VOL XXIII, No 1 [Summer, 1996]

(Dia)critic’s Corner

Marc A. Schindler, Spruce Grove, Alberta

A letter writer once accused The [Toronto] Globe and Mail, Canada’s newspaper of record, of setting a new record for splitting an infinitive. A front-page article ended in the phrase, “Premier Peterson said that in order to” after which the notice SEE P. A16 was inserted, and on page A16 the sentence was indeed completed as promised: “balance the budget, expectations would have to be lowered.” That is some split!

However, writing letters to editors to complain about split infinitives is child’s play for the truly obsessed. As a self-confessed obsessive when it comes to newspapers' errors, my own pet peeve—one which all the North American news services and most of its major news magazines seem to be guilty of—is leaving diacritical marks off foreign words. To their credit, British news services (e.g., Reuters) and publications like the Observer, Guardian, and Economist, are usually quite careful to get it right. Sometimes these omissions are genuinely trivial. Montreal is quite acceptable; Montréal would be pretentious except perhaps in Canada. But sometimes they are not trivial at all, because a diacritical mark can change the pronunciation, the spelling and therefore even the meaning of a word.

In general, diacritical marks are all those little jots and tittles that appear over, under, and even through various letters. We don’t have many in English; the only common one I can think of offhand is the diaeresis (as in the two dots over naïve). where it indicates that two vowels side by side are not a diphthong but separate, distinct vowels. Israël is an example which is not seen much any more; Zaïre is seen occasionally; Haïti is common in French, where it is pronounced as three syllables, but the English standard seems to be Haiti (two syllables). The New Yorker still insists on coöperate.

Related to diacritical marks are two constructs, the ligature, which is a character resulting from “tying together” two or more standard letters, and the digraph, which is a special case of the ligature. The term ligature is usually reserved for printer’s conventions (that is, where combinations like fi, ffi, fl, and ffl are linked together to form a single character), whereas the digraph. while graphically tying together two characters, actually represents two diphthongs which were common in Latin: after the invention of printing, the Latin/Romance “ae” became “æ,” and “oe” became “œ.” These are almost never seen in the US today, but they are still occasionally encountered in British and other varieties of English influenced by British practice, although it is usually the “unligated” form that one encounters, not the digraphs. The most common example used to be US encyclopedia vs. traditional non-US encyclopaedia (encyclopædia). However, as even the British spell this word the US way now, the best examples of current US/non-US dichotomies in the use of the digraphs can be gleaned from the world of medicine and science, as in gynœcology/gynecology, hœmatology/hematology, œsophagus/esophagus, œstrogen/ estrogen, cœsium/cesium, œdema/edema, œstrus/estrus, pœdiatrics/pediatrics. In Canada, one rarely encounters in common usage the British spellings listed, but, while they continue to be widely used by medical professionals, even that practice has come under US influence.

Diacritical marks can be broken down into two types: “accents,” which affect, roughly speaking, pronunciation only; and “umlauts,” which affect spelling as well as pronunciation. As already mentioned, English is relatively sterile when it comes to diacritical marks; true gold can best be struck in foreign fields, where the accent grave, accent aigu, and the circonflexe. The two accents are used in French to change the value of e, which is the most common vowel in French (as in English) and which comes in as many varieties as Campbell’s soup—hence the need for some kind of regulation by diacritical marks. The circonflexe, on the other hand, is really a sign of orthography, not pronunciation, being a reminder of a dropped s—it is usually there for historical reasons but connoting a reason which has long since ceased to make sense and which modern French speakers have probably been blithely unaware of. Thus the French île reminds us that the word was once spelled isle, from Latin insula; the name of the eight month, Août, reminds us that it came from the Latin augustus; and être betrays its origins as Latin esse with the same orthographical “scar.”

French, being a Latin-derived language, is also very rich in digraphs, which are often still retained today in France, but are dying out in Quebec: cœur and œuvre are common examples.

German has no pure accents that I can think of (other than the occasional diaeresis in foreign proper nouns, such as Israël), but it has one very common ligature and, of course, the umlaut which is much like a digraph—in fact, these characters are essential to proper spelling, and it is for that reason that a “dropped umlaut” may be seen as an offense. The common ligature in German orthography is the esszet (β, β) and there are three vowels which can take the umlaut (ä, ö, and ü). The esszet (pronounced “ess-tset”) was formed when mediæval (for US read “medieval”) humanists got carried away and tried to force German into the Græco-Latin mould of grammar and spelling (a disease that spread to the British Isles, too).

In Greek, the sigma that is written in the middle of a word (σ, called medial sigma) is different from the sigma at the end of a word (ς, called final, or terminal sigma). In mediæval Latin the two s’s were also differentiated: ∫ was the medial s, and s the terminal s. This convention persisted until recently. In microfilms of the 1881 Canadian census, I have come across names like “Agne∫s,” who was sometimes noted as being a “dre∫smaker.” In German, this double-s, ∫s, eventually evolved into β. The diphthongs ae, oe, and ue appear so often in German that mediæval scribes started writing the e above the first vowel, something like this: \?\. As they were writing with flat-pointed pens, which tended to emphasize the vertical strokes (especially in Fraktur, the so-called “gothie” script of old German) the little superior e came to be represented by two short, vertical strokes, which then became two square dots. Then, when Germany adopted Latin letters during the pre-World War II era, they became two round dots. I have always thought that the ü was a perky little character—draw a circle around it and you get that ubiquitous Californianism, \?\.

The convention in English is to transcribe the umlaut—to restore, as it were, the “lost e.” Hence, the Hanseatic port of Lübeck is properly Luebeck in English Similarly, the esszet should be transcribed as “ss,” never as “B,” which I see often.

The Scandinavian languages also have characters similar to the German umlauts: besides the ä and ö (Swedish), Norwegian and Danish have œ (a + e as in English), Norwegian and Danish also have θ (o + e) and all three use a (a + a). The rules for transcription are similar to those for German words: Alborg=Aalborg; Kθbenhavn= Koebenhavn (of course, in this case there’s a perfectly acceptable English equivalent, Copenhagen). As an interesting aside, German alphabetizes words as if the umlauts were transcribed (so Köln would come before Kohl, for instance), but the Scandinavian languages treat their umlauts as trans-z characters (so in Swedish phone books, Ödlund would come after Zetterström).

News services that drop umlauts might deserve some sympathy; given the isolation of North Americans, the assumption is easily made here that the umlaut is an extraneous character that can be dropped—as accents in French often are when French words are transcribed into English—without doing bodily harm to the word in question. However, dropping umlauts is less forgivable than dropping accents, because accents describe pronunciation, and anyone who is familiar with the word will know how it is supposed to be pronounced, regardless of the accent. If you have heard the name of Canada’s prime minister (Jean Chrétien) pronounced correctly, or if you are sufficiently acquainted with French to know this fairly common name (which means ‘Christian’), you do not need to know that an acute accent is usually put over an e to indicate that it is a “long e” in an unstressed syllable. Hence, its omission will probably not stop you from pronouncing Chrétien correctly (that is, with the emphasis on the second syllable).

Umlauts are not simply accents, however: they are fundamental to the spelling of a word and should always be transcribed as “ae/oe/ue” (or “aa” in the case of the Scandinavian a) in character sets that do not provide umlauts. In any case, many German and Scandinavian place names have English equivalents: “Munich” for München, “Cologne” for Köln, the aforementioned “Copenhagen” for Kθbenhavn, “Gothenburg” for Göteborg, and so on. However, I recently read an Associated Press account of a neo-Nazi demonstration in a place called “Nurnberg.” The problem here is that this is neither fish nor fowl. It is not the correct English name for this city, which is Nuremberg, and it is not the correct German name, which is Nürnberg, or Nuernberg. One strongly suspects that the writer simply did not know the English name for Nürnberg. Yet more confirming evidence to the pessimists amongst us who lament the deterioriation of standards by the users and abusers of the Mother Tongue, especially cis-Atlantic journalists.

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“If there are any questions, comments, that arise from any edition of this newsletter, please feel free to contact me (Ron Shaw) at—. I’m also open to suggestive topics for next trimester’s edition.” [From a newsletter, “Total Quality Management,” published by OAO Corporation, 15 January 1993. Submitted by Pam L. Jones, Sepulveda, California.]

Galling Gallicisms of Quebec English

Howard Richler, Quebec

The Oxford Companion to the English Language (OCEL) is missing an s at the end of its title, for it has headings for more than four hundred varieties of our multivaried mother tongue—Australian English, Singapore English, Indian English, Black Vernacular English, etc. Some of the varieties are unfamiliar, like Babu English, “a mode of address and reference in several Indo-Aryan languages, including Hindi, for officials working forrajahs, landlords, etc.”

My mother tongue is one of the mutants listed in OCEL, and I am constantly being reminded of the peculiarities of my usage. After giving an American telephone receptionist my phone number, I added, “My local is 222.” “Your what?” she retorted. I quickly corrected myself: “My extension is 222.” I left a Newfoundland customer perplexed when I told him that I would try to find an item at one of our filials, instead of subsidiaries. I am guilty of speaking Quebec English.

In Quebec, it is taken for granted that English affects French. One hears expressions like le snack bar, chequer (instead of verifier), and un towing ‘a tow truck.’ In the business world one encounters a myriad of Anglicisms like meeting, cash flow, down-size, and business itself. The presence of these borrowings make some Quebecois feel that their language is under threat. More and more, however, the flow is not unidirectional: most English-speaking monolingual Quebecer will use metro for subway, dépanneur for convenience store, and caisse populaire instead of cooperative bank. The following demonstrates the French influence on Quebecois English:

The professor (‘teacher’) at the polyvalent (‘high school’) believed that scholarity (‘education’) was being affected by students consecrating (‘devoting’) more time to manifestations (‘demonstrations’) about the dress code than to their notes (‘grades’). During his conferences (‘lectures’), their inattention was hurting their apprenticeship (‘learning of the subject matter’). He also felt he was getting collaboration (‘cooperation’) from his confreres, Anglophone (‘English speakers’), Francophone (‘French speakers’), and Allophone (‘speakers of neither English nor French’) in better serving the collectivity (‘community’). He thus had a rendezvous (‘meeting’) with the Director-General (‘principal’), Monsieur Gendron, and stated that it was a primordial (‘essential’) consideration that some teachers be let go before they reached permanence (‘tenure’) under the syndicate (‘union’) agreement. Monsieur Gendron wrote back saying that he had requested a subvention (‘grant’) in the annex (‘appendix’) to his planification (‘policy’) budget to the confessional (‘denominational’) school board in order that formation modalities (‘training methods’) could be created to make teachers more dynamic animators (‘group leaders’).

Although terms like collaboration, rendezvous, and annex might be used in non-Quebec English contexts, they read like inappropriate choices from a synonym dictionary, and cooperation, meeting, and appendix seem more natural.

The trend towards the Gallicization of English in Quebec coincides with the introduction of pro-French legislation around twenty years ago, and the use of French has gained in prestige as a result, making it more likely for Gallic loanwords to appear in English. Anglophones are speaking French to a greater extent at home and at work, creating a situation in which the French term becomes more familiar than the English. Thus, an Anglophone might use the word demand when he means ‘ask,’ reparations when he means ‘repairs,’ and remark when he means ‘notice,’ because he is constantly employing demander, réparations, and remarquer when speaking French.

These faux amis (‘false friends’), as they are called, are confused both by Anglophones speaking French and Francophones speaking English. They are also among many of the words likely to have their meanings changed in Quebec English. For example, résumer does not mean ‘to resume’ but, as Americans know from their adoption of résumé for curriculum vitae, ‘to summarize’; and decevoir means ‘to disappoint,’ not ‘to deceive.’ Not many Anglophones in Quebec today use resume and deceive in the French sense, but over time I suspect that such usages will increase.

It is often hard to know where English and French begin and end. Franglais includes such classics as hot-dog steamé all dressed, and a rock music review which declared that a group’s appeal was to male white trash de vieille souche. Vieille souche is a term that refers to “old stock” Quebecers.

To those who bemoan the loss of the chastity of the French language, all I can say is that the lady never was a virgin: French is essentially mutated Latin corrupted by Arabic, Gaulish, and Germanic, to name a few of the seducers. Even the name of the country, France, owes its name (as does England) to a Germanic tribe. Language purity is a myth. The reality is that English and French have been borrowing from one another since at least 1066. Ironically, some of the dreaded Anglicisms, like rosbif and club, were originally Gallicisms that had penetrated English in the 18th century.

The King of Wordsmiths

Daniel Temianka, M.D., Palos Verdes Estates, California

John Updike remarked that “language has bloomed from the infinite fumblings of anonymous men.” We meddle constantly with our linguistic roots, grafing suffixes and slang with equal abandon, and toss the resulting hybrids about us with the carelessness of toddlers flinging pablum. Thus are new words born, whether as engineer’s lingo or the wino’s mutterings. But new language blooms also from the not-so-careless utterances of certain individual writers, particularly in the field of “speculative fiction.” At least since Lewis Carroll intrigued his readers with “Jabberwocky,” there have been writers—Robert Heinlein and Dr. Seuss, to name two—who deliberately minted new words. In A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess invented an entire dialect (“Nadsat, a Russified version of English”): “I could sort of slooshy myself making special sort of shoms and govoreeting slovos like ‘Dear dead idlewilds, rot not in variform guises’ and all that cal.” Frank Herbert was also no slouch at “wordvention”: chaumurky, sietch, and heighliner are examples from Dune. Much of it is fresh, serviceable language, not merely humdrum technical derivatives or the names of gadgets and aliens, and has certifiable potential to enter the English language. Grok, for example.

But for sheer variety, quantity, and above all charm of his neologisms, I submit that none compare with Jack Vance, a.k.a. John Holbrook Vance. As Jack Rawlins said, “…to make up words that carry just the right scent, that strike the reader as new and familiar simultaneously, is extremely challenging, and Vance is a master at it.”¹ It is not unusual for a single novel to have fifty or more newly created words; in The Face there are almost a hundred. In Showboat World, Apollon Zamp advertises for musicians who “…play instruments of the following categories: belp-horn, screedle, cadenciver, variboom, elf-pipe, tympany, guitar, dulciole, heptagong, zinfonella.” In Galactic Effectuator, Vance tosses off gangee, sprugge, cardenil bush, raptap, and shatterbone in two orgiastic paragraphs.

Most of Vance’s neologisms are nouns, the majority of them plants, animals and/or foods. Others designate musical instruments or weapons, denote magical spells, crystallize cultural concepts or rituals, or express metaphors. Some, like skak and merrihew, are footnoted with lengthy explanations about the sociology of magical creatures. Terms like Monomantic Syntoraxis and Tempofluxion Dogma reflect his droll skepticism toward religion. Some are wonderfully playful, such as pinky-panky-poo, or simply wonderful, such as scurch and dreuwhy (the latter alleged to have been drawn from the ancient Welsh). The adjectives are always vivid: the colors rawn and pallow and smaudre (which also function as nouns), and squalmaceous or halcositic. He also gives us verbs (disturgle, skirkling), a few articles and cardinal numbers, and even a sprinkling of interjections and appellatives.

The words may also be categorized according to whether they are intended to be “English.” Clearly most of them are; we are expected to read them without recoiling, though we may grope for a dictionary. Others are implicitly or expressly taken from an imaginary tongue such as Paonese or the idiom of the Dirdir, or that of the “Water-folk” (e.g., the shibbolethic brga skth gz).

But the most interesting method of analyzing Vance’s neologisms is by etymological speculation, which falls into roughly five categories that shade into one another like colors in the spectrum. I list these divisions in order of decreasing distance from English:

1. Those that appear to have come into the world de novo, from stem to suffix. We can think of no corollary, and feel little or no resonance with known words—dyssac (an herb liquor), thawn (a bearded cave-dweller), bgrassik (translation uncertain).

2. Those that tantalize us with faint echoes of known words. The morphemes are rather familiar, but overall we cannot place them: harquisade (a variety of tree with glass foliage), marathaxus (a scale from the body of the demon Sadlark). Some of these are “… hauntingly familiar growths, like catafalque trees and hangman trees,” as Terry Dowling put it.² Submulgery, ensqualm, bifaulgulate—the reader runs to the dictionary and is surprised to find them absent. Some sound so real that they flit past like butterflies or called strikes, only to awaken us in the middle of the night with the realization that they cannot be: halcoid, subuculate, Chief Manciple. Close cousins of such words float unbidden into our consciousness. We think of “subterfuge” and “skulduggery” to explain submulgery; coaxed by ensqualm, we recall “ensnare,” “qualm,” and “squall”; for bifaulgulate, “ungulate” and a host of words beginning with the prefix bi- come to mind. We are crowded with conjecture.

3. Portmanteau words, the most fascinating and treacherous. Here the stems are reasonably certain, but they ignite an extended metaphor. Thasdrubal’s Laganetic Transfer was the spell used by the magician Iucounu to banish Cugel on his search for the euphoriant cusps in The Eyes of the Overworld. One might easily overlook the hidden word lagan ‘goods thrown into the sea with a buoy attached.’ This is certainly a reference to Firx, the painful parasite installed in Cugel’s liver to keep his mind on his task. Moreover, the phrase is a reminder of Vance’s love of sailing. Another example is gleft, a kind of phantom, one of which stole part of Guyal’s brain while his mother was in labor. Surely this word arose from glia, a class of brain cells, and theft.

An especially intriguing case is pleurmalion, the tubeshaped device used by the sorcerer Rhialto to discern the location of a precious textual prism, even from great distances in space and time. We cannot avoid recognition of the Latin pleura ‘side’ or ‘rib.’ And mustn’t the -malion fragment refer to Pygmalion, the legendary king who fell in love with his sculpture of a woman and persuaded Aphrodite to bring it to life? We are struck by the insight that the pleurmalion relates to the lost prism as the biblical rib to a woman, bringing it (her) into view and thus to hand. They must be reunited.

Any doubts that Vance actually thinks along these lines are dispelled by a revealing footnote to the word murst in Chapter 16 of the last book in his “Demon Prince” series: “The meaning of this word, like others in The Book of Dreams [the villain’s childhood notebook can only be conjectured. (Must: ‘urgency’? With verst: in Old Russia, a ‘league’? Farfetched, but who knows?)”

4. In this group are words that draw clearly from identifiable roots and appendages and combine them according to traditional rules: calligynics, malepsy, Gynodyne, photochrometz. These are mix-‘n’-match suits of clothes. The Latin, Greek, or Old English roots are readily discernible (though I cannot explain the -etz in the last case), and generate few if any metaphorical overtones.

5. Compounds, straightforward alloys of real words, sturdily welded or hyphenated: sagmaw, trapperfish, sadapple, bumbuster, and the delightfully macabre ghostclutch. He has even been known to do this in French: garde-nez ‘nose-protector’ is a logical amalgam of garder ‘to guard’ and pince-nez: “An extravagant garde-nez of gold filigree clung to the ridge of his nose.”

Such compounds can seduce us into spurious assumptions. The term elving-platform—a birthing station for the species hyrcan major—implies the existence of the verb to elve, ‘give birth to an elf’! Vance can indeed be master of the ridiculous. (Meanwhile we should not overlook that hyrcan major is also a fine portmanteau word, with its references to Hyrcania, a province of the ancient Persian and Parthian empires, and Ursa Major, the Great Bear constellation.)

Even some of Vance’s proper nouns hint strongly at the existence of daily words: Universal Pancomium, the name of a large boat, suggests a more generalized category of encomium; reading Dylas Extranuator (a spaceship) compels us to ask what extranuate might mean—perhaps “strain in wonder”? A building called the Catademnon (pungent gust of ancient Greek syllables!) is certainly not merely a confection, reminding us as it does of condemn, Agamenmon, and Parthenon, all of which relate directly to Vance’s hero Emphyrio and his tragic fate.

Vance has achieved something extraordinary: the invention of nearly 1700 interesting new words, a number sufficient to justify his own dictionary.³ In contrast, the Burroughs Dictionary⁴ and The Dune Encyclopedia⁵ include many characters and places and are thus actually concordances or encyclopedias rather than true dictionaries. And Vance is still busily, incorrigibly at work.

Most neologisms remain in their literary greenhouses, to be enjoyed only by visitors. But some have escaped and spread like weeds to become part of the language: Heinlein’s grok, for example. How many of Vance’s coinings will infiltrate our daily gab? Will we send our enemies skirkling, or drink skull-busters at the corner bar? Will our windows be made of translux? In The Languages of Pao, Vance explored the notion of using created languages as instruments of social engineering. Let us hope that his whimsical words—Whimsicant—are already doing just that.

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“Child Safety Prevention Program Offers Little Sisters Sound Strategies.” [From Reaching Out, newsletter of the Big Sister Association of Greater Boston. Submitted by Alice Batchelor, Wellesley, Massachusetts.]

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“Built of sandstone bricks and 25ft tall, Fuller’s remains were placed beneath the floor of this mausoleum on his death in 1834.” [From The Independent, 12 December 1995, Section Two. Submitted by Tony Hall, Chearsley, Buckinghamshire.]

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“Has the past year brought the ‘lowering of voices’ and search for ‘common ground’ called for in the wake of the shootings by Cardinal Bernard Law, Gov. William Weld and others?” [From the Boston Globe, 30 December 1995, front-page article by Don Aucoin (who ought to be made to stand in the corner). Submitted by Alice Batchelor, Wellesley, Massachusetts.]

The Problem of Names

J. A. Davidson, Victoria, British Columbia

Recently a brisk, chummy young woman whom I had just met asked me what my first name is. “John,” I told her. “Well, now, John…,”she began.

“Nobody calls me John,” I said gently. I then explained to her that it is not so much the first-naming itself that some of us older citizens do not like but the doing it in a casual way by people we do not know.

I told her that people who know me call me Jock. I have carried that label from the first week of my life. I was born in Winnipeg General Hospital. My mother was Canadian by birth; my father an immigrant from Scotland. Nurses in the hospital teased him about his accent and began referring to me as wee Jock. My mother’s relatives picked it up and I have lived with it ever since. When I was in high school some of my friends took delight in referring to me as “an athletic supporter.” (I like the woman in Peter De Vries' novel, Forever Panting, who spoke about “John Jock Rousseau”.)

Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, one of the better-selling gurus in pop psychology a few years ago, gave this advice in his book, Pulling Your Own Strings: “Always deal with people on a first name basis unless they make it clear that they need to be addressed in some other way.” Why did he use the word need with respect to those of us who prefer not be called by our first names by people who do not know us at all well?

I read somewhere that a girl was given the name Camery because her uncle had served in the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, a regiment in the British army. The writer pointed out how unfortunate that was, as camery, he said, is “a disease of horses in which pimples appear on the palate.” I was skeptical of that. So to three or four dictionaries. No mention. That writer, I knew, liked to do a little leg-pulling in his writings. Then I went to the big Oxford: camery is an obsolete word and the writer had simply quoted that dictionary’s definition. Now I worry a little about my car, a splendid secondhand Toyota Camry.

H. L. Mencken, in one of his more crotchety moods, said this: “The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist ‘Jack.’ ” On the other hand, an English university teacher said this about John Milton: “I would venture to assert that no human being ever called him Johnnie.”

In the USA an actor who appears in two roles in a play is given as his name for the second one, George Spelvin. An actress is Georgina. I understand that in England he is Walter Plinge. I do not know what name they give to a woman.

P. G. Wodehouse has delighted many readers with the names he gave to characters in his wonderful humorous novels: Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, Pongo Thistleton, and many others. About the naming of characters he said this: “Odd how important story names are. It always takes me about as long toget them to my satisfaction as it does to write the novel.”

Many years ago I found in an abandoned farmhouse a copy of a 1912 issue of The Presbyterian, a periodical published in Toronto and devoted to spiritual uplift and the sale of patent medicines and trusses. In it the editor commented briefly on a recently published pamphlet written by Bernard Shaw, On Going to Church. He gently castigated Shaw for indulging in “one of the modish foibles of the day” by calling himself G. Bernard Shaw rather than use, in the good old Irish manner, George B. Shaw. Then he suggested to his fellow ministers that “J. Melchizedec Smith looks more impressive than either John M. Smith or J. M. Smith.”

A few years ago I read a brief report on some research that had been done at a California university by a team of psychologists in which they discovered that the way people sign their names and use it for public purposes tells something significant aboutthem. They said that if you use John J. Doe you probably are a very conventional person. A simple John Doe suggests that you are rather outspoken, an assertive loner. (Bernard Shaw was the playwright’s usual byline.) John James Doe tends to be rather proud, and he likes to stand in the limelight. J. Doe, on the other hand, is likely to be excessively modest. J. J. Doe is generally a person who likes to remain in the background, a shy one—like J. A. Davidson. J. James Doe is a go-getter, and likes to think himself a man of considerable importance. (H. Allen Smith, an American humorist, called this, and exemplified in his own usage, “parting one’s name on the side.”)

Some years ago I noticed a tendency among American preachers—a tendency I noticed also in Canada—to adopt the three-name pattern. This particular foible may have been initiated by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), who had been a preacher before concentrating on being an important literary man. Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969)—notice that middle name, although it may not be significant—was the leading American preacher of his time. And, of course, we must not overlook Norman Vincent Peale. Would not N. Vincent Peale have given the eminent positive-thinker a bit more class? (I read somewhere that a striptease artiste in California a few years ago adopted as her stage name Norma Vincent Peel.)

Turning To Nod Goodbye

Josephine Crilly, Sale, Cheshire

“Cyberspeak” is ubiquitous. Many cyberwords, for example, download, laptop, and modern are euphonious, enriching the language. They are not loanwords, but here in their own right. Other terminologies, especially that of metrication, are cuckoos in the nest. In turfing out the venerable words, they deprive the language of colour and warmth

Arnold Bennett said that any change, albeit for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts. One regrets the inevitable parting with words that have served us since Anglo-Saxon times and were here before King Alfred. Many arrived with William the Conqueror. Others were absorbed in Shakespeare’s time, often from the great literatures of Greece and Rome. Soldiers, sailors, and traders brought home idioms from distant lands.

Some words die and are forgotten, but many of those which wrapped themselves about us like comfy old coats are stolen off our backs. So we don ‘hectares,’ ‘litres,’ and milligrams'—but not, I hope, without turning to nod goodbye respectfully to the earliest form of English bequeathed by our ancestors.

I like that ancient Saxon phrase, which calls The burial-ground God’s-Acre!

[Longfellow: “God’s-Acre”]

Only in phrases like God’s-Acre and broadacre does acre still mean a field of sorts. Correctly, an acre is a measure of 4840 square yards of land, whereas Old English aecer was the field—a piece of land cleared for ploughing or grazing. An acre’s precise definition varied according to time and place. A farmer was an acreman who paid a firma, or ‘fixed rent.’

Later an acre was a strip of open field, large enough to be ploughed by a yoke of oxen in one day. To help the ploughman measure his 4840 square yards, a chain 22 yards long was laid along the field’s headland, showing the width to be ploughed. From here he would plough furlongs (i.e., ‘a furrow long’), of 10 chains or 220 yards. Come Sunday, the ploughman might mark out the village cricket pitch, having borrowed the farmer’s chain: 22 yards exactly.

Persons of a certain age learned by rote that eight furlongs make a mile, and since the 9th century, a furlong has described an eighth part of an English mile, regardless of its agricultural definition.

From time immemorial we have used our bodies for measuring—by foot, for example. An ell, Anglo-Saxon eln, was a rough reckoning, being the distance from the crook of the arm to the end of the longest finger, the elbow being where the bow or bend occurred. Bow is from an old verb, bugan ‘to bend,’ and is at the root of rainbow, bow (tie), and bow (and arrow).

Using our fingers, we counted in tens. Numbers 11 and 12 emphasize this finger-reckoning. After ten sheep had passed him, the shepherd had used up all his fingers. Many etymologists believe that endleofon is the Old English form for ‘left after ten,’ ‘one left over.’ Twelve in Old English was twa-lif or twelf, when ‘two (more than ten)’ were left. Twa-lif represents the elements in ‘two’ and ‘leave.’

To tell meant to ‘count’ (as in telling the beads of a rosary); a tale was a ‘reckoning.’ In L’Allegro, Milton writes:

And every shepherd tells his tale Under the hawthorn in the dale.

In telling his tale, every shepherd counted his sheep as they went past him. We still tell the time.

A hand-span is the stretch from thumb to little finger. According to Dr. Johnson, span new was the term applied to cloth immediately after taking it off the spannans, or ‘stretchers.’

A rod, pole, or perch was measured by a stick, the Old English rodd being 5½ yards. The area of an acre was standardized by Edward I as being land 40 rods long by 4 rods wide.

Yard (OE gyrd, geard) is of superior stock: the earth itself was middangeard ‘middleyard,’ being the place between the abode of the gods and the abode of giants. As a suffix it survives in churchyard, dockyard, and shipyard.

Until about 1150, Old English time was reckoned by nights, not by days, for the Anglo-Saxon language flourished in lands where nights were long and the days fleeting periods of light. “The light of learning,” notes Simeon Potter in Our Language, “shone more brightly in Northumbria than anywhere else in Europe.” Northumbria was then on the periphery of the civilised world.

North American friends rightly regard as archaic my use of fortnight, this word being a survival of the old way of reckoning two weeks, by using ‘fourteen-night.’ Shakespeare uses sevennights for ‘week’ when the three weird sisters chant:

Weary se’ennights, nine times nine Shall he dwindle, peak and pine.

[Macbeth i, 3, 20]

Reckoning by nights is a relic of the Celtic custom of starting the day at sunset. In the Book of Genesis too, evening always precedes morning: “The evening and the morning were the first day….” The time between light and dark, twilight, is of the same root as two, twain, twixt, and tween, from Old English twa.

A certain drama is attached to words prefixed by night-. From Old English galen ‘to sing’ comes nightingale, simply ‘the singer by night.’ Deadly nightshade and woody nightshade, the narcotic plants commonly known as belladonna and bittersweet, have their origins in Old English nihtscada, niht ‘night’ and scada ‘shade.’ Old English mare in nightmare means ‘demon or devil.’ Tennyson writes of “the black bat, night,” Shakespeare of “the foul womb of night.” Better sleep might have resulted from taking a nightcap or grog (whiskey preferred) before bedtime, helped too by wearing a night cap.

Small units of time—second, minute, and hour—are borrowed from Latin secundus, minuta, and hora. Year, month, week, and day are Old English gear, monao, wice, and daeg. Day has poetical overtones. The daisy flower closes its pink-tipped petals (lashes), and goes to sleep when the sun sets. In the morning the petals open to the light. Anglo-Saxon for daisy was daeges eage ‘day’s eye.’

The Bible uses dayspring for the beginning of the day; also for the commencement of the Messiah’s reign:

The dayspring from on high hath visited us.

[Luke i, 78]

Old English springan (German springen) became spring, but an older word for that season marks a period of the Church Year: Lent. The Saxon’s March was lencten. Lenten food being frugal and stinted, Shakespeare has “lenten entertainment” in Hamlet, “a lenten answer” in Twelfth Night, and “a lenten pye” in Romeo and Juliet. Lent lily is the older name for the daffodil.

When daffodils begin to peer,

With heigh! the doxy, over the dale,

Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year,

For the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale.

[A Winter’s Tale, IV, ii, 1]

Of unknown origin, doxy is variously the low term for ‘sweetheart or mistress, female tramp or beggar, plaything or paramour [toy boy?], even a baby.’ In the West of England, babies were called “doxies.”

The oldest words, for example, wife, live, fight, love, sleep, and house, relate to home and family. They also include the counting of time and measuring of space, the meeting of communities, the working of the soil and caring for beasts. The language was not called “Anglo-Saxon” by those who spoke it, but “Englisc” from Engle ‘Angles,’ Anglo-Saxon being simply the earliest form of the language.

William Burroughs said that words are “an around-the-world, ox-cart way of doing things, awkward instruments,” eventually to be laid aside. He was thinking of the space age and no doubt would have included the cyberworld. But Richard Morrison, writing in The Times in 1995, says he knows a journalist who has taken to writing his stories in longhand, revising them laboriously in ink, and only then tapping them into the computer. When Morrison asked why he did that, his friend answered, “So that posterity can compare the various drafts.” Shakespeare would surely have understood the need.

ANTIPODEAN ENGLISH: Dharuk Words In English

Bill Ramson, Clovelly, N. S. W.

When the first European settlers arrived in Australia in 1788, there were approximately 250 separate languages spoken by the indigenous peoples. During the 200 years of European occupation these have declined in use, to the point where not more than about twenty are active, in the sense that they are being learnt by Aboriginal children and cover aspects of the everyday life experienced by those children.

These active languages tend to be those spoken in the north and the west of Australia, in those parts of the country where the Aborigines have been most able to retain their traditional way of life. The first languages that the Europeans encountered, those once spoken on the east coast of Australia, survive only as they were recorded by the settlers and have been reconstructed in the light of later acquired knowledge of the family of Aboriginal languages as a whole. Paradoxically, it is these languages that have contributed most to the lexicon of Australian English. Not more than about 400 words have been borrowed altogether, and yet of these some 60 come from Dharuk, the language which was spoken on the site now occupied by the city of Sydney and not much beyond it, which existed in an inland and a coastal dialect.

Although there are still a few Dharuk descendants in the vicinity of Sydney, and these may still use a handful of Dharuk words, Dharuk effectively ceased to function as a language by the mid-19th century.

What then survives? Names of flora and fauna, names of implements, especially weapons, a few miscellaneous names of dwellings, ceremonies, people identified by sex or activity, striking features of the environment, and a handful of pidgin terms suggestive of an only rudimentary communicative exchange.

The flora and fauna are characterised by their distinctiveness. The “Great South Land” was to prove extraordinarily rich in new species, some of which, like the kangaroo, had an irresistible novelty about them; at the same time they were as numerous as sheep in England and as useful to man. The wallaby and the wallaroo were, like the kangaroo, large marsupials which the Aborigines hunted; the koala was also a marsupial but arboreal in habit and sufficiently unique in appearance to have had the settlers liken it to a bear, a sloth, or a monkey in their naming of it; the wombat was a heavy, thickset marsupial sometimes known as a badger because of its burrowing habit. The only animal immediately recognisable to European eyes was the native dog or dingo, and the distinction was early made between the domesticated dog, or dingo, and the wild dog, or warrigal. Two of the small number of birds identified were the boobook, an omnipresent owl, and the currawong, a large, crowlike bird whose curiosity would have brought it to notice. The name of a good eating fish, the wollami or snapper, on which the early settlers were frequently dependent, was again an understandable borrowing.

When it came to plants, the same sort of criteria were observed: the waratah, a strikingly beautiful red flower which has become the floral emblem of New South Wales, was soon identified, as were the burrawang, a palmlike plant very common in the coastal forests, and the kurrajong, a plant that yields a useful fibre.

The name of the dance ceremony corroboree, probably the most immediately observable characteristic of peoples regarded as “savages,” which had both a religious and an informal social form, was readily adopted, as was koradji a ‘wise elder’ or, as he was often described, a ‘witch doctor.’

Weapons like the boomerang, the hielamon (a wooden shield), the nulla nulla (a club), the waddy (ditto), and the woomera (a spear-thrower), were identifiable to the earliest settlers as were also gin ‘woman,’ myall, which distinguished a “wild” Aborigine from his “civilised” or “tame” brother, gibber ‘a stone,’ and gunyah ‘a dwelling.’ But the largest group of words that characterise the early period are those that clearly formed part of a language used for the limited communication that took place between the two peoples: cobra ‘head,’ mundowie ‘foot,’ bogie ‘to bathe’ or ‘a bathing place,’ crammer ‘to steal,’ nangry ‘to sleep,’ patter ‘to eat,’ budgeree ‘good,’ cabon ‘big,’ cooler ‘angry,’ jerron ‘afraid,’ narangy ‘little,’ muny ‘very,’ baal a negative, and cooee a ‘call’ or ‘to call.’

Of the several word lists compiled by officers of the First Fleet, as the first group of convict-laden ships was known, that of Lieut. William Dawes is the most ambitious, attempting a grammar of Dharuk as well as a vocabulary. But such a resource is more an indication of what was available to the settlers than a record of what they actually used. For that we must turn to their accounts of life in the colony and to the words which they adopted, which they use more or less unselfconsciously as part of their language as colonists.

And here there are three observations to be made. First, the words used by the Aborigines were seldom as attractive to the colonists as descriptive English names that emphasised the perceived resemblance between the new and the known and familiar, and so made for more certain communication. Thus, distinguishing epithets like colonial, native, wild, black, brown, green, and gray qualify names of common Old World species like apple, ash, oak, and pine to build a considerable and understandable vocabulary. Second, a positive effort needed to be made to ascertain the Aboriginal name, and experience showed that the geographical range of Dharuk was extremely limited: the fact that a new set of names came into use as one crossed the boundary of another Aboriginal language must have mitigated against borrowing. Third, the Aborigines were widely thought of as backward and uncivilised and, while this attitude persisted, their nomenclature carried no great recommendation.

OBITER DICTA: Royal Thoughts on Collective Nouns

Burt Whetton, Wolverhampton

Could the thoughts of the estranged Royal Couple occasionally turn to an interesting series of collective nouns that apply to their circumstances? Princess Diana’s musings, in her sea of troubles, could go back to her association with a nayful of knaves, particularly one, one of an execution of officers who have betrayed her confidences. She has encountered a threatening of courtiers and an abandonment of confidantes. The publication of a beribboned bundle of love letters would entertain a company of gossips and a knot of adversaries for ever, much to the embarrassment of her eloquence of lawyers.

Outdoors she is harassed by cassettes of photographers and a worship of writers, all of whom are employed by a cluster of publishers.

At school her children are surrounded by a rascal of boys and, on occasions, a flock of girls. The young boys have to endure a kissing of aunts and suffer a slew of uncles.

Charles’s reflections are of a non-patience of wives (both his own and others') and an incredibility of cuck-olds. He is one of a state of princes who are shod by a drunkship of cobblers and clothed by a disguising of tailors. During his sporting activities he is accompanied by a stalk of foresters while shooting at a column of wildfowl or riding with a blast of huntsmen who are escorted by a kennel of hounds. His estates are managed by a provision of stewards.

At home he is surrounded by a farrago of toadies, a draught of butlers, and a temperance of cooks.

Charles’s affairs are the concern of a caucus of politicians, a noble crew of lords, and a bench of bishops, all of whom are kept informed by a diligence of messengers. Finally, he is devoted to his maternal grandmother, a descendant of a dishworship of Scots.

OBITER DICTA: Cyberspace and Khyber Pass

Marvin Spevack, Münster

The language of the information superhighway is English—more accurately, a sub-species thereof with its own grammar and semantics. Since it has come into being with a sudden and persistent rush, reflecting the burgeoning and undisciplined information system it conveys,, it has not been amply recorded, much less described, in standard reference works or lexicons. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) and reprinted “with corrections” in the same year, does not even include internet. To fill the gap, specialized glossaries have emerged, the best naturally in computerized form (like “The Jargon File,” Version 2.9.6, 16 August 1991), where entries can be quickly and efficiently updated, a process which in itself reflects the hasty transience of much of the vocabulary.

Although a complete linguistic description will have to wait until the dust settles—if it does at all, given the volatility of the technology and the ever-increasing number of the participants-certain features, destined to remain, are already apparent. As far as grammar is concerned, the simplistic syntax and the exceptional preponderance of nouns and verbs (with an accompanying heavy reliance on conversion) are obvious and enduring. The vocabulary, like the grammar, is determined to a large extent by the medium of computers and the operation of networking. But their insistence on speed is not entirely the message. Nor would it be correct simply to draw comparisons with newspeak or some other centrally decreed and regulated system. For although the vocabulary does make important use of computer terminology, and although it does share with newspeak a penchant for blends and acronyms and an avoidance of adjectives and adverbs, it reflects a manner and an environment greater than both computerese and newspeak.

Within a strictly controlled computer system, in which accuracy is absolute, the vocabulary as a whole is programmatically casual. Its salient characteristic is its playful primitivism. It is laid back: one talks, chats, browses. Stress (evident in terms like prowler, skulker, lurker, as well as Trojan horse, worm, vulture, leech) is soothed with (or disguised by) a variety of linguistic palliatives: generous helpings from pop culture (cookie monster, Kermit) and science fiction (cyberpunk, core wars, cosmic rays, emoticon); chummy diminutives (archie, newbie, smiley); and jingly rhymes (snail mail). The iconic word is surfing: a sociolinguistic cornucopia of connotations of sport, vigor, youth, individuality, speed, independence, leisure, health, and middle-to-upper-class education and affluence. The vocabulary is jocular in its easy mixture of the casual (in slang or coinages or abbreviations), the learned (in avatar, baroque, catatonic, synchronous), the visual (in hieroglyphics or emoticons), and even the aural (in the fondness for explosives, like bang, “common spoken name for ‘!') or onomatopoeia (bletch, glitch, gonk). The vocabulary is suffisant in its wordplay (AIDS, ‘A* Infected Disk Syndrome,’ *sex*, ‘Software EXchange’) as in the nonchalance of its central and mixed metaphor: *surfing the web*, borrowed from scanning television channels for a watchable program.

The vocabulary is mischievous in the mixture—and not just in the ways just mentioned. One prominent phenomenon is the flaunting use of homographs: words that appear in conventional dictionaries are given a meaning which is not to be derived logically or figuratively from the customary one. Leaving aside blends and acronyms, a few representative examples (with definitions from various sources) should be sufficient:

advent the prototypical compute adventure game.

arc to create a compressed (archive) from a group of files using SEA ARC, PKWare, PICARC, or a compatible program.

biff to notify someone of incoming mail [named after the implementor’s dog barked whenever the mailman came].

bum to make highly efficient, either in time or space, often at the expense of clarity.

chemist someone who wastes computer time on number crunching when you’d far rather the machine were doing something more productive.

flag a piece of information that is either TRUE or FALSE.

flame an ill-considered, insulting e-mail or Usenet retort.

jughead an index of high-level gopher menus.

lynx an excellent, text-based, UNIX browser for the Web.

pretzel command key.

strudel common (spoken) name for the circumflex character.

tin a threaded newsreader for UNIX.

troll to deliberately post egregiously false information to a newsgroup in hopes of tricking dense know-it-alls into correcting you.

It may be argued that such personal semantics are more than mischievous. But it would be going too far to assert that they are critical of existing structures. Jargon or slang and standard have always coexisted and over the years have grown more mutually tolerant. What is clear, in any case, is that a private and exclusive language is evolving and engaging ever larger numbers of participants in a linguistic process which is destined to become more and more public as computer technology itself becomes the dominant force in communication and other social activities. From the point of view of language, what is interesting is the coincidence, be it mischievous or critical or accidental, of the ideal and the real. For the examples of semantic noncompliance—along with features as widely disparate as computerese or the variety of registers—begin to reflect a world-view, the crystallization of a special sphere. Real, as in realtime6 the time it takes real people to communicate, as on a telephone’ is set against virtual: 1. common alternative to logical. 2. simulated; performing the function of something that isn’t really there. For netizens, cyberspace is the “shared imaginary reality of the computer networks.” For citizens, shared reality is the existence in space and time of Khyber Pass.

OBITER DICTA: Atmosphere English

Paul Blackford, Bangkok

As a guest in a Thai household I was drying my hands on a towel when, glancing down, I noticed some writing on it. I think my hosts were a little disconcerted to see me emerging from their bathroom laughing roundly a couple of minutes later. I hastily told them what it said on the towel: THE SUN WAS SHINING AND THE DUDE’S FAMILY WENT ON A PICNIC.

This is an example of what Western advertising agencies in Asia call “atmosphere English.” In Japan, particularly, manufacturers feel that English-sounding names and writing on products add prestige to goods marketed there, and it is certainly true that atmosphere English has reached its apogee. This has resulted in such products as a brand of jeans called Trim Pecker, lawn fertilizer called Green Piles, Cow Brand shampoo, Shot Vision TV sets, Carap candy, Pocky candy, Pocket Wetty pre-moistened towelettes, and a nail-polish remover called Fingernail Remover. Two top beverages are named Calpis and Pocari Sweat, and a coffee creamer is called Creap. Slogans, too, are sometimes in English, like this one on a deodorant container: Sweet Medica—it frees you completely from the smell of your underarm sweat. Or this, on a bottle of nose drops: Nazal—for stuffed nose and snot.

But let us return to for a moment The Sun Was Shining and the Dude’s Family Went on a Picnic. It turned out this towel had been made in Thailand. As is already well established, the Japanese are the undisputed masters of putting largely meaningless English on their products. Here, however, was an example of Thai efforts in the same direction and, as a long-term resident here, I am pleased to note that it is grammatically irreproachable and makes some sort of sense! My hosts had one other towel in the same series which they eagerly dug out; it read: In the Evening the Sheep Was Praying to the Twinkling Stars in the Dark Sky. I plucked disconsolately at this towel. Not at all contemporary, maybe it wasn’t the simple-minded nonsense it seemed, maybe a parody of Wordsworth perpetrated by a disillusioned towel copy writer à la J.K. Stephens' celebrated parody of that poet: “Two Voices are there: One is of the deep/And one is of an old half-witted sheep….” But in the end I decided it was the simple-minded nonsense it seemed.

I work with many Japanese in Thailand, often outside office hours in their apartments. So, intrigued by the Dude towel, I furtively began to case their kids' T-shirts (all of which, it turned out, had been bought in Japan). In four weeks I came across the following, starting with the simplest:

SNOB HOUSE

YOUR OWN FEELING

PAPP BABY

THE EMPLOYMENT OF GOOD SENSE IN CLOTHING

THE HAPPINESS OF BEING FASIONALBE—A POLICY OF SELF-DETERMINATION

Here, meaning and grammar cannot be faulted (except for PAPP BABY: PAP BABY would be intelligible if odd— lactation, paps, pap ‘pabulum’), though, with regard to clothing, few countries can be said to conform to the extent Japan does. The salariman’s uniform is well known, and all Japanese schoolgirls must wear blouses modelled on those of Portuguese mariners from the days of sail. Some have said that the Japanese even conform in rebellion: the Yakuza (Japanese Mafia) all dress alike though a little sharper, e.g. two-colour ties, mean pairs of wraparounds, tattoos, brutal crew cuts, and an attitude!

Next up on the catwalk is a young fellow modelling a truly classic T-shirt:

ALL KINDS OF INSECT WARMING

I AM MUCH PLEASED AT YOUR HONESTY

NAUGHTY KIDS BEBE CO.

BEBE KIDS FAVOURITE BEBE NAUGHTY CLUB PLEASE

Notice the spelling of favourite—the writer is incomprehensible in British English.

Rivalling haute insect-warming couture is the last gem my research turned up, a T-shirt bearing the words:

KIDS COMPANY. KIDS DREAM. BLITHE MATE.

YOU OFFERED ME A GOOD PLAN, I MADE UP

MY MIND THAT IT SHOULD BE DONE. IT IS VERY/

THOUGHFUL OF YOU TO DO SO. I GAIN A LOT OF

KNOWLEDGE BY THIS.

All these slogans are wrought in attractive designs and lettering and are not intended to be read, so I would like to express my thanks to those puzzled Japanese parents who allowed me to do so. Even so, native English-speakers confronted with this manner of stuff will have trouble not sniggering in their saké and—horror of horrors—be asked to explain wherein lies the humour.

How do the Japanese manage to come up with such copy? Some have suggested the injudicious use of Japanese/English dictionaries combined with deplorable highschool English teaching. Nicholas Bornoff, in his book Pink Samurai, cites some perhaps edifying advertising copy from a catalogue for bar and club furniture:

I QUENCH MY THIRST BY A HOT LIQUID OF AMBER-COLOURED

THE ICE IN THE ROCK-GLASS TICKED AWAY WITH A CRASH

I GET DRUNK ON MY FAVOURITE LIQOUR WITH MY CONGENIAL FRIENDS

THE HOME WORLD ONLY FOR MEN

OBITER DICTA: More Foreign Treasures

Ruth Flanders, East Yorkshire

Idioms in other languages can be misleading, for there are many different and often colourful metaphoric ways of expressing the same concept. Here are a few examples from French and German.

avoir du monde au balcon [Lit. to have the world on a balcony] (of a woman) to be well-endowed

avoir une peur bleue [Lit. to have a blue fear.] to get the fright of one’s life

avoir des antennes [Lit. to have antennae] to have a sixth sense

bruit de couleur [Lit. a colourful noise] a rumour

casse-tête [Lit. head-breaker] brain-teaser

essayer de noyer le poisson [Lit. attempt to drown a fish] to fudge the issue

avaler les couleuvres [Lit. to swallow grass-snakes] to endure humiliation

prendre un carton [Lit. to take a carton] to get a licking

brasser de l’air [Lit. to shuffle the air] to give the impression of being busy

se noyer dans un verre [Lit. to drown oneself in a glass] to make a mountain out of a molehill

être haut comme trois pommes [Lit. to be three apples high] to be knee-high to a grass-hopper

river son clou à quelqu’un [Lit. to fasten one’s nail to somebody] to leave somebody speechless

pour un oui ou un non [Lit. for a yes or a no] at the drop of a hat

Impossible n’est pas français. [Lit. Impossible is not a French word.] There is no such word as can’t.

Ce n’est pas un aigle. [Lit. This is no eagle.] He is not the brightest.

être aimable comme une porte de prison [Lit. to be as pleasant as a prison gate] to be a miserable so-and-so

un jour à marquer d’une croix blanche [Lit. a day for marking with a white cross] a red-letter day

jeter son bonnet par-dessus les moulins [Lit. to throw one’s hat over the windmills] to throw caution to the winds

Plaie d’argent n’est pas mortelle. [Lit. A wound of money is not fatal.] It is only money.

ne pas savoir sur quel pied danser [Lit. not to know on which foot to dance] not to know what to do

…and some German idioms:

öffentliche Hände [Lit. public hands] local authorities

das horizontale Gewerbe [Lit. the horizontal trade] the oldest profession

Fersengeld geben [Lit. to give heel money] to run away

ein blinder Passagier [Lit. a blind passenger] a stowaway

Farbe bekennen [Lit. to admit to colour] to come clean

Mein Rad hat eine Acht [Lit. My bike has an eight.] My bike has a buckled wheel.

seinem Affen Zucker geben [Lit. to give sugar to one’s monkey] to let oneself go

Stein and Bein schwören [Lit. to swear stone and leg] to swear blind

Der Teufel steckt im Detail. [Lit. The devil hides in the minute.] It is the little things that cause problems

Grillen im Kopf haben [Lit. to have crickets in the head] to have strange ideas

jenseits von Gut und Böse sein [Lit. to be beyond good and evil] to be past it

das Ei des Kolumbus [Lit. the egg of Columbus] an inspired discovery

Das paβ wie die Faust ins Auge. [Lit. That goes like a first into the eye] That clashes dreadfully.

Da lachen die Hühner. [Lit. This makes the chickens laugh.] You must be joking.

And here are some metaphoric masterpieces:

Storchschnabel [Lit. stork’s beak] geranium

Glühbirne [Lit. glowing pear] electric light bulb

Fingerhut [Lit. hat for a finger] a thimble

Eigenbrötler [Lit. one who eats his own bread] a loner

Jägerlatein [Lit. huntsman’s Latin] fish story

ein Achtgroschenjunge [Lit. an eight-cents boy] an informer

Löwenmäulchen [Lit. small lions' mouths] snapdragon

Hühnerauge [Lit. chicken’s eye] corn (on the foot)

OBITER DICTA: Indo' and Outdo' European

Laurence Urdang

The most important contribution to comparative linguistics was made by Sir William Jones (1746-94), a British linguist trained in the law who was appointed judge of the supreme court of judicature at Calcutta, in 1783. “Convinced of the importance of consulting Hindu legal authorities in the original” [Encyc. Brit. 1963, 13, 140a], Jones, well versed in Sanskrit, became aware of the correspondences among Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Slavic, and Germanic forms, which led him to the conclusion that Sanskrit was another, older form of a parent language from which all had sprung. It was his work that formed the basis of the linguistic studies later carried on by the brothers Grimm (Jakob Ludwig Karl, 1785-1863; Wilhelm Karl, 1786-1859), which, in turn, gave foundation to the development of the comparative method. The term Indo-European cropped up first at the beginning of the 19th century; as much of the work was being done in Germany, it is not surprising that the term preferred there was Indo-Germanic, actually a translation of indogermanisch (with a small i because it is an adjective), which arose in the late 1820s; the latter survives in the literature, largely replaced by the former, especially since the discovery that Celtic is a member of the family.

The reason for bringing up this bit of history is to introduce four terms with which some readers may be unfamiliar and which reflect to some small degree the poetry that once lurked in the hearts of linguists educated in literature as well as linguistics.

The first is karmadharāya, a Sanskrit compound of karma ‘fate, destiny’ + dharāya ‘holding, bearing,’ which is used to describe a compound word in which the first member describes the second, as in highway, blackbird, (adj. + n.), steamboat, bonehead, fingerstall, fingernail, toenail (attrib. n. + n.).

The second is dvandva, a Sanskrit redundant compound of dva + dva ‘pair, couple,’ which is used to describe compounds in which the elements are linked as if joined by a copula, as in prince-consort, attorney-general, postmaster-general (n. + n.), bittersweet (adj. + adj.).

The third is bahuvrihi, a Sanskrit compound meaning ‘having much rice,'<bahú much + vrīhiacute; ‘rice.’ It is used to describe compounds composed of an adjective and a substantive so as to form, principally, a possessive adjective, like bahuvrihi itself; it also forms a compound that is different grammatically from its head member and, particularly, plurals that function as singular nouns, as in lazy-bones, sly-boots. Other examples are rosy-fingered, redcoat, high-potency (vitamin), and, indeed, all such compounds that might be spelled as two words in predicative position but are usually written with a hyphen when in attributive position.

The fourth is tatpurusha literally ‘his servant,’ which is used to describe compounds in which the first element qualifies or determines the second, while the second retains its grammatical independence as a noun, adjective, or participle. For example, bookcase, yearbook, summerhouse, windowbox, eyedoctor; hair-raising, finger-licking, God-fearing, man-eating; nose-picker, bottom-feeder, dive bomber, fighter escort.

Whether the compound is written conventionally as two words, as a hypheme, or solid has no bearing on its analysis. These are not the only possibilities for compounding in English (or Hindi, or Sanskrit), but they are the most common.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Unbelievably, Part V,… has not even been accorded pagination, something for which Random House ought to be carpeted for before the International Bibliographical Court.” [From a review by Laurence Urdang in VERBATIM, XXII, 2,18. Submitted by Stephen Robert, LaCheen, Philadelphia, and some other base villains.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Cassell Dictionary of Appropriate Adjectives

E.H. Mikhail, (Cassell, 1996), viii + 342pp.

It must be emphasized that this is not a synonym dictionary; rather, it is just what its title denotes: a dictionary of adjectives that are appropriately connected with the nouns that are listed. In a more technical sense, it is a collection of collocative adjectives, that is, adjectives that are often associated with the nouns that are listed. For example, here is the listing under one of the nouns:

appetite, appetites mighty, enormous, gargantuan, endless, limitless, unlimited, unfailing, uncontrollable, lusty, voracious, ravenous, (in) satiable, sharp, ferocious, rapacious, devouring, brutish, wolfish, healthy, hearty, greedy, keen, robust, inordinate, substantial, unbridled, avaricious, poor, grotesque, morbid, morose, raucous, finicky, discriminating,, (im) moderate, shrunk, new-found, catholic, postprandial

Not all these adjectives seem appropriate to me: it is hard for me to envision a context in which “satiable appetite,” “raucous appetite,” “shrunk appetite,” or “postprandial appetite” might be appropriate; on the other hand, I, like many readers, could probably come up with several other adjectives that are not listed. Without going into detail on each one of these, the difficulty I see is, for instance, with raucous appetite, for raucous means ‘harsh, strident, grating’ and is commonly associated with voice, where, indeed, it is listed. As shrunk is a past and past participle of shrink and not, properly, an adjective, I am not sure why it is there in place of shrunken, especially since Mikhail specifically writes in his Preface, “Only words listed in standard language dictionaries as adjectives are included in this Dictionary. Thus all other etymological forms, as participles ending in -ed (rejected offer) or -ing (playing child), are excluded.” As for postprandial, that is usually applied to something edible or drinkable, as referring to something that comes after a meal; in my language (and culture), postprandial appetite would be a rare collocution.

Everyone has his own private view of how language works, an observation seldom offered by linguists, even those who touch on the subject of idiolect. That this book is highly personal becomes evident in the entry immediately following that for appetite:

appetizer, appetizers See also food intriguing, exquisite, irresistible, tasty, cheesy, spicy, tangy

Here, one might yearn for some punctuation: surely the last four words cannot be considered alongside the first three. Moreover, I can think of dozens of other words in the “tasty, tangy” class that could be added, but those appear in the very long entry under food.

In principle, I like the idea of such a book and have thought about doing one myself. But the almost insurmountable practical considerations reared up before me, and I quickly abandoned the idea. For one thing, entries become less useful the longer they are. In the present work, for example, the entry for appetite runs to eleven lines, which is reasonably assimilable; the entry for approach, approaches, however, runs to thirty-nine lines, life, lives to fifty-eight, eye, eyes to sixty-eight. Are users really so desperate for descriptive adjectives that will go with nouns as to be willing to wade through almost two hundred terms? I rather doubt it. Then there is the question, Why are both singular and plural forms shown for the headwords? Although mention is made of the fact in the Preface, no reason is given, and one might assume that users of such a book would have no difficulty in assuming that the plural of breadwinner is breadwinners, even that the singular of teeth is tooth.

A chief criticism of this book, in particular, is that the adjectives are jumbled together in no discernible order or, as mentioned, with punctuation between (except for a serial comma). Thus under architecture, we find strings like

…(un)original, eccentric, plain, austere, mediocre, nondescript…

…civic, religious, pastel, mosaic, landscape, prehistoric…

and it is not till we get to the end, where a dozen styles are listed that there is any sense of semantic or associative grouping. This shortcoming can be seen in most entries:

area, areas…affluent, rich, unique, crucial, key, prime, vital, sensitive, volatile, enjoyable, quiet…

artefact, artefacts [sic]…impressive, authentic… priceless, deathless…aboriginal, religious, cultural eye, eyes…bluish, (china-) blue, sea-blue, brunet, almond, (liquid-) brown, ginger-brown…

From the spelling (artefact, honour) and from the name of the publisher, this is clearly a work produced in Britain. Although there might be some differences between British and American English, one is sore put to accept their extending to the notion that speakers of British English regard almond as a color for eyes rather than a shape.

This collection could have been made more useful and more usable had the author attempted to group adjectives within an entry according to semantic character rather than just dump them into one helter-skelter list without separators of any kind.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Manual of Specialised Lexicography: The Preparation of Specialised Dictionaries

Henning Bergholtz and Sven Tarp eds., (John Benjamins, 1995), 254pp.

In the decades during which I have been involved in the compilation, editing, revision, updating, adaptation, etc. of dictionaries, I have always considered lexicography an art. That is not to say that technique is not involved, merely to observe that some dictionaries are better than others because their editors are more literate, imaginative, poetic, and generally possess those attributes with which we associate art rather than technique or mundane craftsmanship. Such dictionaries, too, succeed because they establish a rapport with generations of users. It goes without saying that most of those drawn to lexicography, like those attracted to art schools, exhibit skills more likely to be associated with craft than with art; these days, far too few of those who work on dictionaries have a thorough grounding in literature, let alone the various specialties within linguistics—general and comparative studies, classical and modern foreign language study, phonetics, philology, etymology, to say nothing of lexicology and lexicography. The results are seen on the bookshelves of bookshops throughout the world: adequate but largely pedestrian bilingual dictionaries and a scattering of monolingual works that have been resurrected by greedy publishers who have engaged dryasdust editors to update out-dated, out-of-copyright dictionaries in order to make a fast buck.

Lexicographic technocrats enjoy using terms like terminology, terminography, LSP ‘language for special purposes,’ LGP ‘language for general purposes,’ lemma, lexeme, and other words, reflecting the notion, long prevalent in psychology, sociology, and other social sciences, that if you can give a problem a name, you have somehow gone a long way toward solving it. This book, which consists of a series of chapters and subchapters, was written by a committee, which immediately tells the reader something about its likely consistency and continuity.

It is true that the principles that apply to specialized dictionaries are not the same as those that apply to general dictionaries, either monolingual or bilingual. For one thing, the user of a specialized dictionary can be assumed to have a level of sophistication that includes knowledge of and some understanding of what goes on in general dictionaries. It takes the editors of the subject book several pages to make this point, which, it seems to me, is rather simple. Their explanation includes Venn diagrams (which, notwithstanding their utility, I thought had gone out of fashion a few decades ago) and other devices. It is hard to imagine that this book would be picked up by anyone but a lexicographer or someone interested enough in becoming one to subject himself to such a turgid presentation; in the event, one might assume a certain level of familiarity with the subject. Yet the treatment is reminiscent of Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker History of New York, which—facetiously, at least—starts out with the creation of the world. If one doubts the turgidity of the style of this work, witness the following, which merely says that entries in a dictionary can be ordered in different ways:

The macrostructure of the word list should be understood as the arrangement of the lemmata occurring in the word list.

Is that the writing of a person to whom you would want to give the responsibility for explaining complex or unknown terms in simple language? A few sentences farther on, the writer offers:

Knowledge of the alphabet implies that lemmata may easily be arranged and looked up.

I think I have dwelt on such shortcomings enough.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The World’s Writing Systems

Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., (Oxford University Press, 1996), xiv + 920pp.

This is truly an impressive-looking tome, persuading one that it is complete and authoritative. As for completeness, writing systems are a bit off my beaten track, and I dare not offer an opinion; as for authority, while Peter T. Daniels’ name is not familiar to me, the work of William Bright, Professor Emeritus of linguistics at UCLA and erstwhile editor (for twenty-two years) of Language, the journal of the Linguistics Society of America, is well known to me, chiefly in his latter capacity. In a preceding number of VERBATIM [XXII, 3], appeared a review article by Dr. William Brashear, of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, of two new books dealing with the alphabet; now we have this comprehensive work on writing systems.

Interest in writing systems was dormant for many years: some thirty years ago, the only—and best-known— scholar working with alphabets was Dr. David Diringer. The spark that has ignited so many to look at the subject is difficult to identify: perhaps it can be put down to television and its many programs dealing with archaeology. A recent program on the Minoan civilization mentioned that Michael Ventris was a teenager when he listened to a lecture by Sir Arthur Evans in which he described his struggles trying to translate what had become known as Linear A and Linear B, the ancient scripts found at Knossos and elsewhere in Crete. Ventris, the program held, “vowed to be the one who would one day translate the script(s),” a reflex of ambition rarely associated with teenagers today. In any event, Ventris did, finally, decode Linear B, but died (at thirty-four) before arriving at a translation of Linear A. If susceptible teenagers watched that program, perhaps they will be inspired to work on Linear A, still an enigma, owing largely to the paucity of corpus.

The subject of writing systems was considered beyond the pale by structural linguists, as it was not a reflex of natural utterance but a secondary representation. (Structural linguists do not like to deal with meaning, either, satisfied that “the meaning of a word is the sum of its contexts”—a perfectly valid argument if one allows context to include one’s mother telling an infant, “Here, darling, eat another spoon of applesauce.” Unless ostensive objects are thus pointed to and identified, how could anyone ever learn their names?) As a consequence, the subject was infra dig for “serious” linguists for many years, and it is refreshing to see it brought to the surface again. The impact of writing on language cannot be denied: in English, the conservatism of the spelling system has had an effect on the preservation of linguistic features that might have otherwise faded; in all languages, the traditions of literature (to say nothing of scripture [sic]) have a profound influence, as the “fundamentalist effect” bears witness. To ignore or scorn writing and its influences is struthious and unscholarly, and this emerging crop of books, besides their attractive graphics—excuse the pun— are welcome.

The relationships between linguistics and writing are emphasized here and there in The World’s Writing Systems by the short essays, prepared by the editors and contributors, that punctuate the text. It would be most useful to provide a list of the thirteen parts of the book:

Part I Grammatology

Part II Ancient and Near Eastern Writing Systems

Part III Decipherment

Part IV East Asian Writing Systems

Part V European Writing Systems

Part VI South Asian Writing Systems

Part VII Southeast Asian Writing Systems

Part VIII Middle Eastern Writing Systems

Part IX Scripts Invented in Modern Times

Part X Use and Adaptation of Scripts

Part XI Sociolinguistics and Scripts

Part XII Secondary Notation Systems

Part XIII imprinting and Printing

Each of these parts, introduced by a contributor or one of the editors, has several sections; there are seventyfour sections in all, and each of those, in turn, has its own commentary. The result is not only a comprehensive treatment of a subject by an authority but a detailed description of the place the section has in the general scheme of representing ideas by squiggles on a page, rock, or tablet. Not only are (so-called) standard writing systems described, but (under Part XII) there are sections on Numerical Notation, Shorthand, Phonetic Notation, Music Notation (by James D. McCawley, University of Chicago), and Movement Notation Systems (dealing with dance). The section Adaptations of Arabic Script was prepared by Alan S. Kaye (California State University, Fullerton), erstwhile contributor to VERBATIM; Bernard Comrie (Cambridge University) and our friend Eric P. Hamp (University of Chicago) contributed the subsection on Welsh, in Part X.

The word colophon has undergone several metamorphoses since its earliest appearance in the 17th century: it originally referred to the inscription at the end of a book identifying its basic bibliographic information, that is, title, author, subject, publisher, date and place of publication, in other words, the information today found on the title page. Presumably, because it sounded like a fancy bibliographic term, it was adapted in the 20th century as a fancy word for logotype, or trade mark. For its third incarnation we can cite page 920 of the present book in which colophon is drawn into service as the title of a section that lists all the typographic fonts employed in typesetting the book. That is a useful and interesting adjunct, and we must assume that it has been called “colophon” because typography has been subsumed under the original rubric of “bibliographic information.” Although it is not documented in any dictionary that I checked, this usage is familiar to me as referring to the modest comments that publishers like Alfred A. Knopf once included on the last page of their books, for example (actually from a Random House title):

This book has been set in Weiss by Typographic Images, New York; printed by Rae Publishing, Cedar Grove, New Jersey; and bound by A. Horowitz & Sons, Fairfield, New Jersey. The paper was donated by the Lindenmyer Paper Corporation, New York./Book design by Carole Lowenstein

—from Donald S. Klopfer, An Appreciation, Random House, 1987.

The World’s Writing Systems is an essential addition to the library of anyone interested in or involved in any of the myriad aspects of language, both as a fascinating browsing book and as an important reference work. I have no immediate need for information about Sinhalese, for instance, but who knows what sorts of questions may arise in my mind (or others') that might send me rushing to the shelf? My only disappointment was that Daniels' concluding essays on Analog and Digital Writing (Section 74) were not sufficiently detailed and technical for my taste, but then my appetite for matters technical probably exceeds that of most people likely to be concerned with writing systems.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Sounds of the World’s Languages

Peter Ladefoged and Ian Maddieson, (Blackwell Publishers, 1995), xxi + 425pp.

Phoneticians, pronunciation editors of dictionaries, linguists, language teachers, and others who are—and ought to be—interested in and knowledgeable about the sounds of many languages and who have—and ought to have—sufficient background and training to understand the technical materials on which understanding of the text relies will be amply rewarded by this valuable book. The writing is concise and specific, allowing little room for idle chatter; the information is sometimes revelatory:

Nearly 90 percent of the Californian speakers produced 0 as in think…with the tip of the tongue protruded between the teeth so that the turbulence is produced between the blade of the tongue and the upper incisors. Only 10 percent of the British speakers made this sound in this way; 90 percent of them used an articulation with the tip of the tongue behind the upper front teeth. [p. 143]

One is moved to enquire how the sound is articulated by speakers of other English dialects or in other regions (New England, for example), but the book does not go into that much detail.

The organization is by sound types: Stops, Nasals and Nasalized Consonants, Fricatives, Laterals, Rhotics, Clicks, Vowels, and Multiple Articulatory Gestures, the last being combined sounds. Ladefoged, Professor of Phonetics Emeritus at the University of California, and Maddieson, Adjunct Professor of Linguistics, ibid., are well known for their work in phonetics.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Joy of Words

Ronald Rose, (Kangaroo Press, 1995), 159pp.

[Available in the US from Seven Hills Book Distributors, 49 Central Avenue, Cincinnati, OH 45202.]

Ronald Rose writes a weekly column about language in The Canberra Times, and this book is a collection of those essays, fleshed out in full in those instances where they might have been cut by the newspaper for economy of space. The essays are brief and interesting and range throughout the entire spectrum of the subject, including literature. There is, for example, a piece on spoofs in which Rose cites several that are well known, omits others (like Poe’s “The Great Balloon Hoax”), and includes at least one that is a satire, which is a different sort of animal: Gulliver’s Travels is not, to my mind, a spoof. I am all in favor of weekly columns on language, but one must be careful.

Rose is now seventy-six and, evidently, going strong. The book is informative and entertaining, but the reader should check the validity of some of Rose’s comments before incorporating it into a doctoral dissertation or other important work. That admonition applies also to the blurb on the back cover, which, presumably, was composed by somebody at Kangaroo Press but not submitted to Rose for approval. It refers to “His vulgar vocabulary and facility in slang,” but—more important—it offers oddities like a reference to learning by rote on page 105 and to Pidgin on page 41: upon looking both up, I found nothing about rote learning on page 105 and nothing about Pidgin on page 41; nor was either listed in the sparse index. The cover copy also refers to his “endlessly entertaining analyses of literary terms such hypocorism [sic] palindrome, clerihew, idiom, [and] acronym”: of these, acronym and hypocorism are as absent from the index as the as between “such” and “hypocorism.” Perhaps such curiosities will make the book a collector’s item, but whoever wrote the text for it at Kangaroo ought to be relegated to the outback.

I am prejudiced, I know, but while I find the use of impact as a verb an interesting linguistic development, I consider it execrable style for literate speakers and (especially) writers; yet it appears in Rose’s Preface, where one can also find a transitive use for coruscate (OED2e please note). It is not de rigueur for linguists or lexicographers to utter judgments about language, just as doctors are not supposed to react with revulsion should a patient reveal a particularly revolting affliction. But it seems to me (occasionally—like now) that it is just such prejudices that I am being paid to express. Otherwise, why bother reading a review?

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA BREVITER: Thinking Out Loud

Christopher Gauker, (Princeton University Press, 1994), x + 327pp.

Subtitle: “An Essay on the Relation between Thought and Language.” Sparse index.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA BREVITER: Donald Davidson’s Philosophy of Language: An Introduction

Bjθrn T. Ramberg, (Basil Blackwell, 1989), 153pp.

From the cover: The guiding intuition is that Davidson’s work is best understood as an ongoing attempt to purge semantics of theoretical reifications. Seen in this light the recent attack on the notion of language itself emerges as a natural development of his Quinian scepticism towards ‘meanings’ and his rejection of referencebased semantic theories.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA BREVITER: Statistics in Dialectology

Lawrence M. Davis, (University of Alabama Press, 1990), x + 91pp.

From the cover: [P]rovides a clear, easily understood “course” in statistics for the linguist who works with real linguistic data from real subjects and converts those finding into numbers.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA BREVITER: Bilingualism

Suzanne Romaine, (Basil Blackwell, 1989), xii + 337pp.

From the cover: This book is a general introduction to the study of bilingualism from a combined sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic perspective…. Professor Romaine explores bilingualism as both a societal and cognitive phenomenon…. The author also assesses the positive and negative claims made for the effects of bilingualism on children’s cognitive, social and academic development, and examines the assumptions behind various language policies and programs for bilingual children.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA BREVITER: Autosegmental & Metrical Phonology

John A. Goldsmith, (Basil Blackwell, 1990), viii + 376pp.

From the cover: This is the first complete introduction to the current generative theoretical phonology, presenting a general introduction to the two theories of phonological representation that lie at the center of current research. In addition, the central issues and tenets of lexical phonology are set out and critically evaluated.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA BREVITER: Gender Voices

David Graddol and Joan Swann, (Basil Blackwell, 1989), ix + 214pp.

From the cover: Does the language we speak create and sustain a sexist culture?… The authors…explore …the idea that language shapes individual lives—that through our speech we all help recreate gender divisions in society.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA BREVITER: Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition

Dennis R. Preston, (Number 14 in the Language in Society series, Basil Blackwell, 1989), xvii + 326pp.

From the cover: In this book, Professor Preston assesses the relationship between second language acquisition and sociolinguistics, focusing in particular on the findings of quantitative sociolinguists.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA BREVITER: The Ethnography of Communication, An Introduction

Muriel Saville-Troike, (Second Edition, Number 3 in the Language in Society series, Basil Blackwell, 1989), ix + 315pp.

From the cover: [This book] is concerned with how and why language is used and how its use varies in different cultures…. Saville-Troike presents the essential terms and concepts introduced and developed by Dell Hymes and others and surveys the most important findings and applications of their work. Drawing on insights from social anthropology and psycholinguistics and using examples from a great many languages and cultures, she builds up a model which includes communications within the overall framework of cultural competence.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA BREVITER: An Introduction to Phonetics & Phonology

John Clark & Colin Yallop, (Basil Blackwell, 1990), iv + 400pp.

From the cover: Assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, this book offers a thorough account of topics covered in courses in phonetics and phonology.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Oxford English Grammar

Sidney Greenbaum, (Oxford University Press, 1996), xv + 652pp.

Undertaking a description of a language may be regarded as a curious occupation. Writing reviews of them is no less odd an experience. For various reasons, I have chosen to comment on only certain aspects of this book, chiefly because a thorough review would occupy far more space in VERBATIM than many readers might willingly tolerate. Suffice it to say that the grammar is Chomskyan and, though a bit thin on the ground, is quite adequate. I have found other things to criticize, however, that may be more germane to books in general, especially reference books and, particularly, to reference books on language.

First, I want to vent my spleen on publishers' book designers who haven’t the slightest idea of what they are doing. As one case in point, I cite The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, in which, possibly in order to mimic other dictionaries but probably because there are few things that designers can get their grubby little fingers into, the main entry words were reset in sans-serif type, presumably just to make them harder to read. Those who are not “designers” but typographers steeped in statistics of readability and other scientific applications to typography are fully aware that because of the redundancy built into its characters, almost any serif font is more (readily) legible than any sans-serif face, and trying to make a book look “modern” by using sans-serif makes no sense at all. Besides, there is nothing “modern” about sans-serif type: if anything, it is moderne—that is, in the tradition of Art Deco. Turning to the illustrations (including the black-and-white maps) in the RHD2e, it must be said that the originals were a model of clarity and detail: I know, for as Managing Editor, it was among my responsibilities to commission them and to accept or reject completed artwork or to have it modified. That was a laborious and time-consuming task, amply rewarded by the high quality of the drawings as published in the original edition. In the Second Edition, however, the “designers” took it upon themselves—merely for the sake of change, I believe—to lay a fine screen over every illustration (except the maps), thus losing much of the finical detail originally produced. The result is a dull, grayish blob on the page.

As if to confirm that the various afflictions of “designers” have infected the UK operations of Oxford University Press, we are now faced with Greenbaum’s Grammar, which can only be said to have suffered. Worse, their incredibly unimaginative work has resulted in a book that ought to have been about 400 pages shorter than the present work, which I shall explain.

In his Preface, Professor Greenbaum suggests that the Grammar can be used as a work of reference. The structure of the book—through no fault of the author’s, I am sure—militates against such use, for the Index refers the user to numbered sections: each chapter is numbered from 1 (The English Language) through 12 (Spelling), with subsections numbered sequentially (e.g., 1.1 English Internationally through 1.10 Good English). A typical question a user faces is a choice between may and might, so I looked up might in the Index and found

might 3.25; 4.29; 5.17, 24

The first problem, inherent in the poor design of the book, is that there is no clue in the running heads as to which chapter and section one has turned to (unless he has chanced on the beginning of a chapter or section: only the page number appears). The section titles and numbers frequently appear at the gutter column, making it almost impossible to thumb through the book to find a reference quickly. As it happens, both the title of subsections “3.25” and “4.29” happen to be in the gutters of the pages where they begin, making it inconvenient to find them. Had these numerals been set at the foredge of the pages (instead of the page numbers, which serve no discernible useful purpose), finding the proper chapter and subsection numbers would have been greatly facilitated.

The second problem is the (unexplained) style “24,” which should properly be designated “5.24”: there are only 12 chapters, so it is confusing to see a reference, apparently to a chapter, that is really a reference to a subsection. (Under the Index entry for “dictionaries” are listed “8.28, 30,” but chapter 8 contains no subsections beyond 8.21, clearly a mistake.)

Third, excluding the Appendix and a Glossary, the book contains only 600 pages, and, presumably to bulk up its page count (probably at the instigation of the publisher, so that more money could be charged for it), the designer has employed a hanging indention of about ten picas, and wide interlinear spaces. The result, had the book been set to full measure, is that it would have been less than 400 pages long.

Fourth, relating specifically to the entries looked up, while may and might are both mentioned, except for the following passing remark [p. 154] no comment appears:

3. Their past forms are often used to refer to present or future time:

He might be there now.

She could drive my car tomorrow.

That is not inaccurate, but it scarcely tells the full story, nor is it particularly helpful in explaining the use of may, which is the present of which might is the past, in constructions like She may have said that vs. She might have said that. There is no internal cross reference to 5.24 B, where the notions of “Permission” and “Possibility” are given peremptory coverage (though there are six citations), and no helpful comment is offered about their interchangeability in contemporary usage or what was, formerly, their distinction in formal contexts.

Fifth, the Glossary (pp. 615-35) concerns itself largely with the terminology of Chomskyan grammar, but the treatment is unsatisfactory. For instance,

rhotic accent Non-rhotic accents drop the /r/ when it is followed by a consonant sound, as in part.

They also drop the /r/ at the end of a word when it comes before a pause. Rhotic accents retain the /r/.

It is poor style to find the headword term defined virtually as an afterthought. The entry at mass noun is a cross reference, “See count noun.”; but the definition at count noun makes no mention of mass noun. Although the definition for common noun consists of a cross reference to proper noun, there is no proper definition for it at proper noun, only a contrastive comment from which one is supposed to derive a definition by default. As only Chomskyan grammar is covered in the book, entries are lacking for such common grammatical concepts—albeit from other disciplines, like “traditional grammar”—substantive, dependent clause, independent clause, conjunctive adverb, adverbial conjunction, misplaced (or dangling) modifier, etc.—all terms well established in discussions of nonChomskyan grammar. Many of the definitions use terms that are not themselves defined and are not always transparently clear, e.g., postmodify, linguistic unit, etc.

Some of these shortcomings can be laid at the door of the author, some at the door of the book designer, most in the lap of the editor (if there was one).

It is undeniable that the word-stock of a language can be derived from a vast corpus of its writing and speech to produce a dictionary; a grammar can be likewise derived, but such exercises are rare and are usually confined to work on dead languages. Thus, Champollion had little enough to go on to decipher the Rosetta Stone, and Ventris would have been hard put to find a native speaker of Minoan Linear B (or A). But for modern languages, the situation is different. Preparing a monolingual English dictionary, lexicographers who are native speakers of English may often turn to citations of usage in context to derive or verify senses of some words; but for words whose meanings they already know, they can rely on their own knowledge and use citations for confirmation. Relying solely on one’s own knowledge can be dangerous—witness Johnson’s definition of pastern—so one must always check and double-check; but that is not a difficult matter if citation material is available, and there are usually other books or specialists one can consult.

(Let me say parenthetically that not only is there nothing wrong with looking at others' work but that those who studiously avoid doing so for any reason are extremely foolish: how can one know how the competition has handled something without checking? Aside from the unavoidable fact that competition is a driving force in the publication of such works, one can scarcely expect to improve on the competitive works without knowing what they are up to.)

Writing a grammar entails many judgements, but the most relevant for my purposes here is to wonder about the amount of information brought to the task by the grammarian. It is highly unlikely that the subject will be approached with a feigned tabula rasa, relying solely on citation materials. But the question arises whether the grammar is constructed from what is known (or “found”) and then verified through the application of suitable citations, whether the grammar is citation-driven, or a combination of the two is employed. In any event, the requirement for an experienced grammarian is undiminished.

In principle, one must question the function of a grammar. In essence, such a work cannot be more or less than a description of how a language works. But the question must arise in the mind of the publisher (if not the grammarian), Who is going to use the book? That is not readily answered these days. There was a time when students were required to study the grammar of the language, but that day appears to be gone. Today, then, we might more logically be looking at a market consisting of people who want a “reference” grammar, that is, one in which they can find answers to their questions about how the language works.

This raises a question germane to the Oxford English Grammar. Professor Greenbaum has drawn on the huge resources of a number of different corpora of English that have been gathered at the Survey of English Usage and several other research centers, all of which are listed in an Appendix [pp. 601-14]. The sources of the citations range widely and include telephone conversations, classroom lessons, broadcast interviews, parliamentary debates, spontaneous commentaries, business transactions, news broadcasts, etc. One could scarcely disagree with the fact that all of these make up a reasonable crosssection of what must be categorized as the “popular” use of language. Throughout the Grammar are interspersed quotations from these sources, each carefully documented.

That might well provide a reasonably accurate picture of contemporary language. But is that what a user of the Grammar as a reference grammar might want? One of the beauties of the Oxford English Dictionary (and of, say, A Grammar of the English Language, by George O. Curme) is that users are comforted by quotations from sources that are acknowledged paragons of English usage, writers like Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Scott, etc., even Hemingway. Are they likely to be attracted by evidence from students' conversations with their flatmates? from recordings of Christmas-dinner family conversations? I could find only twenty books that had been mined for citations and all were published in 1990. (I hasten to say that although the Curme Grammar is a VERBATIM Book, my purpose in bringing it up is not to sell books but to contrast its content with that of the subject Grammar.)

There is still another aspect to the whole business of citations. Some thirty years ago, I proposed that the most relevantly useful attribute of citations was their exposure, that is, the number of people who, on the basis of readership statistics, could be assumed to be reading and listening to the manifestations of language presented in books, newspapers, magazines, and radio and television broadcasts [Word, XXVI, 3: “An Unabridged Word Count of English”]. The exposure of a word would be expressed as an index number resulting from the normalization of (unwieldily large) numbers of readers and listeners and would be likely to provide some meaningful measure of the frequency for a significantly large percentage of the lexicon. Prior to that, frequencies had been calculated on the basis of raw occurrences in a text selected by a researcher at whim, though it must be acknowledged that the books (at least) selected for examination were classics of literature assumed to be widely read, taught, and used as models of effective expression (if one insists on avoiding the concept of “good” English).

In resorting to sources that might be justifiably viewed as “natural” language, those who concur with Professor Greenbaum’s approach ignore this important aspect of citational matter. I am not sure that anyone has attempted their documentation, but it is well known that an enormous number of clichés, idioms, metaphors, and other expressions used in everyday contemporary speech and writing derive from the writings of Shakespeare and other contributors to the imagery and poetry of the language. While their manifestations undoubtedly appear in the snatches of telephone and flatmate conversations recorded in the numerous corpora cited in the Appendix to the Grammar, their exposure is virtually asymptotic to zero. In other words, there are some who believe that we might be well advised to attend to what Milton, Donne, Dryden, Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Austen, Alcott, Dickens, and thousands of others have contributed to the molding of the language in all its reflexes and who find it difficult to understand the usefulness to be derived from an analysis of idle telephone and flatmate conversations, student essays read by no one other than the instructor charged with their marking, business letters read by no one other than their (individual) recipients, “non-printed examination scripts” exposed to nobody, social letters, classroom lessons, business transactions (between, for example, “architect and 2 clients” and “solicitor and client”), and so on. While it is undeniable that some of the sources—news broadcasts, broadcast talks, press news reports, for instance—can be said to reach a relatively wide (though unquantified) readership or audience, they are in the minority compared with the large number of sources that seem to reflect language that occurs, as they say these days, on a “one-on-one” basis.

Is that lack of representative material what people want or expect from a grammar? Not I, to be sure. Given a choice, I should prefer to model my language on the writings of acknowledged masters and on the speech of Roosevelts and Churchills rather than on what appears in a student essay. I can make a clinical observation regarding the diminution of politeness in the language, attributable, perhaps, to the lowering of the standards of civility and yielding, typically, constructions like Me and her went to the park (as contrasted with “Her and me went to the park,” I suppose).

I was unable to find any comment by the author justifying the use and application of the (million-word British) International Corpus of English (ICE-GB).

Also, comments regarding standard and nonstandard usage are absent. For example, nothing is offered regarding the poor style of the reflexive pronouns for I or me as in Hong Kong had obviously been very carefully planned with Peter and myself in mind [p. 183], though why “and” is italicized in the original is hard to understand. It may be argued that in a descriptive grammar—how can a grammar be anything but descriptive? —comment about “good” and “bad” English are anathema, but weasily little comments can be inserted (as they are in dictionary usage notes) referring to “careful speakers,” “educated users,” their peers, and others whom users of a grammar might, conceivable, wish to emulate. Thus, rare is the dictionary that offers infer as a synonym for imply without some sort of label. Even the “permissive” Merriam-Webster III, while remaining tight-lipped about usage, condescends to offer “see IMPLY” at definition 4 of infer. As those who use infer for imply might be somehow stigmatized in (some) educated circles, failure to report such a usage leaves the suspicious user of a dictionary (or grammar) who has the wit to look it up facing a serious lacuna in the information given about the language. Such information is not “prescriptive” or “proscriptive,” it is descriptive of certain attitudes—right or wrong—about the language and has its proper place in a dictionary. Comparable grammatical usages merit mention and appropriate comment.

In a subsection called Good English Greenbaum makes a passing reference to the aesthetic use of language [1.10]; but remarks concerning artistic use of language are notably absent, presumably lest they constitute some sort of value judgment. As we all know, the grammar has been distorted by political correctness (e.g., in avoiding the masculine pronoun as a pronoun of reference), and, in a rare opinion, the author concedes that constructions like A Candidate who wishes to enter the School before his or her eighteenth birthday may be asked to write to state his or her reasons “can be clumsy.”

The basic question is, To what use can such a book be put? There can be no confuting the fact that the grammar of modern English—that is, the English in use for the past two centuries—differs little from that of earlier stages of the language: after all, languages are sorted and distinguished by linguists on the basis of their grammars, not their lexicons. (Thus, English is a Germanic language because of the history of its structure, or grammar; were its lexicon alone to be considered, it might well be classified as a Romance language, owing to the large percentage of words of French and Latin origin.) There is no gainsaying the advantages in having an up-to-date grammar of English. Though, personally, I am not enamored of Chomskyan grammar, despite its occasional departures from traditional terminology, nouns and adjectives are still nouns and adjectives. The chief aim remains a thorough, consistent, coherent, preferably understandable description of the structure of a language. Indeed, some of Greenbaum’s presentation amounts to a tacit commentary on and reflects valid criticism of the inconsistencies found in traditional grammar. Unfortunately, the commentary, being tacit, is a bit too subtle for many of the people who are likely to refer to the Grammar.

[It is with the deepest regret that we announce the sudden death, on 28 May 1996, of our friend Professor Greenbaum, while on a speaking engagement in Moscow.]

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The F Word

Jesse Sheidlower, ed., foreword by Roy Blount, Jr., (Random House, 1995), 232pp.

At first, the idea that there can be a single word in English or in any language that merits the creation of a 232-page volume—directory, rather than dictionary— devoted to it exclusively must seem preposterous. But with the initial riffle through the pages of The F Word, noting the different typefaces that designate parts of speech, definition, date of origin, source, examples, it becomes evident that this word is the great workhorse, an old familiar in The Life, and indeed deserving.

The F Word, the work of the scholar etymologist who is a resident editor in the dictionary department at Random House, proves to be a rare item indeed: a comprehensive, vastly eclectic, tongue-in-cheek serious treatment that has to be the first and last word on this world-class Word. For the curious layperson, it will be a source of amazement and information, a good deal of it funny, including many of the anecdote-examples, but some of it revealing and far from funny. Funny are the ingenious hybrids, elaborate euphemisms and novel insult-categories. Not funny, I think, are numbers of sex-related terms referring to actions or practices more traditionally the subjects of reports by physicians, psychiatrists, the courts, and, increasingly, stories in the media. That some of the terms, like the practices, are nearly as old as printing cuts or ought to cut the ground out from under those “authorities” who attribute it all to the ’60s' and post-’60s' generations.

It takes no more than a preliminary skim to suspect what is soon substantiated in the ample sources and usages that accompany most entries—that it is within the military services of the United States and Great Britain, from the times of the World Wars, that the F-words have their truest homes. Why this is so might provoke some thought. Is it a kind of barracks clannishness? Certainly it is a macho, masculine kind of thing, with more than a touch of adolescent snobbery in one’s familiarity with a special treasure, such as snafu or B.F.D. (q.v. for yourself).

An instance comes to mind from the 1941-1946 years lived in an infantry division. Crossing the North Atlantic in late 1943, one of the nine of us packed in a cabin made for two read aloud a joke in a letter from home: A Scotsman (jokes were openly ethnic then) on discovering his near-drowned son being resuscitated yells at the exhausted rescuer, “Well and good, mon, but where in ‘ell is his hat?” Overnight it became a staple for expressing ingratitude, greed or pushiness, properly adapted of course: “Say yr chow’s not hot enough? Where’s ‘is fxxxin’ hat, hey?” And there were a number of “outfits” —companies, battalions, and at least one regiment—that claimed snafu was coined solely in-house, to the point that the division newspaper once actually tried to authenticate the origin, precipitating a near riot.

Curious among the many curiosities in this entertaining work: the World War II coinage snafu gets only two and a half pages. The word or term commanding the second greatest coverage is an unspeakable that is evidently spoken a great deal. Including all its usages, initials, purposeful distortions, etc., it fills pages 191 to 214. I, at least, would never have suspected!

This book will probably find no reader fully conversant beforehand with even half its contents. Who knows the distinction between a fxxxface and a fxxxhead?

A big bonus is the funny and learned Foreword by Roy Blount, Jr. Needed is a different term for “humorist” Blount. This one suggests the business of being funny, and conveys nothing of the surprise and delight at observations that cause explosions of laughter. The Foreword is itself worth the price, which easily makes The F Word a double bargain.

[Benedict B. Kimmelman, Philadelphia]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Musical Punstruments

Zach M. Arnold, (The Boxwood Press, 1994).

Salvationist, ex-army bugler, retired marine biologist, inventor, paronomasiamaniac, you name it, Zach Arnold has been or is it. He cites Byron’s lines from Don Juan: “There’s music in all things, if man had ears,” and then sets out with passionate vim to prove the point. The genial wheeze was to construct playable instrument sculptures, and to christen them with music-related puns (e.g., Tuba Toothpaste). Each of the sixty-two Heath Robinsons—Rube Goldbergs to you Americans—here illustrated conceals a miniature harmonica (diatonic and with the range of a full octave).

Zach Arnold is fully versed in the theory and practice of punning, and clearly has it in his bones. He knows about Lévi-Strauss’s notion of intellectual do-it-yourself (bricolage). Each of his punstruments creatively cannibalizes and recycles preexisting materials, all that comes to hand. He is fully aware, too, of the very ancient tradition of the rebus, the pictorial pun. Not letting his own exuberance run away with him, he prudently issues a safety warning about the manipulation of tools and substances. Throughout, rhetoric, figures of speech, music, and handymanship feed productively and voraciously off each other.

After all, the pun is, in (typically) more senses than one, first a mock-up and then, if it works, a working model. As Freud underlined, playing on the multiple meanings of words is an exercise in thrift: two or more meanings for one word or phrase. Wit is psychic economy. In more technological terms, like the computer, as Arnold says, the pun enables a continuous flip-flop (though flip gags often flop). The computer’s version of this is a switching between two stable states (unstable mates), but of course any shuttling begets an element of instability, wobble, neitherone-thing-nor-the-other.

Some Arnoldian examples: Shoe Horn and Soul Music, Jello Dali, Orange-juice Harp, Knocked Urn in Sea (did you wince? That is a clichéic, kneejerk reaction, and you should be ashamed of yourself), Valse Teeth. Infected, I cooked up: Baby Sitar, Bad Vibes, King Gong, Anglo-saxophone (scooped there, I think, by Christine Brooke-Rose). Punning is often, as with the suck-blow mouth-organ, vamping, i.e., harping, extracting blood out of a victim, or camping around. The punner like Arnold prolifically spawns neologisms, inkhorn terms, even nonce-words. As well as being purely verbal, the pun can be visual, kinetic, gestural. Arnold in fact offers useful tips (patter, stage-business) for performing his pieces, rather like the word-balloons in cartoons.

As it is the humble, brazen harmonica, he suggests for the repertoire pop songs of all epochs or popular classics. As always in any collection of wordplays, many— most—are terrible or toothless (e.g., Tuning Fork, which lacks the desirable distance between the two items suddenly conjoined). He is fully conscious of his own, for which he coins “cacohomonym.”

Swift said that like fleas, puns get everywhere. The impulse in this book is macaronic hybrid, adhocist, ecumenical, miscegenating. Example: “A sabot boat, although one could use it on any day of the week and not just on the sabat or shabath, which immediately tempts one to throw the baby out with the shabath, probably the best solution—if somewhat murky and not potable—after all.” This has the pseudo-shamefaced but essentially brass-necked mark of the inveterate punner. There is, of course, method in his madness (it has been claimed that puns introduce lunacy into language, but it was there all along), and capering “wordcaprice” in his pedantry. Brigid Brophy pointed out to me the musical puns in Mozart, where the horns sound forth on occasion to intimate cuckoldry.

Unlike Onan, I am not myself a handyman, nor can I play anything except cricket or hooky. Arnold, like Georges Perec, provides his own mode d’emploi, instructions for use. All you need, apparently, is a lathe, a sharp knife, a band saw (not to be confused with a hawk), manual dexterity, dedication, and the requisite amount of the higher lunacy (though, like Hamlet, Arnold is “but mad northnorth-west”), and you too could say: “I can do that. Gizza job.”

This book is highly sophisticated and deeply naive, just as punning is adult/childish, iuvenis senex; ingenuity and ingenuousness rub matey shoulders. All proceeds go to the Salvation Army. So salve your conscience, and save your soul, by buying it.

[Walter Redfern, University of Reading]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Child Safety Prevention Program Offers Little Sisters Sound Strategies.” [From Reaching Out, newsletter of the Big Sister Association of Greater Boston. Submitted by Alice Batchelor, Wellesley, Massachusetts.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Nel van Dijk,…the European Parliament’s leading campaigner for safe sex, recently distributed 625 condoms to her fellow MEPs, part of an EU programme to help combat AIDS. The campaign had hit the Internet, she informed fellow MEPs. There they could find all the do’s and don’ts about safe sex including a video of a man fitting a condom. For those unfortunate enough not to have access to the Internet, she added: ‘I also have one on a floppy.’ ” [From the Financial Times, 17 November 1995. Submitted by Norman Shapiro, Wesleyan University.]

EPISTOLA {Laura A. Macaluso}

A letter from L. Alan Swanson [XXI,3,21] claims that the original name for the Beatles was “The Golden Beatles.” This caught my eye right away as it is a well-known fact among Beatles fans that one of the original names for the band was “The Silver Beatles.” This name appeared after a few changes in line-up of the members and in their name, such as “The Quarrymen” and “Johnny and the Moondogs.”

After reading through some Beatles literature, it becomes obvious there are some inconsistencies as to how the Beatles chose “The Silver Beatles” after calling themselves “Johnny and the Moondogs,” though the fact remains that they never called themselves “The Golden Beatles.” The best explanation for the name “Beatles” can be traced directly to the music that influenced Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Sutcliffe at the time and to their music idol, Buddy Holly. The music of the early 1960s in the Liverpool area was often referred to as “beat” music, and so, modeling themselves after Holly’s band, the Crickets, “John, who couldn’t resist a pun, suggested ‘Beatles’ as a play on beat music.”⁶

Where the Beatles got “Silver” from is harder to trace. One source claims that “silver” was “an obscure reference to Long John Silver,”⁷ highlighting Lennon’s role as band leader. This proves true when recalling other band names from the early 1960s, such as “Gerry and the Pacemakers,” “Rory Storm and the Hurricanes,” and “Derry and the Seniors,” all names that point out that one member was the leader. Other people have dismissed the adjective “Silver” as merely an addition to “give the name some flash.”⁸

The language of the Beatles, what they said, what they wrote about, and first of all what they called themselves, is an important part of Western culture.

[Laura A. Macaluso, Watertown, Connecticut]

---

EPISTOLA {Gerald R. Martin}

Most authorities in these matters [cf. Darwin Ortiz’s Gambling Scams, p. 189] agree that the broads tossed or faked in three-card monte [XXII,3,15, item 5] are not specifically the queens; rather, the reference is to pasteboards that are wider than the standard deck (viz. pokersized cards vs. bridge-sized), which makes cheating by sleight-of-hand easier in that game.

[Gerald R. Martin, Richfield, Minnesota]

EPISTOLA {Israel Wilenitz}

I have just read Mr. William H. Dougherty’s EPISTOLA [XXII,2] on the subject of balagan in which he refers to a previous contribution by Milton Horowitz. Surely, the vehicle for carrying the Russian word into Modern Israeli Hebrew was Yiddish! And in Yiddish, balagan means ‘mess, bedlam.’ (Uriel Weinreich’s Yiddish-English Dictionary, YIVO, New York, 1968)

It is not unknown, I think, that meanings change when words cross language frontiers, and what was a ‘temporary booth at a Russian fair’ (quite probably a chaotic, noisy affair) becomes a mess and a bedlam in Yiddish. As a lover of Yiddish, I hate to see its influence ignored in such a lengthy etymological review.

[Israel Wilenitz, East Setauket, New York]

EPISTOLA {John R. Cassidy}

[Undoubtedly, Uriel Weinreich would have offered the same remark himself, as his Languages in Contact (1953) made the point many times over. —Editor.]

In his piece, “The Day They Took the Peck out of Pecksniffian” [XXIII, 4], Doug Briggs observed, “There is a movement to ‘decriminalize’ the meanings of words that once described criminal conduct in unmistakable terms.” Amen. And I have an additional example of what he means.

I am a child of the ’20s, a time when those who were involved in what was then (I believe) a minuscule drug problem in the US were called “dope fiends.” The implication for a child or youth, quite intentional I am sure, was that anybody who took drugs (dope) was not only to be avoided, but also feared. To this day I carry that reaction to drug users. Today the use of narcotics is commonly referred to as doing drugs, a phrase that seems to imply a harmless activity such as doing the samba. Alternatively, one perhaps might be into drugs, as if he were dabbling in one more little pastime whose attraction would ultimately fade as he got “into” something else.

These locutions would be of little importance, I think, if it were not for the fact that they have been adopted by most of the news media and the entertainment industry. Nobody uses dope fiend any more, even referring to addicts who regularly overdose. And in that word overdose we have yet another euphemism, don’t we, as if there were such a thing as a beneficent “normal” dose of heroin or crack. As Mr. Briggs seems to be saying, ideas have consequences, and so do the words that express them.

On another subject in the same issue, Ronald Mansbridge’s “The Intrusive S” reminded me of another intrusion, or rather a transposition, that I seem to be hearing more and more these days. It happens when a speaker wants to modify the adjective another, and comes up (turns around?) with “That’s a whole another subject.”

Words are fun if we keep our tempers—and as long as we have VERBATIM.

[John R. Cassidy, Fairfax, Virginia]

EPISTOLA {Berthold W. Levy}

An EPISTOLA from Jim M. Pols [XXII,4] refers to the article in XXII,1 by Jerome Betts concerning names that match their possessors’ professions. It has triggered an old memory from my high-school days (almost 70 years ago) when a teacher cited, as presumably authentic, the story of a visitor to a little western town who noticed a shingle reading “A. Swindler, Attorney-at-Law.” The visitor pointed out the unfortunate conjunction, but the lawyer simply protested that it was actually his name. Suggested the visitor, “Why don’t you at least substitute your whole first name for that awful ‘A’?” The lawyer sadly replied, “It’s Adam.”

[Berthold W. Levy, Melrose Park, Pennsylvania]

EPISTOLA {Bill Simon III}

In “A Proper Look at Verbs” [XXII,4,4], Nigel Ross writes—accurately so—of the pervasion and intrusion of “proper verbs” into our language alongside proper nouns and proper adjectives. Being from the European side of VERBATIM readership, he may not be aware of the “California invasion” of the Pacific Northwest. Thousands of Californians have relocated to Washington and Oregon for personal or job-related reasons, and many, many Washingtonians and Oregonians do not like it at all.

The bumper sticker in the accompanying photo uses a “proper verb” to reflect that prevalent Pacific Northwest opinion concerning their new, ex-California neighbors.

[Bill Simon III, State College, Pennsylvania]

EPISTOLA {Daniel Temianka}

In response to Dr. Murray Zimmerman’s review of A Sea of Words [XXII,4], I enclose a copy of The Patrick O’Brian Newsletter from March 1994 containing an explanation of the word marthambles:

Marthambles is a very fine word that I found in a quack’s pamphlet of the late 17th or early 18th century advising a nostrum that would cure not only “the strong fires” and a whole variety of more obvious diseases but the marthambles too. I have never see it anywhere else and it has escaped the OED.

[Daniel Temianka, MD, Palos Verdes Estates, California]

EPISTOLA {David Isaacson}

A small correction is in order to Daniel Temianka’s “ ‘Badges’ Redux” [XXII,3,13]: for Joseph Wood “Crutch” read “Krutch.”

Bumpersticker seen the other day: Illiterate? Write for help.

[David Isaacson, Western Michigan University]

EPISTOLA {Les Brickman, D.D.S.}

If my Ontario townsman Mr. Kurt Loeb was impressed with the licence plate 2THMD [XXII, 3], may I suggest that he stroll over to Bathurst Street any weekday rush hour and wait for 2TH LES to drive by. Primary, secondary, and (someday, St. Apollonia forfend, mine own teeth should fall out) tertiary appropriateness is his for the viewing.

[Les Brickman, D.D.S., Toronto]

EPISTOLA {A. George Koplow}

Hilary Howard’s article [XXII,1] brings up the song “A Boy Named Sue.” I knew a man named Sue, a distinguished attorney in my home town, but he spelled it “Sioux,” in the city of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He named his daughter Suzanne, but his son was named Bill.

I also knew a girl named Bill. She was called “Billie,” but her given name was Bill Lee. Her father’s name was Lee, and she was the third daughter and last child in the family, so they must have given up on having a boy who could carry on the father’s name.

In a high-school class with five girl Shirleys we also had a boy named Shirley, a refugee from the blitz in England. With that name and a British accent he could well have become the butt of ridicule, but he quickly became “one of the boys” when someone gave him a more appropriate nickname, “Shirts.”

[A. George Koplow, Rock Island, Illinois]

EPISTOLA {Adrian Room}

Marc A. Schindler’s potentially important piece, “Elementary, My Dear Medeleev” [XXII,4] is unfortunately marred by some bloopers.

Hydrogen is a name of Greek origin, not Latin. It is called Wasserstoff in German (not “Wasserstoffe”). Kohlenstoff (not “Kohlstoffe”) means ‘carbon,’ not ‘charcoal’ (which is Holzkohle). The German for ‘oxygen’ is Sauerstoff (not “Sauerstoffe”) and for ‘nitrogen’ Stickstoff (not “Stickstoffe”). English nitrogen comes from Greek nitron (not “natron”). The name of gallium is not only a pun on the name of its discoverer, Lecoq de Boisbaudran, but a patriotic tribute to his native country—Latin Gallia, ‘Gaul, France.’

The history of the discovery and naming of the lanthanides (the fourteen rare-earth elements with atomic numbers 58 to 71 in Mendeleev’s table) is fascinating. In 1788 the mineral ytterbite (now gadolinite) was discovered near the Swedish village (not town) of Ytterby. The Finnish chemist Gadolin isolated a new ‘earth’ (metallic oxide) there in 1794 and called it yttria. In 1803 the Swedish chemist Berzelius discovered another ‘earth’ and named it cerium, for the asteroid (minor planet) Ceres.

Take just yttria. In 1843 the Swedish chemist Mosander analysed this ‘earth’ into yttrium proper, erbium, and terbium, all named for Ytterby. In 1878 the Swiss chemist Marignac further isolated ytterbium, and in 1879 the Swedish chemist Cleve distinguished holmium (named for Stockholm) and thulium (from Thule, the farthest land known to the Greeks). In 1886 the aforesaid Lecoq de Boisbaudran (who had already discovered gallium in 1875) isolated dysprosium (Greek for ‘difficult to reach’). In 1907 the French chemist Urbain separated lutetium from ytterbium, naming it for his native Paris (Roman name Lutetia).

Cerium has its own, similar development, so that by the early 20th century all 14 lanthanides had been isolated. (The element with atomic number 61 is not found naturally, and this number was allocated to promethium, when proof of its existence was confirmed by American chemists, who named it for Prometheus, in Greek mythology the earliest teacher and benefactor of mankind.)

[Adrian Room, Stamford, Lincolnshire]

EPISTOLA {Mary M. Tius}

Ex tempore speakers, whether private citizens unused to explaining themselves before large groups or public figures long used to it, may flounder about when unexpectedly faced with camera or microphone. They may struggle to find the right word and, if they succeed, may mispronounce it. Such lapses, surely, may be forgiven. Charity, however, does have its limits and cannot be stretched to cover the following:

“crooshible” (crucible) Coretta Scott King, The Jim Lehrer News Hour 19 February 1996

“debbicle” (débcle) Economist Paul Solomon, MacNeil/Lehrer 12 November 1994

“esculation” (escalation) Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton, MacNeil/Lehrer 5/31/95

“exasterbated” (exacerbated) Military Historian Edward F. Murphy, All Things Considered, National Public Radio 14 April 1996

“heenious” (heinous) Portland (Maine) Police Chief Mike Chitwood, NBC News 28 June 1996

“imbrigglio” (imbroglio) Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, MacNeil/Lehrer 12 June 1995

“inniment” (imminent)—Military Historian Edward F. Murphy, All Things Considered, National Public Radio 4/14/96

“leggislation” (legislation) Eleanor Holmes Norton, MacNeil/Lehrer 16 January 1995

“mischievious” Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, Mac Neil/Lehrer 27 April 95

“peripatretic” (peripatetic) Alexander Haig, MacNeil/ Lehrer 19 December 1994

“preemptory” (either peremptory or preemptive, the context did not reveal which) Alexander Haig, MacNeil/Lehrer 19 December 1994

“un-be-noun-st” (unbeknownst) Biologist John McChesney, All Things Considered, National Public Radio 23 April 1995

When the “man in the street” or his female counterpart says “all-mond” (almond), “beero” (bureau), “callm” (calm), “carmel” (caramel), “cooten” (couldn’t), “deffly” (definitely), “ditten” (didn’t), “ek cetera” (et cetera), “gore-may” (gourmet), “prolly” (probably), “putt-ing” (putting), “tair-iss” (terrorist), “tore-iss” (tourist), or commits other and worse sins against good English and grammar, the listener realizes that the vernacular—a dialect, “Low English”—is being spoken and “prolly” thinks no more about it. After all, the speakers may never have been taught the basics of their one and only language, their mother tongue. Perhaps, too, they have never heard of dictionaries. The foregoing examples, however, were not drawn from the “street” but from the “air” and were uttered by professional broadcasters.

Is there any excuse for broadcasters who read their scripts still managing to mangle not merely the foreign names which recur daily but even everyday words like nuclear? Consider the following:

“assessible” (accessible) Portland (Maine) NBC reporter Chris Rose 29 May 1996

“baffoonish” (buffoonish) Portland (Maine) NBC News “anchor” Cindy Williams 28 June 1996

“cause celeb” (cause célèbre) former judge and, during the O.J. Simpson trial, a legal consultant for NBC Ira Reiner February or March 1996

“coodigrah” (coup de grâce) Ira Reiner NBC 19 June 1995

“epitats” (epithets) NBC News reporter David Bloom 29 July 1995 and on many occasions since; CBS 60 Minutes reporter Steve Croft 25 September 1994

“in-dicked-ment” (indictment) Lewiston (Maine) NBC News reporter Ann Murray 6 June 1996

“noodging” (nudging) All Things Considered reporter Terry Gross National Public Radio 25 May 1996

On June 7, 1996, the Maine Public Radio announcer, reading the midday news report, spoke of a local philanthropist who was “doughnutting” something-or-other—I did not learn what because I was straining to understand that mysterious verb and, too late, realized donating had been meant. In April 1996, a political advertisement on television used the word legislator when the context made clear that legislature was intended. That ad disappeared after a few days; I wish I could feel confident that its removal was caused by concern for the language. Again and again one hears local and national broadcasters according an extra syllable to past participles as if the words were back-formed from adverbs, e.g., “allegèd, assurèd, composèd, markèd, suffusèd, supposèd.” NBC News “anchor,” Tom Brokaw, who regularly says “bo’l” and “Clin’on,” recently introduced a report on “brust” cancer. A slip of the tongue, perhaps; but, during one memorable two-week period in 1994 beginning in Thanksgiving week and ending December 2, while reporting on Bihac, he came up with “Bihar,” “Bihak,” and “Bihash” before getting it right. Is that acceptable?

BBC has its Pronunciation Unit which advises on usage and pronunciation. Australia has had its watchdog Standing Committee on Spoken English. Now we learn [ANTIPODEAN ENGLISH, XXII, 4] that SCOSE is being disbanded. I urge and advise its members to listen to US broadcasters for a week or two. Listen and reconsider your decision.

[Mary M. Tius, Portland, Maine]

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’m 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 selfjustification? 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 straighttalking, 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?

OBITER DICTA: To Coin a Name and Name a Coin

Marc A. Schindler, Spruce Grove, Alberta

Around six years ago, not long after Canada replaced its “green Queen’s” one-dollar note with an eleven-sided gold-coloured coin, a schoolyard ditty made the rounds:

We’re tiny, we’re tuney

We haven’t got a loonie

Because of Brian Mulroney

and the stupid G.S.T.

Mulroney rhymes with loonie. Brian Mulroney was Canada’s prime minister at the time. The most unpopular PM in Canada’s modem history, he introduced the Goods and Services Tax, a VAT-like national sales tax. Loonie is the well-nigh universal Canadian slang term for the dollar coin. (Only the Royal Canadian Mint refers to the loonie as a “dollar coin.”)

Canada almost didn’t have a loonie. The original design for the reverse side of the coin featured a voyageur— the same as on the older nickel dollar—but the dies were stolen on the way to the Royal Canadian Mint in Winnipeg, where the first coins were due to be minted. The backup design was that of a loon—our unofficial national bird. Ah, but that unfortunate name: loon as in loony bin! Although the terms loonie, a diminutive noun from loon, and loony, an adjective (ultimately) from lunar are etymologically distinct, their similarity has encouraged obvious satirical connections: our economy, which is “loony,” has as its fundamental unit of currency the “loonie”; many felt that the policies of Brian Mulroney were “loony.” In short, the slang term sprang up immediately and collectively, and no one person could ever claim to be the inventor of it.

However, a two-dollar coin is due to be introduced soon in Canada, and the etymological situation here is a totally different story. The Mint, as usual, is no help—they refer to the new coin unimaginatively as “the two-dollar coin,” so the letters columns of every newspaper in the country have been filled with speculation and suggestions for a slang term for this new coin, which is slightly larger than the loonie, gold-coloured and polygonal (like the loonie), but with a silver centre with a polar bear pictured on it. Once the design was released, the name “bruin” was suggested by many people, but the name that appears to be winning is “doubloonie,” combining the “double loonie” with a reference to a traditional coin said to be favoured by pirates—again, a not-too-subtle satirical reference to the appetite for taxation of most governments.

I may have the dubious distinction of being the first to propose this name in a letter-to-the-editor published in Canada’s newspaper of record, The [Toronto] Globe and Mail, on 20 February 1993, long before the Mint announced the coin. At that time the idea had occurred to me because I knew that both New Zealand and Australia had one-dollar and two-dollar coins: I had been to Australia several times on business and had seen them. To me, it appeared to be just a matter of time before Canada also introduced a two-dollar coin but it took an article in the Globe and Mail on the need for two-dollar coin to concentrate a kind of critical mass of public attention onto the issue. What actually appears to happen in cases like this is that neologisms do not appear like a single light bulb going off in one person’s head but rather like wheat after spring rains: if the ground is fertile the seed germinates throughout the field.

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Lukewarm type about to take risks arranged a loan. (9)

8. Part in fog and fail to follow. (13)

11. “A careless order’d garden Close to the **** of a noble down” (Tennyson - Rev. F.D. (Maurice). (5)

12. Part of sacred orthodoxy. (5)

13. Artist when old retires south. (5)

16. Dickensian vehicle’s catchy. (6)

17. Right subject of debate about where the sun turns. (6)

18. Almost the standard Bellini heroine. (5)

19. A small tool the French want put on top of…. (6)

20. …a French variety of cheese around in S.E. Asia. (6)

21. Consecrate Elizabeth, being about 50. (5)

24. Recesses for an art form. (5)

26. French and English articles on which Turner works. (5)

27. Try on cosmetic another way to effect savins. (6, 7)

28. Sign to remove a picnic basket’s lid, going to the beach. (9)

Down

2. A charming accent. (5)

3. Infer the bottom of the suit includes hand finish. (6)

4. Smoke around the sun?. (6)

5. Opposed to starting clever caper. (5)

6. Departed unwillingly?. (4,9)

7. Unpoetic omen, a bad way to start a story. (4, 4, 1, 4)

9. Hard worker has a struggle—it started with a seizure. (6,3)

10. Called for housing once in vain. (9)

13. Star is one that comes out round the northeast. (5)

14. Make a pig of yourself, knocking back English beer!. (4)

15. Murderous attempts. (5)

22. Glory in Ulster’s regeneration. (6)

23. Investment bloomers. (6)

25. A vote on Isle of Man is a truism. (5)

26. Revolutionary—he left Helen at home. (5)

It Figures

Rosalind Woolner, Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire

When it comes to counting, I have always been in awe of French schoolchildren. How do they manage to do mental arithmetic with numbers such as quatre-vingtdix-sept ‘four twenties plus seventeen’ and soixante-quinze ‘sixty plus fifteen,’ which require mental agility just to translate them into the figures 97 and 75? The comparable English three score years and ten is certainly more poetic than the simpler seventy, but I doubt whether it was ever used in calculations.

It is hardly surprising that the French-speaking Swiss and Belgians prefer their own system which, like English, has separate words for ‘seventy’ and ‘ninety.’ They, along with English- and German-speaking children, would appear to have a head start over the French. The German system of saying numbers in “reverse order” (like the old English four and twenty) may even make calculations easier, as children are usually taught to start with the “units column” before moving on to the tens and hundreds.

My admiration for the French has, however, paled into insignificance since I started learning to count money in Mina, a language spoken in Togo and parts of Benin and Ghana. I was astounded to realize that illiterate market women (Benin has an illiteracy rate of over 75%) happily multiply five by thirteen and add one hundred while my brain is still struggling to work out whether this comes to more or less than 150.

Counting money in Mina involves using multiples of five as far as twenty-five and then using a combination of multiples of twenty-five and five as far as one hundred. Even numbers greater than 100 are sometimes expressed as multiples of twenty-five. This means that 180 CFA francs can be expressed as one hundred plus sixteen fives, or as one hundred plus three twenty-fives plus five, or yet again as seven twenty-fives plus five.

After this humbling experience I am inclined to review my earlier belief that French children must be at a disadvantage when it comes to mental arithmetic. In fact, children who grow up speaking a language such as French or Mina, which obliges them to make connections between numbers and introduces them to multiples at a very early age, probably take to arithmetic faster than those who plod along adding one to the previous number ad infinitum.

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. Rawlins, Jack, Demon Prince: The Dissonant Worlds of Jack Vance, Borgo Press, San Bernardino, California, 1986. ↩︎

2. =2 Dowling, Terry, “The Art of Xenography: Jack Vance’s ‘General Culture’ Novels,” in Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature, Vol. 1, no. 3, December, 1978.= ↩︎

3. Temianka, D., The Jack Vance Lexicon: From Ahulph to Zipangote, Underwood-Miller, 1992. ↩︎

4. McWhorter, George T., Burroughs Dictionary: An alphabetical list of proper names, words, phrases and concepts contained in the published works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, University Press, Lanham, Maryland, 1987. ↩︎

5. McNelly, W. E., The Dune Encyclopedia, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1984. ↩︎

6. The Love You Make, An Insider’s Story of the Beatles, by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1983, p. 34. ↩︎

7. The Beatles, by Geoffrey Stokes, Times Books and Rolling Stone, 1980, p. 15. ↩︎

8. Brown and Gaines, p. 34. ↩︎