VOL VII, No 3 [Winter 1980/81]

Blends, Blands, and Blunds

Robert A. Fowkes, Yonkers, New York

Brunch and Mexicali are, as is well known, “blends,” intentional combinations of parts of breakfast + lunch and Mexico + California), respectively. These are transparent formations, and it might prove possible to find the original coiners. James Joyce is notorious for his prolific blends, which range from the banal to the ingenious (with more of the latter than the former). Not many of his blends have entered the English vocabulary in any lasting way, although they may intrigue and even delight us. They are often bound to the not-too-intelligible context of the individual book (Finnegans Wake more than the others), but many of them can be appreciated out of context, for example: Lipoleum (linoleum + Napoleon); astoneaged (astonished + stone age); madison man (medicine man + Madison (Avenue) = advertising man); roaratorio (a type of musical work in which Handel excelled, performed with gusto by scores of local choruses); hantitat (hafujnt + habitat, the stamping ground of a particular ghost); anthrapologise (anthropology + apologize); traumaturgid (trauma + German Traum ‘dream’ + (possibly) dramaturgy + turgid); continuarration (continued + narration); queenoveire (Guinevere + Queen of Eire); muddlecrass pupils (analysis not needed); and, especially relevant here, verbaten words (verbatim + verboten). Joyce’s blends are, to my mind, masterful. A member of a church in Mount Vernon, N.Y., almost deserves to be ranked with Joyce for one blend: in referring to the energetic motions of the choir leader, he coined the term hymnastics.

A great number of blends, some of venerable age, are less brilliant but have achieved a relatively secure place in the lexicon. Often they are not as transparent as the ones just cited and offer either too many or too few possibilities for analysis. At any rate, writers of dictionaries use numerous question marks in their attempts at explanation. Splotch, for example, has been called a blend of spot + blotch (but the latter may = blot + patch-or may not). Splurge has been explained as a blend of splash + surge. Splutter may be splash + sputter, with overtones of mutter, utter. But what is splash itself? (Perhaps it doesn’t matter-but that yields splatter.) Clash could be a blend of clap + dash; and flash has been said to be from flow + dash, or flood + dash, or flame + dash. Sprawl may be spread + crawl; smash can be smack + mash; and trudge is conceivably tread + drudge (hardly trot + fudge). There seems to be little doubt that smog = smoke + fog.

All of these blends, or most of them, are probably effective as onomatopoeia, but they are otherwise not particularly distinguished. We could call them blands, though I doubt we’d get away with it. I would also include brunch and Mexicali (as well as Texarkana and all the rest) under that heading.

When, however, a sports announcer (Bill Stern) said several decades ago that some award was symblematic of the highest excellence in college football, he was using a blund. That is, it was a blundering combination of the elements of symbolic + emblematic with undertones of symptomatic, if not other words too, and he was using it with an arrogance that implied assurance that it was an extant word.

Blends come from blenders; blunds are from blunder(er)s. I am not sure that sports broadcasts generate more blunds than other sources, but they do seem to be highly productive of them. “The Knicks' dwaning chances” were bewailed a year or two ago by a usually careful speaker (Peter Roberts, radio station WOR, New York), and he did not pause to correct the utterance (presumably a blund of dwindling and waning). But sometimes the blund is caught aborning and is corrected, cf., e.g., “Scall—er, call—a skycab,” which was not a very promising blund anyway. The word floundering must have started as a fishy blund (not too infelicitous) for foundering (with blundering, according to the American Heritage Dictionary), but it has survived and has not completely supplanted the word foundering itself.

A blund can also occur in the semantic realm without involving telescoping or combining of phonic elements. This leads to less dissectible formations. I regard the common misuse of aggravate, in the sense of ‘annoy, irk,’ (instead of ‘make worse,’ etc.) as constituting a sort of blund, resulting from semiconscious associations with such words as exasperate , irritate, and the like. The analysis is risky, for it involves mind-reading, assuming a mind is present.

When inchoate is used in the sense of “confused, disordered, entangled' by even fairly learned colleagues (with, however, usually no Latin and less Greek), there must be some sort of semantic blund that imparts the sense of chaotic and adds it to the meaning ‘incipient.’

I am not sure how lackadaisical acquired the blundering sense of ‘listless, languid, careless, apathetic,’ but there are echoes of such words as lax, laxity, lack, lassitude, and maybe lazy days that must have helped to oust the ‘lackaday’ of the original. And connive in its normal misuse may involve a blund with contrive or conspire (or even confide, with reference to confidence men).

Years ago, when the Yorkville section of New York City was largely German, I used to eat in a restaurant that had German cuisine but menus printed in what passed for English. Some customers were astonished when they ordered one item on the menu: shellfish, which turned out to be haddock (German Schellfisch). This was a blund, perhaps, of English orthographic shape plus German semantics (a metaglottal blund, perhaps, but not a flounder).

When Ira Levin was thinking of a title for what became his successful play Deathtrap, he briefly contemplated calling it A Better Mousetrap, since it does parody Agatha Christie’s style a bit (as well as that of one or two others). Agatha’s play has, of course, run for well over .a quarter of a century in London. Levin decided, however, to observe decent pieté and called his piece Deathtrap instead. Both A Better Mousetrap and Deathtrap are blends—not blunds— one with obvious allusion to the superior product for which an avid world will allegedly beat a path to one’s door, as well as with the implication that the new play would surpass Agatha’s; the other, less obviously, blending Mousetrap, the play, with implications of suspense and terror. Brant Newborn (!) in “A Long Life (!) for Deathtrap,” Playbill, Oct., 1980, pp. 12-17, informs us that, of all the many places where Deathtrap has played, Miami alone saw attendance suffer because the prospective audiences “in that predominantly geriatric community” evidently misinterpreted the title in a depressingly subjective way.

Dioressence, the name of a Dior perfume, no doubt a “blend” of various ingredients, may be “essentially” a compound (if it were an Indian scent, it might be a Tatpurusha), but it emits vague suggestions of diorama or diorite, neither of which has any logical association with Dioressence—but associations do not need to be logical.

Skinned milk was the term used by the woman next door years ago for skim milk/skimmed milk. I recall hearing my mother ask the woman why she said “skinned milk,” and the reply was, “They skin the fat off it, you see” (and skinny is, no doubt, the opposite of fatty). I’m not sure that this qualifies as a blund or is merely a blunder, but it does, in a way, blend skim and skin.

People on radio station WFAS, White Plains, New York, making a conscious effort to pronounce White with initial [hw] (which is, of course, not a characteristic of the speech of the region), more than once have brought us a “whether report,” which is a blund of sorts. And The New York Times for October 17, 1980, p. CL, tells us that the leaves age, “whither,” and fall. Possibly they “whither away.”

The vast majority of the blends, blands, and blunds treated here fall into the category of Alice’s portmanteau words. Some of them seem to originate in Blunderland.

OBITER DICTA: Scrutinizing the Matter in Hand

R T. Rosin, Sonoma State University

One scratches the head, runs a hand through the hair, leans forward and, with a deep sigh, scrutinizes again the matter in hand. We must rethink the issue, with a thoroughness not achieved on our first effort.

We must search with a fine-tooth comb. Let us get down to the nitty-gritty. (A pause to reflect, marked by a downward glance at one’s fingernails.) To fail is to feel lousy. The very idea makes my skin crawl. Yet, without nitpicking, our only recourse is to lean back and accept the endless scratching of head and feel a bit of a nitwit.

Such are my reflections on the imagery of the mental process after a half-year residence in rural Asia—where the grooming of one another’s head for both lice and their eggs, nits, is a task involving concentration, repeated effort, and thoroughness. I find it remarkable that several of our English expressions for getting down to the fundamentals, for thinking a matter through for a second time, and for the excessive attention to detail, as well as the gestures to convey the process of mental engagement—the scratching of the head, running the fingers through the hair—may derive from the speech about and gestures of grooming and the important role of the nails in this process.

(Proud of the task well accomplished, he buffs his nails on his lapel.)

Before I Am Too Late

By the present Richard G. Lillard, Los Angeles

“I’m ‘retired,’ ‘former,’ even ‘ex.’ But, please— I’m not ‘late.”’

-Ernest E. Debs, January 11, 1981, objecting to being called “the late Supervisor Ernie Debs.”

On June 14, 1970, I read in the Los Angeles Times that “unlike the sonorous tones of the late Nelson Eddy . . . the humpback whale sings an incredibly haunting and eerie song.” Now, look. Eddy sang only when he was alive. The comparison gained nothing by the fact that Eddy was dead. The point is to compare the voices of Nelson Eddy and of the whale. It did not matter that on June 14, 1970, Eddy was dead; it does not matter now. It does—and did—matter that the whale was, allegedly, the more memorable singer. Unlike the sonorous tones of Nelson Eddy, the song of the humpback whale is incredibly haunting and eerie.

In a 1971 TV Times a writer said, “The cast is headed by the late Van Heflin.” I don’t believe it. I am confident that he was alive when he appeared before the camera. This obsession to announce or reannounce deaths, to seem privy to morbid news, or to write finis particularly afflicts literary and journalistic professionals. In 1972 J. Mitchell Morse, an advocate of correct English, wrote in his Irrelevant English Teacher that “back in the 1940s the late Aldous Huxley . . . was preaching the joys of chemically induced mystical states. . . .” I don’t believe that either. Huxley was alive when he preached those joys, with many years ahead-until 1963.

I know that in a biographical context the word late means recently deceased, though recently seems to have quite a stretch to it. In 1976 an Associated Press item from Tubac, Arizona, referred to “the late American cowboy humorist. Will Rogers.” Rogers died in 1935. The usage in the Tubac dispatch suggests that the more you like a person the longer you cling to the memory by saying the late. The phrase is sometimes informative if you have missed an obituary notice. Yet most of the time the late is worse than useless: it is ambiguous and distracting. Either we know the person is dead or we don’t need to know. To keep bringing up people’s deaths is a logical or stylistic fault, if nothing more. I’d say let it be taken for granted that people were alive when they did or said things. It does not matter except in obits that they died later. We all die later.

Does late or the late help in any of the following?

After World War II the late Lucius Beebe rediscovered the town [Virginia City, Nevada] and transformed it into one of the greatest tourist traps in the Far West. [W.H. Hutchinson, 1969]

. . .a great turning point came-or should have come-in 1941 when the late Arthur Hobson Quinn published his important Edgar Allan foe: A Critical Biography. [Stuart Levine, 1965]

Some 25 years ago the late James V. Forrestal, then Secretary of the Navy, became concerned over the future of fuel supplies for the Navy. . . . [Benard Brodie, 1970]

This time New Jersey’s innocence was upset by that champion disturber of the racket peace, Estes Kefauver. The late Senator from Tennessee was bearing down hard on the mob. [Fred J. Cook, 1969]

Ballinger’s action was defended in recent years by the late former Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes. [Harold T. Pinkett, 1970] Ickes was former when he defended but not late.

The late W. C. Allee studied and wrote extensively on the subject of protocooperation. . . . [Howard Odum, 1963] Allee published in 1961. Did it matter that two years later he was dead? Does it matter now?

The late Justice Harlan wrote a vigorous dissent, concurred in by the late Justices Frankfurter and Whittaker, charging the court’s majority with a lack of judicial self-restraint. [Pendleton Howard, 1975, referring to a Supreme Court decision of 1961] Clearly the three justices were not deceased in 1961, especially the vigorous Harlan.

It is not an attitude shared by the late Enid Starkie, the distinguished Oxonian biographer of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, who completed this biography of Flaubert shortly before her death in April, 1970. [Richard Freedman, 1971] Why in effect bury Ms. Starkie twice?

The problems with the late parallel those with former and ex- and phrases that deal with demise or termination. For instance: “Former Attorney-General James A. Maloney filed suit in U.S. District Court last December . . .” [Albuquerque Journal, 1971]. Maloney was on the job, not out of it. Or: “Then, in 1972, former President Nixon banned the use of predicides on public land . . .” [University of Montana Profiles, 1976]. No, Nixon was still securely in office, somewhat east of Watergate, when he stopped the use of predator-control poisons.

Also: “During the long administration of former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, provincial leaders continually complained of the growing power of Ottawa” [Stanley Meisler, 1979]. At the time, Trudeau was preformer; as an ex-executive he could not have been prime minister. The update is that in 1980 Trudeau became ex-former or once-again prime minister. In 1977 the ornithologist Alexander F. Skutch wrote in his A Bird Watcher’s Adventures in Tropical America that his “Chapter 10, on the Cecropia tree, first appeared … in the long extinct Scientific Monthly. …” The Monthly was alive when Skutch’s piece appeared in it in 1945, and only about thirteen years later did it become extinct, as if it were a species.

Part of the problem comes from trying to write compact summaries and neglecting to keep the narrative chronology straight. Consider this item, which deals with Robert Vesco, Thomas P. Richardson, and a detective named Robert Duke Hall: “Using the slain private detective as an emissary, Richardson tried to force Vesco to help him, then threatening to go to federal authorities if the onetime financial wheeler-dealer refused” [Los Angeles Times, 1976]. At the time of publication, September 11, Hall was dead, but the journalist, who avoided the late, turned Hall into a corpse at the time Hall was indeed living, creating an unlikely, ghastly intermediary.

I’m not forgetting that some disk jockeys have troubles with death. They’ll say in 1980 that the symphony I’m about to hear is conducted by the late Otto Klemperer, the song is sung by the late Bing Crosby, or the Nicolo Paganini violin caprice, as arranged for the piano by Franz Liszt, is played by the late Sergei Rachmaninoff. Query: If Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) is the late, is Liszt (1811-1886) less late, and is Paganini (1782-1840) least late, that is, farthest back? Or in this instance is the Russian the least late, the last one to be late? I have a positive proposal. Instead of saying the late, an inexact term, give the absolute final date. “Played by Sergei Rachmaninoff, who died in 1943.”

To show how confusing it all can be, I cite statements by distinguished men of letters. In 1962 in an introduction to Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth, Henry Nash Smith wrote of Albert B. Paine, the first literary executor of Twain’s estate, and of Paine’s successor: “Shortly after Paine’s death. Harper & Brothers recommended to the Trustees that the late Bernard DeVoto . . . should be asked to take over the task of preparing for publication further material . . . from the . . . unpublished writing by Mark Twain.” The dead Paine was to be replaced by the dead, but less dead, DeVoto? Not at all. Though Paine really died in 1937, DeVoto continued on productively until 1955.

In 1942, in the scholarly quarterly American Literature, Lawrence dark Powell published for the first time an important letter by Mark Twain. In his introduction Powell said: “In 1897, when he was a professor in the Free Church Training College at Glasgow, the late Sir John Adams (1857-1934) sent a copy of his newly published work on the psychology of J. F. Herbart to his favorite author, S. L. Clemens.” In 1897 Adams was about as early as late, with almost half of his life remaining. Indeed he had 28 years to go before he became Sir John.

The late lends itself to irony, as during World War II when I. F. Stone in one of his columns in The Nation referred to Hitler as the worst villain since “the late Judas Iscariot.” On occasion prominent persons like Lewis Mumford see themselves prematurely interred. In one of the closing years of the 1970s a book reviewer in The New York Times alluded to “the late Alfred A. Knopf.” Writing promptly from Tucson, Knopf reported his good health and protested the premature announcement.

Best of all as a gag, I suppose, would be to declare yourself as deceased. I know only of an example in fiction. In Chapter 19 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the old man, a king of frauds, confides to the Duke of Bilgewater, “I am the late Dauphin . . . your eyes is lookin' at this very moment on the pore disappeared Dauphin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the Sixteen and Marry Antonette.”

More Turkish Agglutinative Delights

Norman R. Shapiro, Wesleyan University

For any who might have thought that “Turkish agglutination” was a confectioner’s process for the manufacture of loukoum, Robert Devereux’s article [VII, 2] was most instructive, with its awe-inspiring and jaw-inspiring muvaffakiyetsizliklerimizdendirki. (Turkologist friend Clive Foss assures me that a more “legitimately Turkish” expression of equal length would be turkleştiremediklerimizdenmisiniz, meaning “Are you one of the people we couldn’t turn into a Turk?” But who’s going to quibble?) It immediately set me to looking for other worthy examples. What language could rival such a protracted yet utterly logical construct? Perhaps several Amerindian and Eskimoan tongues, but they are on the fringes of the Occidental ken and are spoken by relatively few. Perhaps German? I recalled once seeing, years ago, in a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, a gargantuan German word allegedly meaning ‘handkerchief.’ But it was really only a factitious invention meaning something like ‘manually-held nasal-passage-mucosa-evacuation square-fabric-receptacle,’ all agglutinated in characteristically Teutonic wordchaintogethergathering.

Then it hit me. There is perhaps no other widely known language as potentially rich in agglutination as Esperanto. Turkish had flung down its 33-letter gauntlet, and, staunch defender of the Internacia Lingvo, I could not let it lie there. Fifteen minutes and a cup of strong coffee produced the resounding fimalsamseksemulinarejestrinegaĉideco, proudly surpassing its upstart Turkish antagonist by a full four letters. (For non-Esperantist readers, it is, of course, pronounced exactly as written, as long as one remembers that j = y, ĉ = ch, c = ts, and that the accent, as always, is on the penult.) Another cup of coffee would have surely let me agglutinate still further.

An exegesis of the term will help illustrate Esperanto’s limit-stretching agglutinative genius. It all begins, appropriately, with sex:

seks(o) ‘sex.’ Note that the ending of all Esperanto nouns is -o. (Other endings being used for other grammatical functions, I parenthesize the endings to indicate the root.)

seksem(a) ‘sexually inclined.’ The suffix -em(a), with the adjectival ending -a, denotes inclination.

samseksem(a) ‘homosexual.’ The prefix sam- (the root of the adjective sam(a), ‘same’) produces the usual Esperanto word for ‘homosexual,’ literally ‘same sex inclined.’

malsamseksem(a) ‘heterosexual.’ The prefix mal- regularly denotes the opposite of the word to which it is appended. Hence malsam(a), ‘different.’ (Purists might object that, in everyday Esperanto, the word for ‘heterosexual’ is aliseksem(a), literally ‘other sex inclined’; but malsamseksem(a) would be easily understood.)1

malsamseksemul(o) ‘heterosexual person.’ The suffix ul(o) indicates an individual characterized by the word to which it is added.

malsamseksemulin(o) ‘female heterosexual.’ Esperanto regularly forms the feminine by adding the suffix -in(o) to the masculine.

malsamseksemulinar(o) ‘female heterosexual group.’ The suffix -ar(o) indicates an association or grouping of individual persons or things.

malsamseksemulinarej(o) ‘female heterosexual group quarters.’ The suffix -ej(o) indicates the characteristic place of action.

fimalsamseksemulinarej(o) ‘brothel.’ The prefix fi- adds the idea of shamefulness to what follows, thus producing this easily understandable result, synonymous with the more usual Esperanto term bordel(o). (By one of those ambiguities rarely encountered in Esperanto —ipso facto— the fi- could logically refer to the ulin(oj), ‘female persons,’ or to their ar(o), ‘group,’ as readily as to their ej(o), ‘place of operation.’ But given the context, it’s as broad as it is long.)

fimalsamseksemulinarejestr(o) ‘brothel keeper.’ Esperanto adds the suffix -estr(o) to denote leadership of an operation.

fimalsamseksemulinarejestrin(o) ‘madam.’ As before, the suffix -in(o) feminizes the noun.

fimalsamseksemulinarejestrineg(o) ‘large madam.’ The suffix -eg(o) is an augmentative.

fimalsamseksemulinarejestrinegaĉ(o) ‘slovenly large madam.’ The suffix -aĉ(o) is used to imply disparagement and general disgust.

flmalsamseksemulinarejestrinegaĉid(o) ‘slovenly large madam’s offspring.’ The suffix -id(o) denotes progeny.

fimalsamseksemulinarejestrinegaĉidec(o) ‘quality of a slovenly large madam’s offspring.’ The suffix -ec(o) (like English -ness, -ship, etc.) indicates the abstract characteristics of its referent.

Who will deny that being told one possesses “the characteristics of a gross bordello madam’s offspring”— fimalsamseksemulinarejestrinegaĉidecon, with an extra -n at the end for the objective case, adding yet another letter—is more picturesque than being called a pedestrian “no-good sonofabitch”? (Or even “no-good daughterofabitch” if another feminine -in is inserted after the -id, thus raising the grand total to forty letters: fimakamseksemulinarejestrinegaĉidinecon.) Surely such withering invective is more satisfying both to give and to receive.

I hasten to add that, Esperanto existing to facilitate communication, few adepts would have occasion to use this word in casual conversation. It would not spring trippingly to the lips of even the most fluent. Still, it is comforting to know that it, and countless potential others like it, can be summoned up into existence whenever the need for a supersesquipedalianistically imposing term arises.

OBITER DICTA: Watching Our g’s and q’s

Richard Bauerle, Ohio Wesleyan University

As skills in writing and proofreading continue to decline, the similar shapes of lower case g and q seem to cause more problems. Often the letters are switched, with results that can be quite amusing. Witness three errors committed recently.

A college student, describing the chaotic last hours of the war in Vietnam, wrote, “As the refugees from the war flooded into Saigon, there was an outbreak of bubonic plaque.” (Our family dentist commented that this new disease had not yet been reported in the medical journals.)

Reversing the two letters the opposite way in the same word. The Chronicles of Higher Education (Jan. 7, 1980, p. 2) reprinted a news item containing the word from the University of San Francisco Foghorn, “The winner of the [Distinguished Teaching] Award will receive between $1,000 and $1,500. There will also be a plague in the hall. . . .”

Perhaps such bloopers will be eliminated by newly developed electronic writing systems, but the advertisement for one such system, reprinted by The New Yorker (July 14, 1980, p. 59), suggests we should not be too optimistic:

Our system is 100% error-free. It is an electronic impossibility for it to make a typographical error. Also, it can never experience ‘fatique’—as a secretary often has been known to experience.

It appears that we must continue to watch our g’s and q’s, or one day we may pick up Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet only to find Mercutio praising the young lovers' families, “A plaque on both your houses.”

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Four Held Over Bomb Are Freed” [headline in The Times (London), June 7, 1980. Submitted by Kenneth L. Karst, UCLA.]

Philip Howard on English English

The Family Talpidae

The London evening newspaper (we have only one in these hard times) announced portentously the other day on a placard: STEEL MOLE SPEAKS. It was referring to an employee of British Steel who had furtively passed confidential documents of his employers to a television programme. This vivid new metaphor, made popular by the craze for the spy thrillers of John le Carré, has burrowed its way into the public imagination and the Balaam-baskets of subeditors over here.

A Mr A. J. Mole wrote engagingly complaining about the way that le Carré and Sir Alec Guinness (who played Smiley brilliantly on the box) have abused his surname to mean sneak, spy, or even informer. He asked me to redress the balance.

Apart from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, from which Mr. Mole is imprinted as an endearing if bumbling goody into the subconscious of British children, the mole has always had a bad press. In the Authorized Version, Leviticus lists the mole as an unclean abomination, along with the ferret, the snail, and others. The translators of the New English Bible are, no doubt, more accurate, but, again no doubt, more boring when they render the Hebrew with pedantry about the jerboa, the sand-gecko, and the wall-gecko. In one of his testy fulminations, Isaiah prophesies that when the Lord comes to shake the earth, a man, not surprisingly in the circumstances, shall cast his idols of silver and his idols of gold to the moles and to the bats. The gnomes of the New English Bible spoil the poetry again by explaining smugly that Isaiah meant dung-beetles, not moles.

King William IV is supposed to have caught his death of cold from a fall caused by his horse stumbling over a molehill. Jacobites toasted “the little gentleman in black velvet” for toppling the king they regarded as the usurper.

Dr Kenneth Mellanby’s book The Mole states firmly: “Moles hate their own species,” and quotes from W.G. Lewis (1828): “This solitary, mischievous animal appears adapted to a life of darkness. Although it is doomed to hunt its prey under ground, and usually denied the cheering light of the sun, yet no animal appears fatter nor has a more sleek and glossy skin.”

Mole proverbs are generally unflattering and concerned with short-sightedness, as in blind as a mole; Argus abroad, mole at home; king of a molehill; and making mountains out of molehills.

Leonard Woolfs volume of autobiography entitled Sowing contains the following mole-lore: “Lytton nicknamed him [E. M. Forster] the Taupe, partly because of his faint physical resemblance to a mole, but principally because he seemed intellectually and emotionally to travel underground and every now and again pop up unexpectedly with some subtle observation or delicate quip which somehow or other he had found in the depths of the earth or of his own soul.”

The relevant British Government departments designate the mole as a pest and even as vermin.

The new metaphor of mole as labyrinthine and secret “sleeper” burrowing away inside the Establishment has a certain seedy glamour for the Brits, who are obsessed with spy stories. Moles might consider it an improvement on the previous proverbial and literary image of the mole as merely a half-blind, worm-snuffling, king-killing, idol-worshiping ravisher of lawns.

Le Carre himself, the mole-maker, gives a precise date and definition for the metaphor of mole as spy who builds a legitimate cover over a period of years by not engaging in spying activities until he is tapped for an important mission. The date when mole impinged on the British consciousness was 1976. Le Carré’s definition: “A mole is, I think, a genuine KGB term for somebody who burrows into the fabric of a bourgeois society and undermines it from within— somebody of the Philby sort who is recruited at a very tender age. . . . They’re people about whom, at a certain time, you guess the pattern of their ideological development, if you’re a talent spotter working for the Russian Secret Service, and you winkle them into a corner and say: ‘We appreciate your feelings about this, but just keep very quiet—sooner or later we will need you and when we do we will tell you.’ ”

Well said, old mole! Canst work i' the Foreign Office so fast? What with the British passion for spies and the other British passion for comfortable old cliches, I am afraid that Mr. Mole is going to have to resign himself to the extension of his name.

When people called Howard become snobbish about their ancient name, which some of the sillier ones do, the way to take them down a peg is to remind them that their name is derived from Hog-ward, or pig-keeper. It is not strictly true, since the Hog in the name was a sheep, but it generally shuts them up.

As for Messrs Mole, Eliza Cook, the pious poetaster whose verse appealed strongly to the Victorian middle classes, shall have the last word:

There’s a mission, no doubt, for the mole in the dust,
As there is for the charger, with nostrils of pride;
The sloth and the newt have their places of trust,
And the agents are needed, for God has supplied.

Troy Romps—Hector Blanks Creeks on Two-hitter

Charles N. Faerber, Woodland Hills, California

In “Score-bored” [VII, 1] Clair Schulz bemoaned the lack of variety shown by wire service baseball writers in describing the manner of a victory or defeat. If variety is his taste, I would guide him to locally written sports columns in community newspapers and counsel that there likely are many sportscasters with a flair for colorful language in range of his radio. Following this advice, he would be dazzled and delighted, as I constantly am, to find there is always a sparkling new way to say, “The Phillies beat the Cubs.” And he might pay more attention to football, the most fertile field for sports metaphor. Mr. Schulz limited his focus to the transitive verbs that use the winning team as subject and the losing team as direct object. There are many other transitive phrases (and some prepositional) that he failed to list.

Conquered, vanquished, and defeated have a military connotation. So do annihilated, massacred, routed, overran, rolled over, bombed, blitzed, wasted, and wiped out in reference to one-side victories, and ambushed, shot down, and bushwacked (albeit with a western flavor) to unexpected ones.

There are terms equating a thorough defeat to criminal assault (bludgeoned, brass-knuckled, pistol-whipped, poleaxed, mauled, victimized, and, of course, murdered—as in the Brooklyn Dodger fan’s exhortation, “Moiduh duh bumsl); to a physical beating (flailed, walloped, throttled, thrashed, cuffed, buffeted, drubbed, dashed, lashed, belted, bashed, savaged, lambasted, and whipped up on); to an uneven fist fight (took apart, tore into, socked it to, laid out, and sucker-punched); to grinding under one’s heel (trampled, stomped, walked over, and ran roughshod over); or to just general bullying (manhandled, overpowered).

There is a whole genre of destructive terms at the disposal of the sportswriter, beginning with the ubiquitous destroyed and demolished. Some have a Tom-and-Jerry flavor, as cracked, crushed, crunched, thumped, dumped, riddled, spattered, splattered, smashed, pulverized, and dismantled; others, an explosive quality (blasted, blew apart).

There are many unexpected sources for terms. Food preparation: butchered, shelled, basted, creamed, pureed, cut up, made mincemeat (or hamburger, or hash) of, and cooked the goose of. Housework and odd jobs: mopped up the floor with, cleaned the clock of, swept aside, polished off, pulled the rug out from under, shellacked, plastered, hammered, and trashed.

Whitewashed might seem to be in the last category, but it is baseball jargon referring (as far as anyone knows) to the blank appearance of a scoreboard when a team is held scoreless. Goose-egged, skunked, shut out, closed down, zipped, and zilched also indicate no score by a losing team.

There are polite verbs: bested, mastered, thwarted, dominated, finished off. Punishing verbs: spanked, pilloried, scolded. Verbs indicating a trial by fire (burned, blistered, scorched, singed) or by cold (iced, cooled). Construction site verbs; bulldozed, buried. Nautical verbs: deepsixed, scuttled, swamped, trimmed the sails of. Barnyard verbs: fleeced, cut the tail feathers of. Weather verbs: blew away. Show biz verbs: tap danced over. Math verbs: solved. Verbs to describe the defeat of a front-runner of champion:

upset, knocked off, toppled, unseated, dethroned. Verbs to indicate the loser can barely comprehend his defeat (jolted, stunned, shocked, dazed) or that he doesn’t want to show his face (embarrassed, humiliated).

Constructing new verbs by prefixing out- offers numberless additional possibilities, starting with outplayed, outscored, outpointed, outhustled, outmanned, outclassed, and outlasted. Outcoached, outmaneuvered, outfinessed, out foxed refer to a victory by brains, and outmuscled, outslugged, outhit, outfought by brawn. Outtoughed and outquicked are gaining popularity among football writers.

Incestuously, verbs may be borrowed from other sports: boxing (kayoed); track and field (hurdled); horse racing (left at the gate or nosed out); and swimming (touched out).

The transitive phrase (“Cowboys beat Redskins”) is used most often by the summarizing sportscaster, since it succinctly imparts both winner and loser. Intransitive phrases (“Cowboys win, triumph, prevail, emerge victorious,” et al.) require further explanation and are more common tools of the sportswriter, who is usually focusing on one game only, without an overriding need for terseness.

There are innumerable formulaic intransitive expressions. The phrase “Lions roar to 20-3 victory,” for example, is one of hundreds of variations on the basic to a victory (or win) formula. The Lions could also have marched to a, stampeded to a, bulled to a, battled to a, stormed to a, exploded to a, or clawed to a victory, depending on how they won. An easy win they might have coasted, cruised, or cakewalked to. A less than artistic win they might have skidded to or backed into. In the parlay formulation, the Lions might have “parlayed four fumbles into a 20-3 victory.” In place of “four fumbles,” anything that pops into the sportswriter’s head may be substituted.

Jargon (“Seaver no-hits Giants”), puns (“Eagles skin Washington”), and nicknames (“Tide swamps Troy”-i.e., Alabama’s Crimson Tide beats Southern Cal’s Trojans) offer limitless possibilities to the enterprising sports journalist.

Headline writers seem to have the most fun. Many, for instance, become giddy when Atlanta pitcher Tommy Boggs wins a game: “Dodgers Bogg down,” “Braves Boggle Reds,” etc. Some may have puns burning in their craws for years; imagine the euphoric release of the head man who learned of Twin outfielder Bobby Darwin’s homerun outburst and wrote, “Darwin goes ape!”

Of all the terms used to impart the fact that Team A beat Team B, my favorite is romp. For me, romp always evokes delightfully anachronistic images. “Steelers romp”— I picture “Mean Joe” Greene and a host of black-jerseyed 275-pound defensive tackles skipping about hand-in-hand like frolicsome schoolgirls. Romp, in fact, often inspires me to surreal silliness: “Troy romps” (Hector blanks Greeks on two-hitter?); “Tide romps” (Oxydol held scoreless?).

The Exception That Proves the Rule

Weldon Ellis, Nashville, Tennessee

In The Exception That Proves the Rule [VI, 4], Steve Coughlan offered an explanation as to why the cliche is so frequently misinterpreted. According to Coughlan, the theory first offered by Richard Grant White in 1870 provided a logical explanation based on the word exceptio in the Latin phrase exceptio probat regulam. White’s theory was that the difficulty arose from the mistranslation of the word exceptio to mean ‘exception’ rather than ‘excepting.’

These comments offer to show how, during the 110 years since White offered his theory, the natural evolution of the English language has further aggravated the situation. It is my theory that the other two terms, probat and regulam, are also being mistranslated. The divergences in the meanings are logical, in that Latin is a dead and almost unchanging language, whereas English is still very much alive and changing.

There are now two misinterpretations of the phrase The exception proves the rule. One carries the meaning that ‘if there is an exception to a rule it does not invalidate the rule—to the contrary—it establishes the validity of the rule.’ The other meaning is ‘unless there is an exception to a rule it is not valid.’ The first is illogical enough, but the latter is even worse. To many, a concern over the misinterpretations may seem to be academic nit-picking. On the other hand, they could have serious consequences.

As a preface to the development of the thesis of possible “serious consequences,” I shall first assume that all automobile manufacturers have a rule that the cars they produce must be safe and dependable. To assure compliance with their rule, pre-production new models are exhaustively tested on proving grounds. Yet, despite their rule and the “exhaustive” testing, many thousands of production models have been recalled to correct various deficiencies. Somehow, the supposed compliance with the rule and the later recalls do not seem to be in accord. Surely, there must be some logical reason for the discrepancies.

According to the “Ellis Theory,” which supplements the “White Theory,” the current misinterpretations and misuses of the phrase The exception proves the rule stem not only from the initial mistranslation of the word exceptio but also from the gradual changes in the meanings of words that are descendents of probat and regulam. The word probare once meant ‘to probe or to test to determine the validity or strength of that being probed.’ The word probe still retains the original denotation, but its close relative, prove, has changed in spelling, pronunciation, and meaning. Rather than to probe or to test,' the accepted meaning of prove is ‘to find true, correct, or to give sanction,’ a very different meaning.

Regulāre once meant ‘to regulate, to control, or to rule.’ Today rule often carries with it the connotation or meaning of being a generalization. Such a usage is illustrated when we say, “As a rule that is true, but there are exceptions.” Yet, in contrast, we often go to great lengths to assure the precision of the length and markings on the type of “rule” that is used in making measurements. The use of the human foot to measure even the most mundane product is no longer tolerated.

So, in addition to the earlier mistranslation of the Latin word exceptio to mean ‘exception’ rather than ‘excepting,’ we now have the other two, probat and regulam, with meanings that differ from the original. All of this means there are three variables in one short sentence. Even mathematicians have trouble with three variables in one equation. It is no wonder that the rest of us have trouble with our language and its wealth of meanings.

Perhaps a more precise translation of exceptio probat regulam might be ‘the exception tests the validity of the rule.’ On second thought, perhaps we are better off with our rather amorphous and often ambiguous language. While it is true an “Automobile Proving Ground” could be called by a more appropriate name, such as “Automobile Testing Ground,” and its purpose clarified, there would be some counterbalancing disadvantages. Such a degree of specificity might deprive the already beleaguered American automobile manufacturers of a certain degree of flexibility regarding defects uncovered during the testing of preproduction models. They could not say, in good conscience, that the defect was the exception that proved their rule of producing only safe and dependable cars.

There could be even more grave consequences of this specificity. What would happen to our social relationships if we could no longer look at a baby that was not pretty and say to its proud mother, “My, your baby has a most interesting face!” Think about the drastic rise in unemployment if all laws were written so clearly and precisely that there would be little or no need for lawyers and judges to interpret them. Then, too, what would happen to international relations if diplomats could no longer speak in ambiguous terms? The only alternatives might be either to return to isolationism and sulk in private or to resort to nuclear warfare and suffer in public.

Yes, after thinking it over, I have decided that, as a rule, we are better off as we are. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule.

Street Names Fun Game

Axel Hornos, Pittsford, New York

Going over city streets' names brings many surprises. Take Rochester, N.Y. There are Daxota, Joiner, Le Frois, Rugraff streets, Hecia Alley and Bob Rich Drive. There is Circle street, which runs in a perfectly straight line. One wonders what these names stand for: a loving if misplaced tribute? a posthumous memorial? an outburst of unbridled fancy? revolt against stifling conformity? (Emanon street-‘No name’ in reverse-may be an example of the latter.)

But I found that Presque Street was the most baffling of the lot. Presque means ‘almost’ in French, yet almost a street Presque street certainly is not. With wide sidewalks, a smooth pavement and regulation lights, it is flanked by duly numbered homes and a public school. In short, it is an honest-to-goodness, 100 per cent city thoroughfare.

Why, then, the demeaning qualifier? Did the person who named the street have a secret grudge against it—perhaps his mother-in-law made her home there—and vented his spleen in this fashion? Was he one of those individuals who believe in the relativity of all things, full-blown streets included? Or did he want to show his superior (?) knowledge of French and picked the wrong word?

I submitted my quandary to a local newspaper, hoping for illumination. It came in the shape of several letters and phone calls, all unanimous in their reply: Presque Street, pronounced “Presscue” by the locals, was thus named by one of the street’s first residents after Presque Isle County in Michigan, which had just been visited by him, captivating him by its beauty. Like millions of other Americans, he assumed that Presque was the name of an island, when in fact it is just part of the word presquîcaple (literally, ‘almost an island’), French for ‘peninsula.’

Additional “Odd Couples”

Elton F. Henley, Tampa, Florida

Eric Winters [VII, 1] supplied a useful list of Latin derived English words with their Greek equivalents. For example, the Latin-derived circumlocution has two roots: circum ‘around’ and locut- (from loquor) ‘to speak.’ The roots of the Greek-derived periphrasis (be careful of its pronunciation), peri and phras, are translated identically.

At the end of Mr. Winters’s note is an invitation for readers to supplement his good listing of words based upon corresponding Latin and Greek roots. Here are my suggestions. (I translate the equivalent roots within quotation marks.

Words Containing Two Basic Roots
(Latin-derived words appear first.)

atrabilious benediction circumambulatory circumcision — circumference — circumspect collaboration — compassion component concurrence conductor consonance — contemporaneous — duplex — election — illegal — imposition — inscription — manufacturer — omniscient precursor preface — prescience — recantation — recurrence — superjacent supernatural — melancholic — ‘black/bile’
— euphemism — ‘well, good/speak’
— peripatetic — ‘around/walk’
peritomy — ‘around/cut’
periphery — ‘around/bear’
— periscopic — ‘around/look’
synergism — ‘together/work’
— sympathy — ‘together/feel’
— synthesis — ‘together/place, put’
— syndrome — ‘together/run’
— synagogue — ‘together/lead’
symphony — ‘together/sound’
synchronous — ‘together/time’
diplomat — ‘two, twice/fold’
eclecticism — ‘out of/choose’
anomalous — ‘not/law’
epithet — ‘upon/place, put’
epigraph — ‘on, upon/write’
chiropractor — ‘hand/do’
— pansophic — ‘all/wise’
— prodrome — ‘before/run’
prolegomenon, prologue — ‘before/speak’
prognosis — ‘before/know’
palinode — ‘again/sing, song’
palindrome — ‘again/run’
— hyperbolic — ‘above/throw’
— metaphysical — ‘beyond/nature’

Words Containing One Basic Root

canine — cynic — ‘dog’
febrile — pyretic — ‘fever’
lingual — glossal — ‘tongue’
peculiar — idiotic — ‘one’s own, private’
popular — demotic — ‘people’
position — thesis — ‘place, put’
rabies — mania — ‘madness’
regal — basilic — ‘king’
risible — gelastic — ‘laugh’
scientism — gnosticism — ‘know’
stellar — astral — ‘star’
terrene — chthonic — ‘earth’
testis — orchid — ‘testis’

NOTE: Permit me to correct some of Mr. Winters’s examples. In the pairing aversion-antipathy, the Latin prefix a(b)- “away from”; the Greek prefix anti ‘against’; the Latin equivalent to anti- is contra-. The Latin verbal root -vers-‘to turn'; the Greek verbal root -path- ‘to feel.’ In the pairing projection-hyperbole, the verbs are equivalent, but the prefixes have no relationship: the latin pro- ‘in favor of.’ and the Greek hyper- ‘over,’ or ‘above.’ Finally, the prefixes in resolution and analysis are unrelated.

Ormonyms/Junctures

Brian Dibble, Western Australia Institute of Technology

Ormly Gumfudgin writes of “Ormonyms” [IV, I], which, he says, Laurence Urdang claims are “junctures.” Whatever the correct term, Gumfudgin means “that they read differently but sound the same.” On reading the article in Australia, I was immediately reminded of our own well known book Let Stalk Strine: A Lexicon of Strine Usage, by Afferbeck Lauder. There are two possible junctures there: “Let’s talk Strine” (i.e., Australian English), by “Alphabetical Order.”

Since then I have come up with an example of my own, which may interest, amuse, and/or edify readers of VERBATIM. It is a French sentence, phonemically represented as follows: /ilavēkylot/.

Though French is theoretically a non-accentual language with respect to polysyllabic words, phraseal rhythms nonetheless are superimposed. The sentence represented above could be read in a rather straightforward way*: /2ìl a 3v\?\ + 3ky lót1 ↓ / = *Il a vingt culottes* ‘He has twenty pairs of pants.’ With different accenting it can be made to read: /2ìl a v\?\ 3ky + 3lót1 ↓ / = I*l a vaincu Lotte* ‘He has conquered Lot.’ A slight variation on this would be: /2ìl1 a v\?\3ky + 1lót1 → / = *Il a vaincu, Lotte* = ‘He (Lot) has conquered.’ There is, alas, still a fourth possibility: /2ìl a 3v\?\ + 3ky + 1lót1’ → = *Il a vingt culs, Lotte*, which I won’t translate, for it is obscene, but will gloss by saying that it perhaps accounts for why, in the various versions, a man has twenty pairs of pants or Lot loses or wins!

Mr. Gumfudgin says: “Maybe what I’m doing is taking junctures and making a sentence with them and that’s what an ormonym really is. Anyway, it’s fun and maybe serves to crack a smile here and there; if so, it’s worth it.” I am reminded of James Joyce’s response to the charge that in Finnegans Wake he was trivial. “Yes,” he responded. “And sometimes I am quadrivial.” So, to go beyond Joyce, I’ll add a fifth example: Il l’a vaincu, Lotte = /2ìl + la v\?\3ky + 1lót1 →/ ‘He (Lot) has conquered it.’

I have no idea if what I’ve put forward are ormonyms or junctures. But, whatever they are, I hope that, with these five examples, I have conquered them. By the way, jointure in French is feminine. I still wonder what Ormly is!

[I am indebted to my friend and colleague Dr. G.K. deHeer, Head of WAIT’S Department of Asian Studies, for the phonemic transcriptions and the fifth example I give. He says, “Since accent, at least primary accent, coincides with juncture, it is really redundant to mark both and + .” I do so for emphasis. Assume the existence of a primary accent ‘., a secondary accent ‘, and a weak or nonaccent.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The fact that no consumer advocate has yet strode forth to defend and protect the interests of those who can afford a $30,000 coupe is probably not the least bit surprising.” [From an advertisement for BMW in The New Yorker, March 24, 1980. Submitted by D. L. Emblen, Santa Rosa, California. It is surprising, though, that no advocate of proper English has stridden forth to replace that copywriter.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Language-The Loaded Weapon

Dwight Bolinger, (Longman), ix + 214pp.

As all linguists and too few nonlinguists know, Dwight Bolinger, Emeritus Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard, is one of the most important scholars in his field. Unfortunately, the further establishment of his reputation among nonlinguists will be seriously hampered by the publisher’s determination to make this excellent book available to too few people by pricing it at an unforgiving (and unforgivable) level. That is too bad, for there are not many scholars of Bolinger’s repute who are capable of writing comprehensible English, and his writing can be compared with that of Otto Jespersen, whom I have always considered the Santayana of linguistics. Unless one has read a great deal in philosophy and in linguistics, that metaphor is meaningless: suffice it to say that when as good and clear a writer as Bolinger writes a book on as important a subject as modern English usage and misusage, it ought to be made available to as wide, not as narrow an audience as possible.

Well, I have my copy, for which I am grateful.

There have been many articles and an increasing number of books published dealing with “The Use and Abuse of squibs in VERBATIM and the bottom-of-the-page quotations in The New Yorker call attention to instances of distortion by poking fun at them. (The New Yorker caught me nodding on one occasion.) But very little cogent analysis of the problem has appeared in print, and certainly nothing that I know of written by a linguist of Bolinger’s stature. In Language—The Loaded Weapon, Bolinger describes the more insidious byways of propaganda, from mystery ingredients (irium, hexylresorcinol) to the couching of simple ideas in recondite jargon in order to give them the patina of harmlessness or of great importance.

As Bolinger points out, “The most consistent feature of jargon is SEMANTIC. It is elevated, ameliorative, euphemistic in the most general sense. It tries to improve appearances, both in what the message is about and in the message itself.” [p. 132] It also serves another purpose, namely, to create an impression in the mind of the listener or reader that its creator knows far more than he does. Jargon is an essential ingredient in disciplines like sociology and psychology: practitioners trade jingling jargon with one another as a matter of course, and at certain levels in certain circles proficiency at using the latest shibboleths commands respect. If you can give something a complicated sounding name, even if the concept is absurdly simple, you are an accepted member of the club. Professionalism seems to be measured more often by the ability to talk about a problem than by the ability to solve it—provided that the proper code language is used.

Bolinger describes the affliction in detail and analyzes the lexical and grammatical techniques used to create noun compounds; VERBATIM comes in for occasional mention, especially in the bibliographical citation of Bruce Price’s article, “Noun Overuse Phenomenon Article” [11,4].

For the penultimate chapter, “School for Shamans,” the author reserves his comments about the various levels at which language is criticized, from the self-styled purists, who appear on national television shows to voice their contempt for the language used by almost anyone under 30 and for the 3rd Edition of the Merriam Unabridged, to the “permissive” linguists, who evade all responsibility when they insist that the proper function of a “scientist” is to describe the way the language is used, not interfere with its use or usage. To them I would say that their description is incomplete because they avoid describing an essential fact about language, namely, the attitudes of its speakers toward it.

The best illustration of Bolinger’s approach is this passage from the beginning of his chapter, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”:

The folkloric title of this chapter is the standard argument of the gun lobby in the United States against efforts to restrict the possession of firearms. Other interests and occupations have their own versions. There used to be a saying about the automobile: ‘It isn’t the nut on the wheel but the nut behind the wheel’ - speaking of responsibility for the annual slaughter in automobile accidents, now running close to fifty thousand lives a year in the United States alone. A spokesman for the Coors Brewing Company tells us that it is not beer cans but people that are responsible for littering parks. Some careless groundskeeper must have said at some time or other, ‘It wasn’t the hole on the course that broke your leg, it was your stepping into it.’ As it would be convenient for governments anxious about their food supplies to say. ‘Food doesn’t nourish people, eating does.’

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“FLAMING TOILET SEAT CAUSES EVACUATION AT HIGH SCHOOL” [From The Philadelphia Bulletin, December 15, 1980. Submitted by Oliver G. Ludwig, Villanova University].

BIBLIOGRAPHIA:

The Book Of Surnames and The Origin Of English Surnames

Peter Verstappen, (Pelham Books, London, 1980), and P.H. Reaney, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).

The first of these two books on surnames was written by a journalist, the second by an academic philologist, and the difference between them can therefore be imagined. Peter Verstappen is an American publishing executive now resident in Britain. His approach to surnames begins statistically, for he chooses to deal with the seventy-six commonest names in Britain. These are shared by some fourteen million people in Britain alone, all of them potential buyers of the book because it deals with their names.

I’m sure that’s how it seemed to the author when he first had the idea for this book, but unfortunately things aren’t that simple. People certainly are interested in surnames, usually their own or ones they have come across while researching their family history, but the surnames that interest most are invariably unusual ones. As Secretary of the Names Society, I receive letters every day from people all over the English-speaking world asking about the origins of particular names, but never those names which appear in Peter Verstappen’s book. The Smiths and the Joneses, the Jacksons and Johnsons feel little pride in their names, it seems, perhaps because they know they share them with so many others. The various companies who supply so-called coats of arms which can be displayed on fancy plaques in the hallway will confirm this fact. They are more likely to do their business with the Verstappens of this world than those with more usual family names.

One question that might be asked, then, is whether this Book of Surnames, which contains the meaning of each name, together with a miscellany of facts and figures, would make the bearers of the names concerned proud enough to buy a book which mentions their name. What would they get for their money? A Jackson, for example, would learn that a Jagger and Jakes were amongst those related to him etymologically (his etymological cousins once removed, as it were). He would be told that his nominal ancestor was ‘son of Jack,’ but would be left to decide for himself whether Jack derived in its turn from John (via Jan, Jankin, Jackin) or was an Anglicization of Jacques, which goes back to Latin Jacomus, our James. (The pure etymologist, such as E.W.B. Nicholson, who wrote a treatise about the derivation of Jack in 1892, would insist on the John explanation. But it seems clear that in former times ordinary Englishmen, noting that Jacques was the commonest French name, must have equated it with our commonest name, John.)

Various famous Jacksons are mentioned, together with statistics about families and places bearing the name in different parts of the world. The article on this name then informs us that it was President Andrew Jackson who originated the ubiquitous American slang expression ‘O.K.’ by abbreviating his illiterate “Oil Korrect,” a subject not unknown to readers of VERBATIM.

The Book of Surnames is typical of books about names written by authors who, in true journalistic fashion, pass from one subject to another in rapid succession. It is no better or worse than any similar book. It says rather little about its professed topic, but will presumably satisfy those who have a superficial interest in surnames.

The late Dr. Reaney (who always maintained, a la Ronald Reagan, that his name should correctly be pronounced “rainy”) had studied his subject extensively at source, and his works—he also compiled A Dictionary of British Surnames—remain by far the most authoritative statements in print on the origins of English surnames. It was the Normans who introduced the idea of hereditary family names to the English, but it took a century or so for names to become truly fixed. Until roughly 1400 a man was likely to have a by-name, a last name that described him but which his descendants might change. Thus, the son of Jack who became Jackson might have a son who was a Smith and a grandson who was Large (because he was generous). By 1400, most of the names had become the identifying labels we bear today, though naturally the modern forms of our names often bear little resemblance to their medieval forms. In the intervening centuries, most names were rarely written down, and those who wrote them used their own orthographic systems. Those American surnames imported from a wide variety of non-English-speaking countries also underwent fairly brutal changes when they were brought into line with Anglo-Saxon linguistic conventions. The modern forms of surnames need not, therefore, be taken very seriously, though the spelling they chanced to have when they became fossilized is often thought, in this highly literate age, to be very important by the name-bearers.

By origin, surnames are transferred placenames, describe occupations, or are link names of the Jackson, Nixon type. They can be descriptive nicknames, pleasant or unpleasant, and, indeed, those people who think they have rather unfortunate names probably have little to complain about compared to their ancestors. As Dr. Reaney rightly remarks:

The language of the time [the Middle Ages] was much less inhibited than that of today and much that we regard as indecent or obscene was to them normal and natural. In an age where sanitation was nonexistent, the normal functions of the body and its various parts were referred to openly and without shame by their ordinary everyday terms. . . .

This is why an innocent looking name such as Orcas reveals itself to be from Old French Oriescuilz, Latin aurei testiculi. It also occurs in the form borne by a fourteenth-century Englishman, Roger Gildynballokes.

For that matter, that most illustrious of surnames, Shakespeare, is likely to conceal a bawdy reference. There is little doubt that the Richard Wagetail whose name was recorded in 1187 was either known for his sexual prowess himself or was descended from such an ancestor. The names Waghorn, Wagstaffe, and Wagpole probably had the same meaning, and from there to Shakestaff and Shakespeare is but a short step. The more blatantly crude nicknames that were at one time fastened on unwilling bearers have long been quietly allowed to fall by the wayside. It is now only researchers into medieval documents, rather than the modern readers of telephone directories, who come across such unfortunates as John Fillecunt, Richard Scittebagge, Roger Louestycke, and Bede Wydecunthe.

Dr. Reaney pauses at each name (not just the bawdy ones) to say in which document he discovered it, so that other researchers can check for themselves. Such scrupulousness makes for a densely packed page of print, through which there runs an economically written narrative of fact piled upon fact. The Origin of English Surnames is not a light bedside reader, but it is a book which I and many others have gratefully turned to for reference purposes during the last ten years. It is now available as a paperback, and can be recommended most heartily to those who appreciate scholarship of the highest order. Leslie A. Dunkling Thames Ditton, Surrey

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Legal Thesaurus

William C. Burton, (Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1980), xii + 1058pp.

[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection]

In his Introduction, the author of this book explains that it was born of a need for a Roget-type work geared specifically to the needs of lawyers. To nonlawyers, it may be comforting to learn that a very large percentage of the words listed here are common in ordinary English. Thus, one finds (in the index, which occupies fully half the book) words like borrow ‘adopt, copy’ and phrases like get temporary use of ‘borrow.’ Looking under borrow in the main part of the book, we find

‘accept the loan of, apply for a loan, ask for credit, get on credit, get temporary use of, mutuari, obtain a mortgage, obtain the use of, take an advance, take on credit, take on loan’ ASSOCIATED CONCEPTS: ‘borrowed capital, borrowed employees, borrowed servant, borrowing statute’ FOREIGN PHRASES: ‘In satisfactionibus non permittur amplius fieri quam semel factum est. In settlements more must not be received than was received once for all.’

Leaving aside the Latin phrase and its cryptic translation, it can be seen that the usefulness of the book lies not so much in the near-synonyms it provides as in its resource as a promptory: too often synonym dictionaries dwell on oneword equivalents that may or may not be substituted for the word looked up, depending on the context; the Legal Thesaurus provides a great deal of collateral material-that is, not only words but phrases and ASSOCIATED CONCEPTS that enable the user to paraphrase his text to accommodate the ideas he is trying to express rather than to follow slavishly a pattern of synonymies that may not yield suitable results.

As David Mellinkoff wrote in The Language of the Law [Little, Brown, 1963], “The law is a profession of words. . . . [The] main objectives suffer when the principal tool of the whole process is neglected. … To be of any use, the language of the law (as any other language) must not only express but convey thought.” Mellinkoff’s book, which is a gem of thoughtful analysis and should be read, studied, and referred to by any lawyer who does any writing at all, treats in some detail a number of common terms of law, such as civil death, heir, last will and testament, and the ubiquitous whereas. On this last, the Legal Thesaurus is remarkably silent; of the others, only heir is listed. That is not necessarily a shortcoming, but one would have expected Burton to have had The Language of the Law at hand in his editing of the Thesaurus.

As one who has always considered the redundancies and cliches of legal language as essential to the avoidance of ambiguity, I find the very publication of the Thesaurus refreshing: perhaps we shall soon be seeing legal documents written in less boring and better English. Now that consumer law demands clarity and down-to-earth language where obfuscating legalese earlier prevailed, the Legal Thesaurus should find many users among those who prepare loan agreements, warranties, insurance policies, leases, bills of sale, and other legal agreements that must be made understandable to the general public. It seems unlikely that this book would serve solicitors and barristers in England without entries like gazump, ancient lights, and other legal terms that, as far as I know, are peculiar to British usage. Notwithstanding, the Thesaurus should go a long way toward explaining, in a rather subtle way for English lawyers, the language of American law.

[L.U.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Compleat Cruciverbalist Or How To Solve And Compose Crossword Puzzles For Fun And Profit and Crossword Puzzle Compendium

Stan Kurzban and Mel Rosen, foreword by Will Weng, (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1980), xvi + 167pp. and The editors of Consumer Guide, (Publications International, Ltd., Publisher Skokie, IL 1980), contributing authors: Norton J. Bramesco, and Jordan Lasher, 192pp.

Because there were no crossword instruction books like The Compleat Cruciverbalist and The Crossword Puzzle Compendium before, aspiring puzzlemakers had two paths to follow. One was to inhale the know-how and technique by osmosis, as most of the better-known constructors did, and the other was to appeal to an established crossword expert for help. Up to now, there has been very little written for rising crossword constructors. I wrote a brief article for Writer’s Digest in 1959 (October issue) telling how to make crossword puzzles. An occasional subsidy-press book has appeared on the subject. None of this is readily available. In 1980, as luck would have it, two books appeared, both covering the same ground and performing the identical service: explaining how to solve crosswords and imparting the secrets of crossword puzzle construction.

They are of approximately equal value, as both are sensibly written, without difficult language, and give detailed information on the use of word structure in making words lie down amicably together to form a crossword puzzle. On the point of language, the Compendium is a shade more down to earth and thus more understandable, but if you are a word person already, this difference won’t matter. And I believe only a word person is motivated to become a constructor. Both books have similar items of puzzle lore and amusing tales of crosswording; in this area the Compendium has more and better material. For detailed instruction and painstaking care in guiding you step by step through your first attempt at making a crossword, on the other hand, the Cruciverbalist is better, and that’s the main idea of it all, anyway. Both books have a section on marketing your product; again, the Cruciverbalist is more complete.

The word compleat should be considered poetic license. I can think of at least two popular puzzle variations overlooked by the Cruciverbalist, and others, like skeleton puzzles, that are merely mentioned. One omitted form widely used now is the word-hunt or word-find crossword, an unlined layout of letters in which words or names are traced in some continuous or broken line, most often continuous. People magazine’s Cerard Mosler does this type, with famous names to be found in the maze of words. Entire magazines are also devoted to this game, which requires no thinking, just good vision, and appeals to semiliterates. The other one overlooked is the multiple-answer crossword, which showed up in this country some years ago as the “Little Fooler” in the New York Daily News, having been invented by the British, probably in the 1930s. Because winning it was about a one-in-a-million shot, it was ideally suited for large-circulation newspaper and magazine contests. It even spread to India and Australia and in fact wherever English was printed. The reason it was almost impossible to win was that every clue gave the solver a choice between two or even three obvious answers, each arbitrary and capable of being defended. Thus, when 20 or more such choices had to be made, it would take over 2 million different puzzle solutions to cover all the possibilities. In fact, I recall seeing the same clue used at different times, with different words given as the correct answer. Enough about compleatness.

Where the Compendium shines is in its lore of puzzles and the personalities of constructors and editors. This far outstrips the Cruciverbalist’s treatment of the subject, which includes only the three New York Times crossword editors (Margaret Farrar, Will Weng, and Eugene T. Maleska), Elizabeth Kingsley, creator of Double-Crostics, E. Powys Mathers (Torquemada of British puzzledom), and Lewis Carroll, who didn’t make crosswords but did make word puzzles. However, the Compendium handsomely makes up for this, listing the “best” constructors alphabetically: Hume Craft, Herbert Ettenson, Anne Fox, Frances Hansen, Henry Hook, Maura Jacobson, Joseph La Fauci, Jordan Lasher, William Lutwiniak, Jack Luzzatto, Alfio Micci, Tap Osborn, Herb Risteen, A. J. Santora, and Mel Taub. Pagelong biographies accompany each listing, with an outstanding example of each constructor’s crossword performance to challenge the reader. To give you the chance to learn by osmosis, there are some twenty crosswords by Jordan Lasher, who specializes in white space and cerebral exercise, including his “world’s most difficult” contest crossword, a rompecabeza if there ever was one. This all makes the Compendium a marvelous buy.

The Cruciverbalist points out that the Random House Unabridged Dictionary has handy French, Spanish, Italian, and German vocabularies in the back of the book. They do warn you to use foreign words with discretion, but my own feeling is that, if foreign words crop up in general reading with some frequency or our good dictionaries give them entry space, then we can use them. One example of using foreign words indiscreetly is on my desk right now. Clue: Prostitute (German) Answer: HURE.

A few quibbles: because it is a book written and proof-read by two puzzle experts, I’ll point out two typographical errors in the Cruciverbalist—a remarkably good percentage. On page 49 is the spelling ALLOTED; on page 157 is PRIMATIVE. Furthermore, the authors are responsible for repeatedly spelling Ximenes XIMINES. Ximenes is the name assumed by the cryptic crossword expert of England, D. S. MacNutt, called Derrick Macnutt (a further error?) in the Cruciverbalist. MacNutt borrowed the name of Jimenez (variant, Ximenes) de Cisneros, Spanish prelate and Queen Isabella’s confessor and the Inquisitor General of Castile and Leon, when he succeeded “Torquemada,” the original cryptic crossworder of The Observer. Their choices of pseudonyms indicates the diabolical difficulty of their puzzles. The Cruciverbalist says Ted Shane, Albert Morehead, and Jack Luzzatto were pioneer constructors of “crazy crosswords.” Albert Morehead was not a constructor; he introduced British-style clues to Americans in 1941 [IV, 3]. Charles Erienkotter, now deceased, and I were his constructors. Ted Shane was employed by Judge magazine, for which I made both cartoons and “cockeyed” crosswords in the 1930s. The Cruciverbalist says that Frank Lewis, The Nation’s puzzlemaker, beat out another aspirant for that job. True: I was the other aspirant. He received more reader votes than I did after readers did six each of our respective cryptics.

[Jack Luzzatto, Bronx, New York]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“VIOLATIONS WILL BE ENFORCED.” [from the list of rules posted at the swimming pool in Eldorado at Santa Fe, New Mexico. Submitted by Reginald E. Dunstan of that city.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Dictionary Of Visual Language

Philip Thompson and Peter Davenport, foreword by George Lois, (Bergstrom and Boyle Books Limited), vii + 258pp. + 5 unnumbered pages of Index and Credits.

For several years a quarterly periodical called VISIBLE LANGUAGE has been published by Merald Wrolstadt, curator of the Cleveland Museum of Art. As a linguist with more than a passing interest in art—especially graphic design—I have long been fascinated by the subject of visible/visual language and take this opportunity to commend that publication to the readers of VERBATIM.¹ VISIBLE LANGUAGE covers many aspects of the subject, ranging from the more or less popular and conventional to the experimental and bizarre. As the authors of The Dictionary of Visual Language are quick to point out, their book deals for the most part with the popular and conventional, emphasizing the visual cliche. However, in the nearly 2000 illustrations (for about 1200 entries), I found many that are too subtle for ready identification and was grateful for the explanatory captions.

Consideration of the symbology of language and, indeed, of visual symbolism received scant attention from linguists until relatively recently; under the active, scholarly persistence of Professor Thomas Sebeok of Indiana University and others, the subject of semiotics has become a topic for serious study by those who believe that language creates its own symbology and psychological effects quite apart from its employment as a medium for a message. In other words, Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” has acquired status. I cannot agree that the medium is the message; but it would be foolish to deny that it affects the message to a great extent, in that it affects the recipient(s) of the message.

Although, as a casual examination of it may indicate, this book seems superficially to deal with pictures, it deals also with the symbology of words and with the rather odd, relatively modern phenomenon of the symbolic effect of words printed in various typographic styles. I often find that such treatments carry with them such an overburden of cliche as to make them corny. However, as the authors point out, it is their very nature as cliches that makes them meaningful. The trouble with many cliches is that they are often neither cross-cultural nor cross-linguistic. For example, the use by the Milk Board in Britain of the word pinta is symbolic to residents but not readily meaningful to visitors from, say, America, where milk is usually sold in quarts, not pints, to whom pinta may look more like a female pinto (horse) than a “pint o’ milk.”

Certain typographic symbols appear often in advertising and other forms of promotion (e.g., trademarks). For example, the British firm Balding + Mansell uses a plus sign in place of an ampersand (or the word and) in its name (as on letterheads), but a telephone call revealed that the company refers to itself as “Balding and Mansell.” On the other hand, when the Scottish publishers, William Collins Sons & Co., Ltd., bought the World Publishing Company, an American firm, it represented the new company as Collins + World, but in this case the name was read as “Collins + World” and so mentioned, as they say, in dispatches.

At the more pictorial level, one can find the Mona Lisa with a mustache and with the faces of numerous (readily recognizable) people inserted. President Lyndon B. Johnson among them. Likewise, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (often referred to as “Venus on the Half-shell”), has seen Jane Fonda’s head in place of Venus’s, Venus wearing a bathing costume, and many other variations. These seem to me to be more in the order of cartoons than symbology, but then I suppose that certain kinds of cartoons are themselves a form of semiotics. For example, Escher’s drawings may be looked upon by some as humorous cartoons or, on a different plane, as ironic philosophical comments. I refer, in particular, to his hands drawing each other, his monks marching along the walls of the cloister, his waterfalls flowing downhill in an ever-rising context. These are spoofs of art: they satirize the techniques of perspective.

I have always admired good poster art and have long wondered why European poster art has consistently, on the whole, been better than that produced in America. Does it have something to do with literacy? In earlier times in America, poster art flourished; except for certain companies’ promotion (e.g., Wrigley’s posters by Shepard), the art has languished in America. Perhaps Americans lack the kiosks where posters normally appear in France and elsewhere in Europe. The board walls of construction sites in America usually carry only the message Post No Bills unless the client for whom the building is being built chooses to advertise itself.

Most of Visual Language concerns itself with advertising. What I found especially interesting were the headwords selected by the authors: after all, the book is a series of entries in alphabetical order, each with one or more illustrations. How does one decide that art for a record sleeve in which the key word is Eroica, made by cutting out each of the letters from magazines, should be called Blackmail Lettering? I cannot think of a better heading, but I am unsure of how one using this book can refer to it: alphabetical order is a retrieval system for those who know the words they are looking up; it is only rarely conceptual. I have no idea where I might have looked for Blackmail Lettering since I cannot imagine having thought up such a headword. (I “lost” the entry showing Jane Fonda’s face stuck over that of Venus and looked for it under Botticelli and Venus, without success; I found it again under Art.)

As example of what I should consider symbols that are too subtle (I daren’t say “too subtle for words”), are a trademark for batteries, “Pb” (the chemical symbol for lead), and a darkened window on a jacket for a book on the subject of bereavement. Some of these are surrealistic, to be sure, and one can understand them merely as attention-getting devices. But a symbol, it seems to me, ought to be almost universally symbolic of the same thing (at least within a culture), and I doubt that the chemical symbol for lead and a darkened window carry the same impressions to all who view them.

These are merely quibbles. The book stands as an extremely interesting and useful commentary on symbolism in communication, though one must read through it and cannot use it as a reference book for looking things up till after it has been studied. A few minor slips (fan dancers are more closely associated with American burlesque than with vaudeville, and I wonder how “deeply rooted in the American psyche” is the image of Ice Tongs any longer) do not mar the value of this book, which emerges as a major work on the subject of visual metaphor.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Second Barnhart Dictionary Of New English

Clarence L. Barnhart, Sol Steinmetz, and Robert K. Barnhart, (Barnhart/Harper & Row, 1980), xv + 520pp.

[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection.]

There can be little doubt among those who know his work, which has spanned some 40 years—the most important period in the development of modern lexicography— that Clarence L. Barnhart is one of the most important lexicographers in the field of English language. Unless I am mistaken, it was entirely through his persistent efforts that Scott, Foresman, whose dictionaries he compiled and edited along with Edward L. Thorndike, became the first American dictionary publisher to employ the schwa (that is, the inverted e used in pronunciation respellings as the symbol for an “indeterminate” vowel sound, like the a in alone, the e in flutter, the i in handily, the o in scallop, and the u in cup). The schwa, named for a point mark that indicates a missing vowel sound in written Hebrew, had been adopted for this purpose by the Association Phonetique Internationale in the development of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA); but publishers, who are slow to change, lest they alienate book-buyers, were reluctant to use IPA and its symbols, because they looked unfamiliar. Publishers of popular dictionaries (in particular) seemed to prefer what I call the Moo Goo Gai Pan brand of respelling (to which I sometimes refer as the “Ah-oo-gah” system). Some, who do not believe that dictionary users will make the effort to interpret unfamiliar symbols like the long s (\?\), IPA for the sh in shoot and other spelled forms, the theta (θ), for unvoiced th as in thing, the edh (\?\), for voiced th as in this, the agma (\?\), for the ng in thing, and others, continue to use Moo Goo Gai Pan transcription, arguing against the principle, adhered to by phoneticians, that each of the distinctive sounds in a language should be represented by a discrete symbol. As I should be reviewing the subject book here, this is not an appropriate place for engaging in that argument: it may suffice to say that Barnhart won his case—at least for the schwa.

Employing, essentially, the principles set forth by the planners of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Barnhart has long been gathering citations for new words and senses in the English language. The first compilation, Barnhart Dictionary of New English, was published in 1973; the present work is the second in what we must hope will be a continuing series.

Although it is generally true that modern dictionaries of any importance are carefully kept up to date on a periodic basis, either by the inclusion of supplements or by the integration of new words and senses in their proper place in the text, the nature of most dictionaries precludes devoting space to extensive citations and, hence, to the documentation of what may be their earliest appearance in writing.

It should be emphasized that the Second Barnhart Dictionary (SBD) does not confine itself to the recording of new words: new senses are also covered. For example, agoraphobia is accorded nearly three quarters of a column of citations and explanation.

Many of the terms reflect the obsession with the coinage of jargon to which speakers of English are prone; we can see this propensity for novelty in a string of words having the previx agri- ‘agricultural’: agri-argument, agribiz, agribusinessman, agrichemical, agri-corporation, agricrime, agri-industrial, agrindustry, agripower, agriproduct, agri-proletariat. This is followed by a group of neologisms with agro-, an older form of the same prefix.

Through the reading of English language materials on a worldwide basis, the editors have summoned a collection of entries that cannot be said to be confined to American English. In addition to the American publications reviewed and cited we find The Times, New Scientist, Nature, and other non-American periodicals. Nonetheless, if I have one criticism of the book—and that of not too serious a nature—it is that the citations have been drawn in very large part from a relatively small number of publications, and most of those reflect a predisposition toward reading matter popular with the Eastern Establishment. Also, I am surprised to find ball park and ball-park figure here, for they appear in the Random House Unabridged (1966), and I encountered them as early as 1960.

But these are nit-picking comments and cannot detract from the value, importance, and quality of the SBD. It is far more interesting and useful to examine some of the entries that are listed. Where else could one find representatives of Western culture like group grope, grunge (‘something bad, inferior, ugly, or boring’), gyro (“a type of Greek sandwich made from thin-sliced beef and lamb on pita’), hair implant, I.R.A. (‘individual retirement account’ in the U.S.; obviously only metaphorically the same thing in Ireland), pump iron, muggee (‘one who is mugged by a mugger’), quango, and the ubiquitous legionnaires' disease? Of particular interest is the thorough treatment at person (followed by entries for person-, as in personhole, and -person, as in businessperson). Useful is the entry at Pinyin, which provides a partial table of the system. Social comment can be seen in rent-a-crowd and rent-a-mob (in their very coinage, not in the SBD treatment), and the dictionary is replete with the scientific and technical terminology that will probably dominate any list of neologisms in the future. It is hard to find a term relating to fine arts, but I should think that Art Deco might be one: as far as I know, the style was called moderne when it was fashionable, with Art Deco emerging only with its resurgence about a decade ago or less. Collectibles is there, but I quibble with its definition, given as “items suitable for collecting, especially rare or outdated objects of little intrinsic value.” As I understand it, collectibles (or collectables) refers specifically to those items that are not genuine antiques, though they may be rare; “intrinsic value” has little to do with it when one considers that the intrinsic value of a da Vinci drawing may be less than a dollar—for the relatively high-quality paper on which it is drawn. VDU ought to have a “Chiefly Brit.” label.

Sprinkled here and there are longer discussions (as at person) that are short articles in themselves. Under Coinages one finds almost a full column of comment about the ways in which words (and phrases) are made and enter the language. Nonce Words, Technical Terms, Acronyms, Trademarks, and Blends are other topics among the 22 covered by essay-length entries.

Barnhart continues to enhance his own and his staffs reputation by producing worthwhile works of lexicography like this one; anyone who already has a dictionary should have the SBD as an interpreter of what is going on in the English language.

[L.U.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Mental Health Prevention Office Opens” [headline in The State Scene June 1980, p. 15. Submitted by R. J. Gualtieri Amston, Connecticut. So much for the mental health of the residents of Connecticut.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Falcon’s New Illuminated Dictionary Of Ornithology

W. F. Hollander, (Falcon Diversified Co., 1979), 46pp.

This work firmly straddles two stools (not the pigeon kind) by providing what I assume to be useful text (I’m no ornithologist, despise city pigeons, and prefer birds of the featherless biped variety) punctuated by sketches of rarae aves like night owls, young turks, no-left terns, and other outrageous fauna. It would be best, for the serious (text) side of the book, to pick up the following from Hollander’s prefatory notes:

It has been estimated by reputable taxonomists that there are over 8000 species of birds in the world despite man’s heroic drive to make them extinct like the dodo. Most of us see very few of these even at the zoo. In addition, people who cultivate domestic birds-poultry, pigeons, parakeets, canaries, etc.— have created a multitude of breeds and varieties, with proper names. The fanciers don’t know the wild species, and the taxonomists don’t know the “artificial” or man-made types. We have tried to bridge the chasm a bit. Only a hint is provided, however, of the astounding adaptations in behavior, anatomy, ecology, and whatnot.

The alphabetical list includes mainly common or non-scientific terms except for Order names. After such terms come synonyms, then usually names of scientific genera (some probably out-of-date), and finally an indication of world distribution.

W. F. Hollander, Professor Emeritus of Genetics at Iowa State University (Ames), has not let anyone forget his state’s reputation for corn. He certainly hasn’t laid an egg with this book, which you can buy for chickenfeed from The Ink Spot, Burrton, Kansas 67020. It may leave you ‘owling with laughter or drive you cuckoo, all of which you will agree are pretty cheep ways of selling something.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The 4 Puzzler*

Will Shortz, ed., (Game), 8-1/2" × 11", 12pp.

Readers of VERBATIM know that we rarely review periodicals. We are making an exception in the case of the 4 * Puzzler because it is new (only the first two issues have appeared) and because we feel that there are many VERBATIM readers who are puzzle buffs. (We assume you already know about Games, which has been around for a few years.)

The 12 pages, printed clearly in two colors and with (for a change-N. Y. Times please note) enough space to write in the answers, are packed with all kinds of word and picture puzzles, from crosswords (cryptic and normal), acrostics, logic games, cryptograms, and cartoon rebuses to competitions and other miscellaneous fun. Not everyone likes every kind of puzzle, and there are quite a few to choose from in a given month’s selection. Certain old standbys appear in each issue, but each issue of The 4 * Puzzler offers new delights. For puzzle fans. The 4 * Puzzler is just their meat; for those who want to try their hand at a good variety of quality puzzles, there is no better place for them to start.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Pleasure In Words

Eugene T. Maleska, 549pp.,Simon & Schuster, 1980.

[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection]

Mr. Maleska is well known to puzzlers who see The New York Times, where he is the puzzle editor. This chunky book contains much information about the English language and its origins, with some chapters on etymology (indeed, most of the book deals with the various sources of words in English), some on names, and a relatively short section called “How to Construct Crossword Puzzles.” The text reflects the author’s personal biases—which is as it should be—and the style of writing is somewhat dull, at least if one compares it with that of a Willard Espy. The 20-page section on crossword-puzzle construction is neither as complete nor as helpful as The Compleat Cruciverbalist, reviewed elsewhere in this issue, and, since I am looking at uncorrected page proofs, I cannot tell what sort of illustrations are likely to be included in the final work.

I generally view with approbation any work that offers new and different ways of looking at English, and Mr. Maleska has organized his book so that all the words of Creek, Latin, Italian, and other origins are discussed in their respective chapters. Obviously, none of these treatments is exhaustive, and most of the book reads pretty much like a list of etymologies that have been rewritten in readable language, rescued from the abbreviated style found in most dictionaries. Thus, there isn’t very much here that is novel, and some of it is a bit misleading: what, for instance, is the point of going into long descriptions of words like fettucine, fra diavolo, gnocchi, and so on, when they are clearly loan words? Giving definitions of these words is not particularly helpful, and learning that the (Italian) meaning of fettucine is ‘little ribbons’ is not particularly revealing. This sort of thing goes on page after page for the various languages covered, and if that is your cup of tea, you will want to buy the book. An appendix lists words with definitions, some roots with their derivatives, and answers to quizzes that appear here and there. The bibliography (promised in the table of contents but not shown in the proofs received) should prove interesting. There is no listing for an index in the table of contents, and I hope there will be one, for without one it would be difficult to find again the information contained in this book once it has been read.

[L.U.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: N’heures Souris Rames

Ormonde de Kay, trans. and annot., (Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1980), 40pp. (and several unnumbered pages).

[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection]

The author’s debt and dedication to Luis d’Antin van Rooten (Mots d’Heures: Gausses, Rames) are acknowledged and the former, at least, is evident throughout this work. Like all great poetry, these examples must be read aloud for their full pleasure. Rather than clutter up this review with tiresome explanations, we reproduce here a brief sample of one piece, complete with annotations. Before leaving the reader to savor this morsel, it should be pointed out that this little book reflects the publisher’s efforts to appeal to the reader’s eye as much as de Kay’s efforts to appeal to his ear.

EPISTOLA {Patrick J. O’Connor}

The opening paragraph of Axel Hornos’s article on butterfly would lead the reader unversed in etymology to presume that the six English words in the list that follows are “English words of Latin ancestry.” Such is not the case.

Three of the words—hour, machine, and flower—are indeed borrowings from Latin. But the other three are most certainly not. Their resemblance to Latin is the result of English and Latin being related languages, descended from the same ancestral language. The difference between these two relations is crucial to the comparative linguist, since it is only the latter kind of words, descended independently from the ancestor language, that can be used to show genetic relation among languages.

[Patrick J. O’Connor, Yale Alumni Magazine and Journal]

EPISTOLA {W. R. Edwards}

Mr. Axel Hornos, in his article “Why Butterfly?” [V, 4], draws attention to the curious departure from tradition by the Romance languages in the naming of this insect. One’s wonder grows on investigating the equivalent in other European languages. It appears that this frail and ephemeral creature impressed almost every country with the need to find a separate name for it, unlike that in even related languages:

German — Schmetterling
Finnish — perhonen
Dutch — vlinder
Swedish — fjäril
Russian — báboshka
Danish — sommerfugl
Polish — motyl
Norwegian — sommerfugl — iâr fach yr haf
Greek — petaloúda
Hungarian — lepke
Welsh — glöyn byw — pili-pala

Can one detect, in pili-pala, an echo of the Latin papilio?

Most of these names do not suggest, to my ear, at least, the flutter of wings or the delicate poising on a flower, as do farfalla, mariposa, and fluture (but not the borborygmous borboleta), yet all members of my class of foreign students claimed that their native word conveyed such an association; and not one of the German speakers connected Schmetterling with the verb schmettern, meaning ‘to bray or blare’ (of a trumpet)’ or ‘to come down with a crash.” Students of all nationalities agreed in disliking our word, as they laughingly translated it as Butterfliege, mouche de beurre or mosca de mantequilla! I remembered Stephen Leacock’s mock Ibsen sketch with its love-song in mock Norwegian beginning, if I remember correctly:

Was ik en butterflog
Floeg ik den brust entswog.

To return to the question “Why Butterfly?”: as a schoolboy I had a theory that the word was a corruption of flutterby. The dictionary dispelled that naive notion by giving buttor-fléoge (OED) as the earliest form, establishing the oleaginous connection which Mr. Hornos rightly resents. The Oxford English Dictionary plainly states that the origin of the word is unknown. An explanation sometimes offered is that certain species are the colour of butter. It is true that conspicuous amongst the earliest to appear in the English spring is the handsome brimstone butterfly (Gonopteryx— the ‘angle-winged’). The male is indeed the colour of butter; but why extend the name to the many other species, not one of which is truly yellow? Lepidopterists must have been rare in the Dark Ages, and perhaps, after the first pleasure of seeing the brimstone, the Anglo-Saxon ignored the later varieties. Yet there was a persistent association of butterflies with a golden colour. King Lear planned to “laugh at gilded butterflies,” Drummond of Hawthornden wrote of “golden butterflies,” and the naturalist John Ray (1628-1705) when asked “What is the use of butterflies?” replied “To adorn the world and delight the eyes of men, to brighten the countryside, serving like so many golden spangles to decorate the fields.”

Another suggestion is that the first butterflies reappeared at the same season as butter. In the days before bovine dietetics, cattle, cropping the sparse winter pasture, may well have become thin and have ceased to yield milk until spring renewed the lush grass, bringing with it the early butterflies.

But enough of speculation: let it remain an Anglo-Saxon mystery. In the words of Chaucer: “Swich talkyng is nat worth a boterflye.”

[W. R. Edwards, Chesham, Buckinghamshire]

EPISTOLA {Hugo von Rodeck}

I have taken unusual interest in the discussion of the origin of the name butterfly, being an entomologist by training. My first teacher in the subject was Professor Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell, a British-born entomologist of some fame, who used to refer humorously to “butterfly/ flutter-by” as a possible origin of the name, but he always did so so lightly as to suggest that he did not take the derivation very seriously.

Seeing how seriously my colleagues who express themselves in VERBATIM are taking the problem, I am almost impelled to suggest that we may be going too far afield for an origin for butterfly.

I have taken a popular and elementary book on insects (Swain, The Insect Guide) off my shelf as an indication of our almost universal tendency to call all insects which fly flies. Eliminating the scores (nay, hundreds) of members of the order Diptera, the two-winged flies, most of which are properly called one or another kind of “flies,” the rest of the insect kingdom in our country includes alderflies, bat flies, caddisflies, damsel flies, dragonflies, fireflies, dobsonflies, lacewing flies, louse flies, mayflies, sawflies, scorpion flies, snakeflies, stink flies, stoneflies, and many others the mention of which would become tedious here, and none of which is a true fly in the technical sense.

In the face of such a widespread tendency to term any flying insect a “fly,” I am driven to the assumption that since the commonest diurnal lepidopteran in the European area is the yellow cabbage butterfly, Pieris spp. one might comfortably suppose that the group derived its name in this fashion.

The “butterfly/flutter-by” coincidence is then a pleasant linguistic accident to bemuse us who delight in playing with the sound of words. We might note that no insect has ever been named a “byfly” because it flies by.

[Hugo von Rodeck, Northglenn, Colorado]

EPISTOLA {Richard Hanser}

Victor Margolin’s piece on punning [VII, 1] was, as they say, worth the price of admission all by itself, and I will probably be stealing from it for a long time to come. Having opened prettily, I will now proceed to become irritating. Why don’t you identify your authors? I don’t give a damn that Victor Margolin comes from Evanston, Illinois (pedantically spelled out), and knowing it adds nothing to my knowledge of him. But I would like to know who he is, and so with your other writers.

In his first paragraph, Witzelsucht doesn’t mean ‘witseeking’ but ‘wit-mania.’ He (and you) have taken Sucht—mania, passion, rage’—for Such-e—‘search, quest.’ Blumlese doesn’t mean ‘flowers of reading’ but ‘flower gleanings or collection.’ Here lese, which he takes to refer to reading, actually is Lese, a selection or harvest or, as I say above, gleaning. Also Raumlehre doesn’t mean ‘space gauge’— where does ‘gauge’ get into it? —but ‘space study’—as Krankheitslehre means ‘study of illness.’ One more observation before I retire to curses and anathema: I emitted a small gasp when I read of Bierce’s “gentle humor.” Oh, boy! If there is life after death, look out. Bierce will come back and tear your ears off. It’s like speaking of the “winsome charm” of Dean Swift.

[Richard Hanser, Mamaroneck, New York]

EPISTOLA {Paul Pascal}

In Victor Margolin’s erudite, amusing, and (almost) comprehensive survey of the pun [VI, 1] I do find two imperfections which I am moved to comment on. One is the spelling paronomasia (Sic! Sic! Sic!) both in the subtitle and in the body of the article. An evil spell, indeed.

The other is the author’s dismissal of a whole fascinating millennium with the words, “Medieval literature is almost devoid of puns. . . .” The fact is that the pun reigned in torrents in the Middle Ages, particularly in its voluminous Latin literature.

The literature of medieval England practically begins with a series of pious puns attributed to Pope Gregory I and dubiously reported by the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. In Rome, before he became Pope, Gregory is said to have seen some unusually handsome slaves for sale in the slave market. Being informed that they were Angli, he compared them to angeli; further, when told that they were of the tribe called Deiri (roughly, Northumbrian), he replied happily that they were now rescued de ira (“from wrath”); finally, when it was reported that their king was named Aelli, Gregory’s comment was, “Alleluia!” Thereupon he proceeded to plan the evangelization of England.

Towards the other end of the Middle Ages, the satires of the wandering scholars or Goliards, represented for us largely by the Carmina Burana, are replete with word play of all kinds. In one of them, for example, the poet, referring to the common designation of Rome as caput mundi ‘head of the world,’ continues: “Sed nil capit mundum ‘but it contains nothing pure.’ Elsewhere in the same poem occurs a striking macaronic pun: Papa, si rem tangimus, nomen habet a re; / quicquid habent alii solus cult papare. Vel si oerbum Gallicum vis apocopare,! “Paies! Paies!” dist li mot, si vis impetrare. ‘The Pope, if we consider the matter, derives his name from fact;/ For he alone wishes to lap us (papare) whatever others possess. Or, if you will abbreviate a French word, “Pay! Pay!” the saying goes, if you want to win your case.’

It was early in the history of their order, which was founded in 1216, that the Dominicans came to be called Domini canes ‘the dogs of the Lord.’ (It is to be noted that originally this was meant not in any derogatory sense, as it is often understood today, but rather in admiration. The dog, or watchdog, is traditionally a symbol of preaching; and, in fact, a dog still figures in the iconography of St. Dominic.)

It might even be maintained that puns play a role in medieval learning, inasmuch as mere phonetic resemblance was thought to be the principal element in the etymology of a word, regardless of other considerations, such as history, logic, or common sense. For this reason, there was no difficulty in accepting the proposition that a word could have more than one etymology, if it lent itself to more than one pun. Here, for example, are a few of the thousands of clues to the “true meaning” of words to be found in the encyclopedic Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, one of the most influential books of the Middle Ages. It will be observed that Isidore’s standards for claiming phonetic resemblance are far from confining. The puns, of course, are in the Latin only. It is useless to attempt to reflect them in the translation. Caelebs dictus quasi caelo beatus ‘Celibate, so called as if blessed in heaven.’ Dims . . . quasi divina ira in id actus ‘Dire, as if driven to that condition by divine wrath.’ Dubius, incertus; quasi duarum viarum ‘Dubious, uncertain; as if of two roads.’ Does this tell us something, about the way Isidore pronounced b and v? Fatigatus, quasi fatis agitatus ‘Fatigued, as if driven by the fates.’ Luscus, quod lucem ex parte sciat ‘One-eyed, because he knows light only partially.’ Mutus, quia vox eius non est sermo, nisi mugitus ‘Mute, because his voice is not speech but mooing.’ Here the pun, alas, survives the translation. Niger, quasi nubiger ‘Black, as if cloud-bearing.’ Piger, quasi pedibus aeger ‘Lazy, as if sick in the feet.’ As tempting as it is to speculate otherwise, we must finally acknowledge that Isidore is in deadly earnest with all this. But despite the lack of humorous intent, surely these are as much puns as they are etymologies.

To compensate Mr. Margolin for my appearing to take issue with some of his splendid article, let me contribute to his collection a pun which he may not know, or he might have included it. While not medieval, it is (partly) Latin, and so relates to my other examples (at least as well as the words in many puns relate to each other). One of the detractors of Martin Luther (Luterus, in Latin), a man named D. Eck, remarked that if you took away his r he became luteus ‘muddy.’ Luther’s retort: “Yes, and if you give myr to him, he becomes Dreck.”

It should be clear that I am a devoted medievalist, and I rejoice to see the message of the Middle Age spread.

[Paul Pascal, University of Washington]

EPISTOLA {Harry Loshak}

Victor Margolin [VII,1] quoted Hook’s defence of the pun (“A double meaning has a double sense”) but did not mention what is perhaps the best example of such a pun!

Is life worth living? That depends on the liver. Does anyone know its author?

[Harry Loshak, Cambridge, England]

EPISTOLA {Henry P. Lewis-Comas}

In your review of The Reader Over Your Shoulder [VII, I], I was slightly surprised to find that you consider even doubtful that serai and serez are phonetically distinguishable. I had always thought them to be perfect homophones, but I sought corroboration for my opinion from two French friends of unassailable authority on the specific subject of the French pronunciation of these two words. I consulted each of them separately (no communication between them on this point), and they both agreed with me that these two verb forms are indeed phonetically indistinguishable. They both added, as a baker’s dozen, that some purists make a shade of phonetic distinction between the indicative, serai, and the conditional, serais.

In “Colorful Language” [VI, 1] Sterling Eisiminger says that the rather familiar Italian expression essere al verde means not only ‘to be insolvent’ but ‘to be in debt’ as well. On the basis of my 28 years in Italy, plus the corroboration of two Italian schoolteachers, my maid, and my 26-year-old daughter, whose first language is Italian, I can safely affirm that essere al verde means only to be ‘broke’ and not ‘in the red.’ He also gives vert' histoire [sic: should be verte] as meaning in French ‘off-color tale’ and says that red cabbage is black in Italian. With the backing of the authorities mentioned above, I fully disagree. Then, as a born Spanish speaker, substantiated by dictionaries, I must add that Mr. Eisiminger’s collateral familiar meanings of naranjada and naranjo should be rendered in English as ‘a gross saying’ and ‘a gross person,’ respectively, instead of ‘rude.’ At any rate, neither of these expressions is ever, ever used, any more than the dodo uses its wings.

[Henry P. Lewis-Comas, Rome]

Editor’s Note

No, we are not turning VERBATIM into a puzzle magazine Word Ways and Games fulfill that function very well already. But we could not resist setting forth a few of our efforts that resulted from the preholiday silly season that pervades these offices. Please let me know if you would like to continue to see “Paring Pairs” in VERBATIM and, of course, we should like to know if you like the “Anglo-American Crossword.” If readers do not protest too loudly, we shall continue both in future issues.

Paring Pairs No. 1

(a). Growing pile of rubbish. (34,3) Compost Heap.
(b). Sound metallically. (30,40) Copper Bottomed.
(c). Two connected with pipe. (7,14) Clay; Drain.
(d). But not press cutting? (23,4) Paper Clip.
(e). Two cities. (8,41) Intercourse; Paris.
(f). A book. (27,6) Animal Farm.
(g). Venus for Communists? (37,5) Morning Star.
(h). Two suggesting baked. (10,17) Half; Beans.
(i). For a tiny professor? (9,16) High Chair.
(j). 16 oz. of silver. (22,42) Pound Sterling.
(k). Two synonyms. (26,31) Proper; Seemly.
(l). Two that are black. (13,45) Ebony; Anthracite.
(m). Having the opposite effect. (33,46) CounterProductive
(n). Two suggesting mine. (28,36) Limpet; Sweeper.
(o). Where to teach the wealthy. (38,29) Private School.
(p). Two with bone. (12,20) Funny; China.
(q). A proverbial weapon? (11,2) Maxim Gun.
(r). Two sauces. (32,44) Tabasco; Worcestershire.
(s). Two connected with blue. (24,35) Cobalt; Bottle.
(t). Wimbledon assizes? (39,43) Tennis Court.
(u). For Trojan gymnasts? (15,1) Wooden Horse.
(v). Grammatical error? (18,21) Split Infinitive.
(w). Two going with breaker. (19,47) Ice; Tie.
(x). A novel. (48,25) Little Women.

The winners of Paring Pairs No. 1 (Answer: 49. Classical.) are Jack Luzzatto, Bronx, New York, Donald Marritz, Biglerville, Pennsylvania, and Stephen Waters, Rome, New York, U.S. (received on the same day in Essex) and Jared Weinberger, Bologna, Italy and Thomas M. Lillis, County Clare, Ireland (received first in Aylesbury).

Paring Pairs No. 2

Paring Pairs No. 1 was too easy, judging from the number of right answers received (though only five readers qualified as, winners by sending in their correct answers first). Therefore, we have laced this version with Spoonerisms, homophones, homographs, puns, and other nasties to make it harder or, as they say in puzzledom, “more challenging.” In consequence, we are raising the stakes: the winners will receive either a copy of the Collector’s Edition of Thomas Middleton’s Light Refractions (retail value $30) or a copy of English English, by Norman W. Schur (retail value $24.95). Those living in the U.K., Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa should send their answers (on a post card, please) to VERBATIM, 2 Market Square, Aylesbury, Bucks., England. All others should send them to VERBATIM, Box 668, Essex, CT 06426, U.S.A.

To allow for the sloth of the various postal systems on which we depend for the delivery of VERBATIM and to make it fairer for those who live far from either one of our offices, we shall arrange to collect all correct answers for 21 days, starting with the day we receive the first correct answer, and to draw one name in Aylesbury and one name in Essex, with a prize awarded from each office. Please indicate on your answer card which book you would like to receive.

The clues are given in items lettered (a-z); the answers are given in numbered items which must be matched with each other to solve the clues. In some cases, a numbered word may be used more than once, but after all matchings have been completed, one numbered word will remain, and that is the correct answer. Our answer is the only correct one. The solution will be published in the next VERBATIM along with the names of the winners.

(a). Change the locals.
(b). Person in charge of those occupying lavatories.
(c). Three-card monte.
(d). Hat.
(e). Trouble.
(f). Not Oxbridge, origami.
(g). Tired horseman.
(h). Peter x 2. Missouri?
(i). Trap.
(j). High-grade meat. bear.
(k). Low-grade meat.
(l). Trajan.
(m). Wardrobe mister.
(n). Time drags behind him.
(o). Lord Tom Thumb’s wife?
(p). Duke always took it.
(q). Out-of-town comedian.
(r). Counterfeiter.
(s). Lollipop.
(t). Paris hotel.
(u). Financial gains from origami.
(v). Oxbridge teams in Missouri?
(w). A washout next to real bear.
(x). Slow writing.
(y). To easily solve.
(z). More than eight containers for wood defects.

Answers

(1). Brick.
(2). Fall.
(3). Tower.
(4). Natives.
(5). Card.
(6). Hanger.
(7). Prophets.
(8). Commander.
(9). Blues.
(10). Rig.
(11). Haggard.
(12). Cut.
(13). Water.
(14). Fiend.
(15). Pooh.
(16). Pots.
(17). Visiting.
(18). Gear.
(19). Eater.
(20). Ship.
(21). Queen.
(22). Finger.
(23). Steer.
(24). Dragon.
(25). Sank.
(26). Infinitive.
(27). Closet.
(28). Alter.
(29). Lady.
(30). Paper.
(31). Sham.
(32). Thimble.
(33). Arch.
(34). Eh?
(35). Lieutenant.
(36). Rider.
(37). Upper.
(38). Pumpkin.
(39). Watch.
(40). Red.
(41). Dead.
(42). George.
(43). Paper.
(44). Head.
(45). Hot.
(46). Real.
(47). Split.
(48). Pen.
(49). Train.
(50). St. Louis.
(51). Good.
(52). Nine.
(53). Bum.

Iterative Redundancies

Inspired by the contributions of Benjamin Keller and Jay Ames [VII, I], we offer the following quiz.

Each of the numbered items is a clue to a one- or two-word answer that consists of parts that are spelled identically. Example: father: papa.

Answers whose parts are spelled differently don’t count (e.g., Lallah, cuckoo, lily, etc.). Watch out for tricks; some are used more than once. If you want to see more of these, see the Autumn 1980 issue. Answers are listed later on in this issue.>

(1). La Bohème heroine. Flintstones).
(2). Farewell.
(3). Girl’s nickname.
(4). Quickly! tribesman.
(5). “The Governor and —”(U.S. TV series), arising from ignorance.
(6). Mustard pickle.
(7). Dog.
(8). Nurse in Peter Pan.
(9). Barbara — (nickname of TV interviewer).
(10). Kind of avis.
(11). Ms. Osterwald.
(12). Overly much. utterance.
(13). Train from Chattanooga.
(14). Antiaircraft cannon (2).
(15). Society Island.
(16). Ancient Egyptian god of the ocean.
(17). Racehorse, monkey.
(18). M. Le Moko.
(19). Kind of -rum.
(20). Starlet activity.
(21). Sunken fence, idol.
(22). Peter Joyce.
(23). Wicked stepmother’s confidant.
(24). Yale yell.
(25). 1940s' expression of approval or excitement.
(26). Small African antelope.
(27). Barney’s son (in TV’s.)
(28). Prison.
(29). North African
(30). Unanticipated problem
(31). Belittle.
(32). G & S characters (2).
(33). Puccini character.
(34). Rin’s surname.
(35). Nut.
(36). Ammunition.
(37). Santa’s joyful
(38). Toast.
(39). Lava.
(40). Cheerleader’s cue.
(41). Pitcher Newsome.
(42). Extraordinary example.
(43). South American
(44). Art movement.
(45). Feather palm.
(46). M. Chevalier’s song
(47). Hawaiian bird.
(48). Kind of -versal.
(49). African charm.
(50). Hawaiian goose.
(51). Politician’s perquisite.
(52). Diminutive comic-strip character.
(53). Hawaiian dance.
(54). Resembles pareu.

Double Reverse Spoonerisms

Each clue suggests a phrase, which, when Spoonerized, yields another phrase; the meanings of both phrases are couched, albeit subtly, in the definition. Answers are on page 22.

(a). I’d give my shirt for some fingernail soup.
(b). Was Raquel Welch’s publicity program inspiration for Dickensian novel?
(c). Pinch-visaged before the hearth.
(d). Melodramatic start reverses to utter failure.
(e). Suppliant after the swag he smuggled.
(f). Spirituous British sandwich lands an innocent in jail.
(g). Odd university official alternates with expensive homosexual .
(h). When lepidopteran passes, spread takes wing.
(i). Shame on letting the yeast die.
(j). Look at the lager and play without music.
(k). Describing Mayor La Guardia’s abrupt departure from the phone company.
(l). It is equitable to divide up the counterfeit booty.
(m). Apiary banner resides in disreputable hotel.
(n). Discalced, brown gamin with Chinese wood.
(o). Ruins boxes after entering free.
(p). Fog for the barbecue is profitable.
(q). Delighted grumbling dog has gone west.
(r). Sleep while staying on the horse.
(s). If she had smiled, the outgoing administration wouldn’t be outgoing.
(t). Do everything to rock the seabird to sleep.
(u). Incongruous cleaning tool used by a sissy.
(v). Work hard there to produce liquor from germinated grain.
(w). This snooty fellow cons everyone.
(x). Many women think they live here when their husbands lose their vigor.
(y). To be surprised while the nail is in the oven.
(z). Many who undergo this are happy to find a connection abroad.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“. . . There is no trace of any commission for this work, although Handel might have written it as an act of praise for his recovery from paralysis the following year.” [From an advertisement in The Musical Heritage Review, IV: 14 (10 November 1980), for “Israel in Egypt.” Submitted by Emily Z. Tabuteau, East Lansing Michigan who considers the act most prescient.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“7 oz. of choice sirloin broiled to your likeness served with golden fried onion rings.” [from the November 19-26, 1980 Weekly Specials on the menu of the St. Louis County Country Club. Submitted by Maryan Eger Kirkwood Missouri, who comments: The golden fried onion rings impart just the right halo effect!]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Police said the bodies were found at 12:30 a.m. in Snider’s bedroom in a two-story house under a freeway in West Los Angeles that he shared with two other people.” [From an AP dispatch in The San Diego Union, August 16, 1980. Submitted by Thomas S. Terrill, Carlsbad, California. We know those Californians are rich, but this is too much!]

EPISTOLA {Mitio Inokuti}

In the list of words for cock-a-doodle-doo in Eric Winter’s article “Odd Couples” [VII,I], there is at least one error. The word in Japanese is kokekokko (in the standard transliteration). One pronounces it roughly as “kowkaykowkko.”

The “nyaw” is a good phonetic representation, but is expressed as niyao in the standard transliteration.

[Mitio Inokuti, La Grange, Illinois]

EPISTOLA {John M. Campbell}

Through fifty years, I have read many complaints about our normal spellings of English words and many schemes and systems of proposed reforms, but never seen a defense or advocacy of the established usage. Most “reforms” would revise spelling to conform to pronunciation, neglecting or discounting the very different pronunciations of most common words throughout the English-speaking world. Virginia Howard’s “Pooh-Poohey [VII,1] may shock some quixotic iconoclasts into sense.

In a world where pronunciation varies subtly or drastically from region to region, century to century, the advantages of a completely arbitrary and conventional orthography for distant communication and permanent record are obvious. Today’s post brought me letters from Edinburgh and Trinidad; I am grateful not to have to puzzle out braid Scots or Calypso lilt. If we allow convention a virtue, then any reasonable convention will do; and our dictionary spellings have the advantage of being already established in the habits of our populations. Schedule is a more useful word, however pronounced, than “skedule” or “shedule” or both coëxistent would be. “Tho,” “thru,” and “enuf” would likely offend few readers a century after reform, but they would miss the self-evident distinction between, e.g., through and threw. Though such pairs are usually distinguishable by context, reform would cost us this touch of redundancy by which so much of our intelligibility is facilitated. (“The trumpeter ternd cold and blu” and “He thru the dery made a sale” are pretty far-fetched, but “My students reed a lot, on the hole” is not.)

Perhaps no more need be said on this subject, though I once lectured on it for an hour, but, if one of your experts writes an article, he will find a willing reader in

[John M. Campbell, Paris]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Was cut despite permission to enter the Corps Diplomatique. (7)
5. The grand mal? Not in the least.
9. Outrages of blackouts (')are eliminated. (7)
10. Anthony, the commercial jingle specialist? (7)
11. Characteristic of our tardy oil and energy program. (8)
12. Really free is the way he likes it. (4)
15. Property seized to fulfill pledges causes badly strained virtues. (10, 5)
16. Pimps and ponces at the airport, or working stiffs? (7, 8)
20. Heavenly dishes do make a mess of us. (4)
21. Mean fist leading a strong arm in a football knockdown. (5, 3)
24. A great year among the top talent. (3, 4)
25. Red who was run to heaven by his own comrades. (7)
26. Snack fit for a king, so I hear. (7)
27. Dead Red, still feared. (7)

Down

1. “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too —”—Yogi Berra. (7)
2. Sings the praises of (7) the old phone rates.
3. One whose diet would be eat vinegar to others.(10)
4. Tore one’s hair out when deeply troubled. (10)
5. Type of water used to split the atom. (4)
6. Sailors in blue. (4)
7. Booked and bound for Casablanca, perhaps.(7)
8. Scene stealer in Hamlet. (7)
13. Made less great or utterly destroyed. (10)
14. Cupid fooled with a little governor, (1, 3, 2, 4)
16. Wail for a dead whale. (7)
17. Genial joshing from a decent chap. (4, 3)
18. Terribly pleased to have passed. (7)
19. Some day like this is fit only for a dog. (7)
22. List of all that’s left. (4)
23. The French of the Big Apple disavow it. (4)

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. VI-brat-E
5. Dew-Fall
9. Perpetual motion
10. DISPOR-ti-VE
11. Berg
13. SH-err-Y
14. Pre-amble
17. Re-sonant
18. Zircon
20. Co-co
22. Jack-knifed
25. Ulterior motives
26. Ex-press
27. She-a-Red

Down

1. V-a-P-id
2. Birdseeds
3. AXE-T-o-g-R-ind
4. Equate
5. DELIVERY (very devil minus V)
6. Wool
7. A-GI-le
8. Long green
12. MAR-I-one-TTE
13. Stric-T-ure
15. Buck fever
16. In-famous
19. Ski-MP-s
21. Cutup
23. Dosed
24. Free

Double Reverse Spoonerisms: Answers

(a). Clawed Broth.
(b). A Sale of Two Titties.
(c). Plier-face.
(d). Thud and Blunder.
(e). Lootbeggar.
(f). Rum Bap.
(g). Queer Dean.
(h). Flutter by.
(i). Fie! the Barm.
(j). Eye Beer.
(k). Like a Hat out of Bell.
(l). Share Fake.
(m). Bee Flag.
(n). Barefoot Boy with Teak of Chan.
(o). Crate Gasher.
(p). Mist for the Grill.
(q). Happy Grunting Hound.
(r). Sit the Hack.
(s). Dame Luck.
(t). Leave No Tern Unstoned.
(u). Silk Mop.
(v). Malt Signs.
(w). Joe Snob.
(x). Male State.
(y). Bakin' a Tack.
(z). Foreign Tether.

Iterative Redundancies-Answers

(1). Mimi.
(2). Bye-bye.
(3). Fifi.
(4). Chop-chop.
(5). J.J.
(6, 7). Chow-chow.
(8). Nana.
(9). Wawa.
(10). Rara.
(11). Bibi.
(12). Too, too.
(13). Choo-choo.
(14). Pom-pom, Ack-ack.
(15). Bora Bora.
(16). Num.
(17). Ceegee.
(18). Pepe.
(19). Summa summa-.
(20). Twinkle, twinkle>.
(21). Ha-ha.
(22). Haw-Haw.
(23). Mirror, mirror.
(24). Boolah Boolah.
(25). Hubbal Hubba!
(26). Dik-dik.
(27). Bambam.
(28). Sing Sing.
(29). Berber.
(30). Unk unk.
(31). Pooh-pooh.
(32). Yum-Yum,Koko.
(33). Cio-Cio.
(34). Tin Tin.
(35). Coco.
(36). BB.
(37). Ho! Ho!
(38). Cin! Cin!
(39). Ao.
(40). Hip, hip.
(41). Bobo.
(42). Lulu.
(43). Titi.
(44). Dada.
(45). Grugru.
(46). Gigi.
(47). O-o.
(48). Quaqua-.
(49). Grigri, greegree.
(50). Nene.
(51, 52). Lulu.
(53). Hula-hula.
(54). Lava-lava.

EX CATHEDRA

In addition to the usual Matchbox, Betsy Wetsy, and other games and toys offered for Christmas a few weeks ago, was a host of new items that have, by now, probably disappeared from the shelves of shops catering to parents who cater to children. By now, in fact, many of them may be lying at the bottom of some closet, broken beyond repair or rejected either out of boredom or because their batteries (not included) have died. What interests me about these toys is their names, for the manufacturers must clearly have some notion that the name given to a toy or game has some effect on its sale. Thus, Matchbox is descriptive of the size of the cars; Betsy Wetsy, Wet-Me-Wet, Wipe Your Tears Baby, Mattel Baby Cries for You, and similar objects are descriptive of the various biological and emotional excreta that a child may expect when squeezing in the proper place, pressing the appropriate button, or simply waiting the prescribed amount of time.

The recent crop of children’s amusements includes a number of toys with names that would dissuade any peaceloving parents from allowing their children within a whiff of a toy shop: Slip Disc (Milton Bradley), contrary to the inference of its name, is neither, a shrink-pack of wet banana peels nor a collection of molded figures of middle-aged men, doubled over, clutching their backs, and bearing an agonized expression on their faces; Run Yourself Ragged (Tomy) is probably much tamer than it sounds, for it is described as an “obstacle course for armchair athletes”; Illco offers Emergency Dashboard, complete with siren, horn, simulated CB, and “more”—it takes little imagination to speculate on the doting uncle who presented a nephew (I assume) with such an instrument of torture, but quite some imagination on the youngster’s part to reconstruct the rest of the vehicle on the living-room carpet.

One of my favorites is Kenner’s Play-Doh Doctor Drill ‘n Fill, consisting of a head with a large, open mouth and a few plastic implements. Apparently, the teeth (which have faces printed on them!) are removable: “Put the teeth in one by one!” read the instructions. The child (Can you imagine bringing up a child to be a dentist!?) pulls out the teeth and, I suppose, fills their cavities with Play-Doh. What hours of chairside fun await the tyke supplied with “three 6-oz. cans of modeling compound”!

For those children with a more destructive (or, at least, nonreconstructive) bent, there awaits Mattel’s Hot Wheek Wipeout: “Watch for a wipeout, keep ‘em on the track!” reads the copy on the box. Shouldn’t these be sold with an Emergency Room Doctor Kit, complete with defibrillator (battery not included)? Then, there’s Illco’s Musical Cash Register, sure to disappoint the mercenary child because after it has been wound up, a drawer pops open on the press of a button, and music plays. What does it play? “Pennies from Heaven”? “I Found a Million-Dollar Baby in a Five and Ten Cent Store”? Gabriel offers some rather morbid contributions led by Sudden Death (suitable for budding body snatchers) and Colossal Fossil Fight, which is distinguished not only by rhyme and alliteration but by descriptive copy sure to attract all nine-year-old paleontologists, to wit, “Titanic dinosaurs battle for supremacy in the Valley of the Bones.”

Apparently, animals are big these days—in more ways than one. A ready competitor to Colossal Fossils is Hasbro’s Hungry Hungry Hippos, more alliterative than literal, for hippos, as far as I know, are herbivores offering a greater threat to the house philodendron than to the yobbo who dares open his box. So much for the macroscopic. At the microscopic end of the spectrum is Ideal’s My Dog Has Fleas, which, as far as I could see, had more to do with dogs and fleas than with musical staves.

Colorforms came up with the (sensational) Hook, Line, and Stinker “Scratch & Sniff Fishing Game.” Apparently the players discover a catch by identifying it by smell, a rather sad commentary on the freshness of fish in the markets of America. Turning to those who cater to the more destructive instincts among the younger set, Kenner makes (and, presumably, sells) a Starwars 3-position Laser Rifle, though it was not immediately apparent what the three positions were. By far the most aggressive toy, made by—Wait for it!—Fun Stuf, is named simply Hulk, an innocuous-sounding word till you discover that it comes complete “with rage cage and split-away shirt.” In 1980, Fun Stuf also promoted its “New! Smash-out handcuffs.”

So much for the animate and those items suggesting that their victims can quickly become inanimate. My favorite, even though I am not a train buff, is something called a “Life-Like Railroad Car.” A life-like railroad car?

If I gain any more weight, I shall have my own splitaway shirt, and, if the American judiciary goes much softer on punishing criminals, felons might as well be provided with smash-out handcuffs. My gift problems were solved by sending all my female friends Christmas cards with Scratch & Sniff perfume panels and my male friends cards with Scratch & Sniff scotch panels. The latter report a safe (if slightly insane) New Year’s Eve; the former nothing worse than a broken fingernail or two.

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“More good news is that the Brooks company may issue a shoe designed for the higli-arched foot, which can cause the runner major medical problems.” [From “Medical Advice,” by Dr. Geo. Sheehan, in Runner’s World, November 1980, p. 100. Submitted by N. M. McGee, Daly City, California.]

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COVINA. As part of an on going program to upgrade the present system, Covina City Water Department is replacing an 8 “water main with a new 12” one on Rowland Avenue west of Grand Avenue near Barranca Avenue to increase and improve fire flow to the area. [From Pipeline, November-December, 1980, p. 4. Submitted by David C. Michen, Pomona, California. Residents of the area take notice and increase your fire insurance at once!]

Editor’s Note

We apologize for being so late with the Winter issue, but we hope that our readers will agree that it was worth waiting for - our first 24-page issue!

Internet Archive copy of this issue

‘Visible Language. Merald E. Wrolstad, Ph.D., Editor and Publisher, P.O. Box 1972VB, Cleveland, Ohio 44106. $15.00/yr. (Foreign subscribers add $1.00 for postage.) ↩︎

Blends, Blands, and Blunds

OBITER DICTA: Scrutinizing the Matter in Hand

Before I Am Too Late

More Turkish Agglutinative Delights

OBITER DICTA: Watching Our g’s and q’s

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Philip Howard on English English

Troy Romps—Hector Blanks Creeks on Two-hitter

The Exception That Proves the Rule

Street Names Fun Game

Additional “Odd Couples”

Ormonyms/Junctures

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BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Language-The Loaded Weapon

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BIBLIOGRAPHIA:

The Book Of Surnames and The Origin Of English Surnames

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Legal Thesaurus

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Compleat Cruciverbalist Or How To Solve And Compose Crossword Puzzles For Fun And Profit and Crossword Puzzle Compendium

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BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Dictionary Of Visual Language

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Second Barnhart Dictionary Of New English

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BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Falcon’s New Illuminated Dictionary Of Ornithology

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The 4 * Puzzler

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Pleasure In Words

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: N’heures Souris Rames

EPISTOLA {Patrick J. O’Connor}

EPISTOLA {W. R. Edwards}

EPISTOLA {Hugo von Rodeck}

EPISTOLA {Richard Hanser}

EPISTOLA {Paul Pascal}

EPISTOLA {Harry Loshak}

EPISTOLA {Henry P. Lewis-Comas}

Paring Pairs No. 1

Paring Pairs No. 2

Answers

Iterative Redundancies

Double Reverse Spoonerisms

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EPISTOLA {Mitio Inokuti}

EPISTOLA {John M. Campbell}

Crossword Puzzle

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Double Reverse Spoonerisms: Answers

Iterative Redundancies-Answers

EX CATHEDRA

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BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The 4 Puzzler*