VOL XXIV, No 3 []
Slayer Slang (Part 1)
Michael Adams, Albright College
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BTVS), a recent teen television hit, coins slang terms and phrases in nearly every episode, many of them formed in the usual ways, some of them at the crest of new formative tendencies, and some of them interesting, not only lexically, but morphosyntactically. The show incorporates familiar slang, too; the familiar and newly coined “slayer slang” together compose a particularly vivid snapshot of current American teen slang. Examination of mainstream and cult magazines, fan books, and websites, however, suggests that slayer slang, far from ephemeral vocabulary, steadily intrudes on everyday speech and may be here to stay.
Joss Whedon, a versatile screenwriter whose credits include Alien: Resurrection, Toy Story, and Speed, introduced Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the eponymous feature film (1992). He subsequently adapted the story for the small screen. The series premiered on 10 March 1997 and this year completed its third season. Its fairly large following, the largest of any show on the U.S. WB (Warner Brothers) network, consists of teens and twenty-somethings who share a taste for Anne Rice novels and cinema on the cusp of the fantastic. Fans of the show have proven extraordinarily dedicated to it: they support a Buffy industry that already produces the obligatory t-shirts, posters, trading cards, jewelry, and shot glasses, and has generated a dozen novelizations, a quarterly magazine, five or so books about the show, and dozens of articles in dozens of magazines. In December 1998, there were 1816 websites worldwide devoted to Buffy, most of them located in the United States, but including sites in Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Germany, France, and Singapore. “BTVS: Slayer Central,” a site chosen at random, registered over 25000 hits in 1998, and no wonder: that site has received The Buffy Index Award, The Graveyard Award, BTVS Land’s Award, The Nosferatu Award, and The Buffy Award for Outstanding Sites, among others. Homage for Buffy is more frequent, more sincere, and more competitive than most of us can imagine easily.
The series opens with a formulaic introduction to vampire slayers, of which Buffy is only the most recent: “As long as there have been demons, there has been the Slayer. One girl in all the world, a Chosen One, born with the strength and skill to hunt vampires and other deadly creatures…to stop the spread of their evil. When one Slayer dies, the next is called and trained by the Watcher.” Buffy is a reluctant slayer: vampires interfere with her cheerleading career and her social life. After burning her Los Angeles high school to the ground during a prom, in order to kill the vampires who attempted to turn the event into a blood-fest, Buffy Summers moved to Sunnydale, California. Unable to escape her destiny as the Slayer, however, she encounters her new Watcher, Rupert Giles, who poses as Sunnydale High School’s librarian. Sunnydale, we discover in the first episode, is located on a Hellmouth, and vampires roam the streets freely, bent on nothing less than the destruction of this world. Though her identity should be secret, a few friends know Buffy as the Slayer and assist her: Willow Rosenberg, her best friend, is a brilliant computer nerd who once loved her childhood friend, Xander Harris; Xander is clever enough, too, though an underachiever, has a crush on Buffy, but has always loved Willow; Cordelia Chase is rich, popular, acid-tongued, and unaccountably in love with her boyfriend, Xander; Oz, incidentally a werewolf, is usually just Willow’s boyfriend and plays guitar in a band; and Buffy falls in love with Angel, a reformed vampire who turns bad again, and whom Buffy is forced to kill at the end of the second season. By twists of plot too convoluted to rehearse here, a rival slayer named Faith appears in the third season, a high school drop out, horny, leathered, and tattooed. They are all average kids, in average relationships, battling the forces of adolescent evil, personified, in a sense, by vampires, demons, and monsters; they are also particularly adept speakers of American English, especially of slang.
Of course, the show employs plenty of familiar slang, some recorded in dictionaries and some not. The oldest item, five-by five, Faith may have gleaned from The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, where it appears, in the sense Faith employs, in a single quotation from 1983: “‘How are you?'” Buffy asks Faith, to which she responds, “'Five-by-five.'” “‘I’ll interpret that as good,'” glosses Buffy in turn, and very near the dictionary’s ‘perfect, fine.’ If Faith’s Goth-chick slang veers towards the obscure, other characters favor the teen mainstream: “‘Don’t worry, I can deal,'” Buffy assures her companions; “‘So, you’re not down with Angel,'” she acknowledges of Spike, Angel’s rival among Sunnydale vampires; “‘That’s the sound she makes when she’s speechless with geeker joy,'” Xander explains of Willow; “‘Don’t forget, you’re supposed to be a girly girl, like the rest of us,'” Willow reminds Buffy. “‘Great,'” says Willow, “‘I’ll give Xander a call. What’s his number? Oh, yeah, 1-800-I’m dating a skanky ho'”; “‘You just went O.J. on your girlfriend,'” Buffy remarks to one unfortunate; “My egg went postal on me,'” she explains after a monster hatches from it. Buffy, just like any real American teen, develops crushes on hotties, but if the love is unrequited, the situation is, like, totally heinous. Buffy, far from abject, chills. Maybe she’ll stay at home on Saturday and veg rather than indulge the boy’s unromantic riff. If the hottie in question asks her out again, she might see an upside and be good to go, or she might ask herself, “'What’s up with that?'” refuse him sarcastically with archaic, and therefore insincere, slang, like “‘Wow, you’re a dish,” and then bail. Whatever, you get the idea.
But the show does more than merely capture current teen slang; rather, it is endlessly, if unevenly, inventive. Thus Buffy, only tentatively supporting the romance budding between Xander and Cordelia, assures them, “‘I’m glad that you guys are getting along, almost really.'” Vampires, apparently cast into fashion Limbo on the day they become undead, are often marked by their unstylish wardrobes. “‘Look at his jacket,'” says Buffy of one them. “‘It’s dated?'” asks Giles, to which Buffy responds, “‘It’s carbon-dated.” When Cordelia dumps him, Xander asks a young, not awfully proficient witch to cast a love spell on Cordelia; when it backfires and affects everyone BUT Cordelia, he muses to Giles, “‘Every woman in Sunnydale wants to make me her cuddle-monkey.'”
Most of us are lucky if we’re carefree, but the Slayer thinks in grander terms: “‘I don’t have a destiny,'” she retorts, when reminded of her cosmic role, “‘I’m destiny-free.'” When bitten by his infant nephew, Oz is shocked to learn that he belongs to a family of werewolves: “‘It’s not every day you find out you’re a werewolf,'” he explains, “‘That’s fairly freaksome.'” In spite of the lunar cycle, Oz’s popularity, his social position, is intact, but not everyone in high school is so lucky, as Cordelia, ever alert on such matters, points out: “‘Doesn’t Owen realize he’s hitting a major backspace by hanging out with that loser?'” Teens map their own linguistic territory, as opposed to their parents’, with slang, and sometimes “improve” earlier slang to stake their own generation’s claim. Cordelia complains to a petulant Buffy, “Whatever is causing the Joan Collins ‘tude, deal with it. Embrace the pain, spank your inner moppet, whatever, but get over it.'” Cordelia’s coinage puts her divorced parents’ pop-psychological jargon in its place.
With vampire slaying and other important teen responsibilities imminent, Buffy and her cohort are forced “to do round robin'” which, as Willow glosses, is “‘where everybody calls everybody else’s mom and tells them they’re staying at everybody’s house.'” Slang for Sunnydale teens, as for teens worldwide, serves as a transgressive code. Fun abounds for average teenagers, who round robin to party in the Sunnydale graveyard but, as the Slayer who inevitably saves them from rising vampires ruminates, “‘It’s all mootville for me.'” Instead, she’s forced to play miniature golf with her mother’s boyfriend; when she cheats and the boyfriend, actually a robot who makes people like him by lacing baked goods with pleasant sedatives, overreacts, she admits, “‘Yeah, I kicked my ball in, put me in jail, but he totally wigged.'” Man or robot, the prospect of a boyfriend for mom unsettles her: “‘You know how dispiriting it is for me to even contemplate you grownups having smoochies,'” a sentiment echoed in the hearts and minds, at least, of teen viewers everywhere.
Lest the show seem “cleaner” than other adolescent TV, sex comes up frequently, especially regarding Buffy’s relationship with Angel. Angel, though a vampire, had regained his soul, but when he and Buffy have sexual relations, her first, he finally experiences true happiness, the trigger that fires his soul back to Hell. Given the plot on its own terms, and the way in which the story metaphorically represents one take on adolescent sexual experiment (whatever boys say before sex, they’re monsters afterwards, sex kills, etc.), the show’s references to sex are, for the most part, predictably innocent. Unlike the other characters, however, Faith is sexually active, her sexual language potent and notably absent from the dictionary record: “Bet you and Scott have been up here kicking the gear stick,” she remarks to Buffy as they hunt vampires on Lovers’ Lane; unable to leave the subject alone, she asks, “‘Do you ever catch kids doing the diddy out here?” Faith’s sexual references aren’t always euphemistic and lighthearted, however. At her earthiest, she grunts: “I mean, I’m sorry, it’s just, all this sweating nightly, side-by-side action, and you never put in for a little after hours unh?'” Sometimes she is even racier, but careful of the FCC: “Tell me that if you don’t get in a good slaying, after a while, you just start itching for some vamp to show up so you can give him a good unh.'”
It is difficult to imagine the value of such terms to the show, embedded as they are in a rich and dynamic context, context that resists excerption. Meaning, then, is sometimes difficult to isolate, but not the sociolinguistic importance of slayer slang: every major character in the show coins or derives terms to reflect subtly his or her social and psychological experience. The result is clever, precise, and expressive, as the language of adults, slang or other, naturally cannot be. Neither Buffy nor any of her associates is, as Oz denominates a particularly dim bulb, “‘a master of the single entendre,'” and the show’s continual use of slang, not to mention its running commentary on the English language, successfully dignifies teen language and the range of teen experience for which it speaks.
Evidence already quoted proves that the English language often occupies the writers’ minds, and thus it often occupies the characters’ minds, as well. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an especially language-conscious television show. The characters are backhanded definers (“‘Man, that’s like, I don’t know, that’s moxie, or something.'”), bemused grammarians (in one episode, Willow struggles to determine whether one should say “slayed” or “slew”), amateur etymologists (“'“The whole nine yards”– what does it mean? This is going to bother me all day.'”), or self- conscious stylists (“‘Again, so many words. Couldn’t we just say, “We be in trouble”?…”Gone.” Notice the economy of phrasing. “Gone.” Simple, direct.'”), whatever the situation demands. “‘Apparently Buffy has decided that what’s wrong with the English language is all those pesky words,'” Xander remarks in one episode. But the problem may not be the absolute number of words so much as the plethora of inadequately expressive ones. As the show continually demonstrates, teens dissatisfied with the language they inherit can invent a language in which the words are, not pesky, but relevant.
While much of the show’s slang reproduces the current teen lexicon, good fortune for slang lexicographers, who comb the media for words generally spoken, and then only recently, Buffy the Vampire Slayer not only invents slang, but intends to do so. As Sarah Michelle Gellar, the actress who plays Buffy, explained to The Rolling Stone (April 2, 1998), “‘Let me tell you how un-Buffy I am . . . For the first episode, I come in and yell, “What’s the sitch?” I did not know what “sitch” meant. I still have to ask Joss [Whedon], “What does this mean?” because I don’t speak the lingo. I think he makes it up half the time.’ ‘The slang? I make it all up,’ says Whedon cheerfully,” though Gellar’s estimate is more accurate. Once America’s busiest teen, Gellar nonetheless surely knows plenty of slang, and her ignorance of Whedon’s lingo is one index of its novelty. Viewers recognize and appreciate the show’s characteristic innovation: while playing the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Drinking Game (for which the official shot glasses come in handy), viewers are invited to drink whenever “Buffy utters a ‘Buffy-ism,’ though we are told that this category “Does not include CBSs (Cute Buffy Sayings) like: ‘Goodbye stakes, hello flying fatalities.'” According to the rules, CBSs deserve two sips where Buffy-isms warrant only one, but the game neatly distinguishes the show’s linguistics from its poetics. Naturally, the former interests us primarily, and the sequel to this first of a two-part article will consider the semantics and morphology of slayer slang in some detail.
[The second part to come in the next issue. —Ed.]
Identity and Language in the SM Scene
M. A. Buchanan, New York, New York
For the past seven years, I have been studying the process of identity formation among SM/radical-sex practitioners living in and around New York City, in preparation for my doctoral thesis in cultural anthropology. Among the first things that I noticed when I started doing my research was the importance of language in the definition of what people in my subject group did, how they thought about it, and how they saw themselves in relation both to other differently-pleasured people (swingers, clothing fetishists) and the “normal” world. I also found that problems arose between practitioners and non-practitioners at the intersections of language: that because the SM world has co-opted so many ordinary words and phrases, these became almost unintelligible to outsiders.
I have two favorite examples of this. The first involved an informant of mine who was asked to give a speech on SM to an organization of “vanilla” (non-kinky) men. My informant was Chinese-American (I’ll call him John) and one of the leaders of a very prominent SM organization here in New York. The group had been trying to promote itself as being open to people of color, so when John was asked to give a talk to a local group of Asian and Pacific Rim gay men, he jumped at the chance. John went to the meeting in his finest leathers and wore the colors of his organization.1
After doing the usual SM 1012 lecture and emphasizing that he was considered a leader in his community, he opened the floor to questions. There were none. He was rather disappointed: He could tell that his audience was being more polite to this strange guest than anything else. Finally when the meeting was over, a Chinese-American couple approached him. They said that they had enjoyed his talk, and were surprised that leathermen3 were inclusive. They had always thought that SM was something that only weird white men did4. Still, they said, they didn’t think that they could ever try kinky sex. They preferred their own quiet sex life the way it was. Out of curiosity at this complacent couple, John asked them what they enjoyed the most about their sex lives. “Well, what we really like is choking each other. None of that wild stuff for us5.”
The second story is about a women’s SM organization that was looking to increase its numbers. The group knew that there were many women in the city who were doing SM in private. Some of these women even turned up in the local sex clubs, but they never came to any of the women’s groups’ events. Finally the membership committee decided to make up a flyer that could be used as an ad in the local gay paper and distributed at clubs. Unfortunately they kept having problems with the wording. If they said “masters and slaves welcome,” there were women of color who wouldn’t attend meetings because the terms were considered offensive. If they said “dominants and submissives welcome,” the switches6 and undecided might not come, because they’d feel excluded. If they said “butches and femmes welcome,” straight women and androgynous lesbians might not come, because the terms implied a particular lesbian-oriented dichotomy. Finally the committee decided to put “all women welcome” on the flyer. Which led to the crisis about the transgender male-to-female who wanted to join (but that’s another article).
In both stories the essential problem was the real or anticipated misunderstanding of SM language. Language acts as the marker for the parameters of thought. What may and may not be contemplated by members of a society is encoded in the language used by its members7. When the language of one group collides with or is appropriated by another, something gets lost in the translation that at least one group doesn’t see as necessary.
SM practitioners often see themselves as crossing an invisible boundary into a parallel universe, SM-Land. They refer to the time “outside of the Scene” as “real life,” as if what they do inside the scene is less real or more ephemeral and shadowy than the grind of going to the supermarket. Yet the ideal for many people is to become “hardcore,” “lifestyle,” or “24/7” — to live, eat and drink SM all the time, or at least to incorporate it into their daily lives. Doing so, however, requires a heightened ability to translate one’s secret language to the world outside, so that vanilla neighbors, co-workers (if any), and strangers will tolerate one’s presence even if they find one’s living choices unacceptable. If one cannot or will not go completely hardcore, than one has at least to mask oneself with the aura of plausible deniability, even to the point of denying one’s proclivities to oneself.
The terms D/S and B&D are perfect examples. D/S stands for dominance and submission, which sounds a tad less scary than SM. The term was popularized and probably invented by heterosexuals in SM chatrooms, where the majority of visitors are nice middle-class people with houses in the suburbs. The term is consciously used as a way of distancing practitioners from the implications and stigma of SM, even though the terms are exact synonyms for each other. B&D, or bondage and discipline, is said by practitioners to be a milder version of SM, less violent than that nasty stuff, although somehow the “nasty stuff” never quite gets defined. Perhaps it’s because, again, B&D and SM are actually one and the same, with B&D having slightly more emphasis on roleplay. The desire to mask one’s participation in one’s own personal theatre of cruelty seems to be almost as strong as a desire to create one in the first place.
But the desire to mask oneself does not merely arise from shame over one’s own behavior. As I said before, one has the neighbors to think about. And the police: A local organization had a talk a few years ago on the subject of “Daddies and their Little Girls.” The meeting was attended by a variety of people, including two of the most obviously on-duty undercover cops the world has ever seen. They were probably the only ones in the room who were horrified to see three women in their thirties and forties talking about the joys of dressing in bobby socks and going to the park with their older lovers. The terminology of “ageplay” had apparently not found its way to the captain of the local vice squad, who would have done well to buy a copy of Sensuous Magic by Pat Califia, and saved himself and his officers the trouble of a tedious (to them) meeting.
In a few cases, SM organizations have actually had sit-downs with the police to explain what all the mysterious terms on their flyers and in their books mean and have been successful at removing the constabulary’s unwarranted fears of illegal behaviors. They have even written glossaries of both well-recognized and little-used terms for newcomers, so that their world might be a bit more comprehensible. I leave you with a few terms and their translations:
Body Modification—Altering the surface of the body, whether temporarily or permanently. In other words, tattooing, branding, scarification, permanent piercing, corsetry. Earrings and a bustier would be considered body modification.
Collar—lit., a length of chain, leather, or other adornment placed around the neck to indicate that a person is in service to another. This may be for the evening, or for a longer period.
Forced crossdressing—what it’s called when a man brings a bag full of women’s clothing that he’s bought for himself to a dominatrix and pretends that he doesn’t want to wear them.
Flagging—indicating ones’ preference as a top or a bottom and what type of activities one likes by wearing keys, jewelry, or bandannas on one side or the other. Left means top or dominant; right means bottom or submissive.
Houseboy—a bottom whose duties include cleaning, waiting on guests, answering the door, laundry, cooking, or any other household duties the top may assign. The bottom may or may not live with the top, and this may or not be a sexual relationship. Although I have heard rumors that there are female house servants, I have never run across one. For some reason, only men seem to like doing chores as a sexual outlet.
Negotiation—The exchange of information on SM preferences and limits, and the decision of whether or not to play between two or more prospective partners. The SM equivalent of dating.
Property—a bottom, who by the nature of their relationship is owned or controlled, either partially or completely by the dominant. Often there is a written contract that spells out the terms of the relationship.
Role-reversal—what some practitioners call it when a man gives up sexual and other types of control to his (always) female dominant. Naturally, role-reversal is only a temporary state of things.
Wrapping—the accidental delivery of a whipstroke that causes the tips to land on the side of the body as opposed to the front or the back. Wrapping is considered to be bad because it can leave marks and be quite painful.
[M. A. Buchanan, MA, is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at New School University in New York City.]
EPISTOLA {Erik Nappa}
While reading William Dougherty’s article, “Bromides,” (XXIV/1) about the reluctance that physicians exhibit in speaking frankly about their patients’ life-threatening conditions, using euphemisms and circumlocutions, I remembered an experience I had that illustrates his point exquisitely.
I was riding in a hospital elevator on my way to visit someone when several interns got on and started discussing various patients.
“What does Mr. Jones have?” asked one.
“The big C,” said another. All nodded in silence.
“What happened to Mr. Brown?”
“He was discharged.”
“What happened to Mrs. White?” Another moment of silence and then one of them said “Tenth floor.”
All of them nodded and left the elevator. I stood and puzzled for a few minutes and then I suddenly realized—the hospital had nine floors.
[Erik Nappa, Jackson, New Jersey]
HORRIBILE DICTU
Mat Coward, Somerset, England
“In most circumstances, I think a teacher who has a relationship with a pupil should be barred from the profession.” So said the Chief Inspector of Schools in the UK—someone who, one might have hoped, would have some idea of what the word “relationship” means. I recently overheard (all right, eavesdropped on, if you want to get technical) a conversation during which a middle-aged woman told a young woman that she was “enjoying an excellent relationship” with her new doctor. The young woman blushed; evidently, hearing about her friend’s sex life was something she totally didn’t need right now.
I give up. I give up on relationship; I give up on homophobia (a troubling condition, sufferers from which are presumably prone to vomit whenever faced with identical twins); I am on the verge of giving up on “ethnic,” when employed as a euphemism for “not white”—even though I loathe the idea of living in a world where people in positions of authority think such a euphemism necessary. (The Independent newspaper recently complained that “out of 175 New Labour candidates for the Scottish Parliament, guess how many come from a multi-racial background? One.” Does this mean that all the rest were full-blood Cherokees, I wonder?). But I’m not ready to give up altogether.
Like all lovers of language, I despise pedantry in others, and deny it in myself. The purpose of this new, regular column is not to sanction or to encourage pedantry, but to provide an opportunity for VERBATIM’s nitpicker-free readership to identify, monitor and discuss contemporary crimes against decent usage of the English language. (Please send letters and cuttings intended for this column to either VERBATIM’s address, marked “Horribile Dictu”. I anticipate receiving lots of letters, so please accept my apologies in advance for not replying to all of them; all will, nonetheless, be received with gratitude and read with great interest. As far as limitations of space allow, I shall mention here those that strike a chord with me, and attribute them to their contributors).
Let’s not waste our time re-fighting long-lost battles: don’t write to me about “gay” or “chairperson” or even “hopefully”. Write instead of the new and the ugly, the unnecessary and the confusing, the redundantly neologistic and the elaborately incoherent. Write of words that are suddenly, and pointlessly, given entirely new meanings, replacing perfectly good existing words. From the mildly irritating trendy cliche, to the apoplexy-inducing threat to civilisation, from the repugnantly coy to the frankly baffling, from the euphemisms of the professions to the anti-sense of the corporations—bring me your fuddled messes.
If it pains you to read an interview in a supposedly leading newspaper during which a politician is asked “What women’s issues do you support? And which do you oppose?”, then Horribile Dictu is for you. As it is, if you don’t know whether to laugh or snarl when you read of a Boston pastor who celebrates “the willingness of the black community at last to reclaim ownership of their own crime issues,” or of a televangelist who fears that “role modelling a gay lifestyle is damaging to the moral lives of our children”.
At the start of the war against Yugoslavia, a NATO general promised that his bombs would “degrade” the Serbian armed forces. If such degradation of the language leaves a nasty taste in your mouth, then spit it out: spit it out and send it in.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
Inclimate Weather Affects Defense The Most “You try to go in the gym and emulate as many activities as you can, but it’s still not the same.” State College coach Jeff Kissell, in the State College Daily News, March 30, 1999. [Submitted by Bill Simon III, State College, Pennsylvania.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
P/T Agency Assistant—Literary agency seeks part-time Assistant for New York Office to answer phones, manage office systems, read manuscripts, edit proposals and coordinate submissions. Must be a self-starter with suburb organizational, editorial, and PC skills. [From Publisher’s Weekly, February 22, 1999. Obviously, those “suburb” organization skills are lacking in the City, so they need to import talent. —Ed.]
A Backhanded Pardon
“My Lord, I had forgott the Fart.”
Queen Elizabeth I, as told by Aubrey
When Oxford first appeared at Court,
He blushed to hear a loud report
Behind him as he bent his knee
Before Elizabeth, and she
Must have shown she too had heard
By uttering a witty word,
Such as: “That noise, my Lord, imparts
That you think I’m the queen of hearts.”
At all events, he felt such shame
As not to show his face again
For seven years. When he returned
To Court, he doubtless thought he’d earned
The right to find his fault forgot,
But no, the witty queen had not:
She made the other courtiers laugh
With what’s shown in my epigraph.
Though time had worn her teeth, her tongue
Grew sharper than when she was young,
And it was, even in her youth,
As sharp as any serpent’s tooth!
Whetted by seven years, it bit
At anything that stirred her wit;
And seven years had made that jest
Too pestilent to be repressed.
If it seems strange so great a queen
Could be so small as to demean
Herself by mouthing such a word
As even then was seldom heard,
She doubtless felt she was above
What others might be chary of:
So low a thing was quite all right
When uttered from so high a height!
—Henry George Fischer
I May Already Be A Wiener
Gary Wiener, Pittsford, New York
As a startup on my computer I have this soundbite: Homer Simpson, down on himself as usual, in dubious assessment of his self-worth, saying, “I am a WEE-NER.” Homer surely evokes a good chuckle from his audience, and best of all, the next day, maybe even an hour later, he will be his old normal self again. In this he has a great advantage over me. Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, for 45 years of my life, I have been a Wiener, and currently I see no hope that the affliction will ease. I was born a Wiener; I will die a Wiener. My children, even my wife, are all, inherently, undeniably Wieners.
There was a time when being Wiener was not really so bad. Though my wife insists that the worst connotations of the name have been with us since the Arthurian knights (“He can’t joust! What a wiener!”), and my father, at the opposite extreme, claims he has never heard a discouraging word regarding his misbegotten moniker, I can recall nothing worse than a few taunts of Oscar Meyer Wiener from my salad, or should I say mustard days back in the fifties. And just as today’s six-year-old former Barney worshipers have changed “I love you, you love me . . .” into “I hate you . . .,” so their baby boomer counterparts altered “I wish I were an Oscar Meyer Wiener . . . “ to I’d hate to be an Oscar Meyer Wiener . . . ,” or, in my case, “a Gary Alan Wiener.” But I recall nothing worse than that chant based on the unfortunate metrical fit of my full name.
When it changed, precisely, or when the phallic properties of the name came into full colloquial acceptance, I cannot say for sure. But as it did, many of my namesakes who suffered through the Oscar Meyer days said, “enough,” and jumped off the Wiener bandwagon faster than you can say sauerkraut, changing their names to Wyner, Wynn or Winner, or just altering the pronunciation to Why-ner, the way the name would be said, (and the way most people actually mistakenly pronounce it) if it weren’t for that rotten Germanic rule that dictates that the latter vowel, or “e,” determines the pronunciation and the not the former.
I can’t say I haven’t considered the switch myself, and, to tell the truth, my wife and I did adopt the “Why-ner” pronunciation for the two years during the late seventies that we spent away from our family in another city. I taught inner-city junior high then, and for African-American kids in that city at that time, “wiener” was not just a synonym for penis. Wiener was a penis. So it was somewhat comforting to be called Why-ner and not to have to suffer through daily snickers and giggles everytime I introduced myself to another student.
Usually, that is. Kids, as we know, are flexible, and can make something out of any name. To those with an axe to grind, I was “wino.” In that regard, it’s almost better to have a name that is so egregious all on its own that no one will see the necessity to alter it.
One day the students informed me that there was a substitute teacher in the building whose name was spelled the same as mine “but he pronounced it Wee-ner.” The kid betrayed not even the slighest snicker when he told me, but, to tell you the truth, I felt sorry for the guy anyway, and strangely odd, as if in avoiding this “other” I was avoiding a confrontation with myself, or as if I were a passenger on a sinking ship who shoved the women and children aside and selfishly made for the lifeboat.
I felt equally cowardly when, at a school assembly, one of the school’s brightest students, Melissa Pigg (oh that assonance—not unlike Gary Wiener—both our parents had a knack for poetry, no?) stood at the lectern and introduced the day’s guest speaker, her father, The Reverend Pigg. You should have heard the snickers, and somehow, I almost felt as if each one was really for me, as if there was a conservation of snickers for last names in this world, as if all of the snickers the Reverend Pigg garnered might easily have been mine but for a lack of personal fortitude.
Adopting Why-ner undoubtedly saved me the insults, but it was always so confusing. Once, at a party, my wife, by way of introduction, informed another couple, “This is Gary Why-ner and I’m Iris Wee-ner.”
This rampant name changing has understandably caused quite a ruckus among our relations. After my cousin Larry in Connecticut hit it big as a video game entrepreneur during the early eighties, subsequently branched out into real estate and settled into a life of Lincoln Town Cars and million-dollar townhouses, and paid an enrollment fee to Choate for his four-year old, he changed his name along with his social status. When my always proud uncle Paul in California heard that he was now Larry Wyner, he had just one word for his nephew: “Asshole,” he said.
I decided not to inform Paul that we had altered the pronunciation of our name those two years.
The last time I was in California I visited Paul’s son, my cousin Steven Wiener, who has also hit it big and drives a ‘Vette and has a condo with a stunning view of the ocean in Malibu and an equally stunning girlfriend who shares it with him.
When I asked him if he had any problems with being Wiener, Steven replied laconically, “The women like it.”
And I have to admit, if my brother, Richard Wiener, has not changed his name, then none of us has a complaint.
So when we returned to New York State eighteen years ago, we just bit the bun and reclaimed our full Wienerhood. It hasn’t been easy. Sometime within that span, the phallic connotations of Wiener inevitably suggested a disparaging slang word that made my last name the colloquial equivalent of “dork” or “loser.” Suddenly you couldn’t read a Doonesbury cartoon, or listen to a Budweiser spot, or watch The Simpsons or, of course, Beavis and Butthead without coming across the “w” word. Life might as well have branded a big penis right on my forehead.
When I complained bitterly to various friends, they smiled benignly and told me I worried too much. The name really wasn’t so bad. But they inevitably had names like Jones or Smith or Bird, names that were clean and simple, names that others couldn’t turn into a penis no matter how creative they were. As the saying goes, a man who is warm cannot understand a man who is cold.
Fighting the Wiener Wars has never been easy. I have been forced to acknowledge that the tide of colloquial language cannot be stopped. A seemingly ubiquitous (at least to me) greeting card that appeared a few years ago provides an example. It begins, “Birthdays are like weiners.” When you open it up, the “punch line” reads, “Well, not really—but I find that there aren’t nearly enough birthday cards that say weiner. Weiner. Weiner. Weiner.”
Even my wife gets on my case now and again, claiming at times she’s the most steadfast woman on earth, merely for having suffered the indignity of not retaining her maiden name, the innocuous “Schifren.” The worst anyone ever made of that she claims, was Iris “Shipwreck,” a pretty lame effort if you ask me. She did have an elementary school teacher who rendered her first name as “Arse” for an entire school year. Even so, nothing she claims, is as bad as being Wiener, especially when she started at a local agency where a co-worker had the name of Edie Seaman (another person whose parents had a wicked taste in assonance, apparently). “Oh no, Iris Wiener and Edie Seaman. What’s next?” one of her colleagues was heard to exclaim.
Personally, I don’t think “Iris Wiener” is nearly as clever. At least her parents didn’t name her Edie.
Then there was the day, shortly after we moved to a new neighborhood, when our next door neighbor came over and saw our son Michael walking around naked, as he often did after swimming in the backyard pool. “His little wiener is showing,” the woman, a pediatrician, said. Iris mumbled something about how we didn’t call it that in our family. After she left, I told Iris that I found the episode amusing, considering her surname was “Johnson” a popular slang for penis and the genesis of the “Big Johnson” line of t-shirts. Iris wasn’t impressed. “Nothing is as bad as ‘Wiener,'” she said.
Maybe not, but, upon reading comedian Tim Allen’s Don’t Stand Too Close to a Naked Man, I was amused to learn that his given name was Timothy Allen Dick. I was equally impressed by the similarity of our middle names, and the alternative of Allen to Wyner or Winner or Wynn. Allen writes: [When he did his first t.v. show] “the producers said they just didn’t feel comfortable flashing my real name onscreen. ‘surely you understand, Tim—Dick? People will think you made it up to be funny.’ I wished I had. I wanted to be a comedian so much. But I relinquished the Dick to keep my spot on their show.”
I wish it were that simple. If I’d only gone into show biz.
Elsewhere, the erstwhile Dick writes, “Despite what I went through as a kid, it’s my good fortune that my real name is Tim Dick.” Easy for a man whose surname is now Allen to say.
Another comedian, Marc Weiner, has retained his last name, to his great, or at least modest, fortune. Weiner, a former stand-up, is currently the host of Nickelodean’s Weinerville, a children’s show based on a village of puppets, old cartoons and bad puns. He has made a career out of hot dog jokes, even though his name is spelled wrong—Wiener is “ie,” as anyone who knows the “except after ‘c’” rule can confirm. Sometimes I feel as if he has stolen my act—even my life. When I first came across him on Saturday Night Live back in the early eighties, he was churning out one wiener joke after another. Hey, I thought. There was a living in such misery? I could have done that! While his t.v. audience howled, I remained stonefaced—not because his jokes weren’t funny, but because I had heard or thought of just about every single one myself. It was nothing to me to hear of potential howlers created by the infelicitous choice of first names: Ima, Harry, and of course, Richard!
Weiner, an orthodox Jew, has long-since toned down the ribald side of his act and replaced the bawdy with those hot dog puns, liberally sprinkled through his Nickolodean show. His puppet-band is Cocktail Frank and the Wieners, and guests are “Weinerized,” that is, doused with special sauce and turned into puppets.
Another well-known Wiener lived a more dignified existence. Norbert Wiener, (1894 –1964) was an American mathemetician and genius who is commonly credited with founding the science of cybernetics—that deep and tedious stuff that led to the creation of computers. To commemorate the life of this brilliant man, astronomers have named a crater on the moon after him. That is, Wiener crater. Just in case you don’t believe me, its location is 40.8N 146.6E 120.0 NA AM 2, whatever that means. In like fashion, I’ve always thought it might be prestigious to have some institution name for me. After all, school buildings are often named for famous educators. I’m hoping to leave enough of a mark in my field that someday, bright-eyed students will inform their friends and relatives: “I go to Wiener High.” Now that really does sound like something out of the Simpsons.
Well, that pretty much explains my sensitivity to my last name, I suppose. When I earned a Ph.D., my high school students started calling me “Doc” instead of Mr. Wiener, and I’ve enjoyed the nickname very much. One student insisted to one of my colleagues, who is also a close friend, that I must be pretty stuck-up, having all of the students refer to me by this title. To which my colleague replied that it had nothing to do with rank: “If you had his last name, what would you do?” was his wise response.
The only mystery that remains is, as I’ve said, when the metamorphosis from hot dog to phallic symbol occurred, but, I’m afraid, I’ll have to leave that to better researchers than myself. I did make a half-hearted attempt to find out, consulting the Oxford English Dictionary. But there was no mention of “wiener” as a slang word for penis in the Oxford’s etymological account. The O.E.D. notes the standard derivation, that the word derives from the German, meaning “of Vienna,” and then adds, “see SNITZEL.” But that is all. Perhaps this omission occurs because any slang usage is non-existent in Great Britain, although I do seem to remember a reference to showing off one’s “Why-ner” in The Full Monty. So there must be another reason, and I think I’ve found it: if you turn to the title page of the recent edition of this masterwork of lexicography, you’ll find that the co-editors’ names are J. A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner.
OBITER DICTA: A Bestiary of Adjectives
Susan Elkins, Sittingbourne, Kent
Darwin, Desmond Morris and David Attenborough, to mention but three, teach us that man is just another animal: a hairless primate distinguished by uniquely complex language patterns. In DNA terms a human being is more than 95% chimpanzee. Does that explain our curious habit of describing human attributes in animal language? It’s a sort of anthropomorphism in reverse.
Sometimes the comparison is simply physical. Someone who moves with “feline” grace or “elephantine” slowness, glides with the fluidity of a cat or treads with the heaviness of an elephant. If you are said to have a “leonine” head or an “aquiline” nose than your admirer or detractor is simply trying to describe the shape of your large hairy head and absence of a discernible neck, or your long beaky nose. It’s just a matter of appearance. She or he doesn’t, probably, mean to suggest that you are, in any deeper way, like a regal lion or a predatory eagle.
A “canine” tooth is the stubby pointed one third from the centre of the mouth and is vestigially related to a dog’s fangs. The “Serpentine” in London’s Hyde park is a lake named for its winding snake-like shape. “Bovine” tuberculosis is a disease of cattle and “equine” activities are games with horses.
But in other contexts the descriptors are figuratively based on characteristics which men and women rather oddly ascribe to animals. For hundreds of years, without logic or evidence, humans have casually regarded geese, cattle, sheep and donkeys as stupid.
Accordingly, we have coined, from Latin the lexicographically nice adjectives “anserine”, “bovine”, “ovine” and “asinine” to connote various sorts of silliness in each other. When in 1855 poet OW Holmes, for instance, wrote the gloriously politically incorrect line “Where bovine rustics used to doze and dream” he meant that uneducated country people are inert, sluggish and dull—like his (unfair?) perception of cattle. To be as daft as a honking goose (“anserine”) or as apparently incapable of making an independent, individual decision as a sheep (“ovine”) or to be as easily duped with a suspended carrot as a donkey (“asinine”) are all just variations on the same idea.
And there’s no scientific evidence at all for the poor old wolf’s alleged villainy either. Mythology and folklore have given him a rotten press. We might use “lupine” to describe a con-man or a murderer yet real-life flesh-and-blood wolves, zoologists assure us, nervously run away from humans. So do foxes, in spite of all those fairy tales about cunning Mr Fox and the adjective “vulpine” used to describe sly “foxy” people.
By the same token pigs aren’t greedy, although “porcine” humans might be. Goats, unlike “caprine” humans, are no more randy than any other animal. And what on earth did Carlisle mean in 1872 when he described Frederick the Great as “an ‘ursine’ man-of genius” ? Is there a high correlation between bears and intellectual prowess? Or did Carlisle think there was? Surely not.
Aside from metaphorical uses we sometimes use Latinate animal adjectives quite literally to describe animals and what they do. “Corvine” birds are just crows and ravens and “vespine” construction is a roundabout way of saying wasp’s nest. “Caprine” antelopes are the ones that look like goats and when in 1799, Richard Kirwan, Irish chemist and natural philosopher wrote as geological essay describing a place as “covered with bituminous marlite and piscine remains” he just meant there were a lot of fish bones about.
If they knew it the Romans had a word for it. And their names for common animals have given us a lot of intriguing -ine adjectives, on which, over the centuries of linguistic evolution, we have imprinted many a new twist and connotation. Remember the dog in BBC TV’s Doctor Who series which was called K9?
It’s All Double Janglish To Me!
Martin Nuttall, Tokyo, Japan
Every Monday on my way to pottery class in a neighboring part of Tokyo I pass a shop selling casual clothes which has an unforgettable name : ‘Horse Shit’. I’m not sure whether it’s ignorance or wit on the part of the shop’s owner but I always chuckle when I see it and am reminded of Juliet’s famous line—”What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet.” Indeed, but would you like to try ‘Creap’ creamer in your morning coffee, or a can of ‘Pocari Sweat’ after working out? Not to mention the soft drink ‘Calpis’, which actually tastes pretty good despite its name!
Here in Japan, wherever I look, whatever I’m doing, I seem to be surrounded by English words and expressions. Or should I say words and expressions that look like English. A Japanese version of English—let’s call it ‘Janglish’—seems to have taken root in the country and it’s almost impossible to avoid it. You can find ‘Janglish’ on a beer can: ‘Savor the mellow flavor of the harvesting season’; on a bar of chocolate: ‘Beautiful things are beyond time’ and on students’ pencilcases and notebooks. One of my favourite pencilcase lids goes like this: “Without generation, all women like icecream. Because as it melts, the sweetness rushes to their heart. This is the taste of first love which we cannot forget.”
The Japanese language—like most languages—has borrowed widely from other languages over the centuries. Many of the Japanese lexical items in the fields of religion, philosophy and the arts, for example, came from Chinese and the very characters which make up the writing system of Japanese were borrowed from China.
More recently, in the early years of Meiji Japan (1868-1912) when Japan began to open to the West and the country’s elite were striving to modernize the country and assimilate Western technology, there was a great influx of foreign loan words into Japanese as new ideas and concepts entered the language.
Many of the loan words which came into Japanese at that time were associated with the world’s most advanced nations and naturally took on a certain prestige. Indeed it was even suggested by Arinori Mori, the first Minister of Education in the Meiji Era, that English should become the official language of Japan and that the Chinese characters and Japanese syllabaries used to write Japanese should be abandoned. Needless to say, Mori’s proposals came to nothing, but if he were to suddenly find himself transported to modern Japan, he could be forgiven for believing that a later minister had been more succesful in anglicising Japanese.
Take the apartment block next to where I live, for example. “Lilac Mansion”. At a pinch, ‘lilac’ might just be acceptable, even though there is a hardly a tree to be seen in this densely-populated neighborhood, let alone a lilac tree! But ‘mansion’ is not quite the term that springs to mind to describe the cramped space of a typical Japanese apartment block. And if we walk around the neighborhood a little, we can find all sorts of interesting examples of ‘Janglish’.
To start with, there’s the ubiquitous cigarette vending machine just around the corner with the brand names of Japanese and imported cigarettes alike written in English. So not only do we find Marlboro and Camel cigarettes, but also ‘Lucky Strike’, ‘Seven Stars’, ‘Mild Seven’ and ‘Peace’. And that’s not all; it’s easy to tell which Japanese brand has a charcoal filter and contains low tar and nicotine, because it’s all there—written in English.
The same is true for the drinks machines, where again many of the brand names and advertising slogans are in English. When it comes to choosing a can of coffee, for example, we are invited to ‘Relax and enjoy Wonda coffee with tasty aroma for refined adults’. And if we prefer tea, Kirin’s Royal tea sounds just right: ‘A delightful blend of the world’s finest tea with the rich taste of milk’.
Not only the vending machines, but also many shopfronts identify themselves in English—Date’s Barber Shop, Nakamura’s Liquor Shop and Renoir Cafe-Restaurant are near neighbors. Then, of course, there are the simple awnings with ‘Book’, ‘Bakery’ or ‘Pharmacy’ clearly inscribed upon them, though sometimes it might be ‘Bakely’ by mistake!
Continuing my stroll around the neighborhood, I notice a familiar alphabet on a young Japanese chap’s colorful sweatshirt and look carefully to read the words—”Santa watches the children of the world through his magic telescope and keeps a record of their good deeds in his behavior ledger!” Got that, boys and girls?
Everywhere we look we see ‘Janglish’, especially in advertising material. No self-respecting magazine, advertising flyer or brochure would seem to be complete without it. Japan Railway’s recent advertising campaign, for example, was centred on the word ‘TRAING’. That is to say, an amalgamation of ‘train’ + ‘ing’ to give ‘TRAING’, the ‘-ing—form’ of ‘to take the train’. No, I don’t quite get it either, but that’s ‘Janglish’ for you!
Despite Japan’s economic and technological success, Japanese people often feel an inferiority complex towards Western culture and this is reflected in advertising. Many Japanese commercials feature Caucasians in advertisements for fashion accessories, non-Japanese cars and luxury goods, and the use of English in commercial texts seems to be aimed at evoking images of reliability, quality and modern living in the reader’s or viewer’s mind. Ironically, the texts and expressions used in such advertising copy are not intended to be understood by your typical Kenji Tanaka and his wife and although individual words might be recognised and understood, the main purpose of the text is to create an image and attach prestige value to the products being advertised, rather than to create meaningful copy.
Indeed, few native speakers of English can usually make much sense of the text and for them, ‘Janglish’ has been described as an Alice-in Wonderland universe of strangeness and familiarity in which the connection between words and their orginal meanings is often obscured. But whatever our opinion of it, ‘Janglish’ is part and parcel of daily life in Japan. And not only in advertising. ‘Janglish’ crops up as much in everyday conversation as in commercial copy. There are literally hundreds of examples in daily use, including ‘loose socks’ (referring to the thick white socks which hang loose around the calves and which are popular among Japanese high-school girls), ‘my-pace’ (doing things at one’s own pace), ‘bed town’ (a commuter town) and ‘doctor-stop’ (an expression used to explain that the doctor has advised a person to stop drinking or smoking).
‘Janglish’ is so ingrained now that just as we may speak of Indian English, Singaporean English and so on, perhaps Japanese English will one day be officially recognised. It is, after all, a living language, with its own idiosyncratic lexical and structural patterns that are constantly in a state of flux, as in any natural language. Like it or loathe it, ‘Janglish’ is here to stay since to borrow a phrase from a well-known Japanese TV commercial for beauty products, language is essential ‘For Beautiful Human Life’!
[Martin Nuttall is British and lectures in English and Linguistics at Tokyo Medical and Dental University.]
EPISTOLA {Julia P. Edwards}
“Everybody took their books home.” You may say this sloppy sentence every day—and get used to it. But I won’t!
I still plan to structure my sentences so that a plural pronoun will be grammatically correct, and I will expect those whose works I read to do the same. Those who persist in this error will receive SPELL “goof cards.” SPELL, for those that don’t know, is the Society for the Preservation of English Language and Literature.
Ms. Editor, repeat this sentence several times a day: “They all took their books home.”
[Julia P. Edwards, Goldsboro, North Carolina]
EPISTOLA {N. Hamment}
I have been waiting (and hoping) for years for an attack on the unspeakable “up until” so I welcome Dr. Finkel’s exposure, together with the other “up” horrors. Recently I noticed that a motorist “parked up” his car.
Perhaps other readers have noticed another word that should be “put down” — “fulsome.” Currently it has been so mis-used that it is useless. When I saw, in cold print, “a fulsome breakfast,” I gave up.
Could it be that “The LeaVING Room” [see Vol. XXIV No. 2 letter from Milton Horowitz —Ed.] was originally “The Living Room” and became corrupted? “Living Room” used to be quite common here, but now less so, having given way to “Lounge.”
[N. Hamment, Bolton, England]
EPISTOLA {Adam G. N. Moore, MD}
Dr. Finkel urges us to eschew “up” in myriad contexts (Vol. XXIV No. 2). I can tell by his text that he’s upset!
[Adam G. N. Moore, MD, Newmarket, New Hampshire]
Widows, Orphans, and ?—Semantic Holes
Sol Saporta, University of Washington (retired)
In lectures delivered in Japan in 1987, Noam Chomsky discussed the notion of a ‘conceptual framework’ which he proposed as ‘a common human property’ He suggested that ‘the concepts . . . are available, independently of experience [and are] associated with (or labeled by) words in a human language.’ (“Language in a Psychological Setting,” Sophia Linguistica, Working Papers in Linguistics, p. 22, 1987)
Of some interest in this connection, is the phenomenon of semantic holes, i.e., concepts which are clearly defined, but for which there seem to be no labels, or at least no simple one-morpheme words. The most familiar is the absence, at least in English, for a word for unmarried sexual partners, living together. (A colleague writes that his university is seriously considering adopting the term ‘spousal equivalent.’ The caricature has now become the reality.)
It is apparently the case in English, and the very few other languages with which I am familiar that there are only two words for concepts, based on the relationship to a person who has died, namely the words widow/widower and orphan. In other words, the death of a spouse, or of a parent is generally labeled, but the death of a child or a sibling is not. (The word orphan, incidentally, is age-based; only children can be orphans.)
A generation ago, linguists were infatuated with the Whorfian hypothesis that suggested that each language served as a grid on the world. A semantic hole such as this one would surely have been anomalous. That it would be universal would be inexplicable. It is hard to imagine a greater emotional impact than the death of a child. How could a culture ignore such an obvious linguistic need?
The explanation is not obvious. A lawyer friend tells me that in both criminal and civil cases, the courts routinely refer to ‘surviving parents,’ which suggests that legal considerations may in fact be relevant. Widows and orphans have legal rights that require precise resolution, surviving parents and siblings less so, So it seems that semantic holes in general, and this one in particular, bear on general theoretical questions of some interest.
Words For Their Own Sake
John Konrad Kern, Signal Hill, California
Strip a word of its meaning and etymology and what do you have? You have a collection of alphabetic characters arranged in a unique order. Devoid of definition, however, these strings of letters have virtually no utility. But I am here to tell you they are not useless. They can be as entertaining as all get-out.
What you do is go through a reputable collegiate dictionary (I used Webster’s Ninth) word by word selecting those that appeal to you solely because of their sound, appearance, rhythm, spelling, construction, or evocation of interesting, pleasant, or amusing feelings. This is a tedious and time-consuming process, but it also is fun. You will be surprised at your selections and tantalized by your reasons for choosing them. You’ll find, though, that the hardest. part is to consistently ignore all meanings, a requirement vital to the success of this adventure. When using the dictionary, you must discipline yourself to look at nothing but the word itself and its pronunciation. And equally important, you must consciously disregard any meanings you already possess in your memory.
After you have gone through every word in the entire dictionary and have compiled a list of all the words you selected, you make two or three additional cuts to get the number of your most-liked words down to whatever number you want as your final list. In my case I ended up with 857 on my first list, and after two more cuts had 100 words left.
I then decided to pick the 28 words that were my final favorites from that list and these are shown below. This exercise is similar to playing solitaire, except that this game can be played only once, unless you have partners who go through the same procedure and afterwards you all compare your respective final lists. That can be a lot of fun.
If you would be interested in playing this game and then sending a copy of your final list to me, I’ll be glad to keep a cumulative record of all words selected by everyone who does this. Then after every four months,, I will let each of you know the total list of selected words and how many players selected each one. Send your list and your postal address to me in care of our obliging editor, Erin McKean. [Send to either U.S. or U.K. address.—Ed.]
1. Collywobbles
3. Chautaqua
4. Scalawag
5. Caboodle
6. Hornswoggle
7. Twinkling
8. Lackadaisical
9. Squishy
10. Scoot
11. Skedaddle
12. Cantankerous
13. Oodles
14. Dillydally
15. Rigamarole
16. Jitney
17. Thither
18. Curmudgeon
19. Derring-do
2. Persnickety
20. Cahoots
21. Crotchety
22. Whoop-de-do
23. Gumption
24. Balalaika
25. Smidgen
26. Spiffy
27. Dreadnought
28. Nook
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“. . . our Armenian Lavash bread . . . is baked in clay ovens to retain it’s texture and taste from Biblical times of 4,500 years ago.” [from a package of “Old Fashion Lavash Bread”. Submitted by Alice M. Batchelor, Falmouth, Massachusetts.]
Bats as Symbols
Frank Holan, Putney, Vermont
In the United States and Europe, bats tend to be considered creatures of ill omen—it is assumed that there must be something wrong with a mammal that wears fur but flies through the air. What is worse, most bats fly at night, thus proving they are up to no good.
However, in China bats are not considered creatures of ill omen—they are symbols of good luck. This has come about linguistically rather than by means of an attempt at logical analysis. To understand how this took place, it is necessary to understand how written Chinese works.
1. There are several Chinese dialects, and it sometimes happens that an individual from one region will have difficulty understanding what an individual from another region is saying; however, if the message is written., there is no problem, because written Chinese usually expresses the meanings of words without reference to how they are pronounced, and all dialects share the same written characters to represent the same ideas.8
2. Every Chinese word is a monosyllable and hence the language contains many homonyms—words that are pronounced identically but have different meanings.
In order to get more mileage out of a limited number of monosyllables, they are “sung” in various tones, so if you “sing” the right syllable in the wrong tore, you will change its meaning. In Mandarin, the dialect Westerners are most likely to encounter, there are four tones—even, rising, falling, and one with a dip in the middle; in other dialects, there are as many as seven.
Even when “sung” in different tones, there still aren’t enough monosyllables to go around. and hence it sometimes happens that a given monosyllable “sung” in a given tone will have ten or fifteen possible meanings.9
3. If you want to look up a word in a Chinese dictionary, you will have to familiarize yourself with the concept of “radicals. Chinese dictionaries usually provide 212 of these. Each. Chinese written word either is itself’ a radical or incorporates a radical, often mystifyingly abbreviated, as a kind of clue as to the category to which the entire word belongs.10
The dictionary is divided into segments, each dedicated to a single radical; these segments appear in the order of the number of brush strokes the radical contains. In order to find the meaning of a given character, the seeker after truth must first identify the radical that categorizes it, then find the appropriate segment in the dictionary, and finally find the character he is looking for in the list of the possibilities furnished. To assist in his search, all the characters containing the radical are listed in the order of the number of brushstrokes needed to complete the character, not counting those in the radical itself.11
So there we are: writing based primarily on the meaning of the word rather than on how it is pronounced; all words monosyllables; and characters which either are radicals themselves or incorporate radicals presumed to give some clue as to the particular category to which the aforesaid characters belong.
All Chinese characters within a given statement are supposed to more or less fill squares of equal size, and so when a radical is incorporated in a character, it is sometimes squeezed so as to be difficult to recognize The radical may appear at the top, at the bottom, to the left , or to the right of the character in question.
Perhaps the commonest arrangement is to have the radical to the (reader’s) left, while the unique combination of brush strokes that defines the character’s exact meaning is to the (reader’s) right. Sometimes, but not always, the radical categorizes the character as usual, while the brush strokes to the right indicate not only the meaning of the character in question but also indicate how the character is pronounced.
Using this arrangement, the not very helpful radical for one of many Chinese words for “good luck” (“prosperity,” “felicity,” etc.) means “show,” “notify,” or “instruct;” the rest of the character is pronounced fu in the Mandarin dialect.
Using the same arrangement the radical for “bat” means “insect, worm;”12 while the rest of the character, being identical to that appearing in the character for “good luck,” is also pronounced fu in the Mandarin dialect.
We can imagine a garden scene, in which a Chinese gentleman and a guest are enjoying the sights and sounds of a summer evening. A small creature flutters by. “What kind of niao (bird) is that?” asks the guest. His host replies, “That isn’t a niao—it’s a fu.” which means either “bat” or “good luck.” What seems to have happened is that the good luck has rubbed off on the bat.
EPISTOLA {Jim M. Pols}
Two articles in the latest VERBATIM (XXIV/2) “Assing Around” and “Racing for Definitions in South Africa,” tempted me to pass on an old South African quip:
An American tourist, visiting a small village, met Van der Merwe, the butt of many jokes about Afrikaners, and said, “Say, fellow, this really is the ass-end of the world, isn’t it?” Whereupon Van der Merwe answered him with, “Yes, and you are just passing through.”
[Jim M. Pols, Weymouth, Dorset]
EPISTOLA {Harvey E. Finkel}
Jessy Randall and Wendy Woloson (“Assing Around, XXIV/2) mya be interested in an additional use of the word. In poolrooms in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York, around 1950, assy meant ‘lucky,’ as in sinking a lucky shot. I don’t know why.
[Harvey E. Finkel, Brookline, Massachusetts]
From A Dictionary of Interesting Collisions
Gary Egan, Ballina, Ireland
A
Abasement Flat: Digs hard-up tenants lower themselves by renting.
About-facetiousness: earnestness; the reverse of frivolity.
About-preface: Epilogue or afterword; an antonym for introduction.
Acuwomen: Form of female intuition; shrewdness peculiar to women.
Afictionado: Devotee of storytelling.
After thoughtlessness: Rashness, especially of a conscienceless kind.
Also-rant: Loud speech of minor importance.
Amalgambol: To forge playful combinations, i.e. a dictionary of interesting collisions.
Amanuensisterhood: Pool of literary assistants, usually but not exclusively female .
Amorosity: As it sounds—an amalgam of amorousness and generosity.
Ancestor-pit: Family-tree, with special reference to black sheep.
Angimormous: Pain caused by chronic angina.
Anticluckwise: Silent movement of ducks around a pond or lake.
Apocalypsuction: Kissing as if there were no tomorrow; very heavy petting.
Arsenic route: Painful suicide.
Assassenach: English native who murders native of Scotland or Ireland, either literally or in the sense of thrashing them, i.e. in sports.
Astringentleman: Male critic; also hard-hitting journalist as in astringentleman of the press.
Auk-word: Obsolete word sometimes prefaced by the epithet “great”.
Avant-haggard: Would-be progressive (work of art), but actually tired.
Avant-niggardly: Not progressive; minimalist.
B
Banty: To tease in a quarrelsome way.
Barabbarous: material as opposed to spiritual, i.e. a barabbarous choice.
Bathos-scales: Critical yardstick for assessing anti-climax.
Behindhandsome: Falling some way short of good-looking.
Blackguardian angel: Undesirable protector or champion.
Bludgeon-donor: One who dishes out punishment, possibly drawing blood in the process; a bully-boy; a brutal critic.
Briquettiquette: Recommended way of arranging fuel in order to start fire.
Budget-up-and-go: If not a shoestring budget, one that soon walks.
Berkwards: In the direction of foolishness.
Bunkum Holiday: A bank holiday on the most slender of pretexts.
By-compassion: Ignorance of pity that makes for mercy or aid, especially when such a course is thought to be time-consuming.
C
Cadavert: To avoid becoming a corpse.
Canon sequitur: An irrelevant general law or principle.
Caress-purposes: To be intimate; to harbour intentions of becoming intimate.
Cavillage idiot: Derogatory term for critic.
Charlatanston: Dance an imposter leads his dupes.
Clangdestine: A would-be secret approach which is, in point of fact, noisy.
Clankdestine: As above, but with a different sound.
Clausetrophobia: Morbid dread of clauses.
Composeur: A pseudo-musician.
Confettucini: Low-grade, throwaway pasta; consumers would feel justified in throwing it at the chef in disgust.
Congratululate: To applaud and weep simultaneously; to not know whether to laugh or cry.
Consensussurate: To reach agreement in clandestine fashion; to support secretly.
Continuumbrage: When a state of high dudgeon continues indefinitely.
IN MEMORIAM
We will all miss the noted wordplayer Willard R. Espy, who died in February at the age of 88. His books, favorites of VERBATIM readers, included The Game of Words (1971), An Almanac of Words at Play (1975), O Thou Improper, Thou Uncommon Noun (1978), Say It My Way (1980), Have a Word on Me (1981), The Garden of Eloquence: A Rhetorical Bestiary (1983) and Words to Rhyme With (1985).
Through the kindness of Louise M. Espy, we are privileged to share some verses from the Espyverse in his memory.
Merriam-Webster is going to publish The Best of the Almanacs at Play this fall.
Facsimile of a Love Song
Mute as a mackerel, darling, I am;
You’re fit as a fiddle, and gay as a lamb.
You’re clean as a whistle; I’m ugly as sin.
I’m fat as a hog, you’re as neat as a pin.
You’re brave as a lion, I’m deaf as an adder;
You’re brown as a berry, I’m mad as a hatter.
My ducky, my darling, the love of my life,
You’re free as the wind, and as sharp as a knife.
I’m blind as a bat; you are sly as a fox.
You’re pert as a sparrow; I’m dumb as an ox.
You’re plump as a partridge, as sweet as a rose;
I’m flat as a flounder, and plain as my nose.
So come, let us marry, and dance in the lane
As merry as crickets, and righter than rain!
Our days will be brighter than rainbows are bright;
Our hearts will be lighter than feathers are light.
Our love will be surer than shooting is sure
And we shall be poorer than churchmice are poor.
Criteria
There’s but one
Criterion.
Folks inferia
Say “one criteria.”
Abbreviation
The Mrs. kr. Mr.
Then how her Mr. kr.!
He kr. kr. kr.
Until he raised a bir.
The blr. killed his Mrs.;
Then how he mr. krs.!
He mr. mr. mr.
Until he kr. sr.
He covered her with krs.
Till she became his Mrs.
The Mrs. kr. Mr.
(And so on and on and on
A Pup By Any Other Name
Ah, Chloe, the animal kingdom’s a-teem
With litters that turn out not quite what they seem:
For a cow has a calf, but the calf of a mare
Is a foal, and a cub is the foal of a bear;
A fawn is the cub of a deer, while the fawn
Of a beaver’s a kitten; and, carrying on,
The kit of a sheep is a lamb, and the lamb
Of a wolf is a whelp, while the whelp of Madame
Is a babe, and the babe of a dog is a pup,
And I thought for a while this would wind the thing up,
But the pup of a goat is a kid, and—ah, Chloe What else is a kangaroo’s kid but a joey?
Between, Among
When I was asked to choose between
Roberta, Ethel, and Eileen,
My curt refusal may have stung them—
But I could only choose among them.
(Between us two, ‘twas just as well;
The girl I love is Isabelle.)
Only
He said that he loved only me;
I would I could believe him.
He said that only he loved me;
I did not undeceive him.
He loved me—only that said he;
I wished he’d further spoken;
Since only he said he loved me
(And pledge that has no warranty
Is pledge that’s easy broken)
I needed other token.
He said he only loved me. Bliss!
Heart could not compass more than this.
My S’S Grow S’s
Some words ending in s change to quite unrelated words if another s is added:
“My S’s grow s’s, alas!” cried a lass;
“My handles turn handless my bras turn to brass.
A girl who cares deeply is quick to caress;
She dreams of the posses whose love she’d possess;
An as with an s is an ass, and no less
When asses add s’s, those asses assess.
Add s’s to mas and they worship at mass;
Add s’s to pas, and the pas make a pass.
There Are Numerous Locutions to Express The Notion of ‘Never’
When all the world grows honest;
When the Yellow River’s clear;
When Calais meets with Dover,
Do you suppose, my dear,
I shall forget I’ve lost you?
Not until St. Tib’s eve,
Not for a year of Sundays
Shall I forbear to grieve—
Till noon strikes Narrowdale; till
Latter Lammas dawns;
Till Queen Dick reigns; till Fridays
Arrive in pairs like swans;
Till the Greek calends, and the
Conversion of the Jews.
I’ll mourn you till the coming
Of the Cocacigrues.
Get That “Get”!
Get gets around. Get also gets the air;
Gets after; gets it in the neck; gets set.
Get gets off easy . . . back at . . . in my hair.
Prince, marvel at all these: the get of get!
Get gets a wiggle on; gets off the ground; gets wet;
Gets wise to; gets the gate; gets here; gets there;
Gets wind of . . . words in edgewise . . . even with. You bet,
Get gets around! Get also gets the air.
Get gets a load of; gets ahead; gets square;
Gets on the ball (I’ve hardly started yet).
Get gets the worst of; sometimes gets unfair;
Gets after; gets it in the neck; gets set.
Get gets my number; gets me in a fret;
Gets on my nerves . . . a move on . . . tells me where
I get off; gets a rise out of; gets met.
Get gets off easy . . . back at . . . in my hair.
Get gets along; gets by; gets lost; gets rare;
Gets better . . . down to cases . . . in a sweat
The jump on . . . to first base . . . me down.
Prince, marvel at all these: the get of get!
Get gets my back up; gets me into debt.
Get gets the ax . . . the feel of . . . gets unbear
Able . . . the picture . . . in a pet . . .
Me off. Get even gets the clothes I wear.
Get gets around.
EPISTOLA {Israel Wilenitz}
I have a comment to make concerning Bill Simon III’s polemical letter about I HAVE GOT in the Spring 1999 issue.
I was born in England, and came to the USA in 1951, at the age of 28. Although I had been accustomed since childhood to American movies, there was one U.S. usage that struck me very forcibly when I arrived in this country.
That was hearing someone ask a salesperson, for example, “Have you any (whatever)?”, or “Do you have any (whatever)?”
In the U.K., it was perfectly acceptible—in any social register—to say “Have you got any (whatever)?” From dukes to dustmen, all could say, without a blush, I HAVE GOT.
Interesting!
[Israel Wilenitz, East Setauket, New York]
EPISTOLA {William H. Dougherty}
I would like to show my appreciation for Harvey E. Finkel’s EPISTOLA about my “Bromides” that appeared in the Spring 1999 issue by attempting to assuage his ‘“continuing distress at gratuitous and inelegant additions of up, as in “He heads up the corporation . . . “ and “. . . meet up with . . . ,” and “Up until . . .””
The addition of prepositions, either as prefixes, suffixes, or separately, to nuance or strengthen words, particularly verbs, is common practice in Indo-European languages. In the Slavic branch of those languages prefixing prepositions to indicate aspect and often meaning as well is an essential grammatical element. Although in English, except for many words derived from Latin and Greek such as contact, semantically redundant prepositional prefixes are unusual, the addition of unbound prepositions is extremely common. Consider get, get up, get in, get out, get on, get through, etc. In the examples of the addition of up that so distress Mr. Finkel meaning is less dependent on the preposition than in the get examples. His examples are more like, say, “Write down every word” where one senses that the preposition, while not essential to the meaning of the sentence, does add a perfective nuance.
To me the up in Harvey E. Finkel’s ‘‘‘He heads up the corporation . . . “ and in “. . . meet up with . . .” impart a perfective nuance rather similar to that added by a prefixed preposition in Russian (e. g. napisat’ ). In the first example the up implies that the position at the head of the corporation is news, an event, while in the second example the preposition tells us that the meeting was an unexpected single occurrence. The addition of up in both cases makes an occurrence of what without the addition would be a condition. Similarly in the third example, “Up until . . . ,” the preposition implies an event, here termination of a process or situation.
So let’s not be hasty in putting down the practice of nuancing words by adding up and other prepositions. Keep the practice up!
[William H. Dougherty, Santa Fe, New Mexico, whd310@aol.com]
EPISTOLA {David H. Spodick}
Complaints about No. 2: You gratuitously inserted an “n” in my name with my letter; you changed my middle initial to “N” (for these, my stationery is clear,however bad my writing—and the letter was typed!).
Finally, you really ought to reply to substantive, i.e. linguistic questions and protests (mine was about “for free”) with the letters. I’m sure readers would like to have your opinions, corrections, regrets, etc. In any case, you’re off to a good start.
[David H. Spodick (NB: no “n”s), Worcester, Massachusetts]
[Thanks for thinking that readers want to hear my opinions. I’ll try to respond to letters when they seem to call for a response.—Ed.]
EPISTOLA {Clay Liddell}
I thoroughly enjoyed your review of Paul Dickson’s Baseball Dictionary, however I was surprised to learn that at least two of his attributions differed from what I learned as a kid growing up in Philadelphia.
The term to describe the batter who is second in line behind the batter who “is on deck” is “in the hole” referring of course to the dugout where all remaining players must stay. It seems to me that the term “in the hole” is a more logical term to use. The term “in the hold” implies a detention cell of some sort.
The second item that caught my eye was the word “rhubarb”for an on-the-field argument or fracas. I indeed would call such an occurrence a “rhubarb,” however I believe its etymological source is carnivals where the shout, “Hey Rube”, was understood by carnival workers that there was trouble and their help was needed and to come arunnin’. Such disturbances came to be called rhubarbs. Perhaps some other reader could make a case for the source of the term as coming from the pitcher, Rube Marquard. Maybe Dickson’s book explains more about sources for these items and I’ll be enlightened.
[Clay Liddell, Appleton, Wisconsin]
[“In the hold” was, alas, a typographical error. Mr. Liddell is correct. It should read “in the hole.”—Ed.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“More than just a post-World War II pastime, the drive-in has come into its own again through the nostalgia it illicits.” [from the AAA Horizons newspaper, AAA Southern New England, Vol. 29/4.”. Submitted by John Goodman, Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
The article on Bowdlerism (XXIV/1) set me thinking. When I was young (long ago) in England, we talked of cocks and hens, and I should still refer to the cock bird—of any species. Chanticleer will never be a rooster. What do the mealy-mouthed call peacocks?
“Cock” or “old cock” was a familiar form of address to a man—still is, according to my trusty Chambers. I remember an advertisement for “7 o’clock”, a brand of razor blade, in which the punch line was “7 o’clock, cock!”
Another example of Bowdlerism. On my last trip to England, we were impressed by brilliant yellow fields of rape. Back in Oz, and presumably it is the same in the U.S., we found yellow fields of canola.
I further wonder what American mechanics call male and female machinery fittings. It would be difficult to describe them as clearly in other words.
[Margaret Galbreath, Elizabeth, South Australia]
EPISTOLA {Michael Suisman}
Thank you for publishing the delightful column, “Word Words,” by Judge Jon Newman. (XXIII/4)
Alas, the good judge seems to have overlooked a word that is crucial to the development of words to describe words. Perhaps modestly, he has not accounted for those who create word words.
Those who dream up -onym words, likely losing sleep over the juste mot, deserve their own recognition. May I suggest that Judge Newman and other creators of word words be dubbed “insomnonymiacs.”
[Michael Suisman, West Hartford, Connecticut]
INTER ALIA
VERBATIM readers may be interested in a charming little magazine, WORD, published in Oregon.
WORD, although small, is poetic and quirky, consisting mainly of reactions to words as words (which see our “Words for Their Own Sake” in this issue). Musings on the definite and indefinite articles, the word notion, and a squib on this year’s Bad Writing Contest by the New Zealand scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature. The 26 half-size pages of the March 1999 issue are larded with quotations and somewhat surprising illustrations.
Single-copy price is $4. Write to Fred Harrison, Editor, WORD, PO Box 2484, Waldport, Oregon, USA 97394. Tell him VERBATIM sent you.
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Signs in Contemporary Culture: An Introduction to Semiotics
Arthur Asa Berger, (Second Edition, 1999 (1st edition, 1984) Sheffield Publishing Company, Salem, Wisconsin), xiii + 255 pages.
When I was an undergraduate majoring in linguistics, out of all the taboo and arcane (as well as everyday) language topics breached, there was one topic never uttered, one brief section of the introductory texts that remained unhighlighted. Here I will say it, the area was called semiotics. Perhaps this neglect was due to the fact that semiotics, like linguistics itself, is a broad field that can’t be easily pigeonholed. Semiotics encompasses fields of endeavor like anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, literature studies, even economics. But semiotics doesn’t deserve to be an ignored paragraph in a freshman textbook. So rather than forcing semiotics into a branch of some parent discipline, it’s perhaps better to start understanding it with a book like this one, devoted to semiotics in its own right.
Before offering a review of Signs in Contemporary Culture: An Introduction to Semiotics, it’s necessary to delve a little into semiotics itself. Most any definition of the field will start with something like: semiotics is the study of signs, and signs are “anything that can be made to stand for something else” (Berger, p.1) (the inevitable is that arguments arise as to what types of signs there are, such as arbitrary, natural, iconic, etc. This is nicely and concisely untangled early in the book). As vague as this may sound, keep in mind how very vital it is for an individual to be able to conceptualize a sign (whether it’s a visual symbol, sound, smell, etc.) as standing for, or representing, another concept. Not only would fields in the arts and sciences not exist without sign use, but culture, and human communication itself, could never have developed.
Although semiotics looks at signifiers and what they signify in almost any aspect of a cultural system, the most interesting place (in my opinion) to examine signs in rapid-fire action is in spoken (or written) language. This is naturally where a lot of semiotic research is concentrated. In language the arbitrariness of signs really comes in handy. Look at it this way: if we humans were incapable of assigning arbitrary meanings to the words and sentences we utter, language would be nothing more than a collection of imitative, onomatopoeic sounds. There would be no way to combine a bunch of sounds into a word, and conventionalize that utterance as referring to a culturally agreed-upon “thing.” But at a higher, and at the same time elemental, level, more complex analogies in language allow for articulate expression. Phenomena like metaphor, metonymy, simile, and synecdoche (remember high school English?) are dissected in fields like literary analysis and semantics, but in semiotics these are viewed as an essential part of a cultural system, revealing our “fundamentally metaphoric” conceptual systems. Thus reading the “codes” of signs shows us the design of our own systems of understanding.
Let’s take the seemingly innocent metaphor “love is a game” (p. 31). The author claims this is actually a “very destructive metaphor,” especially if it’s accepted that metaphors help form our psychological basis for interpreting the world. By analyzing this metaphor and its analogy of comparing “love” to a game, Berger makes some interesting assertions, since the two should share similar qualities. For instance, a game usually is “nothing serious . . . has winners and losers . . .rules” as well as cheaters, an end when things grow boring, pretense, deceit and can easily be played over. Therefore, if this particular metaphor is ingrained within our culture, “the way you relate to people you love” will be greatly affected, possibly with negative consequences (p. 31).
Another important and revealing area suitable for semiotic discussion is text analysis, which relies heavily on text-internal elements. The author’s approach is extremely informal throughout, and makes analysis accessible to any beginner. Take the introduction to Proppian text analysis where Berger uses Star Wars to illustrate. The story is reduced to a finite number of predictable “Proppian functions” (p.51), with a corresponding event in the film given alongside. Thus, for example, “struggle, pursuit,” and “recognition,” functions (elements) of almost any such work, are identified with specific story events. I particularly like how this in many ways can equate Star Wars to much Biblical and classical literature!
Berger certainly doesn’t neglect signs in the media. He hypothesizes on everything from why advertisements follow particular formulas of presentation, with an analysis of every possible design element and image within an ad, to the hidden meaning expressed by wearing a digital versus an analog watch. The methods by which a company might achieve uniqueness for a logo or corporate symbol are presented, for instance, with a discussion of the particular information packed into a logo, even down to qualities that may be signified by the use of “white space” or the use of a particular typeface.
Although semiotics may sometimes be sedate, the author never is. This book, although sometimes slightly dated, is simply fun to read, and in fact humor itself becomes the topic of discussion, with eight analyses given from the perspectives of what eight different fields would make of a specific joke (e.g. a sociologist’s analysis vs. a semiotician’s). Another integral part of a culture and one which is often overlooked by sociology, covered in “Foods as Signs,” is that of the food and beverages we consume, and the status levels they represent. This is pretty fascinating, especially when it’s shown that Americans as a society view meals as inconveniences or interruptions to the rest of our activities.
The friendliness of the book, along with the author’s own quirky illustrations, makes it very appropriate to the curious novice. Concepts are very well communicated, with the help of a handy end-of-text dictionary of concepts, and I myself finally have a better grasp of the subtle and elusive differences between metaphor and metonymy.
Kenneth Setzer
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Letter Writing Made Easy! Featuring sample letters for hundreds of common occasions! and Letter Writing Made Easy! Vol. 2: Featuring more sample letters for hundreds of common occasions!
Margaret McCarthy, (Santa Monica, Santa Monica Press, 1998), 206 pp.
Volumes of ready-made letters are a venerable tradition. They were favourites of the Victorians, and their enduring popularity stems from that indestructible body of people who know what they want to say but don’t know how to say it.
Margaret McCarthy’s two volumes of templates are no better or worse than many of their type, and, with minor adjustments for technology and changing mores, would have been usable in the days of, say, Grover Cleveland.
Subjects like “School bully needs to be stopped” and “Protesting service charges” are perennial. McCarthy changes with the times sufficiently to include form letters to cover “Goodbye to Ex-Significant Other’s Family” and “`Coming Out’ for Family and Friends” (“You are very special to me, and now that I know how brave you are, I value you even more.”) On the other hand, there is nothing about e-mail communication or about the niceties of Netiquette: If you capitalize everything, YOU’RE SHOUTING.
As a bonus, both volumes append “Forms of Address” and “Helpful Addresses”, though it’s hard to imagine would good might be accomplished by a citizen’s simply writing to the “International Monetary Fund, 700 19th Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20431.”
Writing a letter asking for a favour, whether from the International Monetary Fund or someone else, often requires special tact, as in “Allowing a Friend or Relative to Spend the Night”. The line “I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t for the fact that (+name of friend or relative+) and I are very close and I know what type of person (+he/she+) is” allays the suspicion that the prospective guest may be a kleptomaniac or a serial rapist. If the prospective host is a bulimic, say, or someone given to screaming at night, McCarthy covers that eventuality, albeit a little presumptuously, by adding “I really think you and (+name of friend or relative+) would hit it off well. You have many of the same interests . . . .” [my ellipses]
One pleasure of the volumes arises from the arrangement of letters under section headings like “Medical Concerns” and “Career.” Given brief italicized introductions, they have subheadings that sometimes form rivetting miniature narratives. Take, for example, “Neighbors” (“Keep in mind that, although you may not always socialize with your neighbors, they are the people with whom you most need to have peaceful relations.” In this section neighborly feeling begins (“Welcome to the Neighborhood”), builds (“Request to Take Mail” and—no sarcasm involved—”Congratulations on Property Improvement”), culminating in “Let’s Begin a Community Project.”
But then trouble starts about noise (“Please Keep It Down” and “Rowdy Children”), and obnoxious pets invade and yodel (“Your Pet and My Lawn/Backyard” and “Your Dog’s Barking”). The acrimony further mounts over “Assigned Parking Spaces” and reaches a crescendo of recrimination in “Threat to Take Action Against Neighbor.” The whole sorry episode ends on a peevish note over a “Stolen Newspaper/ Magazine.”
From howdy to rowdy, it’s all there.
Fraser Sutherland
SIC! SIC! SIC!
Heard on Radio 4: “Her remark about him wearing a wig was really below the belt.” [Submitted by Fabian Acker, London.]
[Perhaps the fabled male merkin? —Ed.]
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Bawdy Language: How A Second-Rate Language Slept Its Way to the Top
Howard Richler, (Stoddart, 1999), 208 pp.
As you might guess from the title, A Bawdy Language is a rather irreverent and almost relentlessly topical romp through the “good parts” (those that are fun, or controversial, or both) of English usage. No tedious rules here, just good, old-fashioned, “ain’t it cool” exposition. In A Bawdy Language, Richler speeds through the high points, touching on the usual suspects—slang, varieties of English, etymology, political correctness in language, relations with other languages, and wordplay—in a series of short chapters.
Richler’s writing style is easy to read and playful, and he obviously has a love of words and language. Unfortunately, I wasn’t surprised by anything that I read. The topics he touches upon—British English confusions in the Massachusetts “nanny case,” the need for a better term for residents of the U.S. (other than the “ugly” Americans), and the struggle for recognition as a true language by American Sign Language users—have been well covered, and anyone who pays attention to language news will have already heard much, if not all, of what they want to know about these topics. Perhaps I have an information fatigue problem (to coin a euphemism for “I read too much”) but after reading this book I didn’t feel as though I’d learned anything I didn’t know before—with one notable exception, the chapters on Canadianisms and Canadian dictionaries. Richler is funny and pragmatic in discussing the narrowing differences between American and Canadian English, and goes further than the stereotypical eh? in describing the differences that remain.
Contributing to my feelings of déjà lu were the frequent cites of other authors and their works about English, including Richard Lederer, Michael Quinion, McCrum, Cran, and MacNeil’s The Story of English, Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue, Robert Claiborne, Thomas Cable, etc. With all the citing going on, I was more than a little disappointed that there wasn’t a bibliography. I was also disappointed not to find sources to back up statements such as “Slang is used and created much more by males than by females.” I’d be willing to bet that female slang is written or otherwise recorded less often, thus accounting for any perceived discrepancy in frequency. Without a bibliography or notes, it’s more difficult to figure out the date of the quote that follows: “[g]irls generally learn the standard, even the technical, words before they learn the slang that the boys, contrariwise, take in with every association.” [from the Dictionary of Slang, edited by J.S. Farmer and W.E. Henley—a little digging turned up 1966—which explains a lot, at least to me!]
A few minor quibbles: Richler says “Had Middle English not been tampered with, we would not now enjoy the majesty of Shakespeare.” It’s an interesting philosophical question as to whether Shakespeare would have been Shakespeare no matter what language he was born speaking, isn’t it? Also, the entire chapter on the Clinton/ Lewinsky terminology debate won’t age well, if it isn’t already past its expiration date. The chapter on the definition of sexual harassment was also unnecessarily glib, concentrating on horror stories at the expense of any discussion as to when language constitutes harassment and when it does not.
All of my criticisms (well, most of them anyway) are blunted by the belated realization, halfway through, that I was not this book’s intended audience. This is a book for the beginning English language dabbler, a great jumping-off point, and a funny, engaging introduction. It’s not a book for hardened language roués or the been-there-done-that English usage veteran. Give it to your niece or nephew for their birthday (hide a check in the middle for added enjoyment) and with any luck, kindle a lifelong interest in language. Suggest that your book group read it. Recommend it to your local librarian. But it may not make your permanent reference shelf.
Erin McKean
EX CATHEDRA: Intolerable Intolerance, Redux
In Volume 1, Number 3 of VERBATIM, Laurence Urdang, in an article entitled “An Intolerant View of Intolerance” wrote:
“I consider myself—as, I am sure, everyone regards himself—a tolerant human being: I try to avoid prejudice in all things. Yet I must confess to a seemingly uncorrectable, irrepressible foible: I am intolerant of intolerance, especially when it comes to language.”
If they are still accepting new members in the ranks of language intolerance intolerators, you can sign me up as well. Nothing is as irksome as to be forced, (wearing a polite smile, rapidly souring to a grimace) to listen to someone’s tirade, rant, or polemic against “today’s English.” “No one knows how to speak the King’s English anymore,” they say (ignoring more than 200 years of language democracy). They complain about grammar (or, if writing or chatting online, usually “grammer”), they complain about spelling, they complain about pronunciation (usually “accent”), they complain about sunspots (no,wait, that’s something else)—you get the idea. And, even more irritating, I’m expected to grab their bright banner and run with it. “Language changes!” I say brightly. “Did you know that nice used to mean ‘stupid’?” Or else I sympathize: “Yes, quite terrible, but what can you do?”
Why don’t I fall in with the ranters? Why am I not correcting the speech of those around me (however tempting it might be) and writing letters to the Chicago Tribune, seeing as how their writers are incapable of distinguishing discreet from discrete? It’s not because I have a temperate and forgiving nature—for instance, I think that those who throw lit cigarette butts out of car windows should be shot, or at the very least set on fire—and it’s not because I’m resigned to a future where our children and grandchildren communicate with grunts or exclusively by e-mail. I haven’t joined in with the English-is-disintegrating polemicists for several very good reasons.
Perhaps the weakest reason not to spew corrections at every turn is that I am as certain as I can be that my English is not Fowler-perfect. Being a card-swiping member of the electronic age (q.v. MTV generation, Generation X) I know that some of the finer subtleties escape me. I think I know the rules, it’s just that they just don’t fire all the time. Call it cowardice, but the easiest way to put your own utterances under intense scrutiny is to toss off a thoughtless public correction of someone else’s. Call it McKean’s Law: Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error.
Another reason not to go around citing language offenders, at least verbally, is pragmatic. Bluntly, some prisoners can be rehabilitated, and some cannot. If you believe that the person you have the itch to correct really wants to know their errors and learn from them, go ahead. If not, you’re risking a punch in the nose or worse. (Maybe this is not a problem in the more lightly armed U.K., but here in the concealed-carry U.S., I hesitate to tell strangers in line at Wal-Mart that they should say “fewer bullets” and not “less bullets.”)
Caught up in the glow of your own erudition (everyone loves to catch a mistake!) it is easy to forget that no one loves to be caught in a mistake. Correcting someone’s English, unless they have specifically asked you to, can be insulting. (N.B. I hereby give all VERBATIM readers license to correct me at any time, by phone, mail, e-mail, or in person.) Your correction implies (however rightly) that they are stupid, uneducated, or at the very least, careless. Unless you intend to insult your correctee, such personal corrections—or even minor corrections in print—should be used very sparingly. It’s a matter both of politeness and Do-As-You-Would-Be-Done-By.
Such corrections (although we don’t talk about this too much in the U.S., outside of a few small-circulation magazines) smack of elitism and classism. We’re big believers of the perfectibility of persons here in the New World, and we don’t like to admit that some may be handicapped by their socioeconomic circumstances, education level, or even their natural gifts. But when these corrections are made, allowances are seldom made for these disadvantages, since we “know” that everyone has an equal chance to pull their own language up by its bootstraps. It’s better to stop a minute and think of the circumstances of the speaker or writer before butting in with an “Excuse me . . .” or running for notepaper and a stamped envelope.
Now, I know that VERBATIM readers, being a polite and mannerly bunch, don’t go around correcting total strangers (or even, for the most part, their own relatives) and neither do they fire off letters to the newspaper and popular magazines unless the entire meaning of a statement is changed or unclear because of a misusage. And certainly VERBATIM readers don’t make a point of criticizing people for entirely discredited usage shibboleths, such as the fatal sentence-ending preposition or the dreaded split infinitive. (Just wanted to make that perfectly clear.) VERBATIM readers merely clip the most hilarious misusages, giggling quietly, and slip them in an envelope to me, to enliven VERBATIM with SIC! SIC! SIC!s.
Perhaps the most important reason to restrain rampant criticism is because (and it has taken me a long time to accept this) I like that “bad English” exists.
I don’t especially like hearing most of it, and I don’t especially like reading most of it, and I especially don’t like being guilty of producing any of it, but how boring would reading, viewing, and listening be without it? A tedious flat sameness, going on forever. You might as well be reading traffic signs, listening to a radio weather report. “Bad English,” including under that broad heading so much of the regional, dialectal, and the speaker’s own quirks, gives us so much more to go on than the textbook “Good English” held up as the ideal to emulate. All “Bad English” speakers are bad in their own way, but the vast majority of “Good English” speakers, because of limited vocabulary, for the most part, are good in the same way.
Also, most importantly, if it wasn’t for bad English (as the song goes) there soon wouldn’t be any English at all. Bad English, with all its misusages, mispronunciations, and outright errors, is the cauldron where the new is formed. Every word in English, except perhaps the most obsolete that were left by the wayside long ago (now tourist traps, for the most part), has been changed by the mouths and pens of those speakers and writers who thought the word was fit to use. The vast web of English has broken strands here and there, but the whole remains strong, and in the meantime the broken strands are being woven back in—not repaired, never repaired, but rewoven.
Insisting on this particular era’s “Good English” exclusively, for everyone, forever and ever amen, would be stultifying and ultimately the death of the language. Sure, we can put fingers in dikes and shore up the bits of the walls that are most precious to us, but it’s a hopeless and ultimately unrewarding task. Better to insist on clarity of thought and fight bad style, than to fight little battles over bad usage.
Verbal Analogies Answers
1. Platyrrhinian
2. Prothonotary
3. White(smith)
4. Glyptotheca
5. Curtilage
6. Salade
7. Rotula
8. Lagostoma
9. Milvine
10. Sciatheric
11. Acadian
12. Tocsin
13. Quasimodo (Sunday)
14. Rogation (Sunday)
15. Spraint
16. Laetare (Sunday)
17. Karttikeya
18. Lagado
19. Mods
20. Sanjaksherif (Mohammed)
Answers to Anglo-American Crossword No. 81
Across
1. GEMSTONE (anag.)
5. S(CR)EAM
10. UN(IT)E
11. ME(A + TEA)TER
12. METAL (mettle hom.)
13. DETOURING (anag.)
14. TRIG + GERMAN
17. BASS (base hom.)
19. VISA (hid.)
20. ATMOSPHERE (anag.)
23. MILES + TONE
25. TULLE (tool hom.)
27. OPERATIVE (rev.)
28. PRIZE (2 defs.)
29. ENTREE (hid.)
30. E(YES)IGHT
Down
1. GOURMET (anag.)
2. MO(I)ST
3. THE(O + LOG)Y
4. NO+MAD
6. C(HER)UB
7. EXTRICATE (anag.)
8. MIR+AGES
9. SAiNT + IAGO
15. IN + SOLVE + NT
16. RETROFIT (anag.)
18. EPITAPHS (anag.)
19. VA + MOOSE
21. sEVEREST
22. ESTATE (anag.)
24. ENEMY (hid. rev.)
26. fLYING
Verbal Analogies
Dr. P.A. Pomfret
1. Long, narrow : Leptorrhinian :: Broad, Thick : ? (13)
2. Cival : Papal :: Registrar : ? (12)
3. Iron : Black :: Tin : ? (5)
4. Books : Bibliotheca :: Sculpture : ? (11)
5. Gristle : Cartilage :: Grounds of a House : ? (9)
6. Cold vegetable dish : Salad :: Rounded helmet : ? (6)
7. Knee-cap : Patella :: Knee-cap : ? (6)
8. Hare-lip : Chiloschisis :: Hare-lip ? (9)
9. Swallows : Hirundine :: Kites : ? (7)
10. Diphtheria : Diphtheric :: Sundials : ? (10)
11. Sumerian : Accadian :: Nova Scotian : ? (7)
12. Soft leather shoe : Moccasin :: Alarm-bell : ? (6)
13. 4 : 1 :: Cantate : ? (9)
14. 1 : 4 :: Low : ? (11)
15. Deer, hare : Fumet :: Otter : ? (7)
16. Easter : Cantate :: Lent : ? (7)
17. Wisdom and good luck : Ganesha :: War : ? (10)
18. France : Paris :: Balnibarbi : ? (6)
19. Motorcycles : Scooters :: Rockers : ? (4)
20. Horse : Al Borak :: Banner : ? (12)
Anglo-American Crossword No. 81
Compiled by Pamela Wylder
Across
1. Jewel song: “Meet in a Storm” (8)
5. Mark takes credit for Wes Craven movie (6)
10. Italy invading a French city (5)
11. Non-vegetarian beat consuming a beverage (9)
12. Iron or steel strength is pronounced (5)
13. Buggy got ruined taking the backroads (9)
14. Precise European shooter (10)
17. They say first coat of paint is a deep tone (4)
19. Yugoslav is arrested carrying American credit card (4)
20. Bananas mother ape‚s feeling (10)
23. Davis‚s musical pitch is something truly memorable (9)
25. Sound implement for netting (5)
27. Musical drama about post office counter agent (9)
28. Set value upon something taken by force (5)
29. Comment re effectively displaying main course (6)
30. Number of Ivy League schools maintaining affirmative vision (8)
Down
1. Food-lover developed more gut (7)
2. Humid nearly all around island (5)
3. People maintaining old journal for religious studies (8)
4. Nonstop traveler is not so sore (5)
6. Baseball player hugging her sweet child (6)
7. Release text Erica edited (9)
8. Soviet space station exhibits signs of maturing visions (7)
9. Holy man eliminating one famous villain in capital city . . . (8)
15. . . . broke in to explain New Testament (9)
16. Design change for trite novel (8)
18. Words of tribute from happiest drunk (8)
19. Lodge members supporting Veteran‚s Administration disappear (7)
21. Heading away from most forbidding mountain (7)
22. Degree of interest in broken tea set (6)
24. Letters from retreating infantrymen enrage the opposition (5)
26. Resting topless on the wing (5)
Internet Archive copy of this issue
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Leathers is the generic term for SM-related clothing, in this case a leather shirt, vest and black denim jeans. Leathers can also indicate a chain harness, a jockstrap and a smile, or any other combination that you can think of. Colors is the term used for the backpatch worn on a leather vest. It denotes one’s organizational affiliation. Colors can also consist of club pins or a club t-shirt. ↩︎
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SM 101 is the term used when giving the “we’re safe, sane, and consensual, and we live right next door” talk to vanilla people. These talks always emphasize how safe, cuddly, and friendly SM people and practices are, and usually involve much flourishing of suede whips and pieces of fur as examples of the kinds of equipment used. While these talks are always technically true, they always seem to leave out the fact that the chief fun in doing SM is in being naughty. As a friend of mine once said after going to a talk on lesbian history, “From the way they talk, you’d believe it was nothing more than a political movement, and didn’t involve sex at all.” ↩︎
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Leatherman is a term denoting gay and bisexual men who like wearing leather for sexual please and/or doing SM. There are leathermen who only wear rubber but enjoy spankings, and there are leathermen who like to dress up and are horrified if someone wants to tie them up. Leatherfolk and leatherpeople tends to refer to SM people in general. Straight people usually say that they are “into the Scene,” which sounds so much more circumspect. ↩︎
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For the edification of European-Americans reading this article, I am now going to reveal a painful truth. Most of the people of color who are my informants have told me that when they were growing up, they were told by friends and relatives that white people were all “try-sexuals,” i.e., they would try anything in bed. In other words, they were seen as the sole source and receptacle of sexual perversion in the universe. I myself have actually heard black people claim that black homosexuality is caused by white men seducing black men. Fortunately, most of my POC informants no longer believe this nonsense, but in many cases this canard has made coming out as gay, into leather, or both, impossible. ↩︎
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While the physiological effects can be excruciating arousing—see, e.g., the veiled reference to orgasm in Melville’s Billy Budd—choking, also known as breath control, is considered by most of the SM community to be so dangerous and far out that they rank it in a special category: edgeplay. Edgeplay includes any activity that could lead to physical or emotional trauma, or even death. Most practitioners will not even discuss edgeplay in front of novices or tourists (newcomers or curiosity-seekers) for fear of someone getting hurt or getting some very strange ideas about regular practice and safety protocols. Some practitioners even believe that edgeplay shouldn’t be discussed or practiced at all. ↩︎
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A switch is a person who, depending on the situation, may be willing to play as either a dominant or a submissive in an SM scenario. ↩︎
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A perfect example of this exists in Spanish. Standard Spanish words novio and novia literally translate as “future spouse” or “affianced one.” There is no word for “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” in the American English sense. This is because, as a Spanish-speaking friend told me, love relationships between young persons of the opposite sex were expected to lead, until recently, straight to marriage. Card stores in East Harlem have boyfriend and girlfriend cards in the English-language section, but the novio/noviacards tend to be more serious in tone than their English near-equivalents. ↩︎
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An illustration of how this works out is found in the fact that if a literate native of Beijing were in a Cantonese restaurant, he might have trouble chatting with. the waiter, but would have no trouble ordering what he wanted to eat by pointing to the items he had chosen on the menu. ↩︎
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It must be borne in mind that this kind of “singing” does not require musical talent—it is merely the same kinds, of shifts in, tone and emphasis that Western people use to provide such things as emotion or emphasis. ↩︎
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The Chinese system of writing originated so long ago that in many cases, the connection between the meaning of the radical and the word it is supposed to categorize is not readily apparent. For example “tree” as a radical is used to provide a clue as to what category the entire word belongs. Most of these are reasonable enough—”apple tree,” “plum tree,” and the like—but some, among them “machine” and “building of several stories” don’t seem to fit, until we reflect that when the characters were first invented, it is likely that wheelbarrows and simple carts, invariably made of wood, were about the only machines around, and a. building of several stories, also built of wood, was considered to be a marvel of ingenuity. ↩︎
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Counting brush strokes has its own set of rules, but let’s not get into that. ↩︎
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That’s what the dictionary says. but as a categorizer its meaning is sometimes extended to include “living creatures difficult to categorize.” (The same categorizer is used for “frog,” “oyster,” and many others.) Again, the Chinese system of writing originated long, long before anybody thought of classifying living things according to phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species—it is likely that the ancient Chinese tended to concentrate their attention on animals that were either glamorous—dragons and tigers or were obviously useful to man, and gave scant attention, to those deemed to be of merely academic interest. ↩︎