Vol IV, No 2 [September 1977]

We Shall Know Them By Their Roots

Clair Schulz, Clinton, Wisconsin

Of all the aspects related to the institution known as rock music, one of the most intriguing is the names groups choose for themselves. Whether the names are ordinary or outlandish, they sometimes become so much a part of our culture that, for instance, a casual reference to the Four Seasons or Dawn is just as likely to remind people of tunes as of time. True, most groups vanish after a short period of popularity, but many of their names remain suspended in the same web of nostalgia that holds glutinously to memories of first dates and aborted dreams. The parade of names that follows is for those who want to hear their favorites one more time.

Some groups began merely by counting heads. There were Four Tunes, Aces, Preps, Freshmen, Tops, Fellows, and Lads. One-upmanship has been practiced by the Fifth Dimension, Five Americans, Dave Clark Five, and We Five, although they too were outscored by the New Colony Six and Six Hits and a Miss. Still others (the Association, Group Image, Gallery) banded together under corporate entries.

Music itself has been the inspiration for a number of groups. The Band, New Vaudeville Band, Chords, Chordettes, Crescendos, Accents, Monotones, Cleftones, Sparkeltones Delfonics, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Merseybeats, Easy Beats, New Beats, Delta Rhythm Boys, Rhythm Heritage, Amazing Rhythm Aces, and Blue Notes identified with musical terminology. The Bells, Roxy Music, and Earth Opera struck melodic notes, whereas the Ding Dongs, Platters, and Music Explosion selected less pretentious titles.

Ever since Bill Haley and the Comets blazed across the rock and roll heavens many troupes have considered themselves children of light. The Chi-lites, Limelites, Lovelites, Fireballs, Firefall, Flares, Flames, Flaming Ember, Lamp of Childhood, Silhouettes, Reflections, Shadows of Night, Rays, Link Ray and his Ray Men, Clear Light, and Flash represent direct and oblique references to light, countered by the extraterrestrial illumination provided by the Moonglows, Sounds of Sunshine, K.C. and the Sunshine Band, Ars Nova, Morning Star, Starbuck, and Joey Dee and the Starliters. Artificial energy emerges from the Magic Lanterns, Edison Lighthouse, Electric Light Orchestra, Electric Flag, Electric Prunes, and Pacific Gas and Electric.

Brilliance is also apparent in the colors rock artists select to represent them. The favorite hue appears often: Blue Suede, Blues Image, Blue Oyster Cult, Blue Bells, Blue Cheer, Blues Project, Blues Magoos, Moody Blues, and Schocking Blue. Other colorful performers include Redeye, Redbone, Pink Floyd, Frijid Pink, Rose-colored Glass, Savoy Brown, Soft White Underbelly, Average White Band, Deep Purple, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Silver Convention, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Argent, the Inkspots, and Yellow Pages.

Love and domestic life are not only the themes of most popular songs; they have also served as afflatus for singers seeking an image. Affection has been expressed by Love, Love Affair, Love Unlimited, Ruby and the Romantics, Heart, and Kiss. There have been a number of siblings such as the Osmonds and Jacksons who have recorded under surnames, but groups that lack common bloodlines have also invoked familial ties. Relatively speaking and singing were the Brotherhood, Flying Burrito Brothers, Righteous Brothers, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Mamas and the Papas, Every Mother’s Son, Mothers of Invention, Family, and M(other) F(ather) S(ister) B(rother).

Young people have been unjustly accused of having no sense of time or place. The calendar and clock have been duly noted by the Tymes, T.I.M.E., Moments, Midnighters, Dusk, 8th Day, Wednesday, Ten Years After, and Ides of March. The Belmonts that backed Dion DiMuci in the fifties derived their name from a street in the Bronx, and since that time the nation’s largest city has spawned New York City, Brooklyn Bridge, the Lower East Side, Manhattan Transfer, and the Manhattans. The tradition of paying homage to home territory has been carried on by Chicago, Boston, White Plains, Orleans, Bay City Rollers, Nazareth, Detroit Emeralds, Black Oak Arkansas, Kansas, Ohio Players, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, and Sergio Mendes and Brazil ‘66. (The last group truly changed with the times; they are now known as Sergio Mendes and Brazil ‘77). Additional lessons in geography are provided by Jay and the Americans, America, American Breed, Ronnie and the Daytonas, B.J. Kramer and the Dakotas, Cimarron, Left Banke, Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Linn County, and Stone Country.

Transportation to these places may be achieved in a variety of ways. Among the groups that used automobiles for extensive mileage are the Rivieras, Fiestas, Edsels, Impalas, El Dorados, Falcons, Fleetwoods, Fleetwood Mac, Thin Lizzy, Cadillacs, L.T.D., Booker T. and the M.G.’s, Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids, and Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. Other methods of travel have been obtained via R.E.O. Speedwagon, Orient Express, Ohio Express, B.T. Express, Caboose, Sea Train, Grand Funk Railroad, Dixie Flyers, Led Zeppelin, and Jefferson Airplane (later Jefferson Starship).

People mystified by the feral gyrations of modern dances will not be surprised to discover that many groups captured their names from wildlife. The Animals, Tarriers, Chipmunks, Teddy Bears, Monkees, Critters, Herd, Turtles, Murmaids, Crickets, and Beatles, as well as Crazy Horse, Stone Pony, Howlin’ Wolf, Sopwith Camel, T. Rex, Buffalo Springfield, Elephant’s Memory, Kangaroo, Rhinoceros, Three Dog Night, and Country Joe and the Fish borrowed from the animal kingdom. Flying above the earthbound beings are the Byrds, Yardbirds, Larks, Jayhawks, Ravens, Flamingos, Pelicans, Orioles, Sandpipers, Eagles, Robins, Swallows, Wings, and Crow. (The Penguins and Iron Butterfly performed well, but could not get off the ground.) The call of nature has also been answered by the Gladiolas, Clovers, Rose Garden, Earth Wind and Fire, Rare Earth, Mother Earth, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Seeds, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Grass Roots, Fever Tree, Hollies, Beach Boys, Ocean, Surfaris, Mad River, Credence Clearwater Revival, Zephyr, Hilltoppers, and Mountain.

Parents frequently complain about the cost of feeding and clothing teenagers, and even when not lamenting their fate are reminded of it by the artists who record the albums they themselves often purchase for their sons and daughters. Fruits and vegetables are represented by the Silver Apples, Crabby Appleton, Lemon Pipers, Moby Grape, Wild Cherry, Grapefruit, Raspberries, Strawberry Alarm Clock, and Ultimate Spinach. The simple fare offered by Hot Butter, Bread, Goldie and the Gingerbreads, Sugarloaf, Honeycombs, Peanut Butter Conspiracy, and Marmalade whet appetites for the T-Bones, Joy of Cooking, Main Ingredient, Hot Tuna, and Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. Liquid refreshment and sweets are readily available from the Lovin’ Spoonful, Tea Set, Creem, Hot Chocolate, Humble Pie, Vanilla Fudge, the Candymen, and 1910 Fruitgum Company. After such a rich diet, people might feel compelled to settle down in easy chairs and wrap themselves in the rhythms of the Satins, Turbans, Weavers, Hollywood Argyles, Orlons, Velvet Underground, and Chiffons.

Another parental concern, that listening to rock music brings impressionable minds under Satanic or necromantic influences, is only partially correct. Certainly names such as the Zombies, Enchanters, Undertakers, Mindbenders, Temptations, Temptress, Grateful Dead, Styx, Spooky Tooth, Pickettywitch, Coven, and Black Sabbath are not apt to instill joie de vivre in human breasts. But counteractive forces are presented by the Shangri-Las, Soul Stirrers, Soul Survivers, Sweet Inspirations, New Hope, Seekers, Searchers, Meditations, Devotions, Nice, Miracles, and Angels.

It should be freely admitted that there are negative elements of a mundane nature present as well. Ensembles like the Who, Guess Who, and Question Mark and the Mysterians arouse suspicion. The Mugwumps, Charlatans, Casinos, Trashmen, and Young Rascals are merely mischief makers compared with the Churls, Corsairs, Intruders, Highwaymen, James Gang, Mob, Village Stompers, Stampeders, War, Bloodrock, Lost Generation, Stealers Wheel, Bad Company, Badfinger, and Scaffold. Transients who formerly adhered to the Drifters, Paupers, Coasters, Vagrants, and Rolling Stones have more recently found a voice in the Runaways, an all-female band that exudes sensuality in a manner that might only be surpassed by the Demimondes or the Trulls. There also exists a multitude of groups whose names seem to belong on the tattooed arms of street gangs, foremost among them being the Rockin' Rebels, Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Raiders, Kinks, Dominoes, Outsiders, Hombres, Ramrods, Ventures, Del Vikings, Gaylords, Olympics, Marcels, Spinners, Contours, Youngbloods, Doors, and Los Bravos.

Those who foresee a slide into decadence need not despair, for each pejorative can be balanced with names reflecting breeding, royalty, and even snobbishness. Despite the egalitarian lyrics of many popular songs, groups like King Curtis and the Kingpins, the Kingsmen, King Crimson, Queen, Royal Teens, Royal Guardsmen, Teen Queens, Amboy Dukes, Essex, Barons, Regents, Viscounts, Buckinghams, Imperials, Crests, Coronets, and Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs exemplify the monarchy rather than the great unwashed. Less regal but still displaying elitist sentiments are the Commodores, Cavaliers, Elegants, Beau Brummells, Champs, Supremes, Gentrys, Chairmen of the Board, Friends of Distinction, Presidents, Rocky Fellers, Magnificent Men, Great Society, Uniques, Originals, Stylistics, Fortunes, Classics IV, Influence, Eden’s Children, Sapphires, Diamonds, and Pearls Before Swine. To indicate gentility, groups have taken residence in the glamorous surroundings of Procol Harum, Crystal Mansion, Wadsworth Mansion, Glass House, and Taj Mahal. There is even status in the names adapted from magazines: the Vogues, Playboys, Vanity Fare, and Harper’s Bizarre.

Perhaps one day an artist will translate the incongruity of the noble coexisting with the villainous into rock music’s escutcheon: a white sport coat opposite a black leather jacket.

This is quite obviously not an inclusive list. There are scores of groups who, by selecting a unique identity, defy categorization. Where, for instance, would one place Soft Machine, Bagatelle, and Status Quo? Status Quo is not only a distinctive but also a highly ironical choice for singers and musicians who perform in the most transitory field of entertainment. But even in this rhythmic world of perpetual change there is one constant: all groups, regardless of size, sex, or temperament, can trace their origin to the greatest of recording artists, Noah Webster and the Lexicographers.

Scoring Jargon

David C. Ferris, Exeter University

Compare this:

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the sun. A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted

With this:

Over the past ten years the school has evolved a child-centred individual-learning situation with a degree of integrated day organisation and close co-operation between each year’s mixed-ability classes. Basic-work morning programmes are carefully structured but allow for integration…

Both passages are true enough exemplars of their times, the former from the Authorised Version, the latter from a recent advertisement for a Junior School teacher. Contrasting the two suggests that the language has gained in the past 350 years something that it could well do without. Loosely, we can call it “jargon,” but it would be unfair to leap on our high horses every time we read a passage that contains unpleasantly long words and which does not make much sense to us; if we hear that

Reaction kinetics and gas absorption, as well as catalysis and granulation, are technical fields in which the Division is particularly interested

we can do little but admit that nowadays there is more to fertiliser than following a horse with a shovel.

So this attack is addressed only to the inflated verbal pomposity that we might call bullfrog jargon. The school advertisement quoted above is by no means the most repellent abuse of English available, but I used it because it does at least seem to have been intended seriously, unlike perhaps,

The structured structure by reason of its symbolic efficacy ongoingly structures the structure.

Although you never meet anyone who writes it himself, jargon somehow continues to rampage over English like the tendrils of a creeping jungle. It would be easier to resist if we could pin down a little more precisely what it is, and maybe the enterprise has a certain grisly interest of its own; earlier resistance fighters have of course made their forays, but tended to add a salvo of personal preferences as to style, and besides did not have the dubious advantages of the New Linguistics.

One thing they agreed was that we must all stamp hard on polysyllabic verbalisations. Actually, however, it is too naive to assume simply that ‘jargon’ equals “long words” even though we can see why we feel the temptation, when the enemy called taxmen inland revenue officials or when mockery devises artificial bipartite abdominal integument as a replacement for trousers. Admittedly there is a link; experimentation instead of experiment is a well-known type of irritant, while experiment itself could often give way to test. This is not at all to say that the words in each pair always mean the same thing, only that they sometimes do and that in such cases life would be more comfortable if writers would use the shorter one. Yet even if we could cajole, bribe, or threaten out of use all words of more than two syllables, things would not be that much better. Some people shrink from using one word where ten will do and entangle themselves in Byzantine wiles to avoid our everyday monosyllables; so now disappears underneath at this present moment in time. Switching our scrutiny to the number of syllables in a sentence does not help much either; we can shorten the unexciting but straightforward

to judge from what is happening now, things will go on getting worse

to

current trends indicate a continued decline

which, however, now reeks of jargon. Length simply is not blameworthy in itself; other factors are lurking in the undergrowth.

One noticeable thing about jargon is its cargo of vogue words. For no very clear reason certain weeds or animals sometimes undergo a huge and rapid leap in numbers and threaten to upset the natural system where they live; in much the same way certain words start breeding like rabbits and make an increasing (or “ongoing”?) nuisance of themselves. Today we are plagued by “open-ended” “meaningful” “commitments” “escalating” in all too many “situations.” Sometimes vogue words succeed in keeping the territory they have seized, for it is not frequency as such, but sudden increase in frequency that makes them objectionable. More often they have their heyday and then pass on out of the limelight; orchestrate and organic are examples that seem to be fading into the darkness already.

However, although we may look askance at vogue words they do not really seem to be longer than the common run, nor does their presence of itself turn a text into jargon. Another hare that invites pursuit is the idea that unusual recherché words are the linguistic villians. After all, marmalade and mother are not jargon but are common, while mode and median are jargon but are not common. On this view vogue words annoy us precisely because they forsake their proper rarity and make an indecent exhibition of themselves. Unfortunately, the hare turns out to be a wild goose; there are plenty of words that tend the other way. For most readers the average “rarity” of

the piebald mare trampled the yarrow underfoot

must be much higher than of

the identical theory offers a basis for development

but the latter is jargon, the former plain.

So consider flibbertigibbet and tatterdemalion. At a guess these words get used fairly sparingly and they are certainly not short. Yet there is something reassuring and solid about them that seems to make them proof against corruption; we could sum it up by saying that they are homely rather than official; they are the sort of words we may have met among friends or family, and not in textbooks nor in some official report. There are large overlaps between homely words and those of native English (those not known to have been borrowed from another language) and between official words and those derived from the classical languages, though the agreements are not complete.

Homeliness brings with it two traits, both of which a word must have to earn our highest esteem. One is simplicity. The classical origin of most official words explains why so many start with prefixes like contra- and anti- or end with suffixes such as -istic and -ational. It is a good rule of thumb that where you find many affixes you have a jargon-ridden writer, but the etymology does not matter in itself. What does matter is the amount of brainwork demanded of readers. Vague as it may be, a proper slice of meaning is linked to such affixes in many of their occurrences (contrast archaic and archaistic); and there is evidence that an effort is needed, even if a very slight and subconscious one, to glue together the meanings of affix and root so as to decide roughly what the whole should mean, an effort not required for words that are, in English, simple, like strong or chrysanthemum. These tiny hurdles keep tripping our brain as it follows its semantic path and this is where length comes in. Naturally the more affixes are added to a root the longer the word becomes; but the trouble is caused not by length sensu stricto but by complexity.

The second point about homeliness is illuminated by words like ocelot which we might well first come across in a textbook; certainly, ocelots were not plentiful around my mother’s knee. Yet it would seem odd to describe the name of an animal as jargon. Trying to explain this forces us to admit a cleavage in English between words that are in some way tangible or “real,” and those that are abstract. We might agree in practice about the allocation of many items, but it is impossible to give an exact rule about where to draw the line, and what is more it will by no means coincide with what science would tell us; for instance, unicorns must be real whereas semanticists, regrettably, might be abstract.

We are now nearly able to devise an index to assay the linguistic virtue of English words, but fair play imposes one caveat. A word like international is abstract, borrowed from Latin with both prefix and suffix, and very often met “officially”; its appearances in advertisements even smack of the vogue word. However, we cannot throw many stones at it, simply because there is often no easy brief alternative (think of international opera-singer). Many words look suspiciously like jargon but escape with unsullied character because there is just nothing else that will do so well in the same place. That said, here is the index, built on the above remarks; naturally, we assume some give and take in the workings.

(1.) If the root of the word is “native” English; or (should it be borrowed) if the whole word cannot easily be replaced by another that does have a native root,

SCORE 1.

For other roots,

SCORE 2.

(2.) For every affix except -ing, -ed, -en and -s,

ADD 1.

(3.) If the root is a bound morpheme (that is, if it cannot stand as a word in its own right, like -ceive),

ADD 1.

(4.) If the word as a whole has an “abstract” meaning,

ADD 1.

(5.) If the word is a vogue word,

ADD 2.

Actually, it is far too optimistic to believe that this index could help in rooting out jargon; I merely offer it to readers so that they may amuse themselves in a melancholy way, gauging the monstrous growth of the weeds closing around the language.

The natural next move is to work out an index for texts. This means sniping at the Hydra of structural jargon; for even if they use only low-scoring words, writers can still make things awkward to understand or at least less attractive by using them in complex structures with plenty of subordinate clauses and dependent phrases. It is here that the legendary compilers of government regulations show their true mettle. Sadly, it is out of the question to work out a thoroughgoing system, if only because far too little is yet understood about the freedom with which our language lets us play around with the shape of sentences. But we can cook together a few ideas of our own and other writers, to give something like this:

(1.) Add together the jargon scores for all the verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and nouns other than names.

(2.) For every passive verb,

ADD 1.

(3.) For every double negative (as famously guyed in Orwell’s a not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field),

ADD 2.

(4.) For every subordinating conjunction,

ADD 2.

(5.) Divide the result by the total number of words in the text.

One important ingredient is missing, namely some means of measuring how complex the ideas are that the writer is trying to convey; any hack could score well describing the adventures of Tom and Jerry, but a laureate could, and indeed should, score rather high in expounding Kant’s philosophy. This may be why editorials in the more picturesque newspapers score lower than The London Times. For that matter, something similar applies to the word index; ideally, we should mark different degrees of vacuity on a scale leading towards total meaninglessness, and adjust our sense of outrage accordingly. Yet, it is extremely difficult to pry into the inner anatomy of words to see how far the essence of meaning is diluted, nor is there much hope of getting wide agreement between, for instance, political theorists and theologians. At present, the best available remedy seems to be marking words as abstract or tangible.

One last observation is that here as often elsewhere both extremes are suspect. A very low score betrays a failing in that such writing would be more like babytalk than good English. On the other hand, the indices presuppose that high scores are a greater threat—signs of floundering intellect, or even mental bankruptcy; that is why I am interested, and sorry, to find after marking a range of texts that the highest scores of all were fairly consistently those of works on theoretical Linguistics.

EPISTOLA {Barbara Marsh}

Nine words with oto? What a hornet’s nest that will stir up! The photographers will be annoyed, and all the otologists. (There are at least a dozen earthickling relatives of that one.) The gardeners will throw to croton or a cotoneaster or a sotol; you’ll be told to jump in the Potomac without a rotor. No one will kotow to you, or serenade you on a koto; rather, you’ll be threatened with celotomy or colotomy, equally uncomfortable, or with banishment to Cotonou or Cotopani. (There’s one of those in Colorado as well as in Ecuador.) Notoungulates and lotophage will vie with potoos and potoroos to bring you notoriety—and that’s not one patch of what you’ll hear from readers who have access to a big Webster or Oxford!

John Sinor in the San Diego Evening Tribune had his readers on their otos, trying to find the four English words that end in gry.

Try that, Richard Manchester.

But I am going to buy your book because—lucky me—I have three grandsons who love words. [Barbara Marsh, San Diego, California].

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: LOUISIANA PLACES: A Collection of Columns from the Baton Rouge Sunday Advocate 1960 - 1974

Clare D’Artois Leeper, (Legacy Publishing Company, 1976), 264 pp.

On February 7, 1960, under the heading of “Louisiana Places: Those Strange Sounding Names,” the Baton Rouge Sunday Advocate published a brief account of Natchitoches, the name of “the oldest town in Louisiana,” deriving it from “paw-paw eaters,” the name of a Caddoan tribe. This short discussion turned out to be the starting point and set the tone for a regular column on Louisiana place names (mostly names of towns and post offices) which Mrs. Leeper has conducted ever since. The fruits of the first fourteen years of her labors, about 770 items in all, have now been gathered and published in book form. The collection, while preserving the original wording of the first printing in all instances, presents the names discussed in alphabetical order. Although making them more easily accessible, this arrangement also exposes some of the major weaknesses inherent in the “permanent” reprinting of what once were intended to be “occasional” pieces, i.e., the conversion of a weekly newspaper column into a book without the required thorough revision.

The most noticeable of these shortcomings is undoubtedly the presence of a number of verbatim duplications (as under Arizona, Bordelonville, Bunkie, Converse, Dry Creek, and several others), which makes sense in a series of articles written over many years—at least partly in response to readers' enquiries—but tends to annoy the reader. As the author of a similar column in a monthly magazine, this reviewer is very much aware of the strong temptation to convert such contributions into a book, especially when encouraged by appreciative readers, but only under exceptional circumstances can such a conversion be carried out successfully and should therefore usually be avoided; it should never be attempted without the provision of an overview through a summarizing Introduction or Conclusion.

Having expressed an understandable dissatisfaction with the inappropriate process which created this volume, one is pleased to discover that the original subtitle, dropped in May 1965, does not imply the kind of exclusive hunt for the quaint and the curious which is so often the pursuit of the local onomastician. Naturally, several place names whose major attraction lies either in their intriguing surface meaning (Aimwell, Bayou Bonne Idee, Converse, Forlorn Hope, Fort Necessity, Gin Lake, Lick the Skillet, Luna, Spoon Full, Sunset, for example) or in their exotic sound/spelling (Anacoco, Atchafalaya, Choupitcatcha, Maringouin, Natchez, for instance) are discussed, but their inclusion does not seem to stem from the notion that such names are more worthy of enquiry than those which apparently contain no such mystery (Bailey’s Dam, Baldwin’s Store, Big Bend, Branch, Buchanan’s Ferry, Center Point, Cotton Valley, Oak Ridge, etc.). For the name scholar there is no such creature as a “pedestrian” or “uninteresting” name, and Mrs. Leeper is clearly well aware of the full scope and potentialities of onomastic research.

Naturally, the geographical location and documented history of Louisiana predict a sizable native American and French admixture to the state’s place-nomenclature, but while there does not appear to be any particular toponymic marker with regard to the former, a generic like bayou serves its purposes well as an indicator of the settlement area of the Louisiana French, as was demonstrated by Robert C. West over twenty year ago. The volume under review lists twenty-eight names in which this term, borrowed by the French incomers from the Choctaw bayuk, occurs as the first element; close scrutiny of the specifics of these names (Chene Fleur, Adois, Alabama, Barbue, Beaucoup, Bonne Idee, Bushley, Castine, Chene, Chicot, etc.) would be in itself a rewarding undertaking, opening up a fascinating range of cultural influences and naming practices, from the straight-forward to the bizarre.

As is to be expected, however, a study of Louisiana place names is not so much an exercise in linguistics as an investigation of local and regional history, and the better one knows the people behind the settlements, the first settlers, the first postmasters, the landowners, their wives and daughters, the easier is the task of unraveling the strands woven into some of the name stories; for if there is one chief factor which dominated the naming of Louisiana places, it is the recognizable American phenomenon of the shift from a personal name to a place name, as a gesture of grateful commemoration (Addis: after J.W. Addis, an official of the Texas & Pacific Railroad; Akers: after William W. Akers, the first postmaster; Allen Parish, after Henry W. Allen, Confederate governor of Louisiana; Allen Settlement: after Mr. Allen, the first Justice of the Peace; Amelia, after Miss Amelia Dupuis, the deceased bride of the first postmaster; and several dozen more). It is in the exploration of this toponymic category, which forms such an astonishingly high proportion of the names on the Louisiana map, that Mrs. Leeper is at her best seeking out relevant information wherever it may be hidden. Thus the examination of a naming process frequently becomes the detective story of an eminently human event, and story and history merge again, regaining their former etymological unity.

Under these circumstances, who wants to attribute blame if the narrative impulse sometimes wins out over scholarly sobriety? Nevertheless, it would have been useful to have indicated in some way when a (migratory) place-name legend is recounted rather than a historical fact; otherwise, “West we go” as an answer to the question “Where do we go from here?” will become accepted more than locally as the true story behind the name westwego, and Sunset will continue to be thought of as having been named either by workers building the Southern Pacific Railroad, at the end of a heavy working day, or, alternatively, by inhabitants of Grand Coteau over whose community “the sun would have set,” if the new railroad had not gone through it. Such folk-etymological reinterpretations hardly ever manage to retrace the original naming process, although their value to the student of folk narrative is, of course, undeniable.

Perhaps the special fascination, even virtue, of Louisiana Places lies in this very mixture of the sober and the sentimental, the rigorous and the romantic, the felicitous and the folksy. Just as they have done for the people of Baton Rouge since 1960, Mrs. Leeper’s 770 place-names will now serve for those beyond the circulation area of the Sunday Advocate, as keys capable of unlocking some of the otherwise closed doors of Louisiana settlement history. On the whole, those who trust those keys will not be disappointed. They may, however, well join this reviewer in wishing that the author would soon provide us with a second book (beyond the supplements already promised), which, by abandoning the alphabetical arrangement, will give us that overall summary that the present volume lacks and which will treat the place names of Louisiana in the context of linguistic, social, cultural, and economic history. In the meantime, those of us involved in the Place Name Survey of the United States are grateful for another important stone in this country’s toponymic mosaic.

W.F.H. Nicolaisen, State University of New York at Binghamton


As we were going to press, we received word that the two supplements to Louisiana Places, one for 1975 and one for 1976, are now available. $2.50 each, paperback.

Editor

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Indiana Place Names

Ronald L. Baker and Marvin Carmony, (Indiana University Press, 1975), xxii + 196 pp.

In the 1960s, the American Name Society established a commission to undertake a Place-Name Survey of the United States. The massive project is now well under way and is estimated to take 25 years to complete. It will result in a multi-volumed dictionary roughly comparable to the 50 or so volumes of the English Place-Name Society’s Survey of English Place Names, published over the last half-century by Cambridge University Press. The dictionary will include definitive information on the historical, linguistic, geographic, and folkloristic aspects of the names and of the naming process of such artificial and natural features as cities, counties, streams, and the like. Meanwhile, approximately half of the states have place-name dictionaries of some sort and of varying degrees of completeness and accuracy. Indiana Place Names grew out of materials gathered for the national Survey and could well serve as the model for other studies which will doubtless appear over the next several years while we await the publication of the projected national study.

Indiana Place Names consists mainly of a 16-page Introduction and a 186-page glossary. The book offers information for the general reader about 2,271 villages, towns, cities, counties, streams, and lakes in the state, with emphasis on settlement names. It is quite selective in its coverage and is by no means a gazetteer, as the editors point out. Individual entries vary in length from a couple of lines to nearly a page and include information on spelling, pronunciation (including stress pattern), alternate names, type of name (e.g., village, county), location, origin, and legends. The average entry has perhaps 6-8 lines.

In the Introduction, Professors Baker and Carmony classify the place-names into the following categories: names of persons, names from other place-names, locational names (East Fork Tanners Creek, Half Way Creek), descriptive names (LaPorte, Plum Tree, Badger Grove), inspirational names (Harmony, Waverly, Troy), humorous names (Santa Claus), Indian and Pseudo-Indian names, names from other languages, incident names (Cyclone, Treaty Creek), names from folk etymology, coined names, mistake names, and names from legends and anecdotes. The editors are thus able to account for an impressive variety of memorable names, including Antiville, Beanblossom, Correct, Daylight, Jacks Defeat Creek, Needmore, Popcorn, and Pumpkin Center.

Among the most interesting names are those derived from folk etymology and those that are mistake names. How much more American-sounding can a name be than Gnaw Bone, especially when we learn that it is a corruption of the French name Narbonne? Similarly, Mary Delarme Creek is a version of Marais de l’Orme, ‘Elm Swamp.’ Correct, Siberia, and Taswell should have been, respectively, Comet, Sabaria, and Laswell.

Some 31 of the names covered are derived from legends, and for many other names legends have been included. As the authors point out in the Introduction, the legends often suggest the prejudices and humor of the people telling them, and whether the legends accurately account for the names or not, they indicate what the names mean to the people who use them. It is fun to know that local legend attributes the name Eugene to a drunk who, having lost his wife, tried to call her (“Oh, Janel”), but could only manage to say “Eu, Jene.”

The authors not only analyze and classify the names treated in the book, but also discuss the pronunciations of these names, pointing out characteristics of Indiana speech as they occur in the names treated and noting other phonological reasons for the pronunciations recorded. Thus, the pronunciation of Morristown as if it were spelled “Morsetown,” the loss of the final -t in East Liberty, the pronunciation of Bainbridge as “Brainbridge,” and of Putnamville as “Putmanville” are explained in light of the authors' sound knowledge of the phonological development of language in general and of American English in particular. The discussion can generally be understood quite readily by the non-linguist, and such terms as metathesis, substitution, and assimilation are worked unobtrusively into the explanations.

The book has flaws, but they are relatively minor. For instance, the definition of a place-name given in the first sentence of the book needs explanation. The authors mention no other studies of Indiana place-names in their Introduction, they do not allude anywhere to the fact that an important national journal is published in the field (Names: Journal of the American Name Society), nor do they mention what is perhaps the most popular book on names, George Stewart’s Names on the Land. And they offer no explanation of the purpose or scope of the national Place-Name Survey. The general reader, to whom this book is addressed, needs to know about these things.

It would help the general reader, too, if the relationship between the pronunciation of Indiana place-names and the dialects of Indiana were made clearer. To this end, more of the distinctive features of Indiana dialects need to be emphasized. More information on the method used to select the names studied and on the method used to select the works included in the Bibliography would be useful. Are the works in the Bibliography works consulted, works of general interest, or what? In any case, the publisher should be mentioned for each work listed. More explanation of why and how the particular pronunciation informants were chosen is also needed.

As excellent as the pronunciation section is, some matters are handled superficially. It is not enough, for example, to account for Floyds Knobs becoming Floyd Knobs by saying that this sound change occurs “because the combination is hard to pronounce.” Why not say that since the -s in Knobs is anticipated, the speaker drops the s in Floyds? In addition, the pronunciation key is inadequate, and the printer, apparently, has introduced into it several errors. Finally, although the book has a beautiful map in an envelope inside the back cover, the reader is completely frustrated when he discovers that the coordinates of the map in the glossary do not refer to this map at all, but to a highway map which is not included in the book!

A measure of the book’s success is that it whets the appetite for more than its format can accommodate. For example, it would be interesting to know much more about the origins of the names treated and about the nature and role of topographical terms in the naming process. The discussion of dialects would be even more valuable if some note were taken of social dialect differences. Someone needs to compare the pronunciations documented here with pronunciations found in dictionaries, and an analysis of syllable divisions might tell us more about the nature of English words and their formation. Meanwhile, onomasticians everywhere may well be grateful to Professors Baker and Carmony for a careful and useful study which will help the general reader understand the value and fun of a discipline which is perhaps just now coming into its own in the United States after a quarter-century of serious study by hundreds of scholars and laymen alike.

[W. Bruce Finnie, University of Delaware]

EPISTOLA {M. Panzer}

Since most of your readers appear to be supersleuths, I await the charge that there is no chapter on Howard Cosell in A Civil Tongue. I had written “Criticism in the chapter of Howard Cosell, etc.” and it came out “Criticism in the chapter on Howard Cosell, etc.”

One or two of the items in III, 3 brought back to mind a book manuscript I once failed to sell. It was titled “Psychiatric Cook Book.” I list a few of the recipes:

Plum Loco Pudding
Freud Oysters
Stuffed U.N. Conches
Inferiority Cornflakes
Inn Bread
Accident Prune Pie
Kooky San Jacque
Schizo Farina
Lemon Derange Pie
Filet of Timid Sole
Apple Jitters
Depressed Duck
Fruit Conflict
Moronated Herring
World’s Fear Special
Group Therapea Soup
Poultry, Geist
Egg Foo Jung
Milk of Amnesia
Oddballed Eggs
Traumatic Ketchup
Menthol Blocks
Powdread Milk
Confused Manna
Addle, Pate
Lobster Claws, Trophobia
Raw Shacktoast
Withdrawn Butter Cookies
Sib Ling Chow Mein
I Qcumber Salad
Dream of Celery Soup
Padded Celery Soup
Shocked Liver
Senilla Tea
Shuddered Wheat
Mixed Nut Cake
Oafmeal Cookies
Oedipus Compote

[M. Panzer, New York, New York].

Twenty-six Sticks

Alden Stahr, Columbia, New Jersey

Oscar Ogg, in his The 26 Letters (Thomas Y. Crowell 1961), maintained that the Phoenicians invented our alphabet. But I hold that they didn’t need to “invent” it—all they had to do was go out among the Cedars of Lebanon and pick up an alphabet very handily with the aid of a bronze dagger.

I made this startling etymological discovery when my young son Stanley was having difficulty learning the alphabet. I took him out in the woods, and with the aid of a penknife and a high degree of pertinacity we played a game of finding the building twigs of communication.

It’s possible, of course, to start with A and find the letters in alphabetical order (what else?). But the rewards come sooner if we take any letters that come along and gather them helter-skelter until we have the whole twenty-six. Trees and bushes out in the open are too regular in their growth to have any but I-V-Y letters. If you want the odd, difficult letter, go where the undergrowth is thick and branches must twist and sometimes bend backwards as their leaves reach for sunlight. Certain trees have growing patterns that make them good sources of special letters. For example, the branches of wild cherry and gum often grow at right angles to each other to yield such letters as L, T, E, and F. Grapevines, wisteria, poison ivy (!) or other climbers are good sources of curvy letters such as C, G, J, O, P, and Q. Here is where Stan and I found the individual letters:

A - prickly pear
B - wisteria
C - wisteria
D - apple tree
E - wild cherry
F - wild cherry
G - prickly pear
H - spice bush
I - any bush (even ivy!)
J - wisteria
K - gooseberry bush
L - oak tree
M - hemlock tree
N - mulberry
O - Virginia creeper
P - wisteria
Q - wisteria
R - apple tree
S - wisteria
T - gum
U - wisteria
V - maple
W - mulberry
X - black birch
Y - spice bush (or any tree)
Z - prickly pear

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Sexism and Language and Responses to Sexism

Alleen Pace Nilson, Haig Bosmajian, H. Lee Greshuny, and Julia P. Stanley, (National Council of Teachers of English, 1977), 203 pp. and Ouida Clapp, ed., (National Council of Teachers of English, 1977), 150 pp.

In the course of developing Sexism and Language, the authors sent a questionnaire designed to “survey people’s attitudes on the issue of sexism and American English” to 200 randomly selected editors and members of academic organizations concerned with English. Within this elite group an obvious struggle is going on between those sensitive to the broad currents of linguistic change already at work and those blindly committed to the status quo. Representative of the latter was the following response: “Our editorial policy … is more concerned with clarity and a certain purity … than it is with the rather laughable and probably hopeless attempts (and meaningless ones, at that) to rid English of all sex-determined language.”

The two books dealing with sexist language recently published by the country’s largest professional organization of English teachers will probably not enlighten so confused and self-righteous a “thinker,” but for those more alert and open-minded, they provide solid, well-documented evidence of the damaging influence on both sexes of some of our most cherished linguistic habits.

Responses to Sexism, the current manual in the NCTE’s Classroom Practices series, contains 26 teaching units designed to help students recognize sexism in its many subtle forms and to develop flexible attitudes toward human individuality. Five of the units focus specifically on language and form a useful supplement to the longer volume.

Sexism and Language is an ambitious effort to analyze obstacles to sexual equality both in the vocabulary and grammar of standard English and in its use in several disparate subject area—law, literature, marriage, dictionaries, and children’s books and teaching materials. Inevitably the result is uneven. Like many publications put together from papers related to each other only by their authors' common concern, the book lacks a sense of progression. Further, the distinction between language itself and how it is used is often blurred: much of the analysis deals with the stereotypical images of females and males perpetuated through written materials rather than with words themselves or the exclusionary grammatical “rules” imposed on children by generations of well-meaning teachers.

Despite these weaknesses, each of the eight essays in the book contains valuable insights. Stanley’s “Gender Marking in American English: Usage and Reference” demolishes any lingering belief that masculine-gender “generic” forms are sexually inclusive. Arguing that the “generic” encourages writers and speakers of English to perceive the male sex as the social standard (p. 62), Stanley uses extensive quotes from contemporary writers, both male and female, to demonstrate her case.

Nilsen’s description of her work with young children, in which she tested their responses to William Labov’s Type I (naturally developed) and Type II (formally taught) rules of grammar, supports Stanley’s conclusions (p. 178). In other essays Nilsen discusses the definition of sex-roles conveyed through both slang and standard English. Her introductory article, which traces the media’s handling (from 1970 to 1976) of linguistic sexism as a social issue, will serve as a useful chronology for future students of the subject.

Bosmajian’s “Sexism in the Language of Legislatures and Courts” provides historical perspective on the way “women have been defined, labeled, and stereotyped as (1) mother and wife, (2) infantile and incompetent, (3) seductive and immoral, and (4) nonpersons and nonentities” (p. 77).

Gershuny explores the pervasive consequences of prejudiced Biblical translations: for example, the failure to render the Hebrew ‘adham (translated Adam) as the equivalent of “human being” in Genesis 2. Her discussion of subliminal sexism in dictionary definitions includes the best analysis in the volume of the harm done males (as well as females) by linguistic stereotyping (pp. 147ff).

The Valuable “Guidelines for Nonsexist Use of Language in NCTE Publications,” which the Council published in 1976 is included as an appendix.

As long as teachers, writers, and editors ignore the androcentric bias of standard English, its maiming—and obscurantist—effects will continue. As these books demonstrate, however, pressures for change are widespread and sometimes come from unexpected sources. One reply to the questionnaire the authors of Sexism and Language sent out came from an editor who wished to remain anonymous: “We have made few, if any, changes,” he wrote, “and do not plan to do so.” Tucked in the same envelope was a second, unofficial response: “This is a note from ________’s secretary,” it said. “His answer and the deletion of his name speak for themselves. I’m working on him.”

[Casey Miller and Kate Swift, East Haddam, Connecticut]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Westcountry Words and Ways

K.C. Phillipps, David & Charles, (North Pomfret, Vermont, 1976), 144 pp.

As long ago as 1905 the great British dialectologist Joseph Wright observed: “There can be no doubt that pure dialect speech is rapidly disappearing even in country districts, owing to the spread of education, and to modern facilities for intercommunication.” The gloomy foreboding implicit in this remark has been largely borne out by subsequent events: the spread of literacy and education, and the snobbery that too often accompanies them; the improvements in transportation and travel, which have brought a shakeup of a hitherto stable population; the calamitous influence of two world wars; the coming of radio and television—all have had a hand in the standardization of speech and the decline of colorful localized variations in it.

Having said all that, it comes as a surprise perhaps to think that English dialects are still “alive and well” in many parts of the U.K. The nation-wide Survey of English Dialects (SED), organized by Leeds University, was not launched until 1947, yet it found a wealth of material to record during the 1950s and 1960s.

Dialect is one of the most enduringly popular and approachable areas of linguistics. It often evokes nostalgic reflections on the past, and the humor and practical “horse sense” it often embodies seem to epitomize solid stable values in an all-too-changing world. Although for modern linguists, dialectology is still somewhat rooted in the era of comparative philology, many people with an interest in local words and their origins do their share to preserve both the study and practice of dialect speech. Local dialect societies flourish throughout the British Isles.

The wish to preserve, to “gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost” is a vital element in K. C. Phillipps’s Westcountry Words and Ways. It is a thoroughly enjoyable book, aimed both at the enthusiastic “word-buff” and at the person who is interested in a bygone way of life. Dealing specifically with the dialect and customs of Cornwall and West Devon, the book presents us with an abundance of absorbing data all put together in a highly readable, often humorous way. In a 19-page discursive introduction, Mr. Phillipps, lecturer in English at Leicester University, briefly chronicles the history of dialect research and points up some interesting aspects of Westcountry speech: how it makes use of humorous similes like “You’m like a cow handling a musket,” or turns coarseness into a virtue, as in “The devil shits luck for some, but when he comes to we, he’s hardbound [constipated].” Mr. Phillipps mentions how scientific modern dialectology is; he deplores the lack of interest in the International Phonetic Alphabet exhibited by dialect enthusiasts and general readers alike— but he shrewdly avoids using phonetics himself in this book.

The main part of the work, also discursive, although arranged alphabetically under keywords, is really a detailed expansion of some elements of the introduction. The keywords act merely as points of departure for entertaining, often anecdotal articles on Westcountry life and language. The arrangement suits the browser rather than the reader looking for something specific, and despite the presence of an index the linguist wishing to know about the Celtic element in Cornish English, for example, will have to realize in advance that much of what Mr. Phillipps has to say on the subject is contained under the keyword PADGY-POW.

This unsatisfactory arrangement is regrettably not the only drawback of the book; there is also one that arises from Mr. Phillipps’s desire to prevent interruptions in his text. Thus the rather unusual method is employed of referring to an endnote by using a key phrase rather than a number. It was rather disconcerting to find that without realizing it I had read a passage on which there was a note, even though the author explains his system in the preface.

Yet these points are rather pedantic quibbles. This is not a reference work and my judgment of it is based on its entertainment value, which is very high. Westcountry Words and Ways is a thoroughly well-researched book. The author has gone to local magazines, learned journals, works of literature, and old dialect glossaries and dictionaries, and has also drawn on his own experience as a Westcountry dialect speaker.

True, the book is very often parochial in character, and we have the inevitable lamentation for the loss of things past and detestation of things present (especially motorways and city-dwellers). But in case you think that Westcountry dialect is like a wine that doesn’t travel, just dip into this book and see if you can resist the humor of remarks like “If that hedge wudn’ there he’d a gone right through ‘un,” or a sign on a beach saying “Do not sit in deck-chairs with wet bathers.”

[William Gould, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, England]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Classification and Index of the World’s Languages

C.F. and F.M. Voegelin, Elsevier, New York, Oxford, Amsterdam, 1977, ix + 658pp.

This is a nonobjective review. It has to be. Faced with an index of thousands of names of languages and dialects, only a minute fraction of which are familiar to him, the poor reviewer pursues his feeble ken to an O altitudo! and marvels at the courage that undertakes such an impossible task. That the task, though mainly shouldered by the Atlantic (= ‘Atlaslike’) team of the Voegelins, was shared to a certain extent is inevitable. Over forty distinguished consultants assisted, plus a number of graduate students. Was there enough help? Perhaps not. Perhaps there never can be.

The book is based in part on previous work. In twenty separate numbers of Anthropological Linguistics (1964-66), the authors gave us Languages of the World. Now, with an NDEA contract and the help of the consultants referred to, they have provided a complete revision according to a model provided by Charles F. Hockett ([ix]).

Let me say that the book is superior to others of the sort known to me—which does not imply lavish praise. The nit-picking that follows will be directed at nits that should not have been found in such a volume. The introduction makes a debatable remark in the first sentence: “one century [has elapsed] since the recognition that all the languages of the world could yield proto languages.” This certainly needs qualifying (with “theoretically” or the like?), for what are we to do with Burushaski and all the other languages with no known relatives?

In approaching such a dazzling work, a reader soon turns to his own pet fields of interest or fortuitous areas of useless knowledge. Thus I turned first of all to Celtic, hardly an out-of-the-way realm compared to Chorotega or Upper Cowlitz, granted, but possibly less familiar than French or German to some readers of Verbatim. Here I was self-righteously appalled. I found the traditional divisions of p-Celtic and q-Celtic, but with no explanation of the terms and with no reference to embarrassing contradictions in Gaulish or to recent illumination emanating from discoveries in Spain. I realize that limitations of space are crucial. But space could have been saved in giving the number of monoglot speakers of Welsh in four digits, instead of a fictional six. And the name of the Breton town Vannes takes slightly less ink than the incorrect Vannetais (= the dialect, not the town). To say that Breton is “probably an off-shoot” of Cornish saves space, to be sure, by avoiding many problems. The statement on Patagonian Welsh is most ambiguous: “spoken in Chubut Territory, Patagonia in South America in 1891” (p. 103); it is still spoken there! In listing the counties in which Welsh dialects (North and South—an intolerable oversimplification for anyone even slightly acquainted with Welsh dialectology) are spoken, the book provides an unpardonably incomplete statement. Manx, called “extinct in this century”—possibly a true statement— was presumably still alive and doing poorly when the book was written, for the last native speaker (born in the 1870s) lived on with Celtic stubbornness until 1974. There are still speakers, however, who learned it as a second language.

Let us look at Germanic, the group to which English belongs. A rather old-fashioned division is chosen (East, North, and West Germanic), although we are made aware of alternative theories (p. 139). But what evil genius led the authors to divide Scandinavian into Continental and Insular Scandinavian? A great many speakers of what are called “Continental” Scandinavian languages live on islands. We might well ask why English is not called “Insular West Germanic” ! There is, however, greater fault in historical distortion. The Faroese would be justifiably incensed to learn (p. 141) that their islands are “Dutch-administered”! They never have been, and even the Danish control is slackening more and more in a surge of Faroese nationalism. The figures on speakers of Faroese (and Icelandic, too) are too low, as contrasted with those of Celtic speakers, which are, for the most part, too high. Perhaps the relative exuberance or mendacity of trusted consultants is to blame.

Including English-based Creoles as members of West Germanic, while no doubt intriguing to anthropologists, lends considerable distortion to the classification, especially when the numbering system implies that English (No. 5 in the Germanic group) is more or less equivalent to Gulla (No. 7), or that German and Dutch together (“Netherlandic-German”) have somehow the same statistical weight as, e.g., Beach-la-mar (No. 16, p. 144), with its 50,000 speakers!

Another hobby of the reveiwer’s is Armenian. In this book we find a traditional classification which, while not damnably wrong, was nevertheless shown by the outstanding Armenian linguist Hrachia Acharian/Ajarian as early as 1909 to have certain shortcomings. In his dissertation at the University of Paris, one of the few works by him not written in Armenian, but in French—and therefore accessible to the West, including Indiana—he gave syntactical and morphological proof of a much better tripartite division. Meillet’s notion that Armenian was most closely related to Greek is based on eclectic features and, despite endorsement by Eric Hamp, for whose linguistic acumen this reviewer has boundless respect, is probably not well-founded; it is, nevertheless, accepted in this volume.

Living in Yonkers, N.Y., I am interested in a group of neighbors who call themselves “Assyrians.” In fact, the two centers of Assyrian activity in the United States are Yonkers, N.Y., and Flint, Michigan (the latter also has Druses, to make the picture more intriguing). At the Assyrian National Headquarters in Yonkers one hears, from the lips of people so gentle that they can hardly ever have come down like a wolf on the fold, that they speak the “language of Jesus Christ” (unaltered). How does a book like the present one give an average citizen information on such matters? Not at all. Assyrian is discussed only in its usual connotation, as a “dialect” of ancient Assyro-Babylonian. Even if one looks up Aramaic, bearing in mind the spoken language of Palestine at the time of Christ, there is still not much help. Somewhere under “Modern Aramaic” this so-called Assyrian language should be included, but it is far from clear, in the present classification, where it belongs. (Incidentally, here, as well as in other places in the book, the use of such a paltry device as the semi-colon baffles the poor reader. Such an admission of one’s own inadequacy ought to be eschewed, but it is difficult for me to tell whether a given semi-colon is a wall excluding extraneous elements, or a gate granting access, or a permeable membrane allowing osmosis. A look at p. 303 makes me vote for East Aramaic; but I could be wrong, and my neighbors, if dependent on works like this, will continue to confuse themselves with Christ and possibly Nebuchadnezzar as well.)

If these areas about which I know a thing or two (hardly three) evince so many defects, how can I have any great confidence in the accuracy of those sections (most of them!) where I know nothing? Logicians tell me that this is faulty reasoning. I do not believe them.

There is a bibliography, called “References” (359-383). Now, despite the worldwide scope of the material covered, well over two-thirds of the books listed (articles, too) are in English. Moreover, in those titles in foreign languages, there are incredibly glaring errors—in German, French, Russian, etc. Can you believe that there was an Akademie der Widdenschaften in Vienna? There are many signs of haste in this portion of the book. Perhaps the printer should not be paid.

I wonder how many people can afford the price of the volume? I cannot. I am also not convinced that such a work is really possible. We may need an encyclopedia instead. We also need maps. The ancient Meillet-Cohen had them, and I still consult them with some profit, although not for all parts of the globe. We probably also need tapes and films and many other things.

Come to think of it, there probably hasn’t been a completely satisfactory and satisfying work on language since Panini, and even that great grammarian is said to have had his faults. There is, however, one great merit (in addition to many others, despite my strictures) and that is: its overwhelming list of languages should give pause to those friends (now, perhaps, ex-friends) of mine who mouth sweeping utterances about “all languages.”

[Robert A. Fowkes, New York University]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Eponyms Dictionary Index: A Reference Guide to Persons, Both Real and Imaginary, and the Terms Derived from Their Names

James A. Ruffner, ed., (Gale Research Co., 1977), xxviii + 730 pp.

For those readers not in the mood to reach for the dictionary, an eponym is defined by the Random House Dictionary (Unabr.) as ‘a person, real or imaginary, from whom something, as a tribe, nation, or place, takes or is said to take its name: Brut, the supposed grandson of Aeneas, is the eponym of the Britons.’

Among all of the medical, anatomical, biological, and other names (e.g., Shick test; Voight’s lines; Swainson’s hawk, thrush, cliff swallow, warbler, and warbling vireo; Swammerdam’s vesicle; Unwin’s extensometer, etc.) are nestled Peter Principle, Munchausen’s syndrome, and Murphy’s law (attributed to ‘Murphy Edsel?'). Browsing around, one finds such gems as Queen Elizabeth’s pocket-pistol, Knipperdollings, and Yongjong era. Moving in the other direction (to the eponyms themselves), we can be dismayed that Brillat-Savarin, besides meaning ‘gastronome,’ has provided the name only for Savarin, which is a kind of egg bread (and of course, a brand name for a coffee), while Pierre Paul Broca gave his name to about ten anatomical spaces, angles, and other details. William Carey Brinkerhoff, although only B.’s speculum appears to have been named after him, ought at least to have a longevity potion named in his honor: he appears to be alive though born in 1861. [For the less fleet of fingers, that’s 116 years.]

Extremely useful as reference, especially for etymologists, this book lists 20,000 terms and their 13,000 eponyms. Moreover, each is documented by reference to one or more of the 500 biographical sources neatly listed in a bibliography at the front. Silhouette, Ferris wheel, poinsettia, boycott, nicotine—they are all there.

Inevitably, as the editor suggests in his Preface, some items have been missed, but the only omission we noted was of Urdang’s Law, “If you want a book badly enough you will buy it regardless of the cost.”

EPISTOLA {George O. Morrison}

Below is the answer to a query regarding a word in Mariah Magazine (Fall) found on page 58.

Thanks for your inquiry. A hornsmith is a person who crafts or carves items out of horns or bones (or synthetic substitutes such as plastic nowadays). Items might range from a belt buckle to a knife butt. Hornsmith may be part of western Rocky Mountain vernacular.

[George O. Morrison, Monrovia, California].

EPISTOLA {John P. Kidner}

Cheers & Jeers

The menu of the Sunningdale Country Club, Scarsdale, N.Y., offers: crisp Long Island duckling, “Montmerancy,”; soft shell crabs, sauteed almondine; tournadoes of beef, “Forestiere” [guaranteed to give you wind?]; and mocca layer cake, and All entries [are] served with soup, salad, fresh vegetable, potato & coffee. What we want to know is whether serving potato with the coffee is a rebellious reflex against the (California-inspired) practice of serving a salad with the appetizer? [Richard M. Lederer]

Sign on a restaurant in Richmond, Virginia: veal parma john. [Mrs. Howard Williamson]

Comments about self-referring words in VERBATIM [IV, 1] have evoked some interesting correspondence from several readers. Now a letter from Geertrui H. Garbolevsky on quite another subject sparks the invention of the self-canceling phrase. She provides the following, from “one of the better known universities in the Tidewater, Virginia, area”: This card entitles this student to attend your class. Students who report without this permit should be sent to the Registration Center to determine their registration status. [How does the instructor know what to do about students who have no card?] Another gem, from the railroad station in Amsterdam: We give no information. And a long-time favorite of ours, to be found on every Band-Aid and other sterile gauze pad package made by Johnson & Johnson: Sterility not guaranteed if package is opened.

Two candidates for the Word Most Often Misspelt: minuscule (usually “miniscule”); millennium, millennia (usually “millenium, millenia”). On the basis of actual count, the latter misspelling is actually preferred by The New York Times, which, significantly enough, considers itself “the Keeper of the Anals” (or is that Annals?).

This season’s candidate for the word most often misused: bemused. It means ‘confused, befuddled; lost in thought, preoccupied’; it is more often misused to mean ‘amused,’ usually by journalists.

Words of Size and Shape

I am fond of words. I like the pulsing, throbbing ones that send a sentence bounding: plummet, succubus, plunge, or the angular ones that tear their way through—shock, stark, acrylic, act. Although not enthusiastic about the thin words that set the teeth on edge—needle, skewer, shrew— nor the chameleons that change their color to hide their meaning: appears, figuratively, alleged, I truly admire the big, full-blooded ones that stand like a bulwark, making the verbs work like hell to overcome them: dungeon, mawk, holocaust, turgid, gothic. There are light words that float their message—pastoral, serene, languid, and there are the cossacks that thunder through the mind: savage, murder, cauldron. I like the crisp words, too, those that make thoughts dance: crystal, dazzle, crackle. Still, I am aware of the tyranny of pure definition as it strips some words of their inherent, almost restful euphony—gangrene, influenza. Some there are that have a way of grouping themselves into an invitation to join them in a journey—down across the ways, or summon me to view an exciting panorama of space and time: dawning of an age, a field of stars, or that give me a trip along landscapes of nostalgia: twilight of an era, corridors of time. Yes, sir. I like words. Each is a nucleus upon which misty thoughts— concepts—can condense to become vivid with life and color. And I am most fortunate for I have thirty-five thousand of them immediately at hand, and quick access to a quarter million more. Yes, indeed. I like words. [John P. Kidner, Alexandria, Virginia].

EPISTOLA {George R. Downs}

As you probably already know, the commonly used “four letter words” of 1977 were rarely, if ever, printed in the early days of our country. As a matter of fact, when spoken, it was only in private conversation—and then in a lowered voice.

This is leading up to the article, “That Dirty Bird,” which appeared on the front page of Volume III No. 3 of your publication.

My boyhood home was in Minnesota (where herons and their habitats are numerous). My uncle who was born in Iowa well before 1850 told me (who was born in 1903) that the popular name of “That Dirty Bird” was derived from its habit of evacuation when disturbed and taking flight. According to my informant, the bird was called shitpuke, an easily acceptable explanation considering both the fact that the birds were numerous and immediately flew away from the disturber so that it was difficult to tell whether the bird was regurgitating or was evacuating its bowels. Hence the double “shite-poke” name.

There is little or no need to consult erudite dictionaries. “Ask the man who has seen scores of the Dirty Birds.” Incidentally, the effluviae are white or brownish white and in many places stain the bulrushes where the heron makes its home. [George R. Downs, Denver, Colorado].

EPISTOLA {John P. Jehu}

I would add the German word Kafer to the list in Mr. E. E. Rehmus’ penultimate paragraph of “La Cucuracha” [III, 3]. [John P. Jehu, Albany, New York].

EPISTOLA {L. E. Braun}

A woman in our town is well-read and well-traveled and holds at least two academic degrees. Yet she speaks of the Hillamanian Mountains in Tibet, Simonese cats in Thailand, and Flamingo dancers in Spain.

“You mean Flamenco,” someone murmurs, and she replies, “Yes, that’s what I said: Flamingo!” After a week in Taxco, where the Mexicans corrected her daily, she still called the town Tacos.

What causes this aberration? Where is the malfunction?

Needless to say, her friends are enchanted. She serves steak with Bordello sauce. Her young nephew watches a TV show called Sesame Seed. Her dining room set was designed by Drunken Phyfe. [L. E. Braun, Detroit, Michigan].

EPISTOLA {Harry L. Arnold, Jr., M.D.}

“I” before “e” Except after “c,” Or when sounded as “ay” As in “neighbor” or “weigh,” EXCEPT IN

Neither could either weird, surfeited, counterfeit sheik raise a stein, seize the height by stealth or sleight, or summon the leisure to make an obeisance by the seismograph on the weir.

Sheik and obeisance were of course once exceptions like neighbor and weigh, but no longer, at least in the U.S. [Harry L. Arnold, Jr., M.D., Honolulu, Hawaii]

EPISTOLA {E.J. Moncada}

H. N. Meng [III, 1] asks if spit, as in spit and image, might not be a truncated form of spirit. N. Shapiro suggests [III, 3] that we are dealing with “honest-to-goodness spit” (with which opinion I fully concur) and quotes a 15th century French phrase to substantiate his opinion: son pére tout craché. Proverbial expressions have a way of bouncing back and forth across territorial boundaries and surely one of the most exciting, though frustrating, studies must be the search for the original version of any given proverb. Later reflections of this French phrase may be seen in Mateo Aleman’s Guzman de Alfarache (Pt. I, 1599) where we find the phrase “le decia que era un estornudo suyo y que tanta similitud no se hallaba en dos huevos,” (Clasicos Castellanos, I, 93). James Mabbe, the English cleric who translated Guzman into English as The Rogue (1622), renders this line in his usual verbose fashion as “my mother would tell him, that I was like him, as if I had been spit out of his mouth; and that two Egges were not liker one another, than I was like him” (Tudor edition, I, 84), where the Spanish estornudo (sneeze) is rendered by spit (both, after all, being forms of forceful ejection). In Italian we also have the phrase, e suo padre nato sputato. M. P. Tilley, in his grand A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1950) lists: As like him as if he had been spit out of his Mouth (M 1246) and dates the first example of its use as 1598.

It seems to me that the documented use of spit in such a context makes the expression spit and image a “corrected” form of an earlier participial use of spit, as in spitten image. Given this construction, the derivative spit ‘n image (which puzzled Meng) becomes understandable and perfectly suits the meaning of the phrase as in: he’s the spit ‘n image of his father.

Ruth Brown, in her article on sign language, VERBATIM, III, 3, Hear Finish Before (Pause) You?, points out that nouns indicating the human male are signed above the nose while those belonging to the female are signed below the nose. She then, jocosely I hope, states that “long ago someone must have decided men have minds while women have mouths.” The more charitable and traditional explanation associates the gender with the head piece. The sign for man is much like the gesture of catching hold of the brim of a hat (remember those curious items of dress?). The sign for woman, the thumb tracing a line roughly from the inferior tip of the auricle down to the chin, represents the string or ribbon from the woman’s bonnet which was fastened beneath the wearer’s chin. [E.J. Moncada, Gallaudet College Washington, D.C.].

EPISTOLA {M. DeChant}

It is well known that Milwaukee’s largest ancestral group is German. Imagine the plight of a doctor’s secretary who has to spell and pronounce names like these all day, every day:

Greiveldinger
Griepentrog
Habersetzer
Klotzbuecher
Krautkramer
Kronschnabel
Pflughoeft
Promenschenkel
Reifschlager
Schwabenlender
Seidenstricker
Wesselschmidt
Schachtschneider

[M. DeChant, Thiensville, Wisconsin].

EPISTOLA {Donald Weeks}

In a recent issue of VERBATIM [III, 2], “an (unspecified) number of years ago” was used. In my own writing I solve such a problem quite simply to my satisfaction by putting it: “A (n unspecified) number of years ago.”

One further thought: Why is it that during Lent some bakeries produce “hot × buns” instead of “hot + buns”? [Donald Weeks, London, England].

EPISTOLA {M. R. Paskow}

The Japanese word for insect is properly konchu, a more common word for insect or bug is muchi; the proper name for cockroach in Japanese is aburamuchi, literally ‘oil-bug.’ In III, 2 my letter concerning “The Enigmatic Eggplant” has the following error which is probably due to a misreading of my script: “Italian farmers who just cultivated” should read “Italian farmers who first cultivated.” [M. R. Paskow, Sonoma, California].

EPISTOLA {Donald E. Schmiedel}

In VERBATIM [III, 4], proofreader Barbara Marsh wondered why chili was so often spelled chile. It would probably be more in order to wonder why the Spanish word chile appears so often as chili. I don’t know but I would guess that it is a result of an Anglo mispronunciation of the last syllable of chile. Yes, the name of the pepper is identical to the name of the country, and the vowels rhyme with we-they. [Donald E. Schmiedel, Las Vegas, Nevada].

EPISTOLA {Carol Coon}

The managing editor of the Old Farmer’s Almanac suggested writing to you for help on a reference question I sent to them. We are trying to find the origin of the phrase, old man winter. It is such a common saying but I can’t seem to get a handle on how it started.

Any suggestions you have will be greatly appreciated. [Carol Coon, San Franscisco, California].


Readers may send their speculations, suggestions, etc., directly to Ms. Coon/Reference Librarian/Bay Area Reference Center/San Francisco Public Library/Civic Center/San Francisco, CA 94102.

Editor

EPISTOLA {Charles Bremer}

Our “American-English” is fast becoming the international language that will eventually become the means for all the peoples of the world with which to exchange knowledge and ideas and to strive toward mutual understanding.

Unfortunately, our language in its present state is far from an ideal system of symbols, growing as it has from an array of northern European and Romance languages with a sprinkling of American Indian, Yiddish, and a few dozen other languages.

While this mixture has tended to develop an extensive lexicon, it has complicated it to a degree that endangers its usefulness. Therefore, steps must be taken now to purify and distill our language so that it can be used accurately and be taught to our children and to people of other countries quickly and easily.

Efforts such as yours are at work toward making our language a more accurate and useful tool for communication and should earn widespread interest and support. [Charles Bremer, Lincoln City, Oregon].

EPISTOLA {Joanna B. Paxson}

The February 1977 issue was a delight. Walter C. Kidney, in “The Seating of Zotz” [III, 4], pointed out that reading widely leads to an extensive but not always useful vocabulary. (Emphasis added.) Au contraire.

Ten years ago I had a lunch interview with a writer/ prospective employer. He said he’d always liked the word borborygmus and looked at me expectantly. “Oh yes,” I replied brightly, “Greek for ‘tummy-rumblings.’ ” The job was mine.

I had only learned the word two weeks previously from an amusing column in The Saturday Review of Literature.

Looking back, I bet the writer had learned the word from the same source. If you read this, Mark, I’ll hear your chuckle. [Joanna B. Paxson, Washington, D.C.].

EPISTOLA {Willard Espy}

A cartoon in VERBATIM [III, 4] revolves around the expression to bend over backwards. I am led to share with you an excerpt from a letter I received recently from Robert I. Colin, of Gloucester, Massachusetts.

When, before retirement, I worked at ITT in Nutley, N.J., I often had two-way correspondence with a gentleman working at an ITT subsidiary in Stuttgart, Germany. Our letters (and conversations at personal meetings) were often polyglot, since we both were handy in each other’s languages.

In one of my letters to Stuttgart, I used the phrase bend (or lean) over backwards. In reply, my colleague wrote that he followed well all of my letter, but “what is this thing about bending over backwards?”

To explain it, I composed several instances where that phrase would apply. Also I cited the (cumbersome) German word, überkompensieren ‘to over-compensate’

Stuttgart was still puzzled. Some months later he came to Nutley on a personal visit. In my office was another ITT employee, a Frenchman. I knew that Stuttgart, like many educated Germans, was proficient in French, so I asked Etienne if he could explain what bend over backwards would be in French.

Etienne paused a minute, and replied, “No. A Frenchman would never bend over backwards.”

Since then I’ve put the question to professors of German, French, Italian, Spanish, and what have you. All were stumped. There the matter rests. I conclude that ethnic differences make certain notions impossible to translate into other languages.

I gather from the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary that bend over backwards originated in this country and is seldom used in England. The earliest citation in the OED is for 1926.

Some of your readers might be able to cite a similar idiom from another language. [Willard Espy, New York, New York].

EPISTOLA {Martin Harris Slobodkin}

I wonder if any other of your readers note a certain deficiency in our English language. That is the proper word or expression which means thinking of the clever answer or the witty retort after the event has happened.

Germans say Treppenwörter literally ‘step-words’ while the French say les paroles d’escalier or ‘words of the staircase.’ Both of these expressions mean that you’ve thought of the clever response while going down the stairs AFTER you’ve left the party.

Of course, no one uses steps anymore. We use elevators but “elevator words” seems too uplifting. If we used the English term, we could call them “liftwords” which does have a lilt to it, but nobody would know what you meant.

May I suggest that we use “wishwords” for these afterwards afterwords in the sense that “I wish I’d said that.”

Do your readers have any other suggestions? [Martin Harris Slobodkin, Cambridge, Massachusetts].

EPISTOLA {F.W. Schaub}

If the milli-helen of W.K. Viertel [III, 4] is accepted by the American National Metric Council, they will probably insist that it be written millihelen, i.e., without the hyphen. Also the official symbol would be mH.

Before it is adopted that body may insist that history be ignored and the definition be that a helen is the ‘amount of female beauty required to launch one ship.’ After all, centigrade has been changed to Celsius (not lower case), and for frequency the unit is a hertz (lower case) rather than cycle.

Since it is planned to eventually substitute 3.6 megajoule (symbol MJ) for a kilowatt-hour, the redefinition of millihelen to helen could be done at the same time. [F.W. Schaub, Decatur, Illinois].

EPISTOLA {Ben Bassett}

Ethel Grodzins Romm says silly hyphenation by computers [III, 4] is no joke for marginal readers. I would carry that further: it is a serious roadblock for young readers.

In Westchester County, N.Y., one of the nation’s richest and best-educated areas, eight Gannett newspapers are promoting a Newspaper in Education program. This plan, it tells teachers, “reinforces the things you teach.” So look at some end-of-line splits from these newspapers:

boo-kends
bul-lhorn
brea-kaway
chee-seburger
di-mestore
dinin-groom
gues-swork
houseb-roken
looses-trife
mor-gue
pru-ned
ris-ked
shel-lfire
shellf-ish
so-mething
someth-ing
stil-lborn
spo-kesman
storef-ront
surpri-se
tee-naged

These may evoke little more than ridicule from a discerning reader. I am concerned that some examples may lead to sloppy writing and mispronunciation.

Reasonably acceptable pronunciation is one key to peer respect. English is full of oral traps. The hazards compound when newspapers omit diacrities from foreign words as most of them do. Habitué without its accent easily becomes “ha-bi-too” for a 14-year-old who lacks French and hasn’t heard the word.

Once the Linotype operator and the proofreader took pride in their work; few absurd divisions of words got by. Even when type is set electronically, means exist to provide logical divisions, even though it may take an extra pair of eyes. This is a hard pill to swallow for companies already saving millions through automation. [Ben Bassett, Larchmont, New York].

EPISTOLA {H.G. Frommer}

“Aunt Minnie’s Chicken Talk” [III, 4] finally answered my question of long standing, why Britons say “keep your pecker up” when they mean the chin.

Other pseudo-X-rated expressions we heard during our four-year stay in Scotland were: “Give me a wee tinkle,” “Knock me up sometime,” and, as my 16-year-old Scottish secretary announced one morning upon arrival at the office, “I didn’t get my piece this morning.”

The last one caused upraised eyebrows until she explained that a piece is a ‘brown-bag lunch.’ Knocking up means ‘knock on someone’s door,’ and the wee tinkle has nothing to do with the water closet. Rather, it suggests the use of the telephone. [H.G. Frommer, Mequon, Wisconsin].

EPISTOLA {W.S. Tower, Jr.}

Why does Barbara Walsh [III, 4] prefer chili to chile? When she finds chile on a menu, it is almost certain to be part of the phrase chile con carne, perfectly good Mexican for a dish which presumably originated in that part of the country which became Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Why Americanize part of its name? Would she prefer ‘kid al horno’ to cabrito al horno, or ‘turkey mole’ to mole de guajolote?

Incidentally, Francisco J. Santamaría, in his monumental Diccionario de Mejicanismos, defines chile con carne as ‘a detestable dish which, with the false designation of Mexican, is sold in the U.S. from Texas to New York.’ He must have eaten some of the canned stuff. [W.S. Tower, Jr., Essex, Connecticut].

EPISTOLA {Joyce A. McConeghey}

Re your review of Words and Women in the September issue of VERBATIM: I quote, “…the unassailable fact is that all sages have always been male and we would defy… anyone… to unearth evidence …that the word has ever been used to refer to a female.”

I cite the following passage from the first page of David Niven’s Bring On The Empty Horses:

When Gertrude Stein returned to New York after a short sojourn in Hollywood, somebody asked her, “What is it like—out there?”

To which, with little delay and the minimum of careful thought, the sage replied, “There is no ‘there’—there.” [Joyce A. McConeghey, San Francisco, California].

EPISTOLA {Marianne B. Garland}

Perhaps the Austin Awareness League would find useful the avowed statement of Deacon Ephraim Stebbins of long ago, quoted in Burgess Johnson’s The Lost Art of Profanity, Bobbs-Merrill, 1948. Said Deacon Stebbins, “Unabridged dictionaries are dangerous books. In their pages men’s evilest thoughts find means of expression. Terms denoting all that is blasphemous, foul or obscene are printed there for men, women, and children to read and ponder. Such books should have their covers padlocked and be chained to reading desks, in the custody of responsible librarians, preferably church members in good standing. Permission to open such books should be granted only after careful inquiry as to which word a reader plans to look up and how he plans to use it.”

I derived my appreciation of the language very early from my father who was a merciless critic. My mother was a church organist, and the current minister telephoned our home once and asked my father, “Is your wife convenient?” My father replied, “A strange question, and for what purpose I cannot imagine, but yes, I believe I would say that she is quite convenient,” and hung up. My mother cried, the minister called again, and all turned out well after my parents were finally speaking. [Marianne B. Garland, Wellington, Kansas].

EPISTOLA {Carolyn Farkas}

Reinhold Aman’s letter in VERBATIM [III, 3] refers to Professor Fowkes’s quest for a palindromic English city name. Is that on the level? (Level, by the way, is a Maryland town northeast of Baltimore.) [Carolyn Farkas, Cecil Community College North East, Maryland].

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