VOL XXII, No 2 [Autumn, 1995]

French Lessons in Lallans

Donald MacIntosh, Maldon, Essex

Once upon a time, as they say in all the best fairy tales, one of the most unlikely treaties ever envisaged was forged between two countries who were poles apart in almost everything except their mutual dislike of the nation that separated them geographically. “The Auld Alliance,” a treaty of accord between France and Scotland, was born. Today, nearly seven hundred years later, it remains intact despite the vicissitudes of time and a language barrier that only the French have ever made much effort to surmount.

In The Luck of the Bodkins, P.G. Wodehouse remarked on the “…look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French….” The inimitable Mr. Wodehouse was, as usual, spot-on with his characterization. We insatiable travelers have seen similar scenes enacted many times around the watering holes of the world, from Calais to the fleshpots of Douala, from Quebec to the silver strands of the Côte d’Ivoire. The average Brit is seldom at his most confident when forced by circumstance to attempt the language of another.

Not all citizens of the United Kingdom suffer from this malaise when finding themselves on foreign shores. Mr. Average Scot does not, for one. The intricacies of the Gallic subjunctive do not worry him at all, and for the best reason in the world: he does not even bother to try.

There are those who will sneer that a race which owes its very existence to the ingurgitation of massive quantities of porridge during its formative years is capable of speaking in no other way. But Scots have long been inured to such slurs. As a proud Scot myself, I feel that a much more probable reason for this apparent lack of linguistic ambition is to be found in the regional dialect. There are parts of Britain in which regional dialects can be as incomprehensible as Tocharian to the innocent abroad, and the farther north one ventures through England the more incomprehensible they seem to become. It gets worse in Scotland. Strangers listening to any of the Scottish dialects will soon realize that they are as replete with gutturals as any Teutonic dialect. Tongues created by God for the pronunciation of names like Auchtermuchty are quite unsuited to the more delicate nasal nuances of the French language.

Each dialect is distinct and distinctive. Aberdonians have the Doric, with its quines ‘girls’ and loons ‘boys,’ Glaswegians bombard you with “The Patter,” famous for its infamous glottal stop and raw, street humor. In the moors of Carrick and Galloway, the natives converse in Lallans.

Lallans is the language of Burns, and it is a language in which he wrote most beautifully. It is, in fact, not a separate language at all. It is just one more dialect of English, but one would have to be listening pretty carefully to figure that out on first exposure to it.

For reasons that need not detain us here, some years ago I happened to be visiting the translation section of a large publishing company in darkest Hertfordshire, England, and I became involved in conversation with one of the employees, a charming young French translator. The subject of regional dialects in our respective countries came up. Being very new to this country and having, so far, only encountered “school English,” she found it difficult to believe that dialectal variation could be so great in such a tight little island as ours, and that so much of it could be unintelligible to the uninitiated. We were interrupted by the arrival of a worker clad in a boiler suit of some antiquity. I could not recall having seen him before, but I would have recognized his type anywhere. He was a raw-boned, sallow little chap with sunken eyes and lived-in features, the sort to be found aplenty in bygone days walking out mean-look-ing whippets in the thin gray mists of gloaming around any Ayrshire mining community. At that moment I would have bet my very soul that he hailed from The Land Of Rabbie Burns, and the first words he uttered showed the intuition inherited from my mystic forebears to be firing on all cylinders.

“Huv ye seen ma gaffer, Jim?” he queried.

I sneaked a sidelong look at my companion and a glow of the purest contentment spread slowly through me. She was about to get her first lesson, and I could feel in my bones that it was going to be a good one.

“I don’t think I know your boss,” I hedged craftily. “What does he look like?”

The little man took off his cap. He removed a squashed cigarette from somewhere inside it and lit it carefully with the minute, barely smouldering stump of the old one. He drew with deep satisfation on his reefer and exhaled an acrid cloud of blue smoke around us. He glanced at her, the world-weary eyes of Old Scotia and the prelapsarian ingenuousness of Young Picardie’s meeting in a fleeting look that spanned the ages. He coughed harshly and spat copiously on the ground. Then he let her have it with both barrels.

“Och,” he intoned with Bren-gun rapidity, “He’s jeest a nyatterin' wee nyaff wi' a skelly cacke’e an' a manky, broony-kinna gansey.”

When he had gone, my young French friend asked me in understandable bewilderment, “What sort of language was that?”

“English,” I replied innocently.

“English??!!”

“Well, yes, sort of…”

“Oh my God!” she exclaimed, appalled. “And I am supposed to be a translator! What on earth was he saying?”

I thought carefully for a moment or two before committing myself:

“He intimated that, in his humble opinion, his overseer is a loquacious and diminutive fellow of a somewhat devious and unpleasant bent, that he is afflicted with a strabismus of the sinistral optical member, and that he is currently attired in a rather noisome woolen torsal garment of an indeterminate off-chocolate hue.”

She stood before me like a stricken stirk, her eyes glazed and her mouth agape. Then her teeth clicked shut and she lanced me with a look of frosted French steel. “I theenk you are taking the meeckey out of me,” she ground out savagely. And off she flounced.

The Auld Alliance must have been strong indeed to put up with seven centuries of this sort of stuff.

SIC! SIC ! SIC!

“Balloonist lands in hot water with ex-minister’s wife.” [Headline in The Times, n.d. Submitted by J. Brooks Hoffman, M.D., Greenwich, Connecticut.]

SIC! SIC ! SIC!

“It would also ban public consumption of alcohol and ‘wild’ dogs in these areas.” [From an article by Andrew Jack about La Rochelle, France, in the Financial Times, 5 August 1995. Submitted by Julian Smith, Oberursel, Germany.]

An Aye for an Aye

Carl Wood, Crabtree, Tasmania

I cannot really lay claim to being a native of England’s “North Country” as most of my ancestors left the Borders during the Industrial Revolution, and I was born farther south, in Yorkshire. However, I did live a large part of my life in Seahouses, a small fishing village on the north Northumbrian Coast. Even though I consider Northumberland and the Scottish Borders to be home, technically I am still a Yorkshireman, and, having been raised in that county of virtually unshakable local accents, it was natural that my tongue would give me away and that I would be called a “Yorkie” when living in Northumberland. But on return trips to my birth place, the Northumbrian influence would show and I would be baited as a “Geordie.” (I have since gone international: I’m a “Pommie” in Australia and an “Aussie” when back in England!)

While in Northumberland I did serve my time on a coble, a traditional fishing boat working out of that tiny harbor not far from the Scottish border, and it was during those years at sea that I learned some of the more subtle intricacies of Northumbrian, in particular that most flexible of all words— Aye. To most people in the English-speaking world, Aye means ‘yes,’ as in that well-worn phrase, “Aye, aye, skipper.” But the initiated know that there is a great deal more to this little gem than meets the ear, so to speak.

I remember walking down to the harbor, early one very misty morning, with a friend from Yorkshire who was coming out on the boat to watch us haul the creaves (‘lobster pots’). As we neared the village we met an older fisherman heading in the opposite direction. He glanced up as we passed, shook his head and uttered a terse greeting.

“Thick, eh?”

“Aye,” I replied.

That was the sum total of the conversation. After a few minutes of deep reflection, my Yorkshire friend could contain himself no longer.

“What was that all about?” he asked.

“He said that it was very foggy today and he thought that the boats would probably not be going out—he asked me if I was of the same opinion. I said that I agreed with him.”

My friend lapsed back into thought, stunned by the hidden complexity of such a brief exchange. Unknown to him, the conversation down at the harbor would be even more perplexing.

The smaller boats had no radio or radar, so it was customary, during adverse weather conditions, for the fishermen to congregate around whatever spot at the harbor offered the maximum shelter from the weather of the day. After an appropriate period of time, some sort of taciturn group decision would be made on whether or not the boats would go out that morning. Sometimes the men would stand for several hours, all attention turned to the prevailing conditions—and anything else that might happen by. As we joined the inevitable group gathered at the end of the old lime kilns, one man looked up. The conversation went something like this:

“Aye?” (In a short rising tone as if to say, ‘Who’s this stranger with you?')

Another fisherman turned his head.

“Aye, aye.” (These were two level-sounding words meaning ‘So your mate’s going out with you, is he?’ It was more of a statement than a question.)

Another voice added:

“H’aye.” (With an expulsion of breath, and going down at the end: ‘He’ll be lucky to go anywhere today, with all this fog… it’s far too thick.')

And another…

“Aye’ he.” (This had a long dip in the middle, with a short ending: ‘That’s right, very lucky to get out. He’ll be lucky to climb down onto the boat.') Silence for a while. Then a more resigned sound came from within the group. It was almost a sigh:

“Aye.” (‘I think everything that you all just said is correct, I don’t think that the mist will clear, not this morning.')

“Aye.” (A short, sharp, high note, with a hint of contradiction: ‘You never know, it could; we’ll see who’s right.')

Silence again. An old bomb of a car bounced past with several rough-looking youths inside.

“Aye!” (Quite strong, starting low, rising to the end, as if to say, ‘Going far too fast!')

“Aye!” (More of a growl: ‘Yes, a ridiculous speed to be traveling; and what are they doing, driving about at this time of day anyway? Up to no good if you ask me.')

Several “Ayes”—all different, but all in agreement. (A rare thing!)

Silence. A big lift (‘sea, wave’) came in the harbor and all the boats made a run on their rope ends. It was studied thoughtfully, the implications for the prospects of the day mulled over.

“Aye!” (Long and strong, quite a dip in the middle: ‘Not only is it misty, but the sea is making too!')

“Aye!” (Short, resigned, exhaled as a sigh: ‘I can’t see that we’ll be out today, just you mark my words.')

“Aye.” (Fairly level, slight dip, then rise toward the end: ‘That’s right, we’d have been far better off staying in bed.')

More silence. One of the fishermen lazily drew his knife out of his trouser pocket; he laboriously opened it and began to sharpen the blade on the corner of the sandstone wall. There are providence-tempting implications to be considered in an act like this.

“Aye!” (Throaty, short, rise at the end, hint of disgust: ‘I don’t know what you’re sharpening that thing for…')

“H’aye!” (Strong, definite but falling: ‘Put your knife away, man, you’ll only make things worse.')

One man looked up at the mist. His face scanned the bland emptiness of the full sky.

“Aye.” (Descending, exhaled, slightly wavy, almost a touch of ridicule: ‘Well, you lot can do what you like, I’ve been here long enough, I’m off back home.')

“Aye!” (Short, sharp, level: ‘Me too!’ This was followed by other “Ayes” of agreement, but all different.)

“Aye, aye.” (First one level, second one descending: ‘We’ll not do any good down here. I think we’ve made our decision.')

The men started to move off, each going his own way. My skipper turned to me.

“Aye.” (Short, to the point: ‘That’s it my bonnie lad.')

My Yorkshire friend looked inquiringly into my face.

“Does this mean we’re not going out to sea?”

What could I say?

“Aye.”

Falls the Shadow

John Ellison Kahn, London

There’s many a glitch ‘twixt script and speech. For a start, the script might be mis-typed or semi-legible, and the speaker ignorant. On a state occasion during the Queen’s recent visit to Namibia, the master of ceremonies introduced Her Majesty as “Queen Elizabeth the eleventh.” And on an Irish radio requests program a few years ago, the presenter launched into a dedication to this effect: “And now, a special message for John Donachy of Ballycloran, who is a hundred-and-eleven! …no he’s not, he’s ill.”

And of course, even the clearest of scripts and brightest of speakers will produce occasional misfires, such as:

faulty accessing: a funfair of trumpets; a prawn in the game; I know you like the back of my head.

mispronunciations: deteriate; cow-orkers; Grenada as if written Granada.

botched tongue-twisters: shallow and slipshod shatire; that disquieting condition called Kwok’s Quease; the fire at the Tirestone fire tactory.

spoonerisms and similar transpositions: submersive elephants within the party; a cross-fannel cherry; Tonight’s orchestral concert comes to you from the Bath Room at Pump.

As long ago as the mid 1960s, the phenomenon was conspicuous enough to inspire the title of a comedy series on BBC radio, I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again (whence the title of the current I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue)—the catchphrase adopted by radio presenters as part of their retrieval strategy.

For all their humor and popularity, such types of deviation are in reality neither very common nor particularly revealing. The interesting types of deviation are the more common, yet less recognized types (widely unrecognized, it seems, perhaps because seldom funny). They are mistakes at sentence level rather than word level; “prosodic” rather than lexical mistakes; mistakes of stress, intonation, and syntactic segmenting: in effect, accentuating the wrong word or syllable, modulating the pitch incorrectly (a rising rather than falling tone, say, or a questioning rather than affirming tone), and pausing in the wrong place. A well-known literary example is Quince’s mis-structuring of his prologue within A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Consider then we come but in despite.

We do not come as minding to content you [etc].

And ponder these old parlor-game jokes:

What is THIS thing called, Love? (inquisitively)

Pick your OWN strawberries! (indignantly)

There are 23 full-time professors and ten ¦ odd teaching assistants. (tiny pause after ten rather than after odd)

It’s now ten o’clock Greenwich. Meantime, here is the news.

Greenpeace divers yesterday blew ¦ up an effluent pipeline in the Irish Sea. (tiny pause after blew rather than after up)

Underlying such jokes is a crucial linguistic law: a written sentence carries a higher risk of ambiguity than a spoken sentence. The “stage directions” within a written/printed sentence are rudimentary—being almost always of just the following four kinds (in descending order of explicitness):

typeface (italics or boldface, say, to encourage the reader to accentuate the word);

punctuation (a sentence ending with an exclamation point, say, prompts a quite different reading from one ending with ellipsis dots);

word order (position an element later in a sentence—in English, at any rate—and its chances of taking the main stress are usually increased);

word choice (a word like disgusting, for example, specifically invites being enunciated in a withering tone, whereas the more ambiguous revolting might not).

Since these cues are so rudimentary, ambiguity pervades written sentences—sentences in isolation, that is—and the transition to a spoken version can therefore be a hazardous procedure. Can you read out loud the following sentences, for instance, without feeling torn between rival renderings?

Do you understand? (inquiringly, or menacingly)

I spoke to his secretary yesterday. (accentuating secretary, or yesterday)

She hasn’t scooped me, has she? (confidently, or anxiously)

When can I meet your French mistress?

She tried shooting herself.

Build thee more stately mansions.

Do you think we should postpone or cancel the meeting?

Where the genuinely informative “stage directions” reside is not within the written sentence itself, but in the sweep of the preceding sentences—in the context. It is context that makes smoothly intelligible reading possible. Context, the Great Disambiguator. Written sentences that in isolation appear ambiguous will snap into focus when enmeshed in a larger discourse; moreover, written language has the advantage over spoken language in that it allows rereading (and reading ahead) in order to ensure an accurate interpretation of a given sentence.

Consider how indeterminate the following sentence is, out of context: on which word should the main emphasis fall?

The UN team has also criticized the Bosnian Serbs for various violations of the ceasefire.

But put the sentence in context, and it suddenly becomes quite clear where the emphasis lies:

UN observers have criticized Bosnian Muslims for moving men and heavy guns into a demilitarized zone south of Sarajevo. The UN team has also criticized the Bosnian Serbs for various violations of the ceasefire.

[approximate transcript of a news report on the BBC World Service, 11 May 1994]

Obviously it is on the word Serbs that the main stress should fall (to point up the contrast, established in the preceding sentence, with the word Muslims). Unfortunately, the newsreader failed to render it that way. He placed the main stress on also, overlooking the parallelism of the sentences and the contrast that it was intended to foster. In doing so, he made nonsense of the report.

What accounts for this tendency of theirs to misread? Sometimes it is a clear-cut matter of fatigue or inattention, speaking trippingly, without attending to meaning. (In fairness, it does sometimes happen that they have little or no time to acquaint themselves with the script before reading it on air: stop-press reports flash up on the Autocue; urgent traffic bulletins or revised continuity announcements have to be read unpreviewed from a last-minute printout.) And they neglect, through ignorance or overconfidence, to take the elementary precautions that would guard against such lapses: above all, to “mark up” their scripts, the way actors do—inserting a vertical pause here, or a curving tonemarker there, or an underlining to cue emphasis, or three dots to indicate a dying fall…

Even pre-recorded broadcasts yield a good crop of clangers. (Of the six examples quoted below, four fall into that category.) Perhaps cost-cutting (which the BBC, for example, seems to regard as one of its main functions these days) has led to cornercutting—before, during, and after the recording session: less run-through time, less editorial monitoring, less post-production checking and polishing.

Here is a brief selection of examples (limited to BBC programs) from the dozens I collected during the summer of 1994. They are broadly of two kinds: those in which the wrong word is accentuated and those in which the pause is wrongly positioned (or perhaps, in technical parlance, examples of faulty tonicity and faulty tonality, respectively).

Continuity announcer, on BBC2 TV:

Cataclysmic events in the cosmos are taking place tonight. At this moment, Jupiter should be on the receiving end of the first gigantic comet MASS.

(The main stress should be on first or gigantic or comet rather than on mass.)

Barry Norman, on BBC1 TV:

“Ladybird Ladybird” is not, however, a polemic …Nor is it an attack on the social WORKERS, although they do sometimes appear overzealous …

(Shift the stress from workers to social.)

Prof. Robert Wistrich, in a lecture given on BBC Radio 3:

Dreyfus was pardoned in time ¦ for the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900… and his innocence solemnly proclaimed six years later.

(The unwanted pause after time reveals a misreading of his own sentence.)

Chris Serle, on BBC Radio 4:

As he talked about his life ¦ and played his catholic selection of Desert Island discs, ¦¦ it became clear that he’s a DOER ¦ and not a PONDERER ¦ on life’s inequities. (Get rid of that last pause, and place the second of the emphases more on inequities than on ponderer; the current rhythmic and intonational pattern thoroughly misconstrues the construction.)

Continuity announcer on BBC1 TV:

It’s downhill all the way, ¦ in the SECOND of tonight’s films ¦ starring ROBERT REDFORD.

(Considering that the previous film had been The Sting, the announcer is missing the point when he allows a pause after films and then accentuates Robert Redford: surely the last three words really constitute a restrictive rather than a nonrestrictive phrase.)

Dr. Roy Porter, on BBC Radio 4:

How then did it happen ¦ that a successful and wealthy country ¦ declined to become one of the poorest in the world?

(Shift the second pause so that it follows rather than precedes declined, and the sentence is changed—utterly—from its intended sense.)

Won’t someone tell the big broadcasting companies that accurate script-reading involves more than accurate pronunciation? Isn’t it time, for instance, that the News and Current Affairs producers at the BBC, and the Talks producers as well, began taking advice not just from the BBC’s excellent Pronunciation Unit but from its wonderful Drama Department?

SIC! SIC ! SIC!

“Insectarium buzzes in heart of city of buggerly love.” [Headline in The (Durham, North Carolina) Herald-Sun, 19 February 1995. Submitted by Ronald R. Butters, Duke University.]

SIC! SIC ! SIC!

“He could not shake the dread feeling that he and all the others who had been involved in those projects were sitting on a bomb that, sooner or later, would explode in their faces.” [From The Acting President, by Bob Schieffer and Gary Paul Gates, E.P. Dutton, p. 273. Submitted by Barbara R. DuBois, Socorro, New Mexico.]

SIC! SIC ! SIC!

“[I]n our attempt to provide direction on how to control and mitigate damages, it appears we neglected to empathize with the fact that orchestrating such efforts may have been difficult for you.” [Letter from William C. Turnbull, Jr., of Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, 31 March 1995. Submitted by John and Mary Dirks, Old Lyme, Connecticut.]

Towards a New Literature

Robert Adams, Cardiff

This brief article describes and illustrates the struggle of Hieronymus Stoat (1947-) to produce a completely new literature. In his own words:

The concept of things happening is inherently bourgeois and ultimately capitalist-imperialist. We must, I believe, strive to rout out these corrupting influences on literary art; to debourgeoisify writing.

[letter to the author, 1981]

This achievement could only be brought about by a completely new style of writing in which nothing happened.

Stoat’s first attempt, a novella (untitled, like all his work) opened thus:

The haddock looked at the wall for sixty-two years. The light was on.

He was dissatisfied with this even before the ink was dry. Although little appeared to happen, a number of events were implicit. For instance, the moment sixty-two years were up, the haddock presumably stopped looking at the wall—a momentous event in the context. And, more subtly, the light’s being on contains the event of its having been turned on. But, most tellingly, it was argued by critics that the haddock looking at the wall constituted a happening, even if it were rather drawn out and somewhat uninteresting.

Absorbing these criticisms, Stoat came to the realization that the problem lay in verbs. Wherever you have a verb, things happen. By definition. He thus tried to write in a completely verbless way. His revision of his untitled novella now began:

Pale haddock. Endlessly white wall. Ambient lucency.

This was better. To make up for the missing verbs he attempted to add interest by scattering adjectives and adverbs everywhere. But after a time, he had to recognize that even though the text did not actually describe anything happening, the mind had an extraordinary facility to make things happen, unbidden, to the haddock and wall in the light. And the adjectives actually helped. Quite interesting things could happen, with a vivid imagination.

Now this was as bad as describing happenings. After all, the text had no meaning outside the reader’s mind; so if that mind became full of imagined events as a result of reading the text, then it had failed in its quest for happeninglessness. Slowly, Stoat came to the realization that substantives, too, were the problem. Write a noun and the reader will conjure up an image. Moreover, the image will be doing something—an event will be happening. What if they too were expunged, then? He tried it and came up with:

Pale. Endlessly white. Ambient.

With horror, Stoat realized that this was worse! The text provided a backcloth for all sorts of imaginings. Amazing events were enacted in the minds of readers, conjured by these suggestive qualifiers: virgins dreamt of knights-at-arms on white chargers; dirty old men elaborated prurient extravagances.

Reluctantly he was forced to discard nearly all of these signifiers. Even prepositions could convey the impression of happenings. The single word up, for instance, was so loaded with connotation that it too had to be avoided. Stoat flirted briefly with a form of writing that used only the definite and indefinite articles, but soon became disenchanted with such lifeless passages as:

A the the a the a a the.

He ruefully concluded that even this could stimulate an over-heated imagination.

Meaning: that was the problem. Where words had meaning, they would engender images in the readers’ imaginations. These images would start to move and things would start to happen. What was needed was a meaningless language. How about Latin? Granted some people still understood it, but not the great generality of his readers. He tried it.

Video meliora proboque; deteriora sequor.

A whole new set of problems emerged. With a little more imagination, readers could see all sorts of English words hidden in the text. With mounting despondency, Stoat was forced to conclude that the problem was words. Any words, any words would defeat his purpose. To substitute pictures would be to enter the world of graphic art and to desert literature.

In a dream, the answer came to him: punctuation ! How about a literature that was simply punctuation marks? He tried it, tentatively at first:

,.;;..,,!,:

Then with more authority:

?;,,,.;;:!;;,..?;:…\?\\?\.,,

“Too many semicolons,” said the purists, while the more pragmatic marveled at the piquancy of the single (unopened or unclosed?) quotation marks.

We shall reserve judgment until we see his first work of major length.

SIC! SIC ! SIC!

“But each dish is more elaborate than the next…” [From a restaurant review by S. Irene Virbila in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, 9 July 1995, p. 26. Submitted by D. Wayne Doolen, North Hollywood.]

SIC! SIC ! SIC!

“There’ll be plenty to eat: hot dogs, hamburgers, children under twelve, only a dollar.” [From “Hillbilly,” WHRB (Harvard University’s radio station), Cambridge, Massachusetts, 22 July 1995. Submitted by Daniel E. Bloom, Andover, Massachusetts.]

OBITER DICTA: Notes on Quebec English

Joe D. Palmer, Richford, Vermont

English in Quebec shows much evidence of creolization. Its speakers live in a linguistically complex society, a mosaic of languages from around the world in Montreal, dominated everywhere by speakers of standard French and of Joual (from cheval), the 17th-century Norman and Poitou dialect that is the folk speech of the province.

My student Brigitte Harris, who is from Ontario, immediately observed many peculiarities of usage when she arrived in Montreal to earn an M.A. degree in applied linguistics at Concordia University. Our plan for her thesis was to count the Gallicisms in the annual reports of the Protestant Schoolboard of Greater Montreal for 1970 and 1980 and to compare them. We carefully considered spelling, punctuation, and vocabulary, reasoning that such texts must have been prepared by several people and vetted many times, so the texts must have seemed unexceptional to their writers and editors. We found twice as many Gallicisms in the 1980 text as in that for 1970.

Textual rules of French seem normal to native speakers of Quebec English. For example, the spelling of the name of the Benedictine monastery St-Benoît du Lac contains a hyphen instead of a period, as well as a circumflex accent.

French names for foods are common: poulet frit ‘fried chicken’ Kentucky; moules ‘mussels’; frites ‘French fries’; poutine ‘French fries with curd cheese and gravy’ (named after a Colonel Poutine who was in charge of provisions at the Siege of Quebec in 1749; at the end, the only stores remaining were potatoes, cheese, and chicken stock; local folk etymology has it from putain, putanesca); aubergine ‘eggplant’ (the usual word in Britain); jarret de boeuf ‘shin of beef’; caribou a fortified sweet wine, etc.

Some examples of peculiar usage: we pay at the cash ‘cashier’s station’ in the wicket ‘grated window’; we lose ‘waste’ time; we open ‘turn on’ and close ‘turn off’ the light; and we say il y a rien là ‘there’s nothing to it,’ literally, ‘there’s nothing there.’ We watch out for the S.Q. ‘Sureté du Québec’ (police) on the autoroute ‘interstate’; if you are going to the dépanneur ‘handy store’ (a “mom-and-pop store”), stop at the S.A.Q. ‘Société des Alcools du Québec’ (liquor store).

We receive subventions ‘subsidies’; we give conferences ‘lectures’ and lectures ‘readings’; we have several years of scholarity ‘schooling’; belong to syndicates ‘unions’; have fond souvenirs ‘memories’; attend colloques ‘colloquia’; serve as animators ‘leaders’; ride on the metro ‘subway’; and we eat hot dogs steamé all dress ‘steamed hot dogs with the works.’

Typical Canadian pronunciation is found in Quebec English, such as raising—actually incomplete shifting—of the /au/ phoneme, and the Briticisms been /bin/, tourniquet/ ’t\?\rnike/, and again /\?\gen. There is increasingly a syntactic change in the use of the present perfect for the simple past, as in I have noticed that last year. The present perfect in English has the same structure as the French passé composé, but traditionally it has had a different meaning; this usage may not be peculiar to Quebec: perhaps it is spreading in North America.

Recently, a Francophone taking calls on CBC (English) Radio in Montreal said, “May I make a precision [‘clarify something’] for your auditors [‘listeners’]?” Those who speak neither the dialect nor French would be unable to understand that question.

SIC! SIC ! SIC!

“The fates of two massive proposals to ease conjection in the city centre… are still undecided.” [From New Statesman & Society, 6 July 1990, p. 16. Submitted by M. Gautrey, Geneva.]

SIC! SIC ! SIC!

“Zoning Enforcement Officer Ron Discher reported that the farm has stopped work on the paddock, an enclosed area where horses can graze and be mounted.” [From the Redding Pilot, 16 August 1990. Submitted by N. Selleck, Redding, Connecticut.]

EPISTOLA {Bernard Adelman}

Robertson Cochrane’s enjoyable article, “Me and Empathy” [XXI, 4], says, “Why is it… that people will not hesitate to proffer publicly their guess-work on word origins and other language matters, when they would not similarly dare to “explain the ordinary facts of botany and chemistry”? But that is not so; for Bernard Shaw, for one, was interested in language and in evolution (the “life force” in Back to Methuselah). But the vitalists, like Shaw and Bergson, weren’t alone in trying to explain evolution; there were also the Lamarckians (and later in the then-Soviet Union, Lysenkoism); the orthogenesis “true-believers”; and, finally, the neoDarwinists, whose view of random mutations is the currently accepted explanation. But even today, with the Ebola virus, are there explanations that are not guesses? And in cosmology, what is the “Big Bang” theory if not a guess?

Guess-work on word origins is not and probably cannot be science, since the matter is not involved with well-established general theories. But hunches and logic and experience surely play a crucial role (at least). Take, for instance, the slang word kiester ‘buttocks.’ Bill Bryce, I have read, writes that it comes from the Yiddish. But in my more than 70 years of speaking, reading and listening to Yiddish, I have never heard that word (or read it); also I’ve never heard any German-speaking person use it and say that it derives from Kies meaning ‘small round stones (gravel).’ But in the largely Italian neighborhood where I was born and raised, I heard it often. So, I guess that it’s an adaptation of chiostra, referring to a round thing, like a circle or a globe. And I must, or rather, want to say, that one of the prime reasons for my enjoying Mr. Cochrane’s article is that he demolished the “anti-empathy” argument by using logic and facts.

[Bernard Adelman, Winthrop, Massachusetts]

EPISTOLA {Henry W. Enberg}

In your review of Death Dictionary [XXII, 1, 18], you appear to believe a correspondent who asserted that most of all the people who ever lived are alive today. [In an earlier discussion of join the majority.] That has not been true even for the past two centuries. Today, there are about 5.6 billion living people. If you add the estimated populations from the almanacs for 1800, 1850, 1900, and 1950, you get 6.0 billion—and the real figure for the period was certainly much higher. A similar result is arrived at by calculating in a different way: the almanac estimates a world population of 200 million in AD 1; if they had quietly reproduced themselves every twenty-five years, with no increase in the rate of population growth, almost 16 billion people would have lived and died since then.

I suspect that your correspondent was misled by the word exponential in most statements of Malthusian theory. The statement would be true for a pure exponential series (for example, in the series 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, it is clear the 16 > 1 + 2 + 4 + 8), but humankind does not increase by such a series.

[Henry W. Enberg, Librarian, Practising Law Institute, New York City]

EPISTOLA {George F. Muller}

I agree with Ashok Mohapatra’s basic thesis in “Politicking with Words” [XXII, 1, 1], but I think his search for elegant formulations obscured his judgment in the selection of examples he cites to make his point regarding the new German dictionary. (p.2) Stating that “…many words and usages exiled from East Germany now found a place as free citizens in the world of linguistic glasnost…,” he cites only one, Republikflucht, which is a true East German neologism, i.e., a new crime—leaving the country— which didn’t exist before and has since been eliminated from the penal code. He is downright silly to claim that Meinungsfreiheit (it should be one word and capitalized, as all German nouns are), Weltreise (obviously not “Wettreise,” which would mean a ‘trip to make a bet’—only Phileas Fogg combined the two), and Freizeit have now found a place in the world of linguistic glasnost.

Pomposity of expression is no substitute for clarity of meaning. Meinungsfreiheit, Weltreise, and Freizeit were descriptive nouns used in the German-speaking world well before the East German regime came into being, although it, and the Nazis before, connected the latter two with state-run programs capitalizing on the human desire to travel and have time for oneself. Meinungsfreiheit is a term both regimes clearly shunned; I suppose in a sense it was liberated. Stasi is simply an acronym for the infamous communist secret police, successor to the Gestapo, a term well known on both sides of the Wall. It found its place into the new Duden; OK, so what? Where is the linguistic glasnost?

Mr. Mohapatra is on solid ground in buttressing his argument with the two widely diverging definitions of capitalism. But I am astonished that in his diligent search he did not come up with the most glaringly telling example of all juxtaposing definitions: those for Democracy. It would have been interesting and enlightening to learn how the communist state, which called itself a Democratic Republic, defined the form of government which its every action perverted and defiled.

[George F. Muller, Rockville, Maryland]

EPISTOLA {William H. Dougherty}

Intrigued by Milton Horowitz’s “A Discouraging Word” [OBITER DICTA, XXII, 1, 13], I set about tracking the word balagan along its etymological course back from the modern Hebrew into which, according to Milton Horowitz quoting Herman Wouk, the word was borrowed from Russian.

The entry for the Russian word in the Tolkovyi Slovar’ Russkogo Yazyka (Moscow, 1935), reads as follows, as transliterated and translated:

Balagan [Pers. balahana balcony]. 1. A light wooden structure for shows at fairs. 2. An amateur theatrical production with primitive scenery; a theatrical style based on imitation of this primitive stage-craft (theatrical term). Balagan art. Balagan concepts in Meyerhold’s productions. II By extension: A balagan-like show, i.e. a crude, artistically tasteless, disordered, frivolous one (derogatory). The actors’ clowning turned the comedy into a balagan. This is no session, but a kind of balagan. 3. A temporary wooden vendors’ booth at a fair.

The Russko-Angliiskii Slovar’, compiled under the general direction of Professor A.I. Smirnitsky (Sixth Edition; E.P. Dutton & Co, New York, 1959), defines the Russian word in English as follows:

Balagan, 1. (wooden structure) booth; (for presentations) show-booth; 2. show; (extended meaning) farce, tomfoolery, preposterous piece of buffoonery.

Does not one come away from these definitions of the Russian word with the impression that whoever infected Milton Horowitz’s software may have taken the “discouraging word” directly from Russian rather than from Hebrew? According to Wouk’s footnote, as quoted by Mr. Horowitz, in modern Hebrew balagan has come to mean ‘mess, foul-up, snafu, fiasco.’ But the Russian meaning of a ‘booth for crude, vulgar buffoonery’ seems to fit better the trick title that appeared on Mr. Horowitz’s computer screen. My guess is that the joker who named the program Balagan was a Russian-speaking immigrant, either to Israel or America, who may well have been aware of the word’s currency in modern Hebrew but for whom the meaning remained the Russian one.

Also interesting is the indication in the Tolkovyi Slovar’ that the word is of Persian origin and that in Persian it means ‘balcony.’ Balahana looks a lot like our English word balcony; so I looked up balcony in The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1966), where I found the etymology given as:

balconye < It balcone < balc(o) scaffold (< OHG balcho beam)

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary gives a similar etymology, stating that balcony is ultimately of “Gmc origin.” The Tolkovyi Slovar’ states that the Russian word for balcony (balkon) is borrowed from Italian, which took it from Persian, not the Germanic languages.

So which authorities are right, the American dictionaries or the Tolkovyi Slovar’? Did the Italians take their word balcone from some Germanic tongue and pass it on into English, Russian, and other languages; or did Italian take the word from the Persian balahana, as Russian did balagan, at least according to the Tolkovyi Slovar’? Etymologies in the OED, The Random House Unabridged, and Kluge’s Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache have cognates of balagan/balcony popping up in Slovene (blazina), Greek, and most significantly in Lithuanian (balžienas), purportedly the most conservative of the Indo-European languages. I suggest that these scattered avatars of balagan/balcony evidence descent from a single Proto-Indo-European root, most prolifically in Italian and Persian.

[William H. Dougherty, Santa Fe]

EPISTOLA {Chlorinda V. Russo}

In response to the letter from Mrs. Maughan S. Mason [XXI, 4, 17] regarding the odor emanating from Pozzuoli (Naples), I did not know there was a refinery there, but I do know that it’s a sulfur area (probably a “bath” in ancient times), and it does smell to high heaven. I know: during WWII I was stationed in Naples and we would go to Pozzuoli.

[Chlorinda V. Russo, Washington, DC]

EPISTOLA {Marc A. Schindler}

In Charles Stough’s delightful article, “Insulting Nicknames Give Journalists Something to Be Proud of” [XXI,4], he gives The Grope and Flail for Canada’s national newspaper of record, The (Toronto) Globe and Mail. Another common nickname, bestowed by a satirical paper called Frank, is The Glock und Spiel, probably a sly dig at the Globe’s conservative leanings.

I have heard Sydney’s counterpart to the Globe referred to as the Australian, and, earlier this year, on International Women’s Day, Edinburgh’s The Scotsman changed its masthead to The Scotswoman for the day.

In England, there is a well-known summary of the country’s best-known papers. Here is as much as I can remember (possibly inaccurately as well as incompletely); perhaps another reader can supply the full version:

The Telegraph is read by those who think they run the country;

The Times is read by those who actually run the country;

The Independent is read by those who think they should run the country;

The Mail is read by those who think whoever runs the country’s a bunch of bastards;

The Express is read by those who think aliens run the country;

And the Sun is read by those who don’t care who runs the country as long as she’s got great tits.

[Marc A. Schindler, Spruce Grove, Alberta]

EPISTOLA {Mary M. Tius}

In “A Billingsgate in Kerala,” by O. Abooty [XXII, 4], we read, “…Magnesia (a metal-bearing region in Greece)…” There were two cities in Asia Minor called Magnesia: one was in the Kingdom of Lydia on the river Hermos below Mt. Sipylon; the other, usually called Magnesia on the Maiander [Meander river], was in the region called Ionia. It is probably the Lydian city whose name provided the word magnesium as well as related words, like magnet. Lydian Magnesia survives as the city of Manisa, in what is now Turkey.

To expand on Robert J. Powers’s EPISTOLA [ibid.] shrimp is not the only shr- word pronounced “sr-” in the South: shrink and shrapnel may be added to the list. Other southern pronunciations that strike the northern ear as different are:

[oil] all [fι&thgr] fifth

kst] asked [har] hair

[‘bιdnιs] business [‘pou\?\l] Paul

[‘biy\?\n] billion [‘w\?\d\?\nt] wasn’t

[Mary M. Tius, Portland, Maine]

EPISTOLA {Bernard Witlieb}

Re: “No Boys Named Sue, But…,” by Hilary M. Howard [XXII, 1, 7].

1. John Wayne’s real name was Marion Morrison.

2. The author’s name was Joyce Cary, not “Carey.”

3. The author notes that Shirley “had mainly masculine associations for centuries.” A major American sportswriter for the Washington Post was (the male) Shirley Povish, most noted for his article on Don Larson’s 1956 perfect game in the World Series. It began, “Hell froze over.”

[Bernard Witlieb, White Plains, New York]

EPISTOLA {Tom S. Reyenga}

There has recently been some opinion in VERBATIM [XXI, 3, 21] concerning the acronym AWOL. I suppose it doesn’t matter all that much whether someone is absent without leave or absent without official leave—in either case, he or she is probably in for a heapa trouble. But, for my two cents’ worth, when I was in the U.S. Army, early 1950s (Korea, Land of the Morning Calm, sometimes referred to as Frozen Chosen), I was in a battalion personnel unit and handled daily Morning Reports from each battery. This included manpower accounting. We always saw the term and heard it and used it as “absent without leave.” While we had few or no real instances of AWOL, it was reported daily. The use of WO for ‘without’ meant—to us, anyway—that a person who was gone, missing, couldn’t be found, etc., was absent and had been granted no leave— official, unofficial, or what have you. This was AWOL. There could be leaves of unofficial nature (often called “hip-pocket leave”), but those were not reported as any kind of leave: they compensated a person some time off for a job well done or for a long period in action and were not charged against ordinary leave allowances. But being AWOL was a no-no, whether “official” or “unofficial.”

[Tom S. Reyenga, Del City, Oklahoma]

EPISTOLA {Morrie K. Blumberg}

The Editor’s comments on “…prejudice against Negroes in many Western societies…” [XXI, 3, 9] were apt but somewhat incomplete. I saw equally severe prejudice against people of darker skin, often including Negroes, by non-Whites in two major Asian countries in which I worked (1968-70, 1978-83) and in fourteen sub-Saharan African countries in which I worked (1972-74). Bigotry against Blacks, sadly, is not confined to Western societies.

[Morrie K. Blumberg, Foreign Service Office, Ret. U.S. Agency for Int’l. Development Albuquerque]

EPISTOLA {Dr. Noel H. Seicol}

E.A. Livingston’s communication [XXI, 3] certainly struck a responsive chord in me. I have been troubled by the use of African-American and AfroAmerican to describe the people in question, especially since a dear friend of mine, who is solid Caucasian, emigrated from South Africa and is now a citizen and thus is aptly described as an African-American!

Since I recently had the privilege of seeing the revival of “Showboat” on Broadway, I was particularly interested in the lyrics of “Old Man River.” When I was a child in the early 1930’s, the song was sung with the words: “Darkies all work, etc.”. When Frank Sinatra recorded it, he said “Here we all work, etc.”, fitting the meter but supposedly more correct politically. I never had any reason to suspect that the original was other then “Darkies” until I recently acquired a CD of songs from American musical shows which were recorded in England as performed there.

Please look at the lyrics of the song in the enclosed copy of the notes which accompanied the CD. I suspect strongly that this is the way it was performed in London. What I now wonder is whether anyone can authenticate these words as being the actual words when the show was first performed in this country in 1927. (Incidentally, I was happy to see the corrigendum of the misattribution of authorship of Poplollies and bellibones, since I was the one who called it to Susan’s attention!)

Let me just add how much I have enjoyed and continue to enjoy your magazine. I am probably one of your longest-standing subscribers (a very awkward locution but I am probably not one of your oldest).

[Dr. Noel H. Seicol, Rye, New York]

The relevant verses are:

Niggers all work on de Mississippi,

Niggers all work while de white folk play,

Pullin’ dem boats from de dawn till sunset,

Gittin’ no rest till de Judgement Day.

(© 1927 T.B. Harms Company. Copyright renewed.)

VERBUM SAP: Ha…ha…have one on me!

Robertson Cochrane, Toronto

In Act III, Scene 3, of Much Ado About Nothing, Constable Dogberry exclaims, “Hah, ah ha! Well, masters, goodnight…” In Act II, Scene 1, of The Tempest, Sebastian blurts out, “Ha, ha, ha!” And Act IV, Scene 2, of Troilus and Cressida contains one “Ah ah!” and two “Ha ha!”s. Which goes to show, perhaps among other things, that the Bard was no surer on his feet when it comes to the peripatetic letter h than the rest of us.

Its now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t habits have haunted English speakers of virtually every generation since The Venerable Bede was an altar boy. Although dropping or adding an un-Standard h became a social stigma only in the 19th century, the habit itself is ancient.

In his preface to the Lay of Havelok the Dane (c. 1300), Walter Skeat cited several h-bombs, including holde for old, hevere for ever, and Henglishe for English. In addition he found a handful of instances where the title character was rendered as Avelok. Indeed, the earlier Anglo-Saxons had little more luck with the voodoo h; in a brief article in an 1888 issue of Notes and Queries, Prof. Skeat wrote: “Only last week, I found ors for hors ‘horse’ in an unedited A-S manuscript.”

Of course, Old English provided more opportunities for error. The time of Bede and Beowulf were the hey-days—or ha! -days—for the letter h. Besides providing early aspiration for many words, h did yeoman service in front of the consonants l, n, r, and w. A predecessor of our verb load for ‘take on water’ was haladan, which logically led to the words hlædel ‘ladle’ and hlæden ‘pail.’ It is possible to see today’s louse egg, or “nit” in OE hnitu, but better by far to illustrate the hn start with the felicitous verb hnappian ‘doze’ or ‘nap.’ Hrog, it seems to this perhaps perverted mind, is a better word than ours for mucus of the nose, or snot. But then, half a loaf to the Anglo-Saxons was only half, while a whole one was a half.

The hw beginning accounted for a slew of words, many of which (such as which) have survived, but with the two initial letters transposed. Here too, the migrant, mystic h has served as a social shibboleth. But those who make a big thing of “correctly” pronouncing their wh words should know that it is impossible. What the modern purists are doing is fully sounding the old hw in that order. And my guess is that even the most fastidious speaker drops the h from the third-person pronoun in the question, What did he say?

Mind you, the letter h was playing hide and seek even before Anglo-Saxon times. Its use in Classical Latin was more or less the same as it is today—as a weak aspiration, the Romans being no more desirous of exerting themselves than we are. Spelling and use were already erratic. Arena was used as often as the more “correct” harena ‘sand,’ and we seem to have preferred it as well, because that is the word we adopted for the sandy site of gladiatorial combat, sand being unbeatable at absorbing blood and gore. As another example, the word umidus has no historical right to its initial h but sports it anyway. In the Romance languages spawned by Latin, h has all but disappeared as a symbol of sound value. It frequently persists, however, as an etymological relic (French homme from Latin homo) or with an imagined etymological value (French haut, actually from Latin altus, but influenced by Old High German hoh ‘high’).

Following the Latin lead, the Italians were the earliest to scrap h entirely. The result is such Cockney-looking constructions as orribile and istorico. They were digging the grave in Old French, but the burial service was rudely interrupted by the Renaissance. The English, who were importing French words prodigiously, now have many examples from both sides of the letter-shed—ability and the suffix -able, as well as such words as arbo(u)r, from the cut stage. We have others where the h has been reinstated but is not pronounced (hour, honest, heir, for example), and still others where the h has been replaced, but on whose pronunciation we have not yet made up our minds (humo(u)r, humble, herb). When I was young, we took family vacations near Lake Huron, where pronunciation was subject to the same lack of certainty, providing the potential for some proverbial southwestern Ontario jocularity.

Perhaps the most notorious example of English dithering in this matter is the word for which a Himalayan snow monster is named. Though no one has met the snow monster, and therefore no one is in a position to pass judgment on the creature’s disposition, we seem to feel that abominable is an apt descriptor. But from the time of John Wycliffe until the mid 1600s, we spelled it abhominable in the belief that it sprang from the Latin elements ab ‘away from’ and homo ‘man.’ We changed back again when the abominable truth was discovered that the word had its own legitimate Latin ancestor, abominosus meaning ‘away from the omens, or hateful and odious.’ Something similar happened for a while to preheminent, the suspicion being that the h was inserted to avoid what the linguists call “hiatus.” Some people solve this problem by illogically placing a dieresis over the second e.

But h in the initial position has long been the more nagging nuisance. Abundance existed as an excrescent habundance for most of the 14th century and for a good while after that, in the belief that the word derived from Latin habere ‘to have.’ And neither hermit nor hostage began life with an initial h.

The letter’s name, aitch, goes back to Old French ache, from a late Latin accha, ahha, or aha— all or any of them descendants of an earlier Latin ha. I am sure we will all be happy to know that we are in roughly the same league as the Romans and William Shakespeare when it comes to knowing our ahs from a ‘ole the ground.

ANTIPODEAN ENGLISH: Famous Australian Etymologies

Bill Ramson, Clovelly

The prize for the first—in the sense of earliest recorded and significant—Australianism is generally awarded to kangaroo, despite the fact that another, much less striking animal, the quoll, is noticed in the same glossary of an Australian language, that compiled by James Cook, navigator and explorer, in 1770. Some years elapsed before the British decided to establish a penal settlement in the land which Cook, when he took possession of it in 1770, primarily to forestall the French, named New South Wales. But, in 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip landed at Botany Bay (near the present Sydney) with a mixed party of convicts and their military custodians and sought to use what little knowledge had been passed on to him of the indigenous inhabitants, their language, and the new land’s flora and fauna.

Somewhat to his surprise and that of others in the party, the Aborigines of Port Jackson (as Sydney Harbour was named) did not recognize the word. Instead, they appeared to think it was an English word and borrowed it (as they did other words, like gammon and fellow) with glee, using it of the cattle which the invaders had brought with them and apparently thinking it meant ‘edible animal.’

This was to give Phillip and others their first intimation that there was more than one Aboriginal language; but, so distinctive and so immediately made a symbol of the country was the animal itself, and the word rapidly took on in English and, indeed, in French. And when, in 1820, Phillip King landed at the Endeavour River, in the north of what is now Queensland, where Cook’s glossary was obtained, he found that the local Aborigines did not recognize the word, using a name something like menuah instead. It was to be more than a century before the explanation became clear, and, in the meantime, several other possibilities were floated. It was at first thought that Cook and the naturalist Joseph Banks, who was at his side, had erred, either in their understanding or in their documentation, and it was later suggested that an Aboriginal informant had misunderstood the question and replied “I don’t know” or something a little less polite. It was 1972 before the linguist John Haviland identified the word in the Queensland language Guugu Yimidhirr, where it denoted a particular species of kangaroo and evidenced the fineness of distinction that characterizes Aboriginal languages. By this time, of course, the number and complexity of Aboriginal languages was well known, and the Port Jackson language, or Dharuk as it is now known, was long extinct.

As a footnote, and in illustration of the sense of Aboriginal humor which might have misled Cook, consider the Victorian Aboriginal word moomba, used since 1955 as the name of a Melbourne carnival and freely translated ‘let’s get together and have fun.’ Later scholarship suggests that the city fathers were taken for a ride, the word apparently being widespread in Victorian languages and meaning ‘buttocks.’

Aboriginal etymologies are now mostly settled, the historical and geographical evidence of a word’s early use being brought collectively to bear as in the case of kangaroo. But where there is no evidence of borrowing and no feasible source language, some other explanation has to be sought. This is the case with a favorite Australian term for an Englishman, pom or pommy. At first sight this might appear to be a British regional dialect word, but there is no possible etymon even remotely like it recorded in Wright or the OED. So, whereas for dinkum, for instance, a sense history can be established that fits chronologically with a verifiable regional antecedent, for pommy there is no such answer. The first task then is to track the word back to its earliest recorded occurrence in Australian English to see if the context yields any clues as to origin. And it does. Both forms are first found in popular newspapers, notably the Bulletin, an aggressively Australian weekly, and in the Sydney Truth, also a weekly and no less Australian, but more scurrilous because more urban in outlook. In both papers the chase goes back to 1912, when there was a sudden increase in assisted immigration and in the consequent expression of attitudes to this immigration. Both papers displayed an editorial indulgence in word play. Both evidence a third form, pomegranate, with its tell-tale variant spelling pommy grant. The rhyme might not have been a very good one, but the chant went up nonetheless—“Immigrant, Jimmy-grant, Pommy-grant”—originally expressing a prejudice against assisted immigration of any sort, but later, simply because of the numbers involved, becoming focused on the British, and later still on the English. For some reason unknown to lexicographers the word became popular, and it was but a matter of time before it was shortened to pommy and then pom, both of which were used adjectivally as well.

But this explanation, first advanced and documented by the Australian National Dictionary, has yet to win full acceptance, there still being those who prefer the unsubstantiated acronym POME ‘Prisoner Of Mother England’ or the French pomme de terre as a source. There are even those who find the comparison of the brightly colored fruit with the ruddy cheeks of the newly arrived English immigrant sufficient explanation in itself. Folk etymologies often have a life of their own.

OBITER DICTA: “My jugular vein is caught in the bedding”

Keith Miller, Sevenoaks, Kent

That statement, we were once asked to believe by John Cleese, was an example of the irrelevancy of Victorian English phrase books, along with the well-known, “My postillion has been struck by lightning.” But each age and each culture has its own phraseology. Already after 30 years LPs, gramophones, and wirelesses belong to history and a never-ending tide of new transatlantic terminology swamps these shores with the everyday expressions of Chicago and Silicon Valley. Perhaps we need an English Academy to keep our language pure. But, whether through technological or social change, language moves on.

Two recent phrase books of African languages illustrate how one man’s bread is another man’s mealie-meal. One language is Swahili—as “approved by the East African Swahili Committee” in 1957; the other Fanagalo— “The Lingua Franca of Southern Africa,” printed only twenty years ago but using language very alien to the urban Brit. The phrases chosen aptly describe the sort of society and people these languages serve.

Fanagalo, though hardly heard of in Europe, is used daily by thousands of people in southern Africa. It is a made-up language like Pidgin and, unlike Esperanto or Volapük, is based on a real tongue, Nguni, related to Zulu and Xhosa. It was created to meet an urgent need for a common language between those using the European-derived Afrikaans, English, German, or Portuguese on the one hand and, on the other, the speakers of the numerous African tongues from the Angoni in Malawi to the Zulus in Natal, all of whom worked together in the diamond diggings, gold mines, and farms of the whole of southern Africa, including Mozambique and what are now Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe.

Its vocabulary may look strange but sounds familiar. Counting, for example, begins: wan, tu, tri, fo, fayif, sikis…; while around the home you find stui ‘stew,’ grevi ‘gravy,’ pitsh ‘peach,’ and flauwa ‘flour.’ All these are based on English words as are the expressions used in mines and factories: aseyi hofisi ‘assay office,’ mayin kapten ‘mine captain,’ blas-fonis ‘blast furnace,’ and kaplin huk ‘coupling hook.’ The grammar and construction, though, are Nguni and distinctly unfamiliar. The phrases employed to teach us Fanagalo are indicative of its origin: Who has stolen the venison?, The medicine will kill your intestinal worms, I told this boy he must not go underground, as he is drunk, Open the compressed air immediately, and so on.

Swahili is the lingua franca of East Africa, but it has a lot in common with Fanagalo, and the two include many similar words. However, the 1957 New English-Swahili Phrase Book demonstrates a rather different world. In the section headed “The House” we find Iron the lace with great care, Mangle all these clothes, We need charcoal for the iron today, I want you to buy four sheep’s tongues, and—how colonial—I want also two cucumbers, for afternoon tea! Under “Farm and Plantation” there are the following useful lines: The cowshed roof is leaking badly, The wild pigs are very troublesome, and A lizard got into the fowl-pen. But “Safari and Hunting” includes the choicest phrases: Let all the utensils be safely packed, Is it lung blood or heart blood?, Hang up the kill so that the hyenas do not get at it, Put water in the skull and get the brains out with a stick, and Split the skull and give the brains to the cook. All very useful given the right time and place, although Which way is the wind? and Can they hear us from here? might be better left unsaid.

But it is probably the attitudes revealed that already place these books in a bygone age: “Arrival at the coast” gives us I want to go ashore; carry my loads; on safari there is Pitch all the white men’s tents in line; and Fanagalo phrases for golf include Move your shadow, Don’t rattle the bag, and Have you caddied before? I don’t want a useless boy. I wonder if Ernie Els knows those?

SIC! SIC ! SIC!

“PLEASE DO NOT ANNOY, TORMENT, PESTER, PLAGUE, MOLEST, WORRY, BADGER, HARRY, HARASS, HECKLE, PERSECUTE, IRK, BULLYRAG, VEX, DISQUIET, GRATE, BESET, BOTHER, TEASE, NETTLE, TANTALIZE, OR RUFFLE THE ANIMALS” [Sign in the San Diego Zoo Wild Animal Park. Submitted by Lillian Mermin Feinsilver, Easton, Pennsylvania.]

SIC! SIC ! SIC!

“Attendance has been very erotic…” [From a report of a Master Gardener Meeting in Master Gardener Almanac, July 1991. Submitted by John C. White, El Paso.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Grow Your Vocabulary By Learning the Roots of English Words

Robert Schleifer, (Random House, 1995), xxiv + 265pp. (+ detailed Index with unnumbered pages).

This book is really a comprehensive study of word formation in English, dealing with roots, prefixes, and suffixes. To make it palatable for a popular audience, it has been published in the guise of a vocabulary builder, which, I suppose, it is, though anyone without both the vocabulary to begin with and an inordinately strong will is very unlikely to find the book easy to understand. One might regard it as a popular combination of Carl Darling Buck’s A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages (1949 and 1988) and A Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (1933), both University of Chicago Press, with something of Edward Pinkerton’s Word for Word, Verbatim Books (1982), and my Suffixes and Word-Final Elements of English (1982) and Prefixes and Word-Initial Elements of English (1984), both Gale Research, thrown in. None of these appears in the Bibliography, however, which seems to be given over to books and articles dealing with the teaching and learning of vocabulary.

As it seems likely that readers of VERBATIM are not among the prospective customers for this book as a vocabulary builder, it is worth reviewing as a source book for the meaty information about word formation and to ignore the sizzle about vocabulary building. Indeed, the market as perceived by Schleifer consists largely of “educated adults” and “browsers of difficult words and word lovers of all sorts”: relatively short shrift is given to high school and college students, and, mercifully, no mention at all is made of those who might have been sold on the promise of a better life—or a better after-life, or perhaps a better half-life—through the acquisition of an expanded vocabulary.

The best description of the content is Schleifer’s own, which, to save time and effort, is reproduced here, slightly edited:

Part I: COMMON ROOTS…provide [s] in-depth coverage of 36 common roots and described, in detail, the dissection, analysis, reconstruction, definition, and commentary processes, followed by 24 exercise entries for each root or related roots.

Part II: HELPFUL HINTS is a partial answer key for the exercises in the COMMON ROOTS and provides the meaning and etymology of one root per exercise word.

Part III: SUBJECTS consists of three categories of specialized words and phrases, which are further divided into 36 subjects, each of which, through an illustrative example and a wide selection of exercises entries, provides additional practice in dissecting, analyzing, reconstructing, defining, and providing commentaries for English words.

Part IV: HOW ENGLISH WORDS ARE CREATED: A SHORT COURSE is a simplified, step-by-step presentation, which includes a large assortment of easy-to-understand charts and tables and illustrates how English words are constructed from native Latin-, and Greek-derived roots to which prefixes, suffixes, and other roots are affixed in accordance with precise linguistic rules. This part serves both as a self-contained course in English etymology and as an explanation of the more technical Latin and Greek data presented in A CROSS REFERENCE DICTIONARY and in the Technical Information and Detailed Example sections of the COMMON ROOTS.

Part V: A CROSS-REFERENCE DICTIONARY is a combination dictionary-index, which provides follow-up coverage and page references for thousands of words and roots discussed in this book. …[W]hen used in conjunction with Part I…, [it] becomes a self-teaching primer for the study and application of English etymology.

Unbelievably, Part V, which contains 58 pages of small print and is one of the most useful and informative sections of the book, has not even been accorded pagination, something for which Random House ought to be carpeted for before the International Bibliographical Court.

For some people, a comprehensive description of the history of words in English is more information than they wish to assimilate, and they will be relieved to learn that Schleifer covers the territory in about ten pages. For those who wish to know more, there is a neatly put together section on Latin (pp. 175-228) and one on Greek (pp. 228-64). Grow Your Vocabulary offers an excellent overview of how words are created and compounded in English and belongs in the library of every word-lover.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Witty Words: A Hilarious Collection of Outrageous Quotations for Every Day of the Year and Conversational Joking: Humor in Everyday Talk

Eileen Mason, illus. by Myron Miller, (Sterling Publishing, 1993), 256pp. and Neal R. Norrick, (Indiana University Press, 1993), x + 175pp.

There must exist some standard, somewhere, for what passes as “witty,” “funny,” “hilarious,” but it probably changes hourly and depends on the age, religion, race, financial condition, location, and other characteristics of the observer. We often laugh appreciatively at what is clever, though it may not be funny, humorous, or even mildly amusing. Take, for example, the three quotations from Clarence Darrow given for April 18 in Witty Words (in which, it is easy to see from the subtitle, quotations are arranged for each day of the year):

The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I’m beginning to believe it.

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with a lot of pleasure.

These are, as the book title suggest, witty; one could certainly agree that they are facetious; but they are not funny, and certainly not “hilarious.” Sometimes, the shock of recognition when one encounters a well-phrased truism is enough to trigger a welcoming response, which might manifest itself in a smile to indicate the pleasure of the experience. But a smile is not a response to something “hilarious.” I rather suspect that Eileen Mason was satisfied with the title of her book; then the publisher came along and stuck in “hilarious” for advertising purposes. One could not disagree with “outrageous.” Not all the quotations are witty; an inept one is credited to Adolph Deutsch:

A film musician is like a mortician—he can’t bring the body back to life, but he is expected to make it look better. [October 20]

Another for the same day:

The greatest thrill known to man isn’t flying—it’s landing.

One might comment that “safely” would not have disturbed the meter of that poetic thought.

If one likes this sort of thing, this is a good collection. It is arranged in calendar order and has three indexes, one of people, one of holidays, and one of subjects.

Professor Norrick might be offended to find a review of his book so closely associated with what he might consider to be trivial, but he does expend a great deal of text describing the various forms of “humor”—sorry, I cannot resist the punctuation— that come from one-liners and clichés (many of which, after all, are quotations). There is little humor in this book, either in the joking or the situations described, largely because of the analytical approach: nothing makes a joke fall flatter than having to explain what is funny about it, especially when it was not particularly funny to begin with. It is hard to tell why Norrick persists in interspersing the recorded conversations with irritating “Heh heh heh heh hehhehheh” or “Ehhehheh ha ha ha.” But these are natural conversations, and it evidently takes so little to make people laugh—an apt metaphor seems to send them into paroxysms of laughter—that one need no longer wonder at the success of stand-up comedians who rarely say anything funny but focus on reminding their audiences of truisms.

Humor, as we are told endlessly by those in the entertainment profession, is a serious business; Norrick demonstrates that it is serious for linguists, too, which we might have suspected once Freud got his hands on it.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary

K.M. Elisabeth Murray, (Yale University Press, 1995), 386pp.

Although this book was not reviewed in VERBATIM, encomiastic reviews of it have appeared internationally, and this is merely a notice to let readers know that it is available in paperback (albeit at a formidable price).

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Puzlpack Version 3, for IBM PS’s or compatibles

Chuck Fendall, (Recroom Recware, P. O. Box 307, Pacific Grove, CA 93950, USA).

Puzzle solvers seem to fall into two categories, those who use reference books to help them find the right answers and those who eschew any aids whatsoever. I have always fallen into the latter category. If I could not identify a missing word in a quotation, I marked that down to my own failing, one that was not likely to be remedied by looking it up in Bartlett, after which it would be promptly forgotten; mercifully, not all clues in puzzles are quotations, so some of them worked out; besides, the word that had to be supplied was usually a very common one and its only connection with the quotation was that it happended to appear in it, like be in “To be or not to be.” For many years, the crossword puzzles published in Britain, like those published in VERBATIM) have been of the “cryptic” kind, differing from the typical American variety by a diagram that does not cross-key every letter of every word and by clues that are not simply straightforward matter, like the solution ers for “bitter vetch” and other otherwise useless bits of information; for one thing, many of the clues are anagrams, which is where Puzlpack comes in. To save space, here is what Puzlpack can do (from the blurb):

• Find all single-word anagrams: EIPRST yields ESPRIT, PRIEST, RIPEST, SPRITE, STRIPE, TRIPES.

• Unscramble jumbled words.

• Find all blank tile substitutions.

• Find the unknown letters in crosswords: W?R??S yields WIRERS, WORLDS, WORSES, WORSTS, WORTHS, WURSTS.

• Display all words with any range of lengths in a set of letters.

• Verify the validity of a word play.

I am not entirely sure that I understand what each of those means (especially “worses” and “worths”), but experienced puzzlers might. The program is simple to load and, once in place, easy to use; it is also extremely fast. The OED on Compact Disc has a facility for finding “blank tile substitutions,” but it does not include all possible inflected forms.

If everyone had this software, there would be no point in using anagrams in clues, I suppose; on the other hand, not everyone does, and the use of such aids is probably ruled out in competitions where the entrants are controlled—that is, not working at home. It is also useful for puzzlemakers.

Laurence Urdang

A Catalogue of Cats

Alan Major, Canterbury

In view of the abundance of the worldwide population of the domestic cat it comes as something of a surprise to learn that no authority can categorically state where the name for this group of small, soft-furred carnivorous animals started or when. We know the cat was domesticated both in the East and West in the early historical period, the ancient Egyptians being credited with having been the first people to have done so and at one period in their history to have worshiped it as sacred. The name is found in Latin and Greek in the first to fourth centuries and in the modern languages as far back as their records go.

Almost certainly a loanword, in Old English it is catt; Welsh and Cornish cath; Gaelic cat; Old Irish cat; Dutch and Danish kat; Middle Dutch katte; Swedish katt, katta; Old Norse kött-r; Old High German chazza, chataro; Middle High German katero, kater; Modern German Katze, but Modern German and Dutch also have kater ‘tomcat’ (tom denoting the male of certain species of animal, notably the cat); French chat; Spanish and Portuguese gato; Italian gatto; Old North French cat; West German katta; Breton kaz; Old Slavonic kotŭka, kotka; Slavonic kot; Bulgarian kotka; Russian, male kot, female kotchka, koshka; Bohemian, male kot, female kotka; Lithuanian kate; Finnish katti; Polish kot, male cat or tomcat koczur, kocur. As the above indicates everyone had or has some sort of word for the cat.

What is also a mystery is why the use of the word cat was so often attached as a prefix to other words. In some examples I feel the word also suffered catachresis, a misapplication of cat due to etymology. Catgut, for example, has nothing to do with that animal as it is a tough, elastic cord made from the twisted intestines of sheep, used for the strings of musical instruments. The first element might have come from kit ‘small fiddle.’ When it is played badly, however, some listeners agree that there is a feline similarity to caterwauling, from the Middle English caterwawen, an ‘uttering of a discordant shrieking, as from a cat.’

A person who is catlike is lithe and active, moves stealthily and noiselessly, perhaps like a cat burglar seeking to commit a crime by using a cat-walk, a narrow ledge, footway, or platform. Possibly mannequins (fashion models) can be considered cat-like when they promenade, cat-footed, confident in moving down the catwalk at a fashion show evoking no catcalls from the audience (unless the designs fail to be to the viewers’ liking), eliciting catty remarks, turning the show into a catastrophe. It is unlikely they would have wanted to see examples of cat suits, the all-in-one, neck-to-foot legged garment, worn by women and men during WWII. Winston Churchill, often depicted as a bulldog, frequently wore one to work, though he preferred to call it a boiler suit. “Winnie” possibly thought his cat suit was the cat’s whiskers, i.e., ‘good, satisfactory, perfect, ideal for the task.’ The cat’s whiskers is a term possibly first used in 1927, by Dorothy L. Sayers in her novel Unnatural Death. Maybe the early uses of the cat whisker or cat’s whisker, a thin wire for establishing contact on a crystal (wireless) set was thought to be the same when the listener was successful.

Similar to the cat’s whiskers is the cat’s pyjamas meaning anything that is very good, attractive; American in origin from around 1920, it had become Briticized by 1923. However, according to Eric Partridge, in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, the word was obsolete in the UK by 1934; but it was far from dead in Australia as late as 1965.

In the same war those night fighter pilots who, because they could see well in near-darkness, shot down numerous enemy aircraft were said to be cat-eyed. A famous ace pilot was known as “Cat’s-eyes Cunningham.” Cat-eyed women though are those with greenish, slinky, Oriental-type eyes. Cat’s-eye is a semi-precious, yellowish-brown stone, a variety of chalcedonic quartz or chrysoberyl, which, cut in a certain way, reflects light and has a luster like the contracted pupil of a cat’s eye. Catoptrics is the study of the reflection of light. Cat silver, German Katzensilber, similarly, is silver that still shines in declining light.

A cathouse is a brothel, cat being a former word for prostitute. Perhaps some of the latter drank cat’s water, a 19th-century term for gin. Catting was a word for chasing after the female sex, i.e., a man “out on the tiles”—like a tomcat? Cattery is the name for the place where numbers of animal cats are housed. A cat-hole or cat-flap is the entry and exit site in a door for a household’s cat, the difference being that a cat-hole is merely a hole in the door, whereas a cat-flap is hinged to swing to and fro and close the opening automatically.

A cat-lap is not the owner’s lap on which the cat can sit or lie and sleep, but a cup of tea. It was so referred to as far back as 1785 when Grose, in his Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, stated, “cat-lap: tea, called the scandal broth.” Gossip over the tea cups perhaps? Other authorities hold that cat lap was ‘slops; the stuff a cat will lap.’ A catnap is a short sleep, sometimes after a meal, as a cat is wont to have. Catnip is the American name for a plant known elsewhere as catmint.

Cat ice is a thin layer of ice on a puddle from under which water has receded, so named because it will bear only the weight of a cat, or a catling, a kitten walking over it cat-footed to avoid breaking it. Cat dirt is not what might be thought, but a type of clay. Catbrain is a ‘soil containing clay mixed with stones.’ Cat and clay is straw and clay mixed together to make rolls of material which are laid between the wood posts in constructing mud walls of dwellings.

Ironically, although cats are reputed to dislike water and getting wet, there are numerous words using cat for nautical and maritime items.

Cat is abbreviated from catamaran, used in trade names like Hobie Cat. A catamaran is a raft of logs lashed together or a boat formed of two hulls held together by a bridgelike framework. The word catamaran comes from the Tamil kattu ‘binding,’ katta ‘to tie,’ and maram ‘wood,’ meaning logs. Another use of catamaran, quite different, is a ‘cross-grained, cantankerous woman.’

The cathead is a heavy piece of timber projecting from the bows of a vessel for hauling anchors fitted with a stock into position clear of the ship’s side. It was so called because in the days when there was much carving on wooden-hulled ships, a cat’s head or sometimes a lion’s head was almost always carved on it. This procedure, before the days of the stockless anchor, was known as catting the anchor. A cat purchase is a rope tackle used for hauling an anchor, especially on a cat davit, a light crane used on small vessels to hoist an anchor so it can then be swung round to lower the anchor on to the deck or overboard. A cat pennant is the small pennant used either as a marker for an anchor buoy or as a signal that a vessel is at anchor. A catenary is the curve of the anchor cable between the anchor on the sea bed and the vessel.

Cat’s-paw has several meanings. One is the ‘slight ripple on the surface of an otherwise flat sea,’ interpreted by sailors as portending a breeze. A variation is a ‘light breeze, just strong enough to ruffle the water surface.’ Second, it is a twisting hitch, made in the bight of a rope to form two eyes through which the hook of a tackle is passed for hoisting. A catshank is a knot similar to a sheepshank but with an extra turn through the loops to prevent their slipping through. Third, cat’s-paw dates from the late 18th century as a ‘dupe, a person used by another as an unsuspecting agent, or tool, especially in nefarious transactions.’ This version came from the fable of the monkey which used a cat’s paw to draw hot chestnuts from a fire. A century later the term cat’s-foot was used for a ‘dupe.’ As for cat holes, they were ‘two small holes cut into the stern above the gun ports on a sailing man o’ war, on the same level as the capstan, and used for leading a stern hawser to the capstan when required to secure the ship astern.’

There are many uses of cat in the naming of wild species, some having tenuous associations. A cater-pillar is the ‘larva of a butterfly or moth,’ coming from the Old French chate pelouse, ‘hairy cat.’ This dates back to 1440 and the word catyrpel, ‘worm among the fruit.’ Cat’s-head is a very large apple variety, possibly a cider apple, the name, dating back to 1617, supposedly given owing to the similarity of the fruit to a cat’s head. In the 19th century totally different was cat’s-head, it being a non-nautical term for the end of shoulder of mutton. A cat-bird is an American thrush, with a call like that of a cat. A catfish has barbels on its head, around the mouth, that slightly resemble a cat’s whiskers. Cat’s-foot is another name for the British wild plant ground ivy, so called from the resemblance of the shape of the leaves to the print of a cat’s paws. Cat’s-tail, also timothy grass, was a name formerly given because the shape of the grass flowerhead resembles that caudal appendage.

Male readers will know what cat’s hair is (or was—older men remembering it from long ago) ‘down on the face of youths before the beard grows.’

CORRIGENDA

We apologize for having confused the order of the paragraphs in “Politicking with Words: On Ideology and Dictionary Meaning,” by Ashok K. Mohapatra [XXII1,1]: their proper order is easily determined in the reading, so we shall not bother to clarify it here.

We thought we could ignore the error and it would go away, but readers keep reminding us of what might be called, because of its prominence, a typogiraffical error: in “Murdering the Language” [OBITER DICTA, XX,4,5], the grammatically proper form would have been “Omar m’a tuée,” (reflecting the feminine gender of the preceding m') and not, as printed, tué.

OBITER DICTA

“To those that live in Florida it is almost invaluable, as we cannot get eggs that are fresh and good in any other way.” Mrs. Wm. Henry Montague, St. Augustine, Florida.

[From an advertisement for Condensed Eggs]

The above advertisement appeared in the Chicago Tribune Pronouncing Dictionary, Clark and Longley, 1886. Another advertisement, for the McIntosh Family Faradic Battery (Price $10.00), claims that it treats the following diseases:

Abscesses. Debility. Kidney. Rheumatism.

Acne. Diarrhea. Disease. Ringworm.

Ague. Dropsy. King’s Evil. Salt Rheum.

Asthma. Dyspepsia. Lameness. Scalds.

Baldness. Epilepsy. Leucorrhea. Scrofula.

Biliousness. Felons. Lumbago. Spasms.

Boils. Fits. Milk, to Spinal

Bunions. Goitre. increase Irritation.

Catarrh. Headache. flow. Sprains.

Chilblains. Hiccough. Nervous St. Vitus

Colic. Hysteria. Exhaustion. Dance.

Constipation. Impotence. Nervousness. Toothache.

Convalescence. Incontinence Neuralgia. Tumors.

Convulsions. of Urine. Numb Palsy. Varicose

Cramps. Jaundice. Paralysis. Veins.

Deafness. Joint Piles. Vomiting. Affections.

It is worthwhile pointing out that this editor has suffered from some of these affictions (especially Convalescence) at one time or another (and the attacks seem to return with increasing frequency as the years dwindle down). Still, most have happily been kept at bay: we still have not suffered from, among others, the King’s Evil, insufficient flow of milk, St. Vitus [sic] dance, deafness, or salt rheum; the others, including felons, come and go and must be regarded as natural reflections of everyday life. Etymologically, males cannot suffer from hysteria, and most older people are unlikely to get colic.

Such amusements aside, one might think that a careful review of an older dictionary might reveal something about the state of the language at the time of publication; but that is not necessarily true for old dictionaries any more than it is for new ones. To be sure, there are oddments and peculiarities that can be spotted: in the case of the subject work, one cannot help finding the definition of electricity a source of entertainment:

the operations of a very subtile fluid.

Readers may be surprised to learn that there is, effectively, no definition in the Random House Unabridged for electricity: where one would expect to find the main definition appear cross references to electric charge and electric current, neither of which offers a definition akin to the one we all “know” to the one sought. The problem is, of course, that while our understanding of the behavior of electricity has improved in the last century or so, we know little more about its basic nature than we did before.

Like modern dictionaries, dictionaries prepared in the past contain entries considered important by their editors, either for personal reasons—and there is nothing much criticizable in following a personal opinion if it is that of a qualified observer—or because a given word had become traditional in the contemporary cultural context. Thus, for instance, we can readily understand retaining a definition for awful “striking awe,” but few would agree that that was either the dominant sense (or even a common sense) in the 1880s in America; yet no other definition is provided. It must be remembered that the dictionary in hand contains only 32,000 words and phrases, which means that it is half the size of the average mass-market paperback dictionaries sold today. It therefore carries a surprising number of obsolete and archaic words, and it is difficult to tell whether they are in because they were common in American English, in American English spoken in the Midwest, or simply carelessly retained from an earlier dictionary which was not properly edited. For one thing, certain British spellings are retained, but those might have been left over from pre-Webster spelling reform: endeavour, moulding, humour; enamelling; fulfil. But esophagus not oesophagus, etc.

A large number of words that do not occur in common speech and writing today are listed; some have been selected here (omitting pronunciation and part of speech) with comments based on checking in the Oxford English Dictionary, which, it must be noted, classed the words at about the time of publication of the Chicago Tribune Pronouncing Dictionary:

acritude, an acrid taste. embassy, message to a foreign [obsolete] nation. [Secondary sense in acronical, rising of a star at OED (which has main entry sunset, or setting at sunrise. under ambassy).] [The second part is wrong.]

embolus, a pistion, or driver.

aduncity, bending in the form [obsolete] of a hook. [obsolete]

emolumental, producing profit.

adustion, the act of burning [obsolete, rare] up. [obsolete]

epistolize, to write letters.

after-wit, wisdom that comes too late. […engaged in by borrowing esprit d’escalier only to translate it into the vapour bath.] [Second sense awkward staircase wit.] is obsolete.]

[We should have correspondents to revived this word instead of VERBATIM.]

estuary, an arm of the sea; a prize. [Sense not in OED.] [obsolete]

aggrievance, injury; wrong. estuation, a boiling; agitation [Sense not in OED.] of water. [obsolete]

agonism, contention for a exustion, act of burning up.

allision, act of striking against.

eye-servant, a servant that [obsolete] requires watching. [archaic]

anteact, a preceding act.

eye-service, service done [obsolete] under the employer’s eye.

aphthong, a letter having no [archaic] sound. [useful, but rare]

flammeous, consisting of or belonging to like flame. [rare]

architective, architecture. [Sense not in forestall, OED.] to buy goods before they reach the market.

elusion, escape; evasion. [rare] [obsolete]

There are other curiosities in this book. For example, the entry

affusion, act of pouring upon.

By contrast, here is the pertinent definition from the OED:

1. Med. A remedy in fevers, consisting in pouring on the patient a quantity of water, varying in temperature according to his state, but usually from 50° to 60° or 70° Fahr. Also fig. 1803 W. TAYLOR in Ann. Rev. 1. 273 From the eruptive fever of democratic effervescence, countries recover by slight and temperate affusions of concession.

1844 T. GRAHAM Dom. Med. 752 In very acute attacks of yellow fever…we resort to the use of purgatives, and the cold affusion.

At alcahest, the definition reads, “the universal solvent”; at alkahest, which is merely a spelling variant, the definition is, “a pretended universal solvent,” from which one might conclude that the first is the real thing.

On pronunciation, [ak-ses’] is given as the preferred form, while it is the secondary form in other dictionaries of the period. Huge is shown as [hūj] but humour is pronounced [ū‘mur]; adagio is shown as [adā‘jē-ō], and accompany and similarly spelled words are shown with geminate consonants, e.g., [akkum’pa-ne].

The conclusion is that such books seldom have anything to teach us except in the most general way about the way the language was used in another time, partly owing to the lack of sophistication of their compilers, partly to their conservatism, which tempts them to include terms and definitions that are no longer current. Such entries must be retained for they are encountered in reading. Some conservative dictionaries published earlier in the 20th century listed a huge number of Scotticisms on the (justifiable) grounds that they would be useful in reading Burns; but most school editions containing Burns’s poetry later on supplied glosses, so an ancillary reference proved unnecessary. With all the dialects and long-lived speakers of English today, the lexicographer risks inaccuracy in labeling a word, phrase, or sense obsolete or archaic: there is sure to be someone who speaks a form of English in which the expression is extant. For another thing, we must pay close attention to historical information—not about the language, but about the culture. For instance, just because we now know that the alkahest (or alcahest), phlogiston, and the philosopher’s stone do not exist, they must still be listed in dictionaries, just as the words for abstract notions like honesty, integrity, beauty, truth, and so forth have a place.

Logophobia

Under the headline, “Plaintiff faints at mention of sex,” Ben Maclntyre, The Times correspondent in New York, reported [11 March 1994] about a Cincinnati woman who suffers from conversion hysteria, a fortunately rare affliction in which the individual collapses unconscious at the mention of a word or group of words. Shades of The Manchurian Candidate ! “She was sitting in a chair and immediately fell out when sex was mentioned,” according to the woman’s defense attorney.

It is not a subject for flippancy, one must concede, especially in the circumstances surrounding the case. Evidently, a neighbor learned of the woman’s condition, whispered the word sex to her as she was passing through the lobby of the apartment house where they live, whereupon she dropped, unconscious, to the floor, and he sexually molested her—presumably after moving her to a more private venue. The trial of the molester is becoming difficult to prosecute, for every time the molestee is called to testify, she faints, even if the prosecutor so much as spells the word s-e-x. How the event was reported in the first instance is not revealed. It might be suggested that Ameslan be employed or that the woman be asked to demonstrate what took place using dolls, as they do when asking children to testify. Readers may draw their own conclusions and opinions on the subject; it wouldn’t do for us to comment.

Have a nice day

Even the less sensitive of us become irritated with clichés after a while, and one often wishes that Have a nice day had gone the way of Hi! My name is Bruce and I’ll be your waiter today and the Bunny Dip. But it seems here to stay, and, on reflection, merits comment. It ill behooves us to criticize its emptiness, for we all utter Good morning, Good afternoon, Goodby, How are you?, Hello, and numerous other salutational and valedictory remarks in the course of the day. It is likely that Good day had its origins in Have a good day, which is not very different from Have a nice day, either in meaning or in spirit. Perhaps we may soon be hearing “Nice day” (meaning ‘Have a nice day,’ not, as it already does, ‘It is a nice day,’ to the latter of which our curmudgeonly response is usually, “Yes, if you like warm, sunny, breezy spring days”).

Good day has taken on other connotations, depending on its prosodic features (stress pattern). A straightforward Good day’, with little stress on good, is the neutral greeting; Good’ day’, with equal stress and even a slight pause between the words, uttered emphatically, is tantamount to dismissal; the Australian G’dye is again the neutral expression on meeting or parting. Till something else comes along or we all agree to go back to better established clichés, we might as well get used to Have a nice day and its variant, (You) have a good one, now: the alternative is to stay at home.

Laurence Urdang

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. The German coming round to strike a shop-keeper. (6)

5. Any sonnet made up without a poet. (8)

9. It goes overboard. (5,5)

10. A party-goer loses the way in a fever. (4)

11. The course of e.g. Jupiter…. (8)

12. …and Diana’s madness? (6)

13. Does odd pieces of poetry. (4)

15. Musical outfit? (8)

18. One of three fired, re- tired and gone to pieces. (8)

19. A goblin being taught to hobble along? (4)

21. Girl contributing to net- work. (6)

23. In France, admire cooked grouse. (8)

25. Entertain maybe, but an encore could mean prison. (4)

26. No net—game’s reset so provides something juicy. (10)

27. Exits for dark ladies who lose their head. (8)

28. Nodding acquaintances? (3-3)

Down

2. The domain of a genuine Frenchman. (5)

3. Star journalist went to extremes. (9)

4. Break a hole in a wall. (6)

5. Divine hypocrisy? (3,5,

2. ,5)

6. In this, somehow, confining the Italian revolutionary. (8)

7. Long period of time coming to the point. (5)

8. Composition of copper chimney is no great work. (9)

14. Getting out of bed and making an exposure. (9)

16. Eskimo dogs (silent DOGS?). (9)

17. Ladies of France. (8)

20. Part of the cargo’s yours: it’s richly laden. (6)

22. “O, what a **** and peasant slave am I!” (Hamlet). (5)

24. Gardener’s son takes note of tree. (5)

EPISTOLA {John Brunner}

Paul Blackford’s article [“Some English Loanwords in Thai,” XXI, 1,5] brought to my mind my favourite chunk of Thai vocabulary and, incidentally, another loanword from English (from Thai for Travellers, DK Arts, Bangkok):

Krapaow thue puying bags, ladies’

Krapaow thasanachorn bags, travelling

Krapaow ekka-sarn bags, brief

Krapaow James Bond attaché case

Krapaow rot-mai bus conductor

I never did figure out that last one.

[John Brunner, South Petherton, Somerset]

Internet Archive copy of this issue