VOL XXII, No 4 [Spring, 1995]

Jam Pass Die

Donald MacIntosh, Maldon, Essex

“Jam pass die, monkey chop peppeh”

Cameroon Pidgin Saying

[Literally, ‘In dire straits, a monkey will even eat chillies’ or ‘Anything will do in an emergency.']

Pidgin English is spoken by millions of people all over the Third World. There are many varieties, but they are all most expressive and entertaining. The most publicized is probably “Tok Pisin,” the pidgin of Papua New Guinea. This has developed into a language in its own right. One of the country’s weekly newspapers, Wantok, is published entirely in Tok Pisin, and there are daily radio programs in it,. Attempts have even been made to introduce the works of Shakespeare to the masses by translating them into Tok Pisin.

No one who has ever seen the Bard’s immortal words, “I come to bury Caesar…,” reduced to “Mi kam tasol long plantim Kaesar …” can be expected to take Shakespeare too seriously again. And a Tok Pisin version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” told me some years ago by an old China Sea sailor, remains to this day one of the most hilarious monologues I have ever heard.

Tok Pisin does not stand on ceremony, either. Even the formidable Duke of Edinburgh was heard to remark ruefully on an official visit to Papua New Guinea that it was very difficult to maintain a stiff upper lip when one was constantly being introduced as “Whitefella Blongum Kween.”

But it is “Coast Pidgin” with which I am most familiar. This is the lingua franca of West Africa. I worked as a forester on “The Coast” for thirty years, so I suppose I had more time than most to become fluent in the language. Here, too, there are subtle differences from one country to another both in the spoken word and in the written word, from the phonetic Krio of Sierra Leone and Liberia to the more straightforward pidgins of Nigeria and Cameroon.

But, whatever its background, pidgin remains colorful and, often, onomatopoetic. In Coast Pidgin “mud” becomes putta-putta and “noise” becomes wahallah. A phrase like “I have been involved in an accident” becomes, graphically, I dun fukkup. One’s outrage over some disastrous contretemps is alleviated somewhat by the culprit’s risible attempts to explain away the circumstances of his crime in pidgin.

I had in my employ, for a mercifully brief period, an ancient caretaker called Sixpence. Sixpence’s main claim to fame was that, as a very young lad living in Cameroon, he had been employed by the celebrated Mary Kingsley as a houseboy. His relationship with the renowned traveler had ended in some acrimony after just eight hours, during which time Sixpence had managed to consign the whole of her insect collection (painstakingly accumulated for the British Museum) to the bonfire which he had lit in the compound outside her chalet for the express purpose of burning the rubbish from within it. This was the day on which Sixpence’s innocence had come to an end, and Miss Kingsley’s sulfurous expertise with the English language had remained indelibly etched in his memory all his life.

Sixpence’s eyesight was failing badly when we first met, and he was disaster-prone. Gas cooking had just been introduced to the European houses in the area at the time I hired him, and Sixpence, I was soon to find out, had much to learn about the dangers of gas cylinders. I was walking up the path one day when a colossal explosion rent Africa asunder and a large part of my house fell down before my eyes. I stumbled through the dust and the ruins to find Sixpence, dazed but miraculously unscathed, sitting amidst the debris. “Na some kine ting meka na WHISSSSH lika na shanake foh one dahk konna,” he explained aggrieved, “I go put fiah mek I look am gooh. Den de whole forking place go jakarah.” [A slightly bowdlerized translation might read: “I heard a sound which I took to be the hiss of a snake emanating from a dark corner. I lit a match in an endeavor to locate the reptile. Then the whole deuced building disintegrated.”]

Pidgin loses much of its character when written, and it is a sad fact that both the writing and the speaking of it is discouraged today in many of West Africa’s more modern schools for much the same reason, I suppose, that I remember many years ago being made to feel an outcast for having Gaelic as my mother tongue in an English-speaking school in my native Scotland. One would hope that the evocative pidgin will be kept alive. If it is, it will be due in no small part to the efforts of a few of the older missionaries in the hinterland. I am not, alas, of their faith, but I had to admire the command these old-timers had of tribal languages in general and of pidgin in particular.

It was from one of those missionaries that I obtained a copy of Genesis in pidgin English. It was a version still being used in churches in parts of Nigeria and Cameroon when I was there:

For de furs time nutting been dey. Only de Lawd na He dey. An de Lawd He dun go wakka hard for meka dis ting dem de call Eart. For six day de Lawd He wakka an He dun mek all ting—everything He go put for Eart. Plenty beef, plenty cassava, plenty banana, plenty yam, plenty guinea-corn, plenty mango, plenty groundnut—everything. An for de wata He put plenty fish, an for de air He put plenty kind bird.

After six day de Lawd He dun go saleep. An when He saleep, plenty palava start for dis place wey dem call Hebben. Dis Hebben na de place wey we go lib after we dun die if we no do so-so bad ting for dis Eart. De angeli lib for Hebben an play banjo an get plenty fine chop an plenty palm wine.

De headman for dem angeli, dem de callam Gabriel, he dey dere when dis palava begin for Hebben. Dere be plenty humbug by one bad angeli, dem de callam Lucifer. An Gabriel he catch Lucifer an he beat am ploppa an palava finish one time…

One is almost tempted to remark, “Eat your heart out, Billy Graham!”

There is no doubt in my mind that, without pidgin, West Africa would be the poorer. It is a language of humor and it can lighten the darkest of moments. I have rarely known a situation so bad that a few words of pidgin could not make it seem a little brighter.

It was the height of the African rainy season and I had hitched a ride with an old Dutch missionary to a ceremony several hundred miles away to which we had both been invited. The roads were a sea of mud and now, with night approaching, we were stuck, finally and irrevocably, in the middle of the rainforest. The river in front of us thundered over the road where just the day before a wooden bridge had spanned it. Behind us, a colossal tree had fallen across the road, effectively blocking our retreat. We had not eaten since morning, and the chances of our doing so in the next twelve hours looked slim indeed.

A troupe of chimpanzees emerged from the forest beyond the river. They were the wettest looking monkeys I had ever seen. They stopped and stared at us, then began a chorus of hooting noises that echoed out through the treetops. I swear that they were laughing at us.

“No food for us this night, Father,” I said sorrowfully. “In fact, at this rate we’ll be lucky to eat before Christmas!”

He did not reply immediately. He was ferreting around behind the car seat. He hauled out a disreputable-looking traveling bag and rummaged inside. I caught glimpses of a white soutane, some underpants, a string of rosary beads, a big black Bible. Finally, he unearthed what he was looking for. He removed the cork and handed the bottle to me. The twinkle was back in his wise old eyes. “Jam pass die,” he said. “Monkey chop peppeh.”

I took a long, long pull at Scotland’s finest. I felt it kindle heavenly fires within me right down to the soles of my boots. Suddenly, Africa did not seem so wet and muddy and dreary after all. I handed the amber nectar back to the Reverend Father. The old man raised the bottle to his lips and we watched as the chimps scurried silently, one behind the other, back into the sodden forest.

“Yes, Father,” I replied with quiet satisfaction. “Monkey chop peppeh, indeed!”

The Day They Took the Peck out of Pecksniffian

Doug Briggs, Houston

Erskine Caldwell must have felt that one lexical epoch was enough for him. He stayed with the same old Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary he began with; when it threatened to come apart he would have it rebound. As a contributor to the language and one whose writings were confined to a snapshot of time and people, Caldwell could well afford to stand pat. As a mere word user, I must keep up with the times. Every twenty years or so I upgrade my dictionary.

It was in that spirit of personal progress that I replaced my Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary with the Ninth. Upgrading is a pain; decades of accumulated notes, highlights, and cross-reference jottings must be transferred to the sterile new edition. Things were going fine until I got to the word Pecksniffian. It was still there, but the definition had been cleansed of its contemptible meaning and made tolerably benign. After entering the proper definition in the margin, “Selfish and corrupt behind a display of seeming benevolence,” I sat down to decipher the new version: “unctuously hypocritical.” That is about as easy to embrace as a wet eel, about as useful as a punctured balloon. Describing a Pecksniffian scoundrel as merely hypocritically hypocritical implies that something can indeed be less than nothing, as that theory was catechized by Wilbur the pig in Charlotte’s Web.

Charles Dickens’ character, Seth Pecksniff, made his debut about the time the YMCA was founded, only a few years before P.T. Barnum introduced us to “the Swedish Nightingale,” Jenny Lind. As words go, Pecksniffian is a youngster. The word Calvinism was coined in Vasco da Gama’s day, and during the four centuries since has been left pretty much alone. Seth Pecksniff could no more undergo a post-mortem metamorphosis than John Calvin. Dickens certainly was not wishy-washy when it came to developing characters, and Seth Pecksniff was definitely not just a quick study among the cast in Martin Chuzzlewit.

Something sinister is up, thought I. Why would a lexicographer snatch up a unique, Dickensian creation, gag him and bind his real persona hand and foot, then slyly stand an impersonator in his place? This is clearly a sign of unctuous hypocrites at work. Did the decriminalization of Pecksniff have more expansive implications? Persons in high places would any day rather be called hypocritical than corrupt. With queasy, frantic haste as one might inventory his burgled residence, I looked up corrupt. Whew! Still intact: “morally degenerate and perverted.” I had been prepared for anything: “hypocritical,” “demonstrating poor judgment,”…

For years and years, Merriam-Webster has held out an explicit definition of Pecksniffian, one precisely consistent with the Pecksniff we know, and usage has squared with that definition. It was a special word, unambiguously descriptive of a character’s character. Users have been respectfully fussy about employing that distinctive word; it has not been slung around indiscriminately, as quintessential is today. A literal translation of unctuously hypocritical—the phrase does demand some translation— would describe ordinary slick operators mainly putting on airs. Hypocrites, even hypocritical hypocrites, are a dime a dozen. One can see a parade of the species on TV any Sunday. Sometimes they even pop up in our bathroom mirrors.

But Pecksniffians are a different breed. They are not simply characters who display contrived earnestness and advertise virtues they don’t have, like the big smile and self-bestowed nickname Honest John, your friendly usedcar dealer. The Pecksnifflan is not so benign. Fortunately for society, Pecksniffians are spread pretty thin among the general population. It would scarcely concern a Pecksniff that we suspected that he is not what we had first thought— or hoped for. What he desperately hopes to conceal is what he truly is: corrupt!

Yes, I realize the living nature of language. I expect gradual evolutionary changes in word usage. But the sanitizing of Pecksniffian was no more evolutionary than the stallion’s transmutation to a gelding. The old and new definitions are so opposed as to be in mortal combat. One might want to keep one’s guard up when dealing with an unctuously hypocritical old boy, but that comes somewhat naturally because unctuosity in people is pretty easy to spot. But unctuous hypocrites are not the sort who would make a $500 billion raid on the US Treasury in broad daylight. That kind of a job demands the talents of genuine Pecksniffian politicians and their Pecksniffian pals. Was Charles Keating, as he passed out worthless bonds in exchange for thousands of citizens' retirement nest eggs, merely unctuously hypocritical, or was he corrupt behind a display of seeming benevolence?

A Pecksniffian TV evangelist might conceivably— heaven forbid—revile sin and sinners while wallowing in the conduct that he rails against. A particularly talented Reverend Pecksniff actually averted the destruction of his empire with a tele-tearful explanation that his debauchery was sacrificial and in the line of duty: “It was on-the-job training for hand-to-hand combat with the devil!,” he explained.

There is a movement to “decriminalize” the meanings of words that once described criminal conduct in unmistakable terms. I first noticed it in the early 1980s, coincident with the apex of the looting of the savings and loans, about when Merriam-Webster discovered the tolerable side of Seth Pecksniff.

Then, after that, the Texas Penal Code redefined car theft to “unauthorized use of a motor vehicle” and decreased the penalty for the crime. We should reflect that all Jesse James did was ride about making unauthorized withdrawals from banks. Who can say what the federal government had up its sleeve when it softened the term narcotics and began calling heroin and cocaine controlled substances. Dope addicts in that nature of things became mere substance abusers—new terminology that seemed to come about when some “high” government officials were accused of shooting up on heroin and sniffing coke. The old illegal numbers racket was vigorously battled by vice squads across the land until the states got into the business. Presto! The wicked numbers game is a racket no more, but a respectable, highly promoted Lotto, the hottest gambling enterprise ever conceived.

Who would have ever dreamed that pursuit, apprehension, and prosecution of criminals was the wrong tactic in the war on crime? Now that we have discovered that we can slash the crime rate by simply excising the peck from Pecksniffian, so to speak, we should enter the 21st century with everybody living happily ever after.

A Proper Look at Verbs

Nigel J. Ross, The City of Milan School for Interpreters and Translators

“She was Christian Diored from head to foot.” “Do you know how to Charleston?” “The plot was Holly-woodized.” “Would you xerox this page for me?” “They Sundayed at the lake.” “The milk is pasteurized.” “He Christied down the slope.” All these italicized words belong to a sizable group of verbs based on names— names of people, brands, places, time periods, and so on. But although we can talk about “proper nouns” and “proper adjectives,” we do not have a proper term to classify such verbs. Surely they deserve to be classified, but as what? The answer is not an easy one, so before trying to put forward some ideas, let us start by looking at how similar nouns and adjectives are classed.

The words Jane, Italy, and February are three examples of what we usually refer to as “proper nouns”—those individual nouns that refer primarily to people, places, and time periods and that are generally written with an initial capital letter, Such words can also be termed “proper names” or “proper nouns,” though these more general terms may also include titles (The Times, Gone With The Wind), nationalities (the Japanese, Russians), ethnic or religious groups (Arabs, Jews), languages (English, Swahili), buildings (the Central Station, Durham Cathedral), and organizations (OPEC, the United Nations).

Some grammar books go a step further, pointing out that along with proper nouns there is also a category of “proper adjectives.” Proper adjectives, we are told, generally derive from proper names and are also usually written with an initial capital letter. In the main they refer to nationalities (Swiss, British, Egyptian), places (Venetian, Himalayan, Balkan), ethnic, linguistic, or religious groups (Sanskrit, Gaelic, Muslim), and people (Napoleonic, Smithsonian, Dantesque). Sometimes a proper noun is used attributively, as an adjective (a London buy).

Some proper nouns and proper adjectives that have given rise to widely used expressions are normally written with a lower-case letter; examples include cardigan, boycott, sandwich, platonic love, quixotic. Many experts, however, prefer to categorize these as common nouns or adjectives, labelling them eponyms—words derived from names. In fact, the name that originally inspired the word is now often merely incidental to the meaning and presumably in consequence the capital letter is omitted. These factors appear to strip such words of “proper” status. The OED states quite dogmatically that “a proper noun is written with an initial capital letter.” Other sources are not quite so outspoken; Merriam-Webster dictionaries maintain that proper nouns are “usually capitalized in English.” Definitions tend to be gerrymandered to comply with editorial policies.

A small number of problems of capitalization—and therefore of categorization—arise, as, for instance, with words and expressions like F/french fries, Hoover, B/bohemian, C/casanova, S/scotch whisky, C/casarean. In such cases there seem to be few hard and fast rules: some dictionaries indicate a capital letter, others a small letter, still others give both forms. Here the dividing lines between proper nouns and adjectives and eponymous common nouns and adjectives become even hazier.

But rather than pursue that obscure tack any further (place names such as Washington are surely both proper nouns and eponyms), let us see if the “proper” categories of words really end there as grammar books tend to suggest. If we have “proper nouns” and “proper adjectives,” can we not have “proper verbs,” too? What about verbs such as boycott, hoover, gerrymander, pasteurize (all based on personal names, though all usually written with a small letter). Can they not be termed “proper verbs”? Once again, as far as these verbs are concerned, the answer would seem to lie in the lack of an initial capital letter and the fact that they refer to something very much removed from the naine itself. For these reasons, most grammarians would simply classify these verbs as “eponyms.”

If, however, we look at a few more verbs based on names, the situation is perhaps not quite so clear cut. Brand names, for example, are also regularly seen in verbal form; some typical examples are shown in the following sentences. (All name-based verbs given as examples in this article are included in the OED2, the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang or the Longman Register of New Words unless otherwise stated.)

I’m going to Ajax the sink next. (Ajax is a cleanser.)

You can do it when you B&Q it' (British advertising slogan; B&Q is a DIY chain.)

She barbified herself to go out that evening. (from the Barbie doll.)

We were given a bovrilized version of the report. (Bovril is a concentrated beef extract.)

The pack was cellophaned for convenience.

Most Eastern European countries are now well and truly coca-colonized.

The area is to be Disneyed into yet another theme park.

They Gallup-polled a large sample.

Kodak as you go. (American advertising slogan.)

Please, Sellotape/Scotch-tape the envelope. (from British and US trade names.)

Don’t just book it, Thomas Cook it! (British advertising slogan.)

You should Vaseline your hair down.

The pocket flap was Velcroed shut.

Could you please xerox this letter.

Quite deliberately, some of these have been written with capital letters and some with lower-case letters. To coca-colonize, cellophane, and xerox appear to work quite well with small letters, but capital letters are surely preferable for many of the others. It probably depends on how widely used each individual verb is. Whether or not a capital letter is used may often be a question of personal choice, and dictionaries frequently give both forms.

Place names can also crop up in a verbal form, C/charleston being a classic example. Countries, areas, and cities used as verbs can often indicate a visit: you might hear: They Cyprused in spring or We Florida’d last fall in the course of normal conversation. But other more specific meanings can become attached to places: to Benidorm means to develop (a seaside resort without much respect to the natural landscape or the urban environment); to Rubicon implies going beyond a point of no return. Hardly anyone is aware that the verb to meander comes from the name of the winding Menderes river in Turkey. Place names and the like often become verbs when used with an-ize or an -ify suffix: The story was Hollywoodized; The area risks being balkanized; The region was Vaticanized; The decor was Frenchified; The country is becoming Swissified; The immigrant quickly became Americanized; Standard British English is being Cockneyfied. Capital letters are generally used here, except for verbs which have become fairly common.

Capital letters usually seem compulsory for names of time periods used as verbs. We Christmased at home and New Yeared in the mountains. She April Fooled him would look very strange with lower-case letters. Likewise, capital letters are essential in the song Dishonest Modesty, by Carly Simon and Zach Weisner, where we find the magazines House and Garden, Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Bitch and Screw, and Penthouse all being used as verbs.

Personal names probably constitute the largest category of name-based verbs. Frequently used verbs found in dictionaries are usually written with lower-case letters (boycott, bowdlerize, hoover), the name behind the verb being almost insignificant. Other examples include to braille, to biro, to grangerize, to malaprop, to spoonerize, and to morse. But a more original, significant use of a personal name in a verbal form is more likely to be written with a capital letter. Advertising copy, topical conversation, and song lyrics seem to be three very fertile sources of this latter use. For example, in the song Rainbow High, from Evita, by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, we find, “So Christian Dior me,” “So Machiavell-me,” “So Lauren Bacall me.”

There are numerous expressions based on famous names that celebrate the well-known traits of the people in question; here is a fairly short list:

She threatened to Bobbit him.

She Ciceroned us around the site.

The old couple often Darby-and-Joan-ed a bit.

They tended to Darwinize their theories.

You need to Grundify your comments.

He is Hitlerizing his style of leadership.

You Judased on us.

He tried to Napoleonize his image.

Her drink had been Mickey-Finned.

It was not the first time he was caught Ponting military secrets. (After Clive Ponting who leaked to the press details of the sinking of the Argentinian cruiser, General Belgrano.)

Stop Pecksniffing at me!

He’s Prince Charming her.

They unsuccessfully tried to Stonewall the move.

He Tarzaned out of the tree.

Don’t Uncle Tom me so!

The examples Ponting and Prince Charming from the above list are generally found as verbs only in their -ing form, as that is their original form. But few other name-based verbs seem to have such constraints, probably because English is such a relatively uninflected language, whereas many other languages have dozens or even hundreds of verb forms. The flexible nature of English means that verbs can easily be based on names, whereas in Latinate languages, with their many inflections, such a process is clearly hampered. Perhaps it is precisely because our approach to the grammar of English is still in many ways based on Latin grammar that we do not have a specific grammatical term for name-based verbs, and it is time to give proper recognition to this feature.

The dividing line between proper nouns (and proper names) and common nouns-cum-eponyms is difficult to define. Nevertheless, two key factors for classification seem to be whether the name behind the verb is still relevant to the meaning and whether a capital letter is used. Such considerations are also pertinent to name-based adjectives. There would appear to be no reason why the first of these defining factors cannot be applied equally well to verbs, a boycott and to boycott could be labelled hand-in-hand as eponymous noun and verb (poor Capt. Boycott having been forgotten by everyone except the etymologists and encyclopedists). In the majority of cases, however, the name is not irrelevant, and the capital is usually kept. Clearly, we need a second category for those verbs that still allude directly to the name and that are consequently often written with a capital letter. The only proper term for such a category must be proper verb.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“My cup was an old blue one I had bought long ago at a Dallas Police Association fund-raiser…. You could replace a cup like that, but I had had it a long time.” Page 35. “I did not have a personal coffee cup of my own…” Page 176. [From Turnaround Jack, by Richard Abshire, William Morrow. Submitted by Terry F. Brock, Kansas City, Missouri.]

Elementary, My Dear Mendeleev

Marc A. Schindler, Spruce Grove, Alberta

The categorization of all the known elements of the day by the Russian scientist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834-1907) represents an instance of genius in nomenclature and classification. Not only did Mendeleev notice that the elements could be grouped together in a chart that related their atomic numbers (the number of neutrons in the nucleus of their base isotope), but he also saw that this relationship grouped together elements with similar chemical characteristics. For instance, all the “noble gases” (neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon) are arranged in a vertical row at the right-hand edge of the table.

However, just because elements in the same area of the Table are related atomically and chemically, this neatness is not necessarily reflected in the names, let alone the two-character symbols we have given to elements, which reflect all the chaos, variety, whims, and even vanity of history and human nature.

Let us start with some of the more common elements, however, as their etymology best illustrates the complete arbitrariness in naming elements. Hydrogen, with atomic number 1, is actually rather straightforward: its name comes from easily recognized Latin roots for ‘water’ and ‘create.’ It is the most common element in the universe, and it is the most common element in ordinary, everyday water. In German it is called, very prosaically, Wasserstoffe ‘water stuff’ in recognition of its role as the basic building block of water.

German has a number of other element names which end in*-stoffe: Kohlstoffe, Sauerstoffe*, and *Stickstoffe* being the best known. *Kohlstoffe* is, of course, the ‘stuff of coal,’ or charcoal. Both *coal* and *c(h)ar* come from IE **ker*, meaning ‘charcoal.’ *Sauerstoffe* is not a reference to *Säuerkraut*, but in a way that is not as crazy as it sounds: *Säure* is the German word for ‘acid,’ and *oxygen* is likewise the “stuff” that makes acids. *Oxy* comes from Greek *oxus* ‘sharp’ < IE **ak*, “sharp” and “sour” both being descriptive of acid.

Nitrogen is a little more complicated. The word comes from Greek natron ‘ash’ or ‘soda.’ What might have been referred to was nitrogen’s key role in creating nitrates and other alkaline (soda-like) compounds.

Alongside these four most common elements—probably 99 per cent of all atoms in organic molecules are either carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, or nitrogen—we should consider some of the elements without which our standard of living would be impossible: the base and precious metals. A group of five metallic elements which were well known to the ancients and which also have in common symbols that do not resemble the English words for them are lead (Pb), copper (Cu), mercury (Hg), silver (Ag), and gold (Au). The reason the symbols vary so much from their names is that they are abbreviations of names given them in ancient times. Mercury, also called quicksilver, is liquid at room temperature and thus brought to mind the fleet-footed Roman messenger god. However, the Greeks also called the metal “quicksilver”; in Greek, “liquid silver” is hydrárgyros, from which the symbol Hg derived.

Copper is from ME coper, OE coper/copor, Proto-Germanic *kupar, and is called cuprum in Late Latin; both Proto-Germanic and Late Latin forms are from Latin Cyprium, the adjective for Cyprus, whence the best copper came in antiquity, which goes back to the Greeks, who called it kupros. Whereas both the name of the element in English and its universal symbol come from Cyprus, the name came via Germanic and the symbol via Latin.

Lead is from ME/OE lead, West Germanic lauda, but its ultimate origin is obscure. The Latin plumbum ‘weight’ gives us the symbol, Pb (along with words like plumb, plumb bob, and plumber ‘one who works with lead and lead pipes’.

Silver is from OE siolfor/seolfor, Proto-Germanic *silubhra, and may not be an Indo-European word at all, but one borrowed from the Semitic language Akkadian (the language of Babylon): sarpu ‘refined metal.’ The symbol, Ag, comes from Latin argentum, from IE *arg, meaning ‘to shine,’ or ‘white.’

Gold comes from OE gold, IE *ghel ‘to shine’ but in a “yellow” sense (in contrast to *arg, which is to shine in a “white” sense). This root, or closely related ones, such as *ghol, yield a whole slough of modern English words via various Proto-Germanic and related IE roots: yellow, gild, gall (a yellowish substance), choler, cholera, melancholy ‘black bile,’ and chlorine, all via Greek kholé ‘yellow bile’ and Greek chlidé ‘luxury’ and Proto-Germanic *ghhleid and *glazem: gleam, glint, glimmer, glisten, glass, glaze, gloss, glance, glade, glee, glow, gloaming, glide, and glissade—quite a haul from what is basically a single root! The symbol, Au, comes from Latin aurum ‘gold,’ which, in turn, comes from Indo-European *auso- ‘gold,’ but possibly meaning ‘to draw water,’ leading one to speculate that ancient gold was found by panning, as in placer mining.

Finally, a group of odds ‘n’ sods: nickel (the “devil’s metal”), from modern German Kupfernickel ‘copper demon’: Nickel is a diminutive of Nicklaus, similar to the English “Old Nick,” a term for the Devil, so called because nickel was considered a contaminant when found in copper ore but in the early days of mining—as if the metal were “spooked.” Once a use had been found for nickel (it is what makes stainless steel stainless, among other uses), it became a desirable metal; but its ore was found to have a “gremlin” in it, which turned out to be cobalt (Kobalt in German). The German word for “gremlin” is Kobold, an underground sprite believed to put curses on ore.

Although several elements are spelled differently on either side of the anglophone world (caesium vs. cesium, for instance), only aluminium is both spelled and pronounced differently. Aluminium is so spelled outside North America (except by the Canadian aluminum giant, Alcan Aluminium). The metal was identified in 1808 by Sir Humphry Davy, who originally named it alumium, based on Latin alumen, and alum, oxides and sulphates of aluminum, respectively, which were known to the ancients. Four years later, however, Davy changed his mind and called the element aluminum, which he felt more closely resembled the Latin roots. The word was transformed in aluminium in Britain because it seemed more “classically consistent.” There is another element—tungsten—which used to be known as wolfram in Britain, although this has been supplanted by tungsten.

It is not considered proper to name elements after oneself, but others can name an element after you if you are dead and sufficiently famous. Or you could arrange to have an element named after your hometown or your country: Scandium, Polonium, Europium, Francium, Americium, Germanium, Berkelium, Californium, Yttrium, and Ytterbium, the last two being elements named after the Swedish town where they were discovered. Elements named after scientists include Curium, Mendelevium, Einsteinium, Nobelium (actually this was named after Sweden’s Nobel Institute, not directly after Alfred Nobel), and Lawrencium. However, there is another element whose nomenclature breaks the rules thanks to a trick its discoverer played on the world. The 19th-century French chemist Paul Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran managed to name Gallium after himself (because, of course, Coq in Latin is Gallus!). As gallium is the only other metal, besides mercury, which is liquid at room temperature and since liquid metals have a slightly shady reputation, perhaps Lecoq’s trick was poetically apt.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Logos (‘Speech’) and Logos (‘Symbols’)

William Brashear, Ägyptisches Museum, Berlin

“In the Beginning was the Logos” … and only much later were there letters. When and where humankind made its first intelligible utterance will never be known. However, it was only a mere 5,000 years ago that Homo loquens hit upon writing down some of the Babelian babble around him—and there has been no stopping him since! Presumably, Sumerian or Egyptian accountants—no boob-bookkeepers they!—first substituted signs for pictographs, giving them phonetic instead of semantic values. Literati of the day decided they too could use these new-fangled marks for something besides counting cows, setting in motion another logorrhoeic avalanche that has continued to snowball ever since. Speech and writing, as inextricably joined as a paper’s two surfaces, are different forms of the same, singular phenomenon distinguishing humans from all other creatures on earth. Yet, while the garrulous gabble continues everywhere, constant and unabated, writing still eludes half the world’s population for whom marks on any medium remain inscrutable, impenetrable, indecipherable cryptography.

“Writing is a symbol of the sounds” (Aristotle, Categories). But the discrepancies between language in its spoken and written forms are often blatant. The symbols of any writing system have whatever phonetic value its users agree to assign to them, convention and consensus playing a major role. For example, Europeans in America confronted with the street sign PED XING Efor the first time have seriously believed in the imminent Sinicization of contemporary American English. The configuration “2” is pronounced kaks(i), ketto, tin, rua, dua, lua, iki, xojor, mbili, zole, shnayim, and roughly, four to six thousand other ways around the globe. English orthography’s quixotic, chimerical vagaries, allowing such Cheshire-cat creations as ghoti (= fish, courtesy of G.B. Shaw) and Ghoughphthleightteeaux (= potatoes; see Firmage), are notorious.

From Aristotle and Quintilian to De Saussure, Chomsky, Harris, De Francis, and Pinker—to name a few—man has been studying language for more than two millennia. Two books of recent vintage reflecting this ongoing fascination are:

The Alphabet Abecedarium: Some Notes on Letters

Richard A. Firmage, (David R. Godine, 1993), xii + 308pp.

The Story of Writing

Andrew Robinson, (Thames and Hudson, 1995), 224pp., + 300 illustr.

The Alphabet Abecedarium is the bibliophile’s answer to the botanist’s stroll through the garden, being an eminently enjoyable omnium gatherum of recondite, recherché, and obscure arcana and lore about the letters of our Latin alphabet written in a light, conversational, self-deprecatory, tongue-in-cheek style. After a brief history of the alphabet, each of the twenty-six succeeding chapters is devoted to a single letter, with a final one discussing signs and symbols. Firmage recounts the development of each letter from its first protoplastic attestation on through its often protean metamorphoses over the millennia.

In an engaging, wide-ranging display of erudition, Firmage discusses the letters' symbological values in such diverse parlances as chemistry, music, ancient and modern mysticism (including far too much “New Age” material for my tastes), while quotes from such diverse figures as Joyce, Rabelais, Dostoyevsky, Bob Dylan—and Elmer Fudd—interlard the text. Firmage’s main interest in this pleasant potpourri is in aesthetics: the letters' shapes and designs. Extrapolating on the theories of the Renaissance designer, Geofroy Tory, as expounded in his Champ Fleury (1529), Firmage takes Tory’s sketches as the springboard for his analysis of the letter-shapes and the sometimes highly stylized forms they assume throughout history, from their inchoate inception in the Near East down to present-day, computer-generated typefaces. Line drawings alternate with explicative text.

Quibbling additions and corrections: the mirrorreverse epitaph (p. 2) is anything but an illiterate endeavor, the letter forms being quite standard, the contents entirely normal. Why the letters are reversed is a puzzling enigma. Precedents to the horn book (pp. 59,76) are the approximately 300 sometimes waxed or white-washed wooden tablets preserving children’s school exercises (3rd c. BCE-9th c. CE), many of the later ones likewise adorned by a cross. Acrostics (p. 75) are already attested in the Near East (3rd millennium BCE), Egypt (14th c. BCE) and 6th-c. BCE Greece. The so-called alectorocephalic anguipede deity portrayed on the gem (p. 174) is not the Christian three-form god but a teratomorphic concoction of Gnostic syncretistic fantasy. The (mis)information (pp. 11, 183) that papyrus was costly is an undying canard. After a hundred years of research and the publication of 50,000 papyri in a dozen languages the price of papyrus is simply unknown, too many imponderabilia—quantity? quality? size? amount?—plaguing the few references to a price. Incredible profligacy—a few lines on otherwise pristine sheets—and thousands of ancient tax receipts prove that even the poorest peasant could pay for the papyrus on which his payments were recorded. Scraping writing off papyrus irreparably damages the surface; washing produces only a smudge. Errors were simply crossed out and written over.

Predating Kircher’s mystical alphabets (p. 164) by 1400 years are so-called “ring letters” and characters of Greek, Coptic, Syriac, Hebrew, Ethiopian, Aramaic, and Arabic amulets. Chinese history (p. 183) says Cai Lun, a court official, invented paper in 105 CE. Recent archaeological finds antedate Cai Lun’s putative invention by centuries: the oldest paper artifact being a 3rd-c. BCE map recovered from a tomb in Fangmatan in 1986.

Only Egyptians of the Hellenistic period washed off and imbibed (p. 11) curative spells. Their pharaonic forebears knew nothing of the sort. Missing is a discussion of the word element which some derive from l + m + n; and (pp. 111-12) a reference to Luis d’Antin von Roote, Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames (New York 1967) and to Catullus' hilarious poem (no. 84), “The Egregious Cockney,” persiflaging pre-Augustan Romans' tendency to overaspirate. Rare misprints, and mistakes: p. 96 for “flourine” read: fluorine; pp. 164, 255: “millenia”; p. 179: for “porcarum” read porcorum; p. 254: “accomodate.” Although The Alphabet Abecedarium is not necessarily a book to read from cover to cover, I did it, thoroughly captivated.

In the end were the Logos? Taking a different approach, Robinson’s The Story of Writing is almost coffee-table-sized; it is elegantly designed and richly illustrated. After presenting various systems of communication (signs, pictographs, rebuses, shorthand, tallies, Babylonian clay tokens, Peruvian quipus), Robinson discusses such ancient and now defunct but decipherable writing systems as Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Minoan Greek Linear B, and Mayan glyphs; ditto some of the more outstanding conundra awaiting decipherment—Cretan Linear A, Proto-Elamite, Etruscan, and the Easter Island and Indus scripts. The rest of the book treats living languages and their scripts.

“From Hieroglyphs to Alphabets—and Back?,” the title of Robinson’s concluding chapter, is not an entirely rhetorical question. Only twenty years ago did those now ubiquitous and—depending on how one perceives them— exuberantly eloquent or infuriatingly laconic logos begin to appear on highway and street signs; in terminals (do kilted Scots or slacks-clad women ever end up in the wrong lavatories?); computer screen displays; and instruction manuals for electr(on)ic gadgetry. Similarly, architectural, musical, mathematical, astronomical, chemical notation, dance and circuit diagrams are replete with symbols some scholars place on a par with proto-scripts, implying that after 5,000 years of literary lucubrations and scriveners' scribblings we are leaving the Age of Writing and entering a post-modern Age of Logography.

Succinctly stated, the basic, underlying question is, How do we (who use alphabets) read? Conversely, how did the ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, and how do present-day Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans read? Athanasius Kircher’s (1602-1680) and Joseph de Guignes' (1721-1800) fanciful descriptions of Chinese signs and Egyptian hieroglyphs gave birth to the notion that these writing systems could somehow circumvent pedestrian alphabets, going as it were straight to the heart of things. Since then the myth has persisted that here encoded in these quasi-representational forms was the quintessence of thought, the eternal Platonic ideal, the Jungian Ur- symbol underlying all human cogitation—and by extrapolation, speech—the (al)lure of the fabulous (Far) East playing an obvious role.

Linguistic research has proven, however, that such notions are entirely false. Hieroglyphs and logographs are just as much phonetic-based scripts as letters (which millennia ago were likewise pictorial representations of concrete objects). That hieroglyphs and logographs sometimes contain significant visual elements—mnemonic aids to jog the memory and set the synapses swinging—is icing on the cake. First and foremost, hieroglyphs and logographs are read as sounds, not symbols, as my seven-year foray into Chinese has taught me. How the brain actually perceives writing of any shape is a question spanning a wide variety of disparate disciplines, cognitive sciences, (neuropsycho-) linguistics and -biology, the debate ongoing and controversy-laden. Visible speech, regardless whether alphabetic or logographic, with all its faults and foibles, its inherent inconsistencies, inadequacies, and inaccuracies, it seems, is here to stay.

All Gone Pear-Shaped: Opportunities for Misunderstanding the Police

Mike Seabrook, Doubs, France

One of my first and most vivid impressions after becoming a London police officer was the exceptional richness of police jargon. It also struck me as odd, in view of how inventive and amusing this jargon is, how little is used for background colour in TV police dramas and, when the programme-makers use it at all, how often they get it wrong.

For instance, fictional police are always talking about their being in the Force, whereas real police never talk about the force: it is always simply the job. So an off-duty officer stopped in a speed trap will try to escape by murmuring to the traffic officer, “I’m in the job, mate,” or perhaps just “I’m job.” When his pals ask him about it they will say, “Were you in a job car?” Officers perennially gripe about the abrasive and unsympathetic qualities of job toilet paper. Even the house journal of Britain’s largest force, the London Metropolitan Police, is called simply The Job.

Similarly, no real police officer has, in my hearing, ever referred to his territory as either his manor or his patch, both terms being the norm in British cop shows. In fact, policemen always speak of their ground: an officer might ask his pal, “Do you know a pub called the Rhinoceros?” and his friend will reply, “Of course I do: it’s on my ground.” Returning from a foray outside his own station’s area, one officer will say to another, “Ah, we’re back on the ground again.”

Another term much beloved of TV dramatists is Super, for Superintendent, and its logical next step, Chief Super: “the Super’s on his way.” In reality, police never abbreviate this rank. I’ve no idea why; they just don’t. It is always the Superintendent or “He’s a Chief Superintendent now.” In conversation, however, the Superintendent or Chief Superintendent in charge of a station is almost invariably referred to as simply the guv’nor, and he and his entourage of supervising officers down to and including Inspectors are collectively the governors. The Inspector running a shift of operational officers is also the guv’nor.

By contrast, no one, of any rank, ever addresses someone of the rank of Constable as “Constable”: in direct address he will simply be addressed by name or, in more formal contexts, by his number: “601, report to the Chief Superintendent for annual qualification review at 3.00 pm.” In indirect reference, the body of Constables is always referred to as the PCs, mentioned individually in such terms as “He’s a PC on M Division,” “My son’s in the job: he’s a PC at Wembley.” Sergeants are addressed from time to time as Sarge, but much more usually as Skipper or Skip; and they are always referred to indirectly as such: “He’s a skipper on M division.” Inspectors and Chief Inspectors are never abbreviated or otherwise jargonized. As for the most stratospheric ranks of all, ending with the Commissioner himself, they are known collectively as the brass.

The PCs are divided into reliefs, each working a rotation of early, late, and night shifts. Shift, however, is a word that is not used by the police: early and late duties are known as early and late turn, but nights are always night duty or plain nights. Early turn is generally known colloquially as early worm, but the other two have no sobriquets. Any single period of work is a tour (of duty). Before your tour you get into your uniform, including your bonnet (helmet—but never the flat cap used on motorized patrol), your stick (truncheon, including the new American-style nightsticks), and your uniform jacket (not strictly a jargon term, but another case of police-public divide, in that the public nearly always call it a tunic, which is never used by the police themselves). You also put on your PR ‘personal radio.’ At one time this was called the Batphone, but that term has dropped out of use.

The building where all this takes place is never referred to as anything other than the nick. That is also the commonest of many names for ‘prison,’ and the one almost invariably used by police. Anyone held in police custody is banged up. Nick is the universal verb for the act of arrest: the polite courtroom phrase “I arrested and cautioned him” is almost invariably a euphemism for the words actually spoken by PC to the prisoner on the street are, “You’re nicked”—suitably adverbially embellished if the prisoner has caused the PC to run, fight, or lose his breath.

A prisoner is a body, as in “Any mobile unit available to so to Trafalgar Square to pick up 601 with a body?” But you never arrest a body, or even nick him: you always get a body. You may also feel his collar or, more commonly, have him off, and if it is for anything other than drunkenness, you get a crime knock. Crime knocks often flow from observations. Here is another example of the TV people (and the newspapers) getting it wrong: they always refer to the police as keeping an observation. Police, on the other hand, never say that, always doing an obbo. One thing, however, is certain: however he came to be arrested, the body is always thenceforward referred to as Chummy.

Many crimes are invariably referred to by initials, some of which belong to offences that have been super-seded—a good example of jargon’s proving more tenacious of life than the things from which it arises. For example, someone arrested for the offence of going equipped for theft is still known by the initials of the old offence of “carrying House Breaking Implements by night,” from the Larceny Acts, though they were repealed decades ago. Thus “I had him off for HBI.” You might also have him off for TDA (‘Taking and Driving Away,’ now replaced by Taking a conveyance), or for OPD (‘Outraging Public Decency’), IPO (‘Impersonating a Police Officer’), or for the better-known ABH or GBH (assaults occasioning ‘Actual’ or ‘Grievous Bodily Harm’). And there are many others.

If you have had someone off for some of the more serious of these crimes it is likely that you will be in plain clothes. In that case you need to identify yourself as job to Chummy. You do this by flashing your brief, which means in practice waving under his nose a bit of plastic that is actually your warrant card, but as far as Chummy knows might be anything, and announcing that he’s nicked. When he gets to the nick he will then holler for a brief of an entirely different kind, namely his lawyer—a solicitor; and if the case goes as far as court, the brief will very likely have engaged a mouthpiece—in Britain a barrister, in the USA a trial lawyer—to speak for him.

Some crime knocks are wrongful, and sometimes officers have been known to arrest on sight someone they feel sure is at it and decide later on what they have arrested him for, sometimes even planting evidence. This is known in copspeak as being swift, or as swifting someone off for whatever it is that is later decided upon. Or you may tell your pals in the canteen later that you had him off under the C [or whichever] Division Breathing Act or under the Refusal of Particulars Act. More frequent is the custom of claiming that Chummy said something self-incriminating on arrest. This is known as verballing him up. Any such behaviour is often described as bent, as in bent copper, but among police themselves the common term for such an arrest is, “I see old so-and-so got well and truly stitched up for theft from vehicles.” This is yet another case where police and public part company: the media always talk of bent police fitting up innocent arrestees. The police never use that term, always stitch up. The term fit up was, as far as I can ascertain, coined by the novelist G.F. Newman in his story of a bent detective, Sir, You Bastard, but it is the one that has caught on, at the expense of the real police term.

A police officer caught going bent will get into trouble. Whether or not he ends up in court, he will certainly be the subject of internal disciplinary proceedings. He will describe himself, however, as having been stuck on, this being short for stuck on the dab. Or he may use the other half for his abbreviation and say, “I’m going on the dab for this.” The term comes from the word dabs ‘fingerprints,’ which are taken from a prisoner by police only after arrest for fairly serious crime. And an officer who has been stuck on may well be heard lamenting that “It’s all gone pearshaped”—which is what happens when anything that should have a fine, firm shape sags, with all the stuffing leaking down into the bottom and flopping outwards.

Having initially been stuck on, the errant PC will soon receive the official form warning him that he may be subject to disciplinary proceedings. Like all large bureaucracies, the police flounder in an ocean of paper, with a form for every action. The one for this warning of possible discipline is a Form No. 163, so the PC can now say of himself, “I’ve been one-six-three’d”; and a bit later, when the senior officer assigned to investigate the complaint decides that there is enough evidence to justify a hearing (which he always does), comes the even more dreaded next stage, “I’ve been one-six-foured”—i.e., ‘given notice of the date of the disciplinary hearing.’

You can be stuck on for anything from serious misconduct to minor infringements of the police’s absurdly draconian and catch-all disciplinary codes, which make it possible for a senior officer with a grudge against a junior to stick him on for almost anything. For example, the PC may have been caught slipping unobtrusively into a restaurant or pub on his ground to scrounge—otherwise ponce or mump—a drink or a meal. Every PC cultivates his own special places for this purpose: they are his own preserve and forbidden to other PCs; he will refer to them as his ponce-holes, and they add greatly to the sum of constabular happiness. (Mine included the Savoy Hotel.)

Other things for which one might go on the dab include scrounging provender from markets, the produce being known as codgel; associating with the wrong kind of company, which is to say actions like boozing with known criminals, or CRO men. (CRO stands for Criminal Records Office. The office itself has been given an impressive new name, but the old initials survive it.) So I might talk of your friends with criminal convictions as “your CRO mates.” Police/public again: the cop shows and newspapers always describe these friends of yours as having form. The police always talk of previous. Having either, Chummy will of course have a docket number at CRO or its computerized replacement; any police officer, however, will still say “Well, well, well! He’s got a club number !”

Having nicked Chummy, the police may wish to search his property for the proceeds of his crimes. If he refuses his permission for them to do so, they will get a W (‘warrant’) from a magistrate or, in some parts, a Panel of experts ‘bench of lay justices.’ Then they will go and give his drum a spin, or just spin him ‘search his home.’ Whether or not they find anything, they will eventually get into half-blues ‘civilian jacket over job shirt and trousers’ and go off to the pub for a well-earned pint; and if you eavesdrop on their conversation, since policemen always talk shop, you will undoubtedly overhear some of the expressions you have been introduced to here.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“ ‘No one expected it to be that high, but it’s lower than what we expected,’ said Mark Obrinsky,…”. [From The Wall Street Journal, 5 July 1991, page A8. Submitted by Bernard M. Brenner, Chelmsford, Massachusetts.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“But the N.C.A.A. is concerned only with breaches of its recruiting and academic rules, not with honest-to-goodness crime.” [From “A National Disgrace,” in Reader’s Digest, August 1989. Submitted by Naftali Wertheim, Emek Beth Sh’an, Israel.]<None>

OBITER DICTA: Turns of Phrase

Alan Meadows, Calow, Chesterfield

How long is it since you turned round and gave someone a good earful? And did he or she turn round and give as good as they got?

You might turn round to me and say you don’t know what I’am on about. In which case I am liable to turn round to you and say, “Of course you do. Open your ears.”

But beware. You may find this particular speech habit to be like the creaking tree outside the window: it was always there but you never heard it. Once you hear it you scarcely hear anything else.

Why do we twist and spin before we speak? Is it a ritual? a spell to ward off contradiction? a dance of self-justification? Certainly, it usually carries some hint of aggression, and, as always, vindication is in the mouth of the utterer.

If you turn round and do it to me, it probably means you are being duplicitous in some way—switching allegiance; reversing an opinion. A turncoat, perhaps. “She turned round and told me she always knew I had the dress sense of a bag-lady.”

We might term this Turning Round and Offering Bare-faced Cheek. The orbiting full moon, perhaps.

Consumer grievances are particularly rich in these audacious revolutions. Retailers seem to turn round wholesale on their hapless customers with outrageous demands. “The Gas Board turned round and said I had to pay for their cock-up.” This is called Turning Round and Moving the Goalposts.

If, on the other hand, I turn round and do it to you, it probably means that I am turning in heroic defiance, wheeling in righteous indignation, turning on my tormentors. “I turned round and told them I wasn’t going to take it lying down.” This is known as Turning Round and Standing One’s Ground.

The average day’s listening to talk radio will provide a vertiginous selection of all these categories—plus, of course, the Political Revolution. That is not, as previously thought, the overthrow of one faction by another but describes those occasions when the minister reverses his position while claiming consistency of stance.

That is called Turning Round and Steering a Steady Course and appears on Page 1 of the Spin Doctor’s Manual.

The pièce-de-résistance of the rotating phrase, however, came when my own step-daughter told me of an aggravated duet (or should that be roundelay?) between herself and her habitual sparring partner. After an epic exchange of personal pirouettes she delivered the knockout punch with the following:

“I told her to her face,” [an aberrant piece of straight-talking, this] “Don’t you turn round to me and tell me I turned round and accused you of being two-faced.” Thus creating, in the true sense of the term, a circular argument. Dizzying stuff, eh?

The Intrusive s

Ronald Mansbridge, Weston, Connecticut

The letter s sometimes appears at the end of a word to which it does not properly belong. Examples are a little ways, anyways, and somewheres. This usage is commonly heard in the United States, chiefly from country folk, or folks. The earliest use I have found is dated 20 April 1806, when William Clark, in the Lewis and Clark Journal, wrote, “a long ways off.” Today in newspapers, and especially in advertising, one often reads (and hears) a savings of and, increasingly, Daylight Savings Time.

Sometimes it appears that one s is suggested by another. Thus we hear for heaven’s sakes, and for goodness' sakes. Harold Ross, the founder and editor of The New Yorker, was a stickler for details of grammar, punctuation, and usage. But he is quoted as saying, “For God’s sakes.”

The intrusive s frequently makes its way into place names. The road on which I live, properly Lyons Plain Road, is often called “Lyons Plains Road.” A nearby town is commonly called Greens Farms; it is my guess that Mr. Green had only one farm. For some years I spent the winters in a house in England called Gun Green Farm. Something like one in twenty letters from the USA were addressed to “Gun Green Farms.” An example I particularly like is Smiths College.

The addition of an s to a place name seems to be largely an American habit. But the British have also played their part. In England, rather more than in the United States, one finds an s tacked on to the French names Marseille and Lyon. “Marsales” is in fact the commonly heard pronunciation. Even the good edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911) gives the entry LYONS (Fr. Lyon) and uses Lyons throughout the text except when giving a name, such as the Paris-Lyon main line. The heading MARSEILLES is given with no reference to the spelling Marseille, except when reproducing similar names or as a place of publication.

The Times Atlas of the World (1967) does better; in the gazetteer it gives “Lyons, France, see Lyon,” and “Marseilles, see Marseille.” In the map of France it gives the proper spelling, with the English in parentheses below. In a full-page article in The New York Times, August 26, 1990, “What’s doing in Lyons,” Steven Greenhouse uses Lyons and Lyons’s throughout, though using Lyon in a name, such as Bistrot de Lyon. At one point he writes, “Lyons, which the French spell Lyon.”

Newspaper accounts of sporting events commonly refer to the finals. There are, of course, quarter-finals and semi-finals, but only one final. Let me report that more than once last week, I was wished a Happy New Year’s, though I am sure that my friends were wishing me to be happy for more than one day.

Recently I read Treason in the Blood, a book about the Philbys, father and son, Houghton Mifflin, 1994, by Anthony Cave Brown. The subject greatly interested me; but my faith in the author was shaken on the very first page, by his misquotation from Blake, “And did those feet in ancient times …” I was less surprised by an advertisement of an outfit that offered visiting Americans summer courses at Cambridge and Oxford, misquoting Matthew Arnold, “Oxford … whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Ages.” This horror, ruining Arnold’s lovely rhythm, actually appears in that otherwise admirable book, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

Finally, I hope I may be forgiven, as a Cambridge man, for citing my favorite example, a book called Manuscript and Proof, published in 1937 by Oxford University Press. My copy, carefully preserved, has the jacket, twice proclaiming the title as Manuscript and Proofs.

The Game of the Name

John E. Thorpe, Buntingford, Hertfordshire

Being born of parents from the East Midlands and spending the early years of my life there, having a name like John Thorpe never really gave me any problems. The countryside of Lincolnshire and Leicestershire abounds with village names that end with thorpe and, apart from being called “Thorpy” by my school pals, the name never caused any difficulty. That was before I started travelling. It was then that I found out just how tough it is for most nationalities to get their tongues round the dreaded th. Even when I started working in London I had to accept a fair number of “Mista Forp”s in the course of an average day.

It is not surprising that my first exposure to non-Brits was in France, where I soon reconciled myself to a Gallic attack on my personal hygiene when they insisted on addressing me as “Miss Your Soap,” subtly intoned, I always thought, with an interrogatory inflexion. Later, on many visits to Germany, I reluctantly submitted to the title of “Hair Torpor,” an uncanny prediction of what was to befall my then luxuriant growth. Italians mostly managed with a cheerful “Seen Your Top,” which surprised me because I was taller than most of those I had to deal with. My Russian contact used to call me simply “Zorrp,” which I found pretty much to the point, and a Hungarian colleague settled for “Trope.” Only in Switzerland did I find someone who truly tried to get it right, but the effort involved putting his tongue out at me and concluded with an overly explosive final consonant; but he got all the bits in there.

My travels in Asia demonstrate a much more sensible approach by the wily natives, and in India, China, and Japan most of my contacts have, without invitation, settled for the easy to deal with “Mister John.”

Strange to say, it is in the US that one of the really weird aural hiccups occurs. It usually happens in restaurants or hotels or any of the other places where professional name takers are found. The conversation usually goes something like this:

“Good morning, sir. Could I have your name please?”

“Yes, I’m John Thorpe.”

“OK, Mr. Philips, I’ve put your name on the list.”

“No, no. My name is Thorpe, not Philips, John Thorpe.”

“Oh! Sari! Yewer Jarn Thorwup. Gee, I’m sari.”

Now that conversation may sound unbelievable, but in the US I have been renamed “Philips” dozens of times, on the West coast, particularly. So often, in fact, that I have been forced to assume the new identity of the more acceptable “Jarn Thorwup” when dealing with any of the name takers so deeply entrenched in the American way of doing things. How can they hear it that way? It is not as though Thorpe is that unusual a name in the States: after all, one of the great athletes of all time was Jim Thorpe, and they even named a town after him. To be honest though, I think I would rather be a “Zorrp” than a “Philips.”

F U Cn Rd Ths …

David Galef, University of Mississippi

What is the ruling logic behind abbreviations? Of course, they should be shorter than what they stand for, or why use them? But they should also be quickly decodable for the original words, and that is not always the case. For example, does ct. mean ‘count’ or ‘court’? It can mean either. Or take the state in which I live, Mississippi: should that be abbreviated MS, or is that for Missouri? Or if Missouri is MO, what is Montana, and if Montana is MN (try again), what is Minnesota? A few bouts of this will make your head spin.

And then, some abbreviations have unsuspected depths, or at least possibilities I had never entertained. I have a friend named Mary who stands words on their heads. She is bright, articulate, and ten years old. “Why are some streets called Beloved?” She asked me the other day.

“What do you mean?” I asked—my usual response to one of Mary’s queries.

“Right there,” she said, pointing to the lettering on a map that read Grand Blvd.

“Mary, that’s Boulevard, not Beloved,” I objected, but feebly. Mary’s readings are often more interesting than the conventional interpretation.

She turned her serious gray-eyed gaze full on me. “How can you tell?”

“Context,” I replied with all the adult stiffness I could muster, and that seemed to convince her. But since then, she has me wondering. Why do so many roads end in Saint—Elm St., Main St.? What about the Bulldog in the Manger (“Bldg. Mgr. in rear”) I see listed in apartment blocks? How does a woman fit in an envelope (“Ms. enclosed”)?

From there, it is a short route to Phony Doctors (Ph.D.s) and municipal twerps (“Now entering Monroe Twp.”). But maybe I had better stop here before I lose all central (ctrl.).

ANTIPODEAN ENGLISH: The ABC of Broadcasting Australian

Bill Ramson, Clovelly, NSW

Australia’s national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation [ABC], has had advice on its use of English for more than half a century. The advising body, the Standing Committee on Spoken English [SCOSE], has in recent years been made up of four categories of member: broadcasters [practitioners]; bureaucrats [facilitators]; academics [linguistic experts]; and representatives of the wider community. The committee is generally held in high regard but ran aground when four out of five of the “outside” members resigned earlier this year.

Their action raises two questions. The first is a general one: what sort of standardisation or regulation does a community expect or tolerate in the language its broadcasters use? The second is more local and specific to the set of circumstances pertaining in the ABC: why does a committee which has had a useful and influential life for more than fifty years suddenly reach a crisis point at which a significant proportion of its members are prepared to gamble on an incoming General Manager’s reassessment of its role and put at risk its very existence?

To take the general question first, let us begin with a little history. SCOSE began its life in 1943 as the Pronunciation Advisory Committee. It was concerned with the maintenance of standard English pronunciations as those then believed to be most suitable for broadcasting. “Standard English” meant the King’s English, and in this outpost of Empire, announcers (though unseen) wore dinner suits to read the news and abided by the rulings of the English phonetician Daniel Jones, whose tremendously influential English Pronouncing Dictionary was first published in 1917. Enter a young Australian phonetician, Alex Mitchell, later to become the founding Vice-Chancellor of Macquarie University, and in that capacity to appoint Arthur Delbridge, later to become Chief Editor of the Macquarie Dictionary, as Macquarie’s first Professor of English and Linguistics. In 1952, on the recommendation of an internal committee set up to consider the desirability of the ABC’s making some departure from BBC practice, the Standing Committee on Pronunciation was established to (and the wording is historic) “advise the Corporation on the most acceptable pronunciation of those words for which [the] current Australian pronunciation differs from the pronunciation recorded by Daniel Jones.” The committee was named the Standing Committee on Spoken English in 1954, Mitchell and Delbridge being successive chairmen of SCOSE during its formative years.

Over the years this committee has vigilantly assessed its utility, several times reviewing its aims and procedures (in 1971, 1983, 1987, and 1989). Its revised terms of reference are: “to advise the Corporation on its use of Spoken English in broadcasting, with special reference to pronunciation, grammatical usage, and style; and to prepare for publication, in electronic or print form, such specialised guides to the use of English, or other languages as necessary.” Its primary goal has been the provision of expert advice to broadcasters—on the pronunciation of names, place names, foreign words, words from specialist vocabularies as various as music and sport, the Church and medicine, etc. Daily lists of words that are likely to give a broadcaster the conniptions are constantly being added to a huge database which is electronically available to all broadcasters.

Nor has the committee shirked the responsibility thrust on it by the public or avoided public controversy. It has taken on (over the pronunciation of kilometre) Australia’s most loquacious Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, and fearlessly determined an “Australian” pronunciation of words as divers as Jervis Bay, Chernobyl, and Quixote. It has developed and sustained a public role for itself, as its numerous correspondents will testify. It has watched over and, in a very low-key way, guided the development of a recognisable and accepted Australian standard. It has not been without influence on the ABC’s commercial rivals. It seems reasonable to assume that it is valued by the community.

Where a committee can lose its way, no matter how intrinsically valuable its deliberations, is in its communication with its users (or should-be users). One problem is the receptivity of a new generation of broadcaster that thinks SCOSE ivory-towerish and its recommendations arcane and irrelevant in a world where information matters more than its expression. A second has been the maintenance of a communicating mechanism within the Organisation, which has been dependent on support from within the ABC’s management structure. In its heyday SCOSE was chaired by one of the academic members, which gave it a certain impartiality and independent force, and the circulation of its findings was the responsibility of a senior ABC officer and a trained secretary-cum-research assistant who was the servant of the committee and who reported to that officer. Most recently it has been chaired by a senior officer, alternately the Head of Radio (who has rarely been able to attend meetings), and the Head of TV (who attended one meeting out of eleven). Both professed their whole-hearted support for SCOSE (as did the then General Manager, who attended one Christmas party), but neither has been able to deliver. This has left the research assistant on her own, and SCOSE effectively if unintentionally emasculated. But perhaps the revolution is over and the new generation is in the right.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“WORD PROCESSORS - TEMPORARY - several positions open proficiency with at least 1 language necessary. Call The Agentry.” [Classified ad in the (Springfield, Massachusetts) Union-News, 30 November 1991. Submitted by anon.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“HOLYOKE - An ordinance that will help the city recoup thousands of dollars in fines from abandoned car owners has won the support of the police chief.” [From a story by Martin J. Laue in the (Springfield, Massachusetts) Union-News, 30 November 1991. Submitted by anon.]

EPISTOLA {Theodore Skeat}

Many thanks for the very kind gift of the number of VERBATIM containing the long and very amusing article on my grandfather, Professor Walter W. Skeat [“The (invariably) Right Reverence Walter W. Skeat,” XVIII, 1,16]. From what I was told many years ago, he was constantly deluged with letters from complete strangers demanding to be told the etymology of various words, and I am not at all surprised that he should have shown irritation with those who had not even taken the elementary steps of consulting either his own dictionary or the N.E.D. These, however, were the easy ones and could be answered very briefly. When asked for the derivation of a word of which the etymology had not been worked out, he adopted a rationing system: he did the best he could with the resources available in his study in the space of half an hour. The result was then communicated to his correspondent, whose letter would then be dropped into the wastepaper basket!

This was necessary because otherwise his work would have brought to a standstill.

Of course personal acquaintances were not treated in such a cavalier fashion, and he must have accumulated an enormous correspondence, virtually none of which has survived, except for his letters from Sir James Murray, who with great presence of mind, on hearing of my grandfather’s death, recovered the letters which he had sent him. Both sides of this lifetime correspondence are now in the possession of his granddaughter, Miss K. M. E. Murray, who has made arrangements in her will to bequeath them to the Bodleian.

Apart from these, all his vast correspondence seems to have been destroyed, apart from a few stray items which have descended to me. I say destroyed because I recall having been told many years ago that after his death his two sons (my father and my uncle) “spent weeks tearing up old letters.”

[Theodore Skeat, London]

EPISTOLA {James C. Clark}

Robert Adams writes [XXII,2] of the much-celebrated Stoat as if Heironymous were still anonymous. I am astonished that Adams has been unaware of Stoat’s new career. Mr. Stoat has been profiled several times in Tqydrtk Magazine, among other places. In those articles, he spoke of his frustration with words inevitably creating meaning in the minds of literate readers and his search for an audience neither literate nor readers. Possibly Cardiff has been spared MTV, but we haven’t. The idea that words strung together will inevitably make some sort of sense and conjure connections in a reader’s mind has been vanquished by MTV. Stoat’s insight was to mate words without apparent meaning to video images that move so rapidly and have so little intrinsic activity (as opposed to action, of which there is plenty) that no one can imagine what they’re about. There is no time for reflection and savoring, no desire to be bombarded again. Nouns are often paired, but in ways that guarantee incomprehension. For instance, in one of his famous videos, a haddock (or some other large fish) was on the screen for a moment while a vocalist [sic] sang about a light bulb. Now, of course, we have been given the key to this complicated metaphor. Thanks for enlightening us.

I hope Mr. Adams will explore this oeuvre and see how people can take random words sung to apparently random music and accompany them by random images. Mr. Stoat has successfully broached the barricades of words.

[James C. Clark, Independence, Missouri]

EPISTOLA {Josephine Crilly}

Mr. Champlin [“On Good Terms,” XXII, 1, 11] might be interested to know that in this part of the world, South of Manchester, in the market town of Altrincham, a custom called Beating the Bounds takes place every year. Boundary stones have taken the place of merestones. They may be set in a wall or be part of a bridge or some such construction. I have attended the ceremony, which takes about two hours and involves crossing the local canal by boat since that is where the boundary crosses.

I have a letter from the Steward and Notary to the Barony of Dunham Massey (constituted by the Baron Hamon de Massey after the Norman Conquest), giving me the script which is read at the start of the Beating the Bounds. Once young boys had their heads bumped on the merestones to make them remember exactly where the boundaries of their parish lay! Now one of the members of the Altrincham Court Leet takes a branch of willow and swishes it against the stones occurring along the route.

Beating the Bounds was intended to establish boundaries at a time when accurate maps were not available. The bumping of boys' heads had to be suffered even when the merestones were thrown into dividing streams or ponds.

There is a great deal of history attached to this practice. I took some photos at various stages along the route when I walked with the Court Leet of about half a dozen gentlemen dressed in mediaeval robes.

[Josephine Crilly, Sale, Cheshire]

EPISTOLA {Paul Blackford}

I enjoyed Alan Major’s “A Catalogue of Cats” [XXII,2] very much. In it he refers to the 1785 edition of Captain Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. I wonder if Mr Major is aware of the 1811 dictionary, A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence, which appeared twenty years after Grose’s death and which is presumably an expansion of the original work. It was reprinted in 1984 by Bibliophile Books, 33 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London WC2E 7JS. It’s a great read and has the following cat-derived words and definitions:

cat a common prostitute.

old cat: a cross old woman.

cat-heads Sailor’s slang, a woman’s breasts.,

to cat or shoot the cat to vomit from drunkenness.

cat and bagpipean society a society which met at their office in the Great Western Road: in their summons, published in the daily papers, it was added that the kittens might come with the old cats without being scratched.

cat call a kind of whistle, chiefly used at theatres, to interrupt the actors and damn a new piece. It derives its name from one of its sounds, which greatly resembles the modulation of an intriguing boar cat.

cat harping fashion Sailor’s slang, drinking crossways and not, as usual, over the left thumb.

cat in pan from turn cat in pan ‘change sides or parties’; supposed originally to have been turn cate or cake in pan.

cat’s foot Also, live under the cat’s foot ‘be under the dominion of a wife; be hen-pecked.’ to live like cat and dog, said of married persons who live unhappily together.

as many lives as a cat Cats, according to vulgar naturalists, have nine lives—that is, one less than a woman.

no more chance than a cat in hell without claws said of one who enters into a dispute or quarrel with one greatly above his match.

cat lap tea. Also called scandal broth.

cat match when a rook or cully is engaged amongst bad bowlers. (Elsewhere rook is defined as a ‘cheat’ and cully as a ‘fop or fool.')

cat of nine tails a scourge composed of nine strings of whipcord, each having nine knots.

cat’s paw to be made a tool or instrument to accomplish the purpose of another: an allusion to the story of a monkey that made use of a cat’s paw to scratch a roasted chestnut out of the fire.

cat’s sleep counterfeit sleep. Cats often pretend to sleep to decoy their prey, then suddenly spring on it.

cat sticks thin legs. The allusion is to the sticks with which boys played at cat.

cat whipping or whipping the cat a trick often practised on ignorant country fellows, vain of their strength: a wager is laid with them that they may be pulled through a pond by a cat. The bet being made, a rope is fixed round the waist of the party to be catted and the end thrown across the pond, to which the cat is fastened by a packthread. Three or four sturdy fellows are appointed to lead and whip the cat: these, on a signal given, seize the nd of the cord, and, pretending to whip the cat, haul the astonished booby through the water.

whip the cat Tailoring, to work at private houses, as practised in the country.

In his final paragraph, Mr Major says that cat’s hair ‘down on the face of youths before the beard grows’ is a term that all male readers will be familiar with. I never encountered that: we used to refer to it as bum fluff!

Incidentally, the Thai name for cat is meow.

[Paul Blackford, Bangkok]

EPISTOLA {Marc A. Schindler}

In XXII, 2 you printed a letter from me regarding Charles Stough’s article, “Insulting Nicknames Give Journalists Something to Be Proud of” [XXI,4]. In that letter I gave my own recollection of a popular satirical summary of the nicknames of England’s newspapers and asked if other readers might be able to come up with more complete and accurate versions. Two readers have, in fact, responded, Ms. Diana May (Ickenhan, Middlesex) and Dr. John Kahn (Eton College). I think that other readers might be interested in a “new and improved” list. This list is an amalgamation of Ms. May’s and Dr. Kahn’s, which vary in some details but agree on the most important points:

The Times Read by the people who run the country.

Daily Mail Read by the wives of the people who run the country.

Daily Mirror Read by the people who think they run the country.

Guardian Read by the people who think they ought to run the country.

Independent Read by the people who think the people running the country are wrong.

Financial Times Read by the people who own the country.

Today Read by the people who think they own the country—and want to sell it.

Morning Star Read by the people who think the country should be run by another country.

Daily Express Read by the people who think the country ought to be run the way it used to be run.

Daily Telegraph Read by the people who think it still is.

Sun Read by the people who don’t care who runs the bloody country providing she’s got bit tits.

*[Marc A. Schindler, Spruce Grove, Alberta] *

EPISTOLA {Malcolm Penny}

I read Mary Douglas Dirks’s review of Professor Spevack’s Shakespeare Thesaurus [XXII, 1], in the comfort of the little village pub at Stalham Green here in Norfolk. (If the camera had worked properly, you would be able to recognise VERBATIM on the table beside my pint.) The pub is named after a bird common in the Broads, the grey heron Ardea cinerea, known locally as the harnser. We do not mistake it for a hawk, a plasterer’s board with a handle underneath (called, interestingly enough, oiseau in French). On the other hand, we do not use it to cut wood. Our forebears used to hunt it with hawks, and they could easily distinguish hunter from quarry.

I was taught at school that Hamlet was referring to falconry when he explained to Horatio that he was “but mad north-northwest.” This seems more likely than a punning comparison of tools which His Royal Highness is unlikely to have used. Besides, what other kind of saw would he (or Shakespeare) have known, power tools then being in their infancy? Could the foot-lathe have been adapted as a footsaw?

H. Kirke Swann, in his Dictionary of English and Folk-Names of British Birds (Witherby and Co., 1913, republished by Gale Research Company, Detroit, 1968), gives Hern, Hernshaw, Hernseugh, Hernsew, Harn, Harnser, and Harnsey as names for the Common (Grey) Heron. The last three are East Anglian. All are derived from the French heronceaux ‘young heron,’ which itself descends from heroncel, an Old French diminutive.

There are a number of French words in common use here in the Far East (of England). The cloth with which mine host Wally mops the bar as we discuss “that American mag of yours” is called a dwile, from toile. We use towels in the course of our toilet (and in the toilet, too), but dwiles are found in bars and kitchens all over Norfolk.

Goo ye well together, as Wally says to the company at closing time.

[Malcolm Penny, Sloley, Norfolk]

EPISTOLA {T.L.S. Daintith}

Rosemary Bowmer [XXII, 2, 9] says that a rod was four and a half yards when she started school. I was taught that five and a half yards made up one rod, pole, or perch; thus, four rods equalled twenty-two yards, the length of a cricket pitch, ten times that made a furlong, and there were eight furlongs to a mile. Of course, these measurements were used by unlettered and ignorant peasants, who had no schooling; nowadays, when education continues till well into adult life, even to pensionable age, counting is done, as it were, on the fingers—metric, I believe, that it is called.

R. Millar [ibid., 22] says “there cannot have been so many smiths in olden times.” Smith does not necessarily refer to a blacksmith but to a worker, possibly in metal (smite, as in beating with a hammer or such?). Gold, White, Silver, Copper, and., as in the case of my grandfather, Tyresmith, by trade, not by name.

[T.L.S. Daintith, Melton Mowbray]

[Undoubtedly changes in the values of measurements can be attributed to inflation.]

EPISTOLA {Robert Marjoribanks}

Donald Macintosh’s anecdote about the Scottish workman whose conversation baffles the visiting Frenchwoman [XXII,2] makes the unwarranted assumption that the common speech of the people of the Scottish Lowlands is an English dialect. The subject has been debated for at least four centuries but, as the editors of VERBATIM must be aware, a body of evidence suggests that the Scots tongue has many of the characteristics of a distinct language.

As Mairie Robinson, editor-in-chief of The Concise Scots Dictionary (Aberdeen University Press, 1985), points out in her Introduction, Scots is more strongly differentiated from Standard English than any of the English regional dialects in the number of words, meanings of words and expressions not current in Standard English, in its strikingly different pronunciation, and in the loyal affection with which the Scottish people continue to embrace it. Scots is not a corruption of modern English; Scots and modern English evolved in parallel from Old English, with importations from many other languages.

The Scot in Mr. MacIntosh’s story is looking for his “gaffer,” a word used throughout the British Isles—not just in Scotland—to mean a ‘boss.’ All the other words nyatter, nyaff, skelly, cack e’e, manky, broony, and gansey— are uniquely Scots and are listed and defined in Ms. Robinson’s dictionary.

To call the Scots tongue “Doric” (meaning “broad or rustic”) is to perpetuate the notion that it is the speech of uneducated country folk, an idea still endorsed by snobbish anglophiles in Scotland. Lallans, of course means ‘lowlands’ in Scots and has been used in recent years to designate a variety of literary Scots used by writers of the Scottish Renaissance movement, which is determined to preserve the ancient language as an artistic medium.

Mr. MacIntosh has lived too long among the Sassenachs.

[Robert Marjoribanks, Ottawa]

EPISTOLA {Jim M. Pols}

I cannot resist the temptation to add two fine examples of names matching professions after reading Jerome Betts’s article “All in the Family” [XXII,1]. First there is of course the conductor Simon Rattle and perhaps less well known is the old established firm of Cape Town undertakers by the name of Human & Pitt Ltd. By the way, is Mr. Betts perhaps a bookmaker?

[Jim M. Pols, Weymouth, Dorset]

EPISTOLA {Jerome Shea}

In EPISTOLAE [XXII, 2] Mr. Bernard Adelman writes, “Bill Bryce, I have read…” I have a hunch that he means “Bill Bryson,” and the reference is probably to his book, The Mother Tongue. A niggling point, but other readers may have been momentarily confused, as I was. How Bryson may feel about being conflated with Lord Bryce is anybody’s guess.

[Jerome Shea, Albuquerque]

EPISTOLA {Janet DeLancey}

I shouldn’t wonder that British telly interviewers were intrigued and probably a tad confused, too, for Ms. Hilary Howard got her reds mixed in “No Boys Named Sue, But…”: Carmine Cavallero was a nimble-fingered pop-Latin pianist who performed often on television. Carmen Dragon is the conductor. He made several albums with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra in the late ‘50’s and early ‘60’s and is the father of Daryl Dragon of The Captain and Tennille fame.

I enjoy VERBATIM so much and thank you; but I really miss the Paring Pairs game. Please consider reinstating it… at least now and then.

[Janet DeLancey, Palos Verdes, CA]

[It is not simply a matter of “reinstating” Paring Pairs—I have to make them up, and after several years of doing so, my mind ran dry. Several readers offered contributions, but I felt that they were a bit off the mark. If I am again touched by the muse, Paring Pairs may appear again. —Editor.]

EPISTOLA {Donald R. Morris}

Several items from XXII, 2:

1. Anent the impact of Scottish dialects on the French; the reverse can occur. A World War I Punch cartoon showed a Scottish soldier outside a cafe in France explaining to a new arrival: “Och, mon, it’s an easy language. For example, if ye want twa eggs, ye ask for ‘twa oofs,’ they bring ye three, and ye gie one back. It’s an easy language.”

2. To add to “Insulting Nicknames,” staffers at the late Houston Post referred to The Houston Chronicle as “Brand X.”

3. Also from the late Houston Post, as a practical guide to usage in stories: “An ‘African-American’ is any black with a college degree who isn’t in jail or under indictment.” Cynical? Racist? Nevertheless, an almost infallible guide to current media usage.

4. [EPISTOLA from Bernard Witlieb] The man’s man was Shirley Povich, not Povish.

5. Add to “A Catalogue of Cats” cat-hairpins—much favored by Captain Jack Aubrey in the Patrick O’Brian novels. These are lashings to cinch the shrouds in closer to the mast, to allow the yards a few extra degrees of swing.

[Donald R. Morris, Houston]

EPISTOLA {B.D. Berger, M.D.}

My reference is to “All in the Family.” by Jerome Betts [XXII, 1]. The most aptly named individual I have ever encountered was a dentist who, early in this century, had his office in Netwark, New Jersey. His name was Robert Treat Paine. In the same city, during the same period, there was a dining establishment called “The Celibate Restaurant.” The management were not at all interested in the sexual practices of their clients and, indeed, hoped only to cater to the many yet single people of the city.

[B.D. Berger, M.D., Sun City, Arizona]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion for Patrick O’Brian’s Seafaring Tales

Dean King with John B. Hattendorf and J. Worth Estes, (Henry Holt & Co. 1995).

This dictionary was published too late for me. I became a Patrick O’Brian fan about 20 years and fifteen (of seventeen) volumes ago. O’Brian’s is a roman fleuve recounting the 1790-1815 continuing adventures of his ship captain hero, Jack Aubrey, Royal Navy, and of Aubrey’s best friend, Dr. Stephen Maturin, ship’s surgeon, a naturalist and spy for the British. The enthusiasm of the public for these volumes has increased exponentially with encomiums like, “The best sea stories,” and then, “The best historical novels ever written.” There are fan clubs now all over the world for these enthusiasts. (Charlton Heston is head of the Southern California chapter.) For non-epopts: reading these is like reading Jane Austen—with every so often a hellish sea battle or shipwreck.

In order to enjoy O’Brian’s novels, I have read them with a Hammond Atlas at one side and the Oxford English Dictionary at the other. That is tedious. Had a Sea of Words been published years ago, I would have been most grateful. Anyone would have needed lexicographic succor. Such words as limicole, catharping, xebec, siriasis— as well as boxing the compass, the sails of a full rigged ship, chains, deadeyes, shrouds, halyards, and stays, are all well explained in this book, including pictures of how a square—rigged warship had its sails raised, lowered, and tacked, an incredibly complicated and difficult procedure. Maps and diagrams of engagements are included. At the back is a bibliography of dozens of other Napoleonic era sea stories by other authors.

As a physician, I can usually find errors in a lay author’s medical orientation, but not with O’Brian! The only thing that I have not been able to find in medical dictionaries, the OED, or even in A Sea of Words, is his use of the word marthambles, which remains unknown to me.

If every enthusiastic reader of Patrick O’Brian buys a copy of this book, it will be a best-seller. As one enthusiast, I would recommend the purchase.

[Murray C. Zimmerman, Whittier, California]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Feminist Stylistics

Sara Mills, (Routledge, 1995), 230pp.

Three decades after the reawakening of feminism, no field of scholarship remains unexamined by feminist analysis, a process rhetorician Gay D. Claiborne has defined as an effort “to deconstruct the patterns of thinking that lead to a world-view of reality as consisting of oppositional, hierarchically-ordered pairs of things.” As they seek to undo the masculine/feminine, self/other, writer/ reader splits, according to Claiborne, “feminist scholars… work at an elevated political level of grave potential outcomes, for feminist involvement focuses on the foundation of cultural paradigms constructed by socially sanctioned ways of thinking.” (Gay D. Claiborne, pp. 143—44, Japanese and American Rhetoric: A Contrastive Study, International Scholars Publications, 1993.)

In Feminist Stylistics, Sara Mills challenges socially sanctioned ways of thinking as she confronts the politics of language-use head on. Noting that language is not simply a vehicle for ideas, but rather “a material entity which may in fact shape those ideas,” Mills states that a further aim of feminist analysis is “to draw attention to and change the way that gender is represented, since it is clear that a great many of these representational practices are not in the interests of either women or men.” Her book establishes a framework for such analysis designed both to describe sexism in a text and, through a process she names “feminist stylistics,” to deconstruct the way in which point of view, agency, metaphor, and other features of the text “are unexpectedly closely related to matters of gender.”

For lay readers and students who are not familiar with the prevailing concepts of mainstream linguistics, stylistics, and literary analysis, Mills’s Introduction provides a helpful explication of current theories and positions in these disciplines.

The opening chapters address such questions as whether meaning can exist in a text itself or is more the result of a negotiation between reader and text; whether male writing can be distinguished from female writing in terms of formal linguistic constituents; and how gender interacts with “reader positioning,” that is, the ways a text addresses and identifies its reader.

Mills, a research professor in English at Sheffield Hallam University, looks at these issues in relation to conventional models of text in which a piece of written material is treated as if it existed in its own right “with little reference to factors or constraints outside it—the socioeconomic factors of gender and race, for example.” She then develops a feminist model which extends the parameters of a text into its surrounding context. This model, she asserts, “makes space for the possibility, and in fact the necessity, of integrating notions of gender, race and class, and also sociohistorical and economic factors, into the analysis, and indeed into the definition of the text itself.”

In the second half of the book, Mills employs the strategies of feminist stylistics to expose the workings of gender at three levels of language—the word, the phrase or sentence, and larger-scale discourse. Her examples throughout are taken from widely diverse written materials, both canonical and nonliterary, including novels, newspaper articles, advertisements, and popular songs.

Although the book is described lightly as “a tool-kit”— and indeed Mills’s Summary lists questions through which a text can be analyzed for its representations of gender— Feminist Stylistics is a complex, many-layered approach to reading that enables a reader to look beneath overt content in order to see hidden messages which, while often unrecognized by both writer and reader, nevertheless reinforce and help to legitimatize stereotypical notions about gender differences embedded in our culture.

Examining ready-made phrases referring to women, or in some cases men, Mills cites, for example, some familiar proverbs. “A woman’s work is never done” seems to describe a natural state of affairs. The message is hard to counter because the speaker/writer using it does not take responsibility for inventing it but merely calls on preexisting commonsense knowledge. “Thus, if a specific woman complains of having too much work to do,” Mills writes, “this phrase can be used to suggest that the… difficulty of the conditions of her [specific] working life is not as important as the general ‘fact’ that women always have too much work to do.” It might further suggest that someone who has, at any given time, completed all the tasks before her is not, by definition, a woman.

Also examined are effects of the grammatical convention in English that the masculine is the standard or unmarked form, the feminine being deviant from the norm. One result is the use of generic words to refer to males only, of which Mills gives ludicrous examples like the headline on a news story about AIDS prevention among the elite, “TOP PEOPLE TOLD: TAKE A MISTRESS.”

For all its lively examples and provocative insights, this is not a smooth text; it tends toward the prolix, partly because of the author’s determination to cover all bases. By the same token it succeeds in floodlighting the protean ways gender is characterized in texts. In giving readers the means to recognize—and, if they choose, to resist—such characterizations, Feminist Stylistics is an important, ground-breaking book.

[Casey Miller and Kate Swift, East Haddam, Connecticut]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Spirit Pond Runestones, A Study in Linguistics

Paul H. Chapman, (paperback edition of ESOP, the journal of the Epigraphic Society of San Francisco, Vol. 22, Part II, 1994), iv + 60pp., 30 maps and illust., bib., index.

The Spirit Pond Runestones were discovered in 1972 by Walter Elliott, a carpenter beachcombing on the banks of the Spirit Pond near Popham Beach in coastal Maine. These are four small stones, ranging in size from that of an egg, to the largest, the “size of two fists.” One stone has a map inscribed on one side and is now referred to as the Mapstone. Another is an amulet. A third, the Christian Marker, has two words plus a K-rune, taken to mean ‘Christian’ (Kristinn). The largest one is called in this book the Memorial Stone.

Most of the discussion in the book is based on this Memorial Stone, which measures 7½” × 11” and is inscribed on two flat surfaces. Author Chapman provides a transcription and his translation. The Maine State Museum acquired three (which three?) of the stones from the finder. Archaeologist Bruce Bourque sought help from a “linguist” to have them translated. He retained Dr. Einar Haugen, Professor of Linguistics and Scandanavian Languages at Harvard, certainly a leading scholar in his fields.

Dr. Haugen declared in an article, “The Rune Stones of Spirit Pond, Maine,” in Man in the Northeast, No. 4, 1972, p. 77 that the stones were modern artifacts, which Chapman ruefully glosses as ‘fakes.’ He seems to regard Haugen’s statement of their modern origin as based, in part, on similarities to the Kensington Stone of Minnesota, long considered as fraudulent, although not by everybody. Robert A. Hall, Jr., had submitted an article to a “learned journal” in 1950 supporting the authenticity of the Kensington Stone. We are told (p.2) that the article was neither published nor returned. Prof. Hall published it as a book almost a third of a century later, The Kensington RuneStone is Genuine, Hornbeam Press, Columbia, SC, 1982.

Chapman, convinced by nautical and navigational evidence that the Mapstone was genuine, felt that the other runestones of the group must be authentic too. He managed to make an appointment with Professor Haugen, who had called them “modern.” Haugen invited Chapman to visit him at his home, and in a lengthy meeting they discussed Chapman’s findings. They agreed on most matters regarding the runic characters and on many features of language. But if Chapman had hoped to convert Einar Haugen to his own views of the authenticity of the stones, he did not succeed, for the Professor never deviated from his conviction that they were modern. He agreed, however, to keep in touch with Chapman and to answer whatever questions he had. Chapman states (p. ii) that Haugen had “a scholar’s open mind” (a characteristic not ordinarily perceived by him in most scholars), and he seemed grateful for Haugen’s comments. This lasted for a number of years (until Haugen’s death, in fact). The professor had not been willing to provide a complete translation, for his time and energy were both consumed in a number of projects and obligations. Paul Chapman apparently had his own views of how long it took to provide answers to runic questions and seems to have, in some cases, expected replies “by return mail.”

He compared the text of the Memorial Stone with the contents of two sagas (sometimes called Vinland Sagas). James E. Knirk, head of the Runic Archive of the University of Oslo, who read an early draft of one of Chapman’s articles (pp. 31-32), questioned the validity of using the evidence of the sagas, which contain so much fictional and fantastic material. Chapman’s defense of his procedure is that the two sagas on which he based his conclusions were mostly factual and dealt to a great extent with navigation, an area in which he claims competence and practical experience.

He seems not too much at home in matters of language. His subtitle, A Study in Linguistics, bears this out. He seems relieved to be able to report that linguists had spent considerable time in studying the runestones without significant results or that they were quick to call something fraudulent.

The book is, despite these strictures, worth reading, and judicious readers will probably separate the genuine from the dubious. The illustrations are pleasing and informative and the runes are neatly transcribed. The author makes an interesting attempt to account for several features of the runestones: the reason for their being left in Maine, the presence of Danish and other words in the inscriptions, the implications of runic inscriptions in which oghams occur together with runes, etc. One wonders whether Spirit Pond has spectral or religious connotation.

[Robert A. Fowkes, Bronxville, New York]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Making the Alphabet Dance

A. Ross Eckler, (St. Martin’s Press, 1996), xix + 252pp.

In Language on vacation (1965), Dmitri Borgmann redefined the obsolete term logology to mean ‘wordplay,’ and he also redefined the field itself. Now another author takes a revolutionary approach to wordplay in a handsomely produced, brilliantly written book. Ross Eckler’s Making the Alphabet Dance delves into the fertile substrata of logology that he calls “letterplay,” which considers words as collections of letters to be manipulated. His book shows the abundant possibilities in the field.

Having edited Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics since 1970, Eckler knows letterplay better than anyone else. He has witnessed it evolve through the work of many people, he has written many articles about it himself, and now he has traced its development with the precise logic of a chessmaster of language. Although letterplay can be confusing, Eckler deconfuses the forms and demonstrates the relationships between them. The text flows easily from one topic to another, peppered with examples both serious and humorous. “Forbidden Letters, Obligatory Letters,” the first chapter, presents several take-offs on “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” including this sless version:

Mary had a little lamb with fleece a pale white hue,

And everywhere that Mary went the lamb kept her in view.

To academe he went with her (illegal and quite rare);

It made the children laugh and play to view a lamb in there.

In Chapter 2, “Letter Patterns and Distributions,” Eckler notes that written wordplay may go back as far as the origins of written language. He discusses palindromes and pangrams and many lesser-known forms based on patterns. For instance, word graphs represent words as letters connected by lines. This word graph links the letters in the word before:

O - R

| |

F _ E _ B

“Word Fragments,” the chapter that follows, presents similar ideas, but it involves parts of a word instead of the whole.

Central to Eckler’s “word view” is Chapter Four, “Transforming One Word into Another.” As he sees it, all of letterplay revolves around three simple operations by which one word can be transformed into another—insertion, deletion, and rearrangement of letters. One type of transformation, the word network, grew out of Lewis Carroll’s word ladders (originally called “doublets”). In a word ladder, two words are connected by changing one letter at a time:

LESS

LOSS

LOSE

LOVE

MOVE

MORE

In one type of word network, all words of the same length would be connected at all possible places.

The next chapter, “Alphabetical Order and Scoring,” begins with a discussion of the last word in English and examines forms that rely on positions of the letters in the alphabet. This paragraph by Allan Simmons is an alphabetic pun:

Eh! Be seedy, ye effigy, at shy Jake.

A lemon, opaque. You are a stew—

Feed a bull, you ex! Why said?

In “Word Groups,” the letterplay shifts to words that look ordinary alone but become unusual in combination. The chapter opens with word squares and variations, like the compound word square invented by Hairy Partridge:

toe own bib

ATE At To bE

SET So wE iT

MAY Me An bY

The chapter on “Number Words” explores the fascinating things that happen when words and numbers collide. Many of the resulting forms are ideal for computer letter-crunching. Lee Sallows had to build a special-purpose computer to write this self-enumerating sentence:

This sentence contains three a’s, three c’s, two d’s, twenty-six e’s, five f’s, three g’s. eight h’s, thirteen i’s, two l’s, sixteen n’s, nine o’s, six r’s, twenty-seven s’s, twenty-two t’s, two u’s, five v’s, eight w’s, four x’s, five y’s, and only one z.

The “Afterword” concludes with a look at words as single entities. It is divided into two sections—geometric views of words and a discussion of long words.

Making the Alphabet Dance is the manifesto of a man whose love for words goes far beyond twenty-six letters. One of the most important wordplay books of the 20th century, it gives a name to letterplay and traces its evolution. Although the field is complex, both expert and novice can make new discoveries. And that, Eckler would be the first to say, is exciting:

One of the great joys of recreational linguistics is the chance to do original work, to discover new techniques or better examples illustrating old ones.

Such contributions can even be made by the diligent newcomer to the field; it is not always necessary to serve a long apprenticeship mastering past results.

As Lewis Carroll wrote, “Won’t you join the dance?”

[Dave Morice, Iowa City]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA BREVITER: The Coiners of Language

Jean-Joseph Goux, transl. by Jennifer Curtiss Gage, (University of Oklahoma Press, 1994 [Les Monnayeurs du langage, 1984), xi + 169pp.

A penetrating study of metaphor as illustrated chiefly by André Gide’s Counterfeiters. No index.

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Want to damage the urban area? (8)

5. Immature like everybody in Jersey, for example. (6)

10. Instrument for long-distance off-peak calls. (9)

11. African mother with some American Indian origins. (5)

12. It needs a tonic with it, in bars. (5)

13. Ironical racialist issue. (9)

14. Are they from Grand Island? Ask inside. (10)

17. Char in highland stream. (4)

19. Costume item displayed in the window. (4)

20. Established head of department supports the academy. (10)

22. Drops from the skies. (9)

24. Guess there’s no getting away from Hell. (5)

26. Put in a scheme to start teaching. (5)

27. I must follow the little angel in—he made music. (9)

28. Jock hesitates and gets a duck. (6)

29. New look for examination? (8)

Down

1. Train stress-pads fitted as standard in America. (5,3,7)

2. Dismay as a Northerner turns up. (5)

3. Mineral for poet and pub. (8)

4. These implements might be used to make a seat. (5)

6. “No to****is all the art I know” (Byron - Don Juan). (6)

7. Fail to reckon with odd clue? No so. (4, 5)

8. Moslem revolutionary? (8, 7)

9. Impulse in a way in Connecticut. (8)

15. Stick on soles making it hard to walk? (9)

16. Force studies of cattle with some muscular spasms. (8)

18. Frame of mind a pose, maybe. (8)

21. Bandage man after blow. (6)

23. Bailiff about to meet first lady. (5)

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Words We Use

Robert Lord, (Kahn & Averill, London, 1994, Paul & Company, Concord, Massachusetts, 1995), 116pp.

[Orders: PCS Data Processing, Inc., 360 West 31 Street, New York, NY 10001.]

The Words We Use is a very readable book about English words, though, from the notes at the ends of chapters, one infers that it was intended as an informal text. The reader gets the impression, though the author, educated at Oxford and London universities, was Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong, that the book is either for beginning linguists or for interested parties from other disciplines. It suffers from one severe, reprehensible shortcoming: it lacks an index, something no book should be without.

The book is short and simple, but not simplistic (a word used by some these days to avoid over-simplified); it is divided into fourteen brief chapters, the titles of which will give a good indication of what they are about (for a change). Each chapter concludes with “Notes and Suggested Further Reading,” and from the fairly sophisticated materials listed, one is not deluded into thinking that this is a lightweight work. The chapters are headed:

What is a word?

The trouble with dictionaries

The use of words: what happens when we talk

How did words originate?

How do words change their meaning?

Word borrowing

How are new words created?

Words as structures

How do we learn to use words?

Choosing between words—words in context

On the tip of one’s tongue

The written word

Words and the poet

Sticks and stones: words as reality

There is an “Afterword” that is even friendlier than the text. Space does not permit a more thorough investigation of the content, save to offer the advice that time spent with this book will prove informative and rewarding.

Laurence Urdang

Internet Archive copy of this issue