Vol XXXI, No 4 []

Pronouns in Thai

Euan Harvey, Mahidol University International College

As anyone who has tried to learn it will know, Thai is a most deceptive language. At first glance into a Thai textbook, it can appear quite simple, especially if compared to a language like Japanese. The newcomer to Japanese will learn that the verb go (iku), for example, can variously be conjugated as ikimasu, itta, ikimashita, ikanai, ikimasen, ikanakatta, ikimasen deshita, itte, ikeba, ikou, ikareru, ikaseru, ikeru, and ike.

Compare this to Thai, which as an isolating language has no conjugation. The newcomer to Thai will be relieved to find that time and aspect, for example, are indicated simply by the addition of an adverb to a sentence. Phom (I) hen (see) khun (you), for example, becomes phom hen khun laeow (already) to indicate a completed action, or phom dja (will) hen khun to indicate a planned or future action. To make things even simpler, Thai verbs are not conjugated for person (khun hen: ‘you see’; khaow hen: ‘he/she sees’) or for number (phom hen: ‘I see’; rau hen: ‘we see’).

What could be simpler?

Cue bitter laughter from the author. Unlike Japanese, Thai does not confront the language learner with complexity from the very beginning. Rather, the Byzantine intricacy of some portions of the language emerges only gradually. Probably the single most difficult aspect of Thai for non-native speakers to master is the pronoun system, both because of its complexity and because choosing an appropriate pronoun requires a deep knowledge of Thai culture. In the rest of this article, I will first talk about pronouns themselves, then the mass of other words that can also function as pronouns, and finally how these words reflect the deeply held values of Thai culture.

First person pronouns

To begin with, the choice of first person pronoun in Thai depends not only on number but also on the gender of the speaker and the level of politeness appropriate to a given situation. Below are some—but by no means all—first person pronouns for males and females.

Kra-phom This pronoun is used by men when speaking to people of higher status. It is somewhat old-fashioned, and usually only used by middle-aged or older men.

Phom Also the word for ‘hair’ in Thai, this is the default first person pronoun for men, the one phrasebooks teach. It is appropriate for conversations between strangers, but friends would choose another pronoun.

Chan This is the equivalent of phom for women, and is the most common first person pronoun used for women. It is also sometimes used by males, but only in certain situations. One notable example is in Thai pop-songs, where both male and female singers will refer to themselves as chan.

Dii-chan This is a more formal version of chan, for women only.

Rao This pronoun is the first person plural pronoun, but it is also used as an informal first person singular pronoun.

Gu / Kha Both these pronouns are used when speaking to very close friends. In other situations (for example, a husband and wife speaking), these pronouns are extremely offensive.

Second person pronouns

As with first person pronouns, the choice of second person pronoun in Thai depends on the level of politeness desired and the gender of the addressee.

Than This is a very formal pronoun, only used when addressing males of much higher social status.

Khun The equivalent of phom, this is the default second person pronoun for men and women. As with phom, it is appropriate for conversations between strangers, but friends or close acquaintances would choose a different pronoun.

Khun-ying This is the equivalent of than for women. The word ying in Thai means ‘female.’

Theur This pronoun has approximately the same level of politeness as chan. It can be used to address friends or close acquaintances.

Meung / Gae These are the equivalent second person pronouns for gu and kha. Both are extremely insulting if used to anyone but the closest of friends.

These first and second person pronouns tend to occur in paired sets. So, for example, if a speaker uses gu as the first person pronoun, he or she will probably use meung as the second person pronoun. Similarly, phom/chan and khun form a paired set, as do chan and theur in pop songs.

So to illustrate this, ‘I see you’ (the example sentence used at the beginning of this article) has a number of possible translations into Thai.

Phom hen khun Speaker is a male addressing someone to whom he is not close and who is of equal or slightly higher status

Dii-chan hen khun Speaker is a woman addressing someone to whom she is not close and who is of higher status

Kra-phom hen than Speaker is a male addressing a male of much higher status. Speaker is also probably middle-aged or older.

Kra-phom hen khun-ying Speaker is a male addressing a female of much higher status. Speaker is also probably middle-aged or older.

Dii-chan hen than Speaker is a female addressing a male of much higher status.

Dii-chan hen khun-ying Speaker is a female addressing a female of much higher status.

Chan hen khun Speaker is a female addressing someone of equal or slightly-higher status.

Chan hen theur Speaker is probably a female—but possibly a male—addressing someone with whom they are familiar.

Gu hen meung Speaker is addressing someone to whom they are very close

However, these paired sets are not always used. A paired set like this reflects nearly equal status for speaker and addressee. When there is a perceived gap in social status, then the pronouns used will reflect this. For example, if a male manager of a factory addresses a female line worker (such are often the patriarchal realities of life in Thailand), he might use phom as a first person pronoun and theur as a second person pronoun. The female line worker, on the other hand, might use chan as a first person pronoun and khun as a second person pronoun.

The choice of pronoun does not, however, simply reflect the social context of a conversation; it can influence the situation as well. The choice of a pronoun less polite than is normal can be seen as rude or aggressive. Using meung when meeting a Thai for the first time is extremely rude, perhaps equivalent to using one of the fruitier Anglo-Saxon four-letter expressions to refer to someone upon being introduced to them. Likewise, using phom as a first person pronoun when speaking with close friends can either be used for a show of anger and social distancing, or alternatively for humorous effect—if the addressee is getting a little big for his boots.

Other words

So far, so simple. However, the first and second person pronouns discussed above are not the only words that can function as pronouns in Thai. To understand why, we need to consider the nature of what a pronoun actually is in Thai—and it’s something quite different from what a pronoun is in English.

In English, pronouns form a closed lexical set. Words can be added to this set or removed from it only with the passage of long periods of time and gradual language change, hence the repeated failures of attempts to introduce a gender-neutral third person pronoun to the language. In addition to this, English has fairly strict rules about how pronouns can be used. People speaking about themselves in the third person sound rather peculiar, and although people can use grandfather as a vocative, to use it as a second person pronoun would be decidedly. . . odd.

In Thai, however, pronouns form an open set, meaning that a large number of other words can function as pronouns. For example, it is very common to hear kinship terms used as pronouns. Words such as lung (father or mother’s older brother), ah (father’s younger brother), nah (mother’s younger brother), dah (maternal grandfather), yai (maternal grandmother), ya (paternal grandmother), or bu (paternal grandfather) can all be used as pronouns—first, second, or third person. The same applies to luk (child), por (father), and mae (mother).

Another kind of word commonly used as a pronoun is a person’s title. For example, the word for a university lecturer in Thai is ajaan. This also functions as a person’s title in the same way that Mr./Dr./Professor does in English. As well as being a title, ajaan can also function as a pronoun (first, second, or third) in the same way as the kinship terms given above.

A third choice of pronoun—frequently used by women—is the nickname of the speaker or the addressee. My wife, for example, uses her nickname (Fon ‘Rain’) as a first person pronoun in most situations. Men, however, do this much less frequently; its use is seen as somewhat effeminate.

Another paired set of pronouns frequently heard is phi and nong. Phi is used to refer to someone who is older or who has higher social status, while nong is used for people who are younger or have lower social status. As with titles and kinship terms, phi and nong can be used as both first and second person pronouns. Space unfortunately prohibits a detailed discussion of the concepts behind these two words and, perhaps more importantly, how one decides who is phi and who is nong.

Finally, the Thai language has adopted pronouns from other languages. The Chinese heeya is sometimes used as an alternative to phi. Caution must be exercised here, though, as only the rising tone separates this word from heeya (falling tone), a word perhaps best translated as ‘wretched and low monitor lizard,’ although this doesn’t quite capture the full force of feeling of the word.

Royal and Religious Pronouns

In addition to the plethora of pronouns above, Thai also has specialized pronouns used when addressing the royal family or monks. Some examples are given below.

Kha pa pra puttha jao This is a first person pronoun only used when addressing Their Majesties the King and Queen of Thailand. A literal translation is ‘slave (kha) of the Lord (jao) Buddha (puttha).’ The word pra prefixes sacred objects. This is also the first word of the Thai national anthem.

Dai fah laong tulee pra baht This is a second person pronoun used when addressing Their Majesties the King and Queen of Thailand. A literal translation is (the speaker is) ‘under the dust which is under the soles of the sacred/royal feet.’

Yom First person pronoun used by monks.

Attama Second person pronoun used by monks.

Derivation of Pronouns and Their Significance

Pronoun usage is not simply a grammatical system in Thai; the use and derivation of pronouns reflect the core values of Thai culture. This can be neatly illustrated by looking at the derivation of the most common first person pronoun for men, phom. As mentioned above, phom is not only a male first person pronoun, it is also the Thai for ‘hair’ (head hair only, body hair being khon). Many Thai speakers will claim that there is no connection between the two words, and the most popular Thai-English dictionary sold in Thailand uses separate entries for the two senses, treating them as unrelated homonyms. The words are related, however, and the derivation of the pronoun illustrates the ways in which the values of a culture permeate its language.

The use of the pronoun phom derives from the custom of using a high part of your anatomy to address a low part of the anatomy of a person of higher social rank. In his book Thai Ways, Denis Segaller has the following quote:

For example an untitled commoner would call himself phom when addressing a commoner with the title of Phya, whom he would address as tai thao (sole of the feet). Phom rian tai thao—literally “my hair is addressing the soles of your feet.” Similarly, when talking to a prince, you would call yourself kramom, and call the prince fa baht, literally: “the top of my head is addressing the soles of your royal feet.”

Essentially then, the highest parts of one’s body are used to address the lowest parts of the body of someone of superior rank. This reaches an extreme when addressing Their Majesties the King or Queen. The correct second person pronoun in this situation would be dai fah laong tulee pra baht—translated above as ‘under the dust which is under the soles of the sacred/royal feet.’ Royalty is so far above everyone else that the highest part of a person’s body must now be used to address, not their feet, but the dust beneath their feet.

This ranking of body parts into a hierarchy illustrates the Thai concept of thii tam, thii soong (low place, high place). The head, face, and hair are considered as not only literally higher, but spiritually higher as well. People are also placed in this hierarchy. People are perceived as being of higher or lower status depending on age, family status, occupation, professional rank, or a number of other factors. Using the highest part of your body to address the lowest part of the body of someone of higher rank becomes a metaphorical way to reflect status differences in society.

To conclude then, pronouns in Thai work in fundamentally different ways from pronouns in English. While the class of pronouns in English forms a closed set with clear grammatical rules for their use, the class of words that can function as pronouns in Thai is open and fluid. The choice of an appropriate pronoun does not simply require knowledge of grammatical correctness but also an understanding of contextual and cultural variables, perhaps the most important of which are the status and relationship of oneself and the person to whom one is speaking. Judging status, of course, requires an understanding of the very heart of a culture. Therefore, it is reasonable to say that learning to use Thai pronouns appropriately requires more study of Thai culture than of the Thai language itself.

And finally, I would like to offer a word of encouragement to anyone thinking of traveling to Thailand or learning Thai. In recent years, fashionable young people in Bangkok have begun to use I and you as first and second person pronouns. So perhaps learning Thai needn’t be quite so taxing after all. . .

[Euan Harvey holds an MA in Applied Linguistics from Macquarie University, Australia, and teaches writing and basic linguistics at Mahidol University International College in Thailand.]

The Un-History of the Undead: From Superstition to Celluloid

Tim Kane, Chula Vista, California

Imagine that a vampire knocked on your door—a real, true to life (or death) vampire. You open the door and find a ruddy-faced overweight man with long fingernails, his mouth and left eye open, and dressed in a linen shroud. Not what you expected? Did you expect to find a well-groomed man, tall with pale skin, fangs, and a cape slung around his shoulders?

This same comparison can be made for another walking corpse: the zombie. Which image is more familiar? Do you envision a black man, looking every bit normal and alive, except for the listless expression and glazed eyes? Or would you imagine of a shambling carcass of rotting flesh and bones that wants nothing more than to pull you out of your house and munch on your intestines?

Both words, zombie and vampire, signify a member of the undead—those creatures that come back to haunt the living. However, the image that comes to mind for these creatures has been greatly shaped by popular media, such as literature and film. In the examples above, the first description comes from folklore, while the second is influenced by fiction. How did our perception of these creatures change over the years?

The word vampire first appeared in the English language during the vampire hysteria of the early 1700s. With the Peace of Passarowitz, Austria regained control of parts of Serbia and Walachia, and the occupying Austrians began to notice an unusual local practice, that of exhuming cadavers and killing them again. Although this had been going on in the region for some time, once the rest of Europe got wind of it the story flew through scientific circles.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists the word vampire as entering English in 1734¹, but the term may have entered European writing earlier than this.² The events in Eastern Europe amounted to media frenzy, and two of the early stars were a farmer named Peter Plogojowitz³ and a former soldier named Arnold Paole⁴.

The accounts of Plogojowitz’s postmortem activities correlate to many of the accounts from around the region. Firstly, the victims of the vampire die quickly, usually in one day, and complain of feeling suffocated⁵. Also, several deaths are listed as due to fright, apparently from simply viewing the creature. The vampires are seen not only at night, but also during the day. When not attacking people or livestock, the vampire might become obsessed with his former possessions⁶.

In order to put a stop to the vampire epidemic, the local authorities would, after a formal inquiry, disinter the body and kill the vampire. The corpse, rather than having the pale appearance we would expect of a vampire, was flush and even ruddy in complexion. The locals attributed this to the vampire’s appetite for blood. Rills of warm blood oozing from the lips were seen a proof of the vampire’s activity. The vampire also had red lips, newly grown hair and fingernails, as well as a fresh skin.⁷ When discovered in the coffin, the corpse would have shifted his position, and would often have his mouth open along with one or both eyes[^8]. A foul odor accompanied the disinterred vampire, and the villagers associated this with the spread of the disease⁸.

The villagers disposed of the vampire by staking it though the chest, and many corpses were reported to scream or groan when pierced. When impalement proved unsuccessful⁹ decapitation and immolation were acceptable means of disposal. Unlike the modern vampire, nearly all cases of vampirism began with an unusual event, such as a strange birth¹⁰, untimely death, or simply by being a difficult or gloomy individual¹¹.

By March 1731, vampire mania had reached the ears of the Austrian Emperor. He ordered Regimental Field Surgeon Johannes Fluckinger to investigate. Fluckinger’s report on the vampires of Medvegia quickly became a bestseller, making Arnold Paole the most famous vampire in France and England. This touched off a debate over the true nature of vampires that raged through the 1750s. On one side of the argument was the Italian archbishop Guiseppe Davanzati, who concluded that the reports were mere fantasies. The villagers, being illiterate peasants, were easily deceived. A French Roman Catholic scholar, Dom Augustin Calmet, put forth the opposing view. He also studied all reports of vampirism, but could not rule out superstition or the work of the devil.

The public’s vision of vampires thus far has been one of folklore. Everything changed once the vampire entered the realm of fiction. The first significant vampire story in English was John Polidori’s The Vampyre, which featured Lord Ruthven¹² returning from the dead to have an affair with the narrator’s sister. The story spread quickly due to the fact that Polidori published it under his former patient’s name, Lord Byron.

The elements modern audiences most associate with the word vampire—fangs, pale skin, shimmering eyes, and immense strength—were not a product of Abraham Stoker’s imagination, but of James Malcolm Rymer’s. In the mid 1840s, Rymer produced serial chapters of his novel Varney the Vampyre. It ran 868 pages and attracted a huge following in Britain. Varney would serve as inspiration for Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula. However, both Stoker and Rymer had their vampires go about in daylight. When did the idea that vampires would perish in sunlight attach itself to the vampire mythology?

In the twentieth century, the vampire leapt off the page and onto the silver screen. Bela Lugosi appeared first in the 1927 stage production of Dracula, and later in the 1931 movie, forever adding the widow’s peak and the cape to our image of a vampire. However it was with two subsequent movies, released twelve years later, that made exposure to sunlight fatal for the vampire.

In the 1943 production of Son of Dracula the vampire, Count Alucard (played by everyone’s favorite werewolf Lon Chaney Jr.), is caught when the sun comes up. He falls into a puddle and fades away, leaving only his skeleton. In 1944 Lugosi again played a vampire, this time named Armand Tesla in Return of the Vampire. At the end of the film Armand is staked in broad daylight and physically melts before the camera. The dissolving of the blood-sucking corpse after death was solidified by the hugely successful 1958 production, Horror of Dracula. Here the vampire, played by Christopher Lee, dissolves to ash in vibrant color when struck by the rays of the sun.

Although many new cinematic vampires have come and gone, none resonate as strongly as the performances of Lugosi and Lee. Their interpretations of Stoker’s text have shaped our perception of the vampire, now wholly removed from the folklore that gave it birth. The vampire, at least, had a history in literature before it made the leap to the screen. Our next undead wasn’t so lucky.

Lafcadio Hearn introduced English speakers to the word zombie¹³ through his brief article, “The Country of the Comers-Back”, which appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1889. Hearn had traveled to Martinique in 1887 to study local customs and folklore for a series of articles on the Caribbean. It was there that he heard talk of zombies.

While it’s true that Hearn discovered the zombie, it was left to American adventurer William Seabrook to capitalize on it. Arriving in Haiti in 1928, he left no stone unturned in his quest for the corps cadavers (walking dead). This led to his autobiographical travelogue The Magic Island, which became an immediate bestseller.

A Haitian farmer by the name of Polynice introduced Seabrook to some real live zombies. The farmer brought the adventurer to the middle of a plantation and pointed out three zombies and the man controlling them. Seabrook went up to each of the zombies in turn, and found them to be little more than dumb brutes, working mindlessly. The eyes were dead, unfocused and vacant.

A central precept of Voodoo, a hybrid of African animism and Catholicism, is the possession of a body by the loa¹⁴. A person was believed to have two souls, the gros-bon-age (the big good angel), and the ti-bon-age (the little good angel). Each soul served a purpose. The gros-bon-age served to give the body life, while the ti-bon-age gave the person their personality. During a Voodoo ceremony, the loa would displace the ti-bon-age, and thus control the person’s body.

A Voodoo sorcerer, called a bòkò, had the ability to transform any person into a zombie. The bòkò would sprinkle a powder on the doorstep, and when the intended victim stepped on it, the magic entered through the soles of the feet. The person died soon after. Within three days the bòkò snuck into the graveyard, recited a magical chant, and called the victim’s name several times. The zombie had no choice but to answer¹⁵ and come out of the ground. The bòkò then beat the body with a whip to keep the ti-bon-age from returning¹⁶.

Every member of society shunned the zombie. This fear did not center on what the creature might do physically. Zombies were entirely docile. It was becoming a zombie that so horrified the islanders. This represented a return to slavery, as the creature must literally do whatever its master bids. Even after death, you might return to work in servitude¹⁷.

In order to prevent loved ones from becoming zombies, Haitians took precautions similar to what the Serbians did for vampires. The body was often killed again, either by poison, strangulation, stabbing, a shot to the head or decapitation. Measures were also taken to prevent the zombie from rising. A wealthy family would bury their loved one in a solid tomb, while the less off would inter the body under a piece of heavy masonry. Finally, a zombie might be distracted so that he might not hear the bòkò calling his name¹⁸.

Becoming a zombie was not necessarily a permanent condition. There were several cases of people who died, only to be discovered many years later seemingly normal. One Clairvius Narcisse died in 1962 after complaining of sickness and coughing up blood. Eighteen years later his sister, Angelina, discovered him in the l’Estere marketplace. His speech was slurred and his muscles were weak, but he knew that he was no longer a zombie. Apparently, after being dug up and beaten by the bòkò, he had worked on a farm with other zombies. Only when one of the zombies killed the zombie master did they all become free.

Another way to cure an individual of the zombie curse was with salt. If a zombie consumed even a grain of salt, the fog that swirled around his brain would lift, and he would become filled with an unspeakable rage. He would first turn on the one who controlled him, killing the zombie master and destroying his property. The released zombie would then go in search of his tomb, claw at the dirt, and collapse onto his empty grave.

Seabrook’s 1929 publication of Magic Island touched off interest in the zombie and the Caribbean. Unlike Dracula or Frankenstein, the zombie wasn’t under copyright, since Seabrook was essentially reporting on fact. This led to the production of Universal’s 1932 White Zombie¹⁹, with Bela Lugosi as the zombie master. The film cemented the Haitian myth of the zombie as a soulless body accepting any order. However the Voodoo version of the zombie would quickly be forgotten in the 60s when an independent filmmaker from Pittsburg got a hold of the concept.

Night of the Living Dead, released on October 2, 1968, so shocked America, that Variety’s review included this scathing critique: “On no level is the unrelieved grossness of ‘Night of the Living Dead’ disguised by a feeble attempt at art of significance²⁰.” What was it that had audiences of the late 60s so terrified? Up until then, monsters were typically people in rubber suits, and zombies had been relegated to strangling or bludgeoning their victims. Romero made his zombies crave human flesh. Critic Robert Ebert commented on the horror in the pages of Reader’s Digest: “This was ghouls²¹ eating people.”

Romero’s zombies were completely divorced from the corps cadavers of the Caribbean. These creatures rose from the dead through a pseudo-scientific agent²², and rather than appearing docile and compliant, they were wildly aggressive, doing everything possible to tear people apart and eat their flesh. Finally, the zombie’s fate in Romero’s film was permanent. There was no zombie master to kill, and salt would not wake these creatures from their trance. These were truly the living dead. The additions Romero made to the zombie mythology have so dominated the genre that few movies made afterward strayed from his formula²³.

Romero never refers to his walking dead by the word zombie. Instead each of his films calls them the living dead. Despite this technicality, modern moviegoers made the connection. When Romero’s second film, Dawn of the Dead, was released in 1978, it was distributed internationally as Zombie (or Zombi).

An intriguing fact presents itself when titles of zombie films are viewed as a whole. Nearly every film title translated into English will use the word zombie, even if this was not in the original title. Take for example the 1980 Spanish and French production El lago de los muertos vivientes (literally, The Lake of the Living Dead). When this film was released in the United States, it took the title Zombie Lake. Interestingly, the word zombie hardly ever appears in titles for French, Spanish, or Italian films²⁴. These languages prefer to call the walking dead les morts vivants (French for the living dead) or simply los muertos (Spanish for the dead). Perhaps these counties were influenced by the George Romero films²⁵, or even that the word zombie has a stronger connection with the Americas, having its origin in the Caribbean.

So once again, let’s revisit those lowly creatures on our front stoop. Although the ruddy-faced Serbian corpse might represent a vampire in folklore, he would hardly be recognized today. The symbols of the vampire, the cape and the fangs, were instilled by Bela Lugosi. Likewise, we expect our zombies to be rotten and hungry for flesh, not blank-faced and obedient. In each case, as the mythology leapt from one medium to another, folklore to literature to film, it transformed. Certain elements were lost. Others were reinvented. Perhaps we’re not finished yet. As zombies and vampires enter new realms, the meanings of these words may further mutate to a point where we might not even recognize them.

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[Though Tim Kane teaches sixth grade, his passion lies with all things undead and creepy. His book,The Changing Vampire of Film and Television, will tell you all you’ll ever want to know about vampire films. His website is www.timkanebooks.com.]

A Car by Any Other Name …

Keith Hall, Cottesloe, Western Australia

Car names can be a never-ending source of amusement. At the most basic level, everyone gets a laugh out of ridiculously unlikely cars names like the Daihatsu Naked, Piaggio Ape, Mazda Bongo Brawny and Renault Kangoo. But even ordinary car names can become entertaining in the hands of word puzzlers, who crank up the humour by treating the names as subtly coded acronyms. As a result, Buick becomes ‘Big Ugly Indestructible Car Killer’ and Chevrolet is expanded into ‘Can Hear Every Valve Rap On Long Extended Trips’.

European cars get the same treatment, with names like ‘Beautiful Mechanical Wonder’ or the more negative sounding ‘Bavarian Money Waster’. Other disenchanted owners refer to their vehicles as ‘Fix It All the Time’ and ‘Swedish Automobiles Always Breakdown’. Asian cars are not exempt, as shown by ‘Had One, Never Did Again’ and ‘Here’s Y U Never Drive An Import’.

Another popular word game is spotting funny number plates. Depending where you live, number plates are normally limited to somewhere between six and ten characters. That is no problem if you just want to call your car FRED, BINKY, ENVY IT or 55 CHEV. But using those few characters to say something deep and meaningful about your own character is more of a challenge. Fortunately, many car owners have demonstrated their creativity by producing number plates with attention-grabbing messages like ILUVYU, IMRICH, FANCEME, ORSOME, OWESOME, U2SLO, IAMQUIK, RUQIKA, 2FAST4U and even RS KIKR. The possibilities are endless.

Although these mind games are very entertaining, I have always been puzzled by a much more fundamental question: Why do manufacturers choose such strange names for their cars? Car companies obviously want their product to be desirable and aspirational, not an object of mirth. So why do so many cars have quirkily amusing names?

You could hypothesise that most car designers simply want to be Italian. After all, many car names sound like they were chosen from the menu in an Italian restaurant or a travel guide to Italy. As well as the oddly named Suzuki ‘Cino, car names run an alphabetical gamut of mock-Italian names from Acura, Aerio, Altima, Amanti, Astra, Astro, Areva, Baleno, Camaro, Capella, Capri, Cielo, Cortina, Elantra, Espero, Festiva, Fiesta, Firenza, Forenza, Futura, Impreza, Infiniti, Leganza, Magna, Magnus, Mantica, Marina, Maxima, Miata, Monaro, Mondeo, Murano, Musso, Nubira, Optima, Persona, Prado, Sedona, Sentra, Sienna, Sigma, Solara, Sorento, Stratus, Tempo, Terraza, Torino, Trio, Vitara and Verona, through to Xterra.

Okay, these names aren’t all mock-Italian; many have a hint of Spanish, Latin or Greek. But the overall flavour is definitely Mediterranean. German, French and even English names seem to be much less popular—even for Japanese cars. Do car designers (or their marketing experts) think that most car buyers like to fantasise that they are macho Mediterranean Romeos? But if that were the case, how could we explain all the other car names that aren’t remotely Mediterranean?

Or maybe the car name could be intended to tell you something about the car itself. But then you might think that a Ford Mustang goes as fast as a horse—or that it has one horse power. And you might expect the Mitsubishi Colt to be a deadly weapon that is good at killing people. And the Chrysler Crossfire would be a place to avoid totally. A cynic might see some truth in these interpretations, but it’s unlikely that the manufacturers have such ideas in mind.

One day when I was mulling over this mystery of car names, I met a lady who told me, “I bought a Ford Mustang because I like horses.” She loved all those little horsy motifs on the grille, wheels and dash—but more importantly, she just liked horses. In a blinding flash of understanding, I realized that there was a deep psychological slant to many car names—they were deliberately chosen to make subliminal connections with the jobs, hobbies or interests of car purchasers. So the car names don’t tell you anything about the car; instead they tell you a lot about the car owner.

With this new insight, it suddenly became evident that car names come in groups that are designed to appeal to specific groups of people. For example, music lovers would probably be attracted to cars like the Honda Quintet, Honda Jazz, Honda Concerto, Honda Prelude, Hyundai Sonata, Austin Allegro and Austin Maestro. If Mozart was alive today, he would probably drive a Honda.

Royal families around the world must account for a large part of the car market, because there are many cars specifically targeted at them: Toyota Corona, Toyota Crown, Austin Princess, Vauxhall Prince Henry, Vauxhall Royale, Chrysler Royal, Chrysler Crown Imperial, Ford Crown Victoria and Mercury Grand Marquis. And of course, Royals might also be attracted to the Volkswagen Polo. Surprisingly, some of these cars are produced in America, where there is no royal family. Maybe they are for people with Royalist sympathies, or for romantics who hope to marry a prince or princess one day.

Politicians also have a variety of cars to choose from, including the Studebaker President, Vauxhall Senator, Holden Statesman, Eagle Premier, American Motors Ambassador (or Austin, Hindustan Motors or Nash Ambassador) and Dodge Diplomat. Presumably car manufacturers know that politicians choose their car to match their current status, or their career aspirations.

Like my horse-loving, Mustang-owning friend, animal lovers are well served by car manufacturers. Depending on the type of animal they like, they can choose from cars like the Barracuda, Corvette Stingray, Chevrolet Impala, Jaguar, Ford Cougar, Cobra, Dodge Viper, Dodge Ram, Ford Thunderbird, Volkswagen Beetle, Alfa Spider (or the Maserati, Toyota or Mitsubishi Spider, for that matter), Datsun Bluebird, Ford Falcon, Suzuki Swift and Eagle Premier. Hens, cows and elephants don’t get much attention in car names, but maybe that’s not surprising. The Hyundai Hen and Chevrolet Cow don’t sound like they would be winners.

Unlike animal lovers, sports fans have relatively few cars to choose from. There are the Volkswagen Golf, Volkswagen Polo, Ford Freestyle, Buick LaCrosse and Buick LeSabre. But no car manufacturers seem to be interested in appealing to fans of baseball, football or basketball. Surely there is a huge missed business opportunity here. And talking about business, there are surprisingly few cars that are specifically targeted at business people. There is only the Kia Mentor or the Executive, a car name used by a variety of companies, including Ford, Packard and Pontiac. Obviously another missed business opportunity.

Pilots would undoubtedly be attracted to cars like the Honda Pilot, Ford Pilot, Triumph Spitfire and Lincoln Aviator. But sailors would prefer a Morris Marina, Mercury Mariner, Lincoln Navigator, Chrysler Cruiser, Nissan Armada, Hudson Commodore, or maybe even a Honda Odyssey.

Cowboys would probably buy a Ford Mustang or Mitsubishi Colt, though Asian cowboys may like the Mitsubishi Starion. British cowboys have to settle for an Austin A40 Countryman. Even sensitive, new age gun owners haven’t been ignored. In addition to the Mitsubishi Colt, they can choose a Dodge Magnum, Ford Magnum or Chrysler Crossfire.

Scientists may like to buy a Ford Laser, Ford Fusion, Honda Element, Mercury, Chrysler Neon, Dodge Neon, Chevrolet Cobalt, Kia Spectra, Saturn ION or a Proton. Astronomers and astrologers are well-served too, with cars like a Saturn, Nissan Titan, Ford Galaxie, Ford Orion, Ford Scorpio, Ford Taurus, Mitsubishi Eclipse and Pontiac Sunfire. Even weather forecasters aren’t overlooked. They can buy a Chevrolet Equinox, Mitsubishi Nimbus or Dodge Stratus.

Among the other professions, photographers would probably choose the Ford Focus, while accountants may feel some affinity for the Hyundai Excel. Even outlandish people are catered for—they may like the mysteriously named Subaru Outlander or Mitsubishi Outlander.

But what about readers, writers, and linguists? Have lovers of the written and spoken word been rudely ignored by the car industry? Fortunately, we haven’t been totally overlooked. While the choice is rather limited, we can choose a Hyundai Accent, Datsun Stanza or Honda Odyssey. Even the inexplicably named Lexus sounds more suitable for linguists than for most other people.

Although linguists haven’t been particularly well served by the car industry, it is clear that we have something to offer. We certainly have some unique insights when it comes to interesting words, and the time is now ripe for us to take a bigger role in developing new car names. Who knows, we could even become highly sought after and paid astronomical fees for our novel insights! That would be a new phenomenon—who ever heard of a well-paid linguist?

But how would we develop more marketable names? Maybe we could start by looking for groups of people who don’t have many cars to choose from. But anyone could do that—it doesn’t require a linguist. Homonyms seem to offer a more interesting approach. You may have already noticed that some of the car names discussed above are relevant to several different types of car owner. Using homonym power, the Dodge Ram could probably be marketed successfully to computer geeks and Hindus as well as to animal lovers.

From a linguist’s perspective, it would be logical to use homonyms for all new car names. That would broaden the car’s appeal across several different groups of consumers and hence increase sales. For example, a car named Homer would appeal to poets, book readers and also to baseball fans (and fans of The Simpsons). As an added bonus, it should even sell well in Homer, Alaska, plus all the other Homers scattered across the US. Maybe the Homer is a mega-brand waiting to be discovered.

There are many other sport-related car names potentially waiting to be discovered. You might think of Goal and Champion, but they are too obvious and one-dimensional. Club has more potential—as well as being relevant to golfers, it should also resonate for members of sports and social clubs. Bat has even more multi-dimensionality, being meaningful for baseball and cricket fans, biologists, Batman fans and even vampires—assuming that they drive cars on their way from one victim to the next. In the same way Pitch could appeal to baseball fans, old sailors, salesmen, musicians and maybe even Satanists.

Not many car names seriously attempt to target the younger generation. They might like Gen X or Gen Y, but a car called ME should tap more subtly into the mindset of many young people. And older people as well, for that matter—in fact this could be the universal ego-flattering name, since most car owners obviously think of their car as an extension of their own persona. As a bonus, the car would probably sell to Marketing Executives and also in the Middle East.

Young rappers would probably like a car called a DJ or even Deejay. That should also catch a few investors, who would be subliminally attracted to the hint of the Dow-Jones. And of course all those people whose initials are DJ; like David Janson and Debbie Jones. For business men you could have a car called Leader or Profit, but maybe MD would appeal to Managing Directors (both current and aspiring)—and also to Marketing Directors, Medical Doctors, Martha Dixon, Maxwell Davies, and many more.

A more subtle use of homonyms would be to follow the non-lingual letter-number naming style (Ford F-250, Mazda MX-5 and Jaguar XJ-6) to make hidden words. For example, a car named the K-9 would undoubtedly sell well with dog lovers—and also with fans of Doctor Who, with its canine robot. Unfortunately, those people with the creative number plates would probably outperform linguists at this game.

If Shakespeare was still with us, he would probably write a poem advising us that a car by any other name would run as well. But it might not sell as well. After all, how many Daihatsu Nakeds, Piaggio Apes, Mazda Bongo Brawnys and Renault Kangoos have you seen today?

A Scientific Investigation Into a Linguistic Matter of Some Importance

Marvin E. Mengeling, Oshkosh, Wisconsin

If it were possible (which it isn’t) to poll all the speakers of English as to their choice for the FUNNIEST word in the language, most words would probably get no votes at all (e.g., the, and, at, to), while others would no doubt garner some; surely booby, bozo, doohickey, doofus, and Hilfiger would have their advocates. Nevertheless, it only stands to reason that out of the nearly one million words in the spoken language one would have to get more votes than any other. Obviously there cannot be a consensus on what this word might be because different folks have different funny strokes; indeed, some people don’t find anything funny (these well meaning but hugely boring and tiresome folks invariably reveal themselves when they open their downturned mouths and say, “Well, I’ve got a very good sense of humor, but…”). So even though there can’t be a consensus, there can be a winner.

Although I’m no lexicographer, i.e. language “scientist,” I have long been interested in words, some of which I use on a daily basis. Many years ago, after I had expended much intellectual effort in determining that the ugliest word in the English language is snot (these days, possibly FEMA), I decided to devote myself to an even more difficult challenge, determining what word in the English language is the “funniest.” Not having the means to poll hundreds of millions of English speakers I did the next best thing; I relied on my own sense of what’s funny and what isn’t, and through an arduous, sometimes painful process of elimination I eventually narrowed the list of possibilities to two words, neither of which is inherently humorous according to dictionary definitions.

About this same time I happened to be teaching an adult education class in humor and joke writing at a place called the Winchester Academy, and decided to elicit the help of my students in making the final choice between the two contestants, so after I had carefully explained the premise to them I simply said the word rump, the sound of which brought forth a sizable class laugh. After waiting for things to calm down, I followed with the word crotch. When the intensity of the laughter rose to almost epic proportions I figured I had a tentative answer. Crotch brought a bigger laugh, ergo was the funnier word.

But a good researcher is never satisfied with tentative findings so I decided to proceed more scientifically and proposed to the class the following experiment. I would place each of the two words in identical unfunny contexts and then determine which one, if either, elicited the most laughter. After careful consideration I decided that for the unfunny contexts I would use the titles of serious works of literature—novels, poems, plays—and alternately substitute rump or crotch for one of the words in the title. Who knows, perhaps neither word would seem at all funny under such seriously stringent scientific test conditions.

I began with Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Rumps and The Canterbury Crotches. When much merriment burst forth over both these titles I knew our scientific experiment was on the right track. I’ll just mention a few more titles I used that night, but to save precious space I’ll leave a blank in place of one of the title words and let readers make their own substitutions of rump or crotch as suits their scientific fancy. How about Shakespeare’s *The Merrie_____s of Windsor, The Taming of the_____*, or *All’s Well That Ends_____*. Or Charles Dickens’ *The Old Curiosity* *_____*, *A Tale of Two_____*s, and *_____ Expectations*. How about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s *The Scarlet* *_____,* or Melville’s *Moby* *_____* (or *_____Dick*?), or Twain’s *A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s_____*. Or how about Faulkner’s *The_____and the Fury*, or Cooper’s *The_____of the Mohicans*, or Crane’s *The Red_____of Courage*. Then there’s Proust’s *Remembrance of* *_____s Past* (or, depending on one’s translation of Proust, perhaps *In* *Search of Lost* *_____*). Popular literature provides Zane Gray’s* Riders of the Purple _____*, or Le Carre’s *The _____Who Came In From The Cold*, and Heinlein’s *Stranger in a Strange* *_____*. And so it goes (speaking of which, how about Vonnegut’s *Slaughterhouse* *_____*?). After awhile all I had to do to get a laugh response was recite titles in their original form; the listeners made their own substitutions, as with some Ian Fleming titles I provided. After I said each title—*On Her Majesty’s Secret Service*, *Thunderball*, and *Goldfinger*—there was a short pause while they mentally made their own blanks and filled them in, followed by hearty bursts of satisfied laughter over what they had discovered. When all was said and done, I was convinced that my exacting scientific search was finally at an end. Far and away the biggest laugh getter on almost every title was *crotch.*

So for many years I was convinced that without doubt crotch was the funniest word in the English language, but last week something extraordinary happened in the midst of a casual evening dinner at home. Here’s what transpired while wife Frankie, son Tom, and myself were conversing and stuffing our faces with pork chops. Someone (I don’t recall if it was Frankie or Tom—sin of memory) used the word squat in casual conversation, though I don’t recall in what connection (more sin); then Tom, in the throes dare I say of a linguistic epiphany, immediately hearkened back to my experiment many years before at Winchester Academy, and blurted out: “Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Squats.” This brought a roar from all present, and we were off to the squat races. Burns’s Cold Sassy Squat, Shakespeare’s Two Squats of Verona (one of Frankie’s better contributions), Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Squat,” Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Squat (Frankie was really getting in the groove now), Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Squat (one of my own contributions I’m proud to say), H. G. Wells’s The War of the Squats, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Squat, Tennessee Williams’s The Squat Menangerie, and A Squat Named Desire, and just so poetry wouldn’t be neglected we added Eliot’s “The Love Squat of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Whitman’s “When Squats Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.” Eventually we knew it was time to quit because we were laughing so much our pork was getting cold and none of us was practiced in the Heimlich maneuver.

Wanting to be as thorough and scientific as possible, I decided to corroborate my new findings with a real scientist, my daughter Brenda who has a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Washington University and is currently doing some sort of mysterious research at the University of California in Davis. So during last week’s “how-are-you-I-am-fine” phone call I explained what I had been working on and repeated some of the examples mentioned above. I was heartened by immediate and continuing laughter at the other end of the phone. Brenda stopped only long enough to contribute Goldsmith’s She Squats to Conquer and the three volumes of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rump, The Two Crotches, and The Squat of the King. It delighted me to know that all her years of education had not gone to waste. I thanked Brenda for her invaluable scientific input and turned the phone over to Tom for less important sibling chitchat. I had to get back to work and record my new findings.

No doubt the alliteration and assonance adds to the merriment on some of these titles (e.g., David Coppercrotch and David Coppersquat), and while it’s true that all three words (rump, crotch, squat) provide some occasional ribald connotations to the modified titles (something, by the way, of which I was completely unaware until it was pointed out to me by someone with a far less innocent mind than my own) the word squat often provides an added dimension of jabberwocky-type nonsense, as in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Squat, Hemingway’s To Squat and Have Not, and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Squat. Also, unlike rump and crotch, in Standard English squat can be used as both a noun and verb, which occasionally provides more amusingly bizarre possibilities. Or when a functional shift occurs and the word is used as an adjective, as in Clarke’s 2001: A Squat Odyssey (or, A Space Squat?). But enough! As they say in professional basketball, too much “analysis brings paralysis.”

My eyes have now been forced open to the sad truth that I have long been a bozo for thinking my search for the funniest word had ended with crotch. My overweening pride of intellect and too much reliance on the scientific method alone had led me to believe that my search had ended years ago, but last week son Thomas’s bit of dinner table linguistic inspiration demonstrated clearly that this belief could well be flapdoodle. I might have jumped too hurriedly to a crotch conclusion. And yet, the years of research have taken their toll; I no longer possess the emotional or mental energy to complete the quest, to follow my bliss. I am, alas, only human after all.

Crotch or Squat? It will not be a question easily answered, though I hope I have provided those who come after me with the scientific approach and tools to complete successfully the last leg of the funniest journey. I must leave the final determination to younger, more capable, more vigorous minds. I leave crotch and squat in their hands, but not without a final caveat (warning). Do not fall victim to the sort of pride that befell Victor Frankenstein and myself. There are some things man (and woman) was not meant to know! Always remember that in his Homilies St. John Chrysostom warned that “laughter does not seem to be a sin, but it leads to sin.” Proceed at your own risk! But allow me to suggest a title with which to proceed: Marvel’s “To His Coy Mistress.”

Biotechnologos: Words of the Life Business

Michael J. Corey, Bellevue, Washington

Biotechnology is a land of eldritch miracles: insulin for diabetics by the kilogram, erythropoietin for regeneration of your red blood cells, viral vectors that cure bubble babies, bone marrow transplants for kids with leukemia, and hundreds more. Where else can you submit an IND for a GMP NCE from NCI to stimulate CTLs in HCV, hoping for an NDA with CDER at the FDA after you see 30% CRs and 50% PRs? This sentence is immediately comprehensible to nearly any American worker in biotechnology. (I’m going to tell you what it means a little later.) Unfortunately, as you can see, we aren’t very good at communicating with anyone except each other. You can’t understand biotechnology without learning some biology. You might not want to learn biology right now, so I’m going to be selective. I’m going to give you examples of biotechnology nomenclature that are illustrative, amusing, or, in some cases, appalling.

Several decades ago I badly needed to find some DIW. In the lab where I was working, no one knew what it meant—and yet the benighted person who wrote the protocol must have thought the acronym obvious: ‘deionized water.’

This is the universal experience of biotechnology initiation. When you visit another lab and talk to the scientists there, they have their own jargon, all the terms are self-evident to them, and if you don’t know them, it’s humiliating. You can look pretty foolish if you think BA refers to barium instead of benzoic acid. You might think DTT is ‘dithiothreitol,’ but they think it’s ‘deoxythymidine triphosphate.’ Will it help to increase the length of the acronym to four letters? TRAP is obviously ‘tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase’—unless you think it’s ‘telomeric repeat amplification protocol.’ But the runaway favorite in the amquadriguous (ammultiguous?) acronym competition is APC. I remember chatting with an immunologist for five minutes before we realized that she meant ‘antigen-presenting cells’ and I meant ‘alternate pathway of complement.’ Then a Vice President came along and insisted that APC actually stood for ‘adenomatous polyposis coli,’ which has something to do with cancer. It turns out that he should have added ‘activated protein C,’ ‘aerobic plate counts,’ and ‘anaphase promoting complex,’ which might have shut us up—until a chemist came along and pointed out that APC is actually ‘aminopropyl cysteine.’

In the absence of predators, biotech acronyms breed without limit. An MAPK (which we call map-K) is a ‘mitogen-activated protein kinase,’ in other words, an enzyme that chemically alters various cellular denizens that commit the cell to a divisive fate. That’s already complicated enough. Unfortunately for our sanity, MAPKs are also activated by kinases, MAPKKs, which in turn are activated by MAPKKKs. Alas, MAPKKKs are also activated by kinases, and to pass a modern qualifying exam for a Ph.D. in a department of Cell Biology, you have to say MAPKKKK without stuttering through the rest of your talk. TNF stands for ‘tumor necrosis factor,’ which helps your cells to kill themselves when they should, but it’s only the beginning. TRAIL is ‘TNF-related…’ never mind. Yes, biotechnologists take the original acronyms and graft them into new ones—forever. TRUNDD stands for ‘TRAIL receptor with a truncated death domain,’ and the names of the related proteins TRID and TRICK were engendered in a similar fashion. If you have a really great acronym, your stock price goes up.

However, biotechnologists also have feelings. ELISA means nothing outside the field, but to us it’s love/hate, because we love the results, but hate doing it ourselves. It stands for ‘enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay,’ a technique of great importance that tells you whether you have cancer or heart disease, and a lot more. Of course it has come to be pronounced just like Alfred P. Doolittle’s offspring. I also like the SMADs. Once upon a time, there was a fruit-fly protein named ‘decapentaplegic homolog 4’ (DPP4). For reasons best lost to history, the scientists who discovered an antagonist of DPP4 called it ‘Mothers against DPP4’ or MAD. Finally, a SMAD is similar to a MAD.

But where’s the color? Acronyms may be endearing or irritating, but they usually fail to stimulate the imagination. We want the bizarre, if we can get it, and for that we need look no further than the developmental biologists, especially those who have done pioneering work with the fearsome fruit fly. Lots of genes that are important in embryonic development were initially identified by looking for sick fruit flies, some of which were the results of X-ray experiments. One of them looked like a hedgehog—but it didn’t achieve immortality until a related mouse gene was called sonic hedgehog. Other mutant flies from the same era are worth remembering: armadillo and gooseberry. The mysterious word sevenless refers to a fly that was missing one member of each seven-part eyestalk. EAS is a fruit fly that is ‘EAsily Shocked,’ but this condition is reversed by escargot, a relative of the SNAIL gene. The timeless mutant forgets whether it’s day or night. Shaker mutants shake. Sick flies with defective memories are called dunce and, cryptically, rutabaga. But the mutation you really don’t want is mushroom body miniature.

There are two kinds of biotechnology buzzwords: the kind we use with the investors, and the kind that actually convey information. Clearly in the first category are terms such as pre-emergence, which means you just got funded—inadequately. It reminds me of pre-need services, which means selling you a burial plot, (usually) before you need it. IP portfolio: that’s your ‘intellectual property,’ in other words, the fantasy that your company is founded on ideas, as reflected in patents. Considering that it takes two years for the US Patent and Trademark Office to answer your letter, you’d better have a low burn rate, which means the rate at which you incinerate money—metaphorically, but it feels right. Now for the actual knowledge: if you’re 483‘ed, you may be out of business. A 483 is a letter from the FDA that starts out pleasantly with “Dear …,” but then gets worse quickly: “Failure to make prompt corrections may result in regulatory action without further notice, such as seizure and/or injunction.” You’ve been putting your thumb on the scale again—but not to worry. FDA agents usually don’t carry large-caliber weapons. That’s why they bring along the US Marshals.

GXP is an interesting term. In the beginning there were ‘good manufacturing practices,’ GMP. Then ‘good laboratory practices,’ GLP. Then people figured out that they could put tissue, training, clinical, personnel, or armadillo in the middle. What GMP means in practice is that you’d better have $5 million just for your building, because you’ll need a Class 100 space to assemble your product: an area where there are no more than 100 particles of 0.5 micrometers or greater per cubic foot, a luscious mixing of metric with English units. By the way, the astronaut-like getup worn by the actual manufacturing technicians to protect the product from their disgusting bodies is called a bunny suit.

It might be cheating to steal the names of interesting diseases from the world of medicine, such as tularemia (you don’t want it), or Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (I’d rather have tularemia). But biotech has its own perspective. HIV is bad, sure. But it has a good idea. Copying genetic information back into your DNA is what makes it a retrovirus, and retroviruses turn out to be a promising way of giving you things you want, as well, such as a blood-clotting factor to a hemophiliac. But if we do come up with a therapeutic product, we have to give it a name. Good luck. People struggle and suffer to avoid each other’s trademarks. That’s why we end up with gefitinib, trastuzumab, celecoxib, and sildenafil (Viagra®).

Finally, what was that phrase above? Oh, yes—“… submit an IND for a GMP NCE from NCI to stimulate CTLs in HCV, hoping for an NDA with CDER at the FDA after you see 30% CRs and 50% PRs.” This means you plan to submit an Investigational New Drug application for a Good Manufacturing Practices-produced new chemical entity from the National Cancer Institute, which stimulates cytotoxic T lymphocytes in cases of infection by the Hepatitis C Virus. If all goes well and you show safety and efficacy through Phases I, II, and III, you will proceed to submit a New Drug Application to the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER, pronounced cedar) at the FDA. The reason you have a good chance is that you saw 30% complete responses and 50% partial responses among the treated groups. Now—repeat the mantra that we incant whenever we publish a paper, finish a lab notebook, fail to find contaminating Cryptosporidium in the injectables, or just make a really good cup of coffee in the lunchroom: press release.

Book Production Jargon

Jaqueline Cangro, Brooklyn, New York

In the world of high-power book publishing, glamour and prestige belong to those in the editorial and publicity departments. The production department staffers are the behind-the-scenes people working in the trenches. As the liaisons between the publishing house and the printers, we like to think we are a critical component to getting tangible books available for consumers. In many ways the production department is like the tires on the flashy sports car of the publishing house. Without us, you may look good, but you’re really not going anywhere.

Since the production department must interact with many other in-house departments as well as outside vendors, we often pick up their terminology and add it to our collective vocabulary. It becomes our shorthand, and without it we couldn’t do our jobs. Indeed, the amount of inside language rivals that of a doctor (though we write more legibly). But unlike the specialized words in the medical profession, understood only by people wearing white coats, production jargon utilizes commonly used words. This adds a layer of complexity which is surprisingly more difficult than learning a new professional language (e.g., the legalese of a lawyer), for the words already have meaning in our daily lives. Given that our intensive, formal training program is what one would call “on the job,” new hires stare blankly at their computer screens for long stretches. It is daunting.

To arm you with a way to impress people at cocktail parties, I’ve organized some universal production terms in easy-to-remember categories.

Production lingo that doubles as interesting vacations

Some small-page-count books, such as children’s picture books, are bound with staples instead of thread or glue. To get clean access to punch through the spine, the books are splayed open on a saddle. A saddle-stitched book is ready for the rodeo.

When a production staffer says her book has ghosting problems, she doesn’t mean it’s haunted. Her book probably has alternating pages of heavy and light inks, most common with coffee-table books. The printing press has picked up too much ink from the dark pages and transferred it and the images to the light pages. In cases like this we silently curse the book designer who laid out the pages in that order.

We go to galleys when the house believes we can garner a lot of publicity and reviews prior to a book’s publication date. The galleys often serve as ARCs, advanced reader copies, which are sent to the media months before the book is actually printed.

For many professions, being eco-friendly is important, and production is no exception. We like to use green pallets when shipping cartons of books. These pallets are reusable, don’t need to be chemically treated, and are sometimes made from recycled materials. They also don’t contain any critters that like to hide in the old wooden pallets which are then transferred between printers and warehouses across the world.

When we want a book to have that je ne sais quoi, we order French flaps, which give a high-end look to a paperback book. These mimic jacket flaps attached to a flexible cover and give editors another chance to write snazzy marketing copy.

Production lingo you’re likely to hear at a rowdy bar

Setting up a bleed is imperative for jackets or interior pages if the designer does not want a white border to appear around the perimeter. He must bleed the image about one quarter of an inch off what will be the edges of the paper to allow for the printer’s cropping during the binding process. These days this is usually set up electronically.

In the same vein as a bleed, a gutter accommodates a spread, or an image that lies across two opposing interior pages. The designer must incorporate additional space in the spine area so when the printer binds the book, none of the image will be lost.

If a production staffer orders you to freeze, it’s not necessary to stop in your tracks and hold your hands above your head. She simply wants to make sure that an order of books is set aside in the warehouse for a specific customer.

Die-cutting happens when we decide to punch a circle through a perfectly good paperback or hardback cover. Sometimes we get creative and the make the hole a diamond, rectangle, or some other geometric shape. This allows the reader to peek-a-boo to an image on page one. Fun for children and adults alike, but never for the production staffer, as the interior image must be centered under the die-cut with a margin of error of less than a millimeter.

Production jargon you wouldn’t want to hear on a first date

The bindery always makes sure to trim the excess cover and interior pages (see bleed above) of a paperback book so that it matches exactly the dimensions we have specified. Yet occasionally, despite all of our careful instructions, we receive sample books where the interior pages extend beyond the cover. This is the dreaded paper creep when the paper has absorbed additional moisture due to humidity or insufficient dry time on press.

Most colors in the rainbow can be replicated by some combination of four colors: cyan, magenta, yellow and black, or CMYK. But a little too much of one or not enough of another can alter the final product dramatically from printing to printing. When a designer wants to be sure that a color will be an exact shade of chartreuse, she selects it from her PMS book. Every printer uses the Pantone Matching System and can reproduce the exact color specification from printing number one through one hundred. (The author should be so lucky.) Why not use the PMS colors all the time? Production staffers are penny-pinchers by nature. It’s our job to make sure the books get to our customers on time and on budget. And we can’t do that if we’re indiscriminate about PMS, now can we? [Q: It’s not clear why it’s cheaper to use CMYK than PMS, which rather reduces the impact of the final rhetorical question. Add a sentence of explanation? –SD.]

Some of our books are produced overseas, which means a long delay from the time they are finished printing to when they arrive in our warehouse. To track them, we give the printer an ex-works date, the date the books should leave the printer in order to be at our warehouse when we need them. Ideally, this is before we are actually out of stock.

There are several ways to bind the book. (See saddle-stitch above.) One is to notch the paper by digging small divots out of the spine area and then squirting glue through the divots to secure the interior pages to the cover.

Production jargon that sounds like it might be contagious

CTP is a recent affliction that began with the digital age. Computer-to-plate eliminates the need for old-fashioned film and streamlines the printing process.

Most often used on hardcover novels, rough front is when the pages are not trimmed flush at the bindery. They are purposely left jagged to give them a more traditional look.

When we print a book for the first time, the production staffer will request a set of blues from the printer. This is the last opportunity to check pagination and make any minor corrections before the book goes on press. They are usually circed (or circulated) in-house for approvals by anywhere from three to three dozen people.

Many people are surprised to learn that a book is not printed in consecutive page order. It is printed in long sheets of 16, 32, or 64 pages, depending upon the type of press, where page 1 may be next to page 14. Get yourself a dozen or two of these sheets, called signatures or sigs for short, and you have yourself a complete book. The sigs are then folded in what seems to be an origami trick so the finished book is paginated correctly.

Last, but not least—a round-up of the production “F” words:

FOB: a shipping term that indicates the publisher will handle the cost and responsibility of the freight cargo.

FPO (for position only): used to inform the printer that the images contained within the files are not high-quality enough for printing purposes.

FTP (file transfer protocol): enables us to send digital files for an entire book electronically by uploading them to a printer’s secure website.

F&G (folded and gathered): a term referring to the collected sigs of an entire book.

I hope the next time you pick up a book, you think about all of the terminology some production staffer used to get to that finished product. We’ve only just scratched the jargon surface, but you’ll have to excuse me. I just got a call from a printer: One of my books is going to miss the ex-works date because the editors haven’t approved the blues and the designer can’t decide if we’re going to use a PMS color or include a die-cut on the cover.

Pension Fund Language

Joanne Mason, Agawam, Massachusetts

“Do you have any deads?” my co-worker asked.

“Oh, yes!” I answered, not the least bit startled. “I’ve got a ton piled up here.”

City morgue? Monty Python sketch? No, just another day at the office, where this macabre question was commonplace. Our pension fund routinely processed the files of deceased members.

Like many workplaces, we used a linguistic shorthand to get our work done. I had never noticed the extent of it until I was training a temp to fill in for me.

We turned parts of speech on their heads. What’s your social? was a request for a member’s Social Security number. Sure, leaving an adjective floating in space like that could be jarring for the untrained ear, but it was more efficient and economical to make it a noun. Similarly, the question Is he XYZ Company? begged for a descriptive adjective as the complement, but got a noun instead. The speaker wanted to know what company the member worked for. But it was handier to say Is he XYZ? Quick and to the point.

My favorite question was Did he take Christmas? Take Christmas? Take it where? Was there some kind of Pension Fund Grinch trolling around, just waiting for pensioners to fall asleep so he could slide down his mountain, grab their stockings full of checks, and have his dog chew them up? No, the retired residents of Whoville could rest assured. The speaker was merely asking whether a member chose to have an extra payment during the holidays.

We had lingo that distinguished our particular office as well. When my boss asked for a hi, here it is letter, he wanted a simple two-liner to accompany an item requested by the recipient, such as an informational booklet or a form to complete. The actual letter sent usually went something like this: “In accordance with your recent telephone request, I am enclosing a copy of the Pension Fund’s Consolidated Financial Statements for the Plan year ended September 30, 2005. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.” Perhaps “Hi, here’s that thing you wanted.” is much more direct, but it doesn’t have that flowery gobbledygook flair that accompanies most written corporate correspondence. I sometimes wondered if the recipients even read our cover letters. Why should they bother? It was obvious that the booklet or form was enclosed, wasn’t it?

We used the term scrubsheet to describe a partially typed/partially handwritten template for frequently-sent letters. I was always curious about this noun and how it originated in our office. I never found it in the dictionary. The concept of scrubbing didn’t match these messy, pencil-smudged forms. An employee needed to know a complex set of orthographic rules to make the requested changes. That letter X with the line to the right meant that a benefit would be paid every December. Squiggly lines in the margin were signs to delete sentences. Advanced interpretive skills were required when Put in that sentence we always use was added.

Special vocabulary blossomed among the rank and file, especially when our trustees came to call. “What time are the boys in the band arriving?” a secretary would ask with a grimace, referring to these stodgy, suited gentlemen who would probably rival Al Gore for last place in a Macarena contest. “So what do the guys need to bring to the gala this Thursday?” another would question, referring to that guaranteed party atmosphere that only piles of investment reports, collections cases, and previous meeting minutes could bring.

We also had vocabulary to express job dissatisfaction. Perhaps most telling was the use of Mmmmm!! This meant ‘Wouldn’t you love some coffee from the disgusting pot I hold in my hand, the one with the coffee stains running up the side that I must now scrub out before the boys in the band arrive for the gala?’

Our special pension fund language always suited its purpose. When we needed them, we had concise ways to ask questions and veiled outlets for our sarcasm and humor. As with any language, it takes time to develop fluency. But I’m sure that temp reached native ability before long.

[During her time at the pension fund, Joanne Mason earned an MA in Applied Linguistics and worked extensively with adult ESOL students as a volunteer. She now lives in Western Massachusetts, where she spends her time writing and tutoring.]

CLASSICAL BLATHER: The Wee Folk

Nick Humez, mythsongs@earthlink.net

Fools Are Everywhere, if we are to believe the title of Beatrice K. Otto’s comprehensive study of court jesters.²⁶ So, it would appear, are the little people, those preternatural homunculi²⁷ thought to lurk on the periphery of our everyday rational world. Like Otto’s professional buffoons, they are often tricksters²⁸ who specialize in manipulating our perceptions: In the woods you come on a mannikin in a tiny red jacket, sitting on a cauldron full of gold sovereigns at the end of a rainbow; but turn your head an instant and poof! the little fellow has vanished with his hoard, leaving only an empty pot and the echo of his laughter.²⁹

The leprechaun is one type of the Emerald Isle’s wee folk; others are the clurichaun, whose principal activity is getting drunk on other people’s cellars, and the far darrig, or Red Man, who dresses all in red and “busies himself with practical joking, especially with gruesome joking…and nothing else.” Then there is the pooka, a shape-changer who often appears as a talking horse, but sometimes also as a donkey, an eagle, a bull, or a goat.³⁰ All are of the fairy folk, also known as the Tuatha de Danaan (People of [the Goddess]Danu), who were supposed to have been the fifth wave of invaders of Ireland (in the process exterminating a fearsome race of monsters called the Fomorians), and who were said to have departed either to Tir na n’Og (the Island of Youth in the far western sea) or gone underground to live in the hills called side on the arrival of the sixth race, the Milesians (Sons of Mil) from whom the present Irish claim descent.³¹

The Norse likewise had several categories of little people: the good bright elves, whose abode was Alfheim, presided over the benign sun-god Frey, and the dark elves, of evil disposition, who lived in Svartalheim.³² The Norse also had dwarves, of whom the best known is undoubtedly wicked Alberich, who starts all the trouble in Wagner’s Ring Cycle by stealing the gold from the Rhine Maidens, and whose son, Hagen, will later arrange for the hero Siegfried to die in a hunting “accident.”[^b8]

The belief in elves persists in Iceland to this day, at least to the degree that when a street was being widened some years ago in the town of Hafnarfjordur, and the expansion threatened to destroy part of a ledge which according to local tradition was the dwelling place of elves, the engineers were persuaded to keep the stretch of roadway next to it narrow in order to leave the rock intact.³³ A variety of house-elf called a tomten is still very much a part of folk belief in Sweden; originally a benign guardian of rural farmsteads,³⁴ tomtens have become assimilated into popular culture surrounding Christmas, and are often depicted (aporting with their characteristic conical red hats)³⁵ with bags of toys, the equivalent of Santa Claus’s troop of elfin assistants.³⁶

Trolls also persist in the Scandinavian popular consciousness and place-names: There is a Saab factory at Trollhättan (“troll-bonnet”)—whence the bumper sticker “Made in Trollhattan by Trolls”³⁷—and the composer Edvard Grieg’s country home in Norway was called Troldhaugen (“Troll Hill”).³⁸ But unlike tomtens, trolls often come across in folklore as having a more ornery disposition to match their homely appearance, lurking in caves, inside hills, and under bridges (as in the story of the Three Billy-Goats Gruff) and stealing children, sometimes replacing them with changelings.³⁹ In their troglodytic qualities such trolls resemble English gnomes (which C. S. Lewis fancied could “move through earth like an arrow through the air,” but found air “unbridgeable… utter vacuity” as impenetrable as is solid rock to us humans)⁴⁰ and German Kobolds;⁴¹ like the gremlins⁴² whom Allied airmen blamed for mechanical and other glitches during the Second World War, Kobolds were supposed to be makers of malicious mischief in the mines—whence the name cobalt for an element first encountered and loathed as a pesky impurity in silver ore.

Goblins are ugly little mischief-makers too, and apparently eponymous: The original gobelin was a 12th-century ghost who was supposed to have haunted the French town of Évreux, the name being borrowed into Middle English as a generic. Several English writers of the Romantic era famously exploited goblins in lasting works, notably Christina Rossetti in her long poem The Goblin Market and George MacDonald in his novel The Princess and the Goblin.⁴³

In France are stories of corrigans, who are described by the pseudonymous Hissado Fuan as “female fairies… enchanted and condemned to wander forever as marvelous and beautiful women by day but repulsive crones by night. Legend says that if a man loves one equally as a hag or a belle, she’ll be released from the spell.”⁴⁴ But Hills and Dondo’s Contes Dramatiques, a book familiar to three generations of 20th-century students of French,⁴⁵ includes a tale called “Les Corrigans” in which the fairy folk are represented as a troop of Breton leprechauns on whom a hapless hunchback happens at night as they dance in a ring singing Lundi, mardi, mercredi, lundi mardi mercredi (“Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday….”) The hunchback adds Jeudi et puis vendredi (“Thursday and then Friday”) and the corrigans are so delighted by this improvement that they remove his hump, bestowing it on his already hunchbacked brother when the latter comes on the next evening and spoils the song by trying to add his two cents’ worth.⁴⁶

Nor do northern Europeans have a monopoly on the little people. Hawaii has menehune, the “Small Sacred Workers” who are pleased by offerings of poi, while the explorer Knud Rasmussen reports that one of his Arctic informants, a shaman, told him he’d gotten his powers thanks to an aua, who is a little spirit, a woman, who lives down on the shore. There are many of these shore spirits. They run about with pointed skin caps on their heads, their trousers are quaintly short and of bearskin. They have high boots with black patterns and furs of sealskin. Their feet are turned upwards and they seem to walk only on their heels. They hold their hands with the thumbs always pressed against the palms. They hold their arms raised with folded hands, as though they were continually stroking their heads. They are gay and jolly when you call them, and look like small, charming living dolls, for when standing straight up they are no taller than an arm’s length.⁴⁷

American Indians likewise have tales of little people, such as the Yunwi Tsundi, the subject of folklore collected in North Carolina by Lynn King Lossiah from her fellow Cherokees on the Eastern Band reservation in the Great Smoky Mountains. The Yunwi Tsundi stand no more than three feet tall, are helpful but can be mischievous, like to have offerings of cornbread left for them, protect the homes of elderly people, but can make bad things happen to anyone who crosses them, such as the man who mocked their singing and then inhaled a fly. South Carolina Catawba Indians attributed similar characteristics to the Yehasuris (“not human ones”): They are supposed to feed on turtles, mushrooms, tadpoles, and acorns; they play tricks such as fooling around with children’s clothes at night to make them cry and braiding horses' tails unbeknownst to their riders; they sometimes shoot invisible arrows into ill-tempered people and cause them to fall sick and die.⁴⁸ And the Maliseets of the Tobique Reservation in New Brunswick, Canada report sightings of similar wee folk they call the Geow-lud-mo-sis-eg.⁴⁹

What might be the origin of such tales? One possibility is actual dwarfism,⁵⁰ of which the most common type is called achondroplasia. According to the website http://www.dwarfism.org/, it affects “about 80% of all Little People.⁵¹ An individual with Achondroplasia has disproportionate short stature. It occurs in all races and with equal frequency in males and females, and affects about one in every 40,000 children.” Achondroplasia is caused by mutation of a human gene called Fibroblast Growth Factor Receptor (FGFR3).⁵²

Another possibility is that such legends may have arisen from encounters with pygmies⁵³—bands of humans whose genetic makeup had evolved through natural selection to a significantly smaller adult size—by members of the society of larger folk telling the stories. Modern-day pygmies live in Africa and Malaysia, and fossil remains of a scaled-down human being were discovered in 2003 in a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, dating from approximately 12,000 years ago. Tentatively dubbed Homo florensius, the skeleton’s original owner stood about three feet high. Local legend says that little people lived on Flores until about 300 years ago, but were exterminated by settlers from the other islands who were tired of having their crops raided.⁵⁴ Credible as this narrative might be, it uncannily resembles the story told in rural Taiwan by members of a small tribe called the Saisiyat, about an even smaller (in both senses) population they call the Short Black People, whom they claim to have wiped out between 400 and 100 years ago in a reprisal for sexually assaulting a Saisiyat princess and her handmaidens, but nowadays perform an annual ritual to memorialize the little people, their god, and their cultural heritage.⁵⁵

That there might have been actual pygmy populations in both of these locations seems plausible enough, but the similar plot lines suggest there’s more to it than that. We seem to have a robust psychological need for stories about little people, whether as elusive, liminal, capricious Others on whom we can blame the petty accidents of daily life (pixies, kobolds, gremlins),⁵⁶ as the subjects of thinly-veiled jokes about sex (the French folksong about the man so tiny that the cat chased him, thinking him a mouse, and he escaped only by hiding in the oven only to be roasted),⁵⁷ as the marvelous fancies of invented by writers of fiction for children or grown-ups (the Borrowers, the Lilliputians), as scientific metaphors in didactic allegories (Maxwell’s demon),⁵⁸ or even as sardonic commentaries on modern urban paranoia (James Thurber’s queue of stealthy bearded pursuers, Hughes Mearns’s “Man Who Wasn’t There”).⁵⁹ For whatever reason, those “wee darlin' men” would seem to be with us to stay.

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Xmas, Yttrium, & Zwieback: Unusual Initial Pairs in English

Paul Anthony Jones, Tyne & Wear

Considering myself a bit of a word geek (I actually prefer the term logophile), I was interested to hear from a friend who claimed that, apparently, the only letter of the alphabet that can be followed by any other letter of the alphabet when in word-initial position is the letter A. That is to say, excluding abbreviations, phrases, proper nouns, and so on, it is possible to create a list of twenty-six A-words that follow the pattern aArdvark, aBacus, aCcept … aXiom, aYe, aZalea.

This intriguing fact interested me for two reasons. Firstly, I found it surprising—and indeed unlikely—that A was in reality the only letter with which this was possible, and secondly, I found myself considering more consciously the unusual (and sometimes seemingly counterintuitive) combinations of letters that crop up at the heads of English words. Consequently, I struck out on a linguistic expedition not only to ascertain whether initial A is the only letter that can precede any other, but to uncover obscure words which break our phonotactic rules and linguistic expectations by employing unconventional initial combinations of letters. Who would have thought, for instance, that any word in English could begin with LH-, DG-, or BD-?

But, firstly, returning to the initial aim—is A the only letter to which this applies? Well, at first glance at least, it seems that thanks to words like ajar, akimbo, and aorta, A is unique in this respect, as when in word-initial position the remaining vowels understandably stumble on awkward combinations like OQ-, IJ-, and UU-. Of the other vowels, E comes closest to a full 26-word list: by including the adjective eolithic ‘of the early Stone Age’ and—albeit questionably—the two-letter interjection eh, twenty-five words can be assembled, but seemingly no English word begins with EZ-. Similarly, twenty-four words can be collected for O, including oedema (the British variant of US edema), oology ‘the study of eggs,’ ossify ‘to become bone,’ and ozone, but still we are left with no entries for OJ- and OQ-. Furthermore, compared to their alphabetical cousins, I and U are even less productive—despite including fairly obscure words like ihram ‘a Muslim robe,’ ikebana ‘Japanese flower-arranging,’ ipsilateral ‘on the same side of the body,’ izzard ‘an archaic name for Z,’ uakari ‘an Amazonian monkey,’ uhlan ‘a cavalryman armed with a lance,’ uitlander ‘a South African term for a foreigner,’ ujamaa ‘an African socialist movement,’ uvula ‘the fleshy protuberance in the throat,’ and uxorial ‘relating to a wife,’ both I and U are several entries short. At this point at least, it seems that A is indeed the most compatible of letters.

However, further investigation using Encarta and the OED online bore a handful of albeit fairly obscure but nonetheless acceptable words which quite capably fill in some of the gaps discussed above. For instance, the OED cites a trio of words—ezan ‘a muezzin’s chant at the hour of prayer’; ojime ‘a Japanese decorative fastening’; oquassa ‘a type of New England trout’—which complete both initial E and O. Furthermore, Encarta cites several words—iqhumaal ‘a South African musical instrument’; iwis, an archaism meaning ‘certainly, truly’; ixtle (also istle) ‘a plant fibre’; iyan ‘an edible West African paste made from yams’—which alongside a selection from the OED—ieie ‘an Hawaiian species of climbing pine’; iiwi ‘an Hawaiian species of honeycreeper’; ijolite ‘a plutonic igneous rock’; iulidan ‘a myriapod [centipede-like creature] of the Iulidae family,’ or alternatively iulus, ‘a catkin’—complete the list for I as well. The OED also cites the names of two minerals—ehlite and ehrenbergite— which neatly replace the somewhat unconvincing inclusion of the two-letter interjection eh above.

Even with this expanded search, however, U remains several words short—the inclusion of uchimata ‘the inner-leg throw in judo’ nevertheless leaves no UE-, UO-, UQ-, UU-, UW-, UY-, or UZ- words; whilst the OED lists U-ey ‘a U-turn’ from Australian slang, uomo universale ‘a man who excels in the major fields of learning and action’ from Italian, and Uzi ‘a machine gun,’ these are all rejected on the basis that they are hyphenated, phrasal, and capitalised, respectively.

Unsurprisingly, it is basically logistically unfeasible to create a full list in this manner when dealing with an initial consonant; there are very few languages—if any—that would permit a word-initial combination akin to VK-, RX-, or KC-. But that does not necessarily mean that the consonants should be ignored. In fact, the most complete list of any of the consonants—that of S—is actually closer to completion than that of U.

Initial S can be followed by any of twenty-four letters, including (aside from the obvious, and again with help from the OED and Encarta) sbirro ‘an Italian policeman’; sdrucciola or sdrucciolo, a term from poetry; sforzando ‘accented, suddenly loud’ in music; sgraffito ‘an artistic technique whereby wet plaster is scratched away to reveal the surface underneath’; sjambok ‘a type of antelope’; sraddhaa (also shraddh) ‘a traditional Southern Asian offering to the dead’ from Sanskrit; and szaboite, ‘the mineral hypersthene’. The only S- omissions are SS- and SX-.

Perhaps surprisingly, after S the most successful of the consonants is M, which pairs up with a total of eighteen letters, largely owing to words borrowed from African languages which tolerate more complex initial clusters than English. Hence, we have musical instruments called mbila and mbira (from the Shona language); mfecane (capitalised in the OED, but not in Encarta) ‘a series of 19th-century Zulu wars’ (Xhosa); mganga ‘an East African exorcist or doctor of spells’ (Swahili); mlungu ‘a derogatory term for a white person’ (Xhosa); mpingo ‘an East African tree’ (Swahili); msasa ‘a Central African tree’ (Shona); mtepe ‘a type of square-sailed boat’ (Swahili); mvule ‘the iroko tree’ (Swahili); and mzungu ‘a term for a white person’ (Swahili). As well as all of these, there are also mho ‘the siemens, a unit of electrical conductance,’ mkhedruli ‘the script of the Georgian language,’ and mridangam ‘an Indian barrel-shaped drum’.

However, as with U, there are a number of M- words that have been discounted here on various grounds, notably McCarthyism, which neatly fills the MC- gap but is nonetheless a capitalised proper noun; m’dear, cited in the OED as a contraction of ‘my dear’; and Mfengu ‘a descendent of those displaced by the mfecane,’ which is also capitalised. The interjection mm has been discounted as well.

Other productive consonants include K (kgotla ‘a Bantu tribal assembly-place’; khatib ‘a Muslim preacher’; kjerulfin(e) ‘a form of wagnerite’; ktypeite ‘a form of argonite’; kvass ‘an Eastern European alcoholic drink’; kwacha ‘the Zambian currency’; kyat ‘the Burmese currency’); D (dghaisa ‘a Maltese gondola-like boat’; dhobi ‘an Indian washerwoman’; djati ‘the teak tree,’ from Malay; dvornik ‘a Russian house-porter’; dso or dz(h)o ‘a hybrid of a yak and a cow’); C (cnidocil ‘a stinging bristle of the tentacle of a jellyfish or similar creature’; csardas or czardas ‘an Hungarian dance’; ctenidium ‘the gill of a mollusc’; cwm ‘a Welsh valley’); P (pfennig ‘1/100th of a Deutschmark’; ptarmigan ‘a mountain-dwelling grouse’; pwe ‘a Burmese festival’; pzazz, a variant of pizzazz ‘enthusiasm, excitement’); and T (tchetvert ‘a Russian measure of capacity’; tjaele ‘frozen ground at the base of a periglacial area’; tlachtli ‘an Aztec ball-game’; tmesis ‘the emphatic insertion of one word inside another’; tvorog ‘a soft Russian cheese’; tzatziki ‘a Greek dish containing cucumber’).

Again, a number of words have been excluded here—the hyphenated forms D-Day, D-list, P-Celtic, K-meson, and K-particle; the contraction c’mon; the somewhat clumsy acronym-based term DNAse or DNAase (a shortening of deoxyribonuclease ‘an enzyme that breaks down DNA’); the onomatopoeic tprw (cited in the OED as ‘imitative of the sound of a horn’); and the proper noun Kshatriya ‘a member of the Hindu military caste.’

Predictably, at the opposite end of the scale, the least productive of the consonants is Q, which combines with only four of the vowels (qasadi ‘a Persian elegiac poem’; qintar or qindar ‘the Albanian currency’; qoph or qof ‘a letter of the Hebrew alphabet’) plus W in qwerty ‘the Western typewriter keyboard layout.’ Seemingly—and surprisingly, given what we have just seen—there are no QE- words. X is similarly unproductive, pairing up with the vowels (xanthophyll ‘a yellow botanical pigment’; xebec ‘a Mediterranean ship’; xiphoid ‘sword-shaped’; xoanon ‘a wooden idol’; xu ‘the Vietnamese currency’) and Y in xylem ‘a woody plant tissue.’ Several X- words have been excluded here, namely x-ray, Xmas, the fairly suspect contracted form xtal ‘crystal,’ X-chromosome, X-disease (now identified as Murray Valley encephalitis), and xxxx, defined in the OED as a ‘humorously euphemistic substitute for a four-letter swearword.’ Q fever ‘an influenza-like infection’ and the physics terms Q-switch or Q-spoil have also been discounted.

Perhaps indicative of its phonological similarity to S, Z is actually fairly productive (zho, an alternative of dzo; zloty ‘the Polish currency’; zwieback ‘a twice-baked biscuit’; zymurgy ‘fermentation’), as is J (jheel or jhíl ‘a large flood pool or lagoon’; jnana ‘Hindu spiritual understanding as a means of salvation’; jynx ‘the wryneck, a type of woodpecker’). The inclusion of Encarta’s zzz ‘imitative of the sound of snoring’ would take the Z- total to a respectable ten, whilst Jpeg and J-shaped are both listed in the OED.

Elsewhere, although never seriously in contention for a full A-to-Z list, the remaining consonants bear further unusual and unanticipated results: bdellium ‘a resin (from the bdellium tree) used in perfume-making’; bhaji ‘an Indian dish of fried vegetables’; bwana ‘an East African term of address’ (Kiswahili); gjetost ‘a Norwegian goat’s milk cheese’; gwyniad ‘a Welsh freshwater fish’; hlonipa ‘amongst certain Bantu peoples, the conversational avoidance of the names of respected or revered figures’ (Xhosa); hryvnia ‘the Ukrainian currency’; hwyl ‘enthusiasm, zeal’ (Welsh); lherzolite ‘a coarse-grained rock containing magnesium’; lwei ‘the Angolan currency’; ndugu ‘an East African term for a brother or compatriot’ (Swahili); ngaio ‘a small New Zealand tree’; nritta or nritya ‘an Indian dance’ (Sanskrit); nsima ‘a thick flour-based African porridge’ (Mambwe); ntate ‘a respectable address for a man’ (Sotho); vladimirite ‘a form of calcium’; vraisemblance ‘the appearance of truth’; yclept ‘called’; ylang-ylang ‘a tropical aromatic tree’ (Tagalog); yperite ‘mustard gas’; and yttrium ‘a metallic chemical element.’ Excluding zzz and mm, L is the only consonant that can precede itself, as in llama and llano ‘a South American grassy plain.’

As well as those already discussed, these remaining consonants also throw up further debatable words and word forms which straddle the border of acceptability. For instance, g’day exhibits the same dubiety seen in c’mon, whilst other hyphenated and semi-abbreviated forms include b-girl ‘a bargirl,’ F-word, G-string, H-bomb, R-boat ‘a German minesweeper,’ V-chip, V-mail ‘voicemail,’ and V-sign. The proper nouns Hjelmselvian ‘pertaining to Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev’ and Nkrumahism ‘the principles associated with Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah’ are unfortunately capitalized, whilst the crossover into common parlance of the algebraic expression nth, as in the phrase to the nth degree, brings it into contention as well. FTSE, the Financial Times Stock Exchange, although prohibited on the basis that it is acronymic, is actually pronounced as a whole word, footsie; the same applies to BBQ and DJing. The inclusion of hmm or hmph would take the total for H to nine.

The OED also lists a large number of obsolete, archaic verb forms which have also been excluded—the characteristic y- prefix of Middle English verb forms such as ygazed ‘gazed’ and ysatled ‘settled’ would otherwise all but complete an A-to-Z list for Y, but only yclept (as listed above) has real application today.

All in all, although the original fact still stands, it is certainly in doubt. Based on general vocabulary and basic, recognizable English words A is indeed the only letter that can be immediately followed by any other letter of the alphabet when in word-initial position. However, if more unconventional, esoteric terms and words are taken into consideration, A is joined in this otherwise unique feat by E, O, and I, with S, M, Y and U not far behind. There are still, however, a great number of gaps to be filled, and although some will seemingly never be filled due to the limitations of English phonotactics, I would be interested to hear from anyone who knows of or discovers any other unusual initial combinations that have not been listed here.

[Paul Anthony Jones is a recent graduate of the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, having studied English, and will hopefully be returning to Newcastle to continue some postgraduate research. Between playing classical piano and tennis (although not, as yet, simultaneously), his main interest is in accompanying friends to the pub and staying there for long periods of time.]

Anyone for Gerunding?

C J Moore, Leysin, Switzerland

Alongside the cross-country ski track of a Swiss mountain village where I often go, there extends a wide piste where very fit people on long narrow skis pursue an activity known in French as le skating. Needless to say, like so many –ing words disseminated across the globe, le skating bears absolutely no relationship to what is meant in English by the word skating.

Somewhere in the modern human psyche lies an urge to create trendy and interesting words of this –ing type, in grammatical terms known as gerunds, or verbal nouns. Let’s call this creative process gerunding. Yes, I know the word gerunding doesn’t exist in your dictionary, but since when did such a concern deter those who go gerunding? The whole point is to make up words which sound and look English. It matters not a bit that they are foreign inventions, often unrecognizable to a native English speaker.

Smoking, footing, bronzing, shampooing, pressing, lifting, mobbing, standing —these are just a few of the words that have found their way across Europe in curious variations or distortions of their original sense.

Take the strange history of the word pressing. In its British context, pressing was and still is, a service provided for those who wear uniform or smart clothing. “Shall I have your trousers pressed, sir?” the butler might say, before going off to see to the damp ironing of the garment. Building on this association, around the 1930s un pressing entered the French language in the sense of a dry-cleaning service, and has remained on the French high street ever since—if never in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française.

But nowadays a pressing has been given a completely new life in football commentaries on radio and TV around Europe, referring to one team “putting pressure” on the other. The only country where you won’t hear such a gerund is Britain.

Where does this kind of neologism come from? And how does it arise and become widespread without any relationship to standard English? By what mysterious process, for instance, did European properties for sale come to have standing, or even better haut standing? Standing is a quality which British English associates with people or institutions, but certainly not with houses or kitchens.

Inconsistencies abound in this area. Perfectly good English gerunds like boxing and surfing get ignored in favour of European forms like boxe and surf.

Equally strange, the term le sparring comes to refer no longer to the activity of sparring but to the sparring partner.

No British English speaker ever went footing but el footing has been around in Europe since the end of the nineteenth century when it entered Spanish, for example, in the sense of hiking. Nowadays it substitutes for jogging, a word which is often harder for non-native speakers to pronounce.

The Spanish, at least, are starting to have real fun with gerunding. Recent inventive examples I’ve seen in newspapers and blogs include: el puenting (the “Kiene-swing” sport of jumping off a bridge—puente—with a rope tied to your feet and to another bridge, so as to swing beneath it); el goming (bungee jumping with an elastic cord, or goma); mochiling (backpacking, from la mochila, the Spanish for ‘backpack’); and most hilarious of all, el tumboning (lying on the beach on a tumbona or lounge chair). A new low-cost airline has even sprung up in Spain with the name Vueling (from el vuelo, flight), with its webpage and advertisement copy playing Englishing games as a fun and trendy corporate image.

It must be said, though, that native speakers of English are as guilty as the rest of the world when it comes to gerunding. Grammatically the gerund is a verbal noun, therefore its root should be a verb, as in walking, eating, running, and so on. But in modern (and especially American) English we find an increasing use of gerund-type words generated from nouns, a usage severely frowned upon by purists.

Knowledging, a dynamic approach to business management, is a typical false gerund, conveying the idea behind the Norwegian pun kunnskaping— know-shaping—which refers to the bringing about of new knowledge through human interaction.

Going beyond Europe, a leading article in the International Herald Tribune referred to bunkering, a “quaint term Nigerians use to describe outright stealing of crude oil by members of the armed forces or the government.” (IHT 8/03/05) Here we see a legitimate if ungrammatical term (referring to the fuelling of ships) turned to a completely and ironically different meaning. In the words of one commentator, the term has been “abused, demonised, and misused in Nigerian parlance.”

Bunkering can hardly be called an English cultural export. But I wonder how long it will be before beasting and monstering find their way around the world? These unsavoury words are slang terms for interrogation methods employed by the US military, made public by court proceedings related to abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Another nasty word, mobbing—meaning emotional aggression in the workplace—is a term which may have American origins but which spread rapidly around Europe in the 1980s as a result of the work of the Swedish industrial psychologist Dr Heinz Leymann. The word conveys its unpleasantness so strongly that some scholars prefer the anodyne label horizontal violence.

On a sad note, too, I’ve been interested to see the term el bullying used more and more frequently in the Spanish newspapers, over articles about youngsters being harassed by other children at school. Bullying, as it happens, is a genuine gerund, but its use here is worth comment. While sometimes glossed in the Spanish text as el acoso, a general term for being aggressive, the word bullying itself refers to the emotional and physical variant found in the school environment. The problem has been aired nationally because of the tragic case of a fourteen-year-old in San Sebastián who committed suicide in the autumn of 2004 following a campaign of bullying against him by his schoolmates.

“Why is that in English?” I asked a Spanish friend. The answer came, “We’ve never needed a word for that before in Spain.” By which she meant, of course, not that the phenomenon is unknown, but that it has never been an issue of public debate before.

Here, as ever, language is our clearest indicator of social change. A living language always reflects the fact that in our daily conversations and reading we invent the shorthand of the moment, of the day, to say what we mean most economically. When has grammar or correctness ever got in the way of spontaneous linguistic creativity? Long live gerunding!

[A shorter version of this article was first published in the International Herald Tribune on April 12, 2005]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English

Grant Barrett, (McGraw-Hill, 2006), 288pp.

Before getting to Grant Barrett’s new book, there are a few words that should be explained, though I doubt this information will help you on the GRE or New York Times crossword puzzle:

If it squicks you out when buckle bunnies or punk bunnies gleek, then it grosses you out when rodeo or hockey groupies squirt water through their teeth.

If you go bazootie for gurgitators with trout pout, then you go crazy for competitive eaters with collagen-pumped lips.

Finally, if you use your chevrolegs to attend bark mitzvahs with paleoconservatives, then you walk to 13th birthday parties for pooches with uber-mega-conservative people who hold outdated beliefs.

Many readers may now be giving the stink (or skunk) eye to these not-so-well-known terms, while others may be ready to shout, “they’re not real words.” But if real means that multiple citations by different authors can be found over a substantial period of time, then they’re all real as rain, as demonstrated by Barrett’s new book The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English, which collects old and new words that slip through the cracks of the major dictionaries.

The origins of this book can be traced to World New York, a blog Barrett started in 1999 where he posted new and unusual words as one type of curiosity amongst others. Turns out the words were particularly intriguing to his readers, leading to the creation of Double-Tongued Word Wrester (http://www.doubletongued.org/) in 2004, a project Barrett describes as a “growing dictionary of old and new words from the fringes of English.” DTWW is where entries such as rocket surgery (a blend of rocket science and brain surgery), turkey bacon (a rent-a-cop), boo-boo face (a pouty, lippy, demanding expression), lesbian bed death (a decidedly unromantic condition), salvage (a ghastly euphemism for assassination that’s apparently only found in the Philippines), hokey Dinah (a clearly hokey exclamation), and metric buttload (a lot) first appeared.

For folks who still think about words being in “the” dictionary, this book should alert them to the realities of lexicography as well as a metric assload of words that are in use but not in any dictionary at all. Barrett—who is Project Editor of The Historical Dictionary of American Slang—said in an email that, “…even though dictionaries are sometimes perceived as overly liberal in their inclusion of new words, they are, in fact, highly conservative forces—by necessity, otherwise they would be drowned in the flood of new words. There’s more than they can handle, so each dictionary sets up its own criteria for inclusion. Those criteria do a good job of keeping the work from being overwhelming, but they also act as a natural restraint so that a term is not included too early.” The other result of this restraint is that many deserving words never make the cut.

Barrett’s un- and underdocumented words have flown under the radar, but they’ve been flying there for awhile. Few are truly new, and some are almost ancient: one of the oldest is road to Damascus experience, a term for a religious conversion or epiphany that’s been used since at least 1899. This is a historical dictionary, so in addition to collecting and defining the words, Barrett demonstrates their currency by providing representative citations, which allow readers to enjoy something lexicographers experience constantly: finding out that a term has been out there longer than expected. AMW—an acronym for actress-model-whatever—seems like it was created just for Paris Hilton, yet it can be found back in 1988, when the heiress was barely a trollop-in-training at seven years old. Given the obscurity of the material, the historical dictionary format is particularly useful: There’s no room to suspect Barrett pulled anything out of his fourth point of contact (a military term for the ass) since there’s such clear evidence of use.

Speaking of our boys, girls, and rocket-launchers, the military is the source of many terms—such as tiny heart syndrome (cowardice), POI (pissed-off Iraqi), toe-popper (landmine), and Mortaritatville—a name for a frequently attacked base. But since Barrett searches without regard to subject matter, his word strings take him all over the map, topic-wise: politics, sports, porn, medicine, media, business, crime, architecture, pro wrestling, competitive eating, and dog culture contribute terms, so besides the obvious word-lover audience, this book should appeal to trivia buffs who like knowing a little bit about everything.

Meanwhile, our language chugs on, and this project continues to grow in the form of DTWW, which recently added full entrees for whoa break (teaching a dog to immediately stop on command) and lucky sperm club (whose members include big-money-inheriting screw-ups everywhere). Barrett’s work is a vivid reminder that dictionaries are incomplete photographs of our enormous, ever-growing language, which never stops going bazonkers, bazootie, and anywhere else we need it to go.

—Mark Peters

Anglo-American Crossword No. 107

Across

1. A sharp weapon the mace replaced (7)

5. Modern way to communicate the news Rev. Spooner’s fish died (7)

9. Cheese and some more grub Milton rejected (9)

10. Note: research facility returned bundling machine (5)

11. Like a G-string—heavens!—worn by one Member of Parliament (6)

12. A huge number of computer units wasted battery energy (8)

14. A feeling no schedule is kept by cast (9)

15. Former Egyptian leader brooded about Russian agreement (5)

16. Nothing: a hockey player’s due (5)

18. Are daring nuts taken to court to answer charges? (9)

20. Barbarians outside cause trouble to retreating giants (8)

22. Petunia Dursley, for one, edges away from duty-dodger (6)

25. Municipality named for a donkey (5)

26. Not enthusiastic about collecting Gershwin’s original dance music (9)

27. Grocery stores import fuel (7)

28. A mountain most arduous, initially overlooked (7)

Down

1. They dig Mexican sauces (5)

2. Amusingly affected style elevated #1 sleuth series (7)

3. Furnishing cyberspace humor? (9)

4. Extremely irritable and acting jumpy (4)

5. Varietyspeak for a talent agency log maintained by Shelley (10)

6. Call you, informally, Cheney’s boss (5)

7. Relieved, everyone cheered at last after favorable vote (7)

8. People splitting dessert finally howled in anguish (9)

13. Rome phases out old-style signal devices (10)

14. Bebop song rearranged for a cartoon character (9)

15. Specify stone roofing material to cover peak up (9)

17. Rude lines penned by rude bride (3-4)

19. Sleepwear is near Formalwear (7)

21. In association with Laotians, getting a fresh start (5)

23. Terribly stern German painter (5)

24. Somewhat progressive fellow like Shrek (4)

Answers to Anglo-American Crossword No. 107

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. The OED entry is most likely from Johannes Fluckinger’s report on the wave of vampire attacks in Medvegia, and the previous vampirism of Arnold Paole five years earlier. The text was published in Nuremberg in 1732 and has rarely been translated into English in its complete form. ↩︎

2. References to vampirism, without using the word, date back to 1679 with Phillip Rhor’s De masticatione mortuorum, which was delivered orally at the University of Leipzig on August 16, and printed that same year. Another account, this by a lawyer named Charles Ferdinand de Schertz, appeared in Magia posthuma in the year 1706. This concerned a village woman who died and returned four days later. The vampire is described alternately as a ghost and a hideous man. ↩︎

3. Although Plogojowitz is mentioned in Lettres Juives by Marquis d’Argens (translated into English in 1729 as The Jewish Spy), the translation available to me, from the German, comes from the 1728 edition of De masticatione mortuorum. ↩︎

4. The written accounts for Arnold Paole had a haphazard journey into English. Some reports have the victim as Arnold Paul. ↩︎

5. The reports from Magia posthuma attest to victims being seized by the throat and generally exhausted to the point of severe fatigue. Even animals are not immune. Horses in the village are over-heated, trembling and foaming at the mouth, as though ridden at full gallop. An additional type of exhaustion was reserved for the wife of the vampire, as he would wear her out sexually each night. ↩︎

6. There are many reports of the clothes of a vampire being moved from one place to another. Plogojowitz’s wife said that her dead husband had come to her demanding his opanki, or shoes. ↩︎

7. The corpse had a whitish scarfskin that when peeled away, revealed a fresh one underneath. ↩︎

8. In opposition to the foul smelling plague fumes, people would burn pleasant smelling soft woods (juniper, ash, oak, pine, rosemary, aloe, amber, or musk). They thought this would protect their family from the plague. In New Orleans, during the yellow fever epidemics of the nineteenth century, people burned barrels of tar to purify the air. ↩︎

9. There is an incident where a herdsman from the village of Blau received a large stake through the heart. He appeared that very night and mockingly thanked those who had done the staking for giving him a fine stick to drive away the dogs. ↩︎

10. Slavic communities had certain days where intercourse was discouraged. A child conceived on one of those days could become a vampire. Also a child born with teeth or with a caul (a membrane cap) on its head would become a vampire after death. ↩︎

11. Arnold Paole broke his neck in a fall from a hay wagon, but before that, people noticed a certain strangeness in his manner. ↩︎

12. The name Lord Ruthven was created by Byron’s former lover, Caroline Lamb, to ridicule Byron in her novel Glenarvon. ↩︎

13. Although the OED dates zombie back to 1819, it was Hearn’s article that circulated widely enough to catch the public’s attention. ↩︎

14. The loa is usually translated as god or divinity, but it is closer to a genie, demon, or spirit. ↩︎

15. In order to prevent the zombie from answering this call, precautions were taken. The mouth might be sewn up or tied shut using a strip of cloth fastened over the head and under the chin. ↩︎

16. Often the bòkò kept the ti-bon-age in a jar. This was called a zombie astral, while the body that walked around, soulless, was called a zombie cadavre. ↩︎

17. Canadian ethnobiologist Wade Davis spent several years researching the zombie powder. He commented, “Given the availability of cheap labor and the physical condition of the zombie, there is no economic incentive to create a force of indentured labor” (American Scientist, 1987). ↩︎

18. There were two types of distractions. First the body would be buried with an eyeless needle so the corpse would spend eternity trying to thread it. The other method was one also used by Serbians against vampires. Seeds were scattered in the coffin, and the zombie was forced to count them all, one by one. ↩︎

19. The film was preceded by a dreary play, Zombie, penned by Kenneth Webb. The production opened and closed in 1932 after only twenty performances. ↩︎

20. George Romero had originally wanted to make a non-horror art-house movie, but quickly realized that an exploitation movie would be the best chance of making a profit. ↩︎

21. The idea of consuming human flesh was borrowed from the mythology of the ghoul, who rips its victims apart and devours them whole. ↩︎

22. A Venus probe that returns to Earth is hinted as the cause for the living dead. ↩︎

23. One notable exception is Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow, made in 1987 from the book by Wade Davis. ↩︎

24. The notable exception to this is Lucio Fulci’s series of films titled Zombi 2, 3, 4 and 5. This may be due to Fulci releasing Zombi 2 as an unofficial sequel to Dawn of the Dead (titled Zombi). ↩︎

25. Although released internationally as Zombie, each film had a subtitle that referred to the living dead. ↩︎

26. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Among Otto’s many court fools are some memorable little people as well, such as the Thai dwarf Nai Teh (“Mr. Little”), whom Anna Leonowens (in her Anna and the King of Siam) mentions as a “comedian and buffoon” to King Mongkut. Dwarves, together with hunchbacks, have worked as court fools as far away as China and as long ago as Egypt’s Sixth Dynasty (late third millenium BCE). ↩︎

27. A homunculus is literally a little person (it’s the diminutive of Latin homo, “human being”). Prior to the discovery of the microscope, many physicians from Rome through the Renaissance had thought that sperm cells were actual homunculi. (Whether some unconscious versions of this belief persist to this day, coloring arguments over fathers' rights and fetal personhood, is a question I leave to sociologists and theologians. For the fetus as homunculus, see Susan Merrill Squier, Babies in Bottles [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994], especially her remarks on Aldous Huxley’s “froward Homunculus” on pp. 136-37 and 160; see also page 231, endnote 11, where she gives Paracelsus' recipe for making a homunculus in the laboratory from semen and blood.) ↩︎

28. For a great deal more on tricksters, see my Classical Blather column “Trickster Treats,” VERBATIM XXX/4, pp. 21-25. ↩︎

29. This is very close to the encounter described by Robert Dwyer Joyce in his poem “The Leprechaun,” reproduced on the site www.marvelicious.com/stpatrick.html; a charming setting of it for soprano and harp can be heard on a 1957 Elektra LP, Susan Reed Sings Old Airs (EKL 126). The name, according to William Butler Yeats, comes from Irish Gaelic leith brog, “one-shoe-maker.” Yeats also reports that solitary fairies wore green coats instead of red (endnote to page 85 at pp. 345-46 of Yeats, Fairy and folk tales of the Irish Peasantry [London: Walter Scott, 1888], page 345, quoted on http://www.celtic-twilight.com/ireland/yeats/fairy_folktales/lepracaun_cluricaun_%20fardarrig.htm. ↩︎

30. Ibid. Yeats adds that some people think a clurichaun is merely a leprechaun on a toot. ↩︎

31. John F. X. Corcoran, “Celtic Mythology,” in The New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (New York: Crescent Books, 1987); see especially pages 224-26. The side were actually barrows, mounds built over the tombs of prehistoric warrior-princes, but were thought by the peasantry of more recent times to be the banqueting halls of the fairy folk—the Gaelic name for whom is sidhe; not to be confused with side, it is pronounced shee, as in banshee (Gaelic bean-sidhe, “woman of the Otherworld”). ↩︎

32. Alfheim and Svartalheim mean “elf-home” and “dark-home” (cf. swarthy) respectively. 8 Wagner drew freely on medieval materials, principally the Volsungs' Saga and the Song of the Nibelungs, and on Norse mythological sources such as Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, in cobbling together the plot of his 26-hour operatic extravaganza. ↩︎

33. Sarah Lyall, “Building in Iceland? Better Clear It With the Elves First,” New York Times, July 13, 2005, page A-3. ↩︎

34. “[T]he friendly house spirit called the Tomten…keeps watch over a Swedish farm homestead, its animals and people.” (Review by “Treeseed,” a resident of Little Chute, Wisconsin, at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0698115929/ref=cm_cr_dp_pt/104- 0165859-8833507?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books). ↩︎

35. They are so depicted in the illustration to The Tomten and the Fox (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1992), by Astrid Lindgren (better known in America as the creator of the beloved Pippi Longstocking character). Is it a coincidence—see note 12 below—that such hats also crown the elves assisting le Père Noël (sc., Father Christmas) in the mountain workshop into which Babar the elephant falls while on a skiing excursion (Laurent de Brunhoff, Babar et le Père Noël [Paris: Hachette: 1998])? The conical hat turns up on the heads of depictions by the pagan Norse of their gods, e.g. on an Icelandic statue of Thor and a Swedish one of Frey respectively shown on pp. 250 and 264 of the New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology. ↩︎

36. “Contemporary marketing associations with Santa Claus are everywhere apparent…” according to The Tomten Page (http://members.tripod.com/~auntida/tomte.html); for readers wishing to learn more on these friendly little fellows, this informative and generously illustrated site is not to be missed. ↩︎

37. A fanciful play on a spurious folk etymology: Manhattan has no connection at all with the English/Germanic word man, being in fact the name of the tribe of Indians from whom Peter Minuit purchased the island that is now New York’s principal borough, allegedly for $24 worth of trade goods. ↩︎

38. Arguably Grieg’s best-known and most beloved piano sketch, “Wedding Day at Troldhaugen” was composed in 1882 as an anniversary present for his wife, Nina Hagerup, and subsequently published in the eighth of his ten albums of Lyric Pieces (as Op. 65 #6). The feisty little men had already put in an appearance for one of his earlier Lyric Pieces as well: “March of the Trolls” (Op. 54 #3). ↩︎

39. Or in the Arctic: “In some Norwegian accounts…the trolls live in a far northern land called Trollebotten—the concept and location of which seems to coincide with the Old Norse Jötunheimr,” the abode of the Frost Giants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll). Other beliefs about trolls likewise seem to be drawn from from Norse giant lore: “large, brutish and a direct descendant from the Norse jötnar”—the giants—“…[and] often described as ugly or having beastly features like tusks or cyclopic eyes.” But there is also a southern Scandinavian tradition in which trolls “are residents of the underground…, very human-like in appearance. Sometimes they had a tail hidden in their clothing…. More often than not, though, the trolls kept themselves invisible, and then they could travel on the winds…or sneak into human homes. Sometimes you could only hear them speak, shout and make noise, or the sound of their cattle…. The trolls were also great shapeshifters, taking shapes of objects like fallen logs or animals like cats and dogs. A fairly frequent notion is that the trolls liked to appear as rolling balls of yarn” (ibid.) ↩︎

40. “Gnomes,” in C. S. Lewis, Poems, collected and edited by Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), pp. 9-10. The word gnome comes via French from New Latin gnomus (cf. Spanish and Portuguese gnomo), according to the Century Dictionary “a factitious name (by Paracelsus?) apparently taken [from] Greek”—either from gnomê (“thought”) or gnomon (“inspector, examiner”)—who “ultimately came to be regarded as the special guardians of mines and miners, malicious in all other relations and extremely ugly and misshapen; while the females…called gnomides…were endowed with supreme beauty and goodness, and, being the special guardians of diamonds, were chiefly known in the countries that produced them” (vol. III, pp. 2554-55). ↩︎

41. According to the American Heritage Dictionary (3d edition), the word kobolt (“goblin”) is first attested in middle high German in the first third of the 17th century. Kobolds are defined by AHD as either “a gnome that haunts underground places” or “an often mischievous household elf.” It is perhaps to this latter category that we might assign the nasty little protagonist of the Grimm Bros.' fairy tale “Rumpelstiltskin.” (For what it’s worth, Rumpel is German for “rubbish, junk.”) ↩︎

42. AHD says that gremlin was first attested among Royal Air Force flyers in the 1920s, with the meaning of “low-ranking officer or enlisted man saddled with oppressive assignments,” and may be derived from Irish gruaim (“ill humor”) plus the suffix -lin from goblin. ↩︎

43. Published in 1862 and 1872 respectively. MacDonald’s goblins are miners and in the sequel, The Princess and Curdie, their tunnels eventually collapse, destroying (perhaps in an allegory of sin) the fanciful Babylonish city above; but by this time the sympathetic protagonists are long gone. C. S. Lewis was a great admirer of MacDonald—he claimed that reading MacDonald’s Phantastes was instrumental in pointing him towards his rebirth as a Christian—to the point of embarrassingly resurrecting his senior colleague as a stage-Scotchman character in Lewis’s own allegorical novel The Great Divorce. ↩︎

44. My liberal translation of Fuan’s quote, taken from a French URL for a roleplaying game, http://www.initiative-jdr.com/bibliotheque-fiche.ini3?num=61881&&sec=2. Its context notwithstanding, Fuan’s essay, entitled “Faeries: les esprits celtiques,” contains a good deal of sound material, and is followed by a five-book bibliography of French and English sources. Fuan also offers a thorough description of brownies, who, he says, are “invisible to adults who don’t believe in them, but innocent children can see them. Most rural houses have them….in exchange for their work it is recommended that they be given the best milk. Insofar and as long as they are well treated, they will be loyal to families, sometimes even to the point of following them to new homes…. They are not to be paid for their work, but one should leave their food in a place where it will be come upon ‘accidentally’…. If a brownie is annoyed (and they are very easily offended) he will leave, taking with him all the good luck he brought with him. Sometimes when he is seriously irritated a brownie will become a bodach…which in Scots Gaelic means ‘old man.’ This is a spirit who enters the house by way of the chimney and steals children or else terrorizes them, pinching and yanking them and giving them terrible nightmares. It is said that he only bothers bad children, but that a child can protect itself by surrounding itself with a ring of salt.” (How tempting to advance bodach as yet another candidate for the root of the adjective bodacious!) And pixies, Fuan writes, are extremely beautiful, stand about six inches high, dress always in green, and spend most of their time dancing. He adds that pixie is the generic name for a fairy in Cornwall, and that even to the present the inhabitants of Devon believe the pixies to be spirits of children who died unbaptized. ↩︎

45. Hills, E. C. and Dondo, Mathurin, Contes Dramatiques (Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1927); it was still very much in use in the French classes at Lexington (Mass.) High School in my midcentury salad days. ↩︎

46. This story is virtually identical to the one Yeats (op. cit.) calls “The Legend of Knockgrafton.” In an endnote to it on pp. 344-45, he reproduces the little people’s song as transcribed by his colleague Croker, to the words Da Luan, da Mort, da Luan, da Mort, da Luan, da Mort, augus da Dardine (“Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday”). Yeats adds that another colleague, Douglas Hyde, “has heard the song in Connaught, with the song of the fairy given as…pighin, pighin, da pighin, pighin go leith, augus leith pighin… ”a penny, a penny, twopence, a penny and a half, and a half-penny.” ↩︎

47. Knud Rasmussen (in Thulefahrt, Frankfurt, 1925), reproduced in Stephen Larsen, The Shaman’s Doorway (New York: Harper and Row/Colophon, 1976, pp. 77-78). ↩︎

48. Albert Bender, “The Secrets and Mysteries of the Cherokee Little People –Yunwi Tsundi” (News From Indian Country 5 Sept. 2005); Jim Largo, “Catawba Little People picked on children” (Indian Country Today [Lakota Times], 27 Nov. 2004). I am indebted to Dwain Kitchell for forwarding both of these stories to me. ↩︎

49. Paul, op cit. ↩︎

50. Dwarf comes from Old English dweorh, according to the American Heritage Dictionary (which gives dwarves as a variant plural nowadays, preferring dwarfs.) Its modern German cognate is Zwerg, which the New Cassell’s German Dictionary (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1958) translates as “dwarf, pygmy, midget.” If one wishes to avoid confusion and indicate “pygmy” unequivocally, one can say Zwergling or Zwergmensch; other compounds include Zwerghund, “lapdog,” and Zwergpferd, “pony.” The usual term for dwarf in late Republican and Imperial Rome was nanus(from Greek nanos, source of the modern prefix nano- for “tiny, billionth”), which according to Ernout and Meillet’s Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue Latine (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1979) supplanted the earlier Latin term pumilio. ↩︎

51. As it is for many subcultures, nomenclature is problematic among dwarves. According to the dwarfism.org site, “[W]e are human beings who are of restricted growth. Use of the word ‘midget’ to describe someone of short stature is considered extremely offensive by some people. It is better to refer to someone of short stature as a ‘Little Person’ or ‘Dwarf.'” But this is complicated by the fact that “some people find the term “dwarf” as…offensive as ‘midget.'” Hence “little person” would seem the safest bet for now; not surprisingly, the community’s flagship support organization is called Little People of America, with a website at http://www.lpaonline.org/. Dwarfism.org also gives a long list of other terms by which dwarves have been known throughout the world. Some are far-fetched (Erlkönig, gremlin, and manitou, for example), but the list as a whole provides an excellent jumping-off place for research into the lore of imaginary little people across cultures. ↩︎

52. According to http://www.achondroplasia.co.uk/, a British support site for Little People with this condition. ↩︎

53. The first attested Pygmies (pygmaioi), mentioned by Homer and others as living somewhere off the southern edge of the Greek world, were so called because they were supposedly just a cubit (pygmê) high (Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Century Edition [New York: Harper and Row, 1981], p. 907). Physical anthropologists classify as pygmies any population whose average adult height is under five feet (AHD: “pygmy”). ↩︎

54. As reported by Associated Press writer Chris Brummitt (“Fossil find means ‘little people’ no longer just tall stories,” AP Worldstream, 26 Dec. 2004). His informant Nellis Kua described the little people of Flores as having “these big eyes, hair all over their body and spoke in a strange language.” And possessed of a prodigious appetite (adds Kua, “They stole our crops, our fruit and moonshine. They were so greedy they even ate the plates!”), whence the name given them by the locals: Ebu Gongo, or “Grandmother Eats-It-All.” (Thanks to Dwain Kitchell for this reference as well.) ↩︎

55. Jules Quartly, “Looking After the Little People,” Taipei Times online edition, 5 Dec. 2004 (http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2004/12/05/2003213909). ↩︎

56. Thus H. Allen Orr (“The God Project,” The New Yorker, 3 April 2006, p. 80), remarks on the uniquely human capacity for “attributing agency where no agent exists. Human beings are skilled at positing agents—whispering winds, turnip ghosts, and monsters under the bed—for which the evidence is less than overwhelming, and this tendency might explain why nearly all people talk about creatures like elves and goblins.” ↩︎

57. “Mon Père m’a Donné un Mari,” a folksong from Champagne, on the LP Folk Songs of France, (Monitor MF 339, 1960). This album has a second song by the same title, the next to last in a suite of songs from Normandy; here the husband is of normal size, just uninterested in sex. Its refrain superficially resembles the Knockgrafton fairies’ song (see note 22 above): Quatorze et p’is quat’ font dix-huit…Onze et douze et treize, quatorze et deux font seize (“14 and 4 make 18…11 and 12 and 13, 14 and 2 make 16”). ↩︎

58. The invention of physicist James Clerk Maxwell, as part of a thought experiment to show how entropy works; Gian Vista, James Baugh, and Marijke van Gans offer a lucid explanation at www.maxwellian.demon.co.uk/name.html. Imaginary little people are useful as scientific counterexamples as well: “I doubt that there is a little elf riding on the ribosome,” remarks Earl Hunt in The Mathematics of Behavior (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 278). ↩︎

59. James Thurber, “Preface to a Life” in My Life and Hard Times (New York: Harper and Row/Perennial Library, 1961(1933), p. 11); Hughes Mearns, “The Psychoed” (1899, reproduced in Roger Lancelyn Green, A Century of Humorous Verse [London: Dent and Sons, 1959]). Note that Mearns never says the man is a little one, but the context implies that he is all of a piece with the tiny fellows popularly thought to be seen by people suffering from hallucinatory mental disorders such as acute schizophrenia or the DTs. And Thurber may at least be teasing his readers to wonder if his diminutive followers are of a similar etiology: “[A writer of light pieces] is not afraid, or much aware, of the menaces of empire but he keeps looking behind him as he walks along darkening streets out of the fear that he is being softly followed by little men padding along in single file, about a foot and a half high, large-eyed, and whiskered.” ↩︎