VOL XXIV, No 2 []

Reading the Traces of James Murray in the Oxford English Dictionary

John Considine, University of Alberta

The Oxford English Dictionary has often been described, rightly, as a remarkably readable set of books. Rose Macaulay’s description of “the inexhaustible pleasure to be extracted from the perusal of this dictionary” is typical of a long series of similar responses, which begins with reviews of the fascicle a-ant in 1884, and continues to the present day. There are many reasons to enjoy a well-made dictionary, and I have discussed some of them elsewhere: they include delight in the scope of a given language, patriotic appreciation of the thoroughness with which the language of one’s own country has been documented, and the pleasures of interactive reading, such as the annotation of one’s own copy or, more usefully, the communication of addenda and corrigenda to lexicographers.

They also include pleasurable response to the work of an individual lexicographer. Readers of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of 1755 have particularly enjoyed the strong sense of his personal presence in his text: the muscularity of his definitions vividly recalls that of his conversation, and the references Johnson made in several definitions to his own life and opinions are widely quoted. Readers of the Oxford English Dictionary have good reason to think of its most important editor, James Murray, as much more austere in this regard. As he himself once said, “I am a nobody . . . It was unfortunately not practicable to edit the dictionary anonymously, else I should certainly have done so.” Even if that had been his consistent attitude, though—and in fact, he was by no means averse to being photographed and interviewed—Murray would hardly have been able to keep himself out of the dictionary altogether. Lexicographers depend too much on personal knowledge of words and things for their work to be strictly impersonal. Indeed, in a single randomly-selected forty pages of one of the sections edited by Murray, comprising the alphabetical range c-callyoan and published in June 1888, his own opinions, experience, and general knowledge are so regularly apparent that the work feels almost autobiographical. In the rest of this article, I should like to discuss some of the traces which Murray left in this section of the dictionary.

In the very first entry in the range, that for the letter C, Murray supplements historical statements about the development of English with his own opinions as to how the language ought to have developed, complaining that initial cw- in Old English was “(very unnecessarily)” replaced by qw- and qu-, and that there is “no plea whatever” for the use of c in the spelling of hence. He notes a few pages later that the botanical name Caladium was applied “by a carelessness too frequent in botanical nomenclature” to a genus to which the plant called by the Malay etymon of that word does not belong. This sort of editorial condemnation of usage must have been a way for Murray to resolve the tension between the impulse to prescribe and the scholarly duty to describe. The remark at the end of a long note on the derivation of cajoler, the French etymon of cajole, that “the working out of the history must be left to French etymologists” suggests a similar exasperation, perhaps not only with the Delegates of the Oxford University Press who had argued against the detailed tracing of etymologies, but also with the French etymologists who had as yet failed to establish the early history of the word. In these instances, Murray’s irritability has the ring of mature authority. One status label may tell a different story: the definition of cad sense 5, “A fellow of low vulgar manners and behaviour,” is followed by the comment, “(An offensive and insulting appellation).” Can the particular force with which Murray identified this usage, and no other in the whole dictionary, as “offensive and insulting” derive from his having been insulted thus as a struggling young man?

Murray’s personal opinions might appear in illustrative quotations as well as in definition text. He quoted himself by name once in this range, as the only authority for the word cacographer, condemning a development in medieval spelling brought about by “Norman cacographers.” About fifty quotations in the dictionary are ascribed to Murray, although others may appear anonymously, identified only by the title of the journal in which they appeared. In this respect, his practice followed Johnson’s, but differed from that of later editors of OED. Robert Burchfield claimed in 1980 that he had only quoted himself once in the OED Supplement, and anonymously at that, explaining that this is “a very impersonal age and one has to conceal one’s personal contributions very cleverly indeed.” Other dictionaries have followed rules stricter even than Burchfield’s: in the making of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, “living members of the full-time Merriam-Webster staff, past or present, were not to be quoted.”

Where no quotations existed for a modern usage, Murray would invent his own, labelling them “Mod.” So, for instance, the first four sub-senses of cake, one of the very common words which tended to be overlooked by readers, are all thus illustrated. The record for sense 1a, “a comparatively small flattened sort of bread,” ends with a favourite image out of children’s history-books, “King Alfred and the cakes.” That for sense 1b, “a thin hard-baked species of oaten-bread,” ends with a reminiscence, “Country children in Scotland still ‘seek their cakes’ on Hogmanay or ‘Cake-day.'” That for sense 1c, “a composition having a basis of bread, but containing additional ingredients, as butter, sugar, spices” (if Murray had ever baked a cake, he would have known that they do not, and did not in the nineteenth century, have a “basis of bread”) ends with “to buy a cake for the christening”: Murray’s youngest child was christened in 1888. That for sense 2 ends with the avuncular “little boys are fond of cake.” The “mod.” examples invented by Murray may be in Scots, like that at call v. sense 4k, “I’ll caw the haill town for’t, or I want it” and that at sense 15 of the same word, a reminiscence of children’s speech, “will you come and ca’ ?” (“will you come and turn the skipping-rope?”). Not every “mod.” quotation in the dictionary need be taken, as these two may be, as having any autobiographical resonance. However, at least one in this range sounds very much like Murray’s characteristic thoughts on his work as a lexicographer: the use of called on to refer to the requirements of duty at call v. sense 23c is illustrated by the words, “a man is not called upon to make such sacrifices every day.”

Even when Murray was not quoting himself or inventing quotations, the sources of his quotations were often connected with his professional or personal life. Richard Trench, whose paper On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries was instrumental in founding the OED, is quoted s.vv. cajole and call v. (sense 26d), and Benjamin Jowett, the godfather of Murray’s youngest son, is quoted directly several times in the range, and mentioned in another quotation. A quotation for cadastral is from Joshua Toulmin Smith, whose daughter Lucy was a reader for the dictionary, and the solitary quotation for sense 2 of caddle, referring to people who “won’t take the trouble—won’t, as they say with us in Somerset, be at the caddle to look after such things,” surely derives from Murray’s close friend Fred Elworthy, author of the West Somerset Word-Book. More intimately, an illustration of cadger from the Proceedings of the Berwickshire Naturalist’s Club recalls Murray’s membership in that body, and a quotation of anomalous form illustrating a form of cairn must be a souvenir of Murray’s holidays in North Wales: “1871 6-in. Ordn. Map Eng. Sheet 78 Bangor, has many instances of ‘carn’.”

Murray’s “mod.” quotations usually completed the historical record of a given word, but cab v², to pilfer, is illustrated only by “Mod. Schoolboy slang. You’ve cabbed that apple on your way up.” A number of words and senses in the range are entirely undocumented, and must have been inserted, like cab v², on the basis of personal knowledge rather than that of quotation evidence. These include sense 3 of cabbage n², “A ‘crib’ or key whence a pupil surreptitiously copies his exercise”; the sense “a pannier” of cadge n¹; the sense “a cow’s matrix” of calf-bed; the form calf-kill (the name of a plant poisonous to cattle); the forms calking-anvil and calking-tongs; and the idioms ca' ower (knock over) and ca' on (drive a nail into a body). Several of these words are distinctively Scots. This is true of ca' ower and ca' on, and the “mod. schoolboy slang” cited at cab v² is that of Murray’s own schooldays: the word is identified as Scots rather than English by the English Dialect Dictionary and the Scottish National Dictionary. The very rare calf-kill may be a reminiscence of the six months of Murray’s boyhood spent herding cattle. These Scoticisms accompany a number taken with acknowledgement from Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, one of the finest predecessors of the OED, and a text to which Murray had daily recourse. There is, in general, a remarkably heavy Scots presence in the pages under consideration here: John Willinsky’s recent argument that OED1 “formalized aspects of English culture in preparation for advancing the Anglicizing mission” could not have been made by anyone who had sat down and started reading even a few pages of the dictionary. Murray was not an Englishman, and the language he brought to his work was not that of an Englishman.

Having said that, it is of course true that some of the language which appears to be documented on Murray’s authority is standard English. Two terms from pharmacy are defined without documentation (Murray had worked in a chemist’s shop): caccagogue, “an ointment made of alum and honey, and used to promote stool”—one wonders how—, and calendula, a tincture of marigold “applied as a hæmostatic to wounds.” So are a number of terms from the natural sciences: botany, an old favourite of Murray’s, supplies cachrys sense 2, calabur tree, and calapite, zoology caecilian, metallurgy and chemistry a sense of calcar and the noun calcinate. So, too, are lexical items which seem to depend on a wide general knowledge and an extraordinary ability to call a word to mind as its alphabetical place is reached: cachou (a lozenge to sweeten the breath), caen-stone, two semi-technical senses of cage, the musical term calando, calico ball (“a ball where the ladies wear only cotton dresses”), the phrase to call a bond, the form calliper-square. Even in the case of well-documented words, a personal observation on usage may be added to sharpen a definition: although calibre is the diameter, not the weight, of the shell, “phrases like ‘guns of heavy calibre’ often occur in popular use,” and callisthenics is “chiefly a term of young ladies' boarding schools.” The extent to which OED is founded simply on what Murray carried about in his head is worth considering. When he was about to take up the editorship, he “began to consider the branches of knowledge in which he might find himself most limited and took up the study of chemistry again by way of preparation”: he quite deliberately made himself a polymath, and the dictionary shows it.

Murray’s polymathy manifests itself in OED definitions as well as in the dictionary’s word-list. He has a characteristic trick of adding an interesting fact to a definition when it is by no means essential to the explication of the word. Sense 3 of cabbage n¹ begins, “the tender unexpanded centre or terminal bud of palm trees, which is in most species edible, and is often eaten,” but then concludes with the detail “though its removal kills the tree.” Having explained that the cacoon is “The large flat polished bean of a climbing tropical shrub, Entada scandens (N. O. Leguminosæ) . . . about 2 inches across and half an inch thick,” Murray cannot resist adding that “they are made into snuff-boxes, scent-bottles, spoons, etc., and are sometimes sold in the streets of London as West Indian Filberts.” The calabar-bean is also identified by a Linnaean binomial and then enlivened with the note that it is “called also the Ordeal-bean, administered by the natives to persons suspected of witchcraft.” Likewise, the availability of a photograph of the Kaaba (lemmatized here as Caaba); the “most disgusting garlic odour” of the arsenic compound cacodyl; the “curious cylindrical case” of the larva of the May-fly, or caddis; and the use of cairngorm, a dark variety of quartz, “for ornamenting the handles of dirks, and other articles of Highland costume” are all documented with a sort of quiet pedagogical delight.

This might cause difficulties. The definition of callis-sand as “a fine white sand, originally imported from Calais, used for blotting ink, scouring, etc.” was hardly the place for the observation that “the sands of Calais are frequently referred to in the 17th c. as a place for duels,” so Murray put it in the etymology instead. More normally, small-type notes add information to definitions: such a note s.v. cairn sense b remarks that “the local name of a summit-cairn in the south-east of Scotland and north of England previously to the period of the Ordnance Survey was man, as in Coniston Old Man, the High Man and Low Man on Helvellyn, etc.” Here, pedagogy and memory come together: Murray knew Helvellyn and the other peaks of the English Lake District well.

There are other examples of Murray’s personal voice in this range. He explains that the letter C is used to denote the third of a series in contexts which include “the subdivisions of the longer articles in this Dictionary.” He remarks that the cabbage-worm is “called in Scotland kailworm.” He refers with disapproval to the cabbala as “the pretended tradition of the mystical interpretation of the Old Testament.” He points out that the words cadence and chance form an etymological pair, both being derived from the Latin cadentia. He notes, with an optimism which has not been justified in the twentieth century, that human beings were only imprisoned in cages “in barbarous times.” He quotes an interesting false etymology of calamitas from Bacon as a note to the etymology of calamity. The list—taken, it should be remembered, from a very narrow alphabetical range—could go on.

James Murray’s presence pervades the text of the dictionary. It is, on careful reading of that text, a presence as distinctive as Johnson’s. The unfrivolous delight in every variety of knowledge is that expressed in a sermon he preached as a schoolmaster at Mill Hill: “not in one solitary direction, alone, does [the] thirsting mind thus expand & yearn—[but] in every direction, in every field, in every corner, and bye path & alley of the great field of knowledge.” It is, indeed, the intellectual delight of his early years at Hawick, buying second-hand books on a diversity of subjects, collecting ferns and linguistic forms with equal curiosity, and imparting his knowledge as energetically as he collected it. His contributions to the dictionary suggest vividly what a fine and memorable teacher Murray must have been. And they cast light back into his earliest life, to the child in the playground hearing a girl turning a skipping-rope and shouting over to another, “will you come and ca'?”; and to the child herding cattle on the slopes of Ruberslaw, taking care that they did not graze on calf-kill, and storing the word calf-kill away in his memory.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“[You] are responsible to make good on any checks you accept if those checks bounce and the party who wrote them does not.” (from “Guidelines for Al-Anon Groups” in the Al-Anon Southern California World Service Bulletin, November 1995. Submitted by Theodor W. Polk, Canoga Park, California.

Assing Around

Jessy Randall and Wendy Woloson

The word ass appears in American slang in multiple ways with multiple meanings. It has a rich and varied history and can signify anything from good to bad to more. A mildly transgressive word, ass is not quite as serious as shit or fuck—it is more of a humorously vulgar word, but certainly “dirty,” especially when paired with the anatomical specificity of -hole. And because ass is so short it is easily combinable with other words, making it quite versatile. What also lends to ass’s character, especially as a curse word, is its sound. The almost hiss of the ss allows for particularly colorful emphasis in many expressions.

Historically, the word ass referred to the donkey, an animal representing “clumsiness, ignorance, and stupidity”¹ in many early folktales; the word arse referred to the buttocks. In England, arse is still used more than ass to identify that body part. Over time, ass gained a third meaning in addition to the donkey and the buttocks: synecdoche for the entire body. The first two meanings are usually employed as insults, and the second has a more general usage.

Ass referring to a four-legged equine has been around since at least the year 1000; as a stupid, clumsy beast since about 1200. Shakespeare wrote in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (late 16th century), “This is to make an asse of me, to fright me, if they could.”² Sir George Etheridge, in his 17th century poem “Song (If She Be Not as Kind as Fair),” wrote “I would not have thee such an ass, / Hadst thou ne’er so much leisure, / To sigh and whine for such a lass / Whose pride’s above her pleasure.”³ And as recently as 1998, the word ass used even in this relatively innocuous way caused Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl (written in the 1940s) to be challenged at a Texas middle school: parents objected to the sentence “what a silly ass I am!”⁴ This kind of usage is probably the most common and, the Anne Frank case above notwithstanding, the mildest. It continues to be found today in the mainstream business cliché “When you assume you make an ass out of u and me.”

Of course, ass is often used to refer to the ass: that is, the buttocks, the gluteus maximus, the hindquarters, the butt, the bottom, the tushy, the rear-end. (We could go on all day with other terms for this part of the body—but such a digression would last for paragraphs.) “He’s got a nice ass” is fairly straightforward, as is “he pinched my ass.” But then there’s being a tight-ass, which suggests literally that the person in question is constipated and figuratively that the person is a prig or a tightwad—refusing to let go of even worthless things such as waste. To “keep a tight asshole,” in military terminology, means to stay cool and to avoid panic and the diarrhea associated with it.⁵ Having “a stick up his/her ass” has a related but more pejorative connotation—in this case, the person is rigid and anchored, can’t relax or have fun.⁶

Strangely, a reference to the ass part of the body can be a statement of skepticism. The response my ass expresses the thought “I don’t believe you,” also known as “you’re pulling my leg.” (The g-rated version of my ass is my foot.)⁷

Ass is also used as synecdoche for the entire human body, so that the ass stands for the person to whom the ass belongs: get your ass in here, quit dragging your ass, watch your ass, and cover your ass (often abbreviated in professional dialogue as CYA). And if you are a candy-ass, you are a person who is wimpy, perhaps even feminine, whose ass—and entire body—is easily taken by bullies.

The word can also be used as an adjective-intensifier, as in cool-ass, lame-ass, dumb-ass, and the title of the current television program Bob Goldthwait’s Big-Ass Show. Ass here has no positive or negative meaning; it functions like the modifier very. Ass-out, in hip-hop culture, has the same meaning.⁸ One can also go about things ass-backwards (which becomes back-asswards or bass-ackwards), which is a more extreme form of just backwards.

Similarly, ass can be used to intensify verbs: freezing your ass off is worse than just freezing; falling on your ass is an exaggerated form of falling, with a certain amount of humor and humiliation attached. Working your ass off is the most difficult form of working; there is no further amount you can work. (Conversely, of course, if you do a half-assed job—as opposed to whole-assed?—you have taken a cavalier attitude and not done all you should.) The phrase sitting on your ass implies more than just sitting—since, after all, on our asses is where we all do that—but adds the sense of laziness: hyper-sitting. Being on or up someone’s ass is not just to follow her, but to be literally on her tail—to follow her too closely.

This brings us to the idea of the ass being an unprotected part of the body, a part that gets kicked in a fight or chapped in annoyance. (This last is primarily a westernism, where people’s asses probably could get chapped from riding horses all day.) Having a case of the ass, like having a chapped ass, is to experience a state of irritation. Tearing someone a new asshole means to light into someone, to severely criticize or hurt him, and comes from military references to bullet wounds; but this phrase should not be confused with to tear ass, which means to hurry. If one gets a crazy idea and follows through with it, he is said to have a wild hair up his ass, which may lead him to fall ass-over-teakettle, or -tit, in confusion. John Steinbeck wrote in his 1938 Grapes of Wrath, “You jus' scrabblin' ass over tit, fear somebody gonna pin some blame on you.”

If someone wants to fight you, she might say she’s going to kick your ass; a boxer in a match can be said to have had his ass kicked even though the ass is below the belt and therefore off limits in a fair fight. What the phrase contributes in colorfulness it lacks in intensity—after all, the ass is probably the least painful area to be kicked. The phrase I’m going to kick his ass means something different and less severe than the more specific I’m going to kick him in the teeth or kick him in the stomach. Kicking someone’s ass—perhaps shouting your ass is grass!—carries with it an element of playfulness and fun. It is more of a schoolyard boast (as frightening as those may be) than a truly worrisome threat.

Indirectly, ass also means the sex organs, especially of women, and becomes synonymous with sex: men in particular will speak of getting a piece of ass, alternately expressed as a piece of tail. While the earliest recorded usage of this expression appeared around 1684, more recent occurrences of this phrase are no more genteel: an ass peddler was a prostitute or a pimp in the 1940s.⁹ This usage has worked its way into literature: John Updike wrote in 1960’s Rabbit, Run,“Then he comes back from the Army and all he cares about is chasing ass,” and Donald Stahl riffed on this usage in Hokey in 1968 with, “I’ve always felt that the quickest way to a woman’s heart is up her ass.”¹⁰ Interestingly, British English uses fanny in a similar way—to mean a woman’s vagina. Lawrence Levine, in Black Culture, has identified this usage in Black vernacular language as early as the 1910s: “White folks on the sofa, / Niggers on the grass, / White man is talking low / Nigger is getting ass.” ¹¹ This usage of ass that objectifies the (female) human body and treats it as an object of sex also is used by a male pederast who is similarly in search of a piece of ass. (In prison slang, a butt pussy is an anus.)¹²

These terms are not to be confused with ass man, which merely means a man who appreciates and is most attracted to a woman’s behind. There is also the more familiar tits and ass, shortened to T and A, a phrase used to describe something really terrific or cool, as in that was really tits and ass, buddy; it can also more directly refer to the pleasure of looking at the actual body parts in question—Baywatch is the quintessential T and A television show. ¹³

When associated with other parts of the body, ass can be particularly demeaning. Ass-for-face is a derogatory noun denoting ugliness. But there are other familiar and colorful insults in which ass figures prominently. From the refrain kiss my ass to the crude you asshole, or, shortened but no less offensive, a-hole, (which seems to be applied more to males than to females, despite the equality of ass-ownership by both sexes), there are many unkind things we can say about each other that involve the word ass.

These can be related to stupidity or ignorance: when ass is connected to speech or thought, it is clearly an insult. You horse’s ass plays on the sense of donkey-like clumsiness. Talking out your ass is talking as if you know what you are talking about when you don’t, also known more succinctly as talking shit. Similarly, if you’re being a smart-ass, you’re being a wise guy, acting as if you know more than you do. (This expression has a couple of g-rated variations: smart-aleck, smarty-pants.) He’s got his head up his ass and she doesn’t know her ass from her elbow are other forms of the ass-as-stupidity insult. To try to blow smoke up someone’s ass is to try to fool someone through obfuscation—bullshitting someone, to mix metaphors. While to pull something out of one’s ass is to create it from out of nowhere.

The list of insults goes on. A person who is annoying is a pain in the ass (mildly, pain in the neck). Some ass insults are scatological—ass-wipe, for example. Others are related to sycophantic “brown-nosing”: ass-kisser (and its reverse, kiss-ass), ass-licker. A recent email chain-letter of “office vocabulary” included assmosis, defined as “the process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.” Most inscrutably, Jimbo calls Nelson ass-butt in an episode of the Simpsons, suggesting that the word ass is simply a modifier meaning bad. But according to contemporary college slang, butt-ass means very, as in it’s butt-ass cold. ¹⁴

Even culture brokers themselves have a hard time pinning down the meaning of ass. A recent article in a Philadelphia newspaper¹⁵ claims that ass is the new “edgy term to replace sucky,” as in “WMMR [a local rock station] is so ass.” None of the Philadelphians we have interviewed, however, admits to using this term or even hearing it used, although we all agree that an edgy term to replace sucky is highly desirable. We did find evidence to suggest the opposite—that ass means good, as in the advertisement for a brand of sneakers with a circled S logo: “Sketchers—it’s the S,” where the pronunciation ess is supposed to sound like ass.

Curiously, ass can also connote the positive: a kick-ass party is the best kind of party. A badass is credibly both an adjective and a noun: a person who is tough but cool is a badass, and something that is really awesome can also be badass. And speaking of fun, assing about or assing around is an old-ish phrase for having fun or goofing off: Eric Partridge notes that to ass (or arse) about was a common schoolboys' expression by 1910 in Britain, and James Joyce wrote of “arsing around from one pub to another” in 1922’s Ulysses.¹⁶ (We wonder if this usage relates to “horsing around” or horseplay.) Another Britishism used by schoolboys is the expression can’t be assed (or arsed) to do a particular task, meaning “can’t be bothered.”

So what, then, can we make of ass as used in its myriad contexts of insult, praise, and objectification? For such a small word it gets around, being exchanged in our vernacular language like common currency. It will be interesting to see its 21st-century incarnations, although it is probable that they will have precedents dating back hundreds of years. And we’re not just talking out our asses when we say that.

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Racing for Definitions in South Africa

M. Lynne Murphy, Baylor University, Waco, Texas

For four years, I taught at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. “Wits”, as it is known, is one of the two major English-language universities in South Africa, and in the deep, dark days of apartheid policy, Wits was allowed to educate only white people. Now, when I meet non-South Africans who want to know about the country’s recovery from apartheid, they ask me “what was the racial make-up of your university?” Well, according to the University Vice-Chancellor Colin Bundy, “Black students comprised 14% of the total in 1984; 36% in 1994, and 48% in 1997.” What should we think of such figures? Black Africans make up at least 75% of South Africa’s population, but considering the poverty of their academic preparation, it’s pretty impressive that such a demanding university has so many black students. Or is it? The fact is, black doesn’t mean the same things in South Africa that it means elsewhere. The 1993 Vice-Chancellor’s report spelled this out. That year, “the number of black students increased to [. . .] 32% of the total. Of these, about two-thirds were African and most of the balance Indian.” In other words, Mahatma Gandhi, who lived in South Africa early in his career, was (and was not) a black man. The moral of this story is: understanding reportage of race relations in other parts of the world involves learning a new set of meanings for our racial terms.

Contrary to the way we tend to use racial terms, races are not fixed and objectively describable. Anthropologist Robert Thornton has said that every people he’s met thinks that there are four races ó just never the same four. One reason for this is that there is little physical evidence that humanity is divisible into ‘subspecies’. While some of us may look more like the people in central Africa and some of us look more like the people in China, looks are only a slight part of our genetic make-up. Making any generalizations beyond skin color and hair type is problematic. For instance, the “black' genetic disease sickle cell anemia does not occur in the Xhosa ethnicity, of whom Nelson Mandela is the most famous member, while it does occur in Italians. Both East Asian and African Bushman peoples have epicanthic folds on their eyelids. Indeed, the more we look for physical similarities within the races, the more differences we find. Another reason that cultures differ in their racial inventories is that they have different ways of dealing with people of mixed race. In the U.S., most areas have historically adhered to a “one-drop rule': if you have any African ancestors, then you are Black. You may have three Norwegian grandparents, but if the other is African American, you are, in most of the U.S., black. But in other places, you’d be called something different—maybe mulatto in Haiti, or quadroon in old New Orleans, or perhaps even white in Brazil.

Understanding racial categorization is far from a matter of black and white, and dictionaries are often less than helpful in explaining racial terminology in other parts of the world. For one thing, dictionaries tend to leave out the meanings that are not used in the local culture. So, American dictionaries tend not to note that there was a time in South Africa when the term white could refer to Japanese (who, as honorary whites, benefitted under the laws pertaining to whites and did not suffer under those pertaining to Asians), nor that the usual South African sense of the word Asian refers to the Caucasian peoples of the Indian subcontinent, rather than the East Asian peoples of China, Korea, and Japan. The chasm between South African reality and foreigners' understanding is particularly great when it comes to the word coloured. According to most American and British dictionaries, the “South African” meaning of coloured is ‘person of mixed race’. This definition only tells a very small part of the story. While mixed in the U.S. usually means ‘black and white’, some South Africans would argue that there is no black ancestry in the coloured peoples. (They are wrong to argue this, but the fact that it has seemed plausible to argue this suggests that black and coloured South Africans are not recently interrelated peoples.) We can see more of the story in one of the former legal definitions of Coloured. Proclamation No. 46 of 1959 defines seven different “coloured' groups, namely: (1) Cape Coloured Group (2) Malay Group (3) Griqua Group (4) Chinese Group (5) Indian Group (6) Other Indian Group (7) Other Asiatic Group (8) Other Coloured Group. Later, Asians were separated out, so that coloured referred to mostly the Cape Coloured, Malay (who are not strictly Malaysian, and who, as Muslims, were not considered Asian), and Griqua, as well as others who were not easily classifiable as black (or Bantu), white, or Asian. It’s worth noting here, though, that in South Africa, all of these categories have different boundaries than the non-South African reader understands. Black African or Bantu does not include Khoi (‘Hottentot’) or San (‘Bushman’) people, who are physically different from other Africans, and who have languages and cultures unrelated to the Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, and other peoples of southern Africa. (If you’ve seen the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, you will remember its Bushman hero, Xixo.) Hence, the Griqua group above remains coloured—since they are of Khoikhoi and white origin. People of Arab descent and Zanzibaris have been classified as coloured as well, since the label was regularly used for anyone who didn’t fit easily into any of the other categories.

Many dictionaries simply state that Coloured means the same thing as Cape Coloured, which it often does. But what does Cape Coloured mean? According to A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles, it is “a person of mixed ethnic descent, speaking Afrikaans or English as home language, and (usu.) resident in the Western Cape; particularly, one who is not a follower of Islam.” This definition both clarifies and needs clarification. First we must make clear that here mixed means really mixed and mixed a long time ago. Coloured ancestry goes back to the early days of the European settlement of the Cape, and back then the mix was of European (mostly Dutch), Bantu (mostly Xhosa), Khoikhoi, and Malay peoples (workers indentured by the Dutch East India Company), and those who are labeled coloured almost always have great-great(-etc.) grandparents who were coloured too. The child of a Zulu mother and a white father born in the past century would not typically be considered coloured, since the child would probably speak Zulu and would not have taken part in coloured culture.

During apartheid, South African laws defined racial groups on the basis of a variety of criteria, including which taxes people paid, which areas they lived in, and, for women, whom they married. The variety of conflicting legal definitions of racial terms was so great that the government established a committee to regularize the definitions across laws, but the committee reported back in 1957 that the task was impossible. South African coloured demonstrates that racial labels often have nothing to do with ideas of physical ‘race’. Of course, we didn’t have to go to South Africa to see this. In the U.S., Hispanic is used as a racial designation, even though it groups people according to ancestral language and location, not physical group; Asian groups people by ancestral location, not by physical or linguistic similarity; and Arab is a pseudo-racial term that essentially classifies people by religion and language. While any of these individuals might belong to the Caucasian ‘race’, they are not white in the American sense of the term.

But if such ‘racial’ distinctions are not physically real, they are socially and psychologically real. With the anti-apartheid struggles of the late 1970s, when liberal people of every race were working for a ‘non-racial’ South Africa, liberal people started replacing the term coloured with so-called ‘coloured’. This qualification of the term represented the realizations that coloured indicates an artificial category, invented as a legal category for the uncategorizable, and that the term coloured was nevertheless indispensable for referring to people. Since the 1994 elections, however, coloured has made a comeback, in part due to an anti-black backlash in parts of the coloured community. For instance, in introducing her 1997 Mail and Guardian interview with a civic leader, journalist Angella Johnson wrote, “ Puleeze, do not call Basil Douglas a ‘so-called coloured’. It pisses him off. . . . He is Coloured, with a capital C, and proud of it.” These days, whether you use the so-called or not, you’re bound to upset someone.

The apartheid government was conscious that its categorizations were not objectively supportable in terms of physical races, and so it avoided the language of race in favor of a language of ethnicity and bureaucracy. While the international community accused the National Party (NP) government of racist practices, NP representative N.F. Treurnicht replied, “. . .we have no race classification in the strict sense of the word. We have population grouping. We in South Africa are not at all obsessed with race” (House of Assembly, 21 March 1967). One reason to avoid racial grouping was that, if grouped racially, black Africans would be the majority group in South Africa. The NP avoided the appearance of racial classification by emphasizing the differences among the various South African black ethnicities: Zulu, Xhosa, Northern Sotho, Southern Sotho (pronounced “sutu”), Tswana, Ndebele, Tsonga, Venda, and Swazi. The desire to separate black groups resulted in the creation of separate ‘homelands’ for each ethnicity, and it also resulted in another naming problem. Since all indigenous black people were treated the same in South African law, the government needed a single name for them. But which name? From the 1940s to the mid-1970s, the term was Bantu. Bantu is a linguistic and anthropological classification that includes most of the central and southern African ethnic groups; the word means ‘people’ in many of these languages. By the 1970s, Bantu carried negative connotations, since it usually described things that were inferior and unfair, such as Bantu education and Bantustans (homelands). Those negative connotations remain strong enough today that many black South African linguists refuse to use the internationally accepted term Bantu as the name of a language group, and so within South Africa, the group is often called Sintu—a word invented by Professor James Khumalo of Wits University. After the rejection of Bantu in the 1970s, the government looked for a replacement for Bantu, but didn’t like its options. Black would make the divisions among people seem prejudicially racial, rather than justifiably ethnic, and African would give the impression that the black people had more right to the land than the whites. Using African to refer to blacks also created a problem for the administrators of apartheid because in the Afrikaans language of the government, the word for African and the word for the Dutch-descended whites (Afrikaners) are the same.

Rather than going with either black or African, the government tried to refer to the formerly Bantu groups as Plural, emphasizing that they were to be seen as many ethnic groups, not one racial group. But when the Department of Bantu Affairs was re-christened Department of Plural Relations in 1978, the name was so roundly mocked that the government had to capitulate and refer to blacks. With the rise of non-racialism in the struggle against apartheid, black took on its politicized ‘non-white’ meaning and remains quite ambiguous today. In reaction to the ambiguity and the perceived crudeness of color labeling, many people now prefer African, but the country is divided into two camps on this word too: those who use it for black people, and those who use it for anyone born in Africa, including whites. I learned this lesson in a television interview, where I was discussing African cultural styles in communication. The white interviewer corrected me: “you mean black, since we’re all African here.” I wanted to say “no, I mean African, since I’m talking about black people here and excluding the ones in the Americas,” but was probably wise not to.

The story of changing racial labels for people of African ancestry is familiar to Americans, who have seen negro, Negro, colored, Black, Afro-American, and African American in the past century. In South Africa, the labels for white people are also somewhat unstable. In the earlier days of apartheid, European was a more common way of referring to whites. The government learned that it had to adjust its terminology when white American visitors naturally followed the signs for Non-Europeans when disembarking at the Cape Town airport. While white is the more common term now, one still sees European in ads for household contractors, where European supervision does not mean that Nordic management principles are applied, but rather that white customers can rest assured that no black laborers will be left alone in their houses. As mentioned above, white has its own strange tales, although one would expect that the honorary white status bestowed upon East Asian business people would have died out with the abandonment of white legal privilege. I thought as much until I found myself engaged in a debate with the (white) secretary in my department about how to fill out affirmative action reports on our classes. She wanted to count the students of Chinese descent as white.

During apartheid, the urge to talk about ethnicities rather than races extended to whites as well. But while language differences provided clear group boundaries for blacks, language does not divide whites so clearly. The majority of whites in South Africa speak Afrikaans, a descendant of Dutch, as a first language, and their group has a name for itself, Afrikaners. But the rest of the non-immigrant whites speak English, no matter whether they are of Greek, Portuguese, European Jewish, or English ancestry. The acronym wessa (“white English-speaking South African') has never really caught on as a descriptor, but sometimes the word English is ambiguously used as if it refers to English-speakers, rather than English people. Sometimes the conservative Afrikaners' penchant for differentiating people on ethno-linguistic grounds has gotten out of hand, as when Prime Minister P. W. Botha claimed that “The security and happiness of all minority groups in South Africa depend on the Afrikaner. Whether they or English- or German- or Portuguese- or Italian-speaking, or even Jewish-speaking, makes no difference” (House of Assembly, 20 February 1981).

All of the differences between South African racial terminology and American or British terminology would take many more pages to catalogue, but this snapshot should make clear that within the English-speaking world there are many languages of race and that “races” change as the words for them change.

Resources and further reading

Davis, F. James. 1991. Who is Black? One nation’s definition. University Park: Penn State Press.

Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles. 1996. Cape Town: Oxford University Press.

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1977. Why we should not name human races—A biological view. In Ever since Darwin: Reflections on natural history. New York: W.W. Norton.

Mail and Guardian, The (on-line edition). http://www.mg.co.za/mg/.

Murphy, M. Lynne. 1998. Defining people: Race and ethnicity in South African English dictionaries. International Journal of Lexicography 11:1.1-33.

What’s the French for “Fiddle de dee”?

Margaret of Scotland, Wife of Louis XI, provides an answer for Lewis Carroll:

Here’s a question to explore,

A query Alice merely parried

When she was examined for

The right to wear the crown she carried,

And to be a pawn no more.

Perhaps the French for “fiddle de dee,”

And its meaning, may be seen

In those sad words that a dauphine,

Ever a pawn and never a queen,

Said on her deathbed: “Fie de la vie.”

If so, does “fiddle de dee” belittle

Life any less than it does a fiddle?

—Henry George Fischer

BONA PALARE: the Language of Round the Horne

Mat Coward

Some historians of comedy argue that Round The Horne, a BBC sketch show broadcast between 1965 and 1968, prolonged the life of radio as a major medium of entertainment in the UK, at a time when TV was rapidly establishing its regrettable hegemony. Certainly, RTH was the last of the great wireless comedies—”great” in the sense that it was a programme to which the whole nation listened.

In the decades since, it has been endlessly rebroadcast, in Britain and around the Anglophone world, as a “comedy classic” or “smash of the day”. In the 1990s, more than 500,000 RTH audio cassettes have been sold, making it one of the BBC’s most commercially valuable properties. Other shows from that revolutionary era of satire and taboo-busting—shows which at the time were considered more significant, more groundbreaking—have long since been retired to the Land of Footnote.

RTH’s continuing popularity does not depend chiefly on nostalgia. Fans who were not even born when the sudden death of its sanguine frontman Kenneth Horne ended the programme’s run do not regard the show as some kind of ironic icon. Rather, they laugh with Round The Horne because it is, amazingly, as funny as ever. A generation after its death—it lives.

This vitality is partly explained by the obvious: RTH was superbly written, performed and produced, by people who loved what they were doing, and loved who they were doing it with. But there is, I think, another reason for the show’s longevity: it had an unusually deep and widespread impact on the language of both professional comedy and everyday humour.

RTH was, above all else, a comedy of words, with its elaborate literary puns and broad cultural references, inextricably intermingled with a kind of learned vulgarity. Its creators, Barry Took and Marty Feldman (born 1928 and 1934 respectively) were, to a large extent, self-educated men, and members of a generation which valued self-education. An essential difference between the formally and the informally educated is that, as a general rule, the former read only what they are required to read, while the latter tend to be omnivorous, insatiable consumers and digesters of every manner of material, both printed and oral.

Both men came from what Took (in his book Round The Horne (The complete and utter history), Boxtree, 1998. ISBN: 0 7522 2111 9) calls “caring middle class families” in north London. They were both enthusiastic readers and talkers, listeners and watchers. Their acknowledged influences include the playwrights Harold Pinter and N. F. Simpson. Their interests and influences overlapped but—crucially—were also complementary. Feldman loved jazz, and wore a goatee; Took was clean-shaven, and preferred classical music. Feldman was Jewish, Took was not (that sentence may seem to lack something if you are American; but remember that Britain is not a god-ridden land, and “not Jewish” is an adequate description of many an Englishman’s spiritual stance). According to Took, “our writing obsessions [. . .] were the music halls, the circus, seaside concert parties, and revolting old men.”

They met as music hall comedians in the 1950s. This world, of the old variety circuit, was an already vanishing one, in which aged repertory thesps would attempt to secure free admission to cinema matinees by asking the management “Do you recognise the profession?”—meaning, “Do you let actors in for nothing?” It was a world musty with the scent of failed careers, of defeated ambitions, of the uniquely poignant absurdity of an art form that has outlived its audience. It was, in short, a world in which two talented, word-loving, young smart-arses with an eye for character and an ear for dialogue could hardly fail to find enough comic material to last them a lifetime.

Of course, many British comedy shows, before and since RTH, have been rich in catchphrases, double entendres, and wordplay. The difference here is that a significant proportion of every edition of RTH deviated from standard English in a way that was as systematic as it was manic.

The writers delighted in the sounds of words, and especially in the rhythms they formed in combination. The scores of characters portrayed by RTH’s versatile cast invariably bore outlandish names (“My name is Ebenezer Kukpowder, but we won’t go into that now”), chosen for the noise they made, more than for the sake of the gags which might be hung on them.

The best remembered element of RTH is undoubtedly the weekly sketch performed by Julian and Sandy, two effete ex-chorus boys (exuberantly portrayed by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams) who were always discovered running odd businesses whilst “resting” from “the profession”.

Jules and Sand spoke in a camp chat, mostly gypsy in origin, which had presumably become generalised amongst showbiz folk, and homosexual men, via fairground and circus slang. Remember that male homosexuality was not legalised in Britain until 1967; therefore, the boys' palare was truly an underground argot. Took claims that “Some [of the] words are Williams' and Paddick’s own natural form of expression”. Palare, by the way, can also mean ‘a chat’, as in “Go on, get out your ouija—let’s have a palare with the spirits!”

The Jules and Sand sketches often begin with some variation on the salutation “How bona to vada your dolly old eek again,” meaning “How good to see your nice old face again”. Other named body parts include riah (simple backslang for hair); thews for thighs; and lallies for legs. The body itself is lucoddy, as in “Take your shirt off, Jule. Show Mr Horne your rippling physique . . . There, look Mr Horne. Vada that great butch lucoddy.” I suspect (though it is nothing stronger than a suspicion) that this specifically camp use of butch, along with the term of endearment ducky, may have entered the general consciousness as a direct result of RTH. Similar in intent to ducky are heartface and treash (short for treasure).

Some of the best laughs arise when the very straight Kenneth Horne attempts to address Jules and Sand in their own tongue, eliciting responses along the lines of “Oooh, he’s got all the palare, hasn’t he? He’s bold, he goes too far!” This appropriation of bold is particularly treasurable. Jules and Sand’s mothers or grandmothers might have used it in all seriousness to condemn unseemly behaviour, particularly in a young hussy. When the boys themselves employ the word, the censure is mock, and undercut by squeals of delight.

Palare is rich in ways of expressing approval; fittingly, as Jules and Sand were generally a pretty chirpy pair. (It’s interesting to speculate what effect their likeableness had on popular attitudes towards homosexuality in the mid-60s, given that it is quite likely that at the time Jules and Sand were the only blatant homosexuals most people had ever “met”. In one sketch, the boys have set themselves up as legal advisers: “We have a criminal practice,” they boast, to the delight of the studio audience). As well as bona—”We’ve been screened. They went into our backgrounds and found out our fides were absolutely bona”—there is fab, fantabulosa (emphasis on the fourth, elongated syllable), and gear. Exceptionally fashionable drag (clothing) might be described as a rave. For instance, if one were to get tarted up in an off-the-shoulder holster for secret agents to wear in the evening, “black satin with an embossed rose done in bullion,” one might be told: “Oooh, it’s a rave! That’s a rave, that’s lovely, innit?”

Anything which is neither fab nor a rave might well be naff, which has since become a very common British word. (In RTH scripts, the spelling is naph; I’ve never seen this elsewhere). It is alleged that Princess Anne invented the related phrase naff off, which she deployed against incoming paparazzi—though I admit that I have never attempted to verify this. In other words, if you want to know, you ask her.

If something is naff, you would want to put the mockers on it. “Nante that!” you might cry, nante meaning either ‘cancel’ or ‘desist from’, or simply ‘nothing’, depending on context. You certainly wouldn’t want anything naff where you live, in your lattie.

An omi is a man, a palone is a woman, and an omipalone is therefore self-explanatory. An omipalone’s walk might be described as a mince. Mincing is less purposeful than trolling, with its echoes of ‘trawling’.

Not only individual RTH words and phrases, but an entire comic cadence is still detectable in common British speech and writing. A good measure of the credit for this must go to Kenneth Williams—classical actor, camp comic, unrivaled mimic, fiercely knowledgeable autodidact, and man of many voices—who also played the part of appalling folk singer Rambling Syd Rumpo.

According to Took, Rambling Syd’s language was entirely created by the scriptwriters; it “means nothing, but sounds as if it might”. This “filth is in the ear of the beholder” argument sometimes borders on the disingenuous. When Rambling Syd sang about a chap named Reg Pubes, I think Took and Feldman knew perfectly well why the audience laughed.

Long after the folkies he ridiculed have disappeared from the music scene, the influence of Rumpo’s style has remained as a rough template for nonsensical or mocking phrase-making. This is a verse of Rambling Syd’s, sung to the tune of The Foggy, Foggy Dew:

“When I was a young man/ I nadgered my snod/ as I nurked at the wogglers trade./ When suddenly I thought/ while trussing up my groats,/ I’d whirdle with a fair young maid.”

RTH sold, and continues to sell, around the world—despite, or perhaps because of, its bizarre use of language. In his book, Took tells the hilarious story of his correspondence with a Tokyo university professor, who was studying Julian and Sandy scripts “for the purpose of picking up slangs and very colloquial expressions,” and who was “having some difficulty handling the queer and funny languages brimming over the page”.

Censors manqué, and self-appointed guardians of public morals—fighting a lost battle, as it must have seemed in the 1960s—found RTH disturbing throughout its run. On one now legendary occasion, a leading campaigner against smut accused the RTH cast of the vile crime of “Putting emphasis on certain words”. Took pointed out that this was more or less a definition of acting. It would also, I suggest, make a pretty neat mission statement for VERBATIM.

Graphic Account

As code, is how the alphabet

Began in use. Visible ink.

Cuneiform, which few regret,

Did everything most people think

Essential in a writing system

For three millennia of sale,

Gift, loan-could number, name, and list them,

Hard copy, should agreement fail.

It was so widely understood,

Just that extent of being common

Knowledge ensured inventors would

(Looking to better, as is human)

Make, from some local “first-noise” lines

Needed to label filing baskets

Of dried clay tablets, secret signs

Perfectly suited to their task. It’s

Quite amusing to suppose how

Rich men, far-travelled, bold in trade,

Studied their cyphers then. One knows how

They chanted names, as if they prayed

Unto new gods. “Aleph is ox.”

Vain, the attempt (“Beth, house”) to keep

What works by sharing under locks.

Xenophones (“Gimel—but why no sheep?”)

Yoked this new carrier to new carts

Zestfully. Smarts plus marts gives arts.

—Richard Bready

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary

Paul Dickson, (Harvest Books (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1999)), 592 pp.

We speak baseball all the time. Even those of us who know nothing about the nuances of the game understand what it means if we’re asked to pinch hit for someone. That we’re batting a thousand if we’re doing well or striking out if we’re not. We all know someone who seems to be a screwball, or out in left field. If a store is caught flat-footed and runs out of a certain item, they offer the customer a rain check. And in the end, to paraphrase the comedian, George Carlin, we all just want to be safe at home.

As the author states so simply in the introduction to The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary, “The influence of baseball on American English at large is stunning and strong.” Indeed, no other sport has introduced as many words, phrases, or twists into the language as has baseball.

There are nearly 600 pages of definitions of any word that can be associated with the national pastime (which itself was coined in 1856. By the end of the American Civil War, however, baseball was known as the national game). Dickson has done an exhaustive job of collecting these words along with their origins and in many cases their first uses by the media.

Just as baseball terms are used in everyday life, the reverse is also true. Why is an easy fly ball called a can of corn? It dates back to the days when grocers would use a telescoping wand to grab items off a high shelf.

A fair amount of terms are borrowed from the sea. For example, throwing the ball around the infield in order from third base to second to first is called around the horn, for the manner in which a ship had to travel to get from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific in the pre-Panama Canal days. A submariner is a pitcher who throws underhand tosses. If a batter is in the hold he is second in line, behind the on deck batter, waiting for his turn to hit.

Many expressions are taken from one of baseball’s ancestors, cricket. A hat trick can be used in a positive sense, as for a batter who hits a single, double, triple and home run (a cycle) in the same game; or as a negative, if he should strike out three times. The phrase comes from “the practice of presenting the bowler with a new hat when he . . . knocked down three wickets on consecutive balls.” When a ball goes through the wickets, it squirts through a fielder’s legs.

In addition to the definitions, Dickson also provides a thesaurus for several words which come up time and again. For example, a home run is also a see ya, a gopher ball and a dial 8 (in honor of long distance operator the players use to call home while on the road). Advertisers also had a hand in adding to the lingo, as in a Ballantine Blast.

A pitcher throwing fastballs is said to be bringing heat or throwing seeds, pills, or BBs. Likewise there are some 20 terms for describing the baseball and bat themselves.

Dickson, whose other credits include The Joy of Keeping Score and Baseball: The President’s Game, leaves no expression untouched, thanks in part to scores of bugs (fans) who have contributed suggestions and anecdotes. The word fan, by the way, is not an abbreviation of fanatic, as might be assumed. [The OED still assumes fan to be a shortened form of fanatic, so take this derivation with a grain of salt.—Ed.] According to the author it was an expression borrowed and shortened from fancy, a British, and later American, term for followers of boxing. In fact fan, which, when used as a verb, means ‘to strike out a batter’ (or for a batter to swing and miss a pitch), merits more than two pages of description. Likewise, a simple medical condition known as a Charley horse gets more than a page. Other terms which receive lengthy discussion include bleachers, the uncovered benches for spectators at the ballpark, which carries a connotation of a certain type of rowdy fan; bonehead, a dumb player; catbird seat, coined by the Hall of Famer broadcaster Red Barber to denote a position of control and mastery; and rhubarb, which has come to mean on-field arguments and/or fisticuffs.

As with many legends, there can be several explanations for a given phrase. Depending on which version you choose to believe, the seventh inning stretch either originated in 1869, according to Harry Wright of the Cincinnati Red Stockings, who wrote how “the spectators all arise between halves of the seventh inning, extend their arms and legs and sometimes walk about”; or in 1882, during a college game; or in 1910 when President William H. Taft, who began the custom of having the nation’s chief executive throw out the first pitch on opening day, stood up to stretch in the seventh inning. The crowd, thinking Taft was about to leave, stood up out of respect for the office.

The terms can be broken down into categories: strategic (e.g., the infield fly rule, which broadcasters seem to love describing); statistical; anecdotal; or historical, to name just a few. The derivations of the nicknames of the major league teams are also explained.

Baseball has been examined by such lovers of language as the aforementioned Carlin, who did a bit about the differences between baseball and football. His monologue examined how easily baseball metaphors trip off the tongue, as opposed to the harsh, almost militaristic language of the gridiron. William Safire is another word maven who has devoted a column to the lyricism of baseball.

Dickson credits dozens of fans—both of baseball and of language—for helping put this opus together. He sums up the introduction to the Dictionary with a thought-prodding quote from an Elting E. Morison article in American Heritage: “Why is baseball terminology so dominant in the language? . . . Does the sport imitate the fundamentals of the national life or is the national life shaped to an extent by the character of the sport?”

Readers may not find the answers to Morison’s question within The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary, but looking for them will be a delightful experience.

Ron Kaplan

CLASSICAL BLATHER: On Blue Moons, and Others

Nick Humez, (argentarius@juno.com)

Nature has favored us with a single large satellite with two felicitous peculiarities: It always turns the same face towards us, and it appears exactly the same size in the sky as our sun. The latter property makes a total solar eclipse, if we are fortunate enough to see one, one of the most astonishing events of our lives: After an alarming prelude of the sun being seemingly nibbled away to a tiny sliver by a giant but invisible mouth, our world is plunged into a shadowy half-light as the mercury plummets and birds fall silent, a time just long enough for us to have serious doubts about the rightness of things and of our sanity before the flash of “Bailey’s Beads”—the glint of sunlight between the peaks of the moon’s mountains—as the bright crescent emerges again, gradually waxing into the warm daystar we take for granted most of the time. It is a profoundly unsettling experience, even for those of us who pride ourselves on our rationality and scientific sophistication; its terrifying effect on societies unfamiliar with its cause and unable to predict its recurrence can scarcely be imagined.

And a solar eclipse is just one of the spectacular celestial effects to which our moon kindly treats us. This column’s title, however, has less to do with any intrinsic lunar property and much more with how we reckon time, and specifically how we reconcile the relation between the natural cycle of the moon (about 291/2 days to circle the earth completely, and thus to go through its changes from new to full and back to new again) and the month, which, despite its name, does not necessarily bear a direct one-to-one correspondence to what astronomers now sometimes call a lunation.

A “blue moon” today means the second appearance of a full moon within a (Gregorian )¹⁷ calendar month. This is rare (hence “once in a blue moon”) but by no means impossible given months of 30 and 31 days. This year, in fact, blue moons are not rare at all, there being two of them in twelve months: one in January (the moon was full on January 2 and January 31) and another in March (having had full moons on March 2 and March 31, February of 1999 having had no full moon at all.) On the other hand, having two of them in a year is itself a rare thing: the next year this will happen is 2018, and the next after that in 2037.

It appears, however, that this meaning of “blue moon” is a relatively recent one. In a recent issue of his electronic newsletter World Wide Words¹⁸, Michael Quinion, citing an article by Philip Hiscock in the March 1999 issue of Sky and Telescope Magazine, notes that the current definition of the expression has been widespread only in the late ’80s and ’90s after it appeared on a card in the popular game Trivial Pursuit, which cited as its source an item in a children’s almanac published in 1985, which itself drew on a radio program of 1979 which referred to a quiz in Sky and Telescope in 1943, which in turn referenced an item in the Maine Farmer’s Almanac of 1934 —”and there the trail goes cold,” Quinion says, adding that the oldest reference in the chain defines a blue moon as the second one not in a calendar month but in a zodiacal house (which, since these change every 365_∏12 days, or a little over 30, make such an event a little less likely but again far from a once-in-a-lifetime proposition).

Clearly one must delve deeper, and Quinion has obligingly done so, finding a 1528 citation (in a piece charmingly entitled Rede and Be not Wrothe), “Yf they say the mone is blewe, we must believe that it is true.”¹⁹ This would suggest not just rarity but hens'-teeth impossibility. However, there are occasions when the moon really does appear blue, thanks to smoke or dust in the atmosphere from a very large volcanic event, such as the explosion of the Indonesian island of Krakatau in 1883, or the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980. (Large forest fires or the massive brush conflagrations of Third-World slash-and-burn agriculturists, can also produce this effect.)²⁰

Rare does not mean irregular: Clever readers of paragraph 3 above might guess that the next double-blue-moon year after that will be somewhere around 2056, and they will be right. This is because the common denominator of a 365_-day2 solar year and a 29_-day lunar month yields a cycle of 19 solar years (=235 lunations). If there’s a blue moon in March of 2018, there should be one in March of 2037 too.

The lack of a good fit between a solar year and one based on cycles of the moon has led to several work-arounds, depending on the culture. The Jewish calendar has twelve months of 29 or 30 days (Tishri, Marheshvan, Kislev, Tebet, Shebat, Adar, Nisan, Iyar, Sivan, Tammuz, Av, and Elul); the discrepancy with the solar year is trued up seven times in a 19-year cycle by inserting an extra month, called Second Adar, between Adar and Nisan, whose first day in antiquity used to be the official beginning of the year. (It has since been switched to the first of Tishri, celebrated as the feast of Rosh Hashonah). This allows months to stay lunar but keeps the year more or less in tune with the sun and the fixed stars.

Muslims also observe a lunar month—literally observe it, in fact, since the month starts with the actual observation of the new moon’s crescent, and that can vary by as much as two days depending where on earth one is doing the observing—and dates in the Islamic calendar start at sunset, not at midnight. Thus, as astronomical dating expert Khalid Shaukat points out²¹, a person whose Gregorian birthdate was August 31, 1952, might have any of four Islamic birth dates: Zul-Hijja 8, 9, 10, or even 11, depending on the time of day, hemisphere, and latitude of his or her birth.

There are twelve months in the Muslim year: Ramadan, Shawwal, Zul-Qada, Zul-Hijja, Muharram, Safar, Rabi I, Rabi II, Jumada I, Jumada II, Rajab, and Sha’ban. Each starts on the evening of the first visibility of the lunar crescent. However, unlike the Jewish calendar, there is no provision for intercalary months; after Sha’ban comes Ramadan and the cycle starts all over again. In consequence, the Islamic year is ten or eleven days shorter than the Gregorian one. Dates being reckoned from the Hegira or Hijjra, the year of the Prophet Mohammed’s flight from Mecca to Medina (=622 A.D.), the current year is 1420 A.H., though in Gregorian years the Hegira was 1387 years ago. Both “month” and “year,” then, far from being absolutes, assume the status of cultural constructs.

It is in the nature of the moon to appear ever changeable. Perhaps that is one reason why men in love with binary categories, from ancient Mesopotamia to modern Manhattan, have made the sun male and the moon female, whether Shamash and Ishtar in Babylon or Apollo and Artemis/Diana in Greece and Rome. Another reason may be that courtship is often carried on more conveniently at night, and the moon becomes both the lamp to guide men to the seductive female Other and, by extension, the Other herself, the madwoman in the celestial attic.

Of the 110 lunar citations in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, at least a quarter refer to the moon’s pale light, its inaccessibility, its silence, its barrenness, and its association with irrational behavior of dogs and people. Beauty is linked with calamity, or at least peril: A mooncalf is a freak or a fool; the insane are moonstruck (or lunatic). We may get a touch of moon-blink, a momentary blindness supposedly caused by sleeping out in the open and exposed to the moon’s rays. (To be moon-blind, on the other hand, refers not to people but to horses, and probably derives from the cloudy appearance of the lens of the eye.) Sexuality lurks in such expressions as mooning, i.e. displaying the bare buttocks, a prank particularly favored by adolescent boys as an act of male bonding; women, on the other hand, may euphemistically refer to their moon-time, the average human menstrual cycle and the lunar cycle both being very close to four weeks.[^b7]

Moonshine is illicitly distilled corn liquor, also called white lightning; a moonlighter is one who works on the side, often on the swing or graveyard shift, in addition to and contrast with his or her “legitimate” day job. Moonraking is woolgathering, but also another word for smuggling, from the tradition that those in England who raked a pond to retrieve smuggled goods concealed in it, if surprised by the authorities and asked what they were doing, would play the simpleton and claim that they were attempting to rake up the moon reflected on the water’s surface.

No article on blue moons would be complete without mentioning a song dear to the hearts of American baby boomers reading this article (in whose intracerebral auditory synapses the introductory “BAU-pa-pa-BAU-pa-BAU-pa-BAU-BAU. . .” must surely have been lurking throughout most of the preceding paragraphs). The Marcels' rendition of “Blue Moon” leapt from the charts to our hearts as the 1950s skidded around the corner into the ’60s with a squeal of rubber and a roar of Hollywood glasspack mufflers: “Blue moon,/You saw me standing alone,/Without a dream in my heart,/Without a love of my own. . . .Then suddenly you appeared before me,/The only one my arms could ever hold,/ I heard someone whisper “Please adore me,”/And when I looked my moon had turned to gold. . . . .” Other versions of the song were recorded by Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan, but none with the manic drive of the Marcels' up-tempo doo-wop cover.

In the 1980s “Blue Moon” was adopted as a team anthem by English soccer fans loyal to the Manchester Blues, and hence came to be sung ironically and derisively by adherents of opposing teams. New topical lyrics sometimes were substituted for the classics. After a famous win over the Rags in1989, Blue fans gleefully sang to the fans of the opposition, “Blue Moon,/You started singing our tune,/You won’t be singing for long,/Because we beat you 5-1.²²”

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All about All

Steven Cushing, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts (stevencushing@alum.mit.edu)

In the movie Spartacus,²³ the Roman general, Crassus, ensures the cooperation of the slave dealer, Batiatus, by making him the following promise: “I authorize you to be the agent for the sale of all survivors.”

When Crassus wins the final battle and orders that all prisoners be crucified, Batiatus protests in dismay, reminding him of their agreement. Crassus responds, “I promised you the sale of the survivors and there will be none.”

Why did Batiatus trust Crassus' offer and why did he then feel betrayed?

Arthur Conan Doyle was a fervent believer in paranormal phenomena. Harry Houdini was an equally ardent skeptic about such matters. Despite the chasm that separated their viewpoints, the two men managed to become close friends. Their friendship is purported²⁴ to have begun when Doyle wrote to Houdini, asking him whether some occurrences that Doyle believed to be supernatural “were clever physical tricks, or whether their claim to occult power was a true one,” Houdini is said to have responded “I am afraid that I cannot say that all their work was accomplished by the spirits,” a response that Doyle interpreted as support for his own view. Why did Houdini formulate his response in the way he did and why did Doyle interpret the formulation as a favorable one?

The key to both examples lies in subtle features of the word all. There’s a lot of meaning wrapped up in that three-letter, two-phoneme monosyllable.

All is a member of a class of words that linguists refer to as quantifiers. A quantifier is a word that specifies “how many” or “how much”.²⁵ The word quantifier comes from the Latin quantus, which means—no surprise—‘how many’ or ‘how much’, and facere, which means ‘to make’. It’s related to words such as quantity, ‘measure of how many or how much’; quantify, ‘establish a means of measuring how many or how much’; quantitative, ‘having to do with how many or how much’; and, in physics, quantum, ‘the tiniest possible wee little itsy bit of how many or how much’.

All goes back to the original Anglo-Saxon from which English as a whole derives. It’s related to the Greek word holos, which means ‘whole’, ‘entire’, or ‘complete’. It answers the question “how many?” or “how much?” by specifying that nothing is omitted. However, as our two examples show, that isn’t all it says. Let’s examine all a bit more carefully to tease out whatever else there is.

All occurs frequently in mathematical discourse and, in particular, in geometry, where it typically contrasts with some:

• All triangles have three sides.
• Some triangles have two equal sides.
• All isoceles triangles have two equal sides.
• Some isoceles triangles contain a right angle.
• All isoceles triangles that contain a right angle have a third side whose length is equal to the square root of two times the length of either of the other two sides.

And all that.

All of that is perfectly straightforward, assuming you can get that far. But what would you make of sentences like (1) or (2), if you were to encounter them in a conversation or text (or an exam)?

(1) All four-sided triangles have exactly four sides.

(2) All four-sided triangles have exactly three sides.

What do such sentences mean and are they true or false?

You might decide that (1) is true because a four-sided anything has exactly four sides. Or you might decide that it’s false because a triangle only has three. Reversely, you might decide that (2) is true because any triangle has exactly three sides or you might decide that it’s false because no four-sided thing can. Whatever you decide, it seems clear that (1) and (2) can’t both be true, because the number of sides that a thing can have cannot be both exactly three and exactly four. Whatever else you might want to say about them, the two sentences are mutually contradictory. They cannot both be true.

It comes as a surprise to most people—and to all students who encounter it in a classroom setting—that mathematicians have adopted an opposite convention. In mathematical usage, both (1) and (2) are considered true, because of something called the “falsity of the antecedent”. Sentence (1) is considered to be synonymous with (3) and sentence (2) with (4).

(3) All things are such that if they have four-sides and are triangles then they have exactly four sides.

(4) All things are such that if they have four-sides and are triangles then they have exactly three sides.

Contrary to ordinary usage, mathematicians interpret if. . .then. . ., in such sentences, as always being true, unless the antecedent (the “. . .” phrase after if ) is true when the consequent (the “. . .” phrase after then ) is false. Since (5) describes a property that nothing can have, the antecedants in both (3) and (4) are always false so the embedded sentences—the phrases after such that in each case—are always true.

(5) have four-sides and are triangles

It follows that (3) and (4) themselves are always true as well.

Whew!!! A highly stylized version of the phrase if..then. . ., which is itself entirely at variance with ordinary usage, 4 is used to justify an equally unnatural idealized interpretation of all. Be careful not to make the mistake of thinking that there’s anything wrong with that. Every field has its technical terminology based on its own internal needs. In this case, the conventions have been chosen because they have the effect of simplifying proofs, the mathematician’s stock-in-trade. They eliminate the need for extra conditions describing oft-repeated exceptions, such as “except in an empty domain” and the like.

However, those conventions would confound conversation in everyday discourse about non-mathematical topics. Imagine having to grant that (6) is true, just because there really haven’t been any!

(6) “All alien abductions are genuine.”

Assuming that alien abductions don’t occur, the mathematical conventions require something like (7) as the proper response to (6).

(7) “Yes, that’s true, of course, old chap. Falseness of the antecedent and all that.”

In ordinary English, however, something like (8) makes a lot more sense.

(8) “Hey, there really haven’t been any, you know, so you can’t say they’re genuine.”

Ordinary all carries with it what linguists call an existential presupposition: the speaker takes it for granted, first, that whatever is mentioned in the subject of the sentence is something that exists and, second, that the hearer will accept that assumption without needing to consent to it explicitly. You can challenge the presupposition, as in (8), if you want to, or inquire as to whether it’s really intended, but if you neither challenge nor inquire, it becomes a part of the presumed shared knowledge that serves as the background for the rest of your on-going conversation.

Crassus and Batiatus know all that, of course, as do all normal speakers of ordinary English. The presupposition that there will be survivors is what justifies Batiatus' confidence that Crassus will leave him some slaves to sell. Batiatus suggests the presupposition himself, when he initiates the deal:”Presumably, the survivors will be auctioned off in order to pay for the expenses of this heroic expedition.”

He then asks to be made “the agent for that sale.” The presumably leaves it up to Crassus to accept or reject the suggested existence of survivors. He’s the one with the power to determine whether or not there will be any; Batiatus can only suggest. Crassus could have told Batiatus then and there that the existence of survivors was not guaranteed. Instead, he indicates his agreement with Batiatus' expectation by uttering the cited sentence containing all.

Crassus skillfully manipulates Batiatus' ready acceptance of the presupposition. He knows that his use of the word all conveys it. Batiatus knows that, too; he bases his expectations on it. The presupposition is considered inoperative only in mathematical contexts (and only in recent times). No doubt, Batiatus hasn’t studied enough modern mathematics to know that. Crassus lets Batiatus persist in his justified complacency only as long as it suits his own purposes. He gets away with withdrawing the presupposition later, only because he has an army to back him up.²⁶

Negating all introduces a further presupposition, which has a slightly different force. For example, in mathematical usage, sentence (9) is considered to be synonymous with (10).

(9) Not all triangles have two equal sides.

(10) Some triangles do not have two equal sides.

That’s what you get if you put it is not the case that in front of (11) and then work out the resulting logic.

(11) All things are such that if they are triangles then they have two equal sides.

[Remember what was explained in connection with (1) through (4)!] However, in ordinary usage, (9) also suggests (12), which, as a presupposition, provides further unstated knowledge for the continuing conversation.

(12) Some triangles have two equal sides.

To give a non-mathematical example, you just wouldn’t say (13) if you were not convinced that (14) was true.

(13) Not all occurrences of all have an existential presupposition.

(14) Some occurrences of all have an existential presupposition.

Otherwise, you’d just say (15).

(15) Some occurrences of all do not have an existential presupposition.

In other words, (13) has (14) as a presupposition: (14) becomes part of the shared knowledge, created by (13), on the basis of which the conversation proceeds, even though (14) itself isn’t actually uttered.

That’s how Houdini manipulates Doyle as skillfully as Crassus does Batiatus. He doesn’t need an army to support his ploy, but only because the stakes aren’t as high. Doyle is convinced that “spirits” are real. Houdini thinks they’re not. By saying that he can’t say that all of the allegedly supernatural occurrences were accomplished by spirits, Houdini suggests that he can say that some of them were. However, he doesn’t ever actually have to say that. Doyle interprets his statement as an endorsement of his own belief because of the presupposition of not all. He’s justified in doing that, because it’s not a mathematical context.

That’s all.

---

“Anyone who believes that I’ll turn informer for nothing is a fool.”

[Steven Cushing is the author of Fatal Words: Communication Clashes and Aircraft Crashes(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, paperback 1997) and of many dozens of other publications on language and logic, including three previous essays in VERBATIM. He is also a musician and humorist.]

Byte Bonding, Bit-bangers, and BLOBS

Valerie Collins, Barcelona, Spain (v.collins@bcn.servicom.es)

The mechanisms involved in the processes of word formation have been well documented by linguists; the wit, creativity, imagination and ingenuity displayed by the vernacular is inexhaustible. Magazines and newspapers, songs and screenplays all yield innumerable gems. From my growing collection, I have brought together some examples from the thriving computer industry which beautifully illustrate the verve of word formation in English today.

One method of forming new words is blending, in which elements of two words are fused to form a third one: familiar blends are smog (smoke + fog), dandle (dance + handle), palimony, brunch, electrocute. Lewis Carroll, who coined slithy from slimy and lithe, called them portmanteau words, from the two-part portmanteau bag. The need for compact scientific and technical terms means that blending is on the increase today.

A few blends:

sheeple are sheep people, that is, groups who act reactively from advertising, fads, trends and need to go along with the crowd; those whose decisions are influenced by “group think”

Siliwood and Hollywired: references to the convergence of the computer and entertainment industries.

screenager: today’s teenagers brought up in the computer age

knowbot: a software librarian robot which can act semi-independently to search through networks for requested information.

multimediocrity: the flood of boring, poorly produced CD-ROMs hyped as the latest hot multi-media titles

triority: the three things your boss wants you to do right now.

notwork: a network which isn’t working properly

And now, welcome to TLA. The Three Letter Acronym department is one that does not have any apparent function at all, and is usually the fruit of trendy management fads. Ironically, TLA is not in fact an acronym but an initialism, that is, an abbreviation in which the initial letters are pronounced in sequence. An acronym, on the other hand, is a pronounceable formation: like a BLOB: a Binary Large Object, aka a very large binary file.

PONA: Person of No Account (not online)

WOMBAT: person, product or project that is a Waste of Money, Brains And Time.

PITA Fee: An “extended service fee” or “additional delivery cost” added onto a bill or invoice. This is done when the customer has been a total “Pain In The Ass” . I’m so glad I found this acronym for what I used to term my aggravation surcharge.

BAD: A Broken As Designed product fails to perform as expected because the company made it that way, either due to misunderstanding or deliberately.

LOPSOD: a product that has been hyped up but does not live up to expectations: Long On Promises, Short On Delivery.

CRAP: Cheap Redundant Assorted Products. ‘Nuff said.

FRED: Fucking Ridiculous Electronic Device. What you call your computer or answering machine or whatever device you have developed affection for.

PEBCAK: Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. Another technobfuscationism for I/O errors. Input/Output? Naw: Idiot Operator. Like not plugging your machine in. Get it?

SLIRK: Smart Little Rich Kid. Precocious brat with great technical prowess who uses daddy’s money for “toys.” Fascinating how the acronym picks up on the “revolting” connotations of all those words beginning in sl-: slime, slink, sloth, slop, slovenly, slurp. . .

Another device is compounding, whereby a new word is made up of two or more other words. Most English compounds fall into two types: vernacular compounds, for example, teapot, steamboat, keyring, coffee pot, formed on principles typical of the Germanic languages, which are written in solid form, open form or with hyphens, and classical compounds like philosophy and horticulture, based on the compounding patterns of Greek and Latin, which are generally written in solid form.

Here are some vernacular versions of useless software:

chartware: software that exists only on an overhead projector and in the mind of the presenter.

shelfware: software that is so worthless it remains in its shrinkwrapped box on the shelf by your desk.

shovelware: CDROM containing shovel loads of re-hashed material, copied on with very little organisation.

bloatware: software that has excessive features that are accessed only by a minority of users. The third major release of a package tends to be bloatware. The term is also used to refer to a software package which comes with demos of other software packages, making the installation process longer.

vapourware: soft/hardware that has been advertised for months but is not available in any shape or form.

meatware, bioware and liveware: you and me.

While most compounds are instantly understandable to native speakers, explaining them or translating them will require paraphrasing, which exhibits a kind of covert syntax based mainly on prepositional phrases: a pot for tea, a boat driven by steam, and so on.

But such paraphrases unfortunately cannot capture the wit of a toasternet, for example, namely, a computer network put together out of discarded, apparently obsolete hardware.

Attribution is closely linked to compounding. Here, a noun or phrase is placed in the attributive position, before another noun, in order to modify it. Phrases with attributive nouns are extremely common and are being coined all the time. With attribution, creative possibilities are infinite, and the paraphrasis or translation may be quite a mouthful. A greenhouse gas is a gas responsible for the greenhouse effect. And the greenhouse effect in turn has to be paraphrased. Such concision is truly elegant, which is why Spanish gynecologists talk about “el pill scare”.

Metaphor is the essence of attribution. Foodstuffs provide some vivid metaphors in Silicon Valley:

lasagna syndrome: writing a piece of software with too many dialogue boxes overlapping each other to complete a task.

spaghetti code: software with an execution path so tangled and confusing it is almost impossible to understand.

tofu: too general in use or appearance for anying specific.

tofu syndrome: making software or a product so general and portable that it does not take any advantage of the special features of the machine it is being run on.

The above attributions are probably instantly comprehensible. But what would a translator or language teacher do with the following?

potato server: any server in a network which operates suspiciously slower than its siblings. Said to originate with servers operating in Ireland with legendary slowness, comparable to transporting sacks of potatoes by train.

banana problem: refers to something not expected to require a lot of effort for less technically knowledgeable types (i.e. big dumb gorillas) to handle. Problems can have banana ratings: a one-banana task is very easy, a two-banana task fairly routine, and so on. Now I come to think of it, this is not politically correct: it’s anti-animal. Or possibly anti-fruit ‘n’veg. But you know what I mean.

salami attack: elaborate computer crime strategy which involves doing only a tiny amount at a time in order to avoid detection. The metaphor is shaving extremely thin slices off a salami.

Here are some other amusing attributions:

dead tree edition: a paper copy of a report. This one has great possibilities. Dear John, I’m writing you this dead tree message. . .

screensaver face: the look on the face of a person so bored they have completely shut off their brain.

meeting engineer: person who spends more time in meetings than doing actual work. When not in meetings, these people complain about never having time to get any work done since they’re in meetings all the time.

And a nice metaphor: a boat anchor is a computer so obsolete it cannot even be pressed into service for your toasternet.

And, now, just in case you hadn’t realised what a genius the English language has for puns and word play, here are some of my favourites:

Dead End Users (DEUs): three-way play on dead end/end users. Derogatory term used by some tech support people to refer to the clueless masses who call with painfully obvious (to them) questions.

glass-roots campaign: any sort of grass-roots political activity associated with the Internet and communications issues (glass is a reference to fibre-optic cables).

ohnosecond: that minuscule fraction of time in which you realise that you’ve just made a BIG and probably irreparable mistake. Like deleting your electronic address book (nanosecond). Been there, done that.

The ingenuity and playfulness of the vernacular is particularly evident in the use of devices such as alliteration, assonance and rhyme. The top-of -the-mountain experience in word formation is the snappy attributive phrase using two monosyllabic nouns that rhyme or alliterate: here we’re talking road rage, dream team, boob tube, toy boy, gang bang, snail mail. The computer industry again provides some great examples of English at its most vivid:

byte-bonding: this is what takes place when a bunch of computer nerds get together and discuss things no-one else can understand.

to bit-spit: to transmit information digitally, via modem, network, etc.

bit-banger: a programmer who works out the details of a computer program.

Perhaps the novelty (to most of us) of computers accounts for the verve and élan with which their users coin new words (and commandeer old ones), filling voids of expression and matching those words and phrases to ideas.

[If you would like to read more about new computer words and slang, there are a number of online sources, including: Silicon Valley Slang at (http://www.sabram.com), Neil Franklin’s Hackers Jargon File Page (http://caad.arch.ethz. ch/~neil/Info_Texts/Jargon_File/index.html.en),The New Hacker’s Dictionary (http://wwcn.org /jargon/) Strafe’s Guide to Streetspeak (things cyberpunk)(http://www.strafe.com/)(Note: hacker here is used to mean a person who is very good with computers, not a person who breaks into others’ systems—that sort is known as a cracker.) You might also want to check out the Jargon Watch column in Wired magazine, edited by Gareth Branwyn.—Ed.]

OBITER DICTA: Fun Things to Say in Spanish, French & English

Joseph K. Slap, Los Angeles, California

There are many people from Spanish-speaking nations here in southern California. It’s fun, for me and for them, to converse in Spanish. Those people get a big grin from my non-rhyming poem, in Spanish. I tell the people,

“Quando estoy con un pájaro, digo:

Pajarito eres qual yo.

Vives en el aire,

Y del aire vives.

Cantas lo que sientes

En tu corazón.”

“When I am with a bird, I say:

Little bird you are the same as I.

You live in the open air,

And thrive upon it.

You sing what you feel

In your heart.”

Other statements that I make in Spanish for laughter are the following two, both of which do create laughter. For the first of the two, I say that when I was in a food market near my home, a clerk from Mexico suggested that I buy cocoa, & I responded as follows.

“No compro mucho coco. Porque como poco coco, poco coco compro.”

“I don’t buy much cocoa. Because I eat little cocoa, little cocoa I buy.”

For the second, I usually show it in writing or say it aloud. It makes frequent use of the Spanish letter ll.

“Cuando llamo a llamas en la llosa cuando llueve, las llamas llegan al llatar, la llanada llega a ser un llamazar, y unas llamas llaman a las otras llamas.”

“When I call to llamas in the fenced-in field when it rains, the llamas arrive to the fence, the level ground comes to be a swamp, and some llamas call to the other llamas.”

The house cleaning team that my wife & I used for a while are all from Mexico, and speak Spanish far more than English. It was enjoyable to converse with them in Spanish! One day, I said to them, in Spanish, “You come when it is a day for cleaning.” I said it in a poetic way, as follows.

“Ustedes vienen cuando

Es un día por limpiando.”

My gardeners are from Mexico, and I occasionally ask one of them, in a poetic way, “Do you like to be singing while working?”

“Quire usted estar

Cantando cuando trabajando?”

Many people who live in southern California or visit here enjoy going to the La Brea tar pits. In Spanish, la brea means “the tar”; so, “the La Brea tar pits”, when translated into English, means “the the tar tar pits”. When the major league baseball team, the Angels, played in L.A., it was called “The Los Angeles Angels”. In Spanish, los angeles means “the angels”; so, “the Los Angeles Angels”, when translated into English, means “the the angels angels”.

In Italian, pizza means “pie”; so, “pizza pie”, when translated fully into English, means “pie pie”.

A French-speaking person always laughs when I joke with the following French statement, about a man walking behind a mule. The words “je suis” mean both “I am” & “I follow”. Therefore, when written or stated without an explanation, that combination of two words is difficult to translate with precision. My French statement & meaning are the following.

“Je suis ce que je suis, mais je ne suis pas ce que je suis. Si je suis ce que je suis, je ne suis pas ce que je suis.”

“I am what I am but I am not what I follow. If I am what I follow, I am not what I am.”

It also means, “I am what I am but I am not what I am. If I am what I am, I am not what I am.” Additional meanings can be derived by substituting “follow” for “am”, and vice versa.

My wife’s parents moved from Boston to Miami late in their lives. When they returned to Boston for a visit, and they mentioned Miami, one of their young grandsons, son of my wife’s brother, asked them about “Your ami”. When I was told about that cute misunderstanding of “Miami” by the little boy, I thought that in a combination of French and English, “My ami” could mean “Mon friend”.

One day, not very long ago, I left my wife the following message on a piece of paper. For fun, I combined French & English.

You’re not only my femme,

But you’re also my gem.

So, I say, “Ahem,

Really je t’aime!”

In combining French and English, a person could say, “A chien has a bone appetit.” Also, the person could say, “Pas de deux is the father of two children.”

It’s a pleasure to be friends with friendly people of all cultures, and to try to convince unfriendly people to pacify their attitudes.

CORRIGENDA

As you may have noticed, the crossword grid in the Winter 1999 issue was maimed beyond repair. A corrected grid is available at our web site: http:/www.VERBATIMmag.com. If you do not have access to our web site and would like a copy of the corrected grid, please write or telephone either office and one will be sent to you as quickly as possible. Many thanks to those readers who brought this to our attention!

Also, number 10 of the Verbal Analogies should have been Soften: Intenerate :: 100% Pure:? (Answer: Intemerate).

Another new feature on our web site: your letters and our answers, many more than will fit here!

Hearing is in the Ear of the Listener

Howard Richler, Montreal

Knock, Knock.

Who’s there?

Sam and Janet

Sam and Janet who?

Sam and Janet evening, you may see a stranger.

As every puerile individual like me knows, some words and phrases resemble other words and phrases. In the above example, the tandem of “Sam and Janet” sounds like “Some enchanted.”

The French have raised this tendency to an art form by way of the holorime, a two-line poem in which both line are pronounced identically but use different words:

“Par le bois de Djinn, ou s’entasse de l’effroi,

Parle! Bois du gin, ou cent tasses de lait froid.”

“Gall, amant de la reine, alla, tour magnanime,

Gallamment, de l’Arènr a la Tour Magne, à Nimes.”

The first poem loosely translates as “When going through the Djinn woods, surrounded by so much fear, keep talking. Drink gin or a hundred cups of cold milk.” The second poem relates that “Gall, the Queen’s lover, went gallantly on a grand promenade from the arena to the Magne Tower located in Nimes.”

Far less poetically, the English riddle, “How do you prove in three steps that a sheet of paper is a lazy dog?”, also conveys how phrases can sound similar; the answer: 1) a sheet of paper is an ink-lined plane; 2)an inclined plane is a slope up; 3)a slow pup is a lazy dog.

Usually, however, the similarity of sounds is not contrived and we simply mishear phrases.

Growing up in the drug-hazed 60s, I pondered the identity of the enigmatic Leslie referenced in the popular song “Groovin” by the Rascals:

“You and me and Leslie”

Leslie, however, was a figment of my imagination, or more precisely of my imagined hearing. The lyric, I found out in later years, was “You and me endlessly.”

I had been “mondegreened.”

The term “mondegreen” was coined by writer Sylvia Wright. As a child she had heard the Scottish ballad “The Bonny Earl of Murray” which she interpreted thus:

Ye Highlands and Ye lowlands

Oh where have you been?

They hae slay the Earl of Murray

And Lady Mondegreen.

Sylvia Wright was wrong in thinking that a double homicide had occurred. The “Lady Mondegreen” was a projection of her romantic imagination for the last line in fact was not “Lady Mondegreen” but “laid him on the green.”

Children are particularly prone to this type of mistake, where an unfamiliar word or phrase is changed into something more familiar . This process has created some memorable “religious” personages such as “Round John Virgin” (instead of “round yon Virgin”) , [Malachy McCourt entitled his book A Monk Swimming, which was his hearing of “amongst women” in the Hail Mary.—Ed] “Harold be thy name” (instead of “hallowed be thy name)”, “Lead On, O Kinky Turtle” (instead of “Lead On, O King Eternal), and “Gladly, the cross-eyed bear” (instead of “Gladly, the cross I’d bear”).

Many a familiar phrase has been mondegreened. A “dog eat dog” world has been rendered as a “doggy dog world” ; “for all intents and purposes” has become “for all intensive purposes”; “duct tape” has turned into “duck tape” ; and “no holds barred” has been phrased as “no holes barred.”

The majority of mondegreens seem to occur in the lyrics of songs. William Safire years ago cited an American grandmother who interpreted the Beatles’ lyric “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes” as “the girl with colitis goes by.” The lyric “Excuse me while I kiss the sky” from Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze was interpreted by some as “Excuse me while I kiss this guy.” Hendrix was aware of this misinterpretation and sometimes during a performance he would help perpetuate the misunderstanding by kissing a male associate after singing the line.

The obscure lyrics and indistinct pronunciation of many songs facilitates misinterpretations. On a website dedicated to misheard lyrics (wysiwyg://2http://wwwkissthisguy.com/index.html), I noticed that in Sarah McLachlan’s “Building a Mystery”, her lyric “you strut your rasta wear and a suicide poem” was interpreted as “you stretched your ass to where in a suicide home.” Maria Muldar’s “Midnight at the oasis” was interpreted by a listener as “Midnight after you’re wasted.” In the Aerosmith song “Dude looks like a lady”, the titled lyric is somewhat squealed. I always thought the line was “Do the funky lady.” This website confirmed that I was not the only confused listener. Others had misheard this line as “Do the shockalayley”, “Do the rock-a lady” and “Doodoos like a lady.”

Some song lyrics are almost impossible to decipher. I suspect few people know that the lyric that follows “Willie and the Poor Boys are Playin' (by Credence Clearwater Revival) is “bring a nickel tap your feet.” Small wonder that someone at this website reported hearing the lyric as “singing pickles can’t be beat.” Also misinterpreted by this musical group is the lyric “there’s a bad moon on the rise” which has been heard as “There’s a bathroom on the right.” Unilingual troglodytes claim to have heard the Beatles' “Michelle, ma belle, sont les mots qui vont tres bien ensemble, tres bien ensemble” as “Michelle, my bell, some day monkey play piano song, play piano song”, and José Feliciano’s classic rendition of “Feliz Navidad” as “police naughty dog.”

Some mishearings are somewhat incredible. Dylan’s line “the answer my friend” in Blowin' in the Wind has apparently been interpreted entomologically as “the ants are my friends.” A Crystal Gayle song years ago was heard as “Doughnuts Make Your Brown Eyes Blue” and at the aforementioned website somebody claims to have heard the lyric from Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall, “no dark sarcasm in the classroom” as “no Dukes of Hazzard in the classroom.”

Stephen Pinker in The Language Instinct says that the “interesting thing about mondegreens is that the mis-hearings are generally less plausible than the intended lyrics. He relates the anecdote of a student who heard the Blue Cheer song “I’m Your Venus” as “I’m your penis” and thus was amazed that it wasn’t censored.

Pinker says that “listeners lock in to some set of words that fit the sound and that hang together more or less as English words and phrases, but plausibility and general expectations are not running the show.”

EPISTOLA {Harvey E. Finkel}

In William H. Dougherty’s “Bromides” in the Winter, 1999 issue, lumpectomy appears to be presented as equivalent to mastectomy. Not corect. Lumpectomy means just what one might guess, excision of a lump. Mastectomy is the surgical removal of the entire breast, the ultimate lumpectomy, I guess. (Removal of a cancerous lump is much more common now that removal of the entire breast.)

Physicians I know, mostly in eastern Massachusetts, hardly ever talk to patients as Dougherty describes.

While I am writing, I’ll register my continuing distress at gratuitous and inelegant additions of up, as in “He heads up the corporation . . .,” and “. . .meet up with. . .,” and “Up until. . “ I would very much like to see comments. Put the practice down!

Very truly yours,

[Harvey E. Finkel, Brookline, Massachusetts]

EPISTOLA {Donald Oliveau}

Your use of “feel” (“A short list of things I feel deserve a pass. . .”, Vol XXIV, No. 1, p. 47, col. 2, para. 3) put me in mind of the following comment by a curmudgeon far more venerable than I:

“feel.” ‘The Committee f. that Mr. X must share the responsibility for this unfortunate occurrrence.’ “To feel”, says the COD, defining the sense in which the word is here used, ‘is to have a vague or emotional conviction that.’ That is no way for a committee to record a grave conclusion, with its suggestion that they are guided by intuition rather than by the evidence. Officials, perhaps from a misplaced modesty that shrinks from positive assertion, are too fond of announcing conclusions in this namby-pamby fashion.”

Just because officials still obfuscate with feeling doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t, at least once in a while, think.

Best wishes for your revived enterprise,

[Donald Oliveau, Lincoln, Vermont]

EPISTOLA {E. Wallace McMullen}

The writer would like to apologize for the inadvertent omission of the mailing fee ($2.00) for PUBS, PLACE-NAMES, AND PATRONYMICS (PPP), and both fees ($25.00 for the book, and $3.00 for mailing) for NAMES NEW AND OLD (NNO) which should have been included in the concluding remarks fo the review on page 24 of VERBATIM Vol. XXIII, No. 4.

(To order, send a check (total $8.00 for PPP and $28.00 for NNO)—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.

Sincerely yours,

[E. Wallace McMullen, Professor of English Emeritus, Madison, New Jersey]

EPISTOLA {James Girsch}

I am hoping to collect as many examples of the following, usually humorous and punning, false word divisions. For example, in a theology course, a classmate heard the professor’s remark concerning the issue of whether or not “God in three persons is not bound by his own pronouncements.” A fellow student had picked up her pen in the middle of his words while taking notes; when we were reading over those notes later, we saw the statement that “God in three persons is not bound by his own pronoun cements.” This caused some restrained hilarity.

As I was reading recently, I was startled to see that some mythical king had flung men, women, and children into battle as “combat ants.” This improved the book a good deal. The word had been broken at the end of a page with a hyphen that I had overlooked. Another example comes from writing or reading “furbelow” as “fur below,” which it might be in some instances. The etymology of course has nothing to do with “fur” nor “below.” I’d appreciate contributions from readers of VERBATIM—or “verb at ‘im”—none of these work when read aloud as you can see, or none that I know of.

If those come up, so much the better. Also - does anyone know a term for this phenomenon other than “mistake” or the awkward “false word division”

[James Girsch, Glenview, Illinois]

EPISTOLA {Israel Wilenitz}

Concerning Odet’s use of the word “fluxionary.” My comment has to do with the opening sentence, in which “Odets (1906-1963) confided to his friend Philip Lottman . . . .”I was waiting to find out what he confided to Philip, but it never came. Not in that sentence anyway. I feel that actually Odets confided in Lottman.

Press on, regardless!

[Israel Wilenitz, East Setauket, New York]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Scottish Proverbs,

Comp. Editors of Hippocrene Books, (New York, Hippocrene Books, 1998), i-xi +111 pp.

“A fox always smells his own hole first,” my mother, a lady of undiluted Highland Scottish descent, liked to say. As she uttered it, the expression pertained more to the fox’s anatomy than to its den. Such pungency is not to be found in Scottish Proverbs, a lame and clunkily assembled assortment of apothegms apparently intended for bathroom reading.

In a brief foreward Helen G. MacRobert Galazka, whose academic qualifications are given as “D. Min.”, asserts that “What distinguishes many Scottish proverbs is their humour.” Certainly Scots—once they are diverted from their time-honoured pursuits of stating grievances or of making money—are possibly the funniest people on earth. One won’t find the nation’s comic genius here, unless one’s tastes in humour runs to the like of “Bitin’ an' scartin' [scratching] is Scots fowk’s wooin”

The “Editor’s Note” damages its own cause. “These proverbs have been collected and carefully edited to reflect the language spoken in Scotland at the turn of the century”. Which century? How collected? The dark suspicion arises that the entries were hastily cribbed from a handily out-of-copyright source.

“Because the spelling is quite different from contemporary English language, many of the words are not immediately recognizable,” the note continues. Scotland in fact boasts at least three languages, Scots, English, and the linguistically unrelated Gaelic, and is composed of at least two countries, the Highlands and the Lowlands. These fact are not reflected in the book’s inadequate glossary or amateurish illustrations.

Nor does the book attempt dual or tripartite divisions. Galazka does makes a thinly argued case for regional origins, asserting, for example, that, in Ayrshire, sayings are “rural in character” (“She was a guid goose, but an ill gaislin”) and that in Glasgow they have a commercial emphasis (“Mony hands, mak licht wark”).

The latter, allegedly Glasgwegian, proverb makes one wonder how Scottish this book really is. Many of its entries are universal: “Penny wise and pound foolish” and “The cure may be worse than the disease”. Or the universal is merely expressed in Scotspeak: “She looks as if butter wadna melt in her mou'”, the suspiciously New Ageish “Be a freend to yoursel' an' ithers will follow,” or the suffocatingly banal “When freends meet, herts warm.” Matters aren’t helped much by inconsistent orthography. “Ye needn’t poor watter on a drooned mouse”, advice to avoid overkill, is succeeded by “A wee moose can creep under a great corn stack”, a reference not to the large North American ungulate but to the small omnipresent rodent.

If most entries are over-obvious, the occasional one is just baffling. “Lang may your lum reek” may be translated easily enough as, “Long may your chimney smoke”, that is, “May you live long and prosper”. But “Tak your thanks to feed your cat” could mean “Charity begins at home” but at first glance makes for a semantic quagmire of gratitude and pet-care.

“A licht purse makes a heavy hert.” So does this book.

Fraser Sutherland

DACTYLOLOGIA

The dinosaur dingbat font used in the borders and throughout the text is DinosoType, a PC and Macintosh shareware font from Match Software. You can explore their other font offerings at http://www.matchfonts.com.

EPISTOLA {Bill Simon III}

Regarding the Winter 1999 VERBATIM, which I HAVE GOT here in my hand, and the article (p. 45) “Why Have We Got Have Got?”, I HAVE GOT another painfully humorous example of such usage.

As most states change their license plates (color, style) occasionally, so does Pennsylvania. In the late 1970’s or early 1980’s, they issued a blue plate with yellow/gold lettering, with a state slogan across the top and bottom of the plate. OR: should I say, the license plates had got(ten) a slogan across the top and bottom of the plate:

YOU’VE GOT A FRIEND IN

PENNSYLVANIA

That style lasted several years, until a vocal, apparently literate, minority protested to the Capitol in Harrisburg, concerning the bad English usage. The state changed the plate, and since that time, new plates simply say “Keystone State” across the top and “Pennsylvania” across the bottom, though the older ones are still in use.

I have, like, a continuing crusade with my students (not in English classes), like, y’know, about other, like, horrible usages. Student asks: “Is Excel, like, a spreadsheet?” I answer: “No, it isn’t LIKE a spreadsheet—it actually IS a spreadsheet!”

It may be, like, a losing battle which I HAVE GOT on my hands (y’know).

[Bill Simon III, State College, Pa., billiii@psu.edu]

EPISTOLA {David N. Spodnick MD, DSc}

As a long-time subscriber to the original VERBATIM I welcome the “new” publication under your direction, which bids fair to be an improved version.

The foregoing having been said, may I call attention to your footnote on p. 41 of Vo. XXIV No. 1. Unless I have missed something fundamental, you appear to accept “for free”, which I consider almost a barbarism. “Free” was sufficient for a very long time, implying “free (of charge)”. The “for” is popular (truly, vulgar) usage and is plainly excess baggage. I do believe in ultimately adopting irresistible trends as is done in dictionaries which become less and less prescriptive, but you cannot argue that this gross vulgarism is yet in that category.

I hope you can correct this situation. Otherwise keep up the good work.

Yours sincerely,

[David N. Spodnick MD, DSc, Professor of Medicine, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts]

EPISTOLA {Milton Horowitz}

In a recently published novel by Anita Brookner (Falling Slowly), the illustration on the book jacket is identified as a painting called “The Leaving Room.” It shows a woman seated in an armchair and holding a book.

In my examination of several reference books, including the Oxford English Dictionary, I found “leaving book” (a commemorative) and “leaving shop” (British slang for pawn shop), but no “leaving room.” I’ll appreciate your comments or those of your readers.

Cordially,

[Milton Horowitz, Jackson Heights, New York]

EPISTOLA {Henry Volker}

With apology to Mr. Rawson, of “Bowderlism in the Barnyard,” what a grand cock-up your grid-maker created of the Crosswword Puzzle this issue. A true bugger.

[Henry Volker, Boca Raton, Florida]

EPISTOLA {Tony Ford}

Omitting to block in 6 squares was tricky enough but to re-number half the clues was a bit underhand!

[Tony Ford, Penzance, Cornwall]

EPISTOLA {Donald K. Henry}

It is delightful to be receiving VERBATIM again. And to be able to point out minute errors. In the issue received today, I discover that Footnote 1 to the charming article on Barnyard Bowdlerism informs us that “The Family Shakespeare appeared in 1807, twenty years before Victoria became queen.” Unless the book actually appeared in 1817, which I doubt, the line should read “thirty years before Victoria became queen,” since she ascended the throne in 1837, her uncle, William IV, having died on 20 June of that year.

[Donald K. Henry, Mill Valley California]

EPISTOLA {Kathleen Wunderly}

In the current VERBATIM, Hugh Rawson discusses people’s use of euphemisms in generally neutral terms, his strongest comments being references to “squeamishness” or “nervousnellyism,” until his remarks on page 4 regarding “donkey.” Here we are informed that “nice people” were using the word donkey most of the time by mid-nineteenth century, except in “backward Ireland,” where evidently there were neither nice people nor the rudiments of civilization. By contrast, that same sentence informs us that people in Scotland, though by implication also not nice but not specifically backward, used another donkey euphemism.

If Mr. Rawson wishes to offer future insights into the use of language in VERBATIM, perhaps the editor could assist him in restraining his bigoted comments, which would be better voiced only in the company of his fellow neddys at the Sunset of the Empire Club.

[Kathleen Wunderly, State College, Pennsylvania, kdwunder@stamps.org]

Anglo-American Crossword No. 80

Compiled by Cullen

Across

1. Pre-Euro currency, guys, is start of modern movement towards union (9)

2. Influenced, reportedly, by the material (5)

3. Endlessly seek advice from an old magistrate (6)

4. Something abhorrent in Montana—The Mafia? (8)

5. Japanese high-rollers (8)

6. Claws the post-deal remainder (6)

7. Cottage the French talk about (6)

8. Poor Rasputin was not of their persuasion (8)

9. A goby is nothing that can be caught in a trawl (8)

10. Gemstone taken from ring first placed in funeral fire (6)

11. Dedicated Round Table members (6)

12. Chinless friar gives permission to some old Veronese (8)

13. Boatman at end of galley where dishes are washed (8)

14. Accomplished by a doctor, there’s nothing to it (6)

15. No peace of mind amongst gangsters (5)

16. Domestic flight (9)

Down

2. Make an important decision to change banks (5,3,7)

3. Filial claim that carries strong force (5)

4. More inelegant, after a fashion, sporting a Busy Lizzie (4-2-7)

5. Doesn’t go for outdated underwear (5)

7. Furnish with composer in pure homespun (9)

8. Broke so hadn’t paid many close friends (5,3,7)

11. Othello’s cannibals (13)

15. They help in making products - wooden furniture, for example? (3-6)

16. Container, worthless if tin (3)

20. Announce physical training—and vault! (5)

21. A song for the hoisting of bunting round yacht’s bow (5)

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, eds. The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) 698-9. ↩︎

2. Ibid. ↩︎

3. Alastair Fowler, ed. The New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) 707. ↩︎

4. Eric Partridge, ed. A Dictionary of the Underworld (New York: Macmillan, 1950) 11. ↩︎

5. American Libraries (December 1998): 21. ↩︎

6. J.E. Lighter, ed., The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (New York: Random House, c 1994) 47. ↩︎

7. We have even heard of a young woman said to have a train up her ass—but we do not know the woman personally and cannot stand by this assertion. ↩︎

8. There is an old joke that uses this expression to some effect: a “Myra bird,” which attacks whatever you tell it to using the command “Myra bird, cracker” or “Myra bird, bathtub,” is purchased for a friend’s birthday. Upon hearing about the bird’s special talent, the friend replies, “Myra bird, my ass.” (This joke can be told to children by replacing ass with foot in the punchline.) ↩︎

9. Tom Dalzell, Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1996) 202. ↩︎

10. Lighter 38. ↩︎

11. From this usage comes a mildly off-color joke (brought to our attention by friend Nick Humez): two rakish young boy mice are standing on the corner watching all the girl mice go by. Says the first mouse, “Wow—will you look at the ass on that one?” To which his comrade replies, “Personally, I’m a titmouse myself.” ↩︎

12. Lighter 38. ↩︎

13. William K. Bentley and James M. Corbett, Prison Slang (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1992) 61. ↩︎

14. Paula Munro, Slang U (New York: Harmony Books, 1991) 51. ↩︎

15. “The Razor’s Edge,” Philadelphia Weekly, 27.48 (December 2, 1998): 22. ↩︎

16. Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (New York: Macmillan, 1984) 29. ↩︎

17. Pope Gregory XIII’s calendar of 1582 was a revision correcting a ten-day error, the result of a lingering imprecision multiplied during 1600 years of the previous Julian calendar, itself a reform under Julius Caesar of the still older Roman calendar which had gotten out of phase with the solar year by several months. The Gregorian calendar is essentially the one Westerners use today, with its 365-day year plus an extra day thrown in every four years except at the turn of three centuries out of four. In case you’re wondering, there will be a February 29 in the year 2000. ↩︎

18. For more information about this delightful publication, write to worldwidewords@linguist.ldc.upenn.edu.[Q]:uinion himself lives in the British seaport of Bristol, whose venerable maritime tradition is enshrined in, among other places, the touchmark of its silversmiths' guildhall, an anchor. ↩︎

19. Dating from the same period are the first mentions of the moon being made of green cheese, cited by John Heywwod in his 1541 collection of English proverbs but first appearing in print a dozen years earlier in John Frith’s A Pistle to the Christian Reader, published in 1529: “They woulde make me[n] beleue that the Mone is made of grene chese.” Both blue and green-cheese moons are clearly intended to mean nonsense. A more rational view of the latter, however, has been offered recently by a child whose name is unfortunately lost to posterity but whose age (6) has been preserved, and who, with charming ingenuity, explained that “For centuries, people thought the moon was made of green cheese. Then the astronauts found that the moon is really a big hard rock. That’s what happens to cheese when you leave it out.” ↩︎

20. By contrast, the color of the moon during a lunar eclipse is a faded red; the earth’s albedo — the reflectivity of its surface — keeps the moon from being altogether darkened during the hour or so when it is in the earth’s shadow. While not as awe-inspiring as the blotting out of the sun at mid-day during a solar eclipse, the transition of the moon from its silvery fullness to a sickly dried-blood color can inspire a distinct uneasiness, and as the eclipse lasts nearly ten times as long, the cumulative effect can be quite unsettling. on the other hand, lunar eclipses are much more frequent, so one can get used to them, not the case with eclipses of the sun. ↩︎

21. Shaukat, who is also an engineer and mathematician, has a fascinating web site at http://moonsighting.com. ↩︎

22. According to Roger “Blue Kiwi” Sharp in his review of Larry Bulmer and Bob Mills' Dicks Out: The Unique Guide to British Football Songs. ↩︎

23. Stanley Kubrick, Spartacus, Universal, 1960. ↩︎

24. Massimo Polidoro, “Houdini and Conan Doyle: The Story of a Strange Friendship,” Skeptical Inquirer, 22:2:40-46, March/April 1998, page 41. ↩︎

25. For more than you ever wanted to know about quantifiers, see my Quantifier Meanings: A Study in the Dimensions of Semantic Competence (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1982). For all, in particular, see my “Two Explanatory Principles in Semantics,” in L. Vaina (ed.), Matters of Intelligence (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987). ↩︎

26. Crassus does go through the motions of justifying himself by pointing out that Batiatus hasn’t identified Spartacus for him, as he had agreed to. However, he’s already given the crucifixion order, without having consultated Batiatus. Batiatus later complains to Gracchus: ↩︎