VOL XXVI, No 4 []

Lip Control

Al Stevens, Cocoa, Florida

The art of ventriloquism comprises many skills. The ventriloquist creates the illusion of being two people at once, coordinating several simultaneous actions: manipulating a ventriloquial figure; speaking dialogue for both the figure and the ventriloquist; maintaining two distinct voices and personalities; and making it seem that the figure’s speech comes from the figure.

Probably the most mysterious and interesting of these skills is lip control—speaking for the figure without lip movements. In normal speech, we move our jaws and lips. Yet a ventriloquist speaks without doing this. Lip control is only one of a ventriloquist’s skills, but it is the one that people notice and comment on most often.

Does a ventriloquist really “throw” the voice? No. It’s an illusion based on misdirection. Every day we hear sounds that seem to come from somewhere other than their origin. Who hasn’t searched in vain for a loud cricket in the house? Voices on television do not come from the people on the screen; they come from a speaker located nearby. Stereo speakers fool us into hearing a wide spectrum of sound. Our brains interpret what we hear and see and assume the sound’s direction. Ventriloquists exploit this human characteristic. By changing his or her voice, coordinating a figure’s movements with each syllable, and speaking with still lips, a ventriloquist seems to throw the voice.

Not all ventriloquists are masters of lip control. Edgar Bergen’s was so bad that Charlie McCarthy kidded him about it. Bergen learned his art in vaudeville, where the audience was not close enough to notice. Also, with no amplification, speech had to be clear and articulate. Ventriloquists preferred clarity to technique.

Bergen’s biggest success was on radio, and lip control was not an issue for those performances. He used a few devices to disguise the flaw. He turned his head toward Charlie and away from the audience and moved his head so the viewer could not keep a close watch on his lips.

Ventriloquists often employ such devices. Beards and mustaches help, too. Many ventriloquists avoid difficult words or repeat a phrase that the figure says:

Figure: My prom partner was plastered.

Vent: Your prom partner was plastered?

Hearing the words repeated, the audience forgets that they did not understand them the first time.

Bergen had a more effective diversion—Charlie himself. Bergen’s manipulation was so masterful that people watched Charlie, ignoring Bergen when Charlie spoke.

The early days of television established a new standard. TV involves closeups, and people noticed poor lip control. Paul Winchell and Jimmy Nelson had excellent lip control.

Mouth Position

A ventriloquist speaks with the lips slightly parted and the teeth barely touching. The lips can be smiling, relaxed, or turned down to express reactions to what the figure is saying. The figure’s speech is not altered by these changes, because they express the ventriloquist’s feelings, not the figure’s.

There is a tendency among students to push the lower jaw forward, clamp the teeth tightly together and keep stiff, retracted lips when speaking. This practice presents a rigid grimace to the audience and is neither effective nor attractive. Ventriloquists learn to relax their faces and look natural.

Understanding lip control requires knowledge of the underlying physiology. Ventriloquist and author Valentine Vox treats this subject in his comprehensive study of ventriloquism.¹

The Easy Letters

The letters A, C, D, E, G, H, I, J, K, L, N, O, Q, S, T, U, X, and Z are the “easy” letters; we can say them without using our lips. We routinely use our lips with these sounds, but it isn’t necessary. Say “Oh!” or “Oooo!” while grinning. You don’t have to form your lips into a circle. When we say “Oooo!” while grinning, we form our tongue into the half-rounded shape that the lips normally make. We can do this involuntarily because verbal communication is commonly augmented with facial expressions.

To maintain complete lip control, you must suppress the lip movements associated with the easy letters. But even though the easy letters are easy, they give some ventriloquists trouble. They routinely practice the difficult sounds, but their biggest problems involve involuntary lip flutters with the easy letters. These problems show up when you are tired, lay off ventriloquism for a while, or fail to regularly review and sharpen your technique. As with most skills, lip control needs practice to maintain proficiency.

Labials, The Hard Letters

The letters B, F, M, P, W, and V are called labials because they involve one or both lips. Speaking the “hard” letters employs oral substitutions using the tongue, teeth, and the roof of the mouth.

Here’s what Bergen says about labials:

“In fact, it is physically impossible to speak them without moving the lips . . . you must avoid words containing these letters whenever possible.”²

Clearly, Bergen found it impossible. For substitutions, he recommends “Vhee” for “B” and “Fee” for “P,” saying, “A ‘big piano’ would become a ‘vig fiano.'”

Bergen used the lower lip against the upper teeth to make the B and P sounds. It is extremely difficult to make those substitutions without lip movement; the lip has to part from the teeth to make the sound. This approach might account for Bergen’s lip control problems.

The letter R is easy to say in some words and less so in others. Normal speech sounds the R in “red” by using the lower lip against the upper teeth. In such words, speak R the way you speak it in words where R is not the first letter of a syllable (such as “word”).

Students substitute D for B, N for M, and T for P, but these are imperfect. Saying “dad doy” for “bad boy” sounds wrong. Instead of using the tip of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, press the tip against the back of the upper teeth. As the voice forms the sound, release the tongue pressure, forming the substitution. You can’t always get the same pop of air that labial speech produces, but it is not necessary, either. According to Paul Winchell:

“Like all ventriloquism, you are again deceiving the ear of the listener. If you make a substitute sound which sounds close enough to the true sound, the ear of anyone listening will accept it as the real sound.”³

A popular correspondence course teaches different substitutions for B, M, and P. These substitutions use the rear portion of the tongue against the roof of the mouth to emulate the lips pressing together. M is pronounced as “ng,” B is pronounced as “g,” and P is pronounced as “k.” According to the course, if you “think” about B, “G” will sound like B. The course emphatically discourages the student from using Winchell’s technique, saying, “It is more difficult to make accurate substitute sounds near the front of the mouth.”⁴

Each ventriloquist learns from experience which technique works best. Our mouths are not all the same; what works for one might not work for others.

In normal speech, the labials F and V are formed by touching the lower lip to the tips of the upper teeth. Ventriloquists employ substitutions based on variations of the “th” sounds. “Very” becomes “there-ie,” and “fox” becomes “thox,” using the two different ways “th” can sound, with voice added (as in “the”) and without it (as in “thin”). But normal speech often starts the “th” sounds with the tongue protruding between the upper and lower teeth. Since the audience would see the tongue stick out, pronounce “th” by touching the tip of the tongue at the back of the upper teeth.

There is a subtle difference between the “th” substitution in “fox” and “th” in “thing.” They are almost the same, but not quite. You say “thox” with the tongue tip touching the back of the upper teeth closer to the roof of the mouth, and you say “thing” with the tip touching closer to the gap between the upper and lower teeth. The audience hears the sounds in the context in which they are used and subconsciously interprets them correctly. There is no such word as “thox.” If say you went “thox hunting,” your meaning is understood. The audience knows from the context of the dialogue whether “thin” is a substitution for “fin” or “thin” itself.

In normal speech, W is spoken by compressing air behind partially closed lips and pushing the sound out while relaxing lip pressure. Say the word, “window” and observe this behavior. Ventriloquists are taught to substitute the “oo” sound for the first W and to not pronounce the last W. The word “window” becomes “oo-in-dough.”

But the “oo” substitution for W is imperfect. Say, “oo-under” for “wonder.” As you repeat the exercise, substitute the following action for the “oo” sound: Compress air between the back part of your tongue and the roof of your mouth and release it as you voice the sound. The substitution is similar to a hard G. “Wonder” becomes “gunder.” Obviously, that doesn’t sound correct, so, to form the substitution, do not touch your tongue to the roof of your mouth; instead force air and voice between the tongue and the roof. With practice, the substitution works.

Letter Combinations

Some difficult sounds are rarely taught. They involve the labials in combination with other sounds that the tongue makes in ways that interfere with the substitute labial tongue positions. These sounds include: BL as in “blue,” BR as in “bread,” FR as in “free,” MPR and MPT as in “impromptu,” PT as in “empty,” PL as in “play,” PR as in “practice,” PS as in “lips,” and RT as in “partner.”

These sounds use substitutions where the tongue does what the lips normally do followed by sounds that the tongue normally does. In normal speech, the tongue is ready for the second sound while the lips make the first. In ventriloquial speech, the tongue makes the first sound and then moves rapidly into position for the second. With practice, “practice” becomes “teractice” as the T-for-P tongue tip substitution comes off the teeth and moves back to form the R sound against the roof of the mouth. “Blue” becomes “balue.” “Empty” becomes “empaty.” In this case, you can omit the P sound and say, “emty,” which isn’t that easy itself. Ventriloquists learn to shift the tongue rapidly to minimize the extra vowel sound added by the tongue shift. Some words use the side of the tongue against the gums of the upper molars to form the first sound and the tip of the tongue to form the second. “Blue” can be spoken this way.

Changing the Voice

The figure needs its own voice so the audience can differentiate between the figure’s speech and the ventriloquist’s. Changing your voice involves raising or lowering the pitch, modifying timbre, changing pace, and adding a dialect.

Pitch is how low or high the figure speaks. Jimmy Nelson’s Danny O’Day and Jay Johnson’s Bob both speak in a raised falsetto voice, although that technique is not encouraged. It can be uncomfortable for the listener and hard on the ventriloquist’s voice. Usually a small raise or drop in pitch is sufficient to distinguish the figure’s voice from the ventriloquist’s.

Timbre is the quality of the voice. You change timbre by distorting your throat and nasal passages. You can add nasal sounds for a small, whiney boy, gutteral sounds for a rugged outdoors type, a scratchy voice for an elderly person, and so on.

Pace is the speed at which the figure talks, which can be fast for a wise guy, slow for a dim witted fellow, and so on. Yup, yup.

Dialect reflects speech patterns and idioms that suggest the origin of the figure’s character, which can be from another language or from various regions of the country.

Other Ventriloquial Effects

Ventriloquists employ the “distant voice” to simulate telephone conversations or make the voice come from a closet, trunk, another room, or outside the building. The distant voice is formed in the back of the throat with compressed tongue and throat muscles to muffle the sound. To increase the apparent distance, tighten the stomach muscles in the diaphragm area as if lifting a heavy object. The more constricted this muscle system, the farther away the voice seems to be.

The distant voice works only when the ventriloquist controls the circumstances. If someone asks you to “throw your voice,” they are expecting something, watching you closely, and are not fooled by the illusion.⁵

The so-called double voice sounds like there are two voices speaking simultaneously. The effect produces a dubious sound at best, is more curiousity than entertainment, and is one that few, if any, ventriloquists have mastered. The double voice is an urban legend among ventriloquists, and serious literature does not address it.

Ventriloquists often engage one or more figures in fast-paced verbal exchanges. These routines show the ventriloquist’s skill in the rapid changing of voice and manipulation. The ventriloquist precisely coordinates voice changes and figure manipulation, switching between lip control for the figure and lip movement for the ventriloquist. Rapid changing often switches between the distant and near voices as the ventriloquist opens and closes a trunk or talks on the telephone. Rapid changing is difficult and requires intensive practice.

Other effects involve drinking water, smoking, and similar activities that ought to prevent speech, even though the figure is indeed talking. These effects typically involve trickery, sometimes using recordings of the material being spoken.

Practicing

Ventriloquists often use mirrors to practice. A mirror reveals lip movement, but while you concentrate on the other parts of the art, slight lip movements might escape your attention. I recommend videotaping your performances and practice sessions. Review the taped sessions and evaluate your technique, identifying areas that need work. To concentrate on lip control, zoom the video camera in on your face.

Ask someone, preferably another ventriloquist, to evaluate and criticize your technique. Local ventriloquist clubs are a good source for help.

Once you have identified troublesome sounds, practice those sounds. Since this practice is repetitious, do it privately lest you annoy people and make them wonder why you are talking to yourself. Practice while you are driving, in the shower, taking a walk, or wherever you have time alone.

Your goals are to speak without perceptible lip movement and for such speech to become second nature. Anyone can do it with practice—er, “teractice.”

* Ventriloquists dislike the word “dummy,” preferring “figure.”

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[Al Stevens is a a professional writer and an amateur ventriloquist. He also writes on computer programming and on ventriloquist figure building.]

(Mis)interpretation?

Allison Whitehead, Stifford Clays, Essex

Had Michel de Nostredame (more popularly known as Nostradamus) been alive today, he probably would have subscribed to VERBATIM. His love of punning and wordplay, his use of anagrams, abbreviations and ambiguities . . . they are all still keeping us busy more than four hundred years after he wrote the Centuries. Was Nostradamus really predicting the future in his quatrains, or was he merely showing us what a knot we can get ourselves into when trying to decipher such vague and dramatic verses?

Fear of being accused of witchcraft by the Church led him to set down his predictions in a mix of languages, also inserting his own coded type of language and arranging the Prophecies out of their chronological order. We also have the problem of ‘split’ quatrains, where the first two lines of a verse refer to something completely different from the last two, done once again to confuse the Church at the time. Add to this the fact that a man living in the 16th century was trying to describe visions of life as lived in the twentieth century and beyond, it’s no wonder some of his translated verses are somewhat bizarre.

Certainly, some of the meanings given to the -words he chose are far removed from their literal meanings today. Take the following examples — many modern commentators agree that when Nostradamus uses the word ‘animal’, he actually means ‘machine’. A similar example can be seen in Century 11, Quatrain 5:

When weapons and documents are enclosed in a fish,

Out of it will come a man who will then make war.

His fleet will have travelled far across the sea,

to appear near the Italian shore.”

Here the word ‘fish’ is agreed to be the nearest Nostradamus could get in the 16th century to describing the modern day submarine, which neatly illustrates the broadness of mind needed to attempt to decipher his writings. Not only must we interpret what a man saw over four hundred years ago, we must try and see things from his point of view. He described what he saw within his own terms of reference. ‘Death’ is seen as meaning either literal bodily death, or political death, and again the meaning chosen depends on the contents of the rest of the quatrain. His attempts to describe things not yet invented have, if one believes the suggestions made by commentators, led to some interesting interpretations. ‘Copies of gold and silver’ is taken to mean paper money. Being ‘put on a spit’ is thought by some to mean being run through with a sword, and by others to mean being burned alive (perhaps at the stake?). A ‘thunderbolt’, as referred to in the quatrain which predicts the assassination of John F. Kennedy, is taken to mean a gunshot; an ‘iron cage’ is thought to indicate a car, or perhaps a tank, or other type of vehicle; and perhaps most ingeniously, the ‘half pig man’ mentioned in one than one quatrain is translated by some as referring to a pilot, with his oxygen mask. So the quatrain describing the person born of a pig man, is telling us of someone born to a pilot. Most ingenious. But is it correct?

Here lies the main problem with Nostradamus. Many phrases have double or even multiple meanings, depending on how you interpret the words, which can radically alter the quatrain itself. Words and phrases can be taken to be general as well as specific, i.e. ‘pestilences extinguished’ can mean any number of diseases and ailments overcome, which could easily refer to the advances of modern medicine, rather than to any specific disease. Easy to ‘foretell’, this one, especially by someone with extensive medical knowledge, such as Nostradamus had. We should also question the interpreter’s motives. Both believers and non-believers may deliberately or quite innocently twist the meanings to fit their own expectations. Both parties have managed over the years to produce quite convincing evidence that Nostradamus is a fake, and also the most talented seer the world has ever known. A certain amount of luck is inherent in everything, and with the vagueness of some of the quatrains it can be easy to see only what we want to see.

But not all the Centuries are filled with such vague writings. Some of the quatrains are more specific. The reference to the Kennedy assassinations seems more precise in this quatrain:

The great man will be struck down in the day by a thunderbolt.

An evil deed, foretold by the bearer of a petition.

According to the prediction another falls at nighttime.

Conflict at Reims, London, and pestilence in Tuscany.

‘The great man’ is taken to be JFK, who was indeed struck down during the day; and the other falling at nighttime is accepted as being Robert Kennedy, who was shot at night only a few years later. Nostradamus gets more specific still in Century 1, Quatrain 35, predicting the death of Henri 11:

The young lion will overcome the older one,

in a field of combat in a single fight:

He will pierce his eyes in their golden cage;

two wounds in one, then he dies a cruel death.

The ‘golden cage’ represents the gilt helmet that Henri wore during a duel, when his competitor’s lance struck the helmet and entered his head just above his eye. It took ten days for him to die. Quatrains where a specific location is mentioned are more convincing, which begs the question — why was he so obvious with some, and so obscure with others? The Great Fire of London was predicted in Century 2, Quatrain 51, where London is stated as being ‘burnt by fire in three times twenty plus six’. This places the event in a year ending in ‘66.

Nostradamus also made heavy use of anagrams and other word games to hide the meanings of his prophecies. ‘Chiren’ is commonly accepted to be an anagram of Henric, meaning Henri, while ‘Rapis’was often used in place of Paris. ‘D.nebro’ is accepted as being a phonetically challenged version of Edinburgh, while ‘Leon’ is a transparent disguise for Lyon. In some cases the anagrams are allowed to be ‘nearly but not quite’, i.e. ‘Nersaf, is taken to be a wonky anagram of France. A slightly more involved example occurs in Century 1, Quatrain 87, which appears to predict a huge earthquake affecting New York. The last two lines announce that ‘two great rocks will war for a long time, then Arethusa will redden a new river’. ‘Arethusa’ is the key word here, and once again more than one potential meaning has been offered. Some commentators have shortened ‘Areth’ to ‘Ares’, meaning the God of War… and the remaining ‘usa’ is obvious. But Arethusa was also a Greek nymph, blessed with the ability to change into a stream. What connection has she got with the ‘reddened river’, one wonders?

Another somewhat dubious example concerns ‘Mabus’, a name mentioned in more than one quatrain, and which Nostradamus seems to connect with the third Antichrist. Some people have claimed he was referring to Saddam Hussein — reverse Mabus to give us Subam; make the ‘b’ into a ’d’, and Sudam is as close to Saddam as you could get, phonetically if not literally. It seems a stretch . . . or maybe there is a man called Mabus who hasn’t appeared on the world stage quite yet.

But perhaps the most famous name which appears in the Centuries is ‘Hister’. This particular example is full of delights and possibilities. Firstly, we must be aware that in Nostradamus’ time, the letter ’s’ was written in long form, to look more like an T. This gives us ‘Hilter’. Swap the middle two letters around and there you are — the name of the second Antichrist. So did he know we would read the ’s' as an ‘l’? Or was Hister the closest he could get to the name? Interestingly, before the Second World War, ‘Hister’was accepted as meaning the River Danube, as Ister was its Latin name. But seeing as Hitler did have connections with the river, maybe Nostradamus was giving us a double word clue by putting the letter H in front of Ister … ? Even if you believe Hister to be nothing more than a lucky guess, or another case of modern day interpreters twisting the quatrains to fit what they see as being correct, the words ‘war’ and ‘Germany’ also appear with ‘Hister’ in this quatrain. These three words together surely hold more precognitive power than they would individually.

Another example of where spelling in the 16th century differed from what we would expect now is contained in Century 8, Quatrain 1, the first line of which says ‘PAU, NAY, LORON, will be more of fire than blood’. Pau, Nay and Loron all exist as French towns, but some have pointed out they are an anagram of Napaulon Roy, meaning Napoleon the King. Napaulon was a common way of spelling Napoleon in Nostradamus’s time. But what of the French towns? Is this another double meaning, in the same manner as Hister and Ister, the Danube? These apparent double meanings are rife in the Centuries, and both Napoleon and Hitler have been connected by commentators to the following quatrain:

In the deepest part of Western Europe

a child will be born of poor family,

who by his speech will entice many peoples.

His reputation will grow even greater in the Kingdom of the East.

Double prophecy, double meaning? This quatrain isn’t completely vague as Western Europe is mentioned, and it isn’t the only quatrain with an apparent double relevance. Is this wordplay at its cleverest, predicting two major historical events in the same four lines? Or are we once more reading too much into it, with the huge benefit of hindsight? Napoleon is also sometimes referred to as the ‘Eagle’, meaning his characteristics match those of the bird. But the word ‘eagle’ is also taken to represent the United States of America in some quatrains, so quite how one can be sure which one Nostradamus is referring to, is a puzzle. The ‘Lion’ is another emblem that often appears, usually being equated with England. The ‘great lady’ and the ‘ancient lady’, when appearing in quatrains relevant to London, are agreed to mean St Paul’s Cathedral.

One of the better known quatrains, at least since the beginning of 1999, is this one, from Century 10, Quatrain 72:

In the year 1999 and seven months,

from the sky will come the great King of Terror.

He will bring back the great King of the Mongols.

Before and after war reigns happily.

As this is one of the few quatrains that contains so precise a date, not to mention the emotive words ‘war’ and ‘terror’, believers announced this to be the end of the world. But at the time of writing, in 2001, we’re all still here. So was this misinterpreted? Does it in fact refer to a localised event in another country? Does it show that we are unable to correctly decipher the word clues and obscure but accurate meanings he left us? Or is it irrefutable proof that Nostradamus was wrong?

The problems begin when different commentators translate the original Centuries slightly differently, trying to negotiate their way through the quagmire of languages Nostradamus used to set them down. His 16th century descriptions must then be compared to the subsequent four hundred years of knowledge and history, to get an idea of what he could see.

The intriguing thing is, the more you study the Centuries, and the more aware you are of the wordplay, tricks and meanings he liked to use, the more sure you are that we will never know for sure whether he was a genius or a crank. The one thing we do know is that he was perhaps one of the greatest word manipulators the world has ever seen.

At least, that’s how I translate it.

[Allison Whitehead has had two other pieces published in VERBATIM, including “Titillating Titles” in Vol. XX/4.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Being able to envision an angry loner in the lab is less terrifying than an invisible web of hate that might weave its poison anywhere.” [from The Boston Globe (as reprinted in The Wisconsin State Journal, November 19, 2001), submitted by Susan Fiore]

How Wise is Proverbial Wisdom?

Richard Lederer, San Diego, California

A proverb is a well-known, venerable saying rooted in philosophical or religious wisdom. Just about everybody knows some proverbs, and we often base decisions on these instructive maxims.

But when you line up proverbs that spout conflicting advice, you have to wonder if these beloved aphorisms aren’t simply personal observations masquerading as universal truths:

How can it be true that you should look before you leap but make hay while the sun shines? It’s better to be safe than sorry, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Haste makes waste, but he who hesitates is lost. Patience is a virtue, but opportunity knocks but once. Slow and steady wins the race, but gather ye rosebuds while ye may. All things come to him who waits, but strike while the iron is hot. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, but faint heart never won fair maiden.

We often proclaim that actions speak louder than words, but at the same time we contend that the pen is mightier than the sword.

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, but don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

There’s no place like home and home is where the heart is, but the grass is always greener on the other side and a rolling stone gathers no moss.

A penny saved is a penny earned, but penny wise and pound foolish.

The best things in life are free, but you get what you pay for.

Where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise because what you don’t know can’t hurt you, but it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness because the unexamined life is not worth living.

Too many cooks spoil the broth, but many hands make light work.

Two’s company and three’s a crowd, but the more the merrier because two heads are better than one.

If at first you don’t succeed, try try again, but don’t beat a dead horse.

Silence is golden and talk is cheap, but the squeaky wheel gets the grease and a word to the wise is sufficient.

Clothes make the man because seeing is believing, but beauty is only skin deep because aooearances are deceiving, you can’t judge a book by its cover, and all that glitters is not gold.

Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise, but all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy because idle hands are the devil’s workshop.

Birds of a feather flock together, but opposites attract. Blood is thicker than water, but familiarity breeds contempt.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but it’s the thoughts that counts.

Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today, but don’t cross that bridge until you come to it.

Variety is the spice of life, but don’t change horses in mid stream.

There is nothing permanent except change, but there is nothing new under the sun.

You’re never too old to learn, but you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

A stitch in time saves nine, but better late than never.

The bigger, the better, but the best things come in small packages.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind.

What will be will be, but life is what you make it.

When it rains, it pours, but lightning never strikes twice in the same place.

Don’t bite off more than you can chew, but hitch your wagon to a star.

Don’t cross your bridges before you come to them and don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched, but forewarned is forearmed and well begun is half done.

What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, but one man’s meat is another man’s poison.

With age comes wisdom, but out of the mouths of babes and sucklings comes wisdom.

Might makes right and only the strong survive, but a soft answer turns away wrath and the meek shall inherit the earth.

Turn the other cheek, let bygones be bygones, and forgive and forget, but an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth because revenge is sweet and turnabout is fair play.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but all’s fair in love and war.

Virtue is its own reward, but the good die young.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, but the ends justify the means.

It’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game and winning isn’t everything, but to the victor goes the spoils.

So for better days ahead, all you have to do is figure out which proverb to use under which circumstances! Quite apparently, whichever side of an argument one takes, one can usually find a proverb to support it. That’s why Miguel Cervantes wrote, “There is no proverb that is not true,” while Lady Montagu proclaimed that “general notions are generally wrong.”

[We’re happy to welcome Richard Lederer back as a contributor in this issue. He is the author of the new Merriam-Webster’s Word Play Crosswords, and Anguished English, Fractured English, and Crazy English.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

Cricket match becomes a one-name game

Umpires and scorers at a cricket match were left scratching their heads when they realised all 22 players had the same surname. Patel caught by Patel off the bowling of Patel was a common sight in the scorebook for the top-of-the-league clash between Yorkshire LPS and Amarmilan in Bradford, West Yorkshire. One of the scorers of the match was also called Patel - but fortunately 15-year-old Amit knew all the players and could refer to them by their first names. [From The [London] Times, 19 July 2001. Submitted by Laurence Urdang, Old Lyme, CT]

Book Words: Words Describing Paper and Printing

Carol-June Cassidy and Paul Heacock, Larchmont, New York

Books about words can rarely resist words about books, and this one makes no exception. Many of the terms here are obscure in modern publishing circles, although knowing when to use recto and verso is one way of showing you have some knowledge of how books are made.

codex n an ancient manuscript comprised of a number of pages, usually a quire, folded or sewn together, or a manuscript volume of an ancient text

fascicle n a bundle, especially the gathered papers of a small piece of writing, which combined with other writings forms a larger work; a section of a book published as a separate piece, or a book in a set published as a separate volume

folio n a sheet of paper folded in half to make two leaves or four pages, or a book with large pages, or a page number printed in a book

incunabula pl n early printed books made before the invention of movable type

incunabular adj having to do with such books

octavo n a sheet of paper folded three times to make eight leaves or sixteen pages, or a book with small pages

palimpsest n a reused writing surface, such as parchment, that contains an erased text which can still be discerned beneath the writing of newer text

quarto n a sheet of paper folded two times to make four leaves or eight pages, or a book with pages of medium size

quire n a set of twenty-four pieces of paper of the same size and weight; a twentieth of a ream

recto n the page of a manuscript meant to be read first, or a right-hand page in a book

verso n the page of a manuscript meant to be read second, or a left-hand page in a book

[From THE NEW AMERICAN DICTIONARY OF DIFFICULT WORDS by Carol-June Cassidy and Paul Heacock. Copyright © Carol-June Cassidy, 2001. Reprinted by arrangement with Dutton, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc. To order the book, please call 1-800-253-6476.]

A Possible Origin of Flash Flood

Ari Hoptman, University of Minnesota

The term “flash flood” is used constantly in weather reports, indicating a quick and very destructive flow of water. Though seemingly self-explanatory, it is also possible that the word is a fusion of two separate flashes, one meaning ‘a sudden outburst or issuing forth of flame or light,’ the other a term describing a body of water.

The Oxford English Dictionary has little information on “flash flood” besides listing it as a vocabulary item; no dates are given for its earliest use. Random House Dictionary of the English Language (2nd ed) describes a flash flood in more topographical terms, viz., “a sudden and destructive rush of water down a narrow gully or over a sloping surface, caused by heavy rainfall,” and lists its first occurrence as between 1935 and 1940.⁶ The National Weather Service characterizes a flash flood as a sudden rushing of water which follows heavy storms, and which is likely to recede in less than six hours. The term is used in opposition to river flooding, which is of a significantly longer duration.

A homonym of flash, however, is worthy of note. The English Dialect Dictionary includes a term flash (Middle English flasshe) with the definition “[a] pool, shallow sheet of water; a swamp, marshy pond.” Among the many quotations found under the entry are “a hollow boggy place, grown over with rushes and flags,” and “the waters that lodge in wet seasons on Brumby West-common.”⁷ That the term could also be linked specifically to flooding is suggested in a report found in the Dublin Review on the dangers of over-mining, where we find the following:

The market-place, after sinking 30 feet, and requiring reconstruction, has now found a solid foundation, the entire salt bed beneath it having been worked out. Near the Station Road, which has sunk 40 feet, is to be seen a house with its ridge tiles and chimneys a few feet above ground, the remainder of the premises having gone down. In some places large lakes, called “flashes” are formed, some of them more than 200 acres in area and gradually extending.⁸

The term (in various forms) is found in many northern and central English place names, usually ones denoting swampy areas or low fields.⁹ Indeed, the doublet flass does exist, indicating a depression or low-lying area. In a discussion in Notes and Queries concerning the place-name Flass (also known as Flask), a river village near Durham, derivations from both meanings are suggested: Chevallier and “Ceyrep” see the name as relating to its position in the low area of the river plain¹⁰ ; “Wulstan,” however, connects it with the Celtic root esc, usc ‘water’ (cf. Irish uisce, whiskey), which is preceded by an (unexplained) sequence fl-. He refers to the Swedish lake Flasjon, the river name Flesh in County Kerry, and the term flash “a sluice erected upon rivers.”¹¹

The combination fl- + ash is conceivable though unlikely, especially given some of the over-enthusiastic derivations of English words from Celtic in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, it is possible that the fl- sequence is sound-symbolic, either for the meaning ‘moving [water]’ (flow, flood, float, Latin fluere) or for the group that contains English flat and German flach (thus the sense or a ‘collection of water in lowlands’).¹² The meaning ‘to flow,’ however, seems to be the more likely: it would support the primary sense of “small lake, pool” (especially one that exists seasonally), but also the designation for a ‘sluice,’ as well as providing a derivation for flashing ‘a metallic sealant for roofs to guide water away.’

Flash floods are sudden floods, but they may also be ones that initially had to do with actual flashes. True, the term flash flood is more than a little reminiscent of flash fire ‘a sudden and destructive fire,’ but it is possible that the original sense of the flash flood was a kind of flood which affected lowland areas (or was simply a collection of water in low areas), as in the reference to salt-mines. Later, through the influence of the other flash ‘sudden outburst,’ it took on its current meaning.

---

[Ari Hoptman is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota. This article was written with the assistance of the files of the Encyclopedic Dictionary of English Etymology. Thanks also to Anatoly Liberman and Jeffrey L. High.]

The ‘Phenomenon Calendar’ of the Xhosa

Bertie Neethling, University of the Western Cape

The Xhosa speaking people of South Africa number some 8 million, making them the second largest cultural and language group in multilingual and multicultural South Africa. Having been exposed to the influence of westernization in all its forms for more than 180 years, old traditions are under severe pressure to survive. The Xhosa are a people with strong beliefs in traditional custom where prescribed social behavior is highly valued, and it is relatively easy to appreciate the confusion and divisions that set in when they were introduced to different and often conflicting sets of values. The impact of this exposure has been tremendous. Although there has been resistance to change and emotional appeals are made to all African communities not to forsake their traditions and customs, few if any, have managed to remain unaffected.

The Xhosa people have a very interesting naming system for the months of the year. Not unexpectedly, this very colorful and descriptive set is under pressure too, and is challenged by an adoptive set of names via English and/or Afrikaans. This new set of names adheres to the Gregorian calendar which has become a convention in nearly all literate societies: a year has 365 days, split up into 12 months, each having a more or less equal number of days. Only minor adjustments were made to accommodate the phonological system which, amongst other things, requires syllables to be open, i.e. ending in vowels. Variation in spelling occurs, but even to the uninitiated it is relatively easy to recognize these names as borrowings from English or Afrikaans.

1. January uJanuwari/uJanywari/uJanyuwari

2. February uFebruwari/uFebrwari/uFebhuwari

3. March uMatshi

4. April uAprili/uEprili/uApreli

5. May uMeyi

6. June uJuni

7. July uJulayi

8. August uAgasti

9. September uSeptemba

10. October uOktobha

11. November uNovemba

12. December uDisemba

This fairly unimaginative set is also fairly new. How did the Xhosa people organize their time before they were introduced to this calendar? Did they have a notion of the month, and if so, on what basis was it calculated? John Mbiti writes illuminatingly in his book African Religion and Philosophy (1989) on the concept of ‘time’ as experienced by the traditional African. Unlike in the West where time is considered a commodity that is used, bought and sold, the traditional African does not live by the clock. Mbiti even reckons that time in the traditional context is of little importance for the African. Time is merely a composition of events that have taken place, that are taking place now, or that will take place in the future. According to Mbiti, time within the traditional context is basically two-dimensional: it has a long past, a present, and hardly any future. Actual time is what is present and what is past: it moves ‘backward’ rather than ‘forward’, and people set their minds not on future things, but mainly on things that have taken place. Time is not indicated for time’s sake, but only to link up with certain events: it is the event that takes place that makes the time indication meaningful. Times of the day and the month are therefore expressed in terms of events taking place at a given time. ‘Dawn’ in Xhosa is expressed as Xa kumpondo zankomo, i.e. when the horns of the cattle become visible against the horizon.

It has become common practice among many African communities to name the different months of the year according to the phenomena of nature prevalent during those times: it does not matter if the month consists of 25 or 35 days. The events are important, not the mathematical length of the month. Numerical calendars therefore become quite meaningless in the life of the traditional African. Mbiti says: ‘Outside the reckoning of the year, African time concept is silent and indifferent. People expect the years to come and go, in an endless rhythm like that of day and night, and like the waning and the waxing of the moon.'(p.21)

It seems reasonable to accept that traditional African societies calculated the duration of a month on a lunar rather than a numerical basis. It therefore comes as no surprise that many African communities have exactly the same word for ‘moon’ and ‘month’ as is also the case in Xhosa: inyanga. The traditional set of month names reflects the close relationship between man and nature and therefore gives rise to a ‘phenomenon calendar’. For an interesting comparison, one can look at John G Neihardt’s well known book on the Native American Sioux in his book Black Elk Speaks (1988). It appears as if these ‘phenomenon calendars’ might be common to many other preliterate communities.

1. January: eyoMqungu (Moon when Tambookie grass sprouts)

This month name is derived from the noun umqungu referring to a kind of long grass used for thatching. It is commonly known as Tambookie grass in South Africa. By contrast, the (translated) Sioux name for this period is Moon of Frost in the Tepee. In South Africa it is summer, in the northern hemisphere, winter.

2. February: eyoMdumba (Moon grain is swelling)

The noun umdumba ‘a pod’ serves as the base of this name. The noun derives from the verb –dumba, ‘to swell’ and refers to the time of the year when the grain is swelling and ripening. The Sioux have a totally different phenomenon at that time: Moon of the Dark Red Calves.

3. March: eyoKwindla (Moon when harvest is reaped)

The name derives from the word for autumn (fall), ukwindla, which is then also the common name for the autumn (fall) season. This is the time when the harvest is brought in. A different natural phenomenon inspires the Sioux name: Moon of the Snowblind.

4. April: uTshaz’ impuzi (Moon when crops get frostbitten)

This is a compound name, deriving from the verb –tshaza ‘to become frostbitten’, and the noun impuzi ‘the pumpkin plant’. The name refers to the late crops becoming frostbitten on the approach of winter. Neihardt’s name for the corresponding period among the Sioux is Moon of the Red Grass appearing. It is reminiscent of the Xhosa name for January.

5. May: ekaCanzibe (Moon when Canopus is visible)

This month name is derived from uCanzibe, referring to the large bright star visible in the southern hemisphere in winter. The difference but also the similarity in the naming processes in these originally preliterate societies come out clearly. The Sioux looked to their horses, an integral part of Indian life, and called the corresponding period Moon when the Ponies Shed.

6. June: eyeSilimela (Moon when Pleiades is visible)

Like the previous month, this one is also linked to the visibility of a star constellation, the Pleiades. It derives from the word isilimela, referring to this constellation. This time of the year, mid-winter in South Africa, announces the ploughing time. It is also interesting to note that the initiation ritual of the young men, ukwaluka, during which they are circumcized, usually takes place during this period. To establish the number of manhood years of an individual, a Xhosa male may be asked: ‘Izilimela zakho zingaphi?’, i.e. ‘How many winters (izilimela) since your circumcision (initiation)’. The month name is therefore also closely linked to an important cultural event.

It is interesting to note that in the months of May and June, a dormant time for crops and vegetation in general, stars serve as the inspiration for the month names. By contrast it is a time of abundance among the Sioux: Moon of Fatness.

7. July: eyeKhala (Moon when aloe blossoms)

This month name is derived from the noun ikhala, which refers to the Cape Aloe, a species of aloe found mainly in the southeastern parts of South Africa where the Xhosa are concentrated. This time of the year announces the blossoming of the aloes. It is a joy to behold the bright orange flowers that contrast nicely with the succulent green leaves when traveling in those parts in July. The Sioux enjoy another type of offering from nature: Moon of the Red Cherries.

8. August: eyeThupha (Moon when budding starts)

The noun ithupha ‘bud’, is derived from the verb –thupha ‘to bud’. This is the time of the year, in early spring, when nature awakens from its winter slumber, and trees and shrubs begin to bud. In the northern hemisphere, the opposite is happening: summer is passing. The Sioux name links up with the one for July: the cherries are now in a more advanced state, hence Moon when the Cherries Turn Black.

9. September: eyoMsintsi (Moon when coral tree flowers)

The name derives from the noun umsintsi, referring to the coral tree with the botanical name Erythrina caffra Thunb. The flowering of this tree serves as one of the signals for sowing sorghum and maize during this time. Neihardt gives three descriptions of this period in Sioux: Moon when the Calves grow hair, Moon of the Black Calf, and Moon when the plums turn scarlet. The first two are references to the bison calves prominent at that time of the year in the good old days. It is obviously an era that, alas, has gone by.

10. October: eyeDwarha (Moon when dwarha shrub flowers)

This name is derived from the noun idwarha. It refers to a shrub, Senecio latifolius D.C. This plant is considered to have medicinal qualities with regard to wounds and sores, and is often used to soothe and heal the sore backs of horses. When this shrub blooms in October, it is time for sowing maize. While it is now warming up in South Africa, the opposite takes place in the northern hemisphere: the Sioux call this period Moon of the Changing Season.

11. November: eyeNkanga (Moon when ragwort blossoms)

The noun inkanga refers to the ragwort, Senecio juniperinus L. The month of November is characterized by the blossoming of this shrub. It also features in a Xhosa proverb: Akukho nkanga idubul’ ingethi. Literally it means that there is no ragwort that does not blossom and die. The closest English equivalent is probably ‘Kingdoms wax and wane’. The Sioux name for November is Moon of the Falling Leaves, clearly suggesting the Fall.

12. December: eyoMnga (Moon when mimosa tree flowers)

The noun umnga refers to a kind of thorn tree, sometimes called the mimosa. Its botanical name is Acacia horrida Willd. This thorn tree blooms at the end of the year during the month of December. Incidentally, the Sioux name for December is also after trees: Moon of the Popping Trees.

It is clear that these traditional sets of month names of the Xhosa as well as the Sioux reflect the kind of ‘phenomenon’ or ‘events’ calendar that Mbiti claims is the general one in the traditional African context. As the Sioux data suggests, this may also apply to other (non-African) preliterate societies. Certain events are associated with particular months and they are named accordingly. It is fairly obvious that both the Xhosa and the Sioux have been strongly influenced by nature around them, and the regular occurrences of these phenomena in nature, linked to the agricultural activities of especially the Xhosa, served as the inspiration for naming the months.

As the old traditions yield to new influences, so it seems to be developing in Xhosa society where the new adoptive and unimaginative set is slowly but surely ousting the old traditional set. The younger generation is still able to mention a few of these names, but they no longer know which one belongs to what period. It is only a matter of time before these colorful and descriptive names finally disappear. It is not surprising, but extremely sad. Xhosa society will be the poorer when that happens.

[Bertie Neethling is Professor and Chair of the Xhosa Department at the University of the Western Cape in Bellville, near Cape Town, South Africa. His main interests are Xhosa onomastics, oral literature and language acquisition.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

ASK ABOUT OUR PRE-FIX MENUS FOR LARGE GROUPS [Seen in a Chevy Chase MD restaurant by Doug Hoylman, Chevy Chase MD]

BUGSPRAY.NET ON THE WEB—Please give this catalog to a friend if you already have one. [If you don’t, please make a friend, then give away the catalog? Submitted by Robert L. Sharp, Japan]

HarpWeek: Full-Text Searching of History

Fred R. Shapiro, Yale Law School

Electronic resources presenting text and images through the World Wide Web are rapidly revolutionizing the study of history. One of the most exciting of these services is HarpWeek. HarpWeek provides electronic access to Harper’s Weekly, the famous illustrated “Journal of Civilization” that is perhaps the most important primary resource for examining 19th-century America. News stories, illustrations, cartoons, editorials, biographies, literature, and even advertisements from this journal are available with facsimile images, thesaurus-based indexing, and now as searchable full text. The searchable full text is the ultimate access to the gold mine of material in Harper’s Weekly, allowing word or phrase searching, proximity searching, full date range searching, and restriction to particular features such as news stories or fiction.

One way of illustrating the power of HarpWeek’s full-text search capability is by using it to trace the origins of words and phrases. The Oxford English Dictionary has had thousands of editors and contributors working for a century and a half to find the earliest known usage of each term in the English language. The recent best-seller, The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester, spotlighted the phenomenal research that has gone into the “first uses” in the OED. In a few seconds of searching, however, HarpWeek can often beat out these OED first uses and provide earlier evidence from the pages of Harper’s Weekly issues. The richness of Harper’s Weekly’s contents, the extensive historical coverage (1857–1912), and the power of the ability to search the full text for occurrences of desired words or phrases all add up to an extraordinary tool for linguistic research (and, of courses, countless other applications).

I have used HarpWeek to improve upon the historical record for a number of important nineteenth-century terms. For example, the first citation for the crucial term carpetbagger given by the Oxford English Dictionary is dated September 1868. A HarpWeek search, however, shows that the March 14, 1868 Harper’s Weekly quoted the Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail (11 February) that “many of them [Negroes] preferred to go with the scalawags and carpet-baggers.”

Reconstruction-era politics is only one of the vast number of subjects illuminated by HarpWeek. Therefore it is not surprising that searches of the type I have described can “antedate” the OED for a wide range of words and phrases. Here are a small number of the interesting antedatings of terms that I have uncovered with HarpWeek full-text searches (the date of the OED’s first usage for the term is given in parentheses, followed by the earlier appearance in Harper’s Weekly):

bicentennial (OED 1883) 1876 Harper’s Weekly 1 Jan. 11 “The bicentennial anniversary of the discovery of infusoria by the great Dutch microscopist Leuwenhoek, in 1675, has just been celebrated at Delft.” 1880 Harper’s Weekly 21 Feb. 115 “On the 22d of March next it is proposed to hold a celebration of the bicentennial of the church.”

bicycle (OED 1869) 1868 Harper’s Weekly 19 Dec. 811 “The connecting apparatus differs from that of the French bicycle in that the saddle bar serves only as a seat and brake.”

biologist (OED, modern sense, 1879) 1874 Harper’s Weekly 19 Dec. 1043 “For eighteen years … he edited the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science, and after that he associated himself in its magagement with his son, Mr. E. Ray Lankester, an eminent biologist.”

chauvinist (OED 1877) 1871 Harper’s Weekly 14 Jan. 43 “The whole chauvinist camp, from Emperor to drummer-boy, have been swept into space and into ignominy.” 1872 Harper’s Weekly 15 June 467 “The policy of the Jesuits … here had a common ground of action with that of the French Chauvinistes.”

double standard (OED 1951) 1897 Harper’s Weekly 6 Mar. 219 [quotes 1895-96 annual report of President of Harvard University on “double standard’ of morality]

gold rush (OED 1893) 1886 Harper’s Weekly 25 Dec. 839 “Brannan brought a ship-load of Mormons to California in the first days of the gold rush.”

impressionism (OED 1882) 1880 Harper’s Weekly 23 Oct. 678 “There is nothing more to be said on the subject of impressionism than that.”

lobbyist (OED 1863) 1858 Harper’s Weekly 30 Jan. 70 “There is not a soirée, or hop, or social gathering that our fair lobbyists do not improve the opportunity to present some private claim in the most attractive light.”

This list spans topics from politics to science, from art to sports, as might be expected from the “Journal of Civilization.” Such results in studying the history of words strongly suggest the limitless potential of HarpWeek for research in the history of American culture and ideas.

[Fred Shapiro is the Associate Librarian for Public Services and Lecturer in Legal Research at Yale Law School and the editor of the forthcoming Yale Dictionary of Quotations.]

First Person Singular

No pronoun’s more pronounce or high–

ly thought of than the pronoun I;

No other pronoun is more prone

To be content to be alone.

It’s capital, it’s number one,

It is, no doubt, my father’s son.

There is none better, seems to me,

Unless (with capital) it’s He.

—Henry George Fischer

SIC! SIC! SIC!

The following was found on a bottle of Tylenol brand Arthritis Pain medication: “do not use for fore than 10 days unless directed by a doctor under 18 years of age” [Submitted by Dale E. Claes, Fresno CA]

HORRIBILE DICTU

Mat Coward, Somerset, Britain.

Of all the empty, ugly, moronic cliches we have endured in recent years, I don’t suppose there’s one worse than politically correct—unless it’s politically incorrect.

The latter, of course, is used almost exclusively as a term of self-congratulation (“I’m afraid I’m being terribly politically incorrect,” old humbugs chortle at each other via the columns of conservative newspapers, and other designated Humbug Reservations), or as a protective incantation against criticism, intoned before saying or writing something which is intended solely to incite hatred or cause offence.

The correct form, meanwhile, is simply a way of arguing without argument; anything which the speaker disapproves of can be dismissed as “politically correct”. Needless to say, the same thing can be damned as correct and celebrated as incorrect simultaneously from two different poles.

It’s nearly pointless to catalogue examples of this particular Horribile, as it is so prevalent and mindless, but I was taken by the self-contradictory fundamentalism of an American TV mogul who told an interviewer that he instructs his staff to “be themselves. One thing I’ll insist on is that they not be politically correct. I can’t stand politically correct.” Ah, what a hero of Liberty! And anyone who says otherwise gets shot, no doubt.

I have to ration myself when it comes to issue , else I might fill this whole column with it—which would be journalistically incorrect. (VERBATIM readers, however, are not subject to rationing; please feel free to send me as many of your own Horribiles as you wish, via either of the magazine’s usual addresses). My one issue for this issue is an advert for a trichology clinic, headlined “If you have any issue with your hair or scalp we can help.” (Then again, perhaps I’m doing the clinic a disservice; my dictionary gives “a suppurating sore” as one meaning of issue).

I’d be particularly glad to hear from readers about “superglued” words—those which generally appear in public as pairs. In Britain, a largely secular country, no-one is ever described as a “Christian” any more, but always as a committed Christian, whether the god-botherer in question is an eccentric celebrity or The Accused entering a plea for mitigation. I imagine this is to make a distinction between the agnostic millions who tick the C of E box on official forms, and those few extremists who take their religion to the bizarre lengths of actually attending church.

In the long history of English, it’s not particularly unusual for words and phrases to reverse their meanings, and I try to remember that what seems like vocab vandalism to VERBATIM types might sometimes be nothing more than another example of a word on the move.

“Bipartisanship is fine,” said Tiger Woods, according to newspaper reports, following the barracking of foreign players by US golf fans, “but not when you get on to guys personally. I played against Colin Montgomerie and some of the things said to him were downright wrong.” Mr Woods is clearly a gentleman and a sportsman of the old school, and I wonder if the reason he chose bipartisanship over partisanship was because he felt so strongly about this matter that he wanted a word which sounded as if it was double the strength of the original; or whether “partisanship” is now so rarely employed compared to its bi-cousin that it is fading altogether; or whether Tiger did say “partisanship,” but was misquoted by an ignorant reporter working to an ignorant sub.

Then there was the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, who was recently quoted as saying “The importance of forests cannot be underestimated.” I laughed when I heard this; but I laughed quietly, because the joke is becoming a little thin. In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest that cannot be underestimated is now so close to replacing cannot be overestimated that we have almost reached the point where we will have to consider it correct by dint of common usage, rather than comical on grounds of back-to-front-ness.

Personally, I could care less—but I fear others, literally, couldn’t.

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

Bogus E-mail Subject Lines

Jim Veihdeffer, Tempe, AZ

The following are actual subject lines from e-mails that are come-ons for pornographic web sites. The lines are given VERBATIM, exactly as received, punctuation and all. The sender’s intention is, apparently, to somehow trick you into thinking you have an actual note from a friend or long-lost relative. (Note that the senders are not typically very fussy about matters of punctuation and often the same line, by different…er…vendors, will show up with slight variations.) I’m especially fond of subject lines relating to “personal finance” since people who use credit cards or have mortgages are apparently, in the worldview of these folks, likely to be heavy users of pornographic web sites. The effrontery, the sheer cheekiness of lying outright, of creating a subject line that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the content is awe-inspiring. (My commentary in italics.)

And now, the…um…winners.

Hey there

RE: your line of credit

Like animals

(Ok…this might be obvious once you’re in on the joke but just imagine you’re receiving it without any prior tip-off)

Here Are The PICs Of Me Naked That You Wanted

(yes, it’s obvious, but note the indication that this is a response to a prior note)

Bought a computer, drop me a line

Guess who, bought a puter.

(gotta love that punctuation)

Guess who, bought a computer.

Guess who, bought a computer : -)

( note the addition of the smiley face)

been trying to reach you…….

Not today

So what should I…

Are we there yet?

(almost diabolical in its metaphysical simplicity)

Re: Hey

(much better than a simple “Hey”)

Lots of pink!!

(should have seen this one coming)

Re: your mortgage

(Re: your annoying message)

How was I supposed to know

Did you send this?

You tell me what I should do

IMPORTANT NEWS!!!!

(I guess one exclamation wasn’t enough!)

What happened to my letter?

See you next week

Been hacked, under a new screen name

been trying to reach you……

(ellipsis seems to be a popular tool)

RE: Your mail

Something happened with your…

OPEN, why did you say that about me…

(note: two hooks for the price of one)

Try again

Here are the settings.

How does “Dinner & a Movie” sound?

(how does a smack upside the face with a pig’s bladder sound?)

I need that list from you

Does it still hurt?

I don’t want to go, sorry

(wait…has someone been reading my e-mail?)

(Romantic Music)

(yes…that’s just how it appears on the subject line)

Whats wrong with your email?

(what’s wrong with your punctuation?)

You have to keep this a secret.

(no problemo!)

I still have feelings for you!!!…

(feelings for my gullibility, you mean)

Is your phone broke?

You are giving me a complex

(sorry about that)

hey :#@$

(the Beetle Bailey school of cursing to get your attention)

i hate college so much!

New pics I found of flowers

(ya just to have to roll yer eyes at this one)

[Jim Veihdeffer is a freelance technology writer, the founder of Save the Virgules!, and has not worn a full-body chicken costume for more than two years.]

EX CATHEDRA

There’s still time to enter our favorite word contest, either by mail or at www.VERBATIMmag.com. Recent entries have included usufruct, amaranth, lollapalooza, shinny, hella, cicisbeo, forlorn, flummox, and ubiquitous. We’ll choose one or two entries at random and award them a new desk dictionary.

Speaking of new dictionaries, I’d like to put in a plug for one that I worked on, the New Oxford American Dictionary. It has a new arrangement of definitions by core sense and subsense—which not only makes it easier to use, but also can lead you to some surprising associations and connections between meanings that you might not have otherwise discovered. It’s available in the US wherever books are sold.

Speaking of plugs, the new (and very well-reviewed) collection of VERBATIM pieces (entitled simply VERBATIM) is out. See the ad on page 23 of this issue for more details. A UK edition might be in the works; we’ll let our loyal readers there know as soon as there are more details.

I will be “doing some media” for both of these new books (you might have seen me recently on CNN). If you’d like to be notified when I will be on local radio or in a bookstore in your area, send your email address and your nearest major metropolitan area to editor@VERBATIMmag.com. (We can send only email notices because of the cost of postage.)

We have a new US toll-free phone number! This will connect you to the editor in working hours and to a voicemail system otherwhen. It’s 800-897-3006. (Alas, this combination of numbers doesn’t spell anything.) Call with questions, comments, or to enter last-minute holiday gift subscriptions.

We’re still working hard on the long-promised index, and on a redesign of our website, as well. Suggestions welcome (at least, suggestions that don’t involve streaming media, chat rooms, and adding music are welcome).

Another “suggestions wanted” note: some of our best contributors needed to be invited to write for VERBATIM. Would you like to see your favorite (non-fiction) writers in these pages? Send us their names and we’ll send them a letter begging them to write for us. It’s worked before!

—Erin McKean

CLASSICAL BLATHER: Baddabing, Baddabang

Nick Humez, argentarius@juno.com

Viewers of the HBO hit series The Sopranos will have noticed a nightclub named Bada Bing, as in “Baddabing, Baddabang.”¹³ Doublets of this general form, conjoined minimal pairs in which all the consonants are the same and only one vowel is changed, abound in English, falling into two major classes. In the first, the initial vowel is a somewhat high front unrounded one (represented in International Phonetic Alphabet by the symbol I)¹⁴ and the second a lower front unrounded one (IPA symbol æ), as in rickrack (a wiggly cloth tape or ribbon used for decoration or seam binding), riprap (a type of masonry for a retaining wall), flimflam (a confidence game in which the con-man borrows a small sum of money off victims by persuading them that it will allow the retrieval of a much larger sum), chitchat (idle conversation, probably a back-formation from chatter), fiddle-faddle (nonsense), wigwag (a railway signal with a movable arm), and zigzag (to move first one way and then another).¹⁵ In the second type, the initial vowel is also IPA I but the second vowel is lower back rounded (IPA ç), as in flipflop (which can either mean to move one way and then reverse altogether, as in “The candidate flipflopped on the issue,” or else refer to sandals held on the feet by a thong between the big toe and the first little one, with attached straps to either side—no doubt so called from the sound they make when one is walking in them), hip-hop (a popular urban musical style)¹⁶, tip-top (highest [point], acme), singsong (an adjective referring to speech which approximates singing)5, dingdong (onomatopoea for the sound of a bell, and also a euphemism for “penis”;¹⁷ capitalized, it is the name of a commercial dessert snack), and ticktock (the sound of a pendulum clock ticking, and hence capitalized as the name of a diner on 34th St. at 7th Avenue in Manhattan, a block north of Penn Station, whose facade features a clock face).¹⁸

Of the former class, some items convey a clear sense of purposeless, vain, or useless things or activities: dilly-dally (undoubtedly reduplicative from dally), shilly-shally (prevaricate), knick-knack and bric-a-brac.¹⁹ Onomatopoea also plays a part, especially in light lyric poetry: the splish-splash²⁰ of Bobby Darin’s rock hit “Splish Splash, I Was Taking a Bath,” the snicker-snack²¹ of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” and the tink-a-tank in the refrain of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “When First My Old, Old Love I Knew.”²² Other popular songs whose titles and choruses include minimal pairs of this sort are the Beatles' “Obladi, Oblada” from the 1968 “White Album” and “Funiculi, Funicula,” written early in the 20th century to celebrate the opening of a funicular (cable-car) service up the slopes of Mt. Vesuvius. (In this class we might also include Malvina Reynolds' beloved satire of midcentury suburbia, “Little Boxes” made of ticky-tacky).

Additional examples abound. We speak of making everything ship-shape²³ (and presumably spic and span in the bargain, especially if we have a box of the powdered cleanser so named), deliberate policy in a think-tank, relax at home in the company of our kitty-cat,²⁴ refer to an egregious surfeit of something as having it “up the ying-yang”²⁵ and when spooked are said to have the jim-jams—also known as the heeby-jeebies.²⁶

The last is an example of another kind of minimal-pair reduplication closely related to the type above, but here what is altered is not the vowel but the initial consonant: namby-pamby,²⁷ helter-skelter²⁸ and its synonyms hurry-scurry and pell-mell,²⁹ pop-top³⁰ cans, a hodge-podge,³¹ the hurdy-gurdy,³² and such commercial names as the Nice Twice resale shop on Route 3 in Aurora, Maine.³³ Then there is reduplication pure and simple, frequently found in words adopted from languages other than English, such as frou-frou,³⁴ Mau-Mau,³⁵ dum-dum,³⁶ mahi-mahi,³⁷ and dik-dik³⁸ The tendency to double an affectionate truncation of a word, often (though not always) for the benefit of small children, crosses linguistic borders as well: faire pipi or faire do-do in French,³⁹ po-po⁴⁰ in German, din-din and ack-ack in English.30

Finally, there are triplets of which the first two members are reduplicative and the third a monosyllable, frequently appearing in poems or songs: Winken, Blinken, and Nod;⁴¹ Hickory, Dickory, Dock; the Illy, Ally, Oh;⁴² the Walt Disney Studios coinage Bibbity, Bobbity, Boo.⁴³ Note that in all these examples the progression of vowels follows the pattern cited above: front high to low or back or both. Also in this category is a sometimes-cited variant of our title: Baddabing, baddabang, baddaboom.

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[If you enjoy Nick Humez’s columns, seek out his books, including Alpha to Omega and ABC Et Cetera.]

AS THE WORD TURNS: Some Ado About Nothing

Barry Baldwin, Calgary, Alberta

“Is this then nothing?/Why, then the world and all that’s in ’t is nothing;/My wife is nothing: nor nothing have these nothings,/If this be nothing”—Shakespeare, Winter’s Tale I. 2. 292–295.

If the Bard puzzles, try this snappy extract from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (L’Etre et le Néant): “Nothingness is not, Nothingness is made-to-be, Nothingness does not nihilate itself, Nothingness is nihilated. The Being by which Nothingness arrives in the world is a Being such that in its Being the Nothingness of its Being is in question. The Being by which Nothingness comes to the world must be its own Nothingness…”

There are 600 more pages of this. Apart from recalling Bill Clinton’s Sartrean “It all depends what IS is,” I fancy they support Lucretius' contention—under challenge since Augustine—Ex Nihilo Nil Fit (Nothing Comes Out Of Nothing). Certainly, they add up to no more than Leonardo da Vinci’s single Notebooks sentence “Among the great things which are found among us the existence of Nothing is the greatest.” Well, as the Beatles put it, There’s Nothing That You Say That Can’t Be Said, a dogma enhanced by Shirley Bassey whom I once saw warbling I Who Have Nothing whilst heavily pregnant.

(By the way, there was no Zero in Egyptian, Greek, or Roman mathematics. It originated with the Babylonians, Mayans, and Hindus: “The Indian zero stood for emptiness or absence, but also space, the firmament, the celestial atmosphere and ether, as well as nothing”—Georges Ilfrah, From One To Zero)

In his Book Of Nothing (2000), John D. Barrow rounds up some synonyms for Nothing. Apart from the obvious Zero, the American twins Zilch and Zip, and the sturdy Latinisms Nil and Nul, he offers Goose-Egg, Napoo (from French “il n’y a plus”?), Nowt, and tennis' Love (from French “L’Oeuf”?), remarking how cricket prefers Nought, soccer Nil, athletics Ow (O).

As a Lincolnshire man, I am glad to add that county’s self-serving prayer “May we nivver want for nowt, noan on us, nor me naythur,” along with Nowter (a person of no consequence). There is also Nix, opulently expanded to Nix-My-Doll, probably to do with German Nichts, both 18th-century. In cricket, the Goose-Egg must yield to the Duck’s, or plain Duck, from the 19th century, now sent across the TV screen in animated form to rub in the batsman’s disgrace.

Our age has contributed Zeroise, “Put the dial back to Zero.” As Ivor Brown (Chosen Words, 1955) remarks, this smacks of totalitarian euphemism—shades of Orwell’s vaporise.

Barrow mentions Passerat’s 16th-century Latin poem on Nothing, but not Rochester’s English equivalent, “a barren topick” said Dr Johnson, jokingly adding that Rochester’s performance had “not only a negative but a kind of positive signification.”

Alas, Barrow is no help on why Bugger-All and Fuck-All should mean Nothing—they surely promise the sexual opposite. And what about Sweet Fanny Adams? Why should that young lady denote Nowt? She seems as elusive as her proverbial partner, All My Eye And Betty Martin. Had she, in fact, any existence beyond that of harmless initial replacement of Fuck-All?

I am most perplexed by Diddly Squat. The OED prefers Doodly Squat, deriving it from US slang for excrement, with half a dozen examples from 1934–1979, including Rolling Stone and Peter Benchley’s The Island. No disrespect to American excrement, but what about Tennyson’s Lincolnshire-ism Squat (or Squad), meaning animal shit, in his dialect plays and poems? And in Victorian pornography, Doodle is a regular synonym for Cock—To my aid, American readers!

Just for fun, I Internettingly typed Diddly Squat, and found its own website, copyrighted 1998 under Joey Jo Jo Productions. One has to wonder about a person who’d copyright nothing. After glossing “Means Zip, Zilch, Zero.” Mr/Ms Diddly Squat adds “Exept no substitutions” (sic), suggesting that he/she has rather more than nothing to learn about orthography.

[Barry Baldwin writes in Calgary, Alberta, population 710,677 (1991).]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Dictionaries, The Art and Craft of Lexicography

Sidney I. Landau, (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Second Edition.

I remember being impressed with the first edition of this book, when it came out in 1984 (Scribner’s). Seventeen years later, I confess that, not having committed it to memory, I cannot recall a word of it, so I was able to read the new edition without prejudice and beyond the point of making any comparison, which would be a simple waste of time.

The book deals with dictionaries in a variety of ways—that is, it can be used as a textbook for training lexicographers and as a book containing a wealth of information about dictionaries for those who are interested in their history and in how they are made. It draws not only on a great many articles and books that have dealt largely either with matters pertinent to lexicography or, in rare instances (since lexicography is not itself the subject of many works), with other books on the subject. In general, for the practical application of basic and, in some cases, even sophisticated techniques related to dictionary-making, it is extremely thorough and provides much wise advice. In particular, the chapter, “A brief history of English lexicography” stands out for the most part as interesting and useful, but it gets a bit muddled toward the end, when dealing with details of the dictionaries published after World War II.

In connection with the “exchange of letters” between Robert Burchfield and me in Encounter, Landau fails to point out that the entire point of my threat of libel was based on Burchfield’s implications regarding the correspon-dences among the EWD, the ACD, and the Macquarie Dictionary (and their similarity to The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia) as tantamount to plagiarism, while the truth of the matter was that the first, the ACD, paid for the right to use the Century and that the other two, EWD and Macquarie, also paid for that right. In other words, there was nothing either plagiaristic or questionable about the “correspondences.” The way Landau refers to the subject, I come off as something of a crank (which, of course, I am, but Landau, not having been in touch for decades, cannot know that).

I have other points of dispute with Landau. On page 107, he writes:

No form of alphabetization can successfully deal with all type of idioms without listing each in several places, and no dictionary can afford the luxury of such repetition.

But, as it happens, The Random House Dictionary of the English Language—Unabridged Edition [RHDU] (1966; second edition, 1987) does offer that luxury, with, for example, kick the bucket defined under bucket (def. 11.) with a cross reference under kick (def. 25). Also, no mention is made among the books listed in two back-of-the-book bibliographies of my Idioms and Phrases Index, Gale Research Company, 1985, and the useful information that it contains references to more than 250,000 expressions permuted by key word into twice that many entries occupying four large volumes.

On page 113, where he discusses syllabication and the “wrap-around” feature of most computer keyboarding software, he fails to mention automatic hyphenation programs, which, today, with increased memory storage and speed of access, have become not only very accurate but virtually instanta-neous. His comment criticizing the syllabication of an·y, man·y, and other words that one would not hyphenate takes into account neither the notes on such practice in the forematter of those dictionaries that do it nor the fact that for further treatment, The Collins English Dictionary (1979), of which I was (unmentioned) Editorial Director, followed the unique practice of showing points where compounds can be hyphenated, by marking them with a tiny plus-sign (or hyphen), as contrasted with the use of a centered dot to mark syllabic breaks where hyphens should not be used; thus, moth·er-in-law, man·y, but hap+pi+ness. Also, it has been found that syllabication of headwords in dictionaries aids in a rapid reading of the pronunciation of many words.

Landau quotes Patrick Drysdale’s etymological desiderata, which includes “3. Date or period of entry into English,” surely one of the most misunder-stood and abused bits of information provided by dictionaries today. It is bad enough that, despite warnings by the editors of the OED, generations have mistaken the first date among quotations for a given sense under an entry as the “date of its entry into English,” when all that was indicated was the “earliest found citation for its use in an English context,” which may be far from the same thing, considering the paucity of material available from the period before 1500.

In the section on illustrations, it is a pity that those in the first edition of the RHDU were not recognized, for they are truly among the best to be found in modern dictionaries and were modeled after those in the Century, which Landau admires so much. Unfortunately, in the Second Edition of the RHDU, to satisfy some perverted whim of the Random House art department to be different, the clarity of the original line drawings was destroyed by laying a screen over them.

In a section dealing with Simplicity in the chapter on Definition, Landau takes up a critical matter in discussing definitions of such difficult concepts as time:

If one’s life experience were so limited that one had no idea what time was and had never heard of the word time, [its] definition would be of no help. However, in that context, what would be of help? How could a concept of this complex-ity—or those underlying the words motion, being, life, and many others—be comprehended in words by anyone who had never heard those simple words ut-tered? The answer is plain: they could not. [p. 167]

Quite so, of course. And the problem does not stop there, for there are many words and terms that are undefinable in any context understandable by an average dictionary user but have a sufficient frequency in the language to merit inclusion (or, to put it differently, draw criticism from others if they are excluded). A typical example is theory of relativity—I don’t care whether it is the “general” or the “special”: take your choice. The term is virtually undefinable in lay terms, and the best that a definer can do is to write a definition that will, in essence, warn the user that he’d best take an advanced course in physics before attempting to deal with the expression.

This raises the question at the other end of the language, why bother putting in all the words that everybody knows the meaning of? To be sure, it is con-ceivable that somebody might look up the word dog to find out if that is the designation of the male animal (in contrast to bitch) but it is highly unlikely that any native speaker of English would be unfamiliar with what a dog is. (They know the animal, of course. But there are other metaphoric defini-tions that make less sense if the animal sense is not present.) The answer, which does not pertain to dog, cat, horse, chicken, sloth, pig, etc. and which I was unable to find in Dictionaries, is essentially that lexicographers regard dictionaries as records of the lexicon of the language (or as much of it as they choose to cover), and that the undefinable—including words like of, the, in , out, on, etc.—must be included because they are the most frequently found. It is extraordinary how much time (and page space) is wasted by definers struggling with such entries, especially if they are trying to say something original and useful which nobody but another lexicographer is ever likely to read! It is hard to imagine a normal user of dictionaries looking up the word the. Landau writes,

It is one thing to be able to recognize dogs, and another to know what dog means.[p. 168]

I suppose he’s right, but it is questionable whether anybody really needs to know what dog means. That is a philosophical point far from the prosaic business of producing useful dictionaries.

One of the biggest frustrations of one’s life is to be referred to inaccurately, the other to be ignored. Although I do not agree with everything he has set forward in his book, I think that Landau has produced a superb piece of use-ful work in Dictionaries. Yet, I cannot help voice my objections to some misrepresentations and omissions, which, to save space, I shall document as briefly as possible.

In his footnote [13] to document his reference [page 229] to his article in the very first issue of VERBATIM, Landau says that the issue is “undated, issued June 1974.” It is dated (in the masthead) as May, and it was issued in May 1974.

In his discussion of corpora, Landau makes no mention of my article, “An Unabridged Frequency Count of American English,” which was written in 1962 but, owing to publishing delays, did not appear till 1966 in Word. It dealt with many basic issues of using computers to compile corpora and fre-quency statistics, issues not addressed by others for at least a dozen years later.

He associates me with the Hamyln Encyclopedic World Dictionary (EWD), and makes no mention of my thirteen-year association with The American College Dictionary (ACD), my planning, systems and hardware design, and editorial supervision of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language—Unabridged Edition (1966), or the College Edition (1968), or with my planning, etc., of Collins English Dictionary (1979). I had nothing to do with the preparation of the EWD, which, though based on the ACD, was prepared entirely under the aegis of Patrick W. Hanks.

In his various references to the use of computers in lexicography, he makes no mention of my having developed, in the late 1950s, the applications, later used by myself and others for the RHDU, information that was well documented in articles in newspapers and other periodicals of the day. Nor does he make any reference to my other papers, “The Use of Typographic Coding in Information Retrieval” (In American Documentation Institute Proceedings of the Annual Meeting, October 3-7, 1966, Santa Monica, Calif. V. 3 (1966). p. 193-200) and “Technological Potentials” (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 211, pp. 282-286, June 8, 1973. which dealt with the application of computers to lexicography long before the work of those he does cite and which were also instrumental in the development of SGML.

There is an enormous amount of useful, accurate information and advice in Dictionaries, and it is regrettable that it is marred not only by a number of errors of commission and omission but by what seems to be a reluctance to acknowledge work done by other living lexicographers. Thus, modern lexi-cographers like Fowler, Onions, Gove, Barnhart, Guralnik, Cassidy, and (retired) Burchfield are treated with respect—De mortuis nil nisi bonum?—if not awe, while the rest of us, like Simpson, Weiner, Hanks, are scarcely worthy of mention. Others who have made major contributions to lexicog-raphy, like Hartmann, Gates, Pederson, and others go unmentioned, too. English lexicography is an international field, yet the European Association for Lexicography (euralex) is not referred to at all. If we are lucky, we might not survive till the third edition of the book and will then be included.

Notwithstanding these remarks, Dictionaries remains the best book available on many aspects of dictionary making.

—Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Warden of English: The Life of H. W. Fowler, Author of Fowler’s Modern English Usage

Jenny McMorris, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. xx + 242.

Dead brilliant!

Purists who have misunderstood the legacy of Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933) might rush to emend this judgment of Jenny McMorris' biography of a sharp-eyed Edwardian observer of English. They would allege that “dead brilliant” might express the mind of Adrian Mole or Harry Potter, but it would not pass muster with the subject of her book. His contemporaries would have made no such assumption.

In the obituary published in The Times, the paper declared Fowler to have been a “lexicographical genius” and celebrated him for “a crispness, a facility, and an unexpectedness which have not been equaled” (quoted by McMorris, p. 216). Fowler himself, in writing one of those famously compact little essays, defined idiom as “racy or unaffected or natural English,” and dead brilliant is one of those usages that he might have unexpectedly liked. Certainly he worried (as he expressed it in 1906) that “books like ours … encourage a dull uniformity of style.”

Still, the odds that Fowler would censure a usage were high, and his special skill was in winkling nuances such as the supposed differences between fellahs and fellaheen or sticklebat and tittlebat (to pick just two entries from his Modern English Usage [1926]).

The only other recent biographer, R. W. Burchfield, described MEU succinctly: “This quite extraordinary book, the Bible of prescriptivists, is the product of a scarifyingly diligent search for fastidious distinctions in English” (Burchfield, 140). But Burchfield holds Fowler in high regard, as did his predecessor in revising MEU, Ernest Gowers. Gowers noted Fowler’s occasional bursts of iconoclasm, and he praised Fowler’s quirky style: “The whimsicality that was his armour in adversity enlivens it [MEU] in unexpected places” (Gowers, vi). (One such place where whimsy erupts is in Fowler’s essay on “Wardour Street English” in which he ridicules the use of such words as anent or wot.)

Strangely, McMorris does not refer directly to Burchfield’s biographical sketch, though it must have influenced if not inspired her work. (The sole reference to him in the index directs attention to p. 226, though he is actually mentioned on a different page.) Nor does she cite Gowers' appreciation. What she has done goes far beyond their work, however, since, as archivist of the dictionary records of the Oxford University Press, she has read the voluminous correspondence between Fowler and various editors and officers in Oxford. This reading she has supplemented by visits to places where Fowler worked and lived, and she is able to draw vivid pictures of the scenery—”among woods thick with bluebells and wild garlic in spring” (146), for example—and to recount memories of old people who remember the kindly Fowler from their childhood.

Fowler was a recluse, living for many years on the island of Guernsey where, after bouts of early morning exercise, he worked doggedly on dictionaries. Though he had been an undergraduate at Oxford, he did not return there (despite repeated invitations), and he paid only two brief visits to the London offices of the Press. At 41, he had resigned his position at a northern public school because he was unable to prepare boys for confirmation since he himself had “lost” his faith. At age 50, he married a nurse and each year wrote loving and whimsical anniversary verses (quoted by McMorris when they are particularly revealing). At 57, he enlisted for service in the trenches of the western front since he believed that all able-bodied men, regardless of age or social class, should answer the call to arms. (He gave his age as 44 pretending to be a year younger than his brother Frank instead of 13 years older, and Frank, telling the truth about his age, also enlisted and suffered fatally from the rigors of mud and bombardment.)

All his long life Fowler embraced vigorous exercise, once, while a schoolmaster, cutting his chest on shards of ice as he swam through a nearly frozen river. He lived frugally, sometimes negotiating proffered payments downwards. (Some at the Press felt guilty that they were making so much from his books and paying him so little. For the most part, they managed to overcome these guilty feelings.) His Guernsey cottage was fitted with a chimney but one can easily imagine that only deep frost would justify the use of it for heating the tiny rooms. His wedding portrait from 1911 shows him in a roughly tailored tweed suit; a snapshot from 1924 shows him in the same suit. All the buttons are buttoned on both occasions.

Fowler had few democratic impulses when it came to language. His first usage book, The King’s English (1906) was given various tentative titles as it was being prepared, several including words like faulty and blemishes. One favored candidate was: The New Solecist: for Sixth-Form Boys and Journalists. The subtitle was later emended to for Persons of Mean Intelligence. In corresponding with Oxford, he described the book as aimed at “the half-educated Englishman of literary proclivities … who has idioms floating in his head in a jumbled state & knows it” (108–109). A wise person hit on The King’s English, but the draft titles show the perspective Fowler and his brother Frank brought to the work, supported in their outlook by such eminences at the longest-surviving OED editor, Charles Talbut Onions, who felt that the audience for the Fowlers' work was “the illiterate public” (McMorris, 105).

Fowler wrote early in his career of “the ‘degrading effect’ of American on English” (McMorris, 65), and in 1921 about a distressing “Yankeefication” of the language (152), Most Americanisms were simply ignored in his books. He would have nothing to do with O.K., for instance, either in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1911) or in MEU. (It was left to Gowers to write up O.K. for the Fowler tradition in 1965; he thought it an expression unlikely to endure.) In 1928, Fowler declared that he had “no horror of Americanisms” but since he knew nothing about them others would have to supply whatever information might be wanted.

Having let other publishers gain from the lives of such Oxford dictionary-makers as James Murray and W. C. Minor, Oxford University Press has made a good investment in McMorris' book. It seems to me unfortunate that she describes Fowler at 57 as “elderly” (117) or his wife at age 46 as “a large lady of advancing years” (86). (In the photograph taken at that age, she seems ample though rather more slender than the principal mistresses of Edward VII.) But McMorris gives readers vivid portraits of the Fowlers and of the figures in their narrow social circle. For an American, the noun head of The Warden of English invites comparison with the CEO of a lunatic asylum or prison, but the Concise Oxford Dictionary ignores these institutions and glosses warden as ‘watchman’ and offers as example W~ of Merton College. Certainly Fowler saw himself as a watchman, and depraved usages as unruly. In an attempt at self-definition, he wrote in 1923 that he was “a heterodox expert, something like a nonconformist Doctor of Divinity” (166).

In the preface to his revision of MEU, Burchfield described the original edition as a “schoolmasterly, quixotic, idiosyncratic, and somewhat vulnerable book” (ix). The same can be said of Henry Watson Fowler. It was left to Burchfield to opine about blurb, a word he added to the Fowler canon. My blurb for Jenny McMorris’s biography would be the words at the head of this review.

Dead brilliant!

[Richard W. Bailey, The University of Michigan]

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Burchfield, R. W. 1989. “The Fowlers: Their Achievements in Lexicography and Grammar, 125-46 in his Unlocking the English Language (London: Faber and Faber).

________. 1996. The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, first edited by H. W. Fowler. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Fowler, H. W. 1926. A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Fowler, H. W., and F. G. Fowler. 1952. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English [1911], rev. E. McIntosh. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gowers, Ernest. 1965. Preface to the second edition of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by H. W. Fowler. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: How Language Comes to Children: From Birth to Two Years

Benedicte de Boysson-Bardies, trans. M. B. DeBevoise, (MIT Press), 274 pp.

Whether you’re a doting parent or someone who feels that children are just nature’s way of ensuring a steady supply of waiters, How Language Comes to Children is a fascinating read. Ably translated into (mostly British) English, this overview of child language acquisition is a great summary of the process that is fairly easy for the layperson to read, if you don’t mind skipping over various descriptions of vowel formats. (Don’t worry, bypassing them doesn’t interfere with understanding the overall argument.)

Anyone who has ever said that their child picks up words “like a sponge” doesn’t know the half of it. All of the infant’s capacity is optimized for developing speech, from the womb on. They recognize the melody of the language they are born to. They learn the significant sounds (phonemes) of the language early on. They learn how to divide the continuous speech sound into its constituent phrases, clauses, and individual words. They ignore what isn’t important, and they attach their attention to the fundamentals of language with such devotion, it seems, that you no longer wonder why infants and small children spend so much time sleeping and eating—such work must require a lot of rest and fuel.

Although this book presents the amazing development of language in children in an interesting and straightforward way, its real attraction is the wealth of language-acquisition anecdotes. Did you know that French speakers can pick out the babblings of French babies from those of English and Cantonese-speaking Chinese babies? And that Nigerian babies, who will grow up to speak Yoruba (a language where most of the words begin with a vowel), produce more vowel-consonant-vowel forms than French children? It’s fascinating to learn that deaf babies make the same noises as hearing babies until five or six months; after that, if they are in a signing household, at about eight months they start to babble in sign!

The information in this book, although meticulously cited and organized, isn’t above adding the occasional touch of whimsy. In a discussion of infant recognition of emotional states, the author mentions in passing the delightfulness of a baby’s smile—and mentions the legend of Cypselus, the future king of Corinth, who was to have been killed at birth, but smiled at his would-be killers and was spared. When explaining that intonational cues are sometimes necessary to distinguish sentences that consist of exactly the same series of sounds, the author uses these examples: “J’ai admiré le chapea élégant que ce dandy de Paul a cheté ce matin (I admired the elegant hat that Paul, that dandy, bought this morning) and J’ai admiré le chapeau et les gants que ce dandy de Paul a acheté ce matin (I admired the hat and gloves that Paul, that dandy, bought this morning). (p. 98).

Although most of the studies were done with French children (who seem quite, quite French; one little girl says “it is nice, the tortoise” which seemed to me to be ineffably French), there is a great deal of cross-cultural information in the book. For instance, mention is made of the Kwara’ae of the Solomon Islands, where mothers speak to their infants only indirectly. They often speak to others about children or on behalf of children, and turn the children towards the person who is being addressed. Children of the Kaluli of New Guinea are only considered to be part of the community of speakers when they can say no ‘mother’ and bo ‘breast.’ Some of the cultural generalizations do seem to praise the attitudes French mothers have towards their children’s language acquisition, while criticizing “pushy” American mothers: “they want their child to be early in everything” the author remarks. The author also somewhat gratuitously mentions that a sixteen-month American child said memi ‘money’ when his mother showed him coins. (To be fair, mention is also made of the interesting facts that French babies, although they have the same number of words for food as the American and Swedish toddlers studied, use them three times as often!

The book is further enlivened by four plates; three medieval works of art, and one photograph of a baby imitating the open mouth of an adult. There’s a large glossary, a three-page timeline of language acquisition by month, a fifteen-page index, and two pages on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) which would have been much more useful to the layperson if English words with equivalent sounds were listed (where they exist, of course). Not very many people without linguistic training can glean sufficient information from a vowel map.

A very good read, this book would make a lovely present for the expectant parent with a scientific turn of mind.

—Erin McKean

EPISTOLA {Doug Hoylman}

The use of “Denatured Profanity in English”, as discussed by Ralph Emerson in the Spring 2001 (XXVI/2) issue, was cleverly spoofed by Carol Burnett on her television series (and later by Marge Simpson): “Get me out of this goshforsaken heckhole!”

[Doug Hoylman, Chevy Chase MD]

EPISTOLA {R.L. Spear}

The catch phrase “I could Care less” has not been discussed in these columns for sometime, but now that Laurence has returned it to our attention in his delightfully instructive “Today’s Lesson” (VERBATIM, XXVI/1, Winter 2001), perhaps a footnote is not without purpose.

Picture if you will “happy hour” at the Officer’s Club at Camp Chitose II, Hokkaido, Japan, on a cold winter’s evening in 1953. Tom and Dick are consuming scotch and sodas (or scotches and sodas) at what in civilian life would be considered an alarming rate. Harry arrives:

“Have you heard?” he announces, “Callaghan’s made Captain,” and signals the corporal behind the bar for his usual shot of Bourbon.

“I couldn’t care less,” replies Dick, with a shrug.

“I could,” adds Tom.

Both Dick and Harry look over at their comrade and ask, “What?”; to which Tom, to clarify his remark, replies, “I could care less.”

It was a joke. And everyone within earshot took it as such. Over the next several weeks it became the “with-it” topper to any buddy’s use of I couldn’t care less. Then, with a bit more time and with the stress shifted from the I to the less, the expression made its way into the speech patterns of the Seventh Cavalry Regiment.

Now, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if similar scenarios had not played out at other places and times, but I can attest to it having happened that evening in Japan, and that at the time the remark made perfectly good sense to everyone who heard it (just as the extra “not” in the first clause of this sentence somehow makes sense.) From there, and perhaps elsewhere, the expression became part of the Army’s treasure trove of slang and served as a perfectly appropriate comment on any matter that was felt to require a greater degree of disinterest than that conferred by the more usual “I couldn’t care less.”

Does it make sense grammatically? Uttered without the preceding negative form, one can argue that it doesn’t. In 1979, I heard Dick Cavett tell those who had gathered in Baltimore for the Hopkins commencement that the repeated use this abomination was a sure sign that the English language was going to Hell. But then, by his standards it’s been heading that way for a hell of a long time. What’s the grammar of “You don’t say!”, “Says who!”, or “The hell you say!”

Catch phrases drop in and out of all languages with delightful regularity, and their use should be celebrated, not their users castigated. As Laurence has rightly cautioned us, we ought not let ourselves be so intimidated by fastidious writers that we take to constructing our conversations according to a style sheet devised to satisfy the taste of a literary elite—or might one better say the literary taste of an elite? Anyone who can’t enjoy both The Vicar of Wakefield and Finnegans Wake (and one might toss in Huckleberry Finn) should blush at his or her over-refinement. And that’s for sure!

[R.L. Spear, Nasu, Japan]

EPISTOLA {Fabian Acker}

The variety of ways of not taking God’s name in vain (“Denaturized Profanity in English”, XXVI/2), reminds me of one variation that my daughter demonstrated with hilarious effect. Some months after we had returned to England from Israel, and my children had been placed at a village school, the headmaster asked me why Daniella—then about 8—had persuaded the kids in her class to use the phrase “Promise in dog”, when making a solemn commitment.

It took me about five minutes to think of the answer. Daniella had been acquired (not from me!) the Jewish tradition of never saying the name of God in any circumstances—vain or not—and had used the Hebrew strategy of reversing the letters of holy or horrible words, quite unconsciously transposing the whole process into English. I enjoyed watching the kids at her school solemnly crossing their hearts and promising in dog. I wonder what Dog thought about it.

I believe that the word yok, a contemptuous term for a non-Jew (usually a Christian!), derives in a similar way from goy. I’m guessing here, but I assume the letters were reversed because the idea of a non-believer was so abhorrent it was forbidden to say it.

[Fabian Acker, London]

EPISTOLA {Donald E. Schmiedel}

Three articles in the summer issue were especially edifying and entertaining. Each suggests a comment. Nick Humez cites Down’s Syndrome in his “Eponymous Ailments” without noting that the preferred term now seems to be “Down Syndrome.” It was changed several years ago, by whose authority I know not. I saw only the lame explanation that Dr. Down himself did not suffer from the condition. The irony is that, due to the assimilation of the S’s, the pronunciation of either version comes out just about the same.

In “Medical Malapropisms,” the eye infection junkovitis would seem to be based on “conjunctivitis” rather than “gingivitis” which is more remote both phonetically and anatomically. Mr. Bernard’s “Noncing”brings to mind two words that came into English via Spanish by the assimilation of a noun and definite article. la riata gave us lariat and I fantasize about an early explorer in Florida screaming “Mira el lagarto,. el lagarto!!! (Look at the lizard!) as a 17-footer swam toward him… an alligator.

[Donald E. Schmiedel, Las Vegas NV]

EPISTOLA {Jim Kottemann}

I thoroughly enjoyed the article by Roger Smith, but was somewhat startled to find that “… a barium enema is a large cocktail of liquid barium that must be swallowed quickly…”

The port-of entry for enemas is not the port of swallowing; liquid barium would be a molten metal; a solution of barium would not lead to a visit with a gastroenterologist, but more likely a posstmortem examination. Barium in solution is highly toxic and can be administered as a suspension of the very insoluble Barium Sulfate salt only.

[Jim Kottemann, jimluddite1@AOL.com]

EPISTOLA {Harvey E. Finkel}

I write to comment on the entertaining pieces by Nick Humez and Roger Smith in the Summer 2001 (XXVI/3) issue.

The Pickwickian syndrome mentioned by Humez in “Classical Blather” is misnames, although it is widely called that by physicians. It was not Mr. Pickwick who was so afflicted, but Joe, the fat boy who worked (when he could be awakened) at the Wardle farm. Contrary to Humez, hypoventiliation, not hyperventiliation, is characteristic of the syndrome.

Smith’s “Medical Malapropisms” recalled to me from long agao a colleague’s collection of these, several of which have also been captured by Smith. I quickly remember four others that are likely easily decipherable: diabeebees, cute collapsing pancreatema, romantic heart disease, corruption in the pajama.

[Harvey E. Finkel, Brookline, MA]

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. Vox, Valentine, I Can See Your Lips Moving, Plato Publishing, 1993 ↩︎

2. Bergen, Edgar, How To Become a Ventriloquist, Presto Books, 1938 ↩︎

3. Winchell, Paul, Ventriloquism For Fun and Profit, I & M Ottemheimer, 1954 ↩︎

4. Maher Home Course of Ventriloquism, Lesson 10, Maher Studios, 1975 ↩︎

5. Maher Home Course of Ventriloquism, Lesson 20, Maher Studios, 1975 ↩︎

6. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd ed. (unabridged) (New York: Random House, 1966) s.v. ↩︎

7. Wright, Joseph (ed.), The English Dialect Dictionary. Being the Complete Vocabulary of All Dialect Words… [etc.]. (Oxford: University Press, 1900) s.v. ↩︎

8. Anonymous, “Subsidences in the Cheshire Salt District,” Dublin Review 104 (1889): 430-1. ↩︎

9. For place-name references, see the extensive guide by the English Dialect Society (Cambridge: University Press), including The Place-Names of Cumberland (Vol. 22 [1952], p. 473), and The Place-Names of the West-Riding of Yorkshire (Vol. 36 [1961-3], pp. 36, 168). ↩︎

10. Temple Chevallier, “Eshe, ushaw, and flass,” Notes and Queries I/12 (1855): 74; Ceyrep, “Flass,” Notes and Queries I/12 (1855): 112. ↩︎

11. Wulstan, “Eshe, ushaw, and flass.” Notes and Queries I/12 (1855): 150 ↩︎

12. Wright lists a borrowing in French, flaque (Old French flache) with the meaning ‘petite mare d’eau sans profundeur,’ (from Adolphe Hatzfeld, Dictionnaire général de la langue française du commencement du XVII e siècle jusqu’à nos jours [Paris: C. Delagrave, 1895, 1900]), s.v. Other derivations have been less certain. See Oscar Bloch and Walther von Wartburg, Dictionnaire étymologique de l langue française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), s.v.; Jacqueline Pinoche, Dictionnaire étymologique du français (Paris; Robert, 1979), s.v. ↩︎

13. This versatile phrase, evidently onomatopoeia for “sound of rapid, quasi-percussive process” and hence applicable to a wide variety of events from a #10 tomato can falling off a pantry shelf to a thermonuclear test, has achieved surprising currency in just a few years, owing in part to its use in the dialogue of TV shows such as The Sopranos. Although its origin is obscure—young white urban English-speakers in mid-Atlantic states is our best guess –it is probably safe to rule out a connection with Battambang, the name both of Cambodia’s second-largest city and of the major rice-producing province of which it is the capital. ↩︎

14. For a complete chart of the IPA, as revised to 1993, visit http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/fullchart.html. In the Germanic languages, so-called “strong” verbs often distinguish between present- and past-tense forms by altering the vowel in this fashion, as in speak/spoke (originally spake), write/wrote, wake/woke, sing/sang, spit/spat, and heave/hove (though this last verb has in recent times been turned into a “weak” verb with the past tense heaved). Linguists refer to this sort of vowel shift to denote different function of the same stem as ablaut, German for “off sound.” ↩︎

15. Hypenated and with initial capital Zs, Zig-Zag also is the brand name for a famous brand of French cigarette papers. Visitors to the site www.zigzag.com will be told that the first cigarette paper as such was supposedly improvised by a zouave on the battlefield of Sevastapol: After his clay pipe was shattered by a bullet the infantryman rolled some tobacco in “a piece of paper torn from his bag of gunpowder,” thus inventing the cigarette. While this is possible, it is more likely that what he actually used was the wrapping for an individual cartridge: Towards the end of the muzzle-loading era, ball and powder came to be pre-packaged with the powder already measured; after tearing the end off the paper cartridge with one’s teeth, one poured the powder down the barrel, then rolled the ball in after it, tamping both home using the cartridge paper for wadding. One may suppose in any case that residual specks of gunpowder helped keep the zouave’s tobacco alight, whatever the effect on his lungs; and, indeed, most American cigarettes to this day include trace amounts of saltpeter (potassium nitrate, one of the three ingredients in black powder, often in the ratio of one part saltpeter, two parts sulfur, and three parts charcoal) to keep the cigarette from going out between puffs. Zig-Zag papers were virtually unknown in America until the 1960s, except among a small and unfashionable population of roll-your-own tobacco smokers; but the burgeoning market in marijuana changed all that, and led to the trademark icon of the bearded Zig-Zag man being reproduced on T-shirts and parodied in underground comics, e.g. as the model (if unconsciously so) for the face of Robert Crumb’s hirsute sage, Mr. Natural (whose long gown and portly figure, however, were almost certainly drawn from a supporting character in Rudolph Dirks’s pioneering sequential comic strip The Katzenjammer Kids, which began publication in 1897). ↩︎

16. For a thoughful article on the rise of hip-hop music, see Kelefa Sanneh’s “Gettin’ Paid,” The New Yorker, Aug. 20/27, 2001, pp. 60-76, together with the photo portfolio on hip-hop artists by Martin Schoeller on page 125-137 of the same issue. ↩︎

17. Compare dong and ding-a-ling, the latter probably derived from the verb dangle and prominent in the title and lyrics of a risqué pop song first recorded by David Bartholomew for the King label in 1952, a cover of which was issued by the Bees rhythm-and-blues group two years later under the title “Toy Bell.” Rock music scholar Jerry Osborne (http://www.jerryosborne.com) observes that “[w]ith so many rock and roll classics to his credit—both as a singer and songwriter—it is ironic that Chuck Berry’s only No. 1 hit on the Pop charts would be ‘My Ding-A-Ling,’ a novelty tune recorded just for fun in front of a live audience.” ↩︎

18. A ticktack, on the other hand, was a tack on a string, formerly attached by Hallowe’en pranksters to the frame of a window so that it would rattle at the pane when the wind blew; see Penrod, Booth Tarkington’s classic novel of early 1900s boyhood. On the other hand, the tick-tack of the American name for the game the British call naughts and crosses—tick-tack-toe— almost certainly represents the action of marking an X, the “toe” being “O” with a T in front for emphasis and articulation. ↩︎

19. Knick-knack apparently derives from knack in its now-obsolete meaning of ‘cleverly designed device,’ derived from Middle Dutch cnacken, “‘o strike.’ Bric-a-brac is from French, one of a cluster of words about collecting from a variety of sources: bric-à-brac means both such merchnadise and the store where it is sold, de bric et de broc means ‘from here and there’ or ‘having pieces of varied provenance,’ and bricoler means ‘to be a jack-of-all-trades.’ ↩︎

20. “Splish Splash” was written by Darin (the stage name of Walden Roberto Cassotto, born in Manhattan in a then-Italian neighborhood in East Harlem in 1936) on a dare: John Pidgeon, in an essay in the website http://www.bobbydarin.net/crooner.html, writes that during a visit Darin made to the mother of disc jockey Murray Kaufman, she “taunted him to compose a song with the line ‘Splish splash, I was taking a bath.’ A ragbag of rock’n’roll cliches, it nevertheless impressed [Atlantic Records' Ahmet] Ertegun, who agreed to produce it himself although the extent of his enthusiasm might be measured by his allocating no more than 90 minutes for the recording session,” which took place on April 10, 1958; the single would sell over a million copies. ↩︎

21. Carroll’s snicker-snack, describing the fatal stroke which slew the Jabberwock, was almost certainly derived from snickersnee, a bladed weapon of a size between a knife and a sword; it comes from the Dutch phrase steken of snijden, ‘stab or cut.’ ↩︎

22. The song inroduces the defendant in Trial by Jury, the duo’s second collaboration, commissioned by Richard D’Oyly Carte as a curtain-raiser (for Offenbach’s La Périchole); it opened at the Royalty Theatre in London on March 25, 1875 and ran almost to the end of that year. Tink-a-tank represents the sound of a mandolin or tenor banjo played with a flatpick, as an astute bit of stage business included in this spring’s production by the Ridgewood (NJ) Gilbert and Sullivan Society revealed to this columnist after forty years of supposing it nothing more than the nonsense-refrain syllables it appears to be on the printed page. ↩︎

23. And Bristol-fashion, in its longer form, presumably from that port’s function as a major depot of the British navy, and unrelated to the euphemism Bristols for ‘breasts,’ which is probably analogous, in its use of most of the consonants and vowels of the real thing, to such terms as figure in a bumper sticker we saw recently: “Gosh is Where People Go Who Don’t Believe in Heck.” See Ralph H. Emerson’s astute article “Denaturized Profanity in English,” VERBATIM XXVI/2 (Spring 2001). ↩︎

24. This usage was already old at the time of London’s “Kit-Kat Club,” so called from its meeting at a tavern called the Cat and Fiddle (Christopher Cat, proprietor), which flourished from 1703 to 1733 as a center for Whig party adherents, including the leading contributors to the journal The Spectator, Joseph Addison (author of the familiar poem “The Spacious Firmament”) and Richard Steele. ↩︎

25. Synonym: up the wazoo, both being euphemisms for ass(hole) in its anatomical rather than sociological sense. Ying-yang is a garbling of Yin/Yang (the female and male principles of the universe according to Taoism) making both halves of the doublet more regular. A similar “regularization” of a foreign expression is hari-kari, a corruption of hara-kiri, Japanese for ‘belly-slit’ and the vulgar term for the form of suicide-for-homor’s-sake more politely known as seppuku. ↩︎

26. Also featured in popular songs, including the 1957 Little Richard (Penniman) hit “The Heeby-Jeebies,” and Laura Nyro’s mellifluous “Oh Yeah Maybe Baby (The Heebie Jeebies),” from her final album, Walk the Dog & Light the Light(1993). ↩︎

27. The American Heritage Dictionary gives ‘insipid and sentimental’ as the first definition and ‘lacking vigor or decisiveness; spineless’ as the second. The expression originated as a nasty nickname for the English poet Ambrose Philips (1674–1749) in a poem so titled by his contemporary Henry Carey poking fun at Philips’s verses for children; following Carey, Alexander Pope satirized Philips under the same name. ↩︎

28. Of unknown origin. The name of a Beatles song recorded on the 1968 White Album, and thence adopted by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry for the title of their book about the multiple slaying by Charles Manson and his “family” in 1969: Helter Skelter: The true story of the Manson Murders (New York: Norton, 1974). ↩︎

29. From French pêle-mêle (originally pesle-mesle, reduplication from mesler, ‘to mix,’ and related to both mélange and meddle. Not to be confused with pall-mall, originally a game in which a wooden ball was struck with a mallet to drive it through a ring suspended at the end of an alley. As a proper noun this was also the name of a fashionable street in London where the game was formerly played, and, in turn, a brand of American cigarette, the display of which was a discreet sign of one’s sexual orientation among gay men in the 1960s—in part as an ironic co-option of its advertising slogan, “Where Particular People Congregate.” ↩︎

30. First introduced by the Schlitz brewery in 1963, pop-tops constitued 75% of all drink cans sold just two years later, the year twist-off bottle caps also came into general use—both inventions eliminating that bane of thirsty consumers, the search for a church key (can and bottle opener). ↩︎

31. From Middle English hochepot, ‘stew,’ a borrowing from old French; sometimes spelled and pronounced hotch-potch. From the same source is derived the legal term hotchpot, a combining of assorted properties to assure an equal distribution of their total value, e.g. to one’s heirs if one dies without making a will. ↩︎

32. In a medieval hurdy-gurdy, the strings were sounded by being rubbed by a rosined wheel turned by a crank, the individual notes being produced by stopping the non-drone strings with tangents attached to the keys. Later the name came to be used for any crank-driven instrument, such as a barrel-organ. The former usage seems to have been intended in Donovan (Leitch)’s 1968 song “The Hurdy Gurdy Man,” since its lyrics say that its title character “came singing songs (plural) of love,” while a barrel-organ’s repertory is extremely limited. (Alden and Cali Hackmann of Olympic Musical Instruments make this argument on their web site http://www.hurdygurdy.com/hg/genfaq.html, which will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about hurdy-gurdies and then some.) ↩︎

33. On the same stretch of road there is a sign reading “No Jake Brake Next 2 Miles.” We will be grateful to any reader who can enlighten us as to the meaning of this term. ↩︎

34. Referring to exaggerated feminine frippery, and by extension frivolousness; possibly derived from fanfreluche, French for ‘furbelow.’ ↩︎

35. The Mau-Mau appears to have been a term coined by European settlers of Kenya to denote a secret society dominated by the Kikuyu people and two smaller related ethnic groups, the Embu and Meru, which launched attacks on white farmers in 1952. It took the British more than four years to crush the rebellion, which ended in 1957 with the capture, trial, conviction and hanging of its leader, Dedan Kimathi. Many black Kenyans were rounded up and jailed, including Jomo Kenyatta (thanks to the bribing of both the key witness and the trial judge), who was sentenced to seven years in prison, but went on to be the first president of Kenya when British rule ended and the nation became independent in 1964. See http://www.channel4.com/plus/secret_history/mau8.html. ↩︎

36. Named for a town in India, dum-dums expand on impact to inflict maximum trauma; prior to the invention of the soft-nose slug, they were made by carving a notch in in the head of an ordinary bullet. ↩︎

37. An edible shark, considered something of a delicacy and served in moderately upscale restaurants. ↩︎

38. A very small ungulate, also known as Thompson’s gazelle, and indigenous to the savannahs and veldts of southern Africa. ↩︎

39. From pisser (‘to urinate’) and dormir (‘to sleep’) respectively. The Cajun term for an evening dance parties in Louisiana bayou country is the fais do-do, presumably because one dances till one drops. ↩︎

40. Meaning ‘arse,’ possibly derived from posterior. ↩︎

41. A neo-Mother Goose poem written by Eugene Field (1850-1895), by whose day the “Land of Nod” mentioned in Genesis (4:16) had already become a synonym for ‘dreamland,’ ‘slumberland,’ or the like. ↩︎

42. A Irish children’s term for ‘ocean,’ according to the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, who sang a song so titled as part of a kids' folk medley in a live-in-concert recording made during the 1960s. ↩︎

43. Sung by the fairy godmother in the feature-length animation film Cinderella (1950). ↩︎