Vol XXX, No 2 []

The Simpsons: Embiggening Our Language with Cromulent Words

Mark Peters, Buffalo, New York

At this point, saying The Simpsons is an institution is a little like saying the Smithsonian is an institution. Matt Groening’s animated comedy has come light years and millions of doughnuts from its place as filler on the Tracy Ullman Show: it’s the longest-running sitcom ever and a kajillion-dollar financial juggernaut, with syndication alone bringing in an estimated billion dollars. That doesn’t include the endless books, clothes, dolls, games, DVDs, and other products that have inspired far too many “it should be dough” jokes. But along with all that cash and comedy, the show has made numerous contributions to American English.

Like a lot of other shows, The Simpsons has produced catchphrases, mostly from Bart, such as eat my shorts, ay caramba, don’t have a cow, man, underachiever and proud of it, smell ya later, and I’m Bart Simpson—who the hell are you? There has also been an endless stream of highly quotable maxims, sayings, and proverbs, including the following, all by Homer: “Trying is the first step toward failure,” “Singing is the lowest form of communication,” “A boy without mischief is like a bowling ball without a liquid center,” “Fatherhood isn’t easy like motherhood,” and “To alcohol—the cause of, and solution to—all of life’s problems.” Some (like myself) wonder if The Simpsons has surpassed Shakespeare as the most widely quoted source in the English language.

The Simpsons' verbal ingenuity includes all the above and more, but I’m going to focus on individual words—specifically new words. The show has invented hundreds of terms that lasted no longer than a single episode, like disembowelingest, love-matic, Bonerland, applesauce-cicity, ass-groove, su-diddly-uck, and spankological. These words show up almost exclusively in books and web pages that directly quote the show, remaining nonce or stunt words. I’m going to focus on words that have caught on at least a little outside the context of the show—plus one personal favorite.

Before starting, I want to offer my apologies to fans of craptacular, dumben, kwyjibo, Scotchtoberfest, hankering for some spankering, sweet merciful crap, meh, sacrilicious, Commander Cuckoo-Bananas, and everything else I left out. To do justice to all the Simpsons' language contributions would require a book (and if you want to help me with that book, send me an email when the article is over).

D’oh. Of all The Simpsons' neologisms, d’oh (or doh) is the star pupil that overachieved, outshone its siblings, and went to Oxford—the Oxford English Dictionary, that is. With enshrinement in the most prestigious English-language dictionary, plus 734,000 Google web hits (on December 1, 2004, the date for all Google stats quoted), this word is by far the most popular I will discuss.

The OED defines d’oh like so: “Expressing frustration at the realization that things have turned out badly or not as planned, or that one has just said or done something foolish. Also (usu. mildly derogatory): implying that another person has said or done something foolish (cf. DUH int.).” Oh and duh are probably part of the d’oh family tree, and there are older citations for dooh, a longer, synonymous, and nearly identical variation that actor James Finlayson used often in the Laurel and Hardy films.

As many know by now, d’oh began its life in Simpsons scripts as not quite a word at all; it was represented by a stage direction—(annoyed grunt)— and we can thank Homer-voicer Dan Castellaneta for giving d’oh its consistent, concrete form. There’s not much consistency to what makes Homer say d’oh, as causes have included cutting a finger, breaking a lamp, waiting for a tortoise, and losing an argument to George H. W. Bush. The infinite variety of Homer’s failures and annoyances is far from far-fetched, and since failure and annoyance (and Homer) aren’t going anywhere, I doubt d’oh will either.

-ma-. That’s not ma as in “Ma, Billy’s hurting me!” or “It’s all right ma, I’m only bleeding,” but -ma- as in Homer’s extra-syllabic words metaba-ma-lism, panto-ma-mime, and maca-ma-damia. This -ma- is also an infix. In English, the infix (also known as the quiet but foul-mouthed sibling of the prefix and suffix) is most often used with obscenities, like fan-fucking-tastic and absogoddamnlutely. Those infixes work mostly as intensifiers, but the purpose of some infixes is a little less clear. The ma infix is somewhat similar to the hip-hop infix ­iz(z) that, in very un-infix-y fashion, can take obscenity away by turning fuck into fizzuck. While -ma- and -iz(z)- add neither direct meaning nor intensification to words, they do add a certain flavor or connotation—a Homerish buffoon flavor and a Snoop Doggish hip-hop flavor, respectively.

Homer’s use of the -ma- infix may also be related to the -ma- in whatchamacallit, thingamabob, thingamajig, thingumajog, and gigamaree. When Homer calls something a sophisti-ma-cated doowhacky, or when he makes up names for instruments like vio-ma-lin, tuba-ma-ba, and obo-ma-boe, the connotation and context of -ma- is similar enough to the non-Simpsons -ma- words that we can at least guess at a relationship.

One of the -ma- words has become very successful in its own right: edumacation gets a whopping 19,000 Google web hits and 4,790 group hits. Since education is an institution much-maligned by the undereducated, overeducated, and educated alike, it’s not surprising that such a note-perfect mockery of the word would catch on.

Cheese-eatin' surrender monkeys. As a popular suffix-like word, monkey has been used to create labels with varying levels of offensiveness that refer to drug use (weed monkey, coke monkey), sex (stud monkey, slut monkey), profession (code monkey, stunt monkey), ethnicity (porch monkey, sand monkey), and George W. Bush (drunk Texas prairie monkey, disaster monkey). Nonce words of this type appear all the time, and the writers of The Simpsons have been particularly productive monkey-word-makers: In various episodes, Moe calls a supermarket bag boy a sack monkey, Sideshow Bob calls a bellboy a brainless luggage monkey, Homer gets a job as a prank monkey and Krusty the Clown describes children as channel-hoppin', Ritalin-poppin' monkeys.

No doubt, all these usages have contributed to the ongoing productivity of monkey as a suffix, but one term in particular has become extremely popular on its own, and that’s Groundskeeper Willie’s name for the French: cheese-eatin' surrender monkeys (‘Round Springfield, April 30, 1995).

With 4,780 Google web hits (and 2,460 group hits) for cheese-eating surrender monkey and 11,000 web hits (and 5,060 group hits) for surrender monkey, it’s clear this word has spread widely and well, inspiring such variations as wine-drinking surrender monkeys, cheese-mythologizing surrender monkeys, goat-eating surrender monkeys, Kielbasa-eating surrender monkeys, gazpacho-eating surrender monkeys, duplicitous surrender monkeys, yellow-bellied surrender monkeys— and, appropriately enough for a Simpsons word—donut-eating surrender monkeys.

Diddly. No Simpsons character speaks more distinctly than the hyper-holy Ned Flanders—his “Flandersisms” include greetings (howdilly hey, hidilly ho, heydilly-ho, how doodlydo, howdilly-doodily), affirmatives (okelly-dokelly-do, abso-not-ly), exclamations (cock-a-diddly-doo-doo), names for the Simpsons family (Ho-diddily-omie, neighboreenos, neglectareenos), skipping-CD-like verbal diarrhea (shoddily-iddly-iddly-diddly,exact-a-tickaly-tackly), and what might be called a bizarre form of Spanglish (buenos-dingdongdiddly-dias).

The most characteristic Flandersism is diddly— sometimes written as diddley or written and pronounced as diddily. Flanders uses diddly as an infix in words like mur-diddly-urder, de-diddly-lighted, scrum-diddly-umptious, in-diddly-different, and dil-diddly-emma, as well as in sentences like What can I ding dong diddly do for you? There’s a euphemistic quality to all these infix uses, but sometimes diddly is a non-infixed euphemism, as in the lovely and talented Son of a diddly!

Though it’s hard to imagine a Flanders-free diddly at this point, the word has a history going back to at least 1964, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, with diddly apparently evolving from words like diddly-shit and diddly-squat. Since diddle means ‘to copulate’ and diddlywhacker means ‘penis,’ this is a euphemism that’s not entirely euphemistic—adding to its humorous effect.

Tomacco. In the episode “E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt)” (Nov. 7, 1999), Homer’s obsession with challenging people to duels leads to the family fleeing town and becoming farmers. We’ve all been there. Predictably, Homer is a bad farmer, but with the help of some plutonium, he manages to create a new crop: tomacco. This cross between the tomato and tobacco gets memorable reviews from Bart (“It’s smooth and mild—and refreshingly addictive”) and Ralph Wiggum (“This tastes like Grandma”).

Tomacco would probably have been no more successful a term than ranch dressing hose or exorcism tongs if not for fan Rob Baur. After enjoying the episode, Baur recalled and dug up a Scientific American article from 1969 that discussed a real tomato–tobacco cross. Baur then created his own tomacco plant, which he presumes is poisonous and therefore hasn’t offered to any real children. Thanks to Baur, tomacco has been a successful enough word to garner 18,400 Google web hits and an entry in Paul McFedries’s Word Spy collection.

By becoming part of both television and botanical trivia, tomacco may be diversified enough to stick around a while longer.

Cromulent and embiggen. I’m lumping these words together since they originated in the same episode (“Lisa the Iconoclast,” Feb. 18, 1996) and illustrate some interesting points about new words and how they succeed or fail.

In this episode, Springfield’s founder, Jebediah Springfield, is quoted as saying, “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man,” and another teacher reassures Mrs. Krabappel that embiggen is a “perfectly cromulent word.” Also in this episode, Principal Skinner reinforces the meanings of both words when he says that Homer, who auditions for the part of town crier, has “embiggened that role with his cromulent performance.”

Embiggen’s meaning is fairly clear, and based on the evidence, the occasionally trustworthy Urbandictionary.com’s definition of cromulent seems right on: “Used in an ironical sense to mean legitimate, and therefore, in reality, spurious and not at all legitimate. Assumes common knowledge of the inherent Simpsons reference.” Given this complex meaning, I was a little surprised to find that cromulent is used much more widely than embiggen; cromulent wins the popularity contest between the two with an impressive 30,700 Google web hits to embiggen’s paltry 5,250. Since the Bushism-like embiggen is arguably funnier and definitely easier to understand at a glance than cromulent, I thought that would lead to greater popularity, but the opposite is true.

Why? Well, Alan Metcalf’s book Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success provides a possible answer. Again and again, Metcalf found that jokey or self-consciously clever words have not been successful. A great example is how none of Rich Hall’s sniglets has caught on—except the word sniglet itself. So the silliness of embiggen might be a handicap, while cromulent—since it contains no obvious joke—is able to spread more easily. In addition to meaning “respectable,” cromulent sounds fairly respectable—it turns out cromulent is a perfectly cromulent word indeed.

Yoink. This is probably the most d’oh- like of the Simpsons words, in that it is an exclamation that always accompanies the same kind of action: when a character steals, snatches, grabs, or otherwise takes something from another character, the snatcher usually says yoink!

Classic yoinkers have included Nelson, Homer, Andre Aggasi, and a sumo wrestler, who grabbed Milhouse’s glasses, Marge’s money, Homer’s tennis racket, and Homer’s pretzel respectively.

Yoink has some flexibility though. In “Bart Gets Famous,” Bart says yoink after taking Kent Brockman’s danish, and Brockman makes a yoink of his own after Bart’s theft.

In other episodes, Mark McGuire says yoink after hiding a printout under his hat, and Homer yoinks after picking a meatball up off the floor. So it seems the word can be used by the victim of a theft as well as the perpetrator, and it can also accompany hiding and finding as well as the “traditional” snatching and grabbing. With 36,200 Google web hits and 7,360 group hits, yoink has been pretty successful. Metcalf has written about how production of new forms is a sign of a term’s health, and yoink’s linguistic children—which include verbs (yoinked, yoinking) and nouns (yoinkage, yoinker)—speak well of the parent’s health.

Flurk. In “Treehouse of Horror XI,” Kang the alien utters the memorable double euphemism Holy flurking schnit! While schnit is somewhat reminiscent of shiznit, flurk joins a huge family of euphemisms for the f-word, including f-word, f-bomb, freak, frig, frick, frik, ef, frell, flip, fug, fuh, fudge, foul, funk, and others.

With 784 Google web hits for holy flurking schnit, 1,140 for holy flurking, 1,390 for flurking, and 4,550 for flurk, we can see that flurk has a life of its own well beyond Kang’s exclamation.

I found a few examples on the web of what the flurk, flurk off, flurked up, get the flurk out of here, and dumb flurking luck, which demonstrate flurk’s productivity (though, sadly, I found no examples of ratflurk or motherflurker). Time will tell, but right now I’d say flurk is far from the least successful of the f- word euphemisms.

Ape-poopy. With a mere 120 Google web hits—several of them coming from my own web pages—I can’t claim that ape-poopy is setting the world on fire linguistically. Even the existence of a few related words—apeshit, bull-poopy, horse-poopy, and bat-poopy—doesn’t seem to help. Well, I don’t care. This just might be my favorite word in the language. Ape-poopy perfectly illustrates the cluelessness of Principal Skinner when he uses it in this sentence: “We have some new rules and regulations that you’re just going to go ape-poopy for” (“They Saved Lisa’s Brain,” May 19, 1999).

A sensible person who wanted to explain some rules while avoiding apeshit would strangle that sentence before it grew—or just say crazy, insane, postal, nuts, bonkers, bananas, or some other PG-rated synonym for crazy. Ape-poopy—like other Simpsons coinages, such as whup-tushie and heckhole— is a transparent, ludicrous, non-euphemistic euphemism.

Lest anyone think the satire implicit in ape-poopy is far-fetched and without real-world targets, let’s remember the word heaven-o— a neologism that was invented by some well-meaning folks in Kleberg County, Texas, who wanted to take the hellfire and damnation out of our most common greeting. Their crusade was a little less successful than Dan Savage’s santorum campaign, but you have to admire the gum-diddly-umption.

Mmmm . . . gum-diddly-umption. On that cromulent note, my work is done.

[Mark Peters has language-related articles published or forthcoming in American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistics Usage, The Buffalo News, Mental Floss, Other, Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies, and The Vocabula Review.]

Brain Injury and Language

Catherine P. Businelle, Lincoln City, Oregon

Have you ever had a word on the tip of your tongue, impossible to recall but so close that you knew what letter it started with? Have you ever had a nightmare in which your house was on fire but when you tried to warn your spouse, all that came out of your mouth was gibberish?

I know what it’s like to feel that way when awake. For years I have suffered from occasional migraine headaches attended by a condition called aphasia, which the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines as: “loss or impairment of the power to use or comprehend words, usually resulting from brain damage.”

I can’t complain. My aphasia lasts a only matter of hours and occurs just three or four times a year. Brain injuries such as stroke or head trauma cause many aphasia sufferers to lose their ability to speak for weeks, for months, or even permanently. Brain injuries cause other types of language disorders as well, all tragic, but many also fascinating. They have taught neurologists valuable information about the way our brains process language.

Much of our current understanding of the brain and language started with a quack, a bet, and an advanced case of syphilis. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a scientist named Franz Joseph Gall developed a hypothesis of brain-function localization later referred to as phrenology, the belief that certain parts of the brain, measured by examining a person’s skull, controlled various elements of personality, intelligence, and psychology.

He identified twenty-seven measurable behavior indicators, ranging from kindness to poetry. Not surprisingly, his observations and those of his followers tended to support the superiority of the European male to members of the other gender and races. At one point, before settling in Paris, Gall managed to incur the displeasure of Napoleon by declaring him an unfit subject for study, based on the emperor’s insufficient skull circumference.

Most scientists of his time considered him a quack because he had no real evidence to support his theories of phrenology and because he charged admittance to rather flamboyant “scientific demonstrations” of his area of expertise.

It is unfortunate that, for a time, his specialty overshadowed the idea he got right: that certain parts of the brain controlled specific elements of cognition, speech, and movement.

It fell to Ernest Aubertin, the son-in-law of Gall’s student, Jean Baptiste Bouillaud, to advance the study of brain localization. In 1861, Aubertin presented a paper describing his case studies on the subject to the Société d’Anthropologie in France. Paul Pierre Broca, a surgeon and genius already well respected for his advances in medicine and anthropology by that time, was in the audience when Aubertin made a fateful challenge. Aubertin would concede that the hypothesis of cerebral localization was false if anyone there could show him one case of speech loss without a lesion in the frontal lobe of the brain.

Broca’s opportunity to take him up on that bet came within a week, when he began to study the case of a syphilis patient named M. Leborgne. Leborgne had been admitted to the hospital thirty years before, at age twenty-one, suffering from various cognitive problems related to neurosyphilis (advanced mental symptoms of syphilis). He came to be known in the hospital as Tan because that syllable (usually said twice in succession) was the only speech he could produce, although he seemed to comprehend the words of others and repeated “tan-tan” with a variety of expressions and gestures that seemed to indicate attempted communication.

When Leborgne died shortly thereafter of a gangrenous infection, Broca’s autopsy revealed a lesion in a part of the brain he referred to as the circonvolution du language, now known as Broca’s area. This and subsequent case studies led him to believe that this area was necessary for articulate speech.

In 1874, Karl Wernicke broadened Broca’s theories by discovering a link between a different type of aphasia (characterized by a lack of comprehension, whereas Broca’s was characterized by the inability to speak) and another specific area of the brain. This region came to be known as Wernicke’s area, connected to Broca’s area by a neural pathway called the arcuate fasciculus.

Aphasia, the most common form of language problem related to brain injury, varies widely depending on which of the three regions, Broca’s, Wernicke’s, and the arcuate fasciculusis, is affected. One could even say there are millions of variations of aphasia, each as slightly different as the fingerprints of the sufferers affected. Because the brain and its connections are so complicated, the tiniest deviation in the location or size of a lesion causes a unique mix of symptoms.

Most aphasics (also called asphasiacs) fall into general groups of characteristic symptoms that can be classified as fluent or non-fluent. Fluent aphasias cause a problem with comprehension but don’t deprive the sufferer of the ability to speak, while the non-fluent aphasias cause slow, stilted speech in spite of various levels of understanding.

Broca’s aphasia is the most common of the non-fluent type, thus named because it corresponds to a lesion in Broca’s area of the brain. The aphasic can understand the speech of others but has great difficulty speaking.

In the most cases, the sufferer has the most trouble with such auxiliary and function words as conjunctions, prepositions, and articles, but severer cases limit the patient to the most basic and common noun-verb combinations.

Sufferers also have difficulty in finding the right word for a concept that they are thinking about and are far better at answering a question than initiating speech. This difficulty with language is not limited to conversation, however. Their speech problems are paralleled by the inability to write coherently, although their handwriting will be exactly like their normal script. In cases involving deaf aphasics who normally communicate by sign language, the sufferer will make incoherent or overly simplistic signs.

Transcortical motor aphasia is very similar to Broca’s aphasia. In this type of aphasia, however, the lesion or lesions causing the problem do not directly affect Broca’s area but interrupt communication between it and Wernicke’s area. Because Broca’s area affects speech output (forming words), and Wernicke’s area affects input (understanding words), the sufferer can still understand and speak quite well, but putting the two together is nearly impossible. So the sufferer can understand what is said and can repeat a sentence with perfect clarity but has to make a huge effort to express an original thought or initiate speech.

People suffering from non-fluent aphasias are known for having high levels of frustration that often lead to outbursts of tears or yelling. That isn’t exactly surprising if one examines their dilemma. Because this is the type of aphasia that affects me briefly during my migraines, I can attest to the terror and frustration caused by understanding a question, thinking quite clearly about an answer, and then saying “dog roller meek give” when trying to say “I think I should take a handful of Advil really soon.” The only thing that keeps me calm at those times is the knowledge that the episode will pass within the hour. If I didn’t see that end in sight, though, I might indulge in a little crying or yelling myself.

What is so particularly interesting about non-fluent aphasia is what it suggests about the nature of thought. Many claim to think in pictures or words, and much research has been done on the different ways we process ideas. I would have said, before having migraines, that I think in words. When, however, I try to focus on the word I mean to say while aphasic, I do not merely find it impossible to say the word, but I find it impossible to think the word. So what words am I using to process the fact that I can’t think a word?

Sufferers of fluent (or semantic) aphasias are less likely to feel frustrated or afraid than patients with non-fluent aphasias because they usually don’t realize they have a problem or don’t seem concerned by it. This lack of awareness is a barrier to rehabilitation for the obvious reason that they don’t understand that they don’t understand.

The interesting thing about the language output of fluent aphasics is that it sounds like normal speech but doesn’t make any sense. If you overheard a Portuguese person with this disorder attempting to speak his or her native language but you didn’t understand Portuguese yourself, you might never know there was a problem. Fluent aphasics mimic the melody of language so well that it can take a few moments to realize that they’re speaking gibberish.

They make some grammar mistakes when speaking but are generally capable of using complex syntax for their utterances. Patrick McCaffrey of California State University compares it to Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky because it sounds as though it should be understandable but isn’t. As with non-fluent aphasias, varying levels and causes of this type of language disorder exist.

Wernicke’s aphasia corresponds to lesions found in Wernicke’s area of the brain. Because that region deals with comprehension, the sufferer can neither understand conversation nor express herself. If the person affected has only a mild form of this aphasia, she might catch the gist of a discussion but not understand the specifics. In the most serious cases, she would be unable to understand even a single word.

This type of aphasia often causes a similar symptom called paraphasia, in which a patient jumbles words or substitutes an incorrect word for the one he meant to say. Verbal paraphasia is the substitution of a word with a related meaning, such as rake for shovel. Literal, or phonemic, paraphasias involves switching similar-sounding syllables so that first-served becomes mirst-surg. A neologistic paraphasia gets less than 50 percent of a word right, for example, saying trip instead of the intended bird.

When trying to repeat a sentence, sufferers of Wernicke’s aphasia might use several paraphasias and add extraneous syllables as well, an effect called augmentation. These people are also known for a tendency to rush through a sentence or interrupt others when trying to feel a sense of successful communication, almost as though doing so will get the words out before the speaker has a chance to be confused by them.

Conduction aphasia is a rare type, occurring in less than 10 percent of cases. It is caused by lesions in the arcuate fasciculus, the nerve fibers that connect Broca’s area to Wernicke’s area. Spontaneous speech, auditory comprehension, and written comprehension are typically intact. One unusual problem sufferers of this aphasia face is difficulty in repeating what they hear.

When trying to repeat a sentence, they will produce many paraphasias; they tend to make more errors trying to repeat words than trying to repeat numbers. When repeating numbers, they tend to use verbal paraphasias (substituting a word with a related meaning); when repeating words, they tend to use literal paraphasias (interchanging similar syllables).

Another surprising result of such injuries, in one case, was the exact opposite of aphasia. It is a rare condition in which a person is capable of speech without thought. Carl Zimmer, a science writer for the New York Times, came across a case of what he calls Reverse Broca while researching Soul Made Flesh, his book on the discovery of the brain and its impact on humanity. A woman in a vegetative state had only isolated “islands of activity” discernible by an MRI scan, one of these in Broca’s area. The treatise Zimmer studied described her injuries as due to “acute brain damage secondary to successive primary cerebral hemorrhages.”

Amazingly, although incapable of higher thought, she would let out an occasional curse word. Her condition is extremely rare; as far as Zimmer knows, it is unique. Where an aphasic might be capable of all forms of thought but language processing because of damage to Broca’s area, this woman, with part of that region undamaged but the majority of the rest of her cerebral cortex destroyed, was capable of speech without thought.

Zimmer says this is significant because it “means that the language system—or part of it—can continue to operate without memory, perception, or even consciousness.”

Another unusual way that brain injury can influence language is called Foreign Accent Syndrome. Although it is extremely rare, it is still far more prevalent than Reverse Broca. In these cases, after a head injury, a person will develop an authentic-sounding foreign accent, often corresponding to a language he or she doesn’t speak. Doctors who came across this condition believed for years that the problem was psychosomatic. Friends who don’t understand and strangers who assume the patient is a foreigner can cause all kinds of emotional and social difficulties.

Tiffany Roberts, sixty-one, of Indiana, developed a British Cockney accent while regaining speech following her injuries. Wendy Hasnip, forty-seven, of England, retained a French accent in place of her Yorkshire accent after a head trauma that initially caused her to lose her speech, by no means an easy feat even if she had been to France more than once (which she had not) or ever spoken the language. A forty-four-year-old Japanese woman began to sound Korean, and a Norwegian woman with shrapnel injuries developed, in 1941, an extremely unpopular German accent.

Researchers at Oxford University now believe these bizarre incidents to be the result of complicated injuries to various parts of the brain that cause the sufferer to lengthen or shorten certain syllables, misplace stress within a word (ta-BLE instead of TA-ble), and use incorrect syntax, or a combination of all three. The language output, instead of being absent or impaired as in aphasia cases, is subtly changed in ways that we associate with a particular accent.

In cases in which the accent is heard by members of the group that does speak that way (for example, a Scots brogue spoken by an English woman to Scottish co-workers), the true accent can be discerned as false. John Coleman, a phonetician, confirms this and says that these speech impediments are merely mistaken for the accent closest to the one recognizable by its hearers, which would explain why the Japanese woman didn’t develop a Russian accent but Korean, one that would be identifiable by her and those around her, and why a Norwegian would sound more like a German than some other ethnicity unfamiliar to those who heard her.

This syndrome is rare, probably because a lesion that happens to block just the right combination of signals necessary to produce such a notable effect without causing more severe damage would be unusual. It’s likely that a different placement of lesions is responsible for deviations in the result produced. I imagine the effect itself wouldn’t be half as frustrating as constantly having to explain it to others.

Tourette’s syndrome can be aggravated by a brain injury sustained around the time of birth, such as a fall. People with Tourette’s syndrome suffer from unintentional tics that vary in severity and the embarrassment they cause. They range from a repetitive cough or wink to complicated movements or sentences. Winking at the wrong time could obviously become awkward but would be far easier to deal with than coprolalia (blurting out obscene words).

It may be a stretch to consider Tourette’s a language disorder because it involves several unintended actions, not just coprolalia. It is believed to be primarily a genetic syndrome, although the specific gene involved has yet to be identified and other factors, such as the perinatal head injury just mentioned, influence its severity and onset. It generally manifests itself during childhood, before the age of eighteen, and a full two-thirds of its sufferers either lose their tics or learn to control them by the time they become adults.

It’s unfortunate that speech problems are the best way to learn about how our brains process language, but the knowledge gained is a fascinating area of study. Perhaps it interests us so much because the words we choose to express our thoughts and feelings seem like such a vital part of who we are. Studying just how our brains accomplish that job teaches us about not only about how we communicate, but how we think and understand ourselves.

[Catherine P. Businelle is a freelance writer whose current brain injuries are all due to pregnancy and an active toddler.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!=

“According to the recommendations, there should be no extra judicial killing without trial….” [From The Daily Star (Dhaka, Bangladesh), January 17, 2005. Submitted by Iftekhar Sayeed.]

The Corporatization of Verbal Communication Processes

Keith Hall, Cottesloe, Western Australia

My interest in corporate English started in 1984 (the year, not the book). I was a new recruit in a large multinational corporation in England, and the human resources department had just announced the company’s latest motivational slogan: “Standing still is going backwards.” I was mystified. Every word made sense, but the overall sentence was nonsense. Surely there was a mistake, since standing still is definitely not going backward—or forward, for that matter. Standing still is the complete absence of going anywhere. What could this mystery slogan mean?

I knew I had a problem, since ignoring human resources announcements sounded like a good way to start my career “going backwards.” So I asked my colleagues if they knew what the slogan meant. That triggered a hilarious discussion about the fact that the year was 1984, that George Orwell was probably smiling in his grave, and that senior management didn’t know what they were talking about. But no one could explain the mysterious maxim from our corporate Big Brother.

Fortunately, the mystery was unraveled later in the day when our departmental manager gave an announcement. Henceforth, all staff were expected to continually improve their performance and productivity. This year you had to achieve more than last year. In brief, “Standing still is going backwards.” Aha, I was enlightened.

Having come to grips with this corporate doublespeak, I decided that I might be able to have a successful career after all. The obvious strategy was to watch for idiosyncratic English usage, find out what it meant, and then apply it assiduously in all my communications. Having successfully applied that strategy for twenty-five years, I feel that it is time to “share my learnings” with others. Yes, learning is pluralized in corporate English. My computer’s spell-checker doesn’t speak corporate English, so it has underlined learnings and asked whether I really mean learning’s. Which just proves that computers will never run the world.

All books and training courses on how to succeed in the corporate world use lists of guidelines, like the four Es model of leadership, the five characteristics of great businesses, the six ways to boost creativity, or the seven habits of successful managers. So here are my Five Rules for Successful Corporate Communication:

Rule 1: Keep It Positive, Stupid. In big corporations you will often be advised to, “Keep it simple, stupid.” You might think that means using clear, simple English, but managers aren’t really looking for simplicity. What they want is a report of positive progress, without any complicating problems. Of course, political and corporate events of the past few years have made us more skeptical about people putting a “positive spin” on the facts. It sounds like being a bit loose with the truth, but in the corporate world, positive statements are still much more acceptable than negative ones.

Interestingly, that doesn’t mean that bad news is suppressed or ignored. Instead, it is renamed or redefined in a way that stops it from sounding so bad. Back in 1984 it was still acceptable to use the word problem in big companies. But problem sounds negative, so it was gradually replaced by the more neutral term issue. With time, issue was also dropped in favor of the more motivating term challenge. And more recently, challenge has been replaced by the even more exciting term opportunity. So an employee who had a performance problem in the 1980s now has an opportunity for improvement.

In the same way, negative-sounding layoffs and sackings become downsizing, then the more neutral restructuring, and are now often described as increasing organizational effectiveness. Letters from consumers about the company’s products or services used to be called consumer complaints. But now they are more commonly called consumer comments or consumer feedback. Corporate takeovers have acquired a negative image and are now described as Merger & Acquisition or the abbreviation M&A.

Rule 2: TLAs Rule OK! For many of us, NASA put acronyms—especially three-letter acronyms (TLAs)—firmly on the linguistic map during the moon-landing program of the 1960s. News services at the time were full of abbreviations like ETA, EVA, and LLM (referring to estimated time of arrival, extra-vehicular activity, and lunar landing module). More recently, NASA has moved back to more user-friendly terminology like space walk and Martian rover.

Yet acronyms still abound in the corporate world, sometimes for convenience and brevity in communication, and sometimes as a euphemism for unpleasant situations (to comply with Rule 1, above).

If you attend a business meeting in any large corporation, you will find that virtually every sentence used in the discussion will include at least one TLA. Some will be familiar from their use in news services, like CEO ‘chief executive officer,’ CTO ‘chief technical officer,’ 2IC ‘second in command,’ ROI ‘return on investment,’ and TSR ‘total shareholder return.’ Others will be used broadly within the corporate world but rarely outside it. These include FGI ‘focus group interview’ (sometimes FGD ‘focus group discussion’), OEM ‘original equipment manufacturer,’ SKU ‘stock keeping unit,’ TQ ‘total quality,’ GMP ‘good manufacturing practice,’ and MRP ‘manufacturing resource planning.’

Of course, some TLAs are specific to a given company, but most people don’t know which terms are used only within their company and which are more widely understood. That leads to some amusing interactions when people from two different companies meet. At first they try to avoid using acronyms, which means that their sentences become rather long and labored. Then one of them accidentally uses an acronym, realizes his or her mistake, apologizes, explains what the acronym means, and (if it is a broadly used acronym) is dumbfounded to find that the other person understands it anyway.

A popular game in corporations is the invention of amusingly irreverent new meanings for existing TLAs. MRP is sometimes playfully expanded into ‘marketing runs the place.’ One company named its global downsizing and restructuring program Strengthening Global Effectiveness (see Rule 1), and then further disguised the unpleasant realities by adopting the acronym SGE. Before long, many of the staff were calling the program by the amusingly apt description ‘say goodbye to everybody.’ Another company started including objectives, goals, strategies, and measures in its business plans under the convenient acronym OGSM, but senior management were dismayed to find that junior staff simply referred to these elements of the plan as orgasms.

The staff of one company were amused to find themselves working on a project with the eye-opening acronym PISS. Surprisingly, everyone continued to write about the project under the outrageous acronym, and no one openly admitted that it was a bit of an embarrassing project name. It was a clear case of the emperor’s new clothes. In speech, however, the project was always said as “pea-eye-ess-ess”—never as “piss.”

Rule 3: Play the Numbers Game. The corporate world is totally focused on numbers. There are the twenty-two immutable laws of marketing, twenty-two irrefutable laws of advertising, seven habits of highly effective people, ten deadly sins of marketing, the four Es model of leadership, and many more. It almost seems as though things that can’t be stated numerically have a rather shadowy and tenuous existence.

Despite this apparent desire for numerical accuracy, there is always a strong tendency for numbers to get rounded. Of course, they get rounded upward if they are a measure of something good or desirable and downward if they are unwelcome. So sales of $87 million will probably be referred to loosely in meetings as “$90 million” by middle management and then further rounded to “about $100 million” by senior management. This tendency is fully consistent with Rule 1 (Keep it Positive, Stupid).

Rule 4: Mystify Them with Sporting Metaphors. In the 1980s, military terminology was popular in the corporate world. Sun Tzu’s classic, The Art of War, was required reading for managers, and many business situations were described in terms of military analogies. It was common to talk about businesses that were fighting for survival; marketing was a battle for more consumers and greater sales; competitive companies were combatants; some companies won the battle early on, while others had to fight to achieve market domination. The bloodthirsty terminology reached its peak in the 1990s when companies aimed to nuke the competition and achieve global dominance.

Then there was an abrupt change. Companies that used such terminology were seen as adopting unfair business practices. After a few court cases, executives turned away from military terminology and used sporting metaphors instead. Combatants have now become players, and battlegrounds have become playing fields. Business and marketing books refer to local companies “joining the race”; describe the competition between big companies as a “two-horse race”; and even refer to “a titanic struggle between two major players.”

There is one big snag with using sporting metaphors. In the increasingly global business world, the sporting expressions are being used in countries where the sport in question is virtually unknown. So I have heard American managers in China telling their staff that a new product must “hit the sweet spot on the value equation” and that a risky project will only work if we “hit a string of homers.” If you don’t know about baseball, these are inscrutable statements.

The basketball expression “full-court press” is just as mystifying, but “calling timeout” seems to have successfully entered the global corporate English vocabulary.

Rule 5: Expect Unexpected Reversals. Many statements in the corporate world turn normal logic upside down. I have already described my confusion on first hearing the slogan “Standing still is going backwards.” In a similar vein, marketing experts who advocate reducing the number of items in your product lineup will assure you that “less is more.” And all general managers know that doing business is hard when the business is soft. You might also guess that bottom-line results are the opposite of top-line results, but you would be wrong. Top-line results are the initial, big-picture learnings; bottom-line results refer to the final profit after paying all costs and taxes.

Even the familiar expression “apples-to-apples comparison” is a bit of a contradiction. A visiting American manager told staff in the Beijing office of one company that they couldn’t compare apples and oranges.

They had to make an apples-to-apples comparison. The Chinese staff were completely mystified. As they explained to me afterward, apples and oranges are both fruit, they are both round, both sweet, both purchased in the fruit-and-vegetable market, and both are in season at the same time and at around the same price. So why is it such a terrible thing to compare them? I had to admit that their logic was convincing. Still, it would cut no ice in the corporate world.

Of course, there are further aspects of corporate English to learn. There are all those new words: leverage, proactive, priorize, prioritize, diarize, incentivization, dollarize, paradigm shift, and many more. Some have been adopted into conventional English, but business documents still get a lot of those red zig-zag warning lines in Word!

So if you are just starting out on your corporate career, take my advice: keep it positive, stupid; remember that TLAs rule OK; learn how to play the numbers game; mystify them with sporting metaphors; and expect unexpected reversals. Compared with these linguistic challenges, you will find that your work is trivially simple. Success is guaranteed.

[Keith Hall has a Ph.D in chemistry from the University of Western Australia and has worked as a research and development manager in England, Japan, China, and Singapore. He recently returned to Australia and reinvented himself as a writer, focusing on the humorous aspects of language, culture, and travel.]

Playing Boggle with My Sister

I shift the pad of paper on my knees. Tessa’s coughing,

studying the letters. She just learned how to read.

I feel contrary tonight. I’m looking for words like

“kiss” or “kill,” words

with bite. I scribble: breast and areola. Queer and quail.

Australia. Europe. Rope, she offers. I think of “knife.”

The squirting quill.

Bet, says Tessa. Clears her throat. And it. Bop. Rub.

I click my teeth and think of talent. Teles(c)oping out.

Pope and slut. Aorta. I quibble at her last and suggest lust.

Soul, says Tess, quiet.

Quiet. Sister, let’s quit our sly poetry

lest our queue of slurry letters turn to butter, lest our best art

sour and burst, lest I pose as poetaster

to you, blest rosy (M)use.

—Lauren Rile Smith

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Local Pilates Instructor Gives Back to Kids with Arthritis” [From The South Pasadena Review (California), August 17, 2005. Submitted by Robert L. Sharp.]

Falsest of Friends

Fraser Sutherland, Toronto, Ontario

You remember that hot day in 1974 when you were in the Cairns area of Queensland, Australia, and you were chatting matily in Mbaram to an Aborigine named Arthur Bennett? The language was something of a novelty to you, as it was even to Arthur, who’d last spoken it some twenty years earlier, when his mother was still around. Poor Arthur himself died later that year, and you’ve forgotten most of your Mbaram. Nor is there anyone left to speak it with. But you do recall one Mbaram word, dog, and the peculiar fact that it meant ‘dog.’

Linguists term such pairs false cognates, since it would take an intergalactic conspiracy theorist to suppose there was an etymological link between the Mbaram and English dogs: Abo languages don’t have relatives outside Australia. True cognates—look-alikes that have a common origin—are a godsend in learning Spanish and French since those languages possess them in abundance. Superior and supérieur are superior. Cognates are shipwreck-prone, however; they often conceal reef-like verbs that pretend to be nouns. Supplier in French refers not to a person who supplies, but means ‘to entreat,’ and supporter isn’t a fan of a sports team but means ‘to bear or endure.’ Falsest of all is blesser ‘to injure or wound.’ Nor is the pandemic spread of global English all good news for the English speaker. Hybrid short forms have sprung up like linguistic weeds. In French, pull is a pullover or sweater; catch is wrestling. Then there are the pseudo-Anglicisms, which look like English to the non-English and look like English to Anglophones, but mean something different to the former. Such is the case with Handy, German for cell phone.

Learning a foreign language would be a lot simpler if there were more false cognates to greet us. Much more frequently, we encounter false friends, those evil twins of foreign-language learning. I first became cognizant of them some years ago in Barcelona, where an election poster urged the populace to salt one of the contending parties. Salting a political party seemed like an odd thing to do, until I grasped that salt means ‘to jump’ in Catalan. Voters were being exhorted to jump to, or for, or at, a slate of candidates.

False friends are jumpy creatures, and not just in Catalonia. Sometimes they’re not merely false, but downright deadly. Alto means ‘high’ or ‘tall’ to the Italians, Portuguese, and Spanish, and a high-range singing voice to you, but in Spanish it can also mean ‘Stop!'— which you realize just after you slam into another car. If a Portuguese doctor tells you that have rim— which seems peculiar, possibly fatal—he’s talking about your kidney. On the other hand, the Dutch or Swedish physician may point out that your lever is out of joint, meaning your liver. Ostensibly alluding to the time that you should take your medicine, a German doctor, or someone posing as one, may say, After. The trouble is that he’s referring to your anus. The trouble in fact begins with ‘A’: a can be a preposition with many senses in numerous other languages: if you encounter someone attempting to speak Cornish, he or she means ‘of.’ Air means ‘water’ in Malay. An ape is a ‘bee’ in Italian.

Although place names are not false friends as such—one’s either in a place, or one’s not—they can inspire mirth, if not confusion. English place names like Newfoundland’s Dildo and Black Tickle can be funny enough in themselves; in a foreign language they can add an extra sniggering dimension as, for example, Condom, a village and administrative district in France known for its Armagnac, or the names of German or Austrian spa towns, which are often preceded by Bad (bath): “Are you going to Bad Sachsa?” “No, it’s Bad Lippspringe for me.”

If Bosnians, Croatians, or Serbians tell you to hopa, you should step lively because it means ‘Jump!’ Appearances are equally deceiving if they say someone’s a drag: they mean the person is beloved, perhaps by bog ‘God,’ ‘Heaven,’ or ‘Providence.’ At any rate, God or god is ‘good’ in Danish. ‘Good’ is gut in German, and bra in Swedish; in a Romanian restaurant you may think you’re choosing a bun, a bun, though the menu really notes only that an item is ‘good.’ Be careful renting a motor vehicle in German: if you order a Car, they may give you a charter bus or motor coach; if you ask for a Limo, they may give you a soft drink. Don’t accept a gift or Gift in Swedish, Norwegian, or German, unless you’re having trouble with domestic rodents: it means ‘poison.’ None of these should be your French but, your ‘goal’ or ‘purpose.’

Dada in Swahili is not an artistic movement, but an ‘elder sister,’ sometimes a term of endearment or respect among women. In Catalan, dada is neither an artistic movement or a Swahili female friend, but a ‘datum’ or ‘fact.’

A byte in Swedish is not a group of binary digits but a ‘victim’ or ‘prey,’ though it’s doubtful if a Swedish hawk measures his prey in kilobytes. Finger can mean ‘toe’ in Yiddish (though toes means a ‘mistake,’ of which you make many. A host in Czech is a ‘guest’ or, in Afrikaans, a gas. When a German host or guest puts on his Hut, he’s putting on his hat. Swedes are not necessarily being vulgar when they say fart: to them it means ‘speed’ or ‘swiftness.’ To Poles, fart just means ‘good luck.’

In some languages it’s hard to keep track of people. In Finnish, me is ‘us’ or ‘we,’ and he can be ‘them’ or ‘they.’ On is ‘he’ in Polish and Serbo-Croat, and the non-specific ‘one’ in French. Numerals in general can be treacherous. If you want to say 11 in German, Yiddish, or Afrikaans, it’s elf. In Somali, sir is ‘to deceive’ (though in Serbo-Croat it’s ‘cheese’), and jeer is a ‘hippopotamus.’ Papa is Spanish for a white potato and for a pope. Tagalog and Yiddish have something in common: they both say pay for ‘pie.’ The cellist Yo-Yo Ma may inspire the occasional chuckle on his concert tours, since ma can mean ‘but’ or ‘yet’ in Italian, ‘today’ in Hungarian, and ‘hand’ or ‘my’ in Catalan.

One keeps coming back to Catalan because its many false friends won’t go away. Speakers of Catalan number about eight million, so there are enough around to get you into serious trouble. Catalan’s quicksands extend to a plethora of short blunt words that look suspiciously like subjects of heated disputes in playing Scrabble: corb, cort, eben, foc, fus, gal, grat, palp, rebot, tard, and tron. If a Catalan tells you he plays the ferrets, it’s not some mustelid version of betting on dogs (playing the puppies): your musical friend performs on the triangle. A pet is a ‘fart’ (though not a Swedish or Polish one), pop is an ‘octopus,’ and barb is a ‘beard.’ If you have decor, you don’t have interior decorating but ‘decorum.’ Ham is a ‘fish-hook.’ A cub is a ‘cube,’ and a cup is a ‘wine-press.’

Since English is mainly a muddy estuary formed by the confluence of Latin and Germanic linguistic streams, we possess, when it comes to false friends, the worst of both worlds. As the Catalans say, “Ja pots xiular sil’aseno vol beure.” One can lead a horse to the water but twenty cannot make him drink. Or make the English horse talk sense.

[Fraser Sutherland is a lexicographer and the co-author of The Making of a Name: The Inside Stories of the Brands We Buy.]

Fan Words

Marcelo Rinesi, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Fan fiction, fanfic or simply fics, are stories written by fans of TV shows, movies, book series, comic books, and other media. Even boy bands like N*Sync have their own, sometimes very elaborate, fan-generated literary corpus. Members of these fandoms form loose communities centered around their object of interest, swapping fiction, criticisms, and plain gossip on web sites, mailing lists, and other electronic media. It’s a thriving activity, with thousands of active authors all over the world. One web site alone, FanFiction.net [http:www.fanfiction.net], hosts almost one and a half million stories in hundreds of fandoms. Fan fiction also boasts a tradition that spans decades, predating not only the World Wide Web but email itself.

The origin of fan fiction, both as a term and as an activity, dates back to science fiction fans from as far back as the ’40s or even before. They were fans of written science fiction, books, and short stories published in magazines like Amazing Stories who liked to meet in cons (short for convention) and write and publish fan-created fanzines, commenting on these cons, their activities, and, of course, science fiction. Mimeographed or printed on small or leased presses and sent by the post mail, these fanzines did not originally carry much fan fiction. Fans with the desire and ability to write could always submit stories to the professional magazines; many if not most nowadays legendary writers like Isaac Asimov began their careers as eager teenagers submitting (and being rejected) time and again to these magazines. Besides, most science fiction stories “live” inside their own universes, and there was seldom an incentive to create stories using a shared narrative background.

Television, in particular Star Trek, changed all that. Fans of the show—trekkers or, more pejoratively, trekkies—got hooked into a consistent narrative universe with a core set of characters and conventions. “Serious” science fiction fans found this universe coarse and uninteresting compared with the more challenging creations of the literary corpus, but this same simplicity (and its undeniable attracting power) soon spawned the first fan-written Star Trek stories. For the record, many decades, spin-offs, and technological revolutions later, there are still ST:TOS (Star Trek: The Original Series, as fans refer to it) fan fics being written.

What did change with the arrival of new communication technologies was the social structure involved in these activities. Membership in virtual communities being much more fluid, terms like BNF ‘big-name fan’ and WNF ‘well-known fan’ aren’t normally used inside fanfic communities.

This is not to say that the roles themselves have disappeared; in every mailing list there can be found some well-known writers and owners of archive web sites. Yet since fan fiction communities seldom engage in the kind of elaborately coordinated activities that traditional fan groups espouse, social issues take a secondary role behind the textual ones in those communities.

With so many people doing it for so long, and with the particular linguistic fluidity that characterizes both fan activities and the Internet, it’s no wonder that a rich and flexible vocabulary exists to deal with the complexities and nuances of writing fanfic. The most basic question is one of shared background. If you are writing a Harry Potter story, for example, you must generally assume that everything narrated about the books is true, and you can rely on your readers also sharing those assumptions. So many issues of character and background development refer to the body of stories shared by everybody in the fandom, that it’s aptly called the canon, following the traditional literary use of the term. It need not be a set of books. In the case of TV shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the canon comprises the episodes themselves. Stories are located in this fictional universe and must follow the rules established there, what’s called the continuity. This term is used in cinema to refer to the process of ensuring that sequences done in multiple shootings don’t betray those multiple shootings by accidental changes in clothing and object placement or other factors.

The metaphor also works on fan fiction, although it also refers to things like personal stories and psychological traits, which should conform to the accepted canon and not change inexplicably from story to story. As a side effect, fan fiction writers and readers develop an acute eye to detect failings in continuity and are often prone to detect and criticize such inconsistencies when they creep into the canon itself.

Fanfic communities usually come up with names for these shared universes, often multiple ones. For example, there is the Buffyverse, the universe of the show “Buffy,” sometimes called the Jossverse or the Whedonverse in reference (and deference) to series creator Joss Whedon.

The naming pattern is a recurring one: there is the Xenaverse (from the TV show “Xena: Warrior Princess”) as well as the Movieverse, from the “X-Men” and “X-Men 2” movies. This last term was created to distinguish the movie canon from the comic-book canon, as there were enough differences in their backgrounds to define different settings.

Sometimes multiple universes coexist inside the same canon. In the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” episode “The Wish,” a misguided wish ends up changing reality into a much darker one, where most cast members are either dead, evil, or both.

Although by the end of the episode things are back to normal, the concept proved alluring enough for fans that many pieces of fan fiction have been written as taking place in this subuniverse, the so-called Wishverse. More technically focused TV series like “Star Trek” are classically ridden with these parallel universes and alternative timelines, to the point that they become one of the main plot devices used by the series writers, instead of an anomalous event. But comic books are perhaps the media most prone to this phenomenon. Besides a dazing array of parallel planets, timelines, and entire universes grafted sometimes inconsistently into the canon, editorial companies have created whole issues and even series exploring other possibilities, the so-called Elseworlds (DC Comics) and What if’s (Marvel Comics). We have thus alternative universes where all males have disappeared from the planet or where Superman is a young blacksmith in a medieval town.

It’s not surprising then that fanfic writers are also adept at creating and exploring these possibilities. This kind of fan fiction receives the general name of alternate universes or AUs, sometimes reusing the terms alternate timeline, Elseworld, or “What if.” They can grow into the equivalent of multiple-book series with many authors, creating incredibly detailed alternate universes for which they are the canon themselves. Sometimes people even write alternate universes to these alternate universes.

Still, the multiplicity of universes is not the only creative driver behind fan fiction. Fans always and everywhere have been interested in the romantic relationships of the characters, both in and outside the canon. As this tends to be a somewhat sensitive issue for some people, authors are often required by the community’s rules to tell the readers in advance about any romantic or other relationship in the story, especially if it’s not in the canon.

This also has the advantage of luring readers also interested in these relationships. Fans particularly vocal about a particular relationship are often referred to as ‘shippers, a shorthand for relationshippers that also plays on worshippers.

The most common notation for relationships is the “x/x” format. For example, in the Harry Potter fandom, a fic involving a romance between Harry and Hermione would usually be tagged a “H/Hr” or a “H/H” story, while one involving Hermione and Ron would be a “R/Hr” fic. In the “Buffy” and “Angel” fandoms, likewise, a story featuring a pairing between Buffy and Angel would be tagged “B/A,” while “C/A” identifies a pairing between the characters Cordelia and Angel, and “K/U” would be readily identified in the “Star Trek” fandom as a Kirk−Uhura story.

The beauty of this notation, besides being so easy to grasp and use, is that it can be—and often is—used to refer to relationships well outside anything in the canon. Harry Potter fans have written stories about practically any possible permutation of characters, from “Hr/R” (Hermione and Ron) to “H/R” (which can refer to either Hermione and Ron or Harry and Ron) to extensive “H/D” (Harry and Draco) relationship stories. Pretty much as in real life, gender and background don’t limit the possible stories in the absolute sense, and often whole mailing lists are dedicated exclusively to stories dealing with a particular pair.

In any case, while obviously clearly not reactionary against same-sex relationships, fanfic communities have developed protocols to allow people to avoid these kind of stories if they so wish. Any story involving a relationship between two males or females is customarily marked as “M/M” [Male/Male] or “F/F” [Female/Female]. The general name for this type of stories is slash (sometimes femslash for “F/F” stories). The term dates back to some of the earliest fan fiction dealing with a pairing between Captain Kirk and his first officer, Mr. Spock (“K/S” fic). Although these stories are completely beyond the canon as far as any explicit recognition goes, some fans have long affirmed that there are enough elements in their on-screen interaction to support the hypothesis. This sort of detailed analysis of postulated subtexts (a term borrowed from literary analysis to refer to implicit content under the surface text) is fairly common in most fandoms, although in some cases—most notoriously “Xena, Warrior Princess”—it can be argued that the show producers and writers have themselves encouraged this ambiguity.

Another issue shared by all fanfic communities is the uncertain legal status of the activity. It is common practice to include at the beginning of every fic what is called the disclaimer, a short notice indicating that this or that company owns the characters and settings of the story, and that it wasn’t written or distributed for profit.

Of course, fan-fiction writers wouldn’t be who they are if they were satisfied with stock phrases. Disclaimers often achieve the status of small creative pieces by themselves. Some common themes are elaborate descriptions of what, exactly, the author would do if he or she did own the characters and a deliberately pathetic (in the classic sense of the word) and usually funny plea not to be sued.

Yet the most direct relationship between the owning companies and the fanfic writers (and fans in general) is carried through the media itself. Fiction writers are especially vocal critics of pretty much anything companies do, from spin-offs to introducing new characters. Creators themselves, they are anything but “passive consumers,” accepting everything that the Powers That Be (show producers, book editors) deign to inflict on their beloved characters.

The term itself harks back to the New Testament: “The powers that be are ordained of God” (Romans xiii.1), and has a long story of being used to refer to the real (and often assumed to be somewhat invisible) power in a given context. Science fiction fans found the phrase apt to describe the commercial forces that own and direct their favorite media, and fandoms have since adopted it as their own. It’s worthy of notice that the (in general benign but often unpredictable) mystical powers “behind the curtain” in the Buffyverse spin-off “Angel” are also called in the canon “The Powers That Be,” so the term has a special and sometimes usefully ambiguous meaning in that fandom.

As a note on its vitality as a literary form, even as fan fiction covers the range from short poetry inspired by comic books to two-hundred-thousand-word epic stories about Harry Potter and his friends, it has managed to conjure its own distinctive (and much dreaded) archetype: the “Mary Sue.” She (or he) is an original character that reflects the personal characteristics of the writer, or what he or she wishes were his or her personal characteristics. This character is often young, unusually beautiful, and extremely accomplished. However it is introduced into the plot, it tends to take it over, dazzle all regular characters, save the day, and either die heroically or marry the regular character the writer would like to. It also usually ruins the fic.

Its origins date back to 1974, when Paul Smith identified the type in a Star Trek story. A common contemporary manifestation would be a “mysterious new girl” arriving to Hogwarts showing strange powers and quickly making an impression on everybody from the teachers to Harry Potter himself. (For more info about Mary Sues, their history and ways of detecting them, see http:writersu.s5.comhistorymarysue.html.)

Dreadful to read as they might be, “Mary Sues” are perhaps, in one way or another, at the core of what motivates fanfic writers. Often dedicated “consumers” of their favorite media, they nonetheless don’t see these narrative universes as closed products under the control of a remote author or corporation. They engage the stories they read and watch, projecting into them their own ideas, stories, and issues, creating and re-creating these modern myths in ways that Homer, himself a fanfic creator of sorts, would have recognized in intent, if not in its tools. By blurring the distinction between readers and writers—indeed, by granting every reader the status of potential writer—fan fiction, the more unofficial and grassroots of all literary genres and perhaps the one most native to the Internet, shows a possible future with a renewed and more balanced relationship between us and the media.

After all, possible futures is what fan fiction is all about.

[Marcelo Rinesi watches TV, does mathematics, and works with computers—sometimes all at the same time—in Buenos Aires, Argentina.]

What Do Poets Want?

Words that fit,

Double-parked

In tight spaces.

Jaunce, for example.

Or Moon-simple.

I’ll stick them

in lines 4 & 5

Hope

No one will notice.

—Louis Phillips

HORRIBILE DICTU

Mat Coward, Summerset, Britain

“Not to use a well-worn cliché,” said a radio commentator as Bangladesh’s cricketers caused the sporting surprise of the decade by beating Australia’s, “but it’s a funny old game.” Is there a name for this technique, by which a speaker seeks to absolve himself in advance by announcing that he isn’t going to do the thing he then goes on to do? I once heard a man in a pub say to another, “No offence, but you are the sorriest tosser I’ve ever met.” The extraordinary thing is, it worked: no punch was thrown.

We haven’t had any “superglued words” lately, so I’m grateful to the reader who reminded me that the only type of hoax ever mentioned in newspapers is the elaborate hoax. Simple hoaxes, he supposes, simply go unreported.

Not a hoax, unfortunately, was the decision by Britain’s Department of Trade and Industry to change its name to the Department for Productivity, Energy and Industry (DPEI). The costly cosmetic decision was quickly reversed, however, when the government minister in charge at the DPEI—the Productivity Energy and Industry Secretary—found that his new acronym was PEnIS. (The official explanation for the rethink, I should point out, was that “The Secretary has been listening to feedback from stakeholders.”)

Stakeholders have also been widely consulted over plans to build a huge number of new homes across the UK, as a result of which it’s been agreed that, in some developments, “up to half of the homes will be affordable.”

What’s going to become of the unaffordable ones I don’t know, since, by definition, no-one’s ever going to buy them.

If you suffer from hay fever, you might be interested in a new product being advertised in British periodicals. It uses phototherapy, apparently, which is “a widely accepted form of non-evasive treatment.” Perhaps evasive therapies are those tablets which slip out of your fingers and lodge themselves down the back of the sofa.

A few years ago in this column I mentioned that I’d received an invoice from a U.S. publisher addressed to “Mat Coward, Valued Customer,” set out as if the last two words were part of my address. Last week, I heard from the company again—and this time they saluted me as “Max Coward, Valued Customer.” It’s good to know that the computer still values me sufficiently to get half my name right.

Words which are used to disguise the reality of unequal relationships have always been popular with the powerful, and language plays an important part in the modern management method of trying to persuade staff members that, far from being anything so demeaning and old-fashioned as employees, they are really members of a big, happy family—equal-but-separate, you might say. When two union activists were sacked by a supermarket chain, leading to threats of a national strike, the company defended its actions by explaining that “two colleagues were dismissed for misconduct, not for any trade union issues.” Everyone is a colleague these days; there are no workers any more, let alone bosses.

It’d be no good writing a column like this one without acknowledging that some of my dislikes are largely irrational. Even so, I hope I’m not the only person in the world who has always been irritated by the use in newspaper headlines of the present tense to report events which have already happened. I take grim satisfaction from those occasions on which headline writers are tripped up by their own “now habit,” as in this tortured example: “Boy of 2 is found wandering along the street TWO DAYS ago—and NO ONE has claimed him.”

Another source of innocent fun is seeing someone drawn irresistibly to a familiar phrase, even when context renders the cliché absurd.

I made a scribbled note some months ago when I heard a professional snooker player tell an interviewer that, “basically, I’ve been on a one-way roller coaster this year.” I’ve no idea how a one-way roller coaster might work: would it only go up? Only go down? But the sad thing is that, all this time later, I cannot recall whether the player meant he’d had a good year or a bad one.

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

A Word or Two in Spanglish

C. J. Moore, Bilbao, Spain

Using a Spanish-English dictionary the other day, I had a most unsettling experience. I even forget the word I was searching, because what I found left me momentarily in a state of bemusement. My eye traveling down a page discovered the following sequence of words:

soul, souvenir, Soviet, Spanglish, spaniel, sparring, speed, spinnaker, sport, spot, spray, sprint, sprinter, squash, stage, stand, standing, starter, status, step, stick, stock, stop, strapless. stress, strike, striptease.

For a moment I thought I must be in the English-Spanish section of the dictionary, but no, the column was in the Spanish half of the book. How can this be possible? I thought, and turned to the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (RAE) to compare the same pages. Needless to say, none of the above words was to be found in the RAE “official” version of the language.

The reason was staring at me from within the sequence of words. It seemed I had fallen into a nest of Spanglish. But how was such a serried array of English words possible, one after the other?

A clue was given by the pronunciation guidance in the book, where each of the above words attracts the telltale Spanish initial es- (as es-spot, es-stand, and es-spray). Spanish traditionally has no words with an initial s. Its phonological path from Vulgar Latin produced the need to ease that pronunciation by changing it to es-. Thus Scotia (Scotland) became Escocia, Scandinavia became Escandinavia, and so on. Even adoptions dating from earlier modern times show the same pattern: espín, esnob, esquí, estigma. Similarly we find estándar, escuadrón, escoch (whisky), estación, and even escáner, a quite recent acquisition.

Quite by chance I had stumbled on an area where English words have been absorbed into Spanish with no change in spelling, suggesting a colloquial usage. The dictionary I was consulting happens to reflect the language of the street in a realistic and up-to-date way, and Spanglish is a vibrant part of this trend.

For purists who would reject all such borrowings—and, as in France, not a few of them are to be found in the Royal Academy—this kind of unregulated acquisition is nothing new, and the battle an ancient one. But the reality is that nothing can halt a living language from diving into any areas it pleases to satisfy its hunger for novelty and to provide labels for newly discovered objects and experiences.

As we know, science, technology, sport, and business are all areas where English has effortlessly carved a swathe of influence across the world.

How this path is shaped can be interesting. In a previous age here in Spain, the terminology of railway engineering came mainly from English, for instance, tren and wagón, while the language describing aspects of the service to passengers tended to be in Spanish, like andén and via.

Computer technology today similarly divides between “translated” words—ordenador ‘computer,’ ratón ‘mouse,’ teclado ‘keyboard,’ pantalla ‘screen,’ and carpeta ‘file’—and borrowed words like internet, surfear, cliquear (though we also find pinchar), email (though also correo electrónico), and software. Here the pattern seems to be that computer-user activities, which are new experiences, require borrowed terms, whereas hardware terminology has extended the meaning of existing words. The odd word out here is mouse, which, in Spain as elsewhere, seems to have been widely translated into local tongues.

Spanish academician Fernando Lázaro Carreter, who has long entertained the Spanish public with his newspaper articles on language, has returned more than once to the irksome question of Spanglish. In an article in 2001 he wrote mournfully: “If, according to one classic definition, Spanish in its origins was badly spoken Latin, soon it will be just a kind of broken English.”

He reserves most of his scorn for the phenomenon of what he calls anglojerga ‘anglo-jargon,’ with which radio and television banter is filled. The only mercy, he points out, is that when you hear it, the original (and untransferable) pronunciation is lost in Spanish phonetics.

But the picture of linguistic influence sometimes has a more attractive colour. In an article written in 1984, Lázaro argued for Spanish adopting the English sense of the word romance—a love affair—observing that his native tongue seemed to have no word reflecting this very modern form of relationship. Popular usage had already led the way with frequent press reports of “romances” between celebrities.

The Spanish word romance has a distinguished linguistic and literary sense, referring both to Romance tongues and also to a rich and beautiful ballad tradition. One might have thought the Academy would jib at diluting such an honourable word, but with Lázaro as champion, a swift change was brought about. Only a year later the Academy Dictionary displayed its official acceptance of this new meaning for the Spanish. How good to see the heart winning the day over the head in these matters.

[C. J. Moore, the author of In Other Words: A Language Lover’s Guide to the Most Useful and Intriguing Words from around the World, has worked as a teacher, editor, and journalist and has degrees in modern languages and linguistics.]

The Alphabet Is Killing Us

Having defeated KKK

And TB (both relaxed and galloping),

We boldly gave the NRA

of FDR a legal walloping.

But, gentle veterans, don’t let

Initial triumphs lull, seduce you.

If USSR didn’t get

You, some day IRS will noose you.

—John Nixon, Jr.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

A front-page article in The News Journal (Wilmington, Delaware, June 23, 2005) reported that the odds were 676 quintillion to one that the DNA of a suspect matched the sample taken from the victim. However, the friends of the suspect must have been hopeful when they read the following sentence of the reporter’s article:

“But what [defense lawyer] O’Neill didn’t know before a preliminary court hearing Wednesday was how steep the odds are that the DNA belongs to someone else.” [Submitted by Roger J. Steiner.]

Ode to a Clodhopper

Jerome Betts, Torquay, Devon

Humorous coinages of bird names, in the vein of double-breasted weevil-eater and the like, may come a poor second to real ones, if Christine E. Jackson’s British Names of Birds of 1968 is anything to go by.

The basis of her book is an older work, H. Kirke Swann’s Dictionary of English and Folk Names of British Birds, published in 1913, to which she adds about eleven hundred others from printed sources such as bird books and county lists. Her total of about four thousand therefore includes dialect and local names, alternative common names, and names applied at various times by the first ornithologists and used, however rarely, in the early literature.

How necessary some accepted vernacular name is—let alone a unique “scientific” label—can be seen from the duplication of names revealed in her pages for some common, or formerly common, birds. Whaup, for example, has been applied to curlew, avocet, and blue tit, and barley-bird to an astonishing tally of at least seven other species: common gull, greenfinch, grey wagtail, nightingale, siskin, wheatear, and wryneck. Bee-bird has covered chiffchaff, green woodpecker, spotted flycatcher, whitethroat and willow-warbler, and blackcap served for bullfinch, stonechat, reed-bunting, and three kinds of tit, as well as the eponymous warbler itself, Sylvia atricapilla.

A striking feature of the lists is the scarcity of alternative names for some birds and their abundance for others. On a rough count, the mistle-thrush, the hero of Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Darkling Thrush,” has more than thirty separate and distinct names, such as stormcock and shrite, disregarding those that seem to be merely spelling or pronunciation variants. The popular and literature-haunting robin has only about half a dozen. On the other hand, the bird it is associated with in folk-myth and rhyme, the wren, has at least twenty-five, though here it is harder to sort out the variations on a basic theme.

Both the mistle-thrush and the wren have distinctive “signatures” the one its large size and strident singing from prominent posts high in trees, and the other its cocked-up tail and amazing volume of sound from a tiny body. But what about the lark, which has an equally distinctive “signature,” that singing spiral to the sky?

It appears to have attracted only four or so names, including clodhopper from Sussex, if you leave out the versions of lark and laverock. Those earthy Sussex rustics seem to have seen a different bird from Shelley. Ode to a Clodhopper? Weighed down by that title, his soaring stanzas would hardly have got off the ground and remained poetical never-werts.

It is even worse with those highly conspicuous swans, who, apparently, are always swans, and nightingales, for whom the only regional name recorded is the previously mentioned barley-bird. Kingfishers, too, come off badly (dipper; green snipe), as do swallows, who score only five. In contrast, the dashing swift weighs in with fifteen (not counting all the changes rung on devil combinations) from the anchor-bird of Sussex to the whip of Yorkshire.

Another bird that has a name list of mistle-thrush proportions is the contrastingly inconspicuous hedge-sparrow (thirty-five plus), alias blue Isaac and haysucker, that pons asinorum of the ornithologically correct, who call it a dunnock because it’s a thin-billed insect-eating accentor (Prunella modularis) and not a sparrow at all. There is also the black-headed gull (twenty-five plus), once known as a coddymoddy, in Suffolk and a Scoulton pewit in Norfolk, and the green woodpecker (twenty-five plus), or rain-bird, yaffle, and wood-awl.

The long-tailed tit (twenty-five plus) has names like featherpoke and bum towel, which, because of similarities in nest construction, in many cases overlap with those for the willow-warbler (twenty plus) or bank bottle and cherry-chopper. Among other twenty-plusers are the yellowhammer, the nightjar—another Hardy star as the dewfall-hawk—and the wheatear.

Do these feast-or-famine extremes reflect patchiness in the sources, a popular consciousness of some species rather than others, or influences from the other languages in contact with English in Britain? Are they caused by the perception of certain birds as harmful to human interests, proximity to hedgerows, houses and gardens, or prominence in an open habitat particularly favorable for observation, as with wheatears?

In the Oxford Dictionary of British Bird Names (1993), with its fascinating etymologies, W. B. Lockwood mentions habits, appearance (particularly color), and, above all, voice, as factors behind the creation of names. He emphasizes the folk rationalization of old name elements no longer understood, like haysucker evolving from words meaning ‘hedge’ and ‘creeper’ (OE -smugge) or ‘wheatear’ from ‘whitearse’ (ME whiters) as a further important source of multiplication. Another is the superstitious avoidance of unlucky words, such as Jack-a-Dells (Suffolk) and Dicky Devlin (Yorkshire) replacing Devil in some of the local terms for the swift.

A final trawl through Christine Jackson certainly confirms the suspicion that fact outstrips fiction, with names like watery pleeps for the common sandpiper, which sounds like a pager dropped in a puddle, or, for the same bird, skittery deacon, with its overtones of clerical misbehavior in Trollopeland. Just how did the rook come to be called Lord Barrymore’s pigeon in Cheshire and the house-sparrow a snurk?

And even some of the obvious “book names” of the pioneers are not to be sneezed at. How much more impressive might it have made those juvenile bird diaries, with their run-of-the-pond moorhens, to have been able to record them as green-footed gallinules?

[Jerome Betts’s most recent article for VERBATIM was “Hand to Mouse” in Vol. XXIX/4.]

One, Two, Three

Francis Heaney, Brooklyn, New York

Members of the National Puzzlers’ League (NPL)—a group so dedicated to words that we once had a fierce debate over whether to issue membership cards just so we could call ourselves card-carrying members—are used to being dismissed as “word nerds” by people for whom word nerds counts as clever wordplay. Yes, we have our social maladroits. But we also have ordinary people whose idea of fun is simply a little more inventive than others. One guy I know (Kevin Wald) created a cryptic crossword whose grid was a map of Greenwich Village. Tell me that’s not edgy.

Being a restless bunch, we’re always on the lookout for new amusements. Of the pastimes that have passed through our circle of obsessions, one of my favorites is “One, Two, Three,” a noncompetitive game invented in 1992 by counselors at Camp Winnarainbow, a circus camp near San Francisco. Yes, I know that even for someone who likes words and is generously disposed to things of this nature, the phrase “Camp Winnarainbow,” with its unsavory tang of the 1970s and all manner of things hippie, is doubtless making your turn-the-page instincts scream wildly. But just try a few rounds.

The game starts out sort of like Rock, Paper, Scissors: two players count to three in unison. After that, instead of shaping their hands into a cunning facsimile of a piece of paper or whatever, they each say a word (or phrase). If it’s the same word, they both win. If not, they do it again until they say the same thing.

Well, of course, that’s the deliberately obscure explanation. The object is to converge on the same word by finding a word that somehow connects the two previously spoken words. For instance, in one game I played, we started out with purple and Sherlock Holmes and met up on the next word with scarlet (as in the Holmes story, “A Study in . . . ,” naturally).

But most games last longer than that. So you’ll need to know one other rule: you can’t use a word or form of a word that was said earlier in the same round. For instance, if your two starting words are fireman and hot, then you’ll have to think of something other than fire to go to. Maybe pin-up calendar.

That’s pretty much the whole game. Simple, yet incredibly addictive. Fellow NPL member and New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz got hooked the second he heard the rules: “I love the game because it requires no equipment and can be played anywhere and anytime—in a car, in bed, over the phone, even in darkness. I like the psychology of the game—getting inside someone else’s brain—and the creativity of play. And I love the rush that comes with matching someone else’s answer.”

Some tips: it’s not hard to get stuck in a situation where the two of you keep coming up with words that almost match, constantly circling each other. Thinking laterally can help get out of that; try to focus on only the most recent two words, and forget about the previous rounds. For example, in one game, we went from stag and deer to male and hunter, after which we matched on Tab. Also, when deciding between two choices, go with the more general of the two. Faced with cat and roar, you’re more likely to match with lion than, say, Simba. (Although, given utterly implausible plot and torn leather fetish gear, you should clearly go with Catwoman instead of the generic movie.)

The NPL was introduced to the game at its annual puzzle convention in 2002, which was in Vancouver that year. Since it seemed as though everyone in attendance wanted to play the game and playing it with only two people at a time was slightly frustrating, I came up with a way for the game to be played by a group of five or more. The variation was dubbed “One, Two, Many” (after the popular caveman counting method) by NPLer David Greenberg. Any two people start the game by calling two words. They then sit out for a moment as the rest of the players try to come up with a way to connect those words. The first person to think of something says “One.” The next person says “Two.” Then those two people say “One, two, three” in unison and then say their words. If they match, they start the next round (and I guess you can award them each a point if you are the sort of person who just can’t play a game without keeping score, but seriously, “winning” is not the point here), and if they don’t match, the round continues with the two of them sitting out, and so on. (If you have fewer than five people, or you just prefer to keep everyone involved, the two people who havejust said a word don’t have to sit out.)

If you’re feeling especially intrepid, you could try the other multi-player variant that cropped up (which, I’m told, predates the game’s introduction to the NPL but was independently reinvented at the convention by I’m not sure who): three people saying three words simultaneously.

It turned out to be too hard a variation for it to really catch on. I’m aware of only one game of the three-person version that ended successfully, but if you think you and your friends are just so on-the-same-wavelength that you can do it, more power to you.

Of course, if you just want to make it look like you and your partner are on the same wavelength, you could try the prank that Todd McClary and Trip Payne came up with at the Vancouver convention. They decided that the next time a game broke out, they would both start a round by saying, “One, two, three . . . parallelogram!” and amaze everyone by matching on the first word. However, by the time their big moment came, Trip had completely forgotten the plan. Instead of calling “parallelogram,” he said, “One, two, three . . . unicycle! Oh, shit! I was supposed to say parallelogram, wasn’t I? Goddamn it.”

[Francis Heaney’s blog can be found at http://francisheaney.com. For more puzzle fun, go to http://www.puzzlers.org/.]

Francis Heaney and Will Shortz play One, Two, Three:

Heaney	Shortz
basement	lullaby
nursery	baritone
crying	father
confession	sissy
bully	torture
Indian burn	arm twisting
playground	pain
gym	injury
sprain	sprain

Sex and the Single Noun

Thora Von Male, Grenoble, France

Maurice Grevisse, a Belgian, is the French person’s Fowler.¹ In the chapter of Le Bon Usage devoted to nouns, Grevisse addresses the gender issue, referring first to natural gender (male beings are given the masculine gender, female beings the feminine) and then to grammatical gender,² where a gender is applied to an item which has no gender. He goes on to assert that no sexual distinction exists, for example, in the cases of small animals, wild animals, exotic animals, and imaginary animals (whose names will all therefore take the masculine). The names of trees are masculine (except for the thorn bush, hawthorn, bramble bush, vine, viburnum, and holm oak³); the names of sciences are feminine, the names of languages masculine. The reader is as if transported into the palazzo mentale of Borges in his essay on taxonomies, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” Here, Borges alludes to a Chinese encyclopedia according to which all animals can be classified in one of the following categories: belonging to the emperor, those embalmed, those that are tame, suckling pigs, sirens, fabulous ones, stray dogs, those included in this classification, those who are frenzied, innumerable ones, those drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush, others, those having just broken a water jug, those that look from a distance like flies.

Let us leave the fauna to work out their own taxonomy and return to gender classification in the French language.⁴ My goal is to provide a few glimpses of some aspects of gender in French that an English speaker might not be acquainted with.⁵ Unsurprisingly, many French nouns originally formed by lexical borrowing, simply used the gender of source word in the language of origin. Easier said than done, however, since Latin has a neuter form which French does not;⁶ that problem was solved more or less in a batch lot, and many “Latin neuters” became “French masculines.”

Numerous nouns referring to living beings (humans and animals) offer a basic masculine name and a feminine ending for the female representatives: le président / la présidente, le chanteur / la chanteuse, le chat / la chatte, le chien / la chienne.⁷ In these cases, a final -e signals the feminine. For both animals and humans, French, like English, offers as well numerous distinctive pairs for male and female: le papa / la maman, le frère / la soeur, le taureau / la vache, le bélier / la brebis.⁸

Some animals, of either sex, are stuck with a single epicene form; for example, French mouse is feminine (la souris), as are the giraffe, frog, and partridge.⁹Butterflies, snails, and fish, on the other hand, are masculine. To specify the actual gender of these epicene beasts, circumlocutions such as la grenouille mâle are required, and though these do not shock native speakers at all, they come across to non-natives as something akin to “a male female.”¹⁰

This phenomenon is not limited to the animal kingdom. The noun victime, for example, is feminine, as indeed is personne, which means that when these terms are used, the listener is not immediately informed of the sex of the individual concerned. Licorne ‘unicorn’ is also feminine, to which Tracy Chevalier, if you will, adds a particular twist in the translation from English to French of a love story between a lady and a unicorn.

After a brief passage on what he calls hermaphroditic nouns (those masculine terms which in legal usage refer indifferently to men and to women), Grevisse moves on to what I term bisexual nouns, that is to say, nouns that, depending on meaning or context, can be preceded by either le or la. (Should I be calling this category androgynous nouns?) This bisexuality can take many forms. The most straightforward category is that of nouns ending in a final e and referring to persons (among these: artiste, concierge, partenaire, pianiste, secrétaire): the article le is employed referring to a man, and la for a woman.

Another category is those bisexual nouns which are in fact homonyms distinguished by gender. For example, le carpe is the carpus (as in carpal tunnel syndrome), while la carpe is the fish; le page is the young man, and la page, the piece of paper. In both these cases, the masculine term derives from Greek, and the feminine one from Latin. Even nouns based on an ultimately common root may be differentiated by gender. Cartouche comes from the Latin carta, from Italian. Le cartouche derives from the Italian cartoccio and refers to the architectural form also named cartouche in English; la cartouche ‘cartridge’ derives from the Italian cartuccia. La pendule ‘clock’ is not to be confused with le pendule ‘pendulum’; both derive from the Latin pendulus. Though both la voile and le voile derive from the Latin velum, the former is a sail, the latter a veil; not really interchangeable.

Seemingly indifferent to the growing befuddlement of the student of French, Grevisse presses on with the heading “Special Remarks on Certain Double-Gender Nouns.” Here, he devotes a dozen pages to as many words, which clearly enter into no single category other than that of being problematic.

A brief sample for the brave reader: aigle ‘eagle’ will be masculine when referring to the living bird, but feminine when referring to the bird in heraldry. Amour ‘love / cupid’ will be masculine in the singular. In the plural, if it is a crowd of cupids that is referred to, the noun will be masculine, but if the noun is used poetically and in the plural, then the traditional rule is that is should be feminine. Adjectives which immediately precede the noun gens ‘people’ must take the feminine, while those that immediately follow take the masculine. La merci ‘mercy,’ but le merci ‘thanks.'¹¹

Detecting that the reader is not quite out for the count, Grevisse deals yet another blow with his “dubious gender” category. Here are discussed about twenty nouns whose gender was dubious at the time of writing, (for example, automne, enzyme, interview, sandwich, and steppe); “dubious” is a euphemism for “the dictionaries don’t agree on this.” To these he adds two lists of transsexual nouns: those that were masculine and are now feminine, and the other way around (masculine went to feminine: affaire, alarme, comète, date, épigramme, erreur, image, and populace; feminine went to masculine, such as: acte, caprice, exemple, horoscope, losange, poison, and silence). Sadly, he does not mention the undoubtedly apocryphal story of how the term carrosse ‘horse-drawn coach’ supposedly went from feminine to masculine: the child king, Louis XIV, is said to have mistakenly said le carrosse instead of la carrosse, and the courtiers, noblesse oblige, adopted his erroneous usage.

The final coup de grâce comes with a five-page list of the nouns “whose gender is to be noted.” This is diplomatic terminology for “nouns whose gender people are unsure of.” I know this for a fact, since these pages of the Grevisse constitute the raw material of one of my favourite parlour games. There are several hundred ordinary terms that the French hesitate about when it comes to attributing a gender.

Texas Guinan (and Cole Porter and George Bernard Shaw and others) uttered varying versions of the statement: “Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.” Today, the population of the country is more like sixty million, and indeed, there must be a good fifty million who get their genders right.

Bibliography

Borges, Jorge Luis, Enquêtes, Paris, Gallimard, 1952.

Colin, Jean-Paul Colin, Dictionnaire des difficultés du français, Le Robert, Paris, 1978.

Grevisse, Maurice, Le bon usage, Duculot, Paris, 1980.

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[Though Thora van Male teaches English, her research interests are in Things French Lexicographical. Her most recent article for VERBATIM was about the Académie Française (XXIX/1), and in 2005 she published a book on the ornamental illustrations in French dictionaries, Art Dico.]

High-Scoring Scrabble: Strings Seeking Definition

Dan Pratt, Laurel, Maryland

If you begin a Scrabble game with the tiles BEEIQUZ, you can score 124 points with BEZIQUE. Holding the tiles AHINGWZ with a B suitably placed between two red squares, you can score 374 points with WHIZBANG, provided both red squares are covered—a “triple-triple” in the U.S. or “nine-timer” in the U.K.—and the Z lands on a light-blue square. ACHHPUZ with a suitably placed T makes CHUTZPAH for 383. Holding EIMQTUZ, what letter would you like to see suitably placed? You can score 392 points with E, as in MEZQUITE.

These combinations are what you can do with just the words recognized by the Scrabble dictionaries. If you choose your own tiles and make up your own words, how high can you go? Your coinage has to be pronounceable and accepted, of course.

A standard Scrabble board has fifteen spaces in each direction; a Super Scrabble™ board has twenty-one. In either case, you have just seven tiles to play with, and as a practical matter you can count on finding at most one usable tile on the board. (In rare cases even fifteen-letter words, such as DISINFORMATIONS, have been played in real Scrabble; start with FORMAT, add IN- and -IONS, then add DIS-.) So the practical upper limit is eight-letter words. Since the use of all seven tiles yields a 50-point bonus, the practical lower limit is seven-letter words.

Although the two hundred tiles of a Super Scrabble set contains at least two tiles of every letter, let’s restrict our attention to the one hundred tiles of a standard set. There is just one of each of the five high-scoring tiles: Q and Z score 10, J and X score 8, and K scores 5.

Q is almost always followed by U and another vowel, so we can make syllables such as QUOZ, QUIX, or even QUAJ. (Many dictionaries list such words as hajj and swaraj, so the possibility of a syllable ending with J cannot be discounted.) And it’s easy to get the other two highest-scoring tiles into a second syllable. So we might get JOXQUIZ a fine title for ESPN2’s answer to Jeopardy! Or possibly JAZQUIX, someone with a windmillish attitude toward blues music. As an opening play it would score 148.

With a blank and a tile already played, you can form the disused fuddy-duddy spelling JAZZQUIX (but what Scrabble pro ever objected to a disused spelling?) and hope to score 491 on a triple-triple.

But why stop there? Y as a vowel is just as good as an I, and scores 3 more points. W can substitute for U, especially when a vowel follows (qwerty is in some dictionaries). So we’d have JAZQWYX. K is the highest-scoring tile we haven’t used, and we can still pronounce JAKZQWYX. Since there is a second Y in a set, we can produce JYKZQWYX. That could score 617 points! That’s more than most people have ever scored in an entire game. Sometimes all the players combined don’t score that much.

Zut alors! In a French set, K W X Y Z are all worth 10 points each; J and Q score 8 points. So JYKZQWYX could score 824 points! Malheureusement, there is but one Y in a French set, so we must substitute a miserable one-point vowel for the other Y, reducing our total by 81 points to 743.

You get the idea. Make up your own high-scoring word, or invent a definition for one of the following: jaxquiz zexquoj quyxjuz kwyzjyx xykojaz whyzjack zaxquick jockquex chezquak phyzwhyx

To actually play your word and obtain your high score, first you will need a lot of luck in picking tiles! More important, unless you have a gullible opponent, your word will have to be found in whatever dictionary you are using to resolve disputes. To get your word into the dictionary, you’ll have to get it into print. Maybe you can work it into your great American novel. More likely perhaps, a short story in some online forum. Or a letter to the editor. You’ll need to get others to use your invention as well. You can publicize it through the Internet in a blog, Yahoo group, chatroom, or a hundred other places. When others use your word, keep a record. When you have fifteen or twenty citations, preferably in print (online citations tend to disappear), especially in widely available publications, send your collection to a dictionary of your choice.

It’s not a done deal by any means, but if your coinage fills a lexical void in our ever-growing language, you have a chance. Good luck! I’m off to the nearby CHEZJACQ, a French restaurant-cum-sports-bar (518 points).

[Dan L. Pratt is a retired mathematician and a linguist, amateur lexicographer, and onetime crossword champ; the winner of Scrabble® tournaments in Bermuda, Canada, Ireland, and the U.S. over four decades; and a lexicophile.]

Affiant Saith Further Nought

Frank Abate, Cinncinati, Ohio

Dictionaries mark certain entries and senses with labels showing usage limitations for the word. Subject labels, such as computers for the most recent sense of mouse, indicate a subject-specific or technical use of a word or sense. Another type of dictionary label marks the register, or the level, of language. Examples of register labels are colloquial (for conversational forms, including such contractions as doesn’t), slang (for an informal term used in place of a general term, such as noggin for head), poetic (forms such as ‘tis for it is and o’er for over), and dialectal (such as y’all for the informal second-person plural of you characteristic of U.S. southern dialects). The register label indicates how the word differs from the general language and is used in certain settings only or for a particular effect. Theoretically, at least, the (unlabeled) words and senses of the general language (the bulk of the dictionary) can be used in any setting and will not be taken by a general audience as peculiar.

One register label, formal, is used to mark words that are typically limited to specialized settings, such as prayers and religious liturgies, social announcements, and diplomatic documents, where the words have special nuances and a traditional place. If one encounters a formal term outside its usual setting, it seems odd, pretentious, or stilted. Another register label, archaic, marks a word as being wholly outside general use, a relic of a different era.

Recently I needed to sign an affidavit, a simple legal document (in this case) indicating that I swore that certain facts were true and that my signature had been verified by a notary public. As I read down the page, I was struck by the final line, “Affiant saith further nought.” The first word, affiant, is a legalism for ‘one who swears to an affidavit.’

My attorney and I discussed the pronunciation (one rarely hears the word aloud); dictionaries agree that it should be pronounced with a “long i,” with stress on the second syllable, and with the first and last syllables unstressed, with the vowel the linguists call schwa.

But it was the use of saith and nought in one four-word sentence, along with the legalism affiant, that really surprised me. Not that the words or the meaning were unclear, just that the formalism or register of the terms was striking.

The third-person singular verb saith (equivalent to says) appears frequently in such settings as the 1611 King James Bible but has not been a part of the active vocabulary of English for centuries. It merits the register label archaic—as it is so labeled in the venerable 1934 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition Unabridged. While nought seems not so old-fashioned (perhaps because of its survival in the fixed phrase all for nought), its stand-alone use is not typical in everyday language. The New Oxford American Dictionary (1999) gives it as a variant of naught, the pronominal use of which it does in fact label archaic.

My attorney’s reason for the use of the phrase was that he had always used it on affidavits. It is the formula he was used to, even if “the affiant says nothing more” would be eminently clearer and would convey the same meaning. One might even wish to substitute “the person sworn” for the legalistic affiant. But in the language of the law, tradition and precedent often count for far more than clarity of meaning. Legal pleadings traditionally and to this day (my attorney confirmed) still begin with a phrase such as, “Comes now the plaintiff” or “Now comes the plaintiff,” where a more modern form might be, “The plaintiff pleads as follows.”

I set off in search of more examples of still-in-use legal words and phrases that had an air of formality or archaism. Soon I learned of the “plain-language movement,” which encourages lawyers, law clerks, legislators, and all those engaged in legal drafting to simplify and clarify their writing and to move away from the stereotypical party of the first part, thereinafter, pursuant to, and other such legalese that has long been the stuff of legal documents. One of the champions of this movement in the U.S. has been Bryan Garner, an attorney in Dallas and a VERBATIM contributor.

Aside from compiling the latest editions of Black’s Law Dictionary (the standard reference work in the legal field), Garner has also spoken and written widely advocating plain language in legal drafting; some of the examples below are drawn from his various works.

Hyperformal legalese is evident in redundancies, which, in intending to cover all possible meanings, give rise to doublets and triplets in such phrases as:

aid and abet

any and all

cancel, annul, and set aside

covenant and agree

deposes and says

due and owing

fit and proper

full force and effect

give, devise, and bequeath

goods and chattels

have and hold

hold, possess, and enjoy

legal and valid

null and void

peace and quiet

power and authority

repair and make good

rest, residue, and remainder

right, title, and interest

sole and exclusive

successors and assigns

terms and conditions

total and entire

true and correct

understood and agreed

unless and until

will and testament

without let or hindrance.

Plain-language advocates have decried these, but the practice lives on, as shown by the following modern “fill-in-the-blanks” form for a mortgage:

[A]ccording to a certain bond, note or obligation bearing even date herewith, the mortgagor hereby mortgages to the mortgagee ALL that certain plot, piece or parcel of land, with the buildings and improvements thereon erected, situate, lying, and being in the [location of land] TOGETHER with all right, title and interest of the mortgagor in and to the land lying in the streets and roads in front of and adjoining said premises.

And a similar form for a standard letter of attorney:

[B]y these presents do make, constitute, and appoint my/our true and lawful attorney, for us, and in our name, place and stead . . . to grant, bargain and sell the same [property] or any part thereof, for such sum or price and upon such terms as shall seem meet.

Aside from several redundancies, we have in these few lines a herewith, a hereby, a thereon, and a thereof, the use of said as an adjective, and the needless use of such (in the second example), all common markers of legalese, but absent from the speech or writing of today except in very formal or intentionally jocular expressions. Many legal documents are strewn with such tedious self-referencing words as:

hereafter

herein

hereinabove

hereinafter

hereinbefore

hereto

thereat

therein

thereto.

The phrase by these presents (meaning ‘by this document’) is still encountered in a fuller form, “Know all men by these presents” (a loan translation of the Latin noverint universi per praesentes), suggesting a Norman or earlier origin.

Some royal charters, and still today some mortgages, begin with this phrase, or the even more antique “Know all ye by these presents.”

The entry in Black’s Law Dictionary, Eighth Edition, calls the expression “deadwood” and offers as a substitute “Take note.”

Plain-language advocates have railed against legal formalism and archaism, suggesting simplifications (such as the use of the instead of said), substitutions, or simply deletions. In some few cases alliteration can explain the use of redundancies, as Garner notes is the case for part and parcel, rest, residue, and remainder, and several others (see A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, in the entry “Doublets and Triplets of Legal Idiom”). But tradition and precedent are powerful forces, especially in the law, where, in our Anglo-American common law system, pronouncements from the bench have the force of law.

The aura of the courts and of judges commands respect, which leads naturally to a certain level of formality. Unlike the English system, on which American courts are modeled, American judges derive their authority not from the Crown, but simply and directly from the respect of the people for the rule of law. Judges wield remarkable individual power in our legal system, from issuing warrants to arrest persons, seize property, or wiretap phones, to summarily levying a fine or even confining a person to jail for contempt of court. My attorney counsels all his clients, before any court appearance, to “Dress for court”; for men, this means a suit or jacket and tie, with dress pants and shoes. In American state courts, one still can hear the bailiff or marshal announcing the entrance of the black-berobed judge with an archaic “Hear ye, hear ye.” And in every session of the United States Supreme Court, the marshal’s opening announcement includes the phrase “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” the Norman French equivalent of “Hear ye.” The language of the law, by virtue of the high regard we place on judicial tradition and precedent, may never fully dispense with some of its archaic practices.

[Frank Abate is a freelance lexicographer. He was one of the principal editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary, and recently contributed to the forthcoming abridged edition of Black’s Law Dictionary.]

EPISTOLA {William S. Haubrich}

Jessy Randall (XXIX/3) invites contributions to her collection of participatory humor, to wit:

A fellow and his girlfriend are cruising down a country road when suddenly she shouts, “Stop!” The car comes to a screeching halt, the girl jumps out, runs to the nearest tree, climbs to the highest branch, and begins belting out The Star Spangled Banner. At this point the jokester turns to the listener and asks, as an aside, “You’ve heard this before?” To the answer “No” the jokester feigns surprise. “Well, you should have. It’s your national anthem.”

Ho hum.

[William S. Haubrich, MD]

EPISTOLA {Edwin Rosenberg}

In the Winter 2004 issue (XXIX/4), James Lynn Page remarks that we might exchange “tarts for something less embarrassing.” My father told me, some 65 or so years ago, of signs in diners, a few decades earlier, advertising:

“Tarts like Mother used to make: $0.15.

Tarts like Father used to make: $3.00.

Pre-inflation days, of course.

[Edwin Rosenberg]

CLASSICAL BLATHER: Words of Power

Nick Humez, mythsongs@earthlink.net

Readers of a certain age may experience a certain queasy frisson on reading the title of this column, recalling Dr. Wilfred Funk’s Six Weeks to Words of Power,¹² one of several cheerfully dogged vocabulary-drill books much in vogue in the post-Sputnik, pre−Vietnam War secondary schools. Rest easy; this is not that sort of article.”Say the magic word,”¹³ we tell our children, coaxing from them the omitted please. Though still at a tender age, the respondents have already been taught some underlying assumptions on which the adult interlocutor draws: That certain words have the ability to make things happen by the mere speaking of them, and that the parent’s response to “please” will be as reliable as Nature (momentarily setting aside all her laws) will be when the stage magician says “Abracadabra!” and produces a rabbit from his top hat or doves out of thin air.¹⁴

That words can generate phenomena ex nihilo is an idea at least as old as ancient Egypt, in whose Memphis creation story the god Ptah makes the nine first gods through gestures,¹⁵ and by speaking their names.¹⁶ By chanting in its entirety the creation epic called the Enuma Elish at the New Year Festival, the chief priest of Bel-Marduk at Babylon helped to ensure the empire’s prosperity in the coming year through his reiteration of the primal victory of Marduk over Tiamat, the triumph of wind over the annual floodwaters.¹⁷ For St. John the Evangelist, the Word was the ultimate reality, and its manifestation in flesh the salvation of a world gone seriously astray.¹⁸ And Celtic bards were widely believed to cause blemishes to appear on their satiric victims, as well as exterminating household pests.¹⁹

The Romans had spells composed in part of words whose meaning was arcane but whose power was thought to be supernatural; Cato the Censor’s treatise on agriculture includes the following charm, supposed to speed the healing of bone fractures: “Huat, hanat, huat, ista, pista, sista, domina, damnaustro, luxato.”²⁰ Medieval mystics on the fringes of orthodox Christianity record spells useful for such things as summoning servile spirits (“by the most terrible words: Soab, Sother, . . . Hdon, Amathon, Mathay, . . . Eel, Eli, Zoag, Dion, Anath, Tafa, Uabo, . . . Appear before me . . . in a mild and human form, and do what I desire”)

and the registry and animation of magic carpets (“Then, fold it up, saying Recapustira, Cabustira, Bustira, Tira, Ra, A; and keep it carefully until you next need it. . . . [A]fter casting some incense on the fire, . . . say: Vegale, Hamicata, Umsa, Terata, Yeh, Dah, Ma, Baxasoxa, Un, Horah, Himesere . . .”).²¹ Moreover, folklorists have suggested that at least some of the now-nonsensical refrains of songs were originally incantations, such as the “Skowan earl grey . . . For yetter kangra norla” of the English katabasis ballad “King Orfeo.”²²

Given so lengthy a tradition, surprisingly few “magic words” as such have survived into current English. The best known is undoubtedly abracadabra, which appears in other modern European languages as well. Brewer gives its origin as the Hebrew words ab (father),²³ ben (son), and ruach acadsch (holy spirit) and says that “the word was written on parchment . . . and hung from the neck by a linen thread” as a charm against “ague, flux, toothache, etc.” Hocus pocus dominocus is widely attested as well,²⁴ a reduplicative tetrameter incantation almost certainly derived from the noun phrase hocus pocus,²⁵ categorizing the conjurer’s art as a whole. Alakazam is another magic word of obscure origin;²⁶ a pseudo-Arabic derivation is suggested by its al- prefix.

Abraxas, on the other hand, is a proper name: Tertullian writes that Basilides, a second-century Gnostic teacher, claimed that Abraxas was the supreme deity and creator; the name, if spelled with Greek letters to which the corresponding numerical values are assigned (alpha=1, beta=2, and so on) adds up to 365, the number of days in the year. The belief in Abraxas was said to have originated with Simon Magus, the aspiring sorcerer mentioned in the New Testament (Acts 8:9−24).²⁷

Most of the magic words circulating in English, however, prove to have been introduced by the entertainment industry. Perhaps the earliest attested would be “Open, Sesame,” the charm used to open the cave door of the robbers in the story “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” from the Arabian Nights Entertainment.

Europeans were first introduced to the “The Thousand and One Nights” by Antoine Galland, who published a French translation in multiple volumes between 1707 and 1714 (by which time the exotic Muslim East was already competing with court Arcadias peopled with ersatz shepherds and shepherdesses named Cléandre and Phyllide), though across the Channel, readers would have to wait till 1792 for the first English edition.²⁸

Fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers and other folklorists have given us such familiar magic words and spell-like formulas as “Rapunzel, let down your hair,” and the secret name Rumpelstiltskin.

Most of these, however, are story-specific: They are indeed words of power, but only within the particular Märchen’s limited universe of discourse. But sim sala bim has successfully made the transition from Grimm to general use. In America, this seems to have been largely owing to its use as the spell said by the Indian mystic Hadji on the animated series Jonny Quest, whose 26 episodes aired on ABC TV during the 1964−65 season, acquiring a loyal cult following that remains robust forty years later.²⁹ The popularity of the phrase in Europe, on the other hand, was given a recent boost by the German band Tool in the song “Die Eier Von Satan” (The Devil’s Eggs) from their 1996 CD “Ænima.”)³⁰

Comic books, films, and TV shows about or involving magic and metamorphoses have supplied other magic words as well: The eponymous Mary Jane in the 1941 comic book Mary Jane and Sniffles would say “Poof, poof, piffles” in conjunction with the liberal sprinkling of some “magic sand” whenever she wanted to shrink herself to the size of Sniffles, a mouse, or back to normal size again.³¹ Shazam was an acronym for the names of six gods and heroes (Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury) whose attributes the mild-mannered Billy Batson acquired whenever he said the word and metamorphosed into the wizard crime-fighter Captain Marvel (introduced to America in Whiz Comics #1 in 1940).³² And who can forget the Fairy Godmother’s “Bibbity, bobbity, boo” in Walt Disney’s 1950 animated feature film Cinderella?

By far the most popular locus for magic words in fiction as of this writing are J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, where casting spells is what it’s all about (as nervous persons on the religious right are quick to point out when trying to dissuade parents from letting their children read this best-selling series).

For the most part, Rowling’s magic words are Latin stems with plausible endings (evanesco, expellarmus, reparo, silencio, reducto),³³ and the effects of her spells are recognizably related to those roots (evanesco makes things disappear; silencio deprives them of the power of speech, and so on.) So far none of these words has achieved the escape velocity required to launch them from the sphere of fiction into vernacular orbit, but the popularity of the series, both as books and as derivative films, may well provide the needed lift over time.

Rowling’s Latinate conjure words sound authoritative on their face, but for the most part an aura of mystery would appear to be more readily obtained in English with words that sound like Arabic, or, failing that, Italian or even French: Presto (Italian “very fast”) combines with a Latinate ending for the English verb change to form presto chang[e]o, which bears a theatrical panache that the bona fide Latin mutatis mutandis does not.³⁴ Again, the use of Voilà! (literally, “See there!”) has attained quasi-magic-word status in a population increasingly unfamiliar with the French language as a whole.³⁵

We end where we begin, with the very young, who have a healthy appetite for rhymes that have the look and feel of spells to be said with precise fidelity in order for them to work, such as the plague verse “Ring around the rosy” or the weather incantation “Rain, rain, go away.” It is children, after all, for whom the world is all new and every phenomenon a marvel, and most of us may count ourselves blessed if we carry even a fraction of that capacity for wonder into adulthood—as did G. K. Chesterton, who wrote that “[t]he only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, ‘charm,’ ‘spell,’ ‘enchantment.’ . . . A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. . . . [T]he cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country.”³⁶

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Anglo-American Crossword No. 101

Compiled by Philip Marlow

Across

1. State wherein map’s redrawn to include hospital (3,9)

2. Work with a method concerning some precious material (7)

3. Foreign territory’s introduction by friend? (7)

4. Discussion of work requirement (4)

5. At a distance from outlaw, a youngster (4)

6. Go mad in retreat (4)

7. Body of people accompanying English money in French street (7)

8. Representative of power re Rome? (7)

9. Loud brood returning inside for instance to meet (7)

10. A ghoul’s foul stew (7)

11. Take note of footprint (4)

12. Examine much malicious gossip? Not half! (4)

13. Explosive devices stored by team momentarily (4)

14. Boxer in stillness no producer of fantasies (7)

15. Ohio bishop against Irish - that’s one side of coin! (7)

16. US writer’s standard main real novel (6,6)

Down

1. Most friendly attention found in home (7)

2. Lament one inspired by backward statute (4)

3. Mean woman in a generation (7)

4. Foolish talk about independence, very personal (7)

5. Despicable person’s stated remedy (4)

6. Clergyman accepting a nuclear facility (7)

7. Second fool runs into phony national monument (5,8)

8. Former President to linger around whim- sical brother captivating English (7,6)

14. Burden applied to America (4)

17. Mostly rounded fruit (4)

19. Major storm ran wild in commotion (7)

20. Mexican state overturning any cut America’s first included (7)

21. A log for shifting outside new clean boat (7)

22. One respecting Spanish painter endlessly in a German article (7)

26. Stable company (4)

27. Figure’s short triumphal cry around Virginia (4)

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. Perhaps a sweeping statement; he is, nonetheless, the closest thing. His Le Bon Usage—first published in 1936 and frequently reprinted and updated—is a much dryer book than Fowler’s: not chatty at all, and presented in some twenty-five chapters with such headings as “Elision,” “Syllables,” and “The Clause.” It reads more like legal statutes than rambling considerations of how language is and should be. Grevisse seems to provide every rule that can be imagined, and every exception to it, all of which is backed up by quotations from well-known authors and dictionaries. In addition, he provides quotations from famous writers who flouted rules or convention in the name of poetic license or otherwise. In his empirical approach, Grevisse is careful not to take sides in such cases, and the reader is often left thinking, “Well, if this is the rule, and if Proust and Zola disregarded it, why not moi?” ↩︎

2. Which one of his predecessors, Louis-Nicolas Bescherelle, referred to as fictitious gender (genre fictif). ↩︎

3. Respectively épine, aubépine, ronce, vigne, viorne, and yeuse. ↩︎

4. Here I do not address recent developments in the French language in the area of the feminization of nouns referring to professions occupied by women, for example, by the creation of a feminine article for nouns previously masculine only (le ministre and now la ministre for a woman M.P.) or by the creation of a feminine form of a formerly masculine noun (auteure for a woman author, a male author being auteur). ↩︎

5. English being a genderless language as far as nouns go means that English speakers have to start from scratch when it comes to learning grammatical genders in French. Speakers of languages with gendered nouns are not necessarily better off, since a given item may be feminine in one language and masculine in the other: for example, the word for sun is feminine in German die Sonne, and masculine in French, le soleil. ↩︎

6. French has the masculine article le, and the feminine la. Both pluralize as les. ↩︎

7. Respectively, president, singer, cat, and dog. ↩︎

8. Respectively, daddy/mummy, brother/sister, bull/cow, and ram/ewe. ↩︎

9. Respectively, la girafe, la grenouille, and la perdrix. ↩︎

10. English admittedly has some such cases: male nurse, male stripper. I am unaware of cases that work the other way round. ↩︎

11. Grevisse’s “Special Remarks on Double-Gender Nouns” would be worthy of a separate article, in its own right. ↩︎

12. New York: Pocket Books, 1964. ↩︎

13. Robert Todd Carroll’s Skeptic’s Dictionary (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2003) defines magick as “the alleged art and science of causing change in accordance with the will by nonphysical means” (http://skepdic.com/magick.html). For a righteously indignant review of Carroll’s work by the opposition, see http://www.alternativescience.com/skeptic's_dictionary.htm). ↩︎

14. The audience is expected (indeed, often exhorted from the stage) to do its best to follow the prestidigitator’s quick fingers, but in vain, and it is considered bad form by the artists themselves to reveal trade secrets. I venture the wrath of the profession if I here reveal one of them: Most rabbits come out of hats because someone put them there beforehand—and they want care and feeding between performances, like the magicians themselves. Thus my friend T— J—, a second-generation conjurer with a full-time day job as a postal sorter, in addition used to make four-hour round-trips on weekends to tend his father’s dovecote and rabbit hutch two states away, so that both son and father might rely on them as willy-nilly collaborators in performance. ↩︎

15. For a great deal more on the function of gesture in Egyptian theology, see W. A. Schwaller de Lubicz’s monumental The Temple of Man (tr. Deborah and Robert Lawlor; Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1998), passim. Creating an appearance of reality through a “hypnotic gesture” was, of course, the hallmark of Mandrake the Magician. Dan Markstein’s Toonopedia site (http://www.toonopedia.com/mandrake.htm) reports that this long-running cartoon was created by Lee Falk in 1924 with just two weeks’ worth of strips; ten years later, Falk sold the idea to King Features Syndicate and engaged Phil Davis, a commercial artist, to draw it. On Davis’s death, in 1964, he was succeeded by Harold “Fred” Fredericks Jr., who took over writing the story line as well as drawing when Falk died in 1994. The crime-fighting Mandrake was an illusionist whose hypnotic manipulations of the perceptions of miscreants through hypnoses included such effects as making a wall suddenly appear in front of a speeding getaway car. In his top hat, scarlet-lined cape, goatee, and mustache, he worked alongside two subalterns: a Nubian prince named Lothar and the hereditary Princess of Cockaigne (!), Narda, whom Mandrake finally married in 1998. Falk was even better known for creating The Phantom, who joined Mandrake and Flash Gordon (!) in the 1980s TV animation series Defenders of the Earth. The Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Mandrake) suggests that Falk may have based his character on Leon Mandrake (1911−93), a stage magician who got his start in Canadian vaudeville at the age of eleven touring with the Ralph Richards magic show starting in 1927 and on his own from the late 1930s. (He and his wife, Velvet, were honored with a performing fellowship from the Hollywood-based Academy of Magical Arts in 1978.) The folklore surrounding the peculiarity and powers of the mandrake root would make a whole column in itself. ↩︎

16. S. H. Hooke, Middle Eastern Mythology (Baltimore: Penguin, 1966), pp. 72−73 and 77. ↩︎

17. The recitation of the Enuma Elish took place on the fourth day of the Babylonian month of Nisan, roughly today’s April. See N. K. Sandars, Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia (New York: Penguin, 1971), especially p. 39. ↩︎

18. John 1:1. The Greek is logos, which means ‘word’ but a great deal else besides: Liddell and Scott’s abridged Greek Lexicon (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1883) glosses logos as “I. the word by which the inward thought is expressed: also II. the inward thought or reason itself,” adding that the St. John Gospel combines both senses of the term (p. 416). ↩︎

19. Fred Norris Robinson, Satirists and Enchanters in Early Irish Literature (American Committee for Irish Studies, reprint 1, n.d. [1911]), pp. 95n.5 and 114ff. The respect in which the bards were accordingly held was noted by Diodorus Siculus and Cornelius Strabo, both of whom state that both the bards and the Druid priests had been known to come between armies drawn up and ready to fight, persuading them to call battles off (ibid). ↩︎

20. Alexander and Nicholas Humez, A B C Et Cetera: The Life and Times of the Roman Alphabet (Boston, Godine: 1985), p. 46. To its credit, Roman medicine also included a degree of practical knowledge of trauma repair, in part from the valuable if grisly anatomical exposure of deep flesh wounds in the hospitals (valetudinaria) attached to such gladiatorial schools (lanistae) as that of Pergamum in Asia Minor. ↩︎

21. These examples are taken from Gustav Davidson, A Dictionary of Angels (New York: Free Press [Macmillan]: 1971), pp. 358−59; at least some of these arcane words are undoubtedly supposed to be the names of angels, demons, or other spirits. ↩︎

22. This was the refrain as recorded by folklorist Patrick Shuldham-Shaw from the singing of one John Stickle of the island of Unst some time in the 1950s and released by Peter Kennedy and Alan Lomax in 1961 on the long-playing phonograph record The Child Ballads, vol. 4 (Caedmon TC−1145). Apparently the refrain was originally of Scandinavian origin: “Skoven arle grön . . . Hvo hjorten han gar arlig” (Early green’s the wood . . . where the hart goes yearly). The song is a fusion of the Orpheus-and-Eurydice myth with the common Celtic motif of the rescue of a mortal kidnapped by Otherworld people. ↩︎

23. E. Cobham Brewer, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Centenary Edition, ed. Ivor H. Evans (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), p. 4, goes on to say that the charm is cabbalistic in origin. Yet one might well suspect that the derivation given here was created after the fact to fit a preexisting word whose provenance is veiled by antiquity’s proverbial mists. Abracadabra or some variant is the trade name under which a number of magic kits have been marketed on both sides of the Atlantic, as can be seen on http://www.wittuswitt.de/Magic_Sets.html, an inventory of more than nine hundred magic sets from the Wittus Witt Collection. These include the 1989 German kit Abra Kadabra, which promised the purchaser Über fünfzig geheimnisvolle Zaubertricks (more than fifty mystery-filled magic tricks); the collection also includes the French Caverne d’Abracadabra, 1979. ↩︎

24. A Google search turns up more than five dozen mentions of this phrase, most of them from newsgroups and blogs. Leading the list is Marcia Mascolini’s “Hocus Pocus Dominocus,” a whimsical autobiographical essay on First Communion and parental prestidigitation, originally published in the Front Street Review and now archived on the Laughter Loaf site (http://molyworld.net/laughterloaf/arch/hocuspocus.htm). In Mascolini’s memoir this spell is used in conjunction with the appearance of a quarter out of nowhere, in which connection a Midwestern informant (Leslie Edwards) likewise recalls its use in her childhood. For the derivation of hocus pocus, see my “Stuff and Nonsense” (VERBATIM 29:3 [Autumn 2004], p. 22n.9; Dominocus is presumably a corruption of dominicus, Latin for “pertaining to the Lord [dominus].” “Hokus Pokus—25 Tricks” is the name of a magic-kit manufacturer in 1970, an example of which is in the Witt collection (see previous note). ↩︎

25. For a general discussion of reduplicative expressions, see my “Baddabing, Baddabang” (VERBATIM 26:4 [Autumn 2001], pp. 19−22). Shakespeare consistently switches to trochaic tetrameter from his usual iambic pentameter blank verse whenever he wishes to underscore the supernatural, e.g., the witches’ spell in Macbeth IV.1: “Double, double, toil and trouble/Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.” Eric S. Raymond, whose online résumé describes him as “an observer-participant anthropologist in the Internet hacker culture,” offers a cybernetic definition of incantation at http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/I/incantation.html: “Any particularly arbitrary or obscure command that one must mutter at a system to attain a desired result. Not used of passwords or other explicit security features. Especially used of tricks that are so poorly documented that they must be learned from a wizard. This compiler normally locates initialized data in the data segment, but if you mutter the right incantation they will be forced into text space.” ↩︎

26. An anonymous inquirer to the Wordwizard web site elicited no useful responses save this interesting tidbit from one Peter Persoff: “Possibly related to “[A]lagazam.” This was the name of a cakewalk . . . written by Abe Holtzmann around 1900. Unfortunately, he doesn’t explain it except to say that a platoon of African American soldiers [was] marching by and chanting it” (http://www.wordwizard.com/ch_forum/topic.asp? TOPIC_ID=5293&SearchTerms=alakazam). Google lists “about 71,000” results for Alakazam, including a Pokémon character; the 1961 import film Alakazam the Great (its Japanese title is Saiyu-Ki; the English singing voice of the magician was Frankie Avalon); the Binghamton (NY)−based Alakazam Quartet (“a male a cappella quartet performing swing, jazz, doo-wop, barbershop, and other vocal classics” at www.alakazam.info); a mystery novel-of-manners entitled Abracadabra Alakazam, by Jean-Pierre Dorleac (Los Angeles: Monad Books, 2004); and a company called Alakazam-UK, “retailers of fine magic tricks, videos, dvds, and books” (http://alakazam.co.uk). Spin-offs of alakazam include alakazirb (orally attested by a Midwest informant during the preparation of this column) and the smarmy protagonist of “I’m Alakazirl the Magic Girl,” a children’s song from the 1960s so obscure that it does not turn up in a Google search but whose manic incantation (ending with “Hippety, hippety, hippety hops”) has clung to my long-term memory like a rogue cocklebur from a single hearing (unlike the name of either composer or lyricist). ↩︎

27. See http://www.deliriumsrealm.com/delirium/mythology/abraxas.asp. The site’s online store offers an Abraxas mouse pad for $13.99 and an Abraxas teddy bear for $15.99. Brewer (p. 4) adds that the name was often engraved on gemstones to be used as talismans. Its perceived power may be due to its similarity to the other power word, abracadabra. ↩︎

28. According to Brewer (op. cit., p. 46), R. Heron published a translation much indebted to Galland in 1792. More familiar today is Sir Richard Burton’s sixteen-volume unexpurgated translation, which was published (in India!) between 1885 and 1888. For a perceptive exploration of Orientalist literature in France and England, see Lisa Lowe’s Critical Terrains (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). ↩︎

29. For a great deal more information about the series, see Lyle P. Blosser and Craig Fuqua’s Classic Jonny Quest (http://www.classicjq.com), a merger website combining Blosser’s Classic Jonny Quest and Pages and Fuqua’s Jonny Quest Research Laboratory. Although the show was produced under the auspices of the Hanna-Barbera organization (The Flintstones, The Jetsons), the animation of Doug Wildey’s art was promoted as far more “lifelike” than most TV cartoon fare at that time. ↩︎

30. Eier (eggs) can also mean ‘testicles,’ and the song lyrics— ostensibly a cook’s recipe employing some kitchen witchery—play upon this double entendre; the magic phrase in the song is expanded to Sim sala bim bamba sala do saladim (the last word perhaps deliberately evocative of Saladin, the legendary caliph from the time of Richard the Lion-Hearted). Several magic sets entitled Sim Sala Bim, all from around 1960, are included in the Witt collection (see n.12 above); here the name may also have derived from its use as the name of the show of the wildly successful stage magician Dante (August Harry Jansen, 1883−1955), a native of Denmark who was hired by Howard Thurston’s traveling company in 1922 and appeared in several Laurel and Hardy films (see sim sala bim at http://www.magictricks.com/library/glossary.htm). Simsala is also the German name for the Pokémon character whose English name is Alakazam (see n.15 above) according to http://pokefor.greenchu.de/zukan/gba/pokemon/alakazam. ↩︎

31. See http://www.toonopedia.com/maryjane.htm for additional information about Mary Jane. Another popular children’s shoe was named for Buster Brown, whose trickster amphibian, Froggy the Gremlin, altered reality not with a magic word but by plunking his Magic Twanger, which unfortunately goes beyond the scope of the present column; for a through treatment of this character and the comic strip, radio show, and footwear, go to Ronald L. Smith’s essay at http://www.froggythegremlin.com. ↩︎

32. For much more about Captain Marvel, his companions and adversaries, and the reinventions of this comic series in other media, see http://superherouniverse.com/superheroes/shazam.htm. ↩︎

33. See, e.g., Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (New York: Levine/Scholastic, 2003). Often her magic words end in the -o common to Latin verbs in the present indicative active first-person singular; an alternative might be that the words are intended as ablative-of-means singular nouns whose nominative ends in -us or -um. A third possibility is that the -o ending, so common in the discourse of stage magic—Witt’s collection (see n.12 above) has a Gilbert Mysto Magic Set (1949), Presto Magic Show (1975), Wizzo’s 12 Magic Tricks (1989), and Wando, The Talking Magician (1987)—is an echo of Latin’s antique third-person imperative (e.g., esto ‘let it be’). A contributor whose pseudonym is Clockwork Grue, in a footnote posting to the sim sala bim site cited supra (now say that six times very fast), points out that as a source for magic words, “Latin will do in a pinch, too. Sounds cool, and you can match contemporary words to their Latin counterparts for semi-authenticity.” This sentiment was recently echoed by Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist for both the Kerry and Clark campaigns, in connection with what the White House might have said (Res ipsa loquitur ‘The thing speaks for itself’) once it was clear that Karl Rove had indeed outed CIA agent Plame by her unique kinship tie, if not by name, to the press: When you use a Latin phrase, he says, “People always think you’re saying a lot more than you are. It sounds substantive without actually having to be.” ↩︎

34. Rowling has not, so far as I know, combined the Arabic article al- with -fresco for a spell that will instantly bathe and deposit you neatly dressed on the croquet lawn; but perhaps it is only a matter of time. ↩︎

35. This would suggest that to be a credible spell, a word need only evoke an exotic Otherness, whether from the mysterious East or simply from Romance languages with which the speaker has at best only the most casual acquaintance. (Compare Petronius’s hanger-on at the banquet of the boorish rich freedman Trimalchio that forms the centerpiece of the Satyricon who “mumbled some nonsense that he later attempted to palm off as Greek.”) ↩︎

36. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, in Collected Works, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986), p. 256. ↩︎