Vol IV, No 3 [December 1977]

We Do Not Talk Only With Our Mouths

Walburga von Raffler-Engel, Vanderbilt University

IN THE PAST, linguists have analyzed language as if words were the only means for conveying a message. They have ignored the fact that human communication is a combination of words and gestures.

When an Englishman shakes his head he indicates no as much as when he says so. To a Greek this same head movement means yes. To say no, he nods.

Cultures vary greatly in the meaning of gestures. I know of one American girl who waved goodbye with the palm of her hand open towards the Italian male whose attention she did not appreciate. Little did she know that in Italy one waves goodbye with the back of the hand and that showing the palm of the hand means ‘come closer.’

Why have linguists taken so long to incorporate gestures into the analysis of language? Even those anthropological linguists who actually looked at their informants did not analyze body movements. Most of the time, they made note of them to serve as a prop for the time they would get down to the real business of analyzing the verbal transcript. In addition, the bulk of their transcripts came from monologs. Linguists seemed to ignore the fact that most of natural language occurs in dialog, within a conversational setting.

Stranger yet, the psycholinguists working with infants by and large ignored the obvious: eye contact and touch between mother and child, not to mention the infant’s pointing at objects.

What all these linguists did was to transcribe what they heard and then work on their transcripts as if they were the real thing. What they did not realize is that spoken and written language are different media of communication. When we read in a piece of literature that a professor asked a student, arriving for a conference, why he had come, all the while keeping an eye on his watch, we realize that this professor did not encourage the student to speak. When we look at the linguist’s transcript of such a speech act, we find no mention of the professor’s gazing at his watch. An incomplete transcript makes a fully accurate interpretation impossible. The nonverbal component of human communication is as vital to the message as the verbal component. Anthropologists have recently become aware of how much information on nonverbal behavior is provided by the written records of the past. A new branch of anthropology, called literary anthropology, has developed with the task of extricating the forms of the nonverbal behavior of ancient civilizations from their writings, to be added to what otherwise may be deduced from visible records on tombs and other pictorial representations.

Psychiatrists, of course, have always incorporated the movement of the body in the analysis of human interaction. Belatedly, linguists too have come to recognize that people gesticulate while they talk. In 1941, David Efron published a remarkable book comparing the nonverbal behavior of assimilated and nonassimilated immigrants in New York City, showing how culture had influenced their body movements. Nobody noticed. In 1972, Efron’s book was reprinted with a new title, and Gesture, Race, and Culture sold very successfully. In 1952, Ray Birdwhistell wrote his Introduction to Kinesics relating gestural behavior to spoken language. The term kinesics caught on among the linguists of the time, but in the 1960s, the kineme went the way of the phoneme. Now kinesics is definitely in again. A series of books on body language began to appear in the early 1970s, and this subject is now covered by ever longer chapters in new textbooks. Every meeting of linguists, psychologists, or anthropologists— and recently, also sociologists—has its section on nonverbal behavior.

The area is still new and the terminology is still in flux. What I propose is a tri-partite division: (1) Body language for bodily movements in general as they express the mood of the individual, nervously walking back and forth, fidgeting with his hands, or crossing his legs for a more comfortable sitting position: (2) Kinesics for message-related body movements which can substitute for a verbal expression or accompany a verbalization, reinforcing it, e.g., a German speaker can simply touch his forehead with his index finger or while doing so may say that such and such a person is a bit nutty; Mediterranean people have a rich repertoire of kinesic gestures; Anglo-Saxons are supposed to “keep their hands still”; and in one African language, numbers are always indicated by the fingers; (3) Social movements, probably the most important category of the three, comprises those movements of the body that are obligatory within social interaction. These are movements which children may be explicitly taught, while kinesic motions are generally acquired with verbal language. Greeting formulas, for example, enter into this category. In Europe, upper-class youngsters learn how to kiss a lady’s hand without their lips actually touching the skin. Black Americans have developed the highly stylized art of the soul hand-shake. This ritual may take up to fifteen minutes and is seldom if ever practiced in inter-racial encounters. The hand may touch any part of the forearm—and even the elbow— giving a warm sensation of companionship. Among orthodox Jews, members of the same sex may hug each other, but men do not shake hands with women. The Japanese, who find the custom of hand shaking distasteful and unclean, greet each other with a deep bow. Persons of equal status get up at the same time—not an easy feat to accomplish because the two parties must ogle each other unobtrusively in order to synchronize their movements. When there is a disparity in status, it is very important that the person of lower status be the last one to get up. If a subordinate were to get up before his superior, the subordinate would feel highly embarrassed: it would be tantamount to his having insulted his superior.

It is in the realm of social movements that the generation gap is most apparent. Some young Japanese refuse to bow to their fathers, some young Europeans balk at handkissing altogether, and some young women feel that they are not truly liberated if they allow a man to hold the door open for them.

Research in kinesics is not easy. It requires a great deal of patience and technical know-how, first to videotape or film the subjects and then to analyze their behavior. One can start from the meaning and compare all the body motions that go on when an identical meaning is expressed verbally by any of the interactors, or one can concentrate on body parts and transpose on the editing tape all shoulder shrugs, foot tappings, and so on. Eventually, one is still confronted with the task of checking each of these separate body movements within all other movements that go on at the same time, thus forming a gesture cluster. Applauding with a sarcastic grin on one’s face is not the same thing as applauding with a cheer.

Beyond the gestural behavior of people in conversation with each other, one can also research how people perceive and eventually reproduce the kinesic behavior of a third party, e.g., when talking about somebody who usually sits in a very formal manner, people themselves often straighten their posture. Making an analogy with metalanguage, I call this behavior metakinesics.

The relationship between the original kinesic movement of the model and the metakinesic movement of the reproducer is not one of absolute identity but rather one of sameness of proportion. The speaker who reproduces a kinesic model does so within his own body size, the speed of the ongoing conversation, and the limits of the space available between him and his conversation partner. His reproduction may be faster or slower and larger or smaller than the model, but it tends to maintain the same proportional relationship which obtains in the original for duration, range, and direction of movement.

Sex identification is very apparent in metakinesics; people copy movements most readily from those of the same sex. In addition to a natural inclination toward sex identification, in metakinesics one can observe strong sex taboos. These taboos seem much more pronounced in men than in women.

Men are more likely to copy men’s behavior; they rarely copy a woman’s body movements in exactly the same way she has made them. A strong taboo seems to intervene, and the movements are copied only approximately or incompletely. One female subject, mentioning a woman wearing a big earring, brought her hand to her ear in exactly the same fashion the woman talked about was in the habit of doing, while the male subject only touched his ear rather than his earlobe, and his hand remained there for a briefer period. Another male subject described a girl “gently playing with her hair.” He cupped his hand in the fashion that the girl had done when stroking her hair, but he never actually touched his hair. On the videotape one sees the hand going up toward the hair and then, almost suddenly, arresting itself and performing the stroking motion in mid-air. The same male subject copied the eating motion of a woman by bringing his hand up, but again he arrested it just short of touching his mouth.

The process of metakinesics is basically psychological. The individual reproduces someone else’s body movement within his own physical capabilities and social constraints, a process that is largely noninteractional.

The kinesic movements that go on during a conversational exchange are of a different nature. There is a constant interaction by which one conversation partner influences the other and vice-versa. The reciprocal influence is strikingly apparent in the body postures of interactors, which tend to synchronize. Sometimes they cross their legs, put their hands on their laps, scratch their heads, and so forth in what has been termed interactional synchrony. At times, one person who has not performed such an act in concert will “stick out like a sore thumb.” In most interactions, in couples as well as in groups, there is a leader. This dominant partner establishes the tone of the conversation, which may be formal or relaxed, and the other participants then adjust their postures accordingly.

When an adult interacts with a child, he tries to accommodate his nonverbal behavior to the age of the child. The adult sits close to a small child, touches the child when he feels that the little one’s attention is wandering, and makes use of extended movements of the hand and the arm to illustrate what he says.

In nonverbal behavior, as in all forms of human behavior, there are elements that are innate and common to all men, and there are specific forms which are culturally conditioned. Children are socialized into their cultures from the moment of birth. In North America, newborn babies are usually separated from their mothers and are bottle fed by a professional nurse at regular intervals. In other cultures, babies enjoy a playful body touch and rhythmic rocking by their mothers, who also sing to them.

As children grow up, they adjust to the kinesic behavior of their communities. Eventually, they establish a pattern of expectancy for gestural behavior similar to the expectancy which makes one’s mother tongue understandable and other languages foreign. When, in the Vanderbilt Linguistics Program, this expectancy was tested by showing a videotape of a conversational interaction involving a certain amount of gesticulation, persons from low kinesic cultures hardly noticed any details of the ongoing gesticulations, while persons from high kinesic cultures—such as South Americans—recalled most of the movements. It is no surprise to find that bicultural individuals have more than one kinesic code just as bilinguals possess mastery of more than one language.

In truth, we do not talk only with our mouths.

Explication de cricket

Norman W. Schur, Weston, Connecticut

Mr. Herbold’s list of baseball metaphors in VERBATIM [IV, 1] tempts me to submit an analogous list of cricket terms which have similarly been taken into the general language by the British. From my British-American dictionary (No. 21 on the VERBATIM Book Club list) I have culled some examples, to which I must append some interpretation and explanation, since very few Americans have the remotest notion about cricket and its mystique, and analogies to baseball are treacherously misleading. But let’s try.

1. To carry or carry out or bring out one’s bat is to ‘stay with it,’ ‘outlast the rest’—the exact nuance depending upon the context. This expression applies to the batsman (batter) who is not put out during the match while his teammates fall by the wayside, and therefore leaves the pitch (‘field’) only at the end of his side’s innings (yes, it has an -s in the singular: an innings is ‘the period of play during which a side is in [or up]') carrying his bat with him, instead of leaving it for the next batsman, as used to be done in former times before everybody could afford his own bat. His ten teammates are all out; thus he has ‘stayed with it’ and ‘outlasted’ them.

2. To do something off one’s own bat is to do it ‘on one’s own.’

3. To get a duck or be out for a duck is to ‘fall flat on one’s face,’ to ‘fizzle.’ Duck, in this idiom is short for duck’s egg, a British variant of goose egg, meaning ‘zero’ (or nil, as the British prefer to express it in scoring). Thus, a batsman who is out without scoring a single run is said to get or be out for a duck.

4. If one gets a duck in both innings (in first class, or major league, cricket, each side has two innings) one bags a brace. The term is used to describe a ‘double fizzle,’ as it were. You fall on your face, get up, and do it again.

5. A batsman who makes his first run is said to have broken his duck. Hence to break one’s duck is to have ‘broken the ice,’ ‘made a start’ and to ‘be on one’s way.’

6. To have a good innings is to ‘have a good long life.’ Innings is used metaphorically, like inning in America, to mean a ‘turn,’ an opportunity to accomplish an objective. Innings applies especially to a political party’s period of dominance, or the term of a jobholder generally. But in context, a good innings means a ‘life that is satisfying in both length and accomplishment.’

7. To hit (or knock) someone for six is to ‘knock him for a loop,’ ‘knock the daylights out him.’ In cricket, a ball hit beyond the boundary (roughly equivalent to into the stands) scores six runs, and a six is analogous to a ‘homer.’

8. A maiden over is a bowler’s achievement. He bowls (pitches) six balls, and that constitutes an over. If he can do this without allowing any runs, this is called a maiden over (a curious reference to virginity). Metaphorically, then, a maiden over is a ‘successful ordeal,’ one through which the protagonist has emerged unscathed.

9. To queer the pitch is to ‘queer the act,’ ‘spoil some-one’s chances,’ ‘gum up the works,’ ‘throw a monkey wrench into the machinery’ (or, as the British say, a spanner into the works).

10. To be on a good wicket is, like being on a good pitch, to ‘be in a good spot.’ To be on a good wicket with someone is to ‘be in favor’ with him. To be (or bat) on a sticky wicket is to be in a bad situation. Wicket has come to mean ‘situation’ generally. Thus, the newspapers spoke of the “American wicket in Vietnam.”

11. To up or draw stumps is to ‘pull up stakes,’ ‘clear out.’ The stumps are the three upright sticks which form part of a wicket (here wicket means something else again) which the bowler tries to break each time he bowls, and any fielder with the ball in his hand can aim at as well while the batsman is running, in order to score an out. When the match is over, the stumps are pulled out of the ground and everybody goes home.

12. At close of play means (referring to anything) ‘at the end of the day.’

13. To play a straight bat (considered correct form) is to ‘play fair’—the very essence of cricket. Which leads to…

14. It isn’t cricket, a sentence and a sentiment with which I’m sure we are all familiar.

Much of the above may be confusing, but space does not permit a dissertation on cricket—a game, a way of life, a religion. Suffice it to say that in Britain as well as in America, the national sport has been a fecund source of colloquialisms found in the everyday language of those who may never have attended a match.

EPISTOLA {(The Reverend) Frederick W. Cropp}

There is an almost universal misunderstanding of the use of the ministerial adjective, the title “Reverend.” All my life I have tried without success to correct editors, newscasters, parishioners, and the general public in the proper address of the clergy.

The easiest way to remember the rule is to equate the word Reverend with its counterpart, the formal use of Honorable. No one would address a judge as “Honorable” Jones, yet “Reverend” Jones is common practice.

The only time Reverend is used without an article before it is in a public address or in a letter addressed to the Reverend Clergy or Reverend Fathers, although now perhaps the adjective could precede Ladies or Sisters in some communions.

Always, in every other case, the correct form is The Reverend Mister or briefly The Rev. Mr. (or Dr. or Mrs., Miss, or Ms.) Jones.

Years ago, I wrote a bit of doggerel which states the case. It reads, in part:

The use of the “Rev.” when you speak to your preacher Is as tricky a thing as I ever will teach yer; For he’s not “Rev. Jones” though a seminary grad, He is “Mr.” Jones and that’s all my lad. [(The Reverend) Frederick W. Cropp, Santa Barbara, California].

Winking Words

Philip Michael Cohen, Aliquippa, Pennsylvania

Twenty years ago, a group of Cambridge students decided to establish a sport where they could excel, the traditional ones being tiresomely full of experts. When they chose tiddlywinks and began standardising rules and equipment, they surely had no idea that it would become nationally prominent (with the aid of the Goon Show players and Prince Charles) and even take root across the Atlantic. There is now a small but enthusiastic community of U.S. winkers, concentrated at Eastern colleges but with colonies elsewhere.

This form of tiddlywinks offers great scope for strategy as well as physical skill, but even the most serious winkers retain a lighthearted attitude toward the game. This is particularly clear in the vocabulary. The two basic actions of the game are called squidging (shooting a wink with a special oversized wink, or squidger) and squopping (covering a wink with another, thereby paralyzing it).

While HYTHNLBTWOC was beating Zoo at the 1974 North American Championships, I was collecting vocabulary. The list which follows does not seem to have changed much since.

birthday or Christmas present an unexpected stroke of good fortune, such as bad shot by an opponent.

bomb a long-distance shot used to break up a pile of winks. Also v.i. and v.t.

boondock to shoot (a wink) far from the scene of action or off the mat. Incidentally, winkers who graduate & move away from the centers of activity are said to be ‘boondocked.’

Bristol an effective gromp (q.v.), developed at Bristol U., in which the squidger is held perpendicular to the pile and parallel to the line of flight.

butt to knock (a wink) on or off a pile by shooting another wink at it on a low trajectory. Also kick.

click off to remove a wink from another with a shot that ends by just touching (clicking against) the wink below, not moving it.

constipated said of a position in which one has winks but, because they are squopping other winks, they are tied down and useless. (Free = unsquopped.)

dance (of a wink) to wobble around on another wink, the rim of the pot, or the mat.

drunken wink a wink that behaves unpredictably or bizarrely.

eat to squop; especially, to squop thoroughly, completely covering the lower wink. Also, sometimes, chomp.

Goode shot a shot used when one has a wink touching, but not on an unwanted pile. The wink is pressed hard into the mat and, when released, goes through the pile, thoroughly scattering it.

gromp to move a pile as a whole onto another wink or pile. Also v.i. and n. Also trundle—an Ottawaism.

lunch to pot an opponent’s wink to gain strategic advantage; to trounce, especially in get lunched.

nurdle to shoot (a wink) too close to the pot to be pottable or otherwise useful. Obsolete in England, where it originated in the early 60s.

perversion any winks variation, such as Winks Tennis.

Petrie piddle desquopping a wink by squeezing it out from underneath a pile.

piddle to make microscopic adjustments in a pile, usually to walk it off a friendly wink.

shot an exclamation of commendation for a good shot. Antonym: Unlucky. A Briticism, with some currency in America.

sub or submarine v.t. or v.i. To shoot a wink (usually one’s own) under another. In England called an autosquop or ULU. (The latter, pronounced YOO-loo, is said to refer to an unfortunate habit of the University of London Union team.)

EPISTOLA {William J. Cleere}

Here is a genuine entry from the Santa Cruz, California, telephone directory:

FÜTZI NUTZLE

Several years ago the Los Angeles Rams football team had a player named Vivyen Leigh; I am not sure if he is still active. An All-American college player of several years ago at Iowa University was named Wonder Monds. [William J. Cleere, Sunnyvale, California]

The “Uphill Mississippi” Phenomenon and Openness to Unfamiliar Ideas

Robert L. Birch, Washington, D.C.

The statement that the Mississippi river “runs uphill” will usually cause a quizzical eyebrow to suggest further enlightenment. When it is pointed out that the distance from the center of the earth to sea level is greater at New Orleans than at the latitude of Minnesota, since the spin of the earth accumulates water around the equator, the responses begin to diverge.

One common reaction is the statement that since the Mississippi runs downhill “relative to sealevel” we should not say that it “runs uphill.” Other reactions range from observing that, by this reasoning, Mount Chimborazo, in the Andes, is taller than Mount Everest, since it pokes out further into space, to the question as to whether it would take more energy to pull a freight train “uphill” from Chicago to New Orleans or “downhill” from New Orleans to Chicago.

Aside from its use as a psychological litmus paper, the question of the proper terminology to use in discussing the “uphill Mississippi” phenomenon can bring a number of magnitudes of the shape of the earth into perspective. Before thinking about the hydrostatics of this problem I would not have been able to guess whether the difference between the equatorial and the polar diameter of the earth were fifty feet or fifty miles. When a friend brought it to my attention that the difference is about thirteen or fourteen miles, I began to imagine waterskiing up the side of a thirteen-mile-high mountain of water as I traveled from the polar regions to the equator.

The next question that began to tease my layman’s instinct for paradox was the question of what effect the slowing or speeding up of the earth’s spin would have on the distribution of ocean waters and on the shape of the solid part of the earth.

After some frustrating library search and discussion with specialists, I found myself more than ever intrigued by the apparent indifference of the academic world to a phenomenon of such interest to me as a nonspecialist. If the students in colleges and universities are not given paradoxes to play with they are quite likely to become dulled into the assumption that science consists of a number of dried and categorized bits of information, with no function for the sense of whimsy and the play of the imagination.

The current phase of my inquiry has to do with the mathematical handles that would be needed to correlate earth rotation rate with the sea levels suggested by raised beaches and similar phenomena.

OBITER DICTA: Ad Litteram

Noel Perrin, Dartmouth College

One reason so few Americans write letters is that we don’t know how either to begin or to end them. We were taught, of course. Older Americans learned in school to begin a letter with something called the salutation, and to end it with something else called the complimentary close, both of these finely graduated in degrees of servility. (And why not? They were copied from eighteenth-century England. In that caste-conscious time and place, there was a proper amount of servility to squeeze out for every recipient. One might sign one letter with a groveling “I have the honour to be, my lord, your lordship’s most humble and most dutiful servant” and the next with a curt “Yours ever.”) Younger Americans, without ever having heard of salutations and complimentary closes, have picked up the surviving simplified forms of both, and feel awkward if they don’t use them.

But they also feel awkward if they do. Our age values sincerity. It is obviously insincere to sign every letter “sincerely.” Or to begin every one, even to people you despise, with the word dear. Dear enemy. Dear finance company which is about to repossess my car. Dear divorced husband.

Our age also values warmth. Warmth involves personal recognition—a warm smile is one that takes account of the person smiled at. But ritualized beginnings and endings by their essence deny recognition. Not only is the IRS official who writes to question your deductions not “yours truly” (if anything, you are his), but the stock phrase looks past you as if you weren’t there.

Letters written to companies are especially difficult. Sex as well as politeness is a problem. Say you’re writing to Texas Instruments because you’re not happy with your digital watch. Old style, you would begin the letter either “Dear Sirs” or “Gentlemen.” But new style?

There is no new style. I have one friend who has started writing “Gentlepersons”—but this is conscious mockery, and not at all likely to catch on. “Sirs/Madams” would be suitable only for correspondence with the proprietors of a coed whorehouse. If elided to Smadams, it’s ugly in a smeary, smudgy way. (Most words beginning with sm- are.)

What that seems to leave is “Hi, there,” which may be all right if you’re a cheerleader, and “Howdy,” which works in spoken discourse only, even in Texas itself.

Letters that companies write to individuals aren’t easy, either. No one knows how to sign them. “Yours truly” is fading fast, except in IRS offices. Regards are still popular, but threatened, because no one is really sure what a regard is. All agree that you must send several, and they must either be your best ones or warm ones, but that doesn’t help much. Result: Many business men have begun to sign their letters “cordially.” It’s warm, all right: cor, cordis ‘heart.’ But then what happens to sincerity, if you claim to be writing from the heart to all the people on a mailing list you have just bought?

I have no solution to offer, except maybe to turn to extreme simplicity, simplicity as great as the “hello” and “goodbye” that make telephoning so easy. A couple of thousand years ago, an Egyptian cabinet minister sent a letter of official commendation to one of his senior colleagues. Here is the complete letter. “Apollonius to Zeno, greeting. You did well to send the chickpeas to Memphis. Farewell.” No problems of false cordiality, no insincere sincerity, no struggle over intimacy-level. We could do worse.

OBITER DICTA

Nancy Barron, Santa Barbara, California

The first task of the student abroad is to find a suitable room. This I did and was signing a lease in Munich, where I had gone to live as a Fulbright Scholar. The question of Kaution, ‘a deposit,’ came up. I inquired politely whether it would be returned when I moved out. But I erroneously used mich ausziehe rather than ausziehe, so saying, “If I take off my clothes, do I get my money back?” The prurient landlord leered while his good wife explained.

While helping a roommate transfer belongings to a new apartment, a friend’s overladen microbus was stopped along the highway. “What do you think you are doing?” the policeman demanded. “Why I’m helping this guy move,” was the American’s hasty reply. Or so he thought. He confused sich umziehen with umziehen so that the German heard “I’m helping this guy undress and change.” Herr Offizer proved less sympathetic than my landlady. A traffic ticket was drawn up, but at least it cited no charge of indecent exposure.

Mich is accusative. But neither is the dative reflexive safe. I walked into a party one snowy evening, and at once my host asked if he might take my coat. “No thanks, I’m cold,” I said when I should have phrased it, “It is cold to me.” Conversation stopped. I had just announced that I was sexually frigid. Things went from bad to worse. As I began to warm up by the fire, I mentioned that now I was warm. Only this time, neglect of the reflexive rendered it, “I am homosexual.” Thank goodness the company caught on before I blurted out, Ich bin nun heiss, meaning “I’m really turned on now, fellas.”

Another trick the Germans play with their language is the preposition ploy. They simply Scotch-tape a preposition like a prefix onto a verb, and presto, they have a viable new word which likely has little to do with its parent. Idiom governs connotation of the compound. The non-native speaker must beware. I once informed house guests that they were welcome to stay with me, since I had often umgebracht friends at my place before. I should have said untergebracht. Terrified, they retreated to a nearby inn. ‘To have (someone) spend the night’ is unterbringen, whereas umbringen means ‘to murder’ them.

Somehow I made it unscathed through one year at the Universität in München. I certainly learned one thing: The profs don’t teach you all you need to know in a seminar listed Deutsch Semester 3.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Glossary of Faulkner’s South

Calvin S. Brown, (Yale, 1976), iv + 241 pp.

This is a useful, nontechnical glossary of Faulkner’s words and phrases written mainly “… for any reader who did not share with him the time and place called Yoknapatawpha— that richly regional Southern culture of the period between the two world wars.” As the jacket summary implies, all readers will learn something from this book because the language and culture of those decades (1919-39) have undergone enormous change, and Yoknapatawphans who preserve the old regional and social dialects as well as the forms and values of those rural Southern folk institutions have little interest today in the literary accomplishments of their late, eccentric neighbor.

Calvin S. Brown is a rare exception among natives of Oxford, Mississippi. Now a distinguished professor of comparative literature at the University of Georgia, he writes this book with splendid credentials: he knows Lafayette County, Oxford, Faulkner, and Faulkner’s writings extremely well. Although there is no substitute for native competence in the study of language and culture, he could have written an even better book had he attended more closely to the resources of cultural anthropology (and geography) in the delineation of his field and of descriptive linguistics (and dialectology) in the analysis and exposition of his materials. These limitations are reflected in the sometimes uneven and always nontechnical content of the glossary.

The text includes an introduction, a set of abbreviations, the glossary, and an appendix. The glossary elaborates words and phrases from those 22 novels and 27 stories that are set in or relate directly to the South. Including one-word transliterations of dialect spellings and cross references, the glossary has approximately 3,000 entries, about half of which are genuinely interesting. More than a few are so common that it is difficult to imagine what kind of speaker of American English is unfamiliar with bird dog, corn bread, dandelion, lawn mower, prissy, rabbit’s foot, razor strop, suspenders, skillet, trolley, and waterbug. And could any user of the glossary have managed to get through The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn without understanding the large number of words that appear in that novel and the present word list? Even the most casual student of American literature should have no trouble with a-holt, ast, ax (‘ask, asked’), bar’l, beatin’es’ b’ilin, bofe, caint, cheer (‘chair’), clumb, coffin, cottonwood, crope, deef, doan, doggery, done (aux.), fur (‘far’), galluses, gwinter, jimson weed, kaze (‘because’), Mars, mourner’s bench, nemmine, ourn, passel, p’int, plum, resk, ruther, Spanish moss, straw tick, ‘sturb, tote, tother, tow-head (‘sand bar with cottonwoods’), trash (‘base people’), truck (‘junk’), vittles, water moccasin, yonder, and yuther, among the more obvious repetitions.

Against those dubious entries, however, stands a substantial body of information. Even with the elaborate discussions of flora and fauna, place names, and historical figure that seem extraneous here and even without authentic local pronunciations that could have been supplied in broad phonetic notation, Brown’s vocabulary of artifacts and social interaction makes the book a valuable reference work. Descriptions of the forms and functions of the bluegum, eating and drinking, froe, hame strings, lap-link, logger-head, maul, pot still, renter, ridge pole, sharecropper, Silver Shirts, third and fourth, vote-rousing picnics, and wagon stake will not be found elsewhere in a modest handbook. Here is an example of authoritative work:

logger-head (C[ollected Short] S[tories of William Faulkner]: B[arn] B[urning] 16): a double-ended, U-shaped hook used (one on each side) to fasten the TRACES to the HAMES. The hames have a series of holes (illogically called a ratchet), and the logger-head’s two hook-ends are fitted into two of these. The choice of holes permits variation of the line of draft and hence the depth of plowing. (This term seems to be unknown to lexicographers.)

Equally impressive in thoroughness, and perhaps more useful in understanding Faulkner’s South, are entries concerning race relationships:

bluegum (S[ound] (&) [and the] F[ury] 84, 85; CS: [A] Just[ice] 343, 344): a Negro whose gums are blue rather than pink. In folklore he is viewed with that mixture of reverence and fear which constitutes awe. He has many strange properties, such as a fatal bite, and he is a particularly adept and powerful conjuror. I know of no exact parallel to Versh’s story, but it is the general sort of tale frequently told about bluegums.

eating and drinking: racial etiquette. Whites and Negroes were not expected to eat and drink together socially. The strength of the conviction depended entirely on the nature of the occasion; it did not hold at all for a casual snack on a job or on a hunt. (In the 1960s during the racially tense time when the Jackson, Miss., airport was under heavy police guard because of the invasions of “freedom fighters,” I saw one of the white police guards and a black employee of the airport sitting side by side on a bench drinking Coca-Colas and chatting. This would have astonished outsiders, but was not even a matter for notice to anyone who understood the conventions.) As the number of persons involved or the formality of the occasion increases, the taboo comes into effect. Minnie and Miss Reba would drink together if they wanted to, but in a larger group Minnie carried her glass back to the kitchen because “she declined to drink with this many white people at once” ([The] Reiv[ers] 113). When a group of whites had breakfast at the sheriffs, “they left Aleck Sander[black (sic)] with his breakfast at the sheriffs, and carried theirs into the dining room” ([Intruder in the] Dust 114). Similarly, Bayard Sartoris has to insist that the Negro family eat Christmas dinner with him instead of waiting until he has finished (Sart[oris] 347), just as Ned sets aside the drink which Colonel Linscombe pours for him in the company of a group of whites in the colonel’s office, and will not drink it until told to do so (Reiv. 285).

And, despite the curious phonological description, no one should object to the following explanation when balanced against its instructive value to novice observers of Southern language and culture:

nigra ([The] Town 84): Negro. This spelling represents the normal pronunciation of many Southerners who do not say nigger. (The knee-grow pronunciation, with both syllables stressed, is not indigenous to most Southern speech.) Faulkner’s mountaineers use nigra where a north Mississippian of the same class would use nigger (CS: M[ountain] V[ictory] 751, 756, 758.)

The Class system within the white caste is closely related to sensitive problems of racial relationships that are critical to real comprehension of social interaction in the complicated microcosm of Yoknapatawpha. This glossary provides excellent sets of distinctions among renters, sharecroppers, and poor whites, and, although journalists and sociologists (from Cash and Dollard to Weller and McGill) have said much the same thing, Brown’s coverage is much more concise and everywhere relevent to Faulkner’s South:

shares, farming on (Sart. 277; S&F 298; Abs[alom, Absalom!] 209; [The] Ham[let] 238): any of various forms of farm tenancy in which the tenant pays his rent in the form of an agreed upon share of his crop. Such arrangements often, but not always, include credit at the farm store or commissary. The share of the crop given to the owner depends on the nature of the tenancy, the ownership of tools and animals used, and the particular crop involved (see THIRD AND FOURTH). Faulkner refers to the three basic classes in his referenct to “the Negro tenantor-share-or furnished-hand” (R[equiem] f[or] a N[un] 245). The tenant simply rents the land for cash and keeps whatever he produces. The “share-hand” provides his own equipment and pays one third of his corn and one fourth of his cotton as rent. A “furnish-hand” (more often called a sharecropper) is dependent on the owner for equipment, seed, food— everything—and pays one half his crop. This payment includes the use of equipment, but food is simply charged at the commissary, to be paid when the crop is sold.

And many more interesting and useful entries are catalogued in Brown’s guide to Yoknapatawpha: a respectable set of moonshine terms, e.g., blind-tiger, bustskull, kettle, pot still, run, and white mule) and fine glosses of coon, deer, fox, and ‘possum hunting; of bears, barns, and boll weevils; of easy riders and Uncle Bud:

Uncle Bud moved across the water
To keep the boys from screwing his daughter,
Uncle Bud.
Corn in the crib what ain’t been shucked
And a gal in the house what ain’t been fucked,
Uncle Bud.

One surely would have appreciated the remaining stanzas and the arrangement (guitar chords, at least) of this old favorite.

Had Brown consulted Odum and Vance, he might have improved the cultural geography of his book, e.g., the discussion of delta is incomplete (failing to integrate the five components, the basins of the Atchafalaya, Red, Ouachita, St. Francis, and Yazoo rivers, each of which is legitimately described as “a delta”) and, like the ambiguous term Black Belt (apparently not part of Faulkner’s lexicon), easily misunderstood (Mississippi Delta: all five components with reference to the river, but only the Yazoo with reference to the state). Cultural maps, such as those provided by Odum and Vance, would have been more useful than his reprinted essay from PMLA in identifying the subregions of the South: from Virginia to Texas there are at least 44 of these, and the heart of Faulkner’s South—Lafayette County, Mississippi—is set squarely in the middle of the Interior Ridge of Tennessee and Mississippi, from the Buford Pusser’s “Walking Tall” County in McNairy County in the north through Oxford to Philadelphia and the badlands to the south.

Had he made better use of the available materials of American linguistic geography, many entries could have been improved with respect to both accuracy and sociohistorical implications, e.g., several hundred of the entries in the word list have been systematically investigated in the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States project (based in Atlanta). Its findings might have improved some of Brown’s entries. A fice, for example, is usually not just a ‘small mongrel dog,’ but a ‘noisy and contentious, dyspepsic little dog,’ usually spelled feist (probably from OE fistan ‘to fart.’ cf. Scot. fist dog, Eng., feisty and fizz). This is reinforced in Faulkner’s “Shingles for the Lord,” where the dog, one of the central points of interest in the story, is called “that trick overgrown fyce,” with trick (a word omitted from Brown’s list) surely meaning ‘troublesome.’ Indeed, many Southern folk speakers believe the feist (fice/fyce) is a breed apart, as distinctive as the Catahoula cur.

Although most of that information is available in any good dictionary, as is so much of this glossary, the historical dictionaries should have been used more carefully by the compiler. The definition of juke joint, ‘a cheap restaurant or cabaret with music furnished by a jukebox,’ is both misleading and interesting. It implies the place takes its name from the coin-operated phonographs, which had no currency according to the Dictionary of Americanisms before the end of World War II (but check the release date of Glenn Miller’s “Jukebox, Saturday Night”). At any rate, jook joint is older (DA 1942), and jookhouse (‘whorehouse’), according to L.D. Turner has African etymons (Wolof and Bambara) and was observed in Gullah in the 1930s. The matter is interesting because, if jukeboxes were played in juke joints during the days of the WPA (i.e., prior to WW II), Faulkner’s reference in “Shingles for the Lord” is acceptable; if not, it is an anachronism.

Similarly, the glosses of blind tiger, fatback, flying jenny, side meat, and sowbelly are incomplete, but the definition and explanation of greens is perhaps the weakest. If outlanders are really to be taken into consideration, this will not likely be helpful: “any leaves that can be or have been boiled for eating. Greens, used alone, implies cooking. If the leaves are to be eaten raw, they are called salad greens.” Since virtually all flora can be boiled for eating, a reader might assume that Yoknapatawphans eat grass, if not the foliage of jasmine, spiraea, honeysuckle, and Cherokee roses. According to Brown’s introduction, such interpretation is not at all far-fetched: he notes that the Shreve McCannons are unfamiliar with all of those plants and that a college student at Cornell, “A bright girl from Brooklyn,” thought Lena Grove was contemplating dressed pelts when she said in Light in August, “I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.”

Brown also says in that same paragraph of the “Introduction”: “One man’s obvious is often another man’s puzzle.” Although a phonetician, lexicographer, or linguistic geographer could easily turn that line against the author of A Glossary of Faulkner’s South, it would not be wise to do so. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of insights in this book that will improve every reader’s understanding of both Faulkner and his South. The native speaker always knows the dialect bet ter than the observer, and, when that native speaker is also a good literary scholar, his contributions to both lexicography and philology are certain to be useful. To have this book nearby when reading Faulkner is to have the steady company of a solid authority.

Lee Pederson, Emory University

New symbol, new word.

VERBATIM takes pride in introducing the questpersand, designed and defined by John Langdon, Wenonah, New Jersey.

It is pronounced “and?”

KILomoter or kiLOMeter?

John R. Sinnema, Baldwin-Wallace College

Newspapers have recently announced that the Federal Highway Administration has drawn up plans to convert highway speed limit signs to the metric system next year. Signs will read, for example: Speed Limit 80 km.

While scientists are sure to welcome progress toward conversion, they may be at odds with each other over the pronunciation of the word kilometer. Linguists, in general, will tolerate either pronunciation given in American dictionaries: KILometer, accenting the first syllable; or kiLOMeter, stressing the second syllable. The Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford Universal Dictionary give only KILometer, as did the 1927 edition of the 1901 Webster’s New International Dictionary.

Many teachers seem to prefer kiLOMeter. Indeed, one teacher has been known to have militantly promoted it and attacked KILometer by displaying a poster showing someone vainly pounding a “meter” with a mallet while saying, “You can’t kill a meter.”

Be that as it may, at least as long ago as 1940, Willibald Weniger’s Fundamentals of College Physics supported KILometer with this note (p. 14):

The names of metric units are accented on the first syllable. Confusion sometimes arises in pronunciation of words ending in “meter.” If such a word is the name of a unit, it is accented on the first syllable, but if it is the name of an instrument…, it is accented on the syllable ending in the “m” of “meter.”

The stress on the second syllable, -OMeter, is known everywhere in the instruments thermometer, barometer, odometer, speedometer, micrometer, and in perhaps fifty others. The word micrometer now seems to be used only to refer to the instrument for measurement, the former usage MIcrometer now being supplanted by the word micron. This gives a clue to the reason for the double pronunciation of kilometer. No instrument is or has been indicated by it, only the unit of measure. Thus no confusion can result, whichever accent is used.

More Than Meets the -ine

Sam Hinton, Lecturer in Folklore (and former Director of the Aquarium-Museum) University of California, San Diego

LYNNE TIESLAU-JEWELL [III,3] and Jay Dillon [IV,1] have discussed the use of the suffix -ine in converting an animal name to an adjective. They might like to know that this ending can have a special significance to zoologists, who might use it casually as a metaphor, but only under special circumstances in referring to the animals themselves. Thus an ornithologist might describe a colleague as having an aquiline nose, but would not use the word aquiline in reference to a bird of the eagle group.

The scientific name of an animal or plant consists of two words: the generic name and the specific name. These two together give us the name of a species—the only taxonomic category that actually exists in nature, usually defined as a group of actually or potentially interbreeding populations, reproductively isolated from other such groups. The larger hierarchical groups are artificial, set up by taxonomists for their own convenience and according to their own rules. The genus may be regarded as a group of species (although there are many monotypic genera, each with only one species, such as Homo sapiens; any group-name, or taxon, may be monotypic). The family is a group of genera, the order a group of families, the class a group of orders, the phylum a group of classes, and the kingdom a group of phyla. But this is by no means enough taxa, and it is often necessary to intercalate such terms as subspecies, superspecies, subgenus, supergenus, subfamily, superfamily, suborder, and so on, and some groups— such as the opisthobranch snails—have so many classificatory characteristics that specialists have used a number of less conventional taxa, including tribe, group, infra-family, division, and subdivision.

According to the rules agreed upon by the International Congress of Zoology, whose hundred-year-old International Code of Zoological Nomenclature is, although often revised, one of the oldest effective instruments of international agreement, two of these taxa are required to have standardized endings. All names of families must end in -idae, which is added to the stem of the included genus that is regarded as most typical of that family; and when subfamilies are set up, their names are formed in the same way, but with the ending -inae. (The family suffix is from the Greek eidos, ‘a resemblance,’ while -inae was invented for the purpose.)

Family and subfamily names are properly plural, and cannot be applied to individual specimens without additional words. It isn’t good form to say “That fish is a Sparidae”; if you want to use the whole family name, it has to be in a construction like “Look! A member of the Sparidae!” This is awkward in informal conversation, and a custom—not sanctioned by the Code—has arisen, allowing you to drop the final -ae. So, as an English-speaking ichthyologist, you can say, quite correctly, “I think you’ve got a Sparid there.” (A French colleague would reply “Oui, c’est une Sparide.”) This would indicate that you knew the family to which the specimen belonged but were not certain of the smaller categories. You would not say “It’s a Sparine” unless you were sure of the subfamily, and willing to exclude other Sparid subfamilies such as the Pagellinae and Boopsinae.

One word listed by Ms. Tieslau-Jewell is accipitrine, meaning ‘hawklike.’ This is fine when you want to endow a non-hawk with hawkish characteristics, but would not be used by one ornithologist to another in a conversation about birds. He or she might say accipitrid to indicate membership in the family Accipitridae, but accipitrine in this context would refer only to one of the accipitrid subfamilies—the Accipitrinae (the “true” hawks and eagles). This would considerably narrow the subject of discussion, excluding such subfamilies as the Circaetinae (serpent eagles), Circinae (harrier hawks), Milvinae (“true” kites and fish eagles), Elaninae (white-tailed kites), Perninae (honey-buzzards), Aegypiinae (Old-World vultures; New-World vultures, by the way, are in another family, Cathartidae), Machaerhamphinae (the African bat hawk), and Pandioninae (the osprey). (Not all taxonomists agree with all of this; for instance, the osprey is often placed in a monotypic family.)

This process of forming a vernacular word by modifying, in a traditional manner, a technical word, exemplifies an oral folk process among people to whom literacy is supremely important. There are no formal rules about it, and it’s not usually taught in taxonomy classes; it’s just a custom. And it is a more complicated custom, requiring more memorization, among botanists. They (like the bacteriologists) have their own Code of nomenclature. The botanical Code says that all plant family names must end in -aceae, except for eight very important families whose names were well established back in the chaotic B.C. (before the Code) years. Plant subfamilies end in -oideae, while the suffix -inae is used only to designate a subtribe—a taxon between tribe and supergenus, rarely used except in technical literature. As a result, the vernacular names of the family-groups are not as standardized as those of the zoologists, and you simply have to remember the customary way of informalizing each of them. To indicate membership in the Cruciferae, you say “a crucifer.” A member of the Euphorbiaceae is called “a euphorb,” with the accent on the first syllable, or more familiarly “a spurge.” “A composite” belongs to the Compositae, a great family with 20,000 species. “A legume” is a member of the Leguminosae, while a specimen from the Scrophulariaceae would be termed “a figwort.” This last is one of the well-established English names used at the family level; others are “the grasses” for the family Graminae, and “the evening-primroses” for the Onagraceae.

I’m not sure what customs are followed by the bacteriologists; they seem rarely to speak in the vernacular.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Dictionary of Onomatopoeic Sounds in English and Spanish, Including Those of Animal, Man, Nature, Machinery and Musical Instruments, Together With Some That Are Not Imitative or Echoic

Donald R. Kloe, (Blaine Ethridge—Books, 1977), xi + 153 pp.

In even the most superficial way, the knowledge that French dogs say gnaf! gnaf!, Japanese dogs say han! han! and English dogs say bow! wow! demonstrates that speakers of different languages hear the same sounds but reproduce them differently. English speakers say dog, French chien, and Spanish perro, none of which is related, etymologically, to the other, even in the grand scheme of the Indo-European family of languages, to which all three belong. But, surely, one would expect onomatopoeic words to be similar.

The short story is that, in English and Spanish at least, they sometimes are similar and sometimes not. This dictionary examines the similarities and the differences; it is a fascinating piece of work, usefully arranged. Most important, it treats in a formalized way a segment of language rarely examined very seriously or systematically, yet, for all that, nonetheless revealing. At bottom, it says “Pooh! Pooh!” to the “Bow! Wow!” theory of language origin.

Just as surprising, in some ways, that certain sounds that we take for granted as onomatopoeic have very similar counterparts in Spanish is the revelation that many others about which we might have the same feeling, have quite different reflexes in Spanish. The author, a Professor at North Carolina State University, marks some entries “Word which is truly onomatopoeic” and others “Word with doubtful onomatopoeic characteristics.” Since he has provided no detailed explanation of his techniques, we are left to wonder how he arrived at such decisions. For example, Kloe marks coo (as in bill and coo) as “truly onomatopoeic,” which may be difficult to find fault with. However, bill and coo is similarly marked, and, while that may be correct, the image of a bird’s wandering about uttering “bill and coo” strikes one as strange. The Spanish onomatopoeic counterpart is zurear, yielding zurrrr, zurrrr which, if one bears in mind the way Spanish r is pronounced, reproduces the sound of a dove more faithfully than coo.

Some of the close correspondences are interesting: [English/Spanish] cock-a-doodle-doo/quiquiriquiar (reminiscent of German kikeriki, Italian chichirichi, and French coquerico); cuckoolcucu; grr-grr/rr-rr; gobble-gobble/gluglu-gluglu; and hoopoe, hoopoo/hoopoe.

This book, as the title promises, doesn’t confine itself to animal sounds: under sounds of man we find achool/achu, boohoo/buhu, and gargle/gargarizar among an assortment of biological noises that are best left to Alka-Seltzer commercials. There are some items missing: surely, if susurrar is onomatopoeic Spanish for rustle, the English equivalents, susurration, susurrant, susurrous, and susurrus should be shown.

Notwithstanding other, possible omissions—this review was not conceived as a fault-finding apparatus—the book is extremely useful and interesting. Its organization provides a two-column format, with each section (animals, man, etc.) divided in two: the first gives English as the source and Spanish as the target, the second, vice versa. There are bilingual glossaries, a complete index, and what looks like a pretty thin bibliography. The type is large enough for readers with a seeing disability; in case the number of pages is off-putting, it should be mentioned that the page size is 8-½"×11", but why it is is unclear.

When will compilers of dictionaries, glossaries, and other reference books stop setting headwords for entries all in capital letters? They are hard to read and impossible to spell (since one cannot distinguish between words spelled with small or with capital letters).

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Jewish and Hebrew Onomastics: A Bibliography

Robert Singerman, (Garland Publishing, Inc., 1977), xii + 132 pp.

This is not a book that gives the origins of Jewish and Hebrew names, but it does provide comprehensive information about sources where those origins and histories can be found. Following the bibliographer’s succinct Introduction is a list of 1195 books, periodicals, and articles, arranged under such topical headings as “Biblical Names: Reference and Dictionaries,” “Ancient Near East,” “Greco-Roman Period,” and moving on through geographic categories to “Individual Jewish Names.” An interesting and useful Appendix provides an alphabetical index of some 3,000 Jewish surnames treated by Norbert Pearlroth in his column, “Your Name,” which appeared weekly in the Jewish Post and Opinion between September 1945 and September 1976. That is followed by a brief index of “Individual Names,” by which I suppose Singerman means given names, though my experience with people with the given names of Oppenheimer and Zakarbaal has been, to say the most, small.

The titles alone of works published during the Nazi regime are historically revealing: “Law Regarding Jewish Given Names (Second Decree for the Execution of the Law of August 17, 1938),” “Anderungen jüdischer Namen” [“Jewish Name Changes”] 1939; some later works bearing on the period are “The Nazi Name Decrees of the Nineteen Thirties,” and “Jewish Emancipation Under Attack.” In some cases, of course, there are only some sections of the sources that deal with onomastics, and these are noted.

At the price, this is not a book that any but the most ardent onomastician is likely to rush to buy, but even the more limited libraries should own a copy, for the work has been prepared with great care and obvious devotion. It is a pity that the publisher did not see fit to spend the small amount required to set the book in type rather than in that awful IBM typewriter face. However, it’s the information that counts.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Dictionary of Catch Phrases

Eric Partridge, (Stein and Day, 1977), XV + 278 pp.

At the outset, Partridge confesses that he does not know what a catch phrase (or c.p., an abbreviation he uses throughout) is. No matter: vagueness affords him the opportunity to include and omit material willy-nilly.

This may be a book of some interest and usefulness to British speakers of English, because the entries are predominantly British, but of somewhat less enchantment for Americans, because many expressions are not included and because those American c.p.’s that are treated are of questionable idiomaticity and fact. I fear that some of the informants on whom Partridge relied for American c.p.’s just don’t know their stuff.

For example, after you, my dear Alphonse—no, after you, Gaston is given as Canadian in origin (1959). I heard the c.p. in America in the 1930s and am under the distinct impression that it was borrowed from an older vaudeville routine satirizing French over-politeness. In a quotation from a letter from Dr. Joseph T. Shipley under remember Pearl Harbor: “after the airplane strike of 6 December 1941…” Dr. Shipley, as far as I know, is an American: an “airplane strike” would, in American English, be usually taken to mean that the planes are either not being manufactured or not flying—not the same as an air strike. Similarly, the “day that will live in infamy” was Sunday, December 7, 1941— regardless of the side of the dateline you were on—a fact that used to be known to every schoolboy. Curiously, we find, “Built like a brick shit-house, mostly preceded by he’s. A low Canadian phrase, meaning ‘he’s a very well-made fellow: C20.” Balderdash! It is an American c.p. and almost never applied to a man. Besides, it is often followed, after a pause, by “…and not a brick out of place!” Another: “all the traffic will bear, often preceded by that’s. Literally, it relates to fares and freights; only figuratively it is a c.p., meaning that the situation, whether financial or other, precludes anything more…. It is—Dr Douglas Leechman [‘an authority on Canadiana’] tells me—said to derive from a US magnate’s cynicism.” Poppycock! First, what does “said to derive” mean? Second, traffic means ‘trade, custom,’ and the c.p. means ‘charge as much as possible.’ I have my doubts that it was ever used in what Partridge considers its “literal” sense.

Although I am familiar with the Thurber cartoon and have traveled for years in a crowd familiar with The New Yorker, I have never heard anyone say “All right—you did hear a seal bark.” As far as I know, my hearing is unimpaired with regard to c.p.’s and the bark of the seal. Again, Partridge’s American informants have either slipped badly or took delight in sneaking him some home-grown family expressions that the rest of us don’t know. Where is “Sure as God made little apples”? “Nobody here but us chickens”? “No skin off my teeth?” “…or bust”?

The general presentation of the book could have been improved considerably by labeling Briticisms as well as Americanisms.

Partridge’s comments are folksy and frequently as long-winded as they are inaccurate. Pop goes the weasel, which we (and Arthur Fiedler) have had up to here in America, is described as “Very English.” Polly put the kettle on and we’ll all have tea is described as “increasingly obsolescent” since WW2, yet I have often heard English people refer to it jocularly when they offer to put the kettle on to boil: “I’ll be Polly.”

All in all, the Dictionary of Catch Phrases, which resembles in spirit, if not in fact, Partridge’s Dictionary of Clichés, might have seemed a good idea when conceived, and Partridge undoubtedly had a good time compiling it and writing the comments, but the result is uneven and, in places, downright inaccurate. It is also somewhat old-fashioned, to wit Dr. Joseph T. Shipley’s comment of 17 February 1974 that that’s how (or the way) the cookie crumbles “…is a rather frequent expression in [New York].” Perhaps it is among septuagenarians. On the other hand, some informants suffer either from a short memory or a long imagination. Where was Moses when the lights went out? is from an early 20c. riddle [the same vintage as “What’s black and white and re(a)d all over?”], the answer to which is “In the dark” or, more elaborately “Down in the cellar in the dark.”

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: *Poplollies and Bellibones: A Celebration of Lost Words*

Susan Kelz Sperling, (Clarkson N. Potter, 1977), 128 pp.

[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection]

For dretching the curly crineted child with a fearbabe, the killbuck was sent to a kidcote without an eyethurl.¹

Someone has been having fun with the language, and good fun it is, too. A few hours spent with the Oxford English Dictionary alone could produce enough archaic and obsolete English words to satisfy any paleomorphophiliac, but Sperling, unwilling to leave it at that, has ransacked the nether reaches of Skeat’s, Brewer’s, Wright’s and others’ works to compile a glossary of 300-odd words that have, for some unaccountable reason, fallen into disuse in the language. And odd, indeed, many of them are. Not content with a glossary, the author has woven these relics into a collection of turngiddy tales (in which Teneris the Knight is prominently featured), snirtling telephone conversations with a Miss Fleak [‘an insignificant person’], hoful synonym studies, and iqueme poems that cannot fail to confound and amuse. I utter a short prayer that crossword-puzzle compilers never learn of these words—I am having enough trouble as it is.

Not all of the words are as obscure [at least to me—but then I acknowledge an unfair advantage] as they might seem (or, perhaps, ought to be). For instance, I may be one of the few, but there are some people about who know what a zarf is and what widdershins, welkin, tipsycake [served at The Bell Inn, Aston Clinton, Bucks.—note for British readers], spitchcock, prick-song, purfle, poop-noddy, misgloze, and a few others mean. Whether you do or not, your adlubescence at this romp through should be undiminished, and that’s no fadoodle.

---

EPISTOLA {Robert C. Connell}

A.J. Pollock’s discovery of the self-referring word [IV, 1] should probably be shared with the Apostle Paul. Writing to Philemon, Paul finds Pollock’s very example useful in verses 10 and 11 when he writes:

I appeal to you for my child Onesimus [meaning ‘useful’]. Formerly he [‘Useful’] was useless to you but now he is indeed useful to you and me.

Paul uses useful not only as a self-referring word, but a paradoxical one as well. Of course, Paul was also familiar with the paradoxical sentence, quoting to Titus the classical paradox by the Cretan poet, Epimenides: “All Cretans are liars…” (Titus I:12).

In fact, I believe Paul would have enjoyed your publication and its Epistolae as much as we have enjoyed our very first issue. [Robert C. Connell, Portola Valley, California].

EPISTOLA {Jon Richfield}

In Verbatim [IV, 1], Alexander J. Pollock described his discovery of self-referring words. I am sure he will not be surprised to hear that he is one of a goodly company. Not only did I do so independently some years back, but I was not the first. It is probably re-discovered several times a year, as it is too simple and charming an idea to miss.

At first I called them autonyms, paranyms, and heteronyms, but as a quick consultation with the Shorter Oxford demonstrated that the originality of my terms was no greater than that of my discovery, I called them autoscrips, parascrips, and heteroscrips.

The autoscrip is what Mr. Pollock called a self-referring term, e.g., ‘word.’ Parascrips are self-referring in that they describe opposing concepts: e.g., verb describes ‘verbs,’ but is a noun. And is a typical heteroscrip as is dog. Neither describes anything with an obvious connection to itself. Nonself-referring is not a heteroscrip by this definition. In fact I think it is a parascrip. It defines something opposing what it itself is. This does not deny Mr. Pollock’s line of reasoning; I just think that this system of definition is more powerful. Whether it is the best is another matter.

Certainly, as described so far it does not eliminate paradox. Heteroscriptive is plainly a parascrip, autoscriptive is arguably auto-, para- or heteroscriptive; i.e., no obvious contradiction results from attributing any of the three qualities to it. Parascriptive is neither better nor worse, i.e., regarding it as self-referring leads to no ambiguity, but does lead to paradox. Only heteroscription applies to it without contradiction. In cowardice I recommend that, in order to avoid paradox and ambiguity, the definition of the three terms be based on an algorithm until less empirical theory evolves. A modest suggestion follows:

1: Select the aspect(s) of its own nature to which the word is to be considered to apply.

2: Consider the word as an autoscrip and as a parascrip in turn. If exactly one of the two terms applies, apply that term as a definition and go to step 4.

3: If each case or neither leads to contradictions, or neither applies clearly, apply the term “heteroscrip” as a definition.

4: Stop.

I also take tentative issue with limiting the field to nouns and adjectives. I grant that gerunds and participles were included by implication, in that the classification of nonself-referring was mooted, but why exclude pronouns, e.g., it? In this sentence, if it is not an autoscrip (twice), what is it? What, that, and which are similar cases, while they is a parascrip, unless one is careless about antecedents or allows a shareholding definition as in: What and they (they and they?) are pronouns aren’t they?”

Pronouns may be a bit close to nouns, but what about adverbs? Here is an autoscrip, there a parascrip, unless you stand far away from the page when you read this. Of course, you may say that here is always here to itself, while there is never there. Obviously their status as auto- or parascrips is context-sensitive. Facultative autoscrips?

Prepositions are less satisfactory. I am not convinced that say, between is a facultative autoscrip even if it is between quotes. Does it have any meaning by itself, or must it be read in context? If the latter, it is necessarily heteroscriptive. Similar thoughts apply to articles. Is an autoscriptive? Is a parascriptive—or the heteroscriptive? If you don’t know, I don’t (and if you do, I probably disagree!). Interjections are mercifully heteroscriptive, unless one classes expletives such as curses, as used in comic books, as autoscriptive.

Another critical point is: to what aspect of itself must a non-heteroscrip refer, to qualify for inclusion in the category? E.g., one might consider the concept (as opposed to the term or the letters), abstruse as being abstruse, or abstract as abstract, in which case they are in fact autoscrips. Now note: they are then language-independent. The Dutch Afgetrokken is abstract and the Swedish svarfattlig is abstruse. Term is interesting, as it refers to itself as a term, but is language-independent (as long as the concept term occurs in a given language’s vocabulary, that is). Useful refers to itself as a term and a concept and is a language-independent autoscrip. English, French, etc., are language-dependent autoscrips, being parascriptive in all languages but one, as a rule. In this case the aspect referred to is the language. “Correctly-spelt” refers to itself as a string of letters forming a word, and is in this sense a language-dependent autoscrip.

There is no reason, I think, to separate the autoscriptive aspects of phrases, sentences or other utterances from those of words. Certainly the distinctions would be rather arbitrary. (Compare correctly-spelt, correctly spelt, and This is correctly spelt.)

This question of what aspect is referred to is rather important. For example I can think of no autoscriptive verb unless one regards such cases as spells or sounds as autoscrips. Here the aspect described is surely just the character string or phoneme string. Cases such as exists are altogether too difficult. Certainly exists may be called autoscriptive in referring to itself as a term or a character string; but as a concept? Do concepts exist?

Also, a word can be autoscriptive, parascriptive, and heteroscriptive simultaneously, depending on the aspect one chooses to apply it to. Abstract is concrete in the sense of the string of letters (and therefore parascriptive), abstract as a concept, and heteroscriptive in that it neither correctly nor wrongly describes its own length or language.

Then one considers how trivial nonheteroscription can get. How about printed, italicised, purchased, vibrating, spoken, erased, bold-face, etc.?

I suspect therefore that the concept is little different from the existing problem in logic of self-referring statements and as such is of no importance, practical or theoretical, except as a mental excercise. However, that is important enough for me! [Jon Richfield, Cobham, Surrey].

EPISTOLA {Seamus Hosey}

I was interested to see Gary S. Felton refer to Murphy’s Law in his “Exceptions to the Rule” [IV, 1]. Perhaps he and your readers would be interested to hear the complete Murphy’s Laws from the country of their origin.

(1.) In any field of scientific endeavour, anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

(2.) Left to themselves, things always go from bad to worse.

(3.) If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will go wrong is the one that will do the most damage.

(4.) Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.

(5.) If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.

(6.) Mother Nature is a bitch.

In pondering on these profound truths, Mr. Felton might bear in mind Hosey’s Law — In any compilation of exceptions to the rule, no additional information, however useless, may be ignored. [Seamus Hosey, Co. Laois, Ireland].

EPISTOLA {Norman R. Shapiro}

Robert Fowkes’ article “Esrever Hsilgne” [III, 2] has already provoked considerable comment, but none of it directed at what is, to me, the most interesting question it raises — namely, the origin of the American term “english” as used in billiards and other ball games. (The English are satisfied with the simple word “side.”) For a long time I have cherished the hypothesis that it comes from a mispronunciation of “anglish,” since the ball always rebounds at an erratic angle when put under spin. I even thought that investigation might uncover a French culprit in the woodpile, i.e., anglé, ‘angled,’ easily confused with anglais, ‘English.’ (Compare, for instance, the now discredited derivation of cor anglais, ‘English horn,’ from **cor anglé*.)

Professor Fowkes prompted me finally to look into the matter. Imagine my disappointment at learning (from the OED Supplement, quoting the Sunday Times, 5 April 1959) that the billiard term, traced at least as far back as Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad (1869), supposedly comes from a banal proper name:

The story goes that an enterprising gentleman from these shores travelled to the United States during the latter part of the last century and impressed the Americans with a demonstration of the effect of ‘side’ on pool or billiard balls. His name was English.

I say ‘supposedly’ because the quoted etymology still strikes me as very possibly apocryphal, whether or not my own is closer to the mark.

At any rate, even assuming the shadowy Mr. English to be responsible, after a little reflection it occurred to me that the two hypotheses might, in fact, come together rather neatly. The English, after all, stem from the Angles, who, we are told, took their name from their original homeland in Schleswig, whose shape was that of a fishhook (angul). If so, we have what would amount to a stunning etymological coincidence. Considering the immense number of possible proper names an itinerant billiard-shark might have, we could easily be referring today to ‘reverse smith,’ ‘reverse jones,’ ‘reverse shapiro,’ ‘reverse urdang,’ etc., none of which staggering array of possiblities would have anything whatever to do with the ‘angle’ that so expressively describes the trick shot involved. [Norman R. Shapiro, Wesleyan University].

EPISTOLA {Jeffery F. Chamberlain}

Five laws which excerpt the characteristics of the Intergalactic Conspiracy to Deprive You of Your Right to Happiness:

Jenkinson’s Law — It won’t work.

Pudder’s Law — Anything that begins well ends badly.

Borkowski’s Law — You can’t guard against the arbitrary.

Sattinger’s Law — It works better if you plug it in.

Murphy’s Law (of which Mr. Felton quotes only a portion):

(1.) Nothing is as easy as it looks.

(2.) Everything takes longer than you think.

(3.) If anything can go wrong, it will.

Two contributions to help explain the workings of bureaucracies:

Oeser’s Law — There is a tendency for the person in the most powerful position in an organization to spend all his time serving on committees and signing letters.

Dow’s Law — In any hierarchical organization, the higher the level, the greater the confusion.

Two comments about The Present State of Affairs:

Price’s First Law — If everybody doesn’t want it, nobody gets it.

Kitman’s Law — Pure drivel tends to drive off the TV screen ordinary drivel.

The next three Laws are the only rational observations of which I am aware about the so-called quantitative “social sciences”:

Hart’s Law of Observation — In a country as big as the United States, you can find fifty examples of anything.

The Law of the Perversity of Nature — You cannot successfully determine beforehand which side of the bread to butter.

Dibble’s First Law of Sociology — Some do, some don’t.

(Under this category is Felton’s “Third Law of Experimental Psychology,” which I have known as “Harvard Law” and attributed to A.S. Sussman.)

Under the well-known category of “Miscellaneous,” I offer the Law of Probable Dispersal — Whatever hits the fan will not be evenly distributed. (Also known as — The How-Come-It-All-Landed-On-Me Law), and my own contributions, both of which are probably plagiarized:

Chamberlain’s Laws—(1.) The big guys always win, and (2.) Everything tastes more or less like chicken.

Finally, Laurence Peter’s Les Miserables Metalaw: All laws, whether good, bad, or indifferent, must be obeyed to the letter. (A Metalaw is a law about laws.) [Jeffery F. Chamberlain, Rochester, New York].

P.S. I have seen Ormly Gumfudgin’s “People never go there anymore; it’s too crowded” attributed to Yogi Berra. This reminds me of the venerable oxymoron, “good hitting always stops good pitching, and vice versa” which is supposed to have been said first by the well-known dentist, Casey Stengel.

EPISTOLA {Mervyn Cripps}

Cripps Law — when travelling with children on one’s holidays, at least one child of any number of children will request a restroom stop exactly half way between any two given rest areas.

The Fudge Factor — a physical factor occasionally showing up in experiments as a result of stopping a stop-watch a little early to compensate for reflex error. [Mervyn Cripps, St. Catherines, Ontario].

EPISTOLA {Daniel N. Swisher}

Frank Schulman’s article “The Sinister Side of the Language” [IV, 1] left one amused but not very well instructed in the right forms to use in the Romance languages to which he refers.

In the first place, ‘left’ in Portuguese is esquerda, not esquierda, and ‘right’ is direita (or, in some cases, direito), not derecho. In the second place, one would have expected a bit more consistency on the part of the author in his handling of genders. For some reason, he regularly used the feminine form in translating left and the masculine form in translating right. One hesitates to level the charge of linguistic male chauvinism at Mr. Schulman but has little choice after absorbing his ideas about the inferiority of the left. When referring to right or left as a direction, the feminine form is correct in French, Spanish and Portuguese, since the word ‘hand’ is inferred, which is feminine in all three languages (main, mano, and mão, respectively). It is not proper to use the masculine forms droit, derecho, or direito standing alone as meaning ‘right,’ but only when they are modifying a masculine noun. [Daniel N. Swisher, Woodside, California].

EPISTOLA {Robert J. L. Waugh, M.D., Dunlap-Manhattan Psychiatric Center}

Cheers & JEERS

From The New England Journal of Medicine, Jan. 20, 1977: PLAIN WORD FOR “PASSED FLATUS”

To the Editor: The number of letters (N Engl J Med 295: 1204-1205, 1976) in response to the article on a flatulent patient (N Engl J Med 295: 260-262, 1976) prompts me to add what I consider an interesting phenomenon.

There seems to be a curious omission on this subject both in the literature and in the English language. I do not recall any relevant treatise in the psychiatric literature and I do not know of any commonly used single word in the English language that means “pass flatus”—with the exception of a four-letter word.

This four-letter word is “fart,” which is both a verb and a noun. Such awkward phrases as “passed flatus” or “excreted gas” are always used instead of “farted.” And a “fart”—as a noun — can be visualized on x-ray.

It is also curiously interesting that concerning the other (upper) end of the gastrointestinal tract, the language does have usable single words: to belch and a belch, as well as to eruct and an eructation. The word “fart” appreciably arouses more feelings of disgust than the words “expelled flatus” or “belch.”

The matter gets curiouser and curiouser in our wonderland, and I am awaiting etymologic studies on these words and psychologic studies on a suitable patient.

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LeMoyne Farrell of Ithaca, N.Y., referring to VERBATIM [IV, 1], wonders whether the converted bird in the hand-me-down is a duck-shooter’s old insulated jacket.

“…Such mismatches [between a text and the skills (language and otherwise) of the reader] are of particular interest as sources of difficulty in learning to read and write for children whose language and culture are different from the majority.” [Our emphasis.] — From the errata sheet accompanying Basic Skills Research Grants Announcement, Summer 1977, published by the National Institute of Education, HEW. The halt leading the blind?

Words Across the Sea: the British Crossword Comes to America

Jack Luzzatto, Bronx, New York

The puzzle you see in VERBATIM is a British-style crossword in pattern and clues, but the idiom is American.

The difficulty one has with a British crossword puzzle on this side of the water is not in the ingenious brilliance of the clues, though they are clever: any bright word-minded person can figure them out once he gets the hang of it. Rather, the difficulty is with British references to cricket, soccer teams, English place names (Portland Bill and Tolpuddle have shown up recently in New York Magazine offerings from the London Times), and other insular items strange to Americans. Since about half of the letters are unkeyed, it takes insight to complete the crossword. (It may well be that when VERBATIM’s Anglo-American crossword puzzle reaches London, it will baffle the British.)

In 1941, when I was still making American crosswords, I saw my first British puzzle in an American magazine, the now defunct Blue Book. I had seen other British puzzles in English publications, but I hadn’t really understood them. Now I decided to try to find out what they were all about. The Blue Book puzzle was by-lined, “Edited by Albert H. Morehead.” My cunning little mind said, “Ah, edited!” So I wrote to Mr. Morehead, offering my services as a fellow who could construct a crossword. [The one concession Morehead’s British crossword made in its American debut was its pattern; it had the standard American style, meaning no unkeyed letters. But the clues were British style and certainly baffling to those of us to whom such clues were new.]

Mr. Morehead invited me to his office. At that time he was bridge editor for The New York Times. Because he played bridge with Mr. Edwin Balmer, writer and editor of Redbook, and because he was a most persuasive man, Morehead sold the idea of the British crossword to Balmer, and soon they were published in Blue Book and Redbook. If you know anything at all about the timorousness or conservatism of national magazine policy, you will realize that Morehead pulled off an astounding feat.

Morehead had first discovered the British crossword while covering a bridge tournament in London and had fallen in love with it. Though a bridge editor and card expert, he told me his life’s ambition was to be a lexicographer (and so he was to become, abandoning his lucrative Times bridge column in later years). During that first visit with him, I was delighted to have him accept my offer to supply crossword puzzles, even though he said he would create the clues. I still relish the first clue he threw at me: “Wearing inside outside.” Answer in seven letters, Tedious. Neat, to say the least. Well, I caught on fast and started an association with him which lasted until he died, in the summer of 1966. I salute him as the pioneer of the British puzzle in America.

By now, New York Magazine has offered enough London Times crossword puzzles so that the unkeyed pattern is readily accepted here. For many years, though, American puzzle editors were circumscribed by the set of rules made by the 1924 pioneers of crosswords in this country: Hartswick, Buranelli, and Petherbridge (this last member of the trio is the illustrious Margaret Farrar). These rules called for, among other things: no unkeyed letters, not more than one-sixth of the squares to be black, and not more than one word at a time in a space. The British crossword puzzle violates all of these rules. No American crossword editor, from 1930 to about 1960, violated them, however—except Margaret Farrar, who permitted Marc Connelly, the playwright, to make a few British-style crosswords for the Sunday New York Times.

The great advantage of the British crossword is the elimination of “junk” puzzle words such as those that pertain to Philippine trees, Hindu arcana, and extinct flora and fauna— words that are useful because they “fit.” Now, all answer words can be good, the clues can be witty, tricky, even naughty, but always they are amusing or delightfully baffling. The solving of this type of puzzle gives mental stimulation and is a source of satisfaction, once it has been mastered. The solver, then, knows he has won a battle of wits. It’s the only kind of puzzle I care to solve, for its interest never palls, provided the clues are good.

Do not approach these puzzles thinking the clues will prove to be too hard. Each clue carries an honest definition for the word it identifies; it but cloaks the word in a clever disguise. The disguise is a sentence, which, if you analyze it, gives you a blueprint of the answer.

Bring your powers of reasoning into the fray, and you, too, will look forward to each new puzzle with joyful and eager anticipation.

EPISTOLA {Alan A. Grometstein}

As a mathematician, I found A.J. Pollock’s article on “Self-Referring Words” [IV, 1] an interesting example of rediscovery. The fact that the concept of ‘nonself-referring’ can lead to paradox has been familiar to some mathematicians and logicians since, roughly, the beginning of the present century. It is a pleasure to find the paradoxical nature of the concept recognized in a linguistic setting.

Various logicians, among them pre-eminently Bertrand Russell, noted that the antinomies of logic tended to contain the concept that Mr. Pollock calls ‘nonself-referring,’ and which in mathematics is usually called ‘impredicable,’ as contrasted with ‘predicable.’ (Perhaps a more accurate pair of terms would be ‘self-impredicable’ and ‘self-predicable.')

Some apparent paradoxes can be resolved. That of the Spanish barber, e.g., (who, you may remember, shaved everyone in his town except those who shaved themselves) can be settled by denying the possible existence of such a person. Similarly, when Gonseth (1933) suggested the difficulty facing a librarian who wished to compile a bibliography of all bibliographies which did not list themselves, we can counter by saying that such a task cannot be carried out.

But other paradoxes cannot be so resolved, since part of the paradox shows the existence of the ‘product’ in question. In Russell’s terminology, the question whether the word ‘impredicable’ is predicable or, alternatively, is impredicable (after all, it ought to be one or the other, right?) is a genuine antinomy: we cannot simply deny the existence of the word.

Research into this type of question—the subject being generally called ‘metamathematics’—continues apace. Not too long ago, Gödel showed (roughly speaking) that within any discipline of logic or mathematics, theorems could be validly formulated which could not conceivably be proven true or proven false. The prototypical such theorem is the famous, “This theorem cannot be proven true,” which poses obvious difficulties to someone trying to prove or disprove it. The theorem quoted is simply a formalization of the similar one, “This sentence is false,” which opens Mr. Pollock’s article. Gödel’s work is taken as demonstrating that mathematics is intrinsically ‘incomplete’ in that questions may be posed which cannot be answered.

There is a related question: is mathematics consistent? That is, having proven some theorem, say, Theorem X, are we sure that the antithesis of Theorem X, say, Theorem anti-X, cannot be proven? It would be unfortunate if we could deduce both X and anti-X from valid argument. But there is now reason to believe that a proof of consistency cannot be achieved—not simply that we do not know one at the moment, but that one cannot conceivably exist. As someone said, “We know God exists, for mathematics is consistent; but we know the Devil exists, for we cannot prove that consistency.” [Alan A. Grometstein, Stoneham, Massachusetts].

EPISTOLA {Henry Kaminer, M.D.}

I found “The Encompassing Circle” [IV, 1] well written and very informative. There was, however, one error which I have seen often repeated elsewhere. The slang term gringo, applied to Americans by Mexicans, stems not from the first words of a song, but from the American’s mispronunciation of the Mexican’s term of contempt for them. The Mexicans called the Americans griegos or ‘Greeks’ because they could not understand the American’s speech (speaking English or Spanish) — it was Greek to them! I’m sorry I can’t quote learned references, but as a psychoanalyst and an ex-soldier I find it hard to believe our bold troopers would be singing “Green grow the rushes, oh!” (not lilacs, oh!) — and not a more bawdy song.

Anyway, if that were the case, we should all be called gringoes. [Henry Kaminer, M.D., Tenafly, New Jersey (Similarly, from D.E. Schmiedel Las Vegas, Nevada)]

EPISTOLA {Frederic G. Cassidy}

Referring to “Charmed and Other Quarks” [VERBATIM III, 3], I wonder whether Mr. August A. Imholtz, Jr., is not — however amusingly and imaginatively — running around Robin Hood’s barn to find a non-Quark?

It’s perfectly true that Joyce’s words are compounded from many languages — but why settle on German (except that one may know it better than half a dozen other equally implausible candidates) when the closest one can come to any appropriate sense is a mess of white-curd cheese, rubbish, or trifles? Poppycock (see etym)!

Has not Mr. Imholtz rather easily daffed off the known English senses or past uses of quark? That the West Highland frogs gurgle and quark does not require that Joyce’s birds gurgle (though some birds do) merely because they quark. Joyce was quite clearly enjoying onomatopoeia in this phrase, and we should listen carefully.

For an Englishman, the r in quark would be merely graphic, indicating length on the a: the gulls would be not quarking but quaaking. But for Joyce the r most surely counted for itself. And gulls do not merely quack; they have an added quality, prolonging the resonance of their call, which is well represented by r. Quark is very exactly the sound the gulls were making.

Whether Joyce was already playing in his mind with Muster Mark and therefore heard the gulls rhyming with it, or whether he heard the quark first and that led him rhymingly to Mark, must remain an irresoluble mystery. But — let us rejoice — one need not go stravaiging from the sea-coast of Ireland to that of Bohemia to be charmed by the gulls of Joyce quarking for Muster Mark or to be gulled by the charms of Germanic etymology. In any case, when Irish gulls talk about cottage cheese, they have the decency to call it bonnyclabber. [Frederic G. Cassidy, DARE, University of Wisconsin].

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. Gloze: For tormenting the curly-haired child with a something to frighten a baby intentionally, the fiercelooking fellow was sent to a prison without a window. ↩︎