VOL VI, No 3 [Summer, 1984]
The Bows' Stratagem
Peter A. Douglas, Albany, New York
The use of the bow and arrow is among the oldest and most widely practised of human skills. Man’s proficiency with this weapon has been ranked with the development of speech, the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel as significant features of cultural advance. Throughout its long and honorable history it has served man well and it is not surprising that the bow has left a lasting mark on our language. More than five hundred years after the heyday of the English archer, his terminology may still be heard in everyday speech, in proverbial wisdom, and in the imagery of literature.
The longbow is best remembered for the vital part it played in the notable English victories against France during the Hundred Years' War in the 14th and 15th centuries. We find that those days of the archer’s greatness have been fossilized in words, phrases, figures of speech, and adages which remain impressive testimony to those old skills that controlled the fate of nations. Some phrases are as archaic as their origins; but others may still be heard in conversation.
To brace a bow is to string it, to draw it tight, and so we are told to brace ourselves or to brace up—the man as tense and prepared for action as the strung bow. A person whose nerves are too tense may be referred to as high(ly) strung. From the Parthian horsemen who shot arrows at their enemies in real or feigned flight we have a Parthian shot or a Parthian shaft, a stinging remark made on departure. In less aggressive individuals this is merely a Parthian glance. (This has become, through assimilation with a more familiar word, a parting shot, etc., in the speech of some.) In an archery contest the final shot is called the upshot, hence its use to signify the final issue or conclusion: the upshot of the matter was…or in the upshot. Another kind of shot is a long shot, a remote chance, an improbable guess or hazard. This seems more likely to owe its origin to the bow rather than the musket, since the hazard was increased by the physical strength and know-how needed to direct the shot. In any event, many archery terms found their way naturally into the parlance of firearms.
Words derived from the target at which the archers aimed have also enriched the language. An archer’s target at one time was a butt or a mound of earth, hence a person may still be said to be a butt when he is made the object of jokes, scorn, or ridicule. In some cases this ridicule may take the form of a barbed shaft. Today we still have the butts in rifle shooting. The actual target on the mound of earth was a piece of white material known as the blank, a word which has also been used figuratively, though probably implying greater accuracy. Desdemona says to Cassio of Othello:
As I have spoken for you with all my best
And I have stood within the blank of his displeasure
For my free speech (III. iv. 127)
From blank we have point-blank, the construction possibly coming from the head or point of the arrow being aligned with the blank before loosing, or, more probably, from a verbal origin as in “break-neck” or “cut-throat.” To point the arrowhead directly at the blank was necessary when the archer was very close to the butt; in a long shot he would aim above the target. From the directness of such a shot, a point-blank question or point-blank remark is blunt, plain, and straightforward. A successful hit on the target’s center is a bull’s-eye, a later reference to the middle of the target. In this context, a bull’s-eye is usually not merely the goal, but the goal realized; to score a bull or to score a bull’s eye is to succeed in some attempt. An older phrase, to hit the needle, means the same thing and is a reminder of the wooden peg or needle which used to mark the center of the blank. A present-day archer will make a gold, this now being the color of the central area of his target. In contrast to a butt, a rover was a mark selected at will or at random and not at a constant or fixed distance from the bowman. This was shooting at rovers which came to be used figuratively to mean ‘without definite aim or object’ or ‘at random, haphazard,’ chiefly in such phrases as to run at rovers or to talk at rovers. Finally, an archer or his figurative counterpart who misses the target is said to be wide of the mark or beside the mark. Of course, one can also hit the mark—especially an easy mark.
Many phrases still heard are derived from the longbow’s mechanical rival, the crossbow. This weapon’s missile was a bolt and the word is still found in the following phrases and expressions. To shoot one’s bolt is to commit oneself to a course of action. The proverb a fool’s bolt is soon shot reminds us that a crossbow did not have the rapid rate of fire of a longbow so it was unwise to shoot prematurely. However, a fool’s bolt may sometimes hit the mark. The bolt has two qualities which give rise to different figurative uses—its straightness and its speed. From the former we have a bolt of cloth, a bolt as a door fastening and other straight metal rods such as a rifle bolt. In bolt-upright we see that, as early as Chaucer’s day, the stress shifted from mere straightness to erectness. From the speed of the bolt we have a bolt of lightning and a thunderbolt, the discharge of lightning seen as a missile cast to earth. A bolt from the blue is a complete surprise. In battle an archer might shoot high in the air so that the enemy’s shields would be less effective. Such a bolt from the blue (sky) must have carried the sense of unexpectedness and disaster which we still see today. The characteristic swiftness of the bolt led the word to be used verbally, meaning to do something quickly. To bolt, to bolt off, or bolt away mean to ‘rush or dart off.’ More specifically, they refer to a horse which breaks from control, as in a bolting horse. To bolt out is to blurt out. A bolt-hole or bolting-hole is a hole by which to bolt or escape. In to bolt one’s food, to ‘gulp it down,’ the image of a fast-moving object has become less concrete. At first bolt means ‘at first go.’
An archer’s skill was multifarious and long in the learning; phrases grew up around his practical skills from many points of view. Idiomatic expressions containing references to archery are abundant, though most have not survived into current spoken English. Listed below are some of the picturesque expressions.
have two (or many) strings to one’s bow
‘have extra or alternative resources at hand’ as an archer carried reserve strings. The phrase enjoyed an enduring popularity in an amorous context.
draw the longbow
‘exaggerate.’ A longbowman was a ‘romancer or a liar.’ To overshoot the mark is also to ‘exaggerate, go too far.’
outshoot a man in his own bow
The modern equivalent would be ‘beat a man on his own ground.’ A bow was a personal article, usually made by the archer himself and suited to his own requirements.
have the bent of his bow
‘know his intentions or gauge his “calibre.”
by the string rather than the bow
‘by the most direct way.’
draw a bow at a venture
‘attack without taking proper aim,’ hence ‘do something at random or without consideration.’
draw by one string
to be in agreement.
be too much of the bowhand
‘fail in a design’; literally, ‘not sufficiently “dexterous,” ' since the bowhand is usually the left.
be wide at (on, of) the bowhand
‘be inaccurate, miss one’s target.’
make arrows of all sorts of wood
‘turn one’s hand to anything.’
draw the bow up to the ear
‘put all one’s strength or resolve into a commitment.’
unbend one’s bow
‘relax; withdraw a threat.’
bend one’s bow but shoot not
‘threaten but take no action.’
have an arrow left in one’s quiver
‘be not completely without resources or arguments.’
This bolt never came out of your bag
is a crossbowman’s equivalent of ‘This arrow never came out of your quiver,' suggesting that someone’s words or works are not his own.
shoot a second arrow to find the first
In The Merchant of Venice Bassanio says to Antonio:
In my school days, when I had lost one shaft, I shot his fellow of the selfsame flight The selfsame way with more advised watch, To find the other forth, and by adventuring both, I oft found both. (I.i.139)
make a shaft or a bolt of it
‘be willing to take a risk; to have a go.’
bend the bow of Ulysses
‘perform a difficult task; only the owner could draw this bow.’
Many pithy sayings associated with archery have been polished into aphorisms or petrified into proverbs; the following are a few examples. A bolt lost is not a bow broken. A bow long bent at last waxeth weak. Draw not your bow before your arrow be fixed. A good archer is not known by his arrows, but his aim ‘fine feathers do not make fine birds:’ The arrow often hits the shooter ‘the gunpowder equivalent is hoist by one’s own petard.’ Of a pig’s tail you will never make a good shaft— nor a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. A word spoken is an arrow let fly. To unstring the bow will not heal the wound. It is too late to unbend the bow when it is broken—and to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted. Everyman will shoot at the foe but few will pick up the shafts: It was common that when an archer had exhausted his supply of arrows and if the fortunes of the battle allowed, he would try to retrieve some spent ammunition for the next encounter, especially when in enemy territory and without the opportunity to make new shafts. So, few can be relied upon to see a matter through to the end without leaving the tedious or dangerous part to others. He will shoot higher that shoots at the moon than he who shoots at a dunghill, though he miss the mark: spoken as encouragement to noble designs and endeavors. Sir Philip Sidney wrote a variation in his Arcadia of 1590:
Who shoots at the mid-day Sunne, though he be sure
he shall never hit the marke; yet as sure he is he
shall shoote higher, than who ayms but at a bush.
He that shoots oft at last shall hit the mark ‘practice makes perfect,’ or ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.’ If the bow is drawn taut, the arrow will fly fast. When the arrow is on the string, it must go. There is more than one yew bow in Chester: Today we might say ‘there are plenty more fish in the sea’; the bowmen of Chester were famous for their skill and strength. I have a good bow up at the castle: said to someone who promises to undertake something without the means to accomplish it, an expression of disbelief, as in “I have a good doublet in France.” Speak well of archers for your father shot in a bow: A reminder not to be ashamed of one’s (humble) parentage or background, for the medieval archers came from the lowest ranks of society and it was the bow that made the common man of England such a tough opponent for any enemy or authority to tackle. Many speak of Robin Hood who never shot in his bow: In Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer wrote:
…for switch manere folk, I gesse,
Defamen Love, as nothing of him knowe.Thei speken, but thei benten nevere his bowe. (II.861)
Today we should probably suggest walking a mile in a person’s shoes.
In addition to this infiltration into the language, there is a host of beliefs and superstitions associated with the bow and arrow, and the folklore of many countries contains references to archery. The bow is seen, for instance, as an emblem of sovereignty or as a token of prestige; the arrow or arrowhead may be a symbol of virility or of death, a love charm or a talisman against accidents. Though extinct in the civilized world as a military weapon, the bow occupied a unique and remarkable place in history and continues to be popular in sport and as a weapon of the hunt. Together the bow and arrow have pervaded all aspects of human creation—literature, mythology, art, language. Their fundamental symbolism is that of security and survival, not surprisingly so since for thousands of years man has used this weapon to fill his belly and to defend his home. Maurice Thomson wrote in The Witchery of Archery, 1877:
So long as the new moon returns in heaven a bent, beautiful bow, so long will the fascination of archery keep hold of the hearts of men.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Planned Parenthood Looking for Volunteers.” [Headline in The Elmira [Ontario] Independent]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Suggestions for handling obscene phone calls from New England Telephone Co.” [Title of a brochure purported (by Harvard Magazine) to be distributed by a phone company. Both of the preceding submitted by Elisabeth P. Smith, Waterloo, Ontario]
ANTIPODEAN ENGLISH: The Dinkum Oil
G.W. Turner, University of Adelaide
Psst! Like to read some dinkum Australian? This comes from no less august a source than the Times Literary Supplement (8 May, 1969, p. 488) and is part of a review of The Pocket Oxford Dictionary back in the days when the fifth edition had just come out with its supplementary list of Australian and New Zealand words. Here is the passage:
Well, starve the bardies! Any poor choom who takes a squiz at the new Pocket Oxford Dictionary doesn’t have a Buckley’s. Talk about stonkering the poms; fossick about in the last thirty pages and you’ll want to drop your bundle. The O.U.P.’s gone in boots and all and given the dinkum oil about the way the Aussielanders talk— some Earl’s Court exile must have put the acid on them. Nothing bodger about it, though, they’ve curled the mo and brought out a real boomer when they could have gone up the booay with all sorts of blues. So if you want to get the strength of what we’ve been saying and have a bosker hard read slip out one arvo and lamb down some of your oscar for the revised Pocket Oxford (18s.), the first new edition since 1942.
All the words and expressions in this paragraph are indeed Australian English, are mostly current, and are taken, in fact, from the list in the dictionary, but no Australian would for a moment think this concentrated collection of localisms a genuine unselfconscious transmission of thought. It is thought dressed entirely in badges, a special literary genre for facetious reviews of regional dictionaries.
It is, however, not only Poms who write reviews of this kind, or actually use language of this kind, if not quite at this impossible level of concentration, Australians abroad might, when they encounter compatriots, nourish their nostalgia with a concentration of words of home flavour, and even at home (which, so English is the orientation of our culture, can seem to be a version of abroad anyway) nationalism may be asserted with an aggressive infusion of local colour in speech. The ocker style, we would call it now, using a word which became current too late for inclusion in the 1969 dictionary.
What marks the Times reviewer’s passage from real language is its kaleidoscopic irregularity of tone and connotations. Starve the bardies, a meaningless interjection, is Western Australian (stone the crows, itself rather “literary” now, being a more likely Eastern-state term), while up the booay is from New Zealand, nearly a quarter of a world away. Earl’s Court, about twice as far in the other direction, was for some years a district of London where so many Australians rented accommodation that the area acquired the byname Kangaroo Valley, a rare example of “Overseas Australian English.”
Some words are not commonly recognized by Australians as local words, though usually in these cases they will be colloquial or slang words known to be unlikely to occur in books. Probably arvo ‘afternoon’ is in this category along with fossick about (a little old-fashioned now) ‘to rummage around, originally seeking gold,’ blue, ‘error,’ get the strength of ‘understand the essence of,’ boots and all ‘with no holds barred’ (to borrow a metaphor from another sport), or put the acid on ‘exert pressure on (someone) to grant a favour.’ Other expressions are more self-consciously local. Probably boomer in its transferred sense (a large version of anything, not just a kangaroo) and dinkum oil ‘the genuine article’ have this recognizably Australian flavour even at home.
Many Australianisms have dated to varying extent. Squiz ‘a look’ savours of “bygone schoolboy” to me while curl the mo ‘succeed brilliantly’ has an Edwardian flavour to at least one Australian, even though he knows that all the documentation for the word is comparatively recent. This is because of its association with the twirling moustaches, of course. It seems, by the way, to be used more especially in sporting contexts. Bosker ‘excellent’ had its active life in the first decade of this century and is marked ‘obsolescent’ (an understatement if anything) in the list drawn on by the reviewer. Lamb down had its heyday on the goldfields over a century ago, and oscar ‘money’ or ‘cash’ (rhyming slang based on the name of the actor Oscar Asche who died in 1936) has something of a patina of age about it now.
Some Australianisms (e.g. bodger ‘inferior’ or dinkum ‘genuine’) have their origin in English dialect, to the surprise of Australians, though, if words are not Aboriginal or foreign, it is hardly surprising if their source is to be found in some sort of English. Drop your bundle ‘panic,’ ‘give up’ is an idiom arising from Australian life since it appears that the reference was originally to the swagman’s (‘tramp’s’) swag (‘roll of personal belongings’). Sometimes words (e.g. stonker ‘baffle,’ ‘tire out’) are simply of unknown origin.
Choom imitates one kind of British pronunciation of a word itself felt to be British in Australia (especially in the phrase new chum, ‘a newcomer from England,’ and, by extension, ‘a novice at anything’). To say someone doesn’t have a Buckley’s is to say ‘he has no chance.’ It is not known what “Buckley’s chance” was originally. The best suggestion seems to be that there is some reference to the Melbourne firm Buckley and Nunn—that ‘Buckley’s chance’ is ‘Nunn’; but the process, suggesting but not quite resembling rhyming slang, is obscure.
Origins, if unknown to speakers, are generally considered irrelevant to the tone and life of words as they are used now— perhaps too readily, since there is perhaps a residual flavour of dialect about a word like bodger, and as the metaphor in drop one’s bundle is forgotten the phrase loses vitality and becomes merely puzzling.
The reader should now be able to prepare a translation of the reviewer’s paragraph for homework. You might begin “Well, deprive the small white edible grubs of food….”
SIC! SIC! SIC!
A brochure issued by Washington National Insurance Company offers “$100 a day …even for life! for covered injuries during hospitalization.” It would be interesting to see the actuarial figures describing injuries sustained during hospitalization.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
Notice on some London underground escalators: “Dogs Must Be Carried.” As the story goes, a confused and flustered old lady, having seen and complied with a sign reading “Tickets Must Be Shown,” was terrified that, without a dog, she would have to climb the stairs.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
Notice over the door of a small country hospital, somewhere in Europe, that is run by the Nursing Sisters of Charity translates into: “We harbor every sort of disease and have no respect for religion.”
SIC! SIC! SIC!
Street sign in England: “Children Drive Slowly.” (Thank goodness!) [The three preceding from A. Adrian Allen, London, England]
Philip Howard on English English
Philip Howard, Thesaurus 1
Let us now praise notabilities, luminaries, celebrities, raras aves, magnates, worthies, famous men, and our sires, progenitors, fathers, that procreated, engendered, or, if you prefer, begat us. Peter Mark Roget was born 200 years ago on 18 January 1779. In extreme old age he became the author and eponym of that most curious and controversial of reference books, Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, classified and arranged so as to facilitate the Expression of Ideas and assist in Literary Composition.
Roget was not the pioneer of the ingeniously persuasive metaphor of using thesaurus to mean a treasury or storehouse of knowledge, which is the language of salesmen of encyclopaedias. It had been so used in British English since the sixteenth century. John Stuart Mill had used it a few years before the publication of Roget’s Thesaurus, and may have given the old lexicomane the idea.
But Roget was a pioneer of dictionaries of synonyms in English. Was it a good idea? Does his book, as its original title claimed, facilitate the expression of ideas and assist in literary composition? Or is it as specious as those courses that claim they can teach you to write television scripts or novels in twenty easy lessons? Fastidious purists such as Benard Levin claim that to open Roget is a sign of imbecility and an impediment to literary composition. One should express oneself in one’s own words that come naturally, not search out other men’s sesquipedalian jaw-breakers for the purpose of elegant variation or impressing one’s audience with spurious erudition.
That is all very well for people with vocabularies as large, memories as retentive, and wits as quick as Bernard’s. We lesser mortals quite often mislay the precise word that we need, although we know perfectly well that it exists. That is where there is a legitimate and invaluable use for Roget. He is for recapturing lost words, not discovering new ones.
Roget is useless for discovering new words because he groups such diverse words as if they were synonyms. It is as though a zoo were to put gorillas, chimpanzees, gibbons, orangutans, and a man and a woman all together in the same cage, and label it APES. The man who uses my Roget to find a synonym let us say for thanking for a ‘meal’ will come up with such grotesquely inappropriate variants as: manducation, scoff, phytophagy, refection, and spread. There is no indication of their differences, or the contexts or tones of English for which they are appropriate.
There are indeed very few exact synonyms in English. No two words are exactly alike. Gorse and furze are pretty close, though linguistic geographers could draw isoglosses to show that the speaker who says gorse comes from a different part of the United Kingdom from the speaker who says furze. The man who calls the prickly bush with yellow flowers whin proclaims that he comes from Scotland or the North of England. But impartial, unbiased, unprejudiced, and disinterested are not quite synonymous, although Roget shuts them all in the same cage. A judge trying his own son for murder should try to be impartial, though he could hardly be unbiased; he should be unprejudiced, though he could not be disinterested. He certainly would not be uninterested in the verdict, however poor his relations with his son.
New dictionaries of synonyms will give definitions and examples to explain and illustrate the peculiar properties of each so-called “synonym.” Such a book would be a useful tool for discovering the precise meaning of new words, as well as recovering old ones that have slipped one’s memory.
Another frequent criticism of Roget is the mazily systematic classification of categories in which words are arranged, so that Improvement comes next to Impairment, and Cleanness follows immediately after Mediocrity. Newer thesauruses of synonyms such as Webster’s list their words alphabetically. This makes looking a word up one operation instead of two or more. But in fact Roget’s idiosyncratic order of words is helpful, because it forces the user to work out precisely what meaning and connotation he is looking for. Suppose he decides that he wants another word for hoggish, which seems a bit pedantic for his purpose. He looks it up in the index, and has to decide whether it is the porcine, greedy, filthy, or gluttonous implication of the word that is uppermost to his purpose.
Longman, who nearly a century before had published Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, printed only a thousand copies of the first edition of Roget. He was soon reprinting. The Westminster Review welcomed its publication with the words: “Roget will rank with Samuel Johnson as a literary instrument-maker of the first class,” which was laying it on a bit thick.
Since that first edition, more than 30 million copies of Roget’s Thesaurus have been sold in multitudinous editions
on both sides of the Atlantic. It obviously meets a deeply felt need or comforts a deep insecurity. By the time he died, aged 90, Roget, the sage, luminary, longhead, shining light, wizard of synonyms had seen twenty-five editions of the work that has come to be inseparably associated with his name as an eponymous word. It is a source of much gobbledygook and verbal gunge. It can be a useful tool. But it needs to be used with caution: as a rifle for shooting down a particular word that is just the one needed, not as a blunderbuss for scattering (what’s that word for wanting to show off one’s supposed learning? Pass the Roget. Ah, yes) erudite variation of locution, prolixity, and longiloquence.
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Words For The Wise
Mark Beach, drawings by Bill Gilchrist, (Coast to Coast Books, Portland, Ore., 1979), 124pp.
For no discernible reason, this quite good glossary of a few hundred academic terms is decorated with facetious cartoons that belie the serious nature and quality of the text. Useful for students who need definitions for terms like honors program, experience-based learning, and work/study program. Does not attend to educationist jargon, thank heavens!
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Generative Grammar And Linguistic Competence
P.H. Matthews, (Allen & Unwin, Winchester, Mass., 1979), 112pp.
If you are interested in an understandable and understanding presentation of Chomsky’s approach to linguistics and if you are up to paying $18.95 for a 112-page book, then this may be your cup of tea. If you want to continue to squander your time and your money, there is a useful (77-book) bibliography.
Laurence Urdang
Nabokov’s Dirty Tricks
Ray Russell, Beverly Hills, California
Coded sexual references, often coarse, lurk under the elegant surface of Vladimir Nabokov’s work, and most of them have gone undetected by academe. In evidence, you are invited to examine, first, Exhibit A (for Anal):
Driving from one motel to another like a connect-the-dots puzzle, the ardent sensualist Clare Quality criss-crosses the American landscape, one hand on the steering wheel, the other on the smooth warm thigh of this not-unwilling captive, the under-aged, over-sexed Dolores Haze, a.k.a. Lolita, who gave her name to Nabokov’s most famous novel. When Quality signs the motels’ guest registers, he chooses fictitious names designed to taunt his pursuer, the obsessed-unto-madness Humbert Humbert.
These motel register word games were apparently designed to taunt Nabokov’s critics and commentators, too, and to puzzle and misdirect them—all for the private amusement of the author. Many of these registrations are transparent literary allusions: “ ‘Arsène Lupin’ was obvious to a Frenchman who remembered the detective stories of his youth,” says French-born Humbert, “and one hardly had to be a Coleridgian to appreciate the trite poke of ‘A. Person, Porlock, England.’ ” (Coleridge’s poem, Kubla Kahn came to him in a dream from which he was unfortunately awakened by the visit of “a person on business from Porlock.”)
But not all of the allusions in the “cryptogrammic paper chase” (Humbert’s description) are literary. When they are not, when they allude to lore outside the academic range, and particularly when they are in the area of what the Monty Python zanies call Naughty Bits, they sometimes trip up learned annotators—and Nabokov, wherever he may be, smiles wickedly at their pratfalls.
Referring to one of the motel registrations, Humbert says, “Horribly cruel, forsooth, was ‘Will Brown, Dolores, Co.’ ” I had no trouble decoding that one the very first time I read Lolita—but then I’m not an academic, and perhaps too much of my youth was misspent among low companions.
Carl R. Proffer, in a lively, concise and fascinating pioneer work, Keys to Lolita (Indiana University Press, 1968), tried to explain it this way:
In the preceding chapter, Humbert composes this poem:
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores,
On a patch of sunny green
With Sanchicha reading stories
In a movie magazine—
This is odd, because Quilty had no knowledge of these verses—so he couldn’t have chosen “Will Brown” to mock Humbert’s “While brown.” On the other hand, brown is the color most often associated with Lolita… and Quilty would know that. (One should also keep in mind the fact that Humbert is quite mad and may be hallucinating all this.) But more important is the fact that Quilty knew the poem Humbert had parodied… Robert Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”…
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores
Squats outside the Convent bank…
Prof. Proffer, a brilliant Nabokovian and Russologist, nonetheless gives the impression, here, of a man stumbling around in a dark room, trying to find the light switch, falling over hassocks and knocking down lamps. He’s right about the Browning parody (which I, shallowly read in Browning’s works, would not have tumbled to), but while spotting that double-entendre, he misses the triple-entendre. Alfred Appel, Jr., is an equally dedicated and diligent Nabokov buff, and a former student of the master, as well (Cornell, 1954). And yet, in his monumental book, The Annotated Lolita (McGraw-Hill, 1970), he is on this point no more illuminating than Proffer:
Quilty echoes H.H., whose “forsooth” acknowledges the “coincidence”; see 247/1 (“Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores”)…
In the interests of scholarship, I therefore wrote to Proffer:
You appear to be somewhat dubious of your own interpretation of “Will Brown, Dolores, Colo.” since you bring up the fact that Quilty could have no knowledge of Humbert’s verses, and you suggest that Humbert, being after all a madman, may have been hallucinating. I think perhaps you miss the point because you may be unaware that brown, as a verb, is gutter lingo for ‘the act of anal intercourse.’ When Quilty writes in the motel register that he “will brown Dolores,” he is taunting Humbert with his intention to sodomize Lolita.
This would seem to be confirmed in the closing pages of the novel when Humbert refers to Quilty as one “who had sodomized my darling.” How could Humbert know that, except from “Will Brown Dolores”? … One more thing that seems to bolster my view: why would this particular registration be “Horribly cruel” to Humbert if his interpretation was the same as yours? It is no more cruel than many other of Quilty’s mocking registrations, if we disallow the brutality and ugliness of the anal inference.
A copy of the letter was sent to Appel. He didn’t answer it, but Proffer did, saying, in part: “Thanks for your letter and explanation—I have had several letters explaining what brown means over the last few years, but yours is the first real explanation of what is going on in that citation.”
That would have been the end of it, but a couple of months later, while re-reading Lolita, I came upon this passage in Chapter 21:
…the Palace Sentries, or Scarlet Guards, or Beaver Eaters, or whatever they are called.
I chuckled inwardly. Vladimir, you rascal—up to your old tricks, are you, putting another one over on the squares?
Why, I asked myself, do I catch these things when others don’t? Am I sex-obsessed, a Dirty Old Man? Probably, but if I am, so was Nabokov, and that may be the reason I’m tuned in to his wavelength. But there may be another reason. Nabokov had a devious mind; so do I. He loved to play tricks on his readers; moi aussi. He planted obscure clues and private jokes in his books; same here. “Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex,” he once said. No one, God knows, has ever compared my writing to Nabokov’s, either favorably or unfavorably (I’d gladly settle for unfavorably!), but some critics and editors have said things about my work that could also apply to his. A British anthologist, who had included a story of mine in his book, wrote in his introduction: “It is a wonderfully flamboyant Chinese puzzle of a story which rewards close scrutiny by yielding up further mystery upon mystery.” An editor for Random House, asking for permission to use a Paris Review story of mine in a book, wrote, “It took me more than one reading to nail several subtleties and allusions.” In a review of one of my novels, a newspaper critic said, “If you are surprised by the end of Chapter 39, then you really did not pay attention to the clues Ray Russell dropped along the way —or you were misdirected, and that is not too surprising, because Russell is a master of misdirection.”
It takes one, in other words, to know one. At any rate, I reached for my copies of the Proffer and Appel books again. Proffer makes no comment on “Beaver Eaters”—it slipped right past him. Appel does, but, as before, he misses the true point:
Beaver Eaters: a portmanteau of “Beefeaters” (the yeoman of the British royal guard) and their beaver hats.
This time, I wrote directly to Appel, making passing reference to my earlier letter about Will Brown and politely going on to say, about Beaver Eaters, that his note on the phrase was correct as far as it went, but didn’t go far enough. (Actually, I think it’s the Coldstream Guards who wear beaver hats, not the Beefeaters, but let that pass.) “A beaver eater is a ‘cunnilingist,’ ” I informed him, “and our cunning linguist, Nabokov, knows this very well, I feel sure.” My letter concluded: “It’s possible that I just have a dirty mind, and that Nabokov is innocent of anal and oral references. But I doubt it.”
Appel replied promptly, saying that he had asked Nabokov about that very thing, but that “the expression was new to him.” Appel also considered such a reference “inappropriate” because “until the last decade or so those fellows [the Beefeaters] were famous for homosexual prostitution. Beaver would be all wrong.” He admitted that “it is indeed tempting to find an allusion behind every bush.”
Touché, Professor! “Behind every bush.” Not a bad joke for an academic. He made no mention at all of Will Brown, but in a P.S. spoke of a scene in the film version of Lolita, though not in the novel, when Lolita’s mother, Charlotte Haze (played by Shelley Winters) praises the tastiness of her cherry pie, in order to entice the reluctant Humbert (James Mason) to room-and-board in her house. Humbert, at the moment, happens to be looking directly at an underclad Lolita (Sue Lyon), and he immediately decides to take the room, after all. “What changed your mind?” asks Charlotte, “The cherry pie,” replies Humbert. “And Nabokov, not [director Stanley] Kubrick, wrote this line,” Appel asured me, adding “Cherry is an expression Nabokov could have heard on the schoolbuses which he rode for purposes of research; the other expressions would not have been aired by young teens, but rather their older brothers in locker rooms—to which Nabokov never gained (or attempted) entry.”
Well, as for the sexual connotation of beaver being “new” to Nabokov, I have to believe that it was nothing of the kind, and that the Olympian novelist1 was having a bit of fun with his earnest annotator by disclaiming all knowledge of the word’s erotic meaning. In my mind is his contempt for “academic mediocrities” who think “it is possible to unravel the mysteries of genius” (“The Structure of Eugene Onegin”), and while Appel is certainly no mediocrity, it is not difficult to imagine Nabokov toying with his former pupil like a sleek, well-fed old cat with a presumptuous young mouse. Beaver new to him? To Nabokov?? Are you kidding??? However, the rigors of scholarly discourse forbade that kind of raucous response, so my answer went like this:
It appears that we’ll both have to defer to Nabokov’s assertion that he was innocent of double-entendre in Beaver Eaters. Perhaps I give him too much credit for an almost limitless, omniscient knowledge of sex lore and U.S. slang.
But I beg leave to disagree with you about certain expressions not being available to him on teen-crammed schoolbuses: I’ve heard things from teeners that widened my education considerably and brought a blush to my cheek….
I’ve always been under the impression (perhaps mistaken) that it was the Coldstream Guards who were notorious for homosexual prostitution, rather than the medievally-attired beefeaters of gin and Gilbert-&-Sullivan fame [Yeomen of the Guard, or, The Merryman and his Maid, London, 1888]. But I suppose both groups might plead guilty to the charge?
Appel did not respond, allowing me the last word. So much for the differing viewpoints of gown and town (or classroom and poolroom) and the distinctive contributions of each to the Higher Learning. Perhaps that foxy grandpa, Nabokov, really had the last word when, in his little book on Gogol, he spoke of writing that “provokes—not laughter and not tears—but a radiant smile of perfect satisfaction, a purr of beatitude—and a writer may well be proud of himself if he can make his readers, or more exactly some of his readers, smile and purr that way.”
Bartlett’s Ain’t Got It
David Steinberg, San Francisco
Before Richard Malthy, Jr., restaged his Off-Broadway production of Ain’t Misbehavin’ on Broadway, Maltby had told a reporter, the show “is not an attempt to deal biographically with Fats Waller’s life, but to celebrate Fats’s musical contribution to our lives.” In Maltby’s assay, Waller, who died in 1943, “was a national resource.”
On Broadway, Maltby’s montage of Waller stride pianism, songs and shtick won the 1978 Tony for Best Musical. The long-running hit introduces Fats’s jaunty jazz to persons who hadn’t been born when he died. For their elders, Ain’t Misbehavin’ reaffirms Fats’s genius. With Fats’s reascendance, the Book-of-the-Month Club in the Summer of 1979 offered The Best of Fats Waller on records, tapes, or cassettes.
But salutes to Fats won’t be complete if we don’t reclaim and hail Fats’s ten-word contribution to American usage. Fats had told a woman who asked him to explain rthym: “Lady, if you got to ask, you ain’t got it.” That exquisite exegesis of the ineffable, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations ain’t got. Instead, Bartlett’s got this modulation: “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know,” and attributes the variation to another national resource, Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong. Neither Satch nor Fats ever phrased things à la Bartlett’s, mayvins and musicians point out. Many swear Fats had blurted: “Lady, if you got to ask, don’t fool with it,” substituting for “fool” another four-letter word beginning with the same consonant.
Bartlett’s misrendering has for years prompted civilians to reprise the wrong words and musician. Jazz missionary Eddie Condon reprised the right words and musician in his autobiography, We Called It Music, published by Holt in 1947. Condon, who co-wrote his book with Thomas Sugrue, noted that jazz musicians revered Fats for his saying as well as his playing. When he arrived in Manhattan in the late 1920s, Condon was thrilled to meet stride piano star Fats Waller, who was famous for answering, “Lady, if you got to ask, you ain’t got it.” Two musicians mentioned by Condon—trombonist Mike Reilly and cornetist Ed Farley—later improvised The Music Goes Round and Round to answer a woman who asked what swing was. Round and round went the Reilly-Farley impromptu, becoming one of swing’s anthems before World War II.
After the war, Farley came home to Newark, N.J., and worked for the Newark Housing Authority in an office on Market Street opposite The Newark News. At The News, I ran the entertainment desk and covered the lively arts; moonlighted as editor of Music Vendor, trade weekly for jukebox operators and disc jockeys; twilighted as free-lance writer of pieced about showbiz. Farley, who had known Satch and Fats, assured me Satch never uttered Bartlett’s garble of Fats’s, “Lady, if you got to ask, you ain’t got it.” For Farley, for jazz musicians who followed or preceded him, Newark’s nearness to New York—and separation from Manhattan—made Newark their haven, hideout, and home. In Newark, he could live without being vilified because he had “crossed the line” (married a black woman), Mezz Mezzrow, the legendary clarinetist, revealed in his autobiography, Really The Blues.
Walking to The News some mornings, I’d swap hellos with Dave Tough, the Chicago drummer, staggering home down Mulberry Street. To get their choppers capped and grinders fitted, leaders and side men, ride men, flacks, and thrushes fell by the Newark office of dentist Albie Vernet after their gigs. Not only did Albie have a “great hand,” he’d cap and grind from midnight to dawn.
They’d fall by Fat Harris’s Star Bar on Halsey Street around the corner from the Adams Theatre to dig Don Lambert’s piano improvisations and feed the kitty on his box. Backstage at the Adams, Sarah Vaughan told me she lived on Avon Place near the church where she sang in the choir. About a half mile from the Star, at 58 Market Street, I’d yack with Herman Lubinsky, who recorded Charlie Parker on his Savoy label. I covered name bands and pop singers at the Adams and at Frank Daley’s Meadowbrook in nearby Cedar Grove, mecca for returning GIs, WACS, Gyrenes, WAVES and WRENS converted to swing by Matinee At Meadowbrook broadcasts over Armed Forces Radio. I supped and cupped with leaders, pleaders, readers, flacks, jacks, side men and ride men. No pro, no hep—that’s hep, not hip—civilian ever quoted Bartlett’s botch instead of Fats’s dictum.
When daylighting, moonlighting, twilighting in Manhattan, I’d fall by the Turf Restaurant on the 47th Street strand of the Brill Building (Tin Pan Alley). There, I’d scarf with song writers, demo makers, a & r men, cats, gates. We’d scarf at Danny’s Hideaway, too; at Al and Dick’s, or at Gus and Andy’s where you could bug the chartists from The Billboard. To join
seances at the Turf with mystics who wrote “liner notes,” I’d parrot the glossolalia based on rigid rules of rhetoric for writing “notes” (purple paeans) on “liners” (album sleeves): Use no form of record; write platter, disc, side, track, session, wax, etch, cut, press, groove, instead. Identify persons who record as artists, whether they sing, play, lead, or arrange. Artists get pacted, or sign pacts—never contracts—with labels, not record companies. Perennial hits remain ever-greens, never standards.
Indoctrinated with expository exactitudes, authors of liner notes never chanted Bartlett’s blasphemy. They cantillated the gospel according to Fats.
Nick’s, the Pied Piper on West Eighth, George’s on Seventh Avenue and other oases left Washington and Sheridan the only Squares in Greenwich Village. Up at 144 East 42nd Street, in the Commodore Music Shop, Milt Gabler collated jazz discography. Jimmy Ryan’s and 52nd Street swung.
No pro, no true blues proponent challenged on my daylight, moonlight, or twilight quests paired Bartlett’s banality with Satch.
To all, Louis Armstrong personified jazz “Start with Louis,” when you pick an All-Star Jazz Combo, Jazz Critic Leonard Feather said. Nobody wondered, “Louis Who?” Born in 1900, Louis died in 1971, 28 years after Fats. During that 28-year stretch, Louis became the best-known jazz artist in the world. Jet planes sped “Ambassador Satch” to Europe and Africa and across America. Television brought him into focus in millions of homes where Fats had been unknown. On stereo and hi-fi rigs, jazz lovers could amplify Satch’s growling vocals and soaring trumpet with truer “presence” and “fidelity” than prewar phonographs could grind from Fats’s relatively few 78-rpm shellacs. The best known jazz artist in the world, Louis, understandably, might be named author of any statement about jazz.
Suppose Satch did growl the variation Bartlett’s has attributed to him. We know Fats said, “Lady, if you got to ask, you ain’t got it.”
And Bartlett’s ain’t got it.
English in Dutch
Harry Cohen, Brussels, Belgium
Most articles in VERBATIM deal with the way English speakers handle their language, how they play or wrestle with it. Although this probably is what interests readers most, perhaps an occasional look at the joys and sorrows English causes in other parts of the world would not come amiss. Let us take Holland for example. Within the family of official national languages, Dutch is probably the closest relative of English. The two have many elements in common (including a number of delightful faux amis), but a systematic exposition would require the skills of a linguistic historian. All I want to do here is to touch upon some aspects of the large-scale adoption of English vocabulary in recent times.
To be sure, none of these aspects is confined to the Dutch situation. After all, each language has its Franglais. Dutch is just a convenient object of demonstration because the material is so abundant.
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Principal areas of penetration. Words tend to travel with the goods (and the bads) for which they stand. Just as Americans call their sausages baloney, wurst, or salami, we import the names of new things and concepts from the countries where they originated: sport from Britain, science and technology from the USA. A great many of the American contributions stem from after WW II and are therefore concentrated in such areas as electronics, astronomy, nuclear physics, and their applications. America is also our big supplier of terminology in the field that I would vaguely define as “modern life”—to encompass such diverse subjects as certain styles of music and dance, contemporary politics and warfare, business management and advertising, film and television techniques, youth movements, the drug scene, and other subcultures.
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Uniqueness of the foreign term. We Dutch could certainly not do without words like clown, jazz, scooter, call girl, rugby, bestseller, cocktail, sexy, ketchup, chip, napalm, jeep, container, poster, or cruise. On the other hand, a term like pipe line, although likely to be understood in most circles, might be frowned upon as an unnecessary barbarism, and no Dutch dictionary would deign to mention it.
These examples represent two extreme positions. Many English loan words have an in-between status which is less easy to describe but more interesting to study. Take goalkeeper, a term for which good Dutch equivalents exist. “Good” means that it is built from conventional national language elements and therefore easy to pronounce and to inflect, and that it is equal in descriptive quality. Examples: doelman ‘goalman,’ doelwatcher ‘goalguard,’ and doelverdediger ‘goal defender.’ Somehow, however, these words have never gained complete acceptance; although everybody understands them, their active use is mainly limited to purists and to those journalists who cultivate a certain sports lingo. Or take computer. First-rate translations were suggested by men of great authority early in the fifties before any habits had taken root. Some were of even higher descriptive value than the original, inasmuch as they also covered the noncomputing functions that this machine now has come to perform. Again, all have remained strangers, while the foreign word has become naturalized. Quite another case is black hole. The literal translation zwart gat is no less popular than the English term but has a different psychological effect. Black hole is intriguing, mysterious, evoking the thrill of cosmic infinity, whereas zwart gat is just a black hole—if you see what I mean. Sex has enjoyed a similar fate. The Dutch equivalents sekse and geslacht are employed in emotionally neutral contexts, whereas sex (sometimes written as “seks”) seems to be the proper designation for the same thing when it is forbidden or otherwise exciting.
- Restricted meaning. Have you ever noticed that many foreign words cover a narrower semantic range in the adopting language than at home? Think of the highly specific meaning that French words like cuisine, chef, or chauffeur have when used by English speakers. My English dictionary offers more than twenty meanings of the noun flat, but the most extensive Dutch dictionary knows only of four. For the noun bar, the ratio is as high as 30 to 3. The word drug is applied only to the narcotic or hallucinogenic varieties in Holland. Along with these has come a second acceptation of the noun kick—one exclusively a soccer term, as penalty is still. Likewise, crawl is only meaningful to swimmers and spurt to athletes and cyclists. Shelter is reserved for a type of tent, and feeling is a psychological category, never a perception or an opinion. Concern concerns nobody but businessmen, royalty is commonly a commoner’s claim, a dealer is either an automobile concessionaire or a drug pedlar, and meeting refers to what the British would call a demo, the Americans a (political or similar) demonstration. Stick stands exclusively for hockey stick, but the diminutive stickie for a marijuana cigarette (side by side with joint, reefer, etc.). And we know of only one establishment, namely the Establishment.
As some of these examples suggest, a high degree of semantic specificity can make attributes redundant. Indeed, would you call your personal driver a private chauffeur, as the French (rightly) do? To return to the goalkeeper, the Dutch never use that word. We just call him keeper, and there is no risk of ambiguity because we simply have no other keepers in the language. Anyway, most users do not realize what the primary meaning of keeper is. The average Dutchman, whether he knows English or not, never stops to think about the “real” meaning of those English words of which he has borrowed only one or two connotations, like foxtrot, jitterbug, twist, dragline, hardware, service, bulldozer, bumper, pin-up, knock-out, punk, compiler, charter, hip, etc. The same may be said of numerous English abbreviations and acronyms, like radar, quasar, laser, hi-fi, COBOL, OK, LSD, DNA, UFO, IRA, FBI, CIA, PLO, OPEC, and the names of practically the whole UN family. Speaking of meaning, I ought to mention that some loan words are used senses they never or rarely have in the lending language. For instance, lunchroom is a ‘tearoom’ in Holland, and camping a ‘campsite.’ We call a paperback pocketbook (boek = book) or just pocket, even when it sports such uncharacteristic features as giant size or deluxe finish (reuzenpocket, luxepocket). And we have followed the French in using slip for ‘briefs,’ dancing for ‘dance hall,’ and smoking for ‘dinner jacket.’
- Pronunciation. If we pronounce laser the English way, it sounds like the Dutch word lezer ‘reader,’ and that may give rise to misunderstanding. On the other hand, if we pronounce it at face value, it sounds much like one of the less decorous words of our own language, and we may appear ridiculous. No wonder we often hesitate: nobody likes to seem uncultured, but who wants to sound pedantic? Ignoring the English pronunciation is usually considered to be non-U, but an anti-elitist vogue has lately conferred some super-U status on this attitude (provided it’s evident that you are doing it knowingly, of course).
One tiny side problem: which English pronunciation? Words like privacy oblige us to choose between British pri\?\\?\ē and American pra\?\v\?\sē. Mind you, a few words have gone ways of their own: detective is invariably pronounced as if it were of French origin, and most Amsterdam housewives make the first part of corned beef sound like cornet (the trumpet).
- Spelling. Strange as it may seem, the spelling of foreign words can be open to discussion. The word tram ‘streetcar’ was adopted more than a hundred years ago, and we still have not quite decided whether it should be written tram or trem or how to pronounce the former. During the wild 1960s, there was a tendency to stay close to the original pronunciation while going completely phonetic in spelling. This craze has yielded gems like kwis ‘quiz,’ joenit ‘unit,’ rieleks ‘relax,’ and immetsj ‘image.’ The present decade of speakers is not so radical, but it certainly is still considered good usage to harmonize the orthography of foreign words with their pronunciation by “Dutching” up their endings and making other slight alterations. Hence compatibel for ‘compatible,’ puzzel for ‘puzzle,’ kloon for ‘clone,’ boycot for ‘boycott,’ hasj for ‘hash,’ lorrie for ‘lorry.’ There is something debatable about this whole subject, though. For instance, one could argue that lorrie ‘mine car’ has been integrated for so long that it should not be considered as a respelled foreign word any longer. I would go along with that objection, but then there are those who would criticize some of my other examples.
This brings us to a question I have carefully avoided so far: What exactly is a foreign word, or a loan word, or a barbarism? There is probably no simple answer to that, but I can think of several reasons why, whatever the definitions, the English attitude to this issue would differ from that of the Dutch. In the first place, the Dutch language has a relatively high sign/sound correspondence. This makes the pronunciation of a given sequence of letters more or less predictable, or, conversely, once you have heard a word, you can be pretty sure how it “should” be spelled. The system is by no means fully consistent, but words that obstensibly do not fit it reveal themselves as nonnative. A few Anglicisms (like trip, spin, spot, song, run, stunt) come close enough to circulate here in mufti, but most do not and thus cannot help continuously exhibiting an alien badge. Secondly, certain letter sequence patterns or letter positions are generally felt to be un-Dutch, such as -ck (snack), -ey (jockey), -sh (pusher), final double consonants (stuff, mess), and many others. Consequently, words containing them—and many English words do—also carry an alien label, even when they cause no pronunciation problems. A third factor is psychological. Small language communities, like small nations, tend to react more defensively to immigration waves than do the bigger fellows. But that is an altogether different subject.
At any rate, the whole notion of foreignness is a relative and gradual one. Quite a few foreign words may be treated en famille in certain circles while elsewhere they are deemed learned, or pedantic, or vulgar, or just “strange.” They may lose their popularity after a certain time (e.g.in is no longer in in the Netherlands), or hover forever at the jargon or slang level, or penetrate into the general language and become accepted by dictionary makers. Incidentally, the assimilation is easiest in science and technology because there are standard procedures for the transformation of the Latin and Greek roots used to coin new terms in these fields (television/ televisie, ecology/ ecologie, electronics/elektronica, algorithm/ algoritme, sexism/ seksisme, etc.). In fact, the language of science would be almost universal if it were not for those frolicsome Americans who delight in inventing lighthearted names for the most serious concepts, like flip-flop, big bang, quark, software, and debugging.
The spelling of adopted English words presents the same kind of problem as their pronunciation: British or American style? Behaviourism or behaviorism, center or centre? I began to realize that this is even an inter-English issue when I met a British secretary who would normally type programme but would prefer program in texts on computer science, the latter being of American origin.
- Morphological constructions. None of the preceding aspects causes any major problems as long as we look at loan words as immutable lexical elements. In real life, however, nouns have to be pluralized and verbs conjugated, and we even inflect our adjectives a bit. (Modern Dutch has retained rudiments of gender.) Also, new words have to be formed through composition or derivation. That’s where the trouble begins:
(a) Inflection. Pluralization is a relatively simple matter. Dutch has two suffixes for the purpose, one of which is basically identical to its English counterpart (-s) and therefore applied to most words of English origin: trips, insiders. However, for words ending in -y, an apostrophe is inserted so that the plural form looks like an English possessive: baby’s, lolly’s. Words ending in a sibilant are frequently pluralized by means of the Germanic suffix (-en): stewardessen, quizzen, boxen.
Conjugation is more intricate. The infinitives of all Dutch verbs end in -n preceded by a vowel (generally an e), and the regular verb paradigm cannot be properly applied to a word that does not have this ending. Foreign verbs have therefore to be refashioned to fit the pattern. ‘To lunch’ becomes lunchen; other examples: lynchen, trainen, testen, boycotten, runnen, settelen, kidnappen, liften (‘hitchhike’), bluffen, sprinten, and recently also joggen. The trick is even played on English nouns that are normally not verbalized at home, such as hockeyen (‘play hockey’), tennissen, bridgen, pokeren (analogous), keepen (‘act as a goalkeeper’), permanenten (‘apply a perm’), speechen (‘deliver a speech’). Technically speaking, these reshaped infinitives can always be conjugated, but the outcome is not always too elegant.
(b) Composition and derivation. In English, nouns are combined into new expressions (a) by joining them (dogcart), (b) by linking them with a hyphen (dog-ear), or (c) by just leaving them as two words (dog collar). The outcome of (a) or (b) is called a compound; for the outcome of (c) I propose the term “word group” (the first self-referring word group, by the way, see VERBATIM IV, 1, 11). As method (c) does not agree with Dutch usage, English word groups (art director, brain drain, link editor) stand out as conspicuously alien in Dutch contexts, even apart from their unfamiliar spelling. Bearing in mind that English composites often evolve from (c) to (b) to (a) anyway, we sometimes attenuate this effect by stealthily inserting a hyphen (air-conditioning) or by writing a hyphenated word solid (weekend) before the OED has given the green light. But mostly we behave as good borrowers should. The whole issue may seem trifling, but it has a few annoying consequences. In the first place, the combination of an English word group and a Dutch noun into a threesome causes problems. For instance, should one write the combination of data base and beheer (‘management’) as data base beheer, databasebeheer, data base-beheer, or in some other of the nine possible permutations? Moreover, this uncertainty is probably the root of the increasing habit of splitting up genuine Dutch compounds, especially when the number of syllables is high. Authors who should know better are beginning to prefer aardrijkskunde onderwijs to aardrijkskundeonderwijs (‘geography teaching’) or even inkoop afdeling to inkoopafdeling (‘purchase department’).
The English invasion may be detrimental to some of our compositional traditions, but it has induced bustling creativity on the derivation front. I have already mentioned the formation of new verbs through adaptation of English roots. Also, the suffix -er can produce agents of such verbs where they do not exist in English (tennisser, bridger, hockeyer, filmer). In a second round, Dutch free forms are sometimes attached to engender macaronics like afkicken (‘kick off = ‘undergo drug detoxification treatment’), uittesten (‘test out’ = ‘verify by reference to a checklist’), and omturnen (‘turn round’ = ‘make one change one’s mind’).
There is one area of derivation where the Dutch are really on their home ground; that’s the formation of diminutives. The suffix is basically -je, but its modifications are many. It can, given an appropriate context, be applied to practically every concrete noun and sometimes even to other parts of speech. Its basic function is of course to denote smallness, but it can also point to the insignificance or the helplessness of the object in question, express feelings of endearment or commiseration (but also condescension) in the speaker, or convey his modesty, admiration, or apology. It can also refer to one individual item made of the material in question, e.g. interlockje is a shirt made of such fabric. Readers may wish to guess at the semantic nuance implied in each of the following words: shirtje, gangstertje, baby’tje, interviewtje, face-liftje, shagje (or sjekkie), drummertje, foldertje, bandje, and speechje.
EPISTOLA {William Hereford}
With great interest I read the article [VI, 1] written in explanation of the expression GI. From my father, who was in the artillery during World War II, I have a contribution to make to the debate.
Non-infantry combatants were not ordinarily referred to as “GI’s.” It is difficult to imagine Air Force, Navy, or Marine personnel having that sobriquet. It is logical, then, to trace the expression GI to the term ‘General Infantry’ rather than ‘Government Issue’ or ‘galvanized iron.’ Confirmations or refutations of this would be of interest.
[William Hereford, Ouagadougou, Upper Volta]
Rhyme and Jingle
Joann Karges, Fort Worth, Texas
Rhyming reduplicatives occur in English and other Germanic languages in the oldest of our literatures.2 They are found in Old and Middle English, occurring in Piers Plowman and Chaucer, becoming even more prevalent during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and increasing into the nineteenth and twentieth. Some of them are definitely playful: handy-dandy (handy-spandy, handy-pandy), which was indeed a children’s game, and some are reinforcements: hurry-scurry and helter-skelter. Others have variously interesting origins: hocus-pocus, the alleged origin of which is well known; willy-nilly, reflecting a word now otherwise lost to us; hob-nob with its two possible origins3 merging to give us the impression of drinking elbow to elbow beside a fireplace; and namby-pamby, the literary contrivance of Henry Carey (1726). Many of the hundreds of rhyming reduplicatives have long since disappeared from current usage, while new ones are formed and brought into use constantly. There are, in fact, a considerable number of words that have been formed during the twentieth century, some now generally accepted in polite oral and written speech and others only on the fringe levels: in youth slang, ethnic cultures, and commerce.
The phenomena of the creation of these words must include those with a Yiddish association that have come into being since the 1940s: the sch-words, which according to Flexner indicate “dislike, disinterest, mockery, or an attempt to deflate pomposity.”4 In these the original word or part of it is repeated with the prefix, forming such compounds as moon-schmoon, possible-schmossible, fancy-schmancy. Because these are usually spontaneous creations not in consistent use, I have not included them in my collections.
In offering the following lists of current rhyming reduplicatives, I should also like to inquire if other readers are familiar with the following rhyme which we as children adapted to all kinds of personal names, never in derision but always in goodhumored fun:
Anne bom banne, silly Anne go hann,
Hee-legged, high-legged, bow-legged Anne.
George bom borge, silly orge go horge,
Hee-legged, high-legged, bow-legged George.Intentional:
boogie-woogie
chuck-a-luck
eager beaver
flibberty-gibberty
flub-dub
fuddy-duddy
fuzzy-wuzzy
gruesome twosome
handy-dandy
hanky-panky
harum-scarum
heebie-jeebies
helter-skelter
hickory, dickory, dock
higgledy-piggledy
highty-flighty
hipper-dipper
hipperty-skipperty
hob-nob
hocus-pocus
hodge-podge
hoighty-toity
hokey-pokey
honky-tonk(y)
hot-shot
hotsy-totsy
hub-bub
huff-duff
huftymagufty
hugger-mugger
humdrum
hurdy-gurdy
hurly-burly
hurry-scurry
itsy-bitsy
itty-bitty
lovey-dovey
mumbo jumbo
namby-pamby
nitty-gritty5
Pall mall (Pall Mall)
palsy-walsy
pee-wee
pell-mell
polly-wolly-doodle
ragtag
razz-ma-tazz
razzle-dazzle
ringey-dingey
rinky-dinky6
roly-poly
rub-a-dub-dub
rumble-tumble
teensy-weensy
teeny-weeny
thriller-diller
tootsy-wootsy
walkie-talkie
willy-nilly
wing-ding (whing-ding)Accidental:
blackjack
grandstand
kowtow
nitwit
payday
picnic
Hackensack
Hong Kong
Oshkosh
Hell’s bells
jeepers creepersContrived:
Georgy-porgy
Handy-Andy
Henny Penny
Humpty-Dumpty
Piggly-Wiggly
And?
even-StevenOnomatopoeic:
bow-wow
tee-hee
boo-hoo
SIC! SIC! SIC!
Sign at a neighborhood recreation center in Hawaii: “Do Not Sit On Balls. Use For Intended Purposes Only.” [Submitted by Alfred G. Hoel, University of Hawaii, Pearl City]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
After working during the past six months on a part-time probationary basis, San Diego Unified School District officials have decided [Chris Timmins] can handle a full-time job again. [San Diego Union, 24 July 1979, p. B4; submitted by Barbara Marsh, San Diego]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Beware underground cables.” [Sign at a road works encountered by David Purchase, Bristol, England]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
Menu barbarism in a restaurant in Germany: “Cokked Sausage.” [Also from David Purchase]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Use of radar detecting devices is illegal in Connecticut” [Sign on a highway entering Connecticut from Massachusetts. Norman R. Shapiro, Wesleyan University, who spotted it, comments, “How sporting of the State Police to inform me that it’s illegal for them to monitor my speed with radar!”]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
The Congregation Anshei Lebedowe-Radcilowe, at 266 East Broadway in New York City has its “manse” listed in the Manhattan telephone directory. [“Presbyterian Jews, no doubt?” comments Ken Giniger, of New York City, who submitted this.]
Fallin’ In with the Great-Aunts
Rebecca Christian, Hi-Nella, New Jersey
The other day, my Brooklyn-born co-worker characterized her exasperating boss with the expression, “Now that’s a piece of work.”
“When were you in Joplin?” I wanted to know,
“Never, thank God.” was the reply.
But it did turn out that one of her friends is a St. Louis native, and she picked the phrase up from him. Even with an Eastern accent, the words had a welcome ring. Though I grew up in Iowa, visiting relatives in Missouri taught me to vent my spleen in down-home style.
To express consternation, I admit I can’t decide whether to pee or go blind. When I’ve done something clever, I congratulate myself for having cut a fat pig in the hip. If a friend abandons me, I console myself that I am well shet of him.
The highlight of my childhood summers was journeying down to Eldorado Springs, Missouri, for the 20th of July picnic celebration in the town’s tiny central square. What we were celebrating, I never knew, but after we partook of the rusty spring water from a tap in the bowels of the park and gorged on three-bean salad while Aunt Blanche’s weepy chocolate pie went a-beggin', the fun began.
While the men went off to talk politics and pitch horseshoes, I would lie on a picnic bench with my head in one of my great-aunt’s broad lap. Looking up at the stars in the summer sky, I lay low until the women forgot I was there. Then I listened to delicious tales of babes born not quite right, men who were steppin' out, women who found the wifely duty repugnant, and sinners who got caught and churched. The language was almost as intriguing as the racy tidbits floating on the July air.
I was taken with the distinctions between fallin' in (“Stevie got to goin' with that Randolph girl and fell in with the Baptists”), fallin' out (“Great-Grandma and her second husband had a fallin' out because he wanted her to make all the pancakes at once and she wanted to make them in shifts, stoppin' to gobble hers when they were hot”), and fallin' off (“Erma, your dress is loose. Did you fall off a little?”)
A fallin' off was hard to keep straight from a runnin' off, which was diarrhea. Other descriptions of illness were also
challenging to translate. Peaky meant ‘poorly’ and ‘not up to snuff,’ puny was ‘confined to bed,’ poorly meant ‘chronically ill,’ and bad sick meant it was time to call the undertaker.
To like to do something did not always indicate pleasure, as I learned from the example, “He liked to bled to death.” Shore meant ‘sure’ and was used not only as an affirmative but as shorthand for ‘surely.’ My cousin Sharon, a University of Missouri homecoming queen, shore did look pretty, and her mother shore could fry chicken. It took me a long time to figure out Lord Willing wasn’t royalty but kin to crossing your fingers or knocking on wood, a conditional on which plans were based.
Since I was as corn fed as one of those curious hogs that asserted their independence on ice, I was particularly attentive to descriptions of fat. From the plainspoken fleshy to the euphemistic rounded, I heeded them all.
Great-Grandpa Fowble’s ancient mother would croak about her firstborn, “Jenny’s fat, but ‘tisn’t good fat. It’s water fat. She always did swell.” Jenny’s ankles did look ready to bust out of the white surgical socks she wore to ward off infection from a long-ago operation. I can still picture the fluid undulating beneath her flesh like the water under the mattress of a water-bed. Her mother-in-law’s comment always annoyed Great-Grandma Fowble, who would knead the sickly yellow of her droopy forearm and hoot, “Not me. I got good, plain old-fashioned fat. Good fat! I’m right fleshy.”
The discussion of fat always brought up the topic of wedding-day weights, with one aunt whose leg alone weighed 85 pounds claiming that statistic for her nuptials. As a result of my eavesdropping, I always associate wedding-day weights with the length of time spent in labor as crucial information in a woman’s curriculum vitae. The woman who could boast of a match—the number of pounds registered at the altar equaling the number of hours spent in labor with the first child—well, that was a woman indeed.
Even the less sexy conversations had a special twist. While we Iowans shopped for material, our Missouri cousins traded for dry goods. Their potato salad didn’t spoil, but turned. For them to be set back was not ‘to encounter failure’ but ‘to spend a lot of money.’ I can remember being bewildered when someone asked Uncle Kenneth what he had to give for his Ford.
Uncle Kenneth’s dead now—or gone as they say in Eldorado—and I have long since moved from Iowa, the most joked about state in the U.S.A. to New Joisey, the runner-up. Recently, though, I had to go back to Kansas City on business.
As soon as I arrived, I snapped on the hotel TV to hear a newscast drawled in the remembered cadences. The anchor-man, whose hair appeared to have been styled with an eggbeater, was unmistakably from Trenton. I liked to died.
EPISTOLA {Reinhold Aman}
As a longtime reader of Verbatim who drops everything to read the newest issue from cover to cover, I often get the urge to correct, add to, or comment on, various matters. Usually I can suppress this urge; the latest issue [V, 4] is too much to brook. Here it goes:
Of the twenty boldface terms presented by Mr. Mohan in “Hindi Filmi English,” over half have negative connotations (interesting to maledictologists); luckily, the publishers of Hindi dictionaries don’t have an equivalent of the Texas State Textbook Commission to cope with: the dictionary makers would have to delete about 50% of the entries, as a high percentage of Hindi words has “obscene” connotations.
K. Hall’s “Indri!” story recalls an old joke among linguists. In that version, the linguist, eliciting words of the indigenous language he was studying, was told the same word for “tree,” “rock,” “sky” and whatever else he was pointing to. It turned out that the native informant provided every time the same word, meaning “finger.”
The “green growing lilacs,” allegedly the source for the gringo, finally should be snipped off by a wog, suffering from a similarly silly folk etymology (wily oriental gentleman). May both rest in peace!
Ms. Gilman’s story about her friend’s mixing up Matratze with Matrose would have been a bit juicier if the correct German preposition had been used: one does not sleep “next to” the mattress (neben der Matratze) but auf der Matratze, “on (top of)” it. Students of German who have not yet “reasoned out” (take that, R. Fowkes), the dative and accusative cases usually wait auf der Frau, instead of auf die Frau (‘for the woman’).
Dr. Freedman’s suggestion of introducing deflatulate for fart is a gas! This euphemism is even ickier than the existing ones. He also missed the essential semantic component of to
crepitate, namely, ‘to expell gas noisily,’ regardless of whether as a burp or a fart. What the doctors and we need are 2 terms: fart, for the loud kind, and fist (related to feist), for the silent one: short, precise, onomatopoetic words—and very useful for a proper diagnosis!
Finally, Greg Raven’s verbal attack on my fellow editor and publisher, Mr. Urdang, was too hateful to be effective. We editors have the same right to our opinions as do our readers; normally we have to suppress them, to avoid upsetting intolerant folks. If—by trying to stem the deterioration of language, and by producing publications a good cut above the cheap and sloppy mass-market rags aimed at semi-illiterates, and by trying to pull people up to our standards rather than dropping down to their simian levels of education—if our principles make us elitists, so be it.
If all high school drop-outs were as perceptive and literate as Mr. Raven showed himself to be (including “scummy cretins” and “subservient idiots”), most of our present concerns about the state of education and language would not be necessary.
Curiously, in his very last (sarcastic) line, Mr. Raven slipped up, showing his latent eliticism: he used I rather than the semi-illiterate language he seems to embrace: ME: (shaking head)…
[Reinhold Aman, Maledicta Press Waukesha, Wisconsin]
EPISTOLA {Jim Goodwin}
Dr. Siwek’s article [“Body English,” VI, 1] was a real treat for this Classics major. I always enjoy a good word hunt, but the good Doctor really showed me how it’s done. I would have but one addition to make to this comprehensive list.
Most of us know the tibia as our shin bone. To the Roman, tibia meant ‘flute.’ Anatomists borrowed this word because the Roman flute, used at recitals, dinners, funerals, and other events, was an animal’s shin bone.
[Jim Goodwin, Essex, Connecticut]
EPISTOLA {Edward C. Pinkerton}
I was surprised that Jay Siwek did not include in “Body English,” his catalogue of anatomical terms [VI, 1], the ubiquitous muscle Latin musculus ‘little mouse,’ a metaphor coined by the speakers of classical Latin.
[Edward C. Pinkerton, Baltimore, Maryland]
Watching All the Guys Go By
Norman R. Shapiro, Wesleyan University
The effect of the Women’s Movement on contemporary American English is already a dead horse that needs no beating. Our alleged linguistic sexism has spawned its share of books, articles, and much discussion, ranging over a multiplicity of phenomena. Some are quite reasonable, like the generations-old quest for a neutral third-person pronoun (“Everyone does his? his/her? their? work…”). Many are absurd, like the spate of burgeoning neologisms, from this or that asexual person-compound (personhandle, ombudsperson, etc.) to the reverse-chauvinistic etymological abomination of such semi-serious nouns as “herstory.”
One specific phenomenon, however, I find particularly intriguing because of the question of semantic shift that it raises. I refer to the growing feminization of the traditionally masculine noun guy. It is more and more common nowadays to hear a group of females use this term among themselves. “What are you guys doing tonight?” is a perfectly standard question among college co-eds, for example. And I admit that, while not usually a porcine male chauvinist in other respects, I do find it linguistically jarring. (Almost as jarring, I might add, as the often self-conscious use of four-letter words that come tripping off the tongue of a young lady (woman? girl?) bent on proving that she is, indeed, just one of the “guys.”)
To be sure, the feminine use of guy is not a brand-new phenomenon. Wentworth and Flexner (Dictionary of American Slang) cite an example from 1944, “Where are you guys going?” used in addressing a man and woman together. I suspect, however, that its earlier uses, like that one, were limited to sexually mixed groups, and that its use in all-female contexts is, if not wholly unattested in the past, at least far more common today than ever before. What may have begun as a humorous usage—akin to that of older folks addressing one another as “you kids”—has, I think, become something of a sexually aggressive affectation. The probable etymology of the word (from the grotesque effigies of Guy Fawkes) makes this development even less defensible. But that, I suppose, is an old-fashioned argument, and not one that would convince many modern users.
What interests me especially in this feminization of guy is the illogical limitation of its semantic field. It seems to occur, in fact, only among acquaintances and then primarily in the vocative. The same speakers who blithely use it in referring to one another—“you guys” (and, less often, “us guys,” “those guys”)—wouldn’t dream of using it to describe a person or persons outside the group and unknown to its members. One would never—at least, not yet—hear them say, for example, referring to a bevy of female strangers: “We just saw a bunch of guys down at the carwash.” (Except, I imagine, among militant lesbians.) In other words, the noun is, at present, still semantically restricted.
Perhaps, however, it will not always remain so. Perhaps what we are witnessing is a semantic shift in the making— catching it in the act, as it were—always an exciting experience for language buffs, whatever their social persuasion. Perhaps, indeed, guy is eventually to become as completely asexual as the now ever-present person. Only time will tell, but I am one guy who will be watching. In the meantime, male chauvinists offended by the usage always have the option to react, derisively, by beginning to address one another as “you dolls.” But that is one semantic shift I don’t think we have to worry about.
EPISTOLA {A. Adrian Allen}
Dr. Jay Siwek [VI, 1] illustrates, in a lively panorama, the widely-ranging imagery and flights of fancy to which the early anatomists often found themselves driven in thinking up names for parts of the body laid bare by their dissections. However, in the interests of accuracy, critical remarks are called for on a few of the literal meanings or interpretations given.
Esophagus is a puzzle, and (so spelt) something of a trap for the would-be etymologist. The British spelling with oe-, keeping to the Latin rendering of the Greek oisophagos, has the merit of not suggesting a connexion of the first element with the Latin past-participial stem eso- (cf. esurient, obese) from edere ‘eat.'7 This first element oiso-, whatever its meaning, cannot possibly be in any way related to the above and has not been satisfactorily identified. The idea of eating or swallowing is, of course, contained in the second element. Aristotle’s explanation, that the esophagus is so called from its length and narrowness—with reference, presumably, to oisos ‘a withy’—will hardly do, since, on that view, the two parts of the compound are not in a proper syntactical relation to each other, as may be seen by comparison with (e.g.) sarcophagus, literally ‘flesh-eater.’
Orchids (the plants) were so called from the testicles (Greek orkhis), not the other way about. The pudendal nerve got its name direct from the pudenda or ‘private parts,’ a term coined by classical Latin authors on the model of the Greek ta aidoia. Perhaps the best rendering of the semantic content of these expressions, including the English one, would be ‘modesty’ rather than ‘shame’—though, I suppose, some might say there was no difference! Clitoris (Greek kleitoris, found only in the medical writers) presents another problem. No warrant exists for reading into it a literal meaning ‘little hill,’ nor has it a diminutive form. J. B. Hofmann suggests some extraneous source, perhaps Semitic; but if truly Greek, it could derive from the base klei- ‘to close’ plus the agent suffix -tor, to which is added a feminine ending. The true nature of the organ would not have been understood by the ancients.
Finally, a clavicle (collar-bone) is literally not a ‘fork’ but a ‘small key’—in fact probably some form of peg or pin for use as or with a bolt—also a ‘tendril’ (an obscurely derived meaning). As Cecil Wyld (Universal Dictionary of English, 1932) remarks with reason, “the anatomical application of clavicle is not very obvious.”
[A. Adrian Allen, London, England]
EPISTOLA
“My older daughter, a classicist partially informed but ingenious, defined parametritis as ‘the irritation, in old buffers like you, caused by thinking around the coming metric system.’ The younger one, a medical student newly out of the whirlpools of so-called basic science, offered ‘The calor, rubor, and dolor caused by the frequency of occurrence in biochemical literature of parameters.’ ”—Lancet 1967, i, 273. [The preceding, printed anonymously, was sent in by its now-revealed author, A. C. Lendrum, Dundee, Scotland.]
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Censors In The Classroom
Edward B. Jenkinson, (Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), xix + 178pp.
[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection]
If you have been reading your newspaper regularly, you are aware that one of the (several) issues besetting the teaching of English in American schools is censorship. But awareness of the isolated case affecting, say, A Dictionary of American Slang or Catcher in the Rye in a particular school or school district is one thing; the documentation provided by Jenkinson of hundreds of cases of censorship affecting works like Of Mice and Men, The Naked Ape, Black Boy, Slaughterhouse Five, “The Lottery,” To Kill a Mockingbird, Jaws, an issue of Time containing an article on swimwear fashions, The American Heritage Dictionary, The Doubleday Dictionary, The Random House College Dictionary, Revised Edition, Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, College Edition, and Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary is another. One is given to wonder whether anything but Sally, Dick and Jane is left; but even theirs may be nothing other than a thinly disguised tale of troilism. (Or bestiality, if you take Spot into account.)
Here are the facts behind the prurient prudes (see VERBATIM III, 4) who look at sex and see a cesspool (and vice versa): puritanical school boards that consider any hint of obscenity libidinous; old-maidish principals who think of novelists as Cyprian degenerates insidiously debauching the pure minds of their pubescent charges; priggish, frustrated textbook committees whose concupiscence sees a dissolute pervert lurking between the covers of every book. In Anaheim, California, all of Dickens except Oliver Twist and all of Shakespeare except Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet appeared on the Index. Prejudice bred of ignorance, protectiveness born of misguided nice-nellyism may be expected in provincial ignoramuses; but these censors are the ones responsible for the education of millions of school children. In their naive determination to scour the minds of our youth, they sterilize thought and imagination by attempting to obscure life from what they consider to be the prying eyes of our children.
These are the same educators who deny students sex education, refuse to tell them the “facts of life” at home, ban any attempts at “self-education,” and then express astonishment at incidents of rape, premarital intercourse, and other activities they condemn. Essentially, they deny students an education and then hold them accountable for their ignorance.
The incidents documented by Jenkinson do not, in themselves, surprise the reader: everyone knows that such events have taken place. What shocks is the sudden realization that censorship is so widespread and that so many communities are affected.
Dismaying, too, is the number of teachers who have been dismissed in one way or another, usually by not having their contracts renewed but often on the grounds of some fabricated charge. Those are the ones who have refused to defer to the restrictions imposed on them: it is terrifying to contemplate the number who ceased to struggle because they could not afford to exchange security for nobility.
Not all censorship cited in this book is directed at “dirty” books; as the author points out, “The study of the humanities is sometimes perceived as being anti-God because students explore the achievements and problems of man without always acknowledging God.” (p. xv) An entire chapter (7) is devoted to “Secular Humanism.” In Iran we can see the results of clericalism: Is it possible that there remains a religion in modern times that seems to be devoted to the eradication of “infidels” through massacre by firing squads? Of course it is. But adherents to such a religion are deemed fanatics, and while most of us know that there are “a lot of nuts out there,” we find it hard to believe that they occupy positions of influence as principals, on school boards, and in other responsible places. In their campaigns, censors declare war on homosexuality and on homosexuals; a Save Our Children group promulgates a “fight to eliminate homosexual literature from our schools and libraries,” suggesting the banning of works by “such homosexuals” as Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather, Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde, T. E. Lawrence, Jean Genêt, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Gore Vidal, John Milton, Hans Christian Andersen, Marcel Proust, Horatio Alger, Jr., Truman Capote, and Rod McKuen. Gee whiz! I never knew that about Emily, John, Hans, and Horatio!
This could scarcely be termed a rabble-rousing book, for the rabble have already roused themselves sufficiently to awake the consternation of those who are seriously concerned about the direction being taken by many in authority in America. Besides, Professor Jenkinson writes in a coldly sober tone about the inequities and iniquities of censorship. Be that as it may, Censors in the Classroom is an important book that made this reader seethe: it may be assumed that some who read it will use it as a handbook and will be inspired to learn about censorship in areas not yet imagined by their tiny minds: Can you imagine some school board member, his blue nose buried in this book, learning that Drums Along the Mohawk contains a hell here and a damn there, and then calling for an extraordinary meeting of the board to vote for the book’s burning? The imagination is boggled. Maybe James Fenimore Cooper was a homosexual. After all, he was never known to have spent much time promoting orange juice.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Pocket Dictionary Of Legal Words
John J. Kasaian, (Doubleday & Company, 1979), 179pp.
This (very) little book contains “over 2,500 definitions” and might, as the cover blurb suggests, serve the casual user who has “ever stumbled through a contract of lease, or tried to decipher the ‘fine print’ on a bill of sale.” It is true that no great puffery is used to pretend that the book is anything more than what it is stated to be, but I was dismayed to find murder and manslaughter entered but no classifications (first, second degree, etc.) given. Under degrees of murder there is a descriptive entry that gives one example but not much clarification. A dictionary of such concision cannot be reviewed on the basis of its inclusions—nor criticized for its omissions—but, within such a small compass one should be able to expect consistency. No small problem is created by the listing (in Appendix A) of Common-law Crimes, for there are a few items there that look interesting, yet entries for them are not in the book: mistreatment of corpses, escape, and contraceptivism are three. Another, barratry is given only a partial definition. The best thing that can be said is that if the term sought is not sophisticated in nature you may find a satisfactory definition in this book. Then again, you may not, and I doubt that it will be “an essential part of [my] reference library,…[a] key to what [my] lawyer…is talking about.” I’d have to study law for 20 years to understand what my lawyer is talking about. [Doc: If you read this, I didn’t mean it.]
Laurence Urdang
EPISTOLA {Edgon H. Margo}
With a bow to Sterling Eisiminger and to William Gass, we have been inspired to collect a compilation of complimentary [sic] colors, viz.:
Sub Lime
Tickled Pink
Dead Beet
Freudian Gilt
Thanks Vermillion
Foreseeable Fuchsia
Original Cinnamon
Anti-Establish Mint
Shirley Temple Black
By Any Other Name Rose
How Now Cow Brown
In Them Thar Hills Gold
Hi-Ho Silver
Im-Peach
Any additional contributions to this project will be most welcome.
[Edgon H. Margo, Reseda, California]
[The violets of this attack are unprecedented, but I can tell that you’re well red. This is a grayed idea, but I can’t believe you’re cerise! There’s not much Lorne Green in it for us, but—azure saying….]
Editor
EPISTOLA {Clyde K. Hyder}
“Colorful Language” [VI, 1] mentions that purple is royal but neglects to add that the royal purple has often stood for crimson. Webster notes that words in classical Greek and Hebrew literature translated as purple probably refer to the same color.
The article states, “If a Spaniard darse un verde ‘gives himself a green,’ he is ‘amused’; if he darse un verde con dos azules ‘gives himself one green and two blues,’ he is ‘highly entertained.’ Why blue should provide an extra measure of amusement is unknown.” But blue is so close to green that one sometimes finds it hard to differentiate. If one wishes to emphasize by adding a larger measure without repeating ‘green,’ what color could one use except blue?
[Clyde K. Hyder, Lawrence, Kansas]
EPISTOLA {Gerald Kamber}
There are a number of points in “Colorful Language” that need amplification or correction. White collar does not connote professionalism as he says (professionalism taken here to mean membership in a profession such as medicine or law rather than ‘a high degree of competence’), but is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as: “Of or pertaining to workers, salaried or professional, whose work usually does not involve manual labor and who are expected to dress with some degree of formality. Often regarded as a social class. Compare blue collar.”
Mariage blance and guerre blanche are interesting examples of French usage of the word blanc to mean ‘qui n’a pas tous les effets habituels’ (Le Petit Robert), in other words ‘going through the motions.’ But cold war is guerre froide and means, as it does in English, something quite different.
When a Frenchman is noir, he is drunk, but unless he is the prey of idées noires or has le cafard ‘the cockroach,’ he is not suffering from the blues. There is no such French expression as reste bleu ‘blue rest’; the expression is verbal: en être, en rester bleu ‘to be flabbergasted.’
After telling us that red-hot means ‘burning’ or ‘full of scandal,’ the article expects us to believe that red-hot mamma and red-light district derive from “anatomical coloration”! Hot has always been a way of denoting sexual excitation, redhot denoting a substantial degree of heat, and it is or was traditional for houses of prostitution to have a red light outside the door.
In Spanish, cuento colorado, rather than ‘red,’ means ‘colored,’ although the connotation is identical; and in Italian, although rosso d’uovo is used for ‘egg yolk,’ tuorlo is a more commonly used term. Rire jaune (and not the archaic or poetic ris jaune) is a ‘wry laugh’ (not a smile) but not ‘maudlin’: an ironic and bitter laugh that covers one’s discomfiture. Vert histoire [sic] (since adjectives agree with nouns in French as to number and gender, and since histoire is feminine, vert must be verte) is not in any dictionary, but the common expression is langue verte ‘off-color slang.’ As for viejo verde, as in all the Romance languages, ‘green’ here means ‘still vigorous’ and not necessarily ‘lascivious,’ although a still-vigorous man might well be lascivious.
Essere al verde ‘to be broke’ exists equally in French as être au vert. In French, eminence takes the acute accent, thus éminence. Gris ‘slightly drunk’ is a lighter gradation of noir ‘drunk,’ and also applies to other types of intoxication. Faire grise mine á is faire grise mine á; and browned-off would seem to have scatalogical connotations. Otherwise, thanks for an interesting and provocative article.
[Gerald Kamber, Simsbury, Connecticut]
EPISTOLA {Harry Cohen}
Anent the critique of Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, I am afraid that the authors and the reviewer have been caught in some of the traps that foreign languages present. Dutch staan blauwbekken does not mean ‘standing in a blue bowl’ because it is not derived from bekken ‘bowl’ but from bek ‘beak.’ The latter word is vulgarly used for ‘mouth.’ The phrase means ‘to stand around with one’s lips blue from the cold.’ Secondly, German Braunkohle does not mean ‘brown cabbage’ but ‘brown coal,’ which seems quite an appropriate description for ‘lignite.’ However, brown cabbage does exist—it’s Braunkohl, a baffling name indeed because it is recorded as a synonym of Grünkohl ‘green cabbage.’ Then, Rosenkohl is not ‘rosy cabbage’ but ‘rose cabbage,’ referring thus to the shape and not the color of Brussels sprouts.
[Harry Cohen, Brussels, Belgium]
EPISTOLA {Sylvia Bursztyn}
Mr. Eisiminger states that a green room is “the actors’ waiting room painted green to soothe eyes strained by harsh stage lights.”
While this may be so in some cases today, the origin of the term is unrelated to the color any such room may have been painted. As I learned it (though I don’t recall the source of the information), the room where actors met to discuss details of a production was originally called the “agreeing room.” This became the “ ‘greeing room” which became the “ ‘greein’ room” which then became the “green room.”
Of the many green rooms I’ve been in over the years, none was painted green. Any green to be seen was in the actors’ faces, not on the walls.
[Sylvia Bursztyn, Los Angeles, California]
EPISTOLA {fr. Thomas C. Donlan, O.P.}
In the article, “Colorful Language,” there is a reference to the French expression, éminence grise, saying that it refers to “one who exercises power behind the scenes.” There is more to the phrase than the article indicates.
In 17th-century France, supreme power was held by Armand Jean du Plessis Cardinal Richelieu. From the color of his cardinalitial robes he was referred to as “éminence rouge.” His secretary was Francois Le Clerc du Tremblay, who became a Capuchin friar and took the name Pére Joseph. He was often very influential over Richelieu. From the color of his habit, a sort of gray, he was called “éminence grise.” This was the origin of the phrase in French.
[fr. Thomas C. Donlan, O.P., New York, New York]
EPISTOLA {W. A. Oliver, M. D.}
I have a few additions to E. E. Rehmus’s list of star names of Arabic origin [V, 3]. Several years ago I took a notion to learn the names of the major stars in the constellations Great Bear and Orion. All of the names in both of these are of Arabic origin except for Bellatrix in Orion. (Latin, ‘The Female Warrior’). Following are the names not included in Mr. Rehmus’s list:
In the Great Bear:
Phecda (sometimes Phad) ‘The Thigh’
Megrez (al magraz) ‘The Root of the Tail’
Alcor (al khawwar) ‘The Weak One’
(This star is binary with Mizar, ‘The Veil’ or ‘The Cloak.')
Alkaid (al caid) ‘The Chief’ or ‘Governor’
In Orion:
Meissa, (al maisan) ‘The Proudly Marching One’
Al Nitak ‘Belt’
Mintaka also ‘Belt’: Apparently a transliteration from the same root as Nitak.
Saiph, ‘The Sword’ appeared in Mr. Rehmus’s list, but the full name is al saif al jabbar, ‘The Sword of the Giant.’ (Cf. Kareem Abdul Jabbar the giant basketball player.)
[W. A. Oliver, M. D., Napa, California]
EPISTOLA {Frederic G. Cassidy}
A new suffix, now in full flow, producing sometimes outrageous results, is [\?\\?\hal\?\k], spelled -o/aholic. Obviously, it was chopped off alcoholic, in reference to people, and therefore means “one addicted to.” So far as my observation goes, it is attached to monosyllabic or short disyllabic bases suggesting (often themselves in truncated form) the thing to which the person is addicted. Alcohol was long ago abbreviated to alky and alk, making the dissection of alcoholic easier. The base must be short—or shortened—so as to preserve the stress pattern of the parent word alcoholic:
The offspring I have seen in print in the past few months are:
workaholic— now quite common.
chocoholic— “addicted” to chocolate.
pianoholic— playing the piano at all possible times.
credaholic— buying excessively on credit.
clipaholic— clipping items from newspapers.
gasaholic— [a car] consuming too much gasoline.
Can readers add to this list?
[Frederic G. Cassidy, Dictionary of American Regional English]
EPISTOLA {Charles N. Faerber}
Sterling Eisiminger (“Colorful Language,” VI, 1) is mistaken about the meaning of redline, as applied to aircraft. It is the understanding of every aviator I’ve ever known that redlining an aircraft does not mean grounding it. Rather, it means pushing the aircraft to or through an important design limit, usually indicated on a cockpit gauge by a cautionary red line. For instance, a pilot in a plane engineered to fly safely no faster than 300 knots redlines the plane if he flies at 325; the airspeed indicator needle will pass over a red line painted on the gauge at 300 knots.
Another aviation term of the same hue that might interest Eisiminger is redding out. A pilot is in danger of redding out when an aerial maneuver puts a strong positive-G stress on his body. In the execution of a tight outside loop, for example, centrifugal force may push so much blood into a pilot’s head and upper extremities that he literally “sees red” because of flooded and expanded capillaries in the eye. Too many positive G’s may cause loss of consciousness—a red-out.
[Charles N. Faerber, Woodland Hills, California]
EPISTOLA {Oliver Owen}
I enjoyed the piece on the In Out [V, 4]. Mr. Fowkes may be interested to know that fathom it out has been quite standard usage here for many years.
We do not get out over here nearly so much, but no doubt it is coming.
Enduring idiomaticity is not such a bad criterion, is it? Most of the examples he gives of repellent outs clearly follow the current fashion of lengthening sentences merely to add spurious weight.
[Oliver Owen, Sussex, England]
READER’S QUERY
Here’s one answer to Peter H. Marsden’s query about the origin of the word syllabub [VI, 1]. It comes from The American Heritage Cookbook and Illustrated History of American Eating and Drinking (1964).
Syllabub is closely related to Eggnog. The name is derived from wine that came from Sillery in the Champagne region of France, and from ‘bub,’ an Elizabethan slang word for bubbling drink. Although Eggnog called for strong liquors, Syllabub has always been made with wine—some men eschewed this weak potation, considering it a lady’s drink. Traditionally a Christmas drink, Syllabub was often made ‘under the cow,’ as shown in a recipe from Richard Brigg’s New Art of Cookery, published in Philadelphia in 1792, which instructed that a bowl filled with wine be placed under a cow, and the cow milked ‘till [the Syllabub] has a fine froth at the top.’
I might add for Mr. Marsden’s benefit that the recipe that follows would not produce a drink resembling the good, rich zabaglione.
[Claire Vanderplank, Brewster, New York]
EPISTOLA {E.A. Goodland}
It still seems somewhat doubtful if Aphra Behn, author of the novel Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave was ever herself in Surinam, though in the novel she says she was; and whether Oroonoko was a real or fictional character. One clue I followed up was that one of the names of the chief characters—Oroonoko and Imoinda.
Neither are, as far as I am aware, names taken up by persons of African descent. Commentators seem to be agreed that the similarity of the name to that of the river Orinoco in Venezuela has no significance. I discovered from the learned Dr. Babalola of the School of African and Asian Studies, University of Lagos, that in all probability the name Imoinda is a corrupt form of the Yoruba personal name ÌMÓYINDÀ which means ‘baby/child/offspring/person who makes honey drip onto the family.’ But no explanation of the name Oroonoko was forthcoming.
Recently, as I was reading Michener’s book Chesapeake, I noticed the word Oronoco applied to a variety of tobacco recommended for planting in the Choptank area in 1688. This word is given an entry in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as follows:—“Oronoco, -ooko, 1706. [Origin unkn..: app unconnected with the river Orinoco.] A variety of tobacco from Virginia.”
I was rather surprised to find the word not given in the Random House Dictionary, nor in Funk & Wagnall’s, nor yet in Webster’s, though the last two dictionaries give entries to the personal name Oroonoco or Oroonoko.
I asked the first of my American acquaintances here about the word, and she said yes, she remembered her father referring to a variety of tobacco by that name. Maybe there exists some monograph on tobacco which would throw light on the origin of the word. As Aphra Behn’s book was published in 1688, it is rather surprising that the editors of the SOED did not mention the title of her book as being prior to 1706.
I shall be very grateful for any further information relevant to this matter.
[E.A. Goodland, Rua Prudente de Morais 441, Olinda, Pernambuco Brazil]
EPISTOLA {Jack Greenberg}
Is it too late to declare war on hone in? It is now used almost always for home in. For several years I have been hoping that it would just go away, but unless we put up a fight it will be in Webster’s IVth. Who will join in the struggle?
[Jack Greenberg, New York, New York]
EPISTOLA {Nicholas Leonard}
Have you noticed the increasing use of the words brill and brills. Brill, derived from brilliant is an adjective (cf. Fab from fabulous) and brills is an expression of pleasure: ‘Oh, Brills!” My eight-year-old daughter picked up these expressions at school and I have recently heard them used by BBC Radio One disc jockeys: “An absolutely brill recording!” There is a popular dishwashing scourer called Brillo and this may partly explain the spread of Brill into the language.
[Nicholas Leonard, East Sussex, England]
Crossword Puzzle
Across
1. A man returned to the Associated Press with a hot topper. (6)
4. Scotch and water? (4,4)
10. Lawyer who may add insult to injury. (9, 6)
11. Safe place for the Warsaw Pact? Get the jump on it! (4, 5)
12. Just for fun, I took one set. (4)
14. Relents when cuddlesome one makes up… (7)
15. …since they’re running mates. (7)
16. I’m by the board, so give me jury duty. (7)
18. Bats, in a way, so please forbear. (7)
21. Kind of explosive rock, it burns, too. (4)
22. Title to the vessel? (9)
25. …they sure rate their wealth under cover. (8)
24. Re: Conmen spreading fiction that their hands are clean…(8, 2, 5)
26. Deserter among the dogfaces gets free. (6)
Down
1. What drama writer got to cage the kids. (7)
2. Is the sun able to obscure clouds of stars? (7)
3. Mad lament about love cast back is bitterly hateful. (10)
5. It’s apparent Zeus’s wife, making debut, is billed above Iris and her song. (4, 3, 7)
6. Laughing boys? (4)
7. To senesce may change one’s inner nature… (7)
8. …so persist, having blithe spirits. (7)
9. Angle in the ring without support. (1, 7, 6)
13. One rider shows the charioteers are out of it. (5, 5)
16. Rip mint for making poor impression. (7)
17. Prison and a harsh cane are enough for punishment. (7)
19. Leading articles on doctrinaire, the freethinker. (7)
20. Pied Piper, between points, assembles the children. (7)
23. The best card case. (4)
Crossword Puzzle Answers
Across
1. PA-nam-a
5. Loch Ness
10. Ambulance chaser.
11. Pole vault
12. (f) UN I T (ook).
14. NESTLER
15. Elopers
16. I’M-panel
18. ABST-a-in
21. Punk (as punk rock)
22. Ownership
24. INNOCENT OF CRIME (anagram of RE + CONMEN + FICTION)
25. TREA-sure
26. G-rat-IS
Down
1. Play-pen
2. N-eb-U-la-S
3. MAL-evol-ENT
5. OVER THE RAINBOW (overt Hera in bow)
6. He-he
7. ESSENCE
8. SPRITES
9. A neutral corner
13. HORSE RACER (anagram when CHARIOTEERS + ARE (R) is out of IT)
16. IMPRINT
17. PEN-ance
19. A-THE-ist
20. N-ipper-S (IPPER = PIPER, pied)
23. ACES
Most Obscure Solecism of the Quarter
[The following item, reprinted in its entirety, is from The New Yorker]
What separates good speakers and
writers from bad speakers and writers is
the ability of the former to make a conscious
choice. I am, for instance, able to
speak and write in a variety of styles,
from very informal to very formal. I can
affect an illiterate style if I wish. The illiterate
speaker is incapable of saying
what’s on his mind in more than one way.
Indeed, the good stylist can probably
think of a dozen different ways in which
he can say the same thing, while the poor
stylist has few such resources at his disposal.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean
that I can express myself with great artistry,
merely that my technique is reasonably
versatile. Also, because of the reams
of text I generate regularly in articles,
books, and correspondence, I am prone to
an occasional solecism, though I do try to
avoid them. I strive for clarity first, expressiveness
second. Long ago I gave up
any notion of becoming a creative writer:
as a lexicographer, primarily, I am compelled
to eschew fiction in my writing.Recently, I was told by an editor that,
as far as he knew, I was the only person
who writes the way I speak.—Laurence
Urdang in Verbatim, The Language
Quarterly.
And that’s as it should be.
Internet Archive copy of this issue
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Olympian novelist: a sly reference to the original Olympia Press edition of Lolita (Paris, 2 vol., 1955). Nice try, guys—close, but no cigar. I just meant lofty, godlike, haughty, etc. ↩︎
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Thun, Nils. Reduplicative Words in English. Uppsala: 1963. ↩︎
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From hob or nob, to drink to one another (earlier to hit or miss) OED; the hob to keep the beer warm by the hearth and the nob (table) where the drink was set by the elbow (Brewer, E.C., Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, New ed. Phila: Lippincott, n.d.). ↩︎
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Dictionary of American Slang. 2d supplemented edition. Comp. by Harold Wentworth and Stuart B. Flexner. New York: Crowell, 1975, p. 606. ↩︎
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Stuart Flexner attributes this to the Black militants of the 1960s and the prevalence of “grit-like nits.” (I Hear America Singing. Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1976.) ↩︎
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Apparently in use only since World War II. Origin not explained. ↩︎
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As a matter of interest, the word tooth and its cognates in many Indo-European languages (Latin dens, dent, etc.) may well have originated as a noun-participle meaning ‘the eating thing,’ IE edent-, odont-, etc., the unstressed root vowel falling away at an early stage except in Greek. This is not certain but is very plausible. ↩︎