VOL VII, No 1 [Summer 1980]

The Pun Is Mightier Than the Sword A Short History of Paronomasia

Victor Margolin, Evanston, Illinois

Through the centuries, pros and cons have argued over the merits of the pun. By some, punning is called an art form; by others, a mental sickness. Stedman’s Medical Dictionary lists an ailment known as Witzelsucht— literally ‘wit-seeking’—which is characterized by “a morbid tendency to pun and tell pointless stories while being inordinately entertained thereby.” No indication of the cause and treatment is given, nor is it stated whether a cure is even possible.

A long line of wags and wits have given the lie to the old adage that “The pun is the lowest form of wit” (“The bun is the lowest form of wheat”). Although there have been some low moments in the history of the pun, each play on words must be judged on its own merits, for the proof is in the punning.

Since Biblical times, the pun has been considered a valuable literary device. In the sixteenth chapter of St. Matthew, Jesus calls his disciple Peter (petros) and says of him that upon this rock (petra) he will build his church. In the Old Testament, it is stated in the Book of Samuel that David shall not build a house (‘temple’) for Jehovah but Jehovah shall build a house (‘dynasty’) for David.

Aristotle, in Rhetoric, held that several forms of paranomasia, as puns were once called, might be permissible in elegant writing. But not all puns made by the Greeks approached elegance. A certain Philagius produced a book of witticisms called Laughter-loving in which the following story can be found:

A one-eyed doctor visiting a patient asked in salutation “How are you?” “As you see,” replied the patient. “Then,” said the physician, “if you are as I see, you are half-dead.”

The best known pun in classical literature can be found in the ninth book of Homer’s Odyssey. Ulysses and his comrades have been captured by Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant to whom Ulysses gives his name as Outis (‘No man’). Polyphemus is later betrayed by this pun when Ulysses blinds him with a blazing pole and the giant, in his agony, yells, “No man has blinded me.” Polyphemus' brother giants take him literally and ignore him while Ulysses escapes.

Medieval literature is almost devoid of puns and even Chaucer, for all his wit, was not addicted to this form. Petrarch, however, is accused of making endless puns on the name of his beloved Laura. With the revival of literature,� the Renaissance brought a rebirth of punning. Rabelais filled his Gargantua and Pantagruel with a plethora of puns—many of them ribald and unfortunately lost in the translation from French to English.

By the 16th century, a school of punsters had arisen, comprised chiefly of the best-known English dramatists: Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, Dekker, and Heywood. Unfortunately, there was more quantity than quality to their punning, as can be deduced from a few lines of Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday where double entendre changes the object of a hunt from deer to women:

ROSE: Why do you stay and not pursue your game?
SYBIL: I’ll hold my life, their hunting nags be lame.
HAMMON: A deer more dear is found within this place.
ROSE: But not the deer, sir, which you had in chase.
HAMMON: I chased the deer, but this dear chaseth me.
ROSE: The strangest hunting that ever I see.

In the art of punning, Shakespeare was great shakes and without peer. Molly Mahood, in Shakespeare’s Wordplay, estimates that he used approximately 3000 puns in his plays. The manner in which his characters use puns lends support to the contention that the function of verbal wit is to afford a safe outlet for repressed impulses. Falstaff’s impulse to be irrational provides a type of pointless punning. In Henry IV, Part 2, he puns on the names of his soldiers. Mouldy is told that it is time he were used; Shadow, that he would make a cold soldier but would serve for summer; and Wart, that he is a ragged wart. At his cohort Pistol, Falstaff bellows, “No more Pistol; I would not have you go off here. Discharge yourself of our company, Pistol.”

A more subtle release of impulses can be found in Mercutio’s punning in Romeo and Juliet:

NURSE: God ye good morrow, gentlemen.

MERCUTIO: God ye good den, fair gentlewoman.

NURSE: Is it good den?

MERCUTIO: Tis no less. I tell you; for the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon.

NURSE: Out upon you. What a man are you.

Both den and dial allude .to the time of day and the female sex organ. Prick alludes to the time of day and the male organ. Under the guise of giving Nurse the time, Mereutio is suggesting a role in the hay.

A pun sometimes attributed to Shakespeare was actually made by Charles Dibdin, a British dramatist, and published as part of a poem in 1803. It is in the form of a punning epitaph on the death of Shakespeare’s wife:

To melt the sad, make blithe the gay,
And Nature charm, Anne hath a way,
She hath a way,
Anne Hathaway
To breath delight Anne hath away.

But the dramatists of the Elizabethan age did not have a monopoly on punning. Elizabeth herself joined the ranks of pun devotees when she remarked to one of her noblemen, “Ye may be burly, my Lord of Burleigh, but ye shall make less stir in my realm that the Lord of Leicester.”

A rather neat but probably apocryphal pun is attributed to Sir Francis Drake who, reporting to Queen Elizabeth after his defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, supposedly uttered only the Greek name for a well-known aphrodisiac—Cantharides (‘the Spanish fly’).

James I was a pun fancier and purportedly appointed few members of his Privy Council who were not versed in punning. When Charles I took the throne, he bestowed upon Thomas Killigrew, the English dramatist and wit, the title of king’s fool, or jester, and provided him with cap and bells so that he could joke without offense. Killigrew once boasted that he could make a pun on any subject. “Make one on me,” said Charles. “But that I cannot do, your Majesty,” retorted Killigrew, “for the king is no subject.”

A controversy flourished in the 18th century over the merits of punning. Although history has exculpated Samuel Johnson from the remark that “A man who would perpetrate a pun would have little hesitancy in picking a pocket,” he was still no great proponent of the pun. An anecdote has it that Johnson, when confronted by Boswell’s challenge that his dislike of puns might be attributed to his inability to engage in this practice, roared at his accuser, “Sir, if I were punish-ed for every pun I shed, there would not be left a puny shred of my punnish head.”

In his Dictionary of the English Language, Johnson defined a punster as “a low wit who endeavors at reputation by double meaning.” Yet he was not above getting off a pun whenever an opportunity arose. At the Library of St. Andrews, he inquired whether they possessed a certain book. “No sir,” was the reply, “it’s a very expensive book and beyond our means.” “Oh,” said the doctor, alluding to the custom of selling diplomas, “you’ll probably get it by degrees.”

Joseph Addison, editor of The Spectator, also looked less than favorably upon a pun. He stated in an editorial that “The seeds of punning are in the minds of all men; and, though they may be subdued by reason, reflection, and good sense, they will be apt to shoot up in the greatest genius that is not broken and cultivated by the rules of art.”

Unlike Addison, Jonathan Swift defended the pun, declaring that “Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise, but he that is without it.” In a tract on punning which Swift is purported to have written, seventy-nine rules of punning are listed which read like a manual of parliamentary procedure. Rule five states that any man may pun another man’s puns about half an hour after he has made them. According to the “Rule of Interruption,” it is lawful to interrupt a discourse of the most serious consequence with a pun. The “Rule of Retaliation” obliges the individual, if another man makes fifty puns, to return all or most of them in kind. By the “Rule of Concatenation,” a person should make a string of puns as fast as possible so that nobody else can put in a word until he has exhausted the subject. The “Rule of Alienation” might be the best means of bringing peace and harmony to the world. When people are disputing hotly on a subject, the punster is obliged to pick out the word that is causing the greatest disturbance and make a pun on it. This, says the tract, has not only occasioned peace in private companies but has put a stop to hot wrangling in Parliaments and convocations which, otherwise, would not so soon come to a resolution.

One of Swift’s allies in The Great Pun Debate was the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan, author of The Rivals, who invented a fanciful origin for the pun in his poem The Origin of Punning from Plato’s Symposiaks:

Once on a Time in a Merry Mood
Jove made a Pun of flesh and blood,
A double two face’d living creature
Androgynes, of two-fold Nature
For Back to Back with Single Skin
He bound the Male and Female in
So much alike so near the same
They stuck as closely as their name
Whatever words the female spoke
The male converted to a joke
So in this form of man and wife
They led a merry Punning life.

One would not expect to find Napoleon Bonaparte among the ranks of 18th-century punsters, but authorities give him credit for a pun made during his Italian campaign of 1796-97. To a lady who was amazed to find him so young, he replied “I am young today but tomorrow I shall have Milan.” (Mille ans, in French, means ‘a thousand years’).

The first half of the 19th century has been called the golden age of punning. In Britain it spawned a bevy of pundits whose irreverence for the English language was unbounded. Charles Lamb, author of the Essays of Elia, and a few friends were once seated in a comfortable drawing room on a rainy night when a dog began to howl outside. One of the group arose to let him in, but Lamb protested with “Why begrudge him his whine and water?” When someone said to Lamb, “Make me a pun,” he replied “Upon what, sir?” Regarding those who were foe and against punning, Lamb commented, “I never knew an enemy of puns who was not an ill-natured man.”

Two younger contemporaries of Lamb, Theodore Hook and Thomas Hood, were perhaps the most notorious punsters of all time. Hood, probably the first Englishman to make a living solely from commercial humor, was a veritable punning machine who ground out puns with alarming facility. His many volumes of poetry are riddled with puns which used to annoy his more serious readers. But he defended himself with the couplet:

However critics may take offense
A double meaning has a double sense.

Some of his better puns can be found in verses from “Faithless Sally Brown”:

His death which happened in his berth
At forty-odd befell
They went and told the sexton
And the sexton tolled the bell.

and from “Faithless Nelly Grey”:

Ben Battle was a soldier bold,
And used to war’s alarms;
But a cannon ball took off his legs
So he laid down his arms.

Extolling a drink called Athel brose, made in the northern part of Scotland by pouring boiling water on oatmeal and adding some condiments. Hood wrote the following epigram:

Charmed with a drink which Highlanders compose,
A German traveller exclaimed with glee,
“Potztausend! sare, if dis is Athol Brose
How goot der Athol Boetry must be!”

Edgar Allan Poe once said of Thomas Hood that “during the larger portion of his life, he seemed to breath only for the purpose of perpetrating puns.” Describing the meeting of a man with a lion. Hood said, “The man ran off with all his might and the lion with all his mane.”

Theodore Hook achieved success at an early age by writing comic operas and spent a number of years as a man about town, winning a foremost place in the world of fashion as well as startling the public by the audacity of his practical jokes. Hook’s memory is associated with what William Walsh called “the most audacious jest on record.” As Governor of Mauritius, Hook ruled for five years before being accused of embezzling 12,000 pounds of public funds. He was dismissed from his post and returned to England, where he told friends that his dismissal was “on account of a disorder in my chest.” Neither Hood nor Hook was above using any possible situation as an excuse to make a pun. Hood said that an undertaker, who wanted to cremate his ashes when he died, had become very solicitous of late because he was seeking to “urn a lively Hood.” Hook, not far behind, spoke lightly of a “fit of coffin” and told of the bereaved widower who said at his wife’s funeral that he was going on a black-burying party.” Of a man hanged at Newgate, Hook said that “he had taken a drop too much,” and of a man murdering his mother in a garret, “he was above committing a crime.” A story is told about Hook and Hood strolling one evening on the outskirts of London with their friend Charles Mathews, the actor. Hood said to Hook, “They call us inseparables, but after all it’s only natural that Hook and eye [I] should go together.” Hook then suggested that the two have a match to see who could make up the best joke on the spur of the moment. They agreed that the loser would buy supper tor the group and Mathews was appointed umpire. Scarcely were the terms agreed on when they spied a sign board the owner of which, wishing to advertise that he sold beer, had mistaken an a for an e and, instead of “Beer sold here” had written “Bear sold here.” “Aha,” said Hook, “I suppose that bear is his own bruin [brewin'].” Hook then went on to say that his rival might beat him because he carried more than two faces under one Hood. At that moment. Hood sighted a small house which displayed a sign reading “Beware the dog.” Discovering no dog, he scribbled on the sign, “Ware be the dog?” At this, Mathews declared that he could not decide between two such horrible puns and that each should pay for his own dinner.

Though Lamb, Hood, and Hook dominated 19th-century punning, there were other wags whose tales dogged those of the better-known punmen. A Mr. Poole, author of Paul Pry, was also considered a clever wit. An actor named Priest was playing at a London theater and someone at the Garrick Club remarked that there were a great many men in the pit. “Probably clerks who’ve taken Priest’s orders” quipped Poole, who once defined dogmatism as “Puppyism come to maturity.”

When asked if he could pun on the signs of the zodiac, the dramatist Douglas Jerrold replied, “By Gemini, I can.”

Sydney Smith quoted the anonymous teacher who rebuked a careless student for reading the word patriarchs as partridges with the scathing comment, “You are making game of the patriarchs.”

Byron also unleashed some biting puns such as the conclusion of his epitaph on the drunken carrier, John Adams:

The liquor he drank being too much for one
He could not carry off, so he’s now carrion.

It is commonly believed that the most laconic military dispatch was Julius Caesar’s Veni, vidi, vici ‘I came, I saw, I conquered,’ but none could equal in brevity that attributed to Sir Charles Napier, a British officer fighting in India who has figured in the capture of the Indian territory of Scinde. His dispatch to the British War Office in London contained only the Latin verb peccavi, meaning ‘I have sinned’ [Scinde]. Unfortunately this most perfect of puns belongs not to Napier but to Punch, which printed the story in 1844.

Some of the best puns in the English language have been made on names. At a tavern where he had been overcharged, Samuel Foote, the English dramatist and actor, asked his host “What’s your name?” “Partridge, sir” was the reply. “Partridge!” returned Foote. “It should have been Woodcock by the length of your bill.”

There is also the jest of Dr. Thomas Browne who, having unsuccessfully courted a lady, was challenged to drink her health and replied, “I have toasted her many years, but I cannot make her Browne so I’ll toast her no longer.”

When Dr. Barton Warren was informed that his acquaintance Dr. Vowel was dead, he exclaimed, “What! Vowel dead? Well thank heaven it was neither you nor I.”

Moving back a century we find equally pun-gent lines in the epitaph of that eminent pun gentleman, Jonathan Swift, for the Earl of Kildare:

Who killed Kildare?
Who dared Kildare to kill?
Death killed Kildare,
Who dared kill whom he will.

Another pun which may or may not have been Swift’s resulted from a visit by Swift’s friend. Dr. Ash, to an inn soon after the passing of an act for the protection of growing timber. The doctor requested a waiter to help him off with his coat but the man refused saying that it was a felony to strip an ash. Regardless of who made the pun, it is a fine example of Swift wit.

Another 18th-century joker commented on John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, produced by John Rich, that the production “made Rich gay and Gay rich.”

The Scottish poet, Thomas Campbell, in his student days in Glasgow, observed that Mr. Drum, the liquor dealer, and Mr. Fife, an apothecary, were next-door neighbors. The apothecary displayed a sign in his window which stated “Ears pierced by A. Fife.” One night Campbell, with the assistance of several schoolmates, placed a long wooden board between the windows of the two shops bearing in large capital letters the Shakespearean line, “The spiritstirring Drum, the ear-piercing Fife.”

Among the ranks of American punsters it is not surprising to find old Poor Richard himself, Ben Franklin. The best-known pun attributed to Franklin was made during the signing of the Declaration of Independence. John Hancock addressed his associates with the words “We must be unanimous; there must be no pulling different ways; we must all hang together.” Franklin replied “We must indeed all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” Another Revolutionary pun was made by Mather Boyles, a Tory Loyalist of New England. Because of his political views, the American patriots posted a sentinel to keep him under surveillance. Boyles, in return, called this sentinel his “Observe-a-tory.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes was a noted practitioner of the pun. His advice to financial speculators was “Put not your trust in money but your money in trust.” He also wrote the famous limerick about Henry Ward Beecher.

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher
Called a hen a most elegant creature
The hen pleased with that,
Laid an egg in his hat
And thus did the hen reward Beecher.

In the 1920s and ’30s fate brought some of America’s finest wits together at the Algonquin Round Table in New York whence issued forth a sally of clever puns. Franklin P. Adams’s remark “Take care of your peonies and the dahlias will take care of themselves” is a classic. George S. Kaufman once groaned during a card game, “I’m being treydeuced.” Alexander Woolcott titled a book of theater criticism Enchanted Aisles.

Other American writers such as Peter de Vries, Clifton Fadiman—who dubbed Debussy fans “Debussybodies”— Christopher Morley, and S.J. Perelman have favored the pun. Morley, who defined a pun as ‘language on vacation,’ observed two small wigs on stands in a wig shop and commented, “They’re alike as toupees.”

Perelman wrote some of Groucho Marx’s best lines. In the film Horsefeathers, a secretary who has been holding a caller at bay in the anteroom warns Groucho that “Jennings is waxing wroth,” to which Groucho replies, “Tell Roth to wax Jennings for a while.”

Groucho specialized in outrageous puns that stretched the English language to its breaking point. He once advised “Don’t conscience-stricken before they’re hatched.” In the original stage version of The Coconuts, he introduced the orchestra leader as follows: “This is Emanuel. I got him from Emanuel Training School. He’s Emanuel like.” In the film Animal Crackers, Groucho, speaking about elephant hunting, remarked with characteristic zaniness, “In Africa the tusks are too firmly rooted, but in Alabama the Tuscaloosa.”

James Joyce is the greatest wordsmith of all. His Finnegans Wake contains upwards of 50,000 plays on words in more than 12 languages. Some have quintuple layers and can only be deciphered by trained experts. Although Joyce made the pun arcane it belongs to the people and is meant to be immediately understood rather than deciphered.

The pun is a subversive element which torpedoes any attempt to make a language too exact, too formal. It is a pleasant reminder to us that language is not a cold, precision instrument but a fascinating ragbag of delights and surprises.

Who Wrote That?!

Here are some quotations that ought to give you paws if you are a purist. See if you can identify either the author, or the source, or both. Score 10 points for each correct answer. If you score 100, you must have cheated. A score of 50 classes you as a genius. If you get none right, your ego may be dampened, but just think how much you still have to learn!

1. All debts are cleared between you and I.
2. Brain Worm has been with my cousin Edward and I all this day.
3. If a person is born of a gloomy temper they cannot help it.
4. There’s two of you.
5. He talks like Brunswick did.
6. Lord Delaware is considerably younger than me.
7. Consider first, that Great and Bright infers no excellence.
8. The Whitish gleam was … conferred by the enormity of their remotion.
9. Unfortunately, few have observed like you have done.
10. Typhus fever decimated the school periodically.

Answers

1. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, III, ii, 321.
2. Jonson, Every Man in His Humour, V, iii.
3. Chesterfield, Letters, IV, ccIv, 170.
4. Shakespeare, 2 Henry VI, III, ii, 303.
5. Southey, Letters, I, I, 12.
6. Byron, Letters, 2 Nov. 1804.
7. Milton, Paradise Lost, VIII, 91.
8. De Quincey, The System of the Heavens, III, 183.
9. Darwin, , Life and Letters, III, 58.
10. Charlotte bronte, letter, in Mrs. Gaskell’s Life, 276.

The above was abridged and adapted from “Plain English,” by Jim Quinn, in Washington Post Magazine, December 11, 1977, pp. 14-16, 34-35. Used by permission.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Police report that a man drove a car wrecklessly through town, damaging several parked cars along the way. The town police cruiser received $500 damage in the incident.” [From the (Kingston, Ontario) Whig-Standard, April 2, 1980, p.26. Submitted by Patricia Whitaker, Kingston, Ontario, who reports that the Whig-Standard . . . is a pretty good paper, . . . only treating us to lost “spade” cats and “martial” relationships.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

A sign in the window of a neighborhood restaurant in San Francisco offers “FOOD” TO TAKE OUT. [Submitted by Margaret Tenney, Berkeley, California.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

One isn’t struck quite so hard by the ambiguous headline in The Times [London, April 14, 1980, p.4] that read “Ban on live sex shows ‘strikes at freedom”’ till he learns that the acronym of the pressure group campaigning for changes in the obscenity laws in England is NCROPA (just missing the “E” by a whisker). One might get the impression that such a group would favor sex shows among the dead-grateful and otherwise.

A Pooh-Poohey

Virginia Howard, New Orleans, Louisiana

In my job as an editor of articles to be submitted to medical journals, the written word consumes my mind. One day, for example, while I was immersed in a paper about the use of arylsulphatase in the treatment of leukemia, my telephone rang and I automatically lifted the receiver; in my usual “answering-the-telephone” voice, I crooned, “Arylsulphatase.” Such is my absorption.

Problems with the written word are encountered and surmounted every day. Idiosyncrasies in spelling and syntax can be understood because the words stay still on the page and withstand hours of withering scrutiny. The most capricious misspelling can be disentangled into a meaningful word, and sometimes the error is even curiously more satisfying than its correction. One doctor wrote: “Chronic laxative use may lead to laxative dependency and the inability to induce a normal response to colon distention, which may then lead to higher and higher doses of laxative and a viscous cycle.” Such peculiarities even fleetingly glimpsed, such as “ORKA” on the sign at a roadside vegetable stand, are still intelligible. Errant script is wonderfully inert, but verbal vagaries that bounce off the eardrums strike without warning and then slither away. The brain is left stunned.

The problem that plagues my phonetically oriented mind is not the ordinary variation in pronunciation, such as being addressed as “Miz Hired,” nor is it the simple spoonerism, like the “turned bokey” that a coworker enthusiastically announced she was having for lunch. Other variations cause only minor gnashing of teeth and clawing at ears. In north Alabama, two radio announcers give disparate interpretations of the title Mrs. To one announcer, Mrs. Smith is “Mizriz Smith,” and to the other she is “Meriziz Smith.” Less tolerable, but still grudgingly understandable, is a poorly educated high-school English teacher’s instruction to her students to write “rough graphs” of their themes.

What is it then that dissolves my mind into a quaking muddle? What dreaded verbal encounter leaves me clutching at a slippery alphabet? The source of my quandary is when an incomprehensible comment is directed to me and an immediate response is expected. The speaker knows what word has just rolled off his tongue, but my mind is unable to grasp it. If, as Emerson suggested, “to be great is to be misunderstood,” then many great people have spoken to me.

My inability to comprehend variations in spoken English first emerged in an educational psychology course, requiring field work in a children’s nursery school. A five-year-old boy proposed a game of cowboys and Indians, and designated to me, “You can be Day-Oh.”

“Who?” I asked. A hazy image of Harry Bellafonte, singing “The Banana Boat Song,” flitted through my head. Were calypso singers part of the Old West?

“Day-Oh,” he repeated.

“Day-Oh?” I asked.

“No,” he said peevishly, and clenching his fists, he enunciated slowly and clearly, “Not Day-Oh—DAY-Oh!”

“Who?” I asked, knowing I dare not repeat the name.

“DAY-OH,” he said, his face glowing pink with gathering rage, “DAY-OH! DAY-OH!”

“I’m afraid I don’t know who that is,” I admitted.

“Day-Oh Evans,” he said in disgust.

I had hoped that my affliction was limited to eardrum encounters with five-year-old vocal cords, but my life continued to be hounded by perplexing vocal riddles. A friend and I were getting off an elevator when she turned to me and asked, “Is that Marv?” The only other person getting off the elevator with us was a girl wearing a purple blouse.

“N-no, I don’t think so,” I replied hesitantly. She certainly didn’t look as though her name would be Marv.

My friend continued, “I just wondered what the color Marv looked like exactly. I thought maybe that shade of purple was about right.” (A next-door neighbor once threatened to paint his house chattaroose. He may have been kidding about his choice of color, but his pronunciation was no joke.)

Are others similarly burdened by this lack of finesse in communication? Are they left spluttering as they try to unwind common words from their linguistic shrouds? Could it be an inherited characteristic? In my case, it definitely is. My father bought some doughnuts in a doughnut shop in Tennessee, and the salesgirl politely asked him, “Yat beyaw?”

He stared at her and said, “I-I beg your pardon?”

“Yat beyaw?” she squealed.

“What?” he asked in alarm. “What, what?”

“Yat beyaw!?” she squeaked, getting a tinge impatient.

“Er-yes,” he agreed as he grabbed his bag of doughnuts and fled. When he got outside, he exclaimed, “That girl just meowed at me!”

Others in my family have vestiges of the disorder. As we were waiting in a hospital corridor for the arrival of the elevator, my mother and I were conversing with a gentlewoman from south Georgia and her daughter. We commented on the slowness of the elevator, and the lady contrasted this elevator’s tardiness with the speed of the elevator in the hotel where she and her daughter were staying, “Why, that elevator’s so fast,” she said, “that last night when it arrived, I got in and ‘fo’ Jean got in—WHOOSH—the door closed and the elevator was gone!”

My mother later commented, “Doesn’t that lady’s daughter have a strange name—Fojean! I’ve never heard the name Fojean before.”

Is there a gene—a phogene, perhaps—that predisposes some brains to misinterpret speech patterns that others understand? Those of us who have inherited the phogene may, after months of understanding everything that everyone says to us, become complacent. The disease, however, is only dormant. Sooner or later a word, innocently uttered, will explode in the phogene-laden brain, and the struggle to capture an auditory outlaw begins again.

Just yesterday my brain was happily dandling written words on its cerebral knees when someone from the orthopedics department of the medical school telephoned me and flung out this question, “What does pooh-poohey mean?”

“I don’t know,” I stammered, while nervously fingering my dictionary, “but it sounds decidedly nasty to me.”

“Don’t you have any idea about pooh-poohey?” she persisted. I admitted that I didn’t. If I was unable to recognize Marv when I saw her, how could I admit familiarity with pooh-poohey?

Searching for a clue I could jab my pencil into, I asked, “Could you mean pooh-pooh? That’s an expression of contempt.”

“No,” she replied, “That doesn’t make any sense. I think there’s even a restaurant in town called ‘The Pooh-Poohey.”’

“Could it be Hawaiian?” I suggested, “A double dose of poi perhaps? Poi-poi?”

“Pooh-poohey isn’t used that way at all in the paper I’m typing.”

“Just how is it used?”

“It’s the title of an article I’m typing from a tape recording. The title is ‘Hand Surgery—A Pooh-Poohey.”’

Suddenly, the lid was off the jar—a whiff of flowers, herbs, and spices, a medley of sensations—this miscellaneous collection revealed the truth about pooh-poohey! My relief was immeasurable.

Yat beyaw?

Yayus!

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“… I would lie on a picnic bench with my head in one of my great-aunt’s broad laps. . . .” [From “Fallin' In with the Great-Aunts,” VERBATIM, Winter 1980, p. 14. Submitted by Edgar P. Wyman, North Sandwich, New Hampshire, who suggests that Either [the author] had a lapse of memory, or the editor allowed his attention to punctuation to lapse, or Great Aunty was a freak (or had been re-lap(s)ed.)]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Devil’s Dictionary

Ambrose Bierce, (Stemmer House Publishers, Inc., Owings Mills, Maryland, 1978), xx + 286pp., illustrated.

[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection]

GLUTTON, n. A person who escapes the evils of moderation by committing dyspepsia.

DRAMATIST, n. One who adapts plays from the French.

KLEPTOMANIAC, n. A rich thief.

LAP, n. One of the most important organs of the female system—an admirable provision of nature for the repose of infancy, but chiefly useful in rural festivities to support plates of cold chicken and heads of adult mates. The male of our species has a rudimentary lap, imperfectly developed and in no way contributing to the animal’s substantial welfare.

POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

TELEPHONE, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

To those who are not familiar with such definitions, they speak for themselves; to those familiar with them, their source will be apparent: THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY.

This was first published in the early 1900s as part of a large collection of Bierce’s works. The present edition-I am not sure that other editions are readily available-is beautifully produced and contains a number of attractive black- and-white and color illustrations. Surely, it is a classic work of cynicism tempered by humor, unlike more recent attempts at the same sort of thing: modern authors who write such definitions almost invariably produce irascible, silly, or bitterly sardonic entries that lack Bierce’s gentle humor. Many of the definitions have been quoted by writers since original publication. The volume at hand would make not only a fine addition to any language-lover’s library but a welcome gift to others, as well.

Laurence Urdang

Bears and Lions Growl

Robert Devereux, Falls Church, Virginia

In a work entitled Divine Songs, Isaac Watts (1674-1748), an English theologian and hymn writer, observed that

Let dogs delight to bark and bite,
For God hath made them so;
Let bears and lions growl and fight,
For ‘tis their nature too.

Not very good or very profound poetry, to be sure, but the lines do serve to point up the fact that while humans speak, other living creatures do not, although they can and do utter sounds. And the English language is rich in terms to describe those sounds. As Watts noted, dogs bark and bears and lions growl. Some such English terms apply to different species of nonhuman creatures; for example, both insects and birds churr. Others denote a particular nonhuman sound but, at the same time, serve other purposes: cranes and geese clang but so do bells and streetcars. There are, on the other hand, some terms that are highly particularized. What quacks other than a duck? And what oinks other than a pig? It may also be observed that for many nonhuman creatures, there is more than one applicable English word. Take, for example, the two most common animals, namely, cats and dogs. Cats caterwaul, mew, miaou (or meow), meaul, purr, and yowl, while dogs bark, bay, growl, howl, snarl, yap, yelp, and yowl. Dogs can also cry, although that term is generally reserved for hounds, as is bay.

Terms that are applicable to the various barnyard denizens, animal and fowl, include the following:

bulls bellow and roar
hens cackle, chuck,
cows bellow, low, and moo
chuckle, cluck, and gabble
calves blat and bleat
chicks cheep and peep
asses and donkeys bray
roosters cock, cock-a-
goats bleat
doodle-doo, and crow
pigs grunt, squeal, and oink
hen turkeys yelp
horses neigh, nicker, snort,
tom turkeys gobble
whicker, and whinny
geese cackle, clang, cronk,
sheep baa, blat, and bleat
gabble, hiss, and honk
ducks quack and squawk

Applicable terms for our feathered friends of the sky are just as numerous, if not more so. Birds in general chatter, chirrup, chitter, pipe, squall, trill, twitter, and whistle, while fledglings cheep, chirp, peep, and tweet. Specific species also do their specific things:

bitterns boom
nightingales and partridges churr
cranes clang and whoop
crows caw and croak
owls hoot, screech, tu-whit, tu-whoo, and whoop
cuckoos cuckoo
eagles scream
pigeons and doves coo
gulls cry and mew
ravens caw, croak, and cronk
hawks cry
snipes scape
rooks caw

Terms available for various species of wildlife include:

elephants trumpet
bears growl
lions growl, roar, and snarl
rutting deer bell
monkeys chatter
bucks troat
jackals wail
squirrels chatter
wolves howl
mice cheep, peep, and squeak
foxes* bark, yap,* and *yelp*
bats *cheep*

Insects also have their distinctive terms. Insects in general can be said to chirp, churr, and trill, while specific terms for specific insects include:

bees boom, buzz, drone,
grasshoppers and locusts and hum
chirr, crick, and whirr
crickets chirp and creak
mosquitoes and gnats hum and trumpet
beetles boom, drone, and hum
Also, frogs croak and pipe, and snakes hiss.

I doubt very much that these terms include all that are contained in the English lexicon, and readers who are ardent logophiles will very likely be able to add others. If they can’t the paleomorphophiliacs certainly should be able to do so. In that connection, I might note that in her delightful book on archaic English words, Poplollies and Bellibones, Susan Kelz Sperling cites three such words: blore (like a sheep), crunkle (like a crane), and winx (like a donkey).

There are several general observations that can be made about these terms. First of all, the great majority are one-syllable words and almost all derive from Old or Middle English or are, in origin, what lexicographers term “imitative,” that is, onomatopoeic. Secondly, the simple noun form is identical with the verbal infinitive. These factors set them very far apart from their Latin-derived associates, which are uniformly multisyllabic and which have differing noun and verb forms, for example: latrate (like a dog) and latration; stridulate (like a cricket or grasshopper) and stridulation; and ululate (like a dog, jackal, wolf, or owl) and ululation.

As already noted, many of the terms cited are imitative, or onomatopoeic, in origin. Onomatopoeia can be defined as “the formation of a word, as cuckoo or boom, by imitation of a sound made by or associated with its referent”; and since a particular kind of animal makes the same sound wherever it may be, an onomatopoeic rendition of that sound should, logically, be the same everywhere. That is not the case, however. Onomatopoeia is very much ethnocentric or, if you prefer, linguicentric, and what is onomatopoeic for the speaker of one language is not necessarily so for the speaker of another. What is bow-wow in English, for example, is oua oua in French, Wauwau in German, vau vau in Hungarian, bau bau in Italian, wan wan in Japanese, mong-mong in Korean, vovvov in Norwegian and hav hav in Turkish.

At the same time, onomatopoeic ethnocentricity must not be over-emphasized, for the similarities in some cases can be as striking as the differences in others. In other words, there are some sounds which register very similarly on ears around the world. The sounds represented in English by cock-a-doodle-doo and meow are good examples:

Croatian — kukuriku — mijau
Dutch — kukeleku — miauw
French — cocorico — miau
German — das Kikeriku — das Miau
Hungarian — kukurikú — nyavogas
Indonesian — kukurukuk — ngéong
Italian — chicchirichi — miagolio
Japanese — kokko-kooko — nyaw
Korean — kkokyo — meow
Norwegian — kykeliky — mjaue
Polish — kukuryku — miau
Portuguese — cocorocó — miado
Romanian — cutcurigu — mieunat
Swedish — kuckeliku — jama
Thai — aek-ei-ek-ek — miew
Turkish — kokoriko — miyav
Vietnamese — cuc-cu-cu — meo meo

Odd Couples

Eric Winters, Marble Dale, Connecticut Here is a list of a few Latin-derived words with their counterparts-element for element-in Greek. Most of the pairs have entirely different meanings though their components are equivalent, only a few can be considered synonymous.

aversion— antipathy
benediction— eulogy
carnivore— sarcophagus
circumlocution— periphrasis
compassion— sympathy
composition— syntax
concourse— syndrome
lucifer— phosphor
passive— pathetic
prescription— program
projection— hyperbole
resolution— analysis
supposition— hypothesis
transformation— metamorphosis

Would the readers of VERBATIM care to add to this list?

The Good Life

Robert A. Fowkes, New York University

A few years ago I stood on a modest eminence overlooking the Hudson, accompanied by an in/outlaw. Small craft glided by, some more magnificent than the rest. When a particularly impressive boat went past, the people lounging luxuriously on deck, drinking wine and obviously enjoying the day, my relative-by-marriage turned to me and said, “The good life, eh Bob?!” and I had no answer to his rhetorical question, for, although not too sure what the “good life” meant, I had never thought of it as including sybaritic pleasure. It had, in fact, quasi-theological overtones for me, reminiscent of Paul and his “good fight”; not that the good fight was synonymous with the good life, but the assonance seemed to connect the two somehow. Strangely enough, there seems to be no scriptural attestation of the good life in so many words. The Lord looked upon His handiwork after each day’s stint in the creation and saw that is was “good.” Yet the serpent’s seductive promise to make Adam and Eve like gods, through giving them the power to distinguish between good and evil is clearly condemned (Gen.3.5). And the source of the “good life” remains elusive.

We are, therefore, fortunate that our advertising hucksters tell us what it is all about. An advertisement for a swimming pool (on one of those annoying sheets that clutter up magazines and fall to the floor with two or three others) tells us what the good life is: “Summer sun for the kids—right in their own backyard—and the perfect setting for entertaining friends—a casual pool party and barbecue, maybe a few cocktails, and there you have it—the good life, your own private country club.” Maybe my in-law was right. He could find further confirmation of his notion that the good life = the life of goods in Phyllis and Fred Feldkamp’s The Good Life … or What’s Left of It (New York: Harper and Row, 1972) with the illuminating subtitle, “Being a recounting of the pleasures of the senses that contribute to the enjoyment of life in France.” The ingredients of the good life include moments at the race track, a visit to a fermier who preserves the ancient art of making Camembert, an evening at the de Gaulles’ place, and an encounter with the cultural element called the truffle: “At the center of it all rests the ugly fungus with the delicate scent, the mysterious truffe” (p. 143).

“The good life” has attracted several other writers as an appropriate book title. Douglas Wallop packed that title on to a novel in 1969. (He is perhaps better known for The Mermaid in the Swimming Pool and The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant.) In this version of the good life a man and his wife sell their suburban house (euphemistically called a “home,” of course) and hire themselves out as caretakers of a magnificent estate. Handsome wages and pool privileges (a pool again!) are theirs for minimal duties. To them, the good life means a chance to experience the delights of the well-to-do without the concomitant worries.

A narcissistic ad in The New York Times, May 27, 1977, p.C24, proclaims, “Ah, the Good Life! Good food, good wine, good talk (and home delivery of the New York Times).” Paradise enow. Sylvia Porter expressed forebodings (New York Post, August 16, 1977, p.60) that the good life might be heading for a fall. The “good life” (quotation marks hers; she is bright enough to see through the sham) is explained as amounting to the perquisites enjoyed by well- paid executives. The “fall” refers to anticipated difficulties after retirement.

Uncle Sam evinces similar materialistic notions of the good life in a pamphlet published by the U. S. Department of Agriculture, 1971: A Good Life for More People, where, it must be admitted, the indefinite article somewhat muffles the effect. But I suppose our government knows best what is good for us, if not what life is.

With the current maddening predilection for the Romance comparative, we might expect to find the “better life.” We do better than that, however, cf. The New York Times, May 14, 1979, p.76: “Barbados. It’s better than the good life. It’s the best” (the summum bonum, no doubt), That superlative degree of excellence is manifested in discounts and special rates.

The revived Life magazine does not disappoint us. Where, if not there, should we expect to find attestations of the expression? It occurs as the title of an article on a spectacular “operative,” Ali Hassan Salameh: “A Charming Assassin Who Loved the Good Life” (April, 1979, pp. 101-108). We learn that he “did not allow duty or danger to inhibit his appetite for the good life.” The elements of that life are enumerated: “Scotch whisky, fast cars, beautiful women and (even when moving under cover abroad) elegant restaurants and fine hotels” (pp. 101-102). No swimming pools?

A program on pimps and prostitutes (David Susskind’s TV show, 1 AM, May 27, 1979) introduced a still more astounding use of the term, when a (disguised) pimp asserted that young girls are lured into the profession by a taste of the good life!

While such meretricious distortion of the concept proliferates, every now and then a more venerable and less hedonistic use emerges, as if to defy the hucksters. The recent book by Helen and Scott Nearing (New York: Schocken Books, 1979) bears the title Continuing the Good Life and obviously harks back to their earlier book Living the Good Life (1954). The Nearings regard the good life as related to the back-to-the-land movement and to the re-embracing of a more natural and simple (and arduous) way of life. They reject the labor of farm animals and most use of machinery, preferring hand tools Mr. Nearing (95 years old!) is somewhat incredibly said to be capable of mowing a field with a scythe before breakfast. He and his youthful bride (not yet 80) are strict vegetarians and consume no milk or eggs. They have disciples who share their idea of what the good life is.

William H. Marnell, in The Good Life of Western Man (New York, 1971) makes a sustained effort to determine what the “good life” seems to have meant to “western man” through the ages. That he chauvinistically excludes the whole East is somewhat disappointing, and, in fact, he is taken to task for this in a foreword by Arnold Toynbee. But the valid central theme of the book is that the good life is to be related to things like altruism and the golden mean. There is no mention of ego-fulfillment or belly gratification or perks for jerks.

Perhaps most people of our day—their ears, eyes, and brains (when present) assailed by all the media with the spurious sense of the “good life”—would regard the Nearing and Marnell titles as either egregious bloopers or as irony. After all, does not bon vivant come close to the real essence of the term? Yet, pursuers of what in Italian is called the. mala vita seem to aim to enjoy those luxuries and delights which, for many, are the real fruits of the “good life.” If Buddha or Christ or a saint or two exhorted would-be followers to get rid of their material possessions, how could the life to which they pointed the way—a life without goods—be a good life, let alone the good life? Cui bono? Cui indeed.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“While some retailers are towing the line cautiously, others. . . .” [From California Apparel News, February 29, 1980. Submitted by Warren Wilkins, Seattle, Washington.] Give them enough rope. . . .

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“She was much shorter than I, but she indeed weighed more than me.” [James A. Michener, Miami Herald, March 16, 1980. Submitted by Daniel James, Ivoryton, Connecticut, who comments. New Rule of Grammar: Height takes the nominative case; weight the objective.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Created from colorful, anodized aluminum and tough, strong compressed polystyrene, you can write with any ball-type pen or pencil on the long-lasting tag.” [From a tag accompanying a vegetable and flower marker sold by Gardener’s Eden, Boston, Massachusetts. Submitted by Hans Beacham, Austin, Texas, who comments. What about those of us that are not created from colorful, anodized aluminum and tough, strong compressed polystyrene?]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

A restaurant in Katmandu, Nepal, offers testy snacks, one in Sana’a, Yemen, paper steak and Garden Blue, and one in Freetown, Sierra Leone (where English is the official language, stake. [Submitted by Kathryn W. Uphaus, Freetown, Sierra Leone.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“REWARD FUND CREATED FOR BURNING ARSONISTS . . . Last month [Mayor] Voinovich promised . . . that he would request that the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration set aside $10,000 for a reward program for nonfatal crimes of arson.” [From The Cleveland Press, March 8, 1980, A8. Submitted by Brud Turner, Cleveland Heights, Ohio, who comments. Code of Hammurabi (Lex Talionis) is alive and well in Cleveland!]

Score-bored

Clair Schulz, Clinton, Wisconsin

Lately I have been attentively listening to reports of baseball scores, but with little interest in the results. One might ask, “Why follow the scores if you don’t care who wins?” Because there is an interesting aspect to these reports other than the naming of the winner and loser. That element is the significant how.

Carefully listening to the latest verdicts, I have learned that the readers of scores or the writers of scores who work for wire services lack variety in decribing the manner of victory or defeat. Beat (or beaten) is used most frequently, although downed (“The Phillies downed the Cubs 4-2”) and over (“The Indians over the Tigers 7-3”) also appear often in the litany. Like a club owner who resists change these reporters (or, more precisely, reciters) continue to use the same words day after day. Occasionally, when a team is shut out, a creative imp might throw in a statement like “The Mets blanked the Reds 2-0,” but soon things are back to beat and over and out (out being the commercial).

When one considers the hundreds of verbs waiting eagerly to get their chance, it seems rather heartless to play the same line-up all the time. No matter what the outcome, the English language boasts a full pen of terms waiting to go into action. Was it a close game? The lackluster got by may bid for a tryout, but it pales beside the likes of edged, nudged, nipped, and trimmed. A lopsided contest? “The Twins took the Angels” sounds as if the teams are dating. But the listener who hears slapped, destroyed, trounced, clubbed, pounded, clobbered, slugged, slammed, punished, routed, or pummeled inserted into a program will know that a team has taken a beating. For those who claim that they lack sufficient air time to search for words, here is an easy-to-remember handful: tripped, clipped, tipped, ripped, whipped, and (for shutouts) zipped.

With a little practice a sportscaster could develop a delivery with enough panache to please even connoisseurs. A gourmet might be delighted to know that the Giants grated the Braves 10-1 and the Orioles battered the Yankees 12-2. Teams could be diced, sliced, and shredded to please any palate. Various types of artists formerly preoccupied with aesthetics might pause in their work to listen to reports that included terms like outstroked, pasted, welded, blotted out, smashed, chiseled, needled, and tattooed. And those involved in the fashion world would certainly respond favorably to descriptions of teams socking, belting, collaring, handcuffing, and straitjacketing their hapless opponents.

There are many other candidates capable of pinchhitting for the overworked veterans, but they may be destined for early retirement unless the managers of language toss off the enchantments of sloth. By now these people who are responsible for the delivery of official results should know that the easy word, the one that comes immediately to mind, is often the dullest. Not only will the reader of scores who varies his verbs find the task less tedious but those listening will be released from the strains of monotonic repetition that seem to emanate from every station. Then they may discover that it is not just this listener to whom the winning and losing is not as important as how you say the game.

Mubblefubbles: An Old-Fashioned Bout with the Black Dog; or Coming Down in the Mouth with a Case of the Humpy-Grumpies

John L. Idol, Jr., Clemson University

I writ of melancholy, by being busy to avoid
melancholy. There is no greater cause of melancholy
than idleness, no better cure than business. . . .

Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy

As any good modern thesaurus (Alien’s, Rodale’s, Mawson’s, or Soule’s) will show, present-day English has no lack of words to express a melancholic state when “doleful dumps the mind oppress” (Romeo and Juliet, IV, v, 129). From standard English through dialectal words to slang terms, words and phrases abound to help anyone suffering from jawfall to express how blue his funk has become. Fascinating as such modern terms are, not they but archaic, obsolete, and rare words for melancholy or dejection will be the theme of this essay on a Cimmerian subject. So “Hail divinest Melancholy” while I write of darksome words.

The sanguine Wife of Bath, narrating the tale of the lecherous Knight who thought he must wed a hag, confided in Dryden’s modernization of her story: “Mirth there was none, the man was a la mort.” Once a term naturalized in English, alamort is now considered French and is rarely, if ever, used in Dryden’s sense of ‘melancholy.’ Two jocose corruptions of melancholy, allycholly and colliemollie, have been dropped from the language since Shakespeare’s time. Shakespeare has the Host in The Two Gentlemen of Verona say to Julia, “Methinks you’re allycholly; I pray you, why is it?” (IV, ii, 27). An anonymous writer in 1603 wrote: “The Devil was a little colli-mollie and would not come off.” Old Nick probably did not come off because at the moment he was an atrabilarian suffering acutely from black bile or black choler, and his atrabilariousness was making him woefully chumpish. Sidney’s Arcadia in 1580 had used chumpish to express the notion of sullenness. Had the Old Deuce had the good fortune to come upon John Quincy Adams a couple of centuries later (1777), he might have borrowed a sentence from one of Adams’s letters and griped, “The spleen, the vapours, the dismals, the horrors seemed to have seized [my] whole State.”

The dole of someone in a griefful state is powerfully exhibited by Spenser when cannibals with sharp knives and hungry looks gaze upon the Damzell in Book VI, Canto VIII, of The Faerie Queene:

Which when she sees with ghastly griefful eies,
Her heart does quake, and deadly pallid hew
Benumbes her cheekes.

Indeed, at this frightful moment, one could share her hepatic condition, for whose liver would not secrete plenteous bile if liver and all else lay subject to a cannibal’s greedy appetite. If not just the liver, then surely the other parts of the hypochondria, the seat of spleen and melancholia, would render one an instant hypochondriack. Without enough pluck to overcome such dreadful foes, what damsel would not be luctiferous, for she would bear much sorrow in losing her limbs and paps to lustful flesheaters. Considering so dire a plight, she could well have anticipated a later cry by Richardson’s Pamela, “My heart was so lumpish!” (1741). Such a bloody end would leave any decent girl feeling justifiably maltalent.

Escaped from these tristful Spenserian perils and safely at court with a copy of John Lyiy’s play Midas in her hands, she could shake her head in agreement over the behavior of young men at court at this time. “Melancholy is the creast of Courtiers armes, and now everie base companion, being in his mubblefubbles, says he is melancholy” (V, ii), unless, of course, keeping up on the latest cant, he is in his mumblefubbles. Should he not care to use slang, he might report that he is now in something of a qualm himself because his friends behave so splenetically. Perchance, if he were not too far sunk in his spleenishness, he could lift words from Gabriel Harvey and confess, “I was never so splenetique when I was most dumpish but I could smile at a frise jest.”

A yearnful distant descendant of his, quoting Sir Richard Blackmore, might well give a similar report about the modish malaise her stylish friends display when “The spleen with sullen vapours clouds the brain,/ And binds the spirits in its heavy chain.” Or should a still later descendant turn ever more bookish and launch a career in dictionary- making, he could be described by a contemporary journalist as “too splentitive, austere, impatient … to reach the abacus of excellence in the science of lexicography” (Monthly Magazine, 1815). A further turn from lexicography to romantic love could subject him to a hopeless seizure of Wertherism. A studiously placed pistol could thus put an end to his dreariment.

Out in the provinces, the cousins of these city-bred melancholiacks were to have their own problems with the mulligrubs and pass their doldrums on down to their children, and their children to theirs. Dolements could beset anyone, but especially a fiddlefaced glumpish fellow whose grum and glum afflicted all of his friends and neighbors with a severe outbreak of the humpy-grumpies. Not to be outdone, his neighbors could be grouty and grump, glunch, grunch until they were worn out with gruntling. The long and short of it was that if one wanted to be dowly, the dismals could strike as deeply in Yorkshire as in London. Any doubters of that generalization need weigh only this neighborly diagnosis by an unnamed Yorkshireman: “She’s having a long dowl on’t this time, there’s somewhat the matter, depend on it.”

The truth of the matter is that the blue devils can make anyone, countryman or city swell, feel “lower than the ring around a Scotsman’s bathtub” anywhere, anytime. But some people choose not to sing the blues with sesquipedalian terms, opting, instead, to chop off long words, create new ones, blend others, or fashion original phrases. One of the first words to go under the knife of the slangwright was hypochondria, becoming hipped, hippish, hypo, and down in the hips in the early 18th century. For example, Richard Steele in 1712 wrote in the Spectator: “I have been to the last Degree hipped since I saw you.” The even further clipped form, hip, was not to appear until 1840.

An early creation was hump, which found its way into a sentence by Defoe in this context: “Under many Hardships and Restrictions, many Humps and Grumps.” A later creation, fantad or fantod, formed perhaps on the base of fantastic, appeared in 1867, some twenty-three years before some disheartened victim of Monday fever got the morbs (1880).

Victims of the boo-hoos (1830s) or the dolefuls (1820s), if they were not wholly picklepussed, could brighten their own nights by sharing such sprightly blends as solemncholy (ca. 1860), lemonjolly (ca. 1860), and lemoncholy (1909). Once such playful blends cropped up, some wag dubbed a pregnant woman’s craving for watermelon as watermeloncholy. But one could obviously develop incurable woefits if forced to endure levels of wit no higher than this.

The creators of phrases have been even more productive. Swift is credited with creating or recording down in the hips (1729), but since Swift’s time melancholic folk have given the pip (1890) or gotten the pip (1885) or the woefuls (1909). Of course, they have coined dozens of phrases still current in British or American slang.

These old-fashioned words and phrases, together with the scores of phrases and words presently denoting a melancholic state or disposition, plausibly suggest that new terms must come as mankind learns more and more about the megrims, for as poor Belarius of Cymbeline once cried, “O melancholy! Who ever yet could sound thy bottom?” (IV, ii, 204.)

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Reader Over Your Shoulder

Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, (Vintage Books, 1979; original edition, 1943; revised and abridged edition, 1947), 290pp.

One approaches a review of a book bearing Robert Grave’s name with respect, almost not daring to dislike it, careful lest the slightest adverse comment make the reviewer a fool. Yet, the cover of this book identifies Graves (presumably for that segment of the television audience to which it is hoped it may appeal) as the author of I, Claudius, a work I found quite tedious when I tried to read it some 25 years ago. That is quite irrelevant, of course, but then so is the publisher’s identification of Graves: either you know who he is or you don’t, and whatever mark he might have made as author of I, Claudius has scarcely any bearing on his qualifications for writing a work on English exposition.

Notwithstanding the respect that Craves and Hodge may merit for their works of fiction, their observations that “English is less ancient than French” on the grounds of its freedom from gender differentiation, and that “French is clearly less ancient than Latin, since it has no separate neuter gender and does not decline its nouns,” are simply not consonant with the facts we know about other languages. That is not to say that French is older than Latin, for we know that is not the case. But the criteria offered, when applied to Polish or Russian on the one hand and to Chinese on the other, prove completely specious. [Besides, it is annoying to find grammer so spelled on the third line of such a book; but there are other typographical errors.]

All of the preceding takes place on page one, an altogether inauspicious beginning for a work on the language. But it gets worse before it gets better. Page seven: “The Romance and Germanic languages, not having had occasion to simplify themselves to the same degree [as English], still retain their genders and inflections. There is no logical justification for genders. They are a decorative survival from a primitive time when the supposed sex of all concepts—trees, diseases, cooking implements—had to be considered for the sake of religious convention or taboo.” This may be the linguistics of The White Goddess, but it is not what we associate with the linguistics since the neogrammarians of the 19th century. In fact, applying the notion of natural (or sex) gender to grammar is probably one of the most misleading bits of nonsense that grammarians ever did, for it has confused students ever since. Don’t you think that the Germans—even the proto-Germans—knew that Mädchens are feminine? Yet, applying the criteria of sex gender, das Mädchen is, of course, neuter. Examples abound. Even in languages like English where we expect “natural gender,” we find nautical references to feminine vessels. The point is not that “gender is illogical,” as the authors say, but that it is subject to a different logic. This is especially evident in French, where there is no neuter gender. In any event, Romance gender is based on Latin gender, in which the gender of a word depended pretty much on the prehistory of the declension to which it belonged, with the so-called first declension (femina, agricola, etc.) being the most archaic. Roman culture was not blessed with a population of Amazonian farmers. The subject is too complex to discuss here, but the point has been made.

The authors continue by criticizing the paradigm of French ‘will’—je serai, tu seras, il sera, nous serons, vous serez, ils seront—as if it consisted of six forms. Clearly, if pronunciation is the measure (as it should be for a spoken language), then there are only four forms, since seras and sera, serons and seront are indistinguishable. It is even doubtful that serai and serez are distinguishable, reducing the forms to three, that is, only one more than English (if we allow shall for I and we, and will only for the rest), or, at worst, two more. To make such a comparison becomes ridiculous, for one must also contend with the interrogative forms, which yield serai-je, seras-tu, sera-t-il, serous-nous, serez-vous, and seront-ils. Moreover, following the affirmative form by a word like ici ‘here,’ one runs into further problems reflected by the rule of liaison ‘elision’ in French.

The authors comments on the method of expressing various relationships in German and French (and, though they don’t choose to list them, languages other than English) by the use of prepositions that do not translate well into English are absurd: all that need be said about their objections is that German mit is only imperfectly translated into English as ‘with’; to be sure, mit means ‘with’ far more often than it means anything else in English, but not in every conceivable instance. And their example. The Man in the Cloak vs Der Mensh mit dem Mantel is simply a proof of my argument, not theirs.

Parts of the book have a quaint, somewhat archaic ring. Comments like “One cannot yet tell whether the word “quisling” will outlast the Nazi technique of preparing for the invasion of a country by a political infiltration” became understandable when viewed with the information that this Second Edition was revised in 1947. It thus may serve as an interesting document to be added to the archival history of English language criticism, but it scarcely merits acceptance as an up-to-date critique of English usage in the last quarter of the 20th century.

I have little enough faith in those who write about English, yet I must confess a deep respect for Graves. When he writes a sentence like this; “Why so many well-educated people spell badly is because they were quick-brained as children . . . ,” I lose faith completely and wonder how much worse it can get. It cannot be recommended that writers take advice from one who offers up such examples. Unfortunately, they abound:

A useful test of the logic of metamorphical English
prose is to translate it into Latin, [p. 32]

…[S]ince English by its simplicity of structure permits a greater mobility of thought than other languages, and so can express subtler insinuations and more powerful thrusts of meaning, an English writer with something to say needs no rhetorical art. [p. 38]

…[T]he future tense goes: ‘I shall, thou wilt, he will, we shall, you will, they will.’ [p. 93].

There follow several chapters in which principles of concise expression are catalogued, followed by poor examples which are discussed and, in many cases, rewritten in improved style by Graves and Hodge. The device is a good one, provided that the reader is able to decipher the original, the discussion, and the improvement. But the authors have selected such sophisticated illustrations and have over-intellectualized their discussions and improvements to such an extent that I found it difficult to believe that anyone capable of understanding their argument would be likely to be reading this kind of book. For instance, “Principle E: Except where the writer is being deliberately facetious, all phrases in a sentence, or sentences in a paragraph, should belong to the same vocabulary or level of language.” I cannot quarrel with the principle. But the examples given are from (1) a newspaper sermon, (2, 3, 4) a translation of Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis, and (5, 6) a translation of Petronius’s Satyricon, It seems unlikely that translators Dr. A. L. Rouse and Michael Heseltine would be reading this book to learn how to improve their styles; it is equally doubtful that the average reader who might derive some benefit from reading this book would be able to make heads or tails of these classical citations, much less care about them. Those who want and need books about improving their style of writing should have available to them works that are explicit and that contain examples typical of the kind they are likely to encounter, not supercilious comments about infelicitous translations of Seneca and Petronious.

The last section of the book consists of a collection of writings by T. S. Eliot, Sir James Jeans, J. M. Keynes, J. B. Priestley, I. A. Richards, Bertrand Russell, G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells, A. M. Whitehead, Sir Leonard Woolley, and a few less well known writers. In each case. Graves and Hodge pick apart the extracts, bit by bit, while applying their Principles. Most people would be satisfied to write as “badly” as the authors cited, even at their worst, and were Graves and Hodge less well known themselves, they could only have come off as purveyors of sour grapes.

The entire book suffers from an imbalance. Perhaps, in 1947, it was directed at a highly literate university reader; today, however, it would seem pompous, stilted, and turgid to the average user. On all of these grounds, I find it impossible to recommend it except to those who collect books on the teaching of style: it simply doesn’t meet the requirements of a practical vademecum.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

Latest entry in the noun-stacking contest: Merit pay appraisal system research field test training session. [From Bulletin 22, of the Air Force Flight Test Center, Edwards AFB, California. Submitted by Ted Bear, Historian, AFFTC, Edwards AFB, California.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“How BONDAGE LIBERATED ME … It was only when tied down that she first felt free.” [Title and subtitle of an article in Variations, Fall 1978, p.7. Submitted by Angus I. Campbell, San Francisco, California, who characterizes it as a double oxymoron.]

English English

Philip Howard

I am chuffed as bollocks about a piece I wrote earlier this year in what Americans quaintly describe as The London Times. Depending upon your understanding of the idiom, this means that I am either pleased or displeased, gruntled or disgruntled. The article was about Janus words and expressions that mean the opposite of what they seem to; for example: I hate to gossip, but . . .; To cut a long story short . . .; the union regrets any inconvenience caused to the public; the Government is confident that most of our athletes will wish to boycott the Moscow Games; NO EXIT (on the London Underground); and chuffed.

The article argued that chuffed was an exemplary Janus or reversible word, because there was reputable authority of good writers who understood it to mean gruntled, and other equally good writers who understood it to mean disgruntled. An avalanche of mail deluged upon us to give The Times the real news about chuffed. Unfortunately no two letters agreed. One persuasive wordsmith declared that chuffed never meant anything except extremely browned off before the war in the British Army; and that since the war it has done a semantic somersault to mean ‘pleased.’ For connoisseurs of class nuances it was observed that while the stiff-upper-lipped officer corps was merely chuffed at reversals of fortune, the troops were invariably dead chuffed.

On the other hand equally old and persuasive retired soldiers declared that chuffed had never meant anything other than ‘gratified,’ and that the displeased variant was pure civilian ignorance. One gave the intensifiers chuffed as fuck and chuffed as bollocks. Old soldiers from the Indian Army wrote claiming that the word was derived from Hindi, like the many words from jungle to bungalow that have come into English from the Anglo-Indian connexion. Old soldiers from the Indian Army have a propensity to do this about any word of disputed etymology.

The Oxford lexicographers confirm that the expression was originally military, but are silent about its precise derivation. Eric Partridge, always very well-informed about military slang, said that chuff had been used in the British Army since about 1930 to mean ‘food,’ on the analogy of chow. Partridge gave as a second meaning of chuff, with pretty precision, ‘stimulation of male member by lumbar thrust in coition.’ Whatever did the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Mr. Holyoake, mean, in that case, when he used to sit on one’s chuff to mean ‘to sit back and do nothing’?

Partridge noted the Janus meanings of chuffed. He declared that if one needed to distinguish them, one said chuffed to fuck or chuffed to arseholes or chuffed pink or bo-chuffed to mean ‘gruntled,’ and dead chuffed to mean ‘disgruntled.’

Squadron Leader John Bloomfield of the RAF in Suffolk sent us an official Ministry of Defence memorandum about chuffed—RAF version 1960s:

The Pongos have missed the nuances of the word and its proper use.
dead chuffed, very pleased
highly chuffed, quite pleased
chuffed, pleased
dis-chuffed, disenchanted
chokka (or chockered), displeased
right chokka, very displeased
(Right and dead can be transposed.)
Hence I’m chuffed by your occasional articles. I’d be dead chuffed if you referred to the above, but right chokka if you can’t be bothered to acknowledge this note.
P.S. Choked off is another matter entirely.

I doubt whether we are ever going to arrive at an explanation of chuffed that is going to satisfy everyone. In any case the Janus word is distinctly old-fashioned in British English.

Meanwhile I am fussing about the piece of American slang laid back that has recently become all the rage in British journalism. I know that it means, roughly, ‘cool, easy-going, relaxed, and generally admirable.’ It is the derivation that puzzles me. Is it just slumped back in one’s character as in one’s chair? Or is it, more interestingly, a piece of Californian psychobabble?

EPISTOLA {Norman R. Shapiro}

As one interested in the anatomy of language, I was pleased to read Jay Siwek’s article on the language of anatomy [VI, 1]. One quibble, however. I have long cherished the belief that the relationship between the testes and the Latin root of such words as testify, testimony, etc., derived, not from the fact that they “bear ‘witness’ to manhood and virility”—an etymology alluded to by the OED, though without much conviction—but rather from the Ancient Roman’s practice of swearing by (among other things) what he held most precious and would least like to lose; i.e., by placing his hands on his genitals. (Perhaps akin to the curious Old Testament oath elicited by Abraham from his servant, “Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh” [Genesis, 24, 2]—a reciprocal action according to Josephus [Antiquities, I, 16]—and to Jacob’s identical deathbed request of Joseph [Genesis, 47, 29].) At least so my venerable Latin teacher Mr. Sullivan once (blushingly) affirmed. I wouldn’t swear to it myself—and certainly not that way— but I like to think that the old man was right and that he wasn’t just having a ball at my expense.

I am, however, willing to swear to a few other obsservations occasioned by Sterling Eisiminger’s article on colors in the same number. Without niggling unduly over a couple of incorrect French genders—histoire verte, langue verte, please, not vert—I would point out that when a Frenchman cracks a wry smile it is his rire that is jaune, yellow, not his ris (which, as a noun, is archaic), and would take even more strenuous issue with the alleged expression reste bleu. No Frenchman, to my knowledge, has ever been in one, whatever it is supposed to be. (It certainly isn’t a ‘blue rest.') When befuddled or amazed he might well exclaim j’en reste bleu, literally ‘I remain blue from it,” which is probably what Mr. Eisiminger had in mind, mistaking en for the preposition in and the verb reste for a noun.

In the adjoining neighborhood of the spectrum, it is of cultural interest to note the origin of another French expression he mentions, prendre sans vert, ‘to catch without green,’ i.e., ‘to take unawares.’ It stems (appropriately speaking) from the charming medieval practice of wearing a green leaf during the month of May, in tribute to the spring. (Presumably not a fig leaf, though I woundn’t swear to-or on-that either.)

[Norman R. Shapiro, Wesleyan University]

Unlikely? That’s the Name of the Game

Warren Tupper Way, Wayzata, Minnesota

unstrung a naked guitar
unlikely you aren’t disliked, but “‘people don’t give you no respect”
unaccustomed smuggled
uninspired an empty balloon
undulation faint praise
unbalanced a neurotic bookkeeper
unremitting slow pay
ungainly just got back to the line of scrimmage
unbecoming won’t be home for Christmas
unlocked Samson
uncanny no toilets
untold the Liberty Bell
unadulterated a chaste wife
unmatched fire by friction
unfulfilled no help for your two pair
unbidden a three-point bridge hand
untoward backwards
unjust not quite
unlettered gets no mail
unspoken comes with disc wheels
unprepossessing owner of a brand new car
unTIMEly U.S. News & World Report
unhorse no longer has a sore throat
uncooperative a company store
unincorporated a very small labor union
unwashed money that doesn’t go to the “family” until Monday
unwanted already in prison
unwilling will die intestate
unfortunate disinherited by a wealthy relative
unfriendly a former Quaker
untreated an empty Halloween bag
unavailing when you plead to Noah Vail
unfailing made a “D” average

Borrowing and Biases in German and English

Sterling Eisiminger, Clemson University

A parenthetical remark in Peter Trudgill’s Sociolinguistics: An Introduction leads one into some interesting comparisons of various linguistic biases. Trudgill states that “preserving ‘linguistic purity’ … is one of the reasons for the replacement of German words like Geographie by the supposedly purer Erdkunde during the Nazi period.”¹ According to the Nazis, the Germanic ‘earth science’ was “less contaminated” than the Greek ‘earth science.’

My wife, who was born in Germany during the Nazi era, recalls men painting over the word Telephon (a word of Greek origin meaning ‘distant sound’) on public telephones and replacing the former word with the Germanic Fernsprecher (literally, ‘distant speaker’). She also remembers being scolded by a teacher for using verb instead of Zeitwort, a Germanic synonym literally meaning ‘time word’ or a word that expresses time.

Biases against other languages exist in many cultures including our own. An American, for example, who goes about using tram, lorry, and telly, whether he is originally British or not will soon have a reputation for being an affected snob. Politicians have long recognized the popular bias against learned words (usually words of Latin or Greek origin) and have consequently avoided them. Short are the tenures of Congressmen who concur with the public in attacking corpulent budgets and who challenge the veracity of their opponents in esoteric terms.

During the English Renaissance, language purists and nationalists resisted the influx of pedantic and recondite inkhorn terms adapted from Greek and Latin such as condisciple, splendidious, and adnichilate. Likewise the Ciceronians, a group of 16th-century Latin prose stylists, scorned the use of any Latin word not located in Cicero’s writings. Later centuries, similarly, were marked by language purists. The 20th century, for example, found Edna St. Vincent Millay employing only words of Anglo-Saxon derivation in her poem The King’s Henchmen because Latinate diction, she felt, lacked the direct force and concreteness of the Anglo-Saxon. But a sentence like, “Once out of his cell, Jack powdered river rocks with a fool’s fury,” is predominantly constructed of words that English owes to the Norman Conquest.

Perhaps no language has gone as far as German to purify itself of outside influences. The following list illustrates the extent to which German transliterators have gone to provide Germanic equivalents for foreign borrowings.

ENGLISH	ENGLISH ROOT SENSE	GERMAN	GERMAN ROOT SENSE
anthology	‘study of the flowers’	Blumenlese	‘flowers of reading’
catapult	‘down bent’	Wurfmaschine	‘throwing machine’
extravagance	‘wandering beyond’	Übermass	‘over measure’
geometry	‘earth measure’	Raumlehre	‘space gauge’
import	‘carry in’	Einfuhr	‘lead in’
jeep	‘general-purpose vehicle’	Geländewagen ‘country vehicle’
malaria	‘bad air’	Sumpffieber	‘swamp fever’
pathology	‘study of illness’	Krankheitslehre	‘study of illness’
utopia	‘no where’	Luftschloss	‘air castle’
vagabond	‘wanderer’	Landstreicher	‘country rambler’

The puzzling thing about this list is that for each of the German terms in the third column there are Germanic- Romance equivalents: Anthologie, Katapult, Extravaganz, Geometric, Import, Jeep, Malaria, Pathologie, Utopie, and Vagabund.

At present there is no pressure on Germans, as far as I know, to use Blumenlese, for example, in place of Anthologie. Quite a different situation exists in France, though, where a person may be fined about $35 for using le weekend, for example, in an advertisement or other public document. On the other hand, in Germany, where English enjoys a great popularity, one regularly hears words like ausflippen, Babydollhemp, gemanaged, and stop-and-go-Verkehr.

As a consequence of the recent English linguistic invasion, German now does have its version of the Franglais movement called the Gegenfremdwörter, or ‘anti-foreign- word,’ movement. Proponents of this latest trend oppose the Germanic variations of English words such as Cräcker, Eskalation, Kompact, and quizzen. But their major objection is to the numerous words borrowed directly from English without any change whatsoever. The following terms have been collected by several people in Germany who listened and looked for English terms on the radio, television, and in printed material. The list can in no way be thought of as complete, but it should give a strong indication of how extensively English is infiltrating the German language and culture.

adapter
aftershave
allroundman
apartment
apple sauce
aquaplane
astronaut
baby
bacon
balance
band (music)
barbeque
beach party
beat (music)
beauty
beefsteak
beef tea
bestseller
bikini
blazer
blues
boss
bourbon
bowling
boy
brandy
broccoli
buggy
bungalow
butler
cake-makeup
callgirl
camera
camping
cash and carry
catsup (ketchup}
center
chair
charter
to check
cheeseburger
chips
chutney
city
cityjet
club sandwich
coat
cocoa flip
cocktail
comics
comic strip
company
computer
cool jazz
copyright
corned beef
corn crisps
corn flakes
cottage cheese
couch
countdown
crew (athletics)
darling
deodorant
dessert
designer
dialer
digital
diner
dip (foods)
disc jockey
disco
do it yourself
entertainer
establishment
eyeliner
facelift
fair (athletics)
fairness (athletics)
family
fan (athletics)
festival
film
filmforum
filter
finish
First Lady
flip
freeze
French dressing
friend
gangster
gangway
gentleman
gin fizz
girl
grapefruit
grill
grog
hamburger
handmixer
happening
hearing
hifi
high society
hippy
hit
hit parade
hobby
human-interest
image
in (fashionable)
input
instant
Irish coffee
Irish stew
jam session
jazz
jeans
jet
jet-set
job
jockey
keeper (athletics)
kicker (athletics)
killer
knockout
leasing
Levis
lift
lobby
lobbyist
long drink
lotion
love
lumberjacket
lunch
makeup
match
manager
martini
meeting
midriff
mint
mister
mistress
mixed grill
mixed pickle
mixer
moderator
monitor
monster
musical (drama)
necking
non-iron
nonsense
nonstop
nuts
Ohio cocktail
okay
Old Fashioned (beverage)
omelet(te)
output
pantry
parka
park and ride
partner
party
pen
pencil
petticoat
petting
picnic
pie
playboy
plum pudding
police taskforce
pool (billiards)
pop art
pop corn
pop music
portable
porterhouse steak
production
processional
protest song
prairie oyster
preshave
pressure group
prunes
publicity
public relations
pudding
pyjama
racing
radio
receiver
recorder
rent-a-car
revolver
roast beef
rock combo
Roger (radio)
roundtable
rush hour
safe
sandwich
scotch
second-hand
service
sexy
shaker (bartending)
shirt
shorts
show
showmaster
shrimp
single (record)
sir
sixth sense
skateboard
sleeping pill
slip
slipper
smart
snack
snob
speedway
sponsor
spot
spotlight
spray
springtime drink
standby
star
steak
stereo
store
story
stress
stripteaser
stuntman
style
super
sweater
sweatshirt
swimming pool
swing
table
talkshow
talkshow master
team
teamwork
teenager
television
test
textile
ticket
tip
toast
tour
touring
tradition
trainer
training
travel
trenchcoat
trend
triumph
tuning
T.V.
tweed
ultracolor
underground
up to date
veal
vehicle
walkie-talkie
weekend
Welsh rarebit
whiskey
whiskey sour
workshop
yippy

The Gegenfremdwörter movement has none of the power or government support enjoyed by opponents of Franglais. The fear among contemporary Germans, at a time when many are striving to improve Germany’s authoritarian image, is that any repressive movement will be labeled Nazi. A language, it seems, adopts what it needs until a saturation point is reached, and the purists begin their repressive counter movement. Bias seldom, however, keeps a useful word out of a language, for languages, like humans, need fresh supplies. Linguistic borrowings fulfill this need for a language, but if the supply threatens its existence, the flow must be cut off. Language, it appears, has such a valuable though erratic mechanism.

---

Orthographe Mirabile

Richard Lederer, Concord, New Hampshire

In 1750, Phillip, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, wrote, in a letter to his son: “One false spelling may fix a stigma upon a man for life.” If Lord Chesterfield’s chilling dictum is true, just about all of us are stigmatized, for who among us has not stumbled on or into the potholes and booby traps that dot the terrain of English spelling?

Indeed, with the possible exceptions of politicians, sports commissioners, and oil companies, there is no more popular object of abuse and ridicule than our “system” of English orthography. “Spelling,” declares Mario Pei, “is the world’s most awesome mess.” Otto Jespersen brands it a “pseudo-historical and anti-educational abomination.” And J. Donald Adams adds: “It is wildly erratic and almost wholly without logic. One needs the eye of a hawk, the ear of a dog, and the memory of an elephant to make headway against its confusions and inconsistencies.”

These are strong words, but even the briefest glance at the situation reveals that they are quite just. In what other language could one find the pairs publicly and basically, moveable and immovable, led and read (past tense), harass and embarrass, deceit and receipt, and deign and disdain? In what other language could manslaughter and man’s laughter be spelled with exactly the same letters? In what other language could minuscule be so unfailingly misspelled that lexicographers have finally had to add miniscule as a variant form? In what other language could coffee be misspelled kauphy and usage, yowztich—not a single correct letter in the bunch!

The most prominent cause of the whoop-de-do (also whoop-de-doo) about English orthography is the considerable distance that stretches between the sounds of our words and their spelling — a state of affairs created by the inadequacy of our Roman alphabet to represent the sounds of English; our cheerful willingness to borrow words and, with them, unconventional spellings from other languages; and, finally, the changes in our pronunciation, most of which have not been matched by repairs to our orthography. The result is that about eighty per cent of our words are not spelled phonetically; in effect we have two languages, one spoken and one written.

One way to explore the chasm that separates phonology from orthography is to examine how letters, alone or in combination, can represent a variety of disparate sounds. The e’s in reentered, for example, have four different pronunciations, including one silent letter. A favorite target of the scoffers is the combination ough, a terror that can produce nine distinct sounds, as in bough, bought, cough, dough, hiccough, lough, rough, thorough, and through.

What most complicated the situation is that English spelling is haunted by what William Watt calls “the little ghosts of silent letters.” Many of these were once sounded, such as the k and gh in knight, the l in would, the p in pneumonia, and the final e. For centuries colonel was a three-syllable word, as in the opening line of Milton’s sonnet:

Captain or Col-o-nel or Knight at Arms.

Other letters, like the b in doubt and the g in foreign, were never pronounced but were added in the Renaissance to make English words conform, often erroneously, to Latin and Greek morphology. As a result, it has been estimated that two-thirds of our lexicon is populated with silent letters, leading Thorstein Veblen to proclaim, “English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste.”

Confronted by such delicious chaos, the intrepid logophile is moved to discover just how consistent is the inconsistency. By comparing the spelling of words with their phonetic transcriptions in the dictionary, I have found contexts in which all twenty-six letters in the alphabet are mute. In the line-up that follows I offer, wherever possible, several settings for each silent letter:

algae, bread, marriage, pharaoh; doubt, subtle, thumb; blackguard, Connecticut, indict, science, victual; edge, handkerchief, Wednesday; height, hope, steak, value, yeoman; halfpenny; gnome, reign, tight, although; bough, ghost, honor, rhyme, shepherd, upholster; bait, business, Sioux, thief; rijsttafel; blackguard, know; halfpenny, Lincoln; salmon; mnemonic; column; country, laboratory, leopard, people, tortoise; cupboard, pneumonia, psychiatrist, receipt; Colquhoun, racquet; forecastle, Worcester; aisle, debris, island, rendezvous, viscount; gormet, listen; parfait, soften; circuit, dough, guide, victual; savuy; answer, cockswain, two, wrist; faux pas, grand prix, Sioux; aye, pray; rendezvous, britzska.²

I would welcome readers’ suggestions for improving any of the above items, especially the following—J: I would prefer a more familiar entry than rijsttafel (rīstäfel), an Indonesian rice dish; Q: the name of British author and explorer Archibald Colquhoun (kōhōōn) is listed in the back of Webster’s Third, but I would like to avoid heavy reliance on a proper name; in racquet I am forced to argue that either the qu or the c is silent; V; for this, the most elusive (one could say the loudest) letter in my search, I can uncover only double-letter items, such as savvy and flivver. Despite these niggling problems, I have demonstrated the deafening silence that rings through English orthography.

Now let us reverse our field. Not only can certain letters represent a variety of English sounds (and silences), we also find that a single sound can be recorded by many different letters. George Bernard Shaw, who first championed and then (unsuccessfully) attempted to bequeath a sizable (also sizeable) sum of money to the cause of spelling reform, once announced that he had discovered a new way to spell the word fish. His fabrication was ghoti: gh as in enough, o as in women, and ti as in nation. And there are many other fish in the sea: phusi: ph as in physic, u as in busy, si as in pension; ffess: off, pretty, issue; ughyce: laugh, hymn, ocean; Pfeechsi: Pfeiffer, been, fuchsia; pphiapsh: sapphire, marriage, pshaw, fuise: fat, guilt, nauseous; ftaisch: soften, villain, schwa; ueisci: lieutenant, forfeit, conscious. We stop here only because the game has become ineffable.

We can adapt Shaw’s tactic to almost any word. My surname, for instance, can be represented by Lleoddoloyrrh, a Frankenstein monster sewn together from pieces of ball, leopard, bladder, cotonel, and myrrh.

Let us ask ourselves what sounds can be represented by the greatest variety of letters or letter-combinations in English spelling. In stalking the answer to this great question, we inevitably become entangled with two thorny issues. First, since sound and spelling don’t match in English, how are we to allocate the printed letters to the sounds? In particular, if a silent consonant follows a vowel or vowel combination, as in aisle, island, and feign, should it be credited to the vowel sound? After much soul-searching, I have decided that it should, or at least can. Second, what do we do with the exotic spellings of proper names like Featherstone-Haux (pronounced Fanshaw!), a question subsumed under the larger issue of which words are “foreign” and which are “English”? My solution has been to include only words that are listed in the main part of Webster’s New International Dictionary (second or third editions) or The Random House Dictionary. If a word is enshrined in these esteemed tones, it is, as far as I am concerned, an English word.

Here then are my chief candidates for orthographic variety. For convenience, I list the letters and combinations in alphabetical order.

SH (23 variants): appreciate, ocean, chaperone, rapprochement, fuchsia, suspicion, hsin, pshaw, sugar, crescendo, schwa, eschscholtzia, conscious, nauseous, shoe, mansion, assure, Asshur, Bysshe, mission, szlachta, initiate, nation.

EYE (23 variants): Kayak, maestro, shanghai, trouvaille, Versailles, aisle, Paraguay, aye, feisty, height, geyser, eye, I, indict, tie, sign, high, island, coyote, guide, buy, my, bye.

EE (31 variants): bologna, aegis, shillelagh, shillelah, Dun Laoghaire, Aoife, quay, edict, heat, Beauchamp, see, deceit, Raleigh, receipt, people, demesne, key, vaccine, grief, genii, debris, esprit, Camonix, amoeba, chamois, buoy, Portuguese, guillotine, guyot, happy, maitre d’.

OO (33 variants): Seoul, sleuth, queue, Devereux, blew, silhouette, lieutenant, Sioux, do, shoe, manoeuvre, boot, pooh, soup, denouement, bouillon, through, brougham, coup, rendezvous, ragout, bouts-rimes, billetdoux, gnu, true, pugh, buhl, suit, buoyant, muumuu, Schuykill, cwm, two.

OH (33 variants): Curaçao, pharaoh, chauvinist, Vaud, La Rochefoucauld, Perrault, faux pas, bureau, trousseaux, yeoman, Seoul, sew, haute couture, haut monde, table d’hote, go, boat, boatswain, Gounod, doe, cologne. Van Gogh, oh, yolk, brooch, de trop, apropos, prevost, depot, soul, dough, tow, owe.

AY (35 variants): aorta, sundae, champagne, trait, campaign, straight, Beaujolais, parfait, halfpenny, gaol, gauge, day, aye, fiancé, break, matinee, thegn, eh, rein, feign, weigh, Pompeii, soleil, Marseilles, dossier, demesne, buffet, tête a tête, entremets, they, eyot, rendezvous, lingerie, menstruate, guerite.

In compiling these lists, I have become such a Wizard of OH’s that I now unveil a 21-word tour de force (tour de farce?), in which all words possess an OH sound, yet each is spelled differently:

Although Curaçao yeoman folk owe Pharaoh’s Vaud bureau hoed oats, gauche Van Gogh, swallowing cognac oh so soulfully, sews grosgrain, picoted chapeaux.

[Parts of this article have appeared previously in Word Ways (Nov.1) and the English Leaflet (Spring 1979). The idea for the ghoti expansions originated with Sandra A, Engel and the search for the silent alphabet with Guy Mermier and Eric W. Johnson.]

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CORRIGENDA

D.L. Emblen, Santa Rosa, California

As one who spent five years researching the life and work of the creator of the Thesaurus (see my Peter Mark Roget: The Word and the Man, New York: Crowell, 1970; London: Longman, 1971), I feel bound to respond to Philip Howard’s article in VERBATIM [VI, 3]. I’ll try to be as good natured as Mr. Howard was, but I probably won’t succeed, for, while I am happy to join him in observing the bicentennial of Roget’s birthday (January 18, 1779), I’m afraid Mr. Howard has simply perpetuated a number of misconceptions about both Roget and his book.

“Roget was a pioneer of dictionaries of synonyms in English,” writes Mr. Howard. Sorry, but he’s wrong on two counts.

1. Roget was by no means a pioneer in the usual sense of that word. His Thesaurus, first published in 1852, followed a very long history of similar books, the earliest being an anonymous 17th-century manuscript, “An Essay Towards a New English Dictionary, wherein the Terms of Art are Cast together, as Likewise Words and Phrases of the Same Import, so that Every Reader May Without Trouble Find Words and Expressions Proper to His Subject.” Some forty printed works on English synonymy had appeared before Roget’s book in 1852. Beginning with the first of the “discriminating” synonymies—that of John Trusler in 1766 —the attempts to organize the English vocabulary in some practical way followed each other closely right up to the year before Roget’s Thesaurus was published, with a volume by James Rawson appearing in 1850, and another by Elizabeth Whately in 1851. These attempts did not, of course, cease with Roget’s triumph, but have continued to the present, the latest I have seen being Webster’s Collegiate Thesaurus, 1976. In fact, during the ten years preceding Roget’s book, no fewer than fourteen new synonymy works appeared on the market. That Roget was working not only a very popular vein but a lucrative one as well is suggested by the fact that the more-or-less standard work of the kind at mid-century, English Synonymes Explained, by George Crabbe, a 700-page compendium originally published in 1816, had run through at least sixteen editions in England and America before the Thesaurus showed its face. Even the one feature that made Roget’s effort different from others— his system of classifying words according to ideas—had been anticipated earlier, as he himself acknowledges in his introduction to the Thesaurus. That he vastly improved that scheme by applying to it his lifelong interest in classification, his characteristic thoroughness, and his insistence on a practical organization is certainly true as the apparently endless success of the Thesaurus attests. However, rather than initiating a new kind of reference work, as Mr. Howard’s remark implies, Roget was but one of a long and crowded tradition.

2. Roget’s work is not a dictionary of synonyms as he himself pointed out many times during his last twenty years, during which he shepherded his surprisingly successful book through twenty-five editions before his death in 1869. That later publishers and editors have often brought out alternate forms of the Thesaurus, which were, in truth, nothing but alphabetically arranged sets of synonyms, is another story. Those who have produced alphabetized versions of Roget have, indeed, made “dictionaries of synonyms,” but those bore little resemblance to what Roget had in mind and what he indeed created. The simplest way to appreciate the difference is to compare any of the many “dictionaries of synonyms,” including the alphabetized versions of the Thesaurus and such recent attempts as Funk & Wagnalls Modern Guide to Synonyms and Related Words, edited by S. I. Hayakawa (1968), with Roget’s book, the latest edition of which was edited by Robert A. Dutch and published by Longman in 1962. For a more thorough study, one could not do better than to read Roget’s own introduction to his book, still the best explanation of the ambitious scheme Roget had in mind: nothing less than the arrangement and classification of all human knowledge under a graduated system of headings and key words. This is hardly the place to get into that, but whatever it was, it was not a “dictionary of synonyms.” To that erroneous description can be attributed much of the misuse of the Thesaurus noted by Mr. Howard.

(Actually, Roget envisioned an even grander scheme, and, if he had had another ninety years, he probably would have accomplished it—a polyglot lexicon that would, he thought, provide a practicable basis for developing a universal language!)

I find it odd that Mr. Howard describes the Thesaurus as a “controversial” work and that he refers to “frequent criticism” of it. True, like other English teachers, I have some misgivings about what happens to his prose when a freshman first discovers the Thesaurus. But I have the same concerns about the use of any reference work, including an ordinary dictionary. If that is what Mr. Howard means by “controversial,” we have no quarrel, but his statement gave me the impression that the value of the Thesaurus was a matter of great argument in the critical literature. This does not square with my research. In tracing the initial reception of the Thesaurus and in following its undiminished popularity through its publication history, I read nearly every review from 1852 to 1970, and with one or two very rare exceptions, I found nothing but a growing admiration for the book. Some of the early reviewers did not quite know what to make of the Thesaurus, but they were uniformly respectful and seemed inclined to put their faith in Roget’s enormous reputation as a scholar and scientist. And, with each new revision of the Thesaurus, the reviews have become more and more appreciative, more mellow, more affectionate, and less and less inclined to examine it critically. As early as 1855, the editor of Putnam’s severely criticized the first American editor of the Thesaurus, Rev. Barnas Sears, D.D., for “meddling with Professor Roget’s book.” Sears had omitted from the English edition a large number of what he called “vulgar words and phrases.” In other words, the Thesaurus rapidly developed such a following that to criticize it or to tamper with it was tantamount to slighting the Queen. Perhaps Mr. Howard thought of the Thesaurus as controversial in the same sense that certain officials did at a Paris airport, according to a columnist in the Daily Mail of March 26, 1940. The writer, bound for Turkey, offered his attaché case full of books for inspection. “I was made the subject of investigation and scrutiny for a full half-hour,” the columnist wrote. “At the end of that time the three officials concerned confiscated as dangerous literature three Baedeker guide books in English, a French dictionary, and Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases.”

Finally, I wonder why Mr. Howard offers as a prediction the probability that “new dictionaries of synonyms will give definitions and examples to explain and illustrate the peculiar properties of each so-called ‘synonym.”’ This is precisely what “discriminating” synonymies purport to do; what such collections as far back as Mrs. Thrale’s idiosyncratic British Synonymy (1794) attempted; what Crabb tried to offer in 1816; and what many in the whole parade of synonymy books to the present have claimed to provide for their readers.

I applaud Mr. Howard’s celebration of Roget’s bicentenary; I wish he had taken that opportunity to acknowledge, however briefly, the important contributions Roget made in a remarkable number of fields: optics, chemistry, mathematics, comparative anatomy, physiology, the history of science, and medicine. The image of Roget as a peculiar, inconsequential old man who spent his life doing crossword puzzles dies hard, and Mr. Howard could have offered more for the cause than the single line, “… Roget, the sage, luminary, longhead, shining light, wizard of synonyms.”

Edible Endearments

Joan Sill Cummins, St. Charles, Illinois

A curious feature of the English language is the frequent utilization of edible terms as endearments. The idiom supports this pattern in its use of variations of “I’m going to eat you up.”

We asked our students and friends for their lists of affectionate terms; the following is a compilation listed in four relatively distinct categories.

FOOD TERMS

Angel Cake
Baby Cakes
Bon Bon Cabbage
Cookie
Cream Puff Cupcake
Cutie Pie
Dumpling Gumdrop
Honey
Honey Bun Honey Bunch
Honey Child
Hun (Honey) Lamb Chop
Lambie Pie
Marshmallow Muffin
Munchkin
Peaches Plumdrop
Pumpkin
Punkin Sugar Dumpling
Sugar
Sugar Bear Sweets
Sugar Plum
Sweetie Sweetie Pie
Sweet Cakes
Sweet Thing Sweetums
Sweet Potato

ANIMAL TERMS

Bunny
Duckie
Fox Foxy Lady
Kitten
Lamb Lambie
Lambkin
Lovey Dove Pet
(Pookie) Bear
Pussy Cat (Tweedie) Bird
(Teddy) Bear
Tiger

GENERAL DIMINUTIVES

Babe
Baby
Baby doll Baby face
Babykins
Doll Doll face
Poopsie (Fr.)
Snookums Toy
Toots

VALUE TERMS

Adorable
Angel
Angel face Beautiful
Beloved
Cherub Cutie
Darling
Dear Dearest
Dearie
Dear heart Good-looking
Gorgeous
Handsome Hunk
Jewel
Love Love-bug
Lover
Lovely Precious
Princess
Sexy Treasure

Of the four classes listed above, three seem obvious choices as terms of endearment. This is especially true of the “value” category which directly expresses the “dear” or “precious” nature of the object of affection. Similarly, emotional carryovers from childhood can account for the many diminutives among these. The animal terms imbue the loved one with the characteristics humans ascribe to each animal.

It is more difficult to account for the paramount frequency of food-related endearments. Although nutrients are an essential human need, it is quite startling to note that almost none of these food terms refers to foods which are, in fact, essential: words in the food category are associated with desserts or culinary treats—chiefly luxuries. Indeed, one of the most frequent grammatical forms used affectionately-pie-transforms almost any word into an edible endearment. Thus are dearest ones reduced to sugary carbohydrates.

A similar deduction or diminution pervades the list of affectionate terms. It seems strange and disturbing, in one sense, to trivialize those whom we value most, using words which diminish, depersonify, or make unidimensional. On the other hand, the emotional force of a pet name can be so strong that being called by his or her real (given) name is interpreted by some as an offense.

ETYMOLOGICA OBSCURA

Jacques G. Richardson, Paris, France

The subject is the word gadget, which is listed in my Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary but without indication of its etymology. Gadget does not appear at all in my [1961-64] edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, making it a much used nonword in Great Britain. [Its origin is listed as “obscure” in the A-G Supplement to the OED.—Ed.]

Dr. Pierre Aigrain, a solid-state physicist who is bilingual in French and English and who is currently junior minister for scientific research (Secrétaire d’Etat auprès du Premier Ministre—Recherche), tells the following story of the origin of the English word.

During the 19th century many tourists who visited Paris returned home with various trinkets, as is their wont today, commemorating Paris’s different monuments. A tiny Eiffel Tower was a common item, manufactured at the time by a small Parisian firm known as Gaget Fréres [Gaget Brothers]. Friends of the tourists returning to Great Britain, according to the story, came to call the diminutive Tours Eiffel and other mementoes ‘Gad-jets.’ Soon ‘gadgets’ came to classify in a group all miscellany of unspecific nature.

Can our fellow-readers elaborate upon or reinforce this interesting tale of the genesis of a popular expression? Gadget has now re-entered the French culture, by the way (and pronounced, somewhat à l’anglaise, “gahd-jette”). The meaning in French corresponds, both concretely and abstractly, to the American slang term, gimmick.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

227 DUNLOP, L. B.; DUFF, G. Pizzle dropping on wethers at Canaway Downs. Queensland Agricultural Journal (1979) 105 (I) 35-37 [En, 2 fig.] Sheep & Wool Branch, Department of Primary Industries, Queensland, Australia.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

Evidence is presented from observations over a period of 5 years on a farm in south-western Qeensland that the operation known as pizzle dropping prevents pizzla strike; by blowflies [mainly Lucilia ouprina (Wled.)] and smelly bellies and, if combined with radical mulesing and jowling, eliminates the need to handle wether sheep between shearings, When wethers were jowled, mulessd and pizzle dropped, but not crutched, wigged, ringed or dipped, the saving totalled SA417/1000 sheep annually.

[From Review of Applied Entomology, Series B, 1980, Vol. 68, No. 1. Submitted by Mary M. Krinsky, North Haven, Connecticut, …as the worst bit of jargon we had seen in many years.]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. It’s tough work to retain bad rum in all that uproar. (7)
5. Love antics can lead to lawsuits. (7)
9. Tangled yarn about raised scale proves true: higher wages! (9,6)
10. Disruption of punctilio is hardly diplomatic. (9)
11. Telephone call. (5)
12. Continent with sign of nerves, because of the Chinese, perhaps. (7)
13. How to make money with the sweet smell of success. (4)
17. Keeping a low profile while on the lam. (4)
18. Sex pun? Gee whiz, blue pencil it! (7)
22. Little diplomat the French set up to take a walk. (6)
23. The diplomate dined at last, getting that degree. (9)
24. Give false name, rank and serial number. (3, 4, 1, 7)
25. Of the greatest callipygian charms? (7)
26. Routine drill takes the set and the medal, too. (7)

Down

1. Tumble, in flight. (4, 2) 2. Various ways of raising dough. (7, 3, 5) 3. How to constipate a computer. (8) 4. Journey made, riding for the ultimate fall. (4,4) 5. Shanghai a seaman on this passage. (6) 6. Cheap attempt to cover a burnt offering. (6) 7. Aboard a rugged old aircraft over the Middle East. (2, 1, 6, 6) 8. Charming trickster to bewilder the bossy lot. (8) 14. A mis-alliance with the riffraff. (8) 15. Person with will-power. (8) 16. Spanish gold in rich earth is enough to tickle anybody. (8) 19. I’d come for the doctor. (6) 20. Anno Domini, expression for the coming of the Lord. (6) 21. A bit of latitude in claiming social status. (6)

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. UPRISEBS;
5. C-ant-AB;
10. DE-vi-LED;
11. A-uto-PSY;
12. Rightmindedness;
13. Obs.-cure;
14. The-ISM;
17. RANSOM;
20. Lib-ERA-1;
23. ESCAPE; MECHANISM (me + chance (in) impasse);
25. IDEA M-a-N;
26. FR-iss-O-n;
27. D-rye-ST;
28. DRAGNETS.

Down

1. UNDERDOG;
2. RAVAGES;
3. Split runs;
4. Red wine;
6. ACTED;
7. Topless;
8. Boyish;
9. Ban(ne)d-it;
15. Embracing;
16. AL-i-ME-nts;
18. Archery;
19. Moment;
20. Lucifer;
21. Re-issue;
22. DENIED;
24. Pumps.

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. Peter Trudgill, Sociolinguistics: An Introduction (New York: Penguin, 1974), p. 59. ↩︎

2. In all fairness to English spelling, we must note that silent letters frequently gain a voice when the base word is extended by a suffix: bomb-bombard, muscle-muscular, line-linear, resign-resignation, fruit-fruition, condemn-condemnation, circuit-circuitous. ↩︎