Vol XXX, No 4 []
Phrenology and Language
Marian Niles Walker, Amherst, Massachusetts
In 1767, a nine-year-old boy named Franz Gall was sent by his parents to attend school in the Black Forest of Germany. His schooling required extensive rote memorization. Young Gall worked hard at his lessons, but no matter how much he studied, he could never manage to recite Latin declensions and the catechism with the enviable accuracy and fluidity of two of his schoolfellows, who recalled words and phrases flawlessly after reading them through only once or twice. Gall noticed that both students had large, protuberant eyes—so much so that he and his friends nicknamed them “saucer eyes.” This memory, unlike his Latin, would stay with him for the rest of his life. In his subsequent medical career, Gall used the physiognomy of his young rivals as an indication of a facility for words in each patient who came under his attention. Where he found the gift of a quick memory, saucer eyes seemed to peer back at him. Gall reasoned that if verbal memory has an external manifestation in protuberant eyes, then other characteristics should also have corresponding physical markers. In his later writings, Gall would recall that, before he was ten years old, he had located the organ of Language, the first organ in what would become the popular nineteenth-century interest of phrenology.
By the 1850’s phrenology (from pçtvetç, Greek for mind), the determination of human character by an examination of the contours of the skull, had spread all over Europe and the United States. Gall, and particularly his student Johann Caspar Spurzheim, thrilled audiences with public lectures on the popular science. They published several books on the subject, which were as popular as Spurzheim himself in America. The American obsession with race and reform, coupled with the American entrepreneurial spirit, offered fertile ground for this new European import.
Orson Fowler learned of phrenology through the writings of Spurzheim while still in college, and abandoned a career in the ministry to preach and practice this new Gospel. He was one of the founders of the New York publishing firm of Fowler and Wells, which shipped books as far as India and Africa. By the time phrenology had run its course in the 1890’s, it had found its way into major social reform movements of the nineteenth century; it had influenced famous poets and novelists; and it had given the nineteenth century a new language to describe aspects of personality. The pique of an eighteenth-century German schoolboy would affect the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, two chapters of Moby Dick, and the publication of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
While the details of phrenology were as various as its practitioners, its basic principles remained constant, and many of these principles are still more or less accurate today. First, phrenology held that the brain controlled the emotional and intellectual functions of an individual: the brain was “the organ of the mind.” Second, each of these functions was controlled by a distinct part of the brain. Neurologists explain that speech is controlled by distinct parts of the human brain, specifically Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, discovered in 1861 and 1876 respectively. Phrenologists split the functions of the brain into the intellectual function and the affective, or emotional function. Specific intellectual and emotional functions such as memory or hate were called faculties, and the different physical parts of the brain that were the sources of these faculties were called organs. For example, a highly developed faculty of Language has its origin in the organ of Language, which is located in the part of the brain just above and behind the eyes. And third, an individual’s larger organs show greater energy than his smaller organs; that is, the power and influence of an organ and its faculty are directly related to its size.
Gall’s schoolmates who exhibited developed faculties of Language, also exhibited prominent, protruding eyes, since an enlarged organ of Language evidently forced the eyes forward.
Modern science and phrenology part company at the fourth principle, which holds that the size and shape of any given individual’s brain can be determined by observing the size and shape of an individual’s head. Another point of difference between phrenology and modern science is that phrenologists believed that abstract characteristics and qualities also had corresponding organs in the brain. So, the organ of the faculty of Ideality, the comprehension of beauty and the sublime, so necessary for poets, was located at the sides of the forehead just above the temples. If an individual was blessed with large Ideality, then this enlarged organ would cause a perceivable bump or widening at that part of the head.
The total number of identified faculties varied among phrenologists. Gall named twenty-six faculties and corresponding organs, his student Johann Caspar Spurzheim located thirty-five, and the American brothers Orson and Lorenzo Fowler named forty-three. The names of the faculties also differed among phrenologists. Having done much of his research on criminals and in insane asylums, Gall identified organs for specific actions, such as Murderousness, Theft, and Poetry. Spurzheim disagreed. Spurzheim thought it impractical that an entire organ should be devoted to such specific actions, and inconceivable that a benevolent Creator would endow human beings with specific organs for Murder and Theft, so he renamed them. Murderousness became Destructiveness, and Thievery became Acquisitiveness. Poetry became Ideality, the contemplation of beauty and the sublime. The specific actions and talents of individuals, he argued, arose from a combination of faculties, so that someone in jail for murder might not have an over-developed organ of Murderousness, but two equally well-developed faculties of Destructiveness and Voluntary Motion.
The organs of the brain covered every emotional and intellectual characteristic, from an attachment to others (Adhesiveness), to the capacity to be astonished and believe in the supernatural (Marvelousness), and from the idea of being or existence (Individuality), to the understanding of cause and effect (Causality). Most intriguing to phrenologists was the organ of Language and its relation to the rest of the faculties. They made detailed analyses of busts and portraits of great writers, scientists and philosophers, and they usually found that all the great intellects had very well developed organs of Language. Phrenologists became adept at distinguishing different types of protuberant eyes.
Eyes which protrude merely beyond the orbit of the eye-socket characterize those with a great memory for words. Even more developed are those possessed of what Gall dubs “eyes with pouches,” caused by middle part of the language organ displacing the eyes and pushing them out and down towards the cheeks, so that when the eyes are open, there appear to be a little pouches filled with water underneath the eyes. Those blessed with these prominent, downward-turning, pouchy eyes were not only adept at remembering words, but also were by nature interested in the study of language and literature. In fact, they made excellent linguists, lexicographers, historians, and librarians. From his examination of busts and engravings, Gall included among this exalted host Francis Bacon, Rabelais, Voltaire, Milton (“Milton wearies me by the crowd of names of which he is everywhere lavish,” wrote Gall), Pico Della Mirandola (the Renaissance scholar who knew twenty-two languages by the age of eighteen), Strabo, and Gibbon. All great men of intellect apparently had eyes of this description. Women, too: Gall justly includes in his list the daughter of Adelung of Brunswick, who inherited her father’s gift for languages, and presumably his large, pouchy eyes.
While the faculty of Language was given a position of importance in the phrenologists' conclusions about intellectuals, it was never the determinate characteristic of a great thinker. Unlike other philosophers of the time (such as Condillac), phrenologists did not think that language or Language was responsible for the generation of ideas or emotions. They maintained that all thought, feeling, and action arose from various organs in the brain and were given expression through the artificial signs of language. Language was a conduit for the activities of the other faculties. This led phrenologists to speculate about a universal, physical Language. Gall thought that each faculty had its own language, which he called a “natural language,” a kind of pantomime by which one could decipher a person’s dominant faculties by observing their physical movements. So, for example, a man with a large organ for Murderousness, or Destructiveness (located just above the ears, perpendicular to the vertebral column) will draw his head between his shoulders and turn it rapidly from side to side.
The natural language of Pride, whose organ is located at the upper posterior of the skull, was a head held high and back, while its cousin Vanity is slightly behind and to the side of Pride, so that the natural language of the vain man or woman is a head not only carried high, but also one that turns from side to side to look out for admirers.
The natural language of the organ of Language is to rub the eyes or lower forehead, particularly if verbal memory fails. Gall thought that all of these natural languages of organs, when combined, made the perfect universal language, because it was not composed of “arbitrary signs,” but of the natural and universal movement of the muscles which are intimately connected to the organs of the brain. Gall theorized that this language of action was superior to any universal language propounded by Leibnitz or Descartes, and thought that the careful study of the workings of the brain upon external movement was the only hope for discovering a truly universal language.
It is along these lines that the Fowler brothers wrote many of their phrenological books. American phrenologists were primarily interested in helping their fellow men to improve themselves, and to this end they encouraged their readers to develop their faculties by performing the activity of a specific faculty. Orson Fowler urged readers who wished to improve their faculty of Language to “TALK. Drive out your ideas—well if you can, and as well as possible—but well or ill, give them UTTERANCE. Join debating and speaking societies.” He thought the study of Greek and Latin and traditional methods of teaching grammar were worthless because they did not exercise the natural activity of the faculty of Language, which was communication through talking and speaking. In Memory and Intellectual Improvement Applied to Self-Education and Juvenile Instruction, he gives specific instructions for improving language, the most important being conversation, particularly a conversation in which each participant takes up to five minutes to speak his mind fully before the next conversationalist. “True eloquence,” he wrote, “rarely grows among Latin rubbish or Grecian lore, but must be FELT.” If someone wished to learn a foreign language, the proper way to learn it was to throw caution to the wind and begin speaking what one knew of it without bothering at first with the niceties of grammar.
An emphasis on the combination of the physical and the intellectual was particularly evident in the phrenological treatment of the poet. For the phrenologist, a poet is born, not made. Poets fascinated phrenologists because their art was language, but not all individuals with large faculties for Language were poets.
Poets required a large faculty of Language, but also a large faculty of Ideality, a faculty whose unique activity was poetry. Like all humans, poets required animation by one of the four basic temperments. For poetry, the nervous temperment was by far the favorite. Differences among poets in theme and vocabulary were accounted for by the prominence of other faculties. For example, an enlarged faculty of Devotion is attributed to the authors of the Psalms of David and Paradise Lost; and a large organ of Individuality to Lucretius, who wrote De Rerum Natura.
Shakespeare was distinguished, in addition to his obvious facility for language, by his large faculty of Comparison, which was considered the source of his character analysis and gift for analogy. Phrenologists enthusiastically scrutinized busts, portraits and engravings of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Ariosto, Tasso, Pope, and many others, looking for outward signs to confirm their talents. All seemed to have a lateral widening above the temples which indicated an enlarged faculty of Ideality. It was only natural that the living poets should be considered along with the dead. In the nineteenth century, especially in a practical America searching for its poetic identity, phrenology had a marked influence on poetry.
Before and after his death in 1849, Edgar Allen Poe was the phrenological manifestation of the poet qua Poet. His narrow, oval face, wondrously expansive forehead, and large, soulful eyes suited the phrenological requirements of his profession perfectly. His image was used for years as an illustration in phrenological books as the physical ideal of the Poet. Poe himself, although there is no evidence that he ever submitted to a phrenological examination, favorably reviewed Mrs. L. Miles' Phrenology, and the Moral Influence of Phrenology, in 1836. Phrenology found its way into some of Poe’s best-known stories. “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” all employ phrenology for descriptive purposes. For example, Roderick Usher is described as having “an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple,” a sure sign of an enlarged faculty of Ideality, which is certainly the source of Usher’s poetical composition, “The Haunted Palace,” four pages later.
Poe also published essays on poetry in the Southern Literary Messenger, in which he analyzed contemporary poetry based on the principles of phrenology, and his posthumous book The Literati (1850) featured brief phrenological descriptions of the literary establishment of nineteenth-century New York.
“His head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington’s head, as seen in popular busts of him,” is how Ishmael nervously sized up his new roommate Queequeg in Chapter Ten of Moby Dick. Melville’s use of phrenology in his greatest work did not stop there. He devoted two whole chapters, Seventy-Nine, “The Prairie,” and Eighty, The Nut,” to a description and phrenological analysis of the majestic head of the whale. Unfortunately for phrenology, the brain of the whale is buried so far beneath the skull that Melville concludes that “phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in the creature’s living exact state, is an entire delusion.”
More fortunately for phrenology, another American writer had far more faith in this new science and was eager to use and to be of use to it. Walt Whitman published a favorable review of a phrenological book in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1846. In 1849 he underwent a phrenological examination given by Orson Fowler’s brother Lorenzo and was found to have highly developed faculties, including the all-important Language and Ideality. In addition, he was found to have qualities indicative of an “healthy American male,” those being Amativeness (desire for physical love), Adhesiveness (attachment to others), Self-Esteem, and Individuality. Whitman was greatly influenced by the examination, for it seemed to presage and to confirm his calling as the democratic, American poet. He used phrenological words and ideas, and Fowler’s call for self-discovery and self-improvement echoed throughout his poetry. In his well-known “Song of Myself,” he writes, “Welcome is every organ and attribute of me”; and in a much later poem called “Mediums,” he describes who shall be “alimentive, amative, perceptive.”
Whitman employed not only the language of phrenology but also the phrenological idea that the poet’s calling is physically determined beyond any accidental powers of language. The firm of Fowler and Wells published Whitman’s first book of poetry, Leaves of Grass, in 1855; it is considered one of the first works to establish a new, American poetry in a new, American, vernacular, poetic language.
Unfortunately for phrenology, experimental science proved, even as early as the 1870’s with the discovery of Wernicke’s area, that its claims were unfounded. In the later nineteenth century, the prestige phrenology had enjoyed among the unscientifically minded public during mid-century had almost completely disappeared. By the early twentieth century, phrenology became nothing more than a side-show attraction, with hucksters doing readings for loose change, like fortune-tellers who travelled with the circus. Fowler and Wells published more books on the subjects of the occult as phrenology was replaced by the teachings of Freud and psychoanalysis. What were the secrets of phrenology’s success in the nineteenth century? It offered, especially in democratic America, a means by which everyone could unlock the secrets of personality and attempt to improve himself. It offered a fascinating new language to describe human characteristics, and it was relatively easy to understand. Its location of abstract and intellectual qualities meant that there was physical evidence for intangibles such as the contemplation of the divine, the sublime, and language. Interestingly enough, phrenology was correct about many of its fundamental principles, and even prescient, as some contemporary cognitive scientists, such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, speculate that language may not be independent of its physical environment. Phrenology offers a further linguistic lesson: the commonplaces of the neurotic (such as the Oedipus Complex and the Freudian Slip), which have come into everyday language, may one day possibly go the way of Roderick Usher’s expansive forehead, Melville’s phrenologically challenged whale, and Whitman’s alimentive mediums. Chaucer’s sanguine Summoner and Whitman’s phrenological self were to their authors literal and scientific. To us, they have become metaphor. And yet, we still seem stangely compelled by the image of a nervous, wide-eyed writer to attribute to the body what are in fact faculties of the mind.
On Chatter
Henry William Brownejohns
Of late, it has been mercifully quiet; several times over the course of the past three years, however, it has risen to such a pitch that the entire nation stood in fear and trembling, and this was exacerbated only because our government told us we were right to be terrified. The offending presence is that thing called chatter, and in this grotesque age of inside-out linguistics and corrupt diction, not the piercing scream of a diving bird of prey strikes more fear into the hearts of the masses than this—chatter, the song of the chipmunk and jaybird.
The Department of Homeland Security (an appellation which, itself, deserves an essay of sincere derogation) has taken to calling the intercepted telephone conversations of the Terrorists by just this adorable little word. Once, we were the subjects of a massive bureaucracy of competent propagandists, who had all read Huxley and Orwell and who all understood how to toe the line. We were put to bed by federal lullabies of Reds, and spooks, and commies. Our punditry was riddled with the philological inspirations of the thought-brigades: brainwashing, escalation, mutual assured destruction. The dangerous world of grown-ups was described by dangerous grown-up words.
And so to what depth of indignity has our government descended to sprinkle their apocalyptic warnings with diction like chatter? Chipmunks chatter. Squirrels and woodchucks chatter. But the wild-eyed men who lurk in the crags of Central Asia, laden with ammunition and ambition, plotting the moments until they can raze Western civilization? Is what they do chatter? We can presume one of two flaws in our administration: either the intelligence hacks are making a dangerously dismissive comparison between the Islamist radicals and simpleminded woodland creatures, or the propaganda hacks have desperately lost their knack for phrasing scary announcements with appropriately scary words.
If we are alert to the grand tradition of propaganda at all, we are probably familiar with the dangerous deceptions of Goebbels and the Stalinists, not to mention McCarthy and the latter-day ‘Spin Doctors,’ and for this the very word propaganda has been tainted and turned into a plague.
Indeed, the first lesson of the aspiring propagandizer is to find another word for what he does, like Communications Director. But as savvy as we are about the art of government euphemism, and as realistic as we are about the degraded condition of human society, we also understand that propaganda is out of the bag, and it is not going back in.
So long as there is a tool for the manipulation of perception and the seizure of psychological power, it is going to be used. We are stuck with propaganda, and for the foreseeable future, our leaders are only going to use words that tactfully approximate the true meaning of their intent.
And as I am an optimist—if a troubled one—whenever I find something that is with us irrevocably, I make an effort to appreciate it on its own terms. This is the best we can do with any degrading human act: hope that it is done with some style and skill. And thus the great despair about chatter—it is a despicable job done with shoddy work.
From a variety of Middle-European cheterens, chatter is naught but an onomatopoeic word which describes the sound made by small animals and birds—originally limited strictly to jaybirds. (To such zoological enthusiasts of the Middle Ages, it was only proper to be specific about such things; apes and monkeys gibber, swallows twitter, geese cackle, and grasshoppers pitter.)
In fact, it is the original specificity of chatter to the widely derided jaybird that spawned the word’s intermediate meaning of ‘gossip.’ The jay, apparently, never enjoyed much respect in the animal kingdom, and so it became customary to compare society’s most conniving characters with him; to chat was to act like a no-good jaybird, to spread rumors, to talk—gasp—idly. A conversation consisting of chatter was the most inconsequential sort of conversation there was—mere chit-chat, paltry palaver.
And the experts in the basement of the Pentagon have settled on this word to describe the rumblings of the world’s most lethal outlaws. They have constructed an equation where the idle chirping of birds and village-women now strikes the most profound anxiety into the core of American society. They have announced to the world that we, the citizens of the free West, impressed by nothing and hindered by no-one, are most intimidated by gossip and petty egg-stealers. We deserve to be better served by those who control our lingo.
And we would be better served, also, by a lingo that was proportionate to the situation we are in. Those of us who have a hard time mustering up the requisite terror every time the chatter increases might be inclined to ignore the real peril which could accompany such chirping. Doubtless, the Department of Homeland Security has abused its alarm-bells and color-coded flags so haplessly under the present administration that even when they come out with a notice of certain death, two-thirds of us are wont to respond with a bird of a different feather, and go on about our business.
If such a government agency was ever really necessary (and wasn’t a Department of Defense adequate?), then the remedial efforts of its wordsmiths has surely made it irrelevant by now. Poor choice of ominous diction has made everything the Department of Homeland Security says as disposable as Mrs. Cavendish’s latest scandal in church and town.
To give a word in support of the intelligence agencies' choice of usage, the term chatter is claimed to be derived from the fact that much of the information intercepted in telephone and electronic communication is nonsensical noise to the spies. We never actually know what they’re saying, only that they’re saying more or less of it than usual. It is, in this sense, quite a bit like gauging the restlessness of the jays in the trees.
It is left to the reader’s able discretion whether this is a productive way to predict human behavior; and whether it is any more of an assurance that the propagandists are only stooping to the low standards of the intelligence experts themselves, and not merely reflecting their own shoddy schooling.
It would be, if nothing else, more appropriate to describe the radicals' portentous dialogue as murmuring, or muttering, or grumbling. Perhaps Al Qaeda could be made to conspire, or insinuate, or even just whisper. Would we feel more threatened, or safer? Which are we meant to be?
The fundamental premise of the art of propaganda—or civil euphemism, if you prefer—is to speak not to the intellect of the public, but to their intuition. The words must sound right, even if the message is not. This was the breakthrough of the National Socialists, and the dictum followed by every national government since. If there are a score of unanswerable questions surrounding our own administration’s treatment of the problem of terrorism, there is at least one thing certain: whatever they may be doing, they are doing it without panache, and still further without skill.
[Henry William Brownejohns founded, edited, and published the seminal, tri-weekly essay pamphlet THREE WEEKS in New York. Since relinquishing that duty on account of overwork and vague malaise, he has assumed the role of Contributing Editor at the Philadelphia Independent, and has been at work on a description of his travels around the world. As Mr. Brownejohns has never granted an interview or acceded to be photographed, there are conspiracists who contend he is not a real person. This, to Mr. Brownejohns, is absurd, and yet also somewhat disquieting.]
Lexical Property Rights: Trademarks in American Dictionaries
Michael Adams, North Carolina State University
Commercial America buys and sells just about everything, and turns abstractions into commodities on a dime. Language, for the purposes of lexicography, deserves exemption from acquisition and leveraged buyouts, yet corporations do appropriate words as trademarks to their exclusive commercial uses, and the right of dictionaries to include and define such words has been a matter of dispute between lexicographers and lawyers since the leading British case, Millington v. Fox (1838), established that trademarks might entail a property right. Thus trademarks have been an editorial issue for English dictionaries since the original Oxford English Dictionary (OED). American dictionaries have been wary of them, too, both before and after American trademark law was codified in the Lanham Act of 1946. Since Lanham, no restrictions on trademarks have applied to dictionaries, but the perception that some do apparently limits their inclusion, for they are treated rarely and inconsistently to this day.
Yet, as a matter of principle, dictionaries should record the flow of trademarks into the general American vocabulary, a principle especially urged by historical perspective: earlier lexicographers handled trademarks gingerly, often bowing obsequiously to corporations asserting their supposed rights. Today’s unabridged and general dictionaries of American English, however, should treat trademarks less deferentially, not only because deference is unnecessary, but also because trademarks often enter mainstream use, sometimes as names, sometimes in general senses, and perhaps sometimes as both. The semantic development from name to common noun is interesting and important to record, and so is the public’s frequent use of brand names in speech and writing.
Nevertheless, trademarks have caused dictionaries some concern, and here is a case in point. The Dictionary of American English (4 volumes, 1938-1944, henceforth DAE) defined crackerjack as “something exceptionally fine or splendid” and as “a confection composed of popcorn, molasses, and sometimes peanuts.”
The entry form is one word but, under the second definition, the DAE provides two citations, one as evidence of the one-word form (“I bought a dollar’s worth of everything from crackerjack to cantaloupe”) and another, from a 1920 Sears, Roebuck catalogue, illustrating a two-word form (“Cracker Jack … made of popcorn, peanuts, sugar and molasses”).
In a letter dated 28 April 1941, the Cracker Jack Company objected to the DAE’s entry: “We understand the term Crackajack to mean as defined in number one of your definition,” attorney Arthur L. Stang wrote on the company’s behalf, “but we do not agree with your definition in number 2, nor your printing of the Sears, Roebuck & Co. Cat. No. 141,802, of the term Cracker Jack with that definition.” Mr. Stang expressed more than disapproval; he struck out with well-toned legal muscle: “Cracker Jack, when used as two words, is a fanciful, arbitrary and distinctive mark that we have used for very nearly fifty years for a popcorn confection, and it is our trademark, registered in the U. S. Patent Office a number of years ago.” So the Cracker Jack Company thought it perfectly reasonable to ask the University of Chicago Press, in future versions of the DAE, to “eliminate the description of the term CRACKER JACK, and place thereon the words ‘when used as two words, a trade-mark registered in the US Patent Office.'”[^1] The trademark holder must zealously protect the trademark from illicit use; the crucial issue is whether dictionary entry is illicit.
In general, trademarks serve good commercial purposes. As Justice Holmes wrote late in the nineteenth century, they “prevent one man from palming off his goods as another’s from getting another’s business or injuring his reputation by unfair means and, perhaps, from defrauding the public.”[^2] On one hand, as Justice Frankfurter argued, trademarks protect their owners, for “if another poaches upon the commercial magnetism of the symbol he has created, the owner can obtain legal redress.”[^3] On the other hand, they protect consumers from confusion about whose goods and services are whose. It’s reasonable that the Cracker Jack Company would preserve its good name in the marketplace by suing any other confectioner who sold something called crackerjack, or krakajak, or anything else remotely resembling the mark consumers associate with the Cracker Jack Company’s excellent product.
In a famous case, Coca-Cola sued a family restaurant in Arkansas because a customer ordered a Coke and got “Dorris House Cola” instead.[^4] If you ask for a Coke, that’s what you should get, and Coca-Cola shouldn’t suffer the commercial effects of consumer confusion if merchants continually pass off other colas as though they were Coca-Cola.
If you ask for a Coke or Cracker Jack, no one will hand you a dictionary. In other words, because dictionaries do not compete in the marketplace with soft drinks and confections, and because consumers are unlikely to confuse dictionaries with either soft drinks, confections, or, for that matter, just about anything else, dictionaries aren’t violating any aspect of trademark law when they accurately record the use of a trademark as a trademark, or use of any common word derived from a trademark as a common word. Of course, dictionaries aren’t at liberty to misrepresent usage in order to gut a trademark of its commercial significance. Short of such unethical, irresponsible behavior on the parts of lexicographers, however, trademark holders have no actual legal recourse against dictionaries.
Thus, J. Thomas McCarthy, whose McCarthy on Trademarks and Unfair Competition is the authoritative guide to the subject, points out that “there appears to be no sure legal remedy against authors and publishers who use an alleged trademark in a generic sense in books, magazines and newspapers. The Lanham Act offers no remedies against such noncommercial generic use,” and, for good measure, that “absent the dilution theory, the law offers no legal remedy to stop those who use a word in a generic sense in magazines, newspapers, books, dictionaries, etc.”[^5] More precisely, there is no remedy against dictionaries because, rather than using trademarks in a generic sense, they record nontrademark senses, derived from the trademarks, that Americans use in everyday speech.
The implications of Stang’s letter for lexicography are clear and should be startling. If the Cracker Jack Company (and many another trademark-owning company) had its way, a company could determine the forms of a trademark that appear in a dictionary, without regard for usage. For instance, the one-word form, crackerjack, could not serve as an entry form for any entry describing the confection, because, according to the trademark owner, the confection is denoted by a two-word term. Further, that company could determine which definitions of a word could be reported or, more precisely, which could not.
So the two-word form could be defined only as a trademark, not by its ingredients, and the description of ingredients could not define the illicit one-word form, even though real people mean the confection when they use that form.
Most alarming, the company in question could control the evidence of use and meaning available to the public via dictionaries. This is an insidious consequence, prompted by the structure of American trademark law throughout the twentieth century. For trademark owners fear dictionaries with good reason: once a trademark enters the general vocabulary, it loses the distinctive qualities that qualify it as a mark, and, as a result, the owner can lose control of the mark. As Frank Schechter observed in “The Rational Basis of Trademark Protection” (1927), “self-evidently, the more distinctive the mark, the more effective is its selling power.” Thus, he argued, trademarks need the broadest possible protection from infringements: “the more distinctive or unique the mark, the deeper is its impress upon the public consciousness, and the greater its need for protection against vitiation or dissociation from the particular product in connection with which it has been used.”[^6]
A dictionary entry can help to dissociate a trademark from its particular product if it demonstrates that the trademark has, as Schechter put it, “been embodied in the English vocabulary under the law of usage by which coined words by reason of long general use become fixed into the vocabulary.”7 So lawyers (like Stang) who represent trademark owners (like the Cracker Jack Company) threaten dictionaries with indefinite actions (because no action is viable under trademark law) in order to protect the status of their marks. The Lanham Act requires trademark owners (and their lawyers) to protect their marks zealously; nasty letters, even irrelevant ones to dictionaries, help to prove zeal. If the lawyers can dissuade dictionary editors ignorant of trademark law to exclude evidence of words developed from trademarks in their dictionaries, then the same lawyers can claim in court that the marks they represent are still only trademarks and protected from commercial encroachments.
Corporate control of dictionary entries, without regard for evidence of use, obviously favors corporations rather than a language’s users. As Sidney Landau has argued, a dictionary written under such interference falls somewhat below expected lexicographical standards, and the situation thus described comments interestingly on the relative claims of profit and people on the American English lexicon.
Landau points out that dictionaries do not consult other “special interest groups” for permission to include words over which those groups might wish to assert some control; he also points out that “now that many dictionaries are published by subsidiaries of large corporations, the influence of corporate legal counsel” intrudes into editorial practice.[^8]
The symbiosis of law and corporate interest amounts to a type of language planning. Roger Shuy explains that trademark law is an “attempt to create a purism that tries to eliminate what it considers to be the deviant varieties of language, a goal that is consistent with law’s innate need to be prescriptive.”[^9] But if trademark law is language planning, it most resembles urban sprawl, and it similarly evades public scrutiny and public intervention. Lawyers who protect their clients’ trademarks by threatening dictionaries essentially fabricate evidence relevant to the status of those marks, and dictionary makers must decide whether to acquiesce in the fabrication or to record linguistic facts and ensure public access to those facts instead. In any event, they will have to make up their minds, because, as the record amply illustrates, lawyers will threaten them, with or without legal substance behind the threats.[^10]
In the case of crackerjack, the DAE capitulated to legal bluff. After Rollin D. Hemens, assistant director of the University of Chicago Press, read Stang’s letter, he asked Mitford Mathews, then assistant editor of the DAE, to map out the lexicographical terrain. Mathews discovered that no one knew the origin of the term, but that it apparently referred to the confection only from about 1905, well within Stang’s “very nearly fifty years” of commercial use. Webster’s unabridged dictionary (1926) recorded the confection definition, but under crackajack; the Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary of the English Language (1913), however, defined the confection under crackerjack, and so did the OED (1933). None of these mentioned that the term was a trademark, though the omission hardly altered the fact.
Webster’s Second New International Dictionary (1934), however, suddenly lacked the sweetmeat definition. “The method of handling the term in the 1934 Webster,” Mathews wrote, “leads me to imagine that the Webster people had been protested to by the candy people and that as a result they took the easiest way out by omitting this sense from their dictionary.”[^11]
Mathews’s tone suggests his belief that Webster’s was not the noblest course; we might go further and consider whether such a solution was even acceptable or professional, though the exigencies of commercial lexicography may explain Webster’s decision. Still, one wonders when compromise becomes truckling under, and whether, if the business of an unabridged dictionary is to record essentially all of the words in the common vocabulary, compromise on the inclusion of words newly entering that vocabulary undermines the dictionary’s integrity.
Hemens consulted an attorney on the issue. The attorney appears not to have opened a book to find an answer, and did not think much about the DAE’s purpose in formulating his opinion: “The matter does not seem to be of much importance; and we suggest therefore that in the next edition of the dictionary you merely eliminate the No. 2 definition of the word ‘crackerjack’ (printed as one word) and omit entirely the reference to the Sears Roebuck catalog. Of course, omitting the No. 2 definition would require you also to omit the quotation from “1905 Beach Pardners.” The DAE could, if it liked, include the trademark statement in any future version, but the lawyer questioned “whether it is within the province of [the DAE] to include trade marks,” and he “suggest[ed] therefore that this notation also be eliminated.”[^12]
In the end, the DAE did not resist the argument that trademarks were proprietary language. When the University of Chicago Press decided to reprint the DAE in 1959, they had forgotten the earlier crackerjack controversy. But J. R. Hulbert, co-editor of the DAE, remembered; hearing of their plans, he reminded them: “I presume that the intention is to issue a new printing of the book, without corrections. One correction, however, must be made to avoid a suit. This concerns meaning 2 of Crackerjack. That meaning is a proprietary usage which should not have been included.” He gave explicit directions as to what should be omitted and how the newly created space should be filled, in order to correct what he called “the error.” He also warned, “this is not a trifling matter … if the correction is not made and the company sues, the Press will not have much of a case.”[^13] Shugg accepted Hulbert’s advice, even though the sheets were already printed; he printed pages 667 and 668 again, with the correction, and tipped them in, copy by copy.[^14]
Hulbert and Shugg overreacted in 1960. They heeded the lawyer who believed, regardless of what millions of Americans called the confection through which they dug to find their prizes, that the Dictionary of American English should not record the word. Though no one hungry for crackerjack will buy the DAE accidentally instead, and though a bad definition of crackerjack cannot filch one peanut of the Cracker Jack Company’s well-deserved goodwill, there is at least one common word in use daily and across the nation undefined in any major current dictionary, commercial or otherwise. One hopes that other common words derived from trademarks receive better treatment, but dictionaries are still reluctant to record them, for the usual reasons. As a result, Americans know slightly less about their common vocabulary from dictionaries than we might wish. On those maps of American English, contours are distorted slightly, byways and landmarks missing: mostly the maps are good, but some folks sometimes can’t find what they’re looking for.
To a trademark owner, a dictionary entry for the trademark looks like a gross and irreversible symptom of decaying distinctiveness, a warning that the trademark’s lease on life has all too short a date. The American Heritage College Dictionary, Fourth Edition (2002, henceforth AHCD4), conscious of the threat it poses, and wishing no one harm, advises its users that “Words known to have current trademark registrations are shown with an initial capital and are also identified as trademarks. No investigation has been made of common-law trademark rights in any word, because such investigation is impracticable. The inclusion of any word in this Dictionary is not, however, an expression of the Publisher’s opinion as to whether or not it is subject to proprietary rights. Indeed, no definition in this Dictionary is to be regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark.”[^15] Unfortunately, a dictionary’s caveat cannot mitigate its influence on trademark status. If a dictionary entry is used as evidence to show the general currency of nontrademark senses derived from a trademark, and if those reviewing a trademark’s status choose to draw conclusions about the viability of the mark from that evidence, that is up to the court, not the dictionary. It seems unlikely that AHCD4 really hopes that those who consult it discount its entries as evidence of semantic development and current usage.
But just because dictionaries are dangerous to trademarks doesn’t mean that they should be held responsible for the damage caused by a trademark’s success and subsequent general use. Even if a corporation could keep a dictionary from recording its trademark, it couldn’t keep people from using it and extending it. Dictionaries are responsible to the public for entering, defining, and illustrating words and should do so in the public interest regardless of the harm it may do to a corporation’s profit or trademark ownership. A corporation can establish a right to use a word commercially, but it cannot own the word itself: the language’s users own the language; dictionaries simply register the deed.
American dictionaries record trademarks worthy of entry, those that are commonly used as trademarks, especially those that have generated nontrademark meanings and nontrademark forms, but they treat them inconsistently and incompletely. If you follow a single trademark, like Dumpster, through a number of prominent commercial dictionaries, you encounter a revealing, perhaps disturbing, variety of treatments. If you search for the term on the Internet, you will see how often it is used to mean any large, industrial trash container, whether one manufactured by the Dempster Dumpster Company (which holds the trademark for Dumpster) or some other brand of the type. You will also see that the term is frequently used as an attributive noun, as in the phrase dumpster diving. From such a search, one turns to the dictionaries expecting treatment of some complexity, but one can see immediately the dampening effect of zealous lawyers.
For instance, Merriam-Webster’s Eleventh New Collegiate Dictionary (2005, henceforth MWC11) offers the following entry (pronunciations are deleted from all entries quoted here): “Dumpster trademark – used for a large trash receptacle.” The entry in AHCD4 is similar: “Dumpster a trademark used for containers designed for receiving, transporting, and dumping waste materials.” Both of these entries are prevarications: they do not indicate that a term dumpster, applied by speakers of American English broadly to receptacles like those made under the Dumpster brand, even exists; nor do they enter the phrase dumpster diving, for which there is ample evidence in print. And the passive construction is significant: used by whom and for what? By all speakers to mean exactly Dumpster brand containers? By the trademark owner for its product?
By those in the industrial waste collection business for the Dempster product? By speakers unconcerned with the industrial waste collection business for any big waste container, regardless of the brand? Both dictionaries have constructed the entries to be as noncommittal about facts of semantic development and usage as possible.
And the entries aren’t accidental. In fact, editors of both dictionaries are aware of their respective prevarications. The American Heritage editors include a fuller, more accurate entry in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (2000). It extends the college dictionary’s definition thus: “This trademark often appears in print in lowercase: ‘[The street is] lined with low-cost apartment buildings and strewn with blue dumpsters” (Chicago Tribune).” And Lars Eighner, in Travels with Lizbeth, his remarkable memoir of life on the streets, begins his chapter “On Dumpster Diving” as follows: “Long before I began Dumpster diving I was impressed with Dumpsters, enough so that I wrote the Merriam-Webster research service to discover what I could about the word Dumpster. I learned from them that it is a proprietary word belonging to the Dempster Dumpster company. Since then I have dutifully capitalized the word, though it was lowercased in almost all the citations Merriam-Webster photocopied for me. Dempster’s word is too apt. I have never heard these things called anything but Dumpsters. I do not know anyone who knows the generic name for these objects.”[^16] Indeed, there is no generic name, so speakers have developed dumpster from Dumpster to supply the gap. You won’t learn that from looking in most dictionaries, though.
Some dictionary entries for Dumpster are more precise than those above, but are just as incomplete. The Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition (1998) emphasizes that a trademark refers to a brand, thereby clearing up some of the vagueness noted in other dictionaries: “Dumpster Trademark a brand of large metal bin for refuse designed to be hoisted into a specially equipped truck for emptying or hauling away.” The hoisting aspect, apparently reflecting the special design of Dempster Dumpsters, figures prominently in other dictionaries, too. So the Encarta World English Dictionary’s “Dumpster tdmk. a trademark for large trash-and-garbage containers and hoisting units,” an entirely inadequate definition, as the hoisting units in question are always a feature of the containers and the novel compound “trash-and-garbage,” if it means something other than “refuse,” is too specific or, if it means “refuse,” is comically inefficient.
Part of the problem with these definitions is that they insist on defining the name of the brand, when there are other related definitions worth recording, those of general terms derived from the brand name. The hoisting is meant to restrict the name’s range of reference, but the Internet search will call up numerous advertisements for “roll off” dumpsters: trucks carry these to a location on platform trailers that lift at the front so that the receptacle can roll off into place. Either these are Dempster Dumpsters, in which case the definitions for the trademark are imprecise, or they aren’t Dempster products at all, in which case speakers have derived a term, dumpster, to stand for a range of receptacles including those hoisted and those rolled off.
The entry in the New Oxford American Dictionary (2001, henceforth NOAD) is the best on offer to the word-curious public: “dumpster (also Dumpster) trademark ► n. a large trash receptacle designed to be hoisted and emptied into a truck.” This entry, parallel to that of the big American Heritage Dictionary, acknowledges the derived sense in the lowercase form, which precedes the trademark as the entry form. The label suggests that any use of either form is as a trademark, but the definition is a great improvement over the others, at it tacitly acknowledges that speakers use the term for receptacles that may or may not carry the trademark. Further, NOAD is the only major commercial dictionary that includes an entry for “dumpster diving ► n. The practice of raiding dumpsters to find discarded items that are still useful, can be recycled, and have value,” the only one to acknowledge the extent of dumpster’s semantic development.
NOAD defines both terms just as it defines other nouns, without formulae special to trademarks, leaving the label, in the appropriate entry, to do its job insofar as it applies. One could be critical of the NOAD entry for dumpster, though, along with the others: no one goes quite so far as to define the trademark use as sense 1 and the general sense, the one unconcerned with brand, as sense 2.
Coke is another excellent example of a term treated somewhat unempirically because of its trademark status. AHCD4 records the trademark in its alphabetical place as a trademark, according to the formula illustrated earlier. But coke has long been used generically: in the American South, speakers still use it as a term for any soft drink, a fact that the dictionary acknowledges in a Regional Note at tonic: “Generic terms for carbonated soft drinks vary widely in the United States. Probably the two most common words competing for precedence are soda, used in the northeast United States as well as St. Louis and vicinity, and pop, used from the Midwest westward. In the South any soft drink, regardless of flavor or brand name, is referred to as a Coke, cold drink, or just plain drink. Speakers in Western Maryland and Boston and its environs have a term of their own: tonic. See Note at dope.” This note is commendable, partly because it acknowledges the derived use and partly because it locates it as a regionalism — without the cross-reference, the regionalism would be obscured entirely by Coke’s trademark status. The only problem with the note is that folks in the South don’t ask for Coke; they ask for coke, instead.
As noted earlier, Coca-Cola defends its trademark from infringement more aggressively than any other corporation; this is a wise strategy, since under the Lanham Act vigilance counts in the trademark owner’s favor, whether suing or sued. But Coca-Cola’s attitude towards its mark, at least historically, has been an exemplary exception to the rule. After Congress enacted the Lanham Act in 1946, Coca-Cola consulted an eminent trademark specialist and came away understanding clearly the limits on proprietary right in American trademark law. It contacted first Merriam-Webster, and then the Dictionary of Americanisms (1951, henceforth DA), urging that they include the registered trademark Coke. Webster had already demurred when Coca-Cola’s John A. Gosnell suggested to Mitford Mathews, on 28 July 1948, that dictionaries “let the policy in these matters be established by the facts; that is to say, that if a trademark has achieved that degree of celebrity which carries with it nationwide currency in daily conversation, that such a trademark should be included.”[^17]
Contemporary dictionaries should recognize what Coca-Cola appears to have recognized long ago. Post–Lanham Act, a company like Coca-Cola would be foolish to sue a dictionary for including its trademark: probably it would lose, but it certainly wouldn’t want to win, for in the process it would prove (to use the language of the Lanham Act) the “common descriptive” nature of its trademark. If the term weren’t commonly used, it wouldn’t be in the dictionary; so the corporation can prove infringement and loosen its own proprietary grip on the trademark, or it can ignore infringement, if there is any, and hold the trademark as long as it can, in spite of the term’s currency in everyday American speech.
Gosnell’s letter indicates Coca-Cola’s understanding that there wasn’t much they could do had the DA, or any dictionary, decided to include coke, so they made lemonade: they turned the threat of dilution into an opportunity to advertise, and suddenly Coca-Cola’s commercial interest coordinated exactly with public lexical interest, on a very sound principle never considered by the Cracker Jack Company or even, apparently, the DAE, namely that dictionaries’ policies on trademarks should reflect the facts of usage and their record. It’s difficult to argue with Gosnell, after all: “There may be more prominent Americanisms than ‘Coca-Cola’ and ‘Coke,'” he wrote, “but at the moment I don’t believe I can think of any.”[^18]
Of course, Gosnell did not suggest that DA or any other dictionary include a subentry for coke to accompany that for the trademark. There are limits to the open-mindedness we can expect from trademark owners and their representatives. And it’s important to recognize that there are limits imposed on dictionary editors by the publishing corporations that pay their salaries. Perhaps editors can do little to improve dictionary treatment of trademarks and their derivatives; there are certainly practical limits to what we can discover about our common language in dictionaries. It’s clear that, while dictionaries are perhaps too quick to make concessions to trademark owners, they also struggle to do good work and often succeed, as entries and notes from the American Heritage dictionaries and NOAD show. But Americans interested in their language should pay attention to trademarks and their treatment in dictionaries. Currently, dictionaries choose their approaches to trademarks in the face of corporate complaint.
But Gary C. Robb, in “Trademark Misuse in Dictionaries: Inadequacy of Existing Legal Action and a Suggested Cure” (1981), urges statutory control of dictionaries, essentially arguing that the owner’s interest in its mark superseded the public’s interest in accurate information about American speech.[^19] One wonders, if such legislation were passed, what the next step would be. Someday, someone might write an article titled “The Misuse of Trademarks in Speech: Inadequacy of Legal Control and a Suggested Cure,” where the cure would prohibit our supposed “misuse” of trademarks by deriving other terms from them. Speakers of American English may want to assert their lexical property rights before that day comes.
The author discovered material about the Dictionary of American English and the Dictionary of Americanisms discussed in this article while reading through the University of Chicago Press Archives, research made possible when he received the VERBATIM/Dictionary Society of North America Award in Lexicography (1996). He would like to thank Mr. Laurence Urdang and the Dictionary Society for their generous support. The author presented an early version of the article at the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society (1997). At that conference and subsequently, the author has benefited tremendously from discussion of trademarks in their legal, linguistic, and lexicographical contexts with Jennifer Westerhaus Adams, Esq., Richard W. Bailey, Ronald R. Butters, Steven R. Kleinedler, Sidney I. Landau, Joseph P. Pickett, and Jesse Sheidlower. Their suggestions have always been intelligent, informed, and eloquent; any errors here, alas, reflect the author’s limitations, not theirs.
[1]: Quoted from a one-page carbon copy of a typed copy of a letter to the University of Chicago Press from Arthur L. Stang, on behalf of the Cracker Jack Company, the original apparently on letterhead, dated 28 April 1941. This item is in the University of Chicago Press Archives (Box 128, folder 2), housed in the Department of Special Collections in the Joseph Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago. All items from this collection are quoted here with permission.
[2]: From Holmes’s opinion in Chadwick v. Covell, 151 Mass. 190, 23 N.E. 1068 (1890), quoted in J. Thomas McCarthy, McCarthy on Trademarks and Unfair Competition, 3rd edition (Deerfield, IL: Clark Boardman Callaghan, 1996), § 2.06.
[3]: Ibid, § 2.07
[4]: See Don N. Curdie, “Infringement of the Trademark ‘Coca-Cola,'” The Business Lawyer (December 1971), pp. 297-310.
[5]: McCarthy, op. cit., § 12.09[3].
[6]: Frank Schecter, “The Rational Basis of Trademark Protection,” Harvard Law Review 40 (1927), pp. xxx and xxx, seriatim.
[7]: Ibid, p. xxx.
[8]: Sidney I. Landau, Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography, 2nd edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 405-409.
[9]: Roger Shuy, Linguistic Battles in Trademark Disputes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 3
[10]: See Landau, op. cit., p. 407; Shuy, op. cit., p. 13; Robert Burchfield, Unlocking the English Language (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991), p. 96; and Herbert C. Morton, The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 219-220. These are all general statements and historical examples of the problem available in print; it is too much to expect lexicographers to air their publishers’ legal correspondence in public.
[11]: Quoted from a one-page typed, signed letter from Mathews to Hemens, dated 4 June 1941 (University of Chicago Press Archives, Box 128, folder 2).
[12]: Quoted from a two-page copy of a letter from Marcus A. Hirschl of Chritton, Wiles, Davies & Hirschl to the University of Chicago Press, dated 5 June 1941 (University of Chicago Press Archives, Box 128, folder 2).
[13]: Quoted from a one-page autograph, signed letter from Hulbert to the “Chief Editor” of the University of Chicago Press, dated 4 December 1959 (University of Chicago Press Archives, Box 128, folder 3).
[14]: See carbon copy of a one-page letter from Shugg to Hulbert, dated 12 January 1960; a carbon copy of a one-page letter from Mary D. Alexander to Hulbert, dated 20 January 1960; and an undated one-page carbon copy of a note from John B. Goetz, Production Manager of the University of Chicago Press to Harold L. Beaver of the Oxford University Press (all in the University of Chicago Press Archives, Box 128, folder 3).
[15]: Joseph P. Pickett, and others, eds. The American Heritage College Dictionary, 4th edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), p. ii.
[16]: Lars Eighner, Travels with Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 111.
[17]: See the one-page carbon copy of a letter from Gosnell to Mathews, dated 28 July 1947 (University of Chicago Press Archives, Box 318, folder 7).
[19]: Gary C. Robb, “Trademark Misuse in Dictionaries: Inadequacy of Existing Legal Action and a Suggested Cure,” Marquette Law Review 65.2 (Winter 1981), pp. 179-196.
Dude, Katie! Your Dress is So Cute: Why Dude Became an Exclamation
Muffy Siegel, Merion, Pennsylvania
Although the nationwide use of other California Val-speak words such as like and totally attracts more attention, the spread of dude has actually been more peculiar. Not only has it moved through the population so that it is now very common among most middle-class teens, it has also broadened grammatically so that it can refer to or address people of either gender in its noun form, and it can also be used as a general exclamation, as at the beginning of the title of this article. The widening use of dude has been documented in Scott Kiesling’s detailed study in the journal American Speech, which argues that, in addition to what dude may refer to in a literal sense—a person—the word also signals a stance of “cool solidarity,” halfway between camaraderie and distance, which is very attractive to young Americans.[^1] But such an explanation of the many meanings of dude and the cultural reasons for its widespread adoption does not address another question: Why has the word dude widened grammatically from its original uses as a noun to become a general exclamation? This kind of grammatical expansion clearly does not necessarily accompany the adoption of such slang terms for people. Guy, for instance, is an older and more common near-synonym for dude, but it still cannot be used as an exclamation; even teenagers would not cry out “Guy, Katie! Your dress is so cute!”
What factors favor this kind of widening of grammatical function? Why has dude become an exclamation, while guy has not? To investigate this question, I interviewed a diverse[^2] group of American English speakers aged 12–19 from the nearby suburbs of Philadelphia. All the boys except one twelve-year-old said they used dude fairly frequently. (Happily, no one mentioned drug use or even surfing as associated with people who use dude.) The girls agreed that their male counterparts all said dude, but reported that only 30% to 40% of their female peers did so. They explained that those girls who used it were “less girly,” more outgoing, louder, more flakey, and more likely to belong to sports teams than those who avoided it.
In addition to formal interviews, I also recorded examples of spontaneous dude use, including the ones that appear as examples in this article, from e-mails sent among members of an elite New England university’s women’s Ultimate Frisbee team and from observations made while chauffeuring members of a suburban high school’s girls’ sports teams.
My young subjects all identified three grammatical functions of dude. We can see all three at work in a sentence I heard uttered in an exchange between young male co-workers in a physical therapy facility: “Dude! I screamed because the dude kissed me, dude.” This means something like “Damn! I screamed because the guy kissed me, pal.” In such a sentence, dude serves first as an exclamation that does not refer to anything at all, then as a noun referring to a man, and finally as a gender-neutral term of address.
Let us consider these uses one at a time, starting with examples from the college e-mails that use the historically earliest form, the referential noun: [^3]
(1) Some dude from Brown came up to us on old campus tonight and knew who she was!
(2) One of the state park dudes suggested we look into city parks in neighboring towns.
The singular noun dude, as in (1), must be masculine, but the plural, as shown in (2), can include a minority of females. (That is, some of those park rangers could have been women.) Second historically was the gender-neutral term of address, as in (3) and the plural (4).
(3) Dude, isn’t that your mom?
(4) Dudes, my stomach just flipped out on me.
Both (3) and (4) were uttered by and addressed to female sports teammates, so we know they are truly gender-neutral. Finally, the last and most recently developed use of dude is the non-referring exclamation, which can appear only in the singular, as in (5).[^4]
(5) Dude, Hilary, good luck with that!
But why has this widening happened to dude and not to guy? If we replace dude with guy in the observed examples (1)-(5) to create examples (6)-(10) below, we see that guy acts very much like dude most of the time. [^5]
(6) Some guy from Brown came up to us on old campus tonight and knew who she was!
(7) One of the state park guys suggested we look into city parks in neighboring towns.
(8) Guy, isn’t that your mom?
(9) Guys, my stomach just flipped out on me.
(10) Guy, Hilary, good luck with that!
Like dude, guy has to refer to a male in the singular ((6)), and it has also widened to allow the plural referential and address forms ((7) and (9)) to include some females. Guy has not, however, followed dude to become a gender-neutral singular form of address ((8)) or an exclamation ((10)). But why hasn’t it?
From an examination of a number of other words, some similar to dude and some to guy, I have concluded that widening into an exclamation like dude requires a combination of two conditions.
First, the candidate for widening must be of the more expected, or “unmarked” gender. In spite of the progress made by the women’s movement, the unmarked gender in most arenas of American life is still MALE. So both dude and guy satisfy this first condition for unmarked gender, since they both started as words for males. The second requirement for a candidate for exclamation-hood, though, is that the word’s meaning must include a connotation of social power, conventional or not. This second requirement should not surprise us too much if we think a bit about exclamations. Our most common exclamations do not start as nouns referring to groups of ordinary people like dudes or guys at all. Instead, they carry the conventional power of religious references (Lord!) or the anti-establishment power of blasphemy or obscenity (choose your favorite curse word here). Exclamations by nature require strong meanings. Ordinary person-words, such as guy, do not possess such strength, so they have failed to become exclamations.
Dude, however, is better situated than guy for grammatical widening into exclamation because it enjoys not only unmarked gender but also connotations of power, thanks to its message of “cool solidarity.” Just googling dude provides an indication of the power imputed to the word. Such a search in July 2004 yielded millions of commercial websites belonging to entrepreneurial dudes, including Pizza Dude, Beer Dude, ArtDude, DrummerDude, the more serious CVSDude, firedude (a resource site for firefighters), Deaf Dude (resources for the deaf), and even the fearless Public Defender Dude. There were far fewer such commercial sites that bothered to include guy, and those that existed were definitely less glamorous: History Guy, Family Guy, Pathology Guy, Fat Guy, Homeless Guy, Sock Guy, and Crazy Drunk Guy.
In order to understand the nature of the power of dude that has led it, but not guy, to become an exclamation, we can consider other similar words which have spread into exclamation uses, like dude, and some which have not, like guy. In the first category, with dude, we find, man, boy and brother. All have the unmarked male gender and represent, more or less (in the case of boy) traditionally socially powerful entities. As predicted, all can be used referentially, as singular or plural terms of address, and, in the singular, as exclamations, just like dude. We can construct (15)–(19), which parallel the examples with dude in (1)–(5):
(15) Some man/boy/brother from Brown came up to us on old campus tonight and knew who she was!
(16) One of the state park men/boys/brothers suggested we look into city parks in neighboring towns.
(17) Man/Boy/Brother, isn’t that your mom?
(18) Men/Boys/Brothers, my stomach just flipped out on me.
(19) Man/Boy/Brother, Hilary, good luck with that!
In the second category, with guy, we find woman, girl, and sister, which have not widened to exclamations. (24) cannot be read as starting with an exclamation, as (5) and (19) can:
(20) Some woman/girl/sister from Brown came up to us on old campus tonight and knew who she was!
(21)One of the state park women/girls/sisters suggested we look into city parks in neighboring towns.
(22) Woman/Girl/Sister, isn’t that your mom?
(23) Women/Girls/Sisters, my stomach just flipped out on me.
(24) Woman/Girl/Sister, Hilary, good luck with that!
Dude, then, patterns with other words usually thought of as referring primarily to males and so can be used as an exclamation, while guy patterns with words marked as female, which do not generally have an exclamation form. Unmarked gender seems to be necessary for exclamations because they need to be very general. We can shout “Oh, boy!” in general happy anticipation because MALE is the default gender.
“Oh, girl!” does not work the same way because the marked gender of girl makes us expect a literal girl to be involved. The same holds for replacing “Man, what a party!” with “Woman, what a party!” or “Oh, brother, what a mess!” with “Oh, sister, what a mess!” We expect actual women or sisters. Even if we look at bitch, one of the more powerful words in English that is marked female, we find that the exclamation version has to be masculinized: “Bitch, that hurts!” will be heard, not as an exclamation, but as an accusation very rudely addressed to a female. To express a general exclamation, one must say “Sonofabitch, that hurts!” (but not in polite company).
Consequently, we can conclude that unmarked gender is crucial for exclamations, but it is not the only requirement, since the male guy still patterns with the feminine words in not forming an acceptable exclamation. Why should this be? What is the second requirement, after unmarked gender, for widening to exclamation? The preference for dude over guy in commercial websites suggests that guy, though it belongs to the unmarked male gender, lacks some of the connoted power of men, and exclamations require power. Guy, as a slang term with connotations of ordinariness, might just not be as powerful as the traditionally dominant man, brother, or even boy.
I was able to gather evidence for this hypothesis by asking my young subjects about hypothetical heroes called “superguy” and “superdude” and what they would be able to do. All agreed that superdude would be more potent than superguy, younger and very much cooler, as we can see by comparing the lists of representative descriptions from subjects below:
Typical attributes of “superguy” according to teenage subjects
He can’t really do anything; he just thinks he can.
Drinks a lot of beer.
Does regular masculine things.
Flies, but more cautiously than superdude or superman.
Not as smart as superman.
Typical attributes of “superdude” according to teenage subjects
Young, cool, very fast.
A little crazy, with weird hair.
Makes people laugh.
Flies to the rescue immediately, maybe
recklessly.
This contrast between the conventional and slightly ineffectual superguy on the one hand and the more powerful superdude on the other would lead us to predict that other words for classes of men with connotations of tameness like guy would also fail to widen to exclamations. Indeed, Gentleman! fails to produce a good non-referring exclamation like Man! Guy, then, is not a good candidate for an exclamation, exactly because exclamations serve to express strong meaning, so even MALE words with their unmarked gender are ruled out if what they refer to is too weak or un-cool to be perceived as powerful. In contrast, dude was an excellent candidate for widening into an exclamation because it is very general in its reference, like man, and its position as youth slang with African-American origins lends it a powerful connotation of unconventionality.
Is it ever possible for words denoting females to widen to produce exclamations? Most feminine words—woman, girl, sister, aunt—are ruled out, of course, because of their marked gender. But there is one area in which FEMALE is the unmarked gender, and that is parents, since mothers are still expected to do most of the child-rearing. Thus, the more expected gender for a parent is FEMALE. Consequently, father, dad, and poppa all fail to form the kind of useable exclamations we get with man, boy, and brother. Even though one might expect father, at least, to have a good deal of social power, these words for male parents fail to satisfy the gender condition for exclamations because the unmarked parent is FEMALE.
Curiously, though, common words for female parents, mother and mom, are just as hopeless as exclamations as these male-parent words or, for that matter, as woman and girl, even though, in the context of parents, their gender is unmarked. But this is because mother and mom do not satisfy our second condition, which requires a connotation of social power, either within the system (man, Lord) or as an outsider (dude, sonofabitch). Mother and mom have only supremely safe and domestic connotations.
However, if we could find a female-parent word that also has outsider connotations, we would expect it to be able to widen into an exclamation, since such a word would have both unmarked gender and social power. I think that momma is just such a word. It is certainly the gender-unmarked term relative to the little-used poppa, and its associations with minority and immigrant communities should save it from the weakness of the tame or familiar. In fact momma does make a passable general exclamation for many speakers. I observed a teenager riding on a city bus with her schoolmates (but not her mother) exclaim “Momma! I’m falling!” when the bus stopped suddenly. Moreover, most of my subjects accepted as normal a version of example (5) with momma substituted for dude: “Oh, Momma, Hilary! Good luck with THAT!”
By introducing two new superheroes to my young subjects, I was able to get some more direct evidence for the idea that the reason that momma works as an exclamation while mom does not is that momma has more powerful connotations. I asked the kids this time what they thought “supermom” and “supermomma” would be able to do. They uniformly saw supermom as the word is widely used, to mean a conventional mother who cooks, cleans, drives carpool, and generally raises a family while working outside the home. One girl even said that if supermom tried to fly, she would probably fall, because she’s “old and tired.” The most super power attributed to supermom was having “a minivan that seats twelve.” According to the kids, supermomma shares supermom’s abilities to cook, clean, and work hard. But her cooking is tastier and her cleaning more thorough than supermom’s. She is also younger, tougher, more fun, and harder-working. Several subjects volunteered with admiration that “no one messes with supermomma,” and some African American teens responded, “What can supermomma do? Pretty much anything!” Once again, the name for the more powerful superhero serves as the more successful general exclamation. Momma seems to have gained its power through the outsider status it has attained through its associations with minority and immigrant communities.
However, other sources of social power, such as religion, can also accord feminine words enough power to enable them to widen to exclamations. Thus, while Mother! cannot be used by itself as a general, non-referring exclamation, Mother of God! can be, because the religious reference, like momma’s outsider status, confers the necessary power.
We can probably never explain exactly why dude has caught on as an exclamation so quickly. We can, however, see that it was well qualified for such grammatical widening because, first, it referred originally to individuals of the unmarked gender, so it was able to expand its range of reference easily and come to have non-specific gender. Then, second, it acquired the connotations of power required for successful exclamations. It did this through its associations with American subcultures that are at once marginalized and widely admired and imitated: African Americans, California beach boys and girls, and, now, the general population of middle-class teens. Other new exclamations should follow this pattern; look for the spread of Dawg! or Baby! in the future.
[1]: Kiesling, Scott F. 2004 “You’ve Come a Long Way, Dude: A History,” American Speech 69.3: 321-327.
[2]: I had fourteen subjects, seven male, seven female, and three African American, three Asian American, and eight European American, mirroring the makeup of the community. The subjects' judgments about the uses and connotations of dude were remarkably uniform.
[3]: The OED Online describes the origins of dude as “a factitious slang term which came into vogue in New York about the beginning of 1883, in connexion with the ‘aesthetic’ craze of that day. Actual origin not recorded. 1. A name given in ridicule to a man affecting an exaggerated fastidiousness in dress, speech, and department, and very particular about what is aesthetically ‘good form’; hence, extended to an exquisite, a dandy, ‘a swell’. 2. A non-westerner or city-dweller who tours or stays in the west of the U.S., esp. one who spends his holidays on a ranch; a tenderfoot. 3. [1993] More generally, any man who catches the attention in some way; a fellow or chap, a guy. Hence also approvingly, esp. (through Black English) applied to a member of one’s own circle or group.”
[4]: Though there was little reported variation by race in total use of dude within the community, African Americans reported favoring the referential use shown in (1) and (2) over the other uses in (3) - (5).
[5]: The asterisks mark examples that the subjects would not accept as sounding right or having the intended meaning.
The Carribean Dichotomy
Larry Tritten
Linguists specializing in pronunciation, not to mention pronunciamientos (a Spanish hors d’oeuvre originated by Cervantes’s wife and which was said by him “to make the palate feel as if it had been kicked by Sancho Panza’s donkey”), tend to declare that there are only two kinds of people in the world: those who pronounce the word Caribbean [special font needed] and those who pronounce it [special font needed]. Dr. Wilford Glimmering, the eminent British pronunciologist as well as the only faculty member of Oxford University encouraged by the school’s regents to run with (and even against) the bulls at Pamplona, has written a paper in which he claims that the characters of these types of people can be deduced from their pronunciation of the word. Unfortunately, he mistakenly used the paper to line the bottom of a canary cage and from that point on would not touch it, although he still attempts to quote it from memory.
Intrigued by this theory, I convinced an editor with a hearing loss to give me an assignment interviewing Dr. Glimmering. I phoned Dr. Glimmering and learned that he was about to spend a few days in Havana mediating on the correct pronunciation of actor Cuba Gooding Jr.’s name [special font needed]. He agreed to talk to me there and the following weekend we met late in the afternoon at Chez Ché. Over Poolabanga Slings with the subtle impact of a Dutch rub by Mike Tyson the interview began, with Dr. Glimmering confiding to me that he’d never met a parrot who could handle polysyllabic repartee, and he didn’t like their weird feet, either.
“But do you really think a person’s character can be determined from the way he or she pronounces the word Caribbean?” I asked, slurring the word so I wouldn’t be thought of as biased in either direction.
“Is it so strange?” Dr. Glimmering asked. “After all, graphologists discern character from the way a person signs a check. The fact is, one can tell more about people from the sound of their voices than from the way they cross their t’s and dot their i’s—, and, for that matter, from the way they cross their fingers and roll their eyes.”
“How’s the rum?” I asked.
Abruptly, Dr. Glimmering tossed off his drink in one swallow, and using (impressively) American Sign Language, handspelled to the waiter for another.
“You say [special font needed], I noticed,” he said, “and I say [special font needed]. Therefore, presumably, you say [special font needed], and I say [special font needed]. Perhaps we should call the whole thing off.”
“Do you say [special font needed] or [special font needed]?” I asked, my patience running aground on the reef of my curiosity.
Dr. Glimmering waved a reproving finger at me, while with the other hand commandeering my drink. “Isn’t the term speech writer oxymoronic?” he asked, to distract me, and in the space of a blink drained my glass.
I caught the waiter’s eye and held up my glass. In a trice he brought two more drinks as well as two menus, which we appraised. “I’ll have the tongue,” Dr. Glimmering announced. “Which is my favorite meal, provided it doesn’t talk back.”
We put in an order of Langues de Boeuf for two and returned to our drinks. My own tongue was already beginning to feel pickled, so before it began to feel indistinguishable from the imminent entrée, I asked, “You stand by your theory’s scientific validity, then?”
Dr. Glimmering responded to the question with the kind of expression a debutante might make if asked to change a tire. “Read . . . my . . . lips,” he said, then with an orotund twinkling in his eyes (an old linguist’s trick), he orally mimed the word yes, adding an exclamation mark in midair by way of the aforementioned sign lingo.
“Let me hear you say the word without the verbal glissando over the consonants with the tip of your rum-soaked tongue,” he said, “and then I will tell you whom you voted for in the last election, whether you’ve ever gone down the playground slide headfirst, and the half you’d prefer in a horse costume.” He dispatched half of his drink, and went on, “And also whether you think the glass is half full or half empty…. But first you should understand more of my method. It’s true that there are only two kinds of people, those who say [special font needed] and those who say [special font needed]. But, as the domino theory would have it, and in the spirit of a nuclear chain reaction, there are also three other kinds of people—those who pronounce Hawaii [special font needed], those who pronounce it [special font needed], and those—”he shuddered here—“who pronounce it [special font needed].” He shot me a sniper’s squint. “So, you see, there is more depth here than you may have expected to wade into.”
“I brought hip boots and a life jacket if it gets too deep,” I told him. I noticed that his glass was miraculously empty again.
He caught the waiter’s eye, waggled two fingers in the air, and went on, “I’ve wanted to be a linguist ever since as a boy I saw the scene in To Have and Have Not, in which one of the pro-Vichy hoods on Martinique called Bogart “lingua larga” Here, with canny precision, his voice metamorphosed into a flawless Bogart impression, and, with his upper lip rumpling in visual accompaniment, he concluded, “Finish your drink, shweetheart, there’s more where that came from.”
I finished my drink and set the glass down. Then I hit him with both barrels right from the horse’s mouth, to mix a metaphor that was perhaps the equivalent of Dr. Jekyll’s potion. I said Caribbean the way I say it, clearly and with confidence, then asked, “So, character-wise, what can you say about me from the way I pronounced the word?”
Dr. Glimmering looked at, or, more accurately, through me meditatively, and, at length, said, “I can tell you this: that in a conga line you’d be right in the middle, where the swaying is more precarious. For some really detailed analysis of your character, I’ll need to hear you say these words….” Here he picked up a cocktail napkin, wrote something on it beside the coconut palm, and slid the napkin across the table.
I looked at the names:
Terre Haute
Chateauneuf-sur-Loire
Ouagadougo
Dnepropetrovsk
Bedford Falls
It was a sucker’s game! I knew that when I pronounced Ouagadougo I’d swivel my hips and he’d know immediately that I’m musically inclined, and the way I’d pronounce the first two names would leave no doubt how I feel about French cuisine.
Our drinks arrived, and so did our tongues. Dr. Glimmering forthwith put sauce on his (the one on the plate) and fell to engaging it in a dialogue with his palate.
I tossed in the towel on the interview and followed suit. Dr. Glimmering’s tongue (the one in his mouth) was not saying anything I thought would rival a parrot’s exclamations for insight and originality. But I didn’t care. I was on an expense account and the blonde and I were starting to make eye contact.
CLASSICAL BLATHER: Trickster Treats
Nick Humez
Hallowe’en falls neatly on a date equidistant between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice; it is one of four cross-quarter days[^1] in the solar calendar. We are accustomed to seeing roving bands of children in costume going door to door in a mendicant ritual[^2] that demands treats on ostensible pain of tricks played at the expense of those who refuse. In some parts of America the tricks are played anyway, but on the day before, which is given the name Mischief Night.[^3]
But if ordinary people confine their tricking today to such feasts as Hallowe’en and April Fool’s Day,[^4] there is also a character in the mythology of most cultures who plays tricks all the time—for whom, indeed, playing tricks is in his very nature. Tricksters are the embodiment of a social paradox: When authority becomes too overbearing and stuffy, it may be necessary to subvert the social order so as to restore it to harmony and balance. That is the trickster’s job—his raison d’être, or at least his primary function in society.[^5]
One story, striking in its cross-culturalism, tells how fire was obtained for us from the gods through the ruse of a trickster. For the Greeks, he was Prometheus, one of the only two Titans[^6] to side with the Olympians in their war against their father Cronus and his siblings, who contrived to sneak fire away from Olympus carried in the hollow of a reed; earlier, he had managed to fool the gods into choosing the fat and bones as their share of animal sacrifices, leaving the meat for human beings. In Polynesian, the trickster Maui was said to have persuaded the fire goddess, Mahu-Ika, to give him her flaming fingernails and toenails one by one, then extinguished them, until she flung the last of them onto the ground in exasperation, whereupon the entire world caught fire and Maui managed to escape immolation and save the world only by invoking the god of storms to send a monsoon. (He had also been responsible for catching the sun in a net and beating it into submission with the magic jawbone of his grandmother Muri-ranga-whenua so that we might all enjoy longer days, as well as snagging and dragging up the two islands of New Zealand from the bottom of the sea with his fishhook and line.)[^7]
The Klamath Indians of the American northwest, on the other hand, attribute the gift of fire to Coyote, who won the right to take it away from Old Man Thunder by cheating him in a game of dice.[^8] Coyote is one of several animal tricksters recurrent in native American myth, others being Crow and Rabbit. The latter is featured in a story from the Northern Pueblo Indians of the American southwest, in which the trickster is himself tricked: Coyote thinks to catch and eat Rabbit Boy, who persuades him to don a saddle and bridle, rides him to and from a celebration at which all Rabbit Boy’s relatives are feasting as Coyote is obliged to look on while tethered to a piñon tree, then escapes down his rabbit hole and mocks Coyote from behind his slammed door.
The European equivalent of Coyote is Fox, who is featured in a number of the fables going all the way back to the legendary Æsop.[^9] The common expression “sour grapes” comes from the story of the fox who, finding that a bunch of grapes was beyond his reach, went on his way remarking that they were probably sour anyway. But his trickster character comes to the fore in other fables, such as the one in which he falls into a water tank, convinces a goat to jump in with him so that he can use the goat’s horns as a ladder, and then abandons the hapless hooved one to his fate. (Aesop’s moral: “Only a fool starts something whose end he can’t clearly see.”) Aesop’s fox is occasionally outfoxed too: A fox and a donkey agree to hunt together, but come upon a lion. The fox strikes a bargain with the lion to betray the donkey in exchange for the lion sparing his own life, and leads the donkey into a trap. The lion, however, once he sees that the donkey can’t escape, falls on the fox and gobbles him up on the spot, knowing that he can eat the donkey at his leisure. (Moral: “Plot against your friends and you are apt to destroy yourself in the bargain.”)
The fox also figures in a set of medieval French stories (attributed to one Pierre de Saint-Cloud and dating from the last quarter of the twelfth century AD) known collectively as the Roman de Renard (“The Romance of the Fox”).[^10] The wily Renard (French for ‘fox’) is a stand-in for the rising middle class and is pitted against Ysengrin the wolf, symbolic of a brutal aristocracy whose contempt for those who were no longer bound to the land and its lord but instead lived in towns (French: villes) survives in the French and English word villain.
Tricksters monkey around with our perceptions of the way things are supposed to be: They change shape, throw their voices, impersonate the opposite sex (as do some shamans in American Indian tribes and in certain parts of Siberia, whose fluid identity is all of a piece with their ability to cross easily between the spirit world and this one).
The trickster is in his very essence a subversive, a figure who undercuts the majesty of the gods and the awe we feel at their powers. What distinguishes a trickster from the one-shot deceiver is that he is always playing tricks. Thus Loki, the Norse trickster god, is the shape-changer who steals Freyja’s necklace; he collaborates (under compulsion, to be sure) with Thiazi the eagle in kidnapping Idun and her golden apples of youth, and then helps to recover both; he puts his cleverness at the service of Thor so that the latter can get his hammer, Mjollnir, back from Thrym, king of the Frost Giants, by mans of a transvestite deception (disguising himself as a maidservant and Thor as Freyja). He forces Andvari to yield up all his gold, including the fateful ring with the dwarf’s curse on it (the prototype for the Ring of the Nibelungs in Wagner’s epic opera cycle). His mischief seems boundless, but often results in the restoration of order by a roundabout route.[^11] [If Þjazi is rendered Thiazi and Þrymr Thrym, I don’t see why Iðunn should be Idun rather than Ithun or Idhun.]
Hermes, the Greek god of thieves—he stole Apollo’s cattle when he was just one day old—is the trickster of Olympus; his swiftness is suited not merely to the messenger but to the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t sleight-of-hand we associate with the stage conjurer, flimflam man, or shell-game operator. As a subverter of authority he is often seen in company with stern Zeus, as in the tale of Baucis and Philemon, in which Hermes turns the old poor couple’s pitcher into a bottomless cornucopia, or in the Roman playwright Plautus’s Amphitryon, in which the standard myth of Zeus’s impersonation of Alcmene’s absent husband in order to beget Hercules is embellished by Hermes' posing as Amphitryon’s comic slave, Sosia. The tradition of the trickster servant (the French term is valet fourbe) was already well established in the late “New Comedy” of Menander and others, on whom Plautus and his contemporary Terence openly and liberally drew.
Many of the conventions of Roman comedy survived well into the Middle Ages and beyond: The French playwright Molière (pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), a contemporary of La Fontaine’s, after abandoning the study of philosophy[^12] got his theatrical training with practitioners of the improvisational commedia dell’arte in the south of France before the culmination of his career as head of Louis XIV’s favorite troupe of comic actors (surviving to this day as the Comédie-Française).
Several of Molière’s plays center on trickster subordinates, such as his farce Les Fourberies de Scapin (an adaptation of Terence’s Phormio), whose title character is every inch the slave-as-fixer, engineering the genre’s expected love-match between the young man and maiden in the face of paternal obstinacy. Phormio/Scapin is the subversive subaltern par excellence, as is Figaro in the plays written by Jean Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais in the late 1700s and the two operas derived from them: Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Rossini’s Barber of Seville. (Indeed, both plays were banned for some time in Austria because they made the aristocracy distinctly uneasy; as a monarch in another autocracy ominously remarked after seeing a similarly subversive play, “This show poked fun at a lot of people, and especially me.”)[^13]
One type of trickster who generally gets away with it, at least in the traditional stories, has been the court jester, a figure closely related to the valet fourbe. Beatrice K. Otto, in an exhaustive study of royal fools, concludes that “[t]he jester is in a sense on the side of the ruler,” in that he has a license to tell a king plainly what other courtiers fear to express openly.[^14] Otto’s examples range from the Chinese you, who was expected to be both jester and jongleur, to the viziers and fools of the Abbasid caliphs (Harun al-Rashid’s lieutenant Yahya is the subject of many such tales) and the Tudor and Jacobean courts: Will Somers, “Kinges fole” to Henry VIII; Queen Elizabeth’s jester Tarlton (a former swineherd); and Archie Armstrong, who traded a promising career in sheep-stealing for a post as court buffoon to James I. In some instances the fools really do seem to have been simple, or at least a bit touched, their wit rooted in a natural candor impervious to social graces;[^15] on the other hand, others were canny professional comics whose jokes were celebrated in jest-books which long outlived them.[^16]
Another kind of professional is the trickster outlaw in popular ballad and story. The legendary Robin Hood[^17] struggled against the brutal tyranny of the Sheriff of Nottingham, and popular songsheets hawked in the streets of 17th- and 18th-century London celebrated the latest highwaymen brought to grim justice at Tyburn with at least ambivalence if not outright admiration (e.g., “Brennan on the Moor”). And new antiheroes are being created all the time: Woody Guthrie, the leftist balladeer of Oklahoma’s Dust Bowl era, sang of “Pretty Boy Floyd,” a reluctant Depression outlaw driven into life off the edge of social respectability after killing a deputy sheriff in a gun battle provoked by the lawman’s incivility towards Floyd’s wife. Visiting the home of “many a starving family/Where he’d come to beg a meal/And underneath his napkin/Left a thousand-dollar bill:/‘You may say that I’m an outlaw,/You may say that I’m a thief,/But here’s a Christmas dinner/For the families on relief.'”
The trickster figure has continued to flourish in film and on television throughout the 20th century and beyond. Subverting the power hierarchy of America’s peacetime army during the Cold War era was vaudeville veteran Phil Silvers in the television role of Sgt. Bilko in the late 1950s (the role was revived a generation later by Steve Martin; the word bilk, of course, means “swindle”). Robin Williams pushes both the trickster and transvestite buttons in the film Mrs. Doubtfire and played a prep-school teacher who cunningly (though eventually at the cost of his job) subverts a dull headmaster with his inspired pedagogy in and out of the classroom in Dead Poets Society. And Danny Kaye, many of whose movie roles in the 1950s were trickster ones (The Court Jester, for example—and note that whatever their role may have been in real-life courts, the jesters are often tricksters, or at least subversives, in literature, e.g., the fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear), brilliantly revived Gogol’s 1836 spoof of Russian imperial bureaucracy and small-town self-important venality, The Inspector General.[^18]
In some instances, a trickster may become a culture hero due to external circumstances reaching far beyond the original myth. Poseyemu was an Indian from the Tewa Pueblo, miraculously conceived as the result of his mother’s having eaten a magic piñon nut. Clumsy and scorned in youth, he nevertheless came into possession of a miraculous hoof rattle which allowed him to attract game; when the town’s old cacique died, Poseyemu was chosen to succeed him, and under his leadership his people became fabulously prosperous.
The story came to be widely circulated during the 17th century, and expanded upon so that Poseyemu was now associated with Montezuma II, the last emperor of the Aztecs. Andrés Reséndez writes that “[i]n the years leading up to the Mexican-American War, the legend …conveyed an unmistakable sense of Pueblo resistance and tenacity in the face of extremely adverse conditions…[and] sought to appeal to the Pueblo Indians by casting them not as subjugated peoples but as the divine founders of the Mexican nation. It created an instant bridge between Hispanics and pueblos and remained a powerful myth long after the Taos Rebellion of 1847.”[^19] In the end, Poseyemu/Montezuma had taken on the qualities of a savior who would return to lead the Pueblos from his temporary hiding place (some versions placed him at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, biding his time like a sleeping Arthur or Barbarossa), and a sacred fire was kept burning in his honor at the Pecos Pueblo in Texas until the last inhabitants departed in the mid-1800s: Rex quondam, rexque futurus.
[1]: While most of us can define solstice and equinox and have at least a rough idea of their dates, cross-quarter days are for the most part ignored in modern society. Their survival in the calendar of the Christian church suggests how very much more important they were to northern European pagans: October 31 was the Celtic feast called Samhain , a day on which the boundary between the Otherworld and this one was much more permeable than at other times of year, much like the semiannual Roman Lemuria ; see Alexander and Nicholas Humez, A B C Et Cetera (Boston: Godine, 1985), pp.65–66. The Christian designation of the day after Samhain as All Saints’ Day (Latin sanctus = English “hallow[ed],” “saint[ed],” whence All Hallows' Eve [n ], contracted to Hallowe’en ) is mirrored in the adoption of the Feast of Saint Brigid (according to some sources, Brigid was originally a Celtic goddess who watched over women in childbirth) as Candlemas , the day for blessing the Paschal Candle to be lit at Easter. The Lemuria was celebrated on three evenings in May: the 9th, 11th, and 13th; in the British Isles, Beltane , another Celtic cross-quarter festival, survives as May Day .
[2]: In England the children’s begging is formalized as the “penny for the Old Guy,” i.e., Guy Fawkes, effigies of whom are burned on the anniversary of his foiled attempt to blow up the king and Parliament on Nov. 5, 1605 (the so-called “Gunpowder Plot”); but the proximity to the old date of Samhain suggests that in some form this latter-day cross-quarter ritual is probably a great deal older than its Jacobean eponym.
[3]: I am indebted to the late Linda Sampey, a native of Yeadon, Pa., for informing me of this custom as practiced in the neighborhood of Philadelphia (personal conversation, ca. 1971). Subsequent informants have confirmed its existence elsewhere in the country, e.g., in northern Ohio, where it is known as Beggars' Night (Leslie Edwards, personal conversation, 30 August 2005).
[4]: The French version of the gleeful exclamation of the perpetrator of the trick (“April Fool!”) is Poisson d’Avril ! [“April fish!”]
[5]: So wrote a Harvard Medical School psychiatry professor, John Mack, in a New York Times column about tricksters and the Nov. 2000 election: The trickster, Mack says, “is providence’s representative, a kind of savior sent when a society is in crisis and no longer serving the needs of its people.” This is also the central argument in Lewis Hyde’s seminal study of the trickster figure, Trickster Makes This World (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998).
[6]: The other was his brother, Epimetheus, whose wife, Pandora, opened her infamous box and let loose all manner of evils upon this world. Nathaniel Hawthorne charmingly retells this tale as the chapter entitled “The Paradise of Children” in his Wonder Book (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1880), the first of two children’s books of Greek myths he wrote in the 1850s. (Its sequel, Tanglewood Tales, or the Second Wonder Book , was republished by Houghton Mifflin in 1883.) Other Greek myths cited in this article can be found in any standard college mythology text, e.g., the Classical Mythology of Mark P. O. Morford and Robert J. Lenardon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999 [sixth edition]).
[7]: For the New Zealand version of these stories, see www.maori.org.nz/Korero . A Hawaiian recension, written for the delight and edification of younger readers, begins at http://maven.english.hawaii.edu/407/projects/roncox/finmain.html.
[8]: This and the following story can be found in Richard Erdoes, American Indian Trickster Tales (New York: Penguin, 1999). In western Africa, a favorite animal trickster is Anansi the spider, about whom stories are also widely told in the Caribbean, a robust cultural legacy handed down from the African slaves captured and brought to the West Indies to work the plantations.
[9]: The tradition is that Aesop was a slave in 7th-century BC Greece. A number of the fables attributed to him were charmingly rendered in French verse by Jean de La Fontaine in the 17th century AD Norman R. Shapiro, who has in turn translated a hundred of the latter into modern English poetry, tells us in the introduction to his first selection (Fifty Fables of La Fontaine [Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997], p. xxvi) that Books I–VI, which La Fontaine published in 1668, were “mainly adaptations of the Aesopic corpus,” adding (p. xxvii, note 2) that there had been a number of medieval French fabulists as well, predecessors of whom, he says, La Fontaine was apparently unaware.
[10]: This classic exists in many French editions, but English translations are rare; one of them is Le Roman de Renard (Editions Tallander, 2003, a reprint of the company’s 1909 edition, lovingly illustrated by Benjamin Rabier, creator of the familiar logo for Laughing Cow cheese). And can it be coincidental that Robertson Davies gives the name Magnus Isengrim to his magician protagonist in World of Wonders (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977), the third novel in his Deptford Trilogy? To be sure, the nature of the characters differs markedly: Isengrim is an intelligent good guy, in sharp contrast to the medieval romance’s stupid and mean baronial wolf.
[11]: Loki’s essential malice, however, eventually undoes him: He causes the death of the universally beloved Balder, Odin and Frigga’s son, and later insults every member of the Norse pantheon at a banquet in Valhalla, for which they bind him in chains with a serpent dripping poison onto his face. This is quite at odds with the trickster’s usual restorative role, and the Norse further believed that it would be Loki who will attack Asgard at the head of the forces of evil in the final cataclysm of Ragnarok, “the Twilight of the Gods.” For a plausible explanation of how the latter-day priestly writers of the Poetic and Prose Eddas might have conflated the Norse end-of-the-world narrative with Christian beliefs (possibly including at least a partial identification of Loki with Satan), see the introduction to Kevin Crossley-Holland’s The Norse Myths (New York: Pantheon, 1980).
[12]: Molière’s philosophy teacher was Gassendi, whose writings on corpuscular mechanics – the “new philosophy” of particles and their interactions in a “Newtonian” universe – would profoundly influence Newton’s rival, the German philosopher-mathematician Leibniz, a generation after Molière’s death (which overtook him at the theater while he was starring, ironically enough, as the hypochondriac in his own play Le Malade Imaginaire ).
[13]: The play was The Inspector General (in Russian, Revizor ), and on hearing of the Tsar’s words the playwright, Nikolai Gogol, prudently and quickly went into exile, from which he did not return for over a decade.
[14]: Beatrice K. Otto, Fools Are Everywhere (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), p. 246.
[15]: The tradition of the “holy fool” is widespread, from the Bauls of Bengal to the idiot son of Tsar Ivan the Terrible, called Fyodor the Bell-Ringer because he delighted in making the rounds of the Moscow churches and tolling their bells (the actual running of the country being in the capable if occasionally ruthless hands of the boyar Boris Godunov).
[16]: Otto, op. cit . A collection of jokes attributed to Somers was still being reprinted in the mid-1600s.
[17]: It has been suggested that Robin Hood was originally Robin du Bois , “Robin [of the] Wood,” a name suspiciously similar to Robin Goodfellow, another name for sylvan Britain’s Pan-like figure Puck. For an exhaustive and profusely illustrated compendium of Robin Hood lore, see the University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees Library website www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/rh/rhhome.stm .
18: Comprehensive filmographies of both Kaye and Williams may be found at www.imdb.com .
[19]: Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 259–263. If the metamorphosis of trickster into the savior of a whole people seems far-fetched, a close reading of the Gospel narratives following the Resurrection show Jesus behaving in some very trickster-like ways: appearing out of nowhere in the midst of some disciples gathered in a locked upper room, or walking alongside others who do not recognize their companion until a sudden revelation, and then vanishing. As G. K. Chesterton somewhere says, one of the hardest things for humanity to see clearly is God’s mirth.
Dirty Words
They mainstreamed all the dirty words,
They’ll never shock again.
The S, the H, the C, the D;
None to offend our civility.
Toothless now for too much bite.
(Even the F seems almost right.)
For the wicked, none reserved;
For the rest, too often served.
No more dirty words to kill you.
Fools, invent some new ones, will you?
—A.M. Siriano
The American Dialect Society in Albuquerque: Notes from the Academy Awards of Words
Mark Peters, Chicago, Illinois
Since 1990, the American Dialect Society (ADS) has been selecting a Word of the Year in emulation of Time’s Person of the Year award, with winners that have included not!, cyber, weapons of mass destruction, and metrosexual. The ADS vote is the most respected WOTY event, and over the years the preliminary categories have immortalized some real gems as well, including Ejaculation Proclamation (1998’s Most Euphemistic), shuicide bomber (2001’s Most Creative), and stalkette (2004’s Most Unnecessary). January 2006 was my first WOTY meeting, and in anticipation of attending and writing about it, I was as giddy as a schoolgirl when the sailboats dock. There just aren't many places you can hear one linguist say “I must speak for Bumper Nutz”—only to have his thought finished by another—“for they cannot speak for themselves.”
But those words and more were heard at 5:30 on January 6, 2006 at the Albuquerque Hyatt, the ADS’s home for the week. The WOTY vote (hosted by Alan Metcalf, author of Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success, and Wayne Glowka, editor of American Speech’s “Among the New Words” column) was an hour and a half of high and low comedy, as professional and amateur word-lovers reveled in their passion with the enthusiasm and competitiveness of a fantasy football league. It’s hard to compose a straight narrative of all the impromptu suggestions, supporting speeches, unintentional comedy, intentional comedy, and the preposterous verbal environment, but before I even try, here are some highlights of the 10:30 am nominating meeting that got the linguistic ball rolling:
1) Glowka’s opening words: “Time to tuck our whale tails and our muffin tops back into our low-riders and get down to business.” If you thought whale tail and muffin top were jargon from the worlds of zoology and coffee shops, well, they actually refer to beltline-area wardrobe catastrophes—according to the ADS definitions, a whale tail is “the appearance of thong or g-string underwear above the waistband of pants, short, or a skirt” and a muffin top is “the bulge of flesh hanging over the top of low-rider jeans.”
2) Steve Kleinedler, a senior editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, nominating truthiness (defined by ADS as “the quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true”) and grippy (a silly alternative to gripping), two words that sprang from the fertile minds behind the new Colbert Report, which, like its parent The Daily Show, has been a favorite of mine and a feast of neology, with coinages including forgive-y, Darwinlutionist, deballification, humbuggery, Bill-of-Rights-hugger, and Jesi (the plural of Jesus).
3) Glowka explaining the difference between neuticles (fake testicles attached to a pooch for dog-self-esteem-related reasons) and Bumper Nutz (fake testicles attached to a car for male-nutjob-related reasons). That’s not a distinction I hope will ever need to be made again. Ok, that’s a lie—if I ran the world, that distinction would be on the SAT, GRE, and every courthouse in the nation. Moving on.
4) Hearing a dignified speaker like Metcalf—patron linguist of the WOTY event, by the way—say crotchfruit (a childish synonym for children nominated by Grant Barrett). That’s comedy, folks.
Back to the linguistic Super Bowl… The first vote was for “Most Useful,” and podcast triumphed over a field that included lifehack (a programmer-inspired word for things that make your life more efficient), patent troll (someone who buys up patents with an eye on suing people, not making stuff), and truthiness. At this point, truthiness seemed to be done for the day and as likely to be a successful word as Federletus, a nominating-meeting reject that refers to then unborn crotchfruit of Britney Spears and Kevin Federline, much like the then-uncoined Infangelina names the growing spawn of Brangelina, the unholy-yet-not-unhot union of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
Up next was “Most Creative,” one of several categories in which delightful words for disgraceful things dominated, as whale tail and muffin top left poor pinosaur(a really, really old pine tree found in Australia) and fleeancé (a goofy term for the runaway bride) in the linguistic dirt. In a runoff vote, the whales topped the muffins. Next, Federline’s nickname K-fed— one of those annoying abbreviated names like Flo-Jo, A-Rod, and Joe Pa— won “Most Unnecessary” over man-date (a non-conjugalicious outing involving two dudes), pope-squatting (a word for cybersquatting domain names of prospective Popes while gruesomely awaiting the death of the current pontiff), and reverse logistics— a deliciously euphemistic term for desupplying a warehouse that got my wasted vote, much to my sad, sad chagrin.
I was quickly cheered up when crotchfruit— which sprang from the non-peopling loins of the child-free movement—won “Most Outrageous” word. I didn’t have long to revel in this decisive victory over Bumper Nutz, Whizzinator (a handy urine-cleansing device), Ex-Lax option (an immediate flushing, er, withdrawal of troops from Iraq),and intelligent design (a last-minute nomination that finished a solid second place), as the voting continued, and the perennially notable category “Most Euphemistic” was up. Earlier, I had nominated holistic practitioner, a euphemism for prostitute that has caught on in Canada due to lax laws for opening a holistic health center/brothel. Though my beloved euphemism lost (along with holiday tree, a preposterous synonym for a Christmas tree, and VBIED, a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device that in more descriptive days was known as a car bomb) to internal nutrition, I didn’t shed any tears for the ho-listic loss: internal nutrition is a government-coined term for forcefeeding a detainee, and I think even Georges Carlin and Orwell would be a little stunned by this noxious use of language.
Sportswriter Bill Simmons recently wrote, “One of the prevailing themes of 2005 was that Tom Cruise turned into a crazy person,” and this was not lost on the linguists in Albuquerque. In a rare moment of consensus and cultural-linguistic kismet, a Tom Cruise category had been suggested and agreed upon during the nominating meeting to host phrases like jump the couch— a mutation of jump the shark in honor of Cruise’s much-spoofed hysterics on the Oprah show—and words like the self-defining Cruise-azy. It seems that do the Cruise and to be Cruised had also been coined, in addition to TomKat, a name-blend nickname for the swell coupling of Cruise and his zombie bride Katie Holmes. (I didn’t remember this until the next day, but I’ve also seen Cruise missile used to describe Mr. Cruise’s, uh, “top gun.”) Anyway, these words were lumped under yet another Cruise-y word, Cruiselex, and jump the couch was an easy winner.
In a much more boring contest for “Most Likely to Succeed,” sudoku and podcast trounced Cyber Monday (the online-shopping blowout after Thanksgiving) and folksonomy (a neat word that, according to Wikipedia,“ refers to the collaborative but unsophisticated way in which information is being categorized on the web,” and I guess Wikipedia should know). In the run-off, sudoku won, and I yawned.
Can we get back to the fun words? I have the attention span of a squirrel on crack, and I needed more stimulating words to keep me awake. Thankfully, I was awakened by pope-squatting, which was revived in the “Least Likely to Succeed” category, where it crapped all over the just-invented Cruiselex, Brangelina, GSAVE (Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism), and metrospirital, (a variation of metrosexual that, despite my word-appreciating ways, makes me want to bleach my brain).
On to the main event… The WOTY candidates were nominated on the spot, and they were the mixiest of mixed bags: topical words like intelligent design, refugee, and all Katrina variations (Katrinagate, Katrina pox, Katrina cough, etc.), clever terms like truthiness, disaster-industrial complex, and brownout, plus the somewhat preposterous entrants Cruiselex and heckuva job (which came from George W. Bush’s thumbs-uppy words to FEMA chief/moron Michael Brown: “Brownie, you’re doin' a heckuva job”). In the initial vote, Katrina edged truthiness 36 votes to 32, resulting in a runoff. It was at this point that I turned to someone and said, “We are so close to being on The Colbert Report right now!” Ok, I’m a starfracker, so shoot me.
Though I was about as nonpartisan as a chicken in a cockfight, I did appreciate (or at least notice) how Katrina and truthiness represent polar views of what the WOTY should be. If you think the WOTY should be a word that’s been in the news, that people have been using as never before, and that has national significance, then Katrina is your kind of word. If you think interestingness and cleverness and resonance count more than use and prominence, then truthiness is up your street. Before the final showdown between Katrina and truthiness, several folks spoke up on behalf of both words. One agitated linguist insisted that truthiness was a vague, preposterous word, to which Slayer Slang author Michael Adams responded by defining truthiness as something that’s “truthy as opposed to facty.”
I don’t know if my memory or notes are less reliable at this point—no wonder I approve of truthiness!—but I threw my two or three cents in. I tried to subvert the argument of the anti-truthiness warrior and said something like, “Detractors of truthiness say it’s a vague word—and they’re right! But the slipperiness of truthiness embodies the slippery games the Bush administration, religious groups, and the media play with the truth!” I swear I saw heads nodding, and this is my article, so there.
Also, just seconds before the final vote, someone from the American Name Society came in and said they were holding a “Name of the Year” vote in the morning that Katrina was almost sure to win. For ministers of truthiness like myself, this was good news and a great omen: Why give Katrina two wins? Hasn’t she done enough?
Sure enough, at 6:30, Allan said those magical words: “Well, truthiness will out!” And out it did, by a margin of 66 to 22. I promptly did the happy dance and inwardly high-fived myself: As a rabid fan of Colbert and amusing y-suffix words like humanitariany, special-forces-y, come-hither-y, creepy-uncle-y, and forbidden-love-y, helping make truthiness WOTY was sweeter than a bucket of honey habenero wings (which can be found in large, yummy quantities at the Doubletree Hotel in Albuquerque, if you’re in town).
As I finish writing this during the second week of February, it sure looks like truthiness has a chance to stick around—the February 13 issue of Newsweek carries the headline “The ‘Truthiness’ of Stephen Colbert,” and truthiness has been used prominently in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Times, USA Today, and elsewhere to discuss even non-Colbert topics such as James Frey’s lie-filled memoir. James Callan (editor of Neologasm, a new new-word blog) offered a plausible explanation for the appeal of truthiness on the ADS listserv: “I imagine that ‘truthiness’ benefits because it’s a media-friendly way of saying ‘bullshit,’ in the HG Frankfurt sense of the word. If not an exact synonym, it’s close enough for headline work” (Jan. 27, 2006).
Does this mean malarkey, twaddle, rubbish, hogwash, and hooey have a brand spanking new sibling? Time will tell, but as Metcalf wrote, also on the ADS lists, “Like astronomers witnessing the birth of a nova, we are watching the nativity and infancy of a new word that has the possibility of becoming a permanent addition to the vocabulary. And we have been midwives” (Jan. 18, 2006). I’ve never been so proud to be a wife, and that’s the God’s honest truthiness.
HORRIBILE DICTU
Matt Coward, Somerset, Britain
“In my role, I drive the performance of the policing family and I need to keep the momentum going.” So says the police inspector of my home town, disappointing those of us who’d hoped his role might have something to do with preventing vandalism, fining litter louts and chasing bag snatchers. Ah well; as long as the family’s performance momentum keeps getting driven, I suppose that’s better than nothing.
Under attack and in retreat around the globe, McDonald’s the burger-maker is pursuing a new public relations strategy. “The McDonald’s family will vigorously communicate the facts about McDonald’s, our people and our values,” according to a spokesman. I’ll leave readers to digest “our people” and “our values” in their own time, but when did a franchise-based chain of snack bars become a family? And is the McDonald clan related to my local copper’s tribe?
As one who unashamedly holds to twentieth-century values in matters of class warfare, I long for the days when enormous U.S. corporations didn’t all engage in cuddly talk. I sometimes fear that the downtrodden masses will never rise in bloody revolt against their masters because they’re too busy vomiting at, for instance, the revelation that Ben and Jerry’s mission statement pledges “deep respect” for individuals. To be precise, the Vermont ice cream maker has a three-part mission statement, and believes that “Central To The Mission Of Ben & Jerry’s is the belief that all three parts must thrive equally in a manner that commands deep respect for individuals in and outside the company.”
They do know that that doesn’t mean anything, don’t they? In what concrete ways is respecting individuals central to the marketing of their “euphoric concoctions”—and what specifically makes their respect deep, rather than merely existent?
The only reason I know all this about Ben and Jerry is that British newspapers have been reporting their launch of an ice cream named, amazingly, “Black & Tan.” To be fair, they haven’t yet tried selling this particular tub of euphoria to the Irish, just as I don’t suppose they market a variety called "Lynch Mob" in Alabama.
Also, I’ve just double-checked their mission statement and no, true enough, there isn’t anything in there about “having at least the vaguest, tiniest clue concerning the history and culture of the various peoples upon whom, with deep respect in and outside the company, we thrust our euphoric concoctions.”
Big business is the same beast it’s ever been, for good or ill; it’s just that the language in which it clothes its rapaciousness has become so much more annoying.
As private-sector businesses increasingly penetrate the U.K.’s National Health Service, the word patient is steadily being replaced by client. This, I’m glad to say, has caused a small amount of outrage from people who understand the enormous philosophical difference between the two terms. One letter to a national newspaper pointed out that doctors have patients, while “accountants, lawyers, and prostitutes have clients.”
The managerial class is having none of this backsliding. One regional health service chief executive explained that users of health facilities preferred not to be called “patients” because they were “fed up with being defined by their illness.” Those of us who, as already admitted, have fallen behind the times thought that was the whole point of socialised medicine: to be defined by one’s illness, rather than one’s economic relationships.
(The most enjoyable letter I’ve read in a newspaper lately, by the way, was one which began “At almost 80, I am the last person to complain about so-called political correctness,” and went on to damn a previous correspondent’s remarks about old people as “inappropriate and unacceptable.” In other words, the cause of his upset was that classic PC sin, ageism; proof, yet again, that the rules of discourse are only politically correct when you don’t agree with them. When you do, they’re plain good manners.)
Buying by mail, of course, is a great way to gather business-speak Horribiles, such as this email message from a merchant: “We are pleased to advise that your order is currently being processed and will be sent to your delivery destination very shortly.”
My delivery destination? Good grief. Perhaps if I’d paid the extra, they’d have sent it to my address, instead.
[Mat Coward’s many doings can be kept track of here: http://hometown.aol.co.uk/matcoward/myhomepage/newsletter.html.]
The Hyperbolic Contrast
Tony Percy, Southport, North Carolina
In 1965, when I was eighteen, the prefects (i.e., student officers) at my independent school in England put on a performance of the farce Dry Rot, by John Chapman, the plot of which involved some bent bookmakers trying to rig a horse-race. Complementing an unmemorable performance as Mrs. Wagstaff, my enduring contribution was to create extracts from spoof critical reviews for use in the program(me). The line that gained the best response ran as follows:
“Makes Moses and Aron look like the Headmasters' Conference.”
Now, while most VERBATIM readers can probably guess that the conference of headmasters (principals) from Britain’s leading independent schools was, and remains, a rather staid and decorous affair, the reference to the Schoenberg opera may not be immediately familiar to them. To a callow teenager in 1960s England, however, Moses and Aron represented a frisson of excitement, and the allusion would have been familiar to most people. The performance of the opera has been described by the Sunday Times as “the notoriously scandalous 1965 Covent Garden production, directed by Sir Peter Hall and conducted by Solti.” Further, "Despite the controversy surrounding the sacrifice of four naked virgins at the climax of the golden-calf episode—or perhaps because of it—the Hall production was only revived once, in 1966."[^1] What had this to do with an amateur, even amateurish, production of Dry Rot? Well, both works were performed on stage, and the positioning of the farce as something more scandalous than the opera, while suggesting a closer link between the opera and the conference, comprised a rhetorical device that I like to call the “hyperbolic contrast.”
The model for my simile was the famous review of Alan Sillitoe’s gritty novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning:
“A novel of today, with a freshness and raw fury that makes Room at the Top look like a vicarage tea-party.”[^2] Room at the Top was another earthy novel about passion in the North of England, an area that had hitherto not received its share of the literary limelight, written by another of the “Angry Young Men,”[^3] John Braine.
Hence the allusion to the demure tea-parties associated more with drawing-room comedies of the previous generation. The gap in tone between the two works was in fact slender, hyperbolic contrast being used to intensify the desired impact of the newer novel. And over the years “like a vicarage tea-party” has passed from inventiveness to cliché.
That intrepid hunter of quotations and radio show host, Nigel Rees, has assembled a number of such constructions in his book A Word in Your Shell-Like [i.e., Ear],[^4] where he reminds us that the analogy was used in the Daily Telegraph in 1984 to describe a rectory that had burned down, quoting:
“It makes the dissolution of the Monasteries look like a vicarage tea-party”.
He also quotes the Washington Post, which echoed the theme with the following passage:
“‘After the Mexican earthquake, they were all jumping up and down saying "Are we prepared?” The next big one here is going to make Mexico look like a Sunday afternoon tea party,’ Shah said.”[^5] (I do not know whether “Sunday afternoon tea parties,” held at a time when vicars are presumably otherwise engaged, are known to be less or more riotous events than those hosted by members of the cloth. On the other hand, perhaps what Mr. Shah had in mind was another tea-party hosted in the Boston area….)
I can add an example from an unknown blurb-writer for James White’s short story “Tableau,”[^6] who resorted to the following:
“Makes All Quiet on the Western Front look like a vicarage tea-party.”
And a more recent variant, from 1989, again collected by Rees, runs as follows:
“The City would grind to a standstill if I spoke out. What I could reveal would make the film Scandal look like a teddy bears' picnic.”[^7]
This was spoken by one Pamella Bordes, who found her moment of fame during a political and sexual scandal in the UK. Miss Bordes admitted to a liaison with a Conservative member of parliament, echoing the 1960s Christine Keeler affair that helped bring down a government and was the subject of the movie Scandal.[^8] With the “picnic” reference, Miss Bordes was also clearly referring to a popular song with words by Jimmy Kennedy that enhanced a John Bratton tune from the early 1900s.
More recently, Mary Poppins has become an alternative cliché of hyperbolic contrast. The indefatigable Rees offers us, from the BBC radio show Round the Horne:
“That grand old lady of the theatre, whose life story makes Fanny Hill sound like Mary Poppins.”[^9]
Rees does not identify the thespian with the history clearly too scandalous to describe, but instead moves on with an example from the world of publicity:
“[Charles Saatchi’s advertisements] made previous campaigns look like Mary Poppins.”[^10]
Mary Poppins, that appealing symbol of saccharine cleanliness, has an immediate attraction for the hyperbolists and was recently invoked by Nick Faldo, the famous golfer, in describing his ambitions as an announcer for the ABC television network. The magazine Golf Digest relates Faldo’s words from early 2005:
“When I loosen up, I’m going to make Johnny Miller look like Mary Poppins.”[^11]
Johnny Miller is another renowned golfer, whose cando(u)r on the rival station NBC has not endeared him to many of the professionals on the PGA tour. While Faldo has been a clear hit working with his colleague Paul Azinger, I would venture to say that he still has a few notches in his stays to loosen, and that his bark has so far been worse than his bite.
But was the “tea-party” analogy the first occurrence of hyperbolic contrast? Certainly not. Unfortunately, the first forty years of my adult reading did not involve a practice of looking out for such examples, but I am sure they are to be found in multiple places. One early example I have found comes from an unlikely source—Nikolai Bukharin, a key figure in the Russian Revolution. In 1928 he wrote:
“We are creating and will create a civilization in comparison with which capitalist civilization will seem like a vulgar street dance compared with the heroic symphonies of Beethoven.”[^12]
Maybe Bukharin devoutly believed in what he said, irony not being a gambit to guarantee longevity in the presence of Uncle Joe. In any case, Bukharin fell victim to Stalin’s purges. The historians Heller and Nekrich, who quote Bukharin, clearly like the device, because they use it elsewhere in their excellent Utopia in Power:
“For several years Malenkov had served in Stalin’s personal secretariat, which was led by Poskrebyshev. There he had mastered the arts of party apparatus intrigue, which makes Machiavellianism look like child’s play” (p 498), and
“Among other widely publicized investigations undertaken by Andropov was one involving bribery and abuse of power in the Krasnodar region. Local officials and militia were involved in corruption on a scale that makes the nineteenth-century abuses satirized by Gogol seem like a cheerful musical comedy” (p 707).
But the device is more commonly used for humorous effect rather than for such solemn purposes as intensifying the direness of dealings among the Soviet nomenklatura. A classic example comes in John Cleese’s and Connie Booth’s unmatched television series Fawlty Towers, in which Cleese acts the role of the hapless and misplaced hotelier, Basil Fawlty.
In The Wedding Party, the alluring Mrs. Peignoir—perhaps the only woman in the Western hemisphere to find Basil Fawlty sexually attractive—declares to him, admittedly when slightly under the influence of alcohol:
“I think beneath that English exterior throbs a passion that would make Lord Byron look like a tobacconist.”[^13]
These are not searing words of encouragement for those considering marrying tobacconists, but comprise a wonderfully capricious association of Fawlty and Byron in the ranks of the great lovers. On the other hand, when John Fowles writes: “Martin Amis makes his father [Kingsley] seem like a warm-hearted humanist,”[^14] one feels that a reference to Mother Teresa in place of “a warm-hearted humanist” might have enabled the cult novelist to make a more dramatic point about the relative misanthropy of Amis père and Amis fils.
Next, some examples from the Western side of the Pond. In 1989, Charles Krauthammer, Pulitzer Prize winner and columnist for the Washington Post, wrote:
“The postfeminist Papa Bear [Stan Berenstain of the Berenstain Bears] is the Alan Alda of Grizzlies, a wimp so passive and fumbling he makes Dagwood Bumstead look like Batman.”[^15]
For those unfamiliar with U.S. culture, the Berenstain Bear series, created by Stan Berenstain, who died in November, 2005, is a very successful set of children’s books in which Mama Bear clearly rules the roost. Alan Alda is a star of TV and film whose acting talents probably extend beyond the “passive and fumbling” and who is now attempting to carve out a second career as a mémoiriste with his recently published Never Have Your Dog Stuffed.
Dagwood Bumstead is an absent-minded and rather idle accident-prone husband in the comic strip Blondie. I assume Batman needs no introduction. The second example comes again from Nigel Rees (whose tireless commitment to veracity in quotation attribution makes Dr. Johnson look like, er…, a harmless drudge). Rees quotes a magazine critique of Jacqueline Suzanne’s Valley of the Dolls, which came out in 1966, namely:
“It makes Peyton Place look like a Bobbsey Twins escapade.”[^16]
Rees explains for us that the Bobbsey Twins were nice, clean-cut Americans who got into and out of scrapes in juvenile fiction. (I might add that Mary Poppins could be said to make the Bobbsey Twins look like the Sopranos.)
My own researches, however, came up with an alternative comparison. According to Louella Parsons, “It [Valley of the Dolls] makes Peyton Place look like a Sunday School picnic,”[^17] but I must state that, as both these no doubt heartwarming novels are still on my to-be-read list, I cannot further comment on the relative appropriateness of the two observations. I would be prepared to bet, however, that the escapades of the Bobbsey Twins involved antics more outrageous than picnicking on the Sabbath.
Finally, some examples that show how the device can fail to come off. The historian Alonzo L. Hamby describes American proto-fascists of the 1930s in these terms:
“The combined effect of all their efforts was to make Sir Oswald Mosley look like Napoleon.”[^18]
While Hamby has already introduced Mosley to his readers (the leader of the fascist party in the UK), they may be uncertain as to whether he is referring to the Little Corporal’s attributes in generalship or as a dictator. The ambiguity of the cross-cultural comparison diminishes the effect.
The incomparable but reclusive head book critic for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, makes demands upon her less widely read consumers, leaving us unsure of whether her comparison is literal, not hyperbolic, in the following excerpt:
“A Million Little Pieces…clearly did not sell because of its literary merits. Its narrative feels willfully melodramatic and contrived, and is rendered in prose so self-important and mannered as to make the likes of Robert James Waller (The Bridges of Madison County) and John Gray (Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus) seem like masters of subtlety and literate insight.”[^19]
And, while we all know about Andy Warhol’s adage about fifteen minutes of fame, another New York Times reporter fails to remember that, if the reason why an individual is selected for contrast has to be explained, she has probably misjudged her audience:
“Mr. Daly [John, the golfer] makes the controversial Bode Miller (who recently said that he had competed while hungover a few times) seem a bit like a vicar whose indulgences extended to too much shortbread.”[^20]
In these examples, a common formula of “a makes b look like c” can be seen. The characteristic elements of the device are as follows:
i) A desire to promote the features of a, usually to an absurd degree.
ii) An implied previous resemblance between a and b, although this rule is sometimes stretched for comic effect, as in the Fawlty/Byron example.
iii) The introduction of element c, previously having little obvious relevance to b, but now marked as having a distinct resemblance to it.
iv) With item a presumably familiar to the readers, items b and c, and the characteristics that drove their selection, have to be recognizable to those readers for the conceit to work.
Hence the supposed similarities between a and b are undermined by an exaggerated case for the similarities between b and c.
“Hyperbolic contrast?” Or, as Rees suggests, “hyperbolic diminishment,” stressing the belittling of the comparison? I invite VERBATIM readers to improve the nomenclature, and to offer further noteworthy examples of the device for the archives. (Google Book Search was not used to search for any of the examples given above; I am aware that it offers up many further excellent examples.) And if anyone has already written about, and named, this construction, my apologies for overlooking his or her work.
[Please send your suggestions and examples to Tony Percy at AntonyPercy@aol.com.]
[1]: The Sunday Times (London), 20 October, 1995.
[2]: The Daily Telegraph, 1958.
[3]: “Angry Young Men” was a term used, in the 1950s, to describe a set of novelists and playwrights in the U.K. who challenged conventional thinking and manners.
[4]: A Word In Your Shell-like – 6,000 Curious and Everyday Phrases Explained, by Nigel Rees, 2004.
[5]: Washington Post, April, 1986.
[6]: James White (1928–1999) was a Northern Irish writer of science fiction. " Tableau” (1958) reportedly "describes the events which stopped the war between Earth and Orligia."
[7]: The Sun, 16 March, 1989.
[8]: John Profumo, the U.K. Secretary of State for War, was forced to resign in 1963 after lying to the House of Commons about his affair with Miss Keeler, whom he shared with a Soviet diplomat.
[9]: Round The Horne, on BBC Light Programme, 14 March 1965.
[10]: The Sunday Times, 21 August 1988, quoting an earlier Sun profile.
[11]: Golf Digest, January, 2006.
[12]: Cited in "Lenin i problema kul’turnoi revoliutsii," in Put' k sotsializmu v Rossii, New York, 1967, p 375, and quoted by Heller and Nekrich in Utopia in Power, New York, 1986, p 221.
[13]: The Wedding Party, third episode in Series 1 of Fawlty Towers, first broadcast on BBC1 on 3 October, 1975.
[14]: John Fowles, in his Journals Volume II, 2006.
[15]: Charles Krauthammer, in a 1989 column in the Washington Post, as reported in an obituary of Stan Berenstain in the New York Times, November 30, 2005.
[16]: This Week, 1966.
[17]: Publisher's Weekly, January 24, 1966.
18: Alonzo L. Hamby, in For The Survival Of Democracy, 2004, p 269.
[19]: Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, January 17, 2006.
[20]: Ginia Bellafante, New York Times, January 18, 2006.
Getting Bowzered in Early America
Rosemarie Ostler, Eugene, Oregon
Crooking the elbow was a serious occupation in eighteenth-century America. Visitors to the early republic often expressed astonishment at the amount of spirits that Americans knocked back during an ordinary day. People of the time believed that guzzling plain unadulterated water was unhealthy (as it sometimes was before the days of water treatment plants). They regarded liquor as nourishment. Then, as now, people also used it for medicinal purposes. A popular euphemism was antifogmatic, a drink taken on the pretext that it counteracted the bad effects of foggy weather.
Although drunkenness was frowned on, moderate alcohol intake was a normal part of meals. What Americans considered moderate in the late 1700s amounted to an annual per capita consumption of nearly four gallons of hard liquor, well over twice the amount that modern Americans consume. They also found room for many tankards of hard cider and one-percent beer, and if they were wealthy a certain amount of wine.
It’s not surprising that in spite of good intentions, Americans compiled a broad vocabulary to describe the effects of all that imbibing. Benjamin Franklin collected a list of well over 100 words and expressions meaning drunk in 1737. It features some still in use, such as oiled, soaked, buzzed, stewed, boozy, fuddled, intoxicated, tipsy, and cockeyed. Others have since disappeared, including jagged, bowzered, fuzzled, glaized, nimptopsical, cherubimical, jocular, moon-eyed, limber, loose in the hilts, in his airs, got on his little hat, seen the French king and stiff as a ringbolt.
Until the Revolution, rum, called stinkibus, was the favored tipple. It could be mixed with spruce beer to make a calibogus or with ordinary beer and sugar to make a flip. During the war, neither rum nor the molasses used to make it could be imported from the British West Indies, so Americans had to fire up the still and make their own. At first whiskey was distilled mainly from rye or wheat—both Washington and Jefferson owned rye distilleries—but by the 1780s the favored grain was sweet corn. Corn whiskey, corn juice, or corn squeezings, as this early form of bourbon was called, was soon the all-American drink. Those who indulged too freely were said to be corned or corned up.
A popular expression in the mid-nineteenth century was acknowledge the corn, meaning to admit guilt or having made a mistake. The phrase was so common that newspapers of the time frequently printed it without explanation, for example, “Mr. Tyler, in reply [to the charges] boldly acknowledges the corn,” or “‘Enough,’ said the captain. ‘I’m hoaxed . . . I acknowledge the corn.'” Prisoners before the bench and congressmen in awkward situations freely acknowledged the corn. The variants confess the corn, admit the corn, and own the corn were also used occasionally.
Long shaggy-dog stories have been concocted to explain the origin of acknowledge the corn. The most widely quoted appeared in the Pittsburgh Commercial Advertiser sometime before 1850, describing how a young man from the Louisiana countryside (a corn-cracker) arrived in New Orleans and was suckered into a big-city betting game. He gambled away his worldly wealth, including a flatboat each of corn and potatoes that he had meant to sell. When he returned to the dock that night he was staggered by a further disaster. For reasons unknown, the flatboat carrying the corn had sunk, taking its cargo to the bottom of the river. The unfortunate young man collapsed into bed with his brain in a muddle. By the next morning, however, he had a plan. When the winner of the previous evening’s game arrived to claim his property, the farm boy was ready for him. “Stranger,” he declared grandly, “I acknowledge the corn—take ‘em; but the potatoes you can’t have, by thunder!”
As beguiling as this explanation is, the one proposed by linguist Jeffrey Alan Hirschberg is more plausible. Hirschberg suggests that acknowledging the corn was originally an admission that the speaker had been at the corn whiskey and was consequently corned, or drunk. Those who acknowledge the corn in newspaper reports often admit as much in so many words, as in this quote from the Philadelphia Spirit of the Times: “Your honor, I confess the corn. I was royally drunk.”
Although early citizens poured rivers of corn whiskey down their gullets, they also enjoyed variety in their beverages. For those who craved something different, cocktails fit the bill. Although Americans did not invent the concept of cocktails, they did provide the name. The word cocktail first appears in print in 1806 in The Balance and Columbian Repository, a Hudson, New York newspaper. In answer to a reader’s query, the editor describes a cocktail as a mixture of spirits, water, sugar, and bitters. The drink was also sometimes called a bittered sling. Much politicking of the time was done in taverns, and the editor remarks that the cocktail was said to be of great use to Democratic candidates (that is, opponents of the Federalists) “because a person having swallowed a glass of it is ready to swallow anything else.”
The word’s origins are mysterious, but theories abound. One possibility is that it came from the French coquetier, an egg cup. New Orleans apothecary Antoine Peychaud, who invented Peychaud bitters, reportedly dispensed strong drinks in these small cups. Another plausible theory is that the word derives from coquetel, a mixed drink introduced during the Revolution by French soldiers from Bordeaux.
English origins for cocktail have also been proposed. Cock-ale was a strengthening beverage brewed from a cock, or rooster, boiled in spices and steeped for several days in ale (the kind of chicken soup that would definitely clear up colds in a hurry). Another suggestion is that the word derives from cock-tailings, meaning the dregs or tailings of liquor barrels, which were mixed together and sold cheaply. The cock in this case was the barrel’s spigot. A more fanciful story concerns a tavern keeper during the Revolutionary War who served rum and fruit juice decorated with a rooster’s feather. In this version, French officers referred to this unusual form of swizzle stick in a mixture of French and English, le coq’s tail. Taking a different approach, a few imaginative etymologists have theorized that the drink is so called because it cocks the imbiber’s tail, like a cock-tailed horse whose tail has been docked short.
Washington Irving mentions two early cocktails in his 1809 book Knickerbocker’s History of New York, “recondite drinks” favored by the Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam. These were the sherry cobbler and the stone fence. Cobblers were made out of wine mixed with sugar, juice, and fruit. The stone fence, also called a stonewall, was a mixture of rum and cider. Although Irving doesn’t mention them, juleps were another popular thirst quencher of the time.
John Bartlett, who compiled a collection of Americanisms in 1848, lists the names of nearly sixty cocktails found in early-nineteenth-century taverns. They include, among others, the racehorse, slip ticket, I.O.U., moral suasion, vox populi, Virginia fancy, Knickerbocker, pig and whistle, smasher, floater, poor man’s punch, milk punch, soda punch, slingflip, phlegm-cutter, and ching-ching.
Sadly, most of these charmingly named drinks have disappeared from the bartenders’ guides, to be replaced by martinis, mojitos, gimlets, daiquiris, and dozens of even more “recondite” mixtures. Cobblers are still around, though, now made with liquor as well as wine, brandy, and sherry. The founding fathers would be proud.
Anglo-American Crossword No. 101
Compiled by Philip Marlow
Across
1. State wherein map’s redrawn to include hospital (3,9)
9. Work with a method concerning some precious material (7)
10. Foreign territory’s introduction by friend? (7 )
11. Discussion of work requirement (4)
12. At a distance from outlaw, a youngster (4)
13. Go mad in retreat (4)
15. Body of people accompanying English money in French street (7)
16. Representative of power re Rome? (7)
18. Loud brood returning inside for instance to meet (7)
21. A ghoul’s foul stew (7)
23. Take note of footprint (4)
24. Examine much malicious gossip? Not half! (4)
25. Explosive devices stored by team momentarily (4)
28. Boxer in stillness no producer of fantasies (7)
29. Ohio bishop against Irish - that’s one side of coin! (7)
30. 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)