Vol XXXI, No 2 []

Classical Music Terms Unravelled (Or UnRavel-ed)

Alice McVeigh, London

The terminology preferred by classical musicians is, on the whole, pretty blackly humorous. To classical music fans this may come as a surprise, as classical music’s image has never married with its reality. To the general public, orchestral players appear to be sedate, stiff-backed gents in white tie and tails (or, these days, just as possibly disciplined young women wearing long, cover-up black dresses or suits) playing with awesome skill and creativity. Sadly, the truth is that these same players are statistically also likely to be single-parent, twice-divorced soft-drug-users, not only seriously overdrawn on their credit cards but requiring regular therapy in order to cope with performance nerves. Beyond this notable lack of sedateness, numerous studies have proven that orchestral musicians boast comparable job satisfaction to factory employees, and roughly as much self-esteem. The very level of dedication and creativity required to achieve the orchestral musical heights stands in sharp and painful contrast to the amount of artistic freedom permitted once one has “made it,” as one is immediately obliged to play one’s every note at the time, in the style, at the dynamic, and with the articulation of the conductor’s own choosing.

For this reason there are lots of terms used for conductors, or music directors, but most of them are unprintable. The most common term is carver, as in, “Who’s carving on Saturday? Will he notice if I’m ten minutes late?” The historical term is, of course, Maestro (master), which was in vogue (at least, to the conductor’s face) throughout most of the 20th century, representing as he then did the hirer and firer of all the players. However, in these days of self-governed orchestras Maestro tends to be used ironically, if at all. (“Don’t tell me, let me guess. We owe these flakey bowings to the Maestro himself, right?”)

And yet great conductors can still be held in high esteem. There is a joke that a viola player in a famous orchestra comes home one night to find his house razed to the ground. A neighbour tells him, “I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you, but the conductor came here with a meat cleaver, killed your family, and burned your house to the ground.” Upon which the violist says, in complete disbelief, “You’re kidding. The conductor came to my house?”

The very term orchestra comes from the area of the hall where what was originally known as the band played. The principal violin-player’s being called the concertmaster (in Europe, the leader) dates back to the baroque-period pre-conductor age when he led the concert from the front of the first violins. Nowadays their role is much reduced, something many leaders have still not come to terms with. The other co-principals, associate principals, assistant principals, and sub-principals within his (and, indeed, other’s sections, whether first violins, second violins, violas, cellos, or basses) sometimes call to mind the cellist joke: “How many cellists does it take to change a light-bulb?” (Answer: “Ten. One to change the bulb and nine to think they could have changed it rather better.”)

Section players in the strings who have not attained even the heady rank of sub-principal are simply known as rank and bile, a corruption of the middle and late 20th-century term rank and file, which came originally from the military. They are also occasionally colloquially known as pondlife, as in, “Right, we’ve finished rehearsing the chamber number. Have the pondlife shown up yet?” A wrecker is somebody, usually in the string sections, who routinely either comes in too early or hangs on to a note too late, as in “He’s a wrecker, and always has been, but his heart’s in the right place.”

Orchestral concerts are referred to as gigs, as in “I’ve only got a gig a week this whole month.” Many people think that this is short for giggle, as there are not nearly as many of them around as there used to be, but jazz players have spoken of their “gigs” for years, and orchestral musicians apparently began to adopt the term around the middle of the 20th century. Orchestral recordings are known as sessions, as in “He’s a session player, so he can only play long notes.” In the can means that, in the opinion of the CD producer, this is the best performance he’s likely to get (or else that the production backers have run out of money). In either case, it is good news, as it means you can get paid and go home. Interestingly, in the can is reputed to date back from the early movies, when the final cut of the film was actually put in a can.

Squeaky-door dates is the derisory title for late-20th-century music concerts. It is deeply unfair to many still extant composers, whose music isn’t even as interesting as the squawk of an unoiled door, but it conveys the general level of musical excitement pretty well, as in “It’s only a squeaky-door date, so I’m planning on using my less good instrument.”

Bucket dates is the term in general use for those kinds of concerts which put bread on the table yet strike dread into musicians' souls, featuring as they do endless conjunctions of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, Ravel’s Bolero, Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, cheesy toastmaster-style carvers, and the Royal Albert Hall. The term dates back from a famous joke (“What’s the difference between this concert and a bucket of horses–t?” Answer: “The bucket.”) Other bucket dates include endless massacrings of Bach’s Brandenburg number 3, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by candlelight, with the performers weighed down by heavy 18th-century costumes and itchy wigs.

Muddy field dates is pretty self-explanatory. You take one muddy field in which sheep habitually graze (generally within hailing distance of a 17th-century stately home or castle); a covered, moveable stage (which still manages to let some rain in, generally on the lower strings); glamorous backstage facilities consisting of one tent and two portable toilets; and several adjoining fields called into service as car parks and places from which to launch the fireworks. There is only one thing of any critical musical importance on a muddy field date, and that is the orchestra exit plan. This is because (due to the popularity of the fireworks) your playing may be amplified to an audience of 15,000 people; hence the union has decreed that the performers have to have a separate exit, even if it is over a plowed field. (What occurred one night when I was playing in the Royal Philharmonic in Yorkshire is part of the reason for the union’s laudable obduracy on this point. As we were accompanying José Carreras, the world-famous tenor, the concert was so packed that I didn’t even succeed in exiting the car park until 2 am, limping back to London as day was breaking.)

A hit and run gig is an amazingly prestigious one-day trip to Copenhagen or similar, involving waking up at 4 am in order to reach the airport at six, checking into the hotel before noon, grabbing a sandwich before the three-hour rehearsal, snatching a meal before the three-hour concert, resisting the impulse to adorn the hotel bar until daybreak (unless one is a brass player, for whom bar attendance is obligatory), and enjoying a 6 am wake-up call in order to get bussed to the flight back. (Happy days!)

A dummy session is when musicians are hired, often in costume, to pretend to play while being filmed for a TV drama or film (some director shaving belatedly realised that actors look incredibly stupid in period dramas holding their horns backwards or the violin bows sideways). There is much more of this work around for men, as professional musicians were always men until the mid-20th century. As far as I can research it, this term is related to the use of actual dummies in film crowd scenes. (A more accurate term would be mime session, as the musicians are often overdubbed by other, session, musicians.)

Fixer is the name for the people who decide who gets hired these days. In America these are called contractors, but the principle is identical. Unless you are currently married to the conductor (not, repeat not, one of his exes) your career is at the mercy of these people, most of whom are surprisingly corruptible, as in, “She’s a genuine wrecker on the double bass, but very good in bed.”

Stone Age is a fondly belittling way of referring to those violinists, oboists, horn players, etc., who prefer to play early music, such as Vivaldi, Bach, or even Beethoven and Schubert, on period instruments, meaning instruments as played at that particular period, and thus disdaining the added power and improved developments in tone and range which occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries. These Stone Age players, who represent a sort of subspecies of musicians, also often specialize in yoga, herbal medicine, trendy non-religions, and facial hair, as in “He mainly does Stone Age gigs, but still eats meat.”

Desk (stand in the US) is the name for the shared music stand; thus, “The principal won’t have him on second desk, because then he can hear his buzzy C-string.”

Sordid is the common slang for con sordino, meaning ‘with mute’; hence, “Can someone check that we’re really meant to be sordid at letter G?”

Rep is a union representative, as in “Doug’s the rep, but, even though it’s 20 degrees below zero, don’t expect him to blow the whistle.”

Pit gig is an opera, musical, or ballet job where you play in a pit sunk down into the centre of the earth. The main difference between a pit gig and hell is that, as far as I know, while in hell you are not choked with fumes from the stage effects above you.

Canon gig is a small ensemble (often a string quartet) hired to play background music for a wedding reception or similar. This is named after Pachelbel’s famous Canon, which is often requested. If an all-girl group has been chosen, these gigs are sometimes known as stilettos.

Some beloved musical works also rejoice in such mangled titles as “The Battered Broad” (Smetana’s Bartered Bride) and “The Glums” (Les Miserables), with Finzi’s elegiac Op. 20 (“The Fall of the Leaf”) becoming, not unnaturally, “The Fall of the Figleaf.” There is a whole baseball joke about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, where the bass section has some time off near the end. In one performance the bassists sneaked offstage, out the back door, and next door for a drink.After quickly gulping down a few stiff ones, one of them checked his watch and groaned, “Oh no, we only have a minute to get back!” Whereupon the principal bass said, “Don't worry, I tied the last page of the conductor's score down with string to give us a bit of extra time.” They staggered back into the concert hall and took their places just as the conductor was busily working on the knot in the string so he could finish the symphony. Someone in the audience asked his companion, “What’s the problem?” whereupon his companion replied, “It’s a critical moment—bottom of the Ninth, the score’s tied, and the bassists are loaded!”

The names of musical instruments themselves can have interesting pedigrees. Many people know that the piano began life as the pianoforte (‘soft-loud’), the term used around 1710 by its inventor Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655–1731) in order to distinguish its superior gradation of dynamic in comparison with the harpsichord (which in turn is sometimes referred to as the harpsi-plonk, due to its method of sound production). However, it is less commonly known that the English horn is actually (a) German and (b) not a horn. Musicologists believe that, as it started off as an early oboe slightly bent in the middle, it was called the cor anglé (in French, meaning ‘at an angle'), which became corrupted to cor anglais (English horn). What bright spark decided it was a cor (horn) at all is still unknown.

Anyone fascinated by musicians’ bizarre and even puerile senses of humour has plenty of websites to choose from, with viola jokes and opera jokes being among the most popular. Here we find “definitions” including:

Bar line: what musicians form after a concert

Metronome: an urban gnome

Conductor: someone talented at following lots of people at the same time

Clef: something one ought to consider jumping off prior to a viola solo

And jokes including:

What is the difference between a soprano and a terrorist? (You can negotiate with a terrorist.)

What is the definition of a gentleman? (Someone who can play the viola, but chooses not to.)

Have a surf for yourself, and get a glimpse of the wonderful and bizarre world of music and musicians.

[Alice McVeigh is a professional cellist who has freelanced with orchestras, including the BBC Symphony and the Royal Philharmonic, as well as period-instrument orchestras, including Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the Hanover Band. Alice also writes a weekly “classical music agony aunt” on www.mvdaily.com.]

Village People

David Dunning, Newport, Gwent

Every racecourse, of the horse racing variety, that is, in Britain, has an area, formally known as the betting ring, or, more colloquially, the village, where the on-course bookmakers conduct their trade.

Inhabitants of the village speak a language which is deliberately, although not maliciously, designed to confuse novice race goers, by disguising the messages sent between the layers and their floor men.

At a basic level, betting slang for Even Money, or Evens, is Levels, often prompting the cry of, “Levels, you devils!” throughout the betting ring.

More bewildering, to the rookie punter, perhaps, is the range of anatomical terms used to identify some of the other betting odds available. Wrist, for example, means ‘odds of 5/4’, Ear ‘Ole means ‘odds of 6/4’, Top of the Head ‘odds of 9/4’, and there are many others. All of these terms describe the gesticulations of the Tic-Tac men, or, increasingly nowadays, women – the individuals who usually wear white gloves, stand on stools on the floor of the betting ring and convey the current odds from one location to another, by means of sign language, or Tic-Tac, a kind of bookmakers’ ‘semaphore’, if you like. It also appears, from personal experience, that the ability to whistle loudly, using one’s fingers, is a prerequisite for this position!

Other expressions used to describe the odds on offer have their roots in rhyming slang.

Carpet is widely used to mean ‘odds of 3/1’—in the 19th century, Carpet Bag was cockney rhyming slang for a Drag, ‘a three month prison sentence’. Double Carpet is therefore, unsurprisingly, used to mean ‘33/1’.

A more obvious example, perhaps, is the use of Burlington Bertie—the character from William Hargreaves' 1915 song, Burlington Bertie from Bow—to means ‘odds of 100/30’ (‘One Hundred to Thirty’).

Rhyming slang can not only disguise the betting odds, but also the amounts of money wagered.

A Lady is £5.00. The Lady in question is Lady Godiva, the Anglo-Saxon noblewoman, who, so legend has it, rode naked through the streets of Coventry. Hence, Lady becomes Lady Godiva, becomes ‘fiver’.

A Cockle is £10.00, directly from the cockney rhyming slang, Cock and Hen, meaning ‘Ten’.

A Grand is well-known; meaning ‘£1000.00’, from its literal meaning of ‘full’, or ‘large’, but this can also become One Large, or A Bag of Sand, again from the rhyming slang.

A Pony, or Macaroni, is £25.00. The most satisfactory explanation for Pony is that the animal once appeared on an Indian rupee banknote of that denomination. Macaroni, as rhyming slang, is likely to be taken from the song Yankee Doodle Dandy:

Yankee Doodle came to London

A-riding on a pony

He stuck a feather in his cap

And called it macaroni

As a matter of interest, this version of the song was first sung by British troops, in the late 18th century, to make mock of their American counterparts. At that time, in England, Macaroni was used to describe a young dandy, who was a victim of the eccentricities of continental fashion, so the joke was that Americans were naïve enough to think that putting a feather in a hat was sufficient to achieve high fashion.

A Monkey is £500.00, and like Pony, owes its derivation to an illustration on an Indian rupee banknote.

As if the level of subterfuge already created were insufficient, bookmakers' slang also includes elements of back slang, such that odds of ‘6/1’ become Xis or X’s, ‘7/1’ becomes Neves, and, more cryptically still, ‘8/1’ becomes T.H. Odds of ‘10/1’ therefore become Net, so, logically, ‘16/1’ becomes Net and X’s and ‘20/1’ becomes Double Net, although this last example is often replaced by the more recognisable Score—presumably derived from the practice of counting sheep into tallies of twenty, and cutting, or ‘scoring’, a notch in a stick to represent each tally.

Finally, in a piece about bookmakers and betting, a favourite cockney rhyming slang expression, Boracic, short for Boracic Lint (or more often, nowadays, Brassic) meaning skint (‘without money’), deserves a special mention. Boracic Lint was originally an antiseptic bandage, created by soaking surgical lint in a mixture of boracic acid and glycerine. It may well have been, then, that patients who required it were, quite literally, skint—their skin had been removed as the result of a graze or other injury.

Professional Wrestling’s Clandestine Jargon

John Lister, Manchester

That professional wrestling matches are performances rather than contests will come as little revelation to most, but until as late as the mid-1990s those in the industry believed it was a secret that must be protected at all costs. As with the culture of travelling carnivals (from which the wrestling business developed), performers and promoters developed a jargon designed to allow communication without fear of revealing the inner workings of the industry to bystanders.

Such secrecy had two notable effects on the development of wrestling language. Terms were understandably rarely recorded in writing, making them more vulnerable to corruption as they spread orally. And with no written authority to which to defer, terms were not always limited to a single, precise use.

This is demonstrated by kayfabe (pronounced “kay-fayb”), the key term in wrestling jargon, and a particularly versatile one. Its primary meaning is as an abstract noun, referring to the concept of keeping the secrets of wrestling hidden from outsiders. As a shouted warning, it instructed wrestlers that an outsider was in the vicinity and that speakers should either change the subject or fall silent. An action that goes against this code (such as supposedly rival wrestlers socialising in public) is breaking kayfabe.

The term can act as a verb: a kayfabed interview is one where the wrestler speaks from the perspective of his in-ring character rather than his real-life persona, while to kayfabe somebody is to lie to them in order to protect the business. An example of the term as an adjective would be a kayfabe manager: a man who appears at ringside with a wrestler but does not truly handle his business affairs.

The term is so common that it can even be employed as a catch-all shorthand where the meaning can be arbitrary. Female performer Missy Hyatt (who recalled the incident in her book First Lady of Wrestling) once heard a colleague warn her “Kayfabe your breast!” and instinctively recognised the meaning as ‘Your dress is coming loose and requires immediate adjustment.’

Most early written examples of the term were insider jokes for those inside the industry. A 1950s performer in New England worked as Boris K. Fabian, while promoter Gino Marella had a license plate reading K FABE, and a 1987 wrestling television special listed Kaye Fabe among the production staff. The phrase’s meaning was first documented in insider newsletters such as the Wrestling Observer (a trade journal launched in 1982), and it was the title of a mid-’80s Japanese-language book written to expose the business by disgruntled performer Satoru Sayama.

There have been several attempts to explain the term’s etymology. The most spurious involve second- or third-hand tales of a wrestler named Kay Fabian who, depending on the variant, was either mute (and thus a literal inspiration for a code of silence) or an untrustworthy gossip; there is no record of such a man existing.

The most common explanation is that the term is a corrupted form of a Pig Latin version of fake, which, in some traditions, would be along the lines of “ke-fay.” Some have put forward the idea that the transformed term is actually be fake, but, even leaving aside the liberal transformation that would be required, it seems unlikely any speaker would coin such a stilted phrase in the first place.

The most credible theory is that it is a variant of the Latin caveo (in the sense of ‘be on guard against’ or ‘look out for’). While tales of upper-class schoolboys using the warning “keep cavey” appear to be literary inventions of the “cripes” and “jeepers” variety, there are accounts of the phrase being used in this fashion among East London Jews between the wars. Many of the leading U.S. wrestling promoters and performers of this period were of Eastern European origin and spoke a broken or heavily accented English, perhaps explaining the term’s transformation in pronunciation.

The earliest documentary evidence of wrestling’s insider terms is a 1937 book Fall Guys by New York sportswriter Marcus Griffin. It is the first in-depth look at wrestling behind the scenes and contains several key terms which survive to this day:

A work is a match that is a performance rather than a genuine contest and stems from the idea of two wrestlers working together to create a show. The term can be used more generally to describe anything that is false, such as a performer adopting a worked accent in line with his character.

A shoot is a genuine contest or, by modern extension, anything that is genuine. A contemporary marketing example is the shoot interview, a videotape on which a performer speaks openly about his career, as opposed to a worked (in-character) interview. The term was used as a double-bluff for a 1934 match at Wrigley Field that was openly promoted as “the last great shooting match in history.” By effectively acknowledging that other matches were fixed, promoters fooled supposedly knowledgable fans into believing that this one was on the level. It wasn’t.

Not unlike cinematic morality tales, a babyface is the heroic wrestler, while a heel is the villain of the piece. While these terms are only used behind the scenes, the equivalent names in Mexico are part of the on-screen presentation, with each match featuring a heroic técnico against a hated rudo. This does not openly acknowledge the good vs evil setup, as the meanings are closer to ‘technical wrestler’ and ‘brawler.’

A pair of wrestlers booked for a series of dates are in a programme or, less commonly, a marriage. The supposed feud may be enhanced by an angle, any staged incident that furthers the storyline.

In each match, one wrestler will go over (‘win’) unless the match goes through (‘to the time limit’), the drawn result known as a broadway (because, ideally, the result makes both men bigger stars). By using such simple terms, early bookers (the men who decide matchups and results) could send instructions by telegram without fear of exposure. CHRIS OVER DODGE CITY THIRTY was enough to inform the local promoter that Jim Londos (real name Chris) should defeat Joe Stecher (a native of the Kansas location) at the half-hour mark.

Many other terms have developed to describe situations unique to pro wrestling. A wrestler can spice up a match by bleeding, either through blading (cutting one’s own forehead with a concealed razor blade) or hardway (through legitimate punches, usually around the eyebrow). A promoter may encourage a wrestler to get colour (‘bleed’) by reminding him that red equals green: that is, bloody matches often lead to increased takings on future shows. Bleeding is also known as juicing, though, confusingly, juice is a euphemism for steroids, otherwise known as gas.

A talented performer may amuse himself by embarking on a Shakespeare, a theatrical routine where he uses sleight of hand to give the illusion of using a nonexistent weapon behind the referee’s back. A less talented performer may potato his opponent (hit him with unnecessary force) or be a crowbar (a stiff performer lacking the flexibility to produce a fast-paced, fluid performance). If particularly unprofessional, a wrestler may sandbag (act as dead weight to make his opponent appear weak to the audience).

Perhaps the most versatile term after kayfabe is gimmick, which can refer to a wrestler’s persona, an illegal object used by a heel, or any item of merchandise.

Even some situations common to all travelling entertainers have their own specific terms in wrestling. A groupie is known as a ring rat or simply rat, while the practice of sneaking in more than the permitted number of occupants is heeling a room.

Wrestlers in Britain had their own variation on insider terms, usually involving nothing more complicated than rhyming slang. Many of these terms were revealed in the late Jackie Pallo’s 1985 posthumous You Grunt, I’ll Groan, the first book to spill the secrets of the business.

The warning “kayfabe” was replaced by Queens, short for the football team Queens Park Rangers, or ‘strangers.’ The babyface was known as a blue-eye, while the heel was simply the villain. Wrestlers also used rhyming slang to instruct their opponent which body part to ‘attack’ next, be it the Daily (…Mail = ‘tail,’ as in ‘back’) or the Gregory (…Peck = ‘neck’).

With the business now less secretive, and with many of the current generation of performers having been exposed to the American product at an early age, these regional variations are becoming defunct.

In some situations, usually when in a public place, conversing wrestlers might discuss a more general topic for which they have no industry-specific terms, but still require confidentiality. In these cases, the preferred option is carny. This involves inserting “iz” before each pronounced vowel in a word (other than those of one or two letters); one would thus “spizeak in cizarny.”

In many cases, a speaker will only insert the sound before the first vowel of a particular word; in polysyllabic words, the “iz” sound will only be repeated if the speaker is particularly skilled at speaking this way, or if the subject being discussed requires stronger camouflage than usual. Carny has the advantage that even if a listener is aware of the technique, it is largely undecipherable to anyone who has not used it regularly.

The technique is not unique to wrestling. Writing in the journal American Speech[2004 79(4):400-416], Carol L. Russell and Thomas E. Murray trace it to carnival workers of the late 19th century. They also found it used by workers in AT (athletic) shows in which genuinely skilled wrestlers would take open challenges, usually working close fights with a planted colleague posing as a member of the crowd, before unleashing their full ability on legitimate challengers and cleaning up on side bets.

Most linguistic accounts of carny today are focused on its musical use. New York DJ Murray Kaufman regularly used carny in his 1960s broadcasts, while Frankie Smith’s 1980 song “Double Dutch Bus” appears to be the inspiration for carny-like affectations in hip-hop and rap music. A celebrated copyright case in 2003 saw a British judge bemused by phrases such as “fo shizzle ma nizzle,” the politically correct translation of which is “for sure, my fellow African-American.”

However, in titling their piece “The Life and Death of Carnie,” Russell and Morrell may have underestimated the life-span of the technique. While they state “professional wrestlers…had adopted it from the beginning of that phenomenon, about 1960,” the wrestling business can be traced back in its current form to at least as early as the mid-’20s.Wrestler Fred Blassie (in his autobiography Listen, You Pencil Neck Geeks) recalls carny being used in a dressing room at the start of his career in 1937.

He also recalled a variant in which the “iz” sound was replaced with “bees” or “bells” depending on the context. Russell and Morrell also questioned the survival of carny in wrestling, having found no sources for its use past 1985, but the subject was discussed in a 2001 book Smarten Up! Say it Right, written by B. Brian Blair, whose career stretched from 1979 to 2002.

On a 6 July 1998 televised wrestling show broadcast on the USA Network, a sequence where one group of wrestlers spoofed a rival squad involved one performer claiming (both orally and in writing on his singlet) to be Mizark Henry: a carny version of Mark Henry, the target’s actual name. While never used on-screen again, the nickname lives on to this day among a certain section of wrestling fans who spend their free time exchanging “insider information” through the Internet. This was most likely helped by the fact that Mizark was not just a play on a real name, but also referred to the term mark, now adopted by some fans as an insult to those they perceive as having a less than sophisticated understanding of the industry’s inner workings.

Indeed, with wrestling’s secrets so exposed, it is becoming common for outsiders on the fringes of the business to attempt to establish their credentials through overenthusiastic use of carny and wrestling jargon. What was once a secretive language used to distinguish those who were part of wrestling’s inner circle is rapidly becoming a clear indication that the speaker is in fact an outsider.

[John Lister (www.johnlisterwriting.com) is a freelance journalist from Manchester, England, specialising in clear communication and the professional wrestling business. He spent six years running Plain English Campaign’s press office, giving more than 500 broadcast interviews about jargon and other unclear language. He is the author of two books, Slamthology and Turning The Tables: The Story of Extreme Championship Wrestling.]

Hot Air

When a speaker uses ad infinitum

I won’t fight ‘em.

And when he follows with status quo,

I let it go.

But when he ventures into joie de vivre,

I leave.

—Paul Richards

The Worthlessness of Lads and Lasses

Anatoly Liberman, University of Minnesota

The author of this article is neither a misanthrope nor a curmudgeon envious of other people’s youth. He is an etymologist who thinks that he knows how the words lad and lass came about and is eager to publicize two discoveries, not entirely his own.

By a curious coincidence, both words surfaced in northern English texts in the same year, as though, following the example of their bearers, they were destined for each other from the start. No pre-1300 citations of either lad or lass have been found, and we have little hope of finding out how long they had existed before they made their way into handwritten books (perhaps not too long). The first etymological dictionary of English was published in 1617, and it already contains an uninformed guess on the origin of lad. Lass was for centuries derived from lad, not unlike the way Eve was made from Adam’s rib.

The languages of the world are full of words reminiscent of lad: Hebrew (ye)led and Arabic (wa)lad (both mean ‘boy’); Classical Greek látris ‘servant, slave; messenger; priest’; Irish láth ‘hero, champion’; Old English loddere ‘beggar’; Old High German latte ‘lath,’ in which tt corresponds to th in Engl. lath; Middle High German (summer)latte ~ Old Saxon (sumar)loda ‘one-year-old tree’; Gothic juggalauths ‘youth’; Vulgar Latin litus ‘a person belonging to a group between freedmen and serfs,’ which resembles Old Norse lithi ‘follower, retainer’; and the plural of the past participle of the verb lead in its Old English form (lǣdde), as well as Old Engl. lēod ‘people.’ This is a drastically abridged list of the words offered since 1617 as possible etymons of lad. Perhaps, it was suggested, crusaders brought lad from the East. A medieval wag may have reshaped Greek látris, and the joke stayed in the language; or the development was from ‘piece of wood, chip, chit, sprig, strip’ to ‘child, offspring, descendant, stripling’ (tales of trees and blocks of wood becoming human beings are widespread, from Askr and Embla in a Scandinavian myth to Pinocchio); or it is a garbled Latin feudal term; or a lad was someone “led” by his superiors.

When people are curious about the origin of a word, they open a dictionary, which gives the user a satisfactory answer, evades the problem by offering an impressive but useless list of cognates (Engl. father, German Vater, Latin pater, etc.), or makes do with the verdict “origin unknown.” Few nonspecialists realize how much linguistic sand has been washed to produce a grain of gold (sometimes a grain that only glitters like gold). The conjectures on the early history of every word are usually so numerous and are scattered in so many articles and books that even the compilers of etymological dictionaries rarely know half of them. To be sure, dozens of such conjectures are wild guesses, so that being unaware of them is a blessing in disguise, but mountains of opinions are like dust heaps in Our Mutual Friend: one cannot predict what will turn up in them. Therefore, it is a pity that complete surveys of such conjectures are usually unavailable (and in English dictionaries even incomplete surveys are absent). Both amateurs and scholars tend to reinvent old solutions and believe that they have come up with a discovery. Reassuring them as early as possible is a charitable idea.

In searching for word origins, it is not enough to unearth a form similar in sound and meaning to the one we are investigating. For example, if lad is a borrowing of walad, we have to explain why only crusaders from the north of England took a fancy to the exotic Arabic noun. As far as we can judge today, all the suggestions listed above are wrong. The turning point in the search for the origin of lad was a remark in the influential Norwegian etymological dictionary by Hjalmar Falk and Alf Torp.¹ In the entry ladd ‘stocking put on over another piece of clothing, woolen sock’ (in dialects, also lodde), the authors said that this ladd is identical with the second element of Norwegian tusseladd ‘nincompoop’ and Askeladd (Askeladd, or Oskeladd, literally ‘ash-lad,’ is a male Cinderella, the third son in fairy tales). They explained askeladd as ‘someone who walks awkwardly, clumsily’ and added: “Perhaps borrowed by English as lad.”Their idea has found almost universal support, even though they devoted only half a line to lad (a mere postscript to the story of Norwegian ladd) and bypassedseveral difficulties.

Ladd has not been recorded in any Scandinavian language with the meaning ‘(young) fellow,’ let alone ‘fool.’ Tusseladd and askeladd ~ oskeladd seem to be the only compounds with -ladd. Lad(d) alternates with lod(d) not only in Scandinavian languages, and the form with o is probably older. Someone called Loddfáfnir is mentioned in an Old Norse mythological poem; he is the recipient of a long discourse of an educational character. Fáfnir is the name of a famous dragon; lodd- is probably identical with -ladd. I am leaving out of consideration Amlothi, from which Shakespeare got Hamlet; its derivation is beset by problems, and discussion of them would take us too far afield. It is unclear why someone wearing woolen socks or old shoes and walking awkwardly should be called ‘fool, duffer, nincompoop’ (and did youngsters wearing such shoes and socks really look uncouth and walk awkwardly?). Finally, the earliest recorded English form was ladde, not ladd, and -e must have been pronounced.

Those blanks in the history of lad cannot be filled up. We do not know enough to write a fully convincing etymology of this word, but of all the approaches to it Falk and Torp’s appears to be the most reasonable. Presumably, one of the words for ‘woolen sock; hose; stocking; shoe’ acquired the figurative meaning ‘worthless fellow’; this change of meaning is not uncommon. Strangely, it has come down to us only in a few compound names and nicknames. Since neither ladd nor lodd ‘youngster; stupid fellow’ has been attested in any Scandinavian language, it must have been abstracted from compounds and gained popularity in northern England and developed into a regular word for ‘worthless person,’ later ‘person of low rank.’ To become fully independent, it joined one of the English declensions and became ladde. Consequently, lad is not a borrowing from Scandinavian, but rather the product of a northern English dialect heavily influenced by Norwegian usage. Although the resulting picture is far from perfect, it is the best one we can get.

Lass was not only felt to be related to lad but was even derived from the ghost word ladess, with -ess being a suffix of either Welsh or Romance origin (as in actress and lioness). Some etymologists compared lass with the Old English form of less (lass turned out to be a lesser member of the family) and a Scandinavian word meaning ‘free from ties’ (now lass emerged as an unmarried woman).But the most probable etymon of lass is a word like Danish las ‘rag.'² In slang, words for ‘rag’ often acquire the jocular meaning ‘child’ and especially ‘girl.’ The path from ‘piece of cloth’ to ‘child’ could have been from ‘diapers’ or from the similarity between a baby and a doll (dolls were made of rags), or from the practice of calling females after the clothes they wore. The earliest attested form of lass is lasce, which is, in all likelihood, a diminutive of las, coined on English soil, a word like Middle English polke ‘a small pool’ and dalke ‘a small valley (dale)’. British dialectal lassikie is a formation parallel to lasce or a continuation of it.

Thus, like lad, ultimately from ‘old, unseemly, or worthless garment’ (‘hose; sock; shoe’), lass seems to have emerged from the metaphorical use of a word for ‘rag.’ Both are words of Scandinavian origin (and are still in wide use mainly in the north of England), but neither is, strictly speaking, a borrowing. Their recorded meanings developed in the northern dialects of British English. The way was not exactly from rags to riches, but attaining a measure of respectability is not a bad thing either.

[Anatoly Liberman is a professor in the Department of German, Scandinavian and Dutch at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His areas of specialization include linguistics, literature, and folklore. His most recent book is Etymology for Everyone: Word Origins … and How We Know Them. Oxford University Press, 2005. The first volume of his etymological dictionary of English will soon be published by the University of Minnesota Press.]

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Old World Names for New World Fish

August Rubrecht, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire

Because many species of fish are common to both sides of the Atlantic, English-speakingadventurers who sailed to the western side knew what to call a lot of the ones they caught off the North American coast. Wherever they found it, a salmon was a salmon, a cod was a cod. Many species that hugged the coastlines were different, however, and adventurers who went ashore and explored brooks, rivers, and lakes found few fishes they knew. They also found much greater variety in North America than in the British Isles, because even early on, they were exploring such varied habitats: from snowy Newfoundland down to the steamy coast of Georgia. Eventually, as following waves of settlers spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Hudson’s Bay to the Gulf of California, they encountered hundreds of new species. They needed names for all of them.

They had three basic choices. They could borrow a name from speakers of a local language, make up a name using English parts, or use an old name they no longer needed because they had left the original referent behind. English speakers made liberal use of all three choices, but it is especially interesting to trace what they did with the surplus names they brought along. They got the most mileage out of names for some of their most important fish: trout, bass, perch, and bream.

In Britain people used the names brook trout, lake trout, and sea trout for a single species of fish, Salmo trutta, depending on the habitat they found it in. That species did not occur in North America, so colonists could use the terms for whatever fish seemed most similar in particular parts of the New World. The most similar fishes would naturally be those in the genus Salmo (the true trouts) and, more broadly, in the family Salmonidae. In fresh waters of New England and eastern Canada, the two most widely distributed salmonid fish were not true trouts but chars. People converted the habitat designations brook trout and lake trout to species names for them. Later, exploring cold rivers in the western mountains, they discovered other salmonids, most of them true trouts, and to distinguish them began devising compound names by adding other descriptors to trout: cuthroat, Dolly Varden (a char), golden, and rainbow, for example. (For simplicity, I omit the Pacific salmons as well as regional trout names such as speckled trout and names of specialized populations such as steelhead trout, “sea-run rainbow.”) So when the European species was later introduced to North America, trout was no longer sufficient to identify it. People added a new descriptor to make it brown trout, or sometimes German brown trout.

In the warm waters of the South no salmonids could live, but there were some similar-looking species. The name sea trout (respelled as one word, seatrout) got applied to a group of saltwater fish also known as weakfish, individual species of which may take compounded names such as sand trout and speckled trout. Inland, many speakers used compounds with trout for fish in other families: bigmouth trout, black trout, green trout, mountain trout, and white trout for the black bass; golden trout for the walleye; and cypress trout or green cypress trout for the bowfin. In this last instance, people must have transferred the name from the black bass, not directly from trout. The bowfin is a grotesque relic from the Late Jurassic that does vaguely resemble a bass in coloration and habits but looks and acts a lot less like a salmonid than a carp does.

What settlers did with the word trout was typical. Sometimes they transferred an English name to some single American species, but more often, to cover the array of new species in the New World, they broadened terms from specific to generic and then used them to make up new compound names. One principle these settlers followed is not too surprising: they made heaviest use of names for their most familiar and esteemed fish. Trouble was, each region in the Colonies presented a different mix of new species to name, and each settlement was populated by a different mix of colonists to name them. The result was a jumble that people are still trying to sort out.

Early settlers made especially heavy use of bass and perch, but here they encountered even more taxonomic complications than with trout. The European bass and perch, both familiar and esteemed in the British Isles, are more distinct from each other than trouts are from chars; still, the species share so many similarities that English speakers applied the same name to both fish long before they began to colonize North America. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines bass as “The Common Perch (Perca fluviatilis),” with the earliest citation about 1440. The first instance of bass in the meaning “A voracious marine fish (Labrax lupus) of the Perch family” appears almost a century later, in 1530. For both professionals and the folk, then, the classification of fishes in this order, Perciformes, has been vexatious. If taxonomists first placed the bass in the family Percidae (the perches), later decided to devise a new family, the Serranidae, and now assign it the family Moronidae and give it the new name Dicentrarchus labrax, is it any wonder that anglers and fishmongers have trouble keeping things straight?

Colonists found members of the perch and bass families in North America which looked verysimilar to their counterparts in the Old Country. But they also found other fish that reminded them of bass and perch, increasing the potential for confusion. The most prominent group is now classified as the Centrarchidae or sunfish family. Though many centrarchids are more deep-bodied and slab-sided than either bass or perch, others look so similar that taxonomists originally placed them, like the European bass, among the perches, as shown by the (outdated) OED definition of black bass: “a fish of the Perch family (Perca huro) found in Lake Huron.” Ichthyologists now identify not one but several species of black bass and assign them to the genus Micropterus, not Perca. Other centrarchids also resemble basses, perches, and one another; what’s more, many other families, in both salt and fresh water, look similar enough to take the names perch and bass.

If there had been no centrarchids, American counterparts of European perch and bass could have taken Old World names with only minor confusion. People called the American perch yellow perch (or sometimes green perch) because of its color, and they called a large bass striped bass to distinguish it from the plain-sided European version. In fresh water, settlers found two other members of this American genus, Morone, both striped like their saltwater cousin, and adopted the names white bass and yellow bass (among others) for them. America has still another true bass in this genus; like the European one it has no stripes and lives along the coast in salt, brackish, and fresh water, but perhaps because it is smaller and a little different in shape, people flipped it into the other category and called it white perch.

And as they did with the term trout, they transferred bass and perch to fish that might be only vaguely similar. They applied the name black sea bass to a deepwater fish in a related family. They called a smaller deepwater fish ocean perch. They encountered a reddish fish in the drum family similar in size and sporting quality to the striped bass and distinguished it, in various localities, from the striped bass by calling it the bar, channel, red, reef, saltwater, school, sea, or spotted bass. They named another saltwater drum silver perch. There is a freshwater drum too, and among its names are buffalo perch, gray perch, white perch, or just perch, but some people call it gray bass or silver bass. Out of a deep and abiding ignorance, I won’t even try to explain how people used bass and perch to devise nomenclature for fish in the Pacific.

But enough digression; I promised to describe how the names perch and bass are distributed among the centrarchid family.

Without necessarily realizing that taxonomists place them all in a single family, anglers in eastern North America generally recognize three major groups of centrarchids: black basses, crappies, and sunfishes. (Only one species is native to the area west of the Rockies. More about that later.) The three major species of black bass (genus Micropterus) are the focus of a major sportfishing industry, inspiring such media attention that everyone has settled on bass as the generic term for them. The list of modifiers used to specify that term is impressive, though. Just for the largemouth bass, the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) includes bayou ,bigmouth, grass, gray, green, lake, marsh, moss, mud, Oswego, redeye, river, rock, slough, spotted, straw, striped, swamp, tiger, white, widemouth, and yellow. (Lists of local and regional names for smallmouth and spotted bass will appear in Volume V, soon to appear.) And just as taxonomists once assigned the black basses to the perch family, some of the folk have also placed them there, using the name perch unmodified or with the descriptors black, green, or yellow. But bass has now definitely won out.

The two species of crappies (genus Pomoxis), on the other hand, still get identified more or less equally in folk terminology as both bass and perch. Though most people recognize crappie, a borrowing from French, as the standard common name, they still regularly use the regional names that early settlers came up with.For crappies in general, DARE lists calico bass, grass bass, and strawberry bass on the one hand and speckled perch and strawberry perch on the other. The black crappie is more often given the generic term bass, with descriptors bigfin, rock, silver, and speckled, though another name is goggle-eye perch. The white crappie is sometimes called white bass, but more often perch, with the descriptors bridge, silver, suckley, tin, and white.

You can see that the same term—white bass, silver perch, yellow perch, and so on—often applies to different fish. The problem only gets worse when we look at the other centrarchids.

Three Eastern ones look intermediate in shape between a black bass and a typical sunfish: the green sunfish, the warmouth, and the rock bass. Like the crappies, they may be classified in the folk vocabulary as either bass or perch. The green sunfish may be a blue, sand, or wood bass; placed in the other category, it may be called just perch, or described as a green or yellow one. The rock bass and the warmouth, similar in appearance but different in habitat and range (and assigned to different genera), share many names, including rock bass itself and goggle-eye(d), lake, or redeye(d) bass. Where they are classified as perch, people may qualify the noun with frogmouth (at least for the rock bass), goggle-eye(d), and redeye(d). That single Western sunfish mentioned before also looks more or less like these three Eastern species, but in a welcome exception to the general pattern, everyone apparently settled early on a single name and stuck with it: Sacramento perch.

Most remaining sunfishes—six or seven species big enough to interest anglers plus several little ones easy to mistake for young specimens of the others—belong (as do the green sunfish and the warmouth) to the genus Lepomis, typified by the bluegill and the pumpkinseed sunfish. They have colorful bodies deeper and flatter from side to side than those of black bass and crappies, smaller heads, and much smaller mouths. Sometimes these species hybridize, and besides, many naturally look so similar that even experienced anglers might catch one they’re not sure what to call, especially in an area new to them. Bass is almost never applied to this group, though DARE does record sun bass for the pumpkinseed sunfish.In Canada and the northern U. S., people have settled on sunfish (not borrowed from any European species, and probably not from the ocean sunfish) as the generic term for these fishes, and it has become the standard common name in fisheries literature and the sporting press. To the south and west, outside the range of the yellow perch, the folk label them all perch, and in the old Plantation South the common generic name is one I haven’t mentioned since the second paragraph: bream, pronounced /brIm/.

In Britain bream, pronounced /brim/, applies to either of two members of the Cyprinidae, the carp and minnow family. I’ve never seen one in the flesh; in illustrations their large size, uniform brassy or silvery color, large round scales, and spine-free fins make them look hardly like sunfish at all, but instead like overgrown, humpbacked specimens of the minnow called shiner. But because the English esteemed them, bream sprang to their lips when they were casting about for a name to give to similarly deep-but-narrow-bodied North American fishes with small heads and tiny mouths. In most regions the term has died out, but in the southern U. S. it has become the standard generic term. One lure designed especially to catch sunfish is even named Breamkiller®.

It is hard to sort out where and when sunfish, perch, and bream have been used unmodified to designate individual species, but I do know that in the part of the Ozarks where I grew up we considered the bluegill a kind of perch but gave it the specific name bream. The long-eared sunfish was sun perch, and we argued about whether the right name for the green sunfish was yellow perch or bluegill. Names for all Lepomis species can spawn similar confusion, so I simply offer lists of descriptors attached to the Old World names, without trying to sort species. Attached to perch: blue, pond, red, red-bellied, red-breast, sun, and yellow. To bream: black-eared, blue, red, red-bellied, red-breasted, red-tailed, and yellow. After bream generalized to cover sunfish in general, people also applied the compound red-eyed bream to the rock bass.

Such compounds made with Old World terms account for only part of the confusion. Considering the whole piscatory vocabulary, we also struggle to make sense of additional compounds such as barfish and linesides, borrowings such as sac-à-lait and chinkapin, and derivational forms such as grunter and stumpknocker (my personal favorite fish name).

I am of two minds about the trend toward giving up localisms and settling on standard common names. On the one hand I enjoy learning picturesque new words. On the other, I don’t enjoy making mistakes, like the time I bought a package of frozen, skinned fillets labeled “perch” from a vendor in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, only to realize when I ate them that they came from freshwater drum. Not bad, but not delectable like yellow perch. And if I didn’t already know what a fellow angler meant by saying “Stumpknockers been bitin’ good,” I would appreciate a translation to spotted sunfish so I would know to dig around in my tackle box for a Breamkiller®.

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This much is scrutable.Negativity is evitableStay couth with the sipid in lifeAnd you will be gruntled without strife.

—Saul Ricklin

As the Word Turns: Lincs Lingo

Barry Baldwin, Calgary, Alberta

“That most brute and beastly of our shires” (Henry VIII); “Ah, Lincolnshire, all flats, fogs, and fens” (George III); “A very MINOR county, my dear” (P. G. Wodehouse).

Walter Marsden (Lincolnshire, 1970) opined that its distinctive dialect was unspoiled thanks to the lack of a local university to impose standard English. There actually now is one, so will the following old Lincolnshire poem on education come true?

1800

Farmer's at the plough,

Wife's milking cow,

Daughter's threshing in the barn,

All happy to a charm.

1900

Father's gone to see the show,

Daughter's at the piano,

Madam's dressed in silk and satin,

Boy's at school a-larning Latin,

With a mortgage on the farm!

The brogue of those famous-in-song poachers and yellow-bellies is distinctive in both accent and vocabulary. One major characteristic is to break up diphthongs, beast becoming be-ast, road ro-ad, and so on. Another is adding an extra a, either in the middle of words (ale drawled out to aale), or at the end, turning (e.g.) so into so-a.

Ah, so-a! The first word in Murray's OED, after the single letter a, was the noun aa, meaning ‘stream,’ illustrated solely from the 1430 account of the watery Lincolnshire town of Saltfleetby, where there was once a rivulet locally dubbed ‘le Seventowne Aa’; cf. Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the OED (Oxford, 2003), p. 143.

Similarly, a 1477 parish register originates ale-draper ‘alehouse-keeper,’ a term confined to Lincolnshire and neighbouring Yorkshire, these two largest counties sharing several words, e.g., the verb sherry ‘to run away,’ of obscure origin.Grose (1796) registers the above, plus several other localisms, including: belch (‘liquor apt to cause eructation’), extended in 19th-century N. Lincs idiom to mean ‘smutty talk’; cagg-maggs (‘old Lincolnshire geese sent to London to feed the cockneys’); court-card (‘a gay fluttering coxcomb’), special to N. Lincs; dun (said to have derived from Joe Dun of Henry VII's time, “a famous bailiff of the town of Lincoln, extremely active and dexterous in his business, so that it became a proverb when a man refused to pay to say, Why do you not Dun him…?”); go-by-the-wall (‘a slow creeping helpless person’); Jacobines (‘malcontents’). are Lincolnshire variants on Grose’s go-by-the-ground and Jacobites.

Jabez Good, a local barber from Burgh le Marsh, compiled (c. 1900) a Glossary of Lincolnshire dialect; Googling yields 778 cognate sites. Here is a tiny sampling, including ones I recall from growing up there in the 1940s and 50s: anshum-scranshum (‘confusion’); back end (‘autumn’); bossacks (‘fat lazy woman’); caps owt (‘beats anything’); cassons (‘dried cow dung used for fuel’); chelp (‘heckling’); hockerdois (‘feet’); kelter (‘rubbish’); loppard (‘sour milk’); muckender (‘handkerchief’); squad/squat (‘muck/mud’); swath (‘bacon rind’); soul do (‘Methodist meeting’).

A complaint ever on my grandmother's lips was “I'm as busy as Throp's wife till she hanged herself in the dishclout,” an expression shared with Yorkshire—it appears in F.W. Moorman's Songs of the Ridings anthology (1918)—and inconclusively pondered from ‘J.E.’ in Notes & Queries 1:30 (1850), p. 485, to various Google sites.

“Aaf-a-lik! Aaaf-a-lik! Aaf-a-lik onward!” That's Lord Tennyson reading his “Charge of the Light Brigade” on a wax cylinder recording. Alfred penned several dialect poems, also filling his notorious Promise of May melodrama with it. “The Church-Warden and the Curate” begins: “Eh? good daay! good daay! thaw it bean't not mooch of a daay. Nasty cazzelty weather! An’ mea haafe down wi' my haay” (bean’t = ‘isn’t’; casselty = ‘unsettled’; haafe…haay = ‘my grass half mown’). “The Northern Cobbler” includes the gem num-cumpus = ‘daft’, a Lincs-isation of Latin non compos mentis, befitting a county that boasts the village toponym Ashby Puerorum (‘Ashby of the Boys’—whatever happened to the girls?).

Bishop Edward Hicks of Lincoln in his diaries (cf. my article in The British Diarist 1, 2003, pp. 32–36) reports that he was rebuked by the incumbent Lord Tennyson for not pronouncing knowledge in the Lincolnshire way as his poet father had insisted. Hicks tactfully replied that he dared not do this in the light of Shaw’s satirising of a dialect-spewing character in Candida. As his biographer Peter Levi (Oxford, 1993), writing before these diaries' publication, observes (p. 328, n. 44), “Pronunciation affects the sound of the whole of his poetry.” It is said that Tennyson taught Benjamin Jowett, Murray’s bête noire (cf. Winchester for details), to rhyme knowledge with rollage, thereby colouring the claim placed in the latter’s mouth in the famous epigram, “I am the Master of this College! What I don't know isn't Knowledge!”

Drafting this between Canadian and American Thanksgivings brought to mind this Lincolnshire Harvest Supper toast: “Here’s tew we ersen’s, tew us a’al, ha’al on us. May we nivver want for nowt, noän on us. Nor me naythur.”

County rivals may think it typical of a Lincolnshire yellow-belly (a sobriquet modernly equated with cowardice, though Eric Partridge dates this only back to around 1918—Grose defines it as ‘an allusion to the eels caught there’) to push himself so conspicuously forward at the end.

HORRIBILE DICTU

Mat Coward, Summerset, Britain

It’s a bit like waking up to find yourself living in a different dimension, sometimes; you recognise most of the words, it’s just the language that doesn’t seem to make any sense. My new computer promises to “Import, repurpose and share digital content quickly and easily.” That sentence isn’t hidden away on page 47 of the instruction booklet, either; it’s written on the front of the box, so it must be important. Now I’m worried: am I supposed to have been repurposing my digital content all this time? What’s going to happen when they find out that not only haven’t I been embracing the challenge of repurpose, but I don’t even know what it is I haven’t done?

This morning I received a mailing from a charity which exists to “support gardeners with needs.” For a moment I was quite excited, and thought of sending them a list: my present needs, as a gardener, include another twenty square feet on the vegetable patch, a polytunnel and a rechargeable lawn mower. But a quick glance at the accompanying pamphlet deflated me. People with needs, it turns out, are what used to be called “mentally handicapped people,” and more recently “people with special needs.” Their needs aren’t special any more, apparently.

Even the junk mail is against me. I am offered an exclusive new cocktail of anti-impotency drugs which guarantee that “In less than 5 minutes you will have a substantial erection that will be available to you for 24 hours non-stop!”

“Available” to me? Will I have to fill in forms? Am I required to valet it, before returning it to the depot?

The morning paper doesn’t help. It contains a profile of an investment banker who has been appointed as her employers' “diversity champion for gender.” Only a cynic would suspect that was a long way of saying “token.” The champion herself clearly has no doubts about her place in the firm. It’s a meritocracy, she assures us, where “It’s business challenges, not gender challenges, that matter.” Challenges, it seems, has joined issues as a kind of universal word; it doesn’t have any particular meaning, and therefore is safe to use liberally in any context.

The champion goes on to boast that she is “results-driven” (which must cause challenging issues for her more process-driven rivals) and that “‘No limits’ is my philosophy.” If that’s true, I’d like to talk to her about an overdraft. Her advice for the ambitious career woman is equally crisp: “Be your own role model.” Or in other words, don’t take any notice of diversity champions.

People at the champion’s executive level tend to be fluent in the language of business, but their lowlier colleagues can often be heard getting their challenges in a twist as they struggle to avoid saying anything that might be understood. That’s the great peril of meaning: it can be used against you. One trick is simply to grab hold of a single word or phrase from the jargon, and keep repeating it. Here’s a spokesman for a utilities company, commenting on a billing error which had put thousands of subscribers into sudden debt: “We’re looking at our customer service to all our customers in order to ensure we always give best customer-value.”

Meanwhile, the day’s emails are adding to my irritation. AOL wants me to install its new software which has been updated “to improve the functionality available to you.” I email back: “Forget the functionality—just make the damn thing work properly!”

Trying to order from a clothes catalogue, over the phone, I kept getting a recorded message: “We are experiencing a period of high-call volumes at the moment.” It took me ages to realise that the cause of my bafflement was merely a misplaced verbal hyphen. Luckily, I had ages.

I was eventually connected to what used to be a sales assistant, then a customer care assistant, and is now an advisor—that is, a person who keys your credit card details into the computer. If I could find the energy, I’d ring the advisor and say “My neighbour’s cousin is in love with his boss’s niece. Do you think he should leave his wife for her?” Well, I like to get my money’s worth.

[Mat Coward’s latest book is So Far, So Near, published by Elastic Press. http://hometown.aol.co.uk/matcoward/myhomepage/newsletter.html]

Bringing Descriptive Linguistics Into Everyday Conversation: A Cautionary Tale

Allison Burkette, Oxford, Mississippi

A couple of years ago, I happened to be in one of those wait-all-afternoon lines for concert tickets in Atlanta and, to pass the time, I starting chatting with the woman in line in front of me. She seemed very nice, especially given the fact that she was middle-aged and waiting in line to purchase tickets for her 20-something son (who had been unable to take off work). And indeed she was nice—and interesting. We talked about lots of things: she told me that, as a young woman, she had worked construction in Texas in the 60s, had studied anthropology, had two kids, had faith in feminism. I told her that I was a sociolinguist. “Oh?” she said and I thought to myself, “If ever there was a time that I could enlighten a fellow being about descriptive linguistics, it is now.” So I began my comparison of “Standard English” and Santa Claus, both of which exist only as judgment-making social constructs, both used to label people as ‘naughty’ or ‘nice.’ She didn’t believe me. I talked about the nature of language and how both change and variation are part of the deal. She resisted. I talked about the fact that all dialects are rule-governed, structured entities that deserved respect. She was adamant. I was shocked. More so, however, when she began to divulge her own passionate belief, not only in the efficacy of Standard English, but also in the ‘true story of humankind’s origins.’ She explained that aliens put humans on this planet 3,000 years ago to work as genetically engineered slaves whose job it is to mine gold from seawater. In addition, as part of a never-ending cycle, our alien masters would soon be returning to earth in order to wipe our planet clean and start again, as we have lately forgotten our ultimate purpose in being here (i.e., to extract gold from seawater). The evidence, she said, is in the pyramids. In summary, I would like to remind you that this woman would not accept for a second, or even consider, the idea that Standard English is merely a concept, that linguistic variation is natural, that all dialects are equally valid means of communication, and yet, gold from seawater, folks, gold from seawater.

Drawlery

Orin Hargraves, Westminster, Maryland

The chimney sweep stopped by the other day for his annual visit, to clear the flume of various things gone up in smoke over the last year, and he was telling me about his recent visit to Smith Island—in Chesapeake Bay, where the natives are somewhat renowned for their peculiar dialect of English. One fellow he met there used all sorts of unusual expressions that the sweep had never heard, but what caught my attention was this peculiar, if not particularly sweeping statement: “You know, he had that brogue.”

Now, what’s a resident of Smith Island doing with a brogue, anyway? It would have been as surprising to learn that he wielded a shillelagh or played a clarsach. But one doesn’t like to be snobbish about the matter of working-class lexis, so I consulted a dictionary or two and sure enough, there it was: Random House Unabridged gives a sense of brogue as “any strong regional accent,” and Merriam-Webster says it can be “a dialect or regional pronunciation.” You don’t have to be Irish, after all, to impress others with your brogue.

Smith Island, it turns out, was settled by English and Welsh settlers, so a brogue there in the limited and usual sense (Oxford dictionaries: “a marked accent, especially Irish or Scottish, when speaking English”) seems unlikely. But if the Smith Islanders haven’t got a brogue, then what is it? Probing a little further I found this statement on a website about Smith Island (emphasis is mine): “The roots on the Island are so deep that even the modes of speech hearken to another era. Islanders have an accent—a slight English lilt warmed by a Southern drawl.”

Aha! This statement confirms to some degree one of my pet theories: when people want to characterize a way of speaking as different from their own, they resort to a rather small set of words—all of which have particular designation, but none of which is often used precisely. Both of the foregoing words, lilt and drawl, are among the culprits here, along with brogue, which started the whole inquiry. Twang completes the nefarious gang of four.

Drawl is variously defined: “a slow speech pattern with prolonged vowels” (WordNet) is a typical definition. Cruising through a few corpora, I find that drawl collocates most often with regions. Americans put drawls all over the map: in addition to the Southern one noted above, people have observed Midwestern, Tidewater, Tennessee, Texas, and Louisiana drawls. In general, drawls seem to be found charming: they are characterized as folksy, sexy, and even soothing and butter-like, though occasionally a drawl goes the other way and is characterized as acerbic or nasal. Britons, on the other hand, recognize drawls in different places: their field observations include Cockney, Harvard, London, West Midlands, and Somerset drawls. One British novelist bridges the Atlantic divide by inventing a character who “spoke with a hint of Scottish accent through his Canadian drawl.”

The striking thing about twangs, by definition anyway, is their nasality: Random House has, for example: “a sharp, nasal tone, as of the human voice.” This suggests that you could, in fact, have a twangy drawl or a drawly twang, though writers don’t often leave evidence of having observed one—a point I’ll return to. Speaking through the nose generally seems to be regarded as an unpleasant thing for English speakers to do, and so the characteristic feature about the usage of twang is that it denotes an accent that is remote from the speaker’s or writer’s own (which of course is pleasant): hardly anyone claims a twang for themselves! Americans identify twangs as western, Aussie, Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin, or Southern. Brits, on the other hand, note twangs that are cowboy, Texas, Irish, or Australian. There is at least a transatlantic consensus that Aussies and Texans have a twang; whether scientific instruments exist to confirm this hypothesis is another question, though one can picture, amusingly, electrodes attached to schnozzes as a means of finding out.

A curious side feature of twangs is that they are unusually often characterized as flat. But flat in what sense? The available contexts don’t really give a clue. While writers claim to have discerned the flat twangs of the Midwest, Harry Truman, Iowa and New Zealand, they don’t say what is, or has gone, flat. Do the vowels get squished as they pass through the nose? Generally speaking, flat is not an adjective that denotes endearing qualities, being glossed as vapid, flavorless, savorless, and insipid on the one hand, and lacking contrast or shading between tones on the other. Conclusion: flatness is to be avoided if you want your twang to be considered at all bearable.

An almost entirely commendable quality in someone else’s voice (speakers rarely acknowledge one in their own, despite the charm factor) is the lilt. We have already seen one attributed to the Smith Islanders, thought to have been bequeathed them by the English. A gander at examples in context reveals interesting things about lilts: they’re seductive! They’re soft and sexy! They’re both husky and feminine! Singer Melissa Etheridge is reputed by one writer to have a trademark husky lilt. Americans don’t seem to be inclined to regionalize the lilt, but Brits are firm in banishing it to the outliers. Lilts on their radar screen include Geordie (by this they mean Tyneside), Irish, Welsh, Bajan, Nigerian, and Scots. (Bajan? It’s in Barbados.)

If you’re waiting for the meaningful pattern to emerge here, I propose this: somebody with a lilt, drawl, twang, or brogue is someone who talks noticeably differently than you do. A Houston Chronicle reporter covers all of his bases in this observation (my emphasis added): “Conversations on airplane flights to this once-sleepy provincial capital [Maturín, Venezuela] lilt with the twangs and drawls of the U.S. oil patch.”

The other observation is that with slight tweaking via modifiers, all of these words (lilt, twang, drawl, brogue) can also used to convey that someone else’s pronunciation is rather charming, or (in the case of “flat” and “nasal”) rather irritating.

So much for the good news. The lexis available for rubbishing someone else’s way of speaking is relatively sparser, but usually unambiguous. One thing you surely want to avoid is any accusation of sounding clipped. Presumably this is clipped in the sense of “cut short,” but it never says anything nice about speech. You’ve got your clipped Oxford-style diction, your British upper-class clipped tones. Tones, in fact, are a favorite collocate of clipped, and they are often noted as cold, short, or deliberate. How about “the clipped tones of one who was raised in the military”? Somehow you know that if anyone ever said “I love you” in clipped tones, it would be calculating rather than sincere and you couldn’t bank on it. Check out this damning characterization in a British newspaper: “Those tight-lipped, clipped voices curl the toes of anyone who lives north of Watford and can’t say “five thisand pinds.”

You might think that sounding clipped would be the opposite of having a drawl or a lilt. However, see below.

Finally, besides clipping, you’ll want to avoid lisping, a definite no-no in endearing speech for anyone over the age of five. Lisp has a technical definition (Oxford dictionaries: a speech defect in which s is pronounced like th in thick and z is pronounced like th in this) and is often thought to be inadvertent and uncontrollable. Why is it then that we tend to use it disparagingly? Examples from corpora abound:

lisping, greasy obsequiousness

a lisping foreign accent

lisping, limp-wristed homosexuals

a stage-Jew/menacing/eerie lisp

However: just to confirm that precision is rarely the forte of observations about accent, I Googled a number of collocates to produce these startling stats. They’re all relatively infrequent as collocations go, but they clearly all made it past some folks' syntax censors:

clipped drawl: 75 (Presumably involves clipping consonants only, as drawl prolongs vowels!)

twangy lilt: 57

twangy drawl: 28 (surely these belong mainly to Texans?)

clipped lilt: 20

clipped brogue: 14

lispy lilt: 12

lispy twang: 8 (most frequently named exemplar of this: David Sedaris)

clipped twang: 7

twangy lisp: 6

clipped lisp: 3

twangy brogue: 1

For now, I’m going to work on my broguey drawl and eagerly await the sweep’s visit next year to find out what he’s been listening to.

Dash It!

Annabel Wynne, Wiltshire, Britain

There are many misuses of the English language by which I am irritated: starting a sentence with an And or a But; the increasing use of the phrase for free (it is either for nothing or free); ending a sentence with a preposition; the placing of apostrophes where they are not needed and of course their absence where they should be present; incorrect uses of the prefixes un-, in-, and non-; and, one that particularly irritates me, describing someone as having been hung, rather than hanged; washing is hung, people are hanged. This list could go on for some time and, as I go about the business of my everyday life, it is easily added to on a daily basis.

However, there is one particular feature of the English language about which I cannot seem to raise even an eyebrow. Don’t get me wrong, this lackadaisical attitude is out of character and against my better judgement, but whatever I do, however much I force myself to think about this increasingly common punctuation mark, I am unfazed. The offending article is, of course, the dash. This used to be a different punctuation animal from the hyphen, but we seem to be living through the point of their merger. Indeed, the OED defines a dash as “a horizontal stroke in writing or printing to mark a pause or break in sense or to represent omitted letters or words” and a hyphen as used “to indicate a missing or implied element,” as well as also defining its more traditional joining function. Now, I may be a linguistic pedant, but even I would say that if these definitions lived in houses they would be next-door neighbours, or should that be next-door-neighbours?! For the purposes of this article, however, I shall keep the hyphen and the dash separate; my issue is not with the hyphen, although I will just say there are few things more irritating than an incorrectly-administered-hyphen (see what I mean?).

This simple, short little line—the dash—(yes, that one,) is being used more and more as a form of punctuation; but it is not as innocent as it looks. Since the novel came into being in 1605 with the publication of the first part of Don Quixote, the dash has been quietly gathering momentum.By the beginning of the nineteenth century it seemed every literary heroine was hysterical; one could tell by the number of dashes in their sentences. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the dash has become ubiquitous and is colonising sentences and paragraphs in every conceivable context; it is taking over and has virtually imprisoned the semicolon in a faraway island known as Pedantry.

The dash has been so successful for two reasons. First, it seems to be able to take the place of virtually any other punctuation mark—parentheses, commas, semicolons, even speech marks. No other punctuation mark has this versatility, but does this mean it is a “Jack of all trades, and master of none”? Because of its versatility, it can of course be very useful, and I think this is why I find it difficult to protest about its increasing presence in prose; I find it a rather useful little mark myself. I have my own ideas and feelings about what a dash is for and how it can be of use to me in my writing, but, in fact, that is part of the problem; if you have a feature of a system of communication that is that subjective, then the communication is more likely to fail. As Humpty Dumpty said:

‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’

Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll.

This is the second reason for its success, its highly convenient lack of rules. This is arguably what makes it a “Jack of all trades,” because it is impossible to use a dash incorrectly; everyone knows how to use it, and, in an age where you can get goods “for free,” where you can “spend and save” or go “literally out of your mind,” that is perhaps its most appealing feature.

So, where is all this leading? Well, I am not exaggerating when I say I can see a time, perhaps in my lifetime, where punctuation is extinct except for the dash, where the dash becomes the all-encompassing, omniscient punctuation mark, and this possibility is not helped by the apathetic attitude of pedants like myself to this insidious coloniser of linguistic structure. Almost every time I use a dash—especially a pair of dashes—(yes, just like that one) I have a nagging suspicion that I should not be using it, that I am being a lazy traitor, which in many cases might actually be true, but with time restrictions on me, it is easier to go with the dash. I justify it to myself by waging my own quiet little private campaign to save the semicolon from extinction by using it wherever it should be used.

Generally speaking a semicolon can often be used instead of a dash; in fact, I believe it is most people's lack of confidence in their own knowledge of the semicolon that leads them to use the dash in the first place. The trouble with semicolons, though, is that they have the strange feature of being addictive. They are not addictive in the way chocolate can be. Simply put, semicolons are nothing less than the crack cocaine of punctuation; start using them and by the end of the piece you are writing you will find you have a semicolon approximately every three words.

So perhaps I should just accept that this is part of the evolution of language, which is a fascinating and essential process, and is why not just language but the punctuation that facilitates it is unendingly beautiful and wondrous. I will continue with my campaign for the semicolon, but I say long live the eccentricities of the English and their language; go forth and use language your own way and be a driving force in its evolution. Just one thing though: don’t ever start a sentence with an And or a But; that’s just annoying!

Glitter Moth

Would be as fit an appellation, I

Believe, as lightning bug or firefly.

—John Nixon, Jr.

Baseball, Chicago-Style

Johnathan Caws-Elwitt, Friendsville, Pennsylvania

Almost everyone agrees that the recent adoption of the Chicago Manual of Style as the “Official Style Guide of the Chicago Cubs” was long overdue. “We’ve had the football tie-in for decades,” says U of C English professor Archibald Lunch, judiciously resisting the temptation to use a flashy en dash where a hyphen is appropriate. “Why should it have taken so long for the board of directors of the baseball team to do us the same honor?” he adds, thereby showing his preference for a “down” style of capitalization with respect to names of administrative bodies.

In some circles, there was speculation that the move by the Cubs was a response to last year’s controversial announcement that the White Sox ball club would be favoring MLA. “I took that as an insult to my town,” says one former White Sox fan, who has now switched his allegiance.

Nobody expects tie-ins to have much of an impact on how a baseball game is played. But June Whisk, a part-time syntax specialist for the Cubs, suggests that the present instance may be an exception: “I think we’re going to start seeing more serial commas this season. And I think you’ll notice fewer errors on the field, particularly when it comes to punctuation placement around parens.” The National League record for serial commas within a single game is held by hall-of-famer Jimmy “Doc” Physician, who in 1964 recited the names of every major-league player in the history of the game—from the mound, with two men on base—in order to settle a bet. (Physician subsequently became the only former player ever to work as a staff filibusterer for a minor-league team, until the umpire’s union succeeded in obtaining a ban on such positions.)

What may have held up the decision to formalize the relationship between the Cubs and the Manual was a concern regarding its potential impact on the team’s catchers. “I’m not saying the catchers held up the show,” says a Cubs director who asked to remain anonymous, “but you might say the catchers held up the show. In other words, I’m not saying that, but I don’t mind if you say it, and in fact I would encourage you to do so.” Another director, who did not ask to remain anonymous but whose name was difficult to spell, clarifies further: “Because catcher patter is inherently asyntactical, the catchers wanted reassurances that no one was going to come along and start redlining them behind the plate. We tried to emphasize that even if they came under scrutiny, they would always have the recourse of querying the ump.”

One Cubs catcher with strong opinions on the matter is Dean “Provost” Ombudsman, who has been with the team since sneaking into Wrigley Field through a knothole in 1951. “No style, no style at all up there . . . cites like my grandmother . . . c’mon manual manual manual manual manual INDEX!” he told us in a phone interview.

But is catcher patter really devoid of syntax? Linguist Claire Pfnipf says no. “No. Catcher patter is a dialect of English (assuming the game is being played in an English-speaking country), and as such it has its own syntax.” Nowadays, according to Pfnipf, it is most common to find languages in which each dialect has its own syntax—which it usually keeps in its room, next to its computer and its telephone. “Due to the ready availability of grammatical systems in the modern world, dialects that have to ‘double up’ and share a syntax are becoming rare,” she explains. “It’s not like when you and I were kids,” she says in an unwelcome aside, Pfnipf being ninety if she’s a day.

The Cubs and the Manual officially joined forces at a gala ceremony last week, the highlight of which was the signing of a fifteen-page agreement between the two organizations. “It was a beautiful moment,” says Lunch, who was one of the few faculty members given the privilege of reading the agreement beforehand. “They did a good job drafting the text,” he opines. “Short-form endnotes were employed after a cited work’s initial appearance, and foreign words that have gained currency in English were left unitalicized.”

Though neither the Cubs nor the University of Chicago would disclose the financial terms of the endorsement (at least not to us), the relationship will definitely entail some out-of-hand expenses for the team. Not least of these will be an entire new set of uniforms. “Per Chicago style, numbers smaller than 100 are generally to be represented by words, not numerals,” says Whisk. “Since all our uniforms were numeral format, our tailor’s going to be pretty busy in the months between now and the start of the season.” Whisk mentions that a lone exception will be made for a fielder whose performance was recently described by journalists as a “footnote” to the team’s overall efforts.

According to sources, the meeting at which the decision to buy new uniforms was announced turned contentious when a key question was raised: Is the number on a player’s jersey a cardinal or an ordinal? A pitcher who was particularly vocal in the ensuing debate recapped his philosophy afterwards: “The way I read my contract, I am ‘Number 32.’ Now the team’s lawyers are saying that I’m merely the thirty-second item in some nebulous set, that I can’t really be 32 unless I have all sorts of special properties, like being divisible by 8 and being a power of 2. I say if that’s what they were expecting, they should have spelled it out when they recruited me.” But an attorney for the Cubs dismisses the player’s complaint: “Our position is that if he wanted to be a Cardinal, he should have signed with St. Louis.”

Despite such tensions, the mood around the marriage of baseball and style is one of buoyancy. “For years, the fans have been asking for more consistency from the team,” says Whisk. “This is the best way we know to bring that about.”

EPISTOLA {Louis Phillips}

Dear Editor:

A laundromat on 18th Sreet in Manhattan some time ago displayed a sign that read:

25¢ for each additonal item hung on hangars.

Actually, considering how much it costs to take a car to Kennedy or LaGuardia airports, that’s a pretty good deal.

[Louis Phillips, New York, New York]

If Foul Is Fair, What Next?

A.H. Block, Bronxville, New York

Words and expressions originally used in sports have long spiced everyday English. Haymaker of boxing, horse racing’s by a nose, marathoners' hitting the wall, and sudden death from football and hockey are just a few examples of crossover vernacular. But it’s baseball which has seasoned the language more than any other sport: hit a home run, three strikes and you’re out, can’t get to first base, you threw me a curve, southpaw. Born of roots more than 150 years old, the game retains a rich jargon for describing the plays, hits, and positions, an argot ingrained and unquestioned … until the past few years, that is, when rumblings of doubt about one term have been advanced. An increasing number of sportscasters have noted that if a ball hitting a foul pole is a home run, the pole must be in fair territory and should be called a fair pole. So, logically, shouldn’t the white stripes leading to them be called fair lines? It flies in the face of well over a century of habit, but the mere possibility that such rationality might prevail is enough to propose other anomalies to rectify:

Home run: Meaningful if it were called run home, which is certainly more descriptive. Trot home would be closer to fact, leaving run home for the inside-the-park variety. Since a player on third base also runs home, it ultimately does not work. Eliminating the un truncates the term into homer, erasing any connection to run. That, however, fails the test of exclusivity. A homer is also a biased announcer, a pigeon, a poet, and a Simpson. No, the proper term presents itself at the end of a normal progression in describing hits … single, double, triple, quadruple.

Home plate: The root of the previous problem. Home (as well as away) is the locale or field where the game is played. Plate evokes the vision of a piece of china. An alternative, dish, simply reinforces the image. Dinnerware has no place in baseball. Again, applying the rule of progression, there are first base, second base, third base, and fourth base.

Round tripper: Interchangeable with quadruple. A round trip, being travel from point A to B and back to A, would require a counterclockwise circuit of the bases and a clockwise return for the expression to be appropriate. That not being the practice, the proper phrase for that single tour around the bases is one wayer.

Run: A verb converted to a noun for the convenience of baseball. But it becomes muddled in its redundancy, as when the runner runs to score a run. There is a universally accepted word for scoring in athletic contests that better makes the point: point. Its usage will extend to statistical areas such as earned point average (EPA) and points batted in (PBI). Note that walk is still retained, reinforcing the true meaning of run. Batters will either walk or run to first base. In the context of baseball, it is doubtful that this will be confused with any government agency.

Double play: In reality a single play that achieves two outs. A more appropriate candidate for the description would be a two-base hit. Twin killing, though violent, is still apt, but can also be construed as the action greedy owners have taken in substituting separate day and night games for traditional doubleheaders. The proper designation for the play is double out. It follows that at the next level, triple out applies.

Fly ball: Pigs don’t fly nor do balls. That ability is restricted to birds, planes, and insects, one of which apparently provided the name. (That bats also fly is too confounding to consider.) A ground ball, by definition, skitters along the playing surface. A ball hit above the ground becomes a sky ball. Air ball, a possible alternative, must be rejected because of its association with abject failure in another sport, whereas a sky ball can be successful; i.e., a sacrifice sky. Other variations, such as line drive and pop up, continue to be acceptable.

Ball: The sphere that is thrown and hit, or a pitch that misses a particular zone around fourth base? Too bewildering. A ball is that round thing, nothing more. From the pitcher’s standpoint, then, a curve that misses the aforementioned zone is not a ball but a bad pitch … a bad. Four bads and the batter walks to first base.

Strike: The batter may strike the ball. A swing and a miss does not hit the ball, so cannot be called a strike. Occasionally, the players don’t play but strike. Perplexing. A waist-high slider that clips the corner of fourth base, as opposed to a bad, is a good. Swings that miss and fouls are also chalked up as goods. Three goods retire the batter.

Strike out: No, the batter does not good out. Nor does he strike out. Strike is synonymous with hit (strike a nail with a hammer, strike a blow for humanity). The so-called strikeout victim obviously does not hit out. What the batter does is swing out, whether the ball is missed or fouled (an argument could be made that a held foul tip is a true strikeout; that is resolved by the old saw, the exception proving the rule).

Shortstop: Usually, the position is farther from fourth base than that of any other infielder, which would seem to call for the name farstop. That, however, would infringe on outfielders, who are even farther away. More accurately, the shortstop roams between second and third … a between baseman. In the interest of linguistic ease, calling the player a ‘tweener is perfectly acceptable. Though the term already exists to describe a ball hit between two outfielders, no one will mistake a tweener to left center for a leaping stab by a ‘tweener.

Note: Some may opine that shortstop is descriptive, as in the cases of the 5'5" Rabbit Maranville and Freddie Patek. The era of the 6'4" Cal Ripkin Jr. and 6'3" Derek Jeter makes the thought moot.

Battery: An energy producer, artillery, an assault. And the pitcher and catcher? It boggles the brain. A word which implies power in all its non-baseball applications would be better associated with the offense whose name it so closely resembles … the batters. Look to the pitch-catch action of the so-called battery to portray the unit. As in dealing with fractions, the common ch is self canceling, leaving pitcat. Admittedly odd, but then how strange bunt (which does have a reasonable derivation) must have first sounded. Though there is also a common t, that is not canceled, to avoid thoughts of an eating disorder or type size.

Since sportscasters already speak out for fair poles, it’s time to step up with these further clarifications. Lovers of the game should not be deprived of the excitement of a right fielder snaring a sky ball and nipping a runner at fourth base, preventing the tying point; the thrill of a swing’m out, throw’m out double out; the bottom of the ninth, two-out drama of a light-hitting ‘tweener driving a quadruple off the left field fair pole to win the game. Inveterate fans may rue tampering with custom, but they can’t deny the accuracy. And the young and future generations will be spared needless befuddlement caused by existing, illogical baseball terminology.

[A.H. Block has written about baseball in Elysian Fields Quarterly and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. A lifelong fan, he takes the game very seriously.]

Sportswriting

Gerald Eskenazi, New York, New York

Once upon a time, in 1950’s Brooklyn, the first newspaper I’d see in the morning was Hearst’s tabloid New York Mirror. I flipped it over to see what the back page blared. And there is was: My Dodgers had won! Or, as the Mirror might have put it, “Brooks Scalp Braves.”

For I was weaned on the New York City tabloids. These papers, created to be read comfortably on the subways, defined what I might call sportswriterese—the language of sportswriting at a certain time. That time is past now, but it probably affected every fedora-wearing sportswriter from the Twenties through the early Fifties.

Now, of course, sportswriting requires Freudian insights, an understanding of seven-figure numbers, and an ability to read the police blotter. What also has changed in the use of language is a significantly better-educated reporter

I believe I successfully made the transition in my 40-something years writing sports for The New York Times. But I learned in a different era. For when I leafed past the back page, which might also have proclaimed “Bombers Rip Pale Hose” (Yankees defeat White Sox), I got deeper into the world of the written word, at least the word the way my newspaper heroes penned it. Remember, Winchell still was the most powerful gossip columnist in America, and Louella Parsons was terrorizing Hollywood. They wrote in a breezy shorthand.

So in reading about baseball, for example, I discovered players didn’t simply hit a high fly ball that was caught. Rather, they hit a can of corn. And once they got on base (or the first sack), they didn’t just try to steal second—they tried to pilfer it or swipe it.

If they were lucky enough to get past second, why, they’d be heading for the hot corner, third base. And a left-fielder in Yankee Stadium played the sun field, you know, while a tricky pitcher hurled sidearm slants to a batter who hugged the plate to get a better view of the pitch.

By the time I got to Thomas Jefferson High School, and became the sports editor, I was swimming in sports syntax. Yet, I had never met a real live athlete, except to ask for autographs (one magical day I got those of Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Roy Campanella, and Gil Hodges). So when I received a letter at the school paper, The Liberty Bell, inviting me, and all other editors from Brooklyn high schools, to meet Duke Snider I felt I was on a professional track that one day might even land me in the press box.

The Dodgers were hosting us before a game, and had Snider (the “Duke of Flatbush”) ready to answer our questions. I had never sat so close to the field as we assembled behind home plate about three hours before gametime.

“Any questions for Duke?” the PR man asked.

I raised my hand. They called on me. What could I ask this icon, this future Hall-of-Famer (or pantheon denizen as he would be known)?

“Duke,” I began, then thought of how I would frame the question in sportswriterese, and finally I got it: I would ask him about the longest ball he ever hit. But remember, I was now asking as a budding professional, and so I continued: “What’s the longest smash you ever clouted?”

Whew. I felt the air escape. I had done it, asked the big question of a real live sports hero. So what if I was redundant—after all, smash connotes a ball that has been clouted.

No matter. Duke took my question seriously and spent some time answering it. Those of us in the business feel validated when the subject of a question gives a lengthy, thoughtful response. He even pointed animatedly to center field to show me where the ball landed. The guy had taken my question seriously.

From there, it was easy. And maybe if my newspaper career had stayed with the tabloids, I might have settled into the comfort zone of my peers: boxers would have thrown leather, and jockeys would be astride horses that slingshot around the field at the turn, and a quarterback would have hooked up with his receiver, and a penalized hockey player would have been sent to the sin bin. All worthy, and quite over-used, descriptions. Instead, I not only joined the staid New York Times, where adjectives were tossed around about as easily as railroad cars, but I entered the dawn of the Sixties. Insight and examination became the rule. Not to mention good writing.

So where else but The Times could I throw in mythological references—every year I used “Sisyphus” to describe the Rangers hockey team’s failed striving. I gravitated toward athletes who had something to say. All one of them had to do was tell me he had once read Hemingway, and furnish me with a favorite quote … well, this guy was going to see his name in print a lot.

I think that, mostly, I was grateful to The Times for not being afraid to toss in a literary allusion. I had been a literature major at City College of New York, and there is nothing so stifling to this reader of, say, a Greek tragedy, as not being able to share the story with the world. Thus, I’d throw in a “hubris” about a conceited ballplayer. But you know what? After all these years, some part of me wishes I could see, just once, my byline, in thick black type, under a blaring headline, in a New York City tabloid. Now that would be a smashed clout.

[Gerald Eskenazi’s latest book is I Hid It Under the Sheets: Growing Up With Radio, from the University of Missouri Press.]

Translating for the Old Ball Game

Ron Kaplan, Montclair, New Jersey

For people like Roger Kahlon, translator for Hideki Matsui, the Japanese outfielder for the New York Yankees, the “Asian wave” of ballplayers coming to America has opened up a new world of possibilities and challenges.

For years, American athletes, either at the tail end of their careers or seeking new challenges, signed lucrative contracts to ply their trade in baseball-crazy Japan. The sailing hasn’t always been smooth. Rules limit the number of gaijin (foreign-born players) on Japanese rosters and Americans were culturally ostracized. For many, the isolation and separation from family—along with the language barrier—prove too much to handle.

Over the last few years, however, the shoe has been on the other foot.

Almost 30 percent of major league baseball players on 2005 rosters were born outside the United States, with the number leaping to more than 50 percent in the minors. Of these, 18 are Japanese-born. Most were high-caliber stars and, like their American counterparts, wish to take advantage of the opportunities playing in America has to offer.

And, like most Americans playing in Japan, these newcomers need translators.

Kahlon has impeccable credentials. His mother, Rogelia, a former diplomat for the Embassy of the Philippines, was assigned to India, where she met his father, Ranjit, then in the Indian military. Romance flourished and the couple married.

Rogelia was assigned to Japan in 1969; Ranjit followed a year later. They settled in Tokyo where Roger and his older brother, Ranjit, Jr. were born, enjoying dual Indian-Filipino citizenship.

Kahlon attended St. Mary’s International School in Tokyo from first grade through high school. “This school [was] truly an ‘international’ environment in that everybody was from every part of the world,” Kahlon said in an e-mail interview. “You can say that everybody was innocent and unaware of any racial or cultural issues. It was truly a unique experience, and the friendships that I developed there have been priceless.

“Although I was a gaijin, the Japanese people were very warm, polite, respectful, and welcoming. They are so to begin with, but I felt there was much more proximity perhaps because I spoke like a native and was able to relate with them in many ways,” he said.

Kahlon attended Pima Community College and the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he received a bachelor’s degree in Management Information Systems. He had no experience as a translator, but a serious of fortunate events in 2003 led to his first job.

“My good friend, who was the former interpreter of Masato Yoshii (a player for the New York Mets in 1998), was contacted by the Yankees after they signed Hideki. By then he had become a full-time lawyer and recommended me instead, as I happened to be in between jobs. The interview was a two-step process, first with front office people and later with Hideki himself. The decision was entirely left to him, and fortunately, he chose me as his interpreter.

“Hideki must’ve thought I was either an American who learned Japanese in school or only half-Japanese,” Kahlon recalled for Times Herald-Record, an upstate New York newspaper. “He said, ‘Hi, how do you do? Nice to meet you.’ I responded in Japanese, with obviously a very Japanese accent.”

Kahlon said he has always been athletic and involved in different sports, including soccer and tennis in school and basketball “for fun.” But “[A]lthough I had watched a lot of it when I was in Japan, I actually never played on a baseball team. It’s interesting how ironic life can be.”

Although a sports fan, Kahlon said he didn’t think it was a prerequisite for his job. “I think it’s necessary to understand baseball, [but] you do not have to be an expert.”

But baseball, like many professions, has a language all its own, with idioms and slang viable only within the context of the sport. “Obviously if one does not follow sports, he or she will find it very difficult to translate the jargon. Such difficulties can lead to misinterpretations, which can eventually lead to misunderstandings at all levels: between the player and the media, or other players, or the coaching staff and front office.”

Kahlon described a typical day on the job. He usually reports to Yankee Stadium more than three hours before a 7 PM game, hanging out by Matsui’s locker for a half hour or so for any media that comes around. Then it’s time to take the field. He remains in as close a proximity to Matsui as possible in case players, coaches, or Joe Torre, the Yankees’ manager, need to speak with him.

Once the game starts, however, Kahlon, as a non-uniformed employee of the team, is not allowed to remain in the dugout. “I’m on standby in the clubhouse, in case I’m needed.” He tries to leave Matsui alone as much as possible when he talks with coaches or other players, so he can learn English. But when it comes to the media, Kahlon said he translates because the questions are specific.

The job doesn’t end when the game is over, however. “Although Hideki is pretty independent, I am available for him outside the ballpark, as well. I guess you could say that would be 24/7.” It isn’t beyond the scope of his job description to set up a meeting with Matsui’s agent, Arn Tellem, or to make restaurant reservations; he often dines with his charge on road trips.

“Matsui’s English has improved quite well since he first arrived in New York,” Kahlon said. “Being around [it] all the time helped his ability to understand more and more over the past few years.”

Language around the locker room can get a bit rough. “Yes,” said Kahlon, “there are quite a few phrases that you just cannot directly translate, therefore would lose its meaning,” he said, feigning ignorance when it came to thinking of specific examples. “He has picked up some colorful phrases, like ‘What’s up, dog?'”

Players have “blooper reels” to poke fun at their on-field flubs, but translators can have their share of off days as well.

“The Bureau of New York City Tourism gave Hideki an award. As [he] spoke for about a minute or two for his ‘thank you’ speech in front of the media, I did not have a notebook to note what he was saying, so I tried to remember it in my mind. He usually doesn’t speak that long, so I usually never have a need for [one].

“As I tried to remember what he was saying, my brain capacity quickly reached its limit, and by the time Hideki looked over to me to translate what he had just said, my mind was completely blank. Unfortunately, I had to ask him to go through the trouble of repeating what he had just said, so I could translate.” To make matters worse, some high-ranking members of the Yankee brass were on hand for the ceremony.

On the other hand, “There have been a lot of exciting moments; experiencing the World Series in 2003 in my first year was pretty amazing.”

Kahlon got a kick out of the suggestion that the major league translators form a club. “There is no fraternity or union, but we’re working on it. I got to know a few other translators from other teams like the Mariners [Allen Turner, who translates for Ichiro Suzuki], Mets [Nozumo Matsumoto/Kaz Matsui], White Sox [Ryan McGuire/Tadahito Iguchi], and it’s great because being in the same position, there are a lot of things we can talk about and relate to.”

Since Matsui signed a four-year contract with the Yankees last November, Kahlon can expect to remain on the job for awhile. That doesn’t mean he’s not thinking about life after sports.

“I look at baseball translating as a temporary need for that player. When the player is fully capable of understanding and speaking English, there would be no need for a translator. Therefore, not knowing when that day may be, it is important to look at the job as an opportunity to develop a good experience, network, and foundation for the next step forward, whatever that may be,” said Kahlon, thinking about the future.

“I’ve developed interest in sports science, biomechanics, and taking care of the body, so I plan to go back to school in a few years. Given my background, I’ve been exposed to both Western and Eastern methodologies of healthcare, so perhaps it would be ideal to pick the best out of both and mesh together to find an innovative and effective way of treating the body and preventing any illnesses and injuries.”

In an interview with the Times Herald-Record, an upstate New York newspaper, Kahlon noted that “[A]s much as a Japanese player tries desperately to bond with an American teammate, there’s always that wall between them. I think the frustration is there for Hideki, even though he's never expressed it to me in so many words.”

As an outsider—as both a foreigner in the U.S. and a non-athlete in a jock world, Kahlon can relate to what Matsui goes through. “I should’ve been in the spy business,” he told the Herald-Record. “Nobody can tell where I’m from. Even I can’t tell sometimes.”

[Ron Kaplan, a frequent contributor to VERBATIM, is the sports editor for the New Jersey Jewish News.]

Thanks, But I Think I’ll Pass on the Smashed Balls

Brett Jocelyn Epstein, Helsingborg, Sweden

It all started with a rabbit on whipped cream.

I was in Prague when I found that odd-sounding dish on a menu. No, thanks, I thought, imagining Thumper splashing a cloud of whipped cream around the room. Before long I was tempted by an oven-baked joint—really, what’s the point of baking your marijuana?—and some well-hung meat—no comment necessary. Soon I realized the importance of a well-translated and carefully edited menu, especially for restaurants eager to attract an international, professional audience.

Some mistranslations and misspellings are not only puzzling, they can also be rather revolting. Forexample, I was not really enticed by pee soup, cock terrine, roach terrine, or bowels in sauce, and I was somewhat frightened by the violent-sounding skewer on blackened loin and the fried potatoes stuffed with flesh. Tender lamp was not illuminating, and, as much as I like Sweden, eating pink-roasted Swedes is not too appetizing.

As I have a major interest in food that includes writing occasional articles about restaurants in Scandinavia and working on cookbooks, I decided something had to be done about this. Sometimes, while eating at a restaurant, I would helpfully mention that the English translation of menu items such as cheese with accomplishments—how proud they must be of their cheese!—or duck with dry fruits and jewels—aren’t jewels a bit tough to chew?—might be just a little off. At some restaurants, I was rewarded with glasses of wine; other places didn’t seem too interested to know that offering plates piled high with rags of suckling pig might not draw in the crowds. Later, instead of helping for free, out of the generosity of my good-food-loving-heart, I incorporated food translations into my translation business. Of course, any translator is proud of a translation well done, but at the same time, I can’t help but think of all the restaurant patrons who will be robbed of the enjoyment that comes with wondering what exactly has annoyed that fed-up chicken, why the petrified trout is so scared, and if there is in fact anything in the bowl of grilled fatless lard.

Goose liver in veal farce indeed.

[Brett Jocelyn Epstein’s website is www.awaywithwords.se]

Metaphorically Speaking; or How to Hang on a Moment

Deb Atwood, Oakland, California

Chul-soo sits alone. Gregarious by nature, Chul-soo would love nothing more than to swap stories with his classmates out in the hall. Instead he remains at his desk, eyes on his book, ears cocked for the voices of his returning classmates.

Chul-soo’s classmates are not cruel. They seek his help with homework. Often they ask Chul-soo to join them in the hall. Chul-soo’s problem is that as a second language learner, he cannot comprehend metaphoric, idiomatic English.

The fact that the hallway in question is on a university campus or that Chul-soo has a family—a wife and children—does not lessen his misery. “I feel very difficult about this situation,” he said to me during one of our tutoring sessions, pressing his fingertips onto the tabletop. And he placed on the table a sheet of paper printed with the words butting heads. He asked: “What does this mean?”

As I explained the phrase, I sketched two grimacing goats in a showdown, and Chul-soo laughed.

The next time I saw Chul-soo, he showed me pages of handwritten and, to him, indecipherable turns of speech from his assigned reading: fuzzy thinking; monkey see, monkey do; comparing apples to apples. That day we embarked on a weekly metaphorical quest.

Metaphor is the way I frame my own experience. It’s how I think. It’s how I tutor, relating one thing to another, and in a dark corner of my writing psyche, I know I’m a metaphor junkie. Picture a shiny green combine harvester parked in a limitless poppy field. Now dangle the keys to said harvester in front of a morphine addict. For me, working with Chul-soo was all that. I believe metaphor holds limitless value for our lives in the beauty of language, in the mind pictures, but mostly in the narrative value of metaphor—the story in the metaphor.

For instance, when discussing burn metaphors, naturally I had to bring up my mother. Mother grew up on an Idaho farm (hence my comfort with combine harvester imagery). In the early mornings after baking bread in the wood-burning stove, my grandmother would open the oven door to let the embers heat the large kitchen. The door opened out flat, and it was Mother’s habit on cold mornings to sit on the warm oven door while she finished dressing for school. One morning, Mother came downstairs a little early. When she plopped herself down on the oven door, it was not warm but hot! For weeks afterward, Mother ate all her meals standing up. But she never made that mistake again. As I told Chul-soo, “Once burned, twice shy.”

When Chul-soo asked about pretenders to the mantle as it related to corporate politics, I doodled an ermine cloak. And I realized in the middle of that night, rubbing my eyes with blue ink-stained fingers, that Chul-soo had pushed me through a preconceived barrier to the literalness of metaphor. Pretenders to the mantle alluded to actual stories of usurpers assuming a monarch’s mantle. In these sessions, I began to learn how entrenched (here we go again) metaphor is in our language, how story-like, so that when Chul-soo brought me “smoking gun” I envisioned a post-coital revolver with a cigarette. But I created a vignette for Chul-soo in which I shot him, whereupon someone saw the gun in my hand with the tell-tale smoke and discovered my identity.

Cultural identity complicates our quest. Not every metaphor translates unerringly. Chul-soo had the hardest time with the phrase: there is no other shoe to drop. It was in reference to Jeffery Skilling and the Enron scandal. I explained a shoe dropping is one bad thing, with the anticipation of another unwelcome event. He understood the concept, a pair of events like a pair of shoes, but had trouble on a literal level. “Why is it bad,” he insisted, “for shoes to drop?” But I couldn’t say. Driving home I wondered why do we have superstitions about shoes—shoes never higher than the head, for instance? All I could deduce is that if the head is lofty, then shoes must be somehow base. Feet of clay that hold one back or Cinderella’s shoes, which are uncharacteristically crystalline and pure. The following week I mentioned that wearing another’s shoes is a metaphor for bridging cultural difference. “Ah,” Chul-soo said, “that one exists in Korean also.”

He promised to teach me Korean metaphors. There is one I know, blue frog. This is what my friend’s father called my friend. I cleverly figured it out thus: since frogs are green, a blue frog must be a nonconformist. I know my friend is a nonconformist. She does not wish to remain in Korea; she does not care for Korean men; she is nearing “auntie” age. A nonconformist in Korea is about as common as a blue frog. Plus, weren’t blue frogs dangerous, even poisonous? But when I discovered that “to be blue” or “to be green” is the same verb in Korean, I had to dissect my lovely theory.

It turns out the term blue frog, chun kaeguri, comes from a Korean folktale of a mother frog and her two sons. Whatever Mother Frog asked of her sons, they did the opposite. If she asked them to sing, they croaked. If she asked them to work, they played. So as winter approached Mother Frog said to her sons, “If I die during monsoon, bury me on the riverbank.” What she wished, of course, was to be buried on the mountain. Naturally, Mother died during monsoon and her sons, ashamed of their disobedience, decided to honor their mother’s misguided wish. And that is why during rainy season, frogs cry on the riverbank—they fear their mother’s tomb will wash away.

Now I understood the story behind the metaphor, but I was confused to discover the frog really is blue, not the Korean verb blue or green but a loaned Chinese word meaning, specifically, blue. No one can explain this to me, this metaphorical blind spot.

Chul-soo asks why is it bad for a shoe to drop just as I ask what does it mean that the frog is blue? This puzzles me.

A puzzled look from Chul-soo the other day caught me unaware. Rising to fetch a dictionary from another room, I said, “Hang on a moment.” When I returned, his expression was bewildered. “Oh,” I said, “do you not know that phrase, hang on a moment?” He shook his head. I pictured the moment as a cliff with one who waits, fingertips on the edge, hanging into the chasm. And what did that tell me but that the moment as a stand-in for time is precarious because everything or nothing is possible in a moment.

These moments of ours hang together in my memory now like poppy seeds slipping down an hourglass to collect in a chamber of exploration. I have always loved metaphor for its beauty and puzzlement, but Chul-soo has reawakened in me a memory of metaphor’s narrative thrust. When I hear “pretenders to the mantle,” I will remember the ermine cloak I drew on notepaper that Chul-soo keeps. I will always wonder why the frog is blue and worry about Mother Frog. Does she cling to the bank still after cycles and cycles of monsoon?

And for me, “Chul-soo sits alone” has become a kind of metaphor. The wall that keeps him from his classmates stands in for isolation, for the desire to communicate. I want to help him break through that wall. He and I just might do it, too. The combine harvester has a working weight of 17,873 pounds and forged steel cutting blades perfect for splintering wallboard or peeling back blue paint shards.

[Deb Atwood earned her MFA from Saint Mary’s College where she received the Agnes Butler Scholarship for Excellence. She works as a writing tutor and is a staff member of the literary journal Tattoo Highway.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Viva La Repartee and Armed Gunmen, True Facts, and Other Ridiculous Nonsense

Dr Mardy Grothe, (Collins, 2005), 304 pp. and Richard Kallan, (Pantheon Books, 2005), 160 pp.

Mardy Grothe’s book is subtitled “Clever comebacks and witty retorts from history’s great wits and wordsmiths,” and its author says in the Introduction “I was surprised to discover that a comprehensive collection of these verbal gems has never been published.” In fact, collections of witty retorts are as thick on the ground as the leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa, ranging from actor Donald Sinden’s The Last Word to the anonymous Insult-a-Day (a tear-off calendar of “365 outrageous insults”—presumably not for use in a leap year). Nonetheless, one can welcome Dr Mardy Grothe’s collection, which puts repartees in context and arranges them in categories (Classic Quips, Political Repartee, Sports Repartee, etc.).

Grothe starts by differentiating between such strands as the retort, the repartee, and the bon mot. Then he launches into Classic Retorts, which include such familiar ripostes as Lady Asquith’s “My dear, the t is silent, as in Harlow” and Dorothy Parker’s “Pearls before swine” (her answer to Clare Booth Luce’s “Age before beauty”). Every saying is prefixed by explanations of the situations in which they were spoken and potted biographies of each speaker and hearer. This can become as laborious as those old joke books which only get to the punch line after a preamble starting with something like “It seems there was an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman….” This is a book for dipping into rather than reading at a stretch.

Still, it is good to be reminded of the excellent put-downs voiced by such wits as Oscar Wilde, George S. Kaufman, and Groucho Marx. And you are bound to come across many ripostes that you’ve never heard before. New to me were such sayings as John Goodman assessing how acting the role of Fred Flintstone would affect his career: “I can pretty much kiss those Ibsen festivals goodbye,” and Heywood Broun’s comment on a performance by Tallulah Bankhead: “Don’t look now, Tallulah, but your show’s slipping.”

I came across many examples of quick-witted repartee when I compiled The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations (1991), for which we tried to check each quotation in an original source. After all, Dr Routh—the 19th-century head of Oxford’s Magdalen College—famously said “You will find it a very good practice always to verify your references.” So it is disappointing to see that Mardy Grothe has apparently not checked his references very carefully.

He misquotes two gems from Mae West’s film I’m No Angel, omitting one “very” from “When I’m good, I’m very, very good; but when I’m bad, I’m better,” and changing “my” into “your” in “It’s not the men in my life that counts—it’s the life in my men.” Robert Benchley’s telegram on first visiting Venice—”STREETS FLOODED. PLEASE ADVISE”—is here watered down as “STREETS FULL OF WATER. PLEASE ADVISE.” And Grothe says that Alexander Woollcott described Dorothy Parker as “a combination of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth,” but Woollcott’s actual words (in his 1934 book While Rome Burns) were “a blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth.”

So one could wish that Mardy had exercised rather more care. Nevertheless, his book will not only give readers pleasure but may even show them how to construct witty remarks. Like Falstaff, Mardy Grothe may well be “the cause that wit is in other men.”

Less value is provided by Richard Kallan’s little book (same price as Grothe but fewer and smaller pages). Readers may guess from the title that it is a collection of tautologies. These might be defined as the unnecessary use of two or more words to encapsulate the same idea—things like “connecting link” or “part and parcel.” Kallan insists that these are not pleonasms or circumlocutions, although pleonasms have the same element of using two or more words where one will do.

Kallan says that the aim of his book is “to alert readers to our propensity for tautology”—and it certainly achieves this, bombarding us with what is essentially a long list of tautologies, giving no sources but with notes pointing out why the phrases are tautologous. For example, “Circle around” is followed by “When circling square won’t do” to underline the unnecessary repetition.

We meet old friends like “free gift,” “I myself,” and “prior notice.” And we are reminded of phrases that we may not have realised were tautologous—like “PIN number” and “ATM machine.” Some of the examples are rather forced—“old proverb,” “Easter Sunday,” “laugh out loud,” and “humorous joke” really tautologies? You can laugh gently, and I’ve heard many an unfunny joke.

—Tony Augarde

Drowned in Translation

Jerome Betts, Torquay, Devon

O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods …

The sylvan river Wye of Wordsworth’s lines wanders poetically through the woods into the Severn Estuary, whereas, across the North Sea, the unsylvan river Where winds prosaically through the polders into the Alkmaardermeer. On one bank stands the town of Overwhere. This name disturbs the English speaker, whose mind feels it should fit into the ‘anywhere, everywhere’ pattern or tries to create the word ‘overwear,’ the opposite of underwear, before sensing something is slightly askew.

Tricky things, languages, especially in translation, as the late Paul Jennings hilariously illustrated in his 1963 Penguin collection of newspaper pieces, The Jenguin Pennings. Here be such jewels as “I am thy father’s spirit,” from Hamlet, rendered into Afrikaans as “Omlet, ek is de pappa spook.”

He similarly marvels over the change of atmosphere when such nursery favourites as Beatrix Potter’s quintessentially English Jemima Puddle-Duck and the Flopsy Bunnies are reincarnated in French. Down the village street of Potterland “comes Sophie Canetang, a Stendhal heroine, acutely analysing love with a cavalry officer and a petit bourgeois— but respectable compared with the awful Mauriac Famille Flopsaut, festering with hate, ruining the brilliant son who will never get to Paris …”

And, of course, it works in reverse, as I discovered with a chunk of Jules Laforgue’s “Chant d’Automne” retained in the little grey cells from the days of A-level French. “J’entends déjà tomber avec des chocs funèbres,/ Le bois retentissant sur le pavé des cours, ” I would intone, an evocation of hearing logs cascading from carts on to the stone-paved courtyards of 19th-century Paris. A wonderful blending of clonk and thud, at least to my insular ear. Something like, perhaps, the fine-tuned sound effects achieved by Dylan Thomas with “the knock of sailing boats on the net-webbed wall” in his “Poem in October.”

Alas, the years have rolled by into an age when not merely a Welsh wall but the whole globe is net-webbed, and its crawlers toil ceaselessly on behalf of even the confirmed monoglots. So I was seated one day at the laptop and was not particularly weary and ill at ease, despite a beginner’s blunders, until, by some quirk of fingers, keyboard or mouse, Jules Laforgue’s familiar lines flashed up on the screen … only they were actually by Charles Baudelaire.

Now at last I understood why an attempt, one late summer evening long ago, to use them to impress a cultivated lady from Lyons, in elegant overwear on a well-wooded bank of the Wye, had fallen like a choc funèbre on her delicate literary sensibilities. Tant pis! Some compensation for rekindling the painful memory of that alfresco fiasco à la française was the square-bracketed invitation to “Translate this page,” which opened up a whole new world as subtly unsettling as Overwhere. “I already intend to fall with funeral shocks/Resounding wood on the paving stone of the courses, ” my computer ominously informed me, which had a certain ring to it, though possibly not Baudelaire’s.

Paul Jennings found it difficult to decide whether translators were heroes or fools. If he had encountered one of today’s automatic systems, he might have found further inspiration in the vein of his creation, from the German Fernsprechbeamtin, of the semi-mythical Teutonic Telephone Queen, the Far-Speaking Beaming One. He could have personalised the invisible translator as a drunken dwarf, hero and fool combined, with occasional flashes of genius, and given it a name like PIGGO (Poetry In Garbage/Genius Out).

Piggo can do wonderful things with poems like Baudelaire’s “L’Albatros,” with its ship “slipping on the bitter pits” and the poor albatross-poet “exiled on the ground in the medium of the hootings,” while “one aggravates its nozzle with a cutty.” And he can turn the wry self-mocking Pierrot-Hamlet-Prufrock persona of Laforgue (the real one this time) into “Monsewer” Eddie Gray, the old British music-hall act, by having him announce, in “Dimanches,” that “The nasillardes bells of Sundays abroad make me that I have mad cow.”

Worthy indeed of the genial Jennings, as he goes on, after Sophie Canetang and the Flopsauts, to introduce more of Beatrix Potter’s foreign cousins, such as Jeremias de Hengelaar, the Dutch version of Jeremy Fisher: “Jeremias de Hengelaar, the 14th-century mystic, shuffles by, pondering on the One.”

Not to mention, no doubt, the Who, the Why, and the Where, before falling absentmindedly into one of the latter’s turbid meanders, with or without a funeral shock. Still, as long as Jeremias could swim, somewhat better, you might say, than having his nozzle aggravated in the medium of the hootings.

EPISTOLA {Jessy Randall}

I read Muffy Siegel’s article (“Dude, Katie! Your Dress is So Cute: Why Dude Became an Exclamation,” Vol. XXX, No. 4) with great interest and enjoyment. I thought of an additional possible explanation for why “Dude” became an exclamation and other, similar words didn’t – its sound. The “u” has an elongatability and dipthongability similar to “cool,” making it capable of expressing different exclamatory emotions. One can emit a long, low, “Duuuuude” of disapproval, or a “dyude!” of excitement (similar to the “kewl” version of“cool”).

[Jessy Randall, Colorado Springs]

EPISTOLA {John W.L Hope}

In his lucid article on Lexical Property Rights, Michael Adams writes (Page 6 of Vol XXX, No. 4) that “Indeed, there is no generic name [forDumpsters].”

I think that, in British English at least, there is. The word is “SKIP”. Two dictionaries to hand, both give it. Chambers 20th Century (1972) gives a definition of the word as “a large container for transporting building, etc., materials or refuse” and Cassell’s Concise English (1994) gives “a container for collecting and moving refuse, building materials, etc.” Most Yellow Pages in the UK will have sections advertising “skip-hire” for those brave enough to attempt large scale DIY home renovations.

[John W.L Hope]

Anglo-American Crossword No. 105

Across

1. US auto industry tried to spread (7)

5. Remember, mud almost covers island (7)

9. Ceramics shop acquires recently-discovered article (9)

10. Monty Python’s finale In Pursuit of Colonel Klink’s Heart (5)

11. Stenches from uncovered watercourses (5)

12. I eat Corn Nuts, an original product (8)

14. Prepared to deal with pet taken in by Bob (8)

16. Gather horses around famous knight (6)

18. Master plan’s initial parts put forth (6)

20. Mostly repeal statute, in retrospect a decisive victory (8)

23. Secreting evidence of smoking is admitted by rock star (8)

24. Stupid little boat bearing king (5)

26. Two thumbs-ups for spiritualist’s board (5)

27. Comedian Youngman, President Clinton heard from Rev. Spooner (5,4)

28. Enigma of unfinished Ravel composition about German general (7)

29. Still dressed in recent newborn’s outfit (7)

Down

1. Troubled fools and flummeries I had rejected (10)

2. American naturalist and author Wilder, describing the origin of ecotourism (7)

3. Breaks into old calabooses (5)

4. That actress in Moonstruck, once a PM (8)

5. Empty beer pitcher for alemaker (6)

6. Speedway’s terrible car racket (9)

7. One soul set straight and set free (7)

8. Somewhat ill-mannered British monarch (4)

13. Earthly woe, suffering to Queen Elizabeth I? (3,5,2)

15. Stymie Woods completely (9)

17. Alarming novel At the Edge (8)

19. Wagering, a key to golf (7)

21. Outlaw ain’t getting room following sampling of vulgarities (7)

22. To the ear, a quality of sound trees (6)

24. With a straight face, read Her Majesty Admiral Halsey’s conclusions (5)

25. Cat Ballou’s face is grave (4)

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. Hjalmar Falk and Alf Torp, Etymologisk ordbog over det norske og det danske sprog. Kristiania: H. Aschehoug (W. Nygaard), 1903-06; Norwegisch-dänisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1910-11. ↩︎

2. Erik Björkman, “Neuschwed. gosse ‘Knabe, Junge’, eine semasiologische Studie.” Indogermanische Forschungen 30, 1912, 225-26. ↩︎