VOL V, No 4 [Spring, 1984]
Hindi Filmi English Is Coming!
Jag Mohan, New Delhi
Hindi Filmi English can be best described as the patois that has evolved out of the hybridization of English and Hindi—the official language of the Indian Union. Hindi Filmi English (HFE) is the argot of the people working in Hindi films—more so of the film journalists—based in Bombay. In recent years, HFE has matured from an oral tradition into a written language. With Roman transliteration, it is spread on the printed page either in italics or in bold type in newspapers, magazines, advertisements, and posters. HFE, which originated in the film studios, tea canteens, taxis, back alleys, and boozing dens, is now heard in respectable drawing rooms, posh hotels, and even in university campuses.
For a first acquaintance, here are a few examples of the picturesque speech and patter of HFE culled from some journals:
filmi adj., attrib, noun ‘of or pertaining to motion pictures’: filmi English; filmi politics; filmi dinner party.
Hulloji, Thank youji ji is an honorific.
Arre, Yaar! ‘Hi, friend!’
bak bak used as adj. in attrib position: bak bak hero ‘hero who babbles a lot.’
bakofy vb. ‘to babble a lot.’
Chamcha n. ‘factotum; flatterer, admirer; troubleshooter.’
chamchafy vb. ‘flatter; today up to.’
chamchagiri n. ‘the art of flattery.’
pocha, pocha adj. ‘cloying, sickening’: She is full of pocha, pocha sentimentalism.
dhadham-dishum adj. ‘noisy, boisterous; fighting’: He is good in dhadham-dishum scenes.
seedhi-saadha adj. ‘simple; straightforward’; She is a seedhi-saadha woman. Masculine: seedha-saadha.
naach-gaana n. ‘singing and dancing’; lit. ‘dance [from nautch] and music [-gaana].’
These examples should be sufficient for lexicographers, philologists, etymologists and neologists to recognize that a new type of pidgin English is evolving and gaining currency. Maybe Kenneth Hudson (The Dictionary of Diseased English, Macmillan) and Paul Johnson (Enemies of Society, Nicholson and Weidenfeld) will get furious at these verbal aggressions on the English language. But nothing can be done against the sweeping tide of HFE. Possibly, the late George Orwell would accept HFE with a wry face and write a satirical piece. After all, he had lived in Burma when it was part of India.
A historical backdrop might be helpful. Ever since India’s English connection began over three centuries ago, there has been a two-way traffic in English. Indians had to be anglicised so that they could be useful in building up the Empire and in maintaining it; the browns, the blacks, and the yellows had to learn English perforce. So did the Indians, since India was the Kohinoor of the British Empire. And, India contributed many, many words to the English dictionary.
In this context, it must be recalled that all Indian languages are related to the English language for they all belong to the Indo-European family of languages. Hindi and English are distant, long-lost cousins. Sanskrit, Hindi, and the other major languages of India evolved out of the Indo-Iranian branch, while English developed from the West Germanic and Anglo-Frisian branch. It must be remembered that for centuries stretching back about two millennia, Indian words had been creeping into English vocabulary. Greek, Roman, and Arab travelers were responsible for the adoption of words from India like amber, camphor, ginger, indigo, lae, musk, opal, sandalwood, and others into Middle English.
The name India does not belong to the Indians, in the sense that none of the ancient texts of Indian languages contains this word. It is a gift of the Westerners—particularly of the English. They had heard of the River Sindhu (River Indus, now is Pakistan) and through a process of corruption baptized the Aryavarta of the Hindus and the Hindustan of the Moghuls as India.
The Portuguese were responsible for channeling into English words like areca, betel, calico, cheroot, coir, copra, joggery, and others; these were derived from South Indian languages of the east and west coasts—Malayalam, Tamil, and Kannada.
The Moghuls provided darbar, maharajah, nawab, sircar, and other words, which for the sake of administration had to be coopted into the English language.
By the time Queen Victoria became Empress of India and the sahibs and memsahibs (both words derived from Arabic) settled down in the hill stations, cantonments, and port towns, a goodly number of day-to-day Indian words were current: mulligatawny ‘soup,’ cashmere ‘cloth,’ jodhpurs ‘breeches,’ dungarees ‘clothes made out of coarse cloth,’ arrack and toddy drinks, pilau and kabab foods, coolie ‘laborer,’ mali ‘gardener,’ and others. The Indologists adopted several words from the Sanskrit and Pali texts: avatar, dharma, karma, mantra, nirvana, stupa, vihar, etc.
By the end of the nineteenth century, there were enough Indian words and expressions current in the language of the British to merit respectability. In 1886, within 30 years of the Sepoy Mutiny, John Murray published Hobson-Jobson, by Sir Henry Yule and Arthur Coke Burnell, a “glossary of Anglo-Indian colloquial words and phrases of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical, and discursive.” The higgledy-piggledy Anglo-Indian that till then had survived only through spoken tradition had achieved the status of, at least, a documented dialect.
In the twentieth century, when Indian writers began to use the English language creatively (unlike the babu administrators), following the example of some pioneers of the late eighteenth century (Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Swami Vivekananda, the father of Rabindranath Tagore, and others), the expression Anglo-Indian was reversed into Indo-Anglian.
It must be recorded that English writers like Edmund Blunden, W.B. Yeats, and E. M. Forster patronized and blessed the Indo-Anglian writers. The greatest among them was Rabindranath Tagore, who to date is the only Nobel Laureate for Literature from India.
Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, C.V. Desani and others of the pre- and post-Independence periods contributed new words to the English language, composed sentences in English in the Indian manner and expressed Indian sentiments, nationalist and otherwise. They have created new metaphors and images, coined neologisms and concocted strange combinations of words and phrases. So much so, India has a pre-eminent place in Commonwealth literature. “We cannot write the English. We should not. We can write only as Indians,” confessed Raja Rao (Kanthapura and The Serpent and the Rope). Mulk Raj Anand (The Coolie, Untouchable and other novels) differentiated his “pigeon English” from pidgin-English and asserted that while his “pigeon English” soared to the skies, pidgin-English wallowed in the gutter. According to him, “native speech enters into the shell of the sentences in the foreign language (English) through certain indigenous words.” (Ms.) Kamala Das, the provocative poet of feminine sensibility, has summed up the position of the Indo-Anglian writer thus:
I speak three languages,
writing in two.Dream in one….
It is half English, half Indian
funny perhaps, but it is honest.It is as human as I am human.
Don’t you see?
A real tribute to India’s contribution to the English language can be found in the Little Oxford Dictionary, which contains a “Supplement of Words from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka” —in other words, what was meant by India half a century ago or what is described as the Indian subcontinent nowadays. R.E. Hawkins, a former manager of the Oxford University Press in Bombay and a long-time resident in India, compiled this supplement, thus updating Hobson-Jobson. Almost all the words in this supplement have found their way into other English language dictionaries. It is the claim of Mulk Raj Anand that he has contributed not fewer than fifty words to the Supplement through his writings.
Along with American English, Australian English, British English, Canadian English, Irish English, Scottish English, Welsh English, and Caribbean English, Indian English has been honored with chairs and departments in universities in India and elsewhere.
Having established the genealogy of Hindi Filmi English, let me provide a closer look at HFE with the requisite historical and socio-economic contexts. The Anglo-Indian Brahmins and Indo-Anglian pundits are likely to resent the efforts of HFE to take off from the gutter and soar to the skies. HFE will first settle down wherever Indians are domiciled in the West and the East. Then it will migrate to adjacent English-speaking areas. Finally, this pigeon will build its nest within the portals of academic institutions.
Hindi Filmi English, the evolving hybrid language, does not belong to the Hindi heartland of the Gangetic plains in the north but to Bombay and to the Hindi film industry based there. Bombay, the gateway to and from India, is a sprawling, modern metropolis. It is the melting pot of almost all linguistic groups of India. The Hindi that is spoken by the polyglot population of Bombay is not the Hindi of the north. The film industry and its ancillary businesses, in which at least 100,000 persons are employed, provide the base for HFE. From the hothouse atmosphere of the studios, the tea canteens, the illicit liquor dens, and the alleys and byways where the workers live, trying to imitate the life-styles of film stars, emanated this patois, born of the necessity of day-to-day life. The ordinary people, who speak debased Hindi and “broken” English, had put in circulation a number of expressions like kaali-pilli literally ‘black and white’ but connoting ‘worthlessness,’ hera-pheri ‘underhand wheeling and dealing,’ faltu ‘spurious,’ gol-maal ‘messy state of affairs,’ and so on.
Over a period of time, film journalists and gossip columnists, writing in English magazines, began to resort in a hesitant way to this corrupted Hindi, transliterating it into Roman script and italicizing it. The Hindi filmi flavor and feel were thus imparted to everything they wrote. More than any journal of the film industry, it was Stardust that succumbed completely to HFE. This glossy monthly for film buffs and fans, with its gossip column entitled “Neetu’s Natter,” modeled after the columns of Hollywood’s Hedda Hopper and Louella O. Parsons, became extremely popular. Teenagers, film-wallahs, and Indians settled in the U.K., U.S.A., and Canada reveled in reading the column. Stardust has a circulation of 130,000 with a total readership of 650,000. It is priced high for India—35 cents (20 pence). Its popularity can be judged from the fact that the largest selling daily has a circulation of 220,000 and sells for about three cents (1½ pence).
The credit for transforming the spoken hybrid dialect of HFE into a respectable medium of expression with alliteration, onomatopoeia, neologisms, and tense formations must go to Ms. Shobha Khilachand, an enterprising, wealthy, and captivating woman, who edited this journal from 1971 till recently. In a communication to the present writer, Ms. Khilachand confesses that HFE “existed before Stardust or I arrived on the scene. Only it wasn’t considered chic enough for common use and certainly no self-respecting editor would’ve passed it for publication.” Writing elsewhere, she has pointed out that the gossip columns written by all filmi journalists “follow one standard style—a challu ‘easy-going’ one, using a strange blend of Hindi/English, which murders grammar (Who cares about it?) but is immensely readable all the same.” For the record, it must be mentioned that there is a pretender—one Mohan Bawa, a filmi press-wallah ‘journalist.’ He claims that it was he, along with “a bright, bitchy, intelligent girl called Indu Singh,” who first launched the style. This is beside the point, for he was on the staff of Stardust for only four months. What is of relevance is that the column, “Neetu’s Natter,” is imitated in style and content by a dozen other columns. The language has seeped into advertising copy. Cocktail parties are animated with lavish quotes from the Stardust column. Overseas Indians writing home use this language. Its usage is spreading fast.
For the present, the vocabulary of Hindi Filmi English cannot be more than 300 words, and they are acquiring adjectival and adverbial forms. Some more words deserve notice:
patao vb. ‘fool (someone); lead (someone) down the garden path.’
kanjoos adj. ‘stingy and knavish.’
khit-phit n. ‘verbal abuse’: a khit-phit talk is ‘a slanging match.’
lafda n. ‘trouble; tangle, mess.’
tagda adj. ‘sturdy; upright.’
izzat n. ‘prestige; self-esteem.’
dada n. lit. (Hindi) ‘elder brother’; lit. (Bengali) term of address for an elderly person; HFE: ‘gang leader; underworld figure; “Godfather.” '
maal n. lit. ‘goods’; HFE: ‘illicit liquor; smuggled goods; sexy woman.’
Who knows where the list will end? Hindi Filmi English has become a living language, soaring higher than any pidgin and scattering its seeds as it goes.
Out Is In—But I’m Not Into Out
Robert A. Fowkes, New York University
I suppose things used to get checked out at a check-out counter, and there was some slight semantic content to the out, as well as the check, not to mention the counter. Now (at this point in pain), suffering from a minor annoyance in one foot, I am urged by a solicitous wife to “have the doctor check it out,” which seems to mean to examine a condition or look into a physical problem.
The teacher told a young niece of mine with no foot ailment to “check it out” at the public library; and she didn’t mean a book but a question of etymology. When the redoubtable Bob Grant of Radio Station WOR, New York City returned from a trip to the Soviet Union recently and was being interviewed about his experiences there, Patricia McCann, also of WOR, somewhat surprised at ultra-conservative Bob’s praise of the Russian people and even of some conditions in the country, exclaimed, “Why Bob, you’ve mellowed out!” (October 6, 1978).
A student (one of mine, I’m sorry to say), having to admit that he had insufficient data to support a claim made in his dissertation, said, “I’ll have to research it out.” Another one, wrestling with a problem in a German dialect, offered to “translate it out” and see what answer might be forthcoming. None was.
For some pedantic reason I find nothing acceptable in the above examples, yet I am not uncomfortable with a host of others like try it out, work it out, sit it out, cut it out, act it out, thresh/thrash it out, hear him out, dish it out, dole it out, eke out, clear out, crowd out, point out, set out, wear out, etc., which either make some sort of literal sense or are rendered acceptable by the hoariness of enduring idiomaticity (unlike the last word).
I writhe at investigate it out and rehearse it out; why, then, do I not react the same way to try it out and act it out, which are not too different in content from the rejected culprits? I’m not sure about flesh it out (or “in”?), but I suspect that the denominative sin is of the flesh here. We sometimes fill in blanks while filling a form out. I can’t make it out!
When our track coach told us to run it out, when we complained of a stitch in the side during a long cross-country race, there was some sense, though not much comfort, to the words. We didn’t “relish it out” —nor did we say such a thing.
A colleague in a deservedly nameless field reacted to a sudden increase in enrollment in Latin and Greek classes in our University with, “I can’t fathom it out!” And a friend who subscribes to more periodicals than he has time to read has decided to cancel a few out. VERBATIM is not among them. During what has been called an “on-going (or ungoing?) situation” in a Long Island community (a teachers’ strike), one official said he was sure that both sides could, with good will, arbitrate it out.
A person calling up a dispenser of omniscience on a radio “phone-in” (not “out”) program, recently (October 16, 1978) asked whether it would be advisable for him to rent his house out while waiting to sell it. This sounded to me like renting out chairs for a graduation—or a funeral.
The attendant at the gas station (which is probably called something else by now) used to ask, elliptically, “Check the oil?” or “Check the front?” (the latter version being followed by the revelation of a need for oil). But for the last several months he has adopted the “in” variant, “Check the front out?”
If I am asked to explain why I accept try it out and reject check it out (although I have wild surmises, both psychiatric and aspectual), I can only, with Col. Sanders, chicken out.
ETYMOLOGICA OBSCURA: Unsavory Savories
Jack Shreve, Cumberland, Maryland
The dissimilarity of the English-French cognates bishop and évêque [V, 2] brings to mind an even more striking lineup of dissimilar English-Romance cognates. This involves the name of the European mint called in British English savory, in French sarriette, in Italian santoreggia, and in Spanish ajedrea.
All are from the same Latin word, satureja, and all underwent uncustomary modifications. The English word was influenced by the unrelated word savor, the French word shows the addition of the diminutive suffix, -ette, the Italian word was confused with santo, ‘sacred,’ and the Spanish word, coming from Latin influenced by Arabic, preserves the Arabic definite article, a(l)-.
Traduttore Traditore
E.J. Moncada, Washington, D. C.
We can now raise the veil of mystery which has, for so long, been associated with the medical profession and which so many of its members try so hard to perpetuate by writing indecipherable prescriptions, by their teasing and noncommittal “Hmm’s,” “Oh’s,” and “Ah’s” while examining the tension-wracked subject, and by their ponderous Greek and Latin terminology:
ankyloglossia: to put one’s foot (up to the ankle) in one’s mouth.
arthritis: excessive devotion to a legendary English king.
ballism: excessive venery.
basophilia carpitis: degenerate predilection for certain type fish.
bathophobia: childhood aversion to shower.
beri-beri: a most grave disease.
bigeminy: expression favored by rural physicians; of. “by cracky.”
boophilus: characterized by a fondness for scaring others.
calculus: material often difficult to pass.
depot therapy: short-term counseling while awaiting commuter train.
discopathy: disease communicated in dancing establishments.
dura mater: a strict and demanding medical school, as opposed to a more placid alma mater.
eucrasy: psychiatrist’s pronouncement at the end of therapy.
extragenital: three testes.
Fallopian way: a thoroughfare best known to dissolute Romans.
forceps: biceps, triceps and forceps.
fureur genitale: pubic hair.
hemanalysis: examination of virile subject.
heterophilic agglutination: cellular racial intermarriage.
hieromania: a compulsion to go ever higher.
highmoritis: rising death statistics.
horizontal fissure: recumbent angler.
humerus: the funny bone.
hypotension: anxiety at the prospect of an injection.
infarct: suppression of desire to pass wind.
lordosis: Jehovah complex.
mastatrophy: plaque awarded to southern plantation owner.
metrography: subway grafitti.
metroparalysis: subway strike.
muliebrity: act or state of being stubborn.
nosopoietic or nosode: literary composition on loved one’s nose.
orchidectomy: snipping a pair of flowers, usually for a loved one.
pox: familiar medical salutation in the Middle Ages: “pox tibi.”
pantaphobia: fear of wearing slacks.
phagotherapy: counseling for homosexuals.
phoresis: not as good as a “full house,” but still a damn fine hand.
pigmented: having a dirty mind.
pleural disease: double pneumonia (a singular malady).
polymorphous: parrot-shaped.
pupils, dilating: schoolchildren’s recitations.
pyknosis: insertion of finger in nose.
pyknic: outdoor meal.
quittor: one whom nobody loves.
regnancy: incomplete pregnancy.
riboside: an example of medical tautology.
syphilization: when prefaced by “modern,” denoting an era of high level in manners and taste.
tarsen: of the Apes.
thyrotomy: gangrenous hip joint.
vagus nerve: what’s needed at a gaming table in Nevada.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
Overheard in an elevator: “He’s not able to prioritize his work at all.” “Well, first he’s gotta learn to routinize.” [Lee Ash, Bethany, Ct.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
Overheard at a showing of Superman, when the hero has flown 1000 miles or so to save the screaming Lois Lane from being buried alive. He: “How could he know she was in trouble?” She (somewhat contemptuously): “Don’t you know that Superman has x-ray hearing?!”
“Indri! Indri!”
Kenneth E. Hall, Middletown, Connecticut
Linguists tell us that even while we’re sleeping the English language is constantly changing. They don’t need to tell us. It’s perfectly obvious from the numerous words and phrases included in the new dictionaries which not too long ago were not included because their use was regarded by language authorities as substandard and unacceptable.
To be fair about it, many things happen to the language by sheer chance that are not in any way the fault of the dictionary-makers. For example, the word indri. This refers to a short-tailed, silky-furred arboreal primate of the lemur family, which is quite rare and looks to the uneducated eye like a cross between a ghostly-faced monkey and an overgrown cat. The French naturalist Pierre Sonnerat had never seen one until his first trip to Madagascar. It was pointed out by his native guide, who yelled excitedly, “Indri!, Indri!”
After Sonnerat had added this word to the language of science, he discovered, somewhat belatedly, that indri was a word from the Austronesian language spoken in the Malagasy Republic and merely meant ‘Look!’ It was not the name of the animal.
But by that time, it was too late. Indri was an established “in” word, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put the dictionary back together again. Which goes to prove, perhaps, that Samuel Johnson was quite right when he said: “Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.”
EPISTOLA {Charles A. Van Patten}
Mr. Alexander’s “War Against whynot” [V,3] reminds me of a court room incident in which the Judge asked the Spanish interpreter “Why is it that, every time the witness says no, you interpret it as yes?”
Of course the explanation was that the witness had said como no which means ‘yes’ in colloquial Spanish just as why not can mean ‘yes’ in English.
[Charles A. Van Patten, New York, New York].
Philip Howard on English English
Philip Howard, Canute
A leader of the National Graphical Association, the principal British printing union, announced the other day that his members were not King Canutes about the new technology that is turning their ancient inky craft upside down. He presumably meant that the lads were not going to try to stop the tides of innovation that are making many of them redundant. (Luddites would have been a more appropriate metaphor.) But he demonstrated again the need for a Society to Rehabilitate the Reputations of Those Whose Names Have Become Metaphorical Clichés. Many such monstrous towers of careless metaphor are based upon foundations of painted smoke.
For example, in the great Boat Club in the sky Canute must be indignant that he is daily slandered down here as a megalomaniac who seriously believed that he could stop the flowing tide. What happened was the exact opposite. Canute (c. 995-1035) was the great sea-king of England and Denmark. His fleets ruled the waves. He was the last man to waive the rules of seamanship. If any contemporary knew about the tides and other ways of the sea it was Canute.
The story of Canute and the tide is recorded only by Henry the Archdeacon of Huntingdon, who wrote his Historia Anglorum a century after Canute’s death. Henry says that Canute sat on the bank of the Thames at Westminster and commanded the rising tide to go back as a dramatic rebuke to his sycophantic court. He got his feet wet as a parable to demonstrate to his magnates that there were forces in the world greater than war, and to prepare them for his submission to the Holy See in Rome. Henry of Huntingdon adds that as a gesture of humility Canute would never afterwards wear his crown: he hung it, instead, on the head of an effigy of the crucified Christ. The story is found nowhere else. It reads like a pious ecclesiastical legend with homiletic intent.
It is an engaging paradox of the whirligig of time that in careless rhetoric Canute has now been widely adopted as the example of an infatuated and arrogant reactionary who seriously believes that he can turn back the tides, usually those unpersuasively historicist currents, the tides of history. Politicians and other noisy persuader evidently feel the need for some such dummy figure as an insult. And poor old Canute has drawn the short straw.
Our Society for Onomastic Rehabilitation will have plenty of other work to do. It is probably too late to persuade the cartoonists and politicians that no ostrich yet hatched has ever buried its head in the sand. But we ought to try to do something for the unfortunate lemmings. The popular notion that the little rodents commit mass suicide by plunging off the Arctic shore and swimming out to chilly sea is deeply ingrained folklore. It is repeated in such respectable reference books as the Encyclopaedia Britannica: “None returns, and the onward march of the survivors never ceases until they reach the sea, into which they plunge and are drowned.” Like most popular folklore this is pure nonsense. No credible observer has ever recorded the mass suicide of lemmings. The most that can be said is that on their periodic emigrations to escape from overcrowding, lemmings cross rivers and lakes tumultuously, like migrating ants, and many are drowned. Yet the false idea that lemmings have a death wish conforms to some evident need in rhetoric. It has given rise to a concatenation of other equally fallacious myths, from the belief of Norwegian peasants that lemmings rain from the clouds like cats and dogs, to the notion of some imaginative biologists that lemmings are following instinctively in ancestral footsteps from the Miocene period, when the Baltic and North Seas were dry land.
It is all bunkum. Lemmings just don’t do what they are supposed to do. The only animal that regularly commits mass suicide is Homo sapiens. But evidently we have a need for some vivid metaphor from Nature to illustrate the human propensity to self-destruction. The poor bleeding lemming has been adopted as a rhetorical cliché to fit the description.
Our Society for Onomastic Rehabilitation will try to explain that there was more to the great civilization of Byzantium than Byzantine deviousness. It is probably too late to persuade anybody that Cloud-Cuckoo-Land is a highly desirable residence. And in fact all such attempts to correct inveterate errors are mostly likely, a priggish waste of time. We evidently need to believe rubbish about Canute and lemmings for our rhetorical purposes. And so the names have come to represent things that never happened.
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Linguistic Atlas Of England and The Linguistic Atlas Of Scotland
H. Orton, S. Sanderson, and J. Widdowson, eds., (Croom Helm London Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Macmillan, Toronto, 1978), 450pp. and J.Y. Mather and H.H. Speitel, eds., (Croom Helm, London; Shoe String Press, Hamden, CT; Macmillan, Toronto), Vol. 1, 1975, 429pp., Vol. 2, 1977, 292pp.,
[By special arrangement, VERBATIM readers may order these books at the following prices: England, U.S. $62.00 postpaid; Scotland Vol. 1, U.S. $48.00 postpaid; Vol. 2, U.S. $48.00 postpaid. Send order to VERBATIM, Essex, CT 06426, with remittance in U.S. dollars. We regret that we are unable to offer these books outside the U.S. and Canada.]
That language varies from place to place to a greater or smaller degree has always been acknowledged and speakers have always been conscious of it. The poor Ephraimites who could not say shibboleth found that out only too well (Judges 12: 4-6). Fortunately, not all differences in language have had such dire consequences. The systematic study of localized varieties of speech, traditionally known as dialects, did not really start for English until the 18th century. Most of the early attempts were the gathering of dialect words from a particular area, usually undertaken by a local clergyman or schoolmaster. In some cases remarks on pronunciation and grammar prefaced these dialect glossaries. Valuable as these studies are they give only a haphazard idea of dialect areas. There is no way of knowing how house is pronounced all the way from Essex to Edinburgh, what areas show the undiphthongized hoose and so on. Similarly one could not know where people say car-handed, caggy-handed, or kay-handed for ‘a left-handed person.’ A.J. Ellis and Joseph Wright tried to remedy this. Ellis collected material on the pronunciation of certain words, so, now, the, gate, etc. and divided England and Lowland Scotland into several different dialect areas on the basis of his findings. He designated the areas Southern, West Southern, North Midland, West Northern, South Lowland, and so on. These simple geographical terms have been taken over by dialectologists ever since and have only been subject to minor modifications. Although Wright himself completed the monumental task of producing a dialect dictionary of English, beyond general statements there was no clear picture of where certain words occurred.
In the latter part of the 19th century, dialect material was being collected in both France and Germany in a systematic way and later published in map form as the Atlas Linguistique de la France and the Deutscher Sprachatlas. In England no mapping of dialect material took place, and in the 1920s Wright himself admitted this defect in English dialect studies. More than fifty years later Wright’s plea has finally been met by the publication of the Linguistic Atlas of England (LAE) and two volumes of the Linguistic Atlas of Scotland (LAS). The origins of both of these undertakings are admirably sketched in detail in the Introduction to the volumes. The impetus to produce them came from various sources: Hans Kurath, who needed detailed knowledge of English dialects with which to compare his studies of American dialects, Eugen Dieth of Zurich, who had worked on English dialects and had also helped to found the Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz, as well as from a number of British scholars such as Harold Orton of Leeds and John Orr of Edinburgh, who was acquainted with the work of Romance dialectologists. Such are the intellectual ancestors of these undertakings. Coming late into the field has had its advantages, for both projects have been able to draw on the experiences of earlier work.
One immediate question that arises is, Why should there be a separate survey of dialects in England and Scotland? Ellis and Wright did not make such a distinction. There is in fact an overlap in that Northumberland and Cumberland (now Cumbria) are dealt with by both atlases. The LAS also deals with dialects in Ulster. The reason for this twofold division seems, according to the introductions, to be historical and personal. In 1947, the Philological Society appointed three survey editors for the study of English (including Scottish) dialects: John Orr in Edinburgh, Harold Orton in Leeds, and C. L. Wrenn in Oxford. From this developed two dialect surveys, the Linguistic Survey of Scotland (LSS) and the Survey of English Dialects (SED), which have provided the material for both of these atlases. The LAS bolsters up its claim for being a separate undertaking by seeing itself as the heir to a tradition of dialect and linguistic study in Scotland stretching back at least as far as the 17th century. These two surveys, however, acknowledge the debt each owes to the other and are an example of scholarly cooperation.
They differ, however, in several points. The LAE deals with pronunciation, grammar (including both morphology and syntax), and vocabulary, whereas the LAS deals only with vocabulary in the two volumes under review. This difference reflects the difference in collecting the material from which the maps were drawn. The material for the LAE was collected by the direct method; that is, fieldworkers, trained in phonetics, were sent to various chosen localities in England to find informants (more about them later) and to work through a questionnaire with them, transcribing their responses in phonetic script. Altogether, eleven fieldworkers investigated 313 localities, mostly small towns and villages. Stanley Ellis, who covered 118 of these, is perhaps the best known fieldworker, having appeared often on television and radio.
The LAS on the other hand used the indirect method, that is, postal questionnaires were sent out to the headmasters of primary schools who were asked to choose informants who “should if possible be middle aged or older and a lifelong inhabitant of your district.” The fieldworkers of the LAE were similarly instructed “to seek out elderly men and women… who were themselves natives of the place and both of whose parents were preferably natives also.” Thus, although the methods of eliciting material were different, the range of informants was similar, both atlases portraying an old-fashioned type of speech. Many urban sociolinguists criticize this type of survey, but it must be said that both surveys have made explicit the restrictions which they imposed and are aware that they are dealing with only a limited amount of material. The value of these kinds of survey is that they provide material on which further studies can be built. The speech varieties of the great conurbations cannot be fully understood if we do not have a description of the old rural dialects of the surrounding areas. The most obvious problem raised by the indirect method is that of the spelling of words by lay-informants. The LAS says that phonological material would be collected in a different way. In the Introduction there is a detailed section on “The Interpretation of the Informants' Spelling.” In most cases the editors have used the majority form, e.g. since car- occurs more frequently than kar- ‘left-(handed)’, it is the form chosen (LAS 1,6). The chief difficulties are with vowel signs, but consonants present some problems too; for example, both ch and gh occur for the sound at the end of loch, the velar fricative. To enable the reader to judge for himself, seventeen “phonetic orthographic maps” are given in Appendix A and four in Appendix B of LAS 1. The LAE does not run into such problems. Both atlases do not contain all the material which was obtained in LSS and SED but only representative maps which are typical of interesting distributions in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.
The method of eliciting and showing the distribution of words, word geography, is onomasiological; that is, one starts with a notion like ‘left-handed’ or a “thing” like ‘icicle’ and tries to find out and then display on a map all the words used in different areas of the country for the particular notion or thing. The dialectologists who have drawn up the questionnaires have a good idea at the outset which words are going to be of interest. In asking questions, the LAS has been more detailed than the LAE. Map L9 dung in LAE has the two words dung and muck. LAS 1, 62 has the same two words but designating cow dung. On maps LAS 1, 62 horse dung, 1, 63 sheep’s dung and 1, 68 fowl dung a great variety of words are used, e.g. orts, dollars (1, 62), parties, tartles, purls, trotties, trintle (1, 63) and pen, scootings (1, 68). By defining the question more narrowly, the LAS has obtained a much more differentiated response. Altogether, the two volumes of the LAS map 180 notions and the LAE maps 65. It must not be forgotten that 207 lexical maps using material from the SED had already appeared in 1974. Unlike phonological maps, lexical maps are renowned for showing random variation, both in the number and geographical distribution of the words recorded. Dialect areas are never set up by reference to lexical criteria alone. The actual mapping of the words differs in the two atlases, as can be seen from the two maps (figs. 1 and 2). One way to map informants' responses is to enter the appropriate answer at the appropriate locality, but this is rather cumbersome and requires large-scale maps. A refinement on this is to have a symbol for similar forms and enter the symbols on the map. This method is used for the phonetic orthographic maps of LAS 1. For instance in map 1 of Appendix A round, any occurrence of round is represented by · and any occurrence of round by □, the other forms being neglected. By this means the reader can see the distribution more clearly; areas with clusters of · and areas with clusters of □ become clearly discernible. This kind of map is known as a symbol map. A further refinement would be to draw lines separating off the areas with round from those with roond. The lines that delineate areas where one form occurs predominantly are called isoglosses and a map that uses them is called an isogloss map (see fig. 1). The LAE clearly marks in all the isoglosses in every map but the LAS uses hatching of various kinds. The latter method avoids the arbitrary drawing of an isogloss and, with the different kinds of hatching being allowed to overlap—signifying transitional areas where there is no clear dominance of one form—it may give a more realistic picture.
All methods of mapping are to some extent an interpretation of the data. Both atlases agree, however, in not entering the words on the map itself but in using a legend, in the LAE with numbers representing the words, in the LAS with boxes showing the different sorts of hatching. The LAE gives more information in its legend such as etymology, first date recorded, and provenance, if the word comes from a foreign language. This is an unfortunate omission in my opinion in the LAS. It would be very useful to know which words came from Gaelic. One surprising thing is how many ordinary words have an unknown or obscure etymology, for instance L8 of the LAE tip (v) shows eight words: cowp, keck, kick, shelve, shoot, skell, tip, tipe of which only shoot has a clear etymology and cowp may come from French. The LAS has, in addition to maps, the informants' responses listed county by county with general comments. The LAE does not have this since the basic material of the SED has already been published. What comes through in the study of all these maps is the incredible variety of dialect words that surveys of this kind can bring to light. There are nine items which are dealt with both by the LAE and the LAS; of these, the words for ‘icicle’ (L58 and LAS 2, 68, figs. 1 and 2) show a wide variety of forms: clinker bells, clinkers, conka-bells, icy bells, and daglets only in England whereas tanklets, ice-shockles (in various forms), occur in both England and Scotland. Of more infrequent forms frosty caundles only occurs in the Shetlands and staapel and spicket only in Northern Ireland. The fact that there is an overlap like this makes it imperative for any future studies to use material from both surveys. The LAS has several appendices in Vol. 1: A and B giving phonetic ortho-graphical maps, which we have already mentioned, C giving a list of the informants with details of their sex, age, length of residence, and birthplace of father and mother, followed by a map of all the localities, D containing other maps, and E the contents of the postal questionnaire so that it is clear which items have been mapped and which not. Vol. 2 repeats the information on informants and the map of localities; it also has the contents of the second postal questionnaire, and indexes of the lexical maps of both volumes and of every word shown on every map, thus allowing the volumes to be consulted easily. The LAE too has several appendices: an index to the maps (with the questions used), notes on the lexical responses, and a list of unmapped responses for each lexical map. For instance, on L58, cockle-bells, ice-bugs, snipes are shown but unfortunately with no information as to where they occurred; for that one would have to consult the SED Basic Material. Finally, an alphabetic index of mapped notions is included.
I have concentrated on the lexical material because that is shared by both the LAE and LAS. The LAE also has 249 phonological, 83 morphological, and nine syntactical maps, the last being of only marginal interest. The morphological maps concentrate on verb forms, noun plurals, and pronouns. M45 (we) have got is interesting because it shows the form getten or gotten used in several areas of England, as of course it is in American English, whereas in standard British English the -en has been lost. M68 shows the distribution of four forms for she: she, hoo, her, and shoo, the last being a blend of she and hoo. The bulk of the LAE is made up of phonological maps which show the distribution of the different pronunciations of a particular word. Many of these maps have been reduced in size so that two can be got on one page. Different areas are again marked off by isoglosses, but instead of there being numbers in the areas which are then identified in a legend, the relevant sound or combination of sounds is entered in phonetic script in the area concerned.
Thus on Ph50 butter and Ph51 thunder [u] appears in the north and midlands and [∧] in the south, the latter being the standard British English vowel. The maps are listed according to their Middle English source, short vowels, long vowels and diphthongs, and consonants. There is a good commentary on the maps in the introduction, but the use of slant lines / / is never explained; although they are presumably meant to signify phonemes, it seems unwise to use them since the SED did not deal with broad phonemic transcription but with narrow phonetic transcription and their use may well confuse the general reader. The maps do not use slant lines, but the editors have subsumed several phonetic symbols under one more general symbol. Many of the phonological maps show a number of different forms, e.g. Phl49 house not only shows the undiphthongized vowel but many different diphthongal forms. Maps Ph149-154 represent ME ū, except before r, and they all show a very similar distribution. The isogloss that separates the undiphthongized [u:] from diphthongal forms occurs at the same points on each map. It is on the basis of such regular distribution that dialectologists can divide up a country into different dialect areas. Ellis, Wright, and dialectologists ever since have used this u/au isogloss to divide the northern dialects from the north midland dialects. The boundary u/au varies slightly from word to word and other criteria are used in addition in characterizing northern dialects. Thus the boundary between dialects is not something rigid, like an international boundary, but rather a transitional zone, or bundle of isoglosses. The widespread Cockney pronunciation of thr- as fr- turns up in the Home Counties and East Anglia as well, shown in Ph234 three, 235 thread. The retention of the r in the pronunciation of -er, although lost in standard British English, is retained in many dialect areas, notably the west country, parts of Lancashire, Northumberland, and the West Midlands, shown in Ph244 butter, 245 farmer.
The publication of this large amount of material is a milestone in the study of English dialects. It “freezes” the rural dialects of the early 20th century. Many readers may wonder why, although they come from a particular part of the country, a word or pronunciation shown to be current there is unknown to them. That is because dialect study is continual. Situations change and new surveys will have to be made.
What use are the maps in these volumes apart from showing us the distribution of certain words or pronunciations? Their main importance will be in the historical study of English, particularly of its phonology. The complicated phonological maps will enable the historical linguist to give a firmer basis to hypotheses he might make about the passage of one sound to another. The pronunciation of the vowel in house, Ph149, can be ranged along a scale from the undiphthongized [u:] to the standard [au], and further development to [a:]. Many of the intermediate values may have been the ones used by Shakespeare or Milton and their contemporaries. If we are now better able to localize certain words and pronunciations in British English dialects, we can perhaps in some cases trace features of American English back to their British origins. Now that all the hard work of collecting, drawing the maps, and editing is over, it is up to linguists and lay-people interested in English dialects to make good use of these well-produced volumes. There is enough material here for many a long evening.
[Charles V. J. Russ, University of York, England]
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Power Writing, Power Speaking: 200 Ways To Make Your Words Count
Comp. and ed. by N.H., S.K., and P.S. Mager, (William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1978), 288 pp. 8-3/16” × 5-1/2”.
I found the title of this book so off-putting that I wasn’t going to review it. By chance, I opened it to page 235 where I spotted a quotation from VERBATIM: clearly, editors and compilers with the extraordinary good sense of the Magers should not have their work overlooked, so I dived in.
This book is by no means the Napoleon Hill treatise it pretends to be, either in title, subtitle, blurb, or stated purpose. I got the distinct feeling that the Magers had prepared the manuscript and had been persuaded by the publisher (or his sales manager) that, as it stood, the book would have little or no appeal: plenty of good steak, but (as Mr. Hill would have it) no sizzle. Thus was an otherwise useful and interesting work on the multifarious rhetorical devices of English (and language in general) forced into a Procrustean bed (that’s a metaphor!) of a market that may not know exactly what to do with it.
Power Writing is basically an encyclopedic dictionary of rhetorical tools, from abusio to zeugma: it contains clear definitions of all devices and gives many citations of examples of each. (One of my pets, probably banned in Texas, is missing: copulative asyndeton; and adversative asyndeton isn’t there either. But asyndeton is and so are all my old friends—hysteron proteron, synecdoche, malapropism, and paranomasia, which is listed under puns.) What makes the book so useful is that with each classification are listed many examples from literature. Usually, a book of this kind lists only one or two examples, and the listing of a half dozen or more not only serves the reader with useful information but aids the clarity of the description.
How this book is going to help anyone “avoid triteness in [his] next club speech” I cannot say; I can say that the title and blurbs should be ignored. Buy the book: it will add a useful and interesting work to your library.
L. U.
How to Keep Dictionaries out of the Public Schools
Edward B. Jenkinson, Indiana University
The perennial protectors of the young dislike dictionaries that contain “dirty” words. The obscenity obliteraters abhor words like hot, horny, and hooker. They disapprove of crocked, coke, and clap. Across-the-board leaves them against. Specific definitions of deflower and bed join several dozen other words on lists that the guardians of virtue classify as “blatantly offensive language.”
After several parents charged that “seventy or eighty” words in The American Heritage Dictionary are obscene or otherwise inappropriate for high-school students, the school board ordered the dictionary removed from the high school in Cedar Lake, Indiana.1 In Eldon, Missouri, after twenty-four parents filed a complaint noting that thirty-nine words in the AHD are “objectionable,” the school board voted to remove the dictionary from a junior high school.2
The dictionary protesters obviously overlooked almost all of the 155,000 words in the nearly 1,600 pages of the AHD and focused only on the so-called dirty words. One parent in Eldon was reported as having said: “If people learn words like that it ought to be where you and I learned them—in the street and in the gutter.”3 A school board member in Cedar Lake noted: “We’re not a bunch of weirdo book burners out here, but we think this one [the AHD] goes too far.”4
Bed was one of the more frequently criticized entry words in the Cedar Lake controversy. Among the definitions are “a place for lovemaking,” “a marital relationship, with its rights and intimacies,” and “to have sexual intercourse with.”3
Anticipating a protest against the AHD and other dictionaries in 1976, Texas Education Commissioner Marlin Brockette stated that no works would be purchased that “present material which would cause embarrassing situations or interfere in the learning atmosphere in the classroom.” By quoting that subsection of the Texas textbook adoption proclamation, Commissioner Brockette apparently justified the removal of these five dictionaries from the purchase list in Texas: the AHD, The Doubleday Dictionary, The Random House Dictionary of the English Language—College Edition, Webster’s New World Dictionary—Students' Edition, and Webster’s Seventh Collegiate Dictionary.3
Commissioner Brockette’s decision was reported in varous Texas newspapers on November 12, 13, and 14, 1976. Four months before he announced that the five dictionaries would not be on the purchase list, Dr. Brockette received bills of particulars from various groups of citizens about the dictionaries that had been submitted for adoption by the State of Texas. Six of the cover letters which I have examined that accompanied the bills of particulars cited these two subsections of the Texas textbook adoption proclamation:
1.7 Textbooks offered for adoption shall not include blatantly offensive language or illustrations.
1.8 Textbooks offered for adoption shall not present material which would cause embarrassing situations or interference in the learning atmosphere of the classroom.
The chairperson of a textbook committee of a prominent organization of women wrote this about Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language:
Reviewer is shocked that a supposedly reputable publisher would offer for adoption a book which is debasing the English language. Students need the basics rather than sub-standard language.5
The chairperson of the organization’s reviewing committee listed these twelve words, among others, as examples of the “objectionable material” she found in the dictionary:
| WORD | REASON FOR OBJECTION |
|---|---|
| across-the-board | Betting on horse racing in Texas is illegal. |
| attempt | Ties word into subject of murder. |
| banana republic | insulting to Latins |
| bawdy house | unnecessary |
| bed | Why is sexual intercourse mentioned? |
| the big house | slang—unnecessary |
| brain | Definition denotes violence. |
| bucket | slang: the buttocks |
| f | Refers to a brothel (claper) and gonorrhea: slang. |
| coke | slang for cocaine |
| crocked | slang for intoxicated |
| deflower | to cause loss of virginity: slang? |
Lovers of language and frequent users of dictionaries would probably not consider these words to be “objectionable material”; nor would they consider the following words, and/or specific definitions of them, to be “blatantly offensive language”:
bastard
easyrider
fag
fairy
gay
G-string
head (as in acidhead)
john (prostitute’s customer)
lay
queer
shack
slut
tail
tail-end
The removal of the five dictionaries from the purchase list in Texas did not go unnoticed. Several organizations concerned with what is taught in the schools hailed the removal as a major victory. One such organization noted6:
God gave parents a number of victories. In Texas alone, the State Textbook Committee did a good job of selecting the best of the available books. Then, the State Commissioner of Education removed 10 books, including the dictionaries with vulgar language and unreasonable definitions.
That statement was included in an announcement distributed by Educational Research Analysts in Longview, Texas. Founded by Norma and Mel Gabler, ERA is billed as “the nation’s largest textbook review clearing house,”3 providing “thousands of textbook reviews”3 that “concentrate on pointing out ‘questionable’ content.”4
A person concerned with specific words or definitions (or both) in dictionaries can send a contribution to ERA and receive copies of the bills of particulars that led Dr. Brockette to place the five dictionaries on the no-purchase list. A concerned person can also request reviews of hundreds of textbooks.
The ERA-distributed reviews concentrate on what’s wrong —not with what’s right—with textbooks and dictionaries. Using such reviews as guidelines, concerned parents can underscore “objectionable” passages in textbooks and take the books to school board meetings to point out why children should not have to study such works. The concerned parents do not have to indicate the sources of the objections: rather, all they have to do is get the ear of a sympathetic school board member and hope to get a book or dictionary removed from a public school.
The tactic works. Concerned citizens in a number of states have used ERA-distributed reviews to complain about “objectionable” books that contain “blatantly offensive language.” Fortunately, the critics of education are not always successful with their attacks on books. However, the victories are more and more frequent, and each victory gives the censors renewed purpose.
As I write and speak about the new wave of censorship in the public schools, I frequently ask myself, or I am asked, what can be done to prevent the removal of dictionaries and textbooks from the schools. Here are five steps that every person can take:
Check the wording of the state’s textbook adoption bill to make certain that the language in it does not permit the removal of dictionaries and textbooks simply because they contain a few words that some people would construe to be “blatantly offensive.”
Attend meetings of the school board (or school committee) and speak out, at appropriate times, for academic freedom and the students' right to learn.
Attend state or local hearings on textbooks submitted for adoption.
Form a local organization for the preservation of academic freedom and the students' right to know.
Write letters to newspaper and magazine editors protesting the removal (or attempts at removal) of any books from the local schools.
OBITER DICTA: The Game of the Name
Joan Knaub, University of Colorado, Boulder
Old newspaper editorials on long-ago presidential campaigns and policy reveal that a lot of history and high feeling are compressed in chief executive nicknames. The Great Emancipator is a case in point.
But the liveliest of these epithets are those which indicate displeasure from some part of the populace. For instance, George Washington had some detractors who dubbed him the Stepfather of the Country.
Many of the unflattering presidential sobriquets were rooted in heated campaigns or unpopular decisions. Grover Cleveland was the Buffalo Hangman, the Stuffed Prophet, and the Perpetual Candidate. The last description serves as a reminder that Cleveland was both the twenty-second and the twenty-fourth president, as well as the Democratic nominee in 1888.
Tyler, the first vice-president elevated to chief by the incumbent’s death, was His Accidency. Hayes, victor in the most disputed election in U.S. history—the one that took five months to determine the winner—was ever after the Fraud President.
Van Buren comes through as a 19th-century swinger with the Enchanter, Petticoat Pet, and Whiskey Van. John Adams was His Rotundity and, as founder of the U.S. Navy, Old Sink or Swim.
Brevity was most usual with these presidential subtitles, but an exception was Hoover’s The Friend of Helpless Children with Jackson’s The Land Hero of 1812 a close runner-up.
Some presidents earned a range of nicknames, proving the partisanship of politics. McKinley was both Prosperity’s Advance Agent and Wobbley Willie, while Wilson was either the Phrasemaker or Coiner of Weasel Words.
If the President had been a military man, his successful battles could provide a title or two. Teddy Roosevelt was the Hero of San Juan Hill. Tippecanoe and Tyler Too made a euphonious duo. And Grant earned accolades as Unconditional Surrender, the Hero of Appomattox and, less flattering, the Butcher of Galena.
Some names were more accurate than witty. Buchanan was the Bachelor President, Arthur was Our Chet, Pierce was Handsome Frank, and Silent Cal was just that.
Among the more colorful nicknames were Benjamin Harrison’s His Grandfather’s Hat (a reference to a White House relative), Polk’s Napoleon of the Stump, Fillmore’s The Wool-Carder President, and Monroe’s The Last of the Cocked Hats.
Even the revered Lincoln didn’t escape an occasional brickbat. Along with Honest Abe and The Sage from Spring-field, he was also the Illinois Baboon. Lincoln, however, does take the honors among presidents as having the most recorded epithets, 19 in all, while Taft and Harding have nary a one between them.
The heat of issues which generated these names has cooled, but sifting through ashes provides both amusement and perspective on the political past. And, after all, even though some early citizens may have claimed a Stepfather for the country, at least so far no one has named a Godfather.
EPISTOLA {Clyde K. Hyder}
Not for the first time I am constrained to quote the so-called Printers' Bible, which substituted printers for princes in Psalm 119:161, making it read: “Printers have persecuted me without a cause.” A verbal nihilist turned noting into nothing in my article on peter out in your September issue [V,2], thereby changing the meaning almost as completely as the printer of the famous Wicked Bible who omitted not from the Commandment that concerns adultery. My sentence should have read: “The capitalization of peter in these early quotations is worth noting” (please, not nothing).
An interesting article on “Porcine Semantics” in the same issue tempts me to offer two comments:
1. Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary defines hog as “a young sheep of about a year old, before it has been shorn” and cites illustrations of this meaning.
2. The unique Hammus alabamus created by cartoonist Al Capp (perhaps named Salomy rather than Salome) is more obviously sui generis than other hogs.
[Clyde K. Hyder, Lawrence, Kansas].
How Off-track Betting Endangers Our Mother Tongue: Draining Color from the Horseplayer’s Gift of Gab
Francis J. Walsh, Chicago, Illinois
The betting messenger services are under wraps by order of the Illinois Supreme Court, but there is a lot of smart money and political pressure around town in favor of setting up a legitimate off-track betting network. Just like New York. You’d only have to walk around the corner to drop your dough. Naturally, this extension of temptation is being deplored on all sides: by preachers, professors of urban economics, some race track operators, budget-strapped housewives, mothers of twelve, constant readers; even supermarket operators and landlords, who see the grocery and rent money going through the betting wickets.
Our collective morality and our continuing money supply have always been under threat from one direction or another. So what else is new? New, and to be viewed with alarm, is the threat the OTB system poses to our Mother Tongue. The race track, it can be fairly argued, is a most productive potting shed, a fruitful compost pile that keeps the language fermenting and blooming. Look at it this way: It is six, two and even that your friendly, nearby OTB branch will be designed with all the color, warmth, and ambiance of a currency exchange. Or the ante room of a public foot clinic. It will be you, a clerk behind the glass screen, a tattered common racing form or green sheet. And silence. And that’s all. You might as well be doing business with a vending machine. (Next revolting development: “Dial-a-Trifecta! Let us charge your wagers to your telephone bill.”)
In such plasticized, sterilized surroundings could you ever hear such fervent, rich jargon as the following, overheard barside at Sportsman’s Park during the flats season there last spring?
The chalk come in like trained pigs!
This lamentation with a little hop on each word was offered up by a bruised horseplayer. He had favored long shots. The fates had fancied favorites. Eight races in a row had been won at odds of 5 to 2 or less. At the track, at the track bars, or in the stands where the action is, parsing this agonized yelp can be as much fun (almost) as holding a winning ticket. For chalk read ‘betting favorite.’ The word, as race track etymologists can tell you, is an anachronism, left over from the days of live bookmakers at such sporty spas as Saratoga and the old Washington Park race track, out around 63rd street and Cottage Grove avenue in the early 1900s. As post time neared, the bookies would erase odds quotations furiously, chalking in the shorter prices as the faithful bet with both hands on emerging favourites. Out of the cloud of chalk dust came the cryptic term, the chalk horse. To this day favorite players, bucking the sophisticated tote machine will say, if you ask them their pick, “I went to the chalk.” (Note: the use of came instead of come in the complainant’s outcry, above, would be unthinkable. The horseplayer, as the cabbie, lives, for purposes of expression, in the more vivid historical present tense. Of course the reference to trained pigs is simply a locution combining the affection-cum-derision with which the player regards the beasts he loses his money on.)
Are you going to hear that kind of rich gab in the bloodless, sterile, Orwellian OTB betting booth that seems to be just around the corner? Not likely. For stalking the wild word, the track can be a happy hunting ground. Offered here are a few notes gathered over years of “traveling on the Erie” at barside and along the rail around Chicago tracks. Read ‘em and weep, for these expressions may become as extinct as noble Chaucerian English, polluted out of currency by OTB robots.
He win laughin’ by five open lenths. Here two meanings may be held simultaneously. Could be sheer joy shared by horse and bettor. A more particular observation: the horse had excess steam in the stretch and the jock had him under the tightest of holds so that the beast’s teeth were bared, lips pulled back by the bit, showing a wild and wonderful simulation of a horse laugh. (Note: the g in lengths is never sounded or admitted.)
Alternatively: The teamster brings him home with his head in his lap. Teamster equals ‘jockey.’ The head is that of the horse, pulled up so tight it looks to be in the lap of the rider. You must learn the lingo, for pronouns and antecedents in track talk can be as tough to sort out as a four-horse photo finish. For instance, the loser squeals, I’m home free but he hangs in the stretch. The adept knows the I is the bettor and the he is the horse who seems to hang in the air, ballet-like, while the field rushes by him. All right class: once around the track and watch your antecedents.
Another bit of poetry with a pair of interpretations: I got caught in the switches. Could be a jockey complaining about two horses coming together in front of him to form a blind switch to block and throw his horse off stride. If intentional this move could set up an “Inquiry.” Foul, a naughty word, is out. Inquiry is in and when flashed on the board it sends the patrol judges to the movies to see who done what to whom.
Or getting caught in the switches could describe the awful dilemma of the tout who takes his client’s or his box-mate’s money designated by them for the five horse, say. At the mutuel windows the tout switches all funds to his own choice, the two horse, and guess what? The five horse wins. The rogue best slink off home quietly or switch over to the grandstand for the balance of the day. From winners and losers alike the breezy language gushes forth. This jeremiad from an all-day loser: “I didn’t ever find out whether them guys in the cashiers' cages were monkeys or Chinamen.”
It’s a safe bet that in the vitreous enamel precincts of the OTB cells you will never hear invoked the hallowed names of Duffy and Sweeney, two shadowy princes of the sport of kings. To take it on the Duffy, an expression now practically obsolete, was the turn of the century equivalent of to ‘take the money and run.’ Duffy the Bookmaker simply walked out on his obligations after a disastrous day. At the end of the day’s sport the faithful came around to collect only to find Duffy long gone: sticks of chalk, blackboard, their money, keister and all. Through the years many another absconder has taken it on the Duffy. And not without some reverential attention from the sporting gentry. If the high roller’s defalcations got into six figures he was said with some awe to have taken it on the Arthur H. Duffy.
Sweeney, according to legend, was a horseman of a different color; a bookmaker, too, but supposedly privy to the insidest of inside information. (Horseplayers go to their graves convinced that somebody knows something.) Running for Sweeney, in sporting circles, came to mean ‘malingering, just out for the exercise, not really trying.’ So much clout had the legendary Sweeney that he could manipulate the performances of horses and riders and always seemed to know whether owners were out to win or just sending the horse out for a little breeze. If he knew the latter he would make the horse a stiff favorite, igniting the bettors' greed with dreams of a sure thing. He knew he couldn’t be beat. Hence the dawdling horse was said to be running for Sweeney, not for the owners or the put-upon betting public.
One of the prime sources for this kind of sport of kings' English was a fixture at Chicago tracks, a professional tout who went under the nom du course of Persian Sam. Sam’s fierce Levantine eye could calculate to the dollar the amount of money the mark might have in his poke or the old girl in her reticule. After about the sixth race, Sam could be observed touting the ladies of uncertain age when business with other clients had turned sour. “Charlie Potatoes” was his withering epithet for the timid $2.00 bettor, and he shot for bigger game. Thus he was often tapped out, caught in the switches. When he died a few years back, Persian Sam was the subject of a few fond obituaries by knowing turf writers. As one of them, demonstrably a graduate student of our subject, wrote on the day of the funeral:
Persian Sam in this morning’s line figures to be about six to five to be gathered up into that great Tap City in the sky.
And, as one wise guy on the copy desk added, “When he gets there they’ll probably put the ‘INQUIRY’ sign up on the board.” But we must all be charitable. Hold on to your tickets until the result is official.
The natural ecology of etymology needs no such artificial additives as OTB branches. They could be hazardous to the health of a growing vocabulary. Language lovers must vote “No” to any OTB proposition. Take the Erie out to the track and listen. Eavesdroppers' paradise. A sure-fire fix for word addicts. May the fates or Gov. James Thompson (circle your choice) preserve us from any further threats to the natural development of our beloved and continually wagging Mother Tongue.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“We regret that due to the increased price of coffee we must charge for every other cup. This does not apply to coffee served with meals or police officers.”—sign in a New Orleans restaurant. [Dot Luckey, Gretna, Louisiana.]
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Rail Talk: A Lexicon of Railroad Language
Collected and edited by James H. Beck, (James Publications, Gretna, Nebraska, 1978).
Mr. Beck has undertaken a sizable task in this compilation of railroad terms. He rummages through all 140 years of the Railroad Era, and, his low-key introduction notwithstanding, he covers the range of vocabulary from slang to workaday terms and highly technical descriptions. To my personal satisfaction, he steps outside the usual haunts of the engine and caboose into the business office as well—an area usually ignored.
While the range of Beck’s material is stunning, two points detract from his effort.
The first difficulty is suggested by Mr. Beck’s acknowledgment that the book started as a “semantics project.” It is evident that Mr. Beck is more at home with phonemes than with flatcars. What else are we to conclude from this definition of so basic a term as “track”:
The space between the rails and space of not less than 4 feet outside each rail.
To define track in terms of space instead of structure is unsatisfying. Other definitions range from precise to vague to descriptive while a couple are just plain wrong. One wonders if Mr. Beck has spent much time outside his study recently. The pictures which illustrate the book are of 1950s' vintage, and the steam engine diverts most of his attention from the contemporary diesel.
The second problem focuses on the organization of the material. Mr. Beck alternates between redundant definitions—he will define a verb and its participle separately— and bald cross-references. When one term can carry several meanings he arbitrarily itemizes them or runs them together. There are several inexplicable omissions. For instance, he describes many different classes of wheel arrangements on steam locomotives without ever telling us what the “tender” is.
In addition, I think the general reader encountering the more technical terms could have benefited more from simple line drawings than from involuted explanations bristling with more unfamiliar terms. Finally, as a personal aside, I prefer my books with page numbers.
Of course, the first of the above criticisms comes from working on railroads (most people don’t), while the second stems from the critical reading of a lexicon nonstop from cover to cover (few people do). Perhaps my comments should not weigh too heavily against this opus. It is a perfectly suitable reference tool for the general reader. As I gather that is what Mr. Beck intended, one must say he has done his job.
[Jim Goodwin, Essex, Connecticut]
Notes Found in Bottles
Deborah Wing
Location of find: Under Tower Bridge
Inscription: “There’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility.
With apologies for any inconvenience….
—Uriah Heep
EPISTOLA {Clark Holt}
Philip Howard [V,3] asserts “We desperately need a word to mean ‘people who are living together but not married.’ ”
Thomas Middleton, “Light Refractions,” Saturday Review, May 28, 1977, page 47, raises the question “How do you refer to the member of the opposite sex who has moved under the same roof and into the same bed with your son or daughter?” Fortunately, Mr. Middleton has a correspondent, Mrs. Gordon Corbett, who has made an excellent suggestion, the French word intime. “…It has another advantage. It permits a nickname. Now I can refer to the beloved partners of our children as our own dear Timmies.”
[Clark Holt, Park Ridge, Illinois]
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Remarks On Colour
Ludwig Wittgenstein, ed. by G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. by Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Schättle, (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1978), 126pp.
As a boy of fourteen interested in mechanics, Ludwig Wittgenstein built himself a widely admired sewing machine. As a student of aeronautics in 1910, he designed a prototype jet engine. As an Austrian grade-school teacher dissatisfied with the available elementary dictionaries, he prepared one of his own, which was published in 1926. And as a medically inexperienced “lab-boy” who wanted to help the English in the Second World War, he surprised doctors by devising an estimating technique that aided the treatment of war injuries.
Faced with any problem, Wittgenstein impressed those who knew him with his concentration, energy, and seriousness. If necessary, he retired to a secluded home in Norway to work out his solution undisturbed. As a philosopher, Wittgenstein was one who wished to settle problems efficiently, not debate or prolong them. Late in his life, he chose to confront many of the philosophical problems raised by the subject of color; he died before completing his investigations and polishing his remarks for publication.
G.E.M. Anscombe, Wittgenstein’s friend with whom he lived his last months and with whom the philosopher left his final manuscript, has done the student of Wittgenstein a great service by publishing both the original German and the English translation of Remarks on Colour. Furthermore, Anscombe has given the student all of the drafts of Wittgenstein’s manuscripts in order to compare the revisions the writer made.
For the student of philosophy, Wittgenstein asks some standard but still unanswered questions: Does pure white exist? How does luminosity change color values? And, What is seeing? More originally and provocatively, he asks, “Why is it that something can be transparent green but not transparent white?” “There is the glow of red-hot and of white-hot: but what would brown-hot and grey-hot look like?” And, “Do I really see the hair blond in the [black and white] photograph?” For this logical positivist who thought that all philosophical problems arose from the illusions created by the ambiguities of language, these are predictable questions. In fact, at one point Wittgenstein asks:
What is there in favour of saying that green is a primary colour and not a mixture of blue and yellow? Is it correct to answer: ‘You can only know it directly, by looking at the colours’? But how do I know that I mean the same by the words ‘primary colours’ as someone else who is also inclined to call green a primary colour? No, here there are language games that decide these questions.
Unfortunately, though Wittgenstein was trained in the natural sciences, he does little more than speculate on color in epigrammatic fashion. Furthermore, transitions between his terse, numbered reflections are often vague or nonexistent.
Often, however, the transitions are not needed, for the epigrams stand very well by themselves as when Wittgenstein imagines “someone pointing to the place in the iris of a Rembrandt eye and saying: ‘The walls of my room should be painted this colour.’ ” Or, equally successful is this passage in which he wonders:
Couldn’t a member of a tribe of colour-blind people get the idea of imagining a strange sort of human being (whom we would call ‘normally sighted’)? Couldn’t he, for example, portray such a normally sighted person on the stage? In the same way as he is able to portray someone who has the gift of prophesy without having it himself. It is at least conceivable.
For the students of language, even those with an interest in color, however, Wittgenstein’s remarks will be of little use. Occasionally the philosopher is guilty of belaboring the obvious. At one point he states in apparent seriousness, “In the Tricolour, for example, the white cannot be darker than the blue and red.” Elsewhere he writes in childlike candor, “A cube of green glass looks green when it’s lying in front of us. The overall impression is green; thus the overall impression of the white cube should be white.”
Before being too critical though, it is well to recall Wittgenstein’s own remark in this volume, “In every serious philosophical question uncertainty extends to the very roots of the problem. We must always be prepared to learn something totally new.” Wittgenstein did not live long enough to show his famous fly the way out of the bottle, but his provocative and thoughtful speculations suggest several new approaches which may ultimately result in an exit for his trapped insect.
[Sterling Eisiminger, Clemson University]
EPISTOLA {Dr. Bernard J. Freedman, FRCP}
Dr. R.J.L. Waugh has drawn the attention of your readers to the lack of any single word in the English language other than fart for the ‘passage of rectal flatus.’ Members of the medical profession frequently encounter difficulty in making their meaning clear to patients without causing embarrassment when enquiring about this aspect of bowel function, and both parties tend to use circumlocutory expressions which are capable of being misunderstood.
Most of the bodily functions can be described by words suited to polite society or physiological terminology: for example, eructate, masticate, sternutate, micturate, defaecate (defecate), copulate. But there is no corresponding word for fart, which remains taboo with a large proportion of the population. In my lecture to the Listerian Society at this hospital on 30th April 1974, I proposed that the act of passing rectal flatus should be termed “deflatulate” in its verbal form, when a single word was needed in circumstances unsuited to the monosyllabic alternative. “Deflatulate” is self-explanatory and is in the same series as those in the above-mentioned list, and I suggest it be adopted for general usage. As a matter of historical interest, the obsolete crepitate was used in the 19th century, but the term did not specify whether the gas being discharged was gastric or rectal.
[Dr. Bernard J. Freedman, FRCP, King’s College Hospital, London].
EPISTOLA {Donna Abrams}
I enjoyed “Public Servants” by Noel Perrin [IV, 4], but as an active member of the National Association of Parliamentarians and the Indiana State Association of Parliamentarians I must write about his use of chairperson.
As early as 1975 our organization has been on record regarding chairman vs. chairperson. When the question was put before some four hundred active parliamentarians, chairman received our unanimous vote for the accepted term defining ‘one who presides.’ (The word chairman is generic.)
According to Roberts Rules of Order, Newly Revised, on pages 18-19, page 24 and pages 98-99 the presiding officer is correctly addressed “Mr. Chairman” or “Madame Chairman.”
An example of another “good” word that is being “desexed”?
[Donna Abrams, Indianapolis, Indiana].
EPISTOLA {Gerardo Joffe}
Kay Haugaard is mistaken in her article [V, 2] regarding the etymology of the word fart (“akin to German faren, to go”). The German word in question is fahren (not “faren”) and it has nothing to do with fart. The German equivalent is Furz, and this good old Teutonic term, essentially the same in both languages, is obviously onomatopoeic in origin.
I am delighted to have been able to make this small, but perhaps important contribution to the science of linguistics.
[Gerardo Joffe, San Francisco, California].
EPISTOLA {William R. Harmon}
…Young persons of my acquaintance have used the terms “mate,” “partner,” “housemate,” and “live-in friend,” the latter striking me as a most attractive description. A local columnist (Herb Caen) has proposed the term “ummer” as the solution. This term stems from the very human resolution of a verbal dilemma posed by a mother introducing her daughter’s cohabitant: “…and this is George, my daughter’s— um, er….”
[William R. Harmon, El Cerrito, California]
EPISTOLA {Largent Parks, Sr.}
I am distressed because those green growing lilacs are being trampled upon. That derivation of gringo is firmly imbedded in Mexican history and folklore. It is such a lovely story.
Those of us from the USA who spend much of our time in Mexico find the term very useful. It keeps us from using “American” which is thoroughly abused by tourists (American citizen, American money, always spoken arrogantly). Mexicans resent this as they consider themselves American, being inhabitants of the American continent.
To preserve our dignity, we are called Norte Americanos but that also includes the Canadians. Being a native Texan, I reject the term “yanqui.” This is a corruption of the word I learned before starting school “damnyankee”—one word, indivisible and fully descriptive.
So we are gringos (gringa, f) and proud of it. Please don’t trample on the green growing lilacs.
[Largent Parks, Sr., Guadalajara, Mexico].
EPISTOLA {Norman D. Stevens}
Had Mr. Devereux been better versed in American humor he might not have made the glaring error that he did in referring to Ellis Parker Butler’s famous Pigs Is Pigs (1906) [V,2]. The entire point of Butler’s neglected classic is that, in fact, sometimes pigs are not pigs. To refresh Mr. Devereux’s memory the whole plot of Pigs Is Pigs revolves around a shipment of guinea pigs that Flannery, a pigheaded agent of the Interurban Express Company, insists must be paid for not at the rate of domestic pets ($.25) but at the rate for pigs ($.30). While the controversy rages the guinea pigs multiply and overrun the express office. Flannery concludes that, “Next toime I’ll know that pigs of whativer nationality is domestic pets—an' go at the lowest rate…. So long as Flannery runs this expriss office—pigs is pets—an' cows is pets—an' horses is pets—an' lions an' tigers an' Rocky Mountain goats is pets—an' the rate on thim is twinty-foive cints.”
[Norman D. Stevens, Storrs, Connecticut].
EPISTOLA {D. S. Chisholm}
Not so fast! I, too, raised my eyebrows when I first heard mid-wiffery [V,3], but eventually found something like it in the old Century Dictionary, more like “mid’wifri.” Also, I think it was MacNeil who said it, and this could explain the pronunciation. I believe he is Canadian.
[D. S. Chisholm, Kent, Connecticut].
EPISTOLA {Richard Toeman}
We do not know the word humongous here, but I have found used the word ginormous [gi(gantic + e)normous] among our teen-age children and their peers for the last three or four years.
[Richard Toeman, London, England].
EPISTOLA {R. Heath}
The sole inscription on a prominent notice in the middle of the N. Yorkshire moors: IT IS FORBIDDEN TO THROW STONES AT THIS NOTICE.
[R. Heath, Scarborough, England]
EPISTOLA {Sam Hinton}
Mr. Urdang missed a couple of important points in his “You Know What I Mean” [V, 2]. He regrets that the “older tests” were mistakenly thought to measure “intelligence”; such regret is fully justified, and was shared by the “pressure groups” he mentions. What bothered them was that school boards and other agencies were acting as if basic intelligence were really being measured, and were adjusting educational methods accordingly. In consequence, hundreds of kids whose language at home differed from that used in school were labeled “mentally retarded,” and placed in special classes for “slow learners”—all because they had not had a chance to learn enough standard English to cope with the tests. So these pressure groups suggested that if the tests were going to be used in this manner, they should at least be given in a language the students could understand, and that correct answers should not require an easy familiarity with WASP culture. The upshot, of course, has been that California schools are no longer permitted thus to categorize their students on the basis of mass testing.
To people whose English is at best shaky, these tests appeared as just another manifestation of a social structure in which their own success requires far greater talent and effort than is required of members of the more favored groups. And there is no denying the trauma to youngsters who feel that they are denied access to dominant roles in the mainline culture unless they completely renounce the culture and language of their parents and other respected adults with whom they share their daily lives outside of school. It is not “rubbish” to think that their cultural heritage is being insulted.
The aim of bilingual education is to help these youngsters retain a pride in their cultural identities while providing them with the skills that will permit them to move at will between differing cultural systems. An immediate practical result of good bilingual education is that students learn more English that way, and they learn it without being made to despise their own home language.
The article sees irony in this movement because, it claims, our immigrants came here in the first place in order to escape from their native cultures. But they didn’t intend to leave their cultures, they were trying to get away from unjust and oppressive political and economic systems, and that’s not the same thing at all. And there is a double irony when one remembers that the ancestors of our Black Americans wanted desperately not to come here, and that—in my part of the country, at least—Hispanic Americans were here long before “we” were. And don’t forget the Indians, some of whose leaders are quite rightly asking to be spoken of as “Native Americans”—precisely for the purpose of reminding the rest of us of the ethnic sequences in populating this continent.
America has never been successful as a melting pot unless one interprets that metaphor in a culinary, rather than a metallurgical, sense. To the extent that we have become a cultural unit, we are like a good Oriental dinner cooked in a wok, with each bit of vegetable and meat retaining its own identity while contributing to the delightful nature of the whole.
The tone of Mr. Urdang’s article makes me think he may have been suffering from the temporary effects of a less well-prepared repast, which someone called a meal and set before him with a “There you go!” and a “Have a good day!” I do hope he’s feeling better now.
[Sam Hinton, School Relations Officer University of California, San Diego].
EPISTOLA
I am feeling fine, thank you. In response to the above letter and to others in the same vein, I should point out that one purpose of my article was to admit to some personal prejudices about language to which few professional linguists who consider themselves scientists—with all of the impartiality that connotes—would acknowledge in themselves. In so doing, I called them prejudices.
Another purpose of the article was to attack bilingualism in education. Without wittering on about babies and bath-water, I fully realize that all that can be expected from the pursuit of any given policy is that it should be beneficial to the largest number of people possible and if harmful at all, then so to the smallest number. That is the principle of utilitarianism on which I touched. As Mr. Hinton presents his side of the argument, I see aspects of the problem that had not occurred to me before. However, we have experimented with both monolingual and bilingual education in this country, and the recent history of the bilingual system has given every indication that it doesn’t work in most cases. That isn’t to say that it may not work in southern California or in certain other areas, only that it has allowed the quality of education in other parts of the country to deteriorate to an unconscionably low level. It is difficult to reconcile the advantages that may accrue with the many disadvantages, in terms of a poorer quality of education, that the majority must suffer. Moreover, notwithstanding the upbeat attitude of Mr. Hinton toward bi-lingual teaching, it has yet to be demonstrated that it has provided anyone — “Native Americans” or others — with a better education, which is the real issue.
At bottom, it is my view that the aim of an educational system is to educate people. It should not, of course, do so at any cost. But the benefits of a good education usually far outweigh the loss of certain other values, and it is my contention that in our pursuit of bilingual education we may be seeing the perpetuation of certain cultural values to the detriment of the fundamental purpose of any educational system, which is not to further ethnic considerations but to teach.*
We all know how poor the ordinary educational system is in this country; interference with its precarious state by introducing issues that are not directly concerned with educating people has further imperiled whatever qualities still survive. Bilingual education can serve only to obscure the basic issues of education and, in so doing, force standards yet lower by sidetracking students (and teachers) into concerns of linguistic and cultural irrelevancies when they ought to be learning (and teaching) the three R’s.
—Editor
EPISTOLA {Greg Raven}
What trials you as a linguist must put up with! It must be terrible to spend one’s life observing something that one can never really change. You must grind your teeth into dust as you fight back your desire to tinker with the language, to write the dictionary the way it SHOULD be written.
And what do you get for all of your hard work? The hatred of the masses. And now they’re out to get you. The hoi polloi is working in concert, consciously using the words “like” and “you know” just to drive you crazy. Then there are those scummy cretins who insist upon expressing their opinions, full in the knowledge that they are of no value! The very super-subtlety of those subservient idiots must rankle terribly when they call you “sir” as they serve you a “meal” (‘Death to the unwashed bastards!'), although I must admit that I myself once thought that a square meal was the only type a linguist ever ate.
I totally agree with you about the state of today’s education, and I applaud you for abandoning the subject for the time being (except for those two rather long paragraphs), although I believe that you are on the right track. Not only should we base all schooling entirely upon IQ tests to ensure that those less qualified students are immediately farmed out to their future roles as prostitutes and con artists, but we should also encourage the development of these and other skills, if for no other reason than to obviate the possibility of being labeled elitists or somesuch.
Poor Kay Haugaard has a similar, equally serious case of the same malady. As one who evidentally has been a close personal friend of nearly everybody of any importance at all since day one, she must be dying a death of a thousand cuts as she watches the deterioration of our fine, logical language.
Likewise, J. Walter Wilson is to be congratulated for sharing his absolute knowledge of the true meaning of “off again, on again,” as Clyde K. Hyder should receive accolades for living long enough to tell us exactly how Peter schemed to get his name into common usage many years after his death.
All in all, it seems to me that the lot of you, the contentrigid, impotent, mewling “guardians of our culture” should take off your blinders and get out of your towers in order to better understand what in the world is going on.
As a high school drop-out, I know that I am less than perfect. Even so, you will not soon catch me constructing a sentence like “…it is Peter that Christ addresses….” (“Etymologica Obscura,” page eleven, third paragraph).
In short:
VERBATIM: Would you like another issue?
I: (Shaking head) I’m fine, thanks.
[Greg Raven, Los Angeles, California].
EPISTOLA {Paul Hoaken, M.D.}
Having read Jeff Miller’s quite overblown and misleading piece about the “Canadian unity crisis” [V, 1] (apparently as seen through the eyes of an American expatriate who has had a limited experience of Canada), I can assure your readers that all Anglophone Canadians who were raised in the 1930s and 1940s were taught that the word lieutenant is pronounced “leftenant,” the common Canadian pronunciation according to the Dictionary of Canadian English (Avis, Drysdale, Gregg and Scargill, W.J. Gage Limited, Toronto 1967). By the way, this dictionary mentions as well: “esp. U.S., lü tén \?\ (ü as in ooze) not “lyootenant,” as suggested by Mr. Miller.
My purpose in writing, however, is not to dispute Mr. Miller’s views, but to draw to your attention two examples in the same May issue of a common misuse of a technical term. Bruce Price, noting that sometimes the Hebrew P is our P and sometimes our Ph (or F), wrote: “Even with that schizophrenia, it’s worth reporting that the alchemical associations assigned to the Hebrew P….” Jeff Miller wrote: “Ultimately, some other Englishman or other (sic) brought the poisonous malapropism over here, contaminating the fragile Canadian body politic with a rash of ‘loo-,’ ‘lieu-’ and ‘lef-’ tenants and, partially at least, the schizophrenia behind it.” Although the meaning of this sentence is obscure, it is evident that in both examples, the term schizophrenia is used to indicate a splitting apart or splitting into two of what should be unitary. Consistent with this is the common misconception of schizophrenia as split personality, in psychiatric diagnostic terms, dissociative reaction.
Schizophrenia, a term coined by the famous Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, is a derivative of two Greek roots and means literally a splitting of the mind (Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Elsevier, New York, 1971). The splitting Bleuler meant was not a splitting of the personality into two (or more! — as described in such popular accounts as “The Three Faces of Eve” and “Sybil”) but a “splitting of the psychic functions” (E. Bleuler, Dementia Praecox or The Group of Schizophrenias, International Universities Press, New York, 1950) by which Bleuler meant cognitions, striving or volitions, and emotions. In the normal person these are congruent and consistent; in the person with schizophrenia, fragmented and inconsistent. Although rarely, a person suffering from schizophrenia reports feeling as if he or she is two persons, this is not a characteristic symptom; so the connotation of the term as it is popularly used is incorrect, and unfortunate as well, since it perpetuates a misconception about this serious mental disorder.
[Paul Hoaken, M.D., Hotel Dieu Hospital Kingston, Ontario, Canada]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
TO AVOID DANGER OF SUFFOCATION, KEEP AWAY FROM BABIES AND CHILDREN. — on a plastic garment bag.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
That explains the shortness of breath one may experience while jogging past a schoolyard. [from Mrs. G.H. Garbolevsky, Norfolk, VA]
EPISTOLA {Mary Louise Gilman}
I particularly enjoyed Vera L. Harding’s “Shocking News from the West” [V, 1].
The story of the French girl who spoke of American boys’ being good and bad reminds me of one a woman in the State Department in Vienna told me some years ago. She was spending the night with some friends in Germany, and it turned unseasonably cold overnight. The eiderdown comforter kept slipping off, so she pulled up the flannel-like bottom sheet and slept next to the mattress.
The next morning, her hostess anxiously asked if she had been warm enough. Mary Jane’s German was a bit sketchy, but she never hesitated to use it. She wasn’t too sure of the word for “mattress” (Matratze) and it came out Matrose. Not until some time later did she learn that the reason everyone at the breakfast table erupted into laughter was that she’d said she’d kept nice and warm as she slept next to the sailor!
[Mary Louise Gilman, Hanover, Massachusetts]
EPISTOLA {John L. Rayment}
Jeff Miller’s fascinating tussle with the lieutenant/leftenant problem [V, 1] does not explore what is, to my way of thinking, the most likely route for the transition between the two groups of spellings and pronunciations.
It seems to me to be highly probable that at some time, lieu- was either mis-written or mis-read to produce liev-, because v frequently stands for u in print and is confused with it in manuscript. Subsequently the v became softened, as is often the case before an unvoiced sound, like t, to f. Lieutenant to lievtenant to lieftenant and all stations onward. As simple as that.
[John L. Rayment, Ongar, Essex]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
Bernard Meltzer on WOR’s advice show, What’s Your Problem, in a commercial for mausoleums: “Burial underground is dirty, muddy, and crowded.”
EPISTOLA {Carolyn Hurless}
I received my copy of VERBATIM [V, 3] today and put aside all activities that I might read this issue from cover to cover. I have to write a letter about an error on page 5, paragraph 6 of the article “The Arabic Star-Names” by E.E. Rehmus.
He states that “…the star Algol, which is located in Taurus….” That is not where Algol is located — at least not since three nights ago. It is located in the constellation Perseus, and is Beta in that constellation. It also happens to be a variable star, a spectroscopic binary.
The Hebrews saw Algol as Rosh ha Satan (‘Satan’s head’) …it was also seen as Lilith, Adam’s legendary first wife. (That story comes from those talmudists!) The Chinese gave Algol a most gruesome name, Tseih She, ‘The Piled Up Corpses,’ and astrologers said it to be the most violent and dangerous star in the entire northern heavens! However, for the group of us known as Variable Star Observers, it is the most noteworthy variable star in the northern sky.
For 2½ days it stays at about 2.3 magnitude. (On a clear night with no moon, the unaided eye can see 6th magnitude.) At the end of 2½ days it begins to dim slightly and then more and more rapidly to 3.5 magnitude, with light oscillations taking about 9 hours. Its total period is about 2 days 20 hrs 48 min 55 seconds. This was confirmed as far back as 1694. No doubt it was evil to those long ago who were aware of its variability, and thus it was a demon star.
It is also interesting to note that at nine o’clock in the evening of the 23rd of December, when on the Meridian, Algol is almost exactly in the zenith of New York City. Shades of astrology… if those fiends knew that …why anything could happen—think of the predictions that would roll out!
[Carolyn Hurless, Starlight Observatory Lima, Ohio]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
The 1979 Radio Shack catalogue lists an Electronic Fever Thermometer “for both oral and rectal use.”
Crossword Puzzle
Across
1. Shot in the dark. (8, 7)
9. Was the old moralist sexy as a turnip? (7)
10. Upshot of the court battle. (7)
11. Arrangement suitable for framing. (5)
12. The end of three monkeys. (9)
14. No dole, as long as one uses his head. (6)
15. Sinatra medley arranged by a skilled hand. (7)
20. Come safely through the storm. (7)
21. Buy! or Try! Immediately, too. (6)
23. Cold sausage. (9)
26. Chain reaction from flying saucers. (5)
27. The star made it in a pile returning with relief for his woes. (7)
28. Tim and I, not being forward, dined last, to do as others do. (7)
29. Very light alarms. (8, 7)
Down
1. Young scamp here to sing about love? Just too pushy!(8)
2. Cupid’s bow. (5, 4)
3. Find Utopia and fortune with a flying machine. (9)
4. Major losses of interest. (6)
5. Super suds. (8)
6. Six squares are foursquare. (5)
7. Marriage of convenience for a fair trade. (5)
8. American flagpole sitter. (5)
13. Fire a depth charge. (3)
16. Charging, in writing, about a little cocaine. (9)
17. Yankee article on Paul Bunyan, cherry trees and jumping frogs. (9)
18. The Politburo, at first blush. (8)
19. Saboteur blows up the wolf pack. (8)
20. Man’s inhumanity to man. (3)
22. In hard times GI joins the smart farm boys. (6)
23. Stared openmouthed… (5)
24. … at the birds? No sir!(5)
25. Wind up right by the Riviera, it’s so much better. (5)
Crossword Puzzle Answers
Across
1. Infrared picture
9. Puritan
10. Lobbing
11. Setup
12. Innocence
14. NO-odle
15. ARTISAN
20. Weather
21. AD-verb
23. GROUND-hog
26. CHINA
27. PAN-ace-A
28. I-miT-ATE
29. Distress signals
Down
1. Imp-O-sing
2. First love
3. AUTOPI-lot
4. Ennuis
5. Pilsners
6. Cubic
7. Union
8. Eagle
13. Can
16. Indi-C-ting
17. Americana
18. Red-heads
19. U-BOATERS
20. War
22. Ag-GI-es
23. Gaped
24. O-r-N-is
25. Nice-R
Internet Archive copy of this issue
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Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom. Volume XXV, No. 6, November 1976. p. 145. ↩︎
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Reported in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 18, 1977. ↩︎
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Ibid. ↩︎
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See footnote 1. ↩︎
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Undated “Bill of Particulars” submitted to the Texas Education Commissioner by the Textbook Chairman of the TSDAR. ↩︎
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See green printed sheet distributed by Educational Research Analysts. The sheet is entitled “THE MEL GABLERS—Consumer Advocates for Education.” ↩︎