VOL XXIII, No 2 [Summer, 1996]

A Yankee Dime and Other Reginal Expressions

Hazel Sample Guyol, Arkadelphia, Arkansas

Some years ago, when sportscaster Red Barber used Southern expressions like sitting in the catbird seat and tearing up the pea patch, there was a degree of national amusement. Unfortunately, much of this colorful speech has been lost as the language has become homogenized through raido and television. Sigmund Freud is not blameless. Thanks to him, we are all nowadays more or less selfconscious.

The generation that came of age in the first two decades of the century was probably the last of the unselfconscious breed. And because there was much less travel in those days, the regions retained their speechways much more completely than they do now. Later, however, especially during World War II, there was considerable mobility from region to region. Southerners who went “up North” were quickly made aware of curiosities of speech like I’m fixing to do something or go somewhere. And there was hilarity among Northerners, for instance, when a Southerner asked, “Who’s carrying you to the dance?” Carry in Southernese meant ‘escort.’ Hush puppies and hoe cakes were also terms sure to attact attention fifty years ago, but are now in common use. Hoe cakes, originally baked on hoe, and hush puppies, allegedly so named because pieces of them were fed to dogs to keep them quite, are variations of what Southerners call corn bread and New Englanders call (spider) johnnycake: spider because it was baked in a spider, a black, cast-iron skillet. And when Northern visitors to the South first saw black-eyed peas, they were puzzled. “We call these beans,” they would say. “When we say peas, we mean what Southerners call English peas or green peas.” Northerners were also amused at a Southern matriarch’s saying to a tardy arrival at the dinner table, “We’ve waited for you the way one pig waits for another.”

Those were the days of the enormous midday meal. Most men worked close to home, and the paterfamilias as well as all school children came home for dinner. It was the custom to cook large quantities of many vegetables and at least two breads for this meal. Yeast bread was called light bread and corn bread was corn pone, corn dodgers, hoecake, or hush puppies. Even in small families, large meals were prepared at midday. One could never tell how many people might drop in. In big families, the cook customarily went to her own garden or to the curb market, now called the farmers' marker, to lay in a big supply of vegetables and fruit. Usually, enough was cooked for supper, too. However, if everything came out even with nothing left over, the meal came out like Willie Ross’s fish. If some foold was particularly tasty, beyond delicious, it was larruping. If someone ate too much, he had a hog’s bait. The word bait used as a noun meaning ‘sufficiency’ is given in few language references. In Southern parlance, a bait ment ‘more than enough.’ A hog’s bait was a gluttonous plenty. “She has more than she can say grace over,” was another expression which seems to have disappeared. Even though it refers to grace before meat and thus means that the materfamilias has more people to feed than she can manage, the term was used in many situations of someone whose load was too heavy.

If a child, in early attempts at cookery, made a mess, it was a mommick or a begarm, both of which were used as noun and verb. However, the word bollix, meaning to bungle, was used only as a verb. Bollix is the only one of the three terms listed in most language references. It is a safe bet that many who use the term bollix (informal) do not know that it is a variant spelling of ballocks (vulgar) ‘testes.’

Before store-bought clothing was available, homemade was the rule. During a fitting, if something was too tight, it was as tight as Dick’s hat band and would have to be altered. Girls learned to sew at an early age. For some it was a slow and tedious business, but others picked it up fast and sewed with a red hot needle and a burning thread. Although it is standard to use the adverb directly for ‘right away,’ it is not used as much now in American English as formerly. “I’ll be there directly,” sometimes contracted to “treckly,” was frequently heard as was in three shakes of a dead sheep’s tail, a colorful hunorous variant on the usual in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

A bossy woman was the old ballyo (‘bell ewe’?), and of a person who put on airs, it was said, She’s got a b-i-g place. If plans went haywire, they went skywest and crooked. Children were warned not to go at some task with main strength and awkwardness or not to go whalestaving at some job. When youngsters overdid some subject, they were told not to make a blowing horn of it.

In the early days of TV, dancing groups blanketed the air waves. This early dancing was fairly frenzied gyrating which S.J. Perelman labeled “fire-in-awhorehouse” choreography. Oldsters called it didapping: “Why are they didapping all over the place like that,” some would ask.

Few things are as crude as antiquated slang; consider the terms dandy-funk and hambeaters, circa 1910. Some men, it was said, “wore dandy-funk on their hambeaters.” Dandy-funk is perfume and hambeaters are the long tails of a swallow-tailed coat, widely worn during that period. Another relic of that period, not heard any more, is the call to children for household help: “Come quick and see old Ringdie!” The source is unknown; perhaps it originated when a dog named Ring was in his death throes and the family were being called. Ringdie was said as one word, and the call was made if one wanted quick response.

Some of the common comparisons were: slow as the seven-year itch, mad as a biting sow, though as withleather, fierce as a boar hog, flat as a flitter, and hot as flugens. Neither fitter (in this sense) nor flugens appears in any readily available American dialect reference, nor do they appear to be related to German words of similar sound. Nor does the prized gold monkey. If a person, an employee, for example, was highly valued, it was said, “His boss wouldn’t trade him of a gold monkey.”

Every child learned the right way to spell Mississippi: M, i, crooked letter, crooked letter, i, crooked letter, crooked letter, i, humpback, humpback, i.

The earlier generation of males wanted hot biscuits for breakfast and spoke disparagingly of baker’s bread as wasps' nests. Skim milk was blue John, a widely used term. Also common was the term Yankee dime, as in “not worth a Yankee dime.” This regionalism was used mainly at Christmas: if a person wanted to make it clear he had not given a friend (?) a gift, he would say, “I gave him a Yankee dime.” The term means a kiss but was used disparagingly, as in to kiss off. Not in any reference work I checked, it is probably a relic of Southern attitudes after the Civil War, as is the term gone to Lincoln. The latter refers to property which had been appropriated because the home ovwner had not paid taxes on it.

The South was indeed the Bible Belt, as H.L. Mencken labeled it. However not only the South, but the whole country was caught up in religious revivalism during the early decades of the century. The best-known national revivalists were William Jennings Bryan and William A. “Billie” Sunday. But there were hundreds of lesser-known revivalists whose teams blanketed the South. These revivals usually lasted two weeks and were also called rotracted meetings. During the summers, every city and small town had its revival tent where repentant sinners walked down the aisle, the sawdust trail, to the mourners' bench for prayer and sometimes emotional repentance. Ordinary people, especially children, genuinely tried to be good in word and deed. The children were probably damaged beyond repair because they were not allowed to take the Lord’s name in vain, or to swear, i.e., use words like devil and hell. Instead of devil, they were to say the bad man, and instead of hell, the bad place. Churchgoers were told not to call anyone a fool no matter how justified the label because there was an injuction against it in the Bible. (Matthew 5:22)

Keeping the Sabbath was also important. Respectable people never did a washing on Sunday. And as for sewing on Sunday, the old superstition stated that if a person sewed on Sunday, the devil would make the sinner rip every stitch with his/her nose. Of course, no one took this seriously. However, two New England superstitions were taken seriously. One, known also in Europe, warned against giving knives as gifts: they would “cut the friendship.” The other warned against watching a parting guest out of sight: bad luick would ensue. Another superstition warned a woman contemplating marriage, “Change the name and not the letter, change for worse and not for better.”

In the old days, a standard farewell was, “You keep out of meanness, hear?” Though it was often used jokingly, it was the equivalent of the current “Have a good day.”

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“If you cannot afford Christie’s Auction price £1,761,500 To buy The Anglesey Desk British Antique Replicas will make you an exact copy almost indistinguishable from the original at less than a fraction of Christie’s price.” [From an advertisement in the Sunday Telegraph, Spring 1996. Submitted by Tony Hall, Chearsley, Buckinghamshire.]

Anti-Language

David Mathew, Dunstable, Bedfordshire

If the chief use of language is to communicate, it might come as a surprise to note a few of the times when language is used specially to confuse and alienate.

Anti-languages do just this: their reason for existence is to ensure secrecy by being understood by only a small band of people. Once too many people have cracked the code — most important, when those who have done so are in some way opposed to the anti-language’s users — the language becomes obsolete and dies.

Linguistically speaking, an anti-language is formed by a process of relexicalization, which is substituting new words for old. The grammar of the original language is kept, but a distinctive vocabulary develops, quite often when referring to activities or areas important to the subculture that the creating the language. Established society usually has its nose put slightly out of joint in the process.

John S. Farmer, co-editor of Slang and Its Analogues, wrote in 1890, “The borderland between slang and the Queen’s English is an ill-defined territory, the limits of which have never been clearly mapped out.” Other linguists who have taken on the chalenge of doing so include Jonathan Green, Hotten, Grose, William and Mary Morris, Wentworth and Flexner, and Eric Partridge, who published the first edition of his enormous Dictionary of Slag and Unconvential English in 1937. Further back, as long ago as 1792, Friedrich Ch. Laukhard wrote, “It is common knowledge that students have a language that is quite peculiar to them and that is not understood very well outside student society…. But if the code of behaviour somewhere is particularly lievly, then the language of the students is all the richer for it—and vice versa.”

Convicts shipped to Australia spoke a criminal argot described by James Hardy Vaux as “flash” language in his New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language of 1812. Vaux, in fact, was criminal himself, but also a linguist; transported to the colonies three times, he used the journeys as opportunities for research. Most of the words he lists (swag being a notable exception) did not pass into mainstream Australian English. Possibly some exist in the criminal underword to this day.

Let us look at the modern underworld. In a friendly manner two men are talking in the presence of third man, an impostor — a detective or an investigative reporter — who believes he has infiltrated their ranks. His problem is that the first two are aware of his deception. The first man says to the second, “Shall we clear up this mess?” “No,” the second replies, “we’ll leave it for the cleaner.” Little does the impostor know that he has just been sentenced to death, for what was really said was, “Shall we kill him?” “No, we’ll leave it to a professional.” A cleaner is a ‘hired gun,’ an ‘assassin’ — or at least it was until recently. Now the definition is too well known, and it will shortly be dropping away. Cleaner is a word which adheres to the second principle of an anti-language: the word employed in the process of relexicalzation should not itself be conspicuous.

A great deal of argot appears to be ordinary language — not only in the English-speaking sunderworld. In india a sentence that translates into English as Go clean the bowl is used by a murderer to an associate in front of a victim. It means ‘Prepare a grave.’ (Note the similar links between murder and hygiene.) Few studies, however, have been made into the language of underground groups, not least because of the dangers to researchers. We know that the language of the Calcuttan underworld contains more than forty words for police and more than twenty for bomb. Often, the meanings of such code words are detected and then they promptly go out of use; sometimes, they are not detected at all.

The same is true of the anti-language of prisoners. Considerably more is known about grypserka — the anti-language of Polish prisoners — than about any English-speaking system, but even that knowledge is incomplete and out-of-date.

The alternative, second life inside Polish prisons involves a complex caste system of people and suckers, categories determined by the type of offence involved and the length of incarceration. Movement within the hierarchy depends on sticking to the rules of a game in which grypserka figures prominently. An inmate is downgraded to sucker by breaking the rules, one of which is never, ever, to reveal the secrets of the anti-language, no matter what pardon or privilege is offered. It is a concept well known in all prison systems. In England a prisoner would be grassing. English prison slang is readily enough available in any prison drama or comedy: screw is a ‘guard,’ snout is ‘tobacco,’ nonce is a ‘child molester or other sex offender,’ and nick or porridge is ‘prison’ itself. This is not anti-language, for we all understand it. This outdated prison slang is used almost nostalgically, in the same way that some people still employ Cockney rhyming slag (which was once itself an anti-language).

Anti-language is not easy to define as it does not have rigid rules to which a subculture’s inventions must conform. Nor is it easy to determine its origins, although historically an argot known as pelting speech was employed by bands of ne’er-do-wells in Elizabethan England. There were over twenty terms for varying types of vagabond: rogue, prigger of prancers ‘horse thief,’ counterfeit crank, and bawdy basket are but a few.

Both then and now, new vocabulary in key areas lead to finer distinctions in meaning than are found in the parent language. There are many synonyms, and for the speakers there is the comfort that comes with the freedom to discuss illegal acts in public places.

While slang is not itself anti-language, it exhibits some of its tendencies. Slag has as many divisions as the English language has dialects. Youth slag, soldier slang, actor slang, gay slang, CB slang — the list is endless. And every gang wants its own argot, a test by which a potential recruit can be measured: if you don’t know the language, very often you cannot get in; or, if you are already in, not knowing the latest key words can be disastrous for your credibility.

Slang is a means of unification; for those who use it, it is fun, unconventional, and sassy. What is more, it can be witty, picturesque, metaphoric. How it differs from anti-language is that while it often intends to subvert, it does so by being understood (at least in part) by the world at large. Where the purpose of anti-language is to be secretive, slang is often offensive. It is used by those4 who want it to be known that they are a clique — not dangerous people or criminals, row.

It is important to remember, however, that what survives of this generation’s slang may bacome the next generation’s standard English. Bus was the slang term for omnibus, zoo for zoological gardens, and piano for pianoforte.

The board slang once used on Citizens' Band radio has similarities with anti-language, although even the police more often regarded CB users as eccentric nuisances than criminals. The users, however, revelled in their outlawed status; the police were well represented in the CB lexis. They were bears or smokeys; police station, a bear cage or cave; a police helicopter, a bear in the air. Police using radar were kojaks with kadaks. More confusingly, a police car was a jam sandwich or a bubble-gum machine. The way CB expressions run along metaphorical pathways is reminiscent of pelting speech. Blood wagon or meat wagon ‘ambulance’ and dragging wagon ‘tow truck’ are like the much earlier crashing cheats ‘teeth,’ smelling-cheat ‘nose,’ and belly cheat ‘apron,’ where cheat means ‘thing to do with.’

Teenage slang in England in this decade has been strongly influenced by African and American cultures, by immigration, and by cinema. Wrongly accused of being a lazy language, youth slag is, in fact, as complex and rhythmic as any dialect. The words man, well hard, wicked, and swear-words are not simply idle padding for a sentence, they are an intrinsic part of the language. That so many adults disapprove of the way the youth communicate is precisely what keeps this variety of slang going.

This leads to the issue of “talking Black.” Linguistically, Black English has origins in Caribbean (mainly Jamaican) Creole. Black English, a patois, does not vary much from region to region and belongs to an ethnically defined social group. In Black sittings its use ensures soldarity between speakers; in White or mixed sittings the use of the patois symbolizes social distance from mainstream society and an assertion of ethnic identity. The more linguistically distinct the sounds of a patois, the more it can come to symbolize social distance. Here is approaches the status of anti-language. For some Black speakers, talking Black provides a system of resistance on a linguistic level to a powerful social order.

It has long since been noted that when two people who come from different social backgrounds meet, there is often a tendency for their speech to alter, so that they become more alike, a process known as accommodation or convergence. Its opposite — divergence — occurs when people wish to stress their personal, social, religious, or sexual identity; divergence takes on a position of confrontation, though is often said to be a result of the speaker’s pride. Anti-language is divergence on a grand scale, and most varieties of slang are at least sympathetic to the philosophy and purposes of anti-language.

Are we faced with the paradox in which groups of English speakers effectively use different languages? Very unlikely. But perhaps there will be a rethinking of the word communication and an instinctive scintilla of caution when communicating outside one’s social group.

The Grockles of Goodrington

Jerome Betts, Torquay

On the 25th of May 1995 a character in The Archers, BBC Radio’s long-running country soap, mentioned “spending the weekend preparing Lower Loxley for an influx of grockles on Monday.” The Archers is set in the Midlands, but it seems the word grockle has trqanscended its southwestern connections and become a widely distributed informal term for ‘tourist, summer visitor, or holidaymaker.’ By extension, it can mean ‘nonresident, nonlocal, or outsider.’ Tony Thorne’s Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (1990) claims that it has been adopted by non-native hippies and travellers living in the West Country to refer to anyone who is not approved of.

The OED2e labels grockle as dialect and slang, of uncertain origin, and mildly disparaging, as well as associating it especially with southwest England. It provides eight citations from 1964 to 1986, including John Fowels' novel Daniel Martin, and another referring to the Isle of Weight. In Cornwall the word emmet is used with exactly the same meaning and is likewise labelled mildly disparaging by the OED, which gives two citations, both of which include grockle, from 1975 and 1984. Its meaning is presumably transferred from the basic sense ‘ant.’ Indeed, the writer quoted in the 1984 citation [Listener 20 Sept. 23/1] regarded it, in comparison with grockle, as “less difficult and more vivid because its true meaning is ‘ant.”’ The Bloomsbury Dictionary claims it has been used in Cornwall since the 1950s.

There have been various attempts to illuminate the uncertain origin of grockle, from the fanciful to the plausible. An Exeter University academic once speculated, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that it might come from the Latin graeculus, translated as ‘Greekling’ with a derogatory flavour. It has often been derives from the name of the clown Grock, an allusion to the red sunburnt noses of seaside holidaymakers. That is the version given in The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, by Jonathon Green (Pan Books 1984, rev. ed. 1992):

The term originated in the West Country, specifically Torbay, where a local remarked that the stream of visitors to the town resembled little Grocks, or clowns…

A most detailed and circumstantial account of its genesis, which more than a little impresses me, also traces its origin to the Torbay area and a comic, but not of the Grock variety. This version claims that grockle was the spontaneous coinage of a worker in the southwest holiday trade, prompted by an early memory of a picture story in a children’s comic. Between 1952 and 1960 Arthur Rivers, then in his twenties and Londoner by birth, was in charge of the boating-lake at Goodrington, a district of Paignton in Devon, now part of Torbay. In the summer of 1955 or 1956, Mr Rivers saw among the customers a tiny old lady with beady eyes, a pointed nose and a ruddy, weatherbeaten, pinched-up face. He was so struck by her appearance that he observed to his assistant that the old lady was “like a little grockle.” His assistant, not surprisingly, replied, “What the hell’s a grockle?” Mr Rivers explained that he had been reminded of a figure from a picture serial he had once read, called Jimmy and his Grockle. The grockle was a small dragonlike creature with magic powers. Mr rivers tells me that he could not recall the name of the comic, when he had seen it, and even whether it was British or an American import.

The old lady and the three equally diminutive adults and two small children in her North Country group regularly visited the boating-lake during their holiday, and the staff took a fancy to the expression Mr Rivers had used and would say things like “Your grockle family’s here” and so on. The term survived the departure of the originals and was soon consciously adopted for all the holidaying patrons, mainly from the Midlands and North, by the large number of seasonal employees at the lake. Mr Rivers' assistant, Freddie Fly, wrote an Ode to the Grockle and the coaches bringing the tourists were christened grockle wagons. Mr Rivers has emphasized to me that the word was not then used in a disparaging way, but more as a kind of professional in-joke, with about the same force as the now universal punter ‘client, customer,’ part of the verbal comaraderie of a lively band of young workers.

The word became current among the families of the boating-lake’s local staff and outlasted the season to be acquired later by other holiday trade people in the area, such as the Paignton-born novelist and local columnist Brian Carter. In an article in Torbay’s Herald Express (May 1993), he remembered hearing grockle for the first time in the late 1950s when working on the Goodrington promenade. From there it would inevitably spread to Paignton and Torquay, the towns which, with Brixham, now make up Torbay.

By the early 1960s Freddie Fly had become a barman at a Brixham pub and there met a writer, Peter Draper, who was working on a screenplay for a flim based on the adventures of seasonal workers in the holiday industry. He picked up Freddie Fly’s use of grockle to add authenticity to his script. The flim, starring Oliver Reed, was released in Britain in 1964 as The System — the “system” being one to “pull birds” — and in the US as The Girl-Getters, a more explicit rendering of the same idea. This was the first national publicity for the hitherto local expression, and the OED’s first citation of grockle is, in fact, from Flims & Fliming, 31 October 1964, extracted from a review of what is presumably The System.

In the same year Pan Books published a halfcrown paperback novelization by John Burke of Peter Draper’s screenplay. The text contained the film’s extended dialogue “explanation” of grockle (including grockle-comforter for ‘transistor raido’ and grocklebox for ‘cheap camera’) as well as its other passing references, but added about fifteen more in the narrative, with an example between quotation marks in the back-cover blurb. It may be that in pre-video days these appearances in print, after the film had ended its run in the cinema, played a part in the spread of the expression during the res of the 1960s.

The word was certainly hard to escape in the Torbay area in the early 1970s, and by then often had a derisive flavour, as friction increased between young locals and young summer visitors. Hence “Look at those bloody grockles!” from some trawlerman was my own first encounter with it as I took a party of Swiss students round Brixham. Stickers reading Nongrockle could sometimes be seen in the rear windows of cars as an assertion of local identity. The word had also spawned more extensions, like grock-trap ‘shop selling tourist sovenirs.’ The Daily Telegraph of 12 August 1986 (the last of the OED’s citations) also gives grockle fodder ‘fish and chips,’ grockle bait ‘tourist souvenirs,’ and grockle nests ‘camp sites.’

In 1993 Arthur Rivers, who had become the landlord of a Paignton pub, took part in a Radio Four programme with Peter Draper, Brian Carter, and an OED representative. At the end, the presenter handed Mr Rivers a photocopy from a 1937 issue of The Dandy, a British weekly children’s comic. The page heading was Jimmy and His Grockle, so Mr Rivers was able to validate and localize the memory that had floated to the surface of his mind in the mid 1950s. Grockle turned out to be onomatopoeic, being all the little dragon ever said.

The first number of The Dandy, published by D. C. Thomson of Dundee, was dated 4 December 1937, when Arthur Rivers would have been six or seven years old. However, Jimmy and his Grockle had started in 1932 as a conventional serial story in another Thomson children’s publication, The Rover, before being “tracslated” into picture strip form in 1937. It ran again in the D.C. Thomson comic Sparky from 1966 to 1976.

Perhaps it was The System that helped grockle to beome so far-flung and win out over the allegedly more vivid but today still Cornwall-confined emmet. But I personally would speculate that the unknown creator of Jimmy and his Grockle in the early 1930s keew the sort of word that resonates in children’s memories. Could a further reason for the word’s success be that it rhymes with the name of a kind of edible molluse that is a traditional feature of British seaside holidays? It clearly seems to have appealed to the writer of some verses in Shooting Times & Country Magazine for 14 August 1975 — not spotted by the OED — which ran in part:

There are the like in other lands,

But here they call them grockles

And feed them on the summer sands

Ice-cream and rock and cockles.

“Latter-day” English

Marc A. Schindler, Spruce Grove, Alberta

When Joseph Smith announced to the world in the early 19th century that he had seen God, and gave to the world his “Golden Bible” (The Book of Mormon), he certainly introduced some radical new theologh. However, as his followers, presecuted and harried out of the estern US to the godforsaken wastes of what is now Utah, then proceeded in build Zion as they made the desert bloom, they and their descendants have also contributed some unique words to the English language (or, in some cases, some unique twists on existing words).

A full exposition of strictly doctrinal terms is beyond the scope of this article because such a listing would entail a detailed examination of Mormon doctrine. Speaking of Mormon doctrine, the term, used as a general-purpose noun, adjective, and adverb, as an unofficial designation for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its adherents, and comes from The Book of Mormon, a book that Joseph Smith claims to have translated from gold plates goven to him by an angle. The book claims to be a parallel to the Bible, but pertaining to the New World, and relates the religious history of several groups of people. Talking about the book in a scholarly way in somewhat like discussing Tolkien’s works, which also contain a richly developed cultural world. In Tolkien’s case it is self-evident that his Lord of the Rings trilogy is a work of fiction, and non-Moromons would probably assign the Book of Mormon to the same category; but faithful Mormons take its truth seriously (whether strictly historical on one end of a spectrum to mythologically symbolic on the other end), albeit of faith. This is by way of pointing out that Mormon was the name of the major editor of the book, and it was named after him, although he did not write the whole book.

Whether Mormon was historical figure or a fictional Character is a matter of faith, but many of the names in the book do have roots in Near Estern languages, for whatever reason. Several of the personal names in the book are popular boys' names amongst Mormon families today; especially popular are Jared (which is also the name of an obscure Biblical personage, but the Book of Mormon character has a far greater profile), Helaman and Nephi. Current place names in Utah that come from the Book of Mormon include: Bountiful, Lehi, Nephi, Manti, Moroni, and Deseret (town, not the territory). There are numerous Biblical names as well: Paradise, Jordan River, West Jordan, Goshen, Ephraim, Zion National Park, Joseph, Mount Carmel, and Moab, as well as places named after early leaders and settlers Brigham City, Grantsville, Heber City and others. The Jordan River is so called because the geography of Utah resembles that of Palestine: Lake Utah drains via the Jordan River into the Great Salt Lake, just as the Sea of Galilee drains via the Jordan River into the salty Dead Sea. Old World Zion and New World Zion are thus mirror images of each other. The names of two towns, American Fork and Spanish Fork bear special mention because of a peculiarity of Utah pronunciation especially rural pronunciation: locally these towns are known as “American Fark” and “Spanish Fark,” respectively.

An intriguing example of a Book of Mormon place name is Desert, which was a very popular name in Mormondom in the 19th century. Utah was not allowed to enter the Union until long after it had achieved the minimum requirements for statehood (1896) because Americans at the time abhorred the Mormon practice of polygamy (called plural marriage in “Latter-day English”). Having more than one wife was all right: Gentiles (nonMormons) just disapproved of having them all at the same time! Speaking of Gentiles, there is a story (perhaps apocryphal) that the famous Israeli general and archaeologist, Yigael Yadin, once prefaced a speech at the University of Utah with the observation, “You know, this is probably the only place I can come and be a Gentile!”

The territory that preceded the state of Utah (named after the Ute Indians) was called the Territory of Desert. It is a term for the promised land in the Book of Mormon and is supposed to mean ‘land of the honeybee.’ It has been speculated that the word is related to the Egyptian d”rt, a term for the Red Crown of Upper Egypt, whose emblem was the bee. In the 19th century these was a Deseret Industries. The hive is the symbol of Utah and appears on its coat-of-arms. The territory of Desert covered an area much larger than the modern-day state of Utah: parts of Nevada, California, Arizona, Idoho, Wyoming, and Colorado were all part of Desert at one time. A non-contiguous part of the “Mormon empire” is Mormon Country, an area of southern Alberta, Canada, which was settled by Mormons in the late 19th century refugees from US marshals looking for polygamists).

Several doctrinal terms bear mentioning. Mormons (or Latter-day Saints, as well call ourselves-not out of a sense of spiritual superiority, it is to be hoped, but because of a reference of St. Paul’s to the members of the ancient church being called saints) have two basic types of religious buildings: chapels and temples and they are as different as synogogues and temples are in Judaism. A chapel is a meeting house, but the area of assembly for worship withinthe chapel building is alson called a chapel. Traditionally there is also a cultural hall, which serves as everything from an overflow for the chapel, a basketball court, an area for dramatic and musical productions, and a hall for wedding receptions. The main Sunday meeting — the counterpart to Catholic mass — is called sacrament meeting, “sacrament” in the Mormon sense being one specific sacrament only: what other christians called the Eucharist. A temple is a building where, as a rule, no meetings are held but where Mormons go for certain ceremonies, including vicarious ordinances (ordinances on be half of one’s ancestors), for celestial marriages (technically, celestial marriage is the institution of marriage that extends past death, as generally understood, and the wedding ceremony itself is called a temple marriage), and a place where one receives one’s endowment. An endowment in this case is a ceremony at which one ritualizes one’s place in the universe, both with respect to God and with respect to one’s extended family. There are also tabernacles, which are large meeting places for special-purpose meetings-the best-known one is; of course, the tabernacle where the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is based, on Temple Square, in Salt Lake City.

When Joseph Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, founded Desert/Utah, he sent colonists out to places as far away as Colonia Juarez, Mexico; Cardston, Alberta, Canada; San Bernardino, California, and all over Wyoming, Idoho, Nevada, and Arizona. All of these colonies were set up in the same way, with streets wide enough “to ensure a full team of oxen could turn around.” The towns were organized politically in a way presious Mormon colonies in the estern states (Kirtland, Ohio, and Nauvoo, Illinois) were, into stakes and words. The image of the stake comes from the stakes used to hold up the tabernacle in Old Testament days; today it corresponds roughly to a diocese, and is a collection of words. The word started out as a political subdivision, just like wards in most North American cities, but became the equivalent of a parish. Stakes are headed by a stake president, a volunteer official (there is no professional clergy), and wards are headed by a bishop.

All males from twelve years of age are eligible to hold the priesthood ant it is this semi-universal priesthood that governs the church (with participation by women in some administrative roles, but outside the context of the priesthood itself) and conducts its rituals. The priesthood is divided into the Aaronic Priesthood, for young men from twelve to eighteen, and the Melchizedek Priesthood for adult males. Each branch is divided into three offices: Decons are 12-13; Teachers are 14-15; Priest are 16-17; and the Melchizedek Priesthood is divided “horizontally” into three offices: Elders (you might have met some awfully yound “Elders” on your doorstep… ), Seventies, and high Priests. The imagery comes from the time when Moses went up Mt. Sinai, leaving a group of seventy at one point and the edlers of Israel behind them. Moses himself was, of course, the high priest.

Slang terms, unofficial terms and humour abounds within Mormondom. The humour column of an unofficial scholarly publication, Sunstone, in called “Oxymormons.” Women are referred to institutionally as the Relief Society, after the name of their auxiliary organization (founded by Joseph Smith’s wife, Emma, it claims to be America’s oldest women’s organization). To hold the priesthood is a euphemism for any sort of physical affection displayed by women towards men (since all men, at least in principle, are members of the priesthood); the Word of Wisdom is a reference to Mormons' dietary laws (which prohibit smoking, alcohol, drugs, and caffeine-containing hot drinks); Primary is a reference to children up to the age of eleven (as with the Relief Society, this is an example of the name of the organization being extended generally to its members). Mormonism has a relatively well-defined theology, but even in such a centralized body of thought there is bound to be a specturm of beliefs and social attitudes. What Gentiles would call “liberals” and called liahonas by Mormons, and “conservatives' are called iron-rodders, both terms coming from Book of Mormon images.

And finally, what about splinter groups, without which no self-respecting religious group would be complete? Mormons who do not practice their religion are called Jack Mormons, the largest schismatic group, The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, (note the difference in spelling of “latter-day”) who did not follow what they call the Utah Mormons out west, but stayed in Missouri, are called Reorganites, and although Mormons have their share of fundamentalists, to call someone a fundamentalist in Mormondom is to accuse him of being a closet polygamist. The practice of polygamy was outlawed just before the turn of the century, but polygamous families persist down to the present day. One has to admit, these terms represent an improvement over one term that used to be applied to Missourians during the days of persecution in the mid-19th century (the Missouri state legislature still had an official Mormon extermination order on its books until someone discovered it in the archives in the 1970s): they were affectionat4ely known as Pukes.

The Meaning of Murder

Steven Cushing, Ph.D., Sensimetrics Corporation Cambridge, Massachusetts

In the 1991 Gulf War, supporters of Saddam Hussien cheered when SCUD missile fell on Tel Aviv, calling George Bush a murderer for having bombed Baghdad. At the same time, supporters of George Bush, who had cheered when US planes bombed Baghdad, called Saddam Hussein a murderer for bombing Tel Aviv. Both sides agreed on what they meant by the word murderer, mut they made opposite judgments as to whom it applied and why. How is that possible and what does it tell us about how language works?

Murder differs from kill in involving the notion of justification. To say that one person kills another is to say that the first deprives the second of life; but to say that a person murders another is to say the depriving is unjustified. This raises the questions, What does justified mean and How does one justify judgments about it?

Justified falls among a class of words that also includes what linguists call modals; the most notable of these are must, should, and can. Despite their apparent definiteness, the meanings of such words involve an element of indeterminacy that someewhat resembles ambiguity.

Must assets that there are laws and facts that jointly necessitate some occurrence, either already completed or yet to be brought about, without specifying exactly what those laws and facts are. For example, the context in which sentence (1) originally appears makes it clear that the author intends it to express a historical necessity already in place, based on the law that time moves forward and on the fact that a lot of time has passed.

(1) Although precise figures must remain elusive, according to the best current estimates a total of 10 to 11 million living slaves crossed the Atlantic Ocean from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century.

[Kolchin, Peter, American Slavery: 1619-1877, Hill and Wang, 1993.]

However, the sentence could just as well have appeared in a government report expressing an admonition to keep the numbers secret, based on the fact that numbers of such magnitude would anger the slaves' descendents and on an assumed law to the effect that sufficient provocation caused people to rebel. Neither must itself nor the sentence as a whole provides the slightest clue as to which of these inter pretation is intended. Only the context makes that clear.

Should means the same as must, except that it leaves room for loopholes that avoid the asserted necessity in new or unusual circumstances. For example, (2) and (3) progvide ways around the necessities (1) asserts, on its reprective historical and admonitory interpretations.

(2) “Although precise figures should remain elusive (under normal circumstances), major new discoveries of slave-holders' journals and artifacts will enable us to compute exact totals.”

(3) “Although precise figures should remain elusive (under normal circumstances), publishing the figures in the current climate of suspicion will clear the air, defuse anger, and enable people to move on.”

Can is related to must in being what logicians call its dual. Whereas must says there are laws and facts that necessitate some occurrence, can asserts that whatever laws and facts there are, some occurrence is permitted (or possible). One consequence of this relation is the fact that though can and must have very different meanings, cannot and must not are synonymous. For example, (4) has can where (5) has must, but the meanings of their respective sentences are the same.

(4) Dr. Larssen, you cannot let it get you down to the point where it affects your work. You can not.

[Turtledove, Harry, World War: Tilting the Balance, Ballantine, 1995.]

(5) “Dr. Larssen, you must not let it get you down to the point where it affects your work. You must not.”

Negating a sentence containing must keep the necessity claim intact, negating only the verb, whereas negating a sentence containing can keep the verb intact, negating only the permission (or possibility). To say “x cannot v” is to say “x must not-v.” To say “x can v” is to deny “x must not-v.”

Justified is, in effect, a hybrid of must and can. Like must, it asserts the existence of laws and facts, but like can it expresses permission, rather than necessity. To say that some action is justified is to say there are laws and facts that permit it, whereas can expresses permission for whatever laws and facts there are. To say that some action is not justified is to say that the action is prohibited whatever the laws and facts are.

So to murder is to kill in a way that is prohibited whatever the laws and facts are. To deny that a killing is murder is to claim there are laws and factsa that permit it. Those who cheered for George Bush, instead of calling him murderer, based their judgment on what they took to be a law regarding the sanctity of national borders and on the fact that Iraqi troops had violated such a border by invading a neighboring country. Thoses who cheered for Saddam Hussein, instead of calling him a murderer, based their judgment on a law regarding the sovereignty of national government and on what they took to be the fact that the borders his forces had crossed were imposed by Western colonialists without the consent of the inhabitants.

Obviously, none of this sheds any light at all on which of the sides, if either, was correct. It does help to explain how people can talk past each other, using the same words in the same language expressing the same meanings, but interpreting those meanings in relation to very different frameworks of concepts, beliefs, expectations, and values.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Kudirat Abiola, 44, was in her car when she was shot at close range by six gunmen Tuesday morning. She died of her head wounds two hours later, as did her chauffeur.” [From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 7 June 1996, p. 10a. Submitted by Dave O’Brien, Hales Corners, Wisconsin.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The caretakers must be physically strong, and have enough stamina to tote groceries and supplies up hill, and garbage down hill. Weedeating is mandatory.” [From the United States Lighthouse Society Bulletin, Fall 1995, p. 1. Submitted by Kenn Oberrecht, North Bend, Oregon.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The truth is that the SAS consists of…men who have fought and died in the western desert, in Borneo, Malaya…” [From an article by Andy McNab in The Sunday Times, 13 November 1994. Submitted by Rosemary Woolner, Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Last week, in the High Court, The Sunday Times apologised to Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, the former Malaysian minister of finance and now leader of one of the main opposition parties, over an article published in February 1994 in which it was alledged that as a representative of the then Malaysian government, he had sought to procure special payments from a major British company to secure the continued progress of a construction project in Malaysia. In a further feature on “The Malaysian Affair” (March 13, 1994), the allegation was repeated and the article further suggested that he might have had a corrupt connection with a $600m banking fraud in Hong Kong, the death of a bank auditor and the false imprisonment of a Malaysian businessman as part of a cover-up.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“…We now accept without reservation that the serious allegations mentioned above should never have been made and as stated in open court last week, apologise unreservedly to Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah for any distress and embarrassment caused by the articles. We have furthere agreed to pay him a substaintial sum by way of compensation and his costs and have undertaken not to repeat the allegations.” [From The Sunday Times, 18 April 1996, p. 1/21.]

The Staff of Life

Margaret Marco, Alicante

Travellers in Spain over teh centuries have always, consciously or not, emphasized the deep division existing between townsman and peasant, especially reflected in the food eaten by one and the other. The peasant’s fare always consisted basically of bread — V.S. Pritchett in Marching Spain, a journey made in 1928, seems to have eaten nothing between towns but hard bread and the occasional doubtful egg; although paying for it, little else could be offered him. The peasants themselves often had nothing but bread or bread and coarse wine. As the faced each new day, the peasant’s first thought was survival for himself and his family for another twenty-four hours. For them bread was life. Through the years popular sayings grew up reflecting this obsession with that one food, applied to the daily philosophy of life. Passed from village to village, from hearthside to field and tavern, losing a word here, gaining one there, sometimes so badly pronounced as to change sound, though not sense, the refráin or saying having the almost sacred pan ‘bread’ as its foundation came to form an integral part of country life.

Spanish Popular Saying or refrán	Literal Meaning	Approximate English Proverb equivalent
Más bueno que el pan	Better than bread As good as gold (children)	To be kindness itself (adults)
Guardar pan para mayo y le para	To put aside bread for May and wood abril for April	To look at both side of a panny
Coger a uno con las manos en la masa	To catch someone with his hands in the dough	To be caught in the act
Al pan, y al vino, vino	To bread, bread and to wine, wine	To call a spade a spade
Amasando se hace el pan	Kneading makes bread	All things come to those who wait
Tan buen pan hacen aqui como en	As good bread is made here as in Francia France	There are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it
Con pan y queso nadie se pone obeso	Nobody gets fat on bread and cheese	Too much of one thing is good for nothing
Quien con hambre se acuesta con pan	Whoever goes to bed hungry dreams of sueña bread	To have a bee in one’s bonnet
Quien con hambre se acuesta con pan sueña	Whoever is hungry dreams of bread	Same as above
Quien do pan a perro ajeno, pierde el	Whoever gives bread to an unknown pan y el perro dog loses bread and dog	Land and lose — so play fools
Pan, pan, muchos lo toman y pocos lo	Bread, bread, many take it, few give it dan	Charity begins at home
Por dinero baila el can, y por pan, si se	The dog dances for money and for lo dan bread if given it	Needs must when the devid drives and Money talks
Media vida es la candela; pan y vino la	Half of life is fire; bread and wine the otra media other half	Count your blessing
Mucho te quiero, perrito, pero pan	I love you well, little dog, but with little poquito bread	A long tongue is a sign of a short hand
No hay vida como la del pobre,	There is no life like the poor man’s who teniendo pan que le sobre has too much bread with a little	The greatest wealth is contentment
Pan con pan, comida de tontos	Bread with bread, food for fools	Variety is the spice of life
Nunca buen pan de mala harina	Never good bread from bad flour	Ill beef ne’er made good broth
Bien sé lo que dogo cuando pan pido	I well know what I say when I ask for bread	Every man is best known to himself
El pobre que pide pan, carne toma si se	The poor man asking for bread will lo dan take meat if it is given and butt are glad to eat	They that have no other meat, bread
Desde los tiempos de Adán, unos recogen	Since Adam’s days, some gather the el trigo y otros se comen el pan wheat and others eat the bread	Some reap what others have sown
Pan ajeno ilunca es tierno	Another’s bread is never fresh	Envy never enriched any man
Pan ajeno caro cuesta	Another’s bread costs dear	Another’s bread costs dear
Agua fria y pan caliente, nunca	Cold water and hot bread never made a hicieron buen vientre good belly	Oil and water never mix
A pan dure, diente agudo	To hard bread a sharp tooth	Necessity is the mother of invention
Abuen hambre no hay pan duro ni	To a good hunger no bread is hard nor falta salsa ninguna sauce is needed the best sauce	Beggars can’t be choosers or Hunger is
A buen hambre no hay pan duro	To a sharp hunger no bread is hard	Hunger is the teacher of many
Para viuda hambriento no hay pan	For the widow and the hungry no duro bread is hard	Hunger finds no fault with the cooking
Pan no mío me quitta el hastío	Bread that isn’t mine takes away boredom	He that serves everybody is paid by nobody
Eso es pan para hoy y hambre para	This is bread for today and hunder for mañana tomorrow	A short-sighted policy
Pan tierno y leña verde, las casa pierde	Fresh bread and green firewood lose the house	Two wrongs don’t make a right
Contigo pan y cabolla	With you, bread and onion	Love will find a way
Can pan y vino se anda el camino	With bread and wine the way is walked	A full stomach makes short work
A falta de pan, buenas son tortas	When bread is lacking, pancakes are good	Half a loaf is better than none
Los muchos hijos y el poca pan enseñan	Many children and little bread teach a remendar mending	Cut your coat accoring to your cloth
Es un pedazo de pan	He/she/you is/are a piece of bread	A good person
Ganarse el pan	To earn the bread	To be the breadwinner
Con su pan se lo coma!	May he eat it with it with bread!	Good luck to him/her/you!
El pan nuestro de cade dia	Our everyday bread	Our daily bread
Es pan comido	It is eaten bread	It’s as easy as pie
Por un mendrugo de pan	For a scrap of bread	For a bite of eat
Repartirse como el pan bendito	To distribute like holy bread	To sell like hotcakes
No es lo mismo predicar que dar pan	It is not the same to preach as to give bread	Actions speak louder than words
Estar a pan y agua	To be on bread and water	To be on bread and water
No solo del pan vive el hombre	Not only of bread does man live	Man does not live by bread alone

Fo Er Si Guo Er and The Cross-Eyed Bear (or: OfOronyms and Other Literary Trompes l’Oeil/Oreille)

William Brashear, Ägyptisches Museum, Berlin

“Singlish.” Sort of (but not really) single? Contemplating marriage or divorce? Actually Singlish has nothing to do with one’s marital status. It is the system of writing that the victorious Japanese wanted to impose on the defeated Australians, New Zealanders, and Americans at the end of World War II, forcing them to abandon Latin letters and use Chinese logographs as phonetic equivalents of English words instead. As a foretaste of things to come to committee responsible for implementing this innovation proffered a Singlish rendition of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: (of er si guo er) “Four score…”

Obviously, this plan never got off the ground. How could it? Historical facts aside, the “Singlish Affair” is the brain-child of John DeFrancis (The Chinese Language, Fact and Fantasy, Univ. of Hawaii, 1984), a parodying bulesque pointing up certain features of languages in general and of Chinese in particular. Languages, though glibly spoken and written, often present formidable problems of perception, both visual and aural. Thus fo er si guo er, to all appearances Chinese, is actually pseudo-Chinese nonsense. Only when one realize its Singlish — that is, English masquerading as Chinese — does it become intelligible.

Although Singlish is a figment of imagination, there are many examples of genuine switched writing systems masquerading as something they are not. In fact, “trans-alphabetism,” to coin an appropriate neolo- gism, goes hand in hand with the history of writing. The first known graphic system, cuneiform, served as the common vehicle of expression for not only Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Ugaritic, but also Elamite, Hurrian, Old Persian, and Hittite. Much later, the Greeks borrowed a foreign alphabet, Phoenician and adapted it to their needs. The Greek alphabet was, in turn, used with modifications by the Lykians, Lydians, Etruscans, Copts, and Slavs. Transformed by the Romans into the Latin alphabet, it has since become the most widely used writing system ever in the history of mankind.

Alongside these examples of mainstream transalphabetism are other lesser-known curiosities. From antiquity many such chameleonic switchovers are preserved on papyrus, parchment, stone, and bone and in clay, Greek letters serving to write Demotic Egyptian, Babylonian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Indian, and Latin. Conversely, Demotic Egyptian signs and Hebrew, Armenian, and Latin letters were sometimes used to write Greek. Such trans-alphabetic texts are approximate phonetic productions written by or for someone interested in but not capable of reading a particular language in its proper alphabet. Thus, numerous trans-alphabetic glossaries—Greek-Latin, LatinGreek, Hebrew-Latin, Arabic-Coptic, and ArabicGreek—once thought to be schoolboys' exercises, are probably elementary aids for tourists, pilgrims, and businessmen. Even in 10th-century Europe it was fashionable to write Latin texts employing Greek letters, Greek being a far more holy language than mundane Latin. Yet in Greek documents, notaries appended their names and formulaic closing statements using Latin letters.

Furthermore, magicians deliberately wrote such trans-alphabetic words and texts on amulets in order to project an aura of mystery and impress a credulous clientele. Thus one finds Egyptian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek/Latin, and other languages disguised in Greek and Latin letters. Likewise, Hebrew was written in phonetic Coptic.

Alongside these more pragmatic productions, trans-alphabetic texts are even found lurking in literature, both ancient and modern. In one of his comedies, the Roman playwright Plautus lets a character declaim in Phoenician on stage. Plautus wrote the text in phonetic Latin. Mark 15.34 records Christ’s reproach from the cross—eloi, eloi, lamma sabachthani?— using Greek letters to transcribe the original Aramaic. In 1903 a Greek papyrus drama fragment from Oxyrhyncus (Egypt) was published in which an Indian appears conversing in his mother tongue. In 1995 a 3rd-century BCE papyrus preserving an unknown language was found. Both of these languages, written in phonetic Greek, still await elucidation. Another ancient oddity is a 4th-century BCE Aramaic religious text in Demotic script.

Modern translingual jeux d’esprit are Mots d’Heures Gousses Rames, by Luis d’Antin von Roote (New York, 1967) in which English masquerades as French; Brigid Brophy, In Transit (London, 1969); and the ultimate: Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake with their ostensibly English yet polyvalent, transliteral letter and word groups which punningly play over no fewer than fifty to sixty languages in Cheshire-catlike, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t trompes l’oeil.

Apart from these curiosities are the many quite standard instances of scripts serving to reproduce languages with which they have no organic relationship whatsoever. Middle Persian (an Indo-European language) was written in a form of Aramaic (a Semitic language). Modern Persian is expressed in Arabic (Semitic) letters. Yet Maltese, a bonafide Semitic language is written not in Arabic but in Latin letters. Turkish, which is neither Semitic nor Indo-European, was written using Arabic letters until 1928, when Kemal Ataturk decreed that it thenceforth be written in Latin letters. Other ancient Turkic languages, as Arabic and Malayalam in India, were sometimes written using Syriac (Semitic) characters. Middle High German, more commonly known as Yiddish, is written in Hebrew letters, and, when similarly expressed by means of Hebrew letters, Spanish is called Ladino. Central Asiatic languages were sometimes written using Syriac letters. The Copts in Egypt originally wrote their language (a derivative of pharaonic Egyptian) in Greek letters; today they read their prayers in Arabic transcription. Chinese logographs have been employed for Korean, Japanese, and Annamese. However, present-day Vietnamese uses Latin letters, as do many African, Asian, Polynesian, and Micronesian languages around the world. If the ancient Romans were to meet up with Latin letters in modern central Africa, Micro- or Indonesia would be flummoxed for certain!

That is not to mention the occasional Modern Greek, Hebrew, Russian, and Chinese transcription of an English, French, Italian, German, or African word, name, or place—and vice versa. Run-of-the-mill trompes l’oeil in every language are foreign words in disguise: Norwegian byra (French bureau); Dutch kadotje (French cadeau + Dutch -tje); Chinese qiao ke li (Aztec xocolatl ‘chocolate’). Hong Kong and Macau present what are probably the most egregious examples of all-pervasive linguistic symbiosis on a daily basis, Singlish ubiquitous in the former, (e.g. ba shi ‘bus’; de shi ‘taxi’), “Portusinese” in the latter.

Aural equivalents of these trompes l’oeil are socalled oronyms—trompes l’oreille—which Pinker describes in Language Instinct (New York, 1994, p. 188), citing such examples as, The stuffy nose can lead to problems ‘The stuff he knows…'; It’s a doggy-dog world ‘It’s a dog-eat-dog world’; A girl with colitis goes by ‘A girl with kaleidoscope eyes’ (Beatles’ song); Gladly the cross-eyed bear “Gladly the cross I’d bear' (traditional Christian hymn). Readers undoubtedly have their own favorites.

EPISTOLA {Richard L. Spear}

I was saddened by the news of Sidney Greenbaum’s death [XXIII,1], and yet made less so somehow by the thought that he died in the middle of what he spent his life doing. May we all be as fortunate.

With regard to your review of his Oxford English Grammar, for me too, the traditional grammarians Jesperson, Curme, et al., do it right. They present us, for our pleasure and edification, with the structures of the language as found in the best of the corpus. Greenbaum’s latest effort, on the other hand, wraps an immense corpus of colloquial and formal speech up in the respectable garb of grammatical explication, leaving the reader to have learned elsewhere which of the examples should serve as a model when he invites his boss to dinner. I take this to be not only silly but potentially politically pernicious.

In her delightful study, Theories of Discourse, Diane Macdonell describes how after the French revolution the bourgeois came to realize that, if the lower orders took seriously the slogan Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, their wealth might fall into the hands of the wrong people. The solution to the problem was straightforward. Teach everyone French as if it were Latin. The results were a working class who could read directions but not compose a well-formed composition in their “complicated” native tongue, and an educated class who got to the university, used French as they had learned it at their mother’s knee (naturally, not as they had been taught it in school), and made good use of the grammatical rules they had been taught by applying them to their study of Latin, a nicely dead and therefore reasonably systematizable language.

The British, who didn’t go through the dislocation (and revivification) of a revolution, simple allowed the gentry to establish the colloquial norm for those who counted themselves among the educated, and mined the literature for texts to constitute a canon that would be taught as a stylistic and, as a by-product, grammatical model. The result was a respect for proper English, that is to say the English spoken by proper gentlemen. All a bit authoritarian, but reasonable. The effectiveness of the policy can be seen by making a quick analysis of the language spoken by Oliver Twist: Dickens, qua social reformer, knew perfectly well that if Oliver hadn’t somehow come to speak the Queen’s English, he wouldn’t have made it. (One might add in passing that the twentieth-century, establishmentarian feathers ruffled by D. H. Lawrence with Lady Chatterley’s Lover were less the result of Mellors' seducing a member of the aristocracy than his not addressing her properly.)

This latest trend, to make use of a vast corpus of linguistic data as a way to “democratize” the understanding of language is—and I think here you and I quite agree—a gross mistake. Not only does it throw out the concept of “good” English, but it establishes the norms of language on “what’s said.” (This is an expression frequently used by my British colleagues and one that in my opinion is as silly as basing a legal system on “what’s done.”) Not long ago, when I suggested—for a passage chosen for our entrance exam—that an it that referred back to an unstipulated topic of a previous paragraph, be changed to this, I was told that there’s no need to be so picky because “it’s said.” The consequences of this (not it) have not been such salutary effects as a broadening of acceptable usage, or a loosening of the traditional schoolmaster’s authority over what constitutes proper English, or a diminution of class consciousness. The results—perhaps totally unforeseen—have rather been a shift in linguistic authority away from the gentry and Oxbridgians to the media.

The consequences of all this are fascinating. “We” who are in control of the media and therefore aware of the context in which unclear English is used, know what’s going on (and therefore the meanings of the utterances used to describe it), while the “vulgar” (to use Berkeley’s delightful expression for those with a shaky grasp of vocabulary and syntax who are therefore ill equipped to understand some particular bit of “newspeak”) are led to believe, when they fail to fathom what’s going on, that the failure in comprehension is entirely their fault.

Greenbaum in his Grammar, with its democratic, “what’s said,” corpus-based approach to language, unwittingly, I am quite sure, keeps the really proper use of English in the hands of those who are to the manner born, while allowing the media moguls to interpret or misinterpret the topics of public concern as they will and at the same time disallowing the vulgar from gaining a firm grasp on the means by which they might enter the debate. We have here a delightfully constructed catch-22: if you don’t study your grammar you’re uneducated; if you do, you’ve been exposed to a proper education by your kindly school system; but when you use one of your grammar book’s “dreadfully improper” constructions as a model, you place yourself in the class of the obviously simple-minded, whose opinions are irrelevant. And please notice: when we use the word class here, we do so not at all in a social sense—oh dear me, no—but strictly in an intellectual one. If you don’t know the difference between the appropriate contexts in which to use two examples placed one after the other in your grammar book, it’s a consequence of your mind’s incapacity to grasp how things ought to be correctly expressed, not that you’ve had the misfortune of being born into the working class. (To what extent this is a conscious agenda on the part of the establishment and how much it is simply an ill-conceived educational policy is a matter for further inquiry.)

Rather than focusing our attention on the establishment of universally applicable rules of grammar as a way to make a more democratic society, we might better develop a more holistic, semiotically based curriculum that points our young in the direction of clear thinking. I take Peirce to be right when he tells us that meaning (and therefore correct usage in the broadest sense) is always inseparable from context. And given that fact, I would argue that as long as the educational system teaches dictionary definitions as giving lexical meaning and grammatically proper structures as carrying grammatically meaning, we will have (as we do now) the vast bulk of our population functionally illiterate.

The subset of semiosis called—perhaps misleadingly—language comes into being when there is a will to share. (Searle would call it an intention.) It works when those involved share a common experience, a common set of general rules for their communication game, and a common aim for their dialogue. It happens best when the experience has the broadest possible horizon, the rules are supplemented by good style, and the aims are the achievement of the best possible degree of understanding. To give short shrift to any of these three facets of communication is to tear apart the fabric of dialogue.

Too much buck-passing (usually in the name of scientific rigor) between the “experts” on language, literature, and history has resulted in the sad fact that clear thought, the mortar that serves to create integrated human interaction, has been quite consistently assigned to the other guy’s bailiwick.

School systems teach systems. But that can’t be the end of the matter. The process that Bakhtin calls Dialogue is ultimately context based and not system based. This is why, for example, the expression, “The teacher has it in for me,” falls through the cracks of lexicon and grammar. The sentence doesn’t mean what the words mean, and if they did, why is the verb have it in for defective? I’ve never heard it used in the first person, nor, one might add, with the Pope as subject. Students would learn ten times more about words and how they are used if, instead of being asked to remember what is grammatically or lexically correct, they were asked in class to play roles such as shoe salesmen or lords of the manor and by doing so got a feel for what is said by such people in such dialogues—not just what is said, but what is said in such by such people dialogues. This kind of contextual sensitivity (a sensitivity that is as yet not sufficiently well understood) is far more important than that sort of abstract knowledge of the proper use of language that prompts certain of us to shiver at someone else’s stumbling over a shibboleth. Needless to say, the idea of “abstract knowledge” isn’t all that simple. How much of what passes from “Knowing grammar” is in fact remembering what was said at home or by an author one has read? Are grammatical rules explanations of what is said by people like us? If they are, how does the learning of them help someone who doesn’t speak like us? Does a child learn to walk by having the musculature of the legs explained to her? (I add in passing a news bite heard between the writing of this paragraph and its mailing: a teacher was recently given an award for innovative teaching. He received it because he has his students write letters taking the part, for example, of Martin Luther King, Jr., and explaining his reasons for encouraging civilrights marches, a context in which repetition might well be more frequent than in an essay by Bertrand Russell. A correlate to this observation can be found in the otherwise wise stylistic advice of E. B. White. What grade would he have given the eloquent civilrights leader? And why?)

I would argue that for survival in the twenty-first century students will need an integrated course in Peircean sem(e)iotics. A course in which an appreciation of one’s cultural context is combined with an understanding of the suitable styles of dialogue needed to express one’s intentions. A good friend, the editor of an award-winning medical journal, received his education in English in Kansas without benefit of grammar book, but rather through the reading and discussion, orally and in writing, of such works as Catch-22. My students at Tokyo Joshi Dai have studied English grammar and memorized its vocabulary for well over a half-dozen years, and when they are asked if they can explain how to get to the train station answer “Yes,” and stand by with a smile waiting for the next question. (And this should not be construed as a lack of grammatical comprehension, since, if they don’t know the way, they invariably answer “I’m sorry.”) Somehow, the proper understanding of how we function semiotically (I’m trying to avoid the word language for now) needs to be built into any educational system by which succeeding generations are taught the most effective way of sharing human experience—both domestic and foreign.

To get started on this major project I’ve been looking at Michael Shapiro’s The Sense of Grammar: Language as Semeiotic (Indiana, 1983), and a rather more interesting effort, one with which you may be familiar, Robert Lord’s Words: A Hermeneutical Approach to the Study of Language (University Press of America, 1996), and would be most appreciative of any suggestions on the work being done by those who are having second thoughts about the use of that apparently promising source of linguistic data known as “The Corpus.”

[Richard L. Spear, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University]

EPISTOLA {Martin Ternouth}

I have immensense pleasure in renewing my subscription to your wonderful periodical.

Marc Schindler’s excellent article [XXIII,1] probably had no space to mention Polish—a language whose alphabet ends in three zs: z, ź, and z Polish appears to be a difficult language to learn, but it has the supreme advantage that every combination of letters is always pronounced the same. It is therefore possible when meeting with a group of, say, pharmaceutical chemists, to pick up a copy of their technical journal lying on a table and impress them with your grasp of their profession by reading an article out loud—without understanding a word of it. Some words you can guess at, of course. The Polish for purgative is czyszczacy—and just by looking at it you can understand why.

Laura A. Macaluso [EPISTOLA XXIII,1] is not strictly correct. Beatles originated from Silver Beetles [sic]. Whatever the subsequent connection with beat, the insect came first. And talking about the naming of things, their most famous song, Yesterday, was originally released on an LP in the US as an instrumental with the title Scrambled Eggs. A Ph. D. thesis there for some earnest young academic!

Some years ago, travelling in luxury to Venice by train, we noticed considerable excitement being generated by an attractive couple at the table opposite. Two female passengers of riper years asked especially to be photographed with the young man for a family album. I asked the Italian waiter who he was. “Oh,” he fumbled, “he eez Ronnie Modern.” I didn’t recognise the name but it told me everything. A sensitive, old-fashioned youth, failing to survive in the hurlyburly of English popular music, eking out a living crooning sentimental nostalgia to elderly matrons on the European night club circuit. I wondered how he had scraped together the fare for the Orient Express. Perhaps he was doing the cabaret from the grand piano after dinner and his agent had scrounged him a free meal in the contract. Mix with the punters, Ronnie, you’ll get bigger tips that way.

[Can anyone tell me the US equivalent of punter? It’s not in the 1996 Webster. Used disparagingly by bookmakers of their customers, especially those placing small bets. By transference a prostitute’s client or the unknowing victim of a minor confidence trick.] Later, we shared a quiet bottle of Laphroaig with this well-mannered and impeccably spoken paragon and his beautiful young wife. We learned that he was trying to make a career as a novelist and that in the discipline of fencing he had nearly made the Olympics. I asked where his name had come from. His wife looked puzzled, then light dawned. “Iron Maiden,” she corrected me. “Bruce is the lead singer.” I had an immediate memory of a bare-chested super-lout backed by a wall of electronic Armageddon screaming at me from a television and earning more dollars in an evening than there are greenfly on my roses. “If it ever gets out what he’s really like,” I remarked, “he’ll never sell another record.”

Does anyone remember Manfred Mann? It is the only instance I am aware of where—initially at least—a band was referred to collectively by the name of its founder. Compare: the members of John Lennon are…

And in the early ’60s, in a small village hall in East Sussex, England, we danced to a group of amateurs called The High Numbers. The who? Yes, The who.

[Martin Ternouth, Dorchester]

[Punter is used to mean ‘guy, fellow, chap, geezer,’ etc., but the most common US equivalent is probably ‘customer,’ a deliberately ambiguous choice for the senses ‘client’ and ‘guy,’ as in cool customer, queer customer, etc. As punt is a Briticism for ‘gamble,’ punter in the sense of ‘gambler’ is a Briticism; there are many US equivalents, the most common being sucker.—Editor]

EPISTOLA {Dr Ann Ridler}

I read “(Dia)critic’s Corner” [XXIII, 1] with great interest but was perplexed by the examples at the top of the second column on page 1, as I counted four misprints at a first reading (œ for æ) and my feeling was confirmed by checking Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary. In my memory and dictionary we would spell the examples quoted as gynæcology, hæmatology, cæsium, and pædiatrics. However, in fiddling with my keyboard I discovered that the italic form of æ (in Times New Roman at least) is almost indistinguishable from œ except with a magnifying glass—thus; œ, æ—so I can only assume you have been thwarted by a quirk of the computer!

In the paragraph at the foot of this column, one might have expected to see diæresis in place of diaeresis, but at least the “unligated” form does not lead in italics to a misleading spelling, in appearance at least.

[Dr Ann Ridler, Wallingford, Oxfordshire]

[In the italic forms of many typefaces, especially those designed since photographic and computer typesetting equipment became prevalent, the distinction between the digraphs æ and œ is all but lost (and in some is lost entirely). That is owing in part to the lack of sophistication among type designers and, undoubtedly, in part to the changes in spelling practices, even in Britain, where the digraphs are gradually being replaced by a single character, usually e. (We had to abandon our customary style of referring to characters by setting them in italics because the characters are indistinguishable.)—Editor]

EPISTOLA {Kenneth Kloss}

David Galef’s article, “F U Cn Rd Ths” [XXII,4,15], brought to mind a puzzling abbreviation I noticed on highway signs when I moved to Los Angeles some years ago. It’s FWY. To reach my house one might, for example, take the HARBOR FWY. I realized eventually that the W is the Welsh vowel and that FWY should be pronounced “PHOOey.” Anyone who has travelled on a Los Angeles FWY would probably agree that this is a very appropriate designation.

[Kenneth Kloss, Lomita, California]

EPISTOLA {Daniel Temianka, MD}

To Ms. Flanders' brief list of “Foreign Treasures” [XXIII,1] I would like to add one of my late father’s French favorites, La moutarde m’est montée en nez, ‘I lost my temper’ (lit. ‘the mustard ascended into my nose’).

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

EPISTOLA {Chris Bayliss}

I am having difficulty remembering the alphabet, and I would appreciate help from a reader. The alphabet in question was recited to me by a London cabbie many years ago. He liked to talk with his fares, and when he learned that I made a living as a writer he turned off the meter and proceeded to teach me his alphabet. The notes I made were incomplete and have been mislaid. Here is how it began…

‘Ay for ‘orses

Beef or chicken

Seaforth ‘ighlanders

…and so on, through to Z—for what? That’s one of the missing letters. I can also remember:

Effervescence

Ifor Evans

‘Ell for leather [my personal favorite]

O for the wings of a dove

Queue for ‘taters [a memory of the recent war]

Arthur Askey

Tea for two

Why for art thou Romeo…

Can anyone fill in the gaps?

[Chris Bayliss, Galiano Island, British Columbia]

EPISTOLA {Beverley Amrita}

It has long been a source of puzzlement to me that borogoves is a source of puzzlement to others. After reading in “The joy of jabberwocking,” by J. A. Davidson [XXII,1,23], that “but somehow a few editors gave it a second r, as in borogoves,” and “Probably many years ago a careless printer put in that extra γ,” I have, somewhat tossicatedly, to ask: Am I the only one for whom (many years ago) Professor Bagos Hitman opened wide a copy of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer and, pointing to a bevy of bilingual yokemates, one of which was (to the best of my recollection) something like bearu grove, burbled (accusingly) “Tulgey”? “Brillig!” whiffled I.

[Beverley Amrita, Horley, Surrey]

EPISTOLA {James C. Petts}

The phenomenon of names matching professions [EPISTOLAE, XXII,4] has been the subject of much discussion this year in the British magazine New Scientist, where it is termed nominative determinism. However, my two favourite examples have not appeared in the pages of that magazine: an officer of the British Trust for Ornithology called Sue Starling, and two researchers in the field of asthma called Ichinose and Sneeze.

[James C. Petts, Stanmore, Middlesex]

EPISTOLA {William H. Dougherty}

As a once occasional translator of Russian, I am overpowered by an itch to comment on Emanuel Strauss”s review of Peter Mertvago’s Comparative Russian-English Dictionary of Russian Proverbs & Sayings [XXIII,3]. A couple of observations in the review, whether Strauss’s or Mertvago’s, strike me as dubious at best and the translation of an example as misleading.

I do not agree that “the relative brevity of many Russian proverbs stems from the fact that the Russian language has no articles and also resorts idiomatically to ‘participial condensation’ by not using oblique forms of the verb to be.” What about byvshii ‘having been’ and budushchii, the future participle of the Russian verb for ‘to be’? No, the form of the Russian verb for ‘to be’ that is usually (but not always) omitted is the present tense, as sometimes in English: Terrific guy, that Tom! This omission and the absence of articles does lend a certain pithiness to Russian proverbs. But I think that the apparent brevity, which depends in part on whether you count words or syllables, is due much more to the heavy inflection of Russian that compresses meaning in single words. The best example of this kind of semantic compression that occurs to me is from Latin, a language that in many respects is grammatically similar to Russian: Romae romane, which comes to us in English as ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do.’ In Russian I can squeeze this down to V Ryme-po-rymski. But then in English one can come pretty close to both the Latin meaning and brevity with, say, “In Rome, act (or be) Roman.” Running English proverbs and sayings through my mind, I seem to find that although our language has the resources to be fairly pithy, we are not as attracted to pithiness as Russians and Romans.

What bothers me more, however, is the translation of the Russian proverb Chemu Vanya nye nauchilsya, tovo Ivan nye vyuchit. Literally, leaving out the tovo as redundant in English, this proverb means ‘What Johnnie hasn’t learnt, John won’t learn.’ Just as in English the nickname Johnnie implies youth, so the Russian nickname Vanya implies boyhood—but only implies: Uncle Vanya was not young—while the formal names John/Ivan imply maturity. By overloading the proverb with “little” and “old” in “What little Johnnie hasn’t learnt, old John will not learn,” the translator (here a traditore, indeed) has killed the clever implication inherent in the play on names, perhaps in a fumbled attempt to bear out his claim that Russian proverbs are relatively brief.

Maybe I am nitpicking, though. The statement that “Generally speaking, the Russians make greater use of proverbs than the Americans or the British” is doubtless true, with the consequence that the careful attention given Mertvago’s compilation is quite justified.

As for me, I hope that my nitpicking through the articles you publish in VERBATIM demonstrates the consideration I think due these articles rather than envy and pedantry.

[William H. Dougherty, Santa Fe, New Mexico]

EPISTOLA {Theodore C. Skeat}

I found the following article by my grandfather, Professor Walter W. Skeat, among some of his papers. The justification for reprinting it would be that although I find his explanation totally convincing, it is not to be found either in the original edition of the OED under the word dear, to which he refers, or in the revised edition published in 1989.

[Theodore C. Skeat, London]

EPISTOLA {Walter W. Skeat}

‘OH! DEAR!'

It must have struck many that the very common phrase ‘Oh! dear’ is, after all, a very senseless expression. When we come to try to read sense into it, some might think that it may be contracted from some longer expression, such as ‘Oh! dear me.’ But this is not in accordance with the evidence. The earliest known example of ‘Dear me’ is no older than 1773, whilst ‘Oh dear’ occurs as early as 1694, and is the earliest known phrase in which dear occurs at all.

Dr. Murray remarks [in Volume IV of the New English Dictionary, 1897, s.v. ‘dear’] that several phrases occur, such as ‘dear save us’ in 1719, ‘dear knows’ in 1876, ‘dear help you’ in 1880, and the like, which suggest that dear represents or implies a fuller dear Lord; thus ‘dear knows’ is equivalent to ‘the Lord knows,’ and so on. But he adds, very justly, that a derivation from Ital. Dio, God, ‘resting upon the modern English pronunciation of dear, finds no support in the history of the word.’

I wish to draw attention to two ascertained facts. The first is that the particular phrase ‘Oh dear!’ is the earliest of the set, as has been already remarked; and secondly, that there is no trace whatever, even in dialects, of a fuller form like ‘dear Lord.’ If we are to go by the evidence, we must recognise that the interpretation of ‘dear’ by ‘dear Lord’ or even by ‘Lord’ at all, is due to the influence of popular etymology, which could make nothing of ‘dear’ when it stood alone.

I think it is equally clear that we must dismiss all thoughts of connecting its origin with the Italian Dio.

I will now go a step further, and assert that there is no evidence whatever for connecting it with the adjective dear at all! It makes no sense, as we may see by a little thought. For dear means ‘beloved, affectionate, precious,’ and the like; but the exclamation ‘Oh! dear!’ is one that denotes something very different, something that is lamentable or calamitous, and very far from being pleasant. Thus, in 1694, Congreve makes one of his characters say—‘Oh! dear! you make me blush!’ In 1769 we find—‘Oh dear! oh dear! how melancholy, has been to me this last week!’ And again— ‘Oh! dear! I shall die!’ And in Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, Miss Hardcastle says—‘Dear me! Dear me! I’m sure there’s nothing in my behaviour to put me on a level with one of that stamp.’

If we will only, for a moment, consider this probability, viz. that there is no good reason for associating this interjectional phrase with a well-known adjective, this will leave us free to look around us, and see whether any other source is possible.

And if we do this, we have not to look far. The phrase, for instance, makes no good sense in English; and this affords a presumption that it was borrowed from abroad. And whenever we consider the possibility of borrowing at the end of the seventeenth century, our first thoughts turn, as a matter of course, to France. Let us see what French will do for us.

I now venture to quote some remarkable words from Cotgrave’s well-known Dictionary, and from the Old French Dictionary by Godefroy.

Cotgrave has:—'Deâ, an interjection, as Dâ, ouy deˆ [the circumflex over the a is not mine, but Cotgrave’s], yes, truly, verily, without doubt also, a tearme of expostulation [note this]; as deâ, qui vous mouvoit? why, or good God, what reason had you? or what, a God’s name, moved you?’

It should particularly be remarked that the sense coincides exactly with that of the English phrase. We can translate this literally by saying—‘Dear, dear! who put you up to it?’ It is a note ‘of expostulation,’ as Cotgrave truly says; and it indicates despair rather than hope.

Godefroy has:—'Dea, dia, dya, da, a sort of exclamation of astonishment.’ His examples show that it was sometimes preceded by the interjection he [illegible character] as Hé, dia! or Hé! dea, which is suggestive of the English phrase. It was usually employed, as in English, to imply lamentation or disaster, as, e.g. ‘Hé, dea! quand je fus né quelle mauditte estoille presida dessus moy’; i.e. ‘Oh! dear! what an evil star presided over my birth.’ ‘Dea! quel desastre est ce qui regne en France!’ i.e. ‘Dear! what a disaster prevails in France!’ It served also, as Cotgrave notes, to enforce an affirmation, as in ‘Ouy dea, dis je’; ‘Yes, forsooth, say I.’

It is worth while trying to guess whence this expression came. We notice that Cotgrave writes it with a circumflex over the a, as if it were a contracted form. It is remarkable that the chief word which in Old French began with dea- or dia- is the too common word deable or diable, the use of which in expressions of lamentation is so prevalent both in French and English. It really seems as if the true sense of ‘Oh dear!’ were ‘Oh! the devil!’ The clipping of ‘swearwords’ is a common phenomenon. If this be so, the exclamation ‘Dear knows’ may have originated in a phrase which meant ‘the devil knows.’ But as this interpretation was not at all obvious, or was forgotten, the familiarity of many Englishmen with the Span. Dios and the Ital. Dio may really have suggested a new interpretation in the eighteenth century; indeed, even Cotgrave seems to have had such a notion. For the earliest example of ‘Dear save us’ is no earlier than 1719; whilst, on the other hand, the use of dea occurs in Rabelais, and Godefroy, in his supplement, quotes the phrase ‘Dya, dya, houoih, hau dia,’ i.e. ‘Dear, dear! houoih, Oh dear!’ from a book dated 1561.

This O.F. dea, later dia, seems to be modern F. da. The O.F. disva, diva, i.e. ‘come along,’ is clearly quite a different word.

Finally, we may notice that the double form dea, dia, will suit either the old or the modern pronunciation of the English dear, so that phonetic requirements are fulfilled either way.

[Walter W. Skeat, The Modern Language Quarterly, date unknown, 1903 or 1904.]

OBITER DICTA: Bob Joyce, Sun City Center, Florida

In OBITER DICTA [XXIII,3,16] Tony Hall writes… “the square of 5.5 is not a simple piece of mental arithmetic.” But it is! The square of any number that ends in 5 (typically n5) = [n(n + 1)]25. Thus the square of 5.5 = (5.6)25, or 30.25.

OBITER DICTA: Contradiction in Terms

Allison Whitehead, Rainham, Essex

Given that the English language is the world’s principal form of communication, we can perhaps be forgiven for tripping ourselves up with it occasionally. We are particularly good at contradicting ourselves— so good, in fact, we do it daily, assuming that other people don’t beat us to it.

I can recall the time I bought some terracotta ducks containing scented candles, which I was instructed to place on a dining table during a meal, or in any room I wished. The scent would repel all biting insects in the area. When the ducks arrived, a footnote on the instructions informed me they were “for outdoor use only.”

Newspapers are extremely good at bringing people’s contradictions to a wide audience. Consider the memorable statement made by the head of a £1.5 million winning pools syndicate. They had filled in their coupon while drinking to celebrate a £20 win. When they won the pools, the leader said, “It’s great. We’ve never won anything before.” Granted, the effects of alcohol might have been responsible for that confusing statement. I have yet to find an excuse for these next examples.

I have seen plastic-lidded containers which are completely safe to use in the microwave—so long as you don’t use the lid; all manner of tablets instructing you to take two every four hours—but no more than six in any twenty-four hour period; and a notice by school bosses who were determined to improve the poor standard of spelling on the Isle of White.

So, contradictions are rife. And I am unanimous in that.

The Internet is quickly becoming a fixture—however mobile it might seem—of modern life. We have not (yet) connected with it, but the link is imminent, and we expect to be surfing along with the rest of the world in due course. In the meantime, we rely on readers to pass on tidbits as they come across items suited to what we perceive to be our readers’ interests; what follows “came via e-mail from the Internet” via our correspondent, Mr. Eduardo Rodriguez, of

WORDS NOT YET IN THE DICTIONARY

AQUADEXTROUS (ak wa dekśtrus) adj. Possessing the ability to turn the bathtub faucet on and off with your toes.

ACCORDIONATED (ah koŕde on ay tid) adj. Being able to drive and refold a road map at the same time.

AQUALEBRIUM (ak wa lib re um) n. The point where the stream of drinking fountain water is at its perfect height, thus relieving the drinker from (a) having to suck the nozzle, or (b) squirting himself in the eye.

BURGACIDE (burǵuh side) n. When a hamburger can’t take any more torture and hurls itself through the grill into the coals.

BUZZACKS (buźaks) n. People in phone marts who walk around picking up display phones and listening for dial tones even when they know the phones are not connected.

CARPERPETUATION (kaŕpur pet u a shun) n. The act, when vacuuming, of running over a string or a piece of lint at least a dozen times, reaching over and picking it up, examining it, then putting it back down to give the vacuum one more chance.

DIMP (dimp) n. A person who insults you in a cheap department store by asking, “Do you work here?”

DISCONFECT (dis kon fekt) v. To sterilize the piece of candy you dropped on the floor by blowing on it, somehow assuming this will ‘remove’ all the germs.

ECNALUBMA (ek na lubma) n. A rescue vehicle which can only be seen in the rearview mirror.

EIFFELITES (eyé ful eyetz) n. Gangly people sitting in front of you at the movies who, no matter what direction you lean in, follow suit.

ELBONICS (el boń iks) n. The actions of two people maneuvering for one armrest in a movie theater.

ELECELLERATION (el a cel er aý shun) n. The mistaken notion that the more you press an elevator button the faster it will arrive.

FRUST (frust) n. The small line of debris that refuses to be swept onto the dust pan and keeps backing a person across the room until he finally decides to give up and sweep it under the rug.

LACTOMANGULATION (lakto man gyu laýshun) n. Manhandling the “open here” spout on a milk container so badly that one has to resort to the “illegal” side.

NEONPHANCY (ne oń fan see) n. A fluorescent light bulb struggling to come to life.

PEPPEER (pehp ee aý) n. The waiter at a fancy restaurant whose sole purpose seems to be walking around asking diners if they want ground pepper.

PETONIC (peh tońik) adj. One who is embarrassed to undress in front of a household pet.

PHONESIA (fo neézhuh) n. The affliction of dialing a phone number and forgetting whom you were calling just as they answer.

PUPKUS (pup kus) n. The moist residue left on a window after a dog presses its nose to it.

TELECRASTINATION (tel e kras tin aý shun) n. The act of always letting the phone ring at least twice before you pick it up, even when you’re only six inches away.

OBITER DICTA: Future to the Back

Judith Weiss Cohen, Pawtucket

Whatever happened to the word back? I feel as if I have been transferred back to the future, or should I say “future to the back”? I look back to yesterday and ahead to tomorrow, but recently the meaning of back seems to have reversed behind my back. Back is often now used to mean ‘forward.’ Dictionaries show no such change. The adverb back still means ‘in, to, or toward a past time,’ and the adjective back is still defined as ‘of a past date; not current’; but I continually find examples of backward writing.

In an Associated Press story:

The Library of Congress put off a major exhibit on Sigmund Freud and promptly found itself on the couch…. The show was pushed back to late 1997 and possibly later.

In a Providence Journal story about a person considering a new job:

The 32-year-old father said he would do it only if he could push back the starting time until 11am instead of 9.

In one of thousands of articles about O. J. Simpson, in The New York Times Judge Ito was quoted as saying, in response to a request that the trial date be moved ahead, that

[I]t was too late to move the date back.

Reverse news from The New Yorker:

National Weather Service renewed its prediction for a 32.5 foot crest, but put it back another day, to Thursday. “It just kept coming at us like a bouncing ball.”

A backward bouncing ball?

From Larry McMurtrey’s Lonesome Dove:

He hurried to Santa Rosa, risking further damage to the wagon, only to discover that the hanging had been put back a week.

More Providence Journal back talk:

The hearing had been scheduled for Tuesday, then pushed back to Friday.

Lawmakers pushed back from Feb. 1 to Nov. 1 the effective date of a law requiring all motorists to carry liability insurance.

A possible theory for reversing the meaning of back is that the sense is ‘further [back] in the schedule,’ not ‘further back in time’; but a usage such as the following in a published television schedule for 8pm may negate this argument:

Looking for Roseanne? You’ll have to wait until 9:30. ABC pushed the program back 90 minutes.

I sent pages of examples to the editors of New Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. They replied that my evidence

…is filed for the attention of our new words editors. If they find that we have accumulated a number of examples of back in this sense in our files and on our databases then it will be considered for drafting as an established usage.

OBITER DICTA: A Calendrical Sentence

O. Abootty, Kerala, India

Many years ago I came across a meaningful sentence attributed to Rabindranath Tagore, the only Indian writer to win the Nobel Prize:

Worship God and attain a soul devoid of anger, passion, and guilt.

Memorize this sentence, because it is not only meaningful but also useful in that it will enable one to find out the day of any date except in leap years.

The sentence has twelve words. Each word is connected with each month, respectively, that is, worship for January, God for February, and for March, and so on. Here is the method to apply in finding the day of any date of any year except leap years. (Leap years are easy to identify: they are any year divisible by 4 and centuries divisible by 400: thus, 2000 will be a leap year, but 1900 was not.)

India became independent on 15 August 1947.

To find the day of the week on which that date fell, first divide 1947 by 4: the answer is 486 (with a remainder of 3, which should be ignored); add this number: 1947 + 486 = 2433. Then find the word that stands for August, the eighth month—of—and add the number of its letters: 2 + 2433 = 2435. Now add the date sought: 2435 + 15 = 2450. Divide this number by 7: 2450 ÷ 7 = 350 with 0 remainder.

Now, the days of the week are numbered 0 through 6, beginning with Friday: 0 = Friday; 1 = Saturday; 2 = Sunday; 3 = Monday; 4 = Tuesday; 5 = Wednesday; 6 = Thursday.

Ergo, India’s Independence Day, 15 August 1947, fell on a Friday.

Take another example: V-E Day, 8 May 1945:

1945 ÷ 4 = 486 (+ 1).

1945 + 486 = 2431.

May = “A” = 1 + 2431 = 2432.

2432 + 8 = 2440.

2440 ÷ 7 = 348 + 4.

4 = Tuesday.

And a final one: the day Lincoln was shot, 14 April 1865:

1865 ÷ 4 = 466 (+ 1).

1865 + 466 = 2331.

April = “attain” = 6 + 2331 = 2337.

2337 + 14 = 2351.

2351 / 7 = 335 + 6.

6 = Thursday.

OBITER DICTA: Iffy Sentences

David Galef, University of Mississippi

“I won’t be home till later tonight, says the wife to the husband in the sit-com. “If you get hungry, there’s ham in the fridge.”

I have always wanted to be the husband in that scenario so I could snap back, “Oh, really? And where’s the ham if I don’t get hungry?”

Similarly: the secretary is going to leave for vacation, and the morning of her last day at work, a coworker remarks, “If I don’t see you again before I leave, have a great trip!”

“Oh, yeah?” I make her reply. “And what kind of trip should I have if I do see you before I leave?”

I call these situations iffy sentences, whose if-then logic doesn’t quite work. Syntactically speaking, the apodosis, or consequence, is not linked to the protasis, or condition, and this causes semantic confusion. That is, the ham is in the fridge no matter what the state of the husband’s stomach, and a last possible meeting has nothing to do with the well-wisher’s kind hope. In each case, the conclusion should stand whether or not the premise is fulfilled. Of course, someone may note, “If you think about them, they do make sense.” And what if you don’t think about them? Do they recede into nonsense?

The truth is that these sentences are really just elliptical constructions. Fully expanded versions of the first two might read, albeit clunkily, “You should know, if you get hungry, that there’s ham in the fridge.” “Since I may not see you before I leave, let me wish you a great trip right now!”

Anyone who keeps an open ear can add to the list of iffy sentences. “If you don’t mind, I have to go” is another example in my growing collection, along with “If you speak to the boss, I’m sick today.” Quibbling over such syntax may seem trivial, but language is so often a dormant phenomenon that it is worth tweaking its tail on occasion. And those who are alive to such nuances often get better results from their queries. As I once heard a man asking a woman out on a date, “If you’re interested, just let me know. But let me know if you’re not interested, too.”

She suddenly looked interested.

OBITER DICTA: The Game of the Name

John E. Thorpe, Buntingford, Hertfordshire

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, I’m John Thorpe.”

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

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

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

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

OBITER DICTA: Cyberethnicity

Marvin Spevack, Münster

The language of the Internet is visual, produced on a screen and printoutable. Still, for all their delight in browsing and surfing, netizens seem to prefer chatting, personal and intimate communication. Chatting has restraints, of course, in a network of burgeoning traffic and explosive costs. If chatting is friendly and informal, it must also be brief and pungent. Derived to a large extent from pop culture comic strips, science fiction, TV—the jargon of the superhighway is larger than life, bold if not simplistic, and not without a certain intellectual mischievousness. Highlighting is a natural and favored component, as in the fondness for abbreviations, acronyms, capital letters, telescoping, emoticons, interjections, and other striking visual devices, not to mention their frequently slangy (plunk ‘I just put you in my killfile’) or vulgar (RTFM ‘Read the fucking manual’) content, as well as onomatopoeic renditions (bang common spoken name for ‘!').

Although the Internet is international, its jargon is a subspecies of American English. It is a melange, to be sure, but given the technological nature of the medium, its roots and contours are clearly definable. It is a product of the east and west coasts of the United States, its poles being MIT in Massachusetts and Berkeley in California. A detailed profile is not necessary here, but one element is of interest as a further device of highlighting: ethnicity. “In the U.S.,” The Jargon File (Version 2.9.6 of 16 August 1991) asserts (not without a certain telling naively, “hacker-dom is predominantly Caucasian with strong minorities of Jews (East Coast) and Orientals (West Coast). The Jewish contingent has exerted a particularly pervasive cultural influence (see Food, above [‘where available, high-quality Jewish delicatessen food is much esteemed’], and note that several common jargon terms are obviously mutated Yiddish.” Leaving aside such fully assimilated German words as pretzel and strudel (and the fact that new meanings have been attached to them), the “mutated” Yiddish terms represent, for one thing, the only discernible ethnic orientation in the vocabulary and are thus by their very appearance a form of highlighting. They stand out. For another thing, they are generally emotive—onomatopoeic expressions communicating dissatisfaction or disgust.

Among those listed and defined (albeit not always accurate in explanations) in The Jargon File are

bletch [from Yiddish/German brechen ‘to vomit,’ poss. via comic-strip exclamation “blech”] interj. Term of disgust. Often used in “Ugh, bletch.” (Also bletcherous Disgusting in design or function; esthetically unappealing.)

DRECNET [from Yiddish/German Dreck ‘dirt’] n. Deliberate distortion of DECNET, a networking protocol used in the {VMS} community. So called because DEC helped write the Ethernet specification and then (either stupidly or as a malignant customer-control tactic) violated that spec in the design of DRECNET in a way that made it incompatible.

foo interj. Term of disgust… Very probably, hackish foo had no single origin and derives from Yiddish feh and/or English fooey.

glitch [from German glitschen ‘to slip,’ via Yiddish glitshen ‘to slide or skid’] n. A sudden interruption in electric service, sanity, continuity, or program function.

gonk v.t., n. To prevaricate or to embellish the truth beyond any reasonable recognition. It is alleged that in German the term is (mythically) “gonken”… “You’re gonking me. That story you just told me is a bunch of gonk.” (In German, for example, “Du gonkst mir” ‘You’re pulling my leg.') And from another source,

greps Yiddish for ‘belch.’ “Some say that [Kibo] is the first deity of the Internet. Also known as ‘he who greps.’ ”

It would be going too far to suggest an anti-Semitic stance (despite the implications of not including Jews among Caucasians). Undeniable is the grossly comic intention and effect, doubtless a reflection of pop culture’s infatuation with the sputtering, guttural, goofy German (rather than Yiddish) sounds of TV’s Stalag 17. What better accompaniment to the cacophonous examples listed than blinkenlights: “n. Front-panel diagnostic lights on a computer, esp. a (dinosaur).” Derives from the last word of the famous blackletter-Gothic sign in mangled pseudo-German that once graced about half the computer rooms in the English-speaking world. One version ran in its entirety as follows:

ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!

Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen and poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cottonpickenen hens in das pockets muss; relaxer und watcher das blinkenlichten.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Cannibal Victims Speak Out!

Mat Coward, ed., David Lyttleton, illustr., (Victor Gollancz, 1995), 128pp.

Those VERBATIM readers who delight in Sic! Sic! Sic! squibs will find fulfillment in the pages of this book, which chronicles examples of unfortunate syntax and typographical errors—usually called “literals” in British English—gleaned from the pages of various (British) periodicals. Inevitably, those that seem funny to one person may be deadly to another. A few samples:

ACCOUNTING ASSISTANTS

Keen to broaden your experience? c£12,000 Chevron welcomes sex with all suitably disabled people regardless of size of bank balance.

—Evening Standard

Q. I’m fourteen and one of my boobs is smaller than the other. Does it matter?

A. Be positive. Say that one is bigger than the other.

—People

In the August 8 edition, a photo of famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal was incorrectly identified as Dr Josef Mengele. We regret the error.

—Weekly World News

Such things can often raise a chuckle from those who appreciate the incongruity of the item and those who smirk with smug superiority.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Yankee Talk: A Dictionary of New England Expressions

Robert Hendrickson, (Facts On File, 1996), xvi + 256pp.

Dialects are subject of popular interest, especially quaint ones like Pennsylvania Dutch or many dialects of the South and New England. Treatments of such dialects appropriate for the popular market cannot be technical, but neither should they be inaccurate. It is after all possible to be both informative and interesting. Yankee Talk works hard at being both, but succeeds better at the second aim than the first, giving out a passel (indefinite number) of entertainment and a gorm (gooey mess) of misinformation.

The misinformation begins in the introduction [v], where the author acknowledges among his sources “Mitford M. Mathews’ The American Dialect Dictionary and A Dictionary of Americanisms.” Only the second of those works is by Mathews; the first is by Harold Wentworth.

The work is also generous in what it considers to be New England expressions. Anything quaint found in New England is fair game, regardless of where else it may occur. For example, each tub must stand on its own bottom is said to be “an old proverb stressing New England self-reliance,” but A Dictionary of American Proverbs documents its distribution throughout the United States and Canada.

Chat gets an entry as a New England expression, with a citation from Herman Melville boasting, “By our immortal Bill of Rights, that guarantees to us liberty of speech, chat we Yankees will.” Never mind that the Oxford English Dictionary documents the word’s use since the fifteenth century or that it is familiar all over the English-speaking world.

Chock full and church supper also have entries. The first is attested in the OED from as early as 1400. The second is the sort of free combination that can and does occur anywhere. Both are standard English, neither being a specifically New England expression. Other standard English words mislisted as New England words are package store a ‘store selling alcohol by the bottle for consumption elsewhere,’ pshaw! an exclamation archaic everywhere, sheers ‘sheer curtains,’ and verandah.

Verandah is Anglo-Indian from Hindi or Bengali, which got it from Portuguese. It is apparently included here because Edith Wharton used it (at least the entry includes a quotation from her) or because some New England houses have verandahs. But on either of the same grounds, window and arch could be listed as New England expressions.

Folk etymology is favored in this dictionary. The entry for anadama bread, a New Englandism whose origin is unknown, is devoted to variants on the following tale:

Tradition has it that a Yankee farmer or fisherman, whose wife Anna was too lazy to cook for him, concocted the recipe. On tasting the result of his [sic] efforts, a neighbor asked him what he called the bread. The crusty Yankee replied, “Anna, damn her!”

There are other genuine New England expressions in this volume—and plenty of them—including dingclicker ‘humdinger,’ forth-putting ‘bold, forward,’ grouty ‘surly, sullen,’ Hampton boat a ‘dory-type of sailboat used for fishing,’ and harness cask a ‘tub used on ships for storing salted meat.’ All of these can also be found in the best dictionary of American dialects: Frederic G. Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall’s Dictionary of American Regional English, including, as it happens, the same illustrative quotations used in Yankee Talk plus some additional ones.

There are also occasional, perhaps disingenuous, puzzles. The entry for chism, for instance, which reads in full, “Heard in Maine for gravy or cream sauce.” It would be useful to give a bit more information for the guidance of the innocent and unwary: chism is a variant of the vulgar slang term jism or gism for ‘semen,’ so in the reported use is an indelicate metaphor. Readers of the dictionary should be warned that in a Bangor restaurant they ought not ask for chism with their roast beef.

The problem with this book is knowing which entries are genuine and which spurious. To make that discrimination, another more reliable work like the Dictionary of American Regional English needs to be consulted. So the user might as well go to the better source in the first place, thus confirming Dorothy Parker’s critical recommendation (slightly paraphrased): This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

[John Algeo, Wheaton, Illinois]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Wordplay, Origins, Meanings, and Usage of the English Language

Robertson Cochrane [1937-95], (University of Toronto Press, 1996), xii + 244pp.

Among life’s sadder experiences must be meeting someone late in one’s career only to have him suddenly snatched away. That is how I felt about Robertson Cochrane, whose articles on language in the (Toronto) Globe and Mail were first called to my attention several years ago. We corresponded, and I persuaded Bob to write for VERBATIM. His lively, friendly, perceptive, well-written column appeared several times under the heading he chose, VERBUM SAP. We finally met in 1995, when we had lunch together at Niagara Falls. Alas, he succumbed shortly thereafter.

Five of the articles reprinted here are from VERBATIM, and that speaks for the high esteem I have of Bob’s writing. Moreover, I provided the Foreword to Wordplay. Perhaps I may be allowed to quote from that:

It is… an unalloyed delight to see Robertson Cochrane’s cogent commentaries cap tured in book form, a less transitory medium than the periodicals in which they originally appeared….

…[W]riting well is only half the task; one must also have something to say. Owing to the vastness of the English language, it is impossible to believe that one would run out of things to say about its myriad aspects. Indeed, the scholarly journals have been overflowing with turgid prose for decades, and it is particularly refreshing to know that comment on virtually any aspect of language can still be offered in language that, glowing with respectability, cleaving to the well-turned phrase, punctuated by the provocative pun, can be so engagingly presented.

Laurence Urdang

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. It’s why I claim it might be a fanciful characteristic (12)

9. Metal mast-head used in plant (9)

10. Praises two-fold rising against the South (5)

11. Concerns a speck of dust? Far from it (6)

12. A sharp blow with a gar- den-tool leaves red skin, we’re told (8)

13. It’s such a waste to leave like this (6)

15. Diamonds best? That’s sweet (3-5)

18. Leading in the fight, one gathers (6,2)

19. Doesn’t call for advances? (6)

21. Be disarming, perhaps, in the theater? (8)

23. Way to go round on foot (6)

26. Free love in embrace of miss! (5)

27. It’s quite unpredictable when the cashier’s not present (2,7)

28. For an unusual stitch, lay bet on an old security mechanism (8,4)

Down

1. Bet one’s earnings on a single colour (7)

2. Muslim leader supports hair-style and white robes of Mecca pilgrims (5)

3. Car tested, found faulty, and broken up (9)

4. Early killer one put in jail (4)

5. Lines from tree to stack? (8)

6. Switch lit up bulb (5)

7. Hard-hearted as Naomi certainly wasn’t (8)

8. First edition faces adverse opinion (6)

14. Relief worker? (8)

16. Worker enters unfriendly town producing lace (9)

17. Document about American taste for horses (8)

18. Truly make friends again (6)

20. Chemical I acquired for the water-chestnut (7)

22. Candidates for crowning that might eventually be removed (5)

24. Circular letter liable to shock a girl (5)

25. The case of one who mends? (4)

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“After 170 years of uselessness and £100,000 of refurbishment, the Government is at last proposing to do something with Marble Arch.” [From The Times, 21 May 1996, p. 17?. Also caught (in a Letter to the Editor) by Daniel Snowman, London.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“PUCCINI: Tosca (Filmed in the locale & time periods specified in the libretto)…” [From Atlantic Classics-Complete Catalog 1995, p. 197. Submitted by Reifler, Clinton Corners, New York.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“A scene just before the intermission, when the family is sitting down for the Jewish satyr, does drag on a bit, but otherwise, the pace of the humor is right on.” [From a review of Beau Jest in The Daily World, 10 May 1996. Submitted by Eugenie Fox, Aberdeen, Washington.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Sixteen searchers, a search dog and a helicopter were being used to search today, but rain and six to 10 inches of new snot, with a total accumulation of two to three feet at those elevations, are hampering operations.” [From The Daily World, 18 April 1996. Submitted by Eugenie Fox, Aberdeen, Washington.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Boas was puzzled by a Japanese paper that kept referring to ‘stricken mass distributions.’ Unable to figure out what this meant, he wrote to the journalist’s editor. It turned out that a referee’s report had told the author, ‘The term “generalized mass distribution” is no longer used. The word “generalized” should be stricken.’ ” [From American Scientist, March-April 1996, p. 192. Submitted by Judith Weiss Cohen, Pawtucket, Rhode Island.]

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