VOL XXIII, No 3 [Winter, 1997]

By Their Notes Ye Shall Know Them: A Look at Onomatopoeic Ornithonymy

Adrian Room, Stamford, Lincolnshire

According to the great Danish linguist, Otto Jespersen, there are five theories to account for the origin of language: the “bow-wow” theory, in which speech imitated animal calls; the “pooh-pooh” theory, in which people made instinctive sounds through physical or emotional reactions; the “dingdong” theory, in which people reacted to the environment; the “yo-he-ho” theory, in which people spoke when working together; and the “la-la” theory, in which speech arose from the romantic side of life.

If bird names are anything to go by, the “bowwow” theory (perhaps we should call it the “tweet-tweet” theory) rules the roost, since many birds are named for their songs or calls. This even holds for the generic cock, hen, and chick. The farmyard cock is so called for its clucks, as illustrated by Chaucer in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” in which Chanticleer “cryde anon, ‘cok, cok.”’ The cockerel’s cock-a-doodle-doo” is an extension of this, as a cock’s crow. The hen is so called for her “singing,” with a name related to Latin canere ‘to sing,’ and so to English chant. (Chanticleer, though male, has a name meaning ‘one who sings clearly.') The chicken has a name related to that of the cock, with its changed vowel representing its less powerful cry. The chick, as a young bird, is named from it.

Outside the farmyard, but still (usually) within farmland territory, the crow and rook are both named for their harsh call or caw, and though less common, the chough and the raven are similarly named. The chough’s cry has been described¹ as kyaw, and the raven’s as prruk (suggesting the name of the physically related rook). The corncrake’s cry has been verbalized as crex, which adequately represents the crake that is the basic form of the name.

Elsewhere afield, the curlew, with its cry of courli, is obviously named, as is the cuckoo, whose name is similar in many languages (French coucou, German Kuckuck, Greek kokkux, Latin cuculus). The first part of its name is in fact directly related to that of the cock, as the initial cuck- of its call corresponds to the farmyard bird’s cluck.

The jackdaw also belongs to the crow family (Corvidae), and daw represents its chak. (It does it better in Italian than English, where the bird is a taccola, from earlier tacca.) The first part of its name is

the personal name Jack. The sparrow does not itself have an imitative name, although it was formerly nicknamed Philip, for its rapid twittering and chirping notes. Hence John Skelton’s early 16th-century poem Phyllyp Sparowe, a lament by a young lady for her pet sparrow killed by a cat, with the affecting lines: “Nothynge it auayled/To call Phylyp agayne,/Whom Gyb our cat hath slayne.”

Another bird with an imitative name prefixed by a personal name is the magpie. Here pie is related to Latin pipere ‘to chirp.’ There are other birds with pi- or its equivalent in their names similarly, such as the peewit, pipit, and even the pigeon. True, pigeons coo, but the bird derives its name from the onomatopoeic base pip- that imitates the chirp of a young bird (and that also gave English pipe). Hence also the more obvious name of the sandpiper, a bird that pipes (or peeps) on the sands.

We are now by the seaside, where the gull has a name representing its repeated kyow, kyow. The seagull is also known as the mew, likewise an imitative name. Another aquatic bird is the goose, whose name represents its distinctive “honk.” The male of the species, the gander, has a directly related name, as does the gannet. Its cry is described as a barking arrah. Still with the water birds, the heron is named for its harsh cry rrank; the name itself is related to that of the hen. The bittern is a further wading bird; its cry is usually described as a “boom,” and the first part of its name, from Latin butio, represents this. Yet another water dweller is the garganey, a kind of duck. Its name represents its distinctive quacking.

On dry land, the finch is named for its prolonged nasal tswe-e-e, mostly clearly heard in the greenfinch. The siskin is in the same family and has a similar name—and indeed a similar call. A harsher note is sounded by the shrike, whose name is related to screech and shriek. The quail is so called not because it is timid but because the call of the female is a double note queep, queep. The quail is a gamebird, as is the partridge. Its own name is equally imitative, not of its voice but of the sharp whirring sound made by its wings when it suddenly flies up. This sounds like a fart, a related word. (Compare Greek perdix ‘partridge.’ and perdesthai ‘to break wind.') Quite a different sound is made by the owl, whose name represents its familiar hoot, otherwise the final, longer note of its conventional call tu-whit tu-whoo. English howl is a related word. French hibou also imitates the bird’s call, as does its German name Eule, a diminutive form of Uhu, ‘eagle owl.’

Even the little wren has an echoic name, as much more obviously does the chiffchaff, although its chiffs and chaffs are usually repeated in irregular order, such as chiff, chiff, chiff, chaff, chiff, chaff. A rarer bird, but also with an obviously onomatopoeic name, is the hoopoe. Its far-carrying poo-poo-poo is also represened in its Latin name, Upupa epops. Its name evokes the equally exotic bobolink, bulbul and whippoorwill, with their clearly echoic names. The last bird is an American nightjar, where jar is also an imitative word, referring to its loud churring cry. (Churr and jar are related words.) The nightingale does not have a directly imitative name, although the final-gale is related to yell, which is undoubtedly echoic.

It is tempting to relate the yellowhammer’s name to yammer (German jammern), referring to its fussy call, a rapid chi-chi-chi-chi-chi… chweee, traditionally rendered “little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese.” But the origin of the name is disputed. (The first part of the name indicates the colour of the bird’s head and underparts.)

Finally in this bouquet of bird names, let us savour the rail, whose repeated gep, gep, gep and groaning and grunting notes suggest a death rattle, a related word. They order things more neatly in France here, for râle is both the name of the bird and the word for this agonized and agonizing sound.

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SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Ex-woman student to get a $125,000 settlement.” [From the Seattle Post Intelligencer, 26 July 1991. Submitted by Harold J. Ellner, M.D., Richland, Washington.]

EX CATHEDRA: Vale!

The time has come, as it does to all entities, animate and inanimate, to say goodby. This issue, Volume XXIII, Number 3 [Winter 1997], will be the last published and edited under our aegis.

It has, as they say, been a good run. There have been ups (like the time when we had a mailing service that kept adding new and renewing subscribers’ names and addresses without removing the old ones, leading us not only into a state of euphoria contemplating our 20,000 paid subscribers but, at the same time, into near bankruptcy paying the attendent increased printing and postage costs without the expected revenues); and, of course, there have been downs (like falling behind so far in the publishing schedule that we changed the dates of the issues from “May, September, December, March” to Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring (as in Of Thee I Sing!), and the dismay and disappointment at the down-marketing of The New Yorker, once a stalwart—if expensive—source of new subscribers, now—still expensive—catering to the pretentious philistine market).

Present subscribers might be surprised to learn that the initial rate for a year’s subscription was $2.50 and that copies were sent out via first-class mail. It must be said, though, that those first issues ran to six and eight pages compared with the current twenty-four (or, sometimes, more). Being rather indolent in money matters, we have never been aggressive in pursuing advertisers; but the frequent return and regular orders from some advertisers reflected some satisfaction with the results sought.

One of our proudest moments came when, upon first loading into our computer the CD-ROM of the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, we discovered that it contains 121 quotations from VERBATIM. We were pleased, too, when, several years ago, we were able to pay contributors, a rare occurrence in the loftier realms of noncommercial publishing. Also, many periodicals, from Reader’s Digest to journals of lesser circulation, have reprinted articles from VERBATIM.

With the rarest exceptions, those who wrote to us seeking information, offering comment or criticism— and there have been many, from everywhere in the world—treated us with kindness and respect, even when they caught us in the most embarrassing errors. We have enjoyed chatting with those who have telephoned, and we have—without fail, we think—sent written replies to all who have written (with the exception of those who sent publishable EPISTOLAE). Lately, we have been remiss only in writing discouraging letters to job applicants, because virtually all have written merely to a name and address found in a list of book or periodical publishers.

Our book publishing activities have not shaken the earth beneath our or anyone else’s feet: our bestseller by far has been the two-volume Grammar of the English Language, by George O. Curme (seven printings), with Richard Lederer’s Colonial American English a close second (two printings). Other books, which I still believe to be good (Word for Word, by Edward C. Pinkerton), amusing (Wordsmanship, by Claurène duGran, a thinly disguised anagram of Laurence Urdang), and useful (Verbatim Volumes I-VI and the Index thereto, altogether four books), have not fared so well: indeed, a substantial portion of the stock at our warehouse in Pennsylvania consists of Word for Word and the Verbatim volumes. Another Great Disaster (though it will probably go unnoticed on any television series of that name) has been our offering of VERBATIM binders: one must assume that the back issues have ended up, along with the Sears Roebuck catalogue, hanging from a nail in the privy.

We found the number of people who knew—or know—about VERBATIM to be astonishing: in Europe, among “ordinary” people interested in language, among linguists, among scholars in general, most knew of it; alas, they didn’t subscribe.

We, personally, shall miss the correspondence with contributors, commentators, critics, and friends; and we shall miss the “silent majority,” those of you who quietly continued to renew your subscriptions, year after year, occasionally dropping a line with a complimentary remark.

If we owned a green eyeshade, quill pen, and cuff-protectors, we could tell you, with some sentiment, that we are hanging them up. We do not, and you may be assured that if there is any reason to write to us, we shall be about (either in Aylesbury or Old Lyme), hence reasonably accessible to answer your questions.

—The Editor

Muddled Meaning

Mary M. Tius, Portland, Maine

Confusion results not only from using the wrong word, but also from “Sinful Syntax.” In the sentence, She loves music better than me, the syntax gives the meaning ‘She loves music better than she loves me’; but a majority of listeners and readers, infected by Sinful Syntax, will today understand the sentence as ‘She loves music better than I love it’ or ‘…better than I do.’ If that is really what was meant, then the sentence should have been, She loves music better than I. “Elementary!” one would have said only a few decades ago; but Sinful Syntax is now pandemic and contaminates even some of the most careful speakers. For example, former US Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and Maine Governor Angus King, both of whom have said on more than one occasion between you and I, for you and I, like you and I. Other examples are:

The two members of Congress argue in the media over whom is more obsessed with sex

[Subheading of a Portland Press Herald article.]

Who’s more to blame? Them? Or us?

[Maine NBC News “anchor” Cindy Williams, 21 May 1996.)

He is that rarest of travel writers, one whom his readers feel is completely trustworthy.

[From a review by John David Morley of The World, The World, by Norman Lewis, Cape, 1996, in The Times Literary Supplement, 26 July 1996, p.7.] Not even The New York Times, our “journal of record,” is immune. The caption beneath a photograph in the Metro Section, 1 February 1995, was

Ivy Pearson, 12, left, reflecting on the everyday hardships that pupils like she and Lakesha Perry face in Brownsville, Brooklyn.

Sometimes it is not the case that is wrong but the pronoun itself: the organization who; the people which. Even possessive pronouns present difficulty for some. My wife and I’s constant fear was… “said a man interviewed by Maine NBC News “Health Beat” reporter Diane Atwood, 22 December 1994; and, in David Plante’s novel, The Family, hers and her husbands bedroom appeared several times. So many “educated” people misuse pronouns that others, uncertain of what is correct, try to avoid one error by committing another. This, at any rate, would explain the increasingly common “for John and myself” and “John and myself are.”

One of the most basic rules of grammar, that decreeing agreement in number of indefinite article or demonstrative pronoun with the noun modified, is, apparently, no longer seen as binding. Maine CBS News reporter Thom Halleck said, 21 May 1996, “…a potentially-fatal tumors”; and Los Angles NBC News reporter David Bloom, 3 June 1996, and on later occasions, has spoken of “a balanced-budget amendments.” Far more common are errors like the following:

These sort of habitat…

[Zoologist Dr. Merlin Tuttle, founder of

Bat Conservation International,

speaking on NPR “All Things

Considered,” 8 April 1995.]

…those kind of redeeming aspects…

[Roger Courts, a direct-mail fund-raiser

for the Sacred Heart League, quoted

in an article about a film, The Spitfire

Grill, in the Portland Press Herald,

24 August 1996, p.2.]

Breaches of that other basic rule decreeing agreement in number between subject and verb are at least as common as the foregoing errors:

Everyone have assured that…

[Boston NBC News reporter

Tewa Che, 30 December 1994.]

If there are such a thing…

[Peter Walsh, Commissioner of Maine’s

Department of Human Services, speaking on

Maine NBC News, 19 December 1994.]

The best device [for detecting bombs] are dogs.

[FBI Officer Fox, speaking on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, 13 December 1994.]

More generally, there are a variety of pleasures…

[From a review by George Stade of Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s A Crooked Man, in The New York Times, 21 February 1995.]

If meaning is to emerge without ambiguity from a language like English, largely uninflected and having many homonyms and homophones, writers must be able to recognize not just the Parts of Speech but also those peripatetic words that wander from one category to another. All your work is undone. Does that mean ‘no work was done’ or ‘the work done was destroyed’? In the Maine Sunday Telegram, 30 December 1992, an article about hibernating bears contained this sentence: “I have seen some bears double their size.” Is double verb or adjective? Treating adjectives as if they were nouns is a form of abuse which has become common. In “Painting for Posterity,” an article by Amy Sutherland in the Maine Sunday Telegram, Section E, 1 September 1996, there was this: “[in a portrait] Too broad of a smile could look maniacal, or like a smirk.”

Even when syntax is not “sinful,” meaning may be muddled. James Gleick in his 1992 biography, Genius, the Life and Science of Richard Feynman, quoted the Harvard philosopher, W.V. Quine: “I think that for scientific purposes the best we can do is give up the notion of knowledge as a bad job…” Did he mean ‘give up as a bad [useless, vain] job the notion of knowledge [of the ability to know anything with precision]’ or did he mean ‘give up thinking that knowledge is a bad [impossible] job? In light of the context, the first interpretation seemed more suitable to this reader.

On page 60 of Harper’s, December 1995, Kathryn Harrison, in “What Remains,” wrote: “Because most of us fear suffering so intensely…” Did she mean ‘fear so intensely [all] suffering’ or ‘fear such intense suffering’? In the comic strip Prince Valiant, whose captions are consistently well written (and no wonder: their author is John Cullen Murphy), there was in the 5 May 1996 sequence: “Cormac’s arrival was watched… by the island’s most populous inhabitants.” Perhaps the original was “most of the populous island’s inhabitants” and was deformed through some editorial glitch—but even Homer, it is said, sometimes nodded.

Stress may alter meaning in ways unforeseen by a writer. On page 72 of The New Yorker, 2 August 1993, there was this: “I think it’s what they used to call the dog.” Was it something for calling the dog or the dog’s name? On page 42 of the same issue is the ambiguous “He disliked boring people.” Advertisers often exploit the possibility of a double meaning or of a pun which shifting stress can provide: “A growing problem”; “Drink in the sun!”; “The company you keep.”

Other ambiguities occur when vernacular expressions begin to invade “High English.” A Maine NBC News reporter, Jennifer Rooks, 31 January 1995, said, “[School] officials say they have no problem with drugs in Freeport [Maine] schools.” Because of the faddish (and odious) “No problem!,” such a sentence will soon mean—even now will be understood by many to mean—that school officials do not disapprove of drug use among students.

And what of that little word, too? “I cannot speak too highly of him.” “It cannot be too long.” “He’s not too fond of his students, is he?” Abbott and Costello could have wrung a good many laughs from such sentences, as well as from one in an accident report: “There was no one to help.” At first, the meaning seemed to be ‘no one to give help’; but, as the report continued and we learned that the victim had walked away, the meaning changed to ‘no one to be helped.’

Meaning can be muddled in many ways. Sense is slippery. It easily escapes the nets flung out by words, even when they are straitened by rules of syntax and by logic. When the possibilities for misunderstanding seem nearly as infinite as words themselves, what a wondrous thing it is when words and their users’ intentions coincide.

Salty Sayings from Cornwall

Bel Bailey, Stevenage, Hertfordshire

The Cornish way with words tends to be as salty as their native pilchards. Many old sayings are concerned with “cutting people down to size” and shrewd thrusts are meant to find their mark!

The slow-witted are often described as, “Like Tregony band—three scats [‘beats’] behind,” or as “too slow to carry a cold dennar [‘dinner’].” Stronger still is the old gibe, “Put in weth the bread and took out weth the cakes,” often muttered behind the deficient one’s back. Any sign of putting on airs or assertiveness is frowned upon, and one still hears crude jokes like, “Quietness is the best noise as Uncle Johnny said when he knocked down his wife,” or “Dressed to death like Sally Hatch.” Mournful looks were crisply dismissed in Old Cornwall as “looking like a dying duck in a thunderstorm.” Greed, too, was discouraged with a terse reminder, “You don’t need that any more than a toad needs side pockets.”

The famous Cornish pasties provide the saying, “As long as Jan Bedella’s fiddle” if a new young cook makes a misshapen pasty. For the Cornish tend to be rather a critical race owing to their struggle to make ends meet in a county which has long known economic hardship. A hard-pressed life naturally tends to blunt speech.

Of a bandy-legged individual you will hear, “He couldn’t stop a pig in a passage!” and of lank hair, “like a yard of pump water.” Even a contented person is often heard to say, “Ah’m happy on me own dung heap,” with typical Cornish self-mockery. Ask an older inhabitant for his or her age and you may well get the familiar reply, “As old as my little finger and a bit older than my teeth.” In a strong-minded county like Cornwall an individual may be admired as being “as tough as Hancock’s mother”—an archetypal dragon lady rooted in local history.

Being a Celtic nation, the Cornish cleave naturally to vivid descriptions. Any sign of restlessness, for instance, is summed up as, “All of a motion like a Mulfra toad on a red hot shovel,” and when shivering, it is a case of “cold as a quilkin [‘frog’] or “chilled to the marra [‘marrow’].” Although pushiness is not a quality naturally approved of in Cornwall, neither is undue modesty: “standing in his own light like the Mayor of Market Jew” (another apocryphal figure). Pride is rebuked as, “Fancies she was brought up in Court, pigs one end and she t’other!” Laziness is tartly described as, “like Ludlow’s dog, leaning agen the wall to bark.” As for the maker of weak tea, more strong words are forthcoming: “Water bewitched and tea begrudged.”

More encouraging are the old Cornish sayings, “Turn the best side to London” ‘Show off the best side of anything’ and “Cheer up you’ll live till you die!” More rough good humour comes out in the oft heard, “You’ll do it bit by bit as the cat said when she swallowed the hatchet” ‘…I’ll manage but it’s a tight fit.’

Dark explanations may be given for misfortune in Cornwall such as, “He bin awverlooked [‘ill wished’].” Still, bracing remarks in plenty urge folk to get on with things. After all, concentrate on the basics, “carry a knife, a piece of string and some money; then you can cut, tie and buy. Count your blessings, however meagre, as, “a toad is a diamond in a duck’s eye.”

The idea that someone has been in a situation very like your own, long before you, is very prevalent in these old Cornish sayings. Often this has a warning note, “like Lady Fan Todd dressed to death and killed with fashion” is one, so is the curious “Children’s tongues will cut your throat with a bar of soap or hang you with a yard of cotton.” Just as strange is the gluttony warning, “like Tommy Dumplens after guldize supper, carry me home and don’t bend me, for I’m feeling rather possed up.” Vanity in young girls is checked by, “Nobody will stop their horse galloping to look at you.”

Throughout all these sayings, a downright judgmental tone can be heard, summed up in the old Cornish last word, “Theer tes [‘it is’] an' caan’t be no tesser!” No arguing with that.

ANTIPODEAN ENGLISH: Settlement by Sea

Bill Ramson, NSW, Clovelly, NSW

Astride Port Jackson, the city of Sydney marks the site of the first European settlement in Australia. From Sydney a second convict settlement was established at Hobart, in Tasmania. To the north, on Moreton Bay in Queensland, Brisbane was founded; to the south, on Port Phillip Bay in Victoria, Melbourne. Westward round the southern coast, Adelaide was first approached from the sea as was, at the western extreme, Perth. In time, overland routes between these cities (Hobart, of course, excluded) were found but, for much of the 19th century, what are now the capital cities of the six Australian States were most easily reached by sea.

In each of these the linguistic situation obtaining in Sydney was replicated. The settlers quickly discovered that knowledge of Dharuk (the Aboriginal language spoken in Sydney) was of no help to them in communicating with the local Aborigines—unless the Aborigines had learned words from the settlers in the belief that they were English, as indeed happened with some pidgin terms and, in the west, with boomerang. In each new settlement, therefore, borrowing began anew. So, in Brisbane, dialects of Yagara were the first encountered, and the source of some sixteen loan words. In Melbourne, the Victorian languages, Wuywurung (spoken in three dialects on the site of Melbourne and to the north and west) and Wathawurung (spoken on the western side of Port Phillip Bay) were the first source of borrowings, though the surviving words number no more than sixteen. The language spoken on the site of Adelaide, Gaurna, though unusually well recorded—by Lutheran missionaries who were amongst the early settlers—again yielded only about ten loans. The extremes are provided by the nameless Tasmanian languages, which gave no more than three words to English, and Nyungar, the language spoken over quite a large area in the southwest of Western Australia but essentially the language of the site of Perth, which has enriched English with more than fifty loanwords. The ignorance surrounding the Tasmanian languages betrays the fact that the relationships between convicts and later settlers and the Tasmanian Aborigines were of a hostility unreached elsewhere; the continuing fertility of Nyungar by contrast results from a much happier and more accommodating relationship.

One has to assume that the words which had a Sydney-based currency in English were known to most colonists because they had been encountered either in Sydney or in accounts of Sydney. Nonetheless, there is a sense in which each new settlement meant a new start, and consequently a duplication in the nomenclature of key items. Gunyah, the Dharuk word for ‘dwelling,’ is matched by the Melburnian quamby, a verb meaning ‘lie down,’ ‘camp,’ and also a noun meaning ‘shelter,’ by the Brisbane humpy, the Adelaide wurley, and the Perth mia mia. Of these, hump is now the most commonly used, in the general sense of a hut or temporary dwelling, whether of Aboriginal or European provenance. And mia mia has been widely used in Victoria in this sense and, in New Zealand, of a duck-shooter’s hide. But the fact remains that, despite this diversity, the English word hut enjoyed a greater currency than any of the borrowings, being the usual word for the accommodation of the convict, the rural labourer, and the itinerant bushman.

Australian pidgin acquired a second negative, borak, used as an alternative to baal or in a figurative sense for ‘humbug, nonsense, or rubbish,’ from Wathawurung, whence came also an exclamation merrygig ‘well done’ and coolie, a derogatory term for a person who partnered an Aboriginal woman. It is ironic that lubra, a word for a black woman—usually a younger woman than is connoted by the Dharuk gin—was one of the few survivals of the Tasmanian languages, in which it has been suggested that it meant ‘penis.’ From Yagara come bung ‘broken, dead,’ yacka, both as a noun and a verb meaning ‘work,’ and yohi, an affirmative, all originally in pidgin.

Other loanwords repeat the Sydney pattern, striking or otherwise significant flora, fauna, and weapons being named: so there is the Tasmanian boobialla, a fruit-bearing Acacia, the Melburnian bullan bullan, a beautiful bird with a lyre-shaped tail, the Brisbane yungan ‘gong,’ the Adelaide pinkie, a bilby or bandicoot, and the Perth quokka, a species of wallaby. And there are local names for weapons, like weet-weet, a Victorian missile used both as a weapon and as a toy, -wirra, a South Australian club, and kylie, a West Australian boomerang.

Each new settlement meant a new beginning but so limited was the relationship between settlers and Aborigines that there was little progress beyond the Port Jackson model. Not until travel by land supplemented and eventually replaced that by sea did incremental borrowing became at least a possibility, just as the passage of time meant that there was a likelihood that a language would be more fully and more competently recorded.

The Case of Nyungar

Bill Ramson, Clovelly, NSW

Exploration and settlement overland followed travel by sea. In particular, once the mountain barrier had been overcome, the settlers from the Sydney area moved inland and to the north. Thus the languages of the New South Wales inland—Wiradhuri and Kamilaroi and its dialect Yuwaalaraay—formed part of a borrowing continuum which began with Dharuk and which incorporated the Australian pidgin which David Collins, an officer of the First Fleet, had described as a “barbarous mixture of English with the Port Jackson dialect.” Words like gammon and piccaninny, from English slang and African pidgin respectively, joined a range of Port Jackson words to form a pidgin in which limited communication was possible. This was added to as it travelled north and west by words like yabber ‘talk,’ based on the root ya-, found in Wiradhuri and other languages), the Yagara (Brisbane) words bung ‘dead,’ humpy ‘dwelling,’ and yacka ‘work’ (as noun and verb), and, particularly, by names for flora and fauna the travellers now recognized as being commonly found in the inland. So Wiradhuri words like corella and gang-gang, names for cockatoos, kookaburra, a kingfisher, boggi, a lizard, belah, a Casuarina, billabong ‘anabranch,’ gilgai ‘waterhole,’ and bondi, a club, became parts of everyday Australian English, as did the Kamilaroi words brolga, a crane, budgerigar, a small parrot, coolamon ‘wooden vessel or basin,’ gundy, yet another word for ‘hut,’ and towri ‘country,’ the traditional territory of an Aboriginal people, the Yuwaalaraay words galah, a parrot, and gidgee, an acacia, and words common to Kamilaroi and Yuwaalaraay like the names of other species of acacia such as boree and mulga. When a would-be poet writes the lines,

Where the tangled “boree” blossoms,

Where the “gidya” thickets wave,

And the tall yapunyah’s shadow

Rests upon the stockman’s grave

he has, in a sense, guaranteed the currency of the words he uses.

Much the same sort of continuum exists in the west, where Nyungar, which had a number of advantages over Dharuk, has provided for more than 150 years a source of loan words. First, the settlement in the west took place some forty years after that in the east, and the settlers had a better idea of what they were handling. Second, though the language is no longer spoken, it was more fully and more intelligently recorded than those first encountered. And, third, as a matter of governmental policy, Aboriginal names for flora and fauna have been preferred. So, for instance, the names of the farmed freshwater crayfish, koonac, and marron, have only short histories of usage in English, coincident with their utility, though they were first recorded in the 19th century. And there are substantial lists of the names of trees—jarrah, karri, mallett, marri, tuart, and wandoo—and of animals—chuditch, dalgite, dunnart, kumarl, nool-benger, and numbat—that are familiar at least in the west.

There are also words representative of other areas of Aboriginal life, such as boylya ‘cleverman’ or ‘wise elder,’ gnamma ‘waterhole,’ kylie ‘boomerang,’ miamia ‘dwelling,’ monaych, originally the name of a cockatoo and by transference ‘a police officer,’ nyoongar ‘Aboriginal person,’ wagyl, the mythical rainbow serpent, wilgie, a red ochre used to paint the body on ceremonial occasions, and wongi, a word for an Aboriginal person, originally used around Kalgoorlie.

But, though the Nyungar words supply a more comprehensive picture of Aboriginal life than do the Dharuk or those from any single inland language, the greater number of words used to denote key notions of Aboriginal belief and life are special uses of English words like ‘cleverman,’ which has replaced words like the Dharuk koradji and the Nyoongar boylya, which are effectively obsolete. So the Aboriginal equivalent of the Creation is Dreamtime, itself a translation of alcheringa (an Aranda word), bark hut is preferred to gunyah or humpy, country to the Kamilaroi towri, and walkabout to the Nyungar pink-eye. And bark paintings are known in the terms in which they are characterized by the European eye, as dot or X-ray paintings. The language of the invaders is the language of choice, except in the artificially maintained case of the nomenclature of flora and fauna.

In other words, although the opportunity was there for borrowing on a larger scale and with a degree of comprehensiveness that had not been achieved hitherto, it has not been taken. In the west, as elsewhere in Australia, the lexicographical evidence of a developing understanding of the indigenous peoples of Australia is slight indeed.

OBITER DICTA: Proliferating Plurals (and Some Singular Substitutions)

Mary M. Tius Portland, Maine

It seems that reporters and other writers and speakers have invented a new rule: Whenever possible, use plurals. Thus television, radio, and newspaper reporters tell us:

Aids and assistances were given by the Red Cross.

The conditions of the bombing victims are unknown.

An oil spill has impacted [i.e., affected] many fishing crafts.

Damages to the bridge from the collision were slight.

It was a meeting of Republican Party faithfuls.

The futures of American children are in doubt.

Toxic substances in their drinking water have caused harms.

A passing motorist gave much-needed helps after the accident.

The intelligences of the two groups are the same.

I am writing in regards to…

A $20 savings over the regular price… [A retiring football coach] always worried about the academic standings of his athletes.

Fog will lower visibilities today.

At the same time, perhaps from an unconscious discomfort caused by so many perplexing plurals, there has been a mini-trend in the opposite direction. One form has been the de facto singularization of some commonly used words of foreign origin: L bacterium, datum, medium, stratum; It graffito; LL (fr Gk) phenomenon; Gk criterion. Though all are currently being used almost exclusively in plural form, they are treated as if they were singular, e.g., “a bacteria”, etc. The more usual form of singularizing appears when we are told that someone is no longer in the “good grace” of someone else; the ground for divorce was…; the supervisor or custodian (i.e., janitor] of a school building was also responsible for the “upkeep of its ground”; and one reporter, evidently mightily disturbed by the prevalent “pluralism,” even tried to make a singular noun still more so by lopping off its final s: a specie of mammal (which one might think is right on the money). Though the singular insanity is far outstripped by the multiple mania, one can expect, in this age of downsizing, to encounter more of the less and less of the more.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: What’s In a Name?

Paul Dickson, (Merriam-Webster, 1996), 270pp.

This slightly enlarged version of Paul Dickson’s Names, published by Delacorte Press in 1986, is a light-hearted collection of names that the author considers to be interesting for one reason or another. We are invited to share his delight in Embraceable Zoo (for a store selling toys), Onan (Dorothy Parker’s pet canary who “spilled his seed”), Robot Redford (a robot which once gave a commencement address), and many similar examples. For most of us, these are typical tit-bits that raise a passing smile when we come across them as column-fillers in our newspapers. To “irrespressible name-collectors” like Paul Dickson they bring the thrill of a new “find” that anyone who has ever collected anything will understand. I have known a few name-collectors in my time, and they are an enthusiastic bunch. I remember George Hubbard showing me the filing cabinets in his New York apartment, crammed with lists of personal names like Mollie Panter-Downes and Romeo Yench. I also recall with affection the late John Leaver, who cycled around the English countryside as a boy collecting pub-names. He was still collecting them in his seventies.

John Leaver is not mentioned in this book, which is very thin on British material. Mr. Dickson says, for instance, that he has long had a special “passion” for apple names, and quotes several hundred of them, but he ignores the National Apple Register of the United Kingdom, by uriel W.G. Smith, which catalogues the names of 22,000 cultivars. (Miss Smith once amused herself by working 365 apple names into a story, which began:

Mrs Toogood, whose daughter Alice was a Little Beauty, but rather a Coquette, despaired of ever seeing a Golden/Ring on the Lady’s Finger…)

We need not cavil, of course, at the absence of such obvious reference sources; in a work like this the author has the right to favour serendipity over methodical research.

Whether he has the right to be needlessly careless in his statements is perhaps another matter. As a typical example, we read that the word derrick, derived from the surname of a famous hangman, was “in use for centuries as a name for the gallows.” A glance at the citations in the OED or at Partridge’s article in Name Into Word, which Dickson cites in his bibliography, would have made it clear that this usage did not extend beyond the 17th century. It is also news to me that I once wrote a book called First Names, mentioned on page 138. Mr. Dickson’s definition of name is itself rather unsatisfactory. Why are we suddenly treated on page 16 to an incomplete list of -ine words (bovine, feline, lupine, etc.)? What are the German nouns Wettfahrt and Fahrtwind (printed without their capital letters) doing here? The latter may interest those who make a special study of flatulence (“perdologists”?), if such people exist, but these are not names.

There is no need to include non-names in a book of this kind when we are surrounded by thousands of minor nomenclatures. The paper on which these words are printed, for instance, as well as the typeface and even the ink, have names. Almost any generic noun can be broken down into named subdivisions. To a knowledgeable pogonologist, a beard is a Bodkin, Cathedral, Ducktail, Goatee, Lavatory Brush, Imperial, Pique-devant, Spade, Stiletto or Vandyke, to name but a few. At least two hundred types of hat have more specific names. If Mr. Dickson wished to remain thoroughly American, he could still find interesting names on his doorstep. Let me recommend the names of ten-pin bowling teams, which often pun on strike, split, or pin. (The over-fifties team for which I play is the Hot Irons: we “strike while the iron’s hot” and also play golf.)

Merriam-Webster say that this book forms part of their “lighter side of language” series. I hope that they will at some stage do justice to the more scholarly work that has been done, especially on place names and personal names. Names and naming rightly attract the attention of philologists, sociologists, psychologists, literary critics, and others. Huge sums of money are spent on finding suitable brand names. Paul Dickson has every right to approach names in a light-hearted way, but Juliet’s question, “What’s in a name?” can be answered in many more intellectually satisfying ways than this.

[Thames Ditton, Surrey]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Chasing the Sun: Dictionary-makers and the Dictionaries They Made

Jonathon Green, (Jonathan Cape, 1996), 423pp.

Jonathon Green has deservedly acquired the mantle of Eric Partridge as the foremost authority on British slang. His books are many; listed on the back flap of the dustjacket of this book are the Macmillan Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, The Slang Thesaurus, Neologisms: New Words Since 1960, Slang Down the Ages: The Historical Development of Slang, and The Dictionary of Jargon.

The present work is a departure for him, for most of his earlier works have been reference books. I have heard some of Green’s broadcasts and interviews, and he comes off quite well, for he is smooth and glib, just what is needed for radio. That style translated into book form, however, makes this book seem greatly overwritten. Its main fault lies in the reliance on extensive quotations from the works described, the sort of thing one expects to be paraphrased by a historian, with the original matter buried in footnotes. Mercifully, there are few such notes, and they come at the end of the book where they can be ignored. The problem with the quotations is that they are often quite long and neither interesting nor revealing, often serving to support a point made by the author, whom I would be happy to believe on his own recognizance. Still, there are a number of errors which ought to be corrected for any subsequent edition or printing.²

Green’s account of the early history of dictionary-making is very useful and interesting, for it gathers together information about the personal lives (and qualifications—or lack thereof) of the famous lexicographers. One might quarrel with an occasional comment (like, “[The Techne] might be said to have become the basis of every Greek textbook that schoolboys, in England and elsewhere, would face until the year 1000,” which must have encompassed a relatively small number), but such are few and far between in the earlier chapters of the book. It is not till we arrive at the final chapter, The Modern World, that serious inadequacies rear their ugly heads.

Green writes:

[Lexicographers] have retained their priestly role, especially in America, and especially in the world of what America terms ‘college’ and Britain ‘concise’ dictionaries,…

[p. 359]

The simple facts are that American “college” (or “desk”) dictionaries today contain about 170,000 entries (about half that number of headwords), up from the ±130,000 they had till the 1960s); British “concise” dictionaries contain far fewer than that: the Concise Oxford, the best-selling dictionary in the UK, contains about 120,000 entries (probably not more than about 60,000 headwords), which is equivalent to what are classed as “concise” dictionaries in America. As far as I am aware, what are called “college” or “desk” dictionaries in America have no special label in Britain, though several, notably the Collins Dictionary, are of comparable extent.

Green is correct in writing that the (“unabridged” Funk & Wagnalls) Standard Dictionary of the English Language (1893) gives two pronunciations for each entry, but he is mistaken in reporting that one represents “the popular pronunciation, the other showing the precise one” [p.364]: there are two pronunciations because one employs a more popular, presumably understandable pronunciation key (called, in the phonetics trade, a “broad transcription”) while the other cleaves to a scholarly transcription (called a “narrow transcription”); if such a pattern were followed today, the first would be the simplified system used generally in most dictionaries and the second would employ the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (which, for their more recondite transcriptions, require a trained phonetician for their understanding).

In discussing the third edition of Merriam-Webster’s New International Dictionary (MW-III), Green describes one of its main advances as “a general move away from America’s traditional prescriptive lexicography, towards a more descriptive, British style.” Such a move had, indeed, taken place many years before Philip Gove’s editorship of the MW-III and is evidenced in such works as the Merriam-Webster Collegiate, Webster’s New World, and American College dictionaries, among others. Some of these dictionaries contain notes describing contentious issues of usage (e.g., infer/imply, reason is because/that, etc.), but those are, essentially, reflective of the concerns of many users of the language, hence can be set forth as “descriptive.”

On page 366 Green refers to the MW-III as containing “450,000 headwords”: it does not, of course; it contains 450,000 entries. The notion of entry, as described many times in these pages, includes (1) head-word,(2) inflected forms (which, in the sole case of the MW-III, includes regular inflections, which “pumps up” the entry count considerably), (3) changes in parts of speech, (4) embedded boldface entries (like idioms and phrases), (5) run-on forms (those that are added at the ends of entries to illustrate headwords with suffixes of transparent meaning added, e.g., national and nationally run on to nation and nationalization run on to nationalize, (6) spelling variants (like British honour, nationalise, nationalisation, etc.). Thus, a dictionary with approximately 80,000 headwords, the size of American “college” dictionaries, contains more than 170,000 “entries.” I do not know how many headwords the MW-III contains, but it is far, far fewer than the 450,000 entries claimed. (Those who greet with consternation what might seem to be a publisher’s fiddling with counts in dictionaries ought to know that the system for such counting was worked out in the 1930s, mainly between Merriam-Webster and the US Treasury Department, which was then in charge of all government purchases, as a means for assessing the information content of dictionaries being purchased for the government, a responsibility later shifted to another department.)

On page 379 Green writes:

There are, after all, a number of books of ‘Americanisms’ but none, although there have been plans to fill this gap, of ‘Briticisms.’

That is not quite accurate, for, in 1973 Macmillan (US; Johnson & Bacon 1974 in the UK) published Norman W. Schur’s British Self-Taught; revised and expanded, it was published as English English by VERBATIM BOOKS in 1980; revised and expanded further, it was published as British English A to Zed by Facts On File in about 1990. It is not entirely accurate to describe Schur’s book as a dictionary, for, although it is in alphabetical order (by Briticism, with the American equivalent in the Index), it combines definitions with descriptions of cultural phenomena (as in the entry for the Ashes, which needs an explanation rather than a mere definition).

Green’s treatment of the “Modern World” of lexicography is very thin on the ground. Bare mention is made of the most important and best-selling dictionaries published in the last fifty years, when the sales of all kinds of dictionaries exploded throughout the world. It is probably true to say that an entire book could be written about this recent period in dictionary development, including not only the reflection of sound linguistic philosophy but the effects of the introduction of computers into the dictionary research, compilation, composition, and accession (as through personal computers to CD-ROMS and diskettes): certainly there is more documented information about it than the period of several hundered years covered in the first fourteen chapters of Chasing the Sun.

But one must be grateful to Jonathon Green at least for the first fourteen chapters, which gather in one place an enormous amount of interesting, useful information about (deceased) lexicographers and the dictionaries they prepared. The title, which will make the book difficult to find amongst others that deal with dictionaries, is from Johnson’s Introduction to his dictionary.

P. 244: If “asks” is correct, then there should be a “?” at the end of the quoted matter.

P. 244: “new-dangle”—ok?

P. 245: for “accumen” read “acumen.”

P. 276: (bottom) for “Allan Walker Read” read “Allen…”

P. 298: for “no less than 83 readers” read “no fewer…”

P. 306: correct “to join at the this period.”

P. 307: for “reconsituted” read “reconstituted.”

P. 310: for “enormity” read “immensity.”

P. 311: for “slacked” read “slackened.”

P. 319: for “Minor, it turned, out…” read “Minor, it turned out,…”

P. 329: for “The Beaux Strategem” read “The Beaux' Stratagem.”

P. 333: for “fulsome” read “flattering” or “effusive,” etc.

P. 361: for “pronounciation” read “pronunciation.”

P. 369: (in extract) for “grey” read gray” (the way the word was spelt by McDavid).

P. 370: for “Encyclopedia Britannica” read “Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

P. 378: for “soldily” read “solidly.”

P. 392: Notes (13.4) what does “IEL” stand for?

Ibid.: (13.5) “Trench [2]” is not in the Bibliography.

P. 418: for “Random House College Dictionary 33-4” read “…35-6.”

---

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Health Care Terms

Vergil N. Slee, MD, Debora A. Slee, JD, and H. Joachim Schmidt, JD, (Third Edition, Tringa Press, Saint Paul, 1996), xi + 655pp.

[Order from: Cheever Publishing, 1201 N. Freer Road, Chelsea, MI 48118.]

We need not be bludgeoned with the information that the world has become more bureaucracy-ridden in the past few decades, a trend that probably began in the 1930s to be reinforced through World War II. It is probably the language that has borne much of the burden in that development: the first citation for acronym in the OED, 1943, quotes American Notes and Queries, which refers to earlier, unidentified usage of the term. In the early 1940s we were besieged by repl depots (pronounced REPil DEPOZe), GI, and thousands of other acronyms and abbreviations the meaning of which we learned through daily repetition on news broadcasts.

(I find it convenient to distinguish an abbreviation as a shortening that is not or cannot be pronounced, like USA, UN, IOC, GB, NIH, NAS, RC, OED, IBM, etc., from an acronym as a shortening that is pronounced as a “word,” like ad lib, NASA, WREN, OPEC, COMSAT, NATO, etc. Those who specialize in this area prefer to subsume them all under the general rubric, initialism, a term quoted by the OED from the 1890s in Notes and Queries, but one that did not become current, I believe, till Gale Research Company published Acronyms and Initialisms Dictionary, in 1965. An enormous work, that book has grown by the publication of periodic supplements.)

Health Care Terms contains a good deal besides initialisms, but I focus on those because they are probably most representative of the jargon we are faced with whenever we encounter the Bureaucracy: as if the compounding of incomprehensible, undescriptive jargon were not enough, those who concoct that obfuscating gobbledygook are not content till they have turned it into an abbreviation or an acronym. The jargon also becomes sprinkled with euphemisms, among which I count health care professional, a definition for which—too long to repeat here—appears in this book under professional. Part of it (excluding the awkward pronoun of reference) is pertinent:

…[S]ome individuals may call themselves “professional” with little or no training. For example, there are no minimum requirements to be a “nutritionist,” so anyone can call him or herself one.

During a recent hospital stay (my first), I learned that the person who mops the floor is referred to as a “health professional,” along with what I would have called the medical orderly who has the responsibility for taking blood samples, the registered nurse in attendance, the head floor or ward nurse, and the various doctors. Having been the editor in chief of Mosby’s Medical and Nursing Dictionary (first edition), it occurred to me that I, too, might be termed a “health care professional”; so too, perhaps, might an inveterate hypochondriac.

This book can do nothing, of course, to relieve us of the sort of vocabulary that makes a garbage man or dustman into a “waste removal consultant,” but it is enormously helpful in explaining, in a straightforward way and (unfortunately) without rancor, what bureaucracy has bequeathed us. Evidently, the GP no longer exists, having been replaced by the “family practice” practitioner, now considered a medical specialty. Naturally, family practice is referred to as “FP”—what else? why not “FamPrac”?—for which Health Care Terms offers the following definition:

The specialty of medicine which deals with providing, supervising, and coordinating the continuing general medical care of patients of all ages, primarily in family groups. The care provided is primary care. One of the medical specialties for which residency programs have been approved by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). See specialty.

I suppose that means that as an aging divorcé who lives alone, I am only marginally entitled to treatment, for a single individual can scarcely be considered a “family group.” This “specialty” reminds me of a time, some decades ago, when my doctor advised me, indignantly, that he was not a “GP”: gesturing to a framed certificate hanging on the wall of his office, he told me in no uncertain terms that he was an “internist,” to which I replied that I should thereafter require only two doctors, an internist and a dermatologist. He didn’t see the humor of that remark.

If one’s field touches on the medical profession, insurance, or any other area concerned with the bureaucracy (which I am always tempted to spell “bureaucrazy”), this is an essential aid in unraveling and clarifying—insofar as is possible—the verbiage that assails one from all sides. Although the average victim of the medical bureaucracy need not have this as a vademecum, public, private, and, especially, hospital librarians should note its great value as an adjunct to the other reference books available, none of which covers the same territory. Three appendices round out the usefulness of this work.

It would be only fair to mention that the terminology is that used in the United States.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Ship to Shore: A dictionary of evryday words and phrases derived from the sea

Peter D. Jeans, illustr. by Ross H. Shardlow, (ABCCLIO, 1993), xxi + 425pp.

My aim in this work is to illustrate what I believe is the astonishing debt that our idiomatic speech owes to the nautical language of the past. English is extraordinarily rich in metaphor, and it is the intention of this book to show that many of the figures of speech that we use from day to day derive from the language and customs of the sea.

—From the Preface.

Peter D. Jeans is an Australian who writes a column in The West Australian on the origin of words. This is a substantial, useful, interesting work, but if the reader/user is seeking an authoritative, documented archive of nautical expressions, he may be disappointed. As readers of VERBATIM are aware, we give short shrift to the trappings of academia in our pages: we eschew footnotes (with rare exceptions) as well as bibliographies. But in reviewing the works of others, attention must be paid to such materials, and the Bibliography of Selected Sources and Dictionaries Consulted include only twenty-five titles under the former category (plus fifteen of Patrick O’Brian’s “Jack Aubrey” novels) and only ten under the latter, some of which are curious choices indeed: Robert Hunter’s Universal Dictionary of the English Language, New York: Collier, 1897, which I have never heard of; Eric Partridge’s Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English contains a great many errors and ought to be avoided by serious researchers; the author evidently chose not to wade through Johnson’s Dictionary, relying instead on McAdam and Milne’s A Modern Selection.

Still, it is unfair to judge a book by its peripherals. Before getting to the content, let us look at the appendices, of which there are four. The first, Nautical Prepositions, includes aback, abeam, about, abox, a-cockbill, adrift, and other words that are adverbs, not prepositions, along with ahoy and a few others beginning witha-: evidently the author believes that many nautical words beginning with a- are prepositions, which is simply not the case. Appendix 2 contains Changed Spellings and Corrupted Word Forms; although the information given here is accurate as far as I could tell, it is confusing to have some words listed under their “original” spelling (studding sail, treenail) and others in their corrupted form (gunnel, bosun)—and what happened to trunnel? I fear that there is a great deal more to the question of spelling and pronunciation than has been allowed for.

Appendix 3, Nautical Terms Related to Human Anatomy, shows nauticalisms that were borrowed from anatomical terms, not the other way round. The coverage is a bit loose, but no one is likely to consider earring an anatomical term, and forelock, “a small iron wedge of pin driven through a hole or slot at the end of a sheave-pin to prevent it from working out,” contains a -lock from a door, not from a forehead, which has a different etymological origin.

Nautical Terms Derived from the Land, Appendix 4, is divided into the sublistings Domestic Environment and General Environment. The suitability for such treatment varies: bosun’s chair is listed simply because it is a chair; cap is listed presumably because it is thought to refer to an item of apparel. But a chair is virtually ‘anything for an individual to sit on’ and cap, etymologically at least, originally meant ‘cape (with a hood)’ or so the OED has it. Without dated citations for the earliest occurrences of these words in a nautical context, how is one to know if they were derived from the “Land” or merely coincidental with them?

Still, no serious harm. Let us now turn to the main body of the work. Opening it at random we find, appropriately enough,

Hogwash Sailor’s slang for nonsense, rubbish, a tale with no truth in it; and worthless stuff: “His claim that he is an experienced motor mechanic is all hogwash.”

Aside from the unfortunate quotation, which hardly seems nautical at all, hogwash is ordinary English, which, it may be assumed, (English-speaking) sailors used as a medium in which to couch their nauticalisms. Thus, the direction would seem to have been from “everyday word” to language of the sea, and not, as advertised, vice versa. The same must be said for hitch, go without a hitch, get hitched, hoist, hold off, hold on, and scores of other entries: these were everyday words in the general language before they were used by sailors. The problem—and it is a serious one— is that there are, indeed, many words and phrases that originated at sea and were brought ashore for ready embodiment in everyday speech, but to find the same terms in both does not justify the assertion that the sea term came first.

It must be said—and I believe I shall be borne out on this—that relying on citations appearing in the OED or in works written long ago is a precarious business: the only accurate, safe statement that can be made about such information is that it provides evidence for the existence of a word in a given context at the time of publication of the work: it cannot and must not be construed as the “first” time the word appeared on the face of the earth, merely as the first written evidence we have of its appearance. Clearly, that is not to say that most words appearing in quotations in the OED and in any other (original) source are being used for the first time: on the contrary, it is very likely—and this might well apply to “terms of art” of a specialized field and, particularly, the speech of sailors, who did not enjoy an entirely savory reputation—that the terms were in oral use for a long time before they were written down. Consider how long it took lexicographers to include four-letter words in their dictionaries; yet we know from long experience with spoken English that a researcher five hundred years hence would be wrong to conclude that those terms were invented or even came into general use at the end of the 20th century. (And still not all are listed.)

A problem arises when those who would swallow dictionaries whole are left to conclude that their content is sacrosanct. Those who try to apply a scientific approach to the assessment of data become rapidly aware that what we are examining is not likely to be complete—which is certainly true when dealing with language—or even accurate, as the alchemists and other early researchers in science discovered.

There is a certain charm seen in working the alchemy of language, and we can well appreciate it in the context of artistic license. But it is quite another thing when it is foisted on an unsuspecting public as “fact,” when, indeed, it is either pure speculation or a writer’s interpretation of the best way to make data fit into the procrustean bed of his theory.

There is no doubt that much controversy has surrounded the interpretation of the word devil in nautical contexts and, particularly, with the expression between the devil and the deep blue sea. Likewise, it is indisputable that many nautical expressions have come ashore to be used metaphorically by landlubbers. The problem is that although many such expressions have been included in Ship to Shore, many that were not nautical have also been listed. As it is impossible for the non-expert to sort them out, it remains for people like Jeans to do so, and he has incautiously included many for which insufficient evidence exists that they were originally nautical, and he has failed in his duty by not identifying questionable entries.

Shardlow’s drawings are a model of clarity and character.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Nineteenth-Century English

Richard W. Bailey, (University of Michigan Press, 1997), viii + 372pp.

It is always a good idea to read an author’s preface (or foreword) to discover the purpose of a book before reading and, certainly, before reviewing it. From Professor Bailey’s, we quote the following, which pretty much sums up his attitude toward language in general and English in particular:

English is a single language full of variety, and I believe that no speaker is beneath notice and no single one has exclusive rights to represent “the language.” Models assuming metropolis and hinterland, capital and colony, standard language and dialect have little to offer except fragmentation and prejudice.

It is virtually impossible to argue against such a point of departure from the standpoint of the linguistic scientific investigator. After all, researchers into cancer, heart disease, virology, and bacteriology would look quite foolish were they to adopt the high moral ground by damning the causes of disease as “sinful” or “bad.” Yet the issue of “good” vs. “bad” is always at the forefront when language comes up for discussion, not, perhaps, among linguists but, to be sure, among the rest of the population. In some cases, murder, mayhem, and, to borrow a tasteless euphemism from social conflict, “linguistic cleansing” have been aroused by language—not by vituperation, cursing, and blasphemy but simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time speaking a particular language or dialect. Dialect differences can cause strife and disharmony, as can be witnessed in the contemporary dispute over the decision by a California school district to use “Ebonics” as a vehicle to teach “Standard” English.

Linguists might well distance themselves from such mundane anti-intellectualism, but that does not make it go away nor does it solve the problem or come close to answering the question of what should be done about teaching language. A very telling point in such disputes is that those who speak a dialect other than “Standard” (which we persist in putting in quotation marks because it continually changes, both temporally and geographically) are condemned to accept work that is below a level, socially and economically, to which they aspire and to which they feel they are entitled, at least from the standpoint of opportunity.

As I have held, while language itself can the subject of cool analysis in some contexts, it is a social institution and our means of communication. While it is not only scientific and scholarly but noble to maintain that such matters as pronunciation, usage, dialect, and other features are all part of the description of language and are neither “good” nor “bad,” the fact remains that using a dialect or speech pattern that is unacceptable to those who are giving out the jobs may mean that one either gets the job or not, other qualifications being equal, hence the “scientific” and “scholarly” considerations may be effectively put into their academic niches where they belong.

There is another aspect to the entire subject, invariably ignored by linguists and “linguistic scientists” because they remain unable to measure or quantify it, namely, style. Language is language says the scientist, totally ignoring (sometimes deliberately, usually owing to lack of discernment) any art—or lack thereof—that might be involved in the speech or writing of individuals, whether professional writers or not. (Some might protest that the study called stylistics deals with art in language, but those who know the nature of stylistics are aware that it does not even come close to measuring effectiveness, poetry, eloquence, beauty, and other characteristics associated with artistic expression.)

Third, the language of an individual reflects his culture, which is a catch-all term covering many things. There are those of an older generation that considers itself better educated than almost anyone younger who understand culture to mean familiarity with the better and more important works of art (of all kinds) of the world. This interpretation of culture, is admittedly, of decreasing importance to an increasing proportion of the population, who place rock ‘n’ roll stars on the same scale of artistic accomplishment as Milton, Rembrandt, Mozart, Gershwin, Hemingway, et al.; because the last do not “speak” to them, they are peremptorily shouldered out of consideration. This aspect of language should not be construed solely as a demonstration of knowledge (as in knowing how many symphonies Beethoven wrote, whether Caruso was a tenor or a bass, or being able to hum melodies from Puccini’s operas), though that is certainly a reflex of a cultured individual. Rather, it is the artistry that rubs off on the person steeped in the best parts of the culture, the phrase unconsciously plucked from a 17th-century poem or 16th-century play, (no matter how corny, like Methinks the lady doth protest too much), the single word that indicates at least passing familiarity with history (like defenestration), the fragment of an air associated with a Bach fugue.

These aspects of language are social, philosophical, artistic, largely ignored by linguists, sometimes out of devotion to what is perceived as the “scientific method,” sometimes out of sheer philistinism and the inability to exercise taste, sometimes out of abject ignorance. One need only read the academic papers published in linguistic journals to be convinced that, notwithstanding their specialty, linguists at large are incapable of writing simple, expository, declarative sentences without resorting to turgid syntax, obscure vocabulary, and uncompromising sesquipedalianism. In short, considering that their specialty is language, it is astonishing how few of them use it effectively.

In this regard, I am pleased to say that Richard Bailey is an exception. Though a linguist—and a good one—he knows how to write, and how to write persuasively and informatively. Most of the preceding commentary has nothing whatsoever to do with the substance of Nineteenth-Century English, which traces the spread, growth, and increasing universality of the English language during that period. Bailey examines the Writing, Sounds, Words, Slang, Grammar, and Voices of English, to quote the chapter headings, and he does so without expressing much opinion about them, letting the facts speak for themselves. Well, almost. Bailey’s presentation is tinged by an underlying suggestion of disapproval of those who would “dictate” the way the language should be used. He does not say as much expressly, but his characterization of such do-gooders as pedants (p. 215) and purists (p. 223), his persistent placing of quotation marks around words and phrases condemned by contemporary “purists and pedants” to signify—what?— their quaintness? their curiosity?

For the most part, despite the occasional campaigning for linguistic liberalism (aimed, obviously, at 20th- and, presumably, 21st-century readers), what emerges is an engaging picture of concerned speakers of English, some of them “pedants” trying to establish (or preserve) some purity in the language, the remainder readers of the works published by the former in the shape of grammars, usage guides, pronunciation guides, spellers, etc. Because English spelling is often unrelated to its pronunciation and inconsistent with it, the majority of spellers were used as teaching tools in schools; but there was also an opportunity to acquaint adults with accepted spelling forms (just as there is today, among the “bad speller’s” dictionaries).

There is no gainsaying that standardization of spelling (and of other mechanics of language) can be helpful to communication, but like other reflexes of language proficiency, it can also mark the relative literacy or education of a person. Spelling and conventional hyphenation can be linked; while I noted not so much as a single typographical error in this book, I saw once again confirmation of the encroaching ignorance of those who write automatic hyphenation programs for computers, presumably employed in the production of the work: the oft-repeated word English, “properly” hyphenated Eng-lish, has been made to conform to the other words having -ng- at a syllable break by appearing as Eng-lish throughout. This “rule” is well known to traditional compositors, though, curiously, it does not extend to Angle or Anglo (as in Anglo-Saxon) though they are all linked etymologically. The same point was raised in our review [XIX, 1, 15] of Bailey’s Images of English (1991, also University of Michigan Press).

In his assessment of the century as a whole, Bailey discusses the progress of education, especially public education and the spread of literacy. In that regard, a point to be made about the culture of the period in contrast to the language, is the publication, late in the century, of a number of reference books, especially readers' handbooks and particularly A Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, by E. Cobham Brewer, which went through many printings and, revived in the latter part of the 20th century, through several updated editions. It is significant because its enormous popularity reflects the public’s interest in metaphor based on classical and cultural references understandable only to those steeped in the literature, not to those who, having learned to read, seldom read anything but a dime novel, a popular magazines, or a newspaper. Those who aspired to broader knowledge used Brewer’s and others' books as a ready-reference guide to culture. It is not insignificant that their popularity has seen a reflowering a hundred years after their original appearance, late in the 19th century.

Nineteenth-Century English is an interesting if somewhat staid tracing of the development of English into a world language, though its influence today is probably owing directly more to events of the past sixty years than to the growth and spread it enjoyed during the century of colonialism. Still, there is no gainsaying Bailey’s ultimate argument:

Nineteenth-century English was part of a social transformation that changed the language and changed the world.

It remains to be seen what will be written about the 20th century, the close of which is seeing a spread of English via the Internet that is regarded as so pernicious by the French that they have seen fit to prosecute a company (with a pied á terre in France) for advertising on the medium in English without the accompaniment of a French translation. Will the 21st century see still more diversification of English and encouragement of that diversity or more standardization and conformity to the medium employed by major industrial powers? There is little doubt that people who are driven by economic necessity will cleave to the language most closely associated with financial reward, and the opportunities offered by the Internet are immense compared with those formerly offered by books, motion pictures, television, and other media. Still, it is impossible to predict accurately what the future will bring, and a hundred years hence everyone might well be lisping in Swahili.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: English Accents and Dialects

Arthur Hughes and Peter Trudghill, (Third Edition, Arnold, 1996. Dist. in the US and Canada by St. Martin’s Press).

[Note: The publisher originally sent only the cassette, and that is what is reviewed here.]

This hour-long tape recording, employing the casual format of the “candid microphone,” offers thirteen diverse English speech patterns gleaned from as many “off the cuff” interviews.

Because no other information accompanied the tape, this reviewer was forced to depend on the more than slightly helter-skelter impression it leaves on the chartless listener.

The quality of the tape itself is often fuzzy (no matter that the interviews appear to be unrehearsed). The table of contents on the sleeve omits the Dublin segment, even though the speaker is very much “there,” in his recollections of the 1916 uprising, Lloyd George, the Black and Tan, as well as bits and pieces of his own life’s history.

The interviews are preceded by a set of drill-words, presumably to establish the regional pronunciation of English vowel sounds, which have, over the centuries, undergone many striking changes. Not altogether surprisingly, the drill-words are almost without exception spoken with great clarity, from Bristol to Northumberland and Liverpool to Lowland Scots. But once the polite obligation to enunciate these sounds is got over, the narrators are back on familiar ground, most of them buoyantly loquacious and quite at home with the art of the monologue.

Their stories range from a mirthful account by a Bristol woman about her shiftless next-door neighbor whose overflowing drain gutters flooded her property, to a somber story by a man from South Wales whose son’s leg was amputated in a fearful childhood accident.

There is no high drama in these everyday stories: they are simply abstract and brief chronicles of time and place, spoken artifacts for preserving the everfluctuating accents and dialects of Great Britain’s intricate linguistic hierarchy.

It should be noted, however, that these singular odds and ends of regional accents are far from being useful for an actor aspiring to become the next Meryl Streep, mistress of the (virtual) dialect. Although they are indisputably accurate, none of the excerpts is sufficiently “heightened” to be a model for simulation, especially given the unfocused quality of the tape itself.

In his 1912 preface to Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw wrote, “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making another Englishman hate or despise him.” And, in 1989, John Honey, an English professor and phonetics expert, wrote Does Accent Matter? [rev. XVI,1,10] in which he champions the cause of teaching the Queen’s English (RP, or “received pronunciation”) in order to achieve social and economic equality for those who are passed over in the job market because of unacceptable regional accents, such as the nasal twangs and glottal stops of Cockey, Liverpudlian, and Glaswegian.

Both “Pygmalion” arguments are sound as well as altruistic; but at a time when certain civilizations and cultures are in danger of losing their spoken heritage, these slight, quirky renderings of native speech may prove to be as valuable as the archaeologist’s fossil finds. Only this year, the Ainu, an indigenous people of the Japanese island of Hokkaido, are struggling valiantly and often painfully to relearn their native language, which almost died out over the past fifty years. An Ainu farmer speaks for the strange, tenacious hold of one’s mother tongue: “It’s true the language is almost lost, but there’s a lot of spirit still, so I don’t think it’s too late.” And that appears to be the underlying purpose of *English Accents and Dialects, *a fitting epigraph to which might be added Lady Percy’s tribute to her husband killed on the battlefield:

…[H]e was indeed the glass / wherein the noble youth did dress themselves… And speaking thick, which nature made his blemish, / Became the accents of the valiant.”

[Henry IV, II, 3]

[Mary Douglas Dirks, Old Lyme]

Deranged Diction

Mary M. Tius, Portland, Maine

Sometimes, when speakers use the wrong word, its context, that Great Disambiguator, as John Ellison Kahn has called it [XXII, 2], will make the meaning emerge. Thus, when a family-planning expert was interviewed on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and said, “The [Clinton] White House is so abhorred by the anti-abortionist lobby…,” even though abhorrence may indeed have been the sentiment of anti-abortion lobbyists, the context made clear to some listeners that intimidate had been meant. So, too, when halfway through a report on cases of fraud, a local Consumer Affairs reporter for NBC News, Ursula Lipari, said, “This was obviously a sham,” some listeners knew that scam was the word she should have used. Likewise, when in May 1996, on CBS News, Joe Cook said of gay marriage (a term cynics of an earlier era might well have labeled an oxymoron), “The [Roman Catholic] Church sets the standard which people adopt to,” some listeners knew that adapt was meant. I say “some listeners” because it is evident that many listeners and readers, like many broadcasters and writers, are unable to distinguish one word from another.

We are probably indebted to “spelling-check” functions on computers and electronic typewriters for an apparent decrease in spelling errors such as the following:

Brest Cancer

[A caption displayed on NBC News, 16 January 1995.]

…skin conditions such as excema…

[From an article by reporter Meredith Goad, in the Maine Sunday Telegram about the uses of St. John’s wort, 11 August 1996.]

The Good Shepard [a soup kitchen]

[A caption displayed on NBC News, 24 January 1995.]

Electronic spelling checkers cannot detect phonetic errors where one homonym—or near-homonym—replaces another, e.g.:

I was taken aside and balled out by a vice-president…

[From an article about how businesswomen should dress, in the Portland Press Herald, 1 March 1995.]

The book contains a forward by Dr. Brian A. Fallon.

[From an article, “Phantom illness: Shattering the Myth of Hypochondria,” in the Portland Press Herald, Section C, 31 July 1996.]

…parents who share custody are likely to horde the time they get with their children.

[From “A Camping Tradition,” Section F, the Maine Sunday Telegram, 11 August 1996.]

On-Sight Supervision

[A caption describing a segment of a report on renovations to the Portland [Maine] High School building, NBC News, 26 January 1995.]

Reliance on electronic proofreaders may, in fact, increase phonetic errors. In Honolulu, the student editor of the University of Hawaii’s campus newspaper, a native English-speaker, was unable to understand a professor’s telephoned complaint about the paper’s use of band as the past tense of to ban. She understood the meaning of ban; she had apparently heard its inflected past tense form; but the infinitive and the present tense forms were unknown to her. The editor’s electronic “reader” had not rejected band and therefore the word must be correct. We can expect to read more of such phonetic errors since even highly literate and careful writers will sometimes make such mistakes and occasionally proofread in haste, as well, though if it is pointed out, they will always understand what the error is.

Joe Cook’s “adopt” (for adapt) might have been a mere slip of the tongue; but when NBC’s Los Angeles reporter, David Bloom, said on 30 July 1996, “Bob Dole came not to censor Hollywood but to…” and the context demanded censure, he cannot be allowed the same excuse—he has been guilty of too many bloopers.

But slips of the tongue, phonetic and spelling errors are the least of our word woes. On 26 June 1995, a local political commentator, speaking with general approbation of Maine Governor Angus King, said, “… which [the governor] equivocated to …” meaning “equated to.' At about the same time, National Public Radio’s Terry Gross on “All Things Considered” said of an artist she had interviewed, “He flouted his radical opinions [in order to shock].” Flaunt was the verb she should have used. NBC’s Tokyo correspondent, Lucky Severson, reported 15 January 1995 that crowds of people had gathered, “hoping to catch a glance of the Pope,” when it was a glimpse they really hoped for. Bruce Stokes, of the National Journal, a political affairs magazine published in Washington, DC, said during the “MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour” 30 June 1994, “It was incredulous! “Again and again we read or hear that some bank or other commercial establishment “services” its customers better than some other; and how often in recent years have we heard and read that a terrorist group has claimed “credit” for yet another atrocity?

There is more and—some of it—worse. Nor does context always render the meaning intelligible. “Deceptively spacious!” was the leading phrase of an ad which ran for months in the Portland Press Herald Real Estate Weekly section. Was the house bigger than it looked? Or smaller? The following list is a small sample of the deranged diction offered by the media over a two-year period. Not all the examples were the work of professional journalists or broadcasters, but all the writers and speakers are supposedly “educated.”

Why are their recruiting methods so backwards?

[NBC News reporter Ed Rabel, 21 May 1996. The context indicated ‘backward’ was meant.]

… [Few poor people] would want their names bantered around by strangers.

[NPR, “All Things Considered,” on which Christine Holmgren described the forms of charity at the church of which she is the pastor in Minnesota; 23 August 1996.]

Its simple houses, built of concrete blocks and chaff…

[From “The Quandary” by Mary Anne Weaver, The New Yorker, 19 August 1996, p. 24.]

It’s a never-ending surprise to see some of the stunning coiffeurs that have been hidden under bowl cover-style [sic] shower caps.

[From an article about women who meet only at the “Y” swimming pool, by a guest columnist, Portland Press Herald, 8 March 1995.]

The kayaker, donned in a bright yellow raincoat…

[From “On the Bay,” by columnist Nick Mavodones, Portland Press Herald, 25 May 1996.]

[Lifeguard] David Cowell lives what most consider an envious lifestyle…

[From “Ogunquit Life,” Section B, Portland Press Herald, 13 August 1996.]

[The US Government station housed] a crew whose job was to watch for shipwrecks and rescue survivors. They [presumably the crew] were forebears of today’s Coast Guard.

[From the fifth in a series of articles on Maine islands, “Island Odyssey,” by Edie Lau, staff writer for the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, 18 August 1996.]

This was obliging for all.

[Reporter Chris Rose, NBC First News, 16 May 1996.]

[Brooke Shields] knows what it is to have a career in Hollywood rise and fall and then plummet again.

[NBC First News “anchor” Rob Caldwell, speaking of the ultimate success of stars whose careers have been uneven, 31 July 1996.]

A man with not one redeemable quality…

[Dr. Elissa Eli, a Massachusetts psychiatrist on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” 20 August 1996.]

A tougher training regiment [for New York City police]…

[Tom Brokaw, NBC News, 12 June 1995.]

Thomas L. Kinney says he wants to revive strained relationships between Time Warner and local communities

[Subheading of “Cable firm picks new Portland president,” an article in the Portland Press Herald by staff writer Eric Blom, 14 April 1995.]

Insurance companies may be unwilling to venture into unchartered territory…

[Reporter Susan Chisholm, Maine Public Radio, “Maine Things Considered,” 2 August 1996.]

When a nation’s best-educated citizens and professional “wordsmiths” can unblushingly commit blunders such as these, is it any wonder that public discourse so often degenerates into slanging matches and the bitter exchange of empty slogans? “Words fail me,” we say when at a loss. But here it is not the words that have failed us but the so-called literate elite: and their failure is both a symptom and a cause of the increasing confusion.

OBITER DICTA: Sad Stories of the Death of Kings

Rosalind Woolner, Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire

Can there be any significance in the disappearance of euphemisms for death? Does it provide proof that death is no longer taboo, or are such euphemisms the victims of a modern contempt for flowery, imprecise language? For whatever reason, phrases such as pushing up daisies, breathed his last, is no more, gone to a better world, etc. sound decidedly old-fashioned these days. In some parts of Africa, however, the death of a king is seen as a return to chaos and disorder and is never announced directly. Dare to announce that the king is dead in so many words and you could soon be feeding the worms yourself. The accepted formula varies from place to place. The Baule people of Ivory Cost say that the King has hurt his foot, while the Diola of Senegal say that the earth is broken. For the Fon people of Benin the appropriate phrase is Night has fallen or The King has returned to Allada. In the Indiene kingdom of Ivory Coast people say The world has lowered its eyes

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“With his stentorian gaze and minimalist technique, Yevgeny Mravinsky (1903-1988) presided over the Leningrad Philharmonic for almost 50 years…” [Form a mailing piece sent by BMG Classical Music Service, n.d. Submitted by Mr. Edward T. Dell, Jr., Peterborough, New Hampshire.]

EPISTOLA {Alan Roberts}

Doug Briggs’s nearly serious article [XXII,4] about the bowdlerizing of recent editions of Webster’s reminds me that the same censorship is rife in the United Kingdom. For years I have used Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary, first published in 1901—I have the New Edition of 1939, latest impression 1960)—and, like Erskine Caldwell’s Webster’s, it shows its age. Chambers’s head office is in Edinburgh, the printers are in the same city; that might account for the hundreds of Scottish words therein: some are easily recognized, some are more obscure.

But what attracted me to the dictionary was its sense of humour. Some definitions:

Sea-serpent an enormous marine animal of serpent-like form, frequently seen and described by credulous sailors, imaginative landsmen, and common liars.

non-smoker a railway compartment in which smoking is supposed to be forbidden.

bull a ludicrous inconsistency in speech, often said to be an especial prerogative of Irishmen—I was a fine child, but they changed me.

bump a protuberance on the head confidently associated by phrenologists with qualities or propensities of mind.

leal, adj. true-hearted, faithfull. —noun, lealty Land o' the Leal, the home of the blessed after death; heaven, not Scotland.

There were many more. But no longer. Some twenty years ago came another New Edition and the gentle wit of some of the definitions was done away with. This bowdlerizing was the subject of extensive correspondence in the Guardian (London) bemoaning that the new edition had dropped the witty invention of earlier editions. Why new lexicographers (I’m suggesting they belong to a new generation) want to make their mark by eliminating these harmless jokes beats me.

I have some sympathy for Doug Briggs’s stance against American circumlocution. Too often prisons are called “correction facilities”; a lavatory with urinals a “bathroom”; and as Briggs wrote, dope a “controlled substance.”

But I take issue with him on one thing. According to Briggs the Texas Penal Code, not noted for leniency, has softened its attitude to car theft. May I offer a better solution? As a long-time magistrate (English— now retired), I understood the legal definition of theft was something akin to “to take possession permanently and illegally.” There were many “joy-riders” in England, as there are in the US, mostly juveniles, who abandon their prize when they run out of gas. To bracket them with serious car thieves would be unjust. As far as I know, the problem has been solved in England by a creating another offence, less serious, with lower penalties, “driving and taking away.” Offenders, especially young ones, are usually charged with driving without insurance and with no licence as well, thus increasing the penalties and going some way to mollifying the feelings of the car owner.

[Alan Roberts, Ruidoso, New Mexico]

EPISTOLA {Michael Vnuk}

A few comments that arise from XXII, 3:

On “Some Secrets of English Nicknames,” by Ralph Emerson: the article did not mention a common Australian nickname pattern. Some examples:

Barry Bazza Gary Gazza Warren Wozza

Sharon Shazza Darryl Dazza

The nicknames can be shortened to Bazz, Shazz, etc. (I’ve never seen or heard Hazza for Harry.) Bazza was the nickname of the title character in The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, a comic strip created by Barry Humphries and artist Nicholas Garland. The strip first appeared in Private Eye and was the subject of two films in the early 1970s. Barry Humphries (also known for his alter ego Dame Edna Everage) is an Australian with a sharp ear for language. I don’t know how much use the nickname pattern had before the 1970s, although I’m inclined to think that the films increased the use of the pattern. The suffix -s for nicknames still seems to be used, as in the following, which I have heard in the last year or so:

Kylie Kyles Julie, Julia Jules

Shirley Shirls

On computer language (David Isaacson’s “Power Users Dump Baudy Language…”), I’ve noticed that the expressions can be humorous and often cynical. For instance, the head has been called a neck-top computer, on the lines of desk-top computer. The early portable computers were more aptly described as luggable. Software which is promised but whose release is repeatedly delayed or even abandoned, is called vapourware, and shelfware is software that is bought but never used, i.e., it just sits on the shelf. New hardware or software, which the marketers have trumpeted as leading-edge technology, is called bleeding-edge technology by those who have experienced the many problems accompanying new products.

On apostrophes (John Felts’s “Safire’s Syndrome”), I have occasionally wondered if I need an apostrophe if the word already has an apostrophe. For example, if the Burger King chain puts out a new product, it’s called Burger King’s new product. On that basis, if the organisation McDonald’s puts out a new product, shouldn’t it be called McDonald’s new product? Or am I just making things too complicated?

[Michael Vnuk, Brisbane, Queensland]

EPISTOLA {Thomas R. Pacl}

In your article [“Indo' and Outdo' European,” XXIII, 1, 14], you cite postmaster-general and attorney-general “n. + n.” I would take them as n. + adj., where general indicates ‘on the whole,’ ‘in general,’ ‘for the public at large.’ After all, general, as in general of an army, is said to be derived on the model of sergeant-major-general ‘sergeant acting for a large formation of men’; eventually, “sergeant-major” was dropped, yielding general for the person in charge of an army.

[Thomas R. Pacl, Greenbelt, Maryland]

EPISTOLA {Joseph Whitehill}

Your readers, treasuring punctilio the way we do, will have written you in hot numbers about the familiar solecism that slipped past author Bill Ramson and the copy editor who sits next to you: in “Dharuk Words in English,” XXIII, 1, 10], we find, “Aboriginal language must have mitigated against borrowing.” Mitigate is a voracious and incestuous cannibal, eating militate at every chance.

How many readers wrote?

[Joseph Whitehill, Chestertown, Maryland]

EPISTOLA {Colyn Phillips}

[You were the only one. However unmitigated Ramson’s sin might be, he is in “good” company: In A Private View, Vintage Contemporaries (New York), 1996, page 49 (evidently not reset from the original 1994 publication by Jonathan Cape (London)), Anita Brookner, winner of the Booker Award in 1986 for Hotel du Lac, wrote:

There was the same hieratic passivity, as if she were waiting for his response to complete the sequence. In a way this mitigated somewhat against her appeal…

—Editor

The piece titled “Cyberspace and Khyber Pass” [XXIII,1,11] is unfortunate, to say the least. Contrary to assertion, the language of the internet and some of the associated culture and attitudes of its writers, as of a certain time, is captured quite well in The New Hacker’s Dictionary 2d edition, (1993, MIT Press).

Your correspondent missed the point on so much. For example, stress was not soothed by a cookie monster which locked up your terminal and kept you from working until you provided a required response (whose exact form was not necessarily known by the victim) to its demand for a cookie. Some of the definitions are quite wrong. A flame is not distinguished by its being ill-considered: a flame is usually insulting or provocative (in the sense of causing irritation); it can also be simply persisting incessantly and rabidly on a topic others find uninteresting (or past the point of interest). Flames are not any more ill-considered than all the rest of human communication, unless you are of a particularly pacifist philosophy that deems all acrimony “ill considered.”

If the reader doesn’t know what a flag is, defining it as a ‘piece of information that is either true or false’ is worse than not defining it at all. You can think of a flag as a marker associated with something else: the flag can be ‘one or zero,’ ‘on or off,’ ‘yes or no.’ One use of a flag is to mark whether information currently in use in a computer application has been changed since it was last saved. If yes, the user is asked whether it should be saved upon exit; if no, the program simply exits. A flag is true or false only in the very limited sense of asking the question, “Is it true that the information on the screen is different from its counterpart on the disk?” It has nothing to do with the correctness of the information, and the flag itself is presumably always true.

Almost as misleading is the idea that real time is an amount of time such as ‘the time it takes real people to communicate on a telephone’: real time as applied to a computer system is actually a respected technical term that describes using a computer for something that is happening while the program is running, like the computer’s modification of the angles of the flaps of an airplane in flight based on the rate of change of the altimeter, independent of commands from the pilot. This term distinguishes such programs from the more common type, for example, calculating a flight path based on weather predictions for use later in the day. Real time in jargon applies to doing something ‘without time for planning or previous thought,’ as in the minutes before a presentation (or indeed during it), creating a display to replace the key prop someone forgot. Other terms define a duration of time “in the real world” as opposed to the amount of computer processing time required for something. One such term is wall time (from the clock on the wall).

I do not claim to be a member of the society that uses this language, but I have traveled there and learned a little from the natives. Nor are my definitions of these terms intended to be rigorous.

[Colyn Phillips, Reston, Virginia]

EPISTOLA {Marcus Radi}

I am delighted that Ruth Flanders has tried to show the interesting imagery underlying French and German idioms [“Foreign Treasures,” XXII,1,21]. Unfortunately, she only browsed through the dictionary and, thus, committed a number of deplorable inaccuracies and infelicities.

Ms. Flanders lists bö hmische Dörfer and Wortsalat as synonyms. These two words are, however, far from interchangeable. Wortsalat means ‘obscure phraseology and mysterious wording,’ often referring to page-length sentences that can crop up in the writing of bureaucrats and politicians. The phrase jemandem / fiir jemanden böhmische Dörfer / ein böhmisches Dorf sein could be translated as ‘to appear incomprehensible, inexplicable, or strange.’ Originally, the phrase expressed the fact that to Germans living in Bohemia the Slav village names sounded strange and that the Germans could not understand them precisely.

Also, Germans would never say or write Senf dazugeben, when they had in mind the meaning ‘to meddle in other people’s affairs / conversation by adding one’s own piece of wisdom.’ In this case it is especially important to add the possessive adjective, hence: seinen Senf dazugeben. Otherwise it would be assumed that you were talking about sausages and seasoning.

The last German phrase in Ms. Flanders' article, ein Gesicht wie 37 Regenwetter haben, is also not quite correct, as Robert J. Powers notes [EPISTOLA, XXII,3,14]. It should be added, however, that four figures can be used in connection with the phrase ein Gesicht wie 3/7/10/14 Tage Regenwetter haben.

In “More Foreign Treasures” [XXIII,1,13], die öffentliche Hand (singular, not plural) denotes the state and the municipalities in their function as administrators and dispensers of taxes and public funds.

Although Grille (in Grillen im Kopf haben) means, quite correctly, ‘cricket’ in its first and literal meaning, and ‘strange and surprising idea’ in its figurative sense, it ought to be mentioned that there is a direct, traceable link between the two: Grille acquired its figurative sense in the 16th century when—at least in Germany—the superstition prevailed that the demons of illness appeared in the guise of an insect.

The phrase Das pabt wie die Faust aufs (not “ins”) Auge, lit. ‘That goes like a fist into the eye,’ is interesting from a semantic viewpoint. The comparison signified that two ideas or objects did not go together at all, because if someone hits you on the eye with the fist, it would, obviously, hurt very much. Because of frequent and ironic use, however, the proverb changed its denotation to the opposite in Standard German. The old meaning has, meanwhile, declined in social status, frequency, and familiarity.

As regards the term ein Achtgroschenjunge, I really would like to know from which reference work Ms. Flanders has dredged up that term.

The French treasures are also somewhat mutilated, queue [XXII,1] is feminine not masculine: tirer le diable par la queue; appuyer sur le champignon means ‘to step on the gas,’ le champignon being the slang term for ‘accelerator’; in vivre comme un coq en pâte there is no acute accent on the e; it is une [not “un”] autre paire de manches that the French use for something that is entirely different. In “More Foreign Treasures,” se noyer dans un verre means ‘to be incapable of overcoming even small problems and obstacles,’ quite different from ‘to make a mountain out of a molehill.’

[Marcus Radi, Aschaffenburg, Germany]

EPISTOLA {J. David Byrd}

J.A. Davidson’s “The Problem of Names” [XXIII,1] is a very good article and highly entertaining. I have for years suffered those who “know” what my particular method of signing says about me.

However, some of us are simply victims of circumstance. In my case, when very young, the whole immediate family resided in close proximity… including my father and grandfather (James David, Jr., and James David, (Sr., added later). After the customary Jim, James, JD, and the like were exhausted, there was not much left readily identifying yours truly. Logically, then, I became “David” rather than another variant of James. As a result, I have been signing J. David (or just David) since the beginning. The choice was not even mine to make, since my signing “James D.” would simply make folks call me Jim. Not improper on its face, it leads to embarrassing moments when people yell “Jim” as I walk away, not even suspecting they are talking to me. After all, Jim and JD were my granddad and dad, not me. During childhood, when someone yelled Jim!.. I wasn’t sure whom they were looking for, but it was a safe bet that it wasn’t me. On the other hand, a loud “David” was unmistakable evidence that (alas!) I had done something to warrant the sudden attention.

All in all a pleasant and very entertaining article, save the skipping of those of us who have “stylish” signatures by circumstance rather than by choice.

[J. David Byrd, III]

EPISTOLA {Bob Joyce}

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.

[Bob Joyce, Sun City Center, Florida]

EPISTOLA {E.A. Livingstone}

I had a good laugh over J.A. Davidson’s experience with the chummy young lady who called him “John.” If someone uses my real name, as in an opening telephone conversation, for example, I know that they do not know me as I rarely use it myself. I go through this all the time and I have several answers to the question, “What is your first name?” If it is a woman I have just met, I say that I only reveal my real name when we become intimate. This, of course, has killed off several potential relationships, so I have given up on it. I often say that I have the same name as General George Armstrong Custer’s father. This has stumped almost everyone with one exception. My third comment is, “I have an unlisted name. You’re familiar with unlisted telephone numbers, aren’t you? Well I have an unlisted name.”

Now that one generally stops them in their tracks.

[E.A. Livingstone, Glendale, New York]

EPISTOLA {William H. Dougherty}

I cannot resist the temptation to comment on Israel Wilenitz’s comment in his EPISTOLA [XXIII,1,24] about my EPISTOLA [XXII,2,10] in response to Milton Horowitz’s “A Discouraging Word” [OBITER DICTA, XXII,1,13]. The subject of our epistolary dialogue is the etymology of the word balagan, a buzzword in modern Hebrew.

If in Mr. Wilenitz’s EPISTOLA he had written “Perhaps [instead of Surely] the vehicle for carrying the Russian word into modern Israeli Hebrew was Yiddish,” I would agree with him without reservation. But recent experiences in San Francisco, as well as casual earlier observations in the New York area and in Israel suggest to me that Russian is to the current Ashkenazic Diaspora what Yiddish was to earlier Jewish communities in Europe and America.

The analogy is not perfect; analogies hardly ever are. Unless Yiddish is merely a dialect of German and not a separate language spoken almost exclusively by Jews, it differs from the Russian spoken by the bulk of Jewish emigrants from the USSR in being the Jews' own language rather than a shared language like Russian. In the following anecdote substitution of the word Russian for Yiddish kills the joke, though I am sure that many more Jews today speak Russian than speak Yiddish.

An old Jewish lady in Israel was chided by her children for talking to their Sabra children in Yiddish, the dialect of the ghetto, instead of in Hebrew. “But,” the old grandmother protested, “I talk to them in Yiddish because I want them to know they’re Jewish.

Nevertheless, Jewish immigrants to America and even in Israel, despite pressure to learn Hebrew, communicate among themselves mainly in Russian, hardly ever in Yiddish. When Soviet Jews were allowed to emigrate and poured into New York, the HOBOE PYCCKOE CJIOBO, previously an anti-Communist Russian-language newspaper published in New York, became more Jewish than Christian in orientation, running ads for Jewish funeral parlors and Jewish summer camps. The best Soviet Jewish writers, in contrast to Isaac Bashevis Singer from Poland, wrote their masterpieces in Russian. I have in mind Babel, Yevgeniya Ginsburg and her half-Jewish son Aksyonov, the poets Osip Mandelshtam and Joseph Brodsky, and in my opinion the best novelist of World War II, Vasily Grossman.

Recently I accompanied my wife to San Francisco where she underwent a series of diagnostic tests at the UCSF/ Mount Zion Medical Center, which, I gathered, was basically a Jewish institution. I was bemused to notice that throughout the hospital there were signs in Russian as well as English. I found myself chatting with one of the nurses in Russian. While waiting for my wife in the reception room, I saw a dapper little old fellow approach the information desk and attempt in Russian to get directions from the uncomprehending woman in attendance there behind a sign in several languages, including Tagalog—but not Yiddish. I interpreted for the old gentleman and then having nothing better to do, walked with him to the building he had been directed to. He was from Kiev. I was once at a Jewish friend’s birthday party where somehow the guests, mostly Jewish, got to talking about their grandparents, most of whom came from Kiev and thereabouts. One of the guests, laughing, hyperbolically remarked, “Well, everyone’s grandmother came from Kiev.” (Of course, politically the Ukraine, or Ukraine tout court as it is now officially called, is no longer Russian, but as for language, it is at least as Russian as it is Ukrainian.) So I guessed that the old gentleman was Jewish, and I would bet that he was fluent only in Russian.

If indeed Russian is the principal language of the current Jewish Diaspora, balagan, at least in Milton Horowitz’s example where it applied to a computer screen, might have come directly from Russian into Hebrew without the intermediary of Yiddish. Or perhaps it was simply Russian in English transliteration rather than the Hebrew or Yiddish word borrowed from Russian.

[William H. Dougherty, Santa Fe]

EPISTOLA {James C. Petts}

The phenomenon of names matching professions [EPISTOLAE, XXII,4,20] has been the subject of much discussion this year in the British magazine New Scientist, where it termed “nominative determinism.” However, my two favourite example 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 {Daniel Temianka, MD}

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

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

EPISTOLA {Raymond Harris}

Regarding Mr. Chris Bayliss’s enquiry [XXIII,2,17], I give below the Alphabet he asked for:

‘A for horses Nfurl banners

Beef or Mutton? O for a drink!

C for yourself Peter Wimsey

Defer payment Q for fish

Eve a brick Rf a mo’

Ffervescent Es ter Williams

G for Staff Tea for two

H for call-up Ufa films

Ivor Novello Vive la France!

Jaffa Oranges W for a drink

Kave canem X for hatching

L for Leather Yf or husband

M phasis Z the old man

[Raymond Harris, London]

[Too many replies were received in response to Mr Bayliss’s EPISTOLA for printing here. They have all been forwarded to him.

—Editor

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“‘Never has there been a more critical need for the NAACP, a strong and virulent organization with teeth and muscle and intestinal fortitude,” [Chairwoman Myrlie Evers-Williams] said in remarks prepared for delivery at the convention.” [From an AP story by Margaret Taus in The [San Bernardino] Sun, 10 July 1995, p. A2. Submitted by J.B. Lawrence, San Bernardino.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“ ‘This is not the nanny-state, this is the daddy-state and it’s another cockup,’ said Teresa Gorman, the Eurosceptic Tory MP, last week. ‘It is disgraceful that taxpayers’ money is used in this way. We could reach a position where manufacturers of condoms get prosecuted because their users get overexcited.”’ [From The Sunday Times, 19 May 1996, p. 1/15.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Jim Ed Rhodes attained something most people never do, he achieved his dream. He died Thursday, December 14, 1995, at the age of 86.” [From the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, 19 December 1995. Submitted by A.W. Edwards, Corpus Christ I.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“There is no obligation to buy. There are no annoying reply cards. There are only superb reference works at the best prices we offer.” [From the advertisement for the Oxford Reference Book Society in VERBATIM, Autumn 1995. Submitted by Hugh B. Wilcox, Preston, Virginia.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“As soon as doctors will allow me,… I will share again my emotions at Carnegie Hall with the public that respects the past of an fartist and gives him hope for the future.” [From an advertisement in The New York Times, 20 May 1996. Submitted by “Pat J.”]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“A rock slide on Sunday crushed a car in Glacier National Park, killing a Japanese driver who was driving and injuring his sister.” [From The New York Times, 25 June 1996. Submitted by Giulio J. D’Angio, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Mr Muskie broke down before the cameras while defending his wife’s honour on a flatbed truck in New Hampshire.” [From an obituary for Edmund Muskie in The Economist, 30 March 1996, p.83. Submitted by Mr. Thomas C. Gordon, Richmond, Virginia.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“R.M. Alexander’s response (Nuisance dust better than no jobs, March 2-3, 1996) to concerns raised about dust generated by a local mining operation reply in large part on irrelevant ad homonym tactics by conjuring up the Sierra Club, their ‘tree hugging ilk,’ and mining jobs lost to communities elsewhere.” [From a letter, by David B. Johnson of Socorro, to the Editor, Defensor Chieftain, 13 & 14 March 1996. Submitted by Ms. Barbara R. DuBois, Socorro, New Mexico.]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. The finish of two races (6,6)

9. Last Chridtmas present tied up can’t be sent off due to a fall outside? (9)

10. Timid creature gets instant employment (5)

11. One way to get inspiration (6)

12. Adventure of a number in flight (8)

13. Went after fresh detail (6)

15. Innicous hothead, like the Venus de Milo (8)

18. Fine French household one enters to show friendliness (8)

19. Quickly grasp it’s a seizure (6)

21. Excluded, though it might have been expected (8)

23. Wreckage of aircraft on the top of a mountain (6)

26. Indication of low interest rate (5)

27. A national disaster for a Turk (9)

28. Like a Pickwickian, a sight in bed (12)

Down

1. Left out when his party wins! (7)

2. Man holding policeman up for a long time (5)

3. Intrigue disguised role of Chevalier in Spain (9)

4. A visionary, he might benefit from Peter’s deprivation (4)

5. A success with females many lads fancy (5,3)

6. South American doctor goes to a dance (5)

7. Place green-fly, for example, on new shoot (8)

8. A large cactus is not to be taken lightly, by the sound of it (6)

14. Inoffensive tavern has no American money (8)

16. Maine’s not to be confused with this state (9)

17. Sacked a British politician being an underground risk (8)

18. Old note on model commission (6)

20. Our builder’s dwelling unfinished in Idaho (7)

22. Soft journey on horseback, but there could be a fall to come (5)

24. A tumble made light of? (5)

25. Resin I concealed outside the church (4)

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Hardy hero-subject due for a change (4, 3, 7)

8. Graduate in silly dialectic (9)

9. Ecclesiastical vestment put on an early martyr (5)

11. Old German city judge (5)

12. Feel anger, changing color (4, 5)

13. System of disposal with a periodical I’ve compiled (9)

15. Statues showing more than just heads and shoulders? (5)

16. Invents a phrase, making money too (5)

17. Old bishop is to encourage something used in perfumery (5, 4)

19. Crush on German boy the Italian leaves (9)

22. Lands in the water (5)

23. Plays football for excitement (5)

24. Ancient plate-maker, perhaps, producing negative results(3, 6)

25. Any lout is set to cause disorder in flamboyant fashion (14)

Down

1. Meet the young Edward and be articulate (7)

2. Clive discerning new allwoances underway (7, 8)

3. Plants a French husband in jobs (9)

4. From many, uplifting praise (5)

5. Brigand in exciting race around NE Cuba (9)

6. Tribe beginning to gather to the sound of a bell (5)

7. Made contact on the Tokyo Underground in rush-hour? (6,9)

10. Poles, both holding a single ecclesiastical office (5)

14. Pressed in all directions-maybe ruined, too (6,3)

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

16. Bishop may take this piece after chess opening (5)

18. Cuts out some unspecified part of Italy (7)

20. Refuse-what profligate is wont to do (5)

21. In light fog, dead center (5)

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. Verbal renderings of birds’ calls and notes are those given in A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, Roger Tory Peterson, Guy Mountfort, and P.A.D. Hollom, 3rd ed., Collins, 1974. ↩︎

2. P. 239: for “Guildford” Connecticut, read “Guilford.” ↩︎