VOL XXVI, No 3 []

Skip To The Loo: Loo in Its (Indo-) European Context

Anatoly Liberman, University of Minnesota

What a pity that loo is not a Hittite or a Middle High German word! Its origin would then be crystal clear. In Hittite, l¯a lu means ‘penis’ and was obviously a baby word like Modern German lulle(r)n ‘to piss’ (Friedrich 1934: 210–11). When German children go potty, they go lu-lu. Old words about which nothing is known are often easier to etymologize than the equally impenetrable slang of our time. For example, if nerd were coined in Proto-Germanic, it would naturally fall into the components n-er-d: n-, the negation, er- the root of erth¯o ‘earth’, and the suffix -d, as in Old English (ge)byr-d ‘offspring’, derived from beran ‘to bear (children)’, so ‘not of this earth’. Perhaps loo and nerd even existed in the days of asterisked forms (for loos and nerds certainly did) but have not come down to us. Such things are not inconceivable. As early as 1598, punk ‘whore’ was already known, and in 1603 the even more derogatory punkling turned up. Then punk reemerged in American English in the 1920’s and burst into bloom a few decades ago. Punk may be one of many words with the root p / b + a vowel (+n) +k / g, etc. designating swollen objects, like pig, Puck, bug, etc.

According to the OED, James Joyce was the first to use loo, but the example in Ulysses contains a pun and is not fully transparent. This typically British word was felt by most people who used it before the 1960s to be of recent coinage. Its origin has not been discovered. Every attempt to guess it now starts with retelling Allan S. C. Ross’s 1974 article, in which a number of hypotheses on loo are discussed and rejected. There have been a few more publications: Nixon (1978), Hedberg (1980), Shapiro (1987), Cohen (1991), and Wescott (1991–92), not to mention passing remarks in all kinds of books. Cohen summarizes Ross’s survey but does not come to any conclusions.

The conjectures known at the moment are as follows: loo is from ab-LU-tions; from the sign one (that is, simply a vertical stroke) -zero-zero often seen on the doors of lavatories (zero signifies a toilet bowl or rather a hole in a primitive toilet); from the long-forgotten cry gardyloo, uttered when emptying a chamber pot out the window (from some French phrase like gardez-vouz de l’eau); from French lieu d’aisance, or lieu à l’anglaise, or simply l’eau ‘water’; from the name of the French preacher Le Pere Bourdaloue (1632–1704); from dialectal looard ‘leeward’ (that is, from the part of a small boat where latrines were constructed); from loo = lew ‘shelter’; and from a sporadic French joke: water (short for water closet) suggested Waterloo, and loo is all that is left of the joke. The Waterloo etymology is Ross’s; Cohen prefers loo < looard.

Derivations that are the result of intelligent guessing cannot be verified, and this is the main problem with them. To quote Ross (1974: 313) on ablution: “This word was (is?) used in the British Army to mean the building on a base which contains wash-places and lavatories. The difficulty here is twofold. First, there is no evidence at all that loo was originally an army word. Secondly, loo seems a very peculiar abbreviation of ablutions.” Even if loo were originally an army word and if we agreed that the stressed syllable can represent the entire word in slang, under what circumstances did it emerge? Perhaps loo = Waterloo, perhaps loo = Lou (we have john, the earlier word was jakes, and names like Tante Meier, Tante Lotte ‘lavatory’ are universal: see Katora 1961: 163; so why not Lou?), perhaps loo = (doub)le u (from WC); dubby from doub(le u) existed at one time. Some of these hypotheses are better, others are worse, but how can we choose the best one?

I assume that loo emerged some time during WWI, when Joyce picked it up, and that despite its initial popularity at Oxford and Cambridge it was brought home by discharged British soldiers. Curiously enough, all over Europe words for “(public) toilet” sound rather similar: German Klo < Klosett, French lieu for lieu d’aisance, Dutch Plee (on which see especially Van Haeringen 1968), lamely derived from French petit cabinet (plee has the doublet pleti); German Lokus ‘lavatory’ also begins with lo-. Loo may have been coined to parody some such word, perhaps under the influence of ablutions, perhaps in imitation of lieu. It may have caught the fancy of students who knew the Latin verbs lui and ablui ‘to wash (off)’ and associated them with flushing. Puns on Latin sometimes give rise to pseudolearned words that quickly enter into the standard vocabulary. Soldier humor may have been responsible for the coining of loo, while student humor contributed to its spread. A persuasive etymology of loo will be discovered only if someone succeeds in reconstructing the exact context in which this word was first used.

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References

Cohen, Gerald. 1991. Loo ‘Lavatory” — Compilation of Material but with No Sure Solution Yet. Comments on Etymology 20/8, 2–9.

Friedrich, Johannes. 1934. Zwei kleinasiatische Lallwörter. Glotta 23, 207–13.

Hedberg, Johannes. 1980. Loo. Moderna språk 74, 381-83.

Katara, Pekka. 1961. Die euphemistische Verwendung des Fremdwortes Privet im Deutschen. Zeitschrift für Mundartforschung 28, 154-66.

Nixon, G. 1978. Loo. Lore and Language 2/8, 27-28.

Ross, Alan S. C. 1974. Loo. Blackwood’s Magazine 316, 309-16

[Van Haeringen, Coenraad B.] 1968. Dia, W. C. De nieuwe taalgids 61, 88.

Shapiro, Norman. 1987. Untitled. VERBATIM XIV/2, 16-17.

Wescott, Roger. 1991-92. Loo ‘Toilet” < Loo ‘Shelter’. Comments on Etymology 21/3-4, 28.

[Anatoly Liberman teaches the history of German, Old Icelandic, Gothic, Scandinavian mythology, German folklore, and other courses at the University of Minnesota. He is hard at work on a new etymological dictionary of English.]

Why Bud Weiser Can Sell Cars (But Not Beer)

Shawn M. Clankie, Sapporo, Japan

Brand names today have become serious business. Companies spend great sums paying lawyers to protect their names and they don’t like unauthorized use of the brand. Create a web page immortalizing the lowly Q-Tip and within a matter of days you’ll get a letter from the friendly folks at Cheeseborough-Ponds telling you to cease and desist immediately or they’ll come and shove a Q-Tip, uhhhh, they’ll take legal action.

Companies go to great lengths to stop you from using their name generically (I xerox, therefore I am . . . hated by Xerox.). Shame to the family of the heathen who doth xerox on a Ricoh photocopier. A team of grey-suited lawyers, each a xerox copy of some master lawyer misplaced back at Xerox headquarters, will show up at your door accusing you of Xeroxicide.

Xerox, for its part, publishes admonishing ads in publications aimed at editors and writers who play semantic gymnastics with their name. One well-known ad says “You can’t xerox a xerox on a Xerox.” The ad goes on to tell us about our duty to Xerox to protect its name. It is of no concern to Xerox that because we can use xerox as a noun and as a verb without raising eyebrows that the name is already generic.

Companies also are out to keep us from trampling on the emotive qualities of their name (like the magazines that ran what could only be described as Barbie and Ken’s tribute to the Kama Sutra). Mattel viewed this as a violation of the qualities they believed Barbie and Ken should exhibit, preferring that Barbie and Ken remain celibate. Mattel has gone so far off the deep end that it believes it holds all rights to the name Barbie for commercial purposes and any likeness. In a recent case, Mattel sued the band Aqua over its hit song Barbie Girl.

The next time you get the urge to mace someone, put on a band aid, or to use a kleenex, sit down with a coke and have a look at your dictionary. You probably won’t find any of your favorite generic brands. The large conglomerates, parent companies of many well-known brands, write freqeunt letters pressuring lexicographers to remove the generic forms of brand names from the dictionaries. Well-known lexicographer Sidney Landau writes of the case of band aid mysteriously ‘missing’ several of its generic uses (such as a band-aid remedy) from the Merriam-Webster dictionary. He writes, “How can it be that the Merriam-Webster, Inc., which boasts of 13 million citations, has insufficient documentation to include these and many other comparable senses?”

For fear of inadvertently provoking trademark owners, dictionaries now include disclaimers to limit any responsibility for the inclusion of a generic brand name amidst their pages.

So why is it that a car dealership in Beloit, Wisconsin, named Bud Weiser can sell cars without Anheuser-Busch siccing the Clydesdales on him? While Anheuser-Busch would probably love to be able to shut Mr. Weiser down permanently, they can’t. Yes, Anheuser-Busch controls the Budweiser brand name in the United States. They do not, however, own the name outright. Proprietary laws allow for only limited ownership of the name. This allows the company to stop other companies from making Budweiser beer (except for a brewery in the Czech Republic, but that’s the skeleton in Anheuser-Busch’s own closet), or from overtly damaging the name through corporate misuse. But, it is not copyright. Copyright is a level of ownership over the unique combination of words and images, most often granted to published materials. Companies don’t always distinguish between the two, and don’t want consumers to either. They would prefer you believe them when they say, “Stop misusing our name!”. So, as long as Mr. Weiser doesn’t start giving away a free case of Bud with every test drive, then there is little that Anheuser-Busch can do about it.

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Links

The Q-Tip tribute page can be found at

http://www.bway.net/~you/qtip.html.

Anheuser-Busch’s attempts to stop the Czech Budweiser can be found by clicking on the information page at http://www.budvar.cz/oldsite/english/index.html

The Bud Weiser car dealership is on-line at

http://www.budweiserbeloit.com/

[Dr. Shawn M. Clankie is a linguist specializing in naming issues and the law. He teaches in the Institute of Language and Culture Studies at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan.]

EPISTOLA {James Olson}

Clive Exton inquired (VERBATIM XXVI/2, Spring 2001) if there is a word meaning “ignorant and proud of it.”

I do not know if there is a single word. Having listened to Southern politicians, Chicago aldermen and hillbilly preachers, I would suggest the phrase “aggressively ignorant.” Not only do they not know anything, they do not want to learn anything.

[James Olson, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin]

Re: VERBATIM XXVI/2, Spring 2001:

1. (EPISTOLAE, p. 19)”Does anyone know a word meaning ‘ignorant and proud of it’?”

I don’t, but I would suggest a neologism: egnorant (ego + ignorant). One could even spell it eggnorant to emphasize both contributions.

2. (“An Alphabetaphile’s Outrage”, p. 9) The author bemoans the lack of names for letters in English. Can anyone tell me the name for the &oslash:?

3. (HORRIBILE DICTU) Having found in the flyer accompanying the latest VERBATIM,

“We’ll choose one respondent to receive a new desk dictionary of their choice [emphases mine],”

must one accept the definition of their transforming before one’s eyes into “his or her?”

[Paul J. Nuccio, Lakewood, Washington]

[Re: 1. Thank you! 2. It’s called the “oslash.” 3. Yes. —Ed.]

Confessions of a Pert Aleck

Marilyn Knapp Litt, Chicago, Illinois

As a young reader, it bothered me that I heard the word crick every day, but only saw the word creek in print. Creek was a word I never heard. I couldn’t understand why people wrote using one set of words and spoke using another.

I didn’t know it then, but in Grant County Indiana we had a different way of speaking. It was not like the dreadful “kin-tuckee” accent, which we made fun of because we talked better; but it would keep you off radio or television just the same. Every “a” was spang flat. One-syllable words tended to keep going a whole lot longer than they did in the mouths of people from elsewheres. No one said y’all, but everyone said you all with that hesitation between the two words that placed us well north of Mason and Dixon’s boundary line.

We also had a specialized vocabulary. The local supermarket featured mangos in their print advertisements. I learned they were “green bell peppers” to the rest of the world while leafing through seed packets at the dime store. We ate Spanish hotdogs instead of chili dogs. The first snowfall of the season was usually a skift of snow, not quite enough to cover the grass.

My father had yet another way of talking. He was raised in a “holler” in West Virginia and his strong regional accent never conceded to our puny Hoosier dialect. Wash always had an r in the middle. I successfully resisted this in later years and am usually able to speak of Washington, D.C. without special effort, but the extra r in warsh rag is almost irrepressible.

He used mysterious words, some of which revealed their meanings after I was grown. I made fun of him for saying zinc for ‘sink’ not knowing that his grandmother’s funny looking gray sink with a pump beside it took its nomenclature from the element that composed it. My father was always having a noddy and I understood him well enough when he would say to me “I’ve a noddy you’re lookin’ for trouble,” but I couldn’t even find it in the big dictionary put together from supplements sold each week at the grocery store one summer. Re-reading “The Red Badge of Courage” recently, I came across “I’ve an idee” and as the Brits say, “the penny dropped.” I had always read idee and classified it as one of those words that appeared only in print. Now I sounded it out loud and heard my father’s everyday noddy. I have yet to find a reference to his pert aleck, which must be close kin to smart aleck, but I know I am one.

Regionalisms like punkin and liberry were drilled out of me by grade school teachers and somewhere along the way I was shamed out of saying terlet when I wanted the warshroom. These are not the easy choices they may sound; using classroom grammar on the school bus can double the length of the ride home if you become a target for putting on airs, but I was fairly impervious to teasing. I gave as good as I got because I never heard anything as cruel as I heard at home from my own father—pert aleck was the nicest thing he said about me. Words intrigued me, but they had no power over me.

I didn’t pay too much attention to how my mongrel accent sounded until I moved to Chicago where it caused quite a commotion before eventually wearing down to merely an inflection after years without reinforcement. I’m only reminded if I say, “I’m from Chicago,” and the person I’m talking with says emphatically, “You can’t be from Chicago!”

When back home again in Indiana, I used to hear, “Where’d your accent go?” Now when I visit and listen to my younger relatives, they sound, uh, like, you know, like everyone else in the United States.

[Marilyn Knapp Litt retired from the federal government and is now a web content manager for http://www.PreviewPort.com, a literary startup that does author websites.]

EPISTOLA {Marylou S. Williams}

My question for L. Urdang (VERBATIM XXVI/1, Winter 2000):

Am I wrong in remembering the title used in the New Yorker for its bottom-of-the-column squibs as “The Ubiquitous whom”?

Great article; we sharte the horror and the many new barbarisms!

[Marylou S. Williams, Wallingford, Connecticut]

EPISTOLA {Burling Lowrey}

A biographical note at the end of Barry Baldwin’s “As the Word Turns” reads: Barry Baldwin’s last piece for VERBATIM was “Where Do They Come From?” in XXVI/1.

Unless Mr. Baldwin has been declared persona non grata by VERBATIM, I believe that hte note should have read: Barry Baldwin’s latest piece for VERBATIM was, etc., etc.

[Burling Lowrey, Washington, D.C.]

[Mr. Baldwin is certainly not a non grata persona around here. Thank you for the correction! —Ed.]

Medical Malapropisms: What Doctors Say, What Patients Hear

Roger Smith, Portland, Oregon

Ten years ago my wife, a gastroenterologist, came home with a story that started this whole collection. During an interview, patient complained that she had suffered terribly from cowbumpers for some years.

“Cowbumpers?” my wife asked.

“Yes, cowbumpers,” the patient replied.

Utterly mystified, my wife questioned her further but could not elicit a clear description of the problem. The patient, plainly disconcerted at the questions, grew more and more annoyed. Finally, in exasperation, she exclaimed, “We’re talking corruption, honey.”

My wife has considerable facility with language. Suddenly, she knew—carbuncles.

Since then I have collected similar mingle-mangles of medical terminology. Here are the best of them. I have named this peculiar and widespread phenomenon the medical malapropism. Malapropism, a ludicrous confusion of similar-sounding words, is derived from one of the most wonderfully scatterbrained characters of English drama, Mrs. Malaprop. Throughout Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775), she illustrates, blithely and perfectly, that a little learning can go a wrong way. As her niece notes with exasperation, Mrs. Malaprop jumbles vocabulary because her vanity makes “her deck her dull chat with hard words which she don’t understand.” But these hard words have effect: Her “oracular tongue” often produces marvels, as when she calls the hero “the pineapple of perfection.” It’s but one “nice derangement of epitaphs” of the many she produces.

Mrs. Malaprop contributed an early example of the medical malapropism, one that illustrates the typical pattern. In the play’s opening act she complains despairingly that her niece “gives me the hydrostatics to such a degree.” It’s a nice try. Hydro, water, and statics, which apparently suggests something stationary to her, comes close to her intended meaning—swelling from the collection of water in the body. She ignores the common word of the day, dropsy, and chooses a technical term. Wrongly. It’s close, but hydrostatics really refers to the mathematical study of forces and pressure in liquids. The correct medical term of the day was hydropsy (now edema). Therein lies the humor: a near miss in sound and a big miss in meaning.

Medical misnomers have been around far longer than Mrs. Malaprop, though. They are akin to the false analysis, or folk etymology, that has permanently changed some words. For example, during the Middle Ages, angenægl, which meant “painful nail,” turned into hangnail, probably because ange fell out of common usage, and hang, very close in pronunciation, seemed more appropriate: Painful nails often are painful because little strips of cuticle are loose—hanging, even. In this example, like Mrs. Malaprop’s malapropism, it’s a little change in pronunciation and a definite change in connotation.

That is how medical malapropisms are usually created. A doctor, nurse, or someone who understands medical terminology uses a term that is unfamiliar to a patient. It doesn’t make sense and is hard to remember. So, often unconsciously, the patient accommodates the term’s sounds to a word or phrase that is familiar. The malapropism is a hybrid of what the doctor said and what the patient could make out of it.

The miscommunications occur often because of all the sciences medicine sees the most frequent and most intimate contact between professionals and the public. The fruits of those miscommunications aren’t always malapropisms. In fact, not all the items in this collection are malapropisms, strictly speaking. There are neologisms, dialect pronunciations, euphemisms, portmanteaus, homophones, onomatopoeia, and even puns. But they all have malapropos effects, almost always unintentionally and frequently hilariously. True, the occasions of some of these malapropisms involve serious illnesses, pain, and misery, when even the most intelligent, well-schooled patients are not likely to be at their sharpest; still, one needn’t laugh at the pain or the patient to appreciate the comedy of an error. Besides, among the best malapropism are some that, inadvertently and delightfully, characterize medical conditions more fittingly than the official medical terms themselves.

Each entry shows the malapropism and includes a short commentary on its origin, context, source, usage, or meaning. The commentary also gives, in italics, the correct form of the medical term that the malapropism derives from. A suggestion: Cover up the commentary as you read the malapropisms and try to guess the original medical terms before reading the commentaries. You’ll be surprised how often you are right, which goes to show how closely the malapropisms replicate sound, if not sense. And you may be surprised how often you have no clue. I still puzzle over a couple.

When you do decipher correctly, you’ll feel that flash of sure knowledge that gave my wife such pleasure with cowbumpers. By the way, I would be pleased to hear from readers with yet more medical malapropisms at rsmith@OregonVOS.net.

Ammonia—A true malapropism. Ammonia sometimes gets confused with pneumonia by patients. Janitors and doctors know better.

Aneurosis bluejacks—This sounds like a mental ailment of doleful sailors, possibly caused by aneurysms. Amaurosis fugax is a sudden temporary blindness in anyone.

Artificial insemination—That this could be used when artificial resuscitation was intended may be a Freudian slip, but in any case it is worthy of Mrs. Malaprop. Reported by Philip Norman, an English novelist and culture commentator, in Your Walrus Hurt the One You Love (1985).

Atrial tribulations—Atrial fibrillations defintely are a tribulation, and a serious one. Reported by Scott Kimball at personalwebs.myriad.net/kimball/glossary.htm.

Barium enemy—Anyone who has had a barium enema might think this malapropism more apropos. It is a large cocktail of liquid barium that must be swallow quickly and helps gastroenterologists diagnosis problems in the gut. “Barium enemy” might have started as a wry pun, but physicians and nurses claim to have heard it from patients who, under the circumstances, lacked the wits for punning.

Blood clod/blood clog—Neither is the official term, but near enough misses for blood clot as never-you-mind.

Blood-shocked eyes—Were it intentional, this might be an accurate term for what comes from watching too many action-adventure or horror films in sequence, in which case one’s eyes can in fact become blood-shot.

Blue roses—The poignant name that the gentlemen caller in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie uses for Laura Wingfield, a ruinously shy girl crippled by pleurosis.

BO patient—A nurse overheard this abbreviation malapropism in a waiting room. Maybe the speaker was dyslexic, for she was waiting for an OB[GYN] (obstetrics-gynecology) specialist, not an aroma therapist.

Bow and arrow test—According to Norman, English children with leukemia use this euphemism for bone marrow test, a painful, frightening procedure.

Bronickles—A northern English dialect pronunciation of bronchials, as in “I’m having a bit of trouble with by bronickles.” An instance of metathesis, the transposition of sounds.

Brown kitus—An emergency room doctor heard this coinage from a woman who was suffering severe bronchitis. He assured her that brown was the very worst color of kitus. Reported in MD Magazine.

Cadillacs—Upwardly mobile British may have Cadillacs in their eyes instead of BMWs, but when they complain about them to physicians, they mean cataracts, according to Norman.

Careful hematoma—Doctors must indeed be careful with a cephalhematoma, an accumulation of blood in the head of a newborn baby, because with proper care the condition clears up on its own over several months.

Catholics—A family practitioner claims he once had a patient who, during a routine medical history, said, “I had Catholics removed from both eyes.” Small ones, presumably. It was his cataracts that should have been removed.

Cerebral enema—A sure way to clear the head of nonsense, but this procedure unfortunately doesn’t exist. Cerebral edema is fluid accumulation in the head—water on the brain.

Chicken pops—Not a frozen treat for the summertime but a common mistake, especially among children, for chicken pox.

Cistercian method—A recherché mistake for the cesarean method of birthing a child by cutting through the abdomen into the womb. This emergency procedure was named after Julius Caesar, who reportedly entered the world via one. Cistercian monks have other nuts to crack. Reported by Norman.

Contraptions—A malapropism for contractions, an understandable slip from a woman who was trying to endure them. Reported by Kimball.

Coppertone syndrome—Dr. Gerald Weissmann, editor of MD Magazine, discussed this malady in a 1991 editorial. It sounds as if it is epidemic along the Southern California coast, the skin trauma of excessively laid-back behavior. Carpal tunnel syndrome reflects just the opposite, a wrist injury from working hard at repetitive tasks. A commuter’s variant, carpool tunnel syndrome, is unattested. However, MD Magazine did cite a shoemaker’s version, cobble tunnel.

Coroner’s conclusion—Which may in fact devolve from a coronary occlusion, or plugged artery leading to the heart.

Corroded arteries—A cardiologist reported hearing this during a history and assumed the patient meant occluded carotid arteries. If so, it’s as much a portmanteau as a malapropism.

Cream of Jesus—According to a letter in MD Magazine, this came from a coach, who meant Kremer-gesic balm, used for limbering stiff, sore muscles in athletes.

Describe—A frequent mistake for prescribe, liable to cause misunderstanding if used in such contexts as “The doctor described an enema for me.”

Eggs on me—One instance of this charming, imagistic malapropism came from a six-year-old who told her physician she didn’t want to get it from her big brother, who, it turned out, had eczema.

Erotic aneurysm—Not a poetic trope for an erection but an aortic aneurysm, a dangerous bulge in the aorta.

Erotic toes—Few things are less erotic than necrotic toes.

Fireballs of the Eucharist—This malapropism is among the most famous among physicians, many of whom claim to have heard it from patients. It does not, of course, refer to spicy communion wafers. Fibroids of the uterus is a common affliction of benign fibrous tumors.

Fish in ano—”In ano” is medical Latin for “in the anus,” a most inconvenient place for a fish. Also an inconvenient, painful place for a fissure, which the patient who used this multilingual malapropism had. Reported by Norman.

Flea bites—A picturesque but vagrant malapropism for phlebitis, the inflammation of blood vessels. Reported by Kimball.

Frolickin' tubes—Italian anatomist Gabriello Fallopio first described the fallopian tubes in the sixteenth century, and they were named after him. Patients may insist, with some justice, that they are involved in frolicking, but it is a malapropism nonetheless.

Gunnery—A true malapropism for gonorrhea. This may be a double-entendre, cousin to son of a gun, which some etymologists believe came from sexual exploits in the old British Navy, although there is no direct evidence that “gunnery” is such.

Heinous hernia—This malapropism and its cousins cited below are the most common group heard by doctors. That’s because hiatus (or hiatal) hernias are a widespread and annoying affliction: Part of the upper stomach slips up around the esophagus and above the diaphragm, which can cause a person to erp food into the esophagus (gastroesophageal reflux).

High-heel hernia—Hiatal hernia. Wearing high heels doesn’t cause one. The fashion preference is, at best, a fellow traveler.

Hypogloxinia—An ardent gardener produced this malapropism. She was talking about hypoglycemia, abnormally low blood sugar concentrations, not a scarcity of bell-shaped flowers.

Immaculate generation—This sounds like a variant for the immaculate conception of Christ in Christian theology. It has no place in medical jargon. Macular degeneration is a leading cause of the impairment or loss of eyesight in the elderly.

Incompetence—According to Kimball, a malapropism for incontinence, and a rather judgmental one at that.

Infantigo—A common malapropism for impetigo, a contagious, pustulous skin disease. In my experience it was a denizen of elementary schools, rather than the crib. Reported by Kimball.

Information—A common substitution for inflammation, as in “Doctor, I think I have information of the brain,” which just may qualify as a self-denying assertion.

Intesticles—A dialect pronunciation for testicles. It is not a reference to testes that failed to descend; that is, cryptorchidism, or undescended testes.

Iron fish in my knee—This beautifully extended malapropism, surreal and poetic, comes from iron deficiency anemia.

Junkovitis—This malapropism aptly describes the matter that oozes from the eyes of persons with some eye infections, which was the context for it reported by Kimball. But the apparent model is gingivitis, an infection of the gums.

Margarine headache—This smooth, low-fat headache does not exist. A migraine headache is the worst possible; visual distortions and nausea frequently are part of it.

Mental pause—Norman reported this usage by someone who was speaking malaproposly of menopause.

Nymphasema—A widely word that on the fact of it appears to be a portmanteau reference to a wheezy nymphomaniac, but emphysema is always meant. If the complementary satyrpsoriasis exists, nobody admits to having heard it.

Oedipus tissue—A medical transcriptionist, listening to a surgeon’s post-procedure report, typed, “I cut down through the Oedipus tissue.” Another example of a little knowledge going a wrong, albeit classical, way. The cut went through the adipose tissue, fat, not through the patient’s eyes after he, like King Oedipus of ancient Thebes, had plucked them out and handed them to the surgeon.

Old-timer’s disease/syndrome—Whether this began as a malapropism or a cruel pun is impossible to say, but it quickly became a common jocular reference to Alzheimer’s disease.

Possatorium—A thorough mispronunciation of suppository. The nurse reporting it denied categorically that a possum was in any way involved as the substance or agent for the suppository.

Prostrate gland—A very frequently heard malapropism. Well-educated or not, people regularly use it for the prostate gland. An inflamed or cancerous prostate can indeed make a man prostrate, but the usage virtually never implies that double meaning. It is pure error and so common that the correct pronunciation may retreat into obscurity and rarity.

Quaggles—”My blood quaggles real well. I have no problems with quaggling,” a patient assured a hematologist. It is a delightful coinage, but its overtones of perky little movements (wags and squiggles) does not fit the patient’s meaning. Coagulates does.

Roaches of the liver—Hepatitis, the swelling of the liver from alcoholism or viral infection, eventually causes extensive scarring, known as cirrhosis of the liver. Cockroaches, fancy hairdos, marijuana cigarettes, or cyprinoid fishes have nothing to do with it.

Sick-as-hell anemia—Another example of an inadvertently appropriate malapropism. Sickle-cell anemia is a genetic disease that strikes about 1 in 400 African Americans whose forbears came from West Africa. Defective hemoglobin deforms red blood cells, which can disturb blood flow and cause swelling and ulcers. Patients often die young.

Sixty-five roses—The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation of Bethesda, Maryland, sent out letters soliciting donations and used this poignant malapropism to move readers. According to the letter, it is what children with cystic fibrosis call their disease, which clogs the lungs with mucus and is the leading killer of the young among genetic diseases. A wreathe of sixty-five roses has also been marketed.

Smiling mighty Jesus—Few diseases so terrify parents as spinal meningitis when it strikes their children. It is horrifically painful and often fatal. “Smiling mighty Jesus” is probably an example of taboo-replacement euphemism. Counting cream of Jesus (see above), it is the second instance of impressing Jesus into a malapropism, twice the rate of the nearest competition.

Trigenital neuralgia—This malapropism, with its overtones of a menage à trois, actually substitutes for trigeminal neuralgia, a somewhat mysterious nerve disorder. Intense spasms of pain shoot through the jaw, not the genitals, usually touched off by chewing or brushing teeth.

Umbiblical cord—The nurse who reported this said that the scriptural ties of faith are never under discussion when it is used. The occasion is most often a class for expectant mothers, and the topic is the umbilical cord.

Vertical—”Every time I stand up I get vertical,” the patient told his primary care physician. Who could argue with that? What’s the problem? When the patient stood up to prove the point, he became dizzy. The doctor noted vertigo in the patient’s chart.

Vertical veins—Not all veins run up and down, at least not all the time, but some become varicose veins, the purplish, dying, superficial veins that spider up the legs as people age.

Very close veins—Another example of a surprisingly descriptive malapropism. Easily visible, varicose veins do seem closer to the surface of the skin than do other blood vessels.

X-rated—A frequent substitution for X-rayed. There is very little about an X-ray that is titillating, except possibly to radiologists.

[Roger Smith lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, a physician. He is a freelance writer specializing in science and history.]

CLASSICAL BLATHER: Eponymous Ailments

Nick Humez, argentarius@juno.com

A staple of healing-arts humor is the assertion that all doctors' greatest ambition is to have diseases named after them. As with many folk beliefs, this one contains a grain of truth: An afternoon spent browsing in an encyclopedia of medicine¹ will yield a smorgasbord of eponymous diseases, disorders, and syndromes, of which the following taste is no more than a modest antipasto from a groaning medical board.

It is estimated that as many as one in 300 children may be affected by Asperger’s syndrome,² a disorder in which a child may have well-developed verbal skills but misread or fail to notice social cues and react to them in inappropriate ways. Although documented for over half a century, this disorder has only attracted media attention in the last decade. Indeed, the link between fame of the sufferer and notoriety of the disease seems to be a frequent determinant of public awareness: Few Americans had heard of Hurler’s syndrome—a hereditary enzyme-deficiency which can lead, in the absence of a bone marrow transplant treatment, to mental retardation, heart defects, enlarged spleen and liver, bone deformities, and the grotesque thickening of facial features called gargoylism³—until the recent revelation in a New Yorker profile of media czar Ted Turner that two of his grandchildren have been diagnosed with it.

Very much in the public eye at the turn of the millennium has been Alzheimer’s disease,⁴ affecting one person in 10 over the age of 65 and nearly half of those 20 years older. Alzheimer’s, associated with cerebral plaque formation and a shrinkage of that part of the brain called the hippocampus,⁵ was not formerly distinguished from other forms of senile dementia, once considered a virtually inevitable corollary of growing old. (The adjective “senile” is still used loosely by many speakers to mean “old and gaga.”) But with late-20th-century advances in geriatric medicine coming on the heels of the antibiotic revolution, many more people are living much longer than before, spurring interest in the less tractable diseases of old age: The population of the elderly is now large enough for meaningful statistical study and moreover constitutes a much more formidable bloc of voters and health-care consumers than was the case a half-century ago. Here too, famous sufferers have helped to publicize the malady, including novelist Iris Murdoch and actor/ex-president Ronald Reagan.

Awareness of disease requires overcoming taboos, for the tendency to avoid speaking of a thing lest naming it confirm its reality⁶ is probably nowhere so strong as when dealing with (or denying) issues of morbidity and mortality. It is possible that putting an authoritative face (i.e. that of a scientist-physician credited with discovering or describing it, and thus to a certain extent bringing it under human control) on a disease to a certain extent sanitizes it, especially when its former name carried significant stigma: What was once called mongoloidism is today Down’s syndrome;⁷ leprechaunism is now more politely known as Donohue’s disease,⁸ and leprosy has become Hansen’s disease.⁹ In the course of such reforms, a malady may undergo multiple name changes: Sydenham’s disease used to be called Sydenham’s chorea; but before that, back in the Middle Ages, it was known variously as St. Anthony’s, St. John’s, or Saint Vitus' Dance.¹⁰ While some shifts in medical nomenclature may seem merely euphemistic or cosmetic (terminal for “dying,” or hypomastia for “breasts in need of implants”¹¹), a new name may signal a bona fide shift in attitude: The medicalization of a former vice called “drunkenness” into a disease called “alcoholism” has included the recognition of Korsakoff’s syndrome,¹² characterized by severe confusion and impairment of memory for which the patient compensates by confabulation.¹³

Some medical terms bear double eponyms—Tay-Sachs disease,¹⁴ the Epstein-Barr virus,¹⁵ Cheyne-Stokes respiration,¹⁶ the Carrel-Lindbergh pump¹⁷—perhaps evidence of the increased scrutiny and research funding medicine has received in Western society during the last century. (The phenomenon, however, is by no means limited to the healing arts; Famous comets of the last thirty-five years include Ikeya-Seki, which was discovered simultaneously by two Japanese astronomers and reached perihelion at the end of 1965, and Hale-Bopp, first observed by astronomers Alan Hale of New Mexico and Thomas Bopp of Arizona on July 23, 1995, 19 months before its closest approach to the sun). Of the hyphenated maladies, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease¹⁸ was most in the news last year owing to an outbreak in Great Britain from tainted meat, and resulted in the slaughtering of much livestock, though this agricultural disaster has more recently been overshadowed by the greater calamity of the hoof-and-mouth epidemic.

Many of us have personal favorites among the eponymous ills, some more obscure than others. In my search through Stedman’s I was pleased to find Bright’s disease¹⁹ (a form of glomerular nephritis), Tourette’s syndrome²⁰ (a tic disorder in which, contrary to popular belief, involuntary swearing is actually comparatively rare), and Savage syndrome²¹ (not, as one might think at first glance, a pathology of atavistic aggressive behavior, but rather a failure to menstruate found in women with normally developed ovarian follicles but underdeveloped ovaries, also called resistant ovary syndrome). And two other favorites, eponymous not from life but from letters: Pickwickian syndrome²² (a combination of extreme obesity, accompanied by lethargy and general debility due to hyperventilation, a corollary of the patient’s excess weight) and Proteus syndrome (also known as Elephant Man’s disease),²³ in which growth beyond the normal glandular stimulus produces gigantism of the head and greatly enlarged hands and feet.

Although ailments tend to get named for their discoverers, the microbes which may cause them often get labeled instead by a place of origin, animal host, or both. The Stedman’s Dictionary entries under “virus,” for example, include West Nile virus, Ross River virus, Rift Valley fever virus, St. Louis encephalitis virus, mink enteritis virus, snowshoe hare virus, psittacosis virus (now more often called by its Linnaean name, Chlamydia psittaci, psittacos being Greek for “parrot”), Western equine encephalomyelitis virus, and Swiss mouse leukemia virus.²⁴

Doctors who do not succeed in discovering a new disease may still make their mark by devising a test. Hermann Rorshach, a Swiss psychiatrist (1884–1922) earned lasting fame for his projective psychological test in which the subject looks at ten ink blots and relates what they bring to mind; almost as famous was German bacteriologist August P. von Wassermann, for his test for syphilis. Less well known is the Watson-Schwartz test²⁵ for porphyria, a hereditary disease of the excretory system, among whose sufferers were King George III, and whose symptoms include acute attacks of hypertension, abdominal colic, and psychotic episodes.

Those who are dextrous practitioners rather than astute theorists, on the other hand, may still garner fame by promulgating techniques such as the Pancoast suture²⁶ (a method of joining two edge of an incision by a tongue-in-groove arrangement), or the Gritti-Stokes amputation,²⁷ in which the thigh is severed above the knee but the patella and its front ligaments are retained and folded ove to provide a more durable new end for the femur.

If all else fails in the quest for renown, the ambitious physician can invent a rule of thumb. Clark’s weight rule and Cowling’s rule²⁸ are both (now obsolete) methods of calculating the children’s dose of a medication for which the adult dosage is known: Clark suggested dividing the child’s weight in pounds by 150, and multiplying the resulting fraction by the adult dose; Cowling, on the other hand, took the age of the child at its nearest birthday and divided it by 24, and multiplied the adult dosage by that. Chargoff’s rule²⁹ states that in a DNA molecule, the number of unites of adenine is equal to the number of units of thymine, and likewise the number of units of guanine would be equal to the number of units of cytosine (something of a tautology, given what we now know of the internal structure of DNA). And the Ogino-Knaus rule,³⁰ which states that the time in the menstrual cycle when conception is most likely is at the midpoint, and the least likely time just before and just after a woman’s period, is the basis for the so-called rhythm method of family planning, far better known (thanks to its endorsement by the Roman Catholic Church as the only acceptible, if failure-prone, method of contraception within a sexually active marriage) under the pejorative nickname Vatican Roulette.

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CORRIGENDA

Constant Reader Mat Coward writes, respecting our “Silly Songs” column (VERBATIM XXVI:1, pp. 12-15):

“Here in Britain silly songs have continued to appear—and every now and then to make the singles charts—certainly into the 1990s. They are often associated with holidays (vacations) on the Continent, being popular with (especially) young club-going holidaymakers. Related to all this is the Euro-pop song (typically, entries for the Eurovision Song Contest) which has to be more or less nonsensical in order to appeal across linguistic boundaries; so it will have a few English lyrics of the “I love you baby” type, along with some euphonious nonsense sounds of the oo-bop-aloo variety.

The seminal BBC Radio comedy series The Goon Show (mostly written by Spike Milligan) produced at least two chart hits: “The Ying-Tong Song” and “I’m walking backwards for Christmas.” The former “charted” in the 1950s and the 1970s. In the late 80s or early 90s, writers and performers associated with the TV satirical puppet show Spitting Image entered the charts with a song made up entirely of nonsense lyrics, one silly line after the other, supposedly as an attempt to kill “holiday” songs by means of reductio ad absurdum. Inevitably—a thousand times inevitably; does no-one ever learn?—the song became a bona fide hit, and an even bonier, fidier holiday song.”

HORRIBILE DICTU

Mat Coward, Somerset, Britain.

“I am writing to you as a valued existing inquirer,” began an advertising circular I recently received. This seems to me a great improvement on the previously noted “Dear Valued Customer” salutation, as it suggests that now I don’t even need to spend any money in order to be valued—all I have to do is inquire!

I suppose this use of existing is intended to reassure me that the company hasn’t taken my name at random from the electoral register; that this isn’t junk mail—or that if it is, then at least it’s junk mail that I sort of asked for, so don’t blame them. The reassurance would be more convincing if I had ever heard of the firm before, let alone made contact with it, but never mind—it’s nice to be valued. It’s even nicer to exist.

Not that existence is without its challenges. How do you feel about challenges? I could do without them, myself, but some thrive on them. The founder of a bespoke shoe-making firm in Devon told a newspaper that her craftswomen “make innovative and challenging shoes that enable our customers to make a statement”. Challenging shoes, presumably, would be ones that were difficult to walk in—in which case the customers' statement would be something along the lines of “Next time, I’m going to buy some less innovative shoes”.

An ad in a magazine, for a pocket knife disguised as a credit card, says: “Make no mistake though, this is a formidable knife capable of meeting the challenges of today’s busy lifestyle”. Ah yes, indeed, for what is this life if, full of care, we have no time for stabbing and slashing?

Sportsmen enjoy rising to challenges. After winning the last cricket world cup, Australia’s captain was pleased with the performance of his team: “Warney put his hand up in the semi-final, and yesterday I thought everyone put their hand up.” Perhaps they all wanted to go to the loo? No: an athlete puts his hand up to signify that he is ready and eager to take on any challenges which might arise in his busy lifestyle today.

At the same time, a sportsman must know how to cope with disappointment. After a comprehensive thrashing of the England cricket team, one batsman explained to a reporter that “You’ve got to take positives constantly”. Positives aren’t performance-enhancing drugs, but rather what an earlier generation, prior to the ubiquity of sports psychologists, might have called silver linings. “You’ve got to find positives in all you do,” continued the batsman, and no doubt this is especially important when ­­the ask (the task or target required for victory) is a big ask.

Lately, the ask has shown worrying signs of expanding its meaning. When an electronic scoreboard displayed a message from the management during a pitch invasion at a sports ground, the TV commentator noted: “Please clear the pitch—that’s the ask being flashed up here”.

(This column’s ask, as always, is that readers should send examples of their least favourite horribiles, care of VERBATIM’s usual postal and electronic addresses).

These days, the most popular British word to describe disappointment is gutted. Used sparingly, this term would have considerable impact: on receiving news of a bereavement, for instance, one might well feel as if one’s innards had been torn out. It was less impressive, I felt, when used by a losing contestant on a TV game show, who said, with a shrug and a brave smile, “I’m a little bit gutted, but I’m not very gutted.”

A near contemporary of gutted appears in one of my favourite recent “literallys”. A woman who received an award for her charity work wrote that the honour had “left me literally gobsmacked.” Without the literally, this would have meant that she was astonished. Literally gobsmacked­ obviously, means that she was hit in the mouth—poor reward, one might think, for a lifetime of service to the community.

[Mat Coward’s web page is http:// hometown.aol.co.uk/matcoward/myhomepage/newsletter.html.]

EPISTOLA {Brian Rice}

This evening, I was thinking, as I often do, about moist towelettes.

Well, actually, not about moist towelettes per se, but rather the words moist towelette. That’s a remarkable phrase, I realized, because it is a funny phrase that consists of two words, each of which (moist and towelette) is itself funny.

I think common two-word phrases meeting this criterion are fairly rare. For example, briquet is a funny word, but charcoal isn’t, so charcoal briquet does not fall into this special category.

Needless to say, nougat is funny, and word fandango is funny, but regrettably there is no such thing as a nougat fandango.

In fact, so far I’ve only been able to think of one other example:

Toaster Pastry

So, the brain-teaser: can you think of more such phrases?

Also: I haven’t been able to think of a good name for this category of phrases. I have only had two ideas so far: “moist towelettes” and “toaster pastries.” I bet some VERBATIM reader can do better.

Brian Rice

P.S. To help prime the pump, here is a list of some funny words:

Auntie Bowling

Chaps Dwell

Elapse Fruit

Gary Helm

Insert Jejune (not to mention Jojoba)

Klingon Lemur

Maroon Nasturtium

Obese Paltry

Quagmire Rutabaga

Spackle (as well as its friends Saloon, Spaetzle, Strudel, and Smock)

Tweed Uvula

Vague Woo

Xerography Yak

Zipper

[Suggestions may be sent care of VERBATIM. —Ed.]

AS THE WORD TURNS: Catching Some Zees

Barry Baldwin, Calgary, Alberta

“Thou whoreson zed, thou unnecessary letter”—Shakespeare, King Lear II.2.60.

To adapt the divine Jane, it is a truth universally acknowledged that Americans say Zee, Brits Zed. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.

Despite the above Shakespearean zinger (an 80s-looking word, but first surfacing in Margery Allingham’s 1955 novel Beckoning Lady), Thomas Lye (New Spelling Book, 1667) prescribes Zee, while in 1882 E. A. Freeman (Longman’s Magazine 1, p.94) asserted “In New England it is always Zee; in the South, it is Zed.”

In old English dialects, the letter was variously called Ezod, Izzard, Izzet, and Uzzard—sounds like an acrobat team on Ed Sullivan. A pity these have no American currency—what fun to ask Vanna for an Uzzard on Wheel of Fortune.

Z has engendered orthoepic problems. In medieval manuscripts and early typography, Y and Z sounds were identically represented, with predictable confusion—this is why Reginald Hill’s detective Dalziel has forever to point out that he is pronounced Diyel.

Samuel Johnson, introducing Z as “found in the Saxon alphabets, but read in no word originally Teutonic,” gives only about 20 words, mainly (apart from Zeal and compounds) Greek-derived scientific terms (notably Zoo-compounds) and various foreign imports, e.g. Zechin (Venetian coin), Zeodary (spicy plant—ever used by Emeril?).

Talking of Greek, Zeta (6th letter in the Hellenic alphabet) favours Zee.

John Updike (More Matter, 1999, p.457) lists 25 Z-words from Tibor Fischer’s The Thought Gang (1994). Five don’t make the OED—VERBATIM readers, you know what your homework is: Zaotar, Zonitid, Zmudzin, Zyzzogetons, and my favourite, the verb Zephaniah. Deuteronomy 2.20 imparts further Biblical gorgeosity: “Giants dwelt therein in old time; and the Ammonites call them Zamzummins.”

From Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of the Underworld (1950), Zabist (policeman), Zex (sucker), Zib (nincompoop), Znees (frost—18th cent.), Zook (clapped-out whore—Gadzooks!), and Zouch (ungenteel man—18th cent.) miss the OED cut. Other words have unexpected meanings, e.g. Zits (Information on crimes—the acne of neologism?). Still others have curious transmission: Ziph (Narcotics slang) originally (Thomas de Quincey, 1853) described as Winchester argot—was that great public school the birthplace of druggies?

Z-nuggets in OED include Zalamdodont (having straggly molars—perfect for Hugh Grant), Zamuk (first-aid ladies at sporting fixtures—ancestor of Soccer Moms?), Zedonk (offspring of zebra and camel—surely rare, but a good insult), Zeppole (a kind of doughnut—I commend this to the ghost of JFK’s Germanic gaffe “Ich bin ein Berliner”).

But where is the anglophone rival to that fabulous Frenchism Zizi (‘cock’)?

Word-fancier Ivar Brown (Chosen Words, 1961) thought Z “a happy letter,” summing up in verse thus:

You stagger and your step’s awry

With product of zythepsary:

You are not of the wary ‘uns,

The hard-boiled zythepsarians,

Who roll zymurgous barrels out,

Yet never sway nor fall about,

But, fleeting peacably the time,

Absorb, enjoy, and master zyme.

Such plethora of drinking-related Z-words supports this Brown Hail. A further one, Zymotic, is penultimate in OED and in Gallic dress Zymotique the final one in Harrap’s. OED gives no literary example, but it—describing the zesty 1950s Parisian art scene—is suitably the last word in Elaine Dundy’s (herself a zesty lady) first novel The Dud Avocado (1958), which prompted Gore Vidal to say that she was “no longer Kenneth Tynan’s American wife, Whatshername.”

[Barry Baldwin has recently returned from a pilgrimage to Yankee Stadium.]

Thesaurusising, A Little-Known Art

Juliette Shapiro, Bexhill, East Sussex

There are countless amusing observations to be made about the English Language. But Bill Bryson seems to have made them all. And make them, credit where it’s due, better, perhaps, than an English person could have done. Perhaps it is his remoteness, his alien eye or ear, that affords him the level of objectivity that make his annotations notoriously laugh-a-minute. You see, sometimes it takes an outsider to notice just how bizarre our method of communication can be. Alright, Bryson almost doesn’t count as a real American, having spent so much of his life here in England, but when it comes to picking up on the idiosyncrasies of our lingo, no one can do it so adroitly or affectionately than the anglicised Bryson.

If there is uncharted territory to enter into, it is scant. The Bryson flag-pole has been firmly planted in many areas. Bill’s star-spangled banter glistens in all its territorial glory in even the remotest of areas. His enviably funny book ‘Mother Tongue’ is an observational conquest. So what’s left? Not much. Or is there?

The fact is, despite it being our language, we find it funny. If that isn’t truly English I don’t know what is. As a nation we like nothing better than to laugh at ourselves. Or even if we don’t like it that much, we’re really rather good at it. Do the Italians, for example, find their native tongue the cause of such mirth? It doesn’t bear thinking about. Opera would never be the same again.

I am happy to say, or rather I am delighted to declare, that there is one area the revered Bryson hasn’t touched upon. This is the little known pastime of Thesaurusising. A hobby, or in some cases an obsession, that PC owners worldwide could enjoy if only they could be made aware of the joys of it. Actually, the game or the little know art of thesaurusising, is about the only truly good use that a computer-thesaurus can be put to. Any writer worth their sodium-based-condiment knows that the thesaurus on their hard drive has no value where the serious stuff is concerned. But, if it’s laughs you’re after then leave the hard-copy Roget’s on the bookshelf and delve into the virtually incomprehensible world that your computer believes is a digital comparison to this definitive reference work.

Thesaurusising isn’t difficult. Take any piece of text, highlight it on your screen and see what insane alternatives your machine comes up with. Try not to think logically, your machine doesn’t and you’ll defeat the object.

Or to put it another way.

Thesaurusising isn’t exacting. Seize one portion of theme, climax it on your lattice and behold what maniacal options your apparatus arrives out of bed with. Endeavour not to meditate rationally, your apparatus doesn’t and you’ll overthrow the article.

The possibilities of thesaurusising are endless, famous works lend themselves just as well as lesser known pieces to this enjoyable form of digital mutilation. Words are ridiculously funny things to mess about with. Even the Bible makes sure to mention them as having been around for a long time. Remember, in the commencement was the utterance.

The important thing to remember with thesaurusising is that you must not think for yourself. That’s what the thing is designed for. But, for those who wish to use the art of thesaurusising for more than personal amusement there will always be the odd occasion, for example when confusing the enemy is the intention, when thesaurusising might be used for more than pleasure alone. The letter to the bank, explaining the reasons for your peculiar budgeting habits, would read so much better with a little help from the digital word scrambler. Over-illustrated has a friendlier ring to it than over-drawn and the term honour-deserving, as opposed to credit-worthy, seems less clinical, although the permutations should you be deemed non-honour-deserving sound catastrophic.

It is my suspicion that legal jargon has long been based on thesaurusising. How else do lawyers win cases if not by downplaying the guilt of their clients? ‘Stabbed the plaintiff in the chest four times.’ translates, via the thesaurus into ‘Twinged the plaintiff in the bust four times.’ which sounds more like affection than aggression. Your honour I rest my case.

In terms of glamour and intrigue, nothing offers you a better chance to sound like a regency fop than the use of the elaborate manner of communication that is thesaurus-speak. And in these dumbed–down times when we are increasingly subjected to(and in danger of accepting)slang-words and sound-bites as the staples of communication, this sophisticated method of conversing could just be a comfort. You might not be ready to reel off complicated monologues by mouth but the odd E-mail, thesaurusised, will get you started. Asking someone out for dinner for example by posing the question ‘Would you desire the experience of an evening repast with me?’ will certainly get you noticed. Be sure though, if your invitation is accepted, to make the occasion more than a fish supper. Someone looking forward to an evening repast mightn’t be impressed with cod and chips. The problem here, you think, is that restaurant menus aren’t thesaurusised. I concede, purveyors of fish and chips are generally behind the times, Cod and chips is literally that on paper and on the plate. As a meal it might do better if it were re-named but the thesaurusising options are pretty thin on the ground in culinary terms. Fish is rather limply described as Trawl and Chips transmute into unappetising sounding Splinters. Put the two together, add a dollop of tartare sauce and you’ve got a meal that sounds like it will puncture a few internal organs and give you mercurial poisoning on consumption.

Furthermore, it is a sad fact that much of what is written today would benefit from a little thesaurusising if only to render it amusing as opposed to grammatically catastrophic. Silly though the activity itself might seem, thesaurusising is a pastime for intelligent people only. After all, you need to be fully conversant with what’s right in order to see the funny side of wrong.

Happy Word-Scrambling!

[Juliette Shapiro attended the London College of Printing, and in 2000 she wrote “Excessively Diverted”, a sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Cassell’s Foreign Words & Phrases

Adrian Room, (Sterling Publications), 414 pages.

Contrary to popular sentiment, the good ole U.S. of A. is not a melting pot. If that were true, everyone coming from distant shores would meld into one culture, with one language. It is ironic that our grandparents (and, in some cases, parents) came to these shores in the early part of the 20th century because they were persecuted for practicing their particular traditions in their native lands, yet sought to lose their “greenhorn” airs once they passed through the gates of Ellis Island. They wanted to become “American,” to learn its customs and language and eliminate any trace of the “old country.”

No, America isn’t a melting pot. It is . . . what is the mot juste I am seeking . . . more like a salad bar. The distinct components blend to make up the larger course, yet each has their individual flavor. This is evident in relatively recent desire to return to our roots: the ways of our ancestors, the music, food and language.

One way to accomplish this is to take parts of speech from all and incorporate them into the great salad of American speech. Oh sure, there are some who want “American only spoken here,” but then you would miss out on all those different flavors. So rather than demand everyone speak “American,”we embrace the contributions gleaned from other countries that pepper our conversations.

Many dictionaries offer brief etymologies, noting the foreign derivations of English words. But to find them means trudging through all the words.

Cassell’s Foreign Words and Phrases alleviates that problem. It is an impressive collection of “ingredients” which we all use to some extent, whether we realize it or not. Perhaps the most familiar usage of foreign words comes from the food we eat. Take a look in your pantry. What’s there? Macaroni? A can of bisque? Some bulgar? Are there blintzes in the freezer? Gnocchi? A couple of bottles of brut or sake in the wine cellar? Going out to eat opens a whole new smorgasbord of culinary linguistic possibilities (some dim sum tonight perhaps?).

Food is only one aspect of Cassell’s. There are hundreds of expressions we have adopted from French, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish, German, Chinese, Japanese, et al.

While many of the entries are practically a part of everyday speech, there are also a good number that are sure to be new to the reader. Some are used in specific vocations; Latin is the preferred language of law and science, although the vox pop might consider it, de facto, just a high-falutin’ way of talking to prop those professionals on a higher level than us hoi polloi.

Then there are foreign expressions for which we already use anglicized versions. Cassell’s translates the French phrase “embarras de richesse” as “a perplexing abundance of wealth, more than one needs or can manage.” Wouldn’t it be easier to simply use the literal, more familiar translation—an embarrassment of riches? Nor could I see any occasion where I might use “reculer pour mieux sauter” (the use of a withdrawal as a basis for an advance or success), in its native tongue. Similar examples dot the volume.

At times the reader will wonder about the composition of the book. Is it supposed to be a collection of “foreign words and phrases” that are common to our usage? Words that have been “considered” English, though foreign in derivation, such as debacle, debris and debut? As a dictionary, the entries are offered in alphabetical order, rather than a perhaps more convenient lumping together according to category (food, religion) or country.

Cassell’s includes a rudimentary etymology, including century and country of origin. Some words and phrases, however, could start a small skirmish over the “right of ownership.” Divan, for example, used in several different languages, has seven distinct definitions, including a cigar shop, a type of sofa, a collection of poems by a single author, a restaurant and a court of justice. But Cassell’s misses the opportunity to be more precise about these derivations.

(A questionable note is the use of phrases taken from the language of native Americans: should these be considered, to be politically correct, as “foreign?”)

Tout ensemble, this is an entertaining and educational volume to have on your semantic bookshelf.

Voilà!

—Ron Kaplan

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Morrison’s Sound-It-Out Speller: A Phonic Key to English

(Stone Cloud Phonics, 2000).

When I was a kid back in New York in the early ’70s, I remember seeing a sign while traveling on the subway that said “If u cn rd ths msj, u cn gt a gd jb.” It was an advertisement, written in a cursive hand, for a secretarial school that specialized in speedwriting, a variation of shorthand. The idea seemed silly to me at the time. I remember thinking, if you can read this message, you can’t spell, and then who would want to hire you?

In elementary school we were taught the importance of proper spelling is. Pretests and re-tests are still a weekly phenomenon in my daughter’s second grade life. But there is a big difference between the way she is taught (or not) and the drill-instructor mentality my teachers possessed way back when.

Now, it seems that expecting them to use proper letter formation would be stifling their creativity. Evidently, ‘taint what you do, it’s the way that you do it. Now that most people use word processing to create their work, “spell checking” has reduced the need to know the correct way.

Remember when you would ask you mom or dad how to spell a word? What would they invariably say? “Go look it up.” Well, if you knew how to look it up, you wouldn’t be asking them how to spell it in the first place, now would you?

Morrison’s Sound-It-Out Speller: A Phonic Key to English was created to help convert the spelling-impaired into the spelling-empowered, offering a dictionary-like approach to finding the words you need to know.

The Speller begins with the following instructions for usage: “To find a word, try not to picture how it is spelled. Instead, focus on sound and usewhat you hear to create a spelling locator (author’s emphasis) which will lead you to the word you want.” They further instruct you to sound out the word, omit the vowels, look up the “locator” that remains and find the word and its hint. So “kor us” becomes “k_r_s,” which in turn becomes the locator “krs” and leads the reader, hopefully, to chorus.

But what about the words that begin with vowels? Admirable, for instance?

Should it really be offered as “dmrbl” when “dmrl” is given as equivalent for demurely? And it’s a bit confusing when “dmrl” also translates to admiral andDemerol. Some of these entries seem a bit “dmwtd.”

Choosing a phrase at random, we have the simple letter “L,” for which there are over fifty suggestions, including aisle, ale, awl, eel, lie, luau, lye, oil, olé and you-all. Another example, “SK,” includes the terms ice hockey, ischia, Osaka, saki, sect, Sikh, sockeye and suck. So those who need to use this book will conceivably have to exercise a good degree of patience.

What is the most difficult part of spelling? For many, especially the younger set, it can be the dreaded homonym: “They’re always trying to get their two points across over there to the adults, too.” Whew. The Speller includes them all under the same “THR” locator. Looking up your word is still not an easy task, but I don’t know how much easier you can make it than that.

Some of the accompanying definitions are questionable; for example, the use of “hmflk, hemophiliac (n) diseased one.”

Some of the contributions might make one scratch his head. “[S]kdmmdk, psychotimimetic, make insane.” It’s difficult to imagine much use for a word like that if you didn’t already know what it means and how it’s spelled.

The concept of the Speller is admirable and important. Whether this is the right way to go about repairing the problem remains to be seen.

—Ron Kaplan

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“MUSKINGUM . . .river, Ohio, with a course of about 120 miles wholly within the state. . . . The chief towns on its banks are Zanesville, McConnellsville, and Marietta. It is navigable for 90 miles to Dresden, and has been extensively damned for flood control. [From the Encyclopedia Americana (1958), Vol. XIX, p. 652. Submitted by Ed Rosenberg, Danbury, Connecticut.]

The Ones That Got Away: Some Words That Escaped From the Chambers Dictionary

Ian Brookes, Chambers Harrap

The Chambers Dictionary first appeared in 1901 under the title of Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary. The book quickly established itself as a favourite with readers, who delighted in its occasional quirky definitions and appreciated the vast coverage of rare, historical and unusual vocabulary. A hundred years later, it remains the dictionary of choice for British puzzle enthusiasts and crossword solvers because it defines many words that are not covered in any other single-volume dictionary.

To celebrate the centenary of this remarkable book, the current editors have compiled a booklet which traces the origins and evolution of the dictionary, and brings together some of the many humorous definitions and outlandish words that are unique to Chambers.

Among the topics discussed in this booklet is a question that lexicographers are often asked: ‘Which words get left out of the dictionary to make room for the new ones?’ The usual answer to this question is that although more and more new words and meanings are added to the dictionary with each edition, it has never been a policy of the editors to remove existing words to make for them. Even words that become obsolete may still be of interest to the reader of a historical text, and these are normally retained, although they are often labelled as “archaic” or “obsolete” to indicate that they are no longer in common use. New editions tend to absorb new arrivals by increasing in size rather than by removing any entries.

Nevertheless, there are a few words which have not survived from the 1901 edition of the dictionary to the current version of Chambers. It is perhaps tempting fate to draw attention to words which editors have chosen to discard as no longer worthy of a place. Nothing is more certain that any list of these will invite pleas for the restoration of the words into the dictionary. Nevertheless, it is interesting to look at a selection of words that appeared in the original Twentieth Century Dictionary but have since been judged as surplus to requirements.

The editor of the 1952 edition of the dictionary, remarked that he had discarded some “dictionary words that somebody with a Greek or Latin Dictionary has concocted but nobody so far as can be discovered has ever used”. Presumably the following words fall into this category:

decacuminated adj having the top cut off

effodient adj habitually digging

essorant adj about to soar

geratology n the science of the phenomena of decadence

lectual adj confining to the bed.

neogamist n a person recently married

nuciform adj nut-shaped

panidrosis n a perspiration over the whole body

parageusia n a perverted sense of taste

presultor n the leader of a dance

rigescent n growing stiff

zythepsary n a brewery

Some of the words which have disappeared may have been too obscure to justify a continued place in the dictionary:

derbend n a wayside Turkish guardhouse

numerotage n the numbering of yarns so as to denote their fineness.

sabrina-work n a variety of appliqué embroidery-work

savonette n a kind of toilet soap; a West Indian tree whose bark serves as soap

scavilones n men’s drawers worn in the sixteenth century under the hose

tayo n a garment like an apron worn by South American Indians

zyxomma n a genus of Indian dragonflies, of family Libellulidae, with large head and eyes and narrow face

Editors may also omit words because they discover that they do not actually exist at all, but are “ghost words” produced by some copying error. One wonders what was going through the editors’ minds when they struck out these words:

famble n the hand (slang)

flipe vt to fold back, as a sleeve

Jehoiada-box n a child’s savings-bank

pantogogue n a medicine once believed capable of purging away all morbid humours

rimple vi to wrinkle

roytish adj wild, irregular (obsolete)

sammy vt to moisten skins with water

sarn n a pavement

tarabooka n a drum-like instrument

wappet n a yelping cur

wiery adj wet, marshy, moist (obsolete)

Beside the ones that got away, it is also interesting to consider the vast number of words that have been suggested for inclusion in the dictionary at one time or another, but which the editors decided were insufficiently established in the language to merit inclusion in the dictionary.

The process of monitoring broadcasts, newspapers and magazines throws up a huge number of words for consideration every time the dictionary is revised. For every word that is accepted into the dictionary, there are several words that are too ephemeral or too restricted in use to earn a place. Thousands of words have been considered for inclusion in the dictionary at one time or another but have never quite made it into the book.

Some of these relate to concepts that were presumably considered too obscure even for a dictionary with as broad a range as Chambers:

asymmetric hindquarter syndrome a disease affecting pigs, characterised by the afflicted pig having different sizes of right and left thigh

cinqasept a visit to one’s lover between the hours of five and seven o’clock

cowpat roulette a now outlawed German game in which villagers bet on which plot of land will be the first to receive a cow’s calling card

grille-peerer one of a group of clergymen in the 1940s who used to haunt the stacks in the London Library to look up the skirts of female members browsing above

jogger’s paw inflammation of a dog’s paw caused by its owner dragging it along while jogging

A number of the discarded words relate to people who pursue unusual interests and activities:

blurbist a person who writes copy for the cover of a book

chillihead a person who is knowledgeable about chilli

inphulaphist a collector of cigar bands

Turpinologist an enthusiast of the outlaw Dick Turpin

Many words from the reject pile demonstrate the tremendous malleability of the English language. Inventive souls have playfully combined existing words to come up with new terms:

car-cooning making one’s car more homelike in preparation for spending large amounts of time in it while commuting

celebrat a badly-behaved celebrity

golden milkshake a payment to dairy farmers to induce them to reduce production

nutrobabble jargon used by the health food industry

vegucate to teach about vegetarianism

Although these words may never receive the official sanction of a place in the dictionary, they often provide the editors with interest and amusement, and the work of the lexicographer would be so much duller without them.

[This article © Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd 2001. You may order your free copy of Words, Wit & Wisdom: 100 Years of The Chambers Dictionary online at www.chambersharrap.com ]

OBITER DICTA

Words change their connotations as time passes and there are pitfalls for the unwary.

Nowadays we buy “Jumbo” packets of cereal, eat “Jumbo” sausages, etc. Before that everything was “King-sized.” But in my mother’s prime in the 1930s we children went to the corner shop for “Monster” gum balls, and “Monster” lucky bags, and she bought “Monster” soap-flake packs. “Monster” simply meant extra-large and had none of the horror implications it has today.

This gave rise to some embarrassment for me in later years as my mother—rooted firmly in the past—was prone to sticking her head into a passing baby’s pram and complimenting the mother, as she thought, with “Oh, isn’t he a monster?”

[Mrs. D. Parry, Southport, Britain]

Spelt As It Sounds

David Galef, Oxford, Mississippi

As a writer with school-age nephews, I seem to have become a sounding board for all matters pertaining to the study of letters. In the beginning, my job was fairly easy: when one of them came over to me with a tough word to read, I would pronounce it. “That’s ‘laff,’ I would tell the younger one. “I know, I know it’s spelled l-a-u-g-h, but English is funny that way. The gh is pronounced like an f . . .” After a brief explanation of the idiosyncrasies in English spelling, I would turn back to my own reading, at least until another word came up. But one day the older boy came over with a different problem. I looked at the word. “That? Oh, that’s just as it sounds: vittles. “ I mimed fork-to-mouth and made an eating sound. “You know-grub, food.”

“But then what does v-i-c-t-u-a-l-s mean?” he asked, pronouncing it “vikshuals” and spelling it out. “I’ve seen that, too. What’s the difference?”

“They’re the same,” I told him. “One is just….”

“Just what?”

And I realized that my job as English explicator had shifted into a higher gear. The answer I eventually gave him was that too many people had trouble pronouncing victuals properly as “vittles, “ so they often simplified the spelling to just that, vittles. When my nephew wanted to know who “they” was, I told him the people who wrote books and articles.

“But why did they do that with some words and not others?” he asked. “And anyway, what are some other words like that?”

I told him I’d get back to him. That was months ago. Since then, I’ve been collecting examples and forming a surrounding theory to hold them all together. In the first place, I seem to be right about the genesis of these words. Victuals becomes vittles when either enough people misspell it or a sufficiently influential author spells it that way to bring out a certain slangy flavor, and the innovation—or bastardization—catches on. Thus, breeches becomes britches (though in both instances, these terms have become antique, no matter how they’re spelled—or spelt). Other examples include weskit for waistcoat, gunnel for gunwhale, and the ever-puzzling shammy for chamois. What should these examples of pure phonetics in action be called? S.A. L S. (Spelled As It Sounds), Simpl-Spel®, or words for the orthographically challenged? Dumbed-down spellings, if you’re cynical.

But the matter doesn’t end there. Not all the examples are so easy to classify. Do you plough your field or plow it? Most list the first spelling as chiefly British. The British often claim that we butcher the language. Similarly, is a draftsman simply a dumbed-down version of draughtsman? Is that what’s going on when you see both draught and draft in beer advertisements? Tuff and laff don’t seem to have acquired legitimacy, though you certainly see them occasionally in print, usually in a humorous vein. But what happens to the Shakespearean playwright when he turns into a modern playwriter? (The analogy with copyrighter and copywriter doesn’t quite hold up here, since a copyrighter applies for a license on words, whereas a copywriter composes advertisements.) And when is a quay a key? Somehow, Quay Largo doesn’t sound quite right. Or rather, it would sound fine since the pronunciation is the same as in Key Largo, but it doesn’t look right.

Words with swallowed syllables form their own crowd: bosun deserves to have its own simplified spelling because too many sailors swallowed the middle of boatswain. Ditto for focsle from forecastle, though often you’ll see the word as fo’c’s’le in recognition of its missing parts. Down south, chitlins has edged out chitterlings. And though that may be an example from a particular region in the United States, many syncopes may be traced to what my younger nephew persists in calling Britland. What is it about British English that causes whole syllables to collapse? Insufficient interior stressing? Magdalen becomes “Mawdlin,” and Beauchamp turns into “Beecham,” which has become a legitimate name in itself. In the days before the New Pound, haypenny and tuppence often saw print. As for proper and place names, who is Lester if not a truncated Leicester? Worcester becomes “Wooster, “ a name that P. G. Wodehouse popularized in his Jeeves series. The original spelling of Worcester remains ubiquitous because of its namesake product, and anyone who’s ever heard the Abbott and Costello riff on Worcestershire sauce has missed an inspired spot of lexicography masked as high comedy.

Of course, the U.S. practices its own excisions. Is Gloster, Mississippi, glad to be free of its Gloucesterian heritage? Farther south, in fact, a few places are proud to call themselves Nawlins Café or Nawlins Bar & Grill. To say “New Orleans” marks you as a Yankee. On the other hand, even though locals say “Miss’ippi” and “Lou’siana, “ they’ve never achieved anything above “slangy variant.”

Where do you draw the line? Are ice tea and corn beef all right (I mean alrite) because people drop their d’s? And what about the questionables? Did gibe become jibe because of uncertainty about the soft g? How about phantasy to fantasy? Sassy may be a corruption of saucy, but it’s not pronounced the same. And is dumbed-down spelling why Americans have stripped so many British words with -our of their u’s, as in their colour and our color? Did cauldron lose a u to become caldron for this reason?

In the interest of getting a message across quickly and unambiguously, advertising has had a lot (though maybe not alot) to do with dumbed-down spelling. Lite beer and open-all-nite stores are now ubiquitous. Ultra-Brite is a brand of toothpaste. But did advertisers come up with hi and lo and thru? Did they turn doughnuts into donuts? Did the Rite-Aid drugstore chain dispense a drug for hiccoughs instead of hiccups? Speaking of eructations, a website called gazoontite.com sprang up not too long ago, presumably because it doesn’t trust people to be able to pronounce gesundheit.

What’s next? Blackguard, despite its pronunciation as “blaggered,” never lost its old spelling, and now it’s too late, because no one outside of historical novels would use such a term. Last week, my older nephew came over to me with another word, solder. “What’s that?” he asked. “Is it like soldier?”

I explained the meaning. “I know-it’s not pronounced that way, “ I told him. “But one of these days, the way things are going, you just might see it as ‘sotter.'”

[David Galef writes and teaches in Oxford, Mississippi.]

Pub Names in the 21st Century

Mike Warburton, Cheshire

What have the Romans ever done for us? Well, apart from education, sanitation, roads, housing . . . they originated that most British of institutions, the public-house. The Latin taberna (later, tavern) was the pioneer, but in those days it was simply a shop that sold not beer, but wine. The British were more partial to ale, so their tabernae became known as ale-houses. Archaeologists presume the remaining drinking vessels, in pints or quarts, were for beer—but knowing this country’s reputation for imbibing large quantities of alcohol, it is easy to imagine our ancestors knocking back pints of wine one after another.

In Roman-occupied Britain where vines were a rarity, bushes were used outside the tavern to signify the sale of wine. This was often combined with a long ale-stake (for stirring the brew) if that beverage was also available. In the Middle Ages, proper signs developed outside these establishments, which were simple illustrations or word pictures, since most folk could not read. So people gave directions with instructions like “Take the turning by the Bell, go past the Wheatsheaf, then just before the Duke of York . . .” This somehow seems far more quaint than pointing someone towards MacDonalds, via Toys R Us, just beyond Texstyle World.

Everyone must know of a pub in his locality called the Crown, the most prolific of them all. At the last count, there were over 700 of these, with the Red Lion not far behind. Like the White Hart (fifth on the list), the sign is a heraldic representation. This was a time when the monarchy was king, or queen, hence Rose and Crown, and Royal Oak (where virtually every monarch since 1066 is supposed to have hidden); but also when man depended on the countryside, hence The Plough, The Bull; and when religion played a more significant role, as seen in The Angel or the unique Trip to Jerusalem.

This land is blessed with delightfully colourful epithets for its public-houses. Where else in the world could you find such nuggets as The Dunmow Flitch in Essex, celebrating a custom involving bacon; or the Pyewipe Inn, recalling the Lincolnshire lapwing; or The Shroppie Fly on the Shropshire Union Canal at Audlem, referring to an old horse-drawn boat; or Stalybridge’s The Old Thirteenth Cheshire Astley Volunteer Rifleman Corps Inn, Britain’s longest pub-name. All these monikers encapsulate Blighty’s eccentricities and regional uniqeness.

There is often gentle humour and clever word-play in some of these names. The Honest Lawyer is represented without a head on signs—he does not exist. Baker and Brewer is accompanied with the legend “Bread is the Staff of life, but Beer’s life itself.” Letters Inn is an ex-Post Office in Tattenhall, Cheshire; Wye Knot, at Ross-on-Wye, commemorates a famous racehorse; and Clickem Inn at Swinhope, Lincolnshire, supposedly comes from the click of the gate in the opposite field, into which farmers drove flocks while they drank there.

But as language evolves, so do names such as these. They gradually become “modernised” and corrupted by colloquial usage. It is thought that the awkward tongue-twister ‘God encompasses us’ spawned the title Goat and Compass. So now it is much easier to tell the wife if you’ve been drinking there. Swan With Two Necks derives from the “two nicks” on the bird which indicated ownership. The new name probably stuck because it sounded, and looked, when illustrated on a sign, more bizarre.

However, something more sinister seems to be taking place, and it is a relatively recent phenomenon. Coinages of the last few years are not proving very popular. It is not so much the christening of a new pub in 21st century terms which is causing the backlash—throughout history, our hostelries have constantly mirrored the progress of our culture. The conflict is because some of these names are being changed, usually at the casual whim of the prevailing brewer. More often than not, on the surface, these changes seem tasteless and unnecessary.

The Campaign For Real Ale (CAMRA), who regularly monitor pubs and breweries, have a typically firm stance. One spokesman asserts “We oppose needless renaming and branding of pubs” (with owners intending ) “to eliminate any individuality and impose some brand or theme dreamed up in some remote marketing department that will position the pub so that it is attractive to a small segment of the populace (usually the 16–23 year olds.)”

Whilst defending name-changing when alongside shifts in historical circumstances, he retorts “a sudden decision by a company to rename 100 of its pubs All Bar Ones, Goose and Granites, It’s A Scream etc is something entirely different. It is crass, unthinking and takes no account at all of the customers who have used the pub over many years.” You certainly would not bet against CAMRA to arrest this trend: they have won many pub and beer-related victories, including one earlier in the year forcing the government to extend mandatory Rate Relief to rural pubs.

The long-standing breweries which I contacted were similarly opposed to these moves. Adnam’s proudly boast that their names are largely traditional, including the very rare Eel’s Foot and World’s End. They have never yet changed a pub to a modern name, but when they bought two Tap & Spiles, they reverted back to the old names of the Half Moon and the Hospital Arms. Bateman’s, when purchasing a pub, keep the original name. The only time they did change a name was several years ago altering the Gay Dog to the Dog & Bone, as the licensees at the time were call Mr & Mrs Bone!

So who is making all these changes? One major brewery largely responsible is Firkin’s. A firkin, as our more mature readers will know, is a small cask holding a quarter of a barrel. This company have not missed the wonderful opportunity to produce some inventively alliterative pairings, like Footlights and Firkin (Edinburgh) or Fruitmarket and Firkin (Glasgow). This is nothing new—both Fleece and Firkin, and Fox and Firkin have been with us a while. But there is something cheekily new-laddish about the way this word is abused, as signs inside some of its pubs proclaim it as having “the best firkin beer in town” or advertise “live entertainment every firkin Saturday”.

There has been a notable increase in the number of Irish names over the last decade. Scruffy Murphy’s, O’Neills and O’Brien’s now abound. But this is little wonder given the powerful advertising campaigns and current vogue for supping the “black stuff”.

Professional “pub pundit” George East actually grew up in a pub, his parents and grandparents both being licensees. Many of his experiences in the trade are catalogued in his latest book “A Year Behind Bars”. From first-hand dealings, he knows of fewer aspects of pub life which enrage the locals more than changing the name of “their” pub. But even he has opened or been responsible for giving pubs “silly” (his words) new names. He quotes “In the Eighties, a brewery asked me to come up with a name for a new posh theme pub which (for some reason) was to be filled with artefacts and reminders of great composers and classical music. I came up with The Brahms & Liszt, but they thought it would not purvey quite the right upmarket image . . . “

In pub circles just as everywhere else, it is impossible to please all of the people all of the time. Whilst Hairy Lemon and Slug and Lettuce attract much reactionary criticism, some punters are more open-minded. In a Web-chat debate based in Newcastle on this very topic, several concede that modern names may be OK for modern bars and younger clientelle, but the old pubs should be left the way they are. Another said “I think the new pub names are wicked! They make me laugh! Why stick with boring original pub names? It’s 2001 for crying out loud!”

Surely this is a valid viewpoint. Thoughtless re-naming can clearly be offensive to the British heritage. But when it is done tastefully, quirkily and with an individual or even unique flavour—you are not likely to find 700 pubs all called Furry Pear—is this not a better reflection of today’s new generation of pub-goers?

I have seen the future, and for the purist it is a bleak one. A new family of Cyberpubs has developed. Here, you can access the Internet whilst downing your favourite tipple. Currently they retain their original names, but it can only be a matter of time when they metamorphose into The Bill Gates Inn or even Apple MacTavern.

London has a chain of pubs called sportspubs.co.uk with the sole purpose of its customers viewing football on TV. If England qualify and then win next year’s World Cup, then there is a good chance we will have the very first David Beckham Arms, or more appropriately, David Beckham Legs.

Now, who is to blame for all this linguistic depravity . . . the Romans, of course.

[Michael Warburton has left his family’s retailing business, and is turning a keen interest in language into a ‘proper job’ as freelance writer.]

Noncing the Indefinite Article, Or, Do You Have A Nuncle?

Thomas L. Bernard, Place Here

Looking through the dictionary the other day, I came across the word nuncle. Apparently, at one time centuries ago, this was an alternative for uncle and resulted from such phonetic statements as, “ I have a nuncle in London.” We all know that nuncle is now considered incorrect and unacceptable. What many people don’t realize, however, is that there are a number of instances of how the indefinite articles a and an have resulted in the alteration of a number of spellings and pronunciations. What is more interesting is that these grammatical aberrations have now become fully integrated and accepted into the language—even though technically and historically they are incorrect

This is an area that etymologist John Ciardi calls noncing, and which he explains “occurs at the beginning of nouns, the n shifting on and off by some undefinable (sic) force in the sequential logic called idiom.” The origin of nonce sounds somewhat convoluted but results from an old expression to then anes which became to the nanes; this eventually became to the nonce—meaning a word made up for a specific purpose or occasion; inherent in the idea of a nonce word is the notion of one time—only once.

In terms of the shift from a to an, the following changes have taken place:

a nadder became an adder

a napron became an apron

a nauger became an auger

a naught became an aught

a numpire became an umpire.

Illustrative of words where the an became wrongly divided we have:

an ekename became a nekename(a nickname)

an ewt became a newt

an innocent (inny) became a ninny

an otch became a notch

Related to napron above, is the French language directive nappes pliees en ordre (linen folded in order, i.e., neatly) used by Anglo-Norman superiors to their Anglo-Saxon servants; the latter who were unlikely to know French, were inclined to mistakenly interpret what they had heard as apple pie order.” Another ‘pie’ in this noncing context is a humble pie—the eating of which most of us assiduously try to avoid; this originally was a numble pie. With the transference of the n to the article ,we have an umble pie which sounded to English ears as if the h had not been pronounced (which the English still think to this day when they hear Americans say herb)—hence humble pie. Incidentally, the umbles were the innards of a deer or other edible animal.

In the Autumn 2000 VERBATIM (Vol.XXV/4) the article “Funny Animals” by Nick Humez examines how Europeans adopted the Indian names of local wildlife with which they were unfamiliar. A noncing element applies in some of these cases; take for example a hypothetical conversation between an English colonist and an Indian, and what the Englishman might have thought he heard:

Englishman: What is that animal?

Indian: Arakunen .

Englishman: Ok I see, it’s a raccoon.

Similarly, “Oh, I see, it’s a chipmunk. (having heard atchitamon ), and “Oh, I see, it’s a possum” (having heard apossoun ). In this case it’s interesting to note that we have become accustomed to using two forms for this animal—an opossum and a possum).

The Englishman might have had the last name of Nash—which is a result of this same phenomenon. Nash is a habitation name for someone who lives atten ash— ‘at the ash (tree)’. Another proper name is Anne—a hypocoristic form of which is Annie. For some reason, this became a popular farm name to give to a female goat What we have then is an Annie goat, the noncing form of which is a nanny goat.

Let me conclude with the somewhat pertinent story I heard recently of a little girl who was chatting with her mother:

Little girl: Mom, what does noying mean?

Mother: I have no idea. Why do you ask?

Little girl: Because Aunt Ann said I was a noying.

[Thomas Bernard is a longtime VERBATIM subscriber.]

A Note on the Origin of Tall Poppy and Tall Poppy Syndrome

Michele Valerie Ronnick, Associate Professor, Wayne State University

The Encarta World English Dictionary (St. Martin’s Press, 1999), which calls itself a dictionary of global English, presents many interesting words and phrases. One of these is the colorful phrase, “tall poppy,” which is found on page 1819. It is defined as: “n. Aus. jsomebody who, through achievements or wealth, has become a prominent member of society (informal).” “Tall poppy” is followed by a related phrase, “tall poppy syndrome,” whose definition reads: “public figures who loom large and the tendency by the media to want to bring them down.” Both phrases owe their origin to a passage from Roman literature. This is the Ab Urbe Condita (From the Foundation of the City) written by the historian Livy (59 B.C.-17 A.D.).

In the fifty-third and fifty-fourth chapters of Livy’s first book we learn about the actions of Sextus Tarquinius, son of Tarquinius Superbus the tyrannt-king of Rome, who betrayed Gabii, a city that had accepted Sextus disguised as a suppliant for purposes of treachery in order to advance the schemes of his father. Resorting to a plan minime arte Romana fraude ac dolo, “not like the Roman technique at all, one of fraud and trickery,” the elder Tarquin had sent his son out to win the confidence of the leaders of Gabii by hook or by crook. After achieving his duplicitous end, Sextus sent a messenger back to his father in Rome to find out what next the king wanted him to do. Since a verbal reply could be trusted to no one, the king led the messenger into his gardens, and there walking about in silence was reported to have struck off the heads of the tallest poppies with his walking stick, ibi inambulans tacitus summa papaverum capita dicitur baculo decussisse. When this curious behavior was reported to Sextus, he understood immediately that he had to eliminate the leaders of Gabii, primores civitates interemit. This being done, Gabii was absorbed by Tarquin’s empire.³¹

Thus we can see that these two striking phrases have come from an episode in Livy’s history. We can also see from their usage in Australian English that they have retained Livy’s original meaning. In that respect things haven’t changed much, for prominent people are as threatening to some people today as they were in Livy’s era.

---

Resume II

Canvas taunts you;

Clay brings mold;

Photos haunt you;

And marble’s cold.

Reels aren’t tidy;

Crooning’s trite;

Flutes are flighty;

You might as well write.

—Thomas March

Limerick

There was a young lady of Nantes

Who said to her boyfriend, “You can’t!”

But he was a stickler

For usage particular

And said, “Yes I could, but I shan’t.”

—Joyce Rosson Dowler

SIC! SIC! SIC!

Plaintiff homeowners sued manufacturer of a secondary reinforcer added to concrete and used in the construction of the slab foundations for plaintiffs' homes. . . . Defendant's product was a single purpose product, manufactured and marketed for a very discreet application in the construction of concrete structures. [From Acosta v. Synthetic Industries (2001) 106 Cal. Rptr. 2d 361 Submitted by Steven R. Finz, The Sea Ranch, California.]

Prepositional Epiphany

William H. Dougherty, Santa Fe, New Mexico

For decades of the seven decades of my life I have been increasingly irritated by the increasing acceptance of the phrase for free. In part my irritation is doubtless rooted in a natural aging person’s resistance to change. An old man or woman, and maybe especially a man, is apt to pronounce everything in the world in decline, for better or worse, since his or her heyday. The winters were colder back then, the children better behaved, the men tougher, the women tenderer, the streets safer, the tunes catchier, etc., etc. Beginning with middle age, most people, especially those with any pretension to education, resist changes in language; I mean the way young people have of ruining language with their careless diction and disregard or deliberate defiance of the rules. For this resistance to change there is a certain rationale since the generations, like geographic regions, communicate through language, and such communication, on which culture depends, finds support in language stability.

I have done nothing like systematic research on the now almost universally accepted phrase for free, meaning gratis (and why not “for gratis”?), but I have the nagging impression that in my youth, half a century and more ago, one said, for example, “I can get it free,” not “. . . for free.” More and more I notice that people who ought to know better are saying in everyday speech “for free” while the correct usage survives enshrined in the old saw: “The best things in life are free.” I have brushed aside the neologism, never to the best of my knowledge using it myself and silently deriding it as playful slang or a kind of linguistic slumming. Lately, though, the phrase has begun to appear in print and in such reputable publications as TIME, and I have had to realize that the barbarians are no longer outside the gate but that they have settled in well inside.

As I have come to pay more serious attention to the invasion, I have tried to determine just why I find the simple little two-word phrase objectionable. I have decided that it is because this usage violates the rule that in English the object of a preposition has to be a noun or pronoun or anyway a substantive, not an adjective. In such combinations as at large or from warm to hot what may appear to be an adjective is really a substantive as the free in the renegade phrase is not.

Then I went on to test several prepositions with their objects. You can’t say in good English, I found, at pretty, by nice, in ugly, from tight, to eternal, and the like except when pretty, nice, etc. mean the words nice etc. and are substantives as in Begin reading at pretty or By nice I mean cozy. But when I put for to the test, it was revealed unto me that you can in the best English say: for certain, for sure, for dead, for lost, and make adjectives the object of for in any number of such combinations as “I gave him up for … “ So, I concluded with a certain feeling of relief, the preposition for is special and not subject to the grammatical rules that govern other prepositions in the realm of good English usage.

One case of grammatical slippage involving for is that for preceding an adjective semantically combines with the adjective to form an adverb, much as like reduced to the suffix -ly or in full form in such rustic locutions as “He snuck up on her real sly like” combines with a preceding adjective to form an adverb or adverbial phrase. This evolution is perhaps most clearly illustrated by another neologism that also is only beginning to gain full acceptance: for real. The preceding for here has approximately the same effect on real as suffixing -ly to it. In other words, for real and really are nearly synonymous, at least in some contexts. “He committed suicide for real” (TIME, Feb. 8, 1993, p. 60) means about the same thing as “He really committed suicide.” Since unlike the purely adverbial really, for real can function as either an adjective or adverb, a little syntactic fiddling may be necessary to make the two locutions function in roughly the same way in such clauses as “This time it’s for real,” which you can hardly convert to “It’s really this time.” You can, however, say with about the same meaning as that of the for real clause: “This time it’s really it.”

You can say that, but you probably never will unless you happen to be well advanced in years. Neologisms crop up and gain general acceptance because they fill semantic lacunae in language. “He committed suicide for real” does not convey quite the same meaning as “He really committed suicide.” The difference is more a matter of semantic shading, of fresh punchiness, than of basic information, but it is . . . for real. And since for real is a relatively new addition to our language and not an adaptation like hopefully in the sense of ‘it is to be hoped,’ it has the advantage of not sometimes causing such ambiguity as for example occurs in a statement like: “Hopefully we shall prevail.”

I can imagine a younger, more liberated linguist, professional or amateur, snorting at my bondage to tradition and reminding me that English has drifted Chinaward and half abandoned the Indo-European family with its formally defined parts of speech. In English nowadays as in Chinese a word is a noun, adjective, verb, or adverb by function or syntactically more often than because the word is inflected or marked to indicate that it is a certain part of speech as in Latin, for example in the adage Romae romane. Accepting this drift away from Indo-European grammar, one can turn my old fogey’s analysis upside down and say that in the for combinations I find objectionable the words following the preposition, such as real and free, are not adjectives but by virtue of being the objects of the functionally defined preposition for are substantives, nouns.

As for me, I have retreated slightly from my former staunch stand against splitting my infinitives, have even caught myself saying hopefully in its current predominant sense, and (noblesse oblige) blithely use gay as gay folk would have it used however much I miss the useful, really irreplaceable old gay. But I cling to free, free of its needlessly encumbering prepositional adornment.

[William H. Dougherty is one of VERBATIM’s favorite correspondents.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

Maria Pinto Couture Cheap & Chic Sale. . . . City parking lost just north of the building. [From the Chicago Tribune, 20 June 2001. Reward if found.]

EPISTOLA {Dempsey Hurst}

Re: “The Humble Origins of Chad” VERBATIM XXVI/2

In England during the Second World War a cartoon character was drawn on walls with a question below. It looked something like this.

Or something else in short supply.

It was made up of electrical symbols and the character was called Chad. Punches had been used for many years before that war; for IBM cards, railroad tickets, street car transfers, etc. I have no idea when the word was first used, but there should be someone still living in England who remembers Chad.

[Dempsey Hurst, Riverside, California]

EPISTOLA {Jon Simpson}

[Barry Popik, the indefatigable word-origins researcher, has found a letter to the New York Times of 18 March 1946 (and a similar letter to Life magazine of the same date) that makes reference to this drawing and suggests that the name used for it, “Mr. Chad” (not just “Chad”), came from the nickname of a REME (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) training unit, popularly known as ‘Chad’s Temple’. According to the Life letter, he was also known as “Flywheel,” “Doomie” or “The Goon” in the RAF; “Foo” or “The Watcher” in the Royal Navy; “Clem,” “Private Snoops,” or “The Jeep” in the army.—Ed.]

Nick Humez’s Classical Blather is always very entertaining. I have a couple of quibbles, however, with his latest article on “-ists, -ites, and Other Ends” (XXVI No 2):

1. “sitar is cognate with Greek kithara”

Hindi sitar comes from Persian si (three) + tar (string), whereas kithara probably refers to a cavity.

2. “So we speak of suffragettes (called suffragists in England)”

The English surely use both forms, -ette providing negative connotations of feminine militancy, and -ist describing any advocate of suffrage.

He deserves a medal for working on a much needed index for volumes 7-25. I can hardly wait for its publication.

[Jon Simpson, Quispamsis, New Brunswick, simpsons@nbnet.nb.ca]

EPISTOLA {Frank Ferguson}

The following bit of somewhat arcane usage, from the Gag-O-Matic Joke Server 3.0, jokes@gag-o-matic.lowcomdom.com, strikes me as colorful however infrequent usage . . .

“Extracted from some source code: else {Some weird channel mapping was requested; horse ‘em. A note to the curious. The phrase “horse ‘em” comes from an American television commercial in which Santa Claus is trying to determine what toys particular children should get. If a child wasn’t sufficiently precise in his or her description of a desired toy, an evil elf would hold out a boring rocking horse and suggest in a malevolent manner that Santa “Horse ‘em.” The phrase thus suggests the provision of a satisfactory but non-optimal or unexciting solution to a problem.}”

“Horse ‘em” hardly has passed into the mainstream. However, “horse ‘em” DOES seems to exist and therefore might be worthy of scant notice.

[Frank Ferguson, President, North Billerica, Massachusetts]

EPISTOLA {Allan Mahnke}

Thanks for Jessy Randall's charming article on words in the Harry Potter books. I would add one reference. Echoing Rowling's characterization, Thomas Hardy has the west gallery players use the word "dumbledore" in Under the Greenwood Tree in a most unflattering way.

"Strings for ever!" said little Jimmy. "Strings alone would have held their ground against all the new creation." "True, true!" said Bowman. "But clar'nets was death." "Death they was!" said Mr. Penny. "And harmonions," Williams continued in a louder voice, and getting excited by these signs of approval, "harmonions and barels' organs ("Ah!" and groans from Spinks) "be miserable–what shall I call 'em?—miserable—" "Sinners," suggested Jimmy. . . "Miserable dumbledores!" "Right, William, and so they be—miserable dumbledores!" said the whole choir with unanimity.

Those who do not know him as Harry does frequently perceive Prof. Dumbledore as useless and ineffectual, or even slightly demented. Recall his "few words" spoken at the opening banquet of the first book. We too occasionally have reason to suspect his mental faculties.

Finally, the insufferable pedant in me rises. (Sorry!) The infinitive of the Latin verb crucio is cruciare not cruciere as the participle cruciatus suggests.

[Allan Mahnke, FuriusBib@aol.com]

Cryptic Crossword Number 88

Composed by Pamela Wylder

Across

1. Gold in large area of swamp (6)

4. Reptile is passing feeding ground (8)

10. Irritated nobility took the initiative (7)

11. General, boxer, pope and astronomer (7)

12. Horsing around in a cute car is wrong (10)

13. Wear away part of guitar (4)

15. Get lost in conversation in card game (4)

16. Kind of carpeting in alley edged with flowers (9)

19. Revolting earth-born mutant (9)

21. Marry without hot, restless yearning (4)

23. Box containing large skirt (4)

24. First off, Bob shoots Barb’s museum pieces (6,4)

28. Send in beer for messenger (7)

29. Toss Mr. Whitney a flower (7)

30. American pitcher enters, feeling uncertainty (8)

31. Decent guy starts to make excuses, noting spouse’s current hostility (6)

Down

1. Former citizen offers thanks (5)

2. Display case containing articles for rifle (7)

3. More or less lawful suggestions of choice attorneys (10)

5. Skating figure bolted in audition (5)

6. Function of expensive watch for the most part (4)

7. Buddy mixed up Rome and Sicilian capital (7)

8. When people have lunch, Tim feeds nobody (8)

9. Charming a former senator eating upside-down cake (8)

14. Notice piece of buckshot in weapon can be allowed as evidence (10)

17. Nothing tells us convertible is more popular with consumers (8)

18. Collectors of useless items flipped over sheer head covering (4,4)

20. Hospital grants honors (7)

22. Music hall isn’t featuring lightweight material (7)

25. Hits in the mouth with vegetables (5)

26. Refuse tactlessly at first without thinking (5)

27. Ophthalmologist Yearbook covers eye inflammation (4)

Answers to Cryptic Crossword Number 88

Across

1. Morass (mass + or)

4. Terrapin (terrain + p)

10. Rankled (rank + led)

11. Galileo (G + Ali + Leo)

12. Inaccurate (in a cute car)

13. Fret (2 defs.)

15. Skat (scat)

16. Broadloom (bloom + road)

19. Abhorrent (earth-born)

21. Itch (hitch -h)

23. Kilt (kit + 1)

24. Objets d’art (Bob - B +jets dart)

28. Apostle (ale + post)

29. Lobelia (lob + Eli + a)

30. Suspense (US + p + sense)

31. Mensch (I st letters)

Down

1. Merci (forMER CItizen)

2. Ransack (rack + ans)

3. Solicitors (so + licit + ors)

5. Eight (ate) 6 Role (Rolex - x)

7. Palermo (pal + Rome)

8. Noontime (no one + Tim)

9. Adorable (a + Dole + bar)

14. Admissible (ad + missile + b)

17. Outsells (0+ tells us)

18. Pack rats (stark cap)

20. Hallows (h + allows)

22. Challis (musiC HALL ISn’t)

25. Beets (beats)

26. Trash (t + rash)

27. Stye (ophthalmologiST YEarbook)

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. My principal source for this article is Stedman’s Medical Dictionary, 26th edition, edited by Marjory Spraycar and published in 1995 by Williams and Wilkins of Baltimore, the same city in which the original Stedman’s Dictionary—compiled by Thomas Lathrop Stedman (1853–1938)—had been published by William Wood and Co. in 1912, going through 11 editions before the title’s acquisition by Williams and Wilkins in the early 1930s. ↩︎

2. Named for Hans Asperger, an Austrian clinician (1906–1980). Asperger and child psychiatrist Leo Kanner (1894–1981)—who was also born in Austria but by the 1930s had emigrated to America, where he became a highly influential professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore—independently coined the term “autistic” during the early 1940s, but owing to the war were unaware of each other’s work. Asperger’s seminal paper Die ‘Autischen Psychopathen’ in Kindesalter (“‘Autistic psychopathology’ in childhood”), though printed in a German-language medical journal in 1944, would not, in fact, be published in English until 1991 (by Cambridge University Press, in the collection Autism and Asperger Syndrome, ed. F. Uta). See Peter E. Tanguay’s excellent summary, “Understanding autism—a work in progress,” originally published in Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience 24(2) [1999], pp. 95-99, and posted by the Canadian Medical Association on its website at http://www.cma.ca/jpn/vol-24/issue-2/0095.htm; see also Barbara F. Meltz, “Asperger’s children miss social cues,” Boston Globe, March 29, 2001, pp. H1ff. ↩︎

3. After G. Hurler, Austrian pediatrician (1889–1965). ↩︎

4. Also known as Alzheimer’s dementia or Alzheimer’s syndrome, and named for German neurologist Alois Alzheimer (1864–1915). Much of the information in this paragraph is drawn from an article about the tests used by New York University’s Aging and Dementia Research Center, designed by Drs. Mark Gluck and Catherine Myers of the Memory Disorders Project at the Rutgers Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience in Newark (“Outsmarting Alzheimer’s,” Rutgers Magazine, Spring 2001, pp. 30-35). ↩︎

5. Latin for “seahorse,” from Greek hippos (“horse”) and kampé (“a bending”), so called because of the organ’s shape. Latin campus (“field, plain, exercise-ground,” whence the English term for “college site”) is apparently not related to kampé, according to Ernout and Meillet’s Dictionaire étymologique de la langue latine (Paris: Klincksieck, 3d ed. 1979), whose authors tentatively postulate a native Italic folk origin for the root camp(a)- instead—but interestingly suggest also that German Kampf (“struggle”) derives from campus through the latter’s connection with military practice (e.g. the campus Martius, “Mars Field,” at Rome). ↩︎

6. The problems and solutions many societies encounter in their attempts to map a discontinuous word inventory onto a continuum of reality have been thoughtfully addressed by many linguists and social anthropologists; see, e.g., Charles O. Frake’s “The Diagnosis of Disease among the Subanun of Mindanao” in Dell Hymes, ed., Language in Culture and Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1964) and the essays of Edmund Leach collected as Rethinking Anthropology (New York: Humanities Press, 1966), particularly the chapter entitled “Symbolic Representation of Time—Time and False Noses.” ↩︎

7. After John Langdon H. Down, English physician (1828–1896). Down’s syndrome, a genetic disease, is the result of a triplication or translocation of chromosome #21; its old name derived from the superficial resemblance to actual Central Asian features present in the flat face, short nose, and epicanthic folds to the side of the eyes of Down’s victims, who also suffer from mental retardation, have a high incidence of heart disease and leukemia, and are almost certain to see the onset of Alzheimer’s syndrome by age 40. ↩︎

8. A form of dwarfism with emaciation, named for William L. Donohue, Canadian pathologist (b. 1906). ↩︎

9. Gerhard A. Hansen was the Norwegian physician (1841–1912) credited with discovering that leprosy, long associated with divine vengeance, was in fact caused by a simple microbe, Mycobacterium lepri. ↩︎

10. Chorea is Greek for “dance,” and while displaced—perhaps as too grim a joke—in front-of-the-house medical terminology, it still remains the technical name for an involuntary jerky, spasmodic movement of the limbs; cf. Huntington’s chorea (named for U.S. physician George Huntington, 1850–1916), the progressive disorder responsible for the decline and death of folksinger Woody Guthrie, and the result of an inherited genetic mutation wherein a sequence of four identical pairs of DNA bonds in a normal chromosome is mutated into a string of 17 identical pairs instead. Thomas Sydenham was a 17th-century English physician who saw the link between St. Vitus’s Dance and prior rheumatic fever (in turn, as we now know, specifically following a streptococcal infection). The ambivalent relationship between saints and diseases has its roots in classical antiquity: Apollo, for example, was both sender and healer of plagues. For a robust list of quaint and obsolete names for diseases (e.g., gleet and the vapors) readers are invited to visit the website of Dr. Paul Smith at http://www.gpiag-asthma.org/drpsmith/amt1.htm; I am indebted to David Weinstock of Middlebury, Vt. for this reference. ↩︎

11. An eye-opening discussion of the terminology and reasoning employed by plastic surgeons to justify mammary alterations will be found in Nora Jacoson’s Cleavage (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), especially chapter 4, “The Medical Construction of Need,” pp. 108-[143]:. ↩︎

12. Named for Russian neurologist Sergei S. Korsakoff (1853–1900). ↩︎

13. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, better known by its acronym, AIDS, has eluded eponymization almost from the beginning. This may in part be due to its early notoriety as a “gay plague,” but also because so very many physicians soon became involved in its study and attempts at treatment, owing to the syndrome’s complexity: Thanks to its targeting of the immune system, Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) leaves the body vulnerable to a host of opportunistic infections, some of them otherwise uncommon in the relatively young cohort most at risk for transmission through sexual contact, intravenous drug use, or tainted transfusions. Two of these are Hodgkin’s disease (from Thomas Hodgkin, British physician, 1798–1866), a chronic enlargement of lymph nodes, spleen, and liver—a similar ailment is found in domestic cats—and Kaposi’s sarcoma (from Moritz Kaposi, Hungarian dermatologist, 1837–1902), characterized by dark blotches caused by multiple subcutaneous hemorrhages and hitherto found almost exclusively in elderly Italian men. HIV is now thought to be as much as 50,000 years old but to have only recently made a species jump from lower primates to humans; it is thus considered one of a class of emergent viruses (such as Ebola) which have transcended a limited habitat, due to the encroachment of civilization, and now have reached epidemic proportions. ↩︎

14. A recessive-gene disease predominantly found among Jewish children; like Hurler’s syndrome, its proximate cause is an enzyme deficiency, resulting in irritability, poor motor development, blindness, seizures, and early death. Warren Tay was an English physician (1843–1927) and Bernard Sachs an American neurologist (1858–1944). ↩︎

15. Named for English virologists Michael Epstein (b.1921) and Yvonne Barr (b.1932), this virus is formally called human herpesvirus 4, and is a significant cause of infectuous mononucleosis. ↩︎

16. An intermittent breathing characteristic of those on the point of death, named for two physicians: John Cheyne (1777–1836), a Scot, and William Stokes (1804–1878), an Irishman not to be confused with the Stokes of the Gritti-Stokes amputation, for whom see note 27 below. ↩︎

17. Used in the perfusion of entire organs for anatomical dissection, the pump was jointly invented by Alexis Carrel, a French-American surgeon and Nobel laureate (1873–1944) and the American aviator Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974). ↩︎

18. Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt (1885–1964) and Alfons M. Jakob (1884–1931) were German neuropsychiatrists. The disease, which can affect both cows and people (it is easily transmitted by eating meat contaminated with infected brain matter) is described by Stedman’s as “rapidly progressive, inevitably fatal bovine spongiform encephalopathy.” It was also observed, early in the last century, among a primitive Pacific Rim society which practiced ritual cannibalism. ↩︎

19. Named for Richard Bright (1789–1858), a British pathologist. ↩︎

20. French physician Gilles de la Tourette (1857–1904) is credited with discovering this syndrome, which is a dominant inherited disease usually first appearing in childhood; while echolalia and coprolalia are rare, it is often associated with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), obsessive-compulsive syndrome, and other psychiatric disorders. A brilliant descriptive novel with a Tourette’s sufferer as its protagonist was published two years ago: Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (New York: Random House/Doubleday, 1999). ↩︎

21. Savage was not the surname of the physician who discovered the syndrome but that of the patient—Stedman’s does not give her first name—in whom it was first observed. ↩︎

22. From Mr. Pickwick in Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, who exemplifies this type. ↩︎

23. Proteus, the “Old Man of the Sea,” was a son of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys (or, as some say, a son of Poseidon), and noted for his ability to change his shape at will. The original “Elephant Man,” Joseph Carey Merrick (1860–1890), worked for several years as a sidewhow freak but was also the object of intense study by a British surgeon, Edward Treves (1853–1922)—who attempted to palliate Merrick’s condition with an operation on his face in 1882—and the subject of a highly successful film by David Lynch, The Elephant Man, based on Treves’s book The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences and Ashley Montagu’s The Elephant Man, A Study In Human Dignity. For a compendious website on the life and times of Merrick, visit http://www.zoraskingdom.freeserve.co.uk. ↩︎

24. Also called Friend’s virus, from Charlotte Friend, U. S. microbiologist (b. 1921), who studied it—one of very few examples of an eponymous virus or bacillus in Stedman’s. ↩︎

25. C. J. Watson (b. 1901) and S. Schwartz (b. 1916) were both members of the medical faculty at the University of Minnesota. ↩︎

26. Attributed to Joseph Pancoast (1805–1882), an American surgeon. He should not be confused with U. S. roentgenologist Henry K. Pancoast (1875) for whom Pancoast’s syndrome (a disorder of the nerve plexus which diverges from the spine into the arms) is named. Roentgenology—from Wilhelm K. Roentgen, the German physicist who discovered x-rays and won the Nobel prize—originally referred either to a skilled interpreter of x-rays (i.e. a radiologist) or one who treated diseases using x-ray therapy. ↩︎

27. Named for surgeons Sir William Stokes (1831–1900) of England and Rocco Gritti (1838–1920) of Italy. ↩︎

28. Alonzo Clark (1807–1887) was an American pharmacologist. Stedman’s gives no data on Cowling, perhaps because his rule is considered even more obsolete than Clark’s. ↩︎

29. Edwin Chargoff, an Austrian-American biochemist, was born in 1905. ↩︎

30. Formulated by U.S. gynecologist Hermann Knaus (b. 1892) and a Japanese physician, Kyusaka Ogino. ↩︎

31. The Latin text of Livy here used is that established by B.O. Foster, Livy Ab Urbe Condita, 13 vols., (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1919) 182-189. All translations are my own. For the influence of this passage from Livy upon John Milton, see Michele Valerie Ronnick. “Milton’s Reason of Church Government, 1.5.” Explicator 52(1994): 210-211. ↩︎