Vol III, No 3 [December 1976]
- That Dirty Bird
- Hear Finish Before (Pause) You?
- Menu Barbarisms
- The Cape Cod Reader
- Charmed and Other Quarks
- A Plea for Plain Talk
- Irish Bulls—Second Series
- More About the Name Cowbird for Molothrus ater ater
- Animal-Like Adjectives
That Dirty Bird
Steven R. Hicks, University of Missouri at Kansas City
The elation the pioneers must have felt in their New World Eden was seldom expressed in the unimaginative names of their first settlements. But if Plymouth and New London represented outposts of Christian European culture, the fact remained that much of God’s handiwork in America—topography, plants, and animals—lacked names in “civilized” tongues. Of those names bestowed on American species by latter-day Adams, at least one must stand as an example of our ancestors' earthy exuberance. Charlton Laird, in his Language in America, provides the best short explanation of the origin of shitepoke.
Some animals were named for notable conduct, among them the shitepokes, heron-like creatures of several varieties, who, when frightened, behave like the soldiers in The Naked and the Dead; they have difficulty maintaining what Norman Mailer calls a tight cincture. According to legend, a fleeing shitepoke could evacuate for half a mile; the latter part of his name means bag. (pp. 245-6)
Having been raised in a family where shitepoke was a term of endearment for a baby—as apt as that usage may have been, in view of the word’s literal meaning—my curiosity was aroused.
The OED confirmed Laird’s derivation of the word, defining it as “The small green heron of North America.” The single citation was dated “c 1850.”
Following the first component of shitepoke to its more familiar form, however, revealed the compound shit-sack, paralleling in structure and meaning the name of the American heron. Shit-sack was defined as “an opprobrious name applied to non-conformists.” Two citations, both from English works, were dated 1769 and 1785. The latter, Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, noted that the term was applied to “a dastardly fellow.”
But if shit-sack pointed away from the avian world, the entry following shitepoke brought me back. Shiterow, compounded of the now-familiar first element and a second that “may be a corrupt form of Heron,” was defined as the latter bird. As early as the 14th century, a scribe translated the Norman French “un beuee de herouns” into English as “a hep of schitrowys.” A second citation attested that around 1827 the people of County Wexford, Ireland, were using shederow to mean both “heron” and “a thin weakly person.”
Craigie and Hurlbert’s A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles led me in an interesting new direction. Again defined as the green heron, shitepoke was noted to have an unknown origin. The earliest citation, however, predated that given by OED, being from an 1832 history of Maine. This citation provided a new clue, for it read, “The Skouk… is vulgarly called a ‘shite-poke.’ ” Craigie and Hurlbert also referred me to their Poke n. 4.
Skouk, of “uncertain” origin, was said to be “possibly the same word as Skoke 1 or Skoke 2: note the parallel relationship between Poke n. 4 and Poke n. 3.” The earliest citation for Skouk itself was Morse’s American Geography of 1974, in which poke and skouk were listed as names of the green bittern. Skoke 1 and Skoke 2 proved to be disappointments. The former, from a Massachuset Indian word, referred to Poke (-weed) n. 3; the latter, probably derived from a Delaware Indian term, was a name for skunkweed. The entries for Poke, however, did reveal the promised parallel relationship noted previously. Poke n. 4, with or without shite-, denoted the ‘green heron’ or ‘American bittern’ (an aquatic bird of habits similar to the heron’s); and Poke n.3 ‘pokeweed.’ Poke n. 4 and Poke n. 3 thus showed a connection like that of Skouk ‘green heron’ to Skoke 1 ‘pokeweed.’ Nevertheless. I considered myself little wiser for knowing that shitepoke, poke, and skouk were synonyms, and that one dated to 1794. At this point, unrelated research revived my enthusiasm with the discovery of a use of shitepoke—for a person!—predating the citations in all the reference works consulted.
Carl Holliday’s The Wit and Humor of Colonial Days, in tracing the colonists' satiric mood as the Revolution approached, quotes from a series of pamphlets printed in 1774-5, “The First Book of the American Chronicles of the Times.” In this parody an anonymous patriot author mimicked the Biblical style in his description of the arrival of General Gage’s army in rebellious Boston.
“36. Now it came to pass, while the Gageites abode in the land of the Bostonites, they day by day committed iniquity; they made great clattering with their sackbuts, their psalteries, their dulcimers, bands of music, and vain parade.
“37. And they drummed with their drums, and piped with their pipes, making mock fights, and running to and fro like shitepokes on the muddy shore.” (Holliday, pp. 95-6)
The rebel author obviously refers to a creature of aquatic habits. Equally obvious is the fact that we cannot know at this late date if the author intended his readers to understand that the excretory habits of the British soldiery were similar to those of the shitepoke. In the context, however, it seems unlikely that the comparison was meant to be flattering. If our patriot satirist was any kind of a student of etymology, he may have been making veiled allusion to the then-current English slang term shit-sack, above. Such insults, in the form “sack of shit,” remain in modern usage. At any rate, it is apparent that even at the date of this first recorded printed use of shitepoke the word’s possibilities as a derogatory epithet were already being explored.
A published inquiry on the current uses of shitepoke produced thirty-six replies. Twenty informants (56%) knew the term solely as one for a bird. Sixteen persons named the heron, bittern, or similar waterfowl, but one-half of that number cited a printed reference for the identification. Other birds named included the buzzard (Ohio), Northern raven (New York), and road-runner (!: western Nebraska). Five people mentioned the defecating behavior of the bird as the source of its name. A delightful letter from Mr. John H. Pomeroy of Maryland explained the shitepoke’s appellation as being “from the bird’s habit of defecating when flushed.”
Eleven informants (30%) applied shitepoke solely to a person, and five (14%) used the term for both a person and a bird. The latter group disagreed, however, as to what characteristic of the bird was implied by the application of shitepoke to a person. A lady in Michigan inferred that “long-legged awkwardness” was intended. A Missouri man considered a “shankpoke” to be one who poked his nose into affairs in the manner of a heron searching for aquatic food. The Nebraska lady who used shitepoke for the road-runner derived the word’s use as an epithet from that bird’s “senseless over-activity.”
Those informants applying shitepoke solely to a person reported only two entirely positive definitions. One of these, from a lady in southern New York state, was as “a term of endearment for a baby,” exactly as my mother used the term in Missouri.
Outright folk-etymologies, on the other hand, were invariably derogatory. A Pennsylvania man wrote that a shitepoke is like a slowpoke, with the difference that the former malingers by going to the bathroom. (This definition uses Craigie and Hurlbert’s Poke n. 7, “a lazy or slow person; a stupid person.”) A Florida woman found the explanation of the term in the behaviour of the glutton to whom she applied it, defecating, “poking more food in his mouth,” defecating, etc.
But a woman in Montana, who learned shitepoke from German parents, may have been near etymological roots in her definition “gossips, lawyer shysters … a cheat or unsavory person.” Partridge’s Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English notes (Shoot 5) that shyster seems to be derived from such roots as the German Scheisser ‘defecator’ and so is closely akin to shitepoke and shitehawk (Shoot 6). The same author’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English yielded shit-pot, “a thorough or worthless humbug (person): a sneak … mid-C. 19-20; ob.,” a possible connection suggested by a Delaware informant who defined shitepoke in similarly unattractive terms. An intriguing letter from Will County, Illinois, reported that shitepoke denoted a crane, but mentioned local use of the bird name “yellowhammer” for “dirty and disreputable … not necessarily poor” natives.
My informants gave nine different spellings of shite-poke, and reported six synonyms, including “shit stork” (California) and the cryptic “baloop-da-doop” (North Dakota). Definitions and application, as we have seen, differed widely. But, like the authorities consulted, my informants overwhelmingly agreed that shitepoke and its variants remain thinly-veiled and contemptuous epithets.
“Giving the English language to the Americans is like giving sex to small children: they know it’s important, but they don’t know what the hell to do with it.”
—Morton Cooper, Author of The Queen
Hear Finish Before (Pause) You?
Ruth Brown, New York Society for the Deaf, New York City
No longer does a person need to be deaf in order to enjoy using sign language. Thanks largely to the perseverance of deaf adults and their hearing offspring, the past decade has witnessed a flowering of sign language systems—American Sign Language or Ameslan, Signed English, Signing Exact English, sign-mime, and cued speech—in this country.
Of these, Ameslan is the most useful for communicating with most deaf people and the most fascinating from a linguistic viewpoint. To begin with, in an obvious departure from formal English usage, it lacks articles, and plurals and verb tenses are supplied either through context or by the addition of the word “finish.” The Ameslan title of this article thus translates into English as: “Have you ever heard of this before?”
For fullest communication, facial expression and body language must also be used when signing in lieu of aural inflection cues. “Think funny (pause) you?” translates from Ameslan into English either as: “Isn’t he funny?” or “So you think he’s funny, do you?” depending on whether the signer wears a smiling facial expression and relaxed posture, or a grim facial expression and threatening posture.
Strike your right fist down on top of your left fist twice. Then flick your right index finger twice quickly away from the side of your forehead. You have just signed “Work-work, for-for” in Ameslan. This translates into English as “What are we working so hard for,” and again your face and body must supply the correct punctuation and depth of feeling appropriate to the utterance of the sentiment.
Are you surprised to find yourself using Ameslan so easily? Then tap the side of your forehead twice with your right index finger, curl and “freeze” the fingers of both hands in mid-air, and point to your chest. You have just signed “Think freeze me!” in Ameslan, or in English, “I was so surprised I couldn’t think!”
Perhaps you wish to express a quizzical attitude by stroking your chest lightly, quickly and upward, with the middle fingers of both hands, then bringing the tips of thumbs and fingers of both hands together twice. You’ve just said in Ameslan, “Exciting, more?” or in English, “What else is new and exciting?”
Straddling your left index finger between your right index and middle fingers, then rocking the latter two fingers slightly and pointing to your chest indicate “Undecided me” in Ameslan or “I haven’t decided yet” in English.
Or instead you may want to flick your right index finger upward next to your forehead, then form an “O” in mid-air with your cupped hand before pointing to yourself. That would convey in Ameslan, “Understand zero me!” or in English, “I don’t understand a single thing!”
Another way to sign what you mean is to run your right middle finger vertically across your open left palm upward in the direction of your chin. Hold the tip of your tongue against your upper front teeth and let a sly expression creep into your eyes. You have just said in English, “I’m going to take advantage of this!”
If you want to use an Ameslaner’s favorite phrase, it can be best expressed by the erect index and little fingers, open palm, outstretched thumb and upright forearm simultaneously spelling out “I-L-Y,” the Ameslan acronym for “I love you.”
Conversely, if you think Ameslan’s just a lot of hogwash, you could vent your feelings by wrapping the fingers of your left hand loosely around your upright right thumb, then jerking the thumb downward with an emphatic movement. This sign happens to be a graphic description of a physiological function.
Often there is a pictorial similarity between the sign and the concrete thing it represents, which is sometimes reinforced by also using the initial letter of the word. To cite only two examples here suffices: The word “tree” is signed by having the left hand, palm down, support the right elbow, while the right fingers remain outstretched and the right forearm turns from side to side. The word “water” is signed with the sign for “w”—the outstretched index, middle and ring fingers of one hand—tapping against the chin.
All signs are classified according to position in relation to the head or upper torso, shape of the fingers or hands, and motion in relation to the rest of the body. In this connection, it is interesting to note that nouns indicating the human male—man, father, husband—are signed above the nose; those belonging to the human female—aunt, daughter, grandmother—below the nose. Long ago someone must have decided men have minds while women have mouths. While today liberated women would scorn such a connotation, it cannot be denied that such a gestural distinction is helpful in practice.
Like all other living languages, Ameslan changes and thrives, thanks to the input and encouragement it receives from the National Association of the Deaf, teachers of the deaf in total-communication school programs, various meetings and sports events run by and for deaf people, institutions like Gallaudet College, the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, California State University at Northridge and New York University’s Deafness Research & Training Center, the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf and the National Theatre of the Deaf. Television coverage of deaf people, such as of the recently crowned Miss Deaf America 1976-1978, on a captioned news program also makes more people aware of sign language.
Anyone can obtain a basic knowledge of Ameslan by enrolling in one of the many sign-language classes offered by adult education programs, churches and colleges throughout the country and by studying any of several textbooks available. After a beginner masters the one-handed manual alphabet and a basic vocabulary of perhaps five hundred signs, he is ready to enjoy the peculiar logic, economy, and beauty inherent in Ameslan.
EPISTOLA {Norman R. Shapiro}
Since nobody has (as yet) pointed out my gaffe, let me be the first to correct myself. In my letter on French Canadian baseball terminology (III, 1), I attributed to Winston Churchill the observation that England and America are two countries separated by the same language. Now, while Churchill more than likely subscribed to it, and may well have repeated it, the original quote should, of course, be credited to G. B. Shaw. [Norman R. Shapiro, Wesleyan University]
Menu Barbarisms
John G. Caffrey, Ph.D., Suffern, NY
For some years I have collected specimens of mangled language from printed menus. Some of them are the result of carelessness or an attempt to spell phonetically, while others represent real ignorance or misunderstanding. I except the “difference of opinion” classics such as sherbert or Welsh rarebit.
The following are more or less self-explanatory.
A subclass exhibits the “dropped d” which reflects colloquial usage:
Some are merely pretentious:
Others are merely unfortunate:
When I pointed out Swish Cheese to a waitress, she was helpful: “You know, with the holes.”
Liver with Smothered Onions, frequently encountered, must derive from the older “Liver smothered with onions,” but I have found waiterpersons who explained that smothering must be a cooking process.
When I first began to teach English in 1946 there was a local campaign to stamp out FOOD AT IT’S BEST on a local restaurant’s roof. Dozens of hot letters from students finally produced an effect: the apostrophe was taken out, but the space was left. This motto now appears on menus and appears to be impossible to stamp out. But an art form which can spawn Chopped Suey must be forgiven its little weaknesses.
BIBLIOGRAPHIA The Plight of the English and On Writing Well
Basil Cottle, Arlington House, 1975, 159 pp. [A VERBATIM Book Club Selection] and William Zinsser, Harper, 1976, viii + 157 pp.
The subtitle of Plight reads, “Ambiguities, Cacophonies, and Other Violations of Our Language”; that of Writing, “An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction.” Here are two books about the use of English, one by an experienced practitioner of the craft of nonfiction, author of nine books (plus Writing) and of an enormous number of articles in national periodicals, who teaches at Yale, the other by a scholar at Bristol University in England, author of a dictionary of surnames and of The Triumph of English: 1350-1400.
Zinsser’s book falls into the style of a text quite early, when he makes his straightforward plea for simplicity. Consequently, his book reads like an English handbook; notwithstanding the author’s demurrals, despite his urging that the details of his exposition be searched out in grammar books, the reader comes away with the definite impression that he is being taught. There is nothing wrong with being taught, but it is hardly as engaging as being exposed to learning. On Writing Well is a serious book and not really very entertaining.
Cottle, on the other hand, exhibits the sly cynicism one comes to associate with editorial writers in The Times —people like Philip Howard and Bernard Levin. There is no doubt that Plight is the more learned of two books, but its erudition is clothed in a combination of practical advice and detached humor. Cottle also makes his plea for simplicity of expression:
One of the first casualties in the search for affectation is the verb to be: opposing the idea that men wear beards out of another kind of affectation, someone sensibly wrote, ‘Surely the affectation is in the removal of facial hair, not in its retention’; few writers would leave it at that-is in would be varied to is found in, rests in, dwells in, lies in, stands in, shows in, stems from, issues from, proceeds from, belongs to, originates in, is discernible in, is ascribable to, is symptomatised by, and thus the value of the good old plain word is is further cheapened.
Cottle’s book has more humor than Zinsser’s; but that may not be an adverse criticism for those who prefer to keep learning and entertainment separate. Cottle’s book has more information about the history of the language, and it seems very apt where it appears; but the absence of such information in Zinsser’s book will be no loss to those who want to get on with the business at hand. Cottle’s book, by rough estimate, contains about ten per cent less text than Zinsser’s yet costs more than 16 per cent more (at retail); but such differences are trivial. Cottle’s style, though entertaining in content, is less informal than Zinsser’s.
The authors appear to have set out with the same ends in view, to enlighten readers in the difficult business of writing well—at least well enough to communicate. Both directed their books to people of education who wish to improve their techniques with language, not learn them from scratch. In their approaches to these purposes, the authors differ markedly: for acquiring techniques, Zinsser’s book must be recommended over Cottle’s; for enjoyment, Cottle’s takes the honors
EPISTOLA {Donald W. Lee}
I have been udderly delected by the assay on Malatropisms in the currant VERBOTIN and am confidential that such articulates would do much to accrease the cirularity of your readership. In any K’s, I am unclothesing my check to cover a year’s sumstription.
[Donald W. Lee, Galveston, Texas]
EPISTOLA {W.N. Loos}
As a new subscriber to VERBATIM I wish to tell you how much I enjoyed my first issue, that of May 1976. I particularly enjoyed Mrs. Malaprop’s Bicentennial by James D. White, the theme of which coincides with my thinking.
I would like to pass on to you my contribution for a more hilarious language. My former employer used to say, “This corporation has set up rules of conduct for the employees and we expect you to live up to them sacrilegiously.”[W.N. Loos, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania]
The note reproduced above was found on the doorstep of a couple whose children are grown. Speculation about who had written it, why, and under what circumstances lead the imagination into the empyrean at one extreme and innumerable culs de sac at the other. The note speaks volumes about modern society, family, mores, personality, and communication (in its broadest senses). It serves as a point of departure for some random comments on the word mother and its congeners.
Mother, as most communications experts will be quick to offer, is a “loaded” word. Like God, country, sex, C.I.A. (replacing the F.B.I.?), it can be regarded—in western culture, at least—as a lexical element pregnant with connotation, teeming with psychological overtones. To the modern observer of slang, mother is referred to facetiously as a half a word, frequently (in eye dialect) spelt muthah.
It is interesting to note that ma and maw, which may be regarded by some as family language, reappears as Ma Barker, the notorious leader of a murderous gang, whose ironic nickname makes her renowned cruelty seem all the more heinous.
The ma of “…And your ma is good-lookin' ” (Summertime) is the same as the one in Shopright Supermarkets' “Hey Ma! What’s for dinner?” and in Ma and Pa Kettle— all folksy and bucolic.
Momma (spelt that way) evokes the “red-hot momma” notion; spelt mama, but pronounced the same way, the word reverts to familial status. But we must not ignore the warmth of the epithet in combinations like Mama Cass, whose ample proportions seem to have won her this sobriquet as much as her personality did. Mamma Leone’s, a restaurant in New York City, evokes the image of a motherly Italian lady presiding over pots of steaming spaghetti and tomato sauce. Certainly, “Momma Leone’s” would never do. Also in New York City is the more formal Mother Bertolotti’s; not lacking in warmth entirely, this name evokes images of matriarchal domination.
The “Last of the Red-hot Mommas” (Sophie Tucker) evokes an image of ample sexiness, chiefly because we can recall the person herself. This is not the mama of “Mah mama don' tol' me” (Blues in the Night) or of I Remember Mama (can you imagine, “I Remember Momma”?). It is the momma of “Come to Momma, come to Momma, Do!” (Embraceable You).
Among the musical groups are The Mamas and the Papas, and references to Momma appear, now and then, in song lyrics: “Hey, sweet Momma, tree-top tall, Won’t you kindly turn your temper down,” “…Momma’s going to buy you a…,” and so on. The most famous is probably Mammy, which is so evocative of a large, black, motherly woman as to be virtually denotative.
Mum, which is more common in England than in the U.S., emerges as an affectionate term of address and as a designation with the same connotations: His mum is having a dinner party for his fiancee leaves the listener (or reader) with the impression that the son’s relationship with his mother appears to have changed little since he was a small boy, an impression that might be based on fact or might be intentionally humorous. Mater, surely, is a term associated, in Americans' minds, with the sort of formal, Victorian relationship expected between an upperclass Englishman (of almost any age) and his mother.
Mom, with all its simplicity and warmth, is chiefly a term of address rather than of reference, but can be found in contexts like Mom and Pop Store, referring to a family-run retail business that carries the connotation óf being only marginally profitable, and in “More Parks' sausages, Mom!”
Coming full circle back to mother, recalling the songs of yesteryear, we have such sentimental classics as “Just Break the News to Mother,” “M is for the Million Things She Gave Me,” “Mother Macree,” and so on.
Mother also has its unpleasant senses, especially as a term for the whitish bacteria found on the surface of fermenting liquids (also called mother of vinegar), mother’s (or mama’s) boy, and mother yaw, a rather revolting pathological term. It serves as a kind of folk-word denoting ‘source’ in mother liquor, mother lode, mother-of-pearl, and mother tongue. Its other connotations can be seen in mother-naked (‘original’), motherland (‘original’; compare fatherland), mother superior and mother church (‘maternal’), and mother wit (‘innate’). Mother Goose remains a unique referent; Mother Carey’s chicken, a petrel, received its name from one knows where.
These casual observations probably leave a great deal unsaid, particularly about words like mother-in-law, but that might be just as well.
EPISTOLA {Norman R. Shapiro}
A few remarks on the myriad delights of VERBATIM III, 1:
I wish that Axel Hornos had distinguished between the two kinds of interjections: those that are mere sounds— the “ouch” and “phooey” variety—and those that are actual words used exclamatively. When an Italian shouts bravo, for example, he isn’t just voicing indiscriminate onomatopoeia; he is using a bona fide adjective. (Hence the feminine, brava, to a deserving diva.) Likewise the German toll ‘fantastic, smashing,’ and the Indonesian bagus ‘beautiful’ and adjaib ‘wonderful.’ Similarly, several of Mr. Hornos’s examples are verb forms. The Spanish oye is an imperative of oír ‘hear’; the Dutch zeg—note the spelling, though pronounced “zeCH”—is an imperative of zeggen ‘say,’ as in the English ‘Say there’; and even the Italian evviva, thinly disguised, is fundamentally a verb: the hortatory subjunctive of vivere, plus an exclamatory e, and meaning, roughly, ‘Long (may you) live!’ Numerous current American monstrosities could be cited as interesting hybrids of the two types of interjection, generally expansible: e.g., ‘like wow!’, ‘like I mean wow!’, ‘like man I mean wow!’
H.N. Meng’s suggestion that the spit of spit and image is a deformation of spirit delights my etymo-logic, but unfortunately I think it misses the mark. While OED documents this use of spit no earlier than the 1800s, Partridge (Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English) gives analogous usages from two centuries before. That we are dealing here with honest-to-goodness spit and not spirit (or even spi’t) would seem to be corroborated by a similar French phrase, attested as early as the 15th century. A child who is the image of his father is commonly said to be son pére tout craché, freely translated as ‘the very spit of his father.’ The The Nouveau Dictionnaire Etymologique du Français (Hachette-Tchou, 1971) offers as an explanation the analogy between the act of spitting and the act of procreation which, if accurate, is rather a far cry from the realm of the spirit.
In passing, Candace Murray Huddleston’s reference to the Kentuckian use of poke for sack or bag calls to mind the origin of the expression to buy a pig in a poke. The term is, of course, cognate with the French poche ‘pocket.’ Interestingly enough, the French buy cats in theirs, not pigs, as in the expression acheter chat en poche….
And lastly, as for your comments on sentence-ending prepositions, I couldn’t agree more. Especially with the observation that they are often really verbal particles…
Still, logic and linguistic histroy notwithstanding, a certain aversion to ending a sentence (or clause) with a preposition has ingrained itself into the instinct of would-be discriminating speakers over the years since the 18th century grammarians imposed their spurious rule. (That is, in relative clauses, and where the preposition is a real one and not a verbal particle.) In defense of the purists it should be admitted that it is, in fact, a convenient rule to have when we want to tailor our speech to the audience and the occasion. Circumstances will tell me whether to say “the guys I work with” or “the gentlemen with whom I work.” It’s one of those differentiations, however illegitimate their origin, that English is richer for holding onto. (Or “onto which English is richer for holding”?)
[Norman R. Shapiro, Wesleyan University]
EPISTOLA {Harry Cohen}
VERBATIM [II, 4] second column: In the review of Mencken’s The American Language, it is stated that “Yankee is apparently derived from the Dutch Jan Kees (John Cheese).” The translation in parenthesis is wrong: Kees is a proper name (short for Cornelis = Cornelius) and in no way related to the Dutch word for cheese. The same mistake is made by Mario Pei in The Story of the English Language (1960), page 107.
[III, 1]: Axel Hornos offers Sech, Jan! as a Dutch equivalent for Hey, John! However, the word sech does not exist in the contemporary Dutch language; at best, it could be construed as a phonetic rendering of a certain dialectical mispronunciation of zeg. But then, Zeg Jan! would be a rather poor translation of Hey, John!
The other examples given in this article could also have been enriched with Dutch equivalents. In Holland, the cod-liver-oil drinker would say jasses or jakkes or ajakkes, the bug squasher bah. As to animals' sounds, it’s wau wau or woef woef for dogs, kukeleku for roosters. Cats spinnen, doves koeren or kirren, birds kwetteren or tjilpen, and cats (again) miauwen. [Harry Cohen, Brussels, Belgium]
EPISTOLA {Emily P. Brady}
Regarding Robert Fowkes’s “Esrever Hsilgne” in the latest VERBATIM:
Let us not forget poor Hazel Shade: …She twisted words: pot, top, Spider, redips. And ‘powder’ was ‘red wop.’ She called you a didactic katydid.
(Pale Fire, Nabokov)
[Emily P. Brady, Lexington, Massachusetts]
EPISTOLA {Cathy Butler}
Lately I have noticed a minor, lopsided flirtation with the word “former.” A guest on a quiz show, while discussing his new book, mentioned the “Nixon family’s former dog.” How did this pet manage to change species, I wonder.
And then I heard an athlete described as “a former graduate” of a certain university. Once a graduate, aren’t you always a graduate. It sounded as if he had to give back his diploma.
Lastly, did everyone notice the wonderful, but unconscious (I think), pun uttered by a congressman in the midst of the Legionnaire disease controversy? He chided President Ford for “injecting” politics into the immunization plans!
[Cathy Butler, Seattle, Washington]
The Cape Cod Reader
Henry Morgan, Truro, Massachusetts
On Lower Cape Cod, specifically in the village of Truro, a common English word that started life as a noun has become a verb, adverb, gerund, participle, conjunction, interjection and practically every other part of speech. In fact some of the parts are elusive and therefore it seems best just to give instances of usage and the reader can make up his own mind.
Bullshit. A simple declarative, usually taken to mean ‘I have reason to doubt the veracity of what you just said.’
I was bullshit. In effect, ‘very very angry… upset…terrified.’ It’s necessary to consider the context of what has been under discussion and to observe the speaker’s manner. Sometimes the phrase follows a fairly simple announcement—e.g.: “I just got my electric bill and I was b.”
My wife was b. with the kid. ‘The kid has done something it shouldn’t have done. The wife hit it.’
He lives in that b. house near you. The speaker in this instance is a plumber who is being called much too often by the owner of the house to do repair work. The plumbing was installed by his chief competitor.
This year my gahden went b. on me. ‘Weeds. Also, rabbits, chipmunks, corn borers, raccoons, etc.
The weather turned b. [Fisherman] was out in his illegal trawler and got caught in fog.’
The harbormaster went b. ‘He also got caught by the harbormaster.’
This here chowdah is b. ‘Canned.’
The way I have to start my cah, I have to b. it for a while. ‘Old car. It has a manual choke and it has to be “babied” a bit.’
The wind blew b. last night. ‘The anemometer registered gusts over seventy mph—not uncommon.’
Another multi-faceted word in our town is “unreal.” About half the goings on, especially during the tourist season, are thus described. “The way he was driving—it was unreal.” “She burned the corn. Unreal.” And so forth.
What may be of interest to students of the genre is the not-all-that-rare combination (I’ve heard it three times in the last month) viz: “Unreal bullshit.” While there is no accurate way of translating this into something more meaningful, still, it serves its purpose.
Charmed and Other Quarks
August A. Imholtz, Jr., College Park, Maryland
The U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) announced on June 8, 1976, that a group of physicists working at Stanford and the University of California thought they had discovered a new subatomic particle believed to be the long sought “charmed” quark. “The new particle,” according to the ERDA news release “appears to be made up of a combination of a ‘charmed’ quark and another non-‘charmed’ constitutent. If this discovery is confirmed, physicists will have established the existence of ‘charm’ and gained a much deeper understanding of the world of subatomic particles.”
The existence of quarks was first proposed by the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann as the basis of all matter. He hypothesized three elementary quarks, quark ρ, η, and λ, which through their various combinations explain the properties of all other subatomic particles. Had Gell-Mann been a Lewis Carroll enthusiast, he might have named his hypothetical particles snarks; but instead he borrowed the word quark from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Quark occurs in the first line of the poem (p. 383) recited by gulls and other birds to King Mark of Cornwall:
Three quarks for Muster Mark.
But what is a quark? The Trieste scholar Steilo Crise, in an article published in the James Joyce Quarterly, correctly observed that quark does not exist as a substantive in English. There is a rare English verb to quark which is probably of imitative origin and was first used by J.F. Campbell in his Popular Tales of the West Highlands in 1860: “The gurgling and quarking of spring frogs in a pond.” In the slang of the American West the verb was used as a synonym for murder. Since birds do not gurgle, even in a quarkly way, nor commit murder, the meaning of Joyce’s “quark,” like so many of his other recondite words, must be sought outside English.
Quark is a common German word for a rather bland variety of cottage cheese. The modern German word is derived from Middle High German twarc which in turn was derived from the West Slavic (Wendish) word twarog sometime before the 14th century. Twarog is cognate with Czech tvarog, Polish twaróg, Bulgarian tvarog, and Russian tvorg, all of which mean ‘curds or soft cheese.’ The Slavic words appear to be related to Greek τυρς, meaning ‘cheese,’ and Avestan tūiri- meaning ‘milk that has become cheese.’ Karl Lokotsch, however, believes that the Slavic words are derived from the Turkish tu\rcirc\at, a word meaning ‘curdled milk or cheese.’
Helmut W. Bonheim, in his Lexicon of the German in Finnegans Wake, offers the following definition: quark: curd, rubbish, trifle. ‘Curd’ is correct but ‘rubbish’ is, at best, a misleading gloss. Quark, from its orgiinal meaning of ‘cheese,’ came to be applied to any cheeselike substance, especially human or other animal excrement. Hence the proverb quoted by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm:
Getretner quark Wird breit nicht stark.
Finally, the third meaning of quark is, as Bonheim points out, a ‘trifle, a little nothing unworthy of consideration.’ In Finnegans Wake, the second and third senses seem more appropriate than does the primary meaning of ‘cottage cheese.’ The assumption that one or more of the German meanings of quark should be understood in the song of the gulls and curlews is supported by the context of both direct and disguised references to the myth of Tristram and Isolde and by the fact that “Muster,” the first substantive after quark, is the German word for ‘model, ideal, or type,’ which refers to Mark and H.C. Earwicker, the hero of Finnegans Wake.
Whatever Joycean sense quark assumes, one may still speculate whether matter, according to the Quark Theory, is really composed of green (for color, like strangeness, is a property of quarks) cheese, crap, or, in the end, nothing really worthwhile.
EPISTOLA {Reinhold Aman}
While not able to supply Robert Fowkes with a palindromic English city name [VERBATIM III, 2], a double palindromic Wisconsin Indian river name might be of interest: Kinnickinnic.
As to Old Trebor, peek ti pu & yats llew! [Reinhold Aman, Milwaukee, Wisconsin]
OBITER DICTA: That Ubiquitous Cockroach!
E.E. Rehmus, San Francisco, California
Enter any building in which these depressing creatures thrive and you will be told at once that they were not there before (“in the good, old days”) but that they were “brought in.” Likewise, when you cross the border into a foreign country the language of the country will tell you the same story. Everyone knows that the English word derives from the Spanish cucaracha; the spelling “cockroach” is due to popular etymology. It has nothing to do with roosters or even that carplike fish known as “roach” (Old French roche), although the slang for a marijuana butt, roach, seems to derive from the Mexican song, “La Cucaracha,” judging by the lyrics: “Ya no puede caminar porque…le falta marijuana que fumar.” In other words, the cockroach was “brought in” by the Spaniards. But there is also a Latvian word kukaraca—and which country got it from which? Incidentally, the Basques call all beetles karrakaldo and the Australian aborigines of Melville Island called any insect kărakàringa. But no one in his right mind would hazard any connection between them—or would he?
Even if we break the Spanish word down we don’t get much closer to its origins. The Spanish cuca, cuca is merely a kind of caterpillar. And just to show that Latvian & Spanish have more than one (accidental?) form in common, for cuca there is the Latvian word for ‘insect,’ kukainis, which is puzzlingly similar also to the Japanese word for ‘insect,’ konchu. Again, is this merely more of my mania for juxtaposing “impossible” relationships or is there something we don’t know?
Cucaracha, however, has even more interesting relatives. Among these is the Greek kantharis, or blister-fly, a kind of beetle from which we get cantharides or Spanish fly, quite wrongly believed to be an aphrodisiac—unless you are a bull or if you like burning & blisters! Another relative (not so “impossible” this time!) is the sacred beetle, or scarab of Egypt: h-p-r (cf. Malayalam parra, ‘cockroach’) or chepera. In German this word falls from grace as Schwabe ‘cockroach’ which the Germans believe comes from Swabia-just as we believe our pests came from Spain. Its real origin, however, is not Swabia, but the Lithuanian vabalas (cognate of English weevil) or beetle via Czech svab ‘cockroach’.
I believe, in contradiction to most etymologists, that the Egyptian scarab, chepera, is our word chafer, French cafard, and possibly Italian scarafaggio. In Sanskrit the r becomes an l and the elements are transposed resulting in pulaka ‘insect.’ The Aztec word chapul ‘grasshopper’ as in the fashionable Mexico City district, Chapultepec or ‘Grasshopper Hill’ is another odd similarity. But pulaka, rather than fugio or some such root, as many would have us believe, is most likely to be the origin of Latin pulex, English flca. This is despite the fact that many old textbooks use a blanket term for all nocturnal pests, lucifugia ‘lightfleers’ even to the inclusion of rodents.
If we substitute b for p in pulaka we get the Latin word for cockroach, blatta. Although that is not a cognate of English beetle (< OE bitula, ‘a biter’), blatta could conceivably be a relative of Old English budda—not any friend, however, of Gautama—as scearn-budda is only a dung-beetle. Weevil could also be another relative and the latter is almost certain to be part of the same ugly family as Portuguese barata ‘cockroach’ and Albanian brumbull ‘beetle.’
Thus, for the meaning ‘cockroach’ we find any number of alternate senses: ‘insect,’ ‘beetle,’ ‘grasshopper,’ etc. Since all of these creatures are first of all insects and secondly pests, the Egyptians sought to incorporate all of these meanings in the one sense of scarab which then represented therefore a creature of persistence and reincarnation or immortality. The identification of the scarab with the dung-rolling beetle was purely visual and secondary. Don Marquis may or may not have been aware of all that when he made Archy, the cockroach who used his typewriter by night, a reincarnated being descended all the way from the Egyptian pharaohs, but the fact is the cockroach is the hardiest and most ancient of all insect scourges.
As for its geographical origin, it seems mysteriously & gradually to have appeared from all sides and no matter how much one culture may try to blame another, the fact is it is impossible to determine where it ultimately came from. Aside from cockroach the native English term would seem to be wood louse, except that a wood louse is a sow bug or a termite and only has the meaning of ‘cockroach’ in a metaphorical sense.
I hasten to add that there are none of these awfuls in my house, which is probably just luck—but please don’t knock on wood (work) because you never can tell!
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Phrase-Dropper’s Handbook
John T. Beaudouin and Everett Mattlin, (Doubleday & Company Inc, 1976).
From the jacket copy it is difficult to tell whether this little book is supposed to be serious—until one reads in the Introduction that it is “meant as a guide to the game, a game of tongue-in-cheek badinage and verbal bluffery.” A shorter description would be “A Manual of One-upmanship for Cocktail Party Conversation.”
The authors provide a guide to befuddlement of the pompous by leading the reader over a course of study in which he is exhorted to learn and use jargon (developmental lag, hypoactive, behavioral objectives), irrelevant historical events (“Not since the Gadsden Purchase have we seen such a flagrant disregard of the public interest”), a collection of choice items from French, German, Yiddish, Latin, and English, and, of course, phrase-drop-ping (“Revenous á moutons,” “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes”).
If you consider deception to be fun, you will enjoy reading this book and even using it. Its main premise is that no one really knows what he’s talking about anyway, so you might as well get aboard the bandwagon. Woe be unto you if you encounter any who have their wits about them and take as much delight in flushing out the phonies as they may take in bamboozling the pretentious.
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A WHIMSEY ANTHOLOGY
Carolyn Wells, comp., (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906. Republished by Gale Research Co., Detroit, 1976), xiv + 221 pp.
[Available only from the publisher.]
THE LITTLE STAR
SCINTILLATE scintillate, globule orific, Fain would I fathom thy nature’s specific. Loftily poised in either capacious, Strongly resembling a gem carbonaceous.
When torrid Phæbus refuses his presence And ceases to lamp with fierce incandescence, Then you illumine the regions supernal, Scintillate, scintillate, semper nocturnal.
Then the victim of hospiceless peregrination Gratefully hails your minute coruscation. He could not determine his journey’s direction But for your bright scintillating protection.
Anonymous.
ON THE STREET
He bought a little block of stock The day he went to town; And in the nature of such things, That Stock Went Right Straight Down!
He sold a little block of stock: Now sorrow fills his cup, For from the moment that he did, Up. Right Went Thing Blamed The
He bought a little block of stock, Expecting he would taste of bliss; He can’t let go and can’t hang on, The blamed thing wriggles round like this.
Anonymous.
WHAT HIAWATHA PROBABLY DID
HE slew the noble Mudjekeewis, With his skin he made him mittens; Made them with the fur side inside; Made them with the skin-side outside; He, to keep the warm side inside, Put the cold side, skin-side outside; He, to keep the cold side outside, Put the warm side, fur-side, inside:— That’s why he put the cold side outside, Why he put the warm side inside, Why he turned them inside outside.
Anonymous.
300 whimseys [sic] by Anonymous, Lear, Addison, Kipling, Poe, Herrick, Burgess, Carroll, Hood, Swinburne, Dickens, Southey, Holmes, Gilbert, Cosmo Monkhouse, and lesser-known poets, collected by the lady who gave us The Anthology of Nonsense Verse. A necessity to any library that aspires to a collection reflecting fun with language in verse.
OBITER DICTA
We note that more and more companies and institutions include in their employment advertising and, in many cases, on their letterheads the slogan, “An equal opportunity/affirmative action employer.” The “equal opportunity” part of the slogan seems forthright and sufficiently unassailable not to merit comment, unless one might be allowed the cynical observation that if you have to advertise your equality, honesty, or whatever, the obvious inference is that it might have once been suspect.
But the second part doesn’t yield quite so readily to acceptance. Is “affirmative” to be construed in the sense, ‘positive; assertive’? If so, then one could be led to assume that any job applicant had the right to expect affirmative action on a work application: that is, the affirmative action employer would have to say “Yes” to any applicant. What is probably intended is the sense of assertive action; in other words, “We don’t shilly-shally when asked for a decision on an application.” That’s all well and good, but in these days when the cop on the beat (and on TV) can no longer utter a simple “Yes” or “No” to a question but replies with an “Affirmative” or “Negative,” we wonder why companies persist in a meaning that could be easily misunderstood and doesn’t reflect the more commonly accepted sense of the word.
A Plea for Plain Talk
Douglas R. Woodworth, Judge, Superior Court San Diego County
As some practitioners are cognizant, I harbor a personal idiosyncratic affinity for sesquipedalian words, and would invite you to indulge your own polysyllabic propensities, if you feel ineluctably constrained to do so, in expounding recondite legal propositions in my courtroom.
But talking to witnesses and jurors is another thing. Plain English is a must. I don’t mean you should talk down to them, but you are hurting your cause if you cloak your thoughts in strange garments. You may have seen that this second paragraph is made up mostly of everyday Anglo-Saxon words; yet you can tell what I mean, I hope, just as well as you could in the first paragraph.
Time and again I have observed lawyers evoke their hostility or bafflement by unnecessarily using fancy words instead of plain ones. Here are some recurrent samples:
You can no doubt think of dozens of other examples. This vice, which I might label “ornamental opacity,” probably results from years of saturation with professional jargon in college and law school. We lawyers are supposed to be masters of the art of communication. So let’s escape from the shackles of academic obscurantism, and assume a special responsibility for plain talk and lucid writing.
The first goal should be to weed out these round-about—Oops, I almost said “periphrastic”—ways of putting simple thoughts into words.
This article first appeared in the California State Bar Journal, from which it is reprinted by permission.
Mr. Ted Bear, Historian, Air Force Flight Test Center, Edwards, California, wrote to enquire whether an or a is to be used in a parenthetical construction like “…an (unspecified) number of years ago.” We’ve been perplexed about this problem too, but a long time ago we decided that because the construction is what might be called a “visual colloquial” form, an would be preferred to a. Similarly, “a (new) auditorium.” In such cases, the parentheses around the word or expression are “weak” and are intended only for visual effect.
Editor
EPISTOLA {Pete Chappars}
Any of you people putting out VERBATIM or any readers have ideas about the extraordinary use of the word signifying as a synonym for “seriously discussing”?
In court one day I heard a black man tell the court that after a shot was fired in the vicinity of a bowling alley all the parking-lot people gathered about and were “signifying.” I asked other blacks what that word meant to them and they agreed that it means to gather worriedly and discuss an event. The judge said he didn’t know what the word meant; said he had never heard of such a meaning for that word.
My dictionaries are of no help. Is it a Southern meaning? Mid-western?
[Pete Chappars, Oxford, Ohio]
Irish Bulls—Second Series
Robert A. Fowkes, New York University
A short time ago our little article on so-called “Irish Bulls (VERBATIM II, 1) provoked a surprising amount of correspondence. Since one or two readers were incautiously kind enough to ask for more, we are rashly reacting to that suggestion with “another debut,” a term I have from a neighbor who was forced to retire and referred to his appearance at the usual farewell party as “my final debut.” He bullishly added, “I’m starting the eventide of life with a terrible feeling of the morning after the night before,” whereupon a friend said, “Well, the heyday of your career took place mainly at night.” He attended night school and alleged that he excelled in those subjects that he never took. Although he did well enough in life, he was once severely rebuked by his wife for having signed “an oral contract,” which, as everybody knows, “isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”
As a boy in Europe he began in the apprentice system: “I started with zero pay, but they were so pleased with my work that they doubled it every year.” He became active in a union and recalled with pride his part in negotiations: “We once tried to put through a demand for no working between meals, but we figured some lazy guys would cheat.” The factory had a yearly trip and “Everybody without exception left town for the annual outing once a year, but the ones that stayed behind wrecked the place.”
At the retirement party mentioned above, Mr. Self-mademan said, among other things, that if he could begin his life over again, he would not start to work at such an early age, even if he lived to be a hundred!
He was no more materialistic than the next fellow but admitted that, “The sweetest sound to my eyes was the lovely metallic clang of a five-pound note.” Some mornings, in order to save time, he would dry himself before taking his shower. But when his wife tried to serve him a new brand of instant coffee, he protested, “I can’t drink this stuff! I’m allergic to all the things they’ve taken out of it.”
He subscribed to a house organ and was told that it was gratis. He asked whether there was a special rate for bulk orders. He became a great sports fan and contributed several gems like, “Those sturdy hands have kicked the greatest number of field goals in the county.” He was loyal to the home team and boasted, “We invariably win, through not always.” After one tremendous international soccer match he related, “As we all rose for the singing of our national anthem, there wasn’t an empty seat in the stadium.”
Some of his pronouncements were rivaled by “sportscasters” during the last world series. One said, “Those skillful hands of Pete Rose surely cover a lot of ground in the air.” He also pontificated, “The Reds are favored to win, and, as we all know, everybody hates a favorite.” Then came the irrefutable logic, “If you can’t stay close to Cincinnati in the scoring column, they’ll beat ya.”
Another athletic bull came from the incomparable Paavo Nurmi or a slanderer of his. When asked the magic formula for setting a world record in the mile (then about 4 mins. 12 secs.), Nurmi supposedly replied with a Finnish bull (or reindeer?), “You start out at full speed, gradually increasing pace.”
When a loudly bawling child was asked, “What are you crying for, little fellow?” he answered, “Boo-hoo! Dennis kicked me in the belly when my back was turned.” That Dennis chap took piano lessons, to the dismay of the neighborhood, and his proud, tone-deaf but not entirely dumb father said, “I must admit that Dennis seemed hopeless at first, but he’s been improving with each preceding lesson.” In school, however, Dennis majored in mayhem, and one teacher showed him the door with the old-fash-ioned verbiage, “I’ll never allow you in class again; that’ll teach you!”
When Dennis was born, an event from which the town ultimately recovered—but slowly—his grandfather learned what the child’s name was to be and asked the father, “Whatta ya calling him Dennis for? Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is called Dennis.” At the christening, Dennis was the only one present to take water. Among the countless toasts proposed was one by Dennis’s father: “May all our children get rich parents!”
One guest asked another, “Did you come by car?” and received the sarcastic reply, “No, by camel.” “Ah, that’s a horse of a different color!”
Other bulls have been heard recently on radio and television, and one or two have probably been heard that were not said—a sort of bullish situation in itself. These were new to me: “You’ve got to give that man credit; he always pays cash!” “Many things occur to me, but nothing ever happens.” “Those who stir up trouble among nations are no friends of peace.” One of more ancient vintage recently heard again is: “After they got rid of capital punishment, they had to hang twice as many people as before.”
A colleague came up (or down) with this rewording of an ancient slur: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; all others become linguists.” Oh, well, they philological gap.
My friend who retired concluded his autobiographical remarks with a sigh and the following suprapontic bull: “But that’s all water over the bridge.”
Finally, the following would have been funnier in a less tragic era, but it is still funny as an instance of the bovine stupidity of man: “Wanted: man and woman to care for two cows, both Protestant”-a possibly fictitious ad (possibly not!) in an Ulster newspaper, quoted in Seán McCann, The Wit of the Irish (London: Leslie Frewin, 1968), p. 74. What do you mean, “it’s no bull”? At your service.
EPISTOLA {Steven Short}
In Jon Miller’s letter about quotation marks, he asks why advertisers use quotation marks around such phrases as “Tastes Great!” “The use of quotation marks,” he says, “must have a predictable motivational effect. I would like to know what it is.”
In journalism, quotation marks are used to set aside an important factor in a story. The quotation marks immediately call attention to any sentence on a printed page. When they are used on such phrases as “New! Improved!,” “Home-made Taste,” etc., they have even greater effect because of their closeness to each other.
Consumers are more likely to believe a direct quote if it is attributed to Mrs. Amanda Housewife of Anytown than if the same phrase comes from an advertising agency, so quotation marks help lend credibility to the claims.
Besides that, quotation marks bear the same relationship to words that advertising does to products: they are used to attract attention. Because of this, it seems only natural for quotation marks to be used around advertising claims.
[Steven Short, Long Beach, California]
More About the Name Cowbird for Molothrus ater ater
W.M. Woods, Oak Ridge, Tennessee
In a letter [II, 4] I conjectured that Molothrus ater ater, the Eastern Cowbird of North America, got its vernacular name because of the similarity of its habits to those of the European cuckoo Cuculus canorus, that immigrants called the bird the kuh-kuh-bird, then by abbreviation the kuh-bird, and finally by improper translation from the German cowbird.
Mr. Edwin H. Hammock of Columbus, Ohio [III, 1] cast shame on me because he imagined I had overlooked a remark by Audubon in an American Orthnic Biography (1828): “From the resemblance of its notes to that word [cow-cow], this Cuckoo is named Cow Bird in every part of the union.”
In fact, this citation is given in the OED, and I was quite aware of it. I rejected Audubon’s explanation for two reasons. No cowbird ever said anything resembling “cow-cow” when I was around, and no other ornithological work I have come across reports any such sound as “cow-cow” although many of them go into considerable detail in reporting the voices of this bird. Then, Audubon himself apparently revised his opinion in a later revision of the cited work. His Birds of America [Vol. 4, p. 20, 1840-44 Edition] contains the following: “This species derives its name from the circumstance of its frequenting cow-pens.” And. “It has no song properly so called, but utters a low muttering sort of chuckle….” Further, “On inspecting it, however, I at once felt convinced that it was nothing else than a young Cow-pen-bird, scarcely fledged….” [Ibid., pp. 20-21].
For other descriptions of the voice of M. ater ater see Field Guide to the Birds by Roger Tory Peterson [2nd Ed., p. 216] and Natural History of AMERICAN BIRDS of Eastern & Central North America by Edward Howe Forbush & John Richard May [Bramhall House, NY, p. 477].
If further refutation of the .“cow-cow” hypothesis is needed, I have an unpublished private communication from Mr. J.B. Owen, a well-known ornithologist who writes a bird column for the Knoxville News-Sentinel—and to whom I am indebted for several references cited in this article— which states, “As for my own observations, I agree that the cowbird does not have any call or song that could resemble its name.”
One of the authors of Forbush & May [loc. cit., p. 478] gives a first-hand account of an observation that may have bearing on the question. “One spring day I observed a male [cowbird] on the ridgepole of a house, attitudinizing for the benefit of his consorts. His attempts at song were peculiar and probably unusual. With each swelling of his throat he produced a soft rather musical sound in two syllables like that of the cuckoo of Europe, but with the accent on the last syllable thus—cook-oó', but several seconds elapsed between the calls.”
This observation, if anything, strengthens my general conjecture, for habits aside, such a call would directly suggest a relationship with the European cuckoo, or coo-coo, and thus kuh-kuh-bird, kuh-bird, cowbird. Indeed, with the stressed last syllable of its voice, the bird might well have been termed the coo-bird to begin with, which eliminates the need for the postulated abbreviation, even for any association with the Old World bird. Only an imagined translation from the German is now needed.
For completeness, and in fairness to the objective question involved, I ought now to briefly cite other references given to me by Mr. Owen, or turned up by me, whether these support my conjecture or not.
Words for Birds by Edward S. Gruson, p. 254 (1972): “Cowbird is a contraction of Catesby’s ‘Cowpenbird’ of which he says, “They delight much to feed in the pens of cattle, which has given them their name.' ” [Catesby lived a century ahead of Audubon (1682-1749) and wrote on the Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands.]
Life Histories of North American Blackbirds, Orioles, Tanagers, and Allies by A.C. Bent (1958): “It deserves the common name cowbird and its former name, buffalo-bird, for its well-known attachment to these domestic and wild cattle.” [The name buffalo-bird would support the “association with cattle” hypothesis since it suggests that the symbiosis of bird with bovine was well-established and well-known before the introduction of domestic live stock. Still, if this be so, one wonders what happened to Amerind words for the buffalo-bird.]
Mr. J.B. Owen, referred to above, gives the following notes. [I do not have these references.]: Alexander Wilson, who was slightly ahead of Audubon, called the bird the cow bunting. The National Geographic’s Song & Garden Birds says that cowbirds “snatch insects stirred up by hoofs and alight on the backs of the animals to pick off ticks and other pests.” A highly respected volume, Birds of the World, by Oliver L. Auston, Jr. says “except for the giant cowbird of Central and South America…cowbirds seldom alight on cattle, but flock around to feed on the insects disturbed by their feet.”
At this point, I think we can very fairly reject the “cow-cow call” hypothesis, without any shame whatever. We are then left to choose between the orthodox etymology “association with cows” hypothesis, and my heretical “kuhkuh-bird→ kuh-bird→ cow-bird” conjecture.
It will require further, deeper research and quantitative empirical observation of this interesting bird to settle the matter. [I often think that etymologists muse too much over musty manuscripts and neglect the evidence of the real-time world, shining bright and informative all about them.] Of course, if the cowbird has changed its habits since the introduction of chemical sprays reduced the tick population on cattle, as Francis E. Throw of Wheaton, Illinois, opines [III, 2], the question may remain moot. In etymological matters, it is seldom possible to discharge every possible or plausible objection or counterexample.
Readers of VERBATIM ought, by now, to be developing some affection for the cowbird. We are perplexed, however, by the high degree of acoustic refinement exhibited by bird-listeners that permits them to be so firm in their convictions that cowbirds say “cuckoo” and not “cow-cow.” Is it possible that we are dealing with dialect differences among cowbirds? [That isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds: ornithologists do report regional variations in the songs of the same species.] Perhaps someone has encountered a cowbird (or a whole family of cowbirds) with a speech defect? And why should only German immigrants have been listening to his bird’s song (if “kuh-kuh” can be said to be a song)? To us, a “coo-bird” is a pigeon or a dove: they’re the ones that say “coo.” And how could the Eastern Cowbird be confused with the Buffalo-Bird, which, if it frequented buffaloes, would have had trouble finding them in eastern North America? As to the question of whether chemical sprays might have reduced the tick population, it suggests that the entire matter may be entomological rather than etymological.
EPISTOLA {Nominally, David H. Scull}
The following interesting incident may have escaped your notice.
As Fred, a Benedict, emerged from behind the Arras to enter his Brougham waiting on the Macadam, he was wearing Jodhpurs and a Cardigan. No Beau Brummel, his Burnsides had been untouched by Occam’s razor. Wearing a Panama instead of his usual Balmoral, he munched a Bologna Sandwich, drinking his Java from fine China. His faithful Boswell was a Maverick who had recently escaped the Guillotine, having been pursued by a Lynch mob who tried to Shanghai him. He was smoking a Havana while holding a half-eaten Napoleon. Just then an Amazon clad in a Bikini and accompanied by her Abigail Meandered over in her Landau drawn by a Clydesdale instead of her regular Berlin with its matched team of an Arabian and a Percheron. She said, “It’s Hobson’s choice, Fred. Put your John Hancock right here. Then we’re going to the Mausoleum if a Bobby doesn’t stop us.” Fred said “No, I won’t be a Vandal. I’ll Boycott such a Neanderthal notion. Besides, I’m going to the cattle show on an Annie Oakley. I’m to be the Solomon deciding between a Guernsey and a Jersey. I’ve just got time to pick up my Prince Albert, my Havelock, and a bottle of Cognac, but first I’ve got to stop at the Crapper; there may not be a John on the Pullman.” Just then the third Bohemian in a Dolly Varden pulled up in a Hackney. “My Zeppelin did a Corrigan so I had to take a Sedan instead” she explained, eating a Hamburger which she had warmed on an Etna. At this point your correspondent, feeling like a Frankenstein, left to file his story. [Nominally, David H. Scull, Annandale, Virginia]
Animal-Like Adjectives
Lynne Tieslau Jewell, Assistant Director, News Bureau University of Southern California
As an amateur wordster, my personal lexicon contains lengthy lists of various types of words. I have columns, for example, of words derived from famous people’s names, like martinet, Ferris Wheel and Stronganoff. I even have a women-only column, brief as it may be at this point, with such entries as maudlin and bloomer. Not all the categories focus on people. Portmanteaus, acronyms and spoonerisms are additionally itemized.
But to date the list that has been a particularly exhilarating experience has been my collection of animal-like words. I am fascinated with -ine (Middle English, ‘pertaining to’) ending words that relate to the animal kingdom. Some are obvious, like bovine ‘cowlike,’ canine ‘dog-like,’ feline ‘catlike,’ elephantine ‘elephantlike’ and equine ‘horselike.’ Others are not as familiar, anserine ‘gooselike.’ ranine ‘froglike’ and ca\pgrave\rine ‘goatlike.’
My search for animal-like adjectives began several years ago. A newspaper article described the announcer at a Playboy Bunny of the Year Contest as a “porcine” (‘piglike’) emcee. I thought what a perfectly polite way to depict a fat slob; there must be more like this. Since then I have zeroed in on other journalistic uses of the words. For instance, in May 1975, the Associated Press ran a story, accompanied with a sketch, on “bovine” brassieres. (And, incidentally, the bovine bras come in four sizes to support sagging udders.)
Vulpine ‘foxlike’ starlet and aquiline ‘eaglelike’ nose are Timese favorites. In People (13 Oct. ‘75), the caption over a picture-story of the bearded actor Peter Ustinov read, “Leonine Ustinov.” “Clown Emmett Kelly Jr. has a small but elephantine wedding,” was a kicker in the table of contents of People (2 Aug. ‘76). Nuptials for the 51-year-old Kelly and his waitress-girlfriend were conducted atop a circus pachyderm.
Related to this particular list are words ending in -ian, meaning characteristic or resembling. Examples are apian ‘beelike,’ simian ‘apelike’ and vermian ‘wormlike.’ Then there are words like swine and ermine. Although they end in -ine, they are not included in the list, as they are not adjectives describing a certain creature.
The following is a glossary of my collection of animal -ine adjectives that pertain to, resemble or are characteristic of an animal:
EPISTOLA {Catherine McVicar}
At my suggestion, VERBATIM is circulated around our editorial department. I was interested in the latest issue to see someone’s contribution of strange names, because whenever I use the phone book I have one eye open for possible additions to my list of “collectables.”
I thought you’d be interested to know that the following can be found in the 1976 Toronto phone directory:
People:
Roman Flicker, Bunny Shoom, Jerry Journey, Homer Tremble, Dewey D. Bloom, F.B. Titball, Tyrone Nurse, Cyril Coveyduck, and Roger Ruttgaizer.
Businesses:
Joy Auto Collision, Jubilant Sales Ltd., Elegant Jobbers, Tajmahal Auto Body, High Class Billiards, and High Tension Clothier.
[Catherine McVicar, Copp Clark Publishing Toronto, Ontario, Canada]
EX CATHEDRA
Those who have not been so fortunate as to have been exposed to that paragon of British publishing known as The Times cannot be aware of the treasures to be found in a national newspaper that summarizes the contemporary history and culture of a country in about 20 pages daily, some percentage of which is devoted to advertising. Within memory, the front page of The Times was dedicated to the (in) famous “Personals,” now relegated to the back page. In place of the Personals appears news, or what might generally pass for news. In a random Times picked up as typical [Monday, October 18, 1976], one might have been misled into believing that the drought of last summer had occasioned a postponement of the Silly Season: the revaluation of the German mark was announced after a surprise meeting of the “snake”; “Uncompromising show of police strength keeps football hooligans under control”; “Mao ‘almost nagged to death by his wife’ ”; the death of Carlo Gambino in New York may lead to a “struggle for ‘Godfather’ succession”; and “Bagpipes sound [in St. Peter’s Square, Rome] for new Scottish Saint.” The featured photograph meriting page one coverage is of “Ramu, a three and a half ton killer whale, being winched from its pool at Windsor Safari Park before being flown to an aquarium in California. It had become too big for the pool.”
One observation of some usefulness is that The Times, which has no stated policy in the “ears” alongside its name on page one, seems to cleave to the tenet that unimportant but interesting news merits coverage, but in only a limited space. Contrariwise, important but not always interesting news receives succinct but by no means sparse treatment. The New York Times, on the other hand, sports its heart in its ear: “All the news that’s fit to print,” a slogan that has often been reinterpreted as, “All the news that fits we print,” and not without some justification. The NY Times fancies itself the documentalist of events of the world, though one is often given to wonder how a reader can be expected to wade through the morass of verbiage in which a NY Times story is almost invariably embedded. It was (at least) once observed that The New York Daily News was one of the best edited newspapers in America. Not the best written, you understand; for what was referred to was the ability of the News’s editors to distill into one brief paragraph the same information that The NY Times needed three columns to describe.
To one who is familiar with the style of The NY Times, it is amusing to speculate to what lengths it would go to treat such items as the following, reproduced in their terse entirety from The Times [of London]:
Purge in Pakistan
Rawalpindi, Oct. 17.—In a big purge of the Pakistan Administration, more than 500 of senior ranks in Government and autonomous departments have been dismissed.
Whisky vats explode
Sao Paulo, Brazil, Oct. 17.—Nine vats exploded at a distillery in Sao Paulo state, causing a fire that destroyed more than 500,000 gallons of cane whisky.
China nuclear blast
Hongkong, Oct. 17.—China today successfully conducted another nuclear test.
The “Letters to the Editor” page of The Times [of London] is far more revealing of the character of its readers than is the parallel page of The NY Times. After several weeks of to-ing and fro-ing about Scots’ eating their porridge while walking about, on October 18 readers finally got down to business with contributions like these:
Sir, It is with horror that I read in VAT News No 11 that “it has been decided that gallop fees which are charged by a landowner for granting permission to gallop horses over his land are liable to VAT at the standard rate with effect from 1 July, 1976.” Do we now have galloping inflation?
Yours truly,
Clifford Prowse,
St. Fillans,
Ray Mead Road,
Maidenhead,
Berkshire.
October 14.
Sir, In your Special Report today (October 13) on business travel, the last item in the table of contents reads “What to pack; taking your wife.” This is particularly gratifying to me: fairly flexible, of small dimensions and weighing only 84 lb, I could be accommodated in a travelling bag of quite moderate size.
Yours faithfully,
Gwyneth M. Ohlsen,
31 Hill Rise,
Woodhouse Eaves,
Loughborough,
Leicestershire.
October 13.
Needless to say, other correspondence deals with matters of greater import, but one can always find the light touch among the more ponderous. Perhaps The NY Times takes itself too seriously.
Certainly, one cannot despair that The Times [London, again] has lost its touch if one can fight off the lugubrious prospects of sinking sterling with headlines like, “Keeping the bounce in synthetic rubber,” “Parris brings downfall of Trojan fortress” [M.J. Parris, playing for Slough, scored the winning goal against the Trojans in the National Club Hockey Championship], “Mr. Ford looks like boring his way back to the White House.”
And what depths of Holmesian intrigue are conjured up by the cryptic advert in the Announcements column: “C.M. Please ring 77557. Move in 2 weeks. P.T.” Had the initials been different, we might have speculated about the Prime Minister’s anticipation of a quick defeat by Mrs. Thatcher’s Tories in a surprise vote-of-confidence election.
EPISTOLA {Keen Rafferty}
I regret that in your “Noun Overuse Phenomenon Article” by Mr. Bruce Price [II, 4] you failed to include the newspaper headline, “Jones Hits Fish Sale Ban Repealer,” although the omission is understandable, since it never got in the paper.
As the former head of the copydesk of The Baltimore Evening Sun (in the 1930’s), I have been waiting for an article about literally. “The American destroyer was literally disemboweled” was a sentence in an Associated Press dispatch during World War II. A recent book of mine cites “The Packers Literally Exploded in the Fourth Quarter.” Even more bloody was a politician’s boast, “I literally tore that fellow apart, eh?”
In television news recently towns have been literally erased from the map, the English language has been literally murdered (could it truly be?), and spectators at a hockey game literally tore the place to shreds.
[Keen Rafferty, Emeritus Professor of Journalism The University of New Mexico]
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: How Real Is Real?
Paul Watzlawick, (Random House, 1976), xiv + 266 pp.
It is impossible, in the few pages of a journal like VERBATIM, to present and describe, let alone discuss, the myriad aspects of language—its history, development, use (and misuse), its style, variety, poetry, its grammar, syntax, vocabulary, pronounciation, its learning, teaching, its curiosities, its relevance, its metaphoricity. If the truth be known, not all the professional journals nor all the books published in every conceivable language, ancient or modern, are sufficient to contain all that can be said on the subject. It is partly for that reason that we review books in VERBATIM, for we hope to introduce to the reader sources of knowledge and an ever-increasing wealth of information about language than it would be feasible for us to attempt to cover in a thousand lifetimes and in ten thousand pages. Whether the reader considers the foregoing an excuse for our inadequacies or a rationalization for the shortcomings of VERBATIM is irrelevant, for its purpose is to introduce him to some of the facets of language that may have failed to catch his imagination.
Notable among writings dealing with the ways in which man’s view of his universe are tempered by the language he speaks is the classic “Four Articles on Metalinguistics,” by Benjamin Lee Whorf, originally published by the U.S. Department of State, now available in a collection, The Collected Writings of B.L. Whorf, MIT Press. We shall review that collection at some other time; for the present purpose, we mention it because it deals with language and reality, the subject of Dr. Watzalawick’s book, and comes readily to mind not for comparative or contrastive reasons but purely for associative ones.
There is little originality in How Real Is Real?, but we can recommend the author highly as an excellent and, as far as we know, accurate reporter of a broad variety of matters relating to language. The central theme of the book is that communication (manifest as language in one form or another) tempers and controls our concepts of reality. Although the accuracy of the book’s flap copy is questionable in its statement, “The connection between communication and reality is a relatively new idea,” we suppose that its author could cavil with the weasel-word relatively, for the notion is at least as old as the Allegory of the Cave in Plato. Nonetheless, the book itself reveals, in an easy-to-read style, much interesting information on communication between man and beast and among men.
The first two parts of the book, “Confusion” and “Disinformation” are less concerned with language, per se, than with behavior. That is understandable in light of Dr. Watzlawick’s professional association with the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto and the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford University. But the behavior discussed is behavior resulting from information, most of it conveyed by language.
Those unfamiliar with research that has been under way for many years in cross-species communication will be interested in the author’s excellent, though brief, descriptions of recent and current experiments with chimpanzees and dolphins.
From Confusion to Disinformation among human beings to Communication with chimpanzees and dolphins to extraterrestrial communication may be leaps far too enormous to describe in the small compass of 266 pages, and, to be sure, the author cannot dwell on any of his topics for very long. But the reporting is clear, the sequence is logical, and the entire book is readable, entertaining, informative, and interesting. Dr. Watzlawick offers little in the way of editorial comment, unless one wishes to impute to the pattern of his inclusions and exclusions a sinister purpose. A sufficient bibliography and an index round out the book, which we are delighted to recommend.
EPISTOLA {R. Roy Williams}
Just to “nit-pick” a bit—Bruce Price’s article on noun overuse is a bit simplistic in its criticism of military or scientific gobbledygook. Much of this scientific noun overuse had its origin during World War Two, when it was necessary to train inexperienced and in some cases uneducated people to use very sophisticated and complex equipment.
Having been active in the aerospace field, I would say that the term “spaceship” was never used to describe a vehicle in our space program, and if someone were to actually use the phrase, he would be laughed out of the lab or shop and be accused of reading too many space comics.
So, booster rocket, ignition system, with commas, means exactly that—the ignition system for the booster rocket (rocket is another obnoxious word—they are engines, not fireworks), not the ignition system for the staging rockets which might be called first stage, ignition system and so on.
I am the first to groan loudly at most of the gobbledygook used by scientists and the military, but not all of it is “noun overuse” and does have its place in communicating one to the other.
[R. Roy Williams, Malibu, California]
EPISTOLA {Frederick W. Cropp}
Dr. Kerr’s excellent letter concerning certain words for some Biblical concepts raised once again an old speculation of mine that the unuttered (by the ancient Hebrews) four-character word which is anglicized as YHWH is an onomatopoetic word based also on breath or wind. To try to pronounce it without vowels gives it a zephyr sound.
Thus the word, avoided by using Lord in some versions and Yahweh in others, may have similarities to ruach and nephesh, the “wind” -words for spirit. These two also give the sound of breath and moving air when pronounced.
Referring to Dr. Kerr’s last line, it may be something to be sneezed at.
[Frederick W. Cropp, Santa Barbara, California]
EPISTOLA {Thomas Daniel}
Axel Hornos’ fine and interesting article, “Ouch! he said in Japanese,” is marred by an error in one of the Greek examples that he offers.
“Hey, John!” is rendered in Greek as “Aye, Ioannis!” This is an impossible construction because Greek is an inflected language and requires that Ioannis be in the vocative case instead of the nominative, as given by Hornos. However, Ioannis is the form of the name which is used in the formal (katharevousa) language only; it is never used in the spoken language, especially in speech as familiar as “Hey, John!” The spoken form is Yiannis for the nominative and Yianni for the vocative. This error, however, is doubly compounded by the appearance of Aye for “hey,” a word, which, as far as I am able to determine, does not even exist in modern Greek. “Hey” in Greek is simply e, as the “e” in get. Hornos' example, then, should read, “E, Yianni!”
[Thomas Daniel, Warren, Ohio]
EPISTOLA {Judy Scarfpin}
Professor G.A. Cevasco’s article, “Ellipsis…Faulty and Otherwise,” [III, 1] inspired me to write down ellipses I am fond of. Until reading his article, I had been making only mental notes.
Immediately I recorded those Rhode Island elliptical expressions which had first jarred my ear but now, nine years after moving to this state, sound normal: “graduate college,” “live home.”
I then remembered, and recorded, an Ohio expression of mine to which a Chicago-born friend objects: “My hair needs cut.”
I found ellipses not only from the past, but in conversations of the present. Speaking of job opportunities, a colleague said, “The field is saturated, from what I’ve heard.” A Providence newscaster said one Friday, “Have a great weekend from all of us.” And, as I left for vacation this summer, someone wished this upon me: “If I don’t see you, have a nice vacation.”
The upshot of my recording ellipses is my realization one day that the ubiquitous “hopefully” is used elliptically —an explanation most welcome to me, since I have not understood why I disliked that word. Even so, ellipses will always be with us, [I say] hopefully.
[Judy Scarfpin, Assistant Dean of Students and Assistant Professor of English University of Rhode Island]
EPISTOLA {William H. Ready}
“Ellipsis…Faulty and Otherwise” by G.A. Cevasco [III, 1] made me reach for a list that I have been compiling these last few months. Why, I have been asking myself, do writers tend to omit that most necessary verb form?
-
“…the author doesn’t have to create her. For the family already has.”
-
“I did not attend Stanford, but after visiting the campus recently, I sincerely wish that I had.”
-
“Nobody calls after her, though the Colonel would have liked to.”
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“There is a mystique that surrounds Grace and has from the beginning.”
-
“He writes beautifully and always has.”
-
“…but what I want most to do is write a book for children. Actually I have.”
(Items 1, 5, and 6 are from THE WRITER magazine. Item 2, from HARVARD MAGAZINE; item 3, from a student’s term paper. Item 4 is from the L.A. TIMES.) [William H. Ready, English Department St. Vincent’s Seminary, Montebello, California]
It is interesting to note that British usage varies: in each of the above examples, the word done would follow the auxiliaries have and has to stand as surrogate for the ellipticized verb.
Editor
EPISTOLA {Ted Bear}
When I was a student at the Sorbonne in Paris an (unspecified) number of years ago, a friend of mine told me of an experience in a taxicab there.
An acquaintance of his riding with him thought he noticed that they were passing a building for the second time. Possibly forgetting that many buildings in Paris look alike, he concluded that the taxidriver was going around and around the block in order to run up the fare. Though he had no reason to believe that the driver was a philosopher, he asked him belligerently, “Quelle est la grand idée?”
[Ted Bear, Edwards, California]