. Then there’s Derbyshire neck, which is a complaint, not an activity. We also have bow legs, Roman noses, pigeon chests, not to mention German measles, chicken pox, and crow’s feet.

One might want to include clothing with anatomy one the grounds of proximity. Oxford bags, like flares, might one day come back into fashion, while Wellington boots obviously won’t. Arran sweaters are both attractive and fashionable, but the idea of a Guernsey Jersey is rather difficult to cope with. Codpieces are definitely out, which is a good thing since, like the Chelsea bun, they fall into a category called “could also be food.”

Sometimes, one encounters exotica. The last Venus flytrap I saw was in Kew, and I’ve seen Mars bars in a shop in Basingstoke. Canterbury bells are nothing like Westminster chimes, Manchester tart is different from Bakewell. Black Forest gateau competes with chocolate log. Swedish massage is performed in Turkish baths. Roman candles, Greek yoghurt, Spanish fly, navel oranges—they will all have to be changed. A Mountain bike or a Hackney cab could be used to go to Cumberland for a sausage, passing through Barnsley for a chop with, of course, Yorkshire pudding. Will we be able to have the same meals riding in a Surrey? One of my friends has a Panama hat which he swears he wore in Vienna. He wants to know if Victoria sponge with a Bath bun and Malvern water is of interest. He is a consumer of the Indian tonic water with the famous London dry gin, which explains the tortuous logic in his offering. His drink has, in fact prompted the “lemon washing up liquid” category into which we should put oddities like Tiger balm, Manila envelope, French kiss, Chinese burn.

Although we have clearly invented a new and potentially dangerous way to look at the world through the eye of the Brussels “Can’t Have This” department, we can now design whole menus of the forbidden food variety. Breakfast could be Canadian bacon, English muffin with Seville marmalade, Irish breakfast tea. Elevenses might be a bit of Dundee cake and a Granny Smith apple. Lunch could be York ham with Worcester sauce washed down with a nice drop of India Pale Ale. In the afternoon you might want to suck an Everton mint to tide you over until dinner, which could include: Dover sole with Leek puree; Turkey with the usual bits and pieces, including the dreaded Brussels sprouts; Spotted dick with custard and a variety of cheeses such as Scottish cheddar, Somerset brie, and Wensleydale from Wales, not forgetting the Bath Olivers. Of course, you would have to drink something, and I suggest a nice Suffolk Punch as an appetizer, followed by a French Pilsener with the fish and a good Australian Shiraz with the turkey, finishing with a spot of Kendal mint cake.

I don’t want to provide any more bureaucratic grapeshot (oops!) to restrict our freedom, but we must remain alert when shopping for food: that Danish pastry sitting next to the Battenburg cake could have been baked by a man wearing Argyll socks with a Windsor knot in his tie. Stick to the farmhouse loaf instead!

SIC! SIC! SIC!

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

OBITER DICTA: The New York Sansculottery

Judith Weiss Cohen, Pawtucket

Writing styles have changed greatly from Victorian days when, as Phyllis Cunnington observes in Costumes of the Nineteenth Century, “to talk of trousers was considered vulgar, and some extraordinary names were given to them, such as unmentionables, inexpressibles, unwhisperables, nether integuments, and others.” But at The New Yorker this Victorian attitude persists, albeit with a new twist: time and again men’s trousers are not given substitute names but are left out of otherwise quite detailed sartorial descriptions. Pants are, as it were, repeatedly dropped.

…during the shooting of the movie “I.Q.,” …Walter Matthau, who plays Einstein, was standing around in an auto-repair garage (the set) in Hopewell, New Jersey. With him were three actors playing the parts of Einstein’s fictional pals…. Matthau had on his Einstein clothes (floppy brown wide-wale corduroy pants, brown suspenders, a gray striped cotton-short-sleeved shirt, Rockport shoes) and his Einstein makeup …Saks was costumed in a Panama hat and cream-colored jacket and pants; Jacobi in cap, gloves, spats, and a too tight vest over a big belly: Maher in a white-and-black-checked coat, tweedy pants, and round-rimmed glasses.

[The New Yorker, December 19, 1994]

Poor Jacobi’s pants were left off. Is this why the headline of the piece was “They All Laughed”?

Whittle himself greeted me, dressed, as he almost always is, in a sweater and bow tie. He showed no sign of being engaged in the struggle of his career… [ibid., October 31, 1994]

But the struggle seems to have turned physical.

[Francis Graeve] goes to the Center every day …dressed quietly in a sports jacket and a striped tie…[ibid., October 11, 1993]

Quiet, indeed!

…Mr. Thieu would step in. He was wearing a bright-yellow shirt and white leather sneakers with pink tongues…

[ibid., August 2, 1993]

When Tom Jones appeared on the small stage, he was wearing what seemed to be a uniform—a black jacket with fourteen red “X”s on it.

[ibid., May 24, 1993]

Irving [Link], dressed in a black cashmere Edwardian coat, chocolate kid gloves, and a camel’s hair scarf… [ibid., February 22, 1993]

Whenever Schultes was at the Botanical Museum, he opted a striking costume: suspenders (“braces” to him), a crimson four-in-hand, and a starched, spotless, snow-white lab coat.

[ibid., June 1, 1992]

In contrast to Shigeru, who was wearing a stained T-shirt and rubber boots, Yasumasa was dressed in a clean white sports shirt and street shoes. [ibid., October 14, 1991]

In an interesting switch on pants-dropping, The New Yorker has on occasion kept in pants but omitted a key top garment.

They had sized each other up at the start, in the ruins of Troy. She was standing in khaki safari slacks and a lime-green tennis visor on Level II… [ibid., April 4, 1994]

It is not clear whether this is an example of prudery or of prurience, which has been exemplified by such new-editor innovations as the magazine’s long excerpt from The Story of O and a cover featuring a man’s crotch.

The New York Times also often resorts to old-fashioned stripping off of pants. Even a cursory reading of “All the News That’s Fit to Print” turns up examples of males appearing bare-legged, not to mention bare-bottomed. From a description of Jimmy Carter’s meeting with Radovan Karadzic:

…former Sarajevo psychiatrist with his pile of Elvis hair, and Sonja, his sturdy daughter, dressed to the nines in a broad-brimmed hat and stiletto heels.” [The New York Times Magazine, January 29, 1995]

She was dressed not to the nines, but to the zeroes.

Arthur, in a green knit cap and tan winter jacket,…rise[s] in morning darkness to begin a 90-minute trip to school.

[ibid., October 9, 1994]

Sheriff Jones, a huge 64-year-old white lawman who dresses for work in plaid shirts and suspenders, was one of the most feared law officers during the civil rights era.

[ibid., February 21, 1993]

The author Allan Gurganus, reading at the Museum of Modern Art, was described as

…wearing his trademark reading outfit: Converse high tops, a formal shirt with black studs and bow-tie, beneath a ratty old sport coat. A mess, but a considered one.

[ibid., December 6, 1992]

More of a mess than the editors admitted.

As Martin, attired in an exquisite light-blue dress shirt buttoned at the neck, watches from a couch, sipping cranberry juice,…Martin on screen is making a weird birthing grimace and taking eggs out of his pants. [ibid., May 3, 1992]

At least his TV attire was more complete than his offstage wear.

An article about Syria, a nation known for its rigid Islamic dress code, states that

The banner was eventually translated by one of the many young men there dressed in black leather jackets and white bobby socks, standard attire of the Mukhabarat…

[ibid., January 26, 1992]

“Whenever I feel tempted to wear something aggressively inappropriate for the occasion, I remind myself of the period in the early 70’s when my bold party look was a black shirt and white tie, along with a pair of Tretorn sneakers that I repainted white before every outing.”

[Thurston Clarke, September 15, 1991]

Not too bold for the editors of “Men’s Fashions of the Times.”

English on the Serbian Front

Peter Constantine, New York City

War inevitably brings with it vigorous surges in language creativity, as people from all corners of the country and from vastly different walks of life are hurled together under extreme, often bitter conditions. In the case of Serbian, language change in the nineties has been particularly active as Serbia has taken energetic measures to distance itself from its Serbo-Croatian past. Today only the Cyrillic alphabet may be used, and new language edicts dictate which words are acceptable and which are taboo. Throughout Serbia, old and young, front-liners and mountain villagers, find themselves regularly overrun by new official vocabularies and new slang as the status quo of the country tilts and changes.

But the newest and most radical trends in Serbian sweep through the fast-spoken slang of Serbia’s first generation of youngsters—those who have come of age since the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. We find, for instance, that the wild new words for ‘cool!,’ ‘red!,’ and ‘brilliant!’ are krvavo! (‘bloody!'), mrtvachki! (‘deadly!'), bomba! (‘bomb!'), ludo! (‘crazy!'), and grom! (‘thunderclap!').¹ A hiphop word for alcohol is supa za teturanye (‘staggering-soup’), and the clandestine drug words of the moment are:

mara, mariya, mariyana, maritsa, marish, marishka, meri, and the American Meri-Jein (Mary Jane) for ‘marijuana’

koks, koki, kokitsa, kokos, kochke, koka, coca-cola, and aspirin for ‘cocaine’

hash, hasha, haki, haksli, hale, hatsa, and the American shit, for ‘hashish’

horn, hero, hop, kon’ (‘horse’), and the American doup (dope) for ‘heroin’

morfo, moka, moki, and mokitsa for ‘morphene’

Sex is alliteratively called keks and group-inter-course, playfully, kontsert ‘concert,’ palachinka ‘pancake,’ and grupich ‘grouping.’

But on a more sinister note, rough new bellicose words have flooded into Serbian slang. Quick rough sexual intercourse, for instance, is called patrola, as in ‘patrol.’ A rapist is called borats ‘soldier,’ mehanichar ‘mechanic,’ buldozer ‘bulldozer,’ and, strangely, turist ‘tourist.’ A military raid is called orkestar ‘orchestra.’ Hundreds of slang words for firearms have cropped up: the common revolver alone is known as rovelo revats, reva, revar, and actor.

One of the interesting phenomena in Serbian slang is the rapid influx of English. Different groups, ranging from urbane students to cliques involved in drug smuggling and prostitution, pepper their language with English or English-based expressions. If a drug dealer were to rattle off lists of narcotics words, the English speaker would be surprised at all the familiar sounds: California, sunshine, gelatina (‘gelatin’), and gelé ‘jelly,’ for instance, are cryptic nicknames for drugs in general. The word for joint is tvist ‘twist.’ Spid ‘speed,’ esid ‘acid,’ amfi ‘amphetamines,’ dast ‘dust,’ and met ‘methedrine’ are all drug names that have been directly imported from the international drug scene. Snifati ‘to sniff drugs’ is a serbification of the English ‘sniff.’ Fiks is a ‘fix,’ as in an injected dose, and sherbet is the Serbian insider word for the actual liquid that is injected. Stereo means that the user is injecting in both arms at the same time. Drug rushes are called flesh, as in a “flash,” or simply trip, and to have a super-strong drug-high with visions and hallucinations is known as imati film ‘to have a film.’

Autsaid ‘outside’ signifies that the drug user is “out of it,” “totally stoned”; paranoia is the word for ‘bad trip.’

The trick of storing a narcotic in a condom and hiding it in one’s anal canal is called finger, and the individual who transports drugs in this way is called a transformator.

In sex-trade circles, English has made even stronger inroads. Penises are called banana, fuckalo, priki ‘prickie,’ Joni ‘Johnny,’ karakter ‘character,’ and tvrd karakter ‘hard character,’ while vaginas have anglicized names like rozbif ‘roast beef,’ banka ‘bank,’ fuck-itsa, and tunel. Prostitutes are playfully known as gerla ‘girl-a,’ super-gerla, spermatorka, spermara, sperm-usha, stewardess, and, because they walk the pavements, granit. Another trend is to give them English-sounding names, such as Martha, Ophelia, or Laura. The unkindest word on the scene is Volksvagina, a pun on the German Volkswagen. Prostitutes, Serbian sex-traders argue, can be thought of as “vaginas” of the “folk.”

Scene words for homosexual hustlers display even more anglicisms. Individuals working in drag are often given the names Margot, Mary, Fifi, or princessa ‘princess.’ Other words are used more specifically to indicate the nature of an individual’s sexual tendencies: the passive homosexual is known as pasivats or pelican (because of his funny walk) while active homosexuals are called aktivist, activats, and draifer ‘driver.’ In the wake of ecclesiastic scandals involving priests and their young charges, older homosexuals who prefer sex with adolescents are known as pater. Bisexuals are called amphibia.

Other more general slang words for homosexual are variations on homo: homos, homosapiens, homic, homin, and the vicious homokenyats ‘homo-ass,’ or variations on sissy: sisi and sisikur. But the largest group of gay taunts can be classified as the ped- group, all words inspired by pederasty: pederaj, pederash, pederishka, pederin, pederko, pedal, pedalo, petsa, pechurka, pepos, pedos, pepi, pedikir (a pun on pedicure), peder, and its facetiously French-sounding inversions derpé and depré.

The strangest Serbian slang word for homosexual is Shekspir ‘Shakespeare.’

---

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Shakespeare Thesaurus

Marvin Spevack, (Georg Olms Verlag, 1993), xxv +541pp.

For a large part of the world—and not only the English-speaking world—Shakespeare remains the inexhaustible source of inspiration for writers, actors, directors, composers, historians, learned societies, linguists, drama schools (where, in America, he is honored more in the breach than the observance), films, academia, literary criticism, bibliographers, translators, painters, pilgrims, philosophers, and psychologists.

An impressive and thoroughly engaging addition to Shakespeare scholarship, Professor Marvin Spevack’s A Shakespeare Thesaurus deserves to take its place in the canon of eminently useful books about the world’s greatest dramatist. Subtitled, after Florio, The World in Words, this is the first work to organize and classify the entire Shakespeare vocabulary, a formidable undertaking, and an eminently successful one. For the Shakespeare maven, this one-volume lexicon could become habit-forming. In Professor Spevack’s concise (6 pp.) and witty Preface, he defines his broader purpose in compiling this treasury of Shakespeare’s idiolect as an attempt to mirror, not only the figurative “universe” of Shakespeare’s words, but the literal world of the Elizabethan age as well.

Shakespeare and his contemporaries regarded speech as God’s greatest gift to man; and speech, in Elizabethan thought, was the ultimate test of power. It was also piously believed that speaking truth would always prevail over evil; language was not only a moral weapon, but in Shakespeare’s fecund and often irreverent imagination, occasion for exuberant revelry:

Moth: They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

Costard: O! they have lived long on the almsbasket of words. I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus.

[Love’s Labour’s Lost, V, 1.]

Professor Spevack lists that final blend word under Communication (subgroup Pseudo foreign), along with 36 other tongue-twisters, among them, oscorbidulchos and kerelybonto.

At the time of Shakespeare’s birth in 1564, the English language was besieged by foreign importations—French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and Latin-by-the-yard. “Thought,” as Virginia Woolf said, “plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.”

An inspired originator of compounds (cloud-capp’d towers; home-keeping wits), Shakespeare created no fewer than 273 for anatomy alone, cited with almost palpable enthusiasm by Professor Spevack. Three of these fusions could very well be contemporary: rug-headed, urchin-snouted, and Agueface (an “in-your-face” gibe delivered to the asinine Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth-Night).

Those who have always thought (or been taught) that Hamlet’s “Get thee to a nunnery” rudely suggests that poor Ophelia hie herself to a brothel, Professor Spevack, ignoring Eric Partridge and other Shakespeare scholars, will have none of that interpretation. A nunnery may be a monastery, an abbey, a convent, a cloister, or a priory. Period.

Not that the world’s oldest profession is in any way slighted in the book and volume of Professor Spevack’s brain: under strumpet (main heading Humans, Family, Friendship) there are fifty-eight references, among them, blowze, giglet, stewed prune, and quail. In contemporary England, quail has shifted to bird; since 1860, quail in America has continued to mean a sexually attractive girl.

Since bastard (the only equivalent male counterpart to whore) is listed rather benignly under the heading, Family, we find under rogue (the sole alternative to bastard) sixty-eight equivalents, including drumble, scroyle, and varletto.

Among the thirty-seven main groups and 897 subgroups, all models of clarity and superbly indexed, subjects range from the Physical World to Sense Perception to Law to Religion to Time and Space. There are 509 references to animals; fifty-nine to flowers; fifty-three to fruits and nuts; sixteen to vegetables, and eighteen to herbs. One wonders if a “nobleman” or a man-about-court could be such a keen observer of the creatures of the field and forest, sea and air, as Shakespeare, the naturalist of Warwickshire, who knew his flora and fauna as well as their many distinctive attributes.

Hamlet is possibly the best known of Shakespeare’s works (and surely the most quoted). Professor Spevack makes short shrift of the lengthy debate over Hamlet’s “I know a hawk from a handsaw” (II, 2). The line, admittedly confusing, is often played (sometimesmimed!) as though Hamlet could not tell a bird of prey from a cutting tool. A hawk is, in fact, simply another kind of tool, used to this day by plasterers and masons.

In the ninety-two entries under the subgroups Decay and Sickness we find further echoes of Hamlet: blast, carrion, foul, mildew, peak, rank, gross, rotten, unweeded, thought-sick.

One of the many benefits of this finely tuned work is not only that meanings, but shades of meaning are made clear, especially helpful for actors, directors, and students. In many instances, one may come fairly close to Shakespeare’s meaning. To miss the crucial element of emotive charge that even a simple, one-syllable word may convey, to lose or pass over the nuance of meaning is to lose Shakespeare’s feeling as well. In Othello’s account of his courtship of Desdemona, he says:

…she thank’d me,

And bade me, if I had a friend that lov’d her,

I should but teach him how to tell my story,

And that would woo her. Upon this hint,

I spake:…

[I,3]

According to Professor Spevack, the word hint has no connotation of ‘invitation’ or ‘covert suggestion’: it simply means ‘cue’ or ‘suggestion’; but should not be construed in the modern sense of ‘innuendo,’ or ‘sly,’ or ‘teasing,’ which it came to mean by the end of the 18th century. This is, to be sure, a super-subtle distinction; but these “bits and pieces” of Shakespearean usage can make a luminous difference both in reading and in performance.

In the merest quibble, the word limbeck (Macbeth, I, 7) is missing from Professor Spevack’s compendium, although it appears to be standard usage in most editions of Macbeth. But, alembic, of which it is a common aphetic form, is there, and it means the same thing.

Professor Spevack and his colleagues have charted the countries of Shakespeare’s mind, casting a new and penetrating light on the infinite variety of his imagination. We are the richer for their perseverance.

Mary Douglas Dirks, Old Lyme, Connecticut

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Death Dictionary

Christine Quigley, comp. and ed., (McFarland & Company, Inc. /Box 611/Jefferson, NC 28640/USA, 1994), xi + 195pp.

Owing to my being unable to find the full bibliographical information for it in my “infallible” library cataloguing system, I cannot provide more than the fact that a book published several years ago by Scarecrow Press, Slang and Jargon of Drugs and Drinks, by R. A. Spears, was recalled when I saw the Death Dictionary: they are similar only in that they are both “thesauruses” (in Roget’s sense of the word—that is, they contain all sorts of direct and oblique references to the subjects they cover). Anyone who has any doubts about the flush nature of the English lexicon and the propensity of its speakers to coin metaphors should attend to these two works (at least), for they deal with only a small segment of culture. I do not mean, of course, to disparage the capacity of other languages in their ability to exhibit such a fine array of words and phrases pertaining to a particular subject, but, if it is common, I am unaware of it.

The subtitle of the DD is, Over 5,500 Clinical, Legal, Litterary and Vernacular Terms. A few years ago, when I made reference to the expression join the majority, a reader who likes to deal with such things wrote to advise that the expression was no longer literally true, for the number of people living now exceeds the total of all who had ever lived. (I apologize for being unable to give the exact reference, but the VERBATIM index goes only through Volume XVIII.) One cannot argue against such wisdom, but its validity does not mitigate our capacity to say anything we like, including, “The earth is flat” and “Adolf Hitler was really a sweetie.” Factual or not, join the majority is in the DD, along with 5,499 other terms. The range is quite wide, running from Texas cakewalk “Death by hanging,” through buy the farm to Thyestean banquet “A feast at which human flesh is eaten,” and Tlaloc “Aztec myth. A rain god to whom children were sacrificed annually by drowning.” As can be seen, this book is a veritable treasure trove of arcane information. The entries include the facetious (throat trouble “Death by hanging”; get or have a permanent “To be executed by electrocution”), the legal and legalistic (executory devise “A situation in which no estate vests under the will until the occurrence of a future event”), the jargon-based (psycho-weaponry “Fear of death implanted in the minds of victims by terrorists”; performance suicide “Suicide in response to a sense of failure in meeting society’s standards”), the poetic (pull a Frankie and Johnny “To kill one’s husband in revenge”), the religious and mythological (Petbe “Egyptian myth. God of retaliation and death”; third-class relic “Rom. Cath. An object or cloth which has come in contact with a first-class or second-class relic”). Shiva or shibah is in, from Orthodox Judaism, but not the phrase sit shiva.

The book has an interesting Introduction, which, for some reason, has a bibliography different from the one beginning on page 193. Although the entire book constitutes, as mentioned above, a sort of thesaurus, there is actually a Thesaurus section where, under main headings like Abortion, Afterlife, Assassination, Autopsy, Burial, etc., are listed synonyms arranged under categories like Examination, Investigation, Medical Examiner, and Morgue (for Autopsy) and Associations, chamber, exhumation, Mound, Premature, Preparation for, Receptacle, Shroud, and Types (for Burial).

Aside from its linguistic, lexicographic, and social uses, the Death Dictionary is highly recommended not only for its approach and treatment but as a course of study for any who have contemplated death in the abstract or in its ineluctable reality— their own or somebody else’s.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Centennial Usage Studies

Greta D. Little and Michael Montgomery, eds., (Publication (Number 78) of the American Dialect Society, 1994), v + 226pp.

[The “Centennial” in the title refers to that of the American Dialect Society, not of American Usage.]

This collection of twenty-seven papers represents a broad spectrum of opinion, chiefly by linguists and teachers, some of whose names will be familiar to VERBATIM readers. The smooth perusal of the articles is aided by a minimum of footnotes (at the ends of the essays), with a detailed bibliography (pp. 205-21) at the back of the book, followed by a useful Index of the words discussed. The essays treat usage from historical and contemporary perspectives, including material on the usage of classes of words (like pronouns of reference), specialized vocabulary, comparative treatment in dictionaries and usage reference books, visual style, and other topics that are likely to interest readers of VERBATIM.

It is not often that this commentator has the opportunity to commend a book as a bargain, but it would be difficult to find a book of this value among commercial publishers’ books at such a price. Those who wish to join The American Dialect Society are welcome on the payment of $30 (regular membership annual dues); for this they receive all publications, including American Speech, probably the best, most readable scholarly periodical on language in the world, Publication of the ADS, among which is the present volume, and the Newsletter. Correspondence concerning membership should be sent to the Executive Secretary/Allan Metcalf/Department of English / MacMurray College/Jacksonville, IL 62650/USA.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Logophile’s Orgy

Lewis Burke Frumkes, (Delacorte Press, 1995), xxii + 211pp.

If one is to acknowledge that it is unfair to express personal prejudice in reviewing books, then the entire reviewing process might as well be rejected as pointless: a critic’s opinions are valid only when he has gained a following among readers who agree with—or, at least, respect—his point of view. The issue arose (again) when I grappled with the purpose of this book. One must accept the premise of the author’s introductory words:

The Logophile’s Orgy began as wondering about other writers’ favorite words…The thrust of the book is that we all have favorite words… I, for example, use the words “eggplant” and “kumquat” more often in my writing than other words…

The problem is that the words selected—summer afternoon (Henry James), powwow, pulchritude, punctuate (Shirley Lord), Preposterous (Charles Krauthammer), delegate (Maxwell M. Raab)—often appeal because of personal association and not for euphony (unlike classics like murmur and smooth). On the grounds of euphony, many would reject words beginning with p or containing a k-sound; on other grounds, there may be someone out there whose favorite word is kreplach. It is not hard to see why publicity- and work-hungry actresses might like ubiquitous, but it would be wise to give up attempts at analysis before coping with eggplant and kumquat, though Frumkes does suggest that they reflect a proclivity for ovoid objects.

Not all those invited to contribute are writers, and one is moved to wonder why people like Ricardo Montalban, (the ubiquitous, to borrow Cybill Shepherd’s favorite) Phyllis Diller, and other major and minor celebrities were solicited. Many are so uncelebrated or of such transitory glory that they have been provided with identifying squibs: (cookbook writer) Maida Heatter’s favorite is chocolate; (CEO, Bear Stearns) Alan “Ace” Greenberg’s, omphaloskepsis (probably after eating kreplach and a good reason for finding another broker); (singer) Gloria Estefan’s, houndation, weirdness, plethora, the first of which is not in dictionaries; and, finally, (entertainer, magician) Penn Gillette’s dysphonic ruckus.

Those to whom all that is acceptable as a basis for a book may find enjoyment, intellectual fulfillment, and other reward in acquiring it. At a stretch, one might regard it as a book of (rather longish) quotations dealing with a particular theme. The contributors are listed alphabetically at the front, then their contributions appear in the same order; there is no index of words, so one cannot “compare and/or contrast” selections. As for this reviewer, he would have preferred looking at the trees rather than the paper.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Quotations with an Attitude: A Wickedly Funny Source Book

Roy L. Stewart, (Sterling, 1995), 160pp., index.

One has to be in the right mood for this sort of thing, and I was particularly so at the time I picked it up for review. In the context of the book, “Wickedly Funny” must be interpreted as meaning ‘cynical, bitter, sarcastic,’ though when it comes to people like Phyllis Diller, who is more vulgarly tragic (or tragically vulgar) than funny, it must include self-deprecating comments (“Old age is when the liver spots show through your gloves”; “My plastic surgeon told me my face looked like a bouquet of elbows”). It is misleading to call this a book of quotations: most extracts are comedians’ one-liners, and the better comedians—Fred Allen, Goodman Ace, Groucho Marx, and a few others—produce the better one-liners.

Samuel Goldwyn could scarcely be characterized as a humorist, so his Goldwynisms, rumored to be the product of a publicity agent, at least qualify as quotations. Similarly for Voltaire (not funny), Thomas Fuller (“The patient is not likely to recover who makes the doctor his heir”—clever but not funny), and Bertrand Russell (“There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge”—wise but not funny), and Sigmund Freud (“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”—a straight line funny only to us). I should say that the book is entertaining, even amusing; but it is rarely funny: if you enjoy her performances, Rita Rudner is funny on stage saying “The closest I’ve gotten to a ménage-à-trois was dating a schizophrenic,” but it is not funny to see its concocted cleverness in print.

The book is organized under six major headings (The Human Animal, Human Endeavor, etc.), with a varying number of subcategories under each (Birth & Childhood, Youth,…Memory,… Sanity & Madness). The quotations are listed in rather haphazard order under these subcategories; authors (including rare attributions to the most popular, Anon.) are ascribed and, if they are dead, their dates are sometimes given (but none for Lenny Bruce, Sigmund Freud, Samuel Goldwyn, Groucho Marx, etc.); it is hard to understand the style. If one is interested only in what Ronnie Shakes or Marty Indik—Who they?—had to say, there is an Index, but it does not list Anonymous. There is even a quotation evidently prepared by committee: “Why is life so tough? Perhaps it was cooked too long.” —University of North Carolina-Charlotte Philosophy Department. Things must be really bad for the tarheels.

Laurence Urdang

EPISTOLA {William H. Dougherty}

I find Mary Imber’s comments on rhyming slang, O. Abootty’s short essay on Kerala Billingsgate, and Charles Lewis’ neat exposition of English permutations [XXI, 4] particularly entertaining and informative.

For me the most interesting thing about Charles Lewis' table is that although I assume it works for his London English, it does not quite work for my standard American English. In my English, as in that of most Americans, bawd/bored/board, sword/sawed/ soared, and or/oar/awe/ore are not homophones; I pronounce bawd/sawed differently from board and or/oar/ore differently from awe. (Incidentally, presumably the second or third sight in the triplet cite/ sight/sight ought to be site.)

Such observations about the differences between British and American English put one in mind of Prince Charles' (a/k/a the Prince of Wales) deprecation of the American idiom and denunciation of its incursions into English English. Henry Porter, in a disapproving article in The Guardian Weekly for May 21, 1995, quotes the Prince as declaring, “We must act now to ensure that English—and that to my way of thinking means English English—maintains its position as the world language.” As Henry Porter comments, “He might as well demand a rematch of the battle of Saratoga for all the success he is going to have.” But we may concede that British English, vocabulary, pronunciation, and all, is still in competition with American English and even clings to a limited superiority of prestige. On American wedding invitations honor is often still spelled honour, some pretentious theatrical enterprises in the USA spell theater theatre, and in mustard ads on American television you won’t hear filthy-rich senior citizens say, “Hey, bud, you got any Grey Poupon?”

I find cultivated English speech often hard to understand, nor do I think this is entirely owing to unfamiliarity with U phonology. The fact that there is no distinction in the British pronunciation of some words, such as sword/sawed, that I pronounce differently supports my idea that my English is phonemically fuller than even cultivated British speech.

And then there is the case of my friend who feared for her hearing. A few years ago she consulted a physician specializing in auditory problems. The doctor examined her inner ears and tested her hearing, which he found normal, and then asked, “Why did you think you were going deaf?” My friend replied, “Well, lately I have had trouble understanding what people are saying—especially on TV.” “What do you watch on TV?” the doctor wanted to know. “Not much lately. I’m down pretty much just to Masterpiece Theatre.” “Well, there’s your answer,” the doctor said; “I can’t understand that British English, either.”

[William H. Dougherty, Santa Fe]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“From its rich nappa leather and pigskin lining to its supple comfort, the Prestige tennis shoe spoils your feet.” [From an advertisement by Prince in The New Yorker, 30 June 1986:47.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

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

EPISTOLA {Pendleton Tompkins}

I have just read “Poetic Licenses,” by Paula van Gelder, in VERBATIM [XIV, 4], which illustrates Environmental License Plates (ELPs) in California. Ms. van Gelder’s article deals with transpositions of letters which strikes me as a sort of stonemasonry. There is another group of ELPs which requires a different level of imagination and which I think of as sculpture. Here are three of the latter:

FUNEDK is the plate on my dentist’s car. The letters are to be read separately one after the other. Try it a bit faster. The answer to the question should be, “No, I have no decay.”

One day I drove up behind, a French Peugeot with the license plate ALLONS.

A very small car passed me with the license plate XX YY. I had to exceed the speed limit to pass him and to see that the driver was a small man with a pointed beard, exactly what I should expect a geneticist to look like.

[Pendleton Tompkins, San Mateo, California]

OBITER DICTA: Foreign Treasures

Ruth Flanders, North Humberside

I have long been fascinated by the way idioms and phrases are often used to express the same concept in a completely different way in different languages. Here are some examples of French idioms:

tirer le diable par le queue, lit. ‘to pull the devil by the tail’: ‘to live from hand to mouth’

mettre des queues aux zéros, Lit. ‘to add tails to noughts’: ‘to overcharge’

Comme un diable dans un bénitier, Lit. ‘like a devil in a font’: ‘like a cat on hot bricks’

ramener sa fraise, Lit. ‘to declare one’s strawberry’: ‘to put one’s oar in’

appuyer sur les champignons, Lit. ‘to stamp on the mushrooms’: ‘to put one’s foot down’

casser sa pipe, Lit. ‘to break one’s pipe’: ‘to die’

avaler son bulletin de naissance, Lit. ‘to swallow one’s birth certificate’: ‘to die’

mal aux cheveux, Lit. ‘hair sickness’: ‘a hangover’

noyer le poisson, Lit. ‘to drown the fish’: ‘to side-step the question’ or ‘to introduce a red herring’

un æil poché, Lit. ‘a poached eye’: ‘a black eye’

reméde de cheval, Lit. ‘horse remedy’: ‘kill or cure’

And some phrases:

vivre comme un coq en pâté, Lit. ‘to live like a cockerel in pastry’: ‘to be in clover’

c’est un autre paire de manches, Lit. ‘that is another pair of sleeves’: ‘that is another story’

c’est le jour où les poules ont les dents, Lit. ‘this is the day when chickens have teeth’: ‘when pigs fly’

soul comme une grive,…un polonais,…une bourrique, Lit. ‘as drunk as a thrush,… a Pole, … a donkey’: ‘as drunk as a lord’

German offers an even greater variety of exquisite examples:

böhmische Dörfer or Wortsalat, Lit. ‘Bohemian villages’ or ‘salad of words’: ‘double Dutch’ or ‘it’s Greek to me’

das alte Lied, Lit. ‘the old song’: ‘the same old story’

Senf dazugeben, Lit. ‘to add mustard’: ‘to put one’s oar in’

Papierdeutsch, Lit. ‘paper German’: ‘officialese’ or ‘gobbledegook’

weiβe Mäuschen, Lit. ‘white mice’: ‘pick elephants’ or ‘traffic police’

Plunderstück, Lit. ‘item of plunder’: ‘a Danish pastry’

eine Leiche im Keller, Lit. ‘a corpse in the cellar’: ‘a skeleton in the cupboard (or closet)’

Hals und Beinbruch!, Lit. ‘Break your neck and your leg!': ‘Good luck!”

ein Landei, Lit. ‘a rural egg’: ‘country cousin’

ins Fettnäpfchen treten, Lit. ‘to step into a bowl of fat’: ‘to drop a brick’ (or ‘to make a tactless remark’)

Nägel mit Köpfen machen, Lit. ‘to manufacture nails with heads’: ‘to go the whole hog’

saure Gurkenzeit, Lit. ‘the time for sour gherkins’: ‘the silly season’

ins Gras beiβen, Lit. ‘to bite into grass’: ‘to kick the bucket’ (or ‘to bite the dust’)

Blau und Grün, Lit. ‘blue and green’: ‘black and blue’

ein blaues Auge, Lit. ‘a blue eye’: ‘a black eye’

ein Rotstift, Lit. ‘a red pencil’: ‘a blue pencil’ (as used by the censor)

And some phrases:

das Schäfchen im Trockenen haben, Lit. ‘to have brought the sheep into the dry’: ‘to have made one’s pile’

Schnee von gestern, Lit. ‘yesterday’s snow’: ‘water under the bridge’

so sicher wie das Amen in der Kirche, Lit. ‘as certain as the amen in church’: ‘as sure as eggs are (is?) eggs’

sich freuen wie ein Schneekönig, Lit. ‘as pleased as a snow king’: ‘as happy as a dog with two tails’

auf beiden Schultern Wasser tragen, Lit. ‘to carry water on both shoulders’: ‘to have a foot in both camps’

wie Gott in Frankreich leben, Lit. ‘to live like God in France’: ‘to be in clover’

ein Gesicht wie 37 Tage Regenwetter haben, Lit. ‘to have a face like 37 days of rain’: ‘to have a long face’

A browse through dictionaries will provide many more gems. Good hunting!

Et tu, Brutus, old chap!

R. Millar, Church Crookham, Hampshire

I recently watched a program on television which featured somebody called Levan—a first name pronounced LEEVan. I cannot get it out of my head that this chap is named after Lee van Cleef. I know it is silly, but there it is. I also find myself making up similar names which might turn out to be popular, like Susanbee, Henrythee, Popejohn, Franklindee, and so on.

Along these lines, another baby name fashion has come along. This time it is for names ending with the masculine suffix -us, the most recent example to receive publicity in England being Columbus. We all know that young parents can’t resist these fashions any more than they can resist the new clothing styles that come along, but where will it all end? Many parents would recoil in horror at being considered fashion victims with regard to names, but when your children (Marcus and Titus) are in school with Tacitus and Rufus and Dædalus you can be consoled by the fact that in the school down the road, the children of Danii and Du’aine (Gluteus and Mucus) are being mercilessly ragged by Tahini and Pooh, themselves the children of Elvis and Moonbeam.

Yes, it is true! Fresh from a demi-generation of people calling their offspring Moonflower and Droplet, they are jumping, or being pulled, on to the latest bandwagon as a result of that curious human trait which makes people want to be twee and different. It is “clever” to have a slightly unusual name for the brats because it makes them stand out from the crowd—at least for five minutes—until that virus, or whatever it is that goes round the maternity wards when suddenly every other poppet is called Jason or Tracii or Wayne.

In Norway there is a law which prevents registering silly or unusual names for children. Apparently at one time people were choosing names like Thunderstorm or Fisherman, these being inspired by current events. A similar rule exists in France, where names must be chosen from a prescribed, though extensive list. However, it is not the same where I live: I am regularly confronted with children whose names I last saw on the menu of the Maharajah restaurant.

We all know that names, or most of them, mean something. More often than not, we in Britain do not know what they mean, whilst foreigners from Boulogne-sur-Mer to Beijing seem to know exactly their meaning and history. In a Chinese restaurant in Tehran (in 1977) a waitress told me that her name meant “the sound of small bells heard tinkling across the valley.” “Yes,” I thought then, “I bet it does.” Only now, I realize, she was telling me the absolute truth. Understanding that names really do mean something, perhaps we could ask people to think more carefully when choosing them. For instance, if you want your latest to be a lawyer, then choose a solid trustworthy name like James, but change your surname to something like Budge, Bilbo & Tweep. If you want a master builder, use Brick, Timber, or Lintel. You might even consider the persistent American habit of giving only initials as names and call your architect-to-be RSJ or your just-announced announcer BBC. Gardeners could be Buddy, Lorne, Jeyes, or Bethany. Astronauts could be Rocket or Luna or even Columbus. A driver could be Dodge. A chef could be Kenwood or even Chefette.

Place names were a favorite for surnames at one time—why should they not do double duty as first names? I favor Bath, Bolton, and Barton-le-Beans for a plumber, carpenter, and farmer, respectively. This has a satisfying economy of word usage which pleases me no end.

It isn’t even necessary to be given these names at birth, because there cannot have been so many Smiths in olden times and I have a suspicion that some people give themselves new names when they take a new job where nobody knows them. How else would we explain the suddenly large number of Krystles, Daleys, and all the Fionas who have suddenly become ffyona?

And speaking of giving yourself something you weren’t born with, what about Peter for a safecracker, Tealeaf for a shoplifter, and perhaps Bogus for a conman, which brings us back to square one!

In the spring of 1994, British toothpaste commercials referred to plaque as “plock”; six months later, they referred to it as “plack.” What the British put on (both our) houses remains “plock.”

No problem

Talking about (or in) clichés, a columnist in The Independent recently commented on No problem: “Why,” she quoted a friend, “when I ask for a pint, should the barman feel it necessary to reassure me that I am not making an unreasonable request?” Our sentiments exactly. In similar situations, especially when one has bought something in a shop, bar, or wherever and says “Thank you” (when it is really the salesperson who should have said that), the reply should have been either “Thank you” or “You’re welcome.” The response No problem is probably intended as a sincere expression of willingness to serve, but it comes across as a polite way of saying, ‘I don’t really mind your having taken up my valuable time coping with the mentally and physically taxing demands imposed by your overbearing, though trivial request, because I am an accommodating, thoughtful person paid to occupy myself with major decisions concerning issues of earthshaking consequence,’ with ‘but don’t let it happen again’ implied. There is no doubt that this one is here to stay—at least for a while—if its reflexes elsewhere (Kein Problem, Pas de probléme, etc.) are any indication. We devoutly wish that it will either disappear or quickly acquire the meaninglessness of other well-established clichés.

The joy of jabberwocking

J. A. Davidson, Victoria, British Columbia

If you do not worry about the borogoves (or borogroves) being mimsy while the slithy toves were gyring and gimbling in the wabe, you should not bother to read this piece. Others of you, of course, know about these splendid beasts, and their activities, in the poem “Jabberwocky”, which is found in Lewis Carroll’s Alice through the Looking-Glass. Some of the nonsense words from this poem have been taken into standard dictionaries of the English language. Jabberwocky itself is given in The Concise Oxford Dictionary as designating “nonsensical writing or speech, esp. for comic effect.” Webster’s New World gives this: “meaningless syllables that seem to make sense; gibberish.”

You may remember that the jabberwock, burbled as it came whiffling through the tulgey wood. The verb burble, according to The Concise Oxford, means “speak ramblingly, make murmuring noise.” As a noun it now means “a murmuring noise; a rambling speech.” It also says that it is an aeronautical term meaning, “(of an air-flow) break up into turbulence.” Carroll may have taken it from the Scots language, in which it means “to bubble or boil up, like water from a spring”; for Scots burble-headed means ‘stupid, confused.’ Whiffle is defined as ‘be variable or evasive.’ In Scots it means either to ‘drive before the wind’ or to ‘play the fife or flute.’ I like to think that the jabberwock played the flute in the tulgey wood. According to the big Oxford, Carroll coined tulgey to designate a wood that is “thick, dense, and dark.”

Others of Carroll’s verbal concoctions are now found in our dictionaries, such as slithy (probably from slither), gyre (from gyrate, perhaps), and chortle ‘utter a low, deep laugh.’ There is the splendid galumphing, which, according to Chambers English Dictionary now means “to stride along exultantly; to bound about in an uncoordinated, noisy way.” Then we are given frabjous, as in “O frabjous day!,” which The Concise Oxford allows straightforwardly as meaning “delightful, joyous” and has provided the adverb, frabjously.

Incidentally, the time at which the slithy toves were doing things in the wabe and the borogoves were going all mimsy was brillig, which Humpty Dumpty said is “four o’clock in the afternoon—the time when you start broiling things for dinner.”

When Carroll coined the word borogoves he gave it only one r, but somehow a few editors gave it a second r, as in borogroves. This led to great confusion. For example, the second edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1953) gave two-r borogroves in its index, but in the text has the one-r borogoves.

Probably many years ago a careless printer put in that extra r, which an equally careless proofreader let pass.

James Joyce said that this poem had some influence on him when he was writting Finnegans Wake.

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Find your position by this when stocktaking in the mortuary. (4, 9)

9. Turn into a slav to find redemption. (9)

10. Picked part of the echo sent back. (5)

11. Take half of this off the prickly weed to get backing for the carpet. (5)

12. Strongbox made from South African iron. (4)

13. Wanted a girl, found one in the end. (4)

15. Flash and relieve the load. (7)

17. Chinaman’s turn for French song. (7)

18. Star 599 is exploding, it’s severe. (7)

20. Goose found with a de- formed gray leg. (7)

21. Helps the new disease. (4)

22. Close group, tied up with this? (4)

23. Was Brown engaged in the Alamo charge? (5)

26. Conjure up the same note around five, all right? (5)

27. Drover Sol’ getting mixed up with the top bosses. (9)

28. Undertakers, of great risks in business. (13)

Down

1. Do battery-hens drink this? (9, 5)

2. Share out all to come back to it. (5)

3. No imaginary landed property, on the other hand, good selling land. (4, 6)

4. “Take this as read” he says! (7)

5. Creating all things, if coming round without end. (7)

6. Found on foot as a rule. (4)

7. House surrounds the Spanish ragwort. (9)

8. If enraged glass is mad, is it brought nearer with these? (7, 7)

14. Pumpkin, found by women later on their rounds. (5,5)

16. Piano that is around out-size expansive type of

19. Trick the flat fish and cheer it up. (7)

20. Approach someone with a volatile reagent. (3,4)

24. Windup of fur company renamed Kerkyra.

25. Aptitude for being dishonest. (4)

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Better than a hotel. Luxury suites, elegantly furnished with daily maid & linen service.” [From an advertisement for Bristol Plaza in New York Magazine (repeatedly). Submitted by Ruth S. Agin, Flushing, New York.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“School Threatened: A new alternative school for young car thieves, runaways and gang members is already in danger of closing for lack of funds B3” [From “Inside Today’s Valley Edition” of The Los Angeles Times, 6 June 1992. Submitted by Robert Goldfarb, Studio City, California.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“With all the promises and claims being bantered about in the long distance marketplace,…” [From the opening salvo of a letter from Pacific Bell, 4 November 1991. Submitted by Philip M. Bernstein, Fairfax, California.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Sexual Aides: How to order them without embarrassment. How to use them without disappointment.” [From an advertisement by The Xandria Collection in Mother Jones, March/April 1993, p. 84. Submitted by Melissa Brown, Indianapolis.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

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

SIC! SIC! SIC!

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

SIC! SIC! SIC!

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

SIC! SIC! SIC!

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

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Whatever one thinks of smoking in public places …isn’t a smoking ban in saloons almost a contradiction in terms?” [From the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, 20 February 1993. Submitted by Nancy Berk, Colorado Springs.]

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. The orthography used here for the Serbian slang-words is not a standardized transliteration of today’s Serbian Cyrillics, and not an official Latin spelling—which would be Croatian, and therefore taboo. My aim was to capture the sound of today’s Serbian slang for the English-speaking reader. ↩︎