Vol XXXI, No 1 []

Qat in Yemen

Gregory Johnson, Tucson, Arizona

I first came to Yemen nearly two years ago as bahlasa, that is, ‘one who arrives from another country without any luggage.’ That afternoon as I was fretting and complaining over my lost luggage a friend tossed me a small plastic bag filled with qat leaves and said: “Chew.” It was sound advice. My bags arrived a week later, but it was too late. I was already hooked, lost in a world where time dissolves in lexical lanes and back alleys.

In Yemen, qat chews provide a popular, and important, forum for debate and dialogue. Nearly everyone chews; even old age and toothlessness fail to stop some, as old men use a mahtana, ‘grinder,’ to mash up the qat before slipping it into their cheek. The chews in Sana’a usually begin around 3 pm and can last anywhere from four to eight hours. Khazzan, which is the word Yemenis use for chewing, actually means ‘to store,’ a fairly accurate description of a process where one chews up the leaves and stores them in their cheek, producing a sizeable bulge. Conversation is the rule at these affairs, and the talk is given over to jokes, poetry, politics, history, solo storytelling, and, as the hour grows late, simply listening to the alchemic beauty of the language.

The language of qat chews, I soon realized, revolves around what the medieval poet, al-Mutanabbi, would have called nawadir, or ‘rare words.’ Al-Mutanabbi, whose name literally means ‘one who sets himself up as a prophet,’ was a connoisseur of nawadir. His diwan, ‘collected works,’ runs to four volumes, not because he was exceedingly prolific but because of all the scholarly footnotes explaining his nawadir. Reading al-Mutanabbi’s four or five lines of poetry per page truly is a journey in the footnotes of history.

Arabic is a beautifully difficult and lyrical language, with a seemingly supernatural ability to mystify people. One old orientalist joke holds that any word can have three meanings: the accepted definition, an opposite one, or it could refer to some part of a camel. Context is everything.

Poetry, the vehicle of choice for nomads, was known as sihr halal, ‘legitimate magic,’ in pre-Islamic Arabia. Those skilled in the proper use of language were said to be in contact with jinn, ‘genies,’ and the inheritors of special powers. That respect for, and even fear of, poetry, like so many other pre-Islamic traditions, was later adopted by Islam. During its heyday, poets could expect to be rewarded with a mouthful of gold for a well-turned verse, an early form of patronage that seems lost in today’s era of budget cuts.

The Yemeni prince al-Afdal was one such patron, commissioning scholars to produce foreign-language keys. His son al-Ashraf, however, did him one better, marrying off his daughter to al-Firuzabadi, a famous lexicographer. Al-Firuzabadi is best known for his dictionary entitled qamus, a word that originally meant ‘ocean,’ but following the success and popularity of his work it became the accepted term for ‘dictionary,’ a meaning it still holds today. In addition to his dictionary, al-Firuzabadi also composed amusing books of synonyms—all in the interest of philology, of course—on topics such as honey and wine. His book on wine, The Cheery Companion on the Prohibition of Old Wine, deals with 357 words, ranging from the mundane, khamr or ‘wine,’ to the witty, ‘ain al-dik or ‘eye of the rooster.’

Al-Firuzabadi may have been the first, as he claimed, to write such a book on wine, but his body of work has been a model for disciples throughout the ages. In 1945, more than 500 years after his death, the German-born scholar and explorer, Carl Raswan, composed a similar work on the vocabulary of Bedouin horse words: 1,050 in all.

Qat has not had, to my knowledge, an al-Firuzabadi or a Raswan, although it did lend its name to a short-lived newspaper, al-Qat. Yemeni Jews who moved to Israel in the late 1940s and 1950s introduced it as a flavor of ice cream, a type of perfume, and even as a painkiller called qatine. In Yemen, it has been celebrated in verse by countless poets and discussed at length by legal scholars. The rulings of the scholars, at least those native to Yemen, have been favorable: it is not a substance banned by the Qur’an. And indeed, like coffee, it wormed its way into society as a religious tool. Chewing qat, the jurists found, allowed them to put off sleep and concentrate on reading and studying the Qur’an. One Yemeni proverb illustrates its religious foundations: “Qat is the food of the pious.” Other legal systems have not been so kind to the plant known as Catha edulis. It is banned in the U.S. and most of the Arab world, including Saudi Arabia, which sentences chewers to death. Britain’s colonial experience in Yemen may have made it more understanding; the former imperial power still allows chewers to practice their habit legally.

The origins of qat in Yemen are so tangled in legends and hearsay that it is nearly impossible to untangle them. But the story that is recited most often claims that a shepherd—one of those whom Muhammad ranked ahead of camel herders in the hierarchy of animal husbandry—noticed his flock chewing on a particular shrub that seemed to excite them. Curiosity overcame his better judgment, and he gave the plant a try. Like the apple in Eden, one taste was all that was needed to write a new chapter in history, and thus qat was born; or so the story goes.

Now qat has taken over society to such a degree that most outsiders and even some Yemenis view it as a self-inflicted curse that is the root of all modern evils: underdevelopment, poverty, and lack of water. The rest of us, however, are too busy chewing to pay much attention. Those who refuse to chew have never experienced kayf, that elusive, nearly untranslatable word, which allows one to melt into the background, becoming perfectly at ease with one’s surroundings and oneself. They have never heard gorgeous and disorderly poetry composed and recited on the spot. They have never heard tales of ancient warriors and distant lands come to life as they do when they are told over qat. In short, they have yet to live a full life.

The road to kayf is a long one, full of pitfalls to snare the unsuspecting, beginning long before the chew. Some Sana’anis like a sweaty lunch of saltah—a boiling, bubbling stew-like mixture, whose ingredients differ from restaurant to restaurant and even from day to day—before buying their qat, immediately giving them a warm base with which to start the process. But I prefer to buy my qat first and then have saltah, working up a sweat slowly, like the way one enters a frigid pool: step by step. Heat, it should be stated, is an integral part of the qat chew. Not only does it prepare the body for chewing, an act as much mental as physical, but it also allows qat to enter the bloodstream faster, which is why Yemenis insist on chewing with the windows closed. And which is why, a few hours into a good chew, the smoke from countless cigarettes floats in what Bulgakov described in a different context as “slow, dense, horizontal layers, without a quiver.” Anything, even the slightest breeze—known as the shanini, a piercing blast of cold air that sneaks in through a poorly fastened window or a crack in the wall—can disturb a chewer’s paradise and send him careening off the road to kayf.

The bargaining process is, for me, the first step towards the perfect qat chew and kayf. The blood starts to flow a little faster, the heart begins to pound a little harder, and the sweat starts to come first in drops and then in a trickle down the back of my neck. There are countless aswaq al-qat, ‘qat markets,’ throughout Sana’a. Men sell qat out of the trunks of their cars, out of cardboard boxes on the sidewalk, and from small closet-sized hovels along the street. The oldest souq in town is in the old city of Sana’a next to souq al-milh, ‘the salt market.’ Out towards the western edge of town is the souq in Hasabah, which takes its name from the pebbles, hasab, that a group of divinely inspired birds dropped on an invading army of Ethiopians who were about to take the city of Mecca in 570 ad, the year of Muhammad’s birth. My personal favorite, the souq I usually frequent, is in al-Qa’a, the old Jewish quarter. But really, wherever you go the scene is the same: men are cursing, jostling, and invoking God’s name, partly in an effort to get the best qat for the best price and partly to work up a sweat.

Most days I find myself squatting inside Abdullah’s qat shack, which is tastefully decorated with old election posters of the president, sifting through bags of qat. Abdullah is a maqut, ‘qat seller,’ and like most good ones, an avid sampler of his goods. This sampling is known as fidhah, and nearly everyone engages in the practice. Its purpose is twofold. First, it allows one to judge the quality of the qat, which sight and smell often fail to pinpoint, and it also warms the blood another degree or two, taking one past another mile-marker on the road to kayf. I’ve watched men sample nearly half a bag before they purchased it, but more than a few sprigs and one is honor-bound to buy the bag. I tend to sample only one or two, lest I be suckered into a bad bag.

Qat comes in a variety of colors: ahmar, abyad, and azraq, literally, ‘red,’ ‘white,’ and ‘blue.’ Red is judged to be the strongest, and white the weakest. And it is further distinguished by the region from which it comes. The best qat in Yemen is generally considered to be shami, ‘northern,’ which one can buy around the Red Sea port city of Hodeida. But the very best of the best, the choicest cuttings of shami are smuggled into Saudi Arabia, where they command top dollar, despite the threat of the sword. In Taiz, one can chew sabri, from Mount Sabr above the city. Here in Sana’a, the choice of most discerning chewers is hamdani, from the region of Hamdan. Less image-conscious chewers, or those with a bit of a daring side, chew sauti, from the region of Saut, which I like to think of as the crack cocaine of qat, since local wisdom holds that after chewing sauti one is unable to sleep for three days. The distinctions are as diverse as the landscape in Yemen, with well over 100 different types of qat, all hailing from different regions, and differing from each other in appearance, taste, color, smell, and effect. But the divisions don’t end there. Qat is also judged by the time of year it was planted, its location in the field, and the position of the branches on the tree.

In the hierarchy of qat, ru’us, or the ‘heads’ of the stalks, are considered the best, while qattal, ‘the pickings of the lower branches,’ has been described by one writer as the “pubic hair of qat.” There is also bazgha, ‘the ends or tips of each stalk,’ or to put it another way the ru’us of the ru’us. Just as the ru’us is the best each tree can produce, so is the bazgha the best each stalk can produce.

But carrying a small bag of bazgha to a chew lacks something of the swagger that carrying a huge bundle of branches, closer to small saplings, commands when walking about Sana’a. These large branches, often more than a yard long, are known as ‘audi. Really, really large branches are called ‘aidan. To carry a bundle of ‘aidan to a chew is to mark yourself as a serious chewer, a man of qat; and like academic degrees and wealth ‘aidan endows its possessor with a certain amount of respect.

Qat is sold in small plastic bags, wrapped in leaves, or bound with string, and costs anywhere from a dollar to more than $50. Western writers inevitably compare the varieties and types of qat to those of wine in the West, and, taking the comparison a step further, the chewers become either snobs or aficionados, depending on the writer’s mood. In the end, one’s choice of qat is, like body art and clothes, all a matter of personal taste and financial capacity.

Abdullah usually has pretty good stuff, most of which is grown on the family farm just outside of Sana’a, but he does buy a little from the muarad, a word that has among its root meanings: ‘to accrue income, to convey, to transport and to feed’ but in this context means ‘middlemen.’ Early on in one’s qat education one learns to steer clear of barahi, ‘yesterday’s qat'; the word comes from the root meaning ‘ill-boding, inauspicious, and ominous,’ all things that yesterday’s qat signifies to the serious chewer. Bagra, ‘qat that is filled with water,’ and nezi, ‘qat that is too dry,’ should also be avoided. Instead one calls for qat hali, which means both ‘fresh’ and ‘sweet.’ “Sweet” here is a bit of a misnomer, as qat is slightly bitter, but to a true mawla’i, ‘one inflamed with passion’ for qat, bitterness in qat is sweetness during the chew. My purchase of two bags tucked inside my shirt, I push my way out of the screaming mob and head for my favorite restaurant and a bowl of saltah.

In the old days, under Imam Yahya Hamid al-Din, who ruled North Yemen from 1918 to 1948, mawla’is used to run up Mount Nuqum, which stands east of the city, after lunch, singing and sweating in preparation for the chew. Nuqum means, among other things, ‘revenge, to be hostile, to be full of rancor or vindictiveness, and to hold against.’ The name is strangely appropriate for the mountain that stands guard over this city. Indeed, the history of the mountain is one of vengeance and wars, lust and loathing, treasures and monsters. That practice, however, ended with the assassination of the imam and the eventual closing off of Nuqum as a military base.

Now mawla’is content themselves with a visit to the public hammam, ‘bath,’ from the root ‘to make hot.’ I, on the other hand, tend to be satisfied with a long, brisk climb up eight or nine flights of stairs to the mafraj in one of the city’s famed tower houses.

Yemenis have traditionally built the mafraj on their roofs, providing them with a place as near to heaven as one can get to chew qat. One can hardly imagine a better room to chew in than one whose name in Arabic means ‘relief, relaxation, denouement, and happy ending.’ The mafraj, however, is not always on the roof, and as the old Yemeni proverb goes: “If your heart is at ease, even a donkey’s asshole can be a mafraj.” The proverb, like most in Yemen, is accurate. I’ve chewed in wonderfully decorated mafrajes with breathtaking views, in ground-floor ones looking over gardens and splashing fountains, on buses, and next to the Indian Ocean. But some of the best qat chews I’ve attended have taken place in a tiny, smoke-filled room with no view or ventilation. In the end, it is not the room or the qat that makes for jaw latif, ‘pleasant atmosphere,’ inside the mafraj; it is the people, the conversation, and one’s own state of mind.

The first part of the qat chew is given over to lighthearted and frivolous zabj, which the dictionary defines as ‘jokes,’ but it has more accurately been described as “the rapid banter, the swordplay of insults that starts all the best qat sessions” by Tim Mackintosh-Smith in his wonderful book, Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land. There is a special type of qat-induced exaggeration, yuznat, that rules during this period, which some, like the ultramodernists and fundamentalists—it is one of the few things the two groups agree about—turn up their collective noses at as kilam qat, ‘qat talk.’ For others, like myself, navigating the brink of reason, between hyperbole and seriousness, is part of the beauty of qat. Besides, one is respected as a chewer if one is khafif al-dam, ‘light of blood,’ lighthearted enough, that is, to engage in yuznat.

This verbal one-upmanship loses steam after an hour or so, and the discussion shifts to a series of individual conversations, and then back again as a poet recites his work or someone tells a story. At times I find myself mentally trying to retrace the seamless transition of subjects, wondering how a conversation that was initially about rising taxes switched over to the proper conjugation of the fourth form of a verb before ending with a retelling of the battle between al-Qarda’i and a lion.

But qat is like life in that respect; the beginning never prefigures the end. Every experience is different, and one never quite knows what to expect.

There is much one can do at a chew. I have been to chews where members of Parliament met with their constituents, poets performed, musicians played, and businessmen sealed deals. Nearly every occasion in Yemen is an occasion to chew. A funeral chew is known as a mujbarah, from the root ‘to set broken bones, to help back on one’s feet, and to console and comfort.’ A chew to celebrate the birth of a new son is called muqayl al-sab’a, literally ‘the resting place of seven,’ coming as it does seven days after the son is born. Even the president routinely chews with advisors, and to be excluded from one of these chews is to have little say in policy. In a takeoff of this, Sally Quinn of the Washington Post argued in a column in January 2005 that President Bush’s administration needed to institute qat chews at the White House as a way of “getting together socially with colleagues, political adversaries and even members of the president’s own party.”

Some chews focus on the esoteric, such as the history of ancient Yemeni swords—like Dhu al-Fiqar, ‘Master of the Vertebrae,’ taken as booty by Muhammad at the Battle of Badr in 623 and subsequently given to Ali, the fourth Islamic Caliph, later returning to Yemen with the first Zaydi Imam, al-Hadi ila al-Haqq, ‘the one who leads to truth’—or the exact location of mythical islands, such as Waq al-Waq, a group of seven islands where humans grow on trees like fruit, which is featured in The Thousand and One Nights, the Legend of Sayf bin Dhi Yazan, a pre-Islamic Yemeni king, and the story of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, a story many say influenced Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. But no matter which direction it takes, the qat chew is, at heart, a discussion in the truest sense of the word, where thoughts are constructed, refined, and polished in the time-intensive style of true craftsmen.

Teetotalers and ascetics avoid qat on the grounds that it alters one’s perception of the world, but like most pro-abstinence rhetoric this is based more on hearsay than fact. Qat doesn’t change one’s perception, it enhances it, focusing the mind and relaxing the body; and most religious scholars in Yemen fall on the side of the chewer. Qat is like that. It allows one to work, study, and be still all at the same time. It allows one to be, the verb the late Polish Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz called the “only subject for a philosopher and a poet.”

This is kayf, which has best been described by Mackintosh-Smith as “a form of untravel.” To achieve kayf, the planets must be aligned, your heart must be at ease, the air must be still, and the qat must be good. Neglect any of these ingredients and one runs the risk of tafshan, ‘qat-induced depression,’ that can grab hold of one with both hands and not let go until the next day’s chew.

As the hour grows late, conversations tail off into vapors as each chewer withdraws into a private world known as atanan, ‘a deeply contemplative and silent state,’ concerned only with some internal riddle. This is sa’ah sulimaniyya, ‘the hour of Solomon.’ This is the hour of music and jinn. When the conversation ends the oud players and singers take over. The music not only covers the silence in the room, but it also acts as a sort of guide as each chewer delves deeper and deeper into his own private world. Under Imam Yahya musicians had a much tougher time of it, as singing and the playing of instruments were outlawed by imamic fiat. There are stories of gramophones hanging from poles and flutes being executed by sword, most likely the imamic sword al-tahara, ‘the purifier,’ used for beheading unruly subjects. The revolution of 1962 changed all that, and now the musicians play free from the fear of execution.

This is also, according to tradition, the hour when the jinn are most active, and some say the hour got its name from Solomon, who could understand and control jinn better than any other human in history. Just as there are good and bad people, so are there good and bad jinn. It is during this hour that one might meet the nasnas, ‘a half-human, half-animal jinn,’ native to Hadramout, a region of Yemen whose name means ‘death has come.’ Or one could stumble across an ‘udhrut, ‘a type of jinn that can take any form, but is usually seen as wolf.’ They are attracted to the blood of dead men, and especially that of murdered dead men. Despite their rather questionable tastes, an ‘udhrut has never been known to harm a living person; it exists only to frighten. Other jinn, like the dubb, are not so benign. The dubb has the appearance of a monkey, but it mimics whatever one does, and can even speak to one like a man. Under no circumstances should one fire a gun at a dubb, as the bullets will miss him, but he will fire back at you. The Yemeni proverb, “do not teach the dubb to pick up stones,” is good advice that most chewers generally adhere to.

Men wrestle with their internal jinn in silence until the spell is broken and the music ceases, as someone mumbles a quick goodbye and slips on their sandals. The chew comes to a rather hurried and untidy end as everyone prepares to leave. Most men tend to go home to a quiet evening with their families, relaxed and at ease with the world. I, on the other hand, having no family here and only books to keep me company, like to cap off the evening with a glass of milky tea at my favorite tea shop, looking out over the old city of Sana’a. Sitting next to al-Mahdi Abbas Mosque, with a final cigarette in hand, I begin to reacquaint myself with the outside world.

Three Limericks

Can the money you’ve got be called loot?

Here’s a test: did a guy in a suit

Grunt, “Da big guy sez T’anks”?

Did you “find” it in banks?

Did a lady say, “Take it, don’t shoot”?

To stick up, out, or forward’s to jut,

Seldom used in the beauty books but

Quite becoming and “in”

For the masculine chin

(Somewhat less so, perhaps, for the gut).

To toss food in the water, to chum,

Is like fishermen hollering “Come,

All you fishies, and feast

Till your hunger has ceased.”

And quite often they do, ‘cause they’re dumb.

—Max Gutmann

CLASSICAL BLATHER: On the -go

Nick Humez, mythsongs@earthlink.net

An earlier Classical Blather column examined some words which rhyme with June.¹ In this issue we’ll tackle another set, those ending in -go. And a rich set it is, both in quantity and in etymological diversity: whereas just about any English word-final -ion or -ate can be shown to come from Latin -io and -atus, and that’s that, the origins of the -go words are all over the map—from island societies Mediterranean and Caribbean, from Africa and Australia and pre-Columbian America, not to mention springing in apparent autochthony² from the nowhere-and-everywhere subsoil of our modern global village onto the shelves of its company stores.

The story of Jason and the quest for the Golden Fleece was, as Homer put it, “on everybody’s lips” by the time the Iliad and Odyssey were being composed in the 8th century bc. Surprisingly, Argo corn starch has nothing to do with the Argonauts’ famous ship, but according to a company history “may have derived from the fact that customer price lists were printed in alphabetical order, and the name Argo would appear above then-competitor Kingsford’s.”³ Almost as familiar a brand name to American consumers is the auto-parts company Steego⁴ (formerly Sterling Precision Corporation). Less so, perhaps (unless one is refinishing one’s home or office), is Pergo, a Swedish manufacturer and wholesaler of laminate flooring (American retail outlets include Lowe’s and Home Depot).⁵

And who of us has never eaten an Eggo (the precooked waffle marketed by the Kellogg corporation since 1936),⁶ nor smothered pasta in Prego⁷ brand spaghetti sauce—nor bounced down the street on a Pogo stick (or at least made the attempt)?⁸ There are plenty of -go words for our leisure hours, whether children’s toys (from Lego⁹ blocks to Mego¹⁰ action figures) or games for adults such as Bingo¹¹ or G¹². One can dance the fandango or the tango,¹³ and though a presto movement may tax its members’ velocity skills, even an amateur string quartet of modest accomplishment can play a respectable largo.¹⁴

In the late 1950s, budding calypsonian percussionists inspired by Harry Belafonte, the Kingston Trio, and their numerous imitators were at pains to acquire some proficiency on the bongo¹⁵ drums; half a decade later the British rock ‘n’ roll explosion of the mid-1960s brought us the Beatles and their rock-solid drummer Ringo Starr.¹⁶

Other proper names ending in -go are common enough: Hugo can serve both as personal name (the Hugo science fiction award honors Hugo Gernsback, author of the pioneering (1911–12) outer-space romance Ralph 124C41+) and as surname (Victor Hugo, creator of the unforgettable Quasimodo, the tragic hunchback of his medievalist romance Notre-Dame de Paris).¹⁷ The French Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stéphane Grappelli were the core of the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, formed in Paris in 1934; even hotter was the fiery furnace at Babylon into which the three Israelites Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were thrown at the orders of Nebuchadnezzar, but preserved by an angel.¹⁸ The name Inigo would probably be unknown to English-speakers were it not for the 17th-century British architect Inigo Jones.¹⁹ By contrast, everyone has heard of “honest Iago” (=Jacob, James), synonymous with treacherous villainy, thanks to Shakespeare’s Othello; the usual Spanish version of the name is Diego,²⁰ but Saint James the Greater is called Santiago (his shrine in Compostela, Spain, is a favorite destination for pilgrims to this day) and commemorated in the names of several Latin American cities, including the capital of Chile.

There are many other Spanish place names such as Durango, Montego Bay, Santo Domingo, and Tierra del Fuego²¹; American Indian ones include Chicago and Oswego²² (but not Fargo, which is named for Wells Fargo cofounder William G. Fargo). In Northern Ireland are a city and bay named Sligo, and in Italy a town named Asiago, famous for a type of cheese which bears its name. And some non–Indo-European place names: the African coastal country Togo, the river and republic called Congo, a large town in Australia named Bendigo, and the capital of American Samoa, Pago Pago.²³

Then there are diseases. Two skin maladies are impetigo and vitiligo; if you do not care for heights and look down from a great one, you may experience vertigo; and if you slip a lumbar disk, you may experience lumbago (both from Latin lumbus, ‘loin’).

Here the -go is a common Latin third-declension nominative suffix whose genitive case ends in -ginis; and since it is the oblique-case forms of nouns and adjectives that made it into Vulgar Latin and thence into the Romance languages, it should be no surprise that a view that excites vertigo is vertiginous, the Spanish city named after Carthage (Latin Carthago) is Cartagena, and the English word derived from Latin virgo is virgin.²⁴ Exotic flora and fauna include the mango (the fruit of an Asian evergreen tree called mankay in Tamil) and indigo (the name of several plants in the genus Indigofera, and of the blue dye extracted from them),²⁵ the flamingo (ultimately from Latin flamma, ‘flame’),²⁶ pongo (the taxonomic name for the orangutan), and Australia’s native dog, the dingo. Of these the first three come to us via Portuguese; but far more words enter American English from Spanish, to the point of being so thoroughly absorbed that we do not think of them as foreign at all, such as latigo (a type of strap used in saddlery; in Spanish látigo means ‘thong of a whip’), hidalgo (‘nobleman,’ a contraction of hijo de algo, ‘son of somebody [sc. not a nobody]'), amigo (‘friend’), lingo (‘language’), and gringo (‘Yankee’).²⁷

The previous examples attest to the mutual permeability of Spanish and English in the American Southwest during a history stretching back several hundred years, from colonial and territorial periods through statehood. But new -go words are being coined all the time, sometimes by treating the verb go as fair game for a suffix—e.g., when we say “from the get-go”—certainly an association the motor fuel company Citgo (formerly Cities Service) would be happy for us to make.²⁸ (There are, of course, several ordinary compound verbs made from go as well, such as forgo and undergo.) Meanwhile psychiatry, like other branches of medicine, has borrowed freely from Latin for its terminology, giving us (inter alia) ego, superego, and imago. During the same half century, public relations and advertising contributed logo (short for both logogram and logotype),²⁹ while the entertainment industry gave us go-go girls.³⁰

And this is not to mention abbreviations and acronyms, save to give one example each: NGO for nongovernmental organization (e.g., such relief agencies as Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, and Red Cross) and GIGO, computerspeak for “Garbage in, garbage out.” ³¹ As René Descartes famously put it, “Cogito ergo sum.”³²

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On the other hand, E.G.G.O. (with periods) stands for Erik’s Giant Groton Observatory (www.eggo.org), which features some very pretty pictures of Comet 1996 B2 Hyakutake, and a few interesting shots of the Ring Nebula (M57) as well. (And that’s just from the first Google page; the search engine claims to have about 625,000 entries for this four-letter string.)

The soldiers of Jephthah of Gilead exploited the absence of another fricative, sh, from the phonemic inventory of the Ephraimites, by making shibboleth (‘wheat in the ear’) the password for those trying to escape across the Jordan; anyone who denied that he was an Ephraimite but could only say “Sibboleth” was killed on the spot (Judges 12:5-6).

The Great Vowel Shift

During The Great Vowel Shift, the earth cracked open.

All manner of creature began to die out.

Before that, all they had done was dee oot,

which wasn’t nearly as painful, as evidenced by the fact

that a few Scots still do it. One of the creatures that disappeared then

was The Great Wheat Robbit,

a long-eared fire-breathing rodent who liked to spear kuh-nicts,

and could’ve leaped tall buildings in a single boond

if there’d’ve been any tall buildings.

I’m telling you The Great Vowel Shift was a bad animal.

It was big number one and rough on roaches.

Mane were mane back then.

Everyone acted kindely toe heese kinde.

All we are is kind of kind, and it isn’t even the same kind of kind.

Sure, we have technology,

but the next time they try to sell you soap on tv,

you just think about it.

Nobody has ever figured out what caused The Great Vowel Shift.

One guy thinks a planet came too close after it made manna

for the Children of Israel.

Most of us just figure plate tectonics, sunspots.

—Jack Butler

Cuckoo for Crack

Mark Peters, Chicago, Illinois

I was watching the NBA playoffs the other night (OK, every night) and my ears perked up when studio commentator Charles Barkley referred to the TNT network’s crack team as a team on crack. Barkley’s joke got me thinking about the influence of crack on language—an influence that may not rival crack’s impact on crime and misery, but one that isn’t going away either. Since the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation of crack to describe crack cocaine is from 1985, consider this a belated celebration of crack’s 20th linguistic year.

The literal meaning of crack—“a potent, crystalline form of cocaine made by heating a mixture of it with baking powder and water until it is hard, and breaking it into small pieces which are inhaled or smoked for their stimulating effect”—is not really my concern here. I’m not even interested in related terms such as ­crack rock, crack ho, crackhead, crack-freak, crackhouse, crack den, and crack baby, or even the notable coinage cracktress (a term for, appropriately enough, an actress on crack). Instead, I’m jonesing for non-smokable, non-pipe-worthy, metaphorical crack, which is mainly used to discuss two concepts: insanity and addictiveness.

As is standard procedure in my family, let’s do insanity first, addiction second. Comedian Dave Chapelle recently announced, “I’m not crazy, I’m not smoking crack,” in Time Magazine, and these words can be read as either two denials or the same denial stated twice. Similarly, my title cuckoo for crack (which comes from Family Guy’s Stewie, who amusingly said, “Oh yes, yes, I love crack. I’m absolutely cuckoo for crack!”) could also be considered redundant; that’s how closely smoking crack and going bonkers are linked.

There are over 47,000 Google web hits for Are you on crack?, and while some of these hits may be straightforward, literal requests for information, I suspect most of these are synonymous with Are you out of your frickin’ gourd? I also found multiple Google hits for Are you smoking crack?, Put down the crack pipe, Back away from the crack pipe, and Let go of the crack pipe.

Since this use of ­crack has diddly-poo to do with smoking anything, it makes perfect sense to ask seemingly illogical questions like, Am I on crack? In fact, whenever I pitch an article to the editor of this very magazine, I ask Is this a good idea or am I smoking crack?

Another way to question someone’s sanity is to investigate their dining habits by asking Did you have crack for breakfast again? or admonishing No more crack for breakfast! Of course, suggesting that a loonball has had crack for lunch or crack for dinner isn’t a ringing endorsement of their sanity either. One of my favorite expressions is crack on one’s cornflakes, as in Did I sprinkle too much crack on my cornflakes this morning? I’ve seen this nonce-ish expression a few times, and I enjoy the implication that there might be an ideal quantity of crack to serve with cereal—or maybe even an insufficient amount that just won’t get the (nut)job done.

Crack was a natural for crazy-discussing, not just because of the extremeness of crack-smoking but because words like cracked were already there. The OED has traced cracked back to at least 1611 as a euphemism for loony, and there are plenty of related nouns (crackbrain, crackskull, crackpot, cracker factory) and adjectives (crack-headed, crack-brained, crackers). Also, crack obviously isn’t the first drug to be used as an indirect-yet-not-at-all-subtle way of asking Are you cracking up? Questions like What are you on?, Are you high?, and Sniffing glue again? are part of established slang patterns—most of which involve booze or weed—that paved the way for all crack queries and comparisons.

I’ve found many innovative uses of crack on one of my favorite sources for funny, nasty, clever language: Television Without Pity (TWoP), the popular website that consists of recaps and message boards for many shows. On TWoP, television writers are a frequent target of abuse, as we can see from sentences like “note: I do know that the only thing the writers are really ‘going for’ is another rock of crack” (cal331, Jan. 25, 2005), “That’s giving the crack monkeys that write this show waaaay too much credit” (valerial, Jan. 19, 2005), “This was the era before the writers discovered crack” (bella1013, Jan. 17, 2004), “Oh season 7 writers … what kind of crack were you on?” (anybodysfool07, Jan. 3, 2004), and “That’s not a cliffhanger. That’s the writers needing to have their crack pipes cleaned over the summer and get things moving” (Daniel, May 26, 2005).

On TWoP, I’ve also found references to video-crack and English major’s crack, which bring me to the second major slang meaning of crack: praise (high praise?) or condemnation of anything really addicting. An exchange of emails between Gareth Branwyn and Rick H. Kennerly on the American Dialect Society’s listserv was my introduction to the terms cardboard crack (collectible card games), Evercrack (Everquest, an online game) and Crackberry (BlackBerry).

Two related types of crack-comparison can be seen in a Wired News headline that asks, “Internet Porn: Worse Than Crack?,” and an anti-Bush website that insists “Voting: Better Than Crack.” Other items considered better than crack (by wise consumers I found on Google) are video games, nostalgia, fan fiction, green tea, pecan pie, skateboarding, a good cigar, the gingerbread latte at Starbuck’s, politics, love, and SPAM (the revolting meat product, not the revolting emails). On the other hand, some stuff is worse than crack, such as iTunes, biking, watching 24 on DVD, romance novels, testosterone, food, money, comics, and the Harry Potter books.

I don’t have much evidence, but I’m convinced that David Letterman was an important force in spreading crack through the language. A collection of Letterman’s Top Ten Lists from 1991 contains lists like “Top Ten April Fool’s Day Jokes in New York City” and “Top Ten Things (Besides Giving Up Fatty Foods) That Will Add Four Months to Your Life” that have crack-related number one answers—”Crack dens replace regular crack that is usually smoked there with Folgers crystals” and “New crack lite!” respectively. Over the years, I can vaguely remember lots of other crack jokes on Letterman; I think it’s high on his personal top ten list of favorite topics (probably near NYC’s giant rats). Though metaphorical crack isn’t Letterman’s specialty, few comedians have been as popular and influential, and I’d bet a shiny nickel that he deserves a lot of the credit (or blame) for crack’s use in humor and language of all sorts.

Speaking of blame, how much blame and bludgeoning do I deserve for celebrating language that makes light of so much human misery? I dunno, but on one of the days I was writing this, I had a meeting with one of my adult writing students: a black woman who was writing a personal essay about media coverage of crime in black and white areas of Buffalo.

Among other depressing facts, she described how crack can be bought as easily as Tic Tacs in her neighborhood’s convenience stores; she also mentioned that her cousin is a crackhead. Needless to say, I didn’t share my draft of this article, of which some versions explored the even more charming sub-genre of crack baby expressions.

But the truth is … I don’t really feel guilty for writing this article, though I do feel a little guilty for not feeling that guilty. Somehow, this guilt alleviates my guilt.

Does that make sense? Or should I lay off the crack?

[Mark Peters has published language-related articles in Bark, Chicago Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia Journalism Review, Esquire, Mental Floss, New Scientist, and Psychology Today. He writes the blog Wordlustitude (http://wordlust.blogspot.com) and the Jabberwocky column for Babble (http://babble.com). His book Yada Yada Doh! 111 of the Most Successful Television Words is forthcoming from Marion Street Press in 2008.]

My Genetic Code

… _ _ _ …

—Louis Phillips

User-Friendly Turkish

Martin Gani, Como, Italy

Do you find Turkish an enigmatic, incomprehensible language to read or listen to? Are you lost for words if you’ve ever endeavoured to utter something in it? Then this foray will show Turkish is not as alien as it looks, nor should it sound all Chinese to major-European-language-speakers. Virtually in any walk of life, in any field, Turkish has been Europeanised, and be it politics, entertainment, sport, business, medicine, technology, or much else, Euro-sounds are ubiquitous. Often in the written form these European terms are disguised in Turkish, but on hearing them pronounced by the Turks themselves they sound delightfully familiar.

We may read that the lider (leader) of such and such parti (party) has taken the inisiyatif (initiative) to call for a miting (meeting) to propose a new ekonomik (economic) reform (reform) paket (packet) to fight enflasyon (French pronunciation of inflation) and if necessary lobi (lobby) the government together with any students’ grup (group) and workers’ sendika (syndicate) willing to join them to challenge the ineffective, rutin (routine) prosedürler (procedures) being applied in every sektör (sector) of the ekonomi (economy). As these words clearly indicate, the spelling of the borrowed words go through surgery so that Turks pronouncing them reproduce the original sounds almost perfectly, just like native English, Italian, and French-speakers would. If the loanword is spelling-friendly it is left unadulterated, like the English words reform, problem, program, park, platform, plan, petrol and the Italian words bomba, parlamento, protesto, posta, and the false friend pasta, ‘pastry’ in Turkish.

Those who think that English or American is taking over the world would be wrong in the case of Turkey. If the English and French were to hold a battle of words in 21st-century Turkish, Napoleon’s descendants would convincingly win ten to one. According to the latest (1998) Turkish dictionary compiled by TDK (Türk Dil Kurumu), the venerable Turkish language institute, the French contribution to modern Turkish is some 4,700 root words, compared to 470 from English, 620 from Italian, 380 from Greek, and around 100 from German, out of a total of 60,700 root words producing 100,000 or so terms in the dictionary.

Perfectly natural 21st-century Turkish is thus flavoured with French: During the büfe (buffet) lunch a young Turk (Turc) meets a Fransız (Française) aktris (actrice) from Paris (Paris) at an etnik (ethnique) sinema (cinéma) konvansiyon (convention) and succeeds in getting a randevu (rendez-vous) with her. He drives his otomobil (automobile) rather than take the tren (train) or otobüs (autobus) in case he has to eskort (escort) the lady somewhere. He suggests going to a konser (concert), she proposes a komedi (comédie) just down the bulvar (boulevard) as a successful alternatif (alternative). After the performans (performance) they have dinner at a restoran (restaurant). The diyalog (dialogue) explores kültür (culture), sosyal (social) issues, and their future proje (projet). As the romantik (romantique) suare (soirée) draws to a close, he invites the girl to his apartman (appartement) for a konyak (cognac) or perhaps to listen to some müzik (musique); she says, "Mersi (merci), maybe next time." His face a tablo (tableau) of depresyon (dépression), the young man drives the lady to her otel (hôtel).

Unlike most European languages, Turkish does not belong to the Indo-European family but to the Altaic group of Central Asian tongues—for a good reason, since Turks are of Central Asian origin and the name Turk was possibly coined by their neighbours, mainly Chinese, as Tu-Kueh or Dürko. These nomadic early Turks, starting in the 8th century, began moving west towards Europe, met and espoused the Muslim religion in the 9th century, and eventually settled in Eastern Anatolia around the 11th century and formed a sedentary empire named after the dominating clan, the Selçuks. In 1299 another clan, that of Osman, finally took power and formed the Ottoman empire, which lasted till the end of World War I.

The Ottomans entered the war on the wrong side, and only thanks to the efforts of Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938), the founder of modern Turkey, who put together an army of Anatolians and successfully resisted the annexation of Turkey by the Allied forces, was it replaced by the Turkish Republic, or Türkiye, in 1923. Turks returned to calling themselves Türk again, like their ancestors in the 6th century, and no longer Osmanlı.

Mustafa Kemal, affectionately known as Atatürk (father Turk), had clear ideas for Turkey. The nation was to look to the West, to Europe, as a model to follow. Politics and religion were clearly separated, polygamy was abolished, and women were able to divorce and vote by 1930. Atatürk took it upon himself as the first president of the newborn republic to replace the Ottoman alphabet, i.e., Arabic script, with the Roman one used all over Europe.

In 1928 he commissioned a panel of experts who came up with a 29-letter, Western-style alphabet in just six weeks. By the end of the year the new writing system became a law and had to be rigorously applied. The president himself travelled up and down the country and personally promoted the teaching of the new alphabet.

In 1932 something just as fundamental happened. The TDK was born and was given the job of purging Turkish of Eastern-Islamic influences and modernising it. The TDK expelled thousands of Arabic and Persian words (though Arabic is still today the most dominant influence in Turkish, with 6,455 root words), thus seriously diluting the predominance of Islamic culture in the newborn republic, and filled the void with importations from Ottoman Turkish and the languages of Europe, in particular French, as it was then the most influential tongue, the lingua franca.

The changes were not easy for the Turks to accept and assimilate in such a short time. Till then the educated classes had used Persian (1,350 or so root words are still in use) to discuss art and literature, matters relating to religion were talked about mainly in Arabic, and the ordinary people used Ottoman Turkish to conduct their daily lives and business; more of a dialect, Ottoman Turkish was rarely written. With the new alphabet a new era began where the Turkish spoken in the streets, laced with European sounds, became superior and had to be learnt and written by all. The gap between the language of the elite and that of ordinary people was bridged, and Turks began to understand each other a little better, as well as feeling closer to Europe.

Turkish is an easy language to pronounce; it has a phonetic alphabet which allows no exceptions. Every letter is given one sound, and when composed into words they retain that sound, whatever the combination may be.

As an agglutinating language, Turkish adds all the tense endings, auxiliaries (e.g., ‘to be’), modals (e.g., ‘can’), and prepositions onto the root word as suffixes, so you may end up with words as long as a train, like Türkçeleştiremediklermizdenmişler, which means ‘they say they are among those we have not been able to transform into Turkish.’ The root Türk can be guessed, as it is similar to the French word for ‘Turkish,’ turc, but the rest will probably sound like double-Dutch to major-European-language-speakers.

There are other complications. Excepting the subject, which comes at the beginning in both languages, Turkish syntax is a mirror image of English. In many major European languages the verb comes right after the subject, or may even be at the start of the sentence as in Italian and Spanish, where the declination of the verb clearly indicates the subject.

In Turkish the verb comes right at the end. In a complex sentence this can naturally cause comprehension difficulties, since we have to store all the information preceding the verb. But this too is changing, and it is not uncommon to hear 21st-century Turkish-speakers put the verb at the beginning.

Walking around Istanbul today, there is a bewildering number of billboards advertising European-language courses, the great majority offering English. If only Atatürk had known how dominant English-American would become, we would probably have a completely different Turkish. Most foreign importations have been in use for so long that they’ve been permanently integrated into Turkish, and Turks wouldn’t know how else to say words like bütçe (budget) or reklam (réclame=advertising), or others like tempo, opera, konservatuvar (conservatoire), or senfoni (symphonie). However, the brand new entries, mainly from English, can be problematic; for instance, self-determinasyon (self-determination), brifing (briefing), and a series of others where the spelling is left unchanged, as in sneak-preview, single, spot, stand-by and side effect, may not be immediately accessible to the average Turk.

But help is at hand; the TDK has a list of troublesome terms circulating in the mass media and gives their definitions as well as supplying a Turkish alternative on their website. Often this is simply a literal, but accurate and clever, translation and may end up replacing the borrowed word. One good example is bilgisayar (knowledge counter), which has successfully ousted kompütür (computer) from Turkish.

To be fair, Turkish has not spent the last few centuries merely borrowing words from Europe; it has also loaned some to the West, including kiosk, divan, tulip, turban, yoghurt, pilau, and kilim. However, turkey, the main ingredient of Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner, has no connection with Turkey, the republic. This pheasant is in fact an American native. Apparently an African bird, the guinea fowl that looks very similar to a turkey was brought to Europe via Turkey; when the Europeans first emigrated to America in the 16th century and saw the local turkey, they thought it was the guinea fowl they were familiar with and called it turkey too. No other European language confuses the bird with the country: the French say Turquie-dindon, the Germans Türkei-Truthahn, the Spaniards Turquía-pavo, and the Italians Turchia-tacchino, respectively and respectfully for Turkey and turkey. Turks themselves call turkey hindi; oddly enough, in Turkey India is known as Hindistan, the land of turkeys—there’s a mystery.

[Martin Gani is a British journalist based in Italy with some 220 features published worldwide. His writing focuses on travel, culture, the arts and language. He speaks Turkish fluently.]

Linguistic Larceny: It’s Ausgezeichnet

Michael J. Corey, Bellevue, Washington

If you were seated at dinner one fine Sunday, feeling no great reluctance to shock your great-aunt Bertha, and you began the phrase, “Please pass the …”, and you were allowed to express “meatballs” in any language at all, which would you choose? Weighing the circumstances, I would definitely favor the Spanish albóndigas, which rings of uproar, revolution, first shots fired: “The infantrymen woke to loud albóndigas on a nearby hill, and, hastily arming themselves …” If you are fortunate, poor Bertha’s outrage will further erode your reluctance, and you, too, will become a linguistic larcen … larce … thief. If you decide to rob instead, however, may I recommend the Japanese doroboo? Spoken properly it sounds a great deal like a door crashing down, and the literal meaning ‘muddy stick’ only adds to its swashbuckling allure.

Our new sport, then, is Linguistic Larceny. The point of it is not to find the shortest, the easiest, or even the most accurate word. If you’re trying to steal a wallet, do you make a fuss if you end up with a five-carat glaçon instead (as in Ian Fleming’s Diamonds are Forever, which was translated as Chauds les Glaçons)? What we’re looking for here is the word, in any language to which we have access, that best embodies, encompasses, and, yes, caresses the concept to be conveyed. Think of Picasso’s sketches of apples; nothing was ever more apple than those simple curves. No language can be expected to provide words as perfect as Picasso drawings for every object, idea, motion, and quality. That is why we need so many languages. Words, however, are not pictures. We are told that apart from onomatopoetic language, the relationship between the sound of a word and its semantic content is arbitrary. This is another of those engineerish, linear-thinking bromides that may well summon the Evil One to appear, usually in the avatar of a poet with a forked pen and two English horns, ringing the Bell of Amherst. “Ah,” s/he says androgynously, “if you do not specify the proper word for the higher ends of clarification, I shall do so in the irreverent name of euphonious obfuscation.” Ainsi soit-il.

Back on earth, I have some familiarity with four languages, and very limited knowledge of a further six. Many Verbatim readers will exceed this range and depth. If we could create a mystical Venn Diagram of all our resources and draw from the union, we could form des phrases of such rarefied acoustic resonance and semantic picoprecision that ангелы заплакали бы (Russian angyeli zaplakaly bi, ‘angels would weep’), or, as they say in certain politically incorrect Prague suburbs (actually, there isn’t any other kind), “the girls will tear their blouses.”

However, one does what one can, as the Comtesse de Winter remarked while committing her final murder. ‘Murder,’ by the way, is rather well done by korosu in Japanese; the word sounds like the act of throttling, while the kanji, or ideographic character, for korosu contains the elements of ‘knife,’ ‘tree,’ and ‘strike.’ Presumably the tree is there to tie him up to.

What of nice things? ‘Bright water’ is a pleasant image, but could it be made more tuneful? I once named a boat ming shui (‘bright water’ in the Pinyin romanization of Mandarin Chinese; the second word is pronounced roughly "shway"). The tones of the words, the first rising from the center of the voice, the second curving into the bottom of one’s speaking range and then rising, add to the music. If you want to say ‘fast,’ may I suggest kuai (kwî)? This is spoken—well, fast, with the “k” strongly aspirated and the pitch falling sharply. For bliss in general, however, German must be considered a major player, in part because it makes even the most lubricious words seem demure: Vergnügen is for ‘pleasure’; ‘naked’ draws a blank (but only on paper); and Verkehr, which denotes the procreative act, sounds like a Doctor Seuss title. Ausgezeichnet, however, meaning ‘excellent,’ is simply over the top, and deserves a Czech pozdrav Pán Bůh (loosely, ‘enhealth you, Mister God’). My advice to the lovestruck male is to speak Italian (ti penso sempre, ‘I think always of you,’ or cannelloni? depending on how you judge the vector of her passions), but encourage her to respond in German, especially since ja is easier to say than nein. A Romantic alternative, in every sense, is to lead with the Spanish phrase Ay! que curvas, y yo sin frenos. (‘Oh! what curves, and me without brakes.') If you wish to invite her to recline in an olive grove, however, I think you should say ελιές (eliehs, Greek).

The Russians have the deepest lake in the world, Lake Baikal, and to describe it they have the word глубокое (glubokoyeh, ‘deep’), which sounds like a Yevtushenko poem in four syllables, maybe about a POW camp at around ninety-two below with a stiff breeze.

In fact, it’s a good language for most anything lugubrious. I was in Leningrad, never mind when or why, but there were plenty of war widows around to hand you your own hotel key in return for Frisbees, and when you said, ‘Thank you’ (спасибо, spaseebo), they responded with this word пожалуйста, which, technically, should be pronounced something like pozhalueesta, but was actually rendered pozhalsta. The word is supposed to mean both ‘please’ and ‘you’re welcome,’ but it came through as ‘How can a pimply American know my suffering?’ I swear they had late-evening training sessions on how to make the halls echo like a mausoleum.

In French the ordinary is beautiful, and the sordid may approach the median. Wouldn’t you rather eat a pomme de terre (‘apple of the earth’) than a potato, even in Quaylese? An haricot instead of a bean? (Comments on the h aspiré are discouraged.) I remember an ad in the London Tube from nearly 30 years ago. The aim was to sell French lessons, and the lure was the hope that your POSSLQ would say, “Mon cher, veux-tu bien sortir les poubelles,” instead of “Take out the garbage, wouldja, there’s a good chappie…” Malheureusement (‘unhappily’), the French I know use the word ordures; I would appreciate an éclaircissement, which should probably be the global winner in the ‘enlightenment’ competition. Always use a de Maupassant word if you can: I believe the lady who borrows the necklace is éblouissante (something like ‘radiant’), and if the bling draws an eye to her décolletage, the elegance of the utterance may soften the sting of the restraining order.

If French can embellish the sleazy, Czech can make the dreadful cute. Given that cukr is ‘sugar,’ and –ka is often a diminutive ending, what do you think cukrovka means? Would you choose ‘luscious sweet,’ or perhaps the correct ‘adorable little diabetes’? In kulometčík, that čík at the end, which is pronounced “cheek,” means ‘agent of…’, but the lightness of the syllable makes our agent seem kindly and ready for fun. Maybe so, but he’s still a machine gunner. Podvod isn’t a cute little beeping robot in a Czech Star Wars—it means ‘embezzlement.’ Puška (“pooshka”) sounds like a stuffed toy, but it’s a grown-up rifle.

Still, there are Czech words I wouldn’t trade even for the equivalent in Quechua or Gujarati. If you want to tell someone his expectations are unrealistic, you say, “Yes, and you want a watch with a fountain.” ‘Fountain’ is vodotrysk, which sounds like a rather gloomy pond that unexpectedly sprinkles into life in the second half of the word.

If your live-in mate suddenly seems less than desirable, use the marvelous word švestka and say, Zbal si svejch pět švestek a jdi si po svejch: untranslatable, but loosely, ‘Wrap up your five plums and go off by your own [whatever].’ Švestek (“shvestek”) is the genitive plural of ‘plum,’ the form used, believe it or not, for five or more objects (as in other Slavics). Cardinalities of two to four take the standard plural.

Numbers have their own aesthetics. ‘Four’ is a standout in many languages. The Persian chahar is lovely (I once learned the Persian integers up to ten from my bassoon student), but the Russian четыре (chyetiryeh) is awarded an Honorable Mention, in part for being even more unpronounceable than it looks (the ы vowel sound alone requires five years of concentrated attention). Take great care not to be fooled by четверка (chyetvyorka), which is enticing, but is a delusion and a snare; this is the numeral four. In Japanese it gets worse. The four they got from Chinese sounds like ‘death’—exactly. So the Japanese have a euphemism for the number four. This gives rise to a veritable garden of delights for those who wish to count the days of the month. For the 2nd through the 10th (the 1st has its own word), you use an ancient Japanese numbering system, with its own associated day-counter. At the 11th you switch to Chinese-derived pronunciations, with a different day-counter—until you get to the 14th. For the 14th day you use the Chinese-derived word for ten (not the Japanese word you used for the 10th, but the one you used for the 11th, 12th, and 13th), but the Japanese word for four, together with the original Japanese counter; then you switch back to Chinese numbers, with the other Japanese counter, for the 15th through the 19th, but don’t forget to use a different Japanese word (unrelated to either the Chinese or the Japanese word for ‘ten’) and switch back to the first counter for the 20th.

Starting with the 21st you use Chinese-derived words to say ‘two tens’ followed by Chinese-derived numbers and the second Japanese counter, except for the 24th, which again uses the Japanese word for four, with the original counter, and then you switch back to Chinese-derived numbers with the second Japanese counter for the rest of the month, but watch out—the 1st still has its own word. Is this a way of avoiding premature death, or of making one long for it?

In sum, while we can, let us go donner un sens moins propre au mots de l’autre tribu (‘contaminate the dialect of someone else’s tribe’). On the other hand, having stolen a word, why return it? We can do no better than depart with a lovely tack så mycket (Swedish ‘thank you so much’).

[Michael Corey, a writer/inventor/curmudgeon who lives near Seattle, is attempting to develop a weaponized retrovirus to annihilate the American sitcom.]

Species

When you see the word number,

Do you think of a digit

Or “losing sensation”

As your finger grows rigid?

Does dove mean a bird,

Or does it mean “dive”?

Is it live to exist

Or untaped and live?

A bow from the waist

Or a bow and arrow?

A row as in “argue”

Or a row that is narrow?

Is evening the night

Or an evening out?

Is bass just a voice

Or a fish like a trout?

Close as in “shut,”

Not close as in “near.”

Does for “perform,”

Not does as in “deer.”

When you tear, do you cry

Or rip down the page?

Do you get the lead out

Or lead onto the stage?

Incense: to anger,

Or perfumed air.

A watch to wind, or

The wind in your hair.

They look just the same,

Orthographically clones,

Polysemous as species,

Yet not homophones.

—David Galef

Speaking Plain Yorkshire

Anne Moore, Leeds, Yorkshire

In the largest county in the United Kingdom, known locally as God’s Own Country, you will find a diversity of accents, environments, economies, and cultures. All these elements are linked by a use of language which reflects a character that is straight-talking, plain-speaking, and prefers to call a spade a spade rather than an agricultural digging implement. Never mind that a miner from South Yorkshire might not fully understand either the accent or the vernacular of a native of Hull (East Yorkshire), or vice versa, the intention to “say it like it is” will always be present.

Here follow some examples of such “plain speaking” to illustrate:

Putt t’wood in't oil!

‘Could you please close the door?’

Poor lass, ‘er bairn's reet mawngey.

‘That poor girl has a very fretful baby.’

She's a reet midden.

‘That woman is of easy virtue.’

A'm brassed off!

‘I am not very happy today.’

'Ees thick as two short planks.

‘He is totally lacking in intelligence.’

‘Ees daft as a brush!

‘What an extremely silly person!’

A'm fair mafted.

‘I am feeling the heat somewhat.’

Eeh, A were gobsmacked! or A’ll go to ower 'ouse! or A’ll go tut fut o' ower stairs!

‘I was so surprised, it rendered me speechless!’

Bluddy ‘ell fire!

‘I am [any of these:] shocked/surprised/dismayed/furious.’

Tha's as much use as a chocolate teapot (or fireguard).

‘You are totally ineffectual.’

It's like plaitin’ fog (or jugglin’ soot).

‘This is an extremely difficult task to complete.’

It's a tuppny ‘op on t'trackless.

‘The journey is a short distance by tram.’

‘Ark at pot callin’ kettle grimey-arse!

‘Did you hear that? Let he who is without sin cast the first stone!’

She’ nubbut a bairn.

‘She is a mere child.’

On the subject of mean people and lack of funds, your might hear the following:

‘Is pockets’re too long.

‘He would never buy a round of drinks, as he cannot find his wallet in time.’

‘Ee’d peel an orange in ‘is pocket.

‘That person would share nothing with anyone.’

She’s tight as a duck’s arse (or crab’s back pincers).

‘She is mean, selfish, and totally lacking in generosity.’

A’m off dawn t’pancrack cos me giro ‘an’t turned up.

‘I am going to the Welfare Benefits Office because the postman has failed to deliver my benefit cheque.’

Poor lass, she’s from t’land o’ the lost rentbook.

‘The unfortunate woman lives in a very deprived area of the city.’

Should you find yourself in any of the beautiful East Coast villages, be aware that Cod ‘eads are ‘citizens of Hull,’ a bernie bayn is a ‘beautiful baby,’ and a grockle, comfort, or Wezzie is a ‘holiday maker’ or week-end ‘caravanner from West Yorkshire.’ Oh, and a rum bugger is ‘someone with a murky past.’

In conclusion, here is a song used many years ago as the opener in a folk club in the Bronte village of Haworth. The first verse is sung loudly, with much winking and nudging, while the second, translation verse is sung in close harmony. The tourists present always applauded with great relief, having been reassured that English was the language in use here.

We’re reet daawn in t’coil oil

Where t’mud slatts ta t’windas

We’ve used all us coil up

An’ we’re reet daawn t t’cinders.

If bumbugger comes, ‘e waint know where ta find us,

Cos we’re reet daawn in t’coil oil

Where t’mud slatts ta t’windas!

‘We are way down in the basement,

Where the dust accumulates on the casement.

We have used all the coal up and are left with the residue.

If the rent-collector’s representative calls, he will be unable to discover our hiding place.

Because we are way down in the basement,

Where the dust accumulates on the casement!’

Remember, when visiting Yorkshire, the maxim that There’s nowt so queer as folk—‘Everyone has their little idiosyncracies’—holds good and Ye’ll be reet!

[Anne Moore was born in Belfast. She has worked as a teacher, civil servant, in-house training consultant, mother, grandmother, drama queen, and sometimes folksinger (when in her cups). She has a degree in drama and education, is qualified in training and development, and has a burning ambition to be a millionaire.]

Phlegmatic Scholarship: Ahem! A Cross-Cultural Study of the Signifying Throat-Clear

Justa Little-Hörss, Ph.D., Dilettante University Press, [Reviewed by Jonathan Caws-Elwitt]

There’s clearing one’s throat, and there’s clearing one’s throat. In mid-winter cold season, we all learn to tune out the repetitive rasps of our families, friends, and colleagues as they struggle to free themselves from the unwelcome matter that accumulates within. Similarly, the throat-clearing manifestations of parched mouths and dry climates are edited out of what we hear, on those rare occasions that we actually pay attention to what other people are saying.

All of these purely physiological throat-clears are outside the province of anthropologist Justa Little-Hörss, who spent five years travelling the globe to study the role of signifying throat-clears—known among scholars as STCs—in human interaction. From the state-of-the-art executive suites of downtown Tokyo to the traditional marketplace culture of Filene's Basement, Dr. Little-Hörss has observed, catalogued, and analyzed the interpersonal, sociocommercial, bureaucratic, and sexual agendas of people who deliberately make a sharp, guttural noise.

“I was trying to get the clerk's attention,” explains a woman in Auckland, interviewed by Little-Hörss after a graduate research assistant heard her clear her throat in a shoe store. “I didn't really need to clear my throat, but it seemed a good way to remind him of my presence without actually saying anything.” Over and over, in dozens of languages, Little-Hörss heard stories like this.

The author notes that although the signifying throat-clear has presumably been around as long as humans, it was not described by scholars until 1893. William James wrote that year of what he called an “attitudinal ahem,” in a letter chiefly devoted to an extended complaint regarding a grocer who had a habit of using the “nonverbal guttural mode” to comment on James’ method of produce selection.

Little-Hörss tells us that, like James’ grocer, many people clear their throats as a passive-aggressive method of expressing disapproval. Indeed, she studied one tribe in which the STC was in fact the only socially accepted means of negative commentary:

On summer nights, they [the people referred to in this excerpted sentence] can be heard in their open-air theatres, giving the equivalent of the Bronx cheer to unsatisfactory entertainers…. This [the activity described in the sentence that precedes the ellipses] culminates in the awe-inspiring music of a thousand throats being cleared in unison. It is the kind of sound that makes one glad one has left Cincinnati [Ohio, the author’s home] to explore other societies, especially with a substantial grant in the picture.

The author duly acknowledges Chomsky’s groundbreaking work in this area, though she ultimately rejects his conclusions. This we deem a bit of a dirty trick, considering with what tiresome regularity she cites his seminal paper Just a Few More Formulas I Had Lying Around, which was originally delivered during halftime at an MIT chess meet. In this text from 1974, Chomsky describes the STC as follows:

A = I (P)

where A represents the “ahem,” I is intent, and P is a constant which defines the phlegm density within the subject’s throat. The parentheses are just parentheses.

Chomsky goes on, obscurely, to categorize the above equation as “two separate propositions,” elaborating only so far as to assert that “one of them is a paradigmatic dead end, and the other too tedious to explain.”

It is here that Little-Hörss places herself squarely in the revisionist camp, stating unequivocally, “I stand squarely in the revisionist camp.”

In a burst of tenure-track factionalism, she accuses Chomsky of “showing off” by using words like paradigmatic; and, on the subject of his disinclination to pursue the discussion, she weighs in with a footnote that reads only “Ahem.”

Ahem!, by Justa Little-Hörss, will certainly not be the last noise in the study of nonverbal guttural communication. But it is an important addition to the body of work on this peremptory subject. It is particularly recommended for college teachers who have developed laryngitis and who may be in need of an absorbing book to take them away from the temptations of conversation, symposia, and other throat-dependent forms of interaction.

The First Use of a Word; How Can You Find it? A piffling little case study

Dr. Bob Turvey, Bristol, England

Several recent books have described in riveting detail how the great dictionaries were put together.³³ In the case of the OED there were two main groups involved. The first was composed of scholars who wanted to have a record of the language; they forced their way past innumerable problems such as lack of money, building constraints, and mice eating their card indexes.

The second was an army of volunteers; they read prodigiously and sent in quite literally tons of examples, definitions, and usages, to be assembled by the scholars into the dictionary we know and love today.

Because of the way the OED is assembled, the earliest known use of a word is given first. It’s so logical! This means that even a skilled dictionary reader will tend to think that the oldest entry for a particular word is the earliest use of the word. It’s human nature, and it’s probably done unconsciously.

If you think about it for a moment, it is highly unlikely that a volunteer reader would have chanced upon the first recording of a word. After all, he had not read every single book, magazine, or newspaper ever printed, and there were time constraints on both volunteers and compilers. Even if he did find the first record of a word in print, how would he know that particular use of the word was the first?

It is of course true that the first use of some words is known. Many of these are modern words; their creators are keen to tell the OED and the world at large what they did and when they did it. In addition, many scientific and technical words have been deliberately invented. Such processes were often published, and the contributions to the language by Whewell, Faraday, and others are well known. But in the case of old and unexceptional words there are probably only a handful of cases where the first use of the word is known for certain.

During the past decade I have read a great number of Victorian magazines and newspapers, in pursuit of something which has nothing to do with this article. In the course of this reading I came across several examples of words which predate their OED first-use entry by many years, but in only one case do I think I have found the first recorded use of a word. That word is piffling. The OED suggests it was first used around 1890, and can only speculate as to its antecedents.

What I found was a long article in an 1877 weekly newspaper.³⁴ Headed by the single word PIFFLING, it started as follows:

The worst of coining a new word is that there will always be people dull enough of apprehension to require a definition of it. They either have not the idea within them which produced the word, or they have it altogether obscured, or else it finds itself a different expression. Thus we can imagine a reader inquiring what “Piffling” is, and expecting a definition in so many words, forgetting all the time that words only have real meaning when they are inspired by an idea in the speaker’s mind, and that if such idea be lost, the word becomes merely a number of letters put in a particular order, in the same way that the human frame becomes a skeleton merely, as soon as the spirit has fled. Now we are not going to contend that the word “Piffling” carries an obvious meaning on the face of it, though there is something in the sound of the word which seems to suggest the notion which it is intended to represent….”

The article then goes on at extraordinary length to examine every possible aspect and meaning of this word and its derivatives, such as piffler and piffled. One could almost say it piffles about by way of example! But nowhere does it explain who created the word, why it was done, or where the word came from. The article stands above no name, and there is no reference to either the word or the article in the next 10 issues of the paper. This probably means that there is a Ph.D. waiting for the person who can find the facts behind the front.

[ I can imagine the following conversation:–

“What was your doctorate about?”

“Piffle.”

“Isn’t everybody’s?”]

Perhaps this newspaper article really is the point at which the word first made its appearance. If so, it is an extraordinary example of a word which seems to have been artificially created and unleashed fully formed with a complete written pedigree. Piffling may be unique among ordinary words due to its origin. It was certainly a word that fulfilled a need, and it certainly caught on with the general public.

So how did I find this word when I was not looking for it? Sheer serendipity.³⁵ Piffling is such an odd word to head an article that it caught my eye, and the first few lines then gave the game away.

Once primed I saw the word everywhere! The OED uses an 1897 poem by Kipling as an early example, but that does not really give a good feel for the meaning of the word. One that does is this 1895 description of the Oxford University f^ootball team on the eve of the ‘varsity match³⁶:

“Our strength consists in the evenness of our team and its excellent combination. Our weakness is a tendency to piffle instead of going straight for goal.”

Their strength fortunately³⁷ overcame their weakness; they beat Cambridge 3–0 in what was said to be a one-sided match. The above quotation is doubly interesting in that it appeared two years later in The Sunday Times, and it is this later version which the OED quotes. Either our young Oxford undergraduate had progressed to a job with the newspaper and was an early proponent of recycling, or we are dealing with a plagiarist possessed of a very good memory.³⁸

It is quite noticeable that old literature is becoming available in computer-readable form. The Gutenberg project makes available out-of-copyright books on-line. Digitised newspapers are available on many sites. Some are free, others are pay-per-view. These vary widely in their ease of searching, ranging from the eye-watering (that’s bad in this context!) to the easily readable. Typing in a keyword transports you in seconds to a scanned page, usually with the word highlighted. There are currently limitations to the accuracy with which the character-recognition system operates, since old fonts are often difficult to machine-read. Add to this lines of typeface that wander up and down on the page, ink-splodges, creases, and rips, and you can understand why some words highlighted bear no resemblance to the word you actually typed in!

But such computer-searchable resources, their availability and their accuracy, will increase exponentially in future. The Times, for instance, is currently available 1785–1985 and has one of the quickest and most accurate search systems. Soon the veriest amateur will be able to keyword-search massive chunks of literature. Sometime in the future I predict that a five-minute search will uncover what is almost certainly the oldest use of any word you care to look for.

And those casual keywordists³⁹ will look back at the old lexicographers with a faint sneer of disdain and ask how they could possibly not have known this, or that, or the other.

Well, I can tell them why the old boys didn’t know. They were just piffling about, sir, just piffling about!

---

Postscript

This article was accepted in November 2005. In March 2006 an entry was added to the OED online as follows:

“1848 A. B. EVANS Leicestershire Words 66 Piffling, employed in little trifling occupations.”

The article deals with the problems facing anyone trying to find the first use of a particular word, and this is an excellent example of those problems!

Leaving aside the question of why the OED hadn’t previously looked at a book which obviously contained early definitions of words, this 1848 reference certainly uses the word piffling in the sense it is used today. It does raise an interesting point though; if a word is used in a small area and only in speech, does that qualify it for a first use in print if it then appears in a dictionary of local expressions?

Where words come from is indeed a complex subject. I wonder if the word piffling might have had two independent births, with the second being the one that lead to its widespread use due to the influence and mobility of university men.

“Always verify your references” is sound advice, although when one is quoting the OED one can perhaps be forgiven for not actually doing so. In the above article I quote an example from 1895, in which The Isis, an Oxford University magazine, described their soccer team thus:

“Our strength consists in the evenness of our team and its excellent combination. Our weakness is a tendency to piffle instead of going straight for goal.”

I had this reference in my hand as I wrote, and I noted that the OED quoted a similar sentence, which it attributed to The Sunday Times newspaper of 2 January 1897. Not having seen this later reference, I wondered if the sentence had been quoted, recycled or plagiarised.

I recently had the opportunity to check this reference. When I opened The Sunday Times for the quoted year I found 2 January 1897 was not a Sunday! Ah, the bane of the researcher’s life; a one hundred-year-old typo! Cutting a long story short, I found the quotation in question in The Sunday Times of 2 January 1898. On page 6, in column 7, there is an article headed Sport at the Universities. Under the section Association Football the following appears:

“The Dark Blues possess a very steady and reliable eleven. Their defence is sound, and their attack altogether good, save a tendency to “piffle” in front of goal at times.”

The article stands over the name CAMISIS. This unlikely confluence of rivers suggests that the writer might once have been a student. He might even have been the sports writer for The Isis magazine. If so, the quotation is more likely to have been recycled than plagiarised. Actually, come to think of it, maybe it was just the in-vogue expression at the time, with everyone using it.

The result in the match, incidentally, was not re-cycled. Oxford obviously piffled too much in 1898; Cambridge won one-nil.

Ho hum. Is there anything one can be certain of in literary research?

---

[After thirty years in the Pulp and Paper industry Bob Turvey is currently engaged in several literary projects. One is to conclude and publish a lifetime’s study of the history of the limerick.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

In olden days courting benches were employed by protective fathers to maintain their daughters’ virtuousity. [from the Linda Anderson catalog. Submitted by Alice Batchelor, Falmouth, MA.]

ENIAC, HAL, and Deep Thought: Computer Names

Jessy Randall, Colorado Springs, Colorado

It is a truth universally acknowledged that computers—real and fictional—need names. These names can be foreboding or friendly, and sometimes funny. For the last several decades, computer names have played off each other in sometimes surprising ways.

The world’s first fully electronic digital computer, designed and built by the U.S. Army during the Second World War, was ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer). It weighed over 30 tons and took up an entire room. ENIAC was quickly followed by BINAC (Binary Automatic Computer) and UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer). By 1950, John von Neumann had developed MANIAC (Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator And Computer), the computer that helped the U.S. produce the hydrogen bomb. Other early computers were EDVAC, SILIAC, ILLIAC, OARAC, and the Rand Corporation’s whimsically named Johnniac (for John von Neumann, who supervised its production). In this last example, the -AC at the end stands for nothing—it’s just part of the convention of computer naming.

Early fictional computer names all seem to comment on ENIAC and its cohorts. The computer in the 1957 Spencer Tracy/Katherine Hepburn movie Desk Set is EMERAC (Electro-Magnetic MEmory and Research Arithmetic Calculator), called Emmy for short. (Computers, when given names, are often assigned genders; these genders sometimes change.) Kurt Vonnegut’s 1950 short story “EPICAC” contains a computer of that name; the acronym is never explained. Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, published in 1958, contains MINIAC (MINIature Automatic Computer), called Minny. John Barth’s 1966 novel Giles Goat-Boy has WESCAC (WEst Campus Analog Computer). Isaac Asimov has Multivac, James P. Hogan has ZORAC and BIAC (Bio-Inter-Active Computer), Kendall Foster Crossen has SOCIAC, Philip K. Dick has Autofac, and John T. Sladek has QUIDNAC. (Most of the fictional -AC computers are evil or in some way untrustworthy.)

Before ENIAC, the British had Colossus, a colossal mechanical computer designed to read encrypted messages. One presumes it was named for its size, but perhaps the name is a reference to the Colossus of Rhodes, an enormous statue of Apollo considered one of the seven wonders of the world. Colossus is also the name of the evil computer in D. F. Jones’s 1966 science fiction novel Colossus and the 1969 film based on it. Other classically oriented computer names include Asimov’s Nestor, Robert Heinlein’s Minerva, and Arthur C. Clarke’s Athena (an early incarnation of HAL).

Computers are often named after ancient deities and related terms: a 1966 Dr. Who episode entitled “The War Machines” has WOTAN (Will Operating Thought ANalogue); another Dr. Who episode, “Face of Evil” from 1977, has a computer/god named Xoanon (a word meaning “a carved statue of a deity”). Roger Zelazny has Loki 7281 in the short story of that name. And Jeremy Leven’s 1982 novel Satan, His Psychotherapy and Cure contains a computer named QED (Quintessential Entropy Device) that refers to itself as Satan.

Probably the creepiest and most malevolent computer I found in my research is AM in Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.” The humans in the story discuss AM’s name: “At first it meant Allied Mastercomputer, and then it meant Adaptive Manipulator, and later it developed sentience and linked itself up and they called it an Aggressive Menace, but by then it was too late, and finally it called itself AM, emerging intelligence, and what it meant was I am … cogito ergo sum… I think, therefore I am.” I should think there’s also a reference there to the biblical “I AM THAT I AM,” usually rendered in all capitals; it’s God’s answer to Abraham’s question “Who are you?” in Exodus 3:14. God goes on to say “Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” One of the proofs that AM has grown all-powerful is that he has the power to turn around and name humans. One is Nimdok, “the name the machine had forced him to use, because it amused itself with strange sounds.”

Other acronymically named computers include BOSS (Biomorphic Organisational Systems Supervisor) from a 1973 Dr. Who episode, “The Green Death”; The Tomorrow People’s TIM, named for Timon Irnok Manta, who helped construct it; Knight Rider’s KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand), both a computer and a car; and, probably most famously, 2001’s HAL (Heuristic ALgorithm), a one-letter shift from IBM. (Author Arthur C. Clarke claims this is just a coincidence; later computers in the series were named SAL.)

The Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson contains the only profane computer name I have come across: FUCKUP (First Universal Cybernetic Kinetic Ultra-micro Programmer)—a computer that predicts the future using a virtual I Ching.

In the 1983 film War Games, the characters played by Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy hack into Joshua, a program within WOPR (War Operations Plan and Response), pronounced “whopper.” The real-life equivalent of WOPR is BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System), built in 1959. (In 1960, BMEWS famously failed to differentiate between the moon and an array of weapons. Luckily, the humans involved figured out what was going on.)

Another important real-life computer acronym is of course IBM, which stands for International Business Machines. (Wags have come up with at least a hundred alternate explanations, including “I Break Monthly” and “I’m Buying Macintosh.”) The IBM corporation acquired the nickname “Big Blue” in the early 1980s, probably because of its blue logo. (The origin of the nickname is now obscure. Some claim it came into being ten years earlier and that it stems from the “blue-chip,” i.e., valuable, stock of the company. Others say it’s from the blue plastic of the computers themselves. Another possibility is that IBM’s navy blue suit dress code inspired the nickname.)

IBM’s chess computer, first named ChipTest, was later renamed Deep Thought after the computer in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Deep Thought became Deep Blue and in 1996 defeated national chess champion Garry Kasparov in the first game of their series. (Kasparov won the series overall, but an upgraded version of Deep Blue, unofficially known as Deeper Blue, beat him in 1997.)

While we’re on the subject, the Hitchhiker’s Guide books contain an abundance of terrific computer names. In addition to Deep Thought (which provided the answer to life, the universe, and everything: 42), there’s the “computer” known as Earth (which was supposed to come up with the question), and several other lesser but still super computers: Eddie (an extremely cheerful computer on board Zaphod Beeblebrox’s spaceship), Hactar (whose name echoes that of Hector in the Iliad—its mission is to design the ultimate weapon), the Milliard Gargantubrain, the Multicorticoid Perspicutron Titan Muller, the Pondermatic, the Great Hyperlobic Omni-Cognate Neutron Wrangler, and the Googleplex Star Thinker.

Googleplex is an interesting word—a googol is an extremely large number: 10 to the 100th power, or 1 followed by a hundred zeros. A googolplex is 10 raised to the power of a googol, a number so enormous that, according to the Wikipedia, “it would not be possible to write down or store the digits of a googolplex in decimal notation, even if all the matter in the known universe were converted into paper and ink or disk drives.” Googol, of course, begat the search engine Google. I don’t know if Douglas Adams deliberately misspelled googolplex for his computer name, or if it was an accident. Similarly, his term Hyperlobic suggests hyperbolic.

Now, a bit of a grab bag. There are three computers on the TV show Blake’s Seven: Orac, Slave, and Zen. Red Dwarf has Holly/Hillie, possibly the second-most-known computer to have had a sex change. Quantum Leap has the first most known, Ziggy. Asimov has computers named Dave, Herbie, Cutie, Giskard, Hummin, and VIKI (Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence); Heinlein has Gay Deceiver, Mycroft (“Mike,” also known as Michelle sometimes), and Dora. The 1979 film Alien, of course, has Mother. Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code, published in 2003, has the C Cube, “the cube that sees everything,” a supercomputer using fairy technology.

In 1985, Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County comic character Oliver received a personal computer from the Banana Junior 6000 series (a play on Macintosh/Apple). It came with “optional software” including Bananawrite, Bananadraw, Bananafile, and Bananamanager and was “just what your four-year-old needs to compete in today’s cut-throat world of high tech and high expectations.”

Boringly, the computers on Star Trek, Deep Space 9, and Babylon 5 are simply called Computer, as in “Computer, give me the coordinates” or “Computer, make it so.” E.M. Forster’s 1909 short story “The Machine Stops” has a computer simply called Machine.

Some computer designers completely do without the convention of naming their work. In Richard Preston’s article “Capturing the Unicorn” (New Yorker, April 11, 2005), we learn about two brothers, Gregory and David Chudnovsky, who built a supercomputer capable of comprehending the vast amount of information contained in digital photographs of the unicorn tapestry at the Cloisters in New York City.

The brothers say they sometimes refer to their creation as “the Home Depot thing” (since some of its protective parts came from that hardware store). Gregory Chudnovsky told Preston, “To be honest, we really call it It. This is because It doesn’t exactly have a name.”

And of course at most colleges and universities the department in charge of computers is usually known now as IT (pronounced “I. T.” for Information Technology), but I always think of the terrifying computer-like brain IT (pronounced “it”) in Madeleine L’Engle’s children’s novel A Wrinkle in Time.

[Jessy Randall is the Curator of Special Collections at Colorado College. Her first book of poems, A Day in Boyland, is just out from Ghost Road Press. Her website is http://personalwebs.coloradocollege.edu/~jrandall.]

Peaks One and Two

When all is said and done, he said

(With obvious enjoyment),

We’ll have a heap of silence and

A pile of unemployment.

—John Nixon, Jr.

Pluralia Tantum or E Pluribus Unum: Three Adventures with the Plural

Anatoly Liberman, University of Minnesota

The First Adventure: “The Mood of the Tales Are Gloomy”

Few things in English grammar are trickier than the use of the plural, which shows that even a language with practically no endings is hard to speak. White Nights is a sentimental story by Dostoyevsky, and this should not surprise anyone, for white nights are the time in May and June when young people in St. Petersburg traditionally fall in love. About a century and a half ago, it was customary to say: “Two Gentlemen of Verona were shown at the local theater,” as though someone had brought two freaks from Italy rather than produced a play by Shakespeare. I have gray hair and take this circumstance in stride, but two hairs (of any color) in my soup make my gorge rise. The police are after the reckless driver who thinks that gin and water is a good tonic for a young man behind the wheel. The assessment of a library ended in the following statement: “Two-thirds (or about 66%) of its stock is trash. How fortunate that nine-tenths (or 90%) of the town’s population do not read books.”

A student wrote in a paper: “The mood of the tales are gloomy.” The noun closest to the verb is tales, so that the subject of the sentence (mood) fell by the wayside. If the mood of the tales is gloomy, the tales are probably also gloomy, but this is beside the point. A rule has emerged in American English according to which the verb should agree in number with a noun or a group of nouns next to it. Another quotation from a student’s paper: “New vocabulary involving the sea and sailing were introduced into the English language by the Anglo-Saxons.” What was introduced: new vocabulary or the sea and sailing? A staff writer explains: “The cost of fringe benefits are calculated by taking the cost of all benefits, including tuition, and dividing that by the salary of the employee.” So this is how the cost are calculated; a useful thing to know.

“The main problem of immigrant families have been physical survival.” The mood is getting gloomier and gloomier. A well-educated university administrator with a linguistic background (of course, a native speaker: foreigners cannot afford such luxuries) writes: “Tuition from CEE students in day school classes are not part of our base.” I always forget what CEE means, nor do I care, but it is a comfort that the above-mentioned tuition are not part of our base.

The opposite situation (a singular verb after a subject in the plural) is less frequent. “The words with which the boy turns to the stranger who saved him from certain death comes straight from the heart” (the words … comes). The writer was misled by boy, stranger, and death and forgot about the subject (words). In the following, understands is perhaps a typo for understand: “All who have felt their foot tap to music understands,” etc. Yet monsters like “The roles of flora and fauna in the Grimms’ collection is numerous and varied” turn up with some regularity.

Speakers of British English may be catching up with what a Londoner of my acquaintance still calls colonial usage. Richard W. Bailey quotes the following sentence from Simon Winchester’s book The Meaning of Everything: “…the loveliness of the assemblages are just too beguiling to pass by.” He comments ironically: “Winchester’s enthusiasm overwhelms his grammar” (Dictionaries 25, 2004, pp. 170-71). I suspect that constructions like the mood of the tales are gloomy developed in British dialects but did not make it to the Standard, while in the New World (“in the colonies”) they asserted themselves and became the norm in unbuttoned, uncensored speech. As early (or as late) as 1888 an anonymous author wrote in The Nation: “One of the main facts that have induced philologists to declare against Asia as the cradle of the race…” (vol. 46, 185) Did he mean: “There are several main facts, all of which have induced…?” I doubt it. Compare a sentence printed on May 13, 2005: “A survey… found that only one in 15 cases of child sexual abuse were reported.”

The norm is capricious. Grammar books recommend saying “Our guide was the stars” and “My greatest joy is books” (most languages require were and are here, the agreement being between the verb and the predicative). Those are tortured sentences (it is more natural to reverse the order of the subject and the predicative: “The stars were our guide” and “Books are my greatest joy”). They are given here for the sake of the argument.

Yet “What we need are a few energetic people” seems to be the only permissible variant; for some reason, after what the agreement changes its direction. At the moment, the cost of fringe benefits are calculated is striving for recognition and is getting the upper hand. I asked a group of undergraduates whether, in their opinion, the sentence “the hope of our best people are gone” needs editing (the sentence occurred in a paper I had graded the day before). No one had any remarks. When I explained what seemed wrong to me, they admitted that the hope…is would be more grammatical but added that with are the whole “flows better.” This sounded like an irrefutable argument.

Speakers always resist the encroachments of cultural change. Linguists call the never-ending process of readjustment the history of language. Some consider it to be degeneration; others call it progress. I am afraid that soon all of us will learn to say: “The love I bear you are sincere.” Don’t we say one pig—many pigs but one sheep—many sheep or the cattle are grazing? Although language and logic are seldom married, this circumstance has hardly spoiled any meat eater’s appetite for pork, mutton, and beef. Gloom pervades my tale; yet fighting the wilderness is a noble pursuit. It may be a losing battle, but, to quote Rostand’s Cyrano, “one does not always fight to win.”

The Second Adventure: “Who Are They”?

It is so important not to hurt anyone’s sensitivity! In a folktale, an unusually hungry visitor has eaten nine meatballs, and the hostess—at first kindness itself—treats her guest to a tenth and thinks: “I wish you would choke on it, you glutton!” And lo and behold! The eater chokes and drops dead. The hostess is full of remorse, but it is too late. The moral is: “Watch your language.” It is more sensible advice than “Leave your language alone.”

We want to speak in fully inoffensive gender-neutral sentences, but neutering English is hard. In the old days, no one objected to instructions like: “Every applicant should indicate his preference by checking one of the boxes.” Nowadays, when women are encouraged to apply, this sounds silly. It is of course possible to write her instead of his. This will be politically correct but equally silly. His or her (her or his) is acceptable but cumbersome, especially if the final version is something like: “He or she should remember that his or her choice is final.”

The plural is an ideal device for neutering, since English does not distinguish between genders in the plural: “Applicants should indicate their preference by checking one of the boxes. They should remember that their choice is final.” The second sentence, with its they—their, carries visible traces of surgery, but we can live with the results: the message is clear, and English is still alive.

The trouble starts when English is murdered in cold blood for the sake of a lofty idea. “When a student comes to see me, I always answer their question,” a proud counselor says. This horror has been sanctioned by teachers, some editors, and by just about everyone who is responsible for the norms of modern American English. Here are a few more tidbits.

“When people are drinking in an addictive manner, the mere process of ingesting alcoholic beverages is abusive and little else. If a person does this to themselves, then it is simply self-abuse, i.e., beating yourself up.” (The elegance of the image need not distract our attention from the desperate alternation a person—themselves—yourself.) “If a caller blocks their name and number, the caller ID subscriber will see the words ‘anonymous’ or ‘private’ on their display unit” (a caller… their, the subscriber… their). “If a tenant has an eviction on their record, it does not mean they were a bad tenant.” (I am sure it does not. Every tenant are entitled to the benefit of a doubt.) “Your driver has their taxicab driver’s license displayed on the dashboard” (in many years I have seen only one female taxi driver, but your driver are quick to take offense, so that caution is recommended). “The hero has their reward.” “The traveler has nowhere to lay their head.” “A fisherman caught a talking fish that promised to give them anything they wanted” (those are quotations from students’ papers). The amusing thing about the last sentence is that the sexual identity (“gender”) of the fisherman is indicated in the tale with absolute clarity, for otherwise modern translations would have turned him into fisherperson, angler (“The Angler and Their Wife”), or something similar. Yet the student felt that the terrible H- word he (him, his) should be avoided at all costs. We have reached such heights of sensitivity that even the word it frightens us. The most innocent pronoun in the singular begins to look suspicious. Consider the following: “If every group received the amount of funding they requested, students would pay roughly $41.85 more per year.” I once heard: “The bookcase is too large. They won’t fit into your office.”

A correspondent from Portland, Oregon was “appalled” at seeing in VERBATIM the sentence: “A person so bored they have completely shut off their brain” (B. J. Seymour in XXIV/4). The letter elicited a short editorial comment: “Although some despise it, this is a very old construction (Jane Austen used it!) that shouldn’t be excised, especially in humorous writing.” It is true that person and pronouns ending in -one have occasionally been used with a plural verb from time immemorial. The variation none is ~ none are is also known; the derivation of none from no one seems to have been forgotten. A popular British book for foreigners does not object to “Who sit on the bench?” if the expected answer is “John and Mary do.” This is all very well, but indefinite pronouns and even the noun person cannot be equated with student, tenant, and driver.

There is a noteworthy difference between the two adventures discussed above. Case number 1 (“The mood of the tales are gloomy”) shows that nature resists nurture: a form known to be wrong triumphs despite the efforts of editors and teachers (the latter group is now called educators). Sentences keep flowing and drown incongruous grammar. Case number 2 (“Your driver has their taxicab driver’s license…”) is the result of unpredictably successful language planning. Most people refuse to change their speech habits. Even proper spelling is hard to instill. The whole country writes occurance, it’s name, and alot. But here an influential group of politically correct tyrants managed to stultify millions of guilt-ridden, docile citizens. The poet (you may remember their name) was right: life is a tale told by an idiot.

The Third Adventure: “How People Put Feet into Their Mouths and Speak Tongues in Cheeks.”

This adventure will be short because it is not mine. Both the idea and the material come from Professor Ellis Dye, who published an article (“On the Abuse of the Plural in English”) in Colloquy, a homey journal supported by Macalester College, St. Paul, MN (Colloquy 12, no. 1 (1993) 9-13). He pointed to “an epidemic of plurals” in American English and cited examples like the following: “[Politicians] are happy to put their political skins ahead of their principles”, “Seventy-five percent of loons were found to have mercury in their livers or their feathers,” “Tens of thousands of out-of-towners are trying to find their ways to the Metrodome,” “Approximately 600,000 women will have their uteri removed this year.”

Such sentences, as Dye indicates, betray the speakers’ assumption that a plural subject requires a plural object; this is why out-of-towners try to find their ways. The result is more repugnant than funny. I may add that the subject is not immune to the plural disease either. A columnist writes in a student newspaper: “We played some good games, and our senses of humor clicked” (two senses for two players).

The three adventures described above call for different reactions. Editors will keep substituting is for are in the mood of tales are gloomy, while people will keep saying what they think is right. When the last stubborn editor dies, are will reign unchallenged (vide the futile struggle against constructions like I insist on John [rather than John’s] staying at home). A driver with their license is preposterous nonsense, and all people of good will should stand up for return to normalcy. Formulating an idea in gender-neutral English may require an effort, but why should good writing be easy? It is certainly nobler in the mind to suffer and spend an extra minute revising a stupid sentence than to mutilate one’s mother tongue. Loons will be reported to have mercury in their livers as long as the study of English is neglected in our school curricula. Permissive “educators” prefer to do without grammar (because—oh horror!—working on grammar may not always be fun, and fun is the main F- word in our life). Cultured people (I realize that the elitist epithet cultured is now seldom used unless applied to buttermilk) have studied grammar and style and were taught to think before they speak and write. They lose their linguistic innocence at a time when such momentous changes are supposed to happen. The growth of language should not be discouraged (it will change whether we want it or not), but not all of its deformities deserve admiration. In the words of the rich miller, immortalized by Oscar Wilde: “Lots of people act well, but very few people talk well, which shows that talking is much the more difficult thing of the two, and much the finer thing also.”

[Anatoly Liberman is a Professor of Germanic Philology at the University of Minnesota. His most recent book is Word Origins … and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone (Oxford University Press, 2005), but he prefers studying language history to being part of it.]

Modern Language: Why Chicken Rectums Are More Relevant Than You Think

Gary Buslik, Mundelein, Illinois

A while back, while researching a story I was writing on Caribbean cockfighting, I emailed Martinique’s head librarian, Niquette, whom I had met a year earlier in a Fort-de-France restaurant when, overhearing me order in my best French what I believed was lobster bisque, she corrected me before the waiter brought me a bowl of crushed glass. I have no doubt the garçon, or gendarme, or whatever they’re called, would have served me the broken shards and watched me eat them, because that’s how the French are. For every perfectly nice woman like Niquette, they have ten mean, lousy socialist waiters who speak through their adenoids and make a stinky face when you order a Coke. I do not know exactly what adenoids are, but the French probably invented them, because it is the official policy of their government that they invented everything, except the guillotine.

Even in the West Indies the French despise Americans, because 1) instead of cleansing our palates with sorbet, we cleanse them with gummy worms, and 2) we absolutely insist that bijou is the French word for movie theater. To compensate for these barbarities, the French national language academy imposes a strict limit on how many letters with accent marks Americans may use annually, after which they debit us fifty cents for each infraction, charged automatically to our VISA cards, which the French invented, right after air.

After Niquette saved my digestive system, we got to talking. When I told her I was a writer, she joined me at my table, and we shared a bottle of Bijou and intelligent conversation long into the night. As a librarian, she had a deep curiosity about English literature. We exchanged probing questions, she asking about existentialism in the novels of Virginia Woolf, and I asking where I might find a good topless beach, and, for that matter, was there really a bad topless beach? And so on.

So, naturally, Niquette, who knew almost as much about the West Indies as Madame Curie knew about glowing in the dark, was the first person I thought of when researching a story about Caribbean cockfighting.

She remembered me. She put me in touch with her cousin Gustave, an avid breeder and handler of Martiniquan fighting roosters. He lives in a village that does not appear on any map and that the U.S. Postal Service does not even list in its thick tome Manual of Places We Can’t Pronounce. I wrote to him in care of Niquette, who acted as translator, in case I inadvertently accused Gustave himself of being a cock. (Cock being a word that always gets me into trouble. I once apprenticed for an uncle who tested and repaired boilers and who would say things like “Only twist your cock finger tight,” “Back your cock off a quarter turn,” “Soak your rusty cock with good ol’ WD-40,” and “Keep your hand well clear of a steaming cock.” This made for difficult holidays. On Thanksgivings I couldn’t make eye contact with him without cranberries shooting out of my nose.)

I did not really expect to hear from Gustave. I imagined a cockfighting enthusiast would be pretty wary of a big-city type wanting to write about a pastime that’s beaucoup rough on critters. But I assured him that my cockfighting scenes would take no moral stance whatsoever—which, anyhow, I’m weak on in the best of circumstances—and that I’d not only be willing to show him my writing in advance, but that I’d appreciate his comments and suggestions. Still, I was plenty surprised when, a month later, the librarian mailed me her cousin’s reply.

I liked Gustave. He didn’t have to respond, but he did. He took a chance. I had plenty of follow-up questions, and maybe because their neutral and doltish nature put him at ease, he answered all my questions thoroughly and trustingly, and, with Niquette’s dedicated assistance, we wound up writing back and forth half a dozen times.

Although I emailed my questions to Niquette, her cousin wrote out each of his replies longhand, underscoring each missive with a chapter-verse reference from the New Testament. Evidently Gustave was a dedicated Catholic, as Frenchmen who live thousands of miles from Paris can sometimes be.

The impression I had was that Gustave and his brood were good, God-fearing descendants of slaves, who, despite their forebears having been kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by Christians, nevertheless believed they were the sinners. When they weren’t working their rocky pastures, Gustave and his neighbors enjoyed frying plantains and cockfight losers and in the evening listened to the distant surf and the sound of vervet monkeys killing one another.

I imagined that he owned a dog named Claude and a donkey also named Claude, that he shared a bit of vin rouge with Father Pierre every Sunday after church, and once a month or so had another child.

Here is his last letter to me, translated by Niquette:

Cher Gary

Thank you for allowing me to read part of your new book. I think God has truly blessed you with a talent of writing. I wish more people would see that we can do nothing great without HIM and that if you are not CATHOLIC you will go to HELL.

I only saw a couple of places where I disagree with or I am not sure of. (1) At the bottom of page 15-top of 16. Maybe use a different description. (2) Top of page 18. –Not sure about the guts. (3) Bottom of page 17. I have never seen a handler insert a finger in “chicken’s rectum” but it could be possible in the location you are describing, I am no mayvun outside of Martinique.

You did a good job. If I can ever help please let me know.

Warmly,

Gustave

(John 13:34-35)

I read that mayvun sentence over and over. Mayvun? Did Gustave mean something different from what I thought he meant? Was there an entirely different word—an African or Creole expression, maybe—that meant roughly the same thing as the Yiddish word that had come into vogue among American big-city lawyers, commodity brokers, and hip magazine writers? Like our own Indian wampum, did it denote material or spiritual wealth and so mean chief, or shaman, or great warrior? Or was mayvun, perhaps, the ecclesiastical substitution for a voodoo expletive, the way Catholic saints stand in for Santeria gods?

Since my trusty French dictionary burped no Gaul mayvun or any reasonably alternate spelling thereof, I emailed Niquette to see if she had misunderstood or misread her cousin’s handwriting. But non, she assured me, she had transcribed it faithfully—though she, too, admitted to being befuddled. So I could only conclude that, yes, what Gustave had meant, and the word that certainly fit his context, was the Yiddish, slightly pejorative, slightly ironic word for “expert”—maven—the word I had heard almost every day growing up, as in “Some day you’ll be a maven, but for now shut up and do what I say, or I’ll give you something to cry about.” That maven.

Had this now-yuppie buzzword seeped into the Martiniquan mountain streams like devil fluoride? Or was it a one-time thing, Gustave’s local rum shop having installed satellite TV, and its owner, after one too many nips with Father Pierre, having accidentally strayed from the Christian Broadcasting Network to chance on CNN, just as Larry King was interviewing Michael Eisner?

LARRY: We’re here today with the mouse maven, Michael Eisner, who recently got voted off as Disney’s Chairman of the Board. What about it, Michael? Not enough mavenosity?

MICHAEL: Well, you know, Larry, today everyone’s a so-called maven. But real mavens don’t grow on trees. I mean, really mavenitious mavens.

LARRY: What kind of maven was Walt Disney?

MICHAEL: Walt was a great cartoon maven. He was also a maven on booze and cigarettes. I wrote a book about it, if you want to see the cover. It’s called The Maven’s Maven, and it’s available on Amazon.com—you know, the book mavens?

I got to thinking. What if life really had begun to change in the West Indian rainforest? I’ll tell you why I was thinking that. My wife and I once visited a gumdrop island in the Eastern Caribbean that no one had ever heard of, not even the people who lived there. The inhabitants had been so inbred that there was only one surname on the entire island—one thousand locals all named Johnson—and one lunatic asylum. Although they turned out to be extremely nice people, they answered you three questions behind, their foreheads were shaped like catchers’ mitts, and their taxi drivers weren’t sure how to find the only guesthouse on the island.

While scouring the serpentine road for the hotel, our own driver, Osmand Johnson, made small talk.

“A where you from, eh?”

“U.S.,” we replied.

“U.S., eh? You know Mistah O’Reilly, him?”

Well, surely there were oodles of O’Reillys in Chicago—probably all working in the Building Department—let alone in the entire United States, but since we knew not a single one, we answered with certainty, “Nope.” Then we chuckled, condescendingly if I’m not mistaken, in the wake of Osmand’s provincial view of the world.

The laugh, it turned out, was on us. For eventually Osmand found the guesthouse, and we checked into our room to discover not only a perfectly good television set, but that the only station it received was FOX, home of “Fair and Balanced News.”

Oh, that O’Reilly.

If a gazillion megawatts of “The O’Reilly Factor,” managing to find the ends of the earth, had altered Osmand Johnson’s chitchat, why, then, couldn’t maven, and who knows how many other Yiddishisms, have circled and pecked Gustave and his fellow cockfighters?

Which is why I can imagine this exchange at the next get-together of Le Grand Club des Coqs de la Martinique:

“Ça va, Gustave? Schlep your kishkes down on a stool there. What’s all this kvetching we’re hearing about?”

“Lisette invited her no-good brother over for a bowl of matzo ball soup, and the next thing I know, he’s eating my last bagel.”

“A real goniff. Since when is your wife a mayvun on matzo balls?”

“Since she brought us out a pot when we were digging up a zombie last month. Tasted great with lox and pastrami. Say, have you ever heard of inserting a finger up a chicken’s rectum to make him fight better?”

“The French invented rectums!”

My grandmother was not French but always had plenty of their mustard when we came over. Her name was Ida Goldfarb, and she was a good, hardworking grandma who made a heck of a chicken soup herself, if you didn’t count the one-inch-thick layer of fat. She never stuck her finger or any other appendage in the bird’s rectum, as far as I know, but I won’t vouch for my grandpa.

This I know for sure. If on Thanksgiving my grandma, rest her soul, had been sitting between me and my mother, I would never have gotten klopped on my head every time Uncle Jack mentioned WD-40. Ida brooked no klopping of her grandchildren, at the mention of the word cock or otherwise, and my mother was enough of a maven to know that the no-klopping rule skipped a generation, and if she dared raise a hand to me, no wishbone in the wide world would have saved her kishkes.

[Gary Buslik writes novels, short stories, and essays. His work appears in many commercial and literary magazines. He teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He does not play golf. Please do not call him to play golf.]

Solutions to Cryptic Crossword 104

Across

1. Scott (ref Sir Walter Scott) +anag of glitz around (f+era+L+D)

9. ie+l(rev)+sure

10. Analog of in loose

11. Settle around a

12. At(a)lanta

13. Homophone of bark

15. Anag of name on mag

17. U+ET+t in state

19. Two meanings

22. Anag of a teen+a+st

24. FT in drier

26. Trail around Va

27. anag of seat+hop

28. Anag of a most fell era+war

Down

1. Sp+lash

2. OK+in+a+wa(r)

3. Two meanings

4. Anag of leaning around E+t

5. Z+anag of deal

6. Tome around Neil+l (all rev)

7. Anon around vig(our)

8. Di’s+DA+in

14. US+anag of team in hoe (verb to scrape)

16. A+NE+CD+anag of a lot

17. Anag of star+in+A & lit

18. A+lab+a+MA

20. Two meanings

21. Gr+apes

23. Hidden (rev) in (notic)ed lit(tle)

25. Ida+ho

Anglo-American Crossword No. 104

Compiled by Philip Marlow

Across

1. US writer and British writer fashioned glitz about fine period with Latin director (5, 10)

9. Unoccupied time that is left after reflection? Certainly! (7)

10. Eccentric in loose group of madmen (7)

11. Set up home fringing a US city (7)

12. Mythical figure overlooking a US city (7)

13. Composer creating sound of bay (4)

15. Old king excited name on mag (9)

17. University movie attracting first of tributes in part of US—and Oscar? (9)

19. Kind model (4)

22. Supremely tidy teen confused with a good man (7)

24. Aimless fellow placing paper inside towel (7)

26. Route around Virginia is hard work (7)

27. Seller with special appeal for the British manufacturing seat with spring (3,4)

28. Famous novel reconstructing a most fell era with war? (1,8,2,4)

Down

1. Special stroke of satire creating publicity (6)

2. Islands gaining approval in an endless conflict (7)

3. Have confidence in property concern (5)

4. Unattractive leaning sadly to trap English with time (9)

5. Final character altering deal—1 across’ partner? (5)

6. Soothing book about man on lake promoted (9)

7. Former papal seat soon inspiring strength (not half!) (7)

8. Scorn shown by girl’s lawyer at home (7)

14. I share accommodation with American team mistakenly getting into scrape (9)

16. A New England recording with a lot transcribed in narrative (9)

17. Fantastic star in America? (7)

18. State having a scientific area supported by a graduate (7)

20. US sportsman’s vessel (7)

21. Greek primates providing a source of wine (6)

23. In turn, some noticed little sign of correct pronunciation (5)

25. Classical mountain and house in state (5)

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. “On Blue Moons, and Others,” VERBATIM XXIII/2, pp. 18–21. ↩︎

2. Autochthony (from Greek autos, ‘self’ and chth�n, ‘earth’) is the quality of being born directly from the land, like the warriors grown from the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus, or Pegasus springing from the sands bled upon by the dying Medusa—and a great cocktail-party word, as is its close synonym chthonic, ‘of the earth.’ (Wanted: Four or five middle-aged women with empty nests, guitars, and attitude enough to throw caution to the winds and go on tour as a rock band calling itself Chthonic Moms [“Earth Mothers”]. Surely there’s silver-screen potential here; remember Calendar Girls? MILFs rule! ↩︎

3. See http://www.argostarch.com/history.asp, which goes on to say that in 1899 “Argo, Kingsford's and two other starch companies merge[d] to form the United Starch Company, a forerunner of The Corn Products Refining Co.” ↩︎

4. From the Aug. 11, 2005, Palm Beach Daily News obituary of J. Russell Duncan (http://www.palmbeachdailynews.com/comm/content/community/ObitDuncan811.html). Duncan had been an industrial administrator for the Marshall Plan in Italy, and presided over the rebirth of such firms as Fiat and Pirelli. Later, under his leadership, Sterling Precision got renamed Steego and began being traded on the New York Stock Exchange. “After selling Steego in 1988,” the Daily News obit adds, “he retained a small division that he built into Milastar Corp., which he served as chairman until his death.” How Duncan settled on the Steego name is not known, but it was certainly more memorable than its predecessor, which could easily have been confused with any number of other similarly named firms (e.g., Waltham Precision Instruments, successor to the Waltham Watch Company, which, during its Civil War heyday of producing cheap but reliable soldiers’ watches, had earned Waltham, Mass., the nickname “Watch City”). ↩︎

5. Its company website URL is, not surprisingly, www.pergo.com. ↩︎

6. Or has never heard its slogan, Leggo my Eggo! According to the Columbia Encyclopedia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975, p. 247), Dr. J. H. Kellogg founded the Health Reform Institute at Battle Creek, Mich., in 1866, and W. K. Kellogg began manufacturing Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flakes in 1906. (For a concise official history of the Kellogg corporate family, see http://investor.kelloggs.com/history.cfm.) But Eggo is also the name of a recruitment agency for technical personnel, based in Paris, France (website: perso.wanadoo.fr/eggo.conseils), and of another company billing itself as “a top management consulting firm focused on innovation” (www.eggo.com) at an unspecified location in the United States. And why Eggo? The French company is mum on this; the American one states that “[t]he name Eggo comes from our belief that innovation must be people driven, as opposed to technology driven,” a derivation that we suspect most readers will find no more self-evident than it seemed to us. ↩︎

7. Just as Eggo must not be confused with ego (Latin for ‘I,’ and Sigmund Freud’s term for the more or less rational adult in his tripartite model of the human psyche), prego (Italian for ‘[if you] please’) is not the same as preggo (synonymous with preggers, both being vulgar diminutives for ‘pregnant’): Prego is from Latin precor, a deponent verb (passive construction with active sense) meaning ‘I entreat/beg.’ There are, it should be noted, a great many Latin verbs whose first person singular indicative active form ends with -go, such as rogo, ‘I ask/beg’ (Rogation Days in the Catholic and Episcopal church calendars are days of prayer, especially for a good harvest), ago, ‘I do/make’ (whose first syllable is accented, in contradistinction to the English adverb/adjective agó) and its negative, nego, ‘I deny/refuse,’ fingo, ‘I make/fashion,’ and pingo, ‘I paint’ (whose past participles fictus and pictus give us fiction and Picts respectively). Frango means ‘I break,’ spargo, ‘I scatter,’ pungo, ‘I punch/prick’ (this gives English a host of words including point and pungent), fugo, ‘I put to flight’ (the same root yields fugio, ‘I flee’), and plango, ‘I beat (my breast)/lament’ (whence complaint). The state motto of Maine is Dirigo, ‘I direct’ (originally ‘I align/lay out straight’). ↩︎

8. The Pogo stick, according to one of its manufacturers (the American Pogo Stick Company, in Marina del Rey, Calif., http://www.pogostickusa.com/history.htm), is supposed to have been named after a pious Burmese peasant girl named Pogo, who “wanted to go to temple every day to pray, but couldn’t because she had no shoes to wear for the long walk through the mud and rocks.” So her farmer father built her a jumping stick, which allowed her to bounce her way to the temple and back. George Hansburg saw the device while traveling in the Far East and on his return to America determined to go into business making his own version, which added a metal spring for additional bounce. He obtained a patent for what he dubbed the Pogo Stick in 1919, starting a craze during the 1920s that included a Pogo-stick chorus line in the Ziegfeld Follies, Pogo-stick marriage ceremonies, and Pogo-stick marathons to set and break world records for most consecutive bounces. Hansburg would continue to make Pogo sticks for the next 50 years before selling the company and retiring in the early 1970s. There is no connection between his invention and Pogo Possum, Walt Kelly’s beloved cartoon character, who is discussed in affectionate detail on the website of Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp Park (www.okeswamp.com/ral_InfoPogo_and_the_Walt_Kelly_Museum/pogo_and_the_walt_kelly_museum.html). The liberal Kelly’s slogan “I Go Pogo” parodied then-dominant Republican culture’s “I Like Ike,” which propelled World War II general Dwight D. Eisenhower to victory in the American presidential elections of 1952 and 1956. ↩︎

9. The company’s website file www.lego.com/info/pdf/LEGO_company_profile_UK.pdf says that its founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, coined the name in 1934 from the first two letters of the Danish words leg godt, ‘play well.’ Seven decades later, the firm today employs over 6,500 people full-time, with principal manufacturing facilities in Denmark and Switzerland, and the product line now includes 2,400 different items in 90 colors. ↩︎

10. Mego, based in New York City, was founded in 1954 by D. David Abrams and his wife, Madeline; their son Marty joined the firm in 1971, fresh from business school, and revolutionized the product line from 88-cent “hush-up” impulse-buy toys to the large action figures now prized by collectors. During the 1970s, the firm is said to have “invented or perfected many of the toy genres and marketing tools that today we take for granted … action figures and dolls that offered a different vehicle for children's imaginations” (www.megomuseum.com/catalog/index.shtml). Though Mego went out of business in the early 1980s, a brisk ancillary market has developed in replacement parts for figures from Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, The Wizard of Oz, KISS, and comic superheroes; see, for example, the site www.megodoctor.com. The origin of the company name does not seem to be a matter of public record. ↩︎

11. Webster’s 10th Collegiate states that while Bingo the game is first attested in 1932, the signal cry bingo! used to announce a winning card had already been in use by 1925, as an intensified variant of bing, onomatopeia for the ringing of a bell (for more on which see our column “Baddabing, Baddabang” in VERBATIM XXVI.4, pp. 19–22). Like bingo, stingo, meaning ‘bitter liquor, especially ale or beer’ (the first edition of Webster’s International Dictionary lists it among the obscure words at the bottom of page 2046, calling it “old slang”) is pronounced with a hard g. ↩︎

12. Shortened from Ig�, the game is said to be several thousand years old, to have been introduced to Japan from China in about 740 ad, and to include more than 25 million players worldwide; in Great Britain, the British Go Association, established in 1964, holds annual three-tier championship tournaments and “liaises [sic] with the European Go Federation and the International Go Federation” (www.britgo.org/intro/intro1.html). ↩︎

13. Both are Spanish dance names, but derived from very different sources: The American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) says that the fandango, a dance with an animated triple rhythm, probably is a borrowing of Portuguese fadango (itself from fado, a type of sad song: the name comes from Latin fatum, ‘fate’). The syncopated tango, on the other hand, derives its name from a central African word related to tamgu (Ibibio for ‘dance’). ↩︎

14. The standard musical term for a movement at a slower tempo than an adagio, Italian largo derives from Latin largus, ‘generous.’ (For more on music terminology see our earlier column “It’s Only Music, Don’t Be Scherzo,” VERBATIM XXVIII.3, pp. 14–17.) ↩︎

15. A straight borrowing of (presumably onomatopoeic) Spanish bongó, these joined-at-the-middle hand-drums democratized American percussion in the late 1950s: unlike trap sets, whose mastery exacts a substantial investment in money and practice time, anyone could own and play the bongos, at least after a fashion. Their place as a pop-culture artifact is succinctly summed up by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in a song about California auto cruising (“Dog Breath: In the Year of the Plague,” on side 1 of Uncle Meat, a double-disk LP released on Zappa’s Bizarre Records label in 1968): “Fuzzy dice/Bongos in the back/My ship of love/Is ready to attack….” ↩︎

16. Half of the Beatles still alive today, Ringo Starr was born Richard Starkey in 1940, and joined the band in 1962. ↩︎

17. In France, Hugo as a first name is Hugues, as in Hugues Capet, founder of the dynasty that Norman Cohn (The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages [London: Pimlico, 2004], pp. 93) says “during the twelfth and the thirteenth century came to enjoy a quasi-religious prestige of peculiar intensity,” not least for its Crusader king (and later saint) Louis IX. But popular hope of a “Second Charlemagne” who would be the emperor of the Last Days and usher in a thousand-year reign of peace was dimmed by the Hundred Years War: “The France which emerged from the great effort of reconstruction…was a monarchy centralized to the point of despotism” (107). Nevertheless, “the tense expectation of a final, decisive struggle in which a world tyranny will be overthrown by a ‘chosen people’ and through which the world will be renewed and history brought to its consummation…continued a dim, subterranean existence down the centuries, flaring up briefly in the margins of…the French Revolution” (285), this time with le roi Louis cast not as the people’s savior from tyranny but as the arch-tyrant himself. ↩︎

18. As told in the third chapter of the biblical book of Daniel and the up-tempo gospel song “Shadrach,” recorded by Louis Armstrong on his Louis and the Good Book LP (Decca, 1958) and earlier on 78-rpm shellac by the Golden Gate Quartet. In the Old Testament Apocrypha the Song of the Three Children, an interpolation between Daniel 3:23 and 3:24, includes a hymn of thanks offered by Abednego (here called by his Hebrew name, Azariah) for deliverance from the fiery furnace, and a litany calling on all God’s creatures to praise Him. The first six verses of the latter are still part of the Morning Prayer liturgy in the Anglican Church (1979 Book of Common Prayer, p. 49). ↩︎

19. Commonly mistaken for a Spanish equivalent of the Latin name Ignatius (as in Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits), Inigo appears instead to be from (late) Latin, Ennecus; the usual Spanish for Ignatius is Ignacio. ↩︎

20. AHD says that Diego is the probable origin of the derogatory and offensive dago, originally applied to speakers of both Spanish and Italian. But it is also possible that dago was imitative of the mispronunciation of “they go” by non-native speakers struggling with our voiced fricative th- in the word they— as well as poking fun at the use of go, a generic pidgin verb of action (much as toddlers are sometimes encouraged to do when first learning English: “Doggie go bow-wow!”, “Snookums go potty?” etc.) ↩︎

21. Durango is a city in northern Mexico founded in 1560 as a mining center. Montego Bay is on the island of Jamaica, and was first visited by Columbus in 1494 (he would discover Tobago four years later); Santo Domingo is the capital of the Dominican Republic, founded by Columbus’s brother Bartolomeo in 1596 and thus the longest continually inhabited European colonial settlement in the western hemisphere. Tierra del Fuego is an archipelago at the southern extremity of South America (and also the name of its principal island), first sighted and so named by Ferdinand Magellan in 1520. ↩︎

22. Also spelled Checagou by its first European visitors, Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet, who found it handy for the access it provided, via the Chicago River, to an easy portage to the Des Plaines River, a tributary of the Mississippi. Oswego is the name of a municipality, river, and county of north central New York; the city is the largest American seaport on Lake Ontario. Two other American Indian names bear mentioning here: Winnebago, an Indian tribe from Wisconsin and now a popular motorhome recreational vehicle, and windigo, the name given by several Plains Indian societies to a snow-ogre similar to the jibai of the Algonkians of northern New England and Canada. ↩︎

23. Bendigo was going by the name of Sandhurst when 18-year-old Alexander Fowler (brother of H.W., of Modern English Usage fame) arrived from England in 1879 in vain hopes of saving his failing health; he would die within a month and a half of his arrival (Jenny McMorris, The Warden of English [New York: Oxford University Press, 2001], pp. 7 and 219 n. 17). As for Pago Pago, it is actually pronounced “Pango Pango,” the g being nasalized (cf. harangue). ↩︎

24. Virago, on the other hand, came into English from Latin in its nominative form (the root is vir, ‘man’; cf. virility)—thus sparing us the difficulty of distinguishing a virgin from a viragin in rapid speech—as did farrago, “medley, assortment” in English and “mixed fodder, hodgepodge” in Latin, from far, the Latin word for a type of grain that also gives English the word farina for a fine meal used in cereals and puddings. ↩︎

25. Then there’s the ginkgo (Japanese ginky�), varieties of which have been around since the end of the Cretaceous era 60 million years ago, making them among the earliest deciduous trees in the fossil record (the fan-shaped leaf is unmistakable.) ↩︎

26. The Portuguese name for the bird, flamengo becomes Spanish flamenco—no connection to the identically-spelled dance and song: Here flamenco either ‘Andalusian Gypsy’ or ‘Flemish.’ ↩︎

27. AHD cautions that gringo is considered an offensive term among native speakers of Spanish (as opposed to the politer norteamericano). A common story is that the epithet is an allusion to the song “Green Grow the Lilacs,” said to be popular among Americans at the time of the Mexican War, but AHD gives a more plausible derivation from griego, ‘Greek’ (as in “It’s all Greek to me”—cf. French latin for ‘jargon’). ↩︎

28. On the other hand, cars that do not go (or not very well for very long) invite scorn, so the -go suffix must be used with caution, as with the unfortunate Yugo, which had the virtue of being less unreliable than the East German Trabi. In this connection Chevrolet is said to have been mystified at lackluster sales of its Nova model until someone pointed out that in Spanish, no va means ‘doesn’t run’ (literally, “no go”). Alas, we have recently learned that this is an urban legend; see http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp. ↩︎

29. A logogram is a single character standing for a whole word, not unlike an ideogram (AHD uses the example of the number 4 standing for the word four); logotypes are single pieces of type bearing multiple elements that usually stand alone, such as n plus ~ to make n-tilde (ñ). ↩︎

30. According to my source, Stephen Dodson, this has “one of the great etymologies of all time (ultimately from the Paris discotheque Whisky à Gogo, meaning ‘lots of whiskey’).” ↩︎

31. AHD elegantly glosses GIGO as follows: “An informal rule holding that the integrity of output is dependent on the integrity of input.” ↩︎

32. Mischievously glossed by Monty Python’s Flying Circus (the “Australian Philosophy Department” sketch) as “I drink, therefore I am.” We must here acknowledge, with grateful thanks, the assistance of a dozen or more patrons at the taproom at Rider’s Hotel in Painesville, Ohio, in compiling the list of words examined above: public-house patrons can be remarkably forthcoming informants once they understand what the researcher is after. An undeniably quicker way to find all the words with a similar terminal string would have been to go to an online dictionary portal such as www.onelook.com and use its “custom search” option on the suffix -go (or -oon, or -ange, or…), but it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as much fun for any of us. The bar- of barrier, bar-and-grill, and barricade also turns up in embargo: AHD derives all of these from Vulgar Latin barra, ‘bar,’ embargo coming into English via Spanish embargar (‘to impede’), itself from Vulgar Latin (in)barricare, ‘to bar (in).’ ↩︎

33. For example The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998) and The Meaning of Everything (2003), both by Simon Winchester, and The Dictionary Men (2004) by R. W. Holder. ↩︎

34. The Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduate’s Journal, 8 February 1877, page 211. ↩︎

35. To use one of those rare words whose first use is known. ↩︎

36. The Isis magazine, 2 March 1895, page 216. ↩︎

37. Fortunately, that is, if you were an Oxford man; unfortunately if you were at Cambridge. ↩︎

38. See Postscript. ↩︎

39. Not a new word; Google throws up an example. ↩︎