Vol XXXI, No 3 []

Stalin, Marr, and the Struggle for a Soviet Linguistics

Neile A. Kirk, Bernard Mees

On the 9th of May, 1950, the Soviet newspaper Pravda opened a discussion on questions of linguistics. The first article in the series—attacking the theories of the late N.Ya. Marr (1864–1934)—was written by A.S. Chikobava, a member of the Georgian Academy of Sciences. After various articles by leading Soviet linguists for and against Marr’s theories, on June 20 appeared the first of several articles on linguistics by the Soviet dictator Stalin. The direct involvement of a political leader in matters of linguistic theory was unprecedented and was a key event in a remarkable story in the history of linguistics and linguistic theory.

Stalin’s intervention in the debate immediately ended all dissent. The principal supporters of Marr hurried off groveling retractions to Pravda, with visions of the Gulag in their minds. Western intellectuals were quick to proclaim Stalin’s intervention just another example of the lack of intellectual freedom in the Soviet Union at the time. But they could not have been more wrong. In one stroke Stalin rescued Soviet linguistics from the threat of a dogmatic dark age. Moreover, the whole incident had been planned a few months earlier by Chikobava and Stalin as an ambush on the supporters of Marr.

Well before the Russian Revolution, Marr already stood out as an esteemed specialist in archaeology and the history of the Georgian language. Born in Georgia the son of a Scotsman, he had studied at St. Petersburg, the then Russian capital, in traditional language studies, history, and classics. By the end of the nineteenth century he was already well known for his works on the Georgian language, but he was not satisfied with merely this; he looked further afield.

Marr deliberately stood outside the mainstream of linguistic theory and was treated as an enthusiastic oddball during his lifetime by most of his Western contemporaries. His first forays out of Caucasian linguistics were into the Semitic languages and also the then poorly understood Etruscan tongue, an extinct non-Indo-European language which was spoken during ancient times in parts of Italy, especially in Tuscany. Among various attempts to link Etruscan with other non-Indo-European languages, Marr grouped Etruscan with Basque and several languages of the Caucasus. His name for this putative language family was Japhetic, after the Biblical figure of Japheth, following in a long tradition of naming things European “Japhetic.” It was Marr’s Japhetic theory, rather than his excellent works on early Georgian language and literature, that was considered by his later supporters to be his first great contribution to linguistics in general.

Marr believed that the family of Japhetic languages, many now lost, had been important as a substratum underlying the Indo-European idioms which later came to be spoken throughout most of Europe. His theory was in part developed in light of the German linguist Hugo Schuchardt’s linkage of Georgian with Basque, but soon turned into something very much more. With the Revolution and the flight west of many major Russian names such as Roman Jakobson and Prince N.S. Trubetskoy, Marr became the major figure in Soviet linguistics. His Japhetic theory was supported by some enthusiasts in Germany and his works translated into the language that was then the lingua franca of linguistic study. But more ominously for Soviet linguistics, Marr was able to have set up a Japhetic Institute at Leningrad which published its own journal, Japhetic Studies, and enrolled research students into the new field. Marr then began developing his own Soviet linguistics empire.

Unlike some notable proponents of Marr-like theories today, Marr cared enough about learning as much as he could about the languages he studied that he would go out and learn tongues as foreign to him as Basque. He was a true linguist in the sense that he knew and spoke many languages as well as having an interest in studying them. Yet the idiosyncratic Marr developed his own set of notations and arguments as part of his work, ones which today are rather difficult to follow. He focused, on the one hand, on trying to prove that words with disputed etymologies (like English horse) had filtered up from the original Japhetic stratum into many Indo-European languages (a group which he proposed be renamed “Promethean”—Prometheus, after all, being the son of Iapetus in Greek myth). He also expanded out the reach of his Japhetic family to include other groups such as the Semitic languages (or rather, spoke of a broader grouping he called Noetic—Noah being the father of Japheth, Shem, and Ham, of course, the Biblical figures from which the expressions Japhetic, Semitic, and Hamitic ultimately derive). Even outspoken opponents of Marr’s later works often proved supportive of Marr’s supposed discovery of a genetic relationship between the languages of his Japhetic (or Noetic) group like Georgian and the Semitic family. This so-called discovery on the basis of the similarity of the structure of words in Georgian and Arabic was even extended by E.D. Polivanov, one of Marr’s later critics, as analogical support for Polivanov’s own somewhat similar attempts to prove the existence of a genetic relationship between Japanese and the Austronesian languages.

Marr was thus at the peak of his powers when he unleashed his far more radical, infamous, and oddball “new theory of language” (novoe uchenie o yazyke) in the early 1920s. This proposal, which is also sometimes known as his four-element theory, was most systematically explained in his 1932 work Language and Today, and would soon become famed as the first Marxist theory of linguistics. Using the strange notation he had developed for his Japhetic researches, and also some of the notions of filtering and development in his substratum explanations, Marr came to the apparent discovery that all words could be reduced to four basic elements. Moreover, he could name them: sal, ber, yon, and rosh.

As Chikobava recounted in 1950, a typical example of Marr’s new approach was his analysis of the Georgian word mukha ‘oak’ as consisting of the elements mu (apparently a reflection of the fundamental element ber) and kha (ultimately derived by Marr from his fundamental element sal). Marr related the first element mu to Chinese mu ‘tree,’ Mordvinian pu ‘tree,’ Georgian puri ‘bread,’ Greek balanos ‘acorn,’ and Mingrelian kebali ‘bread.’ He then connected the second element kha with the Georgian words khe ‘tree’ and tqe ‘forest.’ Marr asserted that the element mu and its apparent variants (pu, pur, bal, etc.) signify ‘tree-acorn-bread’ and thus that humanity in its primitive state once nourished itself on acorns! This was a type of linguistic mysticism rather than science; it is not at all reconcilable with the long-established methods and principles of modern etymology. Nonetheless, to some Soviet scholars of the day, Marr’s “new theory of language” seems to have been taken as an expression of genius—a linguistic breakthrough of the Soviet, Marxist spirit.

Clearly, it was the overtures to Marxism that made the consequent “Marrism” which developed in the 1930s seem so exciting at the time, and what Marr thought made his theory Marxist was his emphasis on how material and societal development affected how these four elements came together to form new words, firstly for new materials, then new concepts and such. Marx and Engels had written on language, but not in such a radical way. Instead, the key to language development, Marr claimed, was to be found by studying processes of labor and how ruling classes and their actions dictated language development. He had long earned the scorn of the main linguists of the West, and very much in the spirit of the revolutionary notion of the refoundation of all knowledge, Marr decided that much of the methodology and findings of historical linguistics could not only be ignored, but actively opposed. The now sexagenarian Marr had descended into an ego-driven, perhaps senile fantasy where a mystical form of Marxism (not to mention the adulation of a pandering cheer squad) seemed to be the key determinant in his thought. Yet a true assessment of his legacy was not allowed upon his death in 1934. Instead, his former students zealously guarded his legacy and the institutional gravitas of the Japhetic Institute they had inherited. Their defense of Marr’s theories soon threatened to turn into a linguistics dictatorship as their critics were derided as “saboteurs” and even “vermin,” and all other theories of linguistics were dismissed by Marr’s followers as bourgeois and unacceptable in a Marxist state.

It is difficult to describe in a brief or measured way how complex, iconoclastic and unconventional Marr’s “new theory of language” in general was: how he explained that gestures had developed via his four elements into words and then more complex forms of language. Drawing on elements of contemporary Western thinking, he saw all languages as advancing through stages of mentality, becoming more complex and sophisticated over time—in Marxist terms, he saw language as part of the superstructure of society (much as ideology is) and therefore as reflecting inequalities in the economic base. He cited in support of this idea the observation of the great French linguist Antoine Meillet that while Greeks, like English-speakers today, say “it is raining,” in Homeric times the equivalent expression was “Zeus rains.” Marr consequently described Homeric Greek as being at a “totemic” stage of linguistic evolution, i.e., one where uses and grammar reflected an earlier and more intellectually pervasive religious mentality. Thinking in similar developmental or stadial terms, Marr even went on to claim that he could prove that a similar linguistic evolution had occurred in the use of demonstratives (such as this and that), which he ultimately thought derived from hand gestures; or that the original employment of Russian’s instrumental (‘by means of’) case could be traced back to the way early tools (i.e., instruments) were used, and hence that the case should be more properly named the “tool-case.” Marr saw word-meanings and their development as of primary importance and developed ad hoc rules in order to explain how the sounds and structure of words and grammatical forms were all subsidiary to matters of class, social inequality, and meaning. Dislocation in space and time were now no bar to his increasingly unlikely comparisons; in fact, by the 1930s he had decided that languages of particular classes throughout the world were more closely related than those within national communities, a judgment as extreme and unfounded in evidence as it is clearly a romantic, celebratory, and mystical expression of Marxism. Stalin was not the only critic who could see how lacking in plain good sense Marr’s proposals were, from his tendentious segmentations of words to his often ridiculous misappropriations of Marxist theory. Marr’s theories were obviously daring and new, but Stalin instead held to a measured and conventional view of language, much as had Marx and Engels before him.

Throughout the later 1930s and into the postwar period too, however, reams of laudations for Marr had appeared, and the possible connections between his theories and Marxism had been further pursued by his supporters with the clear aim of establishing Marr’s theories as a pillar of Marxist dogma. At a time when linguistic theory was undergoing monumental changes elsewhere in Europe, the Soviet Union became widely considered a backwater of language science. A biography of Marr had even appeared by 1948, Marr’s claims were being explained through references to the works of Lenin, and as with Lenin, a stultifying cult of personality threatened to develop about Marr’s name. His former students hailed their teacher for his deep humanism and Marr’s claim that science must be closely connected with the exigencies of real life. Science must be useful for contemporary life, the mythologized Marr claimed; otherwise it is either dishonest or a leftover from the cloister mentality of medieval monastic life.

There was, after all, a clear way in which Marr’s Japhetic theory could be seen to be useful in a modern sense apart from mere academic feather-nesting: Marr was one of the first figures in Soviet Eurasianism. This was a movement (which still has many supporters in Russia today) that championed Russia’s mission as a world power that straddled and encompassed both European and Asian cultures. Marr’s Japhetic theory linked the oldest European languages such as Etruscan and Basque with those of Asia, and claimed that they had also had an important influence in the development of the Indo-European (Promethean) languages too. In fact, by the 1930s Marr was claiming that the Promethean languages had actually developed out of the older Japhetic idioms—Japhetic had now become the substrate, or rather earlier evolutionary form, of all languages in the world. There was a clearly patriotic edge to Marr’s theories, which stressed the Japhetic unity of the ethnically disparate Soviet state, as well as a pseudo-Marxist one, which helps explain why so many university men and women at the time thought they could accept his complex fancies.

N.S. Trubetskoy, the Russian father of modern phonology, had also been a leading supporter of Eurasianism. But the Western type of linguistic theory championed in Tsarist times by figures such as Trubetskoy and the seminal Polish structuralist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay had not seemed very useful in the Marrist sense at all. Linguistic structuralism, many of whose pioneers were subjects of the Russian Empire, had been one of the key influences in the development of Russian formalism, after all, an avant-garde literary movement that had been suppressed in the mid-1920s as elitist and socially useless. Western critics of Stalin’s intervention in the debate over the legacy of Marr assumed a similar dynamic was at play again. But Marr’s name had in fact been used in an attempt to suppress rival theories and linguistic careers by his former students. As Stalin rather obtusely commented in one of his letters to Pravda: “Marxism is the enemy of all dogmatism” (he of course meant dogmas other than ones he supported). Nonetheless Soviet linguistics was done a great service by Stalin’s intervention into the debate over Marrism.

Yet despite the bad press Marrism had developed in its heyday and the later use of the expression as a byword for academic suppression, Marrism did enjoy a sort of resurgence after the time of Stalin’s death, though a full-blown attempt at a Marrist revival never properly emerged. Marr’s key works were still being reissued and translated as late as the 1970s, however, both in the Communist East and the West, as if he were some sort of lost luminary of linguistic thought. His influence can also be detected in some of the thinking of later Soviet linguists, from Aharon Dolgopolsky’s basic universal vocabulary to some aspects of “mega-comparison,” especially of the (substantially Eurasianist) Nostratic theory whose main early proponents were nearly all Russians. But in terms of the linguistic mainstream, the end of his influence can clearly be traced back to a scheme hatched some months before Stalin’s first linguistic essay appeared in Pravda.

In 1950 the first volume of the eventually eight-volume Explanatory Dictionary of the Georgian Language was proudly examined and discussed at a meeting in Moscow. The meeting not only included members of the team of dictionary researchers, but also several leading statesmen, including the Georgian President, two ministers of his government, and the (also Georgian) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, I.V. Stalin. Following the discussion of specifically Georgian language themes, the statesmen then also discussed more general Soviet linguistic matters with the chief linguist in attendance, A.S. Chikobava. At this meeting in Stalin’s dacha on the evening of the 10th of April, 1950, it was decided to hold a linguistics discussion in the pages of Pravda to which Chikobava and Stalin would contribute articles. It was a setup designed to flush out the Marrists—it would take a Georgian dictator to see that the legacy of the most famous Georgian linguist of his day was properly recognized. Marr’s theories were radical, illogical, and vain attempts to create a universal theory of the development of languages using poorly thought out pseudo-Marxist rhetoric and a willful disregard for the findings of the mainstream of language science. It was not an unhappy fact that Marr’s wild theories met their cruelest blow at the hands of his fellow countrymen, Chikobava and most of all Stalin.

[Stalin’s articles on Marrism are available in English at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1950/jun/20.htm.]

When is a Word Not a Word? or, Spurious Words in the Oxford English Dictionary

Peter Gilliver, Oxford English Dictionary

There are ghosts in the OED. It contains thousands of words which are alive and well (in that they are still in use); thousands which, though now dead (that is, obsolete), at least once lived, as part of the English of a former age. There are also many thousands of words whose existence is not attested by any evidence of their ever having been used… but only by their having been mentioned in other dictionaries. A few of the words listed in the very first English dictionary—Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall of 1604—have made it into the OED notwithstanding the fact that nobody has been able to find any quotation, anywhere, that illustrates the word being used in a sentence; words like implume, for example, defined by Cawdrey as ‘to pull off the feathers.’ Many other dictionaries have furnished the OED with words whose existence is similarly shadowy: words such as allectation ‘an alluring, or enticing’ (according to Thomas Blount’s Glossographia of 1656), aliture (meaning ‘nourishment’ and given in Nathan Bailey’s dictionary of 1721), and affiancer (defined by Samuel Johnson in 1755 as ‘he that makes a contract of marriage between two parties’)—all words to be found in the very first section of the OED to be published (A–Ant, which appeared in 1884). The complete Dictionary contains thousands of such rarities.

I wouldn’t (necessarily) want to accuse Cawdrey and the other lexicographers of inventing these words. For example, it is perfectly possible that Cawdrey knew of a contemporary who had taken the Latin word implumis ‘having no feathers’ and made a verb of it (as distinct from the reasonably well attested adjective implumed, or the rather rarer adjective implume). But it is at least suspicious that no actual examples of the word have come to light. Johnson, of course, generally quoted from, or at least mentioned, one or more sources for his words… but in the case of affiancer he merely alludes to an unspecified ‘Dict[ionary]'—indicating that, in collecting evidence for his dictionary, he would accept the listing of a word in another dictionary as well as “real,” contextual examples. Of course with some types of vocabulary, such as regional dialect, “real” examples may be hard to track down in print. But in general, the fact that the only evidence for a word comes from other dictionaries places something of a question mark over its status. The OED has a particular way of labeling such words, which dates back to James Murray’s time. The label “rare” would hardly be sufficient; nor even “rare^–1,” a marking which indicates that a word is thought only to have been used by a single author. No: for these words Murray introduced “rare^–0”—the zero indicating that no instance of the use of the word in context is known.

Even these “dictionary words,” however, may be said to have had some kind of life; an artificial, under-glass kind of life, admittedly, requiring the protected environment of a dictionary, but in some sense “a word.” If this is life, then some of these words have been remarkably long-lived. Take perterebration, for example: a word defined by Edward Phillips in his New World of English Words (1658) as ‘a boring through with a wimble [i.e., a gimlet]’, and subsequently included in a succession of later dictionaries, from Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary of 1721 and Johnson’s of 1755 right down to William Dwight Whitney’s Century Dictionary of 1889–91 and Isaac Funk’s Standard Dictionary of 1893–5. In 1905 James Murray included an entry for the word, listing the sequence whereby the word had been passed from one lexicographer to another—although he spared the blushes of Whitney and Funk, referring only to ‘mod. Dicts.’

But there is another class of word which should surely never have made it into a dictionary in the first place. James Murray became aware of this early on in his editorship of the OED, when he began to investigate some of the headwords given in other dictionaries. In many cases the absence of any contextual evidence for a word did not prevent him from including it—usually with a “rare^–0” or “Obs.^–0” label to indicate its status—but occasionally his suspicions were aroused. Take adventine, for example: an adjective listed by Johnson, who took it as meaning the same as adventitious, and quoted a passage from Francis Bacon’s Natural History (more usually called Sylva Sylvarum). But Bacon never used the word. Murray had good evidence that he did on several occasions use the synonymous word adventive—in the form aduentiue, the letters u and v being used interchangeably in the 17th century—and it seems that in one particular edition of Bacon’s work, the edition presumably consulted by Johnson, the second letter u was turned, resulting in the misprint aduentine. Other lexicographers followed Johnson in including the word, and in 1884 Murray included an entry too—but one which explicitly noted that Johnson’s inclusion of it was based on an error, and which referred the reader to the entry for adventive, where Bacon’s liking for the word (in Sylva Sylvarum and elsewhere) was fully documented. The whole entry was printed within square brackets to highlight its doubtful status. (Not that the OED always reverified the quotations given in Johnson’s Dictionary: often enough Johnson gave such brief references—sometimes no more than the name of the author—that they could not be checked. The OED includes, for example, an entry for the adjective addable in which the only quotation given is that supplied by Johnson, from an edition of Edward Cocker’s Arithmetick; however, the quotation’s source, and its unchecked status, is indicated by a ‘(J.)’ in the citation.) Four years earlier, in his Presidential Address to the Philological Society in May 1880, Murray had singled out adventine, and several other errors which had similarly been copied from one dictionary to another, in order to make the point that other dictionaries should not be taken at face value.

It is words like adventine that are the true lexical ghosts of the OED. The great etymologist Walter Skeat gave them the name “ghost-word” in 1886, in another Presidential Address to the Philological Society, but they have come to be referred to by the OED as “spurious words”—a fair description, given the shakiness of their claim to a place in the Dictionary. As publication progressed, Murray and his fellow editors encountered many more of them: words like enanation, which as Henry Bradley carefully noted was a misprint in Robert Brown’s Manual of Botany (1874) for enation ‘outgrowth,’ and silice, another botanical error, this time for silicle ‘a small short seed-pod,’ which was thus misprinted in Thomas Martyn’s dictionary The Language of Botany (1796). At first these continued, like adventine, to be included in the main text, enclosed in square brackets; but with Part VI of the Dictionary (Clo- to Consigner), published in 1891, there was a change of policy. Murray remarked in his Preface to this fascicle that “the great number of [such] bogus words […]—which have been uncritically copied by one compiler after another, until, in recent compilations, their number has become serious—has decided us to prepare a List of Spurious Words found in Dictionaries, to be given at the end of the work, to which list such verba nihili are relegated from the text.” In a footnote, he goes on to discuss the spurious word cherisaunce—a scribal error (in Chaucer’s version of The Romaunt of the Rose) for chevisa(u)nce, an obsolete word here used to mean ‘remedy’ or ‘means of extricating oneself.’ In the 1830s Charles Richardson had listed cherisaunce, with a quotation from Chaucer, in his great dictionary, as being related to cherish; Murray pours scorn on unnamed recent “compilers” who have not only accepted Richardson’s definition, but also made the unwise extrapolation that, if it means ‘cherishment’ or ‘comfort,’ it may also be used as a name for the wallflower or heart’s-ease. This must surely be a veiled reference to the Century Dictionary, which does indeed include these definitions, and whose entries Murray was frequently moved to criticize.

The idea was, then, that in future these “verba nihili” would not be accorded the dignity of an entry of any sort in the OED: not even one which laid bare their dubious origins. Instead, the text would contain a bare reference “see List of Spurious Words.” The first word thus dealt with was the supposed adjective colophonian ‘relating to a colophon or the conclusion of a book.’ This, of course, was not to be confused with Colophonian ‘of or pertaining to [the ancient city of] Colophon,’ for which the OED entry cited the authority of a 1601 quotation by Philemon Holland; but confusion was exactly what happened in this case to Charles Annandale, who in his revision of John Ogilvie’s great Imperial Dictionary (1847–50) included the spurious word, citing as authority “Cudworth”—although Ralph Cudworth, the 17th-century philosopher and theologian, had not used Colophonian in this sense.

Readers who wished to consult the “List of Spurious Words” would have a very long wait. The final fascicle of the First Edition of the OED was only published in 1928; the surviving lexicographers then devoted themselves to the compilation of a one-volume Supplement, containing entries for “real” words which had been overlooked; and it was only when this Supplement was published, in 1933, that the promised “List” finally appeared. In fact it only dealt with about eighty of the most serious errors: in the event Murray and his fellow editors had decided that they would continue to deal with minor spurious forms (those which could be dismissed in a single line of small print) in the main alphabetical sequence. Some of these were errors which had not even been picked up by a previous lexicographer, and their inclusion in any form was arguably going beyond the call of duty, it being surely not the job of the OED to provide corrigenda for every text ever printed. For example, the word pear-plum (meaning, unsurprisingly, a pear-shaped plum) was sometimes spelt peare-plum in the early modern period; and in a 1577 edition of Thomas Tusser’s Fiue Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry the plural of this was in turn misprinted as the rather more puzzling ‘perareplums.’ Murray accordingly included an entry for the spurious word perareplum, perhaps thinking it sufficiently plausible-looking that readers might turn to the OED to find out its meaning. If they did, then he was evidently glad to be able to put them right. During the 1980s, when the Second Edition of the OED was being prepared, the entries in the separate ‘List’ were keyed into the main OED database; all our entries for spurious words now appear in the main alphabetical sequence, but still enclosed in a warning set of square brackets.

Even the OED itself has given rise to the occasional spurious word. The entry for the combining form magneto- in the First Edition included the word magneto-rotation, giving as authority the New Sydenham Society’s great Lexicon of Medicine and Allied Sciences (cited as “Syd. Soc. Lex” in over 2,000 entries in the OED). However, the actual reading in “Syd. Soc. Lex” is “M.-rotation”—and this appears in that dictionary’s entry for the compound magneto-optic, and should therefore be interpreted as denoting “magneto-optic rotation,” not “magneto-rotation.” Thus the entry in the First Edition of the OED was based on a misinterpretation. Just to confuse things further, there is now a real word magnetorotation: coined in German (as Magnetorotation) in 1921, and borrowed into English in 1934, it is defined in OED Online as ‘rotation of the plane of polarization of electromagnetic waves under the influence of a magnetic field.’

Of course, the fact that a word’s origins are spurious is no guarantee that it will not manage to secure a foothold in the world of “real” words. Take, for example, papescent, given by Samuel Johnson as meaning ‘Containing pap; inclinable to pap’ and illustrated with a quotation purporting to be from “Arbuthnot on Aliments”; in fact John Arbuthnot does indeed refer to “papescent Plants” in his Essay concerning the Nature of Aliments (1731), but Johnson has evidently misunderstood him, as pap was not what Arbuthnot had in mind: the relevant term, which is more usually spelt pappescent, derives from Latin pappus and means ‘having seeds surrounded by down.’ John Ogilvie more or less replicated Johnson’s definition of papescent in his Imperial Dictionary, and Murray recorded the word as spurious; but more recently the OED’s researches have unearthed some genuine contextual evidence for this word, occurring (as luck would have it) in medical descriptions of the texture of feces—where the meaning is very much what Johnson had said it was. Accordingly, although the revised entry for papescent in OED Online records Johnson’s error, the word is no longer marked as spurious: uncommon as it (thankfully) is, it has now joined the ranks of living words. (The revised definition differs slightly, but significantly, from Johnson’s: ‘containing or having the consistency of pap.') Thus we may, if we wish, see Johnson’s original misreading of pappescent, with its post hoc definition, as arguably an act of linguistic creativity. Although probably not the one for which he would most wish to be remembered.

But that leaves dozens, if not hundreds, of spurious words in the pages of the OED. Whether any of them will shed their ghostly status as papescent has done—whether the breath of life will ever infuse adventine, or colophonian, or enanation, or perareplum, or their many fellow ghosts—only time will tell. But if you ever decide to use any of them, the OED would like to hear about it.

[Peter Gilliver is Associate Editor at the Oxford English Dictionary.]

Plurality

David Galef, University of Mississippi

“Hand me the pliers,” I told my ten-year-old son as I attempted to fix a loose connection on our electric stove.

“How many pliers do you have?”

“What?” I bumped my head on the oven door as I got up. “Just one. Why?”

“Then it’s a plier.”

Rubbing my scalp, I thought about that, but only for a moment. “There is no plier,” I told him. “There isn’t any scissor, either.”

“I know that.” He reached for the offending tool, extended it halfway, then paused. “But why?”

“Well, some objects come only in pairs.” I pointed to the pliers, a nifty adjustable model that could mangle metal. “It has two jaws, see?”

He peered at it, or pretended to. “Hmm. What does a scissors have a pair of?”

“Two cutting edges.” I smiled in triumph. “Come to think of it, a lot of tools are like that: tweezers, tongs, forceps…. You can ask for a pair of any of those and get just one.”

My son nodded emphatically in the way that means “I get it. Enough already.”

Of course, I couldn’t stop. “Or think of a pair of pants.”

“Huh?”

“You can’t just have one pant. Not even if you tear them in half.” I made a ripping sound by blowing through my thumbs.

He nodded, this time indicating interest. “What about shorts?”

“Good, good!” A chip off the old block. I closed the oven door and sat on top of the stove. “And then we can include trousers, slacks, jeans—”

“Pajamas!” he cried.

“Y-ess…though you can put on a pajama top.” You can also scissor something apart, I thought, but didn’t tell him that. I also later found out that plier is acceptable, and the British spell it plyer. I would tell him all that tomorrow. Meanwhile, I didn’t want to complicate his life unnecessarily. I would just add more items. He likes lists. “Trunks, briefs, knickers….”

“Do surfing jams count?”

“Sure.” I paused. “And jodhpurs. Even the Germans do it: lederhosen.”

“Which are?”

“Riding pants and leather pants. Wait till you’re older.” I got ingenious. “In fact, even more generally, you put on your togs. You wear fancy duds.” I struck the side of the stove with a wooden spoon for emphasis. “Or just clothes. Whoever talks about one clothe?”

“There’s cloth,” he volunteered hopefully.

“Not the same.”

“I guess not.” He hopped on top of the stove with me. “Are there any others?”

“No. Wait, there must be.” I picked up the pliers, the better to think with. “Glasses. That’s one.”

“But you can have three glasses of milk.”

“Yes, though that’s another word. Clothe is a word. So are pant and short. And dud. But that’s not what I mean. I mean glasses to see with. Spectacles. In fact, that’s another. Binoculars, too.” I made goggle-eyes with my thumbs and forefingers. “Anything for two eyes, I guess, so monocle stays singular.” But what about lorgnette and pince nez? I wondered. To hell with the French.

“Um, okay.” My son was losing interest.

I wasn’t. “How about thanks?”

“Thank you,” he mumbled. “That was a good list.”

“No, I mean thanks. Or congratulations, for that matter. Even kudos. That comes from the Greek kιdos, meaning praise or renown. They don’t come singly.” I nodded, agreeing with myself. “Surroundings is like that, too.”

“What about fish?”

“What about fish? Oh, I see. You mean it’s a plural.”

“One fish or three fish—it’s the same.”

“True.” I contemplated the piscatorial counting system, though I happen to know that different species of fish may be referred to as different fishes. “It’s the same for sheep. Or cattle or kine.”

“What’s kine?”

“Cattle. And troops, which aren’t cattle but are sometimes treated that way.”

“What about a troop of soldiers?”

“Yes, but the soldiers are counted as troops—seven thousand troops, say—and you can’t have just one troop.” Even “two troops,” I realized, would sound odd and probably be read as two groups. My son left the room on some private errand as I took to musing. A lot of people mistreat certain plurals as singular, such as criteria or data. If you treat these words properly, asking, say, “What are the data?,” others will look at you strangely.

For that matter, many people have given up on words like everyone and none as singular. You can blame Agatha Christie for the book title And Then There Were None and John A. Stormer for None Dare Call It Treason, but the misuse clearly didn’t start there, to the point where “none was” sounds a bit awkward. Similarly, because the use of his sounds sexist, teachers no longer request, “Will everyone please hand in his homework?” They either say, “Will everyone please hand in their homework?,” turning everyone plural, or else descend into either/or-speak by requesting everyone to hand in his or her work.

Some items just naturally come in aggregate. I recalled taking a Northern visitor to one of our local breakfast places in Oxford, Mississippi, where she was curious about the grits. The waitress told her they were just boiled hominy, but she was wary. “Well, do you want ‘em or don’t you?” asked the busy waitress.

“Um,” she temporized, “can I have just one grit?”

Plurals can be double trouble. Along these lines, I remembered an old joke: A zookeeper had a request from a zoo in another state for a mongoose, and he was sending a male and a female. The two were all packed up in a wooden crate, and the zookeeper was making out an invoice. “Enclosed are the mongooses you requested,” he typed. But that didn’t look right, so he began again. “Enclosed are the mongeese you asked for,” he wrote, yet that didn’t look right, either. He squinted at it sideways, but that didn’t help. Finally, he amended it to “Enclosed is the mongoose you requested. Enclosed is also the other mongoose you asked for.” (Note to anyone telling this joke: The proper plural is “mongooses.”)

I stared at my pliers. I went looking for my son, who was reading a book on the living room couch. He looked up when I came in. “Did you finish?” he asked.

“With the stove? I think I need some wire.”

He rolled his eyes. “No, with the plurals.”

Was I finished? My mind leaped across decades and settled upon an old Allan Sherman song called “One Hippopotami.” I leaned in and sang to him: “Singulars and plurals are so different, bless my soul…. Has it ever occurred to you that the plural of half is whole?”

That one he liked, and he ended up giggling on the floor. As for the stove, I never did fix it. Instead, I called in a repairman to make repairs—though it was only one repair.

[David Galef is a professor of English at the University of Mississippi. His latest books are the novel How to Cope With Suburban Stress and the poetry collection Flaw.]

Is There an Information Professional In the House? Library Jargon in a Changing Profession

Rachel Singer Gordon, Lombard, Illinois

Every profession adopts its own jargon, ostensibly for clarity’s sake, but in practice often with the underlying intention of distinguishing professional insiders from interlopers. It might be surprising that librarians—who historically care for the written word—adopt some of the oddest and ugliest constructions for their activities. From strange acronyms (AACR2, FRBR) to neologisms (cybrarian, webliography, folksonomy), the field employs a mixed bag of jargon, with predictably mixed results. Sometimes even librarians find it hard to keep up with the flood of information that describes the activities of, well, organizing and retrieving information. The language describing their activities is changing, reflecting both the ways society is pushing the profession and the ways librarians would like others to see them.

Given that different libraries employ different terms for essentially the same activities, it can be difficult for library users to keep up, resulting in an understandable annoyance at seemingly unnecessary jargon. The following discussion highlights some of the more interesting terms commonly employed in libraries, and gives some background into why these are used, rather than more imprecise (but perhaps more readily understood) terminology.

This of course reflects just a few of the terms in common use. If you just cannot get enough library jargon, check out ODLIS, The Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science (http://lu.com/odlis/), which is both browsable and extensively cross-referenced. You can also order your own print copy from Libraries Unlimited for handy reference.

Perceiving Priorities

One can make assumptions about a library administration’s priorities by the words it chooses to use. For example, when librarians remove battered and outdated books from their collections, some choose to weed (with the natural connotations of caring for a collection as a gardener might care for plants, making room for the new and the wanted while preventing the unneeded from choking out the “good stuff”). Others instead choose to deselect, with the appropriate Orwellian connotations (removing the un-good to make room for the double-plus good). Deselection here is the opposite of selection, where librarians make choices about which materials to purchase for their local collections. Still others engage in deaccessioning materials from their library collections. This is more likely, though, to occur in archival collections in cases where an item is returned to its original owner, transferred to another collection, or deemed inauthentic.

Librarianship is at its heart a service profession, and much of its jargon reflects this. This terminology also, though, often reveals underlying assumptions about both librarians as professionals and the people they serve. Some K-12 institutions, for instance, choose to retain their school libraries, while others move toward creating or repurposing their libraries as trendier media centers. The argument here is that media center better reflects changing roles and formats; media centers often focus quite heavily on electronic resources and instruction, while school library retains book-focused associations for most. Of course, we can’t call the professionals who staff media centers librarians; now they have become school media specialists. (On more than one occasion, media specialists have been mistaken for journalists, to everyone’s chagrin.)

Not to be left out, some universities eschew the term library as well, preferring instead to staff information commons. Again, this terminology is intended to reflect the shift toward electronically stored information, as well as the idea of a collaborative space—although some librarians bemoan the tendency for such spaces to parallel computer labs more than they do traditional libraries. Community colleges tend to prefer to build learning resource centers, reflecting the need to support the school’s curricula as well as the move toward a more comprehensive view of library resources and information.

These changes parallel a larger professional argument about language and its broader implications. Schools of library science are transforming themselves into schools of information science, or, simply, schools of information or information schools. Steeped in the jargon of knowledge management and computer science, such programs are often more acceptable to cost-cutting administrations than their seemingly old-fashioned counterparts, regardless of any similarities in their curricula. Renaming schools, though, as well as the concomitant emphasis on new technologies, has led to much internal argument about educational standards and the need to continue teaching the foundations of traditional librarianship. This also creates the odd degree of a master’s in information science (MIS), leading one to wonder what it really means to be an information master.

Some institutions employ more traditional librarians, while others only use information professionals. While their duties and activities may in some instances look quite similar, the use of information professional parallels information technology, trying to evoke associations with the sleek, the new, and the technological, rather than those dry, dusty, and old books.

The ways in which librarians talk about library patrons or customers sometimes show how they perceive their role. Some libraries have customers, emphasizing customer service and satisfaction right along with for-profit rival Barnes & Noble, while others have patrons, with older references to those who patronize—or support—a given institution. Still others, especially those in corporations, have the more generic library users.

Librarians talk about the behavior of library users in interesting ways, too. The phenomenon of satisficing, which librarianship grabbed from economics, refers to library users’ typical behavior of seeking a “good enough” rather than “best possible” outcome. When people search for information, for example, they will most often be satisfied with the first few results, whether or not these results fully answer their original query.

Necessary Neologisms

Most neologisms in librarianship reflect the need for terminology that describes information professionals’ activities in a digital age. Some just modify existing terms, much as generally we add “e” to words to make them sound digital (e-mail, e-commerce…). Many people, of course, are familiar with the concept of bibliographies—having had at the very least to produce them when writing papers in school. A webliography, most simply defined as an online bibliography of web sites, again moves librarianship into the Internet age. For a while, librarians who spent a lot of time working online were referred to as cybrarians and the digital collections they created as cybraries, but these terms are less used than they were in the 1990s.

In other cases, the profession takes an existing neologism and adds its own special touch. The biblio-, blogosphere, for example, adds biblio to blogosphere to refer to the world of library- and book-related weblogs.

Librarians occasionally borrow terms from outside the profession. At its simplest and most self-referential, for instance, metadata refers to data about data, or information that describes a given set of data. One of the simplest examples of metadata is an old library catalog card, which contains information about the contents and location of an item in a library collection. On the Web, metadata can refer to data about a given web page, such as its contents, its author, and how it should be accessed.

Another new and intriguing term that has emerged outside the library science “academy” is folksonomy. Folksonomy, a combination of the colloquial folks and the more formal taxonomy, refers to the collaborative categorization of resources, using keywords chosen by the folksonomy’s users rather than a classification scheme imposed by a system’s creator or other outside entity. One example of a folksonomy includes the social bookmarking site , deli.cio.us, which allows its users to self-categorize and store their bookmarks as well as to share them with other users of the service. The idea is that groups of people will as a collective whole come up with the most natural terms, hence those most understandable and usable by the community’s users. This contrasts with librarian-created controlled vocabulary, which attempts to standardize the terms used to describe resources so that all relevant materials can be found under one term rather than scattered among many synonyms or related ideas.

Agonizing Acronyms

One of the most common acronyms used in today’s libraries, OPAC stands for online public access catalog. The online face of the library catalog, OPACs replace older card catalogs with online equivalents that offer greater functionality, including keyword searching, access from outside the library, the ability for users to place their own holds on library materials, and so on. An OPAC is the public face of a larger ILS, or integrated library system, which includes a lot of behind-the-scenes functionality for cataloging, checking out, and otherwise processing library materials that patrons never see.

Talking about library catalogs brings us to FRBR: ‘functional requirements for bibliographic records.’ FRBR aims to restructure existing library catalog records to better serve users by looking at “entities” and their interrelationships rather than at items. When searching an existing library catalog, for example, each edition and format of a given work will be listed separately. FRBRized catalogs are able to cluster versions of a given work together; OCLC’s FictionFinder project serves as a working example of such a system (http://fictionfinder.oclc.org).

So, who is OCLC? OCLC currently stands for the Online Computer Library Center. Originally the Ohio College Library Center, OCLC has transformed into a global library cooperative, which fortuitously, as it evolved, found a new name to fit the old acronym. Among other services, OCLC maintains a collaborative bibliographic database called WorldCat that allows librarians and library users to locate library materials worldwide and enables librarians to share cataloging records.

Librarians employ a number of other acronyms to describe the way they process library materials. ILL, for one, stands for interlibrary loan. Since no library can own, let alone store, everything, libraries share materials among one another just as they share material with their patrons. Libraries request materials to be sent from other institutions for their customers’ use via interlibrary loan; larger institutions house entire ILL departments, staffed by ILL specialists (poor things). The related DDS, or Document Delivery Service, refers to the ability to send documents (such as article copies) between libraries via fax, e-mail, microfilm, or photocopy.

When circumstances dictate, librarians sometimes employ acronyms that grow over time as the items they refer to change. AACR, for example, originally referred to the first (1967) edition of the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, which compiles a standardized set of rules for cataloging materials in library collections. In 1978, when the second edition appeared, it seemed only natural to dub it AACR2, and then to call the 1988 revised edition AACR2R. We now find ourselves up to Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second edition, 2002 Revision, or AACR2 2002—but not to forget the 2001 electronic hypertext version, AACR2-e. As revisions continue to be made to keep up with changes in materials formats and international cooperation, the new code, scheduled for release in early 2009, has been renamed RDA: Resource Description and Access.

Anyone attending a library conference or dipping into the field’s literature had best be prepared to encounter a world filled with not only its own professional jargon, but that of related fields. From computer science to social science to economics, specialized terms abound. As librarians' duties and work environments continue to evolve, their language is sure to keep pace. Information professionals of the future, while still engaging in the activities of storing, organizing, and locating information, may refer to their profession much differently—while building on a long-standing and important tradition.

[Rachel Singer Gordon (rachel@lisjobs.com) is a former librarian whose work includes The Librarian’s Guide to Writing for Publication (Scarecrow, 2004).]

What I Told the Student From Brooklyn About Why He Flunked English

Youse

You use.

—Louis Phillips

Man Detained at Supermax Prison For Word Transposition

Kenneth W. Cress, Spring, Texas

I have been detained at a “supermax” prison in California because of the simple transposition of two little words.

It was 1994, and I had just finished a four-year stint in the military. Upon my return to my hometown of Ferndale, California, I learned that the construction of Pelican Bay State Prison had been completed. I wanted to see it, so one morning I headed out in my Camaro to see what a supermax prison looked like.

I headed north on that sunny day, and found Pelican Bay about an hour away. I stopped on the shoulder across the street from the prison. I was awed by the immensity of the compound, and was intrigued by the thought that this structure was capable of securely holding large numbers of the vilest pieces of human waste to ever walk the earth. As I sat, I saw a number of vehicles pull up to the guard building at the entrance, exchange words with the guard, and then drive into the complex. I thought that perhaps there was a visitor’s center, or some way to see more of the prison than just the front. I decided to see if I could partake of the same opportunity that these other people were enjoying.

I drove up to where the guard was. I rolled my window down and asked if there was a way that I could see more of the prison complex.

This is where things started to get kind of sketchy. Two different recollections of the same incident would soon land me in hot water. That is, if “hot water” can be defined as having a dozen guns pointed at one’s head while a group of action-oriented prison guards drag a person out of his car, handcuff him, and interrogate him.

When I inquired about seeing more of the prison, the stern, all-business guard’s response was, “You need to take that little road right there,” as he motioned to a small lane that led to a large, open parking lot, “and go out back.”

Thrilled at the opportunity, and slightly incredulous, I gushed, “Wow, great! Thank you!”

I slowly headed down the little road, went through the parking lot, and started looking for “out back.” Another road on the back side of the parking lot took me around to the east side of the complex. I saw guard towers, multiple layers of tall chain-link fence topped with coils of concertina wire, and heavily armed correctional officers monitoring the prisoners. Killers, rapists, and thieves could be seen here and there on the yard. Doberman pinschers prowled, eager to take a bite out of anybody that dared get into their own section of fenced-off property.

I was amazed by the sight. It was just like in the movies. I could hardly even believe that they actually let regular folks like me just drive out here and see all of this hardcore prison stuff.

About that time, a state vehicle came screeching up, nose to nose with my car. Another one arrived at the back of my car a half-second later. It didn’t take more than another couple of seconds for me to be completely boxed in by other vehicles. Red and blue lights flashed everywhere. I thought that I must be in somebody’s way, since I was clearly in the exact location that all of these gun-toting guards wanted to be. I was marveling at my good fortune of perhaps being able to see some real action (prison break? riot?), but hoped that I wasn’t in anybody’s way. In spite of that concern, I certainly didn’t mind being lucky enough to witness some extreme activity!

Alas, I soon realized that the guns that these men had were pointed at … me. Not some escapee, not some ward of the state—no, the business ends of a lot of rifles and shotguns were lookin' at me … a tourist!

As soon as I shifted the car into “P,” I was dragged out of the car through the window opening, handcuffed, and leaned up against one of the vehicles while some guy in a uniform patted me down. The pat-down was both kind of rough and kind of intimate. The loud, apparently hyperactive group of guards started barking questions at me. “What are you doing here? Why did you drive here? Do you have a friend inside? A relative? Are you a former inmate? Do you have any weapons? Bombs? Cameras? Where is your ID?”

The questioning was fast and furious. I could hardly keep up. I really didn’t need to, since the guards were answering most of their own questions by frisking me, searching my car, confiscating my ID, and quickly running a criminal background check on me. In three minutes' time these burly guys knew more about me than I knew about myself, and had seen and touched parts of me that I was unfamiliar with.

The one question that only I could answer, since no background check or cavity search could reveal it, was why I had chosen to drive back there. I told them that the guard at the gate had given me not only permission but actual instruction to go out back.

This was disputed by the gate guard himself, one of the many responding officers. He had a different version of events. He stated, correctly, that I had stopped and asked him if I could go see more of the prison. However, he claimed that he had not granted permission. His recollection of events had his response to my query as “You need to take that little road,” while motioning to the parking lot access road, “and go back out!”

This was a problem. I had heard, “Go out back.” The guard’s recollection was that he said “Go back out.” Apparently, his wish had been for me to take that little road, turn around in the parking lot, and getthehellouttathere.

I’m willing to grant a 50% possibility of either sequence of events being the actual truth. It is said that there are two sides to every story, and somewhere in between lies the truth. However, in this case, there is no “in between.” There is only one order of words that was actually uttered, and it is equally as likely that he misspoke as it is that I misheard. The world will never know.

After an hour of interviews, more thorough background checks, and my official registration as a “person of interest,” should a prison break ever occur at Pelican Bay, I was escorted back to the free world. I was not invited to return, and was in fact told that should I ever try again, I would end up with a far more in-depth and lengthy tour of the inside of the prison. These words were very clear to me; there was no ambiguity of meaning nor misunderstanding of words regarding those instructions, and I have thus chosen not to visit any more correctional facilities, anywhere, for any reason. It holds less interest to me now.

I can now make the statement that I have been detained at the supermax Pelican Bay State Prison due to the transposition of words, whether stated or misunderstood. Fortunately it wasn’t a lengthy detention. I have learned, however, just how order the simple important of words in a given be can sentence!

[Ken served four years—in the Army—but only an hour in prison. His time is currently being spent with his wife and their two kids in the suburbs north of Houston, TX, where he is a freelance writer.]

Dogspeak, So to Speak

Janice Arenofsky, Scottsdale, Arizona

Dogs being a noble species, their owners have amassed, over the years, a huge vocabulary of jargon. Fortunately, the new dog owner or hobbyist is ignorant of this and spends the next several decades learning a second language: dogspeak.

As expected, the jargon covers every aspect of canine experience, including training, breeding, grooming, shows, and agility competitions. To fully communicate in any one area, hobbyists and professional dog enthusiasts must learn terms from several, if not all, areas. Take grooming, for example. If Shirley the Groomer should fire up her electric hair trimmer and direct it toward a certain dog’s topline, you better scream (over the loud hum of the clippers), “Drop that number 5 blade now. We are stripping Fritz [‘plucking fur with a hand tool’] for Great Western [‘a well-known dog show in Long Beach, California.']”

Similarly, if Shirley should suggest chalking your Schnauzer, that doesn’t mean she’s sketching Schultz (in pastel chalks) for posterity. It means she can whiten his beard ‘whiskers’ and furnishings ‘fringe or skirt around legs and front’ with powdery chalk and darken other areas with charcoal.

Don’t think you can merely wade into these fast-flowing waters. A crash course in jargon is the only way to go. For starters, begin with simple interactions at breed clubs, dog parks, or hydrants. Repeat after me: dogs are not simply black, white, or brown. They can be harlequin ‘black patches on white,’ merle ‘black-blue-gray,’ tricolor ‘black, white, and tan,’ brindle ‘black stripes on light fawn or brown’ or sable ‘black over a lighter color.’ Some even have a Dudley Nose, which, instead of black, is flesh or liver-colored.

Ready for your first fun match? No, you’re not going to a dog amusement park. A fun match is really an AKC sanctioned match—an all-breed show (approved by the American Kennel Club) without points ‘credits toward a championship.’ Why are matches fun if you don’t earn points? Because at matches, puppies can learn to like baiting ‘being offered treats in the show ring,’ walking on a lead ‘nylon, Martingale or other light-weight leash,’ and wearing a choke collar ‘restrains the dog.’

Next on your itinerary, go to a benched show. That doesn’t mean you and your dog get to sit on a bench all day and eat nachos. It means ‘show dogs must remain in a specific area designated for that breed.’ That’s where you may literally run into x-pens, which are ‘moveable wire panels for enclosing dogs’—an alternative to crating them in plastic, cardboard or metal dog cages.

At shows, there’s no better way to ingratiate yourself with fellow dog owners than to ask, “Does your bitch experience submissive urination?” To the average run-of-the-mill non-dog fancier, this question might translate to “Does your sweetheart whiz at whim?” Although that’s a pretty good guess, it’s wrong. In dog speak, you are asking another owner if his or her female dog urinates involuntarily when she gets scared. Of course you could have said that to begin with, but what a waste of jolly good jargon that would be!

In some show rings dogs are on loose leads ‘the leash is held lightly.’ You also will see sparring. To the novice, sparring may look like a dogfight (or, at the very least, a gross misunderstanding) but show judges consider it a ‘useful way to evaluate breed temperament.’ In every ring, observe the action. No, this has nothing to do with casino gambling or bets as to which dog will win—it deals with ‘gait’ or how dogs walk. For instance, is your Saluki side-wheeling ‘moving diagonally with feet out of line’? Don’t cry. It could be worse. He could be cow-hocked ‘feet turn out.’

Getting bored finding faults or ‘breed characteristics less than ideal’? Try asking the ever-popular “Did your dog finish?” You’re not probing whether said dog did Number 1 and Number 2. You’re asking if the dog has accumulated enough show points to become a champion. If the answer is yes, etiquette deems you ask the following: Are you campaigning your dog? This has nothing to do with world politics and everything to do with canine charisma. Owners of champions often special their pets by touring the country (often in trailers bearing vanity breed plates) and entering them in Best of Breed and Best of Group (for example, working dog, toy) competitions. Special, however, is not to be confused with specialty, which refers to ‘a one-breed dog show.’

And ignore the fancy clothes and somber faces of the judges. They are just as liable as owners, entrepreneurs, and trainers to use jargon. If a judge tells you your dog will body out soon, doesn’t paddle, and stacks himself nicely, you’ve just got the equivalent of a rave review. The judge has just said your dog is ‘developing well, reaches with his front legs when he walks, and poses himself attractively in the ring.’ On the other hand, if the judge tells you your dog has an undershot jaw and a bad mouth and is a product of heavy inbreeding ‘breeding parent to offspring or brother to sister,’ your dog has just been dumped on. You might think about teaching Paco how to yodel and sending him on Letterman’s. The TV audience won’t care about his ‘lousy bite, crooked teeth, and mental problems.’

Make no mistake. Despite lampooning their own mind-boggling brand of language, dog owners applaud others who stray from the King’s English and enter the confusing, abstruse world of canine gobbledygook. But be judicious. Used improperly, some jargon can offend. For instance, asking if your bitch or dog is intact is akin to asking if Bonzo still wears the “family jewels.” If you inquire about carriers, such as carriers of PRA ‘progressive retinal atrophy’ or JCC ‘juvenile congenital cataracts,’ make sure you’re wearing body armor. Physical or medical problems are automatic show disqualifications. Even if the dog has his CD ‘companion dog’ or CGC ‘canine good citizen’ title, he can’t go into the show ring. Shows are all about conformation ‘exhibiting physical attributes of the breed.’ In short, they’re beauty pageants.

Of course physical attributes vary from breed to breed according to the breed standard ‘written description of ideal traits.’ Miniature Schnauzers, for example, may be shown with natural or uncropped ears ‘not surgically cut to a point.’ But their tails must be docked or ‘cut short.’ And talking about tails, flagging in dog speak is equated with sex. Though not considered good form for a ‘female dog to signal her desire for sex by swishing her tail horizontally in the show ring,’ flagging a stud ‘unneutered male’ dog is the canine equivalent of asking “Your place or mine?”

If you’re still skeptical about the need to hone your dogspeak, browse through a premium list or ‘show catalogue.’ Acronyms and initialisms abound—for instance, BOB ‘Best of Breed,’ BOW ‘Best of Winners,’ BIS ‘Best in Show,’ BOS ‘Best of Opposite Sex,’ WB ‘Winners Bitch,’ and WD ‘Winners Dog.’ It doesn’t matter whether the list is for conformation, agility, or obedience, there are perplexing sound bites such as jumpers ‘dogs that vault over poles of varying heights,’ weavers ‘dogs that zig-zag around poles,’ open dog ‘a competitive class any dog is eligible for,’ excellent ‘advanced agility class,’ and figure eight ‘obedience task in which dog walks around two people, outlining the number 8.’ And, mind you, put up has nothing to do with patience or giving up your valuables; it’s a winning ticket of sorts, as in judges put up ‘award first places’ to the best entries.

Face it. Without your hard-earned background in canine jargon, you would not be able to decode the following conversation:

First person: How’s your handler?

Second person: Great. She got a major yesterday, and today, a reserve.

But a person proficient in dog speak will know instantly that the second fellow’s ‘hired dog presenter has scored show victories in conformation.’

Like it or not, jargon rules, say most two-legged and four-legged alpha ‘top dog’ males (females too!).

Isn’t it lovely when, with just a few well-chosen words, you can exclude hundreds of people from key knowledge?

Senior Glassware Maintenance Engineer

Said the man of his new title,

“This is really heady stuff.

The old name, bottle washer,

didn’t capture me enough.”

—Norman Ball

CLASSICAL BLATHER: Pound Hammers (and Toe Trucks)

Nick Humez, mythclass@earthlink.net

Today we look down from the Olympian balcony seats of discursive adulthood onto the stage of Littlekidspeak.¹ (Caution: For the twin lenses of our opera glasses—folk informants and personal recollection—we make no claims of an acuity approaching that of the 200-inch reflecting telescope on Mount Palomar, let alone the Hubble.)

Scene one: Northern Ohio, early 1950s. A man and his brother are painting his house; their wives are indoors catching up on the usual family gossip while their children are playing outside. Suddenly one of the children, a little girl of about three, bursts into the house, howling: “Cousin Rickie hit me with the pound hammer!”²

Scene two: A kitchen in Massachusetts, around the same time. A mother is coaxing her child to eat as his attention wanders: “Now take a bite for Grandma. Now take a bite for Uncle Willy. Now take a bite for the blow-horsie….”

Scene three: A father’s epiphany from Terry Priachett’s Where’s My Cow?, quoted in a review of the children’s book by Elizabeth Kolbert: “‘Why is his son learning about moo-cows and baa-lambs?’ he wonders. ‘He will only see them on a plate! They go sizzle!'”³

Why not just plain lamb and cow (or for that matter, hammer? And what in Heaven’s name is a blow-horsie?) The easy answer—“It’s just baby talk” —opens an Ali Baba’s cave. For one thing, while moo-cow and similar constructions are commonly used by many American English-speaking parents teaching their children just learning to talk, there are other such expressions confined to particular families or households, the most idiosyncratic of which may be invented by the children themselves—as was “pound hammer” by the little girl above. What is it that such expressions have in common, such that even a little child can figure out how to construct a new one?

For another: Grant that choo-choo train,⁴ tweetie bird,⁵ play toy,⁶ and so on are quintessential elements of a little-kid lingua franca we teach our young. But we do expect them to outgrow such words later on, reinforced by older children and their friends, who can be counted upon to discourage the use of such terms as babyish: It is no coincidence that the closer we still are to infancy, the more effective a sanction is the insult “Crybaby!”⁷ Yet the bigger kids freely talk of steam shovels and dump trucks, lightning bugs and jump ropes⁸ and cuckoo clocks, and so do the grownups; and nobody calls them babyish. What’s going on here?

Possibility #1: When children are first learning the names of things, we often don’t just tell them a noun but add a verb that describes what the referent of the noun does, or in Littlekidspeak, “goes”: Birdies go tweet, trains (used to) go choo-choo, cows go moo, lambs go baa, toys are for playing, and babies cry. Moo-cow reinforces the fact that a cow is axiomatically “that creature which moos,” and so with tweetie-bird and the rest: The verb form prefixed to the noun, then, is arguable “extra” information disposable as soon as the child has the name cow firmly in its long-term memory banks, together with at least some of the cultural/conceptual bovine attributes (has horns in front, is more or less rectangular with an udder under the back end, appears prominently on the labels of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, &c). Likewise play-toy becomes redundant once it is clear that toys are by definition to play with (and that if you can’t play with it, it’s not a toy).⁹

Possibility #2: Experiments on language acquisition summarized by Robbins Burling in his paper “The Slow Growth of Language in Children,” notably those of LouAnn Gerken, Barbara Landau, and Robert E. Remez, suggest that the phenomenon arises from our learning vocabulary items long before acquiring the syntax rules needed to manipulate them correctly. Thus a group of children aged between two and three, asked to repeat a phrase such as pushes the truck, “ were notably more successful at imitating the content words (whether English or nonsense) than the function morphemes (whether English or nonsense). That is, they often said things like push truck instead of the full sequence that they heard.” (Moreover, when presented with partly nonsensical phrases such as pusheg le truck, they reproduced the unfamiliar utterances with greater accuracy; “[a]pparently they recognized some sort of difference between the familiar English function morphemes and their unfamiliar substitutes, and the very familiarity of the real morphemes made it possible to leave them out.”) The conclusion: “[E]ven at a stage when children are considerably less likely to imitate function morphemes than content words, the function morphemes can still be used to help them to extract the meaning, and even the grammatical structure, of the sentences. They used markers of syntax more reliably in comprehension than in their own production.”¹⁰

A further complication, however: The same format (function-verb plus noun) persists well into adulthood, only now the verb is usually used to distinguish among multiple functions:¹¹ Dump trucks and steam shovels are not to be confused with, e.g., tow trucks and snow shovels (just as one may jovially call a pizza with all possible toppings a garbage wagon but never a honey wagon); jump ropes, spank sticks,¹² rumble seats,¹³ and push-bikes¹⁴ are opposed to bell ropes, swizzle sticks,¹⁵ mercy seats,¹⁶ and motorbikes; and so on.

Thus we win (or more probably lose) money at the race track; we carefully clip our hang nail; we chase away the kid who was about to tag our wall using his spray can. That new skirt milady is making is so long it may require a kick pleat; and that two-by-four we’re going to shorten by a couple of feet will certainly need to sit on a pair of saw horses. Come spring we’ll have to mow the grass (assuming the mower’s spark plugs aren’t hopelessly fouled) and cart the cuttings in a wheel barrow over to the compost heap,¹⁷ where we hope we shan’t encounter a rattle snake. And if someone calls us a dip shit when we’re holding a pinch bar, we may have to restrain our temper so as later not to need our beloved to bring us silver or gold to save us from the gallows tree.¹⁸ The list goes on and on.

Meanwhile, back in the Terrible Twos, we are still learning the names of things, and one way of strengthening our connection between nouns and their associated function verbs is the nursery rhyme, many of which begin with a verb-noun sequence before cutting to the chase: “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,”¹⁹ “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” arguably “Rub-a-Dub-Dub, Three Men in a Tub,” perhaps “Goosey, Goosey Gander”²⁰—and so on.

Since the acquisition of speech generally precedes literacy by at least two years, it may be no surprise that so many verb modifiers of nouns represent sounds. Thanks to its popularity as a Yuletide song, Jingle Bells is a natural addition to the Littlekidspeak repertory (despite the fact that in their original context “jingle” is an imperative and “bells” is a vocative).²¹ And on TV (whose role in the acculturation of children looms frighteningly large), long before the Teletubbies and Barney (and even before Sesame Street and Captain Kangaroo) there was Ding Dong School, presided over by the paradigmatically schoolma’amish Miss Frances.²² (Like steam trains, schools whose single bell was rung by a clapper on a rope are for most Americans today only a quaint cultural icon of a mythologized past; but the iconography tenaciously persists even so.)[^23 ]

And the children themselves, as we have seen above, are quite capable of inventing terms on this model themselves. The blow-horsie mentioned in paragraph 2 above turned out on investigation to have been a coinage of the mother’s own little brother²³ a generation earlier: During his third year he had come up with the term to describe the horses he saw pulling a wagon with a calliope on it in a Down East parade celebrating Independence Day. (That the horses did not actually produce the music was either unknown or unimportant to him at the time.)

Moreover, the child may understand the process well enough to draw on it as a source of humor: A correspondent²⁴ e-mailed us that a nephew of hers once ran over her bare toes with a matchbox Hummer, and said, so she thought, “Tow truck!” She replied, “No, buddy, I think it’s a Hummer,” knowing perfectly well that he knew too. (“His car knowledge is encyclopedic,” she explained, “like some little kids’ dinosaur knowledge.”) To which the budding wag replied, “No: one, two, three, four, five toes—toe truck!”²⁵ Out of the mouths of babes….

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As the Word Turns: Some Golden Oldies

Barry Baldwin, Calgary, Alberta

In their second Book of Lists (1980), Amy, David and Irving Wallace and David Wallechinsky cull 18 “obsolete words worth reviving” from the richer store of Susan Kelz Sperling’s Poplollies and Bellibones: A Celebration of Lost Words (1977). None of them feature in Ivor Brown’s Chosen Words or Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of the Underworld (1950). Do these verbal orts need or deserve exhumation?

AIMCRIER ‘an applauder of archers.’ OED cites only two passages (1622, 1638) from (coincidentally) Francis and Gervase Markham. It’s now the American Toastmaster’s Club self-definition; also a common dog name on American Kennel Club websites.

BEDSWERVER ‘one that is false to the bed’—Johnson’s Dictionary, citing Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale (2. 1. 93), the only OED citation. Now taken as one post-punk band’s logo, it would suit many a film/rock star or politician.

BELLIBONE ‘A woman excelling both in beauty and goodness’—Johnson, citing Spenser’s Pastorals (1579); OED adds a 1586 example from Webbe’s Discussion of English Poetrie. Johnson subjoins, “a word now out of use:” is he implying there were no such paragons in his day? See www.alexa.com for 172 entries, including American clown Shirley ‘Bellibone’ Sutton and Bellibone Wines. OED hesitantly suggests derivation from French belle et bonne. Latin bella et bona would be as plausible; cf. my VERBATIM XXX/1 column for Aubrey’s cognate bona roba.

BELLYTIMBER ‘materials to support the belly’ —Johnson; similarly in Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. ‘Still in dialect use (serious) but since Butler tending to be ludicrous’—OED, with examples 1607–1855, the last in a Glossary of Yorkshire argot. One Internet source wrongly calls it ‘lumberjack food’—Well (homage to Monty Python), I’m not a lumberjack so I don’t care …

CHANT-PLEURE ‘simultaneous singing and weeping.’ One Internet site wrongly defines it as French-Canadian. It belongs to Chaucer and his age; OED has a lone 1714 addition. An anonymous Internet sonnet, Clutch Your Purse, begins “Those fucking gypsies: chantpleure …”

FELLOWFEEL ‘to empathise.’ Not before the 17th century, plus a lone 1708 use. It would suit gooey modern Touchy Feely/Here For You.

FLESH-SPADES ‘fingernails.’ Apparently unique to Tom Jones, book 11, chapter 8.

KEAK ‘to cackle.’ OED exemplifies 1545–1878, mainly earlier; the latest text associates it with Cumberland. Internet references are dominated by the rap ‘artist’, Keak da Sneak, not a revival I cherish.

LIP-CLAP Allegedly 17th-century for ‘kiss.’ OED’s lone 1606 entry reads lip-clip or lap-clap. Is there modern confusion with the clap? Cf. Julie Coleman, Love, Sex & Marriage: A Historical Thesaurus (1998), p. 75.

LUBBERWORT ‘junk food.’ Book of Lists gives no dates. OED cites only two 16th-century passages, from which period come lubber and lubberland, mythical herb and paradise for the idle. Johnson, quoting Congreve, defines lubber as ‘A sturdy drone: an idle fat bulky losel.’ Sounds like something from our board game Balderdash.

MERRY-GO-SORRY ‘combination of good/bad news.’ Confined to a handful of 17th-century texts, this has regained titular modern currency for memoirs, short stories, and songs—Google for details.

MURFLES ‘freckles.’ No date given, perhaps unsurprisingly, since it is not in OED— Step forward, fellow-VERBATIMites …

SMELLSMOCK ‘Lecher.’ Common 16th/17th-century appellation. Revived in W. F. Smith’s Cambridge translation (1893) of Rabelais, on show in W. Sespry’s Wordsworth Rhyming Dictionary (2005), p. 24. Also a 19th-Century dialect plant term.

SNIRTLE ‘to snicker.’ Sounds like a Goon Show word, but (OED) unique to Robbie Burns (“He feigned to snirtle in his sleeve”) and other Scottish dialecticians—so we don’t get off Scot-free.

WURP ‘stone’s throw; glance of the eye.’ Very early and rare, three OED examples 950-1275, earliest from the Lindisfarne Gospels, translating Luke 22. 41 (“A stone’s cast”—King James Bible). The Internet’s www.urbandictionary.com professes to show, with a cornucopia of examples, that WURP is now “A word for all conversations,” deriving it from an Oxfordshire toponym—should I rename my column As The Wurp Turns?

Pimping

David A. Cory, M.D., South Bend, Indiana

I don’t know exactly when the word pimp entered the vernacular of what used to be called polite society. Possibly derived from the French pimper, ‘to dress elegantly,’ and referring to a procurer of prostitutes, pimp wasn’t a mainstream word in the 1950’s. During the social upheaval and sexual revolution of the 1960’s, decorum began to break down, and by the 1970’s, the age of disco, young males outside the ghetto were wearing shoes with stacked heels, known as pimp pumps (mine were white).

Today, as mores continue to deteriorate, MTV airs a show called “Pimp My Ride” which involves taking ordinary cars and customizing them, or pimping them out, into what we would have called pimpmobiles in the 1970’s. In 2006, the rap group Three 6 Mafia won an Oscar for the song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” which features the rousing chorus:

You know it hard out here for a pimp

When he tryin' to get this money for the rent

For the Cadillac and gas money spent

Cause whole lot of bitches jumpin' ship

We’ve come a long way from “Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head.”

But I want to talk about the use of the word pimp in the context of medical education. I was introduced to pimping when I began my clinical medical education at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana. After two years of basic science, my baptism of fire occurred in July 1979 with a month’s rotation in internal medicine at the VA. As geese gather in gaggles and lions in prides, physicians in training gather in services. Services are composed of house staff (residents and interns), medical students, and the patients under their care.

We students learned to take histories: “You were in the Navy, are you sure you never had V.D.?” We learned to double the quantity of alcohol the patient admitted to drinking daily. We learned to recognize the crackles and wheezes our new stethoscopes detected in the lungs of the vets. We learned our place in the pecking order. Looming large over us all was the staff, the faculty member assigned to supervise us. Below him were the residents and interns, the fourth-year students, and finally, the lowest life form on the team, the third-year students, otherwise known as studs, studlings, worker bees, work units, or scut puppies. Scut comprised the work that other members of the team had risen above—starting IVs, drawing blood, and collecting the all-important data. Data included lab results, EKG readings, and X-ray interpretations. We were responsible for charting the patients' data and sharing the data with our superiors on rounds, tracking the progress, or lack thereof, of our patients, who were called players by our resident. The origin of the term player is as obscure as that of pimp. I can speculate that the whole system of academic medicine could be viewed as a game, with the object to get the players off your service as quickly as possible, or, less likely, the term was derived from Shakespeare: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Ward players stayed in regular rooms, which ranged in capacity from two-bed semiprivates to the sixteen-bed bullpens at the ends of the hall, where any sense of dignity or privacy was erased. The sickest patients were those in intensive care, the unit players.

Pimping is a perversion of the Socratic dialectic, which uses questions to teach. The teacher asks a question, the student answers. The teacher asks another question, directing the dialogue, and ultimately convincing the student of the correct point of view. Pimping is not so much about teaching as about power. The teacher asks questions not to direct a dialogue but to expose the tender underbelly of the student, to remind the student of his ignorance. Perhaps then the student will leave the pimp session inspired to read a textbook or the medical literature. I was the object of a memorable pimping one day as our team emerged from a dingy VA stairwell, making rounds with our staff guy, a short wiry internist with reddish hair and a beard with no mustache, reminiscent of a leprechaun. As we walked down the hallway, I had the misfortune of being the student closest to the staff. He turned to me and asked, “How much blood does it take to turn a Hemoccult test positive?” From the corner of my eye, I could see the resident wince as his mouth formed a silent “Oh!” He saw the lamb going to slaughter. A Hemoccult test is a small paper card onto which is placed a small sample of a patient’s stool. A liquid is then dropped on the card. If it turns blue, the test is positive, indicating the presence of blood in the gut. The students all carried the cards and little dropper bottles of the liquid reagent around in our still stiff black leather doctor bags, or in the pockets of the short white jackets which distinguished us from our betters, who wore long white lab coats. I stammered, “I . . . I don’t know.” All these years later, I can’t recall the answer as expounded by the professor, or the reason he thought it was important that we know such an arcane fact, but that wasn’t the point of the hazing. The staff guy, the alpha dog, had marked his territory, and I happened to be in the path of the spray.

This was the first of many pimpings I endured over the next two years of medical school. Sometimes I was able to avoid the shame of a wrong answer, as in the operating room, when a surgeon asked me to name the structures in front of his index finger during gall bladder surgery. I responded with, “The common bile duct, the portal vein, and the hepatic artery.” Dismayed that I answered correctly, he responded, “You must be smarter than you look.” He was incapable of any more complimentary feedback. The pimpings continued during my four years of radiology residency. Part of our training was the noon conference, otherwise known as the resident roast, where the faculty showed images related to their individual subspecialties to the residents. I recall one of our staff showing me a case of Fong’s disease (no kneecaps and ribs growing off the pelvic bones) which totally baffled me. Instead of allowing me to slink back to my seat in humiliation after what seemed at the time like hours of questioning, he forced me to stay in front of the audience to look at another case, “because you’re doing so well.” I was laid so low by the first case, I don’t even remember what the second case was, or how I handled it. Conversely, on another day, when a staff guy showed me a case I had seen before, I played it for all it was worth. The case was an extremely rare tumor of specialized kidney cells involved in the regulation of blood pressure. These cells, known as JG cells, produce a substance called renin, and too much renin causes high blood pressure. I recognized the case because I had used it in a conference I was required to give in my first year of residency. A moment such as this was too rare to recuse myself. I described the findings as the professor projected each slide—the ultrasound, the CT scan, the angiogram. Then came the moment of truth. He was ready for the coup de grace. “What is the diagnosis?” he asked. I couldn’t jump straight to the right answer. That might tip him off that I had prior knowledge of the case. I must offer a differential diagnosis. “Well, it could be a renal cell cancer or an oncocytoma, causing hypertension by compressing the renal artery, or it could be an adrenal tumor invading the kidney, but it doesn’t really look like that.” I had thrown the stinking bloody chum into the water and the shark was rising to the bait. “Anything else?” he asked. “Or it could be a reninoma, a tumor of the JG cells,” I said, setting the hook. Stunned, he responded, “You have heard of such a thing?” Nodding my head, I thought, “Oh, yes, my friend, and that really pisses you off, doesn’t it?” He didn’t bother trying to pimp me further that day.

Perhaps medical education is more humane today. Undoubtedly, pimping will never go away completely. Wherever a human hierarchy exists, there will be those who use humiliation and intimidation to inflate their own egos and to keep those lower in the pyramid in their places. And, hey, even though I still don’t know, or particularly care, how much blood it takes to turn a Hemoccult test positive, along the way, I might have learned a thing or two from pimping.

Epitaph for Gertrude Stein

Gertie Stein was Gertie Stein was

Gertie Stein

Was.

—Louis Phillips

You’ve Got Game IV

Gloria Rosenthal, Valley Stream, New York

If you’ve been paying attention through YOU’VE GOT GAME I, II, AND III, you are primed and ready to leap into GAME IV, knowing we traipsed around Toy Fair to find the newest, brightest stars in the games galaxy. I am including a couple of classics, the long-lasting supernovas that burst upon the game scene but, unlike novas, never fade away. I’ve included one surprise, as you will see when you read through the list of games. Don’t jump ahead, please! Wait till you get there.

Games with a single * identify new games to help you find gifts you or your recipients may never have seen. Games with a double ** indicate a new edition or an addition to games already out there.

Don’t take company-assigned age categories too seriously. Many adult games would not be suitable for an 8-year-old, yet many “8 to adult” games are challenging enough for adults. And that is why you need this review!

Most games are clearly word-oriented, but a few are not in that category. I just can’t omit games that I’ve been playing with pleasure, games you might like to give or get as holiday presents (leave hints all over the place).

The listing is not alphabetical, age-appropriate, or personal preferences (if I didn’t love them, they wouldn’t be here). I started with the highest Suggested Retail Price and worked down to the lowest, but you will find discounts at Amazon.com and BoardGames.com, to name a few. Seek and ye shall pay less.

It’s your turn now. Go forth and play.

*WordSpot BOOKSHELF eDITION

8 and up. 2 players. 39.95

This is an exquisite game in a beautifully designed wooden box that looks like a magnificent book when placed on a bookshelf. The game was inspired by a centuries-old tradition of letterpress craftsmen who had to arrange thousands of separate tiles on a single tray to create printed matter.

Masters of the craft hid words within a block of text, challenging each other to find those special words. You and your opponent now vie to become masters at finding words hidden in blocks of letters. All the components, from the richly hued letter tiles to the special tokens in a velour bag, make this game almost as much fun to look at as to play. Scoring is as simple as winning is rewarding. Another version of the game, WORDSPOT DISCOVERY EDITION, at $26.95, is the same game in less costly packaging, but no less extravagant in quality of play. You pays your money and takes your choice!

*ACROSS WORDS

Teen to adult. 2 players or teams. 30.95

They call this The Electronic Talking Word Race Game, and is it ever! That devilish character (surely there is a man hidden inside) calls out clues and letters, and will even cheer for the winning team. Each card is two-sided so that opposing players are looking at the same clue at the same time. When the electronic host calls out letters in the answer, in random order, players take lettered tiles and place them in a console. As soon as one side has the answer (or thinks they have) they press a colored lid over their tiles and that stops the action and the mysterious man gives the right answer. “Yes” or “No” buttons indicate you had the correct (or, sorry to say, incorrect) answer. If yes, the voice cheers for you and states your score; it keeps score throughout. As an aside: I wish I had my Electronic Scorekeeper to keep score when I’m playing other games that call for adding up numbers.

Note: you need a Phillips screwdriver to insert four AA batteries, and I appreciated that this information was provided on the outside of the box.

**TRIVAL PURSUIT TOTALLY 80S

Adults. 2-4 players. 29.99

All right, I did say that some games were not word games in the purest form: how can I ignore a new, terrific version of Trivial Pursuit? I can’t. This version, with a stunning new board and jazzy tokens to make you smile (two computers, a cd, and a teddy bear with a big heart). cries out for attention. The categories are Headlines, Television, Movies, Music, Sports & Leisure, and Wild Card, with all questions involving a decade of big events. For example, if you are totally stumped by “What style of dancing featured moves called the windmill, the turtle and the handglide” you may not move around the board too quickly. But wait! If you said breakdancing you’re on your way. , The 2,400 new questions will keep all players searching their memory for answers to some long-forgotten event, but don’t let that scare you. Your opponents will have an equally difficult time, and it all leads to a great deal of good-time reminiscing.

*WORDROP

8 to adult. 2 to 4 players. 29.95

One of the newest, purest word games is an original, amazing challenge where players, either one on one or in teams, face a standing, clear plastic vertical grid in which letters are dropped into channels. Both sides see the letters in exactly the same position and both sides try to create words up, down, backwards, forwards, or diagonally. Opponents will always be ready to steal your points by blocking you from making your intended word. As an example, I was making nominate backwards, and had gotten as far as nimon when my wise opponent blocked me by starting his word with a b, stopping my progress. The game is nicely packaged, and the grid and tiles are of the highest quality. Scoring is a little tricky in that an addition of just one letter can add up to any number of words. But stay with it, as conquering the scoring will bring you hours of brain-tickling play.

*WORD SWEEP

10 and up. 2 to 4 players. 29.95

I don’t know about you, but when I see the Merriam-Webster name attached to anything about words, I immediately think of course, why not! And so it is with WORD SWEEP. When you find that each card in this game, whether in the category of Everyday words, Intermediate words, or Challenging words, is made up of three words that appear consecutively in a Merriam-Webster dictionary and the object is to name that trio of words from the definitions read by another player, you will revel in this dictionary-driven game. Answering all three correctly is a “Word Sweep,” but beware—another player can steal your missed words, and all players are vying to get around the colorful board. The tokens are books, and the finish line is, appropriately enough, an open Merriam-Webster dictionary. Rules are very clear, covering getting stumped and stealing, and include junior rules for the 10-14 set. This game will make you hover in the air, won’t make you weep with short gasping sounds, and will keep you well-reasoned and balanced. SOAR, SOB, SOBER! Get it?

*JOT

8 to adult. 2 to 4 players. 25.00

I don’t often find a timer that I want to talk about before I talk about the game, but the Jot Roller-timer™ is fascinating. It is an oversized die that, when rolled, activates the timer and with beeps and flashes counts down 60 seconds. Numbers and symbols on all six surfaces indicate what action players must take: add two letters, pick a card, add six letters, replace a word. Players write words with an erasable marker on a most unusual game board that is a cleverly designed crossword-type grid with colored squares. The first player writes any word containing six letters. Play continues from there, and cards tell players they must Add a movie, Add a holiday, Add something to do with music, etc. The various instructions can be hilarious when Add something to wear is followed by disputes (“I can wear an egg if I want to”). Scoring is simple, with nice touches: purple spaces count as two points, yellow as three, and more. Jot this game on your holiday wish list wish!

*TAKE YOUR BEST SHOT

8 and up. 3-5 players. 24.95

How do you describe a new, innovative, enjoyable, challenging word game without using any of those words? You don’t. You tell the person reading this review to simply apply all those words to TAKE YOUR BEST SHOT. This cleverly packaged game includes a “funnel” (now, that’s innovative!) into which players will toss one of the Guessing Balls (color-keyed to identify each player) as soon as they guess the answer to one of the 440 Clue cards. My first card had the words BUS DIVER TRUCK on one side, and the reader (players take turns reading) read the clue on the other side of the card: It goes forward down the road & backwards under the sea. I’ll pause here while you try to answer that one, which I missed (don’t let that get around). All right, the answer is BUS because spelled backward it is SUB. This clever game is all about playing with words. A scoring track and score markers simplify scoring. You have to be quick and quick-witted to play TYBS, but remember, it really is all of those things I said in the first sentence.

**DON’T QUOTE ME—TV EDITION

14 to adult. 2-5 players or teams. 24.95

This is one of the new editions I promised in the introduction, and a worthy one it is. If you remember Game II, you may remember I wrote about the assembly-needed pentagon game board. That hasn’t changed, and it’s still an ingenious board, fun to put together (a puzzle in itself), with special spaces that add to the scoring. This TV version is often a blast from the past, featuring 50 years of TV on 100 cards. Another 300 cards, with categories such as comedy, drama, and movies, include biographies and details about each quote. Five quotes on each card will have you playing happily many times over. The tokens in this game are large plastic quotation marks. Nice touch! When I wondered if this game fits our word game category I decided that any game where quotes are paramount is certainly about words. You can take my word for it.

**PAIRED UP/FAME & FORTUNE

12 and up. 3-6 players or teams. Paired Up 19.95

Fame & Fortune. 9.95. Set 24.95

If I were to ask you to give me a pair of relatives and you jumped in with aunt and uncle, you’re on your way to winning a Paired Up game. All answers come in pairs, but it’s not as easy as it seems. Sure you’ll know faucets are hot and cold, but can you name the famous pair of pandas at the National Zoo? (Ling-Ling and Hsing Hsing.) It’s as challenging to be the giver of clues as the guesser, so clue giver earns points, too. Rules are very clear, and the game is equipped with scoring sheets, timer, die, pencils, and 800 pairs on 200 cards. Speaking of scoring, I get a kick out of this game’s innovative way of assigning number of points in a round: a roll of the die determines it. Roll a 3 and the clue giver and the player each get three points. Neat!

Fame & Fortune is played the same way, and you need Paired Up to make this game complete. Along with basic pairs every card includes one famous pair (bonus points are awarded for those answers).

Another example: if my clue is “long ago TV funny detective and his sidekick,” you would have to know Agent 86 and Agent 99 to get two extra points. Famous pairs are highlighted in red on each card. I like the company’s statement: The couples in Fame & Fortune are just for “fun and games.” None of them endorse our game or have any connection with it, aside from being “rich and famous” enough to be included!

*CROSSWITS

12 and up. 2 or more players. 19.99

If you love crossword puzzles but could never visualize the solving of same as a party game, you are about to find that answering 2 down or 23 across does not have to be a solitary activity. In this very clever version, Team A has a crossword puzzle to complete while Team B reads the clues to that puzzle. B also has a puzzle with clues coming from A. It’s a fast-paced game, as players have only 30 seconds to come up with an answer. Just like solving alone, where you skip around to clues you know, you may ask for a clue to a specified number. Pencils, timer, and Stump Chips (which may be exchanged for an answer when you are—what else?—stumped) are included. The game contains 20 cards, and the company is planning to produce new sets of cards. But in the meantime, I figure that even at a cost of $20 for the current cards, you are paying $20 for many hours of entertainment, and it’s more fun than going to a movie and having a slice of pizza!

**BOGGLE Folio Edition

8 to adult. 19.99

Boggle is as much a part of the word game scene as Scrabble, and this version is the Hope Diamond of Boggle sets. It’s all there, the grid and dome, 16 letter cubes, pencils, pads, and a built-in Electronic Timer with 2 AAA batteries included (but you need a tiny Phillips screwdriver to install them). The timer is terrific, flashing green, amber, and finally red when it’s about to beep. Everything is stowed neatly and compactly in a soft-sided zippered case. The instruction sheet is concise and clear (but you already know how to make three-letter words and up, don’t you?). Take this game anywhere, play it everywhere, enjoy it always. I just flipped the grid and dome and was able to pick out GREAT.

*Sudoku Attache

8 to adult. 1 to 4 players. 19.99

SURPRISE! What is a numbers puzzle doing in a word game article? It’s here because everybody seems to be going Sudoku-wild, so I thought I’d tell you about the latest version. It has a game board, number tiles, a cloth storage pouch, and 100 puzzles and comes in a handsome zippered case. So there you are, and here I am, not using a lot of words to tell you about something to do with numbers just because you might enjoy it and you can take it from here. I don’t do Sudoku!

*DISORDER

10 and up. 2 or more players. 15.95

Ah! I love a game where the player with the fewest points wins, a nice change from striving to score higher than anyone else. The object of this game is to get rid of beautiful, slick letter-cards by placing them, one at a time, on a long, narrow board that folds up nicely to fit in the box. All players add one letter as play progresses around the table, with everyone determined to place a letter while not completing a word. This is not as easy as it seems. Let us say COUN is on the board and you plan to make COUNTRY so you snap down a T. Aha! calls out an opponent, that word is COUNT and so it is, and so are you the loser in that round. There are interesting rules covering chips and challenges and switch, squeeze, exchange, and pass, so even though DISORDER may remind you of an old-time oral game, GHOST, DISORDER is much snappier, jazzier, and more challenging, and with a foolproof method of keeping score (rather than: “I DID NOT HAVE THREE POINTS!”).

*SMART MOUTH

8 TO ADULT. 2 or more players. 14.95

I applaud the array of new word games that come out every year and the new ways conceived for the getting, playing, and counting up of words. SMART MOUTH has a Letter Getter. With a little tap on the top, the Letter Getter pushes out two letters at a time, one green on the left side, one orange on the right. These letters are now the first and last letters of any word of at least five letters in length. All players try to make a word using these designated letters, and the first player to call out an acceptable word wins those tiles. The Letter Getter pushes out two more and the game continues. The winner is the player with most tiles when all 36 pairs have been used. There are wonderful variations: the Name Game, with tiles representing initials of noted people, geographical locations, and much more, or any variations you can think of yourself.

*CONTRARIO

13 and over. 2 or more players. 14.98

A CONTRARIO is a new way of looking at an old (or not so old) phrase using synonyms, antonyms, or phonetically altered or related words to create a new phrase. There are 1,320 CONTRARIOS on two-sided cards, and each card lists four Contrarios containing a convoluted phrase along with two hints and the original phrase. The Contrario on a card in front of me is Twice in a yellow moon, and the two hints are Idiom/Not often, and I will pause while you ponder. Each time a player digs out the original phrase he or she scores points, all clearly spelled out in the rules. Length of the game is in your hands, and I like the way they put it: play a predetermined time; a predetermined number of cards; reach a targeted score. All right now, Twice in a yellow moon translates into Once in a blue moon. Yes, they may be convoluted or even, sometimes, a little forced, but they are fun and, trust me, there is nothing hidden in the words I’ve written here.

OBITER DICTA: A Sampling of the Genius of Saki

Edwin Rosenberg, Danbury, Connecticut

Over 65 years ago, my high school English teacher and idol, Spencer Brown, introduced me to the short stories of Hector Hugh Munro, who took as his pen name that of the cupbearer in Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat (Fitzgerald translation):

“Yon rising Moon that looks for us again—

How oft hereafter will she wax and wane;

How oft hereafter rising look for us

Through this same Garden—and for one in vain!

“And when like her, oh Saki, you shall pass

Among the Guests star-scattered on the Grass,

And in your joyous errand reach the spot

Where I made One—turn down an empty glass!”

Saki (it would be sacrilegious to use his given name) was born in 1870. His life, as fantastic as many of his stories, ended in World War I. The stories, mostly about the moneyed upper crust of pre-war England, were originally published as separate books. Later, they were brought together in a single volume: The Short Stories of Saki (New York, The Viking Press, 1946; 715 p.). The book ends with a brief biography of Saki by his sister.

What distinguishes the 135 stories are not only the trap endings to most of them—like those, e.g., of O. Henry, and perhaps Conan Doyle—but also the delicate use of language. From a recent re-reading of these stories, I extracted 69 aphorisms that particularly please me. Other readers may enjoy making their own selections. Here are some of my favorites.

The art of life is the avoidance of the unattainable. [“Reginald on the Academy.”]

You can’t expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal’s return. [Ibid.]

Beauty is only sin deep. [“Reginald’s Choir Treat.”]

Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people. [“Reginald at the Carlton.”]

People talk vaguely about the innocence of a little child, but they take mighty good care not to let it out of their sight for twenty minutes. The watched pot never boils over. [“The Innocence of Reginald.”]

Thus, although possessed of only moderate means, he was able to live comfortably within his income, and still more comfortably within those of various tolerantly disposed associates. [“The Soul of Laploshka.”]

It’s no use growing older if you only learn new ways of misbehaving yourself. [“The Stampeding of Lady Bastable.”]

I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English. [“Adrian.”]

Discipline to be effective must be optional. [“Filboid Studge.”]

Every profession has its secrets; if it hadn’t it wouldn’t be a profession.” [“The Story of St. Vespaluus.”]

He liked and admired a great many women collectively and dispassionately without singling out one for especial matrimonial consideration, just as one might admire the Alps without feeling that one wanted any particular peak as one’s own private property. [“Tea.”]

In baiting a mouse-trap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse. [“The Infernal Parliament.”]

The [House] member for North Carnarvonshire always gives me the impression of one who in his long-ago youth heard the question-half of a very good riddle, and has spent the remainder of his life in the earnest expectation of hearing some one disclose the answer. [From his newspaper column, “Potted Parliament,” in the Outlook.]

The stories are rife with creative names, though an American will have difficulty knowing which are imaginary. From John James Abbleway to Dora Yonelet, here is a brief collection, Note the occasional alliteration, and do pronounce them aloud.

Brimley Bomefield

Lady Braddleshrub

Colonel Chuttle

James Cushat-Prinkly

Reverend Wilfred and Lady Beryl Gaspilton

Basset Harrowcluff

Mrs. Hatch-Mallard

Bertram Kneyght (what a spelling!)

Lena Luddleford

Lady Mousehilton

Waldo Orpington

Wilfred Pigeoncote

Gwenda Pottingdon (who appears in “The Occasional Garden”)

Sir Lulworth Quayne

Lord Hugo Sizzle

Lord and Lady Slugford

Sylvia Strubble

Consuelo Van Bullyan

A few names were omitted as being clearly non-British: Baroness Booblestein; Constantino Constantinovitch; Demosthenes Platterbaff; and a Roman, Placidus Superbus.

Place names used by Saki are often hilarious, too: especially to American ears. However, without a detailed British atlas, it is hard to distinguish gems from paste.

Finally, if you do pick up a volume of Saki’s stories, read only one or two a day. They are to be savored, leisurely: not devoured.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Label-palooza for All the Elsewhereians: Labels for Locals

Paul Dickson (Collins, 2006), 288 pp.

Things I didn’t know before reading Paul Dickson’s Labels for Locals:

Mudheads are from Tennessee, but Mud Waddlers are from Mississippi.

Even an creationist from Darwin, Australian is a Darwinian.

An elsewhereian might hail from almost anywhere—except California.

Even if Batman doesn’t exist—and I’m not saying he doesn’t—Gothamite is an acceptable word for a New Yorker.

Dickson—author of The Hidden Language of Baseball, Dickson’s Word Treasury, and many other books—has produced a distinctive lexicon that should be of interest to word buffs and road-trippers alike. Labels for Locals is an impressive collection of words such as Ethiopian, Hobokenite, and Iowan —words that describe residence. Dickson claims a practical and modest purpose for his book: to keep the faces of his readers egg-free. That mission seems well-accomplished, but he shares plenty more wealth with language lovers who should eat up words like Sand-groper, Sandhiller, and Sandlapper, even if they never go to West Australia, Georgia, or South Carolina, where sand is evidently groped, hilled, and lapped by the local talent.

When beginning this project, Dickson faced many questions, but none less pressing than: What in the name of Zeus do you call these words? Existing terms included toponyms and patrials, neither of which seemed satisfying. Dickson’s coinage domunyms, as well as suggestions from others such as hailfroms, locunyms, and urbanyms were considered—and judged awful. Finally, at the suggestion of American Name Society member and Sioux City (Iowa) Public Library director George H. Scheetz, demonym was chosen, which is related to the Greek demos (“the people, populace”) and also had the virtue of being used by linguist/etymologist Allan Walker Read and mega-prolific language writer Richard Lederer.

It’s hard to believe just how many demonyms some places have acquired; Connecticut is a particularly demonym-producing destination. Citizens of the Nutmeg State are (naturally) called Nutmeggers and (rarely) called Nutmegians. Cowboy-hat-wearing, brush-clearing, varmint-hunting President George W. Bush is the first President to hail from Connecticut, but as described in a New York Times piece, he’s a reluctant Nutmegger to say the least. Other Nutmeggers have been anything but reluctant to make up names for themselves; attempts have included Connecticotian, Connecticuter, Connecticutter, Connecticutensian, Connectican, Connecticutian, and Connecticutite. And those are the sincere, non-jokey attempts—Connecticutlet is one of many silly suggestions compiled by Dickson.

The largest entry is appropriately about the most well-known, hotly debated demonym: Hoosier. We may never know for sure if the oft-repeated anecdote of a post-barfight query (Whose ear? sounds a bit like Hoosier) is etymological rubbish or not, but we do know that Hoosier Dan Quayle mounted a one-vice-president campaign to eliminate derogatory definitions of Hoosier from Webster’s New World Dictionary. Amazingly, the man who understood the importance of bondage between a mother and child had little success in this word-related endeavor, and justifiably so: insulting meanings of Hoosier are prominent in Kentucky and Missouri, as well as in the slang of seafaring, crime, logging, trade unions, and drugs. However, in the Hoosier state, Indianan may be the biggest insult of all, so don’t even think of dropping the I-bomb.

Though outright slurs were excluded, Hoosier is one of many semi-slurish nicknames listed, including Canuck and the oft-debated Native American. In fact, it may be part of the nature of demonyms that one person’s insult is another badge of honor. Just think of the derogatory aroma northerner and southerner often exude. Despite some attempts at rehabilitation, Okie is considered a no-no word in Oklahoma, but non-Okies often use it—as I just did—with no malice intended. Some common insults—like cracker and redneck can also be found, along with some rarer birds, like Zonie— an insult for Arizona residents, especially those flooding the streets of San Diego in the summer.

When asked to write this review, I must admit I did no mental cartwheels, nor did I inwardly pour a bottle of champagne over my head. I expected dull, dry stuff. Well, I must be a moron, because I found Dickson’s book delightful. Though there are many predictable demonyms that dutifully take on their most likely suffix, there are plenty of surprising and colorful exceptions, and all word-happy readers should be happy to know that a man of Kent and a Kentish man live east and west of the River Medway respectively. (Where you’ll find a woman in Kent, I have no idea.) The inclusion of fictional locales such as Ethniclashistan, Kerplakistan, and Sixpackistan— from The Onion, Austin Powers movies, and The Simpsons— is another treat, and it’s also amusing to read Dickson weigh the relative merits of earthling, earthman, earthwoman, earth people, and terrestrial. I won’t be so amused on the day giant pancakes from space spout those words while pounding us into syrup, but still.

I don’t know if giant pancakes can read, but if they can, one look at this book would surely impress them with the relentless creativity and spunk of our language. Even a Saturnian could see that.

—Mark Peters

EPISTOLA {Jack Butler}

Reading Verbatim with delight. It’s a pleasure to have found a magazine that seems to be all about English, words and patterns and etymologies and phrases. I want to write everyone in the issue. They all feel like kindred spirits.

Reading Richard Lederer’s “Confessions of a Verbivore,” in which he commits a few anagrams, caused me to decide to send you this. It is not, honestly, intended as a submission. It’s just a fun thing, for me, anyway. A form I have invented, and call, immodestly I suppose, jaxagrams.

The rules are simple. Take a word or phrase, and then write something which is grammatically and syntactically correct, but which uses all of the letters of the seed word or phrase, rearranged, in as many combinations as possible.

Am working on one for “television,” which begins, “TELEVISION—I.E., VILE SNOT—may appear to offer one a SOLE INVITE to watch the TONIES LIVE . . .”

Here’s the best completed one so far.

Not every SENATOR is A STONER, although more than ONE RANTS against drugs and yet uses them himself, and at least one is A STERNO addict.

It isn’t fair to describe a SENATOR as an ANT SORE or a RATNOSE, but many of them are guilty of NOSE TAR, and there is a reason we live beside such a TORN SEA.

Every now and then you may find a SENATOR who works hard, but most are ON A REST—OR A NEST—and are perfectly useless.

In short, the best way to handle a SENATOR is with your TASER ON, since he or she will ROT SANE minds, and what these legislators have done to our country is nothing short of TREASON.

Again, having a really good time with the magazine. Thank you for doing it.

[Jack Butler, Wyandotte, Oklahoma]

Anglo-American Crossword No. 106

Across

1. Delaying tactic to conceal a bit of wrongdoing (12)

8. Truck named for horror-film actor (5)

9. Joint underwriter, describing first of offerings, misrepresented pros, cons (9)

11. Big Lennon broadcast is elevating (9)

12. Alligator angrily clutches ape (5)

13. You believe these creeps? Substituting dollars for pence (6)

14. They tend cattle and fowl, crossing roads in front of me (8)

17. Egyptian king I covered in verbal one-on-one instruction (8)

19. Outlaw German sausage in Britain (6)

22. 0 - n = 0 (5)

24. Closest shaft penetrates thieves' den (9)

25. Showing doubt, pick least terrible (9)

26. Buddy in East L.A. with a predecessor of the MiG-1? (5)

27. Redress loss, et cetera? (6,1,5)

Down

1. Urgent—fix annulus in artery-repair device (9)

2. Offer too much rhythm & blues in punk video (7)

3. Geometer’s stick, stuck up on ceiling (6)

4. Appointed to post as former Chinese leader is retiring (8)

5. Luxembourg’s leader ordered poodle for Belgian king (7)

6. Doctor Who companion from New York —in retrospect, a fool (5)

7. Scraps changes, getting a little conservative (12)

10. piritual rebirth from regular worship after initiation (12)

15. You can’t do this to wood grain without good mesh fabric (9)

16. Salt-eating, simple marine crustacean (8)

18. The sound of a rapper backing “So Long, Sailor” (3-1-3)

20. Fruit centers in Grand Haven ignored roaches—that’s ruddy irresponsible (7)

21. Military exercises endangered monkeys (6)

23. Silly people dressed in negligees, earmuffs (5)

Answers to Anglo-American Crossword No. 106

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. Our coinage. Readers who want something less Orwellian and/or wearing more yardage of academic bombazine may opt for the German gloss Kindlsprache instead. ↩︎

2. Told to us a half-century after the fact, by the pounded cousin herself: Leslie Edwards, to whom we are greatly indebted both for the idea for this article and for many of the examples given within it. ↩︎

3. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Goodnight Mush,” The New Yorker, Dec. 6, 2006, page 94. ↩︎

4. That steam almost entirely ceased to move trains in the United States half a century ago (atavisms such as Wilkes-Barre’s Steamtown and Mount Washington’s Cog Railway excepted) does not seem to give us much pause: We once overheard a parent in a Boston subway station telling a child, “Here comes the choo-choo train!” Clearly neither the nature of traction nor the actual sound the train made was a factor here. ↩︎

5. Tweetie-bird’s currency in American Littlekidspeak is attested (and surely reinforced) by the familiar canary character in the “Tweety and Sylvester” animated short features produced in the Warner Brothers studio from midcentury on. (The duo first appeared together in an animated cartoon short called “Tweetie Pie” in 1947.) The “official” site http://looneytunes.warnerbros.com/stars_of_the_show/tweety/tweety_story.html quotes Tweety’s signature song, “I tawt I taw a puddy tat…,” its substitutions of stops for sibilants (Tweety = Sweetie?) evocative of infant proto-speech and the imitation of baby talk by grownups talking to the very young—all of a piece with Tweety’s persona as an innocent with a capacity for blithe mayhem (as Sylvester learns at the end of “Tweetie Pie” when the little bird repeatedly bashes him over the head with a shovel). But this subset of the Loony Tunes can also be read as a subversive allegory of the postwar woman ringing changes on a passive-aggressive courtship strategy; further inquiry in this area might yield an interesting project for a sociologist or historian. ↩︎

6. While play-toy is common enough, it is not universal: Raised near Boston, we didn’t encounter the term till our early teens, when our junior-high art teacher’s (Tennessee-born) husband used it to refer to his banjo, the first one we had ever seen up close. (To hear some of the eventual results of this fateful encounter, visit www.mythsongs.com.) ↩︎

7. Crybaby’s triple barb: It mimics the syntax of earliest speech; it suggests that the person being taunted is a baby; and it asserts that all babies do is “go wah-wah.” Of course, fallacies wriggle on all three tines here, but it’s probable that very few children under the age of reason could refute any one of them, let alone the trio at one go. ↩︎

8. Jump rope games can be found in any compendium of schoolyard and playground activities (e.g. Richard Donnelly, William G. Helms, and Elmer Mitchell, Active Games and Contests, second edition [New York: Ronald Press, 1958], pp 33-38: “Rope Jumping and Skipping Contests”). The rhymes spoken while skipping rope form a body of folkloric text well worth examining in their own right, of particular interest because mostly girls learn them and boys mostly don’t. But that’s a whole other column. ↩︎

9. E.g., one’s female office assistant, as famously explained by the women’s chorus in the up-tempo “A Secretary Is Not a Toy” from the Frank Loesser musical How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying (adapted from Shepherd Mead’s 1952 book of the same name [New York: Simon and Schuster]). ↩︎

10. Burling has for many years been a professor of anthropology and linguistics at the University of Michigan (emeritus since 1995). The article quoted above can be found at www-personal.umich.edu/~rburling/Slowgrowth.html; it was originally published in Alison Wray (ed.), The Transition to Language (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002); Gerken, Landau, and Remez report their experiment in their paper “Function Morphemes in Young Children’s Speech Perception and Production” (Developmental Psychology 26, No. 2 [1990], pp. 204-216). ↩︎

11. There are exceptions; Dwain Kitchell and Leslie Edwards both report regional use—by grownups—of hootie owl and hoot owl respectively; and both mention screech owl as well. The latter is of course the name of a particular species; but apparently hoot(ie) owl can be used for any owl whatever. ↩︎

12. The use of a stick to chastise the naughty is well documented in antiquity. The Latin word was virga ‘switch.’ Unrelated to Latin virgo, ‘virgin,’ virga could also refer to one of the rods bound together with an axe to make up the lictors’ fasces; by extension, the comic dramatist Plautus uses the term virgator for ‘person who beats somebody else with a stick’ (Asinaria, II.2.19). The diminutive, virgula, is the source both of French virgule and Italian virgola, ‘comma.’ Virgule also survives in English (as the name for a part of a clock escapement), as does virgate, an archaic land measure equivalent to 30 acres or a quarter of a hide. (Sometimes defined as the amount that an ox could plow in a day, this hide is etymologically distinct from the sort worn by the ox: It comes from higan, Old West Saxon for ‘member of a household,’ a higed being the land necessary for a family’s support. The Domesday Book reckoned the hide at 120 acres.) ↩︎

13. Now vanished like the running board, a rumble seat was often a feature of such two-door cab-coupes as our parents' first car, a green 1939 Plymouth. The seat would fold out of where the trunk would be today, and could accommodate two people, albeit tightly. ↩︎

14. Push-bike is British usage but most Americans would probably understand it as a muscle-powered bicycle, in contrast to a moped, motor scooter, or motorcycle. ↩︎

15. Swizzle was a drink made from rum or gin and bitters, vigorously stirred; the term surfaced in early the 1800s and is probably onomatapoeia. The swizzle stick is described at the end of the 1890s (in the Century Dictionary, Vol. VII, p. 6118) as “used in making swizzles and other drinks,” and that it was “in China and Japan usually made of bamboo,” citing as an usage example the following (attributed to Elect. Rev. [Eng.], XXVII, 777): “fallen from their high estate, they [the East India Islands] are to-day chiefly associated with such petty transactions as the production of swizzle sticks and guava jelly.” Tiny umbrellas for exotic highballs, on the other hand, would only became fashionable among American mixologists in the 1930s. According to Cecil Adams, Victor J. “Joe” Bergeron III stated that his father, founder of the legendary Trader Vic’s tiki-bar chain, “had borrowed the umbrella idea and a few other things from the Don the Beachcomber restaurants (now defunct), which had pioneered Polynesian-style dining. Prior to that, he believes, they were available in Chinese restaurants, which coincides with the view we’ve heard elsewhere that the parasol (or at least the idea of putting it in a drink) was a Chinese-American invention” (www.straightdope.com/columns/001117.html). The artifact’s ubiquity inspired the instrumental cut “Little Umbrellas” on the Frank Zappa album Hot Rats, released in 1969 shortly after the dissolution of his band, the Mothers of Invention. But though a Google search promises 1,390,000 websites containing the term umbrella drink, dictionaries have yet to catch up, to judge from three published in the last 15 years: American Heritage third edition (1992), Webster’s Tenth Collegiate (1997) and The New Oxford American Dictionary (2005)—all of which do define swizzle stick. ↩︎

16. Not a seat in the conventional sense of something upon which someone sits, the original Mercy Seat was the covering of ancient Israel’s Ark of the Covenant. ↩︎

17. A debatable example, requiring that compost be read as a verb (as in “self-composting privy”). The argument against it is that compost is a perfectly good noun; moreover, any child would recognize it as such a lot sooner than perceive composting as an ongoing process. ↩︎

18. Or the gallows pole: “Gallis Pole” was the title of a song performed by Huddie Leadbetter (“Leadbelly”) and recorded by folklorist Alan Lomax while the singer was still in a Louisiana prison in 1933. (He would be pardoned and freed the following year.) It’s a version of a ballad well known in the British Isles, one of the many collected by Francis J. Child and published in five volumes between 1882 and 1898. Its usual British name is “The Maid Saved from the Gallows,” though the version sung by Julia Scaddon and recorded by Peter Kennedy in Dorset in the late 1950s is called “The Prickelly Bush,” owing to its chorus: “O the prickelly bush/That pricks my heart from sore;/If I ever get out of the prickelly bush/I’ll never get in it no more.” Scaddon’s rendition may be heard on Kennedy and Lomax, The Folk Songs of Britain, Volume IV: The Child Ballads I (Caedmon TC 1145: 1961; it was recently re-released on CD). ↩︎

19. Unlike other familiar English nursery rhymes, many of which are attested as far back as the 17th century, this one has a known author (Jane Taylor) and is much more recent (it was published under the title “The Star” in the Taylor sisters' book Rhymes for the Nursery in 1806). ↩︎

20. Of course, “goose” is surely not intended as a verb here, goosey gander being more probably analogous to pussy cat, bunny rabbit, or puppy dog, with the redundant modifier another noun rather than a verb. Otherwise the process that produces such expressions in both children and adults appears quite similar, at least on its surface. For an interesting newsgroup thread on this subject, see http://physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-115029.html, a discussion which yielded additional grownup examples such as soda pop, taxi( )cab, oleomargarine, rat fink and barenaked. ↩︎

21. The Rev. James Pierpont, a Boston minister, was both versifier and composer of this classic, originally written for his Sunday school’s Thanksgiving celebration in 1857. It has become so familiar as a Christmas song that very few of us ever bother to try and parse its chorus—as few, perhaps, as attempt this with the opening line of the official Army Air Corps (now US Air Force) song, “Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder,” either, thus missing the fact that the object of “into” is actually the noun blue, modified by yonder, instead of the other way around. ↩︎

22. According to Wikipedia’s article on her (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Frances), Dr. Frances Horwich, a native of Ottawa, Ohio, was the head of the department of education at Roosevelt College in Chicago when her Ding Dong School first aired in that city on the local NBC television affiliate. The show went national in November of 1952 and aired for four years until NBC replaced it with The Price Is Right. Horwich, who had prudently retained the rights, then syndicated her program, which continued to be broadcast on various stations until 1965. At its peak Ding Dong School was said to have 95% of the nation’s preschool TV viewing audience. Horwich lived till 2001, dying in retirement in Arizona at the venerable age of 94. ↩︎

23. Harold Willard Gleason, Jr. (1923-2003), eventual “chairpossum” (his term) of the English department at Shippensburg State University in Pennsylvania, and in his 60s the founder of the school’s Runners' Club. A career army reservist and veteran of two wars, a devout Anglican, a teacher of wide learning, ready wit, and unfailing kindness, and a lifelong role model for this columnist. ↩︎

24. Heather McHale, to whom we are grateful for allowing us to pass this story on. ↩︎

25. This brings to two the number of tow-truck jokes we know, the other being “What do you get when you cross a tote bag with a rucksack?” ↩︎