VOL XXIII, No 4 [Autumn 1998]
Periodic Table Manners1 (The Carnival of the Elements)
Nick Humez (argentarius@juno.com)
Like the weather, atoms nowadays are freely talked about but the ordinary person rarely does anything about them. We know that water is H\?\2O and (if we are sufficiently dyspeptic) that baking soda is NaHCO\?\3; and it is generally agreed that uranium is quite heavy and that certain isotopes of it can be manipulated in such a way as to make a very big bang. Some of us may even take a slightly perverse delight in the ability to rattle off the first 90-odd names of the elements to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Modern Major General,” thanks to the jeu d’esprit of a brash young Harvard junior-faculty statistician in the early 1950s.2
Very few of us, however, can say why the symbol for sodium is Na, why quicklime should remind us of a Brooklyn journalist preacher, or what the secret ingredient in a popular variety of ersatz diamond has to do with a little town in the southern end of Sweden and near the end of the alphabet.
The following article makes no attempt to be a 20-minute Chem 101 crash course for the perplexed, but, it is hoped, should at least provide you with counter-ammunition the next time someone corners you at a party and starts dropping terms such as stoichiometry as the temperature of your beer rises slowly but inexorably from cellar to attic.
It is in Attica that we begin, for the notion that the many complex substances with which we are surrounded in daily life might in reality be compounded from a much smaller number of basic elements is documented as far back as the golden age of Greece. Today we are accustomed to thinking of elements and atoms as one and the same; to the Greeks, atoms and elements represented efforts by different philosophic schools to explain the discrepancy between appearances and the true nature of things.
According to Aristotle, it was the qualitative pluralist Empedocles (484-424 B.C.E.) who first argued that everything was fundamentally reducible to the elements earth, water, air and fire (or sunlight) in different proportions, but, as one classical scholar3 observes, “a popular belief in the four as somehow basic ingredients in nature was much older,” possibly a borrowing from Egypt.
Greek atomism was fashioned in a different workshop. Democritus (born sometime between 470 and 457 B.C.E.) maintained that despite our sense perceptions, “in reality there are only atoms and the void.” Aristotle says that Democritus conceived atoms—the word means ‘unsplittables’ (Greek a-, ‘not-,’ plus tomos, ‘a cut, section’)—as being “particles at variance with one another” which “tend to get ensnarled and interlocked… fit snugly and so catch firm hold of one another, for some bodies are scalene while others are sharply hooked, some are concave, others convex…” (As it turns out, atoms don’t quite work this way; but complex molecules, particularly organic compounds, often do, which is why surface proteins of a cell that function as receptor sites for harmful invaders such as viruses can be blocked with other molecules of the appropriate shape, and why, when placed in a solution of mixed sugars, some bacteria flunk the membership test for the Clean Plate Club because they can digest dextrose but leave its mirror image, levulose, untouched.)
Although the four-elements paradigm remained robust throughout antiquity and through the Middle Ages (during which a mystical tradition emerged proposing a fifth element, ruling the others, the socalled quintessence), atomism fell out of favor for nearly two millennia until the quantitative philosophy of the early Enlightenment created a conceptual environment friendly to the metamorphosis of alchemy, through the chemical experiments of Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton, Joseph Priestley, Henry Cavendish, Antoine Lavoisier and others, into something like the chemistry we were all taught in high school.
The scientist’s prejudice, to be sure, sometimes impeded “saving the phenomenon” (as the Greeks aptly called experimental observation). The year before the outbreak of the American Revolution, Priestley succeeded in removing from air, so he thought, the substance called phlogiston which was thought to be what put fires out, and dubbed his “dephlogisticated air” oxygen because he supposed it to be an essential ingredient of acids (Greek oxy-, ‘sharp’—as in oxymoron—plus -gen, related to the verb gignomai, ‘I become, happen, am born’)4. Cavendish was much closer to his own mark: in 1766 he isolated hydrogen, which he correctly perceived as a building block of water (hydro- being the oblique stem of Greek hyder, ‘water’).
In many instances, finding an element was simply a matter of recognizing that it was an element and not a compound, and had been lying around people’s mines and workshops since antiquity. In place of the alchemical signs still common through Newton’s day in the notation of chemical reactions, elements got assigned symbols of one or two letters, often drawn from the Latin names for the same substances because Latin remained the common tongue for scholarly communication across national and linguistic borders until well into the 19th century. Thus the sign for iron became Fe (from Latin ferrum), for gold, Au (aurum), for silver, Ag (argentum), for copper Cu (cuprum), for lead, Pb (plumbum—until steel replaced lead pipe for waterworks, plumbers were, and had been since Roman times, workers in lead).
Other symbols are less straightforward. Sodium—the name is derived from soda, originally an Italian term for ash used in glassmaking and later applied to a number of sodium salts—is Na, short for natron or natrium, a neo-latinate term also applied to a variety of sodium compounds. Because it has the same number of free electrons as hydrogen, sodium is useful in a great many compounds as a substitute for one of the two atoms of hydrogen (also valence 1) in a variety of acids. Thus jewelers' pickling solution, used to dissolve surface sulfides from precious metals and marketed under such trade names as Dixcel or Sparex, is sodium hyposulfate (NaHSO\?\4;), far less corrosive than the sulfuric acid5 it replaced in everyday use. Other common sodium compounds are NaHCO\?\3 (sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda, mentioned above), NaCl (sodium chloride, or common table salt; chlorine is so called because in its gaseous form it is green— Greek chlor-, as in chlorophyl, which, a vulgar euphemism for manure notwithstanding, is what really makes the grass grow green), NaOH (sodium hydroxide, commonly known as caustic soda or lye) and NaNO\?\3 (sodium nitrate, sometimes called Chile saltpeter).
A common substitute for sodium when the latter is contraindicated (e.g. for heart conditions) is potassium (from ‘potash’), whose valence is also 1 and whose symbol is K, from late Latin kalium, a word of dubious etymology. (For what it’s worth, Greek kalia means ‘birdhouse,’ ‘little shed,’ ‘wooden shrine’— such as would cover an outdoor divinty’s statue.) Unlike sodium, free potassium reacts violently with water, liberating gaseous hydrogen6; but like sodium, potassium is rarely free and much more apt to be encountered in compounds. Potassium iodide can be used at dinner as a salt substitute; Morton salt includes significant amounts of it as an additive because iodine (like chlorine, a valence-1 halogen and a gas in its natural state) is necessary to the proper functioning of our thyroid glands.
Potassium chloride (KCl), on the other hand, can be made to react with Chile saltpeter (see above) to produce true saltpeter: potassium nitrate (KNO\?\3), an essential ingredient of gunpowder, whose other two components are sulfur and carbon; the three can be combined to explosive effect in as simple proportions by weight as 1, 2, and 3 respectively. (Do not try this at home.)
There is also a compound called ‘wall saltpeter’ because it can leach out of the mortar between the bricks of damp walls: calcium nitrate (CaNO\?\3). Calcium has a valence of 2, so it can substitute in many a molecule for two atoms of potassium, sodium, or hydrogen, or some combination of them; its name derives from Latin calx, which means both ‘lime’—the substance, not the fruit—and ‘heelbone.’ The association of lime and bones is not accidental: Limestone (calcium carbonate, CaCO\?\3) is nothing but the fossilized skeletons of tiny sea animals, and calcium is the principal ingredient of bone; when Shakespeare wrote, in The Tempest, that “Of his bones are coral made,” he stated a truer fact of nature than he may have known. Other ubiquitous calcium compounds include gypsum—calcium sulfate (CaSO\?\4;), which is what sheetrock is made of— and the active binding agent in cement, quicklime— Calcium oxide (CaO), produced by cooking limestone in a lime kiln (the primitive version, a lime rick —compare hay-rick, a variant of haystack—was a heap of earth with the stone and a fire kept going inside it—whence the name of the town in Ireland by which the doggerel verse-form is called as well7). Quicklime is “quick” (that is, “alive,” as in “the quick and the dead”) because it is anhydrous (Greek for ‘unwatered’) and soaks up water with a vengeance to make slaked lime (calcium hydroxide, Ca(OH)\?\2, from CaO + H\?\2O), which is what makes quicklime so useful as the binding agent in mortar, cement, and concrete.
Some elements bear macaronic labels: one which has a name from Greek but a symbol from Latin is antimony (refined as early as 900 C.E. and used, during the Middle Ages, as a powerful precursor to Ex-Lax. The patient swallowed it as a pill which was collected at the other end and weighed, the patient being charged for the difference.) Antimony is so called from Greek antimonos, ‘against single(ness)’ owing to its readiness to react with other substances, but its chemical symbol is Sb, from Latin stibium, the name of a cosmetic and medicinal powder (antimony sulfide) used by Roman women as a hair blackener for their eyebrows, and in ophthalmology (of which there were many Etruscan specialists, thanks in part to the unhealthy swamps of Rome’s Tuscan hinterlands) as an eye ointment. Another metal, tin—for which the Phoenicians used to sail as far from Tyre and Sidon to the mines on the coast of Cornwall nearly three millennia ago—bears a Latin symbol short for another metallic substance: Sn, for stannum, a Roman-era amalgam of silver and lead. (The Romans called tin plumbum album— ‘white lead.')
Most of the elements discovered in the first exuberant wave of Enlightenment chemistry bear abbreviations close to their actual names: Ni for nickel, first identified in 1751 (an abbreviation of German Kupfernickel, ‘copper-demon,’ so called because miners first noticed it as a stubborn adulterant of copper ore), Al for aluminum—spelled aluminium in the British Commonwealth nations (named in 1825 from Latin alumen, ‘astringent substance’), Co for cobalt (isolated in 1735; the name is a variant of German Kobold, a kind of imp). But there are a few curve balls here as well, such as tungsten (from tung sten, Swedish for ‘heavy stone’), first discovered in 1783, whose symbol is W, short for Wolfram (‘wolf-soot’)—the German name for tungsten oxide.8
Tungsten was first discovered in the United States in 1819, along with tellurium (with the symbol Te, it comes from Latin tellus, another word for terra, both meaning ‘earth;’ compare the consonant shift between Latin puer, ‘boy,’ and puella, ‘girl’) in Huntington, Connecticut, in a bismuth mine. (It was once thought that bismuth—symbol Bi—was a Germanic corruption of weisse Masse, ‘white mass.’ However, it now appears to have a far more complicated history: German Bismut came from New Latin bismutum, itself altered from medieval Latin vismutum, from obsolete German Wismut, itself a compound of Wise-, ‘meadow,’ plus Mut, ‘mine claim’. If this seems far-fetched, consider that a major American silver polish company began when a Mr. Wright of New Hampshire extricated one of his cows from a slough in a wet part of a field and was tipped off by the whitish mud clinging to the animal’s feet to the presence of what proved to be a surprisingly large deposit of calcium-rich diatomaceous earth. Mines do grow in meadows.)
Apart from identifying the elements, the chemists of the 18th and early 19th century were most interested in quantifying them. Jö;ns Jakob Berzelius, who discovered selenium (from Greek selene, ‘moon’) in 1818 and named silicon (from Latin silex, ‘flint’) in 1824, compiled the first systematic table of the elements in 1828, arranged according to units of atomic weight one twelfth of the heft of the commonest isotope of carbon. (The heavier carbon-14—C\?\14 for short—is radioactive, with a half-life—the amount of time it takes half the radioactive atoms to throw off particles and decay to their non-radioactive isotope—reckoned in thousands of years, once the carbon is captured in a living organism such as a tree. This permits a means of reasonably accurate dating which has been a boon to archeologists.)
Four decades later, Dmitri Mendeleev systematized the table to show stacks of elements with similar properties (e.g. the interchangeability of the numbers of hydrogen, lithium, sodium and potassium atoms in molecules such as sulfates and hydroxides: The sodium atom in lye—NaOH—could just as well be replaced by a second hydrogen, making ‘hydrogen hydroxide’—HOH, better known as H\?\2O, or water). Mendeleev’s insight was so valuable that when radioactive elements began being synthesized in laboratories during this century, he got one named after him: Mendelevium—note the dropping of the final e!—the 101st element (symbol Md), first synthesized in 1955.
Other scientists with eponymous atoms include the discoverers of radium, Pierre and Marie Curie (element 96, Curium, symbol Cm, discovered in 1944), Ernest O. Lawrence, founder of the Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore laboratories (element 103, Lawrencium, symbol Lr, synthesized in 1961), and, of course, Albert Einstein (element 99, Einsteinium, symbol Es, created in 1952)—the only instance of an atom named after someone still living at the time of its discovery. (He died in 1955.)
Place names and celestial bodies have been a fruitful source of names for both natural and synthetic elements. For the outer planets, there are uranium, neptunium, and plutonium. Cerium is named for the asteroid Ceres, both having been discovered the same year (1801). National commemoratives include Americium, Germanium, Polonium and Francium; ancient France likewise gets a nod in Gallium (Ga), the only metal that melts in your hand, not in your chamber (unless you have a very warm room)—named both for Gaul (Latin Gallia, that place which, thanks to Julius Caesar’s memoir of its subjugation by the Romans, every schoolchild used to know was divided into three parts) and, in a gesture of unusual levity, as a pun on the name of its discoverer, Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran. (French coq and Latin gallus both mean the same thing: ‘rooster.')
One place has the distinction of having no fewer than four atoms named after it, an embarrassment of nomenclature arising from what was originally thought to be one element turning out on closer inspection to be several. Carl Gustav Mosander found a new element in a geological sample from Ytterby, Sweden, a town just a few miles north of Göteborg (the Swedish terminus for the ferry from Frederikshavn, Denmark. Do not confuse this with Ytterbyn, Sweden, which is 1000 kilometers to the north, on the gulf of Bothnia). Naturally enough, Mosander named the new element Ytterbium, after the town.
One can well imagine his surprise when the new atom turned out to be plural. To make the best of a bad situation, the second and third elements got names from pieces of the first: Erbium (Er) and Terbium (Tb). Complicating matters even more, in 1907 another chemist, George Urbain, discovered that the remaining element was actually two. The new one got called Ytterbium (Yb) and Mosander’s original find got the name Yttrium (Y). Synthetic yttrium aluminum garnets (YAGs) are favored by jewelers and their public because the high refractive index of the gem approaches that of diamond, at a fraction of the cost.
“Revelation is not seal’d:” New elements are being discovered to this day. As of last year, the Society for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany, had gotten up to element 112. These new radioactive atoms are remarkably ephemeral, often decaying in millionths of a second into lighter elements by casting off subatomic particles, their fleeting lives documented only by vapor trails.
Still, they enjoy a brief existence of a sort, and names for them, honoring physicists and the locations of their laboratories, are already queued up awaiting approval by the scientific community at large: Rutherfordium for #104 (Ernest Rutherford), Dubnium for #105 (after the Russian lab at Dubna), Seaborgium for #106 (Glenn Seaborg), Bohrium for #107 (Niels Bohr), Hassium for #108 (Hesse province in Germany, where the Darmstadt lab is located) and—the first element to be named solely for a woman—Meitnerium for #109 (Lise Meitner).
It is a sobering thought, then, to consider that virtually all of the elements above #2 (helium, the fusion product of the hydrogen that makes up the stars, our sun included) are the result of the catastrophic blowing apart of prior suns, and that our earth and everything else in our own solar system are mere cosmic hand-me-downs from someone else’s supernova. In this light the history of the universe according to Taoist thought can be either depressing or exhilarating, depending on one’s point of view; at any rate it seems true enough as far as the Big Picture goes: First there was nothing. Then there was something. Then there was hydrogen. Then there was dirty hydrogen.9
Johnny drank the beaker dry;
Johnny is no more:
For what he thought was H\?\2O
Was H\?\2SO\?\4;.
A great Congregational Preacher
Once said to a hen, “You sweet creature!”
The hen, just for that,
Laid an egg in his hat,
And thus did the hen reward Beecher.
It has been argued, but not definitively proven, that this is a veiled reference to the scandalous affair between Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton, a member of his parish and the wife of his successor as editor of the Independent, for more on which see Richard Brookhiser’s article “The Happy Medium” in the New York Times Book Review of March 29, 1998.
Notes
Loose ends: (a) While we’re on the subject, or at least next door to it—or at any rate, before we leave its vicinity—let this be said for the record: Nowhere in the works of Arthur Conan Doyle does arch-sleuth Sherlock Holmes ever actually say, “Elementary, my dear Watson.”
(b) The term element itself, while unquestionably from Latin—Cicero gives it as a gloss for Greek stoicheion, ‘series’ (stoichiometry is the calculation of relative quantities of reagents and their end-products in a chemical reaction)—is of obscure derivation. Ernout and Meillet, in their delightful Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, urbanely review several rather far-fetched possibilities including “LMN”—well, it is a series—and elephas (‘elephant’), but conclude with a shrug of their shoulders and a suggestion that the word might have come from Etruscan. Another word whose origin is shrouded in the mists of antiquity—like the swamps of Etruria, a notoriously foggy place.
Nick Humez is the coauthor, with his brother Alex, of a half-dozen books on language and word origins including Latin for People/Latina pro Populo (Little, Brown, Boston: 1976). He divides his time between a silversmithing studio in Maine and a scriptorium in New Jersey.
EX CATHEDRA: Ave!
Or, rather, hello again! VERBATIM is back, with as few changes as possible, and we hope that it comes as an old friend. We thank everyone who resubscribed, sight unseen, and especially those who enclosed heartening notes, made helpful suggestions, and, in general, cheered us on.
You’ll find some familiar voices as well as some new ones in this issue. In choosing the articles you see in this issue I had help from a name you may have noticed on the masthead: Paul Heacock, of the Cambridge Dictionary of American English. I would also like to thank Bob Olsen, John Mella, Mike Slattery, Debbie Posner, and (especially) Hazel Hall for their help. (Hazel has agreed to continue as our UK representative.)
One thing you may have already noticed is that we are a little more “wired” than before, and it’s not just due to Coca-Cola and coffee. I can be emailed at editor@verbatimmag.com, and our shiny new website, www.verbatimmag.com, has been duly submitted to all the spiders, indexers, and ‘bots that make up the major Internet search indexes. Eventually, we plan to make back issues available (and searchable!) online for your researching pleasure.
Many of you have written and asked for details about the sale. VERBATIM has been sold to Dr. Warren Gilson, an inventor in Madison, Wisconsin. (His company’s website is www.gilson.com; they make lab gadgets beyond your wildest dreams, and he can be reached electronically at wegilson@gilson.com). Dr. Gilson has set up VERBATIM as part of Word, Inc., which has applied for nonprofit status. We’re awaiting word from the IRS; please cross your fingers for us. Our purpose is “to promote learning and discussion of language and words.”
One of the questions we asked on our survey was if you would be interested in a “Best of” collection of past articles. Many, many of you were, so I am asking you to send in your votes for what articles were “best” from the past twenty-three volumes. Send them to the address on the masthead or to editor@verbatimmag.com. Please include the title, author, volume, and issue number if you know them, or as much information as you can!
Kudos to the sharp-eyed survey answerers who caught the typo in the last line of the survey: The classic “you” instead of “your.” And thanks to those of you who wrote in about the double possessive in the salutation of the letters. To lift from the latest Fowler’s English Usage, (ed. R.W. Burchfield, Oxford, 1996 p. 227) “a friend of my mother’s is idiomatic, but a friend of the British Museum’s is not”. So the idiomaticity of the phrase we used in our letter to former subscribers (“Dear Friends of VERBATIM’S”) all depends on whether you feel VERBATIM is more like your mother or the British Museum!
A few reassurances: some of you have written to express your hopes that VERBATIM will not become clogged with ads. According to our nonprofit application, we can only accept ads for products, businesses, or services related to our mission, which absolutely rules out ads for personal watercraft, financial services, and smelly perfume inserts.
One last plea: don’t you know someone who would like VERBATIM? Think of us when making out your holiday lists. Due to the marvelous response from former subscribers, the special $25/year rate in North America (£18 in the U.K, US $30 everywhere else) will be good for the foreseeable future. Write, call, or email by December 1 and your gift will start with the January issue. Of course, we’ll send a card.
I trust that our readers will not hesitate to make their feelings known about our reincarnation—keep those letters coming!
Erin McKean
DARE—More Than Halfway There
Joan Houston Hall, Associate Editor, Dictionary of American Regional English
Because logophiles regularly ask about the progress of the Dictionary of American Regional English (familiarly known as DARE), I’d like to take the opportunity of VERBATIM’s rebirth to bring you all up to date. First, let me answer the most frequently asked question, “How is Fred Cassidy doing?” I’m delighted to say that Frederic G. Cassidy, DARE’s Chief Editor as well as the founder of and inspiration behind the project, shows few signs of slowing down as he approaches his ninety-first birthday. His recent return from a trip to Jamaica (where he was born and later did the research for his books on Jamaican English) and his imminent departure for a conference on Caribbean Linguistics in St. Lucia should convince you of his good health!
The second most frequently asked question, “When will Volume IV be available?” is more difficult to answer. Before I try, let me give a quick synopsis of the project for those who aren’t already familiar with it.
The Dictionary of American Regional English is a reference tool unlike any other. Its aim is not to prescribe how Americans should speak, or even to describe the language we use as cultivated speakers and writers. Instead, it tries to document the varieties of English that are not found throughout the country—those words, pronunciations, and phrases that vary from one region to another, that are learned at home rather than at school, or that are part of our oral rather than our written culture. Although American English is remarkably homogeneous given the tremendous size of the country, there are still many thousands of differences that characterize the various dialect regions of the United States. It is these differences that DARE records.
The Dictionary is based both on face-to-face interviews carried out in all fifty states between 1965 and 1970, and on an extensive collection of written materials (diaries, letters, novels, histories, biographies, newspapers, and government documents) that cover our history from the colonial period up to the present. These materials are cited in individual entries to illustrate how words have been used from the seventeenth century through the end of the twentieth. The entries also include pronunciations (if they vary regionally or differ from what would be expected), variant forms, etymologies (if DARE can add to what is already known about a word’s history), and statements about regional and social distributions of words and forms.
A feature unique to DARE is its inclusion in the text of the dictionary of numerous maps that show where words were found in the 1,002 communities investigated during the fieldwork. The maps are “distorted” to reflect population density rather than geographic area (giving a speaker in small, but densely populated Connecticut as much space as a speaker in large, but sparsely populated Nevada). Though the maps are disconcerting at first glance, one easily learns to “translate” the state boundaries and make sense of the regional patterns.
Volume I, including extensive introductory matter and the letters A-C, was published in 1985 (to the acclaim of scholarly and lay reviewers alike, I’m pleased to say). It had gone into a fifth printing within a year of publication. Volume II (D-H) came out in 1991, and Volume III (I-O) appeared in 1996. Volume IV will include P through the middle of S (we hate to divide a letter in the middle, but you all know how big S is). And Volume V will take us through Z.
To give you a sample of what’s to come, let me mention a few representative headwords from Volume IV—chosen simply because I like them. (If they are strange to you, see below for their meanings.) The P’s take us from pandowdy to pompey to pudjicky; the Q’s offer qualmish, quick start, and quiddle; in R we find ramstugious, redd up, robin snow, and rumpelkammer; and S yields saluggi, say-so, and smearcase. Not to be outdone in creativity, the natural science entries offer pollynose, prickly pig, puppy toes, Quaker bonnet, railroad Annie, and sac-a-lait, among many, many others.
As you can see from this sample, we are moving steadily along through the alphabet. Our original hope had been to publish Volume IV in 2001, with Volume V coming out in 2006. That schedule, however, was contingent on our maintaining our earlier level of funding, which has become increasingly difficult, and, in the last few years, impossible. In fact, our financial woes necessitated a staff reduction last summer, and it looks as if Volume IV will not be ready before 2002.
Although the project is located on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University can provide very limited financial support. Our funding has come primarily from grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, matched by gifts from numerous foundations and individuals. While the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was for many years our largest source of private funds, we have also received assistance from the Brittingham Fund, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Evjue Foundation, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Hillsdale Fund, Inc., and the Grace Jones Richardson Trust, among others.
After helping DARE for nearly twenty years (despite its usual limit of ten years), the Mellon Foundation has had to move on to other worthy projects. So, we must find other friends who can help us see that this project reaches the only reasonable conclusion for a dictionary—the letter Z. The single bright spot in our funding picture is that the Dean of the College of Letters and Science here at the UWMadison has provided DARE with a Development Specialist for three years. David Simon has just joined our staff, and will be devoting his considerable energies to finding new sources of funding for DARE. Although we hope that the National Endowment for the Humanities will continue to provide us with some support, it is clear that the future of the project depends largely on private philanthropy. We all know people who know people who might be able to help. If you can be part of our support network, or know someone else who can, won’t you give David a call? He can be reached at (608) 265-9836. Or drop him a note at 6125 Helen White Hall, 600 N. Park St., Madison, WI 53706; or send him an e-mail at davidsimon@facstaff.wisc.edu. (While you’re on line, take a look at our website, at http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/dare/dare.html.) We invite you to join in our rallying cry—“On to Z!”
In case you didn’t recognize those Volume IV headwords, here they are again:
pandowdy a deep-dish pie or cobbler
pompey bulging or sagging (used in reference to a floor or a surface of ice)
pudjicky sullen, grouchy
qualmish queasy
quick start a sneaker
quiddle to fuss over unimportant matters
ramstugious violent and reckless in behavior
redd up to clean, tidy up
robin snow a light snowfall
rumpelkammer a junk room or storage place
saluggi (spelled in various other ways as well) a “game” intended to torment its victim
say-so an ice-cream cone
smearcase cottage cheese
pollynose a maple seed that one splits apart and sticks to the bridge of the nose
prickly pig a porcupine
puppy toes a plant of the genus Euonymous, also called “cat’s paw” and “burning bush”
Quaker bonnet a bluet; also lupine
railroad Annie an orange milkweed
sac-a-lait a white crappie (a fish of the sunfish family)
Exploring the Lexicon with Natives of North America
August Rubrecht (rubreca@uwec.edu), University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
In August, 1967, at the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) offices on the University of Wisconsin campus, Frederic G. Cassidy assembled the third group of dialect fieldworkers he would send out in Word Wagons (Dodge vans converted to campers) to collect regional words from far-flung reaches of the United States. I was one; the others were Tom Clark, Stanley J. Cook, and Patt Van Dyke. We went through a week of orientation and instruction, getting to know the office staff and operations, having our driving and phonetic transcription skills checked, and learning to use our camping and recording equipment. Bibliographer Goldye Mohr had identified the communities we were to visit. It was up to us to choose an efficient itinerary and locate informants—as many as needed, but ideally just one in each place—to answer the 253-page DARE questionnaire (QR). We were advised to begin each project by notifying the county sheriff, town clerk, or other officials, and to ask them for leads to good informants.
The ideal informant (INF) was a native and lifelong resident from an old local family, someone without much exposure to the outside world, who spoke regularly and familiarly with community members of all social ranks and occupations, who could remember precisely how all of them talked about their social, domestic, economic, and natural environments, and who would donate ten to twenty hours of free time to transmit all this information.
The ideal fieldworker (FW) was a good listener with at least a little linguistic training and a lot of Sprachgefühl who knew as much about the world in general as the INF knew about the local part of it. First, though, the FW had to possess a talent for fitting in, so as to make such an impression of integrity and worth on local officials that they arranged an introduction at once to the ideal INF. Once the interview began, this ideal FW would seem as familiar as an old friend, so that the INF always spoke in everyday terms instead of bookish formal ones.
Like all ideals, these remained abstract, and DARE had to make do with actual human beings and their limitations. Judging by the quality of the 1,002 QRs archived in Madison, we—INFs and FWs alike—must have compensated for our limitations pretty well.
Of my own limitations, the one I had to compensate for most was my ignorance of city life. I asked Jim Hartman, the fieldwork coordinator, not to send me on any more urban expeditions than necessary. However, since I was the sole FW assigned to Louisiana, New Orleans was necessary. In fact, it was necessary twice, because two QRs were allocated in the metropolitan area. To increase coverage, I divided one between a white suburban housewife and a black gardener from downtown. For the other I went to the Irish Channel, a working-class neighborhood. This was the environment I was most ill-suited for.
I knew how to act in some places. Growing up in the rural Ozarks, I learned early that good country people expect visitors to sit and visit a spell before bringing up their business. From dealing with academic administrators, I knew to come straight to the point with personages who sit behind large desks and have their time allocated by secretaries. One of my teachers, a South Carolina native, had taught me that white men like me always had to state their business clearly when looking for a resident of a black neighborhood; otherwise the neighbors would assume they were up to no good and pretend not to know the person. Because my city experience was largely limited to student enclaves, however, nothing prepared me for establishing turf in a working-class urban neighborhood.
My difficulty was exacerbated by the setting where I was introduced by a city councilman: a bar, Parasol’s, which played a central role in the social and cultural life of the Irish Channel. I could find no one INF who would withdraw to a private spot for a quiet interview; I just had to show up every afternoon and interview whichever authentic old-time Irish Channel male residents came in and agreed to talk there in the bar. Women stayed on the restaurant side, and I was given to understand it would be presumptuous of me to try to interview them. On the bar side, I was expected to buy rounds of drinks when my turn came up and to drink the beer served to me when others bought rounds. The regulars came almost every day to play out roles (jokester, misanthrope, goosey guy, smiley guy, gourmand, and others) in an ongoing plotless improvisational drama.
It was a fun-loving group, and I would have had as much fun as anybody if I had not had work to do, but keeping the QR going required continual exercise of the will. Normally, with one INF, once we established a working relationship, my only strain came from making the questions understood and making sure I understood the answers. In Parasol’s, though, I had to struggle every night to shape and defend my identity because it never did settle down to a single role that every actor could play to. To some I was “the guy writing a book.” One fellow always greeted me with, “Arkansas! Arkansas!” Another fixated on Wisconsin and repeatedly tried to start friendly arguments about the Green Bay Packers.
A quintessential incident: one night a patron new to me came in, noticed me asking questions, and began asking some himself. I explained cordially what I was doing and who I worked for.
He said, “Oh, a Yankee, hunh?”
Still cordially, I said, “No, I’m not a Yankee. I just work for the University of Wisconsin. I was born and raised in Arkansas.” He sparred with me about what the Dictionary would be good for and called me a Yankee again. This time, half for show and half in real anger, I stood up, slammed my fist to the table, and shouted, “God damn it, I’m not a Yankee!”
There were several of us at the table, and every-body’s beer turned over. I thought, Uh-oh, now I’ve got a fight on my hands. Sensing I had to show some spunk, but unable to guage it right, I had almost shown too much. He said, “Take it easy. I’m not trying to start nothing.” He didn’t back off for long; after I had bought more beer, he came after me again about the Dictionary. “I think,” he said, “it’s a lot of bullshit.”
I answered much the way I had answered more delicately phrased objections in Arkansas and north Louisiana: I told how, for example, a fisherman would be able to check the Dictionary if he caught a mudfish in Florida and wanted to find out what the “real” name of it was. He could find that the mudfish is called bowfin in textbooks, that in south Arkansas and north Louisiana it is written grindle or grinnel but always pronounced ['grinl]; that in south Louisiana it is called green cypress trout, grinnel, and choupique, which in English is pronounced [š]; that in northwest Florida the word grindle is sometimes pronounced [‘grindl]. A person could find similar interesting bits of information about every aspect of daily life.
Such explanations had always worked before but here I had gauged wrong again. The people farther north had all been earnest Protestants with a utilitarian outlook. This man resided in a Catholic neighborhood whose cultural values were epitomized by parades: Mardi Gras, St. Patrick’s Day, and St. Joseph’s Day. Celebrants began planning next year’s parade the day after this year’s was over. I should have known that these interests did not point to a utilitarian turn of mind.
“Yeah,” he said, “but I still think it’s a lot of bullshit.”
A few years later I would present a symposium paper titled “Scholarship as Play,” saying academic pursuits manifest the human tendency to extend the learning activity of play all the way through adulthood instead of abandoning it after adolescence, as most other mammals do. Even in 1968, though, I had long realized—without thinking the matter through so thoroughly as I did for the paper—that academic study is not serious in the same sense that farming, mining, weaving, and child-rearing are. I had seldom said so openly, but this began to seem like a good time. I grinned and looked the man in the eye and said, “To tell you the truth, I think it’s a lot of bullshit myself. But I really enjoy doing it.”
He looked blank for a moment and then grinned back and said, “You know something? I kinda like you!”
Fitting in can have its drawbacks. Another time, I was able to keep an informant only because I was an outsider; she realized she should make allowances for my ignorance. That story is worth telling, if only for the word she made allowances for.
In introducing myself and DARE to a prospective INF in Cameron, LA, I gave examples of what I had learned. Among others, I mentioned the names caouane [\?\ka\?\wεn] or [\?\ka\?\wæn], ‘turtle’; gros-bec [\?\gro(u),bεk], ‘night heron’; and bec-scie [\?\bεk\?\si], ‘merganser.’ She agreed to work with me, but the next day she warned me not to say one of the words I had used the day before because it was a dirty word and I would get in trouble for it. At the time I could not recall any words I had said. I asked, “Which one?”
She cast down her eyes and said, “I can’t tell you.”
For a day or two I was almost afraid to speak at all, until I narrowed down to the words mentioned above. Just before leaving Cameron, I made an educated guess and asked my INF if it was the word for turtle that was so bad. She said it was.
Hartman had told me to be on the lookout for the southeastern turtle name cooter, with the slang meaning ‘pudendum.’ If that was what caouane meant, we had something. I pursued the investigation in a bar, where verbal taboos are often relaxed. There was one male customer inside, talking with the proprietress. After I had circumlocuted a while to avoid offense to her, she and the customer agreed slyly they knew what word I meant. I learned over to the man, cupped my ear, and intoned dramatically, “Tell me.”
“It’s caouane [\?\ka\?\wæn],” he said, “and in French it means ‘pussy’.” I remained outwardly calm, but I could have jumped up and down and shouted.
I wrote to Cassidy expressing puzzlement. I remembered Thomas Pyles pointing out in class once that animal metaphors for this body part name cute, furry animals: pussy, beaver, squirrel, monkey, cony, and (in France) lapin. Nothing about a turtle is cuddlesome; it does not fit the pattern. Cassidy offered an intriguing explanation: the metaphor probably originated in Caribbean folklore, which has it that sea turtles (the referent for caouane in standard French dictionaries) copulate for a hundred days at a time. In Louisiana the name was transferred to a freshwater turtle with far more modest size and amatory tenacity, but the metaphor persisted. It pays tribute not to cuteness but to sexual power. It venerates venery.
I would never have learned all this if my INF had not proffered the courtesy owed to an ignorant outsider.
[Textual note] The anecdotes recounted here are retellings of my fieldwork journal entries dated Feb. 5 and Mar. 7, [1968]. The original volumes are in my possession; photocopies are archived at the DARE office.
Ups and Downs
David Galef, University of Mississippi
Explaining English idioms is tough enough, but how do you account for the seemingly contradictory ones? I was in a taxi with a Japanese friend of mine, and the driver was cutting through traffic like a speedboat through a docking area. “Hey, buddy!” I rapped on the divider-glass. “Slow up a little, will you?”
This tactic actually worked. But when we arrived at our destination and were safely on the sidewalk, my friend murmured, “Excuse me, but isn’t the proper expression ‘slow down’?”
“Well, yes,” I began. “I mean, no. It’s both, really.”
My friend cocked his head as if to say, ‘You Occidentals!’ I could have said something about Japanese—how hai sometimes means yes and sometimes means no—but decided not to pursue it further. Still, it got me thinking.
Take a restaurant doing a brisk business: when closing time comes around, does it shut up for the night, or shut down? When your grandmother picked all those cherries, did she put up preserves or put down canned cherries for the winter? For proper directions, do you go down the road for a mile before turning right, or up the road?
These may seem like imponderables, but we can tease out a few differences. First of all, when an establishment shuts up, it simply closes, but when it shuts down, it ceases activity. If this sounds like too nice a distinction, consider common usage: factories shut down rather than shutting up; conversely, your rude brother may ask you to shut up, not shut down. Similarly, putting up food often involves sealing it in jars later stored on shelves, as opposed to putting down a good supply of hay for your livestock. As for which way to go on a road, up is either literally up a rise, due north, or just the way the speaker is pointing.
English has other such ups and downs: ripping up a house versus ripping down the same structure, for instance, or the hearty “Drink it down!” instead of “Drink it up!” If usage is a sundial, the shade of meaning alters its angle slightly here. Ripping up anything means destroying it, often by severing the connective tissues, from ripping up floorboards to ripping up a draft card. To rip down a building, on the other hand, is to raze it. Break up and break down, like tear up and tear down, and cut up and cut down, work comparably. Idiomatic drinking, like drinking itself, is a little fuzzier, but two senses coexist: having your comrades clap you on the back as you tilt up your beer stein, or else downing a draught of nasty medicine because the doctor tells you to.
Of course, most ups and downs function as simple opposites, as in uptown versus downtown. To look up a road should be in the opposite direction of to look down it, just as to look up to a person you admire is the course of to look down on an inferior. But what about expressions that split unevenly? To sit up is at most a slant-opposite of to sit down, since sitting down means to sit, whereas sitting up means that you were already sitting but are now improving your posture. (A sit-up, with a hyphen, exercises your abdominal muscles, but a sit-down strike tends to exercise the tempers of management.) And if you happen to be sitting already, then you can stand up, but if you’re asked to stand down, then you’re still standing after that, just not on the stage or dais. Of course, if you’re in the military, to stand down is to be at ease, no longer at attention.
Other uneven splits include hurry up, or to hasten, versus hurry down, to hie yourself in a particular direction. You dig up buried treasure but dig down on your energy reserves to finish that race. You can be called up for army duty, but in Britain to be called down from university is a bit of a disgrace, similar to expulsion in the United States. Why are these ups and downs not polar opposites? If it comes to that, even uptown and downtown aren’t quite equivalent because downtown in many towns is only a few blocks.
After a while, you can see a difference emerging. Get up and get down, for instance, could be exact antonyms, except that each has one or more secondary meaning that leads away from the original paired meanings. Get up may mean to pull yourself up from the ground or to arise from bed. In the nominal sense, getup can mean a costume. Get down, however, besides meaning to alight, also refers to loosening up or having sex (from get down to it), as in the refrains of so many funk songs from the 1970’s. To throw up a parcel onto the boat may be the opposite of to throw down that parcel onto the loading dock, but clearly throw up has a regurgitative meaning that throw down lacks. This second meaning forms a slant-opposite. Put up and put down, for instance, need not refer just to food: you can put up a guest (and put up with him, as well) or put down a dying dog (a milder form of which applies to making babies sleep). To return to look up and look down, which seemed so complementary in terms of location or regard: look up has a tertiary meaning, as in looking up a word in the dictionary, that look down lacks.
Thus, pipe up and pipe down are also slantopposites: to speak out or to tune a band versus to lower your voice. Keep up means to stay with the pace, whereas keep down is to oppress, or not to disgorge. When you turn down, are you refusing an offer or folding a bedsheet? You can just as well turn up that bedsheet, but when good luck turns up, that introduces a new wrinkle. Maybe one good turn deserves its opposite. As D. H. Lawrence once wrote, in an autobiographical poem called “Red-Herring”:
My father was a working man and a collier was he, at six in the morning they turned him down and they turned him up for tea.
The various senses of both turns show a lot about the mining business and what an efficient hell it was.
In a similar vein: you run up a flag on the pole, or run up a gross of a new product, or just run up a whopping bill, but you run down a colleague, or a truck may run down a man on the street. And the rundown is inside information. You can touch up a paint job, but you touch down on an airfield. And this is not to be confused with the touchdown that all American football fans know. You can stay up as in keeping awake, or stay down as in hugging the boxing ring mat for fear of your opponent, yet to stay up can be the opposite of to stay down—it just depends on the context. (As a linguist friend of mine once wearily conceded, “Everything depends on the context.”)
You can even apply some ingenious logic to the ups and downs: if you want to pack up more in an already stuffed suitcase, better first pack down what you have in there. If you live it up too freely, you may never live it down. And crackdowns, done while there is still time, may prevent future crackups. Or a comeuppance may lead to a bringdown.
Then there are the single halves. You can cook up a storm, but if you attempt to cook down one, leave me out of your dinner invitations. You can catch up to your rival, but who ever heard of catch down? You can pick up a quart of milk at the supermarket, or some information by keeping your ears open, but you generally don’t pick down anything. When you get too rowdy, you may be asked to quiet down, never quite up—or, in reverse, clam up but never clam down. Oppositely, you may be asked to ‘fess up or own up, but not in any other direction. Facing a rough day ahead, you may want to rest up, but never rest down. You can’t butter down your boss. Your feelings may be pent up inside, not pent down. Scuffing your shoes on the pavement wears down the leather, not up. And how would you ever hunker up?
On the other hand, the lopsided quality of single halves has caused a few reparations. Nowadays, the warm up for an athletic meet is paired after the event with a warm down. And the old query “What’s up?” has a streetwise counterpart, “What’s going down?” Just as nature is reputed to abhor a vacuum, some people can’t abide asymmetry.
Of course, there are other ins and outs to pursue here, but in and out just introduce more instances of slant usage, from read in and read out to——(fill in or fill out the blank).
Should I go off from here? Or should I go on?
Word Words
Jon O. Newman, United States Circuit Judge
We need some new words to describe words. English already has several well known -onym words (from the Greek onyma meaning ‘name’), such as synonym (same meaning), antonym (opposite meaning), and homonym (same sound).
Less well known is heteronym (same spelling, but different sound, e.g., sow meaning ‘pig’ and sow meaning “planting seeds’). Heteronyms are also called homographs.
Then there’s pseudonym, (false name), eponym (named for a person, e.g., sandwich after Lord Sandwich), and acronym (formed from the initial letters or syllables of a group of words, e.g., snafu meaning “Situation Normal; All Fouled Up” or laser meaning “Light Amplification Stimulated Emissions Radiation”).
It was that word acronym that started me thinking about the need for more “word words.” The word acronym is sometimes used for words formed from the first two letters of a group of words. Soho is the area of Manhattan SOuth of HOuston Street. But is Soho an acronym? Yes, if we accept a definition that includes the initial letters. But can’t we be more precise? Let’s leave acronym for a word formed from the first letter of several words. Then, we’ll need a word for a word formed from the first two letters of words. How about bicronym? That captures the initial-letter sense of acronym but uses the combining form bi- signifying ‘two’ (from the Latin bi- meaning ‘twice’ or ‘having two’).
What then should we do with Tribeca, the area of Manhattan that is the TRIangle BElow CAnal Street? Bicronym won’t do, because we are using the first three letters of “triangle.” Tricronym won’t do either, because we are using only the first two letters from below and Canal. Perhaps the answer is polycronym, still capturing the initial-letter sense of acronym, but using the combining form poly- signifying many (from the Greek polus meaning ‘much’).
These words, bicronym and polycronym, suggest the need for still another word. The words bicronym and polycronym are formed by breaking up the combining form acro- (from the Greek acros meaning ‘highest’) into a- and cro- and combining bi- or poly- with cro-. A word thus formed by breaking up an existing combining form, prefix, root, or suffix should also have a name. It could be fractonym, using the coined combining form fracto- (from the Latin fractus, the past participle of frangire meaning ‘to break’).
Fractonyms existed in English before we had a word for them. A fairly well known example is prequel the word that means an episode or a movie that portrays events occurring before the events in the original episode or movie. Prequel takes the word sequel (Latin sequela meaning ‘what follows’), breaks it into se- and -quel, and then combines -quel with the prefix pre-. Another current example of a fractonym is threepeat, used to describe the feat of a team or individual who wins an annual championship three years in a row. The Chicago Bulls were widely reported to have achieved a threepeat in professional basketball. Repeat was broken into re- and -peat and -peat was combined with “three.” Voilà, another fractonym!
Then we could have retronym, meaning a word formed by reversing the spelling of another word. Lord Kelvin is credited with coining mho by reversing the spelling of ohm. An ohm is a unit of electrical resistance (named for the German physicist, Georg Simon Ohm), and a mho is a unit of conductivity of a body whose resistance is one ohm. We could also call mho a backword, but we are better off staying with the family of -onyms. Retronym derives from the combining form retro- (from the Latin retro meaning ‘backward’).
A related word is needed for a word with two, opposite meanings. Sanction means ‘to forbid’ and also ‘to permit.’ Moot means ‘a debate,’ and a “moot point” originally meant “a debatable point” and then also came to mean “a point that was not debatable” or “not worth debating.” Such a perplexing word might be called a contronym, using the prefix contra- (from the Latin contra meaning ‘against’), or possibly a contradictonym.
We also need a word for a word that illustrates its own meaning. Oxymoron means a phrase that contrasts opposites for a literary effect, e.g., “a deafening silence.” Oxymoron derives from the Greek oxymoros meaning ‘pointedly foolish’, which itself derives from oxy-, a combining form meaning ‘sharp’ (from the Greek oxus meaning ‘sharp’) and moron (from the Greek moros meaning ‘dull’). Oxymoron is an oxymoron. But what should we call such an unusual word? One possibility is etymonym (pronounced ehTYM-o-nym), using the coined combining form etymo- (from the Greek etymon meaning ‘the true meaning of a word,’ which derives from etymos meaning ‘true’ or ‘real’). This is not as rare a category as you might think. Another etymonym is noun (noun is a noun). Prefix almost qualifies; at least it illustrates a prefix.
Then, there should be a word for a word that has an etymology that is no longer true. Atom literally means a hypothetical body that is so small that it is incapable of being further divided. Atom derives from the combining form a- (from the Greek a meaning ‘not’ and the Greek tomos, meaning ‘cut’). Of course, in the age of neutrons, protons, electrons, and even quarks, we now know that an atom is not a particle that cannot be divided into smaller particles. So we need a word for outdated etymologies. Possibly pseudoetymonym, using the combining forms pseudo- and etymo-. Another possibility is gerontoetymonym, (pronounced ger-ON-to-ehTYM-o-nym) using the combining forms geronto- meaning ‘old’ (from the Greek gerontos meaning ‘old man’) and etymo-. Perhaps better to stay with pseudoetymonym and save the prefix geronto- to form gerontonym, meaning “an old word,” especially one whose original meaning has been altered, but is not necessarily now false.
The category of eponyms might be subdivided to add literatonym (pronounced lit-er-AH-to-nym), meaning “a word derived from the name of a person or place in literature” and mythonym, meaning a literatonym derived from mythology (Herculean from Hercules, and, less obviously, martial from Mars). A well known literatonym is serendipity, often used imprecisely to mean “anything found by good luck,” but precisely meaning “something good that is unexpectedly found while looking for something else.” Serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole from the fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip” (the ancient name for Ceylon), who often set sail for one destination and found something even better, by fortunate accident.
What should be call these new words? Neologism is sometimes used, but it means not only a new word but also the use of new words. Besides, better to stay with the -onym ending and call such words neonyms, using the combining form “neo-” (from the Greek neos meaning ‘new’).
Finally, we need a word for all these words that identify a category of words — the existing words such as synonym, antonym, and homonym, and the suggested neonyms—bicronym, fractonym, etymonym, and the others. The obvious answer is nymonyms, or, a bit catchier, nymnyms—“word words.”
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Mad for Words: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Simon Winchester, (New York: HarperCollins).
At the author’s party held to “launch” this book in Oxford last spring, the current editors of the OED were green with envy. How could Simon Winchester, a journalist best known for travel books, have earned a huge publishers advance for this book? And why would the film rights be worth even more—a cash payment in the six figures sterling? It is, after all, a description of what they do every day as lexicographers.
The heart of the story concerns two elderly gents who copy words out of old books and write about them in a dictionary. It does not seem the sort of action-adventure story that would lend itself to film treatment. Much as those of us who love words would wish for it, a film biography of Sir James Murray isn’t the stuff to draw people to the multiplex theatres out by the highway. A fine scholar, a self-educated and proud man, but one whose favorite recreation was riding a huge tandem tricycle around Oxford and the surrounding countryside.
Hint: it’s the other guy.
The other elderly gentleman with a library of old books and the recreation of copying curious words out of them was William Chester Minor, M.D., an American living in England and one of the most faithful and useful of Dr. Murray’s volunteer readers. Speaking to the Philological Society in 1899, Murray declared: “So enormous have been Dr. Minor’s contributions during the past 17 or 18 years, that we could easily illustrate the last four centuries from his quotations alone.” Minor did little else than make word indexes to old books; it was an obsession with him.
If the filmic possibilities aren’t yet clear, we should begin with Minor’s birth in Ceylon in June 1834, the child of New England missionaries. Winchester invents some luscious women: “young, chocolate-skinned, giggling naked girls with sleek wet bodies and rosebud nipples and long hair and coltish legs with scarlet and purple petals folded behind their ears, who play in the white Indian Ocean surf and who run, quite without shame, along the cool wet sands on their way back home” (40). Here, perhaps, the cinematic possibilities become a little more obvious.
These girls are not, perhaps, altogether fictional; Minor would later tell people that he began to entertain “lascivious thoughts” about the time he was thirteen. And his parents thought it was a good time to send him back to New Haven to board with an uncle while he got more education than the mission schools could provide. (In a characteristic flight of the travel-writer’s imagination, Winchester hints that the parents were sending him back to Connecticut where frolicsome female nudity was, they thought, less common.)
Minor earned his medical degree from Yale in 1863 and immediately enlisted in the U.S. Army. The life of an army surgeon in that dismal year was horrifying, and Minor could not have felt optimistic since neither Vicksburg nor Gettysburg had yet produced hope that the union would be preserved. In May 1864, he was treating the wounded from the Battle of the Wilderness, part of the brutal and grueling campaign that would take so many lives in the peninsula of Virginia. But it was not that carnage that so influenced Minor’s life, in Winchester’s view, but the order that the doctor brand an Irish deserter on the face with a “D.” Fear of retribution from the unforgiving Irish, combined with those Sri Lankan girls, is adduced by Winchester as a factor leading to Minor’s life as a dictionary maker.
The army eventually recognized that there was something badly wrong with Minor, and when he continued to serve as a medical examiner after the war, it became apparent that he was unfit for his responsibilities as a captain in the medical corps. He was, in 1868, diagnosed as “delusional” and taken for treatment to a hospital in Washington. Released at the behest of friends, he left for England in October 1871, with a box of paints, some books, and his gun.
On February 17, 1872, Dr. Minor shot George Merritt, a brewery worker, in the back of the neck as Merritt tried to flee. He killed him, thinking him to be an Irishman stalking him and bent on revenge. And then, when a constable approached, he admitted the shooting. Minor was tried, found insane, and committed to the asylum at Cawthorne—hence the title of Winchester’s book in Britain: The Surgeon of Cawthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness, and the Love of Words.
Minor eventually learned of Dr. Murray’s great project and began to copy words from old books. And then, in December 1902, he cut off his penis. Winchester would like us to believe that this surprising piece of surgery is connected to those lissome beauties of Sir Lanka or to intimacies with Eliza Merritt, George’s widow. (Though Eliza had visited Minor a few times and was grateful for his contributions for the upkeep of her children, the idea that they had been intimate some fifteen years earlier is utterly speculative. This is one of many flights of fancy during which Winchester negotiates among the “possible,” the “probable,” and the “no evidence exists.”) Consider the movie: what script writer would show us Minor copying out words from a 1693 volume called the Compleat Woman rather than a remorseful and forgiving grapple with a tipsy Mrs. Merritt?
In April 1910, the British government yielded to the importunings of Minor’s relatives and let him go home. Cawthorne had cared for him since 1872 and now it was time to shift the costs of his upkeep to the Americans. So, in the company of his brother, he went to St. Elizabeth’s in Washington—Winchester reminds us that an anti-Semite American poet and a failed assassin of an American president have been housed there too. Minor wasn’t quite through, though; in 1915, he smacked one of his fellow inmates, though he had “but little strength to hurt anyone.” In 1919 his nephew urged that he be moved to an asylum in Connecticut. On March 26, 1920, he died—at 85 years and nine months.
Interspersed in Minor’s story is the tale of the editing of the OED. Winchester’s story has an abundance of mistakes. Herbert Coleridge, the first editor of the Philological Society’s dictionary, was not the poet’s grandson; Elisabeth Murray’s biography was only taken on by Oxford after Yale University Press had turned it into a bestseller and shamed OUP into publishing it (OUP having earlier rejected it as unworthy). There are lexical curiosities as well. Bugger grips is his intriguing term for what others might call muttonchops or burnsides; he believes that fulsome means ‘exuberant.’
But these carpings are sour grapes. Winchester is getting very rich from a story pretty well known to many people interested in dictionaries—particularly Elizabeth Knowles of OUP who unearthed basic information and is rightly given, by Winchester, what he would call a “fulsome” accolade. He discovered a Minor descendant and found a trove of correspondence that makes the story much richer (and more factual) than what was otherwise known. He seems to have overlooked a story in the Springfield Sunday Republican headlined “A Mad Dictionary Maker” (July 25, 1915, p. 16).
Winchester wants the story simple, and cinematic. Murray should arrive at the gate of the Asylum imagining it is some private residence—alas, Winchester tells us, a “popular myth.” Murray knew that Minor was in the asylum; it was as obvious from the return address on his letters as “Sing Sing” would have been to an American counterpart. Minor was so guilt-ridden over his “prodigious sexual appetites” that he committed an autopenectomy, reducing his organ to a stub that extended “about one inch from its base.” These are alluring possibilities for film. And remarkable accents to a story that is essentially about two elderly gentlemen making a dictionary. Richard W. Bailey, University of Michigan
On the So-called “Debate” over Black English
Sol Saporta, University of Washington (retired)
Perhaps no issue better illustrates the poverty of our political and intellectual culture than the so-called debate over Black English, or as it has now been christened, “Ebonics.”
The confusions are many; the emotions are high, and the political ramifications obvious. It may be of interest to try to sort some of the issues out.
Language or Dialect?
The Oakland School Board proclaimed that Ebonics was a language, and that teaching English to speakers of Ebonics was an exercise in bilingualism, comparable, in principle, to teaching English to speakers of Spanish or Vietnamese. The outcry was impassioned and predictably hostile.
The debate is virtually meaningless. Most students of language understand that whether two varieties of speech are considered dialects of one language or separate languages is as much a political question as it is a linguistic one. So, for example, the varieties of Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) are about as different as the Romance Languages (Portuguese, Spanish, etc.). That one group is referred to as dialects, and the other group as languages has more to do with national boundaries than any internal feature of the speech varieties themselves. One linguist characterized a language as “a dialect with an army and navy.”
“Bad English”
Much of the debate has been couched in terms of “lowering standards,” the “dumbing-down” of the education system, etc. For example, in a syndicated column, Ellen Goodman (Seattle Times, December 27, 1996) snidely compared Black English “I be” with French “Je suis,” and characterized the former as “merely bad English,” as opposed to “a valid language.”
Even the most superficial analysis of any speech community would reveal that certain varieties of speech are prestigious and others are stigmatized, and that what determines a particular variety’s status has virtually nothing to do with the internal features of that variety and everything to do with the class, and in this case the race, of the speakers involved. In short, the issue is the color of their skin, not the color of their vowels.
But the confusions are deeper, and more insidious. I was on a recent talk show, where the host referred to speakers of Black English as “illiterate thugs.” The juxtaposition of the two terms is revealing. An academic feature, namely literacy, is assumed to correlate with a moral one. In other words, bad English is what is spoken by bad people. This assumption is pervasive in our society. Someone who speaks a prestigious dialect is thereby thought to be honest, clean, trustworthy and admirable.
A friend of mine used to teach remedial reading in the New York public school system. The class was for students who had repeatedly failed, and was referred to as “the last class before jail.” On the first day, my friend would tell the class, “I’m supposed to teach you how to read. But, let’s get one thing straight; Hitler knew how to read, and my grandmother didn’t, and I’ll take my grandmother any time.” The difference between my New York friend and the radio talk show host is crucial. Schooling and morality are not synonymous, and probably show virtually no significant correlation. In the current discussion, familiarity with the prestige dialect does not correlate with moral virtue.
Some Basic Linguistics
On this issue, it is sometimes difficult to know who are worse, the “intellectuals” or the bigots. Columnists quote “scholars” who insist that speakers of Black English are “careless and lazy” and that the particular variety of speech involved has no rules. That positions such as these are articulated and published reflects a level of information analogous to arguing that the earth is flat.
In fact, an example of how rules in Black English differ from those of other dialects may be revealing. Consider the following data. (I hesitate to refer to dialects as “standard” or “nonstandard,” since it seems to me to give the game away.)
In one dialect of English, the plural of nouns is formed by adding [s] or [z] or [\?\], resulting in forms like [posts] [boyz] and [bus\?\s] for posts, boys and buses.
In my dialect of English, however, the plural of post is pronounced something like [poss]. The simplest mechanism for accounting for such a pronunciation is by adding a phonological rule for the deletion of [t] under certain circumstances. So, for example, prints and prince are both pronounced [prins]. The rule, in fact, is more general, applying to [d] as well. Wines and winds are both pronounced [waynz]. Notice, however, that the rule for the deletion of [t] must follow the rule for forming the plural. Otherwise, if [t] deletion preceded plural formation, then [post] would become [pos] and the plural would be [pos\?\s]. Well, it turns out, that for many speakers of Black English, the plural of post is, in fact, pronounced [pos\?\s]. Why? Because they have essentially the same rules as I have, but in the opposite order. In other words, there are three dialects:
Dialect A: Plural formation.
Dialect B. Plural formation followed by [t] deletion
Dialect C. [t] deletion followed by plural formation.
Pedagogy
Now, imagine the average teacher of reading with students representing each of the three speech varieties. A student of Dialect A, sees the written word posts, and pronounces it [posts]. The teacher beams; that child can get to be president. A student of Dialect B sees the written word posts, and pronounces it [poss]. The teacher might encourage the student to “enunciate” more clearly. Such a student might not get to be president, but could perhaps aspire to be Mayor of New York.
But now the student of Dialect C sees the word written posts and pronounces it [pos\?\s]. The teacher is confused “Get that student an eye-exam; get that student a hot lunch; get that student something.” The fact is that such a student has demonstrated the ability to read. What the student needs is a better teacher.
And, ultimately, that’s one thing that the Oakland School Board was suggesting: the simple, commonsense proposal that teachers might be more effective if they knew something about the speech patterns of the people they were trying to teach. Unfortunately, that proposal became obscured by the pointless debate over whether Black English is or is not a language.
History
Another emotional, and largely irrelevant debate resulted from the use by the Oakland School Board of the word genetic to refer to Black English. That some actually took this to mean that people are born with a predisposition to acquire a particular language would be laughable if it were not so pernicious. (Some years ago, there was a brief article in the newspaper about a woman from Texas who had adopted a Mexican infant, and was studying Spanish, so that she would be able to speak to the child when it grew up. She was equally misinformed but not as malicious as the current critics of the Oakland School Board.)
In fact, the origin of some of the features of Black English is of some theoretical, scholarly interest. Slaves in this country were systematically separated from their families, and put in situations where they could not use their native language. In such a situation, what typically develops is what is referred to as a pidgin, based on the language of the environment, in this case, English. The next generation acquires this language as a product of their linguistic maturation, and this variety is sometimes called a creole. Over the succeeding centuries, this language has undergone a process of decreolization for obvious reasons.
Now, what is of some interest is that because slaves in other countries were not systematically isolated, there is, as far as I can tell, no such thing as Black Portuguese in Brazil, for example. In other words, there is a historical explanation for the emergence of Black English, but it surely has little relevance to the current educational and pedagogical debate.
It still remains to be seen whether a rational, coherent language policy for speakers of Black English can evolve in our educational institutions. Given the emotional and uninformed reaction so far, it is hard to be optimistic.
Revising The F-Word
Jesse Sheidlower, Random House
Writing a book entirely about the word fuck, aside from being a good way to guarantee cocktail-party chatter, exposes one to numerous criticisms. Apart from the tiresome “degradation of society” arguments from the puritanical, everyone is familiar with this word in its many forms. Newspapers coyly refer to it with euphemisms and circumlocutions, Tshirt vendors stock shirts emblazoned with its many parts of speech. And everyone has a favorite passage, unusual compound, or offbeat etymological theory to promote.
The original edition of The F-Word was a successful project. It included almost all of the important uses of the word, and the introduction gave a good picture of the word’s history, both etymological and social. But there is always room for improvement, and so when Random House determined it was time to reprint, we decided that a major revision could be supported. The revision is in progress at the time of this writing, and this is a preliminary report on where things stand.
Historical
Interest in the historical aspect of the word fuck has always been high; most reviewers cited various anecdotes from the Introduction. We have accordingly been trying to research and add any relevant or interesting story. The earliest example of fuck, appearing in a ciphered version in the fifteenth-century poem “Flen Flyys,” has always been a crowd-pleaser, since it is not only in code—suggesting that the word was taboo even at that time—but describes monks fucking. (Seemingly a popular subject for that era—an early sixteenth century apostil refers to the poor scribe’s “fucking abbot.”) The original edition gave sparse details on the background of this poem and translated the cipher without explaining it; even the mainstream American Heritage Dictionary, Third Edition, gave more complete treatment. In the new edition, we will give a thorough version of this attestation.
The date of 1926 for the first openly printed use of fuck in America—still the earliest we have discovered—provoked the question of the first use of fuck in the movies. We are still researching this, but it seems that fuck first appeared in mainstream movies around 1970 (MASH and Myra Breckenridge); it had been used earlier in several avant-garde films. Unlike the literary world, where provocative books such as Ulysses or Lady Chatterley’s Lover led to legal battles over obscenity issues, in the movies, no one tried to place fuck onto film until the country was ready for it.
While fuck appeared in popular periodicals such as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, Playboy, and others by the 1960s, it took a bit more time for the word to, um, penetrate the august pages of The New Yorker. The editorship of Tina Brown is usually credited—more usually, faulted— with that journal’s frequent use of the word, and though writers did use it frequently under Ms. Brown, in fact fuck appeared there, spelled in full, in 1985, during the editorship of the puritan William Shawn, in a short story by Bobbie Ann Mason: “Maybe you have to find out for yourself. Fuck. You can’t learn from the past.” (June 3, 1985, p. 81).
The etymology of fuck has never ceased inspiring comment. The various purported acronymic origins are still the first thing most people think of; we will be expanding our treatment of this, and including the first known appearance of an acronymic etymology (in New York’s underground paper The East Village Other), in 1967. The most striking recent development has been the popularity of the “pluck yew” story, which conflates the origin of fuck with an earlier piece of folklore about the origin of the offensive backhand two-finger gesture. According to the original form of the tale, before the battle of Agincourt, immortalized in Shakespeare’s Henry V, the French taunted the English longbowmen by waving two fingers at them, saying that those fingers (used to pull back the bowstring) could never defeat the mighty French. After the English annihilated the hapless French (10,000 dead French to a mere 29 Brits, by Bill S.’s count), the English responded by waving their two fingers back at the French in the now-familiar gesture (the American version limits it to the single middle finger). The recent twist has been to note the fact that longbows are traditionally made of yew wood, and claim that the act of drawing the bowstring was called “plucking yew”; the victorious English not only waved their fingers at the French, but shouted “We can still pluck yew! Pluck yew!” at them. A few convenient sound-changes brought us to our familiar phrase “fuck you.”
This story, totally ludicrous in any version, was popularized on the National Public Radio segment “Car Talk,” where it was meant as a joke; many unfortunates, particularly on the Internet, have taken it seriously. It will be debunked.
On the serious side, considerably more etymological information will be presented. The editor is grateful to Anatoly Liberman for sharing the entry (and bibliography) for fuck from his magnificent forthcoming etymological dictionary. Liberman argues convincingly that the word is part of a large family of Germanic words having the form f + [short vowel] + [stop], having the base meaning ‘to move back and forth’ (not ‘to thrust’, as most dictionaries, and the original edition of The F-Word, had it). It is probably a borrowing from Dutch, Low German, or Flemish, but not a continuation of an Old English word. He finds no Indo-European cognates (of Latin futuo he notes “It is a strange coincidence that Latin futuo is also an f word”).
On the less serious, but still scholarly, side, we will refer to the hilarious Studies Out in Left Field: Defamatory Essays Presented to James D. McCawley On His 33rd or 34th Birthday. This remarkable collection applies the principles of transformational grammar to the analysis of sexual and scatalogical vocabulary. Quang Phuc Dong’s “English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subject” looks at the oft-questioned basis of “fuck you!,” whilst Munç Wang’s “Copulative Sentences in English: A Germanic Language Spoken in Northern Delaware” studies the grammaticality (in the author’s idiolect) of such sentences as “Micky fucked Michelle’s cadaver in the ass” (grammatical), “Bret fucked the mannikin through the hole he drilled in its throat” (of questionable grammaticality), and “Fred fucked the log through a hole that squirrels had made” (ungrammatical). The omission of this classic, first published in 1971, is unforgivable.
Least forgivable of all was the omission of Allen Walker Read’s 1934 classic “An Obscenity Symbol,” the most important article ever written on fuck, despite the absence of that word from the article itself (a not uncommon situation in the field, I might add). The decision of the editor (who even now is hiding behind this circumlocution, but yes, it was me) to forgo a bibliography should not have prevented him from acknowledging this indispensable work.
New Words and Senses
A moderate number of new words or phrases, and a smaller number of new senses, have been added. Several readers suggested the addition of that ’70s hit, zipless fuck ‘an act of intercourse without an emotional connection’, coined by Erica Jong in Fear of Flying. We had originally decided to omit it since zipless was often used on its own to mean ‘passionate but emotionally uninvolved’, but it does appear often enough as a set phrase to deserve entry. Arnold Zwicky, chief editor of the Studies Out in Left Field collection celebrated above, suggested genderfuck ‘instance of reversal of normal sex roles; (specifically) transvestism’, a common term whose absence can only be explained using the Johnsonian formula, in answer to a woman who has asked him why he defined pastern as the “knee” of a horse, “ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.” Thanks to the diligent research of friends and colleagues, we have pushed this back to 1973 with frequent cites thereafter. Another unfortunate omission was fuck buddy ‘a sexual partner, esp. a friend with whom one engages in casual sex’, which we currently have found to 1983 but have hopes of bettering. To mercy fuck and sport fuck we now add the even less pleasant hate fuck, immortalized as the title of the first album of post-punk band Pussy Galore in 1987 but found in the ’70s, and force-fuck, apparently coined because the word rape wasn’t shocking enough. The bizarre lesbian expression fuckerware party ‘gathering for the group use of sex toys’ seems, contrary to expectations, to be real; the definition of fist-fuck, originally limited to anal fisting, has been widened (with citations) to allow for vaginal fisting as well. More recent additions are a new sense of ratfuck ‘a busy party marked by flagrant social climbing’; insults such as fuckball and fuckrag (popularized in the movie Scream); and a number of marginal uses whose admission is being debated, including fuck-trash ‘loathsome person’ and fuck monster ‘promiscuous person, esp. a woman’.
British and Australian terms, omitted on policy grounds from the first edition, are now being included—and why not, with a word this widespread? Fuckpig ‘a disgusting person’ (according to Partridge, it dates to the nineteenth century, a claim I’d love to be able to verify) is a winner, as is fuckwit ‘a fool’, fuckwitted ‘stupid’, and the absolutely delightful contestant from Bridget Jones’ Diary: fuckwittage ‘stupidity’. Fucktruck ‘a van or car in which people engage in sexual activity’ had been mentioned in the introduction as being Australian (where it has been used since the 1960s), a statement rejected by numerous correspondents who testified to their activities in thusly named vehicles in the U.S. of A.; two people noted that the word was also used for ‘a bus on which one can meet prospective sexual partners’ (both, curiously, referring to a shuttle between Wellesley College and the Harvard and M.I.T. campuses).
Many of these new items came from suggestions, but most suggestions were ultimately useless. Everyone and his or her brother or sister, it seems, has a favorite fuck-related usage. And in most cases, these appear to be expressions doomed to the nonce world. The introduction to the first edition listed several such words, suggested by colleagues, such as clothesfuck ‘difficulty in deciding what clothes to wear’ and fuckbreak ‘leave of absence from work in order to get pregnant’ (two other terms from this section, fuckload ‘a large amount’ and fuck-muscle ‘the penis’, were omitted for insufficient evidence but will now be added). Publication brought a blizzard of ever more outrageous suggestions, including (but not limited to) fuckadocio, fuck-a-doodle-doo, and fuck-aroni, whose meanings can only be guessed at. Many suggestions also failed to respect the nature of the definitions; several readers commented on the absence of un-fucking-believable, which appears under -fucking-, infix, or of fuck book, which is covered by fuck, adj., ‘pornographic; erotic’.
Antedatings
As most users of historical dictionaries know, the search for antedatings—citations earlier than those previously known for a word or sense—is a crucial effort. Early examples force us to rethink what we thought we knew about the historical development of language. The original work for The F-Word proved that fuck was used in a variety of figurative senses far earlier than had previously been believed, and that certain expressions were years or decades older than anyone had realized.
The number of antedatings we have found in the last several years has been small, which is both good (in validating the quality of our original research) and bad (no breakthroughs). The insulting epithets fuckface and fuckhead were originally first cited in 1961 and 1962, respectively. Several of the citations referred to World War Two, and a euphemistic 1940 example of fuckfaced suggested that these terms were in use in the 1940s. Happily, we found solid 1945 citations in an article published in this magazine in 1989—an article we had read, without catching these cites. This article also provided a significant antedating for N.F.G. ‘no fucking good’, an abbreviation accidentally omitted from The F-Word but included in the book’s parent work with a first cite from 1977.
The compound fuck-me ‘intended to invite sexual advances’, chiefly exemplified by fuck-me [shoes] (with various specific types of shoes), was only attested to 1989. Several reliable sources claimed familiarity to the 1960s and 1970s, and we were able to confirm this with a 1974 citation from the musician David Bowie. The expression fuck-you money, unknown to the editor before a reader letter called it to attention, was first cited to 1986, thanks to a search of the Nexis database. A colleague subsequently discovered a 1976 example. M.F., a euphemistic form of motherfucker, had been attested to 1964; we found a 1959 example buried in Robert Gold’s excellent Jazz Lexicon. Finally, the best we had been able to do on titfuck was 1986; a Nexis search came up with a Playboy example from 1984, which inspired a check of Robert Wilson’s 1972 Playboy’s Book of Forbidden Words, which indeed had it. The second definition of fuckable, ‘sexually available’, with a single 1977 example, was pushed back to 1972 in Bruce Rodgers’s Queens’ Vernacular, which also supplied a first cite for mouthfuck, verb.
An important goal of the revision has been to include any “famous” use of relevant forms of fuck. In the original version, we were content to have a good smattering of examples from the earliest to the most recent, but as long as the examples were genuine attestations, we were satisfied. (Preference is given to actual examples in running text, then to printed glossarial evidence, and finally to orally collected examples.)
Now we have made an effort to extend our evidence from important or interesting sources. Thus, we have added the famous scene in Catcher in the Rye, where Holden sees a “fuck you” graffito and muses on his desire to protect his little sister Phoebe from seeing such vulgarity. Another important citation is from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” where he has seen “The best minds in my generation destroyed by madness,…who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy.” Bufu ‘a homosexual man’, a portmanteau from butt fucker, was already in with a first citation from a 1982 Valley Girl dictionary, but we have added the use in the defining text of that subculture, Frank Zappa’s “Valley Girl”: “Like my English teacher—He’s like Mr. Bufu…He like flirts with all the guys in the class.” Under fuck up we have added the well-known opening lines to Philip Larkin’s poem “This be the Verse,” the only use of fuck to be regularly found in dictionaries of quotations: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.” And for the literal sense, we learn from Liz Phair that “I want to fuck you like a dog…I’ll fuck you till your dick turns blue.”
The regular program of gathering new evidence, combined with database searches for underattested forms, has delivered an impressive return of citations. We have four instead of two examples of fubar in the secondary sense ‘drunk’; up-to-date examples for give a fuck, fuck ‘act of sexual intercourse’, fuckable, fuck-all, fuckboy, fuckfest, and others; a valuable third cite for fuck ‘an evil turn of events’; more florid entries in the “stronger, more vivid, or more elaborate curses” section, and newly fleshed-out entries for fuckee in both literal and figurative senses. This evidence proves that these terms are all real words, still in current use in the English-speaking world.
We have tried to keep deletions to a minimum, chiefly by not including marginal terms in the first place. Any item with two or more examples may be considered secure; an item from a single non-glossarial source that parallels an existing expression may also be considered secure; an item with only a single glossarial citation would have been kept out unless a confirming example could be solicited. An included marginal term, then, would be one from a single oral or written source that does not parallel another term and appears, in this editor’s opinion, to be unlikely. Those that are on the ropes for this revision, include fuck-plug ‘a contraceptive diaphragm’, with a single example from a college student in 1984, a term not subsequently found despite wide questioning and extensive database searching; fuck 5.b. ‘to trifle or interfere with’ (that is, the usual sense of fuck with, but without the “with”), found in a single example from a movie; and friggin in the rigging, a nautical expression for ‘loafing on duty’, which is too uninteresting a figurative sense even if it does have some currency beyond the single oral example we have found.
And last of all, but first in the book, we are adding something that no book should be without: an epigraph. The easily offended, who nonetheless choose to pick up this book, will be faced with this before they get to anything juicy:
Tis needful that the most immodest word
Be looked upon and learned.
—Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II
SIC! SIC! SIC!
P.S. As you read through this Directory please understand that the committee has worked very hard to make it as accurate as possible considering the circumstances. Let’s remember “To error is human and to forgive divine.” [From the 1998-1999 Southern California Rotary Directory. Submitted by David A. Smith, Encino, California.]
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Names New and Old: Papers of the Names Institute
E. Wallace McMullen, ed., (Penny Press, Madison, NJ. 1993), viii, 361 pp.
This (second)¹ selection of the papers read at the Names Institute covers the last seven years at Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU, 1980-1986) but includes some papers read at meetings of the Institute since 1986 at John Jay and Baruch Colleges (New York). Dedicated to Margaret M. Bryant (1900-1993), the volume has four subdivisions: I. Geographic Names; II. Names in Literature; III. Personal Names; and IV. Various Other Names.
I. “Geographic Names” is further divided into 1) International Names, and 2) Names in the United States. The contributions of three members of the US Board on Geographic Names (BGN), namely, Richard R. Randall, Meredith F. Burrill and Donald J. Orth, give a very good and welcome insight into practical aspects of placename-giving. In “Political Changes and New Names,” Dr. Randall pays particular attention to both the new names of politically changed countries and also to the problems arising when we try to record native names (as in transcription). In “Motive in Placenaming” Donald Orth discusses motivation in naming a location and illustrates his point with a very appropriate quote from Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. He mentions, for example, names that honor persons, names that have a religious background, names that express “ego gratification” and “toponymic habituation” (in which familiar names from the homeland are adopted to make a place seem a little less strange), names which show evidence of discovery, etc. He stresses, however, that “The motives themselves may be explicit or subconscious, but their conjunction at a given moment is normally unpremeditated. Even though they may be considered separate events, there is a direct linkage between the motive to name and the name given. In fact, it is difficult to consider one without the other. They are capable of reinforcing one another in a number of ways.” (p. 23.)
Part 2 of the first section opens with a reprint of Allen Walker Read’s onomastic history of the Rocky Mountains, which is followed by a very lengthy paper on “No Names” in the United States. In the latter work Robert M. Rennick professes that it is only an introduction to the subject and asks for more information so that more extensive research can be done. However, in this work the author is unable to convince this reader of the need for more such research, and I think the paper would have benefitted very much from an abridged presentation. On the other hand, Dr. Burrill’s article on “Toponomy and Cultural History” is a very good example of how toponomy (and lexicography in general) and history can benefit from each other. “Each culture group has its own ways of looking at nature, its own set of distinctions between things in a general class, and its own rigid boundaries to thought that are posed by its language. Including terms for artifacts of all kinds that are useful cultural clues, these elements are reflected in toponyms.” (p. 114-115.) The author describes the use of specific terms and the problems associated with them, beginning with the word swamp, which is followed by creek, folly, tump, and gurnet. Especially, he says, the comparison of the use of these words in the colonies and in the respective homelands has promising results.
Benjamin Nunez’s historical study, “Proto-Portuguez Toponymics on the West African Coast in the Fifteenth Century” speaks for itself, and the same may be said for the optimistic and thoughtful remarks of Alan Rayburn’s “Promoting the Study of Names As a Scholarly Discipline in North America.”
II. The editor introduces this section—
“Names in Literature”—by stating the purpose of it, namely, which is “to ask if the study of imaginary personages and places does not properly belong to onomastics.” (p. 127.) This section contains papers about Bret Easton Ellis’ Less than Zero (Leonard R.N. Ashley); Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (Lynn Hamilton); Anna Seghers’ Revolt of the Fishers (Russell E. Brown), Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire (Betty J. Davis), Baltasar Gracián’s El Criticón (Catherine G. Rovira); Trollope’s The Warden (Vivian Zinkin); and “Names Prime Evil: Fictional Heroes of Horror and Fear” in the work of Sir Walter Scott and Barbey d’Aurevilly (Maxine M. Bernard).
One of the most readable of these articles is Russell E. Brown’s paper on Anna Seghers' Revolt of the Fishers, in which he shows how the author establishes a certain universality for the uprising: accordingly, the names can be attributed to no specific place or time. It seems that the Bretonic language is not only the major source of character names here, but Low German and Dutch also play a part. Brown emphasizes that the last two languages have a lot of names and spellings in common. However, the source Brown uses for Dutch names is hardly adequate: Van der Aa’s biographical dictionary only describes well-known Dutch persons and isn’t meant to be an overview of all the surnames in use. For that information one should turn to the Nederlands Repertorium van Familienamen edited by P.J. Meertens and others, in fourteen volumes (Assen, Van Gorcum 1963-1988). Nevertheless, Brown’s description of the author’s choice of a pen name and her symbolical use of the name Marie in her novel are excellent examples of the relevance of literary name studies.
The paper of Maxine M. Bernard covers the work of two authors, Sir Walter Scott and Barbey d’Aurevilly, but because of this broad span her conclusions are not always very convincing. For example, this is her interpretation of one of Barbey’s religious monsters (the seductor and rapist of an innocent country girl in A Nameless Story): “The name Riculf seems to be a clever composite of two French words: rire, meaning “to laugh,” comes directly from the Latin rictus meaning “a mocking sneering laughter”; and culer meaning “to back away or go astray.” His persona was just such a type: mocking God, leading others astray, scornfully getting away.” (p. 219.) She doesn’t mention that this name is a perfectly normal Germanic name which consists of rik- ‘mighty’ and -ulf, ‘wolf’ which is itself a rather colourful name for a scoundrel. The French connection that Bernard suggests seems to me rather farfetched and certainly needs more proof, e.g., from significant quotations of the novel itself. I would go no farther than point out a possible double meaning, and certainly would not proclaim the French interpretation the only one, but would mention it only as a possible secondary meaning.
III. The contributors to “Personal Names” are Kelsie B. Harder, Herbert Barry & Aylene S. Harper, A. Ross Eckler, Penelope Scambly Schott, and Dorothy E. Litt. Harder’s “Literary Names Mainstreamed As Given Names” is very insightful: How many parents realize that the currently popular Jennifer is derived from Guinevere (King Arthur’s adulterous queen) or that the name Pamela became popular through Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740)? As the author states, “Naming now seldom reflects reading.” (p. 231) Barry and Harper’s article about “Sex Differences in Linguistic Origins of Personal Names” is to the point and thorough. An important point they make is that although names nowadays are often chosen without knowledge of their linguistic roots and meanings, the linguistic background nevertheless persists as an important basis for selection: books of names generally provide information about roots and meanings and as long as these books are read and used, the knowledge of these works will form part of the choice. (p. 251.)
In Eckler’s paper on “Single-Letter Surnames” we learn that all letters exist as a surname (and are “overwhelmingly likely to be held by people of Oriental ancestry”, p. 264), and only “Q” is missing. The paper by Penelope Scambly Schott, “Rosamond: Poison and Contamination” gives a neat example of historical confusion based on the fate of another individual with the same name. Thus, the “fair Rosamond” of English literature—Henry II’s mistress who died in 1176—was (also said to be) poisoned to death in 1592, “not in the flesh but on the page.”
It isn’t clear to this reviewer just what place the Litt article, “Self-Naming and Self-Defining in Subscriptions to Familiar Letters in the English Renaissance,” is supposed to have in onomastics. The author explicitly refrains from “examples of nomination, in code names, code-numbered names, anonyms, pet names, name-changing, and other onomastic oddities” in this material (p. 285). Yet these elements seem to be more related to onomastics than those she has described in this paper and therefore make the reader anxious to know more.
IV. “Various Other Names.” The paper section of the book ends with this general category, which includes articles by Douglas P. Hinkle, Roger W. Wescott, Walter P. Bowman, Thomas L. Bernard, and E. Wallace McMullen. While Dr. Hinkle admits he has barely scratched the surface in his article, yet in “Street-Language Naming Practices in the Hispanic Drug and Underworld Subcultures,” he goes into great detail and tells us quite a bit (e.g., that a snort of cocaine is called a narizón, from the Spanish nariz, ‘nose,’ which compares to English slang ‘snootful’). Anyone curious about technical linguistics will take delight in Wescott’s comments on “The Phonology of Proper Names in English.” He is of the opinion “that slang has formal as well as semantic peculiarities and that names resemble slang in this respect.” (p. 301) Thus, he tells us, names can exhibit phonetic alternation. An example is the sequence Jean, Jen(n)y, Jane, Jan(et), John, and Joan (ultimately derived from a single Biblical Hebrew name meaning ‘Jehovah’s mercy’). He also mentions the four types of palindromization (two will suffice here): progressive additive: pap<pa or paw; and regressive additive: Nan<Ann or Anna. Thus, a good number of common changes are explained for us. For example, one extreme lexical transformation is the nickname Poll which is derived from Mary, “in which the m has been both occluded and unvoiced, the a has been retracted, the r has been lingualized, and the y has been dropped.” (p. 306.)
According to Bowman, “Musical Names: The Titles of Symphonies” is a beginning on an abundant onomastic field. Among those already well-known, Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” appears at first to be an instrument of revenge against one heartless lady and (using the same title) also a means of admiration directed toward his future fiancée. Bowman describes how composers have used placenames to express feelings evoked by visits (e.g., Dvorak’s “From the New World”), or to express a nationalistic or patriotic regard for a homeland (e.g., Hindemith’s “Pittsburgh Symphony”). Personal names as well as political events or dates function in symphony titles. Also literature has left its mark (e.g., Liszt’s “Faust”). Bowman concludes his paper with some fascinating “oddities.” In Thomas Bernard’s “Names, Nationality, and the Incongruity Factor,” our attention is called to the fact that a good number of people have names that don’t seem to correspond with their nationality. One example will suffice: until recently one wouldn’t assume that someone with the name Fujimori would be a Peruvian.
The last article in the volume is McMullen’s “History of the Names Institute, 1980-86.” A companion article, again by the editor, concludes the articles in Pubs, Place-Names and Patronymics and covers the years 1962-1979.
But this isn’t all: the book has extensive indices, e.g., the admirable Index (e) which contains the Abstracts (all written by the authors) and Topics of the Annual Programs of the Names Institute, 1980-1986. In combination, Index (a)—Vitas of the Contributors to this volume—in which the editor lists information about the careers and research of the authors and their mailing addresses, and Index (e) form a helpful guide for onomasticians “on the move” who are looking for partners in discussions about items of mutual interest. In brief, then, it is my opinion that this neat, hardbound, onomastic anthology is indeed very readable.
¹The first anthology was entitled Pubs, Place-Names and Patronymics: Selected Papers of the Names Institute, edited by E. Wallace McMullen (FDU, 1980. Covers 1962-1979.) and is still in print. To order, send a check for $6.00 (made out to E. Wallace McMullen) to Prof. Finke.
Together these two publications include complete programs, papers and abstracts, etc., for a total of 25 consecutive years, plus the subsequent John Jay and Baruch College programs (1987-1998). Including the forthcoming 1999 event, these annual programs continue to be held at Baruch College.
[Karina van Dalen-Oskam, Leiden, Netherlands]
(To order send a check (made out to “E. Wallace McMullen”) to Prof. Wayne H. Finke, American Name Society, Dept. of Mod. Langs., Box 340, Baruch College, 17 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10010; or by fax ++212-387-1591.)
Lost and Foundering (Eheu, Jane Ace! May She RIP)
Mary M. Tius, Portland, Maine (mtius@juno.com)
Last week, as I was arranging my notes on solecisms called from television, radio, and newspapers, I suddenly realized that updating the long list, even without citing dates and perpetrators, had begun to take up too much time. Of course, as I had been telling myself all along, police work is tedious; but someone has to do it. Or so I had always thought. Now, however, I paused in my labors after a short stint of alphabetizing and partially annotating a few recent additions, to wit:
“[Budget] cuts were made all across the border.”
“[The candidate] must definitive his position.”
“…a fashion that was dig rigueur…”
“A storm system is now domineering the weather.”
“…by one of the foundling fathers of our country…”
“After reading the glum statistics”
“Their coffee is grounded daily.”
“this was hollowed ground.” (Paul Gigot on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, 1994.)
“Now we are being indulged[deluged] with snow.”
“[A respected local philanthropist’s] name will live in infamy.”
“The dead were interned.”
“Maybe, as we are about to invoke on a course…” (U.S. Army chaplain in Vicenza, Italy, addressing troops soon to embark for Bosnia.)
“A cherished momentum of…”
“The issue [of the two murders] is a mute point.”
“He was oustered from the Party.”
“it piquéd his interest.”
“Big-Business-bashing …is nothing but tub-thumping popularism.”
“The attack was provocated by…”
“This raked havoc with investors.”
“…rendering the social fabric.” (Paul Gigot)
“Supplies were replentished…”
“Women are reticent to buy such clothes…”
“Pat Buchanan has transpired [transcended?] his early reputation.”
“A prison trustee…” (newspaper article)
“He waived goodbye.” (newspaper article)
“The fee was wavered.”
“Somehow, he wrangled an invitation.”
“The [victorious] army yielded power harshly…”
It was the last example which gave me pause. Perhaps, I thought, the army yielded power harshly while wielding a no-iron velvet fist?
Already, while working my head to the bone10 on the above examples and others too humorous to mention, I had been visited by fond memories of Jane and Goodman Ace, those masters of malapropism—though, according to an article in The New Yorker which I read years ago, Goodman was the “master”; Jane was a real-life Mrs. Malaprop. I had made a list of the Jane Aceisms in that article. I still had that list and now, rather than just sitting there like a bum on a log, I compared Jane’s words with my own burgeoning record of unstrung and unlamented lapses, many, still to be entered in my trustee notebook.
When I had at last poured over the two lists— the one, so much too brief; the other, so much too wrong—you could have knocked me over with a fender! What a disillumining experience! Entre nous and me, until then, I had believed that, in any baffle of wits, Jane Ace would have won, thumbs down. In all my bored days, I would never have believed that she had not reached the highest pinochle of success. Now, I was saddened to see that her words, compared with those of today’s ragged individualists, were thin and emancipated. No longer was she the human domino she had always seemed to me. Hey, you, and a lass, Jane Ace! Your turkeys have come home to roast, with avengings!
I saw that it was high tide for me to stop wrecking my brain looking for more more flies in the oatmeal. It was time, too, to remember that words, like men, are cremated equal. In short, if hers was to remain the clowning achievement, it was time for me to shred my list—and not a moment to swoon.
Internet Archive copy of this issue
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The idea for this title came from Jane Gallagher Cates, to whom, with her husband, David Cates, I am indebted for thoughtful comments and suggestions on an early draft of this article. ↩︎
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Tom Lehrer, who went on in the 1960s to a tenure-track position at Stanford and to write songs for the television hits That was the Week That Was (“New Math,” “The Vatican Rag”) and Sesame Street (“Silent Letter E”). In his easily accessible modified-stride piano style and sardonic lyrics, Lehrer profoundly influenced a whole generation of budding cabaret-song composers, including the author of this article. It could be argued that only Socrates, perhaps, had so widespread an effect on a rising generation in his cultural milieu—and we all know what they did to him. ↩︎
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Philip Wheelwright, in The Presocratics, BobbsMerrill/Odyssey: 1966, page 481, note 8. That the Egyptians recognized an elemental chemistry—the word khem is a very old name for the black alluvium of the Nile delta, and thus, by synecdoche, for Egypt itself—is argued at some length by R. A. Schwaller de Lubizc in his titanic book on the temple of Apet of the South at Luxor, The Temple of Man (Inner Traditions International, Rochester, VT: in press). ↩︎
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Priestley’s flawed insight is discussed in Thomas Kuhn’s brilliant The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Harvard University Press: 1969.) Originally issued by Chicago University Press as one offering in a set of works, edited by the mathematician Rudolf Carnap, called Foundations of the Unity of Science, Kuhn’s blockbuster deconstruction of “normal” scientific practice had the effect among some readers of torpedoing the very idea that that there was any “unity of science.” That it was the final volume in the series may, however, have been entirely coincidental. Carnap died in 1970 and Kuhn this past year. ↩︎
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The formula for sulfuric acid will never be forgotten by anyone who learned in junior high school some variant of the following epitaph: ↩︎
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As the Italian chemist Primo Levi dramatically was reminded when a flask blew up in which he was trying to refine benzene under wartime-scarcity conditions, one of several remarkable escapes from death recounted in his collection of autobiographical essays published as The Periodic Table (Schocken, New York: 1984). ↩︎
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Here is the limerick about Henry Ward Beecher, promised in the opening paragraph: ↩︎
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An alternate derivation, spurious but appealing, was proposed to us while this article was in preparation, in a letter (8/20/1998) from Col. Frank Holan, USAF (retd.): “The symbol for tungsten is W because it is Weird.” ↩︎
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I am indebted to Edward Goldfrank, my coauthor on the Boston Basin Bicycle Book, for bringing to my attention this tidy cosmological synopsis (personal communication, late 1970s). ↩︎
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Italicized phrases are Jane Aceisms. All other anomalies are the author’s. ↩︎