VOL Vol III, No 4 [February 1977]

Mail Lib

Clair Schulz, Clinton, Wisconsin

Several years ago Johnny Cash recorded a song that lamented the plight of a boy who suffered ridicule because his father had chosen to name him Sue. If I correctly interpreted the amused expressions of those I observed listening to the song, people regarded it as a novelty record designed to create laughter in the same manner that the boy’s name brought giggles from his peers. I found little in the story to smile about for it sounded all too personal to be taken as mere whimsy.

From the first grade through graduate school there has been a conspiracy to change my sex. In grade school teachers needed three weeks each year before they stopped lining me up with the girls. During the first roll calls in high school I had to wave the teachers' eyes away from the girls' side of the room when they called my name (except in physical education; that teacher thought the computer had made a mistake). My classmates, ever sensitive to the adolescent sense of masculine identity, called me “Ernie,” a name that even some of the teachers picked up. However, in college I discovered that nicknames as well as swords have two edges: two friends dubbed me with the name of a famous hair coloring product. And I cannot recall a single professor to whom I was a stranger failing to begin a semester by searching the room for a “Miss Schulz.”

But stereotyping by name is not limited to education. Nowhere does it stick deeper or grow with more pernicious root than in the incorrectly labeled mail I have received over the years.

At one time the malady was not so obvious. While I was in high school I occasionally received written inducements from secretarial and beautician schools. The offers themselves were much easier to toss aside than my sister’s requests for me to restyle her hair or type letters for her.

Going to college seemed to expand the possibility of my name reaching more mailing lists. I began to attract catalogs from dress manufacturers and cosmetic companies. Offers to subscribe to women’s magazines filled my mailbox. Semiannually I received a large envelope that was explicitly directed to “today’s modern coed.” These envelopes contained coupons for products that could remove my blemishes and unwanted hair, improve my figure, lengthen my eyelashes, replace my baggy pantyhose, and eliminate my personal hygiene problems. I decided it was time to take action.

I tried placing Mr. in front of my name in the return address. People apparently discarded or discounted the envelope. Then I began signing my entire name to letters, but that was also futile. Clair Alan Schulz came back Clair Ellen Schulz. Once I wrote to the most persistent offenders and simply stated, “Please remove my name from your mailing list.” The letters continued to arrive. I wrote again and changed the emphasis: “Please remove my mail from your naming list.” This also had no effect. I am now considering sending them a letter containing a fictitious change of address for the nonexistent person they have created.

I have rejected my friends' suggestions to use initials for I have no desire to be called C. Alan or C.A. or even Al. Initials depersonalize; consider how sterile authors would appear if they hid behind abridgments like E. Waugh or J. Cary. My name is distinctive and I wish to retain it. What I wish to eliminate is the liberties that strangers take with it.

I suppose I owe it to the efforts of Gloria, Betty, Kate, Bella, et al., that I am now receiving mail addressed to Ms. Clair Schulz. It is comforting to know that even though my winged assailants are not certain as to whether I am married, single, or divorced they at least seem convinced of my sex.

Some would encourage me to file complaints of blatant sexism against the disciples of preconceived notions, but I have not reached the breaking point yet. I’m waiting for something I can turn into a cause celébre like the receipt of a brochure from an abortion clinic or a catalog from Frederick’s of Hollywood. Then I will seek an act named sue.

Author’s Query

For a project, entitled Materials for a History of American Translation, supported by preliminary grants from the American P.E.N. Translation Committee and from the Translation Center of the School of the Arts, Columbia University, and to consist of

(1) Register of Translators & Areas of Competence/Preference,

(2) Index of Translators & Their Translations,

(3) Descriptive Bibliography of Critical Writing on Translation, and

(4) Translation Courses & Programs in Academic Institutions,

I shall be grateful for all data and information pertaining to (1) individual translators and their body of work-bibliographies of work completed during their careers and of works in progress, and (2) data on critical writing by translators and on translation (books, articles, essays, reviews, prefaces, introductions, treatises, commentaries, etc.), especially in areas relatively neglected or little translated into English.

Copies of (1) the project outline, (2) questionnaires for each category, and (3) projected cross-indexed entries are available on request.

[Stefan Congrat-Butlar]

Translation Index, 175 West 87 Street (#24A), New York, N.Y. 10024.

Aunt Minnie’s Chicken Talk

William Bancroft Mellor, New York, New York

It is reasonably certain that my Aunt Minnie never saw a cock-fight in her life, and it can be stated with equal certainty that she is completely unaware that about 150,000 American zealots this weekend—and every weekend during the cocking season—will be busily engaged in pursuing or watching this sub rosa activity at hundreds of pits scattered about the country from coast to coast.

Yet, like most others in the United States who are equally unaware of a subterranean sport which finds its outlet alike in plush pits on Long Island estates and in makeshift arenas covertly operated in the Tennessee hills, or deep in the New Jersey pine barrens, gentle little Aunt Minnie’s speech is liberally and habitually salted with pungent phrases that stem directly from the cockpit.

“Well!” she will exclaim when her favorite grandnephew outruns his playfellows. “He certainly showed them a clean pair of heels!”

Like most of the rest of us, Aunt Minnie is ignorant not only of the origin of the phrase but of its real meaning as well. She would be highly indignant if she were told that she was actually calling the boy a coward—but that is what the phrase originally meant.

Gamecocks have fought since the days of ancient Rome in metal spurs, which cockers call heels, and the bird which did not fight, which kept its heels unbloodied and ran away from the other rooster, was said to have shown his opponent a clean pair of heels.

Although the cockpit is as remote from the lives of most of us as a brontosaurus wallow, our language has been richly endowed by The Sod, and few of us get through a single day without recourse to at least one phrase from the lexicon of cocking.

Even Aunt Minnie would recognize the origin of some of these frequently used phrases—the word cockpit itself, commonly employed in connection with boats or airplanes; cocky, meaning ‘brash’ or ‘conceited’; cock-sure ‘over-confident’; pit against ‘to set someone against an adversary’; and game, ‘courageous.’

Stand the gaff, an expression used to denote the ability to bear up bravely in the face of adversity, is another which most people would spot as referring to the spurs or gaffs worn by a cock during a fight, and when we advise a belligerent friend not to get his hackles up, we are dimly aware that the expression is associated with the great feathered ruff which stands out on a gamecock’s neck when he spots another male fowl in his vicinity.

Show the white feather, a phrase denoting cowardice, is another which some will recognize as stemming from the cockpit, though few know its exact meaning. It refers to the white fluff found at the base of the tail in many strains of game fowl, particularly those descended from the breeds which found their way here 100 years ago from the North of England—the Whitehackles. When the tail of one of these birds is drooped during a fight, and the cock thus acknowledges defeat, the white fluff, normally covered by the saddle and tail feathers, shows plainly.

Less easily recognized by Aunt Minnie and others unfamiliar with the parlance of the pit are the origins of such expressions as coming up to scratch ‘to measure up to a standard,’ and the slang expression, in the bag, both of which, however, are in everyday use. In the cockpit, the scratch is a line drawn by the referee in the dirt of the pit floor, behind which the cock is placed at the beginning of the fight. If he fails to rush eagerly up to the mark to meet his adversary, he is said not to come up to scratch: he is an inferior chicken, fit only to be consigned to the stewpot. Although not one in a thousand users of the expression realizes it, in the bag also comes from the exciting world of cocking. Until comparatively recent years, it was common to transport game chickens to the scene of battle in cloth bags rather than in the comfortable and elaborate carrying cases now in vogue, and the roosters were not removed until the fight was about to begin. A cocker, confident of the prowess of his feathered warrior, would say that victory was in the bag for him.

Similarly, he died kicking does not, as might be supposed, refer to the muscular spasms frequently suffered by creatures which succumb to sudden and violent death; it, too, comes from the pit. It referred originally to the gamecock which continued to fight, kicking out with his steelshod heels, even as he was expiring under his enemy’s death-dealing blows.

The prize ring also owes many of its expressions to the cockpit: the count was used in the pit hundreds of years before it became the method of determining the outcome of boxing bouts; referees and handlers exercise the same function in both sports, though cocking is the older, and the practice of sponging a tired fighter’s head was common in the cockpit long before the lowly fist fight became a formalized sport.

The word cocktail also stems from the cocking world, although some lexicographers would have us believe it was first applied to a drink invented by a Colonial New England barmaid, who stirred it with a cock’s tail feather. It is much more likely that the word is a corruption of the phrase cock-ale, a noisome brew used by handlers as far back as the reign of Henry VIII to strengthen and stimulate a gamecock when he was being conditioned for battle. This “cock-ale” contained soft gruel, stale beer, port wine, chopped oysters, and other assorted ingredients which were supposed to make the rooster a raging tornado in the pit. Tempted by the alcoholic content of the brew, in spite of its less attractive elements, the conditioners of that day used to sneak a nip for themselves now and then, and by all contemporary accounts, the beverage was no less potent than a ten-to-one vodka Martini is today.

The list of cockers' terms currently in use is large: running out on a fight, flying the coop, cutting a wing, dead game, and many others all stemmed from the same source. And then there is cock of the walk, referring to one who is supremely confident of himself and who dominates all of those around him. This relates to the ancient, and still common, practice of putting game cocks out on country “walks” where there are no other roosters, in order to harden them physically and to stimulate the development of their egos to the point that they will not tolerate the presence of any other male fowl.

The combative instinct is so highly developed in game fowl that cocks, once they have attained maturity, cannot be reared together in flocks like common chickens but must be separated and placed either in individual pens or on farm “walks” where they are allowed to roam free with a small flock of hens, unchallenged by any male competition. Hence, cock of the walk.

He blew up a storm, a phrase common in the West and Middle West to describe a man who has achieved a sudden and spectacular success in business or other activities, also comes from the pit. It describes the cock which fights with a spectacular, wing-flapping style that blows up a small hurricane of dust from the pit floor.

And the expression, keep your pecker up (be of good courage) doesn’t merit an X rating, as one might suppose: it refers to the gamecock’s bill, which, when the bird is tired and near defeat, keeps sinking lower and lower toward the ground.

All ready for the fights now. Aunt Minnie?

---

It’s no trick to fix wicks or mix wax; I’m sick of thick chicks in slick slacks; For kicks, I stack sticks, Pick flax, or pack bricks, Sack tacks, or ax ticks, or track yaks.

[William Alsop, North Granby, Connecticut]

Prurient Prudes

Laurence Urdang, Editor, VERBATIM

It is curious how people who may otherwise give the outward appearance of sanity and common sense are often found to be totally unaware of the difference between cause and effect. This phenomenon can be observed among organizations more frequently than in individuals, perhaps because most individuals have to think for themselves, whereas organizations seem to be dominated by the same individuals functioning as a committee. The result is no different from that seen in mob psychology, where individuals will collectively undertake the most stupid, destructive activities that no single individual would condone, let alone engage in.

History can point to many examples: the Inquisition; the Salem witch-burnings; the political witch-hunts of the 1950s; the police behavior in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention in 1968; the Kent State riots, and so on.

Sophistication and education are not barriers to such actions. Those who deplored the Nazi book-burnings of the 1930s engage in figurative book-burnings of their own:

A… conservative women’s group, the Austin Awareness League, has picked a … target for criticism: the sexual slang they found in the Random House Dictionary proposed for high school use.

The Anchorage, Alaska, School Board has voted to remove 1975 editions of the American Heritage Dictionary from all elementary schools in the municipality on the grounds that it contains definitions of “vulgar, slang words” that are “better left in the gutter.” The board’s action drew strong criticism from the city assembly, which after a unanimous vote sent off a stern letter opposing the ban.

But board members complained that city fathers should stick to fiscal matters and not interfere with the board’s “right to set school policy … and make philosophical decisions.” The board had, incidentally, rejected a school administration recommendation not to ban the dictionaries entirely but merely to more closely supervise their use by youngsters.

[from Library Journal]

It seems ridiculous to have to point out to these “protectors” that the words they object to seeing in the pages of these dictionaries:

(1) were not invented by lexicographers;

(2) were undoubtedly well known to the students;

(3) represent records of the speech and writing of many speakers of English;

(4) were unlikely to be found by the two groups unless they were looking for them (hence, knew where to look);

(5) and wouldn’t be found by students unless either:

(a) they knew the words and knew where to look; or

(b) they just happened to be reading through the dictionary one day and found them.

The last possibility strikes any reasonably intelligent person who knows kids as extremely unlikely. Of the other possibilities, numbers (1), (2), (3), (4), and (5a) are well-known facts. So what has gone wrong? Aren’t we contending with groups of prurient prudes who go around looking up filthy words in dictionaries and then complain when they find them?

Let us examine the only other possibility, notwithstanding how remote it may be: A youngster sees word X scrawled on a wall (probably in the schoolyard!). He doesn’t know what it means and goes to the dictionary. There he finds that X is a word for some part of the body or a bodily function and that it bears the label “Taboo,” “Obscene,” “Vulgar,” or some other, similar label. This alerts him to the fact that X is a word that shouldn’t be used in polite society. He is then faced with the choice of not using it or of using it. If he doesn’t use it, no one will say anything. If he does use it, say to a teacher, he will rapidly learn that he should have paid attention to the label in the dictionary. It is very doubtful that he will be asked where he learned the word, for no teacher could possibly be so naive as to ask such a question: anyone who did so would be drummed out of the corps, for, as everyone knows, such words are learned in the “street,” not from dictionaries.

Dictionaries may be used to fulfill a variety of functions, including doorstop, paperweight, and kindling. The language makes the dictionary, not vice versa. The dictionary provides accurate information about the pronunciations, meanings, etymologies, spellings, and, in most cases, appropriate usage levels of the words listed in it. It is not infallible and can reflect only the best and most accurate judgment of the scholars who prepared it. They don’t create the language, they describe it, with as much detachment as they can summon. Moreover, because of the way dictionaries are arranged, the user must know the word about which he is seeking information before he can find it. As far as is known, no general dictionary offers a special section where the taboo words are listed together, as a sort of a vocabulary-building device for extending the user’s mastery of obscenities.

What the prurient prudes may be objecting to is the notion that if the objectionable words appear in print, that gives them a patina of acceptability or respectability. What arrant nonsense! The daily newspapers and TV are filled with reports of murder, incest, arson, torture, theft, treason, genocide, prostitution, sexual deviation, deceit, treachery, rape—all possible manifestations of crime and moral turpitude—yet students are encouraged to be informed about “current events,” and would find it difficult to avoid learning about them. Surely, a hard-to-find dirty word in a dictionary is the last source of information that is likely to corrupt a student.

It all boils down to one thing: style. According to some moralists, style in language and style in behavior are not unrelated, and they are probably right: being polite has its virtues. But eliminating the word murder from the language will have no effect on those bent on murder, and whether you call an act sexual intercourse, copulation, cohabiting, coitus, sexual union, the reproductive process or by any other name, it’s still the same activity. The real question is, Which term is appropriate to the given social context? and with all the mincing, puritanical Board members around, their children will never be able to learn that from the one most simple, innocuous, impersonal, accurate, authoritative source—the dictionary.

Clerihew

Said Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, When rebuked for omitting an accent aigu, “I leave diacritics To Continentals and Semities.”

J. Bryan, III Richmond, Virginia

Ooglification in American English Slang

Roger W. Wescott, Drew University

The coinage ooglification is my expansion of the American slang term oogly, meaning either ‘extremely attractive’ or ‘extremely unattractive.’ The reason for the paradoxical meaning of this adjective is that it is in reality two adjectives. The first of them, which has an alternative form ogley, is derived from the verb ogle and means ‘worth ogling’ or ‘deserving of being stared at.’ The second is a deformation of the adjective ugly. In each case, the stressed vowel or vowel sequence of the standard form has been converted to oo, as in boohoo. This process is one which structural linguists call replacive infixation: it is familiarly illustrated by the substitution of e for a in the plural of the noun man or by the substitution of i for o in the past tense of the verb do.

As it happens, almost any English vowel or vowel sequence may be converted into oo as one way of “slangifying” the word in which it occurs. Examples follow:

vowels(s)		common form	slang variant
short	a	skedaddle	skidoodle
	e	cigarette	cigaroot(1)
	i	diddle	doodle
	o	goggle(s)	google(s)
	u	guzzle	goozle
long	a	Scandinavian	Scandinoovian(2)
	e	sleaze(3)	slooze
	i	divine	divoon
	o	oaf	oof(us)
short	oo	push	“poosh”
	ow or ou	anyhow	anyhoo

(1): Cigaroot may also be explained as a blend of cigarette with cheroot.

(2): Scandinoovian may also have the form Scandihoovian. (Compare hoodoo for voodoo.)

(3): Sleaze is itself campus slang for “loose woman.” The form slooze may be influenced by flooz(e) y, “prostitute.”

Not all vowels are equally susceptible to ooglification. Those that seem most susceptible are: short o (as in noodle for noddle), short u (as in poof for puff), long o (as in gool for goal), and ou = ow (as in snoot for snout).

Sometimes even “blurred” vowels in unaccented syllables are subject to ooglification. An example is bazooms ¹ for bosom(s). Here the stress has shifted from the first to the second syllable. A plausible explanation may be that, when -oo occurs as a slang suffix rather than an infix (as in superoo for super or smasheroo for smash(er)), the primary stress of the word shifts from the first syllable to the last.

The burlesquing effect of replacive -oo- may help explain some otherwise puzzling pronunciations. A number of foreign languages contain proper names spelled with -u- and pronounced with short -oo-, such as Buddha or Guggenheim. Because of the doubled consonants following the stressed vowels in these names, one would expect them to be pronounced with short vowels in English, as in pudding or snuggle. Instead, however, they are nearly always pronounced with the long -oo- of boo or goo. It may be that such unexpected pronunciations represent a less than subtle derision of alien families and titles.

In any case, American slang seems to me not just oogly but ooglific. If any Verbatim readers share my feeling and wish to share ooglified forms with me and with other readers, I hope they will pass them along.

EPISTOLA {W. K. Viertel}

Another item for your collection of malapropisms:

It was reported on our local radio station that someone was arrested for driving while intoxicated and for “driving in an erotic manner.”

Not in the same category, but interesting:

The unit of female beauty is the milli-helen, which is defined as the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. [W. K. Viertel, Canton, New York].

Permission, Admission, Remission and the Missionaries

Laurence Urdang, Editor, VERBATIM

Aristides, editorial writer for the venerable, respectable, learned, occasionally stuffy, always erudite AMERICAN SCHOLAR, joins the funeral procession (chief mourners: Ted Bernstein, Edwin Newman) for the English language: the Winter 1976/77 issue contains a rehash of the same old drivel. Safely ensconced in the cowardly concealment of his pseudonymity, Aristides contributes his comments on the language in much the same way that a Mad Bomber makes anonymous phone calls and the classic kidnapers leave messages composed of pasted-up letters cut from magazines and newspapers.

His polemic against the current decline in expressiveness in the language is prompted, in this specific instance, by 6,000 Words, published by G. & C. Merriam Company as a supplement to Webster’s Third, but from the tone of his article, it would appear that the subject has been rankling in his intestines for many moons. Since, for such ax-grinders for the “purity” of English, the past holds more than the present or future, his point of departure is the respectable Mencken. But one is given to wonder whether Aristides would have been quite as enthusiastic had he reached his present state of old-fashioned respectability contemporaneously with the publication of Mencken’s works on language, in the early 1930s.

Reflecting incredible naivete for one who writes, albeit pseudonymously, with such learndness, Aristides moans:

I should prefer a more prescriptive dictionary, one that notes, where called for, that an entry is a “cant” word, to use the term Dr. Johnson used in his Dictionary. I prefer this not out grundyism, but because I doubt if a language can long survive in health under a policy of (to use another new entry from 6,000 Words) “open admissions.” 6,000 Words, then, is nearly useless as a guide but excellent as a record. Like the period it indirectly chronicles, it is itself a curate’s egg.

Aristides' writing, too, is a curate’s egg. To pick a few nits: (1), grundyism, in the sense used, should have been capitalized; (2), a dictionary, being in alphabetical order, can hardly be said to chronicle anything, directly or indirectly; and (3), a dictionary is, by definition—since Aristides is so fanatic about precision—a record: its use as a guide to levels of usage is a secondary function, imputed to it largely by its users and abusers.

Dictionaries today tend to be somewhat encyclopedic, if not by virtue of entries that, for some unknown reason, many scholars consider nonlexical (e.g., proper names), then because they contain information about the lexicon that is felt to be encyclopedic (e.g., usage notes, synonym and antonym lists, synonym discriminations, illustrations, etc.). Johnson’s Dictionary contained no illustrations. Shouldn’t modern dictionaries be criticized for having them?

Aristides continues by speculating on the opinion of our culture that a future historian would have if he were to depend on 6,000 Words as his sole evidence. To begin with, the straw man being set up, like most straw men, is utterly without substance. Why not acknowledge that 6,000 Words is merely a supplement and include the main work, Webster’s Third, as well? The main work “suffers” from the same descriptivism as its supplement. If only modern historians had available to them a “Webster’s Third” and a “6,000 Words” for Etruria and for ancient Egypt, Babylonia, India, China, Arabia, the Americas, Anatolia, Europe, and Palestine! What incredible wealth would be found in those pages!

Even with the relative paucity of documents available to modern historians of ancient cultures, linguists have little difficulty in sifting, given a sufficient quantity of evidence, the level of usage, the slang, the colloquial, the taboo, the scatalogical. The wealth of information that could be gleaned about those cultures by the discovery of a large dictionary, intact, would be immeasurable. It would be impossible to have concocted more timely evidence than that presented in The New York Times on December 30, 1976:

Then a colleague, Dr. Giovanni Pettinato, who is a language expert, found what amounted to a dictionary of the new language, called Eblait[e], that defined each word in Sumerian, a language that is known to archeologists. When this key was used, the tablets revealed that the palace was not just a minor seat of government but the center of a huge empire….

[“Ruins Show Urban Life Rivaling Egypt’s”]

Webster’s Third and 6,000 Words are by no means perfect examples of the art of lexicography, for they contain inanities and infelicities that resulted, apparently, from their editors' slavish attention to a philosophy of defining that could have improved from re-evaluation as the work progressed. But that is a subject for another article. The only subject germane to this argument is that pertaining to the basic principle of descriptivism, which modern lexicographers have accepted as a tenet. The skill with which they execute their art is irrelevant to this discussion.

Aristides writes, in his closing remarks:

In writing about language, in considering the state of the lingo, there is always a tendency to assume a prelapsarian time—a linguistic Eden where language was once clear and crisp and fitted exactly its function. Bad language has, of course, always been with us: language meant to obscure, to deceive, to defraud.

These statements belie the lamentable lamentations that precede them. Worse than that, the second comment has little, if anything, to do either with the first or with the rest of the article, for, if the truth be acknowledged, “language meant to obscure, to deceive, to defraud” is very rarely “bad” language, even in the ambiguously implied senses of bad employed in the general tone of the article: on the contrary, “language meant to obscure…” is most often the language of Nixons, Hitlers, and others who couch their nefarious thoughts in the very sort of eloquence Aristides probably admires. Moreover, the first sentence of the above quotation belongs in this article, not Aristides'.

What can be concluded from his farrago of fuzzy logophobia? The learned Aristides, like many lesser critics, falls into the trap of trying to exorcise the language—admittedly a fashionable position these days—and the lexicographers who honestly record its fortes and foibles in their methodical, scholarly way. Instead, his target ought to be, more properly, the speakers of the language and their practice of the art of its use. Lexicographers, for the millionth time, don’t make the language, they report on it. The shortcomings of their attitudes and abilities are one thing; the language is another. Aristides' attitude is reminiscent of that of the (erstwhile) dictionary editor, long since attracted to a career outside lexicography, who rejected basket case as an entry for The Random House (Unabridged) Dictionary on the grounds that he found the metaphor “disgusting.”

It is style, Aristides, that you rail at, not the words of the language themselves. Infelicitous, ungrammatical, solecistic, unsemantic, unskillful, and just plain bad style in the use of language is what drives all of us to distraction. It isn’t the words but how they are chosen and put together that constitute deathless prose (or poetry). Some of us are better at choosing and putting together than others.

It is entirely likely, too, that those who are responsible for the coinages so severely criticized by Aristides have a different view of the world from that which traditionalists have set forth—though their view, in turn, probably differs substantially from that of their forebears. An example may be seen in the use of the word like—not the like of Do like I do but the like that occurs in utterances like (like) man, I was (like)) walking down the street and suddenly (like) there was this cat I hadn’t seen for (like) two whole years. In such contexts, it is possible that like serves two functions, one, a simple syntactic one to replace er or um, the other a semantic one to express the speaker’s hesitancy at expressing what might be construed as an incontrovertible fact without the “disclaimer.” Such insecurity, if, indeed, that is what it is, may stem from a felt lack of education, or, because it is so characteristic of a certain level of speech, from a desire to be with an in-group, or merely from habit. Other examples of a more lexical and less complex nature may be attributable to a different metaphoric view of life that, just because it is unconventional and unfamiliar, becomes subject to the darts of fuddy-duddyism.

Language, like time and the river, changes continuously, and we can never use it in exactly the same way twice. As such, it can be only approximation as a “medium of expression,' for not only does it change, but we and our emotions and everything we use language to describe change. The wonder of it is that we can understand each other at all. Plus ça change, plus c’est autre chose.

Of one thing we can be sure: just as today’s older generation of English speakers condemns the speech of its youth, today’s youth, when they become tomorrow’s older generation, will condemn their offspring’s speech. And, for another prediction, we shall always have those among us who, like Aristides, have their gaze fixed firmly on the past.

Who is Aristides? Why did he select such a nom de plume? Does he aspire to identification with Aristides the Just (d. 468 B.C.)? Hardly, for that Aristides was a statesman. With Aristides of Bithynia (b. 129? A.D.)? Unlikely, for that Aristides, a sophist, was known to be exceedingly vain about his eloquence, comparing himself to Demosthenes. With Aristides of Athens (fl. 150 A.D.)? Not likely, for that Aristides, author of an apology for the Christians, bequeathed us nothing of value. With Aristides of Miletus (fl. 150 B.C.)? Less than likely, for that Aristides wrote fiction, and ours would have us treat his writings as fact. With Aristides of Thebes (fl.350 B.C.)? Probably not, for that Aristides was a painter. With Aristides Quintilianus (fl. 150 A.D.)? Scarcely, for that Aristides is the author of a valuable treatise, “On Music,” and ours appears deaf to the music of the spheres.

The Citation File

In an article in The Sunday Times [London], October 10, 1976, appeared an article, “Dowagers and the black Governor,” by Jillian Robertson. It dealt with the appointment of the first black (native Australian), Sir Doug Nicholls, to a high governmental position, as Governor of the State of South Australia. What interested us were the Australianisms it contained, given here with their glosses:

abo an informal term for aborigine.

aborigine a native of Australia before the arrival of white settlers.

Cumeroogunga district where the Yoti Yoti tribe lives.

fair dinkum the real thing.

goanna any of several large monitor lizards.

indiginee new name given to aborigines, presumably to help avoid the stigmas associated with the older term.

poor fella condescending term for an aborigine.

real beaut very satisfactory; most acceptable.

wichetty grubs larvae resembling long, fat, white caterpillars without legs, regarded as a delicacy by the aborigines.

Yoti Yoti a tribe of aborigines.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk: How We Defeat Ourselves by the Way We Talk—and What To Do About It

Neil Postman, (Delacorte Press, 1976), xviii + 269 pp.

It is uncertain whether anything is to be gained in devoting space to a review of this book, but a couple of manhours have been spent reading it and thinking about it, so it might merit a few man-minutes to writing the review and some more to reading it.

It may be assumed that the title is intended to shock, and it does. The shock wears off with each repetition of each phrase in the text, and the reader is left with the feeling that this is a work that the author, who has made many serious and worthwhile contributions to the study of language, dictated into a portable tape recorder while running from one classroom to another. The style is breathless, headlong. If it were possible to determine such a condition from a written document, one might venture to assume that the author had written it while under the influence of a heavy dose of “speed.”

The main theme seems to be the importance of recognizing and maintaining “semantic environment.” This is nothing more than “appropriateness”: in other words, when you are at the embassy, murmuring “Good evening, Mr. Ambassador” when you move down the receiving line, you don’t follow the greeting, in the same tone of voice and with a smile on your face, with “Your fly is open” or “My grandfather was hanged for horsestealing.” Either (or both) may be true, but both are inappropriate to the occasion. With myriad examples interspersed with mediocre jokes and occasional inanities, it takes the very articulate author xviii + 91 pp. to get the point across.

Postman sees nothing wrong with mixed metaphors or with clichés; he is seeking a higher good: proper semantic environment. Inappropriate metaphors, however, are another matter:“… a metaphor whose configuration nowhere coincides with the realities of any actual situation in which he finds himself. The technical name for such a process is paranoia.” Is that the linguist’s view of the true nature of paranoia? a misapplication of a rhetorical device? Such a warped simplification may come as a surprise to linguists and psychiatrists alike.

The author seems to suffer from a modern ailment common among those who have discovered that a glib approach will gain listeners and readers: as long as you set forth your ideas with authority, it matters little what you say, for people will believe you, and you will acquire disciples and acolytes.

For this reason, though not this reason alone, Crazy Talk is a dangerous book. As the reader progresses (if “progress” is not misapplied here—the feeling is more like that of a nightmarish plunge over a cliff), he is ineluctably drawn to the conclusion that the crazy, stupid talk of the title isn’t what the author is writing about but what he is writing. Examples of silliness abound: “ ‘I love you’ is a very important sentence and is probably spoken a thousand times everyday in California alone” (p. 155); “…what about the Miss in Miss Jones (what exactly is Jones missing?)” (p. 65); “If fanaticism is falling in love with an irrefutable answer, then a neurosis is falling in love with an unanswerable question” (p. 145). “And so we have here a sort of paradox. On the one hand, we must naturally assume that others are using words to mean what we would, and that such meanings have some stability. But on the other hand, we must remember that this is only an assumption, that at any given moment a coin of the realm may not be worth quite what we imagined. And, naturally, our purposes will be short-changed.”

This is linguistic philosophy couched in the language of the stand-up comedian. The writing style is a good example of the kind of inappropriateness scored by the author.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: On Being Blue

William Gass, (David R. Godline, 1976), 91 pp.

I often wonder why publishers and editors, with only rare exceptions, are usually ignored. The rare exceptions are Alfred Knopf, Bennett Cerf, and Maxwell Perkins. It is as often the publishers and editors who are responsible for good books being made available as it is the authors who wrote them. It takes some talent and not much money to design and manufacture a book artistically, one that provides as much aesthetic pleasure visually and tactilely as it does in its reading.

On Being Blue is such a rare combination, though, at $8.95 for a 91 -page book, one must be prepared to back up his sybaritism with cold, hard cash. Without further ado, let me give the publisher his proper kudos for a book featly done.

On Being Blue, subtitled A Philosophical Inquiry, could, without distortion, have been subtitled “A Philological Inquiry” (in the etymological sense of philological); it is a sensitive aesthetic experience that, had it been typeset with ragged right lines, would have been construed as free verse. It is a paean, an encomium to the color blue in its infinite shadings, spectral and moral, emollient and painful, serious and facetious. As the reader of this review must surmise, On Being Blue has an inspiring, almost hypnotic effect.

The blue lucy is a healing plant. Blue John is skim milk. Blue backs are Confederate bills. Blue bellies are Yankee boys….

Children collect nouns, bugs, bottlecaps, seashells, verbs: What’s that? What’s it doing now? Who’s this? and with the greed that rushes through them like rain down gulleys, they immediately grasp the prepositions of belonging and the pronouns of possession. But how often do they ask how cold it is, what color, how loud, rare, warm, responsive, kind, how soft, how wet, how noxious, loving, indiscreet, how sour?

The book abounds in four-letter words (besides blue). It is a sensuous, erotic book that seems to say “Color me blue.” It ranges from Democritus to Demosthenes to Henri Bergson to Henry Miller to Henry James.

…while there is time and you are able, because when blue has left the edges of its objects as if the world were bleached of it, when the wide blue eye has shut down for the season, when there’s nothing left but language….

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Civil Tongue

Edwin Newman, (Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), 207 pp.

Mr. Newman’s new book is presented by the publisher as “high comedy in a serious cause.” The cause—an effort to warn against “a smog of jargon” that is settling on our land—is indeed a serious one, as those of us who care about such things will without doubt agree. Comedy, on the other hand, is more subjective. Often there are some who will laugh at the joke itself, while others may find the manner of its delivery amusing.

Wisely, Mr. Newman undertakes to formulate at the very beginning a summary of the point he is bent on making. “A civil tongue,” he writes, “means to me a language that is not bogged down in jargon, not puffed up with false dignity, not studded with trick phrases that have lost their meaning. It is not falsely exciting, it is not patronizing, does not conceal the smallness and triteness of ideas by clothing them in language ever more grandiose, does not seek out increasingly complicated constructions, does not weigh us down with the gelatinous verbiage of Washington and the social sciences. It treats errors in spelling and usage with a decent tolerance but does not take them lightly.”

There you have it in a nutshell. To speak with a civil tongue means to say what you mean, openly, clearly and with due regard for the beauty and the integrity of the language.

Why are so few of us able to do that?

The author, who ruefully refers to criticisms of numerous departures from perfection in the use of the language in his earlier work, Strictly Speaking, has clearly been more careful this time around. One wishes, however, that he had not followed the above definition of purpose with a comment about “a stream of sound that disk jockeys produce,” not because it might be difficult for all disk jockeys to produce a single stream of sound but rather because the statement will lead inevitably to Congressional bloks, ad hok meetings and music that is out of synk. These things are highly contagious, as Mr. Newman is the first to point out.

A Civil Tongue, rather than adding new types of smog to the basic pollutants studied in Strictly Speaking, expands the list of ingredients in the old one. We are now regaled with the overuse of the word “major” in the New York Times (major tests, major enemy categories, major social implications, major states, major rail lines ad infinitum) as well as 650 major items in a single energy message from Gerald Ford. And we find it difficult not to laugh at compositionwise, environmentalwise, economywise, energywise, inferiorize, rigidize, overstrategize and parameterize, among other epidemics.

What appears to be involved here is a major job of collectionizing for the purpose of shocking us publication-wise into remedial action. And it must be admitted that the net result, funny or not, does, at the very least, make us aware that English is rapidly becoming an endangered species.

In terms of cause and comedy, there is reason to feel that Mr. Newman on occasion sacrifices the former for the latter. It is one thing to attack the media, the bureaucracy, the professions, etc., for their mindless proliferation of dumbspeak. The guilty ones in these realms do, or at least should, know better if only for the reason that their callings demand it. But when he devotes a whole chapter to the grammatical errors, malapropisms and vocabulary deficiencies of sports figures, we must believe he is holding them up to ridicule for our amusement. This can border on the cruel, so we shall limit ourselves here to a single example for illustrative purpose: “…said the (fight) manager: ‘It’s problemental.’ ” Criticism in the chapter on Howard Cosell and the like is another matter.

And speaking of the media, Mr. Newman declares at one point: “My vendetta against the term media arises not only for the reasons already given but because it implies a go-between, one who takes orders and carries messages, one who is employed by others for their purposes.” This declaration almost qualifies the utterer for inclusion in the sports chapter, not only, to use Mr. Newman’s phrase, “because the word media is plural and could hardly imply a go-between,” but because when one is employed by others it would hardly be for other than their own purposes.

Because A Civil Tongue will be read by many who without it might be unaware of the peril to which the English language is being exposed, the book provides a valuable addition to the current lists. And it cannot be denied that it is easy to read and to enjoy.

[Martin Panzer, New York, New York]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Mammoth Book of Word Games

Richard B. Manchester, (Hart Publishing Company, 1976).

Walter Raleigh, not the one who spread his cloak in the mud for Queen Elizabeth to step on, but the one who didn’t, once remarked:

I wish I loved the Human Race;

I wish I loved its silly face;

I wish I liked the way it walks;

I wish I liked the way it talks;

And when I’m introduced to one

I wish I thought What Jolly Fun.

I feel the same way about most word games. The real reason, of course, is that I am no good at them; I can’t show off by doing a London Times crossword puzzle in four minutes flat. But just in case you are one who does like word games, you should have Richard B. Manchester’s The Mammoth Book of Word Games in your library, or at least in that of your children. The whole family will find it Jolly Fun (there are answers in back, too). Mr. Manchester has accumulated enough challenges to keep you sharpening your pencil for hours; the front cover does not exaggerate when it notifies you that the 510 lubberly pages (8½" × 11") provide “OVER A FULL YEAR’S ENTERTAINMENT.”

The first entry is perhaps a bit simpler than most, but it gives you the idea. You are asked to find equivalents containing the word “light” for a list of twenty-five expressions. “A tower having warning beacon for ships at sea,” for instance, is a … Ah! You are already catching on. At another point, you are asked to reduce big words to little maxims: “Aberration is the hallmark of homo sapiens while longanimous placability and condonation are the indicia of a supramundane omniscience” turns into … but there! I won’t give Mr. Manchester away. There are Word Mazes, consisting of vocabulary puzzles that I am reluctant to penetrate for fear of running into a Minotaur somewhere inside. There are Threezies, where you list all the words you can think of containing certain three-letter sequences. (Mr. Manchester says that at least nine words contain the sequence OTO. I could not get beyond motor.) There are enough cryptograms to fill a crypt. (I plan to create an insoluble cryptogram some day by substituting two other letters for what I contend to be the shortest verse in English-well, half in English. The wife of the British Ambassador is hostess to the wife of the Spanish Ambassador, and their conversation runs as follows:

“T?”

“C.”

It should make a great cryptogram, but I haven’t got around to it yet, and neither, I gather, has Mr. Manchester.

Cryptograms lead on to Jumbles-emigrants, one assumes, from the lands where the Jumblies live; these are anagrams on various themes. There follow Quizzes, which test background knowledge (I didn’t dare try them); Picture Quizzes, where you are wrong if you put porcupine under the picture of an anteater; Crossword Puzzles, clearly not edited by Will Weng; Across-tics (the pun is self-explanatory); Blankies, which seem to be Jumbles sitting around the fire telling stories; and Initialettes, which in an earlier day were called Categories or Guggenheims. There is more besides.

Word games are an excellent introduction to the delights of English. If you have offspring still on the morning side of pubescence, I hope they will have an opportunity to savor this book before intenser drives supervene. Indeed, whatever your own level of verbal sophistication, you cannot lose by thumbing through these word games; for,

You may be introduced to one

That makes you think What Jolly Fun.

[Willard R. Espy, Author, An Almanac of Words at Play]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Dictionary of American Idioms

Maxine Tull Boatner and John Edward Gates, revised edition ed. by Adam Makkai, (Barron’s Educational Series), xiii + 392 pp.

This book was first published in 1966 under the title A Dictionary of Idioms for the Deaf. The present edition has been provided with a preface by Professor Makkai, who has also “added more than 250 modern idiomatic phrases to the collection.” It is difficult to guess exactly what the publishers had in mind when they chose for the cover a crude cartoon drawing of a bald eagle dressed in checked cap and trousers. The allusion is, one supposes, to the American-ness of the idioms, although most of the phrases in the book are probably not exclusively American, either in use or by origin. The cover does serve to tell the reader something about the book, however. Balloons issuing from the eagle’s beak claim that this dictionary contains over 4000 common idiomatic expressions, including slang, proverbs, and clichés, and that everything is completely up-to-date, excellent for foreign speakers, and valuable to students of American English. The last two claims are ambitious. If one has set out to produce a dictionary for foreign learners and serious students of the language, one has assumed responsibilities that are not lightly discharged, especially if the subject is such an uneasy and ill-defined one as idioms. A really useful dictionary for foreign learners of English would certainly require a much more scrupulous and systematic editorial effort than has gone into this rather casual compilation.

Professor Makkai’s preface makes some basic points about idioms. “An idiom … is the assigning of a new meaning to a group of words which already have their own meaning.” Some examples are to blow one’s stack, to fly off the handle, what’s more, of course, to get up, like a breeze, time off, this is it. He distinguishes two types of idiom. The lexemic idiom, like hammer and tongs (‘violently’) can easily be identified with one of the familiar parts of speech (hammer and tongs= adverb). Longer idioms, like to be caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, “do not readily correlate with a given grammatical part of speech”; these he terms phraseological idioms. The main characteristic of both types (and, obviously, of proverbs and sayings, which constitute a third type) is their grammatical rigidity. “Their form is set and only a limited number of them can be said or written in any other way without destroying the meaning of the idiom.” That is, idioms do not permit certain simple operations— the pluralization of nouns, the inflection of verbs, the insertion of an adverb before a verb, etc.—which can be carried out on ordinary literal phrases.

Thus, transitive verbs in idiomatic expressions frequently will not passivize (the cowboy kicked the bucket, but not *the bucket was kicked by the cowboy). In this case, as with many phraseological idioms, the passive transformation destroys the idiom by literlizing it (the bucket was struck by the cowboy’s boot). One wishes the Professor Makkai had had more space in the preface to devote to this feature of grammatical defectiveness and the invariance and variability of idioms, because these matters are not adequately covered in the individual dictionary entries.

The body of the dictionary is well laid out, with useful run-on entries (e.g., fence-sitter under sit on the fence), “compare” and “contrast” references that draw attention to related expressions (get lost, compare drop dead; give up, contrast hold on to), register labels for slang, informal, formal, and literary, and usage notes that give information about the context in which the idiom is used (as a command, to show surprise, to express disapproval, etc.). In the usage-note category-certainly the most helpful feature for foreign students of English—the editors have seen fit to label some phrases “clichés,” some “trite phrases,” and some “hackneyed phrases.” One wonders why get down to brass tacks, one foot in the grave, smell a rat, slip through one’s fingers, and shot in the arm are clichés, while sleep a wink is trite and pay the piper hackneyed. One wonders also whether any of the three labels, even if they had been clearly differentiated, do much more than express a subjective judgement. As someone has said, “A cliché is an idiom which I do not like.” How much more useful is the kind of usage note one finds at on end-“Used with plural nouns of time.” It is typical of the casual editorial approach that this note is a half-truth—one cannot say “I’ve been waiting for you for seconds on end.” Still, it is this attempt to supply information about context and use that is essential when one is defining idioms. A major shortcoming of this dictionary is its failure to do so consistently and in sufficient detail.

An alarming amount of space in the dictionary has been given to paraphrases of the illustrative sentences. The sentences themselves are appropriately colloquial and simple embodiments of the preceding definitions. The paraphrases are at best needlessly repetitive and too often approach absurdity. For example, at the entry on one’s chest, with this peculiar second-person definition—

Hidden in your thoughts or feelings and bothering you; making you feel worried or upset; that is something you want to talk to someone about…

the illustrative sentence and paraphrase read:

“Well, Dave,” said the coach, “You look sad-what’s on your chest?”

(The coach asked Dave what was making him disturbed. Did he want to talk it over?)

The paraphrase is pointless, but the illustration is worse since its probable effect is to conjure up an image of the athletic Dave’s hairy chest. (This is, of course, an elementary lexicographical blunder-to put a metaphorical phrase in a literalizing context. It is a pastime of lexicographers to invent such monsters, e.g. When she went on vacation she packed absolutely everything. She even took a megaphone, for crying out loud!)

The illustrative sentences and paraphrases develop a different sort of nonsense when they occur, as they unfailingly do, after definitions of straightforward terms or names for tangible material things. For example:

credit card…Mr. Smith used his credit card to buy gasoline.

(Mr. Smith bought gasoline and showed the man a card with his name.)

panel truck…The flowers were delivered in a panel truck.

(The flowers were brought in a closed truck.)

parish house…The ladies served a spaghetti supper in the parish house.

(The ladies had a spaghetti supper in the church social building.)

One doubts that these entries-and there are an enormous number of the same type-really qualify as idioms according to Professor Makkai’s definition (they are simply names for particular kinds of cards, trucks, and houses); perhaps that is why these illustrations and paraphrases seem almost comically futile.

These few objections to details are related to much more serious questions about the character and purpose of this book. One is not told how this collection of idioms was assembled. Were the entries selected on the basis of a citation-reading program? What sources were used? Were the idioms selected according to some judgement of frequency? Were the invented illustrative sentences based on citations? The book was originally compiled for the deaf (and for that original purpose perhaps the illustrative sentences and paraphrases had a real pedagogical value); why was it not rethought and restructured for a more general readership-or at least for a specific readership-before it was published in its present form? One doesn’t have the answers to these questions, but it is hard to avoid the suspicion that they would help to explain why there is so little evidence of editorial responsibility in this dictionary.

[Thomas Hill Long, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire]

The Seating of Zotz

Walter C. Kidney, Essex, Connecticut.

Read widely and you end up with a magnificent but not totally useful vocabulary. For my part, I find no application for such words as:

gumphion: death’s-head banner displayed at funerals;

ergastulum: house of correction for Roman slaves;

dob-dob: member of the hoodlum element in a lamasery;

verbunkos: dance performed to persuade people to enlist in the Hungarian army.

What a waste. And I regret any chance to drop into my conversation the months of the Maya year, just for their Dunsanian sound. The Maya had 18 twenty-day months, plus five or six official days of bad luck. The year began with Pop, which fell between the Nameless Days and Uo. Uo fell between Pop and Zip, and so on. Even more Dunsanian, suggesting a play for grades 6 to 8, was The Seating of Zotz, the correct name for what otherwise would have been 20 Zip.

Some 15 years ago I worked on a job ideal for collecting such glittering trash, the Random House Dictionary project. Much of my time was spent in technology, and my working day was a shower bath of bruzzes, brobs, froofs, snaths, downrights, chime hoops, larry cars, equation kidneys, cullin stones, crizzle glazes, glost fires, muffle furnaces, blue billy, sugar of lead, butter of arsenic, and Victoria Green Mother Liquor. The sea yielded futtock shrouds, euphroes, baggywrinkles, and paravane skegs. Lists of standard paint colors included Cream Dream, Pewke, and U.S. Army Pansy. My Japanese sword mounts won satirical attention from John Ciardi. Heraldry was mine too, a whole private language. I learned not to use or ‘gold’ in definition examples because my colleagues would always fire them back with penciled “Or what?” ’s. But I did enter the various ways of describing a disk. Depending on the tincture, a disk is a bezant, plate, torteau, hurt, gulp, guze, ogress, pellet, gunstone, or fountain. Crosses can be-among other things-crosslet, potent, avellan, moline, paty, formy, fitchy or paty or formy fitchy at the foot. An escutcheon semé of cross-crosslets is crusily, and if the cross-crosslets are fitchy it is crusily fitchy. An escutheon is sometimes divided by dancetty, urdy, undy, embattled, or embattled grady lines, and can be barry, bendy, paly, barry-bendy, paly-bendy, paly-wavy, lozengy, chequy, etc. The sun is in its splendor, the moon is in her complement or detriment, the pelican is in her piety, the lion is gardant passant and ducally gorged, and royalty is represented by opinci, yales, and enfields, one of which has swivel-mounted horns. How the Scottish dragon with flames issuing from both ends is blazoned I never did discover.

Meanwhile a friend in biology was encountering the sarcastic fringehead, the confused flour beetle, and the free-living flatworm.

Some of these things did get into the dictionary, but in most cases there was nothing to do but pause, admire, and dismiss them gently.

Traveler’s Credo

Mary E. Gross, St. Petersburg, Florida.

I believe in Bolivia
and in Lago Titicaca
in Oraru
in Potusi
and also in Chuquisaca.

Tombouctu I can take on trust
Saskatchewan I rely on
prize Ararat
laud Zanzibar
sing praise to ancient Isfahan.

Now you, my bold Bolivian
may name your fancy loud and clear
Sopchoppy town
fair Chincoteague
Oshkosh Dime Box or Rensselaer.

Dash It All

Ethel Grodzins Romm, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

For centuries we’ve labored over hyphenation by historic principles, as in any traditional dic.tion.ar.y. We’re now coping with the new hyphenation by breathing principles, as in a dic.tio.na.ry improved by modern linguists. Their work, however, flowers in bound volumes only. On the pages of the smaller dailies across the land we are enjoying hyphenation by computer according to Hatai! principles. A recent morning offered dau-ghter in our local daily.

My hometown newspaper in Middletown, N.Y., was the first daily in the world to be printed cold-type on offset presses. That printing innovation of 1956, since adopted by more than half of America’s papers, has led to the widespread use of computers for scanning typewritten copy and setting type. Computer typesetting is never monitored by live editors. Without them, hyphenation may return to the pre-linotyping, anything-goes, days of yore.

When the computer was an infant, it could do only simple things, such as separate the -ly in adverbs: mad-ly, glad-ly. Naturally it also wrote butterf-ly, but that was understandable and altogether forgivable; why burden it with an instruction required only rarely: “Divide at ly except -fly”?

Having passed kindergarten, the computer secretly promoted itself to junior high. The first clue was the morning it wrote dau-ghter, although it had been taught to divide -er, like -ly. The new choice was the subject of much breakfast discussion. We reasoned that daughter is a long word to shoeborn into the end of a narrow newspaper column, that at -er the word still wouldn’t fit, and the computer must have used-in doing its best to fill the line-what appeared to be an arcane magnetic principle not immediately apparent. We felt we might be watching the birth of inanimate intelligence.

I must report that the Times Herald Record computer has grown smarter. It has dispensed with most historic as well as inhalation principles and does largely what it knows best: it counts; then very matter of factly it chops off the word, Hatai! Here are three examples:

[Ann Landers] Dear Glad: So am I. I hope somebody out there listens.

Witnesses said the violence was sparked off when a group of blacks tried to set fire to a Zulu boardingouse and the tribesmen retaliated.

Nixon’s intended gifts of his San Clemente home could give him a big tax deduction for six years. Sort of a “squeezing citizens” home.

The computer counts so well that very few words are now hyphenated in the paper, a great saving of space. And the new syllabication has enlivened the news, sometimes turning it into far-out poetry.

But for certain readers, it’s not good news. Pulling apart words into their syllables may be the most efficient way for poor readers to figure out printed matter. There are hordes of marginal readers today who, for many other reasons, have already given up reading newspapers. Dashing the language any which way is, for them, no joke.

---

In a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal [Nov, 9, 1976] about “Winners & Sinners,” the N.Y. Times house organ dealing with grammatical and stylistic goodies and baddies in The Times, the information appears that The Philadelphia Bulletin has a similar bulletin. To quote the WSJ: “ ‘The big problem is finding the time to sustain it,’ says Sam Boyle, the Bulletin’s assistant managing editor responsible for Second Guessing [the title of the house organ]. ‘It may not look like it’s hard to put out, but believe me, it is.’ ”

We’ll take you at your word, Sam.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Discursive Dictionary of Health Care

U.S. Government Printing Office, (Washington, 1976), 182 pp.

This is a truly staggering book, which-as the title page proudly announces—was “Prepared by the Staff/for the use of the/Subcommittee on Health and the Environment/of the/Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce/U.S. House of Representatives.” Truly. And the chairman of the CIFC is Harley O. Staggers of West Virginia.

The dictionary is a serious work designed to help untangle the jargon and technical terms associated with the national health program and national health insurance, currently still under debate. It is an immediate joy to see that the compilers have a sense of humor in what otherwise would be a dry work indeed. One first notices this in the Contents list, for page 169, “Abbreviations and acronyms (alphabet soup expanded).” In an otherwise straightforward Introduction, we are disarmed momentarily by being told that,

The definitions which have been prepared are not in any sense official or final. They are not necessarily the definitions which the Committee will give to these terms when they are used in the actual writing of national health insurance law. Nor is any part of the dictionary completely exhaustive: available time and energy have necessarily limited the effort.

For this information we have to thank Paul G. Rogers, the chairman of the Subcommitee on Health and the Environment.

In spite of the fact that presumably none of the members of the “professional staff” chosen to prepare this dictionary have had prior experience in lexicography, they have done an admirable job in their attempts to give expansive information on the fleeting meanings of terms used by the medical, legal and insurance professions—as they relate to the congressional debates on national health insurance. Approximately one thousand headwords and over one hundred abbreviations and acronyms are defined. (There is some amusing padding, such as the entry dictionary—an attributed quote from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary: “a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of language. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.”) The text is enhanced by numerous anatomical illustrations taken from woodcuts originally prepared for two 16th-century books by Andreas Vesalius (De Humani Corporis Fabrica and an Epitome, both published in 1543).

For the most part, the definitions tend to reflect the jargon and ostensible confusion of the primary sources of the headwords themselves. (H.W. Fowler and Sir Ernest Gowers, where are you now that they really need you!) For example, the definition of prior determination is “similar to prior authorization but less restrictive in that payment will be made if prior authorization is not sought, provided that it would have approved the service as needed.” Within the same letter, we discovered that ping-ponging is “the practice of passing a patient from one physician to another in a health program for unnecessary cursory examinations so that the program can charge the patient’s third-party for a physician visit to each physician. The practice and term originated and is most common in Medicaid mills.” Some entries are invaluable cross-references: “poor See poverty.”

Some “naughties” are revealed, as we learn from the entry kiting: “increasing the quantity of a drug ordered by a prescription. Either the patient or pharmacist may kite the quantity of the original prescription, for example, by adding zeros to the number shown on a prescription. When done by a pharmacist, he then provides the patient with the quantity originally prescribed but bills a third party, such as Medicaid, for the larger quantity.”

Just one more. The entry elephant policy refers us quickly to trolley car policy: “a facetious name for an insurance policy which is so hard to collect benefits upon that it is as though it provided benefits only for injuries resulting from being hit by a trolley car. Typically used by mail order insurance.”

If this dictionary had not already been written it would be virtually impossible to invent it. Nevertheless, sorting out jargon is a respectable occupation. In all fairness, quite a few entries are lucid and valuable to a better understanding of inevitable bureaucratic opacities. But one cannot escape the lingering impression that this is a classical (and possibly unique) example of jargon breeding jargon. Thus the introductory disclaimer, already quoted, perhaps implies a nervous lack of faith and justification in what has been accomplished.

The compilers certainly must be given generous credit for telling it like it is. But what it is is frightening.

Edward R. Brace, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire

Little Error Spells Big Mistake

1. “The Crime of the Ancient Mariner” (Coleridge)….

2. “Wife of Samuel Johnson” (Boswell)….

3. “The Glisteners” (De la Mare)….

4. “The Pickwick Capers (Dickens)….

5. “With Rue My Art Is Laden” (Housman)….

6. “The Old Lady Shows Her Metals” (Barrie)….

7. “I Wandered Lovely As a Cloud” (Wordsworth)….

8. “Home Thoughts from a Broad” (Browning)….

9. “In the Time of the Braking of Nations” (Hardy)….

10. “When I Was One-Ann, Twenty” (Housman)….

11. “Richard Gory” (Robinson)….

12. “A Noiseless Patient Spied Her” (Whitman)….

13. “Death of the Tired Man” (Frost)….

14. “Abraham Lincoln Balks at Midnight” (Lindsay)….

15. “I Have a Rendzvous with Beth” (Seeger)….

16. “God’s Whirled” (Millay)….

17. “A Belle for Adano” (Hersey)….

18. “A Table for Critics” (Lowell)….

19. “Fanny and Zooey” (Salinger)….

20. “Critique of Pure Treason” (Kant)….

A.S. Flaumenhaft

Lawrence, New York

(Answers are on page 420.)

EPISTOLA {Alan M. Perlman, Wayne State University}

Below are some examples of one of our more recent (i.e., unlisted in Wentworth and Flexner’s Dictionary of American Slang) derivational morphemes in action (all are from the Detroit Free Press):

Maybe Her Mom’s a Clothesaholic [1/25/76, title of Ann Lander’s column]

Mom-to-Be’s Candyholic [2/12/76]

So who cares if the majority of the telephone calls we indulge in are non-essential and time-wasters?…

“It’s someone to talk to, isn’t it?” I was once told by another phonoholic. [columnist Bob Talbert, 3/11/76]

Anyone, but especially impulse buyers, can become a credit-cardaholic. [7/11/76]

Fasting also may be the answer for foodaholics who find one forkful of food too much, a thousand not enough. [medical columnist Lindsay Curtis, M.D., 7/ 15/76]

Should the process become truly productive, I propose the label aholicism, ‘The irresistible impulse to use the suffix (a)holic to describe irresistible impulses.’ [Alan M. Perlman, Wayne State University].

EPISTOLA {Harry Cimring}

The “person” versus “man” hysteria continues apace.

Ellen Cooperman of Babylon, Long Island, plans to carry her campaign to change her name to Ellen Cooper-person all the way to the Supreme Court, despite the opposition of Justice John Scileppi. “I would like my name to reflect my humanitarian beliefs,” explained Ms. Cooperperson, divorcee, mother of a 9-year old son, and owner of Feminist Productions, a film company.

Firstly, shouldn’t that be “hu-person-itarian” beliefs?

Secondly, she likes to use the term “herstory” in place of history, a cutesy, but highly illogical neologism: the feminine possessive pronoun, her, is from Middle English; the masculine possessive pronoun, his, is from the Old English; history is from Latin and Greek (historia), further derived from histor or istor ‘knowing or learning.’ The personal pronoun his, which was never present in history, further disappears in the form istor.

Thirdly, if she will, let Ms. Ellen C. play around with the word hysteria, from the Greek hystera ‘womb.’ I hope she is not about to alter that to “hersteria.” After all, what is more feminine than womb, no matter what word the Greeks had for it? [Harry Cimring, Los Angeles, California].

EPISTOLA {Claire W. Belyea}

“Wow!”, or perhaps “Oba!”, “Orv!”, “Ya!”, or even “Ajaib!!” My first two issues of Verbatim contain delights beyond imagining, to be savored and cherished, and reducing me to a state which can be described accurately only by the earthy phrase “off my gourd.”

I must argue, though, with Mr. Hornos' “Ouch! he said in Japanese [III, 1]. Human languages may be familiar but little is known, really, of foreign animal talk. It is vital to know, therefore, if Mr. Hornos' animal sounds are phonetic—which seems unlikely—and if not, just how are these foreign animal sounds pronounced? Unlikely, because, in the case of Greek dogs, a non-Greek-speaker could only wonder if Greek dogs say “ow ow” as in the German “auf,” or “oh oh” as in French “aux.” Greeks pronounce the letters alpha upsilon, or au, as “aff” or “av.” But in fact what Greek dogs actually “say” is gamma alpha upsilon, or “γαυ γαυ ”—phonetically “grraff grraff,” a more accurate representation of “bow wow” than exists in other languages. (Greeks somehow do manage to roll their gammas, producing a sound similar to the “gr” in the French word “grand.”) But, please, help! If “popo” is not phonetic, how will I ever know the sound of a Japanese dove? For that matter, how would one say “Ajaib!” to an Indonesian?

Mr. White (“Mrs. Malaprop’s Bicentennial”) [II, 1], would have enjoyed a recent TV interview with a New England Patriot player who claimed they had won their game by keeping right on top of their P’s and Q’s.

I’d also like to acquaint you with a local landmark. Upon entering the original building of the Boston Public Library, newcomers are transfixed by the baffling message “TIXE NA TON” painted on the glass of the inner door. Obviously this would not merit a second glance by Mr. Fowkers (“Esrever Hsilgne”) [III, 2]; others remain mystified until leaving the building when the sign miraculously rights itself.

I have the pleasure of looking forward to a chunk of solid pleasure four times a year when Verbatim is delivered. THANK YOU for it—in every language. [Claire W. Belyea, Cambridge, Massachusetts].

Little Error—Answers

1. Rime
2. Life
3. Listeners
4. Papers 5. Heart 6. Medals
7. Lonely
8. Abroad
9. Breaking
10. One-and-Twenty 11. Cory
12. Spider
13. Hired 14. Walks
15. Death
16. World
17. Bell
18. Fable 19. Franny
20. Reason

EPISTOLA {Barbara Marsh}

Reading the latest issue sends my mind on many trails. My all-time favorite was a listing in the San Diego phone book for Augusta’s Topsoil Hair Products Manufacturing Co. By its address, I judged that it was a hair-straightener. I dialed the number, said that I had seen the listing, and was curious about the product. A voice replied, “Well, ma’am, we thinks we has a ve’y fine product fo' the hair and scalp, and we wanted a nice-soundin' name fo' it— y’know, lak ‘Wildroot.’ So we named it Topsoil.”

Many years as a proofreader left me wondering why restaurateurs never bothered to learn the French they consistently misused; why an extra “r” always crept into sherbet; why avocado could assume so many guises, the commonest being “avocoda”; why chili was so often “chile”; why au beurre was “au burr”; why béarnaise was “bernaise.”

The one that set me back most, however, was an advertisement for a language school that promised, “You will be able to parse any irregular verb in three weeks.” Thinking it was just a slip of the tongue, I changed parse to conjugate. It came back to be corrected-parse was what they wanted! (That is one language school I shall never attend.)

Elections seem to do strange things to commentators— “It is apparently going to be close if they do not succeed at all,” and to candidates—“Help us begin to put a stop to the end of spending.” [Barbara Marsh, San Diego, California].

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…And why is it that restaurateurs can’t even spell the name of their occupation? It appears as “restauranteur” more often than not!

—Editor

EPISTOLA {Edwin H. Hammock}

Your request for comments [III,2] about professionals and their use (misuse) of their language strikes a familiar chord with me. As a stenotype court and convention reporter, I often reported in technical areas where it soon became apparent to me that I knew more about the day-to-day vocabularies of many people than they themselves knew. Almost all doctors mispronounce gynecology—so often now that many American dictionaries show the “doctors' choice” as an alternate.

Here’s an old medical anecdote which may be new to this generation:

Q Describe the injury as you saw it.

A He had an extravasation of serous fluid into the soft tissues of the optic region causing extensive discoloration.

Q Do you mean he had a black eye?

A Yes.

Engineers do very well with sine, but usually fall flat on cosine. [Edwin H. Hammock, Columbus, Ohio].

EPISTOLA {Nick Raptis}

On “The Enigmatic Eggplant” [Etymologica Obscura, II, 4], the modern Greek encyclopaedia and dictionaries offer the following:

1. Μελιντζανα (melintzána) derives from the Italian melenzana. (Ref.: John Stamatakos, Dictionary of the Modern Greek Language.)

2. Μελιντζανα (melizána) or μελιντζανα (as in 1.) is the colloquial for τρυχνος ε μελιζαυα (trychnos emelizána), which in Latin is solanum melongena.

I think that we modern Greeks owe our τρυχνος ε μελιζαυα to al-badhinjan of the Arabs.

On “Talking Turkey” [II, 3], in modern Greek your turkey is our γαλλος (yállos), which means, ‘the French bird’ or \?\ιανο\?\ (thiános), which means ‘the Indian bird.’

[Nick Raptis, Athens, Greece].

EPISTOLA {Vincent Smith}

You may have already noted that the Dodge dealer in nearby Old Saybrook, Connecticut, has what at first blush would appear to be an unfortunate name for someone in his trade: Risko, which he uses instead of dodging the issue by using “Seaport Motors” or some other evasion. However, “Esrever Hsilgne” would spot the advantages of word of mouth advertising when he drives in the lot to see the owner’s 1937 cream convertible Bentley with his vanity plates spelling his name backwards.

Your “roast beef reporter” could only have seen this week a placard in Newport’s finest Greek cafe, Odyssey, that proclaims theirs is “ah just.”

[Vincent Smith, Newport, Rhode Island].

EPISTOLA {Aaron M. File}

Professor Fowkes might consider mixing Sucrets with his Tums and spelling both backwards.

[Aaron M. File, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania].

EPISTOLA {Betty Anthony}

It takes quite a time for your magazine to reach me so if my remarks seem to refer to several past numbers, I hope at least they are still pertinent.

I doubt very much that the expressions of “spitting image” meaning “likeness” comes from “spirit and image” as Mr. Meng suggested in his letter in III, 1. Even the French have the same expression for similarity, e.g., “C’est son pére tout craché.” More likely the origin is to be found in “spit” meaning an ejection from the mouth combined with primitive belief that progeny of the gods were born through the mouth [e.g., Zeus and his brothers were all first swallowed and then spit out again by their father, Kronos]. It was also believed, in primitive cultures, that certain birds were impregnated through their mouths. One of the Panchatantra tales, I can’t check it here in Greece on my barren island, tells of a bird—peahen? magpie?—who informed on her master’s wife when she had intercourse with a lover (or failed to inform?). In any case, this bird was cursed ever afterwards to being impregnated only through the mouth as punishment.

For that matter, all creation came symbolically through the mouth: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God….”

[Betty Anthony, Hydra, Greece]

EPISTOLA {Gloria Dawkins}

As Robert A Fowkes points out in his delightful article [III, 2], reading backwards can be fun. By sheer good luck, I happened to marry a man whose name spelled backwards is Snikwad, a name he immortalized (for our children) in a series of cartoons depicting the adventures of the Snikwad family. One of these same children, by the way, was so charmed with the discovery that Lipton’s spelled backwards is Snotlip, that none of us to this day has had the heart to point out the mistake.

Anagrams are fun, too. A year or two ago we got hooked on Arthur Swan’s Wit Twisters in Saturday Review and began making up our own for inter-family amusement. An early example is:

“I can’t be __ __ __ __ __ __ ,” his mother stated,

“For all the __ __ __ __ __ __ he’s created.

I’d ne’er have __ __ __ __ __ __ the little guy

If that randy ram hadn’t __ __ __ __ __ __ by.”

Unfortunately, as time went on, our messages began to get rude and coarse-possibly a sign of waning interest. In an effort to liven things up, I have lately been trying to combine the limerick form with the original idea. This has proved more difficult than I had anticipated and, so far, all I have been able to come up with are these feeble efforts:

There was an old __ __ __ __ from Duluth

Who drank vastly of __ __ __ __ and vermouth.

She __ __ __ __ quite a fuss,

When kicked off the bus

And her gestures were grossly uncouth.

An ugly old __ __ __ __ named McDwight

Trained his __ __ __ __ to attack me on sight,

So I’ve hired some nuns

To hurl state currant buns

At his hounds as they __ __ __ __ out at night.

Perhaps your readers can come up with something more electrifying—chances are I’ve been dragged down by the low standards of the Snikwad side of the family.

[Gloria Dawkins, Unionville, Ontario, Canada].

EPISTOLA {John B. Newman}

I am surprised that the learned author of Esrever Hsilgne [III, 2] didn’t know (or note) that Kay Boyle once wrote a short story entitled Kroy Wen. But he might be interested in knowing that the craze he writes of serves still another purpose: creating delightful euphemisms. Thus, I have a friend who berates his children if they should traf in public. And, speaking of Serutan, this same friend tells me that its manufacturers are about to market a soft drink, Sip. [John B. Newman, Queens College, New York].

EPISTOLA {Jerry Mendel}

In reference to a letter from Hugh T. Kerr [III, 2], he certainly picked examples that show just the opposite of what he wanted to prove: that the King James version of the Bible is preferable to modern translations:

My beloved put in his My beloved put his hand by the hole of the hand to the latch, and door, and my bowels my heart was thrilled were moved for him. within me.

As they say in the Army: you do, and you’ll mop it up!

It has been painfully obvious for a long time that the King James version was out of date and long overdue for rewriting. It is fashionable nowadays to say that the King James version is still the best, but I submit that this is just snobbishness. I suppose every religion has to have a book that most people do not understand and must be explained to them by an elite, but the King James Bible had gotten to the point where even the elite could not make sense out of it.

On the subject of ghost, the Catholic Church did one sensible thing this century when it replaced Holy Ghost with Holy Spirit. The word ghost has so many silly and laughable connotations that this change was centuries overdue. As always, this sensible change was balanced by the sudden idea that we have been misspelling for years the name of the man who built the Ark. Now it is spelled Noe, not Noah. All I can conclude is that maybe the Church is trying to convert over to Spanish.

[Jerry Mendel, Plainfield, New Jersey].

EPISTOLA {Lester Saferstein, M.D., Kansas City, Missouri}

In the September issue Hugh T. Kerr writes of “ghost and spirit” pointing out that one wishes a person who sneezes “God bless you” or “Gesundheit” as a matter of concern that he might be “giving up the ghost” or that his soul or breath of life might be departing his body.

It is also likely that the association of sudden death with a sneeze had its origin when, prior to improved medical therapy, many people went on to the last stages of syphilis acquiring thereby a weakened aorta. A sudden surge of increased blood pressure accompanying a sneeze often caused that great vessel to burst, and death followed quickly.

Thus the person who said “God bless you” had good reason to fear that the sneezer might suddenly lose his spirit and his life even though he did not know why.

EPISTOLA {Katherine Adamson}

B.H. Smeaton’s letter on clipping inspires me to offer my list of Australian diminutives [spellings improvised]. Aussie is familiar to Ameriacns, but that mainlanders go on holiday to Tassie may not be. (Both are pronounced with a z, by the way, as is mossies for mosquitoes.) While teaching, I learned about bickies at morning tea (biscuits, our cookies), was asked if I had taken a sickie after a one-day absence, and discussed the girls' cozzies at the Swimming Carnival. (Has anyone ever figured out why Americans wear bathing suits to go swimming and some other nationalities wear swimming costumes for bathing?)

On a camping tour I heard references to the littlies and oldies in the group. We stopped at a Leaguie ‘Leagues Club’ and played the pokies ‘poker machines.’ One of the teenagers was from Sainty ‘St. Mary, N.S.W.,’ whose football team is well known—the Sainties in her speech. Reveille took the form of the leaders going around the tents calling “Wakey, wakey,” in the same abominably cheerful voice that accompanies “Rise and shine.”

Some of those sounded fine to me; others caused a mild shudder. But I never got used to Chrissy and pressy. I would wait, muscles stiffened to receive the blow, for a user of either to mention a Chrissy pressy. It never happened.

I should add about sickie that it isn’t a straightforward synonym for sick day. One takes the latter to nurse a cold, the former to go to a ball game, and an absence of less than two days, preferably three, will be interpreted, even on the administrative level, as a sickie.

[Katherine Adamson, Columbus, Ohio].

EPISTOLA {Phylis Feinstein}

How did Harry Cimring in “Trite ‘n’ True” [Vol. III, No. 2] ever miss Light ‘n’ Lively?

[Phylis Feinstein, Silver Burdett Company, Morristown, New Jersey].

EPISTOLA {B.R. Mullin, M.D.}

Apropos of malapropisms: on the menu of the Back Door restaurant of Dalton, Pennsylvania, are lamb chops “cooked to your likeness.”

[B.R. Mullin, M.D., Rockville, Maryland].

EPISTOLA {Skip Eisiminger}

Archie Bunker in the Classroom

Teachers of vocabulary may have more reason to thank Norman Lear’s Archie Bunker than criticize him and his abuses of the language. Most errors made by this popular television character can be categorized as malapropisms though he is occasionally guilty of a spoonerism (e.g. “hard-pore cornography”). A collection of Mr. Bunker’s slips of the tongue can form the core of an entertaining and informative vocabulary class.

My own procedure has been to distribute the sentences and then ask what was the word the character should properly have used; what does the proper word mean, and, if necessary, what does the word which the character used mean?

Here are a few you might try:

“I’ve been impudent ever since I got laid off.”

[To a Jewish visitor:] “Shaboom!”

[To a policeman:] “You can’t get no judasprudence these days.”

“You’ve got to control your carnival instincts, Gloria.”

“Edith’s mental pause is causing her dizziness.”

“I gave the [accident victim] mouth-to-mouth restitution.”

“Don’t go out in the rain; you’ll catch utopia.”

“Listen, Meathead, don’t take things out of contest.”

“It ain’t German to this conversation.”

“I’ve never used a lollipop in my speech in my life.”

[Skip Eisminger, Clemson University].

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. Here the ba- may have been reinterpreted as a slang prefix. Compare bazoo, “mouth,” in relation to zooed, “drugged.” ↩︎