Vol XXXII, No 1 []

Are Prepositions Necessary? John Horne Tooke and the Origins of Words

Rosemarie Ostler, Eugene, Oregon

What do the words we use really mean? The eighteenth-century Englishman John Horne Tooke believed the best way to get at a word’s essential meaning was to trace it back to its original source. He devoted a fat two-volume book to the subject—Epea Pteroenta [‘winged words’], or the Diversions of Purley, published in 1786 and 1805. Although The Diversions of Purley, as it’s usually known, has been languishing in the discard pile of intellectual history for over 150 years, the book caused a sensation when it first appeared. These days few people have heard of Horne Tooke, but for a time he was the most influential etymologist in England. Scholars as diverse as James Mill and Noah Webster enthusiastically supported his work.

Horne Tooke’s theory was that the original language consisted entirely of nouns and verbs. Other parts of speech—adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns—are merely abbreviations of underlying noun and verb sequences. They are shortened forms, invented for convenience as language became more complex. “Abbreviations,” he writes, “are the wheels of language, the wings of Mercury.” They allow people to speak their thoughts quickly and efficiently. Without them “though we might be dragged along . . . it would be with much difficulty. . . .”

Take the preposition from. Dictionaries assign various meanings to this word, including transmission, descent, distance, absence, starting point, and cause. Horne Tooke argues that all these definitions can be paraphrased as a single noun—beginning. For example, These figs come from Turkey really means ‘the beginning place of these figs is Turkey’; A lamp hangs from the ceiling is a short way of saying ‘the beginning place of this lamp’s hanging is the ceiling’; From morn till night the alarm rang translates as ‘beginning in the morn the alarm rang till night.’ He believes that from is in fact a descendant of the Old English noun frum, meaning ‘beginning’ or ‘origin.’

The conjunction unless is a similar case. Horne Tooke argues that it’s the imperative form of the Old English verb onlesan, ‘dismiss.’ He supports this idea with the early English examples Onles ye beleve, ye shall not understande, interpreted as ‘Dismiss the fact of your belief and you shall not understand,’ and It cannot begynne, onelesse by the grace of God, which means ‘Dismiss the grace of God and it cannot begin.’

As evidence that he is on the right track, Horne Tooke points out that Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, and Greek all have a similar conjunction translating roughly as the verb phrase ‘be it not’ (Latin nisi, for instance). In his opinion, this meaning is virtually the same as ‘dismiss.’ After all, when we dismiss something, it no longer exists.

Other examples of abbreviated verbs, according to Horne Tooke, include if, which is none other than a corrupted form of give, from the Gothic verb gifan. If the weather is foul it will keep me at home can be paraphrased as ‘Give[n] that the weather is foul, it will keep me at home.’ Horne Tooke notes that the archaic spelling of if is gif, making the original root, in his opinion, even more obvious. He cites as an example this quote from the early English play The Sad Shepherd: “My largesse hath lotted her to be your brother’s mistresse gif she can be reclaimed. . . .”

Horne Tooke argues that the conjunction still derives from Old English stellan, ‘to put or place’; yet is from getan, ‘to get’; though is from thafian, ‘to allow or permit.’ But has two sources. The first, used in a sentence like They all left but one, was originally be utan, ‘to be out or away.’ In other words, ‘they all left, be out one.’ In but, to proceed, on the other hand, it comes from Old English botan, ‘to boot’ or ‘to give more,’ so but, to proceed means ‘give more, to proceed.’

In a similar vein, the prepositions behind, before, below, and beside are simply the imperative form of to be combined with hind, fore, low, and side. These in turn are short for the noun phrases hind part, fore part, low place, and side place. Horne Tooke thus concludes that He stood behind her is an abbreviated way of saying ‘he stood, she be commanded hind’ or, more intelligibly, ‘he stood as if commanded to be at her hind part.’

And so it goes, through hundreds of freewheeling derivations. Flights of etymological fancy that strike modern readers as hilarious (her hind part?) were received by Horne Tooke’s eighteenth-century audience with respect. They were impressed with his trenchant style and broad command of languages. Besides, in the time before the Oxford English Dictionary, who could say he was wrong? Eighteenth-century etymologies were not meticulously researched affairs. Samuel Johnson’s revered 1755 Dictionary of the English Language includes many word histories fully as absurd as those found in The Diversions of Purley.

Horne Tooke arrived at etymology through his other passion—radical politics. For Horne Tooke, language and politics were tightly entwined. Most of his political battles were fought in the name of free speech, and he believed that correct and clear word use was crucial for democratic government. In common with many philosophers of the time, he thought that if people understood the etymology, or original meaning, of words, they would be able to speak and reason more clearly, as well as more firmly grasp the arguments of others.

Horne Tooke was inspired to begin writing about word meaning while serving a sentence for seditious libel. A leading member of England’s Constitutional Society, he was a fervent supporter of the rebellious American colonies. After the battles of Lexington and Concord the Society met and voted to send a donation to “the widows, orphans, and aged parents of our beloved American fellow-subjects . . . inhumanly murdered by the King’s troops. . . .” Horne Tooke published the minutes of this meeting in the newspapers. For the British government, already smarting from his earlier written and oral attacks, this piece of brinkmanship was the final straw. Horne Tooke was quickly arrested, tried, and sentenced to twelve months in prison.

The Diversions of Purley began as a 72-page open letter to Horne Tooke’s lawyer, John Dunning. In it Horne Tooke explains that he feels compelled to start writing about words because his libel conviction stems partly from a misinterpretation of one of the legal precedents cited against him. As he puts it, “I had been made the miserable victim of two prepositions and a conjunction.” Horne Tooke is outraged by the absurdity of the situation. “That the conjunction that, and the prepositions of and concerning . . . should be made the abject instruments of my civil extinction,” he writes, “. . . appeared to me to make my exit from civil life as degrading as if I had been brained by a lady’s fan.”

One of the many points of contention during Horne Tooke’s trial concerned the explicitness of the charge against him. The prosecutor stated that Horne Tooke had written and published certain false and malicious libels “of and concerning” His Majesty’s government. Horne Tooke (speaking in his own defense in spite of Mr. Dunning’s attempts to persuade him against it) maintained that to say “of and concerning” was not specifically an accusation of a crime. Positive as well as negative statements could be made “of and concerning” His Majesty. He thought the court should cite a specific instance of libelous language.

Furthermore, Horne Tooke believed that the judge based his acceptance of the charge on an inappropriate precedent—a well-known trial where a forger was accused only through an indirect statement. The judge quoted from the trial record: “She, knowing that Crooke had been indicted for forgery,” did so and so. Horne Tooke insisted that the statement was in fact a direct and specific charge against Crooke, arguing that its true interpretation is “Crooke had been indicted for forgery. She, knowing that (fact),” did so and so. In other words, Horne Tooke claimed that the conjunction that in the judge’s quote held the same meaning as the pronoun that in his rewording of it. Therefore, the statement wasn’t a legitimate precedent for his own case.

Although he evidently failed to convince the judge, the notion that conjunctions are in fact disguised nouns became a cornerstone of his theory. What may have begun as an opportunistic argument ended as a firm conviction. In The Diversions, Horne Tooke returns to the issue of that, arguing that it always retains the same meaning. He supports his claim with examples like I wish you to believe that I would not wilfully hurt a fly, which can be paraphrased as I would not wilfully hurt a fly; I wish you to believe that. Of course he includes the example from his trial as well.

The first volume of The Diversions of Purley was hailed as a valuable contribution to the philosophy of language. Even those few who questioned Horne Tooke’s ideas about word origins agreed that the book was too important to be brushed aside. Encouraged by this enthusiastic reception, Horne Tooke embarked on a second volume. However, before he could complete it, politics again intervened.

Horne Tooke continued to actively support radical causes after his release from prison. He served as chair for the Society for Constitutional Information, as well as continuing his campaign of letters to the editor, pamphlets, and fiery speeches. In May 1794 a number of Society members, among them Horne Tooke, were arrested for allegedly uttering treasonous remarks during meetings.

Horne Tooke was tried in November 1794 and eventually acquitted, in spite of engaging in flamboyant rhetoric throughout the trial. Although he had counsel to defend him, he often examined witnesses himself and addressed comments to the Bench. His fearlessness was much admired, considering he stood in danger of being hanged, but some suspected his motives. William Wordsworth wrote to a friend that he thought Horne Tooke courted persecution more from a love of making trouble than a hope of bringing about reform.

The second volume of The Diversions of Purley mainly addresses the issue of how adjectives are formed. As with Part I, etymology and politics intertwine. The first word Horne Tooke examines is right, explaining that we must understand the meaning of important words if we are to avoid “important error.” He believes that getting down to the core meaning of right is not just an intellectual exercise. It also has the practical purpose of helping people define, and thus recognize, their legitimate rights.

Horne Tooke proposes that right means ‘order’ and originally derives from Latin regere ‘to make straight.’ Civil rights, according to this definition, are privileges that it is in order for people to have. If people have their rights, then the government is behaving in an orderly way. Horne Tooke argues that the various uses of right, including a right conduct, a right line, the right road, to do right, to be in the right, and the right hand, all stem from this single underlying meaning. Right conduct is ordered conduct; a right line is that which is ordered—the shortest between two points; the right road is the road that is ordered, or indicated, to be pursued; to do right is to do that which is ordered; the right hand is the one that custom orders us to use when only one hand is required. Taking advantage of the accidental homonym, he further proposes that the left hand is that which is left out of use, so the adjective left also derives from a verb.

Part II of The Diversions ends with Horne Tooke’s promise to write a final volume completing the details of his theory, but this promise remained unfulfilled. Unsatisfied with the manuscript, he burned it shortly before he died in 1812.

At the time of Horne Tooke’s death, his reputation was high. The philosopher James Mill declared The Diversions worthy to be “ranked with the very highest discoveries which illustrate the names of speculative men.” Alexander Murray, a Scottish language scholar, wrote that his own work on the origins of the European languages owed a great debt to the author of The Diversions of Purley. Murray predicted that Horne Tooke would “receive from future generations more lasting honours than the present can bestow.”

Another admirer was the American grammarian and dictionary writer Noah Webster. His 1789 book Dissertations on the English Language presents Horne Tooke’s theory of word origins, then adds an original thought. “Will my grammatical readers believe me,” he asks, “when I assert that yea, or yes, is a verb?” He reasons that yes and the German ja (pronounced yah) are the same as the French imperative aie ‘(you) have.’ Aie is pronounced like the archaic aye, which Webster considers the “pure form” of yes. Therefore, he concludes, yes is really an abbreviation of the statement have what you say. For instance, Yes, I agree means ‘have what you say—I agree’. Horne Tooke probably never read Dissertations, but he would surely have approved.

The Diversions of Purley was popular partly because it tapped into a central concern of the time, how to classify words. Books that organized and explained the various parts of English were widely consulted by upwardly mobile citizens determined to manipulate language as easily as “their betters.” Such books often disagreed about details like how many parts of speech English required, some proposing as many as thirty, others as few as eight. To puzzled readers of these volumes, Horne Tooke’s pronouncement that all words were either nouns or verbs must have come as a distinct relief.

Horne Tooke was also admired because he appeared to be scientific in his approach. He was among the first to analyze a broad collection of words in an orderly way. His methods were faulty, based on vague sound resemblances rather than evidence from written records, with the result that most of his etymologies were wrong. However, Horne Tooke’s readers generally knew even less than he did about word histories. They accepted his data uncritically.

Horne Tooke’s ideas meshed with those of a group of philosophers known as materialists, which included James Mill and Jeremy Bentham. His claim that abstract nouns and adjectives like right were reducible to concrete ideas like ‘the thing that is ordered’ seemed to reinforce their argument that concrete matter is the basis of all reality. Even seemingly abstract concepts like “right” come down to concrete nouns in the end. Like other readers, the materialists accepted Horne Tooke’s etymological proofs without question.

An updated edition of The Diversions of Purley appeared in 1840. The book’s reception was very different this time around. A reviewer for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine trounced it with a severity that would have been unthinkable in 1805. “The Diversions of Purley,” he writes, “is one of the most consummate compounds of ignorance and presumption that ever practised with success upon human credulity. . . . What is true in it is not new, and what is new is not true. . . .” After this general indictment, the reviewer spends several pages demonstrating that a number of Horne Tooke’s etymologies are false, beginning with that, the original impetus for Horne Tooke’s plunge into the word business.

The Blackwood’s reviewer points out that Horne Tooke’s argument fails when the verb before that is a negative such as doubt, disbelieve, or deny. I deny that I am guilty of treason does not mean the same thing as I am guilty of treason; I deny that. Furthermore, the Gothic pronoun that (thata), the source of Horne Tooke’s etymology, took a different form from the Gothic conjunction that (thatei). In some languages, the two words are completely different—pronominal that is istud in Latin, but the Latin conjunction is quod.

The reviewer continues to sift through the book’s derivations, pointing out several cases where the author has confused his past participles, invented nonexistent Gothic verbs, or otherwise committed etymological errors. He concludes by expressing astonishment that anyone could have been swayed for a moment by Horne Tooke’s notion that the essence of an object or idea can be revealed through etymology. Materialist philosophy was no longer in vogue, and the reviewer looks back on the book’s former reputation with “a mixture of mirth and amazement.”

The Blackwood’s review shows that a lot can happen in a few decades. In 1786, the same year that Part I of The Diversions of Purley first appeared, the Sanskrit scholar Sir William Jones presented a paper to the Asiatic Society of Bengal. He suggested that Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, the Germanic languages, and perhaps others were siblings, descended from a long-lost parent language. This idea inspired linguists to begin systematically comparing the European languages for etymological connections. By 1840 they had uncovered the parent tongue of Indo-European and reconstructed a number of ancestral words, including the roots of many modern English words.

Etymologists could no longer get away with making free-ranging connections between unless and Latin nisi or casually assuming that but comes from botan because bot- and but sound almost alike. Etymologies had to be compatible with what was known of Indo-European words and their evolution.

One significant feature of the Indo-European protolanguage, spoken several thousand years before Horne Tooke was writing, is that it included the equivalent of prepositions, conjunctions, and other parts of speech. Although the Indo-European culture may have been more primitive than that of nineteenth-century Europeans, it was not so basic that its people could manage with nouns and verbs alone. Prepositions were in fact necessary. The Diversions of Purley, once the benchmark for linguistic analysis, was forced to give way to the new science of historical-comparative linguistics, the system that today’s linguists and lexicographers still rely on.

Hanky-Panky, Hugger-Mugger, and Other Reduplicative Rhyming Compounds

Amy Shuffelton, Jessy Randall

The English language contains hundreds of reduplicative rhyming compounds—words like hanky-panky and hugger-mugger. Typically, each half of a reduplicative rhyming compound is meaningless on its own or has a meaning distinct from the meaning of the compound. There are huggers and muggers, but neither word gives hugger-mugger its meaning. In fact, muggers attack and rob people in public places like subways and streets, not in the secret, clandestine sites of hugger-mugger, sites where people might also engage in hanky-panky. You won’t find a hodge or a podge in this article, but you will find a hodge-podge of examples of RRCs.

Hodge-podge, which dates to the early 17th century, is a corruption of hotch-potch, a corruption, in turn, of hotch-pot, a 15th-century word for a mixture of foods cooked together in a pot, used even then in a metaphorical way to describe other kinds of mixtures. We still eat from hot-pots; Americans also eat Nutter-Butter cookies, perhaps with Chunky Monkey ice cream, while Brits eat Hob Nobs, chocolate-covered oat biscuits. Hob-nob is a word vastly predating cookies, though. It comes from hab, nab: have or have not. Shakespeare endows it with the sense of giving and taking. Friends used to hob-nob each other when they shared a drink, clinking their glasses. Later, to hob-nob was to share food or conversation, in England perhaps at tea, the perfect time for a cookie. Perhaps friends would enjoy them on a picnic, originally a “pique-nique”, a meal or party to which everyone contributed something.

John M. Dienhart lists hundreds of reduplicative compounds in his 1999 article “Stress in Reduplicative Compounds: Mish-Mash or Hocus-Pocus?” (American Speech 74.1). Dienhart usefully distinguishes three different categories of rhyming compounds. He refers to them by paradigm cases: boo-boo words (sometimes called exact reduplications), mish-mash words (sometimes called ablaut reduplications), and hocus-pocus words (rhyming reduplications, our main topic). The first category contains words that repeat the same word or syllable: twenty-twenty (perfect vision), fifty-fifty (equal shares), hubba hubba (a whoop of approval), and bling-bling (bright jewelry), for example. The second contains words that change a middle vowel: flip-flop (change one’s mind, or a shoe that makes that sound), fiddle-faddle (trifling talk or action), and ticky-tacky (cheap, flimsy material). The third contains rhyming words that each start with a different sound: boogie-woogie, helter-skelter, and hubble-bubble (an early form of the hookah in which the smoke bubbles through a water-filled coconut shell). Dienhart points out that some compounds contain “real words” while others contain “nonsense,” but he adds that it is rather hard to define nonsense.

So halves of RRCs often sound like nonsense but derive from once meaningful words. In newer compounds these words are immediately recognizable—for instance, artsy-fartsy, walkie-talkie, even-steven, and super-duper. The root of argue shows up in argle-bargle (argument). Shilly-shally comes from “shall I?” and implies indecisiveness. Another word implying indecision, dilly-dally, has a much older root; it comes from dally, to play, flirt, or trifle, which derives from Old French dalier, to engage in light conversation. Namby-pamby, defined as weakly sentimental or insipidly pretty, comes from a disparagement of the first name of Ambrose Philips (1675-1749), an author of sentimental poems for children. A niddy-noddy was a tool used by spinners to wind wool or linen yarn into skeins; made of wood and shaped like two letter Ts attached upside down and crosswise, the tool would bob back and forth like a nodding head as the spinner wound yarn.

The origin of higgledy-piggledy is uncertain, but it may have to do with the way a herd of pigs is apt to stand. Many RRCs relate somehow to chaos or wildness, and as it happens, the OED etymologies of these disorderly-motion words tend to include the others! Such as: willy-nilly (from will ye? nil ye?: will you or won’t you?), helter-skelter (origin unknown), hurry-scurry, pell-mell (derived from the same Old French word, mesle, that gives us melee), and harum-scarum (sometimes hare ‘em, scare ‘em, from to hare, to run like a rabbit).

A number of music and dance words are RRCs, including hip-hop, boogie-woogie, hurdy-gurdy, and hootchy-kootchy. The Hokey Pokey (Hokey-Cokey or Okey-Cokey in England), a participatory dance popularized in the U.K. during WWII and in the U.S. in the 1950s, may derive its name from hocus-pocus. Its lyrics are also very similar to those of a 1940s Shaker song entitled “Hinkum-Booby” (“I put my right hand in / I put my right hand out / I give my right hand a shake / and I turn it all about”). Honky-tonk could be added to this list, though it does not exactly fit the classic RRC form, having the letter y at the end of one word but not the other.

Heebie-jeebies, born in the 1920s and found with various spellings, is another RRC that breaks the pattern slightly, perhaps because, as Dienhart points out, “a single heebie-jeebie [is] no doubt as rare as a single measle or a mump.” In Gregory Maguire’s 2005 novel Son of a Witch, Dorothy, showing her American folksiness, says “I’ve got heebies all over my jeebies.”

Many RRCs have to do with uncivilized people or wildness. The members of one culture may assume another culture savage, their language incomprehensible: famously, the ancient Greeks called non-Greeks barbarians because their language sounded to Greeks like bar-bar, repeated nonsense syllables. Similarly, Arabs have the word barbara (to talk noisily and confusedly), and Arab geographers gave the Barbary Coast (later home of pirates, quintessential wild men) and the North African Berbers their names. For the English of the 16th century, wild people living beyond the pale of civilization included the Irish, whence the word hubbub: Abu! is an ancient Irish warcry. Other people the English heard making a hubbub are Africans, theater-goers, chambermaids, and members of Parliament. Hubbub is also the name given by early New England colonists to a noisy game played by Native Americans. Medieval French wolf-hunters are conjectured to be the source of the word hullabaloo—formerly halloo-baloo, from “bas le loup” (the wolf is down there!). Another kind of uncivilized person is the American hillbilly, earlier Hill-Billie, first defined in print in 1900 as “a free and untrammelled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him.”

And as long as there are babies there will always be barbarians. Babbling babies supply us with rhyming family words in many languages: mama, dada, baba, papa, abba, etcetera. These are slightly different from other RRCs: the rhyme seems to be accidental, simply dependent on how babies jibber-jabber. As such, they fall in the same category as words like khaki, kiwi and dismiss—accidental RRCs. However, the word hobo, labelling as it does another far-edge-of-civilization being, suggests that the lines between baby-talk coincidence and the semi-intentional word play of RRCs are, like the lines between real and nonsense words, not entirely clear.

And, of course, children’s books are filled with RRCs. There’s Maurice Sendak’s Higglety Pigglety Pop, Betty MacDonald’s Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series, the Oompa-Loompas from Roald Dahl, and the story of Chicken Little, whose cohorts include Goosey Loosey, Henny Penny, Ducky Lucky, Turkey Lurkey, and Foxy Loxy. You’ll find a number of RRCs, near-RRCs, and even some rhyming triplicative compounds in the Oz books: Nimmie Amee, Dr. Nikidik, Crinklink, Muffruf, Tintint, a Boolooroo, a Yookoohoo, and Tititi Hoochoo, the Great Jinjin.

A number of “magic” words are RRCs, too. Mumbo-jumbo most likely derives from maamajomboo (a West African Mandinkan masked dancer in religious ceremonies). Hocus-pocus, commonly, though perhaps erroneously, thought to be derived from hoc es corpus (this is [my] body) spoken over the Eucharist by Roman Catholic priests, was first used by a 17th-century juggler who called himself “The Kings Majesties most excellent Hocus Pocus.” Nobody really knows the etymology of abracadabra, but it’s certainly an RRC, and an old one: it first appeared in a 2nd-century poem by Q. Serenus Sammonicus. One final magical RRC: in the 1970s, Babu, a cartoon genie voiced by Joe Besser, used Yapple Dapple as a spell word, though his spells usually went wrong.

RRCs tend to be light-hearted and humourous. Honey-bunny, roly-poly, fuzzy-wuzzy, itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, lovey-dovey, and tootsy-wootsy are all cutesy words—maybe even cutesy-wutesy. Furthermore, using an RRC in place of a more serious word can lighten a serious subject. Taking the Lord’s name in vain is serious; holy-moly (or if you want to add a few more syllables holy guacamole), hell’s bells, and jeepers creepers are not. If artists you know are acting all phoney-baloney, you could call them artsy-fartsy to bring them down a notch. Bigwig (alluding to the large wigs formerly worn by men of importance) and deadhead (a deadbeat, non-contributing member of society or a fan of the rock band the Grateful Dead) are similarly mocking.

English is not the only language that has RRCs. Smingus-dingus (pronounced shmingus dingus) is the name of a Polish holiday that falls the day after Easter. It is not a holy day, but rather a nationwide water fight: in the morning boys and men throw buckets of water on girls and women; in the afternoon, girls and women throw buckets of water on boys and men. Smingus-dingus is presumed to be made-up Latin. Falling the day after Easter, after a week of Masses in a country that takes Easter seriously, a holiday named after bogus Latin, featuring bogus baptism or communion, may be just right, though it might have been better scheduled in a warmer month. But probably we’re just being fuddie-duddies—if they don’t mind getting their tighty-whiteys soaked in cold weather, we’re not going to be all hoity-toity about it. (Note, however, that the Poles could lay claim to being hoity-toity themselves, since, curiously enough, hoity-toity can mean riotous, acting like a hoyden, as well as putting on airs.)

Smingus-dingus raises the matter of adding the sound “sh” to the beginning of words to make them mocking—fancy-schmancy, for example. Such words function slightly differently than other RRCs. They can be invented any time, and they do not have the permanence of words like mumbo-jumbo. Recently, for example, the Daily Show staged a mock-anti-Darwin series, Evolution Schmevolution. The sch beginning (rather than the more standard English sh) is a Yiddishism—see schmuck and schmooze. As it happens, Yiddish, though most closely related to German, takes many words from Polish—including schmuck, from Polish smok, meaning dragon—which makes Smingus-dingus a close cousin of English “sch” rhymes.

RRCs are, for lack of a better word, fun. They are fun to say, read, and write, and they are fun to invent, which is probably why there are new ones all the time. In recent years, the Internet has brought us a few RRCs: wiki (Hawaiian for ‘fast,’ sometimes wikiwiki; a wiki is a site that uses wiki software, so anyone can make changes to the site easily and quickly from anywhere); Wi-Fi (a set of compatibility standards for wireless local networks, commonly thought to be an abbreviation for wireless fidelity, but actually the name of the company that originally created the standards); and kijiji (village’ in Swahili, a sort of world-wide classifieds site).

To sign off, two final RRCs: ta-ta and bye-bye!

The Saloon-Bar Pundit: The Bane of the Philologist’s Life

J. L. A. Hartley, London, England

How I hate him! He’s always there, year in and year out! The man who pontificates on everything, but favours etymology above all else. He confidently stands there in the saloon bar and tells you that the French word for a restaurant for serving fairly fast food, un bistrot, gets its name from the Russian for quick. And that’s not by any means his last shot.

Bistro

Something I read in Verbatim brought it all back to me. Let me be precise. From the current issue of Verbatim, Vol XXX/3, I learn that Bridgit Keenan, in Diplomatic Baggage, repeats this supposed derivation. It brings back to me a good half-century of patiently listening to the Saloon-Bar Pundit—the sort of man who complacently feeds the innocent with spurious derivations with all the assurance of a born-again evolutionist. We don’t need to be creationists to inquire why there are no fossil remains of the giraffe half-way through its evolution. It’s a reasonable question for anyone to ask.

It’s a reasonable question, also, to ask the Saloon-Bar Pundit where’s the proof of the long, long trail a-winding from Moscow to Paris. Before we ever get to inquiring whether any French soldier ever did yell out “Bistro!”, most of us think of the Russians’ scorched-earth policy in 1812. We wonder how the French troops could have found anywhere in the nature of a cook-shop in the smouldering ruins on the outskirts of Moscow. And, if there’s anything in this story, had those troops passed through Russia in Europe without learning the word en route to Moscow? And is it at all probable that soldiers would collectively demand quick service by a single word in Russian to the extent that the word for ‘quick’ became the word for ‘a cook-shop’ a thousand miles away?

The Oxford English Dictionary, under constant revision, merely says of bistro, “French.” Michael Quinion politely dismisses the ‘quick’ etymology. He equally politely dismisses its alternative—invented, we may be sure, to counter the challenge of the smouldering ruins—that the Russian troops who helped to occupy Paris after the fall of Bonaparte were responsible for giving French a new word.

The odd thing is that the word does seem to be a new word. At least, according to the etymological clock, bistro is new word. To a Frenchman, the word is more familiar spelt with a final t, though that t is always silent. It seems to have gained a foothold in the French language about the middle of the 19th century—fifty years or so after the Retreat from Moscow. Its meaning was a small liquor store selling, chiefly, cheap wine. Today, the tendency in France is for the word to mean increasingly a small restaurant rather than a wine-shop. The spelling without the letter t also tends to emphasize the shift in rôle from wine-shop to restaurant. The distinguished dictionary Le Petit Larousse in its edition of 1972 has only bistrot and defines the words thus: “Pop. Marchand de vins. Débit de boissons” (Popular. Wine merchant. Drinks shop). The more progressive Petit Robert, though in an edition of two years earlier, has “Bistro ou bistrot: “1o Pop. Marchand de vin tenant café . . . 2o Pop. Café” (1st Popular, Combined wine merchant and café. 2nd Popular. Café . . .).

The derivation of the word is no doubt from the word bistrouille, “bad alcohol, bad alcohol mixed with coffee.” The word bistro[t] is not in Hatzfeld et Darmesteter, which, despite its Teutonic name, is the most prestigious etymological French dictionary. (The compilers were Alsatian Jews.) This transference from bistrouille to bistrot is characteristic of the movement of sound and sense in popular argots. The word brasserie is a case in point. Originally, it meant ‘a brewery.’ Later, it came to mean, also, a beer saloon, usually one in which food was served. Nowadays, it’s fair to say its primary function is to denote an extremely popular type of restaurant in which food from an ample but relatively invariable menu is served quickly and inexpensively.

A noteworthy characteristic and to some extent comparable shift has taken place in respect of a German word for bad spirits. The word Fusel is a colloquial word for bad brandy or other spirits, formerly applied in Low-German dialects also to bad tobacco: c.f., fuseln ‘to bungle.’ Fusel oil has become a trade and technical term for a mixture of several homologous alcohols, chiefly amylic alcohol, especially applied to this mixture in its crude form (Syd. Soc. Lex. 1885).

Much more breath-taking transferences have occurred in English. Take the word hooch as an instance. The word—in full, Hoochinoo—derives from the Tlingit (Alaskan) Hutsnuwu, a name for a low-grade alcohol distilled by the tribe but meaning, literally, ‘grizzly bear fort.’

There’s a Runyonesque touch to “Gimme two fingers of Grizzly Bear Fort.”

Charlatan

Another hobby-horse of the Saloon-Bar Pundit is to press on you an etymology of the word charlatan. The word correctly denotes one who pretends to knowledge he doesn’t possess, and it’s a word most often applied to quacks. There is absolutely no substance in the derivation that has a French king summoning his physician by crying out, “Charles, attend!” The word enjoys a clearly recorded etymology: ciarlatore, Italian for ‘a babbler, a patterer, a mountebank,’ from ciarlare, ‘to babble, to patter, to act the mountebank,’ from ciarla, ‘chat, prattle,’ taken into French with a number of other words such as richissime during a honeymoon period between French-speakers and Italian-speakers.

In contrast to the real living history of the word charlatan, there is absolutely no history whatever of the supposed French king and his supposed medical man. How do these myths ever get off the ground?

Marmalade

Another bogus etymology, again involving royalty, concerns the derivation of the word marmalade. The close trading associations between Portugal and England account for the virtually intact adoption of the Portuguese word marmelada into English. It originally denoted a preserve based on boiling quince with sugar, to which mixture were added any of a wide range of flavours. Nowadays the word is limited to confections based on citrus fruits, especially bitter oranges, of which the Seville orange, Citrus Bigaradia, is most prized. The Merriam-Webster definition of the word is a model: “a clear sweetened jelly in which pieces of fruit and fruit rind are suspended.” However, your Saloon-Bar Pundit has to bring in Mary Queen of Scots, who, according to this autocrat, could eat only marmalade when she was ill, hence, he tells us, the name, Marie malade (Mary ill). Needless to say, no history book in any way validates this flight of fancy.

Mayonnaise

On the derivation of mayonnaise there is no end of controversy and still no sign of consensus. Predictably, the Saloon-Bar Pundit struts his hour. No etymology so far proposed has any significant merit, but the most breathtakingly absurd derivation to date has the cachet of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, 14th edn (1989):

“A sauce made with pepper, salt, oil, vinegar, the yolk of egg, &c, beaten up together. When the Duc de Richelieu captured Port Mahon, Minorca, in 1756, he demanded food on landing; in the absence of a prepared meal, his chef took whatever he could find—hence the orginal form mahonnaise.”

In the first place, there is no evidence that the Duc de Richelieu or his cook had anything to do with the sauce. In the second place, if “the cupboard was bare”, what did the Duke have with his mahonnaise? In the third place, how do we account for the delay of over fifty years after the fall of Minorca before the form mahonnaise appears? And, lastly, how do we account for the co-existence of the forms mayonese, magnonese, and bayonnaise side-by-side with the form that eventually won out? A number of dictionaries have tentatively cited the Port Mahon derivation, including the New English Dictionary of 1906, the earlier name the OED. The draft revision of the OED’s entry mayonnaise dated March 2001 withdraws the derivation but is frankly unable persuasively to postulate any other. So be it! It’s hardly surprising that many words lack a positive etymology. One of the most common of all French verbs, aller, ‘to go,’ has—believe it or not—absolutely no derivation that any scholar has so far discerned! Like Topsy, aller just growed.

All my Eye and Betty Martin

The Saloon-Bar Pundit doesn’t restrict himself to dreaming up derivations of words only. He does the same with well known phrases and sayings. He will draw your attention to the Delphic phrase, All my eye and Betty Martin and will tell you that English sailors heard Spanish or Portuguese sailors “invoking their Patron Saint” in the following words: Ah mihi beate Martine. He will then explain that the English sailors couldn’t understand a word of it, and adopted those sounds as a means of saying “Mere blather.” If those dog-Latin words mean anything, they mean, “Ah, to me Blessed Martin.” But there are so many objections to this fantastical fiction that it’s hard to know where to begin. In the first place, St Martin has been canonized, not merely beatified, so he warrants “Saint”, not merely “Blessed.” In the second place, sailors have four patron saints: St Christopher, St Brendan the Navigator, St Nicholas, and, particularly among Spanish and Portuguese sailors, St Elmo, he of the electro-static phenomenon known as St Elmo’s Fire, or corposant. There has never been a cult of St Martin among sailors. In the third place, it is only on an impossible supposition that one could derive “my eye” from mihi. What is that supposition? Well, it’s one that raises a million questions in so many departments of life that one hardly dares venture upon an explanation. In essence, this third objection depends on the recognition that, from the Reformation until the early years of the 20th Century, the English had their own pronunciation of Latin that depended on the sounds of the English language, not on the sounds of other languages, and certainly not of the Italian of papal Rome. This English pronunciation is still widely heard, as, for instance, in the expression vice versa. In that English pronunciation, the word mihi would be pronounced so as to sound my high, which is not a million miles away from my eye—but it’s ten million miles from the way that Spanish or Portuguese sailors might have pronounced it—mee-eeh! Brewer’s merely mentions this travesty of a derivation: it doesn’t endorse it.

Perhaps the factor that gives this derivation its final quietus is that, in the North of England, the common expression is, All my eye and Peggy Martin.

The Bull and Gate

There are several public houses in England called “The Bull and Gate.” The Saloon-Bar Pundit tells you that the name comes from Boulogne Gate, a short-term victory of Henry VIII in 1544 but the one bright spot in a campaign that ended in utter defeat—not something the English populace would have wanted to commemorate. But the Boulogne Gate of history was not one of the gates of Boulogne; it was one of the gates of Calais. It’s frequently mentioned as such by Hall and Holinshed. A moment’s thought would convince one that a town the size of Boulogne would have more than one (fortified) gate: the name Boulogne Gate couldn’t possibly refer to a gate of Boulogne itself. The gates of walled towns were most often called by the names of adjacent towns, so the Boulogne Gate of Calais would be the gate of Calais through which you left on your way to Boulogne. The practice was followed with the names of roads, too: the London Road was the road to London, not of London, and so on.

The Saloon-Bar Pundit never seems to think of the difficulty of locating places before streets had street-numbers. The principal means of giving an address was to say what sign was displayed on the exterior of the building. Public-house names are a relic of the most common practice, that of displaying a graphic symbol resembling a heraldic charge on a sign-board projecting onto the street. Hence pub-names such as The White Lion.

The risks implicit in a repetition of the same symbol were dire: thus, a good deal of imagination was needed in populous cities to avoid a confusing conflict of signage. Much ingenuity was expended on devising absolutely unique symbols. To choose the image of a bull and the image of a five-barred gate would be a good way of distinguishing your own tavern from one a little farther down the street, called, simply, The Bull.

Of course, it might just have been possible that the painter of your inn-sign depicted the Boulogne Gate of Calais, but how would you have described your sign to prospective customers? Of course, you might have been of a punning character: you might have instructed your sign-painter to feature a rebus—that is, in the heralds' terminology, a canting device. A canting device depended on a play on words, and it was something that often depended on a great leap of faith or high proficiency in guesswork. It might have helped customers to find your inn if it got round that “A bull-and-gate equals Boulogne Gate,” but isn’t it much more likely that your honest inn-keeper would have opted for the plain and straightforward depiction of a bull and a gate and called his inn precisely that, The Bull and Gate?

P. H. Ditchfield (1854–1930), a respected writer on folklore, succumbed to the temptation of easy money and wrote a book called English Villages (1901) in which he trots out the old tale about the Boulogne Gate. He had written a book in 1894 called Books Fatal to their Authors. Perhaps he ought to have taken his own medicine.

There’s a immense battery of traditional names for inns in England: thousands of them, in fact. Some are very romantic, recalling the days of chivalry. Some produce very artistic signs, particularly the ones that lend themselves to heraldic depiction. Some are plainly and unmistakably dependent on local folk-wisdom or local associations of ideas. Some, of recent creation, are so bogus as to make the flesh creep. One firm of beer-sellers has established a chain of public houses in England with names that are intended to sound traditional but with a novel twist—which makes them utterly phoney. One such is The Rat and Parrot. It’s simply not a pub name.

The firm is no doubt trying to recapture the flutter caused by the cheeky, rude and utterly inauthentic name of their first establishment, The Pheasant and Firkin. A firkin is an innocent ancient name for a particular volume of liquid—a type of barrel—but it also sounds very like the Cockney boozer’s most popular adjective. And egalitarian jests based on the similarity of the words peasant and pheasant are two a penny. There’s even a joke that goes the rounds every few years about a six-foot red-headed man, Frank Field, employed by the prestigious gourmet store in Piccadilly, Fortnum & Mason’s, in the capacity of pheasant plucker. His wife dies suddenly and his son goes to the store to break the news. The doorman shakes his head: “No, I can’t say as I’ve heard of Frank Field.” The boy says, “He’s six feet, red hair, a pheasant plucker . . ..” “Ah, yes!” said the doorman. “He is a nice chap, isn’t he?”

The Elephant and Castle

Perhaps one of the most quoted pub signs is the one that’s given its name to an entire district in London, The Elephant and Castle. An elephant with a martial howdah on its back is the crest of the Worshipful Company of Cutlers in the City of London: it looks something like an elephant with a castle on its back. The symbol was innovative and thus not likely to be confused with other signs. It was easily described to punters: “the Elephant and Castle.”

But straightforwardness has never appealled to the Saloon-Bar Pundit. He must elaborate. He tells you that the pub takes its name from Eleanor of Castile, wife of Edward I. She was the Infanta de Castile (strictly, la Infanta de Castella, the eldest daughter of the King of Spain not heir to the throne) and that Elephant and Castle is a corruption of Infanta de Castile. You ask the Pundit what the symbol would have been on the inn-sign. “Ah”, he says, “It was an elephant with a castle on its back. It was a sort of pun!” We winks triumphantly at the other habitués of the saloon bar. You point out that the Cutlers' Company used it as their crest. “Yes,” he says. “They used it too.” He then starts all over again. “You see, people didn’t understand foreign languages. They made the Spanish words sound like words in their own language . . . .”

The Case is Altered

Oddly, there is one pub in London that seems to fulfil all the promise the Saloon-Bar Pundit could wish for, and that’s the pub called The Case is Altered, which adjoins the celebrated theatre, The Old Vic. Brewer’s says there’s another at Ravensden, Bedfordshire, and another at an unnamed place in Middlesex.

At all events, an explanation of the phrase and of how it gained currency (though not of how it became the name of public houses) is that Ben Jonson named one of his plays by this phrase (in 1598). The celebrated lawyer Edmund Plowden (1518–1585) is said to have won a case by the use of the phrase. In one version of the episode, Plowden is defending a man charged with hearing Mass, but it turns out that the supposed priest is not a priest but a common informer dressed up as a priest so as to be able to entrap the recusants. On the discovery under cross-examination of the secular status of the informer, Plowden is said to have secured the acquittal of the accused by exclaiming, triumphantly, “The case is altered! No priest, no Mass.” (This pro-Papist story was itself altered subsequently so that the charge was that the accused had let his hogs stray onto his neighbour’s land. When evidence was adduced to the effect that the hogs were the complainant’s own, Plowden is said to have exclaimed, “The case is altered,” but this version of the story lacks the equivalent of “No priest, no Mass!” as a punch-line.)

How the name The Case is Altered came to be applied to this public house adjacent to The Old Vic is so outlandish, according to the Saloon-Bar Pundit, that it seems credible: no one would invent such arrant nonsense. This is how it goes.

A Spanish merchant resident in London built a house on the site of what is now the public house The Case is Altered. He built it to four floors high because he wanted his warehouse, his almacén, to be on the ground floor of his own house (perhaps so that he could achieve the acme of many of us, to be able to roll out of bed and into work—or to achieve another dream of the reluctant commuter, that of “living over the shop”).

Since the neighbouring houses were most of them only two storeys high, the merchant’s Spanish servants got into the habit of calling the four-storey building La Casa Alta—“the high house.” This name meant nothing to the neighbours. It sounded to them like, The Case is Altered, and so the house acquired that name. As London grew and affluent people moved further and further out, La Casa Alta fell on hard times and became, eventually, an ale-house—and for that purpose the name The Case is Altered was ideal.

In all probability, the public house was named The Case is Altered simply because Ben Jonson’s play of that name was well known and popular. When Lerner & Lowe’s adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion was made into the motion picture My Fair Lady, half a dozen faux-Victorian pubs sprang up in London under the name My Fair Lady.

The Lesson to be Learnt

No, there isn’t a pub called The Lesson to be Learnt, but there are certainly lessons to be learnt from encounters with the Saloon-Bar Pundit. First and foremost, never believe him! He’s always wrong!

Most Saloon-Bar Pundits profess a respect for scholarship. Ask the next one you meet who dishes out his home-spun folk-etymology whether he’d care to cite his references. I’ve silenced many a Saloon-Bar Pundit by reciting a little dialogue or script that goes like this:

The task of verifying references is an arduous one, but it is one of immense importance to scholarship. A memorable anecdote encapsulates this notion. Dean Burgon (J. W. Burgon, 1813–88) asked “the Last of the Non-Jurors”, Martin Joseph Routh (1755–1854), for “some axiom or precept” he thought of as being of special value “after a long and thoughtful life.” Dr Routh, aged ninety two at the time, had been President of Magdalen [College, Oxford] for almost thirty years! Routh “looked thoughtful.” He “presently brightened up and said, ‘I think, sir, since you care for the advice of an old man, sir, you will find it a very good practice’ (here he looked me in the face) ‘always to verify your references, sir!’ .”

Not a few Saloon-Bar Pundits have asked me for my reference for that anecdote. I have had the prudence to etch the reference into my memory so that it will withstand the passage of a thousand years. I say, solemnly and truthfully: “J. W. Burgon, “Memoir of Dr Routh”, Quarterly Review, July 1878, vol cxlvi.”

Believe me, it’s worth the effort! The effect is best described in the immortal words of half a dozen Punch cartoons: “Collapse of Stout Party.”

(A still, small voice inquires: “What’s your reference for ‘Collapse of Stout Party’?”)

[J. L. A. Hartley is a lexicographer living in Kensington, London. His most recent book, Hartley’s Foreign Phrases—his publishers' choice of name—was published by Stacey, London, in September 2006.]

Ha’penny Hurls and Chittering Bites: Talking Glaswegian

June Sawers, Chicago, Illinois

For a small country, Scotland is linguistically complex. Three languages are spoken there: two, English and Scots Gaelic, are officially recognized. But the third language, Scots, is a private tongue. Scots resides in the crevices of houses and lives on in the ordinary talk of everyday folk. If strangers were to eavesdrop on a conversation between Scots speakers, they would think they were speaking a different language, which, of course, they are (although some still think of Scots as a dialect of English, not a separate tongue). Some of the words most everyone knows or has heard (such as wee or bairns) and once a year the whole world comes together to sing Robert Burns' “Auld Lang Syne” even if they don’t know exactly what all the words mean.

Scots is an older form of English. Not only are Scots sounds and words different from English but so also is the syntax and grammar. “Unlike Gaelic, Scots and English are closely related and are mutually complementary—two branches of the same tree which nevertheless express very different world pictures,” writes Billy Kay in Scots: The Mither Tongue. During the Middle Ages, Scots was Scotland’s national language as well as the language of an emerging literature. Today, there are several varieties of Scots spoken in Lowland Scotland (the Highlands and Islands speak English and/or Gaelic): Southern Scots, Mid or Central Scots, Northern Scots, and Insular Scots (Orkney and Shetland). Scots has also been received other appellations, such as the Doric and Lallans. In recent years, academics and cultural critics have helped raise the status and prestige of the language. Courses in Scots are taught at Scottish universities, for example.

If, in America, the national obsession is race, in Scotland, it is language. We, especially Lowlanders, are intimately aware of accents, the vagaries of speech, and where it places one on the social ladder; for some (but certainly not all) there is a feeling of insecurity in the way we speak, depending upon whom we are speaking to and the social situation. Although we pride ourselves on being egalitarian, speech remains our dirty little secret. Consider Highland English. Several of my best friends are from Inverness, the so-called capital of the Highlands. It has been said that the natives of Inverness speak the purest English in all of Britain, perhaps in the world. And it is true that the inhabitants do speak a lovely, precise, quite beautiful English. Glaswegians would say that they speak “proper,” which essentially means standard English. “Oh, aye, they speak nice up there,” one of my cousins once said.

Glaswegian Scots belongs in a category all by itself. It has a rich, earthy vocabulary, full of robust character and colorful phrases. Based on West Mid Scots, over the years it has developed its own vocabulary and grammar. Glasgow Scots is so popular in fact that it even has spawned its own dictionary. The Patter by Michael Munro was first published in 1985; since then it has been reprinted numerous times and has sold over 140,000 copies worldwide. To Munro, Glasgow Scots “is a valid and creative dialect of Scots, not, as some would have it, a slovenly corruption of standard English.”

Once, I received a postcard from a friend (actually, more of a friend of a friend), who, on a visit to Glasgow, wrote, in apparent exasperation, “What language are they speaking?” Although I am sure she did not wish to cause any harm, I was deeply offended. Another time my mother and I were riding in a city bus, blethering away in our usual fashion, when a young girl, a teenager, turned around and asked my mother in the nicest possible way, “What language are you speaking?” Unlike me, my mother never seemed bothered by these linguistic intrusions, “German,” she said in her best Glaswegian accent. “I’m only jokin',” she laughed, with a twinkle in her eye. “It’s really English.”

Some Glaswegians think it’s hilarious that movies with working-class Glasgow characters are subtitled in America. It is sadly indicative, however, of just how most any kind of Scottish dialect is basically unfamiliar territory in the United States (unlike Cockney English and Irish English which, for the most part, is not subtitled; the assumption being that Americans are more familiar with English and Irish accents, slang, and idiom).

For many years, there has been a stigma attached to speaking Scots, even (or especially) among the Scots themselves. Attitudes are slowly changing, and yet the shame, for some, still lingers. My mother always felt self-conscious about the way she spoke although fortunately she made no effort to change her distinctive Glasgow patois (not that she could). Of all my siblings, I was—am—the only one who still uses Scots words on a daily basis. I have even taught my non-Scots American friends to appreciate them. I’ve slowly realized though that some of the Scots words and phrases that I use are of an older variety and are not being spoken on the streets of Glasgow today. My mother—who I affectionately nicknamed Haggis—was all too aware that the words were disappearing; that the Glasgow Scots she spoke belonged to an older generation. Before she passed away, she asked, “Who’s gonnae say the wee words?” “Don’t worry, Haggis,” my friend and I reassured her. “We will.”

With that in mind, the following are my favorite Glaswegian words and phrases (again, some words are common throughout much of Lowland Scotland). Because Glasgow Scots is essentially an oral language, I have based the spelling on two sources—The Complete Patter by Michael Munro (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 1996; rev. ed.) and The Glasgow Encyclopedia by Joe Fisher (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1994)—as well as my own best approximation:

bahookie backside

chittering bite a snack

clipe tattertale

corrie-fisted left-handed

dowt cigarette butt

drookit drenched

gallus a term of approval; cheeky; self-assured; bold

glaikit stupid

hairy a low-class person

ha’penny hurl a ride in a vehicle

haver/havering hallucinating, especially during the moments before falling asleep

hen a term of endearment for a girl or young woman

kahoochie refers to something that stretches

moolly mean or miserly

nyaff an annoying or irritating person; a pest

pokey-hat an ice cream cone.

scratcher a bed

skelp to smack

skinny malink a thin person

skite slide

snotterybeak someone with a runny nose

stank a street drain

stoat bounce, as in a ball

stoorie dusty

sweary word.an obscenity

sweetie-wife a gossip

tally the local term for an Italian

thingmy a very useful word to use when you forget what you meant to say

wean (wain) the local term for baby or child

yin one (such as the wee yin, a nickname for a child or small person)

Phrases:

All torrid with the one stick All cut from the same cloth.

As two-faced as Camlachie clock and that’s got four Hypocritical; Camlachie is a district in the Glasgow metropolitan area known for its four-sided clock.

Don’t bother your shirt/Don’t cheese your beaver Both mean not to make any unnecessary effort.

Eerie awry um bum skoosh The Glasgow version of eenie meenie mynie moe.

Face like a behind turned inside oot/Face like a well-skelped behind See skelp above. Whichever phrase is used, it is clearly not a pleasant sight!

Face as long as a fiddle The epitome of glumness.

A face like a fish supper, it’s aw chips Refers to a rather unpleasant person.

Gie’s us yer patter.A friendly invitation to chat.

Gony no dae that Please don’t do that.

Hair like straw hangin' oot a midden Hair that is untidy or unwashed.

In a habble In a pickle.

It isn’t the cough but the coffin they carry him off in A witty play on words said when someone has a bad cough.

Keep your hair on, wigs are dear A sarcastic way of telling someone to calm down or, to use another idiom, hold your horses.

Kiltie kiltie cauld bum An irreverent child’s phrase.

Like Sauchiehall Street on a Saturday night Sauchiehall Street is Glasgow’s busiest street; thus it refers to any bustling place; the Scottish equivalent of “like Grand Central Station.”

Teenie fae Troon A disparaging name for any female who acts haughty.

What do you know about Clyde navigation? Another sarcastic way of asking “what do you know about anything?” The River Clyde runs through Glasgow.

Wee daft howff oor A phrase used when a person is wasting time or acting particularly silly.

Wouldnae say eechie or ochie Wouldn’t say yes or no, referring to someone who can’t make up their mind.

Yer face in a tinny A tinny is a tin drinking mug that Scottish schoolchildren used to drink from. The phrase is a sarcastic way of telling someone off.

And plenty more.

[June Sawers was born in Glasgow. She is a writer, editor, proofreader, and indexer, and has written or edited seventeen books, ranging in subject matter from Scotland to the Beatles to Bruce Springsteen. She is working on a short story and poetry collection on Scotland and the Scottish diaspora.]

Learning Modern Turkish

Kevin Revolinski, revtravel@yahoo.com

We called it the Grammar Wall. It started with a single piece of paper taped to the center of the wall in the study. Written in green magic marker the basic suffixes of simple present tense were held up for passing scrutiny and a sort of constant review lesson. From that first sheet, the rest followed in a growing system of charts and lists that mapped out the basics of Turkish grammar and vocabulary.

It was 1997, in Ankara, Turkey, and I had just moved in with two fellow English teachers, Chad and Bob. We were excited like children in a surprising wonderland of culture, history, and a very strange language. Though we had been told that Turkish wasn’t necessary in our jobs, we had committed to learn as much as we could. Armed only with a couple of phrasebooks and an optimistic Turkish in Three Months guide, we began the Grammar Wall and thus embarked on a tongue twisting journey into a revolutionized language.

Often when I speak to someone for the first time about my time in Turkey, they ask me with a bit of a chuckle as though he or she were making up a word: “So what do they speak there? Turkish?” “Well, actually, yes.” On several occasions that fact has been met with surprise. Though I had heard of Turkish before, I was, in fact, surprised to find that over 200 million people share the tongue. Brought to Anatolia (what is now Turkey) by the Seljuk Turks in the 11th century, it later became the language of the Ottoman Empire. Over the centuries it has appeared in many text forms but from the 11th century forward, the Arabic script was used. If that were still true today, I fear I would have been completely lost. However, Modern Turkish is one of the beneficiaries of the revolution of a republic not even 100 years old.

Mustafa Kemal, most commonly known as Atatürk (Father Turk), is still the national hero of the Turkish Republic. He led the Ottoman soldiers who made their brutal stand at Gallipoli in 1915 when the Allied troops attempted to take the peninsula and march all the way to Istanbul. When the Ottoman Empire lay in ruin just after the Great War, he united the Turks—men and women—to rise against the Allied partitioning and Greek military forces that had marched almost all the way to the present day capital, Ankara. The Turks prevailed thus establishing Turkey’s present-day boundaries. Kemal, in turn, abolished the sultanate and soon after became the first president of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. His vision was to keep pace with the Western world while retaining national pride and unity. Part of his revolution included the abolishment of a state religion and the public display of Islamic dress, no small accomplishment in a nation 99.9% Muslim. Though the veil has returned to public life in Turkey, the government has remained a secular one since its inception.

But what is perhaps just as remarkable was the Dil Devrimi, the Language Revolution. He sought to purify the language of the foreign influences that had invariably permeated the vocabulary during the reign of the Ottomans. A veil or a fez can be removed in an instant; what would you do if your alphabet were abolished? In May 1928, the Latin alphabet was introduced with a few extra letters adapted slightly for some Turkish sounds. It was predicted the change would take at least five years. Atatürk demanded three months, and starting with the daily newspapers, he insisted everything be written using the new Latin alphabet. Then followed language courses with the President and Prime Minister themselves among the teachers. Finally, all school textbooks were changed. On November 1, 1928 the Turkish Parliament passed the new alphabet into law. Then Atatürk established The Turkish Language Society (later the Turkish Linguistic Association) which produced language studies with the goal of identifying authentic Turkish words which in turn were compiled into new dictionaries. Students were encouraged to use the purely Turkish words. The role of the teachers became paramount. According to Turkish government reports, before 1932 the use of authentic Turkish words in written texts was 35–40 percent, while now that figure is estimated at 75–80 percent. But despite a streamlined vocabulary and the familiar alphabet, for an English speaker, it was a trip down another language branch.

Turkish comes from the Altaic language family which also includes Mongolian and Tungusic languages, while some linguists even include Japanese and Korean among its brethren. Altaic languages share some common characteristics that often distinguish them from languages of Indo-European origin.

The first is the absence of gender. There was nothing more frustrating for me when learning Spanish when I found myself incorrectly referring to a problema as feminine (la) when in fact problems are masculine (el). Some may find that particular example logical, but there is no rational way to determine the gender of one’s living room furniture. Turkish doesn’t have this problem. In fact, the third person pronoun O lacks any distinction between ‘he,’ ‘she’ or even ‘it.’ In situations where that would matter, one relies on context or presumably a pointing finger.

Additionally, Turkish is an agglutinative language, meaning that words are composed of morphemes that retain their meaning in combination. Words or even entire sentences are built off of a base morpheme by adding suffixes that add information. Take the word gelmek, ‘to come.’ The -mek suffix indicates an infinitive and is removed (except when being used as an infinitive or gerund, of course). Geliyordum uses three extra suffixes to arrive at ‘I was coming.’ -iyor- indicates progressive, the -du- suffix, past tense, and -um the first person. A prepositional phrase like ‘to my house’ is reduced to one word with two suffixes: ‘house’ (ev) plus ‘my’ (-im) plus ‘to’ (-e): evime. There is practically no limit to the complexity that one can compose with what appears to be one word. Consider ‘I should not have said’—söylememeliydim.

Another Altaic characteristic is vowel harmony. Each suffix has a vowel variance. The first person suffix for example can be -im, -ım, -um, or -üm. The suffix vowel is determined by the vowel previous to it in the word. In words of truly Turkish origin, all the vowels harmonize. E and i and u harmonize while e and a do not, for example. A word like merhaba (hello) then is not harmonized as the a would not follow the e. In fact, this word is Arabic in origin (welcome).

At first I skipped over the chapter on vowel harmony, naively thinking it wasn’t so very important. Two weeks into struggling with the vocabulary I ran back to the grammar book and committed the vowel harmony patterns to memory. After a short time I was able to feel the harmony in the shape of the mouth. There is an economy of movement in it, much as in English with the article an and the archaic mine (as in “Mine eyes have seen the glory”) which close the air flow with an n sound rather than a glottal stop between open vowels if we were to say “a apple.” To be sure, the variety of Turkish vowel sounds (23 in all) makes it harder to reduce having an accent. Compare it to the relatively straight-forward aeiou of continental pronunciation. To its credit, each letter corresponded to a specific vowel sound, unlike the seemingly by-guess by-golly of English vowels.

But the difference that I found most challenging was thinking “backwards.” In English and in Spanish the first thing the speaker generally does is conjugate a verb. ‘I went,’ Yo soy, and then all the details follow. In Turkish, verbs come at the end of the sentences. My challenge was to figure the verb in my head, then hold onto it until I composed the rest of the sentence. Until I learned to reverse my thinking, I was often left forgetting what it was I had wanted to say when I first opened my mouth. Add to that the end positioning of articles and prepositional suffixes and it is almost comical in literal translation: “Tuesday on friends my with store the to go did I.” It became important, as it is really in any new language, to avoid thinking in my mother tongue.

The truth is I never went very far beyond basic Turkish, unlike my companion Bob, who had joined a Turkish choir and thus was in a constant immersion environment and became quite good with the language. But I still occasionally count to ten or test myself to keep what little I still have locked away in the back of my memory. I have kept photos of the Grammar Wall, and I am forced to smile whenever I remember myself humbled in the street trying to ask directions while my 6th-grade students could already give them to me in English.

[Kevin Revolinski lived in Turkey from 1997 to 1998 and returns frequently to visit. His book about his experiences there, The Yogurt Man Cometh, was published in late 2006 by Citlembik Ltd. He lives and writes in Madison, Wisconsin.]

CLASSICAL BLATHER: Speak of the Devil!

Nick Humez, mythclass@earthlink.net

Although we may be tempted to lose heart because we appear to live in an age of increasing religious polarization and sectarian hostility, it is reassuring to recall that at bottom Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share some core beliefs, one of them being the chief source of temptation itself. Whether under the name of Iblis, Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, the Prince of the Air, or Old Scratch, the Devil as the chief of all devils and embodiment of all that is evil pervades the formal theological beliefs and folk consciousness of well over half the world’s population.¹ Other societies may have demons² or divinities with certain attributes they share with the Arch-Fiend—ruler of the underworld (Hellenic Hades, Sumerian Ereshkigal), evil trickster (Norse Loki), after-death punisher of the wicked (Egypt’s crocodile-headed devourer Amemait)³—but only People of the Book⁴ can boast an Adversary who has it all.

He’s the Enemy⁵ we love to hate; yet as the proverb from which we took this column’s title goes on to say, Western society has often been squeamish about saying his name aloud for fear it will cause him to materialize in front of us⁶ and do us harm. To get around this, a generous assortment of euphemisms have been invented: Father of Lies, the Dickens or the Deuce,⁷ Old Harry/Scratch/Nick,⁸ the Evil One, the Tempter, Prince of Darkness, and so on. The word devil comes from Latin diabolus, a straight borrowing of Greek diabolos, “slanderer” (from dia-, “against,” and ballein “to throw”), itself a gloss for Hebrew sâtan “adversary” (from sâtân, “to plot against”)—in St. Jerome’s Vulgate simply rendered as a transliterated proper noun, Satanas.⁹

But whereas there was but one Satanas—identified with Lucifer (“light-bearer”),¹⁰ leader of the angels said to have used their free will to rebel against God’s authority—the Latin-speaking church allowed of many diaboli, from actual petty demons such as Titivilus (whose job it was to gather in a great sack all the final syllables skipped over in rapid recitation of the liturgy) to the metaphoric diabolus in musica, i.e. the tritone,¹¹ and the advocatus diaboli (”Devil’s Advocate”), whose job it was to try to refute evidence presented during the process which led to the church’s canonization of a saint. Romance-language cognates of diabolus include Italian diavolo, Spanish diablo, and French diable, and (as we shall shortly see with “devil” in English) everyday expressions containing these words abound.

Beelzebub appears in the Old Testament (II Kings 1:2-3) as Ba’alzebub, a pagan god to whose oracle Azariah, the mortally ill king of Samaria, sends to inquire if he will recover. (His emissaries are stopped on the road by the prophet Elijah, who scornfully asks if there is no God in Israel, such that Azariah must go seeking his answer from a Canaanite one.) In fact, the writer of II Kings may be having a naughty snicker at the Canaanites' expense: Ba’al (“Lord”) is the name of the young rain deity who is also the beloved son of the principal Canaanite god, Father El; hence one of his titles is zebul, Ugaritic for “prince.” So by tweaking the final consonant the author of II Kings was able to turn “Ba’al the Prince” into “Lord of the Flies.”¹²

Other names for the Devil derive from ba’al and its compounds and cognates, such as the Bel¹³ of Bel and the Dragon (in the Catholic Bible but relegated by Protestants to the Old Testament Apocrypha) and Belphegor¹⁴ (a variant of Ba’al Peor, the Moabite deity whose worship by some Israelites God punished with a plague epidemic; see Numbers 25:3-5, as well as Hosea 9:10)—though not Belial, from Hebrew bêliya’al, “vanity, worthlessness, wickedness,” and so used in the Old Testament (see, e.g., Deuteronymy 13:13 and II Chronicles 13:7).¹⁵

Although it is axiomatic in the Abrahamic religions that God is superior to all other beings, including all the evil spirits up to and including Satan himself, the temptation is very strong to see the struggle between good and evil in this world as equally balanced, if indeed not going predominantly to the Devil.¹⁶ In addition, there is a strong tendency in Western thought to reduce categories to dualities, to a degree that has drawn much fire from latter-day critics.¹⁷ So it should come as no surprise that many who profess Christianity nevertheless might, in practice, regard the Devil as God’s exact opposite (much as Ahriman is the dark counterpart of Ormazd¹⁸), despite the established church’s repeated reminders that the biblical Satan was merely a fallen angel, and as such a created being, rather than a deity in his own right coexistent with (and by implication potentially as powerful as) the Creator.¹⁹

Even allowing for the Devil’s implicit inferiority to God (and according to St. John’s Apocalypse, his eventual subjugation by the forces of good), the ordinary believer might well have cause to fear Satan’s legions and the other horrors of the Hell awaiting the damned. Medieval iconography endowed the infernal tormentors with horns, claws, and a variety of nasty implements to use on their victims. In those days “Devil take him!” was by no means a casual curse,²⁰ and folklore abounded in which lost souls were carried off by grotesque fiends. At least one of these tales got elevated to the status of enduring literature: the story of a well-born scholar whose bargain with Mephistopheles²¹ to obtain the outward means of happiness in this world in exchange for damnation in the next would be rendered by Christopher Marlow in English as the play Dr. Faustus, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as the epic poem Faust, and by Hector Berlioz (after Gerard de Nerval’s Goethe translation) as the opera La Damnation de Faust.

Rationalists might argue that the double-whammy of the explosion of Renaissance learning well beyond the church’s control, and the secularism of the Enlightenment which followed, go a long way to explain the proliferation of casual phrases employing the Devil’s name; but it might also be argued that toying with the possibility of actually raising the Devil²² has greater frisson in a society some of whose members still fervently believe that to say a taboo word enacts its referent’s real presence than in one where demons are relegated to folkloric caricatures in red tights.²³ Whichever the case (or both), we may speak of a very heavy object as a devil of a load,²⁴ that we are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, that there will be the devil to pay (and no pitch hot),²⁵ and our best course will be a headlong flight in which it is every man for himself and devil take the hindmost. We may upbraid our young kinfolk for their devil-may-care attitude, and admonish them that the devil makes work for idle hands and dances in an empty pocket,²⁶ that a deck of cards is the Devil’s Bible, and that if they know what is good for them they will stop beating the devil’s tattoo with their fingertips on the table, at least till our homily is finished. We say that he is in the details,²⁷ and add that we must give the devil his due, for he is not so black as he is painted. When unpleasant necessity leaves us no choice, we may say that need must ride where the devil drives;²⁸ and when we do have a choice but neither options is appealing, we may apply the principle of better the devil we know than the devil we don’t.

Those who are bred and born to the publishing trades might be grateful not to have start their careers nowadays as a printer’s devil, so called because part of this entry-level job was to smear ink on a flatbed press for its next impression; in consequence though such a lad began his workday white as snow, he would end it black as Tartarus. But even apprentices have their holidays, and no summer picnic in the country would be complete without deviled eggs (so called because of the spice added to the creamed yokes), perhaps on a gingham cloth spread in a meadow tinged with the bright colors of the alpine flower called the devil’s paintbrush.²⁹ Let us hope our rusticators may not tread upon any of those plants of the genus Ferula whose malodorous gum is called Devil’s dung³⁰ (or asafetida), useful both as a natural ingredient in medicine and as a spice in Indian cooking. Other plants with demonic nicknames include devil’s milk (sun-spurge, whose milky sap is toxic), devil’s guts (the stems of the dodder plant or creeping buttercup), devil’s candlestick (the stinkhorn mushroom, Phallus impudicus) and devil’s snuff-box (any puffball fungus of the genus Lycoperdon).

Places with the Devil’s name are legion as well, often in connection with some local topographic feature: The Devil’s Dyke, in Cambridgeshire, England, is an Anglo-Saxon rampart, as high as 18 feet in places, stretching from Reach to Wood Ditton (a distance of some seven and a half miles). The Devil’s Frying Pan is a tidal basin in Cornwall, east of Lizard Point and near the village of Cadgwith. The town of Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, is named for a nearby igneous pipe (the basalt core of a volcano whose outer slopes have eroded); around 600 feet high, the rock and its immediate surroundings are now a national monument. Devil’s Lake in North Dakota is actually a string of them, totaling some 50 miles in length, and also the name of a town, on the opposite shore from which is the U.S. military reservation called Fort Totten. And of course there is the infamous Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana, on which for 101 years France incarcerated its hard cases and political prisoners (including Captain Alfred Dreyfus).

Finally, a wheeze passed on by Sol “Roundman” Weber³¹ in one of his recent e-mail epistles-general: It seems there was once a Devil worshipper³² who suffered from dyslexia, in consequence of which he sold his soul to Santa.

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H. Hooke, Ptah was “represented as bringing Atum and all the gods of the Heliopolitan Ennead into existence through his divine word” (Middle Eastern Mythology [Baltimore: Penguin, 1963], p. 72), and Celtic bards were thought to be able to bring disfiguring blemishes upon the face of a victim through the recitation of satirical verses against him (so says Fred Norris Robinson in Satirists and Enchanters in Early Irish Literature [American Committee for Irish Studies Reprint No. 1, N.D. (1911)], pp. 95n.5 and 114ff.) A similar reluctance to name what one would prefer not to come to pass underlies the Romans’ use of vixit (“he lived”) in place of mortuus est (“he died”).

Never Say ‘Death’

Daniel Krieger, New York, New York

There was a time, long ago, when the language of morticians was bracingly direct, dealing with such messy realities as death, bodies, survivors and so on. Then, in the mid-20th-century, funeral market analysts in the United States realized that by eliminating such distasteful words from the funerary lexicon, they could get loved ones to embrace with greater fervor the memorial impulse, the biological urge to memorialize the dead.

Of course, no funeral director would be caught dead saying the unmentionable D-word. The whole purpose of funeralese is to draw a veil over the harsh truth, bolstering what is known in the trade as client investment. The transaction starts at the funeral home with an arrangement conference in which a soft-spoken bereavement counselor, formally known as an ‘undertaker,’ begins the sales pitch with soothing words like, “I want to assure you that I’m going to do everything I can to be helpful to you.” Funeral practitioners are professionals, after all, with a degree in funeral science, which instructs them in mortuary etiquette, whether dealing with the vital statistics form, AKA ‘death certificate,’ or recommending a memorial tablet, once known as a ‘tombstone.’

When it comes time for casket selection, the counselor is careful always to refer to the deceased by given or family name. The wide variety of caskets on display in the selection room bear such tasteful names as Classic Royal, White Pearl, Monaco, and Futurama. To secure a loved one against the unfortunate consequences of long-term underground residence, a hermetically sealed protective casket is highly recommended. The leader in this market is Batesville’s Burping Casket, designed to allow the harmless venting of gases that might otherwise interrupt the process of grief therapy by blowing the lid off the coffin. Those who desire even more protection can purchase a vault, a cement or steel outer container that keeps the earth from caving in on what is left of the deceased when the coffin disintegrates. Family members concerned about appropriate shoes for the afterlife may choose a pair of Fit-a-Fut Oxfords or perhaps Ko-Zees, sold by the Practical Burial Footwear Company of Columbus, Ohio. The cost of such funeral goods is graciously referred to as the amount of investment in the service. On average, the bereaved invest about $10,000 in bidding farewell to their loved ones.

Preparing the decedent for viewing poses a great challenge because the expired have a tendency to look dead. This is why death care service includes full hygienic treatment, i.e. ‘embalming,’ which may sound a bit too King Tut for the average funeral buyer’s taste. A dermasurgeon performs this restorative art in a preparation room before the body is casketed and transferred to the slumber room where it can be viewed by the family in a beautified state, achieved with a battery of cosmetics, make up with brand names like Nature-Glo. Great care is taken to provide mourners with the perfect memory picture, the last glimpse of the departed, which they will take with them as a mental image.

The last step is figuring out the final disposition: what to do with the body after the memorial service (funeral). Typically, a casket coach (hearse) transfers the deceased from the chapel to their final resting place, purchased from a family service counselor, formally known as a burial plot salesman, who offers an interment space (grave) which is closed with earth in an outdoor area called a remembrance park (‘graveyards’ are those creepy places in Edgar Allan Poe stories). Those who dread spending eternity in solitude may purchase a companion space such as The True Companion Crypt, ideal for husband and wife who can repose stacked upon each other within a single double depth space. Others who prefer not to biologically degrade may find greater comfort in cremation, which takes place in a retort and is followed by the inurnment of the cremains, which have been processed rather than ‘pulverized.’ For the morose types who like to plan ahead for their demise, it’s possible to arrange a pre-need, ‘prepaid funeral,’ which can be purchased from a pre-need counselor. In the best of all possible worlds, a family member can arrange eternity leave to take care of the pre-deceased until it is time to wrap the just-departed in a slumber robe.

As you can see, undertaking, called ‘The Profession’ in the death care industry, is so much more than merely arranging floral tributes and disposing of the remains of a poor soul who has passed on. It’s a business that specializes in the service of bringing solace to its clients through a sanitized terminology designed to cleanse death of all its morbid associations, a feat that requires great linguistic cunning.

[Daniel Krieger is an ESL teacher and freelance writer living in New York City.]

The Power in the Punch of Welsh Valleys English

Lucy Williams, Cardiff, Wales

The pre-war, pre-union mining communities of south Wales were so downtrodden by the wealthy, educated classes that their descendants still seem suspicious of a ‘posh’ (received) English accent, as I have found on marrying into one such family. Yet I find their way of speaking far more awe-inspiring and domineering than any of the ‘posh’ accents of my affluent English upbringing. But why is it so domineering, and what linguistic manoeuvrings did that tight little forgotten community do to the English language to turn it to such powerful effect?

Welsh Valleys Speak, as I call it, is beginning to fade away now, along with the memories of those harsh coal-mining days, in which little flourished in the Rhondda Valleys except the dialect of its people. There, high amongst the dark, rugged mountains, Wales’s lilting style has been stretched and contorted to create a uniquely powerful instrument of communication—a weapon with which to fight not only the drab misery of those times, but also, no doubt, the outrageous and humiliating injustice of their plight. This is just a personal interpretation, but on the strength of the stories passed down through the generations, a credible one.

The vehement directness of Welsh Valleys Speak is indicative of the need to be heard. Its punchy nature creates impact, and gives clout—even authority—to the speaker’s words.

To this end, various parts of speech have been juggled about, none more than prepositions. Some of these are swapped with more emphatic ones, as in Come by the table, or Sit by the table, where the strong vowel and consonant sounds of by make it an effective substitute for at or to. Where-questions tend to have the preposition to tagged on the end, changing the stress and adding a commanding swing, as in Where’s them coats to? In other circumstances, prepositions are bypassed to make a snappier run of words, as in: I been up the phone box, down my aunty’s. Some prepositions are replaced by others with stronger rhythms, such as before/in front of, as in: He’s going to college in front of her.

I’ve illustrated these below in a sample monologue, drawn from an amalgamation of speeches by my older relatives-in-law. Included are a host of other typical linguistic contortions, some of which you will have noticed in the examples above, and all adding to the impact. Look out, for instance, for the swapping of has to have (‘ave), and the changing of went to been. Note how in spite of is used instead of although, and on account of, for because. You’ll notice, too, the pronoun these as subject, in place of a more drawn-out and wordy reference to the two grandchildren. Finally, you’ll be unable to ignore the vibrancy of the language—the grandiose, emphatic adjectives, the proliferation of exclamations and the back-straightening commands. Imagine, on top, the effect of an accent resounding with heavy, penetrating vowel sounds, here, for instance, stretched into yure, and the fluent rolling of the words, enhanced by the discarding of h’s and all dispensible sounds. Well, who could defy such a speaker?

The focus on nourishment and well-being, incidentally, is no coincidence, but characteristic of the locals in the shadow of past hardship. Nor is it coincidence that the woman of the house holds forth here. Back in those mining days, the man would pour his pitiful earnings into the raised apron of his wife, who would work miracles with them for the good of family and community, and a certain female dominance still lingers on with the dialect.

Here’s a sample speech to illustrate the authoritative dialect of a downtrodden community. Setting: An elderly Rhondda Valleys woman provides Sunday tea for visiting grandchildren. ‘Grandad’ is her husband.

“Come by the table, you two! Sian, sit by here (yure). Tom, you go b’ there please. Good God! Look at the size on you, Tom! You’ll be going to high school in front of your big sister! … Oh, now who are these flowers off? They’re never off you kids? Well, there’s lovely! Duw [God], there’s a scent on them roses! See what these ‘ave give us, Grandad? … Right, kids, get stuck in now, and get this food down your necks! Good God, Sian! Cut yourself a tidy slice, mun, for goodness’ sake! Blinkin’ ‘eck! Get some shape on you now! I went up Pam’s Pastries for that cake, I did. She got some fabulous cakes there, fair play! Tremendous fancywork on ‘em! Bloomin’ marvellous, some of ‘em, no word of a lie. She always had a brain on her, mind, that Pam … ‘Right! Ad all want? Get from the table a bit sharpish, then, the pair on ‘ou! Grandad be taking you over the park, see, in spite of the weather’s not too clever. — Grandad, where’s them coats to?— Grandad have got you posh new raincoats, see, on account of it always rains when you’re down our ‘ouse. So come by the door now and let’s be having ‘em on you.—You’ll ‘ave to be coming from there by six, mind, Grandad, and no messin’: I want these home before dark.—See you after, kids.”

Well, would you dare take issue with any of that? Nor me neither.

[Lucy Williams is an artist and sketches local scenes in between her other career as a stay-home mum. A Londoner by birth, she now lives in Wales and is fast picking up the Rhondda lilt—according to her English friends.]

OBITER DICTA: I Sold My Writing for a Song

Gloria Rosenthal, Valley Stream, New York

For many years I was a “professional contester”, a pejorative term for a person who enters contests “for a living”, such as it is. For example: for two months that “living” consisted of my winning a dog dish, a toy squirrel and a live turtle, but, ah! that was followed by trips to Las Vegas, Jamaica and an 80 pound bag of silver dollars ($2,100), one after the other. So you see, this “career” was fraught with uncertainty but filled with joyful anticipation. More about that another time.

This time I am talking about a leap from entering and winning contests to creating and judging them, which I have been doing for Games magazine for many years as a contributing editor.

The contests I create for Games call for creativity on the part of the readers, as opposed to the magazine’s many logic, numbers and grid-related challenges. My contests require a certain kind of twisted mind on the part of the creator (that would be me) and a bit of the same madcap thinking in the minds of readers who enter.

I play with words all the time, even when not thinking about it. For example, I once saw a sign on a store, Laundry Palace, and my mind’s strange eye saw, not palace, but pal, place, lace, pace, and ace. If a Toyota is driving in front of me, I don’t see just another automobile, I see ATOYOTA, a palindrome. These thoughts automatically take me one step further, into building puzzles and contests with word-playing bricks.

The best part of creating contests is that the fun doesn’t end there the way it does in puzzle-making. Once you’re done making the puzzle, you’re done, but that’s just when your pleasure begins in the contest-creating arena. What publication of the contest is judging literally thousands of entries sent in by astute, and possibly equally twisted-minded, readers who are pushed into coming up with far better, trickier and wittier words than we offer as examples. Judging is never, ever a slam dunk; many entries are worthy but few are chosen. Some very excellent entries we’d like to reward with a prize are often duplicated and must be discarded. The same dead end comes to rule-breaking entrants. Twenty-six words in a 25 word statement? Out! A last line that doesn’t rhyme? Discard pile. An entry with no name and address? Well, that is so obvious I won’t even mention it.

So over the years I’ve had a great deal of fun playing with words to create new contests. But I’ve never had as much fun as I had in the past year when a contest I created in 1984 became known as Dear John, Dear John and was turned into a. . . . wait! You will have to keep reading to find out what happened because first I’d like to give you a few examples of published contests, and I challenge you to try them out for yourself. But please, don’t send them to us! This is an article, not a contest. Thank you very much.

My most recent contest, State Your Case, came to me in a flash when I saw the word deny and suddenly thought Hey! deny is made up of postal abbreviations for Delaware and New York. As soon as I realized that I could get a kick out of finding other words such as memorial (Maine, Missouri, Rhode Island, Alabama) and mainland (Massachusetts, Indiana, Louisiana, North Dakota), I knew I would get an even bigger kick out of tossing the challenge to readers and then judging a contest that required them to tell a very short story using words made up with postal abbreviations. The entries were fabulous and some readers drew outlines of the states they used in their entries (sorry! you don’t get extra credit for decorating; the judges enjoy these tricks but only the actual entry counts).

Another time I was simply looking down at the keyboard when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a bunch of symbols. Pow! These could be worked into signs and not only “could be” but would be in Sign Us Trouble, with readers following my example of a sign in a health club:

Bware when U uu w88

All require = care

Do not

Do it

Translation:

Beware when you use weights

All require equal care

Do not over do it

It was a joy (and a job!) to read 3,000 entries but fortunately we required entrants to include translations or I’d still be trying to figure them out.

Another time we asked readers to tell us something about themselves, but not in any ordinary way, of course. This was, after all, a Games contest. We called it GETTING TO KNOW YOU and required readers to conjure up a rhymed acrostic using their own names, first, last or nick. I loved two features of this contest; my own challenge for me to follow my rules and create one using my first name:

Gorgeous, sexy, tall and slim,

Lovely, charming, full of vim;

Owl-like, stays up half the night;

Reading, writing—very bright!

Indeed she likes to rhapsodize,

And also tells a lot of lies!

A bigger plus was getting to know our readers as they took the task seriously and wrote about themselves in humorous verses. One of the winners bemoaned the fact that his parents did him dirty by giving him a four-letter name, Jack, leaving him one line short of a limerick. He put it in rhyme and won a prize.

WORD ALCHEMY asked readers to forge two or more parts of a word to create an “alloy”, or a new word. We gave some examples for readers to puzzle out and fill in the blanks but for you, I am filling in the underlined blanks with the actual words:

For mother’s birthday we plan to get her loose pearls and string them together in a necklace.

And another: Why is a ‘child proof” medicine cap able to confound the most capable adult?

The trouble with word-playing like this is it never wants to stop; you are forever thinking it must ache to have a mustache pulled, or isn’t it terrible that man’s laughter becomes manslaughter? Our examples in Word Alchemy were bested by such brilliance on the part of entrants that we awarded more prizes than originally promised.

And then there was the contest that went way above and beyond to add another dimension to my wordplay memories and is not likely to be topped, ever. The contest ran in January, 1984, and it challenged readers to create any form of communication–letters, signs, song lyrics, snippets of conversations—starting, with a positive statement that could be completely changed into a negative one with the alteration or addition of punctuation. All words had to remain in the same order, with no words added or deleted, as in my example.

First a charming love letter to John:

Dear John: I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior, John. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we’re apart. I can be forever happy. Will you let me be yours? Gloria

And then, poor John gets slammed!

Dear John: I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior, John. You have ruined me. For other men I yearn. For you, I have no feelings whatsoever. When we’re apart, I can be forever happy. Will you let me be? Yours, Gloria

A composer I will adore forever, Stephen M. Hopkins, Director of Choral Activities in the Hayes School of Music, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, turned both versions into a song. The song, called “Dear John, Dear John” sold well over a thousand pieces of sheet music, has been sung by choral groups all across the country, and I have a CD with a label that proclaims:

Dear John, Dear John

Lyrics By: Gloria Rosenthal

Music By: Stephen Hopkins

When my husband asked if I would get royalties (I did), I said “Who cares! My name is on the sheet music.”

And to quote another lyricist, Ira Gershwin, who could ask for anything more!

[The “Dear John, Dear John” entries are © Games Magazine, and it, and other excerpts, are used by permission.]

HORRIBILE DICTU

Mat Coward, Somerset, Britain

I’ve just read a reference in a newspaper to a man who “sadly passed away when the airship R101 went down in 1930.” Oh, now, look—I know we’re not allowed to say died any more, because it makes it sound as if something bad has happened, but the idea that someone who was killed as a result of a gigantic gas explosion and subsequent inferno “sadly passed away” is just too much. I think people who pass away do so quietly, by definition; it is surely impossible to say, for instance, “he passed away in agony.”

Here’s one more to add to our list of words which now mean the opposite of what they used to mean. A businessman tells a reporter: “We have managed to make this company a success again, and I feel very humble about that.” By humble, of course, he means proud. I have a feeling that this is the only sense in which the word is commonly used these days. I can only suppose the process began in false modesty (as in “I can’t claim credit for making this company a success—that’s down to the workforce, and I feel humbled by their loyalty”), but that now the modesty element has been dropped, leaving only the false.

Meanwhile, my personal quest for the most impressively meaningless lump of business-waffle continues to achieve high-yielding, customer-facing outcomes. Here’s an executive telling a trade magazine how glad he is about his new job: “I am very pleased to be able to take up this challenging new role and working with a wide range of colleagues to make a difference.” Not bad—I make that a score of five on the bollocksometer—but I’m confident it’ll be bettered before the end of the season.

I can’t remember which particular challenging new role that bloke was taking up, but I wonder if it was as Head of Reward and Recognition? This job title is a new one to me, though a quick internet search suggests that it’s widely used. I’m guessing, from context, that the HoR&R is either what used to be called the Head of Personnel or else a glorified wages clerk.

A theme of this column in recent issues—only because it’s a theme of the real world in recent times—is the way in which jargon is being used at the moment to disguise the relationship between employers and employees. This strikes me as a perfect example; your salary is not a “reward,” it’s what you’re contractually due for selling your labour. And what is “recognition”—something they give you instead of a pay rise, possibly?

I also can’t remember which company put forward the spokesman who told a radio reporter that “We are in the industry of giving people what they want.” The phrase rules more in than it rules out, wouldn’t you say? Anyone who was devoted to giving people what they don’t want would perhaps not sell too many. For a long time, just about everyone has been in the business of doing whatever it is they do, whether they are in fact in business, or in politics, or in anything else. But this is the first example I’ve noticed of “business” being upscaled to “industry.”

I hope Verbatim readers will always be in the business of sending their own horribiles to this column, and I’d like to issue a special appeal for examples of lawyer-speak. My interest is sparked by the case of a Welshwoman who was cleared of indecent exposure (after sunbathing naked in her own back garden) despite this eloquent speech by the prosecutor: “A woman exposing her lower region could be grossly offensive to normal decent persons.” Why persons instead of people? And which particular aspect of her lower region was it that caused gross offence to the decent normals of Llandyfriog—was it her knees or her heels?

I realise that quotations from instruction booklets don’t really count as horribiles, since they are written by someone who doesn’t pretend to speak English, and translated by someone who does; so, instead, I offer this—from the instructions to my newly-bought computer screen—as an example of truly lovely found poetry: “Be carefully to your LCD monitor, it’s very exquisite but easy to broken.”

Oh, man—aren’t we all?

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

Bits and Pieces

David Galef, University of Mississippi

America these days is a land of vast sizes and quantities, from Big Macs to Hummers. No one seems to write much anymore about misers and their language of cheese-paring smallness. Imagine my delight, therefore, upon hearing a woman the other day declare, “Just a tittle and a jot.” She happened to be a copy editor, talking about how much work she had left on a manuscript, so it seemed singularly appropriate. Tittle is a small printing mark (a dot, for instance) to indicate punctuation or stress. Jot is from iota, the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet, represented by 4, a tiny letter indeed. Yet “a tittle and a jot” emphasizes a small portion at the same time it ups the ante: a little over and above a tittle, please.

In fact, small amounts often come in pairs, from bits and pieces (as in picking up the bits and pieces of your life after breaking up with your boyfriend) to dribs and drabs (after pouring forth copiously for seven days, the oil gusher finally subsided to dribs and drabs). Drib is a back formation from dribble, cousin to the small amounts driblet and drip, whereas drab, like a muddy ooze, probably derives from dregs, which may be why drab also once meant ‘prostitute,’ deemed the dregs of society. Another minor duo, ‘a lick and a promise,’ borrowed from the way a cat washes itself and evocative of a half-hearted swipe with a washcloth, is the Tom Sawyer response to a request to take a bath.

In negation, bits and pieces often diminish to solo status. “That makes not one whit of sense,” my lawyer uncle used to pronounce after hearing one of my aunt’s arguments. Sometimes he’d add, for good measure, how there wasn’t a scintilla of evidence to back up her claims, or one particle of proof. My aunt, for her part, claimed not a spark of interest in what he said, and since scintilla is Latin for “spark,” maybe they were a well-matched pair. If my aunt didn’t give a rap, my uncle didn’t give a damn. (Or, as a forthright friend of mine used to remark, she didn’t give a fat rat’s ass.) Other bits used in negation have become a bit shopworn, especially in mystery novels: trace, vanished without a—; or truth, not a shred of— but with shred, we start encroaching upon the realm of food and its consumption.

The phrases a shred of meat and a morsel of bread made more sense in the days when that was dinner, and probably carried in a greasy leather wallet. Leftover from those days of leanness are a scrap of cheese and a crumb of cake. Scrap conjures up something scraped off, as from a cheese rind, and morsel derives from the Latin morsum, or something bitten. But who, besides crossword puzzle solvers, recalls ort, a food remnant related to eat? As for beverages, they once came in drams and thimblefuls or sips, just a drop in the bucket, though this last expression is used derogatorily to mean a mere nothing.

Nowadays, the vocabulary of mean portions is no longer used to describe the rations of a starving man but rather the fare of someone on a diet. It’s the language of restraint: just a smidgeon of creamed cauliflower, a touch of butter, a hint of garlic, or a scoche of sugar. A tad more sauce, please. These phrases have an endearing modesty, as in the British invitation “Join me for a spot of tea?” On the other hand, “just a bite to eat,” a favorite phrase of my mother’s, for me always evoked a women’s luncheon where each lady sunk her teeth into one communal sandwich before passing it on. When the cheesecake was unveiled, everyone would beg for just a sliver, which didn’t explain how the cake disappeared so quickly.

“A breath of fresh air” is still the modest rationale for walking outdoors. Other bits, such as shadow in “the shadow of a doubt,” have achieved such notoriety that they’ve displaced more realistic expressions. When I served on a jury some years ago, most of the group thought our job was to acquit unless we were certain of the suspect’s guilt “beyond the shadow of a doubt,” though our instructions were to convict if the evidence showed “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the suspect was guilty. About a decade ago, the humble nubbin, as in “whittled down to a—,” started appearing with such regularity in a New York Times restaurant critic’s reviews—“dainty nubbins of potato”—that a whispering campaign shamed the critic into using synonyms. Of course, whisper itself could be used in a review, as in “a whisper of marjoram,” or “a soupçon of olive oil.” Make it a whisper of perfume and a soupçon of a smile, add a trace of mystery, and you have the ingredients of a romance.

Some bits can apply to anything from sewing to painting to judgment. A snippet of fabric speaks to an era when all clothes were stitched together by a tailor. A pinch or a grain can mean “Take a pinch of oregano” or just “Take this with a grain of salt,” as old as the Latin cum grano salis—though I find some recent statements by politicians need a shakerful of salt to digest. Who can judge a hair above normal? And what about a speck or fleck, as in a speck of crimson on the man’s waistcoat in the canvas to represent a wound? And how about a dab of color?—though advertisement memories tend to drive out literary ones, and for my generation, dab brings up the anti-dandruff Brylcreem’s famous jingle, “A little dab’ll do ya.”

Science has also contributed to the realm of bits, peering through a microscope at an almost unimaginably small world, though it hasn’t yielded many figurative expressions. Who says, “Why, that’s as small as a hydrogen atom,” or talks about an angstrom of length? For some reason, the saying “Give ‘em an angstrom and they’ll take a micron!” never made it big. People think of quarks as minute but don’t work them into many conversations. Similarly, people don’t say “in a millisecond” but rather “in a trice” or “in two shakes of a lamb’s tail,” or “in the twinkling of an eye.” And they pronounce it quicker than you can say Jack Robinson.

Maybe the bits and pieces of science don’t enter popular lexicon because few laypeople know the exact quantities involved: one ten billionth of a meter for an angstrom, for instance, used mainly to measure electromagnetic wavelengths (a field where it would sound far too folksy and imprecise to call, say, the arc of an X-ray “a little titch of a thing”). A micron is a giant by comparison, a millionth of a meter or, in scientific notation, 1 x 10 *-6 *m.

The glory of the scientific method is its pinpoint accuracy—though a pinpoint is a haystack to the needle of a micron. Or would it be an entire hay pasture? “Needle and haystack” presents a vivid but imprecise picture. But the drawback of the scientific method is its dryness. Even infinitesimal and insignificant are polysyllabic but flat. To recapture that colorful quality, scientists should peer more closely at the world of insults, where smallness is rarely complimentary. Or, as my third-grade enemy once taunted the class simpleton: “If brains were fuel, you wouldn’t have enough gas to drive an ant’s motorcycle around the inside of a Cheerio.” Physical smallness also comes in for its share of ribbing: knee-high to a grasshopper, half-pint, pee-wee, runt, wee one, squirt, or Li’l as in Abner, and the spelling of which the performer Lil’ Kim has botched. Only here and there are cute exceptions. eensy-weensy, teeny-tiny, and itsy-bitsy, from spiders to bikinis.

Bits and pieces come in awfully useful, from how little food you want to how small the evidence is. On a more cosmic scale, they show how insignificant we are: a drop in the ocean, a grain of sand on the beach, a speck in the universe, a mote in God’s eye. It’s all, said my aunt, who reached only 4'11” in heels, a matter of perspective.

Beadlemania

Jerome Betts, Torquay, Devon

In Words and Ways of American English (1952), Thomas Pyles described four features of standard spoken British English that perhaps led Americans to call it ‘clipped’ or ‘crisp’. The first of these was the “pronunciation of t between vowels (as in water, butter, later) as a voiceless alveolar stop, in contrast to the widespread American pronunciation of this sound as something very like a d.”

So that was why an American speaker once baffled a British student audience with his references to comedy, when it should have been focusing on the legal concept of inter-State comity. There are possibilities for confusion in Canada too, if the experience of the English resident there who was constantly misunderstood on the phone till she changed city to siddy is anything to go by.

It is also why the Beatles, landing in the USA in the 1960s, turned into the Beadles, with the ludicrous evocation, to traditional British ears, of a quartet of Mr Bumbles. But the group’s original name was The Silver Beetles, and the eventual musical ‘Beat’ spelling a play on words depending on that voiceless alveolar stop.

In the first half of the 19th century, however, ‘beetle’ and ‘beadle’ may also have been fairly close in pronunciation in England, at least in London. Otherwise, the poet and punster Thomas Hood would not have been able to ring the changes on the two words for humorous purposes.

In 1834, an Act came in forbidding chimney-sweeps to “call or hawk in the streets”. Hood had an ironic glance at this piece of legislation in a comic doggerel monologue, The Sweep’s Complaint. It has a carefully calculated flavour of popular speech, rhyming shut and sut (soot), vally (value) and Raleigh. One couplet runs:

They haven’ t a rag of clothes to mend, if their mothers had thread and needles,

But crawl naked about the cellars, poor things, like a swarm of common black beadles.

A subtler allusion to the same similarity of pronunciation occurs in Hood’s prose introduction to his Comic Annual for 1839. The writer is visited by the Marleybone parish beadle in full fig, expecting a Christmas box in exchange for his ‘annual address’, in this case a copy of Gray’s Elegy with italicised insertions of the beadle’s own. Hood refers to this personage in his gold-laced finery as “our Scarabaeus Parochialis”. Possibly this sly suggestion of a multi-coloured Egyptian scarab or dung-beetle was meant to be reinforced by the line in the famous elegy’s second stanza, “Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight.”

Historically, a clear difference between the words might be expected, as beetle ultimately derives from OE bītan, ‘to bite’, and beadle from OE bēodan, ‘to offer, command’, as in bid. So should we authentic voiceless alveolarites be commiserating with the d between vowels brigade, unable to get full value from the Fab Four’s 1960s word-games, even if more attuned to those of the 1830s? Or, perhaps, joining forces to mount a major display of ascending eyebrows at the treatment of water, butter, later in the mouths of the glottal stoppers?

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. Those professing some form of Christianity, Islam, of Judaism at present amount to about 3.5 billion people (http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html). ↩︎

2. The word demon comes from Greek daimon, a being who is spiritual but not immortal; Hesiod gave the lifespan of a daimon at 9720 years, according to Plutarch, who cites this long but finite life as the crucial factor in the silencing of oracular voices throughout the Greco-Roman world: Instead of direct revelation by the gods, it is the daimons who forward divine answers to oracular inquiries; so when the daimon associated with a given oracle dies, that’s that. See Plutarch, “The Decline of the Oracles” in Rex Warner’s translation of his Moral Essays (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971), pp. 31-96). ↩︎

3. For Hades, see Robert Graves, “The Gods of the Underworld” in The Greek Myths Complete (New York: Penguin, 1991, pp. 120-25); for Ereshkigal, see “Inanna’s Journey to Hell,” in N. K. Sandars, Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia (New York: Viking Penguin, 1971, especially pp. 138-42 and 144-47); for Loki, see Robert Crossley-Holland, The Norse Myths (New York: Pantheon, 1980, chapters 3, 7-10, 16, 24, 26, and 29-32); and for Amemait, see J. Viaud, “Egyptian Mythology” in Guirand et al., The New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (New York: Crown/Crescent, 1987, p. 41). ↩︎

4. A Muslim term for the three communities of belief which regard the Old Testament as an integral part of their sacred scriptures, often invoked nowadays in connection with appeals for ecumenicism or, failing that, for at least not trying to blow each other up. Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are also sometimes called the Abrahamic religions because all three recognize Abraham/Ibrahim as their physical and/or spiritual ancestor. ↩︎

5. Of course, one might expect fiends to turn this usage on its head, as indeed the fictional demonic administrator Screwtape does when writing to his field-operative nephew Wormword, for both of whom “the Enemy” was understood to refer to God. See C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1971). ↩︎

6. As mentioned in a previous column (“Magic Words,” VERBATIM XXX/2 [Summer 2005], pp. 27-31), the power that largely preliterate societies attributed to the spoken word should never be underestimated. In the Memphis creation story, as recounted by S. ↩︎

7. A common phonological technique in euphemisms is to begin with the same consonant and go somewhere else with it (e.g. British Oh bother! for Oh bugger!, or French Je renie des bottes [“I deny some boots”] for Je renie Dieu [“…God”]); Brewer’s emphatically denies that the Dickens has any connection with the famous author. But “the Deuce” for the Devil may have additional appeal among gamblers because deuces (that is, twos) are outranked by every other card in the deck unless one is playing a game in which ace is low rather than high, while to throw a deuce is to make the lowest score possible with two dice. ↩︎

8. According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Old Scratch derives from Old Norse skratta, “goblin/monster” (modern Icelandic has scratta, “devil”), and Old Nick, while commonly thought (thanks in large part to a couplet in Samuel Butler’s Hudibras) to be eponymous from Niccolò Machiavelli—whose practical advice on statecraft in The Prince has since its publication in 1532 offended tenderer consciences for its want of moral scruples—is probably from German Nickel “mine-demon” (the –nickel in Kupfernickel “Copper-devil,” the German word for the metallic element nickel). The origin of Old Harry is obscure—Brewer’s tentatively suggests that it derives from the verb “to harry” (cf. the harrowing of Hell)—but according to Dean King’s companion to the Patrick O’Brian seafaring novels, the nautical glossary A Sea of Words (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995) it was a term much in favor among seamen at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. ↩︎

9. The -as ending would seem to have been tacked on for convenience of grammatical declension. The Arabic cognate is Shaitan; although primarily used to mean the chief of evil spirits (cf. Iblis/Eblis), and thus equivalent to the Judeo-Christian Satan, this name has also been employed in the rhetoric of Islamic anti-Americanism, in which the United States is referred to as “the great Satan” (e.g. during the revolution in Iran which toppled Shah Reza Pahlevi in 1979)—the implication being that there can be “lesser Satans” as well. Cf. Beelzebub in note 12 below. ↩︎

10. Also the name given to a type of match, the selling of which was one of the street-trades of the 19th-century urban poor in both Europe and America. One of Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches novels was entitled Mark, the Match-Boy, and the Hans Christian Anderson tale of the little match-girl who freezes to death has been for over a century a beloved tear-jerker on several continents. Henry Mayhew, in Mayhew’s Characters (London: Hamlyn/Spring Books, n.d.) a collection of sketches extracted from his 1851 classic London Labour and the London Poor, makes frequent mention of this trade, both as its own employment and as a prop in the theatrics of mendicancy: “These lucifers are merely excuses, of course, for begging,” says an informant about a colleague respectfully known as “the Lady Lurker” (p. 40); another explains to Mayhew the “lucifer lurk…I don’t mean the selling, but the dropping of them in the street as if by accident. It’s a great thing with the children” (p. 134), presumably eliciting more in contributions from pitying passers-by than the value of the matches the child has “accidentally” let fall and be spoiled (though in fact thriftily recycled as the dodge is reprised on other streets.) But as the Rev. Katherine Ellison points out (e-mail KH to NH, 5/5/07), Lucifer is also a name given to the Morning Star, i.e. the planet Venus. ↩︎

11. Astrid Sverige, in a posting on the Society for Creative Anachronism’s minstrels' bulletin board, writes that “[t]he first reference to Titivilus by name appears in Tractatus de Penitentia, c. 1285 by John of Wales.” This demon “listened for verbal atrocities in religious services as well as those of copying and writing” and hence “became a patron of calligraphers because he absolved them of guilt since they could blame him for their errors.” (http://www.pbm.com/pipermail/minstrel/1997/008723.html). A tritone is an interval equivalent to three whole tones, such as C to F#; while abhorrent to the medieval ear, it is perfectly acceptable to modern Western listeners when embedded in, e.g., a dominant seventh chord resolving on the tonic (V7 > I). Nevertheless, a naked tritone retains an acute ability to upset all of us who grew up in the Western “common-practice” harmonic tradition solidly entrenched since the middle of the 18th century, whence its utility as the ominous alternating seesaw pitch of European police-car sirens. ↩︎

12. Mayhew quotes an informant who uses Beelzebub as a generic: “The name of a bishop is but another name for a Beelzebub” (op. cit., p. 50). Its English gloss, Lord of the Flies, has been rendered newly familiar to readers of fiction since the mid-20th century from its adoption by William Golding for his chilling novel of some boys marooned by shipwreck on a tropical island, the degeneration of whose microsociety may be read as a dark mirror to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Beelzebub reappears in the King James translation of the New Testament at Luke 11:15-18, in which Jesus is accused of casting out devils “by Beezebub, the chief of the devils” (the same story and name are at Matt. 12:24-27 and Luke 3:22 ff.; see also Matt. 10:25). But the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) gives Beelzebul, following (loosely) the Greek New Testament’s Beezeboul but killing the original phonetic whiz-bang (which if uttered within earshot of pious Canaanites might have been rather like referring to the current President Bush, in the presence of neoconservative Republicans, as “President Butt”—not to say Beelzebush.). On the other hand, several sources claim that there was an actual temple to Ba’al Zebub in Philistia—i.e. Ba’al as the object of prayer and sacrifice in order to avert infestations of insects; see, e.g., the entry for Beelzebub in Benjamin E. Smith, ed., The Century Cyclopedia of Names (New York: Century Publishing Co., 1894), p. 138. ↩︎

13. The Bel whose priests were exposed as fakers by Daniel is Bel-Marduk, the city god of Babylon and the victorious hero of the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish, the entire text of which is translated in Sandars, op. cit., pp. 73-111. ↩︎

14. However, Belphegor is also sometimes given as a name for a secondary devil, like Ashtoreth (identical with Astarte, and derived from Ishtar, the love goddess of Mesopotamia) and Asmodeus (the Persian Aeshma daeva, the evil spirit in charge of devastating wrath). In Machiavelli’s Novella di Belfegor, published in 1549, he is a demon who wins (loses?) a lottery among the fiends to be sent to the upper world, take human form, and marry, in order to test the proposition that a woman could make domestic life so unbearable as to make Hell seem the more comfortable of the two; the experiment is successful and the thesis confirmed. For a variation on this theme, see note 21 below. ↩︎

15. I am indebted to Rabbi Jay Braverman for confirmation of this (e-mail JB to NH, 5/6/2007); he writes that “‘beli-yaal’ is a compound noun from two shorter Hebrew words which mean, among other translations, ‘worthless, having no purpose and useless.’ Sometimes it means ‘evil’ as well. The word occurs twenty-seven times (27) in the Hebrew Scriptures…. Often it is preceded by the Hebrew words for ‘sons of, daughters of, and men of,'” and adds that in the Dead Sea Scrolls, “‘Belial’ is a popular name for ‘the prince of evil’ i.e. Satan.” Thus the King James Bible has “sons of Belial” at Deut. 14:13 and II Chron. 13:7, glossed in the Revised Standard Version as “base fellows” and “worthless scoundrels” respectively. As a proper name, Belial appears in the New Testament at II Cor. 6:15 (“And what concord hath Christ with Belial?”). ↩︎

16. The vexing reality of evil prospering while virtue gets the shaft turns up repeatedly in the book of Psalms, e.g. , Ps. 13 ( “How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord?”), Ps. 22 (“My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?”), Ps. 69 (“Save me, O God, for the waters are come in unto my soul”), and Ps. 137 (“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down; yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion”); it is also the central theme in the book of Job, the locus classicus for the “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” scenario. For a Christian perspective on this issue, see C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: MacMillan, 1962). ↩︎

17. Both feminists and postcolonialists have challenged the essentialisms implicit in Western tropes of duality such as orientalism (a term made famous by the late Edward Said), in which an outlandish Other is posited whose characteristics are supposed to be the antitheses of “normal” (e.g. Caucasian-European-male) traits; thus an imaginary Mysterious East, whether Turkey, Egypt, Japan, Andalusia, or ancient Carthage, is made to encode sensuality, non-“white” skins, and unrepressed sex. In operatic discourse, those who cross this boundary generally come to a bad end—Don José in Bizet’s Carmen, Cho-Cho-San in Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, and arguably even Mann’s hapless Aschenbach (smitten with desire for the exotic Polish boy Tadziu) in Britten’s Death in Venice. For a feminist philosopher’s take on a variety of Western binary opposites, see the dozen index sub-entries under “dichotomies” in Lorraine Code, Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations (New York: Routledge, 1995). An entertaining anthology of over a hundred best-of-two playoff trees, modeled on sports eliminations but embracing such disparate categories as “Horses for the Ages,” “Marital Arguments,” and “Sucker Bets,” is Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir, eds., The Enlightened Bracketologist (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007); J. D. Biersdorfer’s contribution, “Emoticons” (§29—the book’s two-page spreads bear no page numbers), includes ]:-> for “devil” (as opposed to, e.g., <-) for “Santa Claus,” , <:| for “dunce,” and [:-| for “Frankenstein”). A dualistic process is, of course, fundamental to Hegelian dialectics, the opposition of thesis and antithesis producing a synthesis which then serves as the thesis for opposition by another antithesis, and so on; its implicit vulnerability to the fallacy of the excluded middle may not have hastened the fall of Marxist-Leninist regimes eastern Europe and the Russias in the 1980s and ’90s, but probably didn’t help matters much either. ↩︎

18. For the role of Ahriman (from Avestan angra mainyu, “negative thought”) in Persian religion, see P. Masson-Oursel and Louise Morin, “Mythology of Ancient Persia,” in Guirand et al., op cit. (pp. 315-16 and 317). In Persian mythology, the demons were called daevas, a flipflop in meaning from the cognates deva (Sanskrit) and divus (Latin), both meaning “divine person, god” (ibid., p. 317). ↩︎

19. This idea is central to Manichaeism, a blend of Christianity and Mazdaian dualism, denounced vigorously by the early Church ever since the Persian prophet Mani founded the sect in the middle of the third century A.D. (ibid., pp. 314-15). ↩︎

20. There are nearly a hundred variants in Britain and Appalachia of the song in which the Devil carries off a man’s wife only to discover that she is such a terror that he is obliged to restore her to her husband, with the explanation, as one version goes, “Here’s your wife, I wish you well/Kept her any longer, she’d ‘a’ tore up Hell” (Jenes Cottrell, “The Devil and the Farmer’s Wife,” performed at the Newport [RI] Folk Festival and recorded on Old Time Music at Newport 1963 [Vanguard VRS 9147]. ) See the listing under this song title at www.ibiblio.org/keefer/do4.htm; also known as “The Farmer’s Curst Wife,” it is so indexed in the monumental collection of folksongs made by Francis James Child during the latter part of the 19th century. ↩︎

21. The Century Cyclopedia of Names (p. 677) points out that in the original legend of Sir John Faustus, Mephistopheles (sometimes Mephisto for short) is merely a devil, not the Devil, but this distinction has faded in popular usage, with Mephistophelian now more or less synonymous with diabolical. The wittiness which make Mephistopheles such a winning tempter is surely a carryover from the medieval morality plays, in which the Devil was a source of most of the laughs, to the grief of the clergy. (From this same tradition came the proverb Jean Kerr used for the title of her book The Snake Has All the Lines [Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1962].) The etymology of Mephistopheles is wonky; the CCN suggests it is a cobbling together from Greek me- (“not-“) + phôt- (“light”) + philos (“lover of”), i.e. “He Who Loves Not the Light,” a theory strengthened by CCN’s citation from B. Taylor’s “Notes to Faust,” which says that “[t]he original form of this name was Mephostophiles,” adding that “Düntzen’s conjecture is probably correct—that it was imperfectly formed by someone who knew little Greek.” This said, the commoner spelling Mephi- suggests at least a convergence with Latin mephitis/mefitis, ‘sulfurous exhalation from the ground’—a word of probably south-Italic origin (=Oscan mefit-?) whose -ph-, according to Ernout & Meillet’s Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, is a Hellenization comparable to the sulfur/sulphur pair; hence a Mephistos would be someone who specializes in noxious vapors from below (cf. sophist, originally a ‘specialist in wisdom)—were mephistis truly Greek, which it isn’t. And -pheles? Well, phêlos is Greek for ‘deceitful, knavish’ (there was a variety of fig called the phêlêx, ‘deceiver,’ from looking ripe when it really isn’t). So Mephistopheles could be read as “deceitful specialist in noxious infernal miasmas” (or as listed in the dramatis personae of a Restoration comedy of manners, Mr. Hellstinkcheat)—at least, at a bit of a squint. ↩︎

22. Cf. raising Hell and raising Cain, all three synonymous with “create a hullabaloo.” ↩︎

23. This is the image Screwtape advises Wormwood to conjure up should his patient begin to suspect that his tempter is real, thereby to “persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he cannot believe in you” (Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, p. 33). ↩︎

24. E.g. in Cottrell, op. cit. ↩︎

25. While these have achieved currency among landlubbers, Brewer’s traces them to the sea, defining devil in both phrases as “the seam between the outboard plank and the waterways of a ship, and very awkward of access.” Picturesque Expressions: A Thematic Dictionary (Laurence Urdang and Nacy LaRoche, eds. [Detroit: Gale, 1981]) clarifies this as “a seam in the hull of ships, on or below the water line,” adding that “any sailor ordered to make necessary repairs was put in a precarious position” (pp. 263-63). To pay in the latter expression refers to caulking with pitch or tar (ibid., p. 278). ↩︎

26. While making the obvious connection between poverty and the temptation to transgress, Brewer’s also suggests that since the back of many coins formerly showed a cross, they made one’s pocket an uncomfortable place for the devil, an empty pocket being a cross-free zone. ↩︎

27. A variant on “God is in the details,” an aphorism attributed to Gustave Flaubert. ↩︎

28. Not confined to English: The French version is Il faut marcher quand le diable est aux trousses, and the Italian Bisogna andare, quando il diavolo è nella coda; either could be roughly translated as “You’ve got to get moving when the devil’s riding your ass.” ↩︎

29. Devil’s paintbrush (Hieracium aurantiacum) is also known as orange hawkweed, and is not to be confused with Indian paintbrush (Castilleja linariaefolia), the state flower of Wyoming. The name has also been applied to the Maxim’s gun (see Dolf F. Goldsmith, The Devil’s Paintbrush: Sir Hiram Maxim’s Gun. (Toronto: Collector Grade Publications, 1989), and more recently has been adopted by a highly-rated golf course in Caledon, Ontario (see http://www.ontgolf.ca/ratingdetail.php?rid=1065332492&amp;id=277 for some startlingly ungrammatical reviews (e.g. “can’t get that kind of a links feel anywhere else but in the UK let’s face it, however all the phescue [sic!] can ruin the aesthetics a bit”). ↩︎

30. When writing Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle probably had this folk name for asafoetida in mind, for he named the German philosopher who figures largely in the book “Diogenes Teufelsdröckh” (in German, Teufel means ‘Devil’ and Dreck means filth in general and excrement in particular). ↩︎

31. Compiler and editor of several collections of rounds, including Rounds Galore (New York: Astoria Press, 1994). ↩︎

32. A Jesuit friend has pointed out that people never deliberately choose what they believe on the whole will be bad for them; if one pays homage to the Devil, it is to be presumed that some reward will be forthcoming whose utility appears, at least, to exceed the cost. According to Christopher Rowe, in “The Place of the Republic (in Plato’s Political Thought,” in Ferrari, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007], pp. 37–38), this notion can be traced back at least as far as to Plato’s Laws, which “sticks to the idea that no one goes wrong willingly…. If anyone does go wrong, and gets what is bad or less good for him than he could have got, then the action in question is not what he wanted; and this will be true whether it was caused by simple miscalculation or by the intervention of uneducated desires (itself involving a kind of ignorance).” A fiend in the field, then, will do well to follow Uncle Screwtape’s advice to “[k]eep him in that state as long as you can” (Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, p. 14). ↩︎