VOL VIII, No 1 [Summer 1981]

Glaswegians and Liverpudlians

Robert A. Fowkes, Yonkers, New York

Denizens of No Mean Burys Less baffling to us Americans than “Beauchamp, pronounced Beecham” or “Caius, pronounced Keys,” but certainly no less intriguing, and the designations of the inhabitants of some cities in England and Scotland. Among the best-known examples are Glaswegian and Liverpudlian, for inhabitants of Glasgow and Liverpool, respectively, followed closely by Cantabrig-ian (for Cambridge), Aberdonian (Aberdeen) and, more remotely, by Mancunian (Manchester) and Salopian (applying to both Shrewsbury and its county, Shropshire). A group in onian (in addition to Aberdonian) includes Bathonian and Exonian, which are less transparent than Bostonian, Etonian, Meltonian (for Melton Mowbray), names on which they may be patterned.

If we have such a practice in the United States, it occurs either in nonce forms, like Albanians (heard once in the sense of people from Albany) or in semifacetious formations: Michiganders, Trojans (from Troy, New York), Sicilians (Messina, New York), Bozemaniacs (Bozeman, Montana), Plattsb(o)urgeois, et al. Gothamites for New Yorkers is not the same thing.

Glaswegian, which is not only a noun applied to the denizens but also an adjective meaning characteristic of that city, is said to have been made up in imitation of the far less familiar Galwegian, for inhabitants of Galloway, Scotland (not a town, granted, but a district). Galwegian itself is considered an imitation of Norwegian, from Norway. Since earlier forms of Norway in English include Norroway, the proportion Norroway: Norwegian = Galloway: Galwegian would be logical, although the claim might be demolished as an anachronism if it were shown that Galwegian came into being long after Norroway ceased to be current. Even then, the relationship of -way: -wegian might suffice. Since Galway, Ireland, also has -way, it would not be inconceivable for that town to acquire a competing form for Galloway’s Galwegian. I am not aware that it has, and it is even possible that Ireland does not go in for such shenanigans.

Glasgow has no -way, obviously, and perhaps its general similarity to Galloway accounts for the analogical formation. Or maybe the ow sequence does it (although Moscow doesn’t yield *Moscwegian, nor Harrow *Harwegian). Why should Norwegian come from Norway in the first place? Ultimately it is because an Old Norse form was Norvegr (nor(o)- ‘north’, vegr ‘way’). At some time Medieval Latin gave it the shape norvegia (adj.); cf. also French norvégien, German norwegisch (Norwegen = ‘Norway’). In the Norwegian language itself, the adjective ‘Norwegian’ is norsk (which once was nordisk), and the name of the country is Norge, with at least a written g, although there is now no sound of g in the name. The -wegian of Glaswegian has acquired quasijocular character, and the whole name is doubtless often felt as facetious, depending, of course, on who is speaking and who is listening. Scowegian used to be heard in my high-school days as a disparaging word for Scandinavians, along with Scandihoovian, a disrespectful distortion of Scandinavian with suggestions of the ending of words like Peruvian, perhaps. Both seem, fortunately, dead. If I have shied away from any etymological elucidation of Glasgow, it is partly because that hasn’t too much to do with Glaswegain and partly because the realm of place names is the most precarious of etymological terrains. If the reader believes that Glasgow is from Gaelic Gleschu and means ‘dear green spot’ (long ago!) or ‘dark glen’ or even ‘blue hound,’ it is difficult to prove or disprove the case.

Liverpudlian, unlike Glaswegian, requires little cogitation to fathom. The pool is humorously altered to its pretended diminutive puddle, and from Liverpud(d)le we get Liverpudlian. There is some dispute about the meaning of pool, but there is no agreement at all regarding Liver-, which may be a chopped version of a Norse word for ‘slope,’ or the name of an extinct bird, or an adjective ‘clotted,’ or a Celtic word for ‘rushes,’ or another meaning ‘wild iris,’ etc. If it has to be a botanical phenomenon, the resemblance to liverwort is tempting—always comically reminisecnt of liverwurst. But if Liverpudlian suggests liver pudding or Lilliputian, that may merely reflect the state and size of the brains of those thinking such a thing. It is a pretty big pool to be called a puddle, in any event, and English understatement (litotes) must have had a hand in the creation. Other -pool names seem not to be subjected to the process, although some music-hall comedian might be quite capable of saying *Blackpudlian or *Hartlepudlian.

A Cantabrigian is a student at Cambridge, or a townsman. The name would be a legitimate derivative of Cantabrigia, often called the Latin name of Cambridge, although the use of “Latin” in such instances can be misleading. Latin names of British places were written by ecclesiastical scribes, then by lawyers and scholars. They were rewritings of English names already there, themselves often alterations of earlier Celtic ones, which could have come from pre-Celtic names themselves. Cantabrigia incorporates and distorts various Celtic elements in a marvelous confusion. Canta- replaces Granta (the British Celtic name of the river, still found in Grantchester, some two-and-a-half miles southwest of Cambridge; Welsh Caergrawnt ‘Cambridge’ shows the same elements as Grantchester in reverse order). The -bridge of Cambridge probably has nothing to do with English bridge. Never mind. An abbreviated form of Cantabrigian, Cantab., is used to refer to students (e.g., “The Cantabs. say …”) or to the degrees acquired (“B.A. Cantab.”).

Oxonian should logically follow, or precede, a mention of Cambridge and Cantabrigian. There is an implied Latin Oxonia, possibly with accompanying adjective. If so, the ford has obviously been entirely omitted. Old English had Oxenaford and Oxenford. Several Oxford graduates have pointed out to me that Oxford = Bosporus, and most Greek teachers shudder at the suggestion. Yet, if the maiden Io swam that strait after being transformed into a heifer, the etymology seems to be more than sheer bull. If the objection is to equating ‘ox’ with ‘heifer,’ perhaps we should point out that the Proto-Indo-European word for ‘bovine’ was both masculine and feminine. The words Oxonolatry and oxonianize have deservedly failed to prosper. And Oxfordian seems confined mainly to geology.

Aberdonian as an inhabitant of Aberdeen, or an adjective applying to that town, might seem superficially to be a formation similar to Oxonian (and other rhyming words: Etonian, et al.). But there may be more to the story than that. To the north of Aberdeen (by now, perhaps in the north) is the mouth of the Don; to the south, that of the Dee. The old town is closer to the mouth of the Don and could appropriately be called Aberdonia in a Latinized form. Aberdonian would be almost acceptable etymologically. I say almost, because of the Aber. In Brythonic (Welsh, especially) aber is the word for the mouth of a river, estuary, etc., as in Aberystwyth, et al. The corresponding Gaelic word is inver, cf. Inverness. Now, the territory of Brythonic Celtic once extended northward into Scotland, and it used to be thought that the northern limits of Brythonic habitation could be determined by ascertaining how far north the names in aber extended. It turns out, however, that abers were found farther north than they have any right to be, as shown by archaeological and other evidence, and this is true of the aber in Aberdeen. (There must have been imitation of Aber- names in areas of Scotland where they did not properly belong).

The city of Bath, famed as a spa since the Roman occupation, has its own special designation, both noun and adjective: Bathonian. A quotation from 1766 in the OED has the lines: “Whose genius guides, whose counsel guards/The labors of Bathonian bards” (Horace is apparently referred to). Bathonian could imply a Latinized name Bathonia (complete with non-Latin thorn, th), with -onia modeled on other such names. But Welsh and other evidence makes it likely that the name once had a form Bathon, apparently from the dative plural (Old English Bathum ‘at the baths’—cf. Baden in Germany, etc.). Bathan-caster is also attested. It is possible that Bathonian = Bathon + -ian and involves memory, or discovery, of that salubrious fact.

After the cleansing tone of Bath, Salop sounds like a filthy letdown. Salop and Salopian may seem not to belong precisely to the group of words being considered, for they now apply mainly to a county, Shropshire, but they can also be used for Shrewsbury. By now the only resemblance to the original form is the initial S-, because Old English had Scrobbesbyrig. By Middle English times, after Norman tampering or bungling, it had become Sloppesberie and Saloppesberie, the drastic alteration resulting from dissimilation. Salopia is a pseudo-Latin writing for Salop, abstracted from Saloppesberie. An elderly gentleman of my acquaintance, a native of Shrewsbury, defiantly refused to write Salop in addressing letters to relatives in Shrewsbury, always inscribing Shropshire in a strong, protesting hand. The old Shropshire lad also eschewed the pronunciation Shrowsbury [šrouzbrI], thought in some quarters to be the proper one (and actually a bit closer to the expected “historical” form). He attributed it to the “toffs in yonder school,” as if Shrewsbury were a stone’s throw from his home in Westchester County, New York. I later tested his claims while staying a while in Shrewsbury and found a certain amount of justification for them. At any rate, Shrewsbury, however pronounced, like Shropshire, can represent retention of an Anglo-Saxon word in spite of competing forms created by Norman ravages. Salop may be a dirty trick.

Perhaps Sarum should be mentioned after Salop. For, although it yields no adjective *Sarumian, it is a strikingly deviant derivative of Salisbury or its predecessors. Sarum is said, with no proof, to be the product of some misreading of Medieval Latin Sarisburia. It is the official ecclesiastical name and is used in the signature of the bishop. It is also encountered in ecclesiastical terms such as ‘Sarum use’ and ‘Sarum missal.')

Unlike Salopian and Salop, Sarum is, in a way, closer to older forms of its name than is the present one The Celtic name was rendered by the Romans and some of their successors as Sorviodunum (the Celtic one would have been Sorbiodunon or Sorviodunon). Saxons altered this to Searobyrg or the like: then it became Saresbury and ultimately Salisbury. Humorous usage of Sarum is reflected in doggerel, limericks, etc. One of the latter begins, “There was a young lady from Salisbury, Whose life was quite halisbury-scalisbury.” The rest of the rhyme escapes me. Perhaps she had gowns but couldn’t walisbury, or wound up in someone’s halisbury. (A note of personal prejudice: the abomination called “Salisbury steak” in this country deserves completely the faulty pronunciation usually accorded it.)

Mancunian for “Manchesterite” seems to have dispensed with most of the second element, -chester, and to have tacked on the strange suffix -unian (found in some Armenian names), which is somewhat like -onian. But Mancunium was a Latin writing for Mancunion, puz-Celtic name. Welsh Manceinion may reflect the same British designation. (A competing form Mamucion puzzles me). At any rate, Mancunians have their own special name and need not take a back seat to Liverpudlians or Glaswegians. Perhaps we should rejoice in the absence of cunianization of other names in -c(h)ester, or we might have a host of unwelcome ones like *Colcunian, *Dorcunian, *Worcunian, *Gloucunian, and plain *Cunian.

There have been various sources of such names. A few may have developed “naturally.” Others imply creativity or malice or wit of people in the scholarly or ecclesiastical world. Some may fill a real need; others are gratuitous. Most of them are a pleasure to ponder, though not necessarily to use. Let’s hope that Shrewsbury never gets an underground, for it might be called the Salopian Tube.

[Frederic G. Cassidy, Dictionary of American Regional English, 6125 Helen C. White Hall, The University of Wisconsin]

“Unofficial Sectional City Names”: Postscript

Madison, Wisconsin

A reader of my article in VERBATIM VII, 2, Mr. Kenneth W. Way, has questioned “a couple of interpretations” of mine, and I have been asked to reply. The original article was necessarily condensed. Mr. Way’s questions are well taken and deserve fuller consideration.

The first: “Isn’t it more likely that the Silk Stocking group of names refers to the higher-class gentlemen who probably inhabited those districts in colonial times? Dated, yes, but more likely to be validated than the reference to women.” I think Mr. Way is right on this. Mathews’s Dictionary of Americanisms [DA], under silk-stocking gentry, quotes Thomas Jefferson, 1812: “I trust … the Gores and Pickerings will find their levees crowded with silk-stocking gentry, but no yeomanry.” I should certainly have remembered this characterization of the wealthy and luxurious class. I did at least remark that the “Silk Stocking” place names “must have been widespread and firmly established to have turned up in 54 of our responses.” Some could well go back to colonial times. On the other hand, my attribution to women may not be altogether wrong: a more recent transfer of the sense from men to women, now that men no longer wear silk stockings, might explain the preservation of this type of name until today.

The second question: “I think … names such as Frogtown and Coontown, … belong down in the ethnic and racial slur categories rather than with the animal names.” My answer is Yes and No: there are some of each, but in our DARE data, even discounting some indeterminate ones, the animal references clearly outnumber the ethnic ones. Our St. Charles, Missouri, informant mentioned Frenchtown, and also “Frogtown, where the poor people live.” These may or may not be the same place. The Campbelltown, Florida, informant mentioned “Frogtown, lower class, wrong side of the tracks” but did not identify it as French. The name was given in places where the presence of specifically French-derived communities are not noted: Villisca, Iowa, and Lake Pleasant, New York, mentioned Frog Hollow; there is Frog Village near Douglas, Massachusetts, and Froggy Bottom in the District of Columbia. The Frog Town near Huntsville, Alabama, and that near Dover, Delaware, are indeterminate.

On the other hand, the Frog Town of Carrollton, Kentucky, is “down by the river” (which looks more like frogs than French); that in Little Falls, Minnesota, is “a wet area with an abundance of frogs”; the observation that in St. Charles, Missouri, “a lot of water stood there,” does not eliminate the French but favors the frogs. The Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, informant clearly says, “There used to be a swampy area filled with frogs.” Frog Level, near Abingdon, Virginia, is “lowland, wet in spring; frogs were heard there first.” The Frog Pond near New Bern, North Carolina, is not likely a French settlement. The Frog Hollow of North Prescott, Massachusetts, named along with Puppyville, is probably an animal rather than an ethnic reference. That some uses of Frog Town were ethnic cannot be denied, but Frenchtown seems to have been preferred in Pentwater and Onaway, Michigan, in Chillicothe, Ohio, and no doubt in other places.

As to the coon names, we have three indeterminate ones: Coon Bottom in Quincy, Florida, and Waycross, Georgia, and Coon’s Corner near Edenton, North Carolina. But the reference is clear elsewhere: Coon Bottom is the “Negro section” in Gifford, Florida, and Salem, New Jersey, and near St. Martinsville, Louisiana, the settlement once called Faubourg is “now called Coon Town, where the Negroes live.” On the other hand, the Napoleon, Ohio, informant mentioned among local names Ratsville, Dog Town, Goose Town, Snaketown, and Coon Hollow. Evidently his mind was running on animals, and this is not an ethnic reference. Also, the Coon Town near Cooter, Missouri, is “now Holland. It was just woods, then, and filled with coons.” The new name may indicate a desire to avoid the appearance of an ethnic slur, but the former name certainly referred to animals.

In sum, it should be noted that, in the North, raccoon is more likely to be used of the animal and coon is now avoided by many people in reference to blacks. Even in 1965-70, when our data were being collected, informants would remark of such potentially insulting words, “We don’t say that any more.” Consciousness was being raised. In the South, coon is still generally used of the animal. The historical fact should also be noted that in the past century (DA 1832 to 1897) coon was commonly used to mean simply ‘fellow’ or ‘person’—the equivalent of our modern ‘guy’—with rural and “canny” connotations but no racial ones. A white mountaineer might say of himself, “This coon is getting out of here till the trouble blows over.” The specialization of application to blacks is relatively recent (DA 1862 forward).

SIC! SIC! SIC!

In the May 22, 1981, issue of Publishers Weekly, appeared notice of a new paperback, Analise, by Lisa Gregory, published by Jove.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“NO DUMPING—TRESPASSERS WILL BE VIOLATED” [Sign at Memorial Road and Eastern, Oklahoma City, reproduced in the Sunday magazine section of the Sunday Oklahoman, April 19, 1981. Submitted by Tom S. Reyenga, Oklahoma City.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Center for Continuing Education, dormatory 3737 Semnry Rd Alex” [From the Northern Virginia (Washington Metropolitan Area) Telephone Directory of the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company, January 1981. Submitted by Andrew F. Downey, Jr., Washington, D.C.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“They glut themselves, eating with their hands, shoveling the groceries into themselves in a caricature of infantile oral behavior. Literally, they rape the refrigerator.” [From a review by Robert Taylor of The Men’s Club, by Leonard Michaels, in The Boston Globe, April 22, 1981. Submitted by Nancy D. Goss, North Andover, Massachusetts.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“PLEASE NOT PLACE ARTICLES OR SIT ON BED.” [Sign placed on a bed in the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, just before it is to be made up for an incoming patient. Submitted by John R. Starrs, Detroit.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The latest [of TV’s ‘reality shows’] is CBS’s ‘That’s My Line,’ which will have its premiere tonight, with unctuous host Bob Barker introducing us to unusual jobs. For example, we visit a school that teaches how to pick up girls and a blind carpenter.” [From The Milwaukee Journal, February 3, 1981. Submitted by Reinhold Aman, Waukesha, Wisconsin, who reports that he has “heard of weird fetishes (deaf bakers and lame plumbers), but picking up blind carpenters is bizarre!”]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Born George William Frederick in 1738, he was descended from the Hanoverian kings of England who had come to the throne in 1714. His great-grandfather, George I, and his grandfather, George II, had paraded their mistresses publicly and had never shown any great love for the country they ruled.” [From Home of the Brave—A Patriot’s Guide to American History, by John Alexander Carroll and Odie B. Faulk, page 71. Submitted by MacDonald Wood, M.D., Phoenix.]

Dating Customs

Robert Schoenfeld, East Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, and Karl F. Heumann, Bethesda, Maryland

The editors, authors, and readers of VERBATIM have a good hold on the language, but who will straighten out the dating mess? Not, we think, the International Standards Organization; it has two related standards that do not agree with one another. One standard recommends an all-numeric form for dates: year-month-day, as, 19810403.¹
The other standard, designed for computers, recommends an ordinal form, as, 1981093, the last three digits being the ordinal number of the day in the year: the 93rd day of 1981.² Leap years change five sixths of these latter numbers every four years.

Another conflict in writing dates, that between European and American practices, is well known. Europeans write day-month-year; Americans (usually), month-day-year. Science magazine writes “3 April 1981.” Some Europeans and Britons write “3.IV.1981.”

More exotic forms exist. One of us recently received a letter headed “1518 s 28 II 81”; we decode that as “3:18 p.m., Saturday, 28 February 1981.” Quaker dates are to be spelled out: First-day, Eighth Month.

You will notice that we have ignored a) roman numerals for years, b) all non-Western forms, c) dates not connected to the common era, and d) such inventions as decimalized time.

On the first impulse, one might be tempted to be tolerant of this variety of customs, as being preferable to dull conformity. But consider the human and legal consequences:

Scenario 1: A young European, visiting America, falls in with bad company, and contracts a painful gambling debt. Desperately, he cables to his rich uncle for help. Back comes a check dated 11-3-1981. The Sinister Syndicate, however, is not disposed to wait the eight months till November; and the next frantic cabled request is for payment of medical bills.

Scenario 2: Calvin Q. Winterbottom, retired from a successful career in Wall Street, is peacefully living out his days in a small Mediterranean village. Stricken by a sudden heart attack, he summons Mayor and Postmaster to his beside, to witness his signature under an important council to his will. Under this signature he scrawls, with a failing hand, 4-18-1981. The local courts refuse to recognize the document, because there is no such thing as an eighteenth month, and by the time the confusion is straightened out, inflation has ravaged the estate. The innkeeper’s daughter, for whose benefit the codicil was intended, gets very little.

What can be done to protect the innkeeper’s daughter? It is a sad fact of life that, when the International Standards Organization speaks, few people listen. But when this Organization lisps with a forked tongue, whose ears will be fine enough?

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OBITER DICTA

My peregrinations through the Yellow Pages, referred to in past “DICTA,” have revealed that the hairdressing biz is populated by punsters, most of them frustrated (to judge by the quality of the puns perpetrated). Here is a fair sampling of the listings in the Fort Lauderdale edition of the Yellow Pages:

A-Head of Time
Blazing Scissors
Clip Joint, The
Company
Hair I Am
Hair She Goes
Hair Today (Gone tomorrow?)
Hair We Are Hair-em South
Hair-o-Dynamics
Hairloom Styling
Headline Hair Designs
Heads Above All
Heads or Tales
Heads You Win
Male Room, The
Mane Event
Shear Genius
Shear Happening by
Shear Pleasure

Others, which I found rather off-putting, were:

Head to Toe “Natural Hairstyles for Men & Women”

Gabriel of Berkley South Beauty Salon “Unisex Haute Coiffure” (pompadours?)

Le Guillotine Hairstylists

Richard’s Hair Affair (a hair fetishist?)

Samson & Delilah’s.

Some made little sense to me at all:

Apple A Day Haircutters
Command Performance Unisex Haircutting

My favorite is Who Cut Your Hair?

From Mervyn Horder, in London, comes a report on the state of af-hairs in that city:

A Cut Above
British Haircraft
Clipjoint
Corporation
Curl Up & Dye
Curls & Capers
Fringe Benefits
Get Ahead
Hair & Now
Hair Raisers Ltd. (wigs)
Hair To Stay Headlines
Headmaster Hairdressers
Minxcrest Ltd.
My Fair Lady
Perfecut Unisex
Shyloks
Snippetts
Under Your Hat
Uppercut
Whiskers

While in Florida recently, I was reading some detective novels, and the thought struck me that the listings in the Yellow Pages under Detective Agencies might reveal some insights into the real-life Lew Archers of the world, especially because, for most of us (I trust) the “knowledge” of how those in and along the fringes of the under world use English comes from books. Here, for instance, is a passage from Playback, by Raymond Chandler:

“… He ain’t in his room. The hotel people ain’t seen him around. I thought maybe you and the girl had some ideas about it.” “The girl is screwy,” I said. “Leave her out of it. “And in Esmeralda they don’t say ‘ain’t seen.’ That Kansas City dialect is an offense against public morals around here.”

“Shove it, Mac. When I want to get told how to talk English I won’t go to no beat-up California peeper.”

The first listing in the Yellow Pages convinced me that, in spite of my having read hundreds of detective novels, I had apparently learned nothing of the lingo, for I don’t know what to make of A Scientific Detection of Deception Co. I’m not exactly sure what it is that is confusing about that collection of words, but they just do not seem to go together—in that order. Passing by the inevitable Acme, Advance, American, Apex, and Authorized set, we come upon Avert Security and Investigations. Why Avert? One would think that a customer would want to have security, not avert it. Checkmate International Detective Agency advertises itself as “one of the nation’s most publicized private investigators,” a seeming contradiction in terms. Among the services offered (Evidence, Photography, Missing Persons—again, one would expect “Finding Persons” offered as a service) is Character Analysis. It is rather too bad that Sam Spade was not better at character analysis: it might have spared him a lot of grief at the hands of Mary Astor.

Bonafide Detective Agency, which uses Kilroy as a trade mark and spells insurance “insurance,” offers investigation into “Habits Attitudes & Beliefs.”

Central Detective Bureau is unusual in that it offers Voice Stress Analysis.

Many of the agencies specialize in what they call Child Custody, when what they probably mean is Child Custody Cases, since none strikes me as suitable for babysitting services.

At length, I was compelled to turn back to Chandler: all the mystery had gone out of the private-eye business.

[L.U]

A Nasal Encounter

Fairfax Stephenson, Seal Beach, California

Listed below are some states and situations in which people often find themselves (or others) that have given rise to idiomatic expressions involving the proboscis, olfactory organ, or whatever you wish to call it. Try to come up with the appropriate expression to match the condition or action described. Answers are on page 8.

1. You’re angry.
2. You’re inquisitive.
3. You’re busybody.
4. You’re a winner.
5. You’re a hard worker.
6. You’re spineless.
7. You’re arrogant.
8. You just made it.
9. Something displeases you.
10. You don’t like the smell.
11. You’re thinking.
12. You’re uncouth (but gratified).
13. You’ve never studied voice projection.
14. You’ve got a cold.
15. You’re trying to stop a sneeze.
16. You’re Johnny Carson.
17. You’re a rabbit.

Bilingualism, or How to Be Tongue-tied in Two Languages

Frank J. Jones, Flagstaff, Arizona

Why are we so concerned about bilingualism? If we face up to the facts about only two of our contemporary lingoes, we must admit that we’ve been multilingual for years. We are all exposed to both Standard English and Deejay—“do-it-yourself”—English. The former is promoted by our school systems, the latter by the electronic media across the country. Tune in on these samples. Without haggling over regional dialects, we may in time find our notions of conventional speech “anniliated” by the electronic media.

One listening area recently lost one of the most notable public service programs ever offered on any airway when the local station gave up broadcasting its weekday morning “Today’s Prime Word for Junior High”—very possibly at the request of the local public schools. Every morning before the kiddies took off for school a deejay announced “Today’s Prime Word!” Then he named the Prime Word and carefully spelled it, with an injunction to the listener to look up its meaning and be prepared to use it in school that day.

One morning he announced, “Today’s Prime Word is ambivalent! A-M-B-I-V-I-L-A-N-T!” On another morning, “Today’s Prime Word is … hey, there are a couple of different ways you can say it—‘lejooms’ or ‘legooms’!”

Strangely, most talented young deejays, usually in their twenties, seem never to have picked up the notion of looking for words in the dictionary themselves. Well trained in pushing the right buttons and consorting with the microphone, they address it with assurance and authority, not to mention an utter reliance on their constitutional right to freedom of speech.

We nod in agreement when they remind us that “The region has endured two successful seasons of drought.” We believe them implicitly when they tell us “Snow is numerous in the mountains” and that “Skies are clouded all the way from Organ to West Consin and contijuous states.” On such a day, we can only agree that “Continuing harsh weather is ineVITable” and shake our heads at dangerous conditions on a highway under repair where “The snow is conjelled with oil in a big lump.” (Though there are cheery times when the deejay says, “This morning is overcast, but later in the day the rain clouds will be dissipitating.”)

We respect the reverence with which deejays mention “the Bishop of the Diosee” and solemnly quote him: “Dust thou art, to dust thou shalt returneth.” We are titillated by news that someone is up on charges “for subordination of perjury” and that someone else “will return to Russia on his own violition.” We like to hear the inside scoop on what transpires in the Legislature, especially that so-and-so has “strived for years” to get a certain piece of legislation “past the top ekelon” to the floor.

At times, of course, “plans have gone orry” and the “protadjonist” vanished into “a closed meeting and what transgressed was not made public.” If no remarks are “attrible” to anyone on conclusion of “the lengthly debate,” we already know the general opinion of the solons that “busing only exackerbates the problems,” and they would do better to devote their attention to “indignant health care.” Anyway, it is rumored that the chairman is “a metaglom … a metagalomaniac,” behind his “impenetratable” facade—though it must be granted that by provoking an “impassay” he has averted “skism in the party.”

Deejay virtuosity can render even commercial announcements in the everyday jargon of consumers: “If you got one of those people on your gift list that you can’t think of anything to get for them, remember: at Blooper’s there is all types of jewelry to please the one you love and you can give them the gift that befits their personality.”

In sum, Deejay English does its job very adequately for its captive listeners. But … “There are others who it feels a little uncomfortable for them.”

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“I hope you can write six more volumes of your autobiography.” [Dick Cavett to former Prime Minister Macmillan, December 23, 1980. Submitted by Marion Nickel, Rhinebeck, New York.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Asked at a House hearing about possible revision of the Consumer Price Index, HHS Secretary Schweiker replied, ‘Let me be explicit. This administration may be looking at across-the-board revision, or nonrevision, of the index.’ ” [From The Wall Street Journal, March 27, 1981. Submitted by Mrs. Andrew Koren, Lake Havasu City, Arizona.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“His answer was that there is ‘a logical relationship’ between a black bank and the Detroit community, which is, as he put it, ‘more than 60 percent minority’ in its racial mix.” [From The Detroit News, April 2, 1981, reporting an interview with Charles E. Allen, president of the First Independence National Bank of Detroit. Submitted by John R. Starrs, Detroit.]

Philip Howard on English English

Wizard

With permission, ladies and gentlemen, I should like to carry on hunting the Wizard of Was this quarter. There is a mystery about the origin of wizard as a British slang term of superlative approval in the 1930s. (Chaps in those days also exclaimed ripping! and stunning !) I do not think that the expression ever crossed the Atlantic. It is now so whiskery and moth-eaten that nobody with any linguistic sensitivity could use it, except ironically or sarcastically. The word was typically an RAF term of approval during the war, when the young men of the Battle of Britain exclaimed about wizard prangs.

Until now the only explanation of the word’s origin has been given by the great WordFowler, Eric Partridge. The earliest citation he found was “a perfectly wizard week” in a book published in 1933. He suggested that the word became extremely popular in the RAF between 1939 and 1945, and thence passed into general civilian slang. In February I published an article in The Times suggesting an earlier origin. Professor Angus McIntosh of the Middle English Dialect Project at Edinburgh University testifies that while he was an undergraduate at Oriel College, Oxford, between 1931 and 1934, wizard became part of the jargon of the junior common room of that college. We wondered whether wizard had been introduced to Oriel and the lexicon of slang by freshmen from some school.

As we might have expected, if we had had any sense, we had a vast and, in parts, instructive mail. It can be divided into three categories—well, four categories, if you count one category for amiable but irrelevant anecdotage.

First there were Old Boys from Charterhouse and several Cambridge Colleges (and educational establishments in between), claiming to have been using wizard as a superlative of enthusiasm before Oriel discovered it. From them we can deduce that the word was common currency in English schools (usually public—that is to say, private—schools) in the years around 1930.

Then there was the aeronautical category. Several retired and eminent aviators pointed out that a plane called the Westland Wizard was by far the most glamorous aircraft fifty years ago. The engine of the Vickers Supermarine seaplane that won the Schneider Trophy (the famous British race for aircraft) was the Merlin, which, when developed further, subsequently powered the Spitfire and Hurricane. Old Schneider Trophy pilots swore until their handlebar moustaches twitched that wizard was being used as an aeronautical term of approval in 1929-30, the time of the Schneider Cup victories. One had even christened his son Merlin, because Merlin was a wizard.

Third, there was the comic category. We were reminded that the extremely popular children’s story-magazine called The Wizard was first published in 1922. For the next 25 years, it was the favourite magazine of boys aged between 12 and 15 and must have influenced the growth of slang.

The question remains: where did the comic paper The Wizard get its name? It is unlikely that its hard-nosed publishers in Dundee pulled the name out of thin air. Wizards were fashionable. The early child comics of the years after the first war often had resident wizards appearing in their comic strips. For instance, one called Marzipan was a regular features in Rainbow. There were others.

Finally, I suppose, we ought to look for literary origins. The Wizard of Oz was published in 1900. The germ of the new meaning may be visible in Vachel Lindsay’s Litany of the Heroes (1918):

God lead us past the setting of the sun
To wizard islands of august surprise.

Lindsay was an American. This supports a theory that the expression was born in the States: for example, Commander John Irving (Royal Navalese, 1946) wrote that wizard “is an adjective which has been flown from America into the Navy by the RAF. It implies that someone or something is marvellous and verging upon the miraculous.” In England at about the same time (1918), Edmund Gosse wrote in The White Throat of “the wizard silence of the hours of dew,” possibly combining the connotation of the miraculous with the superlative.

There you are. That is as far as I have got. It is possible that the origin of wizard in this sense is not exactly traceable. We shall have to wait for the final volume of Robert Burchfield’s majestic Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary to find out.

Meanwhile, wizard in the slang sense is dated on this side of the Atlantic. The fashionable term of approval among football crowds is magic. “Chelsea are MAGIC” they shout on the rare occasions when my sad local team scores a goal. I think that this new use came down from Scotland in the 1970s. I have an authenticated sighting sprayed on a wall in Edinburgh outside the stadium of a team called Heart of Midlothian in 1975. A stronger variant is PFM ‘Pure Fucking Magic.’ Let us see if we can find an earlier instance.

EPISTOLA {Gerald Leonard Cohen}

Of Cabbages and Tailors

English slang presents an original cant term, cabbage, whose origin is considered obscure by etymologists. But the answer seems so clear to me that the only mystery I find is how other scholars could miss it.

Webster III, for example, says of cabbage[3]: “British cloth remaining after the cutting of a garment and traditionally said to be appropriated by the tailor, as a perquisite.” And the origin given is “perhaps by folk etymology from Middle French cabas, cheating, theft, literally, basket—more at caba.”

And under cabbage[4], Webster III says: “to take surreptitiously: STEAL, FILCH … but gives no etymology; cabbage[4] is therefore apparently considered to derive from cabbage[3] (of obscure origin).

Meanwhile, OED, following Farmer-Henley’s Slang and Its Analogues, seeks the origin of these two cabbages in garbage:

This [i.e., Webster’s cabbage[3]] and the accompanying cabbage, verb[2] [i.e., Webster’s cabbage[4]] appear in the 17th century. Herrick (1648) uses garbage and carbage, apparently for “shreds and patches used as padding.” If this was a genuine use at the time, carbage may easily have been further corrupted to cabbage.

Cf. also Partridge 1970 (Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English), which adheres to the garbage hypothesis, and Partridge 1968 (op. cit.), which is silent on the etymology of cabbage.

But the origin of the two slang meanings of cabbage can be found just by looking at the definitions of this word in Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary:

1. Shreds of cloth cut off by tailors in cutting out clothes, and appropriated by them; also larger pieces purloined….
2. To appropriate surreptitiously, to pilfer, rob.

Wright also adds a 1755 quote: “Cabbage, whatever is purloined by taylors and mantua-women from the garments they are to make up.”

So the solution is simply that the shreds of cloth were likened to shredded cabbage; and since these shreds (later, bigger ones too) were appropriated/filched by the tailors for their own use, cabbage came to mean ‘to steal, filch.’ Cf. also Farmer-Henley (under cabbage):

… In America a corresponding term is COLDSLAW, which consists of finely-cut cabbage, and represents the small remnants known in other quarters as “carpet-rags” or CABBAGE.

But right after this illuminating statement Farmer-Henley add, “The derivation is obscure,” and then tentatively advance their suggestion of cabbage < garbage.

[Gerald Leonard Cohen, University of Missouri-Rolla].

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“But [Collingwood Ingram’s] achievements range far beyond the garden; in his time he has been an exceptional traveller and ornithologist, and only this year was writing in Country Life on great tits.” [From The Times, 28 October 1980, in an item concerning a centenarian.]

EPISTOLA {Patricia A. Gazin}

Some flak about ack-ack

In a recent issue of VERBATIM [VII, 2], Benjamin Keller listed a number of reduplicative words in English, among them ack-ack. In a letter [February 13], Nicholas Baker of Louisville, Kentucky, called that classification into question, suggesting that the origin of ack-ack is German acht acht ‘8.8,’ from the designation for the weapon by its bore diameter in centimeters. The Americans, who use millimeters in such designations, dubbed it ‘eighty-eight.’ The OED lists the earliest citation for ack-ack as a 1939 issue of Collier’s magazine, which gives the source as a British abbreviation for Aircraft Attack, employing the British name for the letter A (which appears also in the older ack-emma for ‘a.m.').

We requested further corroboration of his evidence from Mr. Baker, and he has been kind enough to send us an affidavit from Eugene Oldach, born in Poland, who served in the German army from February 1942 till his capture by Americans in 1945. Mr. Oldach’s statement reads, in part:

… Throughout my service in the German army, the 8.8-centimeter gun was called “acht acht.” This was common usage. I do not know if there is any connection between this and the British term ack-ack.

Mr. Baker calls into further evidence a listing from the German Army Handbook 1939-1945 [Arco, 1974], in which the 8.8-cm gun is listed as a major weapon in antiaircraft artillery and, later, as the main weapon of the Tiger, Jagdpanther, and Elefant tanks (Tables 1, 2, 5).

Although the resemblance between the German and British designations may be coincidental, it appears from this incontrovertible evidence that the German source cannot be ignored and must, at least, be considered as an alternative to the British.

In connection with ack-ack, one encounters much flak, and Mr. Baker suggests that its origin is an acronym of Flugzeugabwehrkanone. There is a question of whether that or Fliegerabwehrkanone is the correct source. Mr. Oldach comments:

I am familiar with the terms Fliegerabwehrkanone and Flugzeugabwehrkanone, and they mean the same and are interchangeable.

Dictionaries that list one or the other would, in the future, be well advised to list both as possible sources.

Answers to A Nasal Encounter

1. Your nose is out of joint.
2. You’re nosy.
3. You stick your nose in everybody’s business.
4. You nose out an opponent.
5. You keep your nose to the grindstone.
6. You can be led by the nose.
7. Your nose is in the air.
8. You won by a nose.
9. You wrinkle (or screw up) your nose.
10. You pinch your nose.
11. You put your finger by the side of your nose.
12. You pick your nose.
13. You talk through your nose.
14. You blow your nose.
15. You press your nose under the tip.
16. You swipe your forefinger up the front of your nose.
17. You wriggle your nose.

EPISTOLA {Patricia A. Gazin}

Mrs. Daphne Hoffman Mebane, 238 W. Tampa Ave. (No. 307), Venice, Florida 33595, would like to know the origin of part brass rags. She would like to find an alternative to that appearing in English English, by Norman W. Schur, which she regards as “someone’s specious conjecture.” Any readers with convincing evidence should write directly to Mrs. Mebane; a copy to VERBATIM would be welcome: if the argument is sufficiently convincing, we shall try to persuade Mr. Schur to make a change in the next printing of English English.

I want to corroborate and endorse everything said by Richard Lillard in his article “Before I Am Too Late” [VII, 3]. One of my pet peeves is the kid-glove use of adjectives allied to the name of Richard Nixon. They are too kind. Former President Nixon and ex, even, are not strong enough. He should always be labeled so that history will recognize him for what he is: the president who nobly proclaimed, “I am not a crook”; the president who resigned under pressure; the president who slipped through the fingers of justice; the president who escaped impeachment.

I suggest also: the unconvicted president; the unimpeached president; the resigned president; the nonfelon president; the maleficient president; the scheming president; the conniving president; the criminal president.

[Patricia A. Gazin, Hermosa Beach, California]

EPISTOLA {Albert B. Dearden}

“English English” [VII, 3], whatever that is (nomenclature even less justifiable than Gorilla gorilla as used by zoologists, I should say), rubbed me a bit the wrong way in its bland assumption that Kenneth Grahame’s Mole was known only to English children. But [Philip Howard] really hit a nerve with William IV. Surely there was no substantial number of Jacobites in 1837, when that monarch, from whatever cause, died. I should think Jacobins were more likely. Surely your English correspondent meant William III, or is that a Freudian slip, perhaps? He is so much of the old dispensation he can’t give the usurper his accepted title.

So much for the genuine error. Let’s turn to a matter of opinion. I should like to let loose a long, loud dissent to everything said and just about everything implied or even apparently thought of in Mr. Lillard’s article. Even his lead-off quotation makes no sense, by his lights. He is hardly willing to distinguish between former and late, although such a distinction is the whole point of Mr. Debs’s plaint.

No, Mr. Lillard is just plain wrong. Except for a few examples of awkward writing, which unfortunately can show up anywhere, all his deriding is based on his failure to see that the “now” to which everyone is “late” is the time of reading, or at least of writing, not of acting. His very example, Lucius Beebe—had the writer not used late, he would have been bothered by 10,000 railfans asking for Beebe’s address. Of course using late helped there.

[Albert B. Dearden, Ridgewood, New Jersey]

EPISTOLA {J.H. Elder}

Perhaps I am not a charter subscriber to VERBATIM. It may have taken a year to discover you. But I do have a file from Volume II, Number 1 to the present, and I shall keep it rather than pass it on to the local library, as I do with most of my periodicals, because it continues to provide much pleasure and satisfaction as a reference source.

Thus, it is with reluctance that I discontinue my subscription. The reason for doing so must be good, and I believe it is. I feel that I must concentrate all of my time and energy toward preventing nuclear destruction of our planet. At this time, it appears I may have chosen a losing cause, but unless we can solve this one, it does not matter what we read, what we think, or even where we live.

There are reports of anti-nuclear fanatics. I am not one and reject the term. I do lay claim to being a realist. My concern is that several in places of power are living and playing games in an unreal world.

I’m sure you can manage without me. In the meantime, carry on your good work. Hopefully, as they say, I may join you later.

[J.H. Elder, Pullman, Washington]

EPISTOLA {Daniel McDonald}

On the subject of Richard Bauerle’s article, “Watching Our g’s and q’s” [VII, 3]: a student recently turned in a paper on Hamlet which made several references to “King Claudius’s quilt.” In my comments, I told her I was familiar with his “incestuous sheets,” but this was the first I’d heard of his quilt.

[Daniel McDonald, University of South Alabama]

EPISTOLA {J.D. Sadler}

Eric Winters in his “Odd Couples” [VII, 1] requests additional Latin-Greek equivalents. Instead of supplying more, which would be easy, I wish to diminish his list. Syntax is no match for composition; synthesis is. The pro- in projection means ‘forward,’ and the hyper- in hyperbole means ‘beyond.’ Latin re- has a number of meanings, none of them ‘up,’ the meaning of Greek ana-.

[J.D. Sadler, Sherman, Texas]

EPISTOLA {Gilbert C. McArdle, M.D.}

A well-known and publicized defect of spoken English is that there are several words that sound alike but have widely different meanings: bear, bare, etc. In this modern age of the dictating machine and computer, as a hospital surgeon, I often dictate patient histories and operative notes and have been amazed at the final altered appearance of my dictated words—though I have to admit that when hurried I mumble.

Here is a brief list of some of the alterations:

DICTATED	FINAL COPY
dermatofibroma	dramatic fibroma
estimated blood loss	estimated blood bath
juxtaposed	just pushed
rule out occult	rule out a cold
malignancy	malignancy
male in extremis	male, an extremist, …
contiguous	continued quest
hypertrophoic papilla	hyperfried papilla
splotch	botch
repaired in the manner	repaired in the manner
of Ravitch	of ravage

[Gilbert C. McArdle, M.D., Gettysburg, Pennsylvania]

EPISTOLA {Leon E. Boodey}

Difficult as it is for me to adjust to the notion that $3.95 for a paperback book is a “marvelous buy,” I took Jack Luzzatto at his word [VII, 3] and bought the Crossword Puzzle Compendium. I am disappointed. I should have digested Mr. Luzzatto’s review more thoroughly before making this purchase. I would then have realized from his listing of the “best” constructors that the Compendium is not the book for me. It is crammed with the type of puzzle that no longer appeals to me; not even a sample of the cryptic type and no rules or hints regarding the construction and marketing of this preferred type of puzzle.

And how can biographies of “Today’s Best Constructors” not include Frank W. Lewis (with 1867 superb weekly puzzles), E.R. Galli and Richard Maltby, Jr. (constructors of the unbelievable Twelfth Night Dodecahedron), Emily Cox, and Henry Rathvon? And how can one possibly include a biographical sketch of Jack Luzzatto without a mention of his great Anglo-American Crosswords? Did I say disappointed? It’s a better word I need.

It appear that the proper crossword book is yet to be written and necessarily must be written by Jack Luzzatto. When he does write this much-needed book, perhaps he will include a tiny footnote explaining why constructors, never, ever answer their fan mail.

[Leon E. Boodey, Broomall, Pennsylvania]

Pathologic Pantry

Alan and Janice Coulson, Stockton, California

It is a commonplace that technical jargon, though precise and clear enough to the specialist, is generally meaningless to the layman. When trying to describe highly technical phenomena, the expert must resort to comparisons with objects from everyday experience. It is striking how frequently medical terms are “translated” by comparisons with articles of food, perhaps the earlierst of which is cancer, from the resemblance of carcinoma to the spreading claws of the crab. The following is a list of terms used to describe the shape, size, color, consistency, or other characteristics of pathological conditions.

amyloidosis
anchovy paste
apple-jelly nodules
atherosclerotic material
bacon spleen
bipolar fusion of renal anlagen
breast cancer
calcium of hamartoma
carcinoma of the breast
cauliflower tumor
cavernous angioma
cheesy
chicken breast
chocolate cysts
chronic perihepatitis
coffee ground emesis
Colles’s fracture
colon cancers
corkscrew esophagus
creamy
cutaneous tuberculosis
diffuse esophageal spasm
discharges
doughnut kidney
Ewing’s tumor
forkful
gastic bleeding
hard-baked spleen
Hodgkin’s disease
hydatid mole
melon-sized
miliary tuberculosis
millet seed
napkin rings
onion-peel sign
orange-sized
osteochondroma
ovarian endometriosis
oyster ovaries
pea-sized
pear
peau d’orange
plum-sized
popcorn
porphyria
porridge
port wine urine
potato nodes
rickets
sago spleen
sarcoidosis
schizophrenia
soupy
strawberry nevus
sugar icing liver
Swiss cheese
tumors
ventricular septal defects
word salad

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Major crimes, excluding burglaries, are almost nonexistant. Burglaries, however, do occur. We find ourselves climbing toward the national averages and find ourselves with the problem of unwanted criminals in our homes.” [From a letter to residents from the Chief of Police of East Brandywine, Pennsylvania, submitted by Stanley G. Barnes, Guilford, Connecticut. We had the same problem, so we moved.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Cockney Dialect and Slang

Peter Wright, (Batsford, 1980), 192 pp.

Visiting word-fanciers venturing into the London Underground this summer may have noticed, as they passed up or down on the moving staircase, two advertisement panels of particular interest to them. One demanded: “Where should I swap my dear old Dutch?” The other proclaimed: “If your old China is all she’s cracked up to be, you’d like her replaced as new.” The first recommended the services of an auctioneer, the second of an insurance company. And both, of course, were making play with Cockney slang. Dutch, short for duchess, is a ‘costermonger’s wife.’ China is abbreviated rhyming slang for friend or pal: china plate, ‘mate.’

So Cockney lives, and this new book has appeared with the aim of making better known the vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and quirks of speech of the indigenous inhabitants of famous Lunnon Tahn.

Its author, Peter Wright, a member of the Department of Modern Languages at Salford University, England, thinks it a shame that “whereas the dialects of many country villages have been meticulously collected, that of London with its teeming millions has been almost studiously ignored.” As long ago as 1952, he was “sent around the metropolis” to discover whether, in fact, any Cockney dialect remained (a famous dialectologist wrongly doubted this). Armed with a list of “some 1800 unloaded questions,” he pursued his enquiries in five main districts, from Sahf ‘Ackney ‘South Hackney’ in the East End of London to Walton-on-the-Hill in Surrey and Farningham in Kent: a span, overall, of 35 miles north to south and 32 miles east to west. Not only was Cockney dialect, particularly among the elderly, still found to be alive and kicking; Mr. Wright’s assiduous legwork also established a remarkably homogeneous standard of speech throughout this extensive area. Cockney dialect has followed the new housing estates, the roads, the tube stations, and the general geographical enlargement of what is now “the most complex and spread-out city in the world.” Nor has the Thames, as was once suspected, cut its traditional speech into two halves. “Countless masses of Londoners cross the Thames daily by train, car and on foot,” says Mr. Wright, “and great rivers like the Thames, provided they are crossable, have been meeting-places of dialects and communication, not barriers.”

In London you don’t take a taxi, you catch a cab, Mr. Wright warns; and if, having caught one, you keep your ears open, and have the luck to be driven by a pleasantly talkative cabbie and not one of the morose or—worse still—mad variety, you will probably hear quite a number of the words mentioned in this up-to-date and entertaining book. It is unlikely that you will be greeted with the welcoming Wotcher, cock! ‘What cheer, cock sparrow!’ But, at the end, the announcement That’ll be two smackers ‘two pounds,’ guv’ will not be out of order: indeed, should your ride have taken you, say, from Emma Smif ‘Hammersmith’ to the Menshun Aas ‘Mansion House’ or the Tahr ‘Tower of London,’ the fare on the clock will be far more.

With London in a state of constant social flux, its language is bound to reflect this condition. Mr. Wright has some amusing pages on the modified Cockney spoken by West Indians and other recent immigrants, who have often mastered the pronunciation of their new surroundings but not the technical vocabulary. (“She goes rahnd, she don’ show de lightin’ ”, exclaimed one indignant expatriate, as a lady driver turned a corner sharply without using her indicator). He is good, too, on the distinctive glottal stop (bu’er for butter, etc.), to which the ears of all students should be attuned and the use of which, according to him, is actually increasing among the younger Cockneys.

Some of his listings are pretty arcane, and short of going round the pubs and barrows with one’s own tape recorder, it is difficult, even for one who lives and works in London, to be satisfied about all the findings. Do even Cockney grandads, as Mr. Wright seems to claim, still use words like bowk to ‘belch,’ pissimire an ‘ant’, or ‘oppin’ the wag ‘playing truant’? One feels faintly sceptical. And should he have included so many words which, though no doubt Cockney in origin, have long since passed into the stock of general use—greedy-guts ‘glutton,’ kisser ‘mouth,’ scrounge ‘to steal,’ to mention just three? Here he might have been more rigorous in his filtering.

Yet a living language is hard to pin down. The words collected in this book are like a lot of cheeky schoolboys: they will not stay in sedate rows for the end-of-term photograph but keep pulling faces, getting up, running about, and occasionally bringing off that old schoolboy feat of managing to appear in the same picture twice by rapidly sprinting from one end of the group to the other while the camera on its aged tripod swivels slowly round and the conscientious dialectologist-operator breaths heavily beneath his black cloth. Some of them, in fact, seem to have nipped round three or four times, so difficult does Mr. Wright seem to find it to control his material.

He makes the odd slip here and there. The once stuffy Earls Court Road is no longer Kangaroo Alley, the Australians whose presence there caused it to be so named having been pushed out by newer breeds. And Mr. Wright misses a trick in his discussion of rhyming slang (which some people misguidedly think is all there is to Cockney). Evidently not one who fancies a flutter on the ‘orses, at the risk of returning home b’rassic (borassic lint: skint) ‘broke,’ he fails to mention that Cockney racegoers and bookies, though as loyal and patriotic a bunch as any in the land, have been heard to refer to their Sovereign, with apparent irreverence, as The Boiled. In fact they are using an affectionate piece of rhyming slang: boiled is short for boiled bean, ‘queen.’

The trouvailles, however, far outweigh any small faults. Did you know the name for a slovenly woman whose house is any owd’ow and who ‘angs fings up on de floor? She is called Mrs Tidy, while her friend from Whitechapel, who cusses and swears—or “f”s and “b”s—somefink’ orrible, is, by an opposite phraseology, Mrs Effer.

The Cockney sparrer ‘sparrow’ is a strange sort of bird, with his flat intonation and his temperamental ups and downs. This well-researched book will alert many readers to the vigour, expressiveness, and general wonder of his speech.

[Rivers Scott, London]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Safire’s Political Dictionary: An Enlarged, Up-To-Date Edition Of The New Language Of Politics

William Safire, (Random House, New York), xxx + 820pp., index.

Why did I have to wait until its third edition—the first was published in 1968—before I knew that such a work existed? How often, before deciding, with some hesitation, to use a current political catchword or cliché, has one said to oneself, “I wonder how that originated, what its real meaning is (or was), and whether, if I knew, I would still be prepared to use it”? Well, now I shall consult Safire. Perhaps one day Safire will itself enter the political vocabularly and have an entry of its own in Safire, for never did a blurb quote a sillier commendation than that of Newsweek: “the definitive work on the subject.” The mark of a great dictionary is that no edition is definitive: there will, I doubt not, be a day when Safire, like Liddell and Scott, will reach its ninth edition.

By being called a “political dictionary” and relegating to a subtitle the expression “the new language of politics,” the book avoids defining, and thereby limiting, its field. The heart of it consists of neologisms, invented or imported words that previously had no meaning at all, such as mugwump (from Natick (American Indian) mugquomp), or words which existed as proper names before but since a certain event have become generic terms, such as Watergate (for ‘scandal unsuccessfully denied’) derived from the hotel building in Washington, D.C. Curiously, these specific proper names can spawn a whole vocabulary—the tribe of words compounded with -gate and signifying various implied scandals or with -nik and intended to recall the sputnik. Incidentally, why does Safire not have that most precious Russism, apparatchik?

Then there are phrases which have a literal meaning in themselves but which have become clichés, used by those of whom not one in a thousand could identify the occasion which first gave them currency. Such is hundred days used to mean ‘any dynamic, or even just any, initial period of a government,’ with no conscious allusion to Napolean I’s 1815 episode—a good example of the way in which a cliché, cut completely loose from its allusive origin, can with use become so general as to be no longer evocative. On the other hand, one can have direct quotations which always remain such and are meaningless to anyone who does not know the original context. I remember being puzzled by Wedgwood Benn referring to himself, in a speech in the House of Commons in the late 1950s, as “one of a hundred flowers,” because I had not then heard the Mao Tse-Tung saying. A special case is quotation of part of a well-known proverb, e.g., “changing horses” used in a sense determined by its context in the proverb against changing horses while crossing a stream.

Much, if not all, language is metaphor, and metaphor, being an effective rhetorical weapon if well handled, is a fruitful source of political vocabulary and political humour. The examples are legion: caretaker, steamroller, gag, passing the torch, and domino theory are among them, though whip (abbreviation of the foxhunting term whipper-in) is not metaphorical in the sense often erroneously supposed. Sometimes perfectly general metaphors of immortal applicability, such as whirlwind campaign or whispering campaign, have acquired a special historical application in the politics of a particular country; Safire often, as in these instances, instructively documents the relevant American occasion. An English instance is the connection of finger on the trigger with the British 1951 general election and Winston Churchill.

This last is one of the cases where an English expression has migrated to the States, rather than vice versa, assuming there the more technological form finger on the button, but an English user of Safire will be impressed—and not, I think, mistakenly, just because Safire is himself American—with the volume of originally native American political language which has been imported and naturalized, without acknowledgment or consciousness, in Britain. There is something about the American style of speech, of humour, and of politics which predisposes to the creation of apt and striking expressions. What would we do without carpetbagger or hats in the ring? Incidentally, is gravy train (which strangely is not in Safire) American?

Even, however, with expressions of European origin, Safire has astonishingly few lapses from accuracy and perception. I noticed snake in the tunnel, meaning ‘an exchange rate limited to fluctuate up and down between close margins.’ Safire not only distinguishes the true (‘line on a graph’) from the false (‘snake in the grass’) origin of the metaphor, but notes the peculiar fact that we have now replaced the tunnel by the snake itself and talk about “entering the snake.”

Beyond all the above categories, Safire includes straightforward albeit neologistic terms for American and other political inventions (e.g., New Deal, Medicare, Peace Corps) and even has articles on quite general political concepts, linguistically viewed, such as Conservative, card metaphors, new economics, sports metaphors, most-favored nation. This stretches the subject matter to the extreme but makes the dictionary more valuable as a students’ companion, especially in United States history.

The articles themselves are written in excellent and perspicuous English—which makes all the more curious the revelation in the Introduction that the lexicographer, a journalist by profession, is fully capable of the gravest journalistic crimes against language, especially in the misuse and inadmissible mixing of metaphors. He really ought not to write about “stereotypes that trigger approval or hatred” or how “the choice of a word can crystallize a mood and turn it to action” nor speak of “the use of Hottentots as a symbol of underdeveloped nations.” Perhaps there have been two (or more) hands at work, or is this just the mark of the poacher turned gamekeeper?

I wonder if there is room for an English political dictionary.

[J. Enoch Powell, House of Commons]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“DUO TOMACULA BUBULA CONDIMENTUM PECULIARE LACTUCA CASEUS MURIAE UNIONES IN PANE SESUMINATA” [found in the Papal Wastebasket by a friend of Egdon H. Margo’s, Reseda, California.]

Graphonics No. 1

Axel Hornos

In the first paragraph of the story below there are three words which, when paired with three words in the second paragraph, form, phonetically, three new words. You’ll find these words in the third paragraph, but in the guise of synonyms.

“Just because I want to punish this woman for stealing bread—yes, ‘stealing’ is the right term for it—you raise such a hue and cry? It’s beyond any sensible man’s understanding,” said the judge irritably as he banged the desk with his fist.

“But Your Honour, keep in mind that the bread was for the woman’s starving children and that they have an innate right to eat”, replied the attorney for the defense. “These should be your main concerns in judging the case, it really seems to me.”

Considering that the woman had acted with a legitimate purpose, the judge, being a compassionate man who had people’s happiness very much at heart, decided to put an end to the whole sorry episode: he gave the order to let the woman free.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The choice we have is a simple one: either we will be prisoners and hapless victims whirled around by the impending world events, or we will come to grips with the fact that no matter what we have planned to do with our lives, forces much greater than those we control will shape our lives profoundly.” —Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, Ann Arbor, Michigan. [Submitted by Bert G. Hornback, Ann Arbor, Michigan, who apostrophizes, Some choice, huh?]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

A sign outside the secretarial pool at the Pentagon during World War II: ALL OFFICERS WISHING TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE SECRETARIES IN THE POOL MUST FIRST REPORT TO ROOM 403 TO SHOW EVIDENCE OF THEIR NEED. [Submitted by Murray Schwartz, Nyack, New York.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Death benefits are payable to dependents when accidental injury or occupational disease results in death for 20 years or up to $250,000.00 whichever is greater.”—Summary of Illinois Workmen’s Compensation Act and Illinois Occupational Diseases Act as Amended 7-1-77. [Submitted by Clark Holt, Park Ridge, Illinois.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“This coupon is redeemable for one FREE HANDFUL SAMPLING (2 oz.) of our delicious ‘California Pistachios.’ Just fill in the form below and enclose a $1.00 bill (no checks, please, our bank can’t handle them) to cover postage & handling. We’ll rush you your FREE HANDFUL SAMPLING so that you can discover what you’ve been missing!” —Text on a coupon from the Fresno Trading Co., Fresno, California. [Submitted by Hugh B. McManus, Jr., M.D., Redlands, California, who observes that at $1.00 plus 15¢ postage, the customer is paying $9.20 a pound; Fresno’s regular price is just under $5.00 a pound, about the average.]

Pairing Pairs No. 4

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). Deficit may result in early winter.
(b). Let the shilling remain as auxiliary support.
(c). Dresser has pullout feature.
(d). Bloody offspring is no plum!
(e). Potential energy from down east water.
(f). Source of smelly col' cream.
(g). Where bishops buy their hats.
(h). Lay on one of these and you still have nothing.
(i). Descend into the warehouse.
(j). Bury soprano up to her waist.
(k). Able to mimic an hors d’oeuvre.
(l). Australian stinger.
(m). Used-car salesman’s hint.
(n). Dos Passos quartet?
(o). Nana, the flunky.
(p). Fleet Street Coiffure?
(r). P.M. or notorious TV star?
(s). Hitchhikers pay this.
(t). Pussy’s moan for a jewel.
(u). Insane purpose will get you there.
(v). Regatta on the Isis or fourth down.
(w). Such a vessel would surely sink.
(x). Viceregent subsiding.
(y). Heavily pressing need.
(z). Dramatis personae absent. Marooned?

(1). Ape.
(2). Auto.
(3). Egg.
(4). Dog’s.
(5). Body.
(6). Mitre.
(7). Spring.
(8). Short.
(9). Tacks.
(10). Dam.
(11). Joint.
(12). Cast.
(13). Cutter.
(14). Agua.
(15). Suggestion.
(16). Goose.
(17). Son.
(18). Lunatic.
(19). Mezzo.
(20). Bob.
(21). Fall.
(22). Loco.
(23). Caliente.
(24). Sad.
(25). Motive.
(26). Can.
(27). Factory.
(28). Manhattan.
(29). Stay.
(30). Sin.
(31). Transfer.
(32). Thumb.
(33). Down.
(34). That.
(35). Drawer.
(36). Inter.
(37). Wasp.
(38). With.
(39). King.
(40). Punt.
(41). Cher.
(42). Stone.
(43). Fringe.
(44). Digger.
(45). Sigh.
(46). Ol'.
(47). Away.
(48). Go.
(49). Formation.
(50). Main.
(51). Iron.
(52). Cat.
(53). Proud.

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 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 your would like to receive.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

Tom Brokaw, after the Columbia had been safely landed, advised in a live broadcast from Edwards Air Force Base, California, that Young and Crippen had given their spacecraft “fulsome praise.” [Submitted by Robert Joseph Powers, Shreveport, Louisiana. And here we thought they rather liked her.]

Paring Pairs No. 3

Answer: 50. Service.

(a). More than a discussion on sex. (29,20) Criminal Conversation. (b). Damager of toupees. (43,1) Rug Beater. (c). Surf ‘n’ Ski acrobatically. (36,26) Hot Dog. (d). Church singer. (41,17) Quire Bouy. (e). Bashful helper’s visor. (52,42) Shy Aide. (f). Treacly church rituals. (31,7) Low Masses. (g). Queue for liquid refreshment. (16,2) Punch Line. (h). Miner’s serendipitous strike. (32,5) Pay Dirt. (i). Basic ursine datum. (39,14) Bear Fruit. (j). Complaint merchant. (30,3) Wine Cellar. (k). Inclined tree source. (40, 25) Bent Twig. (l). Ironing work force. (13,6) Press Gang. (m). In favor of tiny particles. (34, 18) Pro Motes. (n). Cattle trading. (49,27) Stock Exchange. (o). Familiar with homosexual aroma. (53,10) Knows gay. (p). Shriek for my just deserts. (33,4) I Scream. (q). Rodent heap. (51,35) Mouse Tower. (r). Depart. (37,21) Way Anchor. (s). Low visibility. (28,8) Sealing Zero. (t). Swag. (44,11) Waltz Matilda. (u). Waiting. (38,24) Spinning Wheels. (v). Pigeon × 2. (48,9) Pouter, Passenger. (w). Site of moustache. (45,12) Hare Lip. (x). Source of congenital sadness. (47,23) Blue Genes. (y). Money maniac. (46,15) Dough Nut. (z). But thorn usually causes this. (22,19) Rose Hip.

ETYMOLOGICA OBSCURA

A study of the word town shows an interesting shift of emphasis through the centuries. For us moderns a town signifies an ‘urban concentration as opposed to more sparsely populated countryside,’ but earlier usages had a generally rural connotation. Derived from the Old English tun, an ‘enclosure,’ town in early days signified an ‘enclosed piece of ground such as a field or yard or garden,’ whence the compounds aeppel-tun, an ‘apple orchard,’ cyric-tun, the ‘churchyard,’ wyrt-tun, a ‘vegetable garden,’ and so on. At the end of the 14th century Wyclif translated Matthew 22:5: “But thei … wenten forth, oon in to his toun….” this rendering the Greek agros, a ‘field.’ From that it was but a short transition to the ‘enclosed land surrounding a dwelling, i.e. a manor or a farm.’ Piers Plowman wrote of “threshing and dyking fro town to town,” and in 1785 John Mill remarked, “Some hill towns had a good deal of corn on the ground to shear.” This application to a farmstead has endured as a peculiarly Scottish usage.

The term town or township was also applied to a ‘village or hamlet with relatively little organisation.’ It was especially applied to the ‘cluster of houses adjoining the church,’ in full the churchtown. Churchtown remains as a place name in modern Southport and no doubt in many other places as well, and there are many completely rural place names still in existence such as Town End, Towns Green and Top of the Town (a farm in a particularly isolated situation near the Shropshire Union Canal).

Only gradually did the term come to signify a ‘collection of dwellings larger than a village,’ and to be used of an urban settlement distinct from or contrasted with the country. Pope drew this contrast in 1715:

As some fond Virgin, whom her mother’s care
Drags from the Town to wholesome Country air.

Country has had in its time a number of shifts of emphasis. It originally signified a ‘region or district or tract of land,’ so that Wyclif could speak of “Al the contrey aboute Jordan.” Derived via the Old French contrée and the Late Latin contrata from the Latin contra ‘against,’ it signified literally ‘that which lies opposite, the landscape spread out before you.’ Then it was applied to a ‘district with distinct characteristics of its own’—chalk country, fen country, sheep country, corn country—or to a ‘district limited or defined by human occupation, e.g. owned by the same lord or inhabited by a specific group of people.’ In this sense men spoke of O’Neil Country or Lochiel’s Country. Two farmers, living perhaps three or four miles apart, might meet each other and enquire, “What’s the news in you country?” Two parishes might be spoken of as different countries in this sense of the word, certainly countries were so described: “In Leycestershyre, Lankesshyre, Yorkeshyre … and manye other countreyes,” wrote Fitzherbert in 1. When the Prodigal Son “took his journey into a far country,” there is no reason to suppose that he left his native land; the Greek word which country here translates similarly meant simply ‘district, region, or place.’

Today, of course, we generally apply the word to a ‘land under a particular government or inhabited by a particular ethnic or linguistic group’—“To bee of one countrie, of one nation, of one language,” as Grimalde wrote in 1553—or else to ‘rural regions or farming districts as opposed to the city.’ In Cowper’s frequently quoted saying, “God made the country, and man made the town.”

The specialized uses of the word are numerous: as a mining term country signifies the ‘rock on each side of a lode;’ as a nautical expression, a ‘region of the ocean, or aboard ship, an area for common use,’ like steerage country or wardroom country; in cricket slang, the ‘part of the field which is remote from the wicket.

OBITER DICTA

Today the actor when he rehearses preserves the last use of a word which originally meant to ‘recite or repeat a lesson.’ “Rehearse the Articles of thy Belief,” says the Catechism. It could also be used in the wider sense of ‘narrating, describing at length, enumerating,’ as in the Authorised Version’s “There shall they rehearse the righteous acts of the Lord.” There was also a provincial usage in which rehearse was used of indigestible food repeating: “Them be strong onions surelie, thaay re’erses ahl daay.” Finally comes our actor’s use of the word when he ‘practises in private what he will later perform in public.’

OBITER DICTA

The Prayer Book use of indifferent to signify ‘without partiality or favour’ instead of its modern meaning of ‘apathetic or unconcerned.’ The old significance of the word is fully defined in the oath administered to the Manx deemsters: “You shall, without respect of favour or friendship, love or gain, consanguinity or affinity, envy or malice, execute the laws of the Isle justly between the Lord and his people of this land and betwixt party and party so indifferently as the herring backbone doth lie in the middle of the fish.”

EPISTOLA {Marjorie Sykes}

That much-abused word nice was beginning to lose its proper meaning as far back as Jane Austen’s time, when Henry Tilney teased Catherine Morland for misusing it. There are regrettably few today who employ it in its correct senses of ‘acute, discerning’ (a nice criticism), ‘delicate, subtle’ (a nice question), ‘accurate’ (nicely balanced), or ‘fastidious,’ as in R.G. White’s “A gentleman should be scrupulously nice in his person.” Perhaps this last represents an old-fashioned ideal, obsolescent in our times. But it would be unwise to start pontificating about this Protean word, for which the Oxford English Dictionary lists some fourteen different meanings, many with their own subsections, ranging from ‘stupid, wanton, and indolent’ to ‘modest, appetizing, and thin!’

[Marjorie Sykes, Macclesfield, Cheshire]

EPISTOLA {J.D. Lorentzen}

In connection with Mr. Eisiminger’s article [VII, 1], I would like to point out that Icelandic has rather successfully been kept free of foreign words. The Norwegians also consciously strive to keep their language “pure,” and though they haven’t capitulated to the degree the Germans seem to have done, they have been fighting an uphill battle, especially since the discovery of oil in the North Sea, with its accompanying flood of semi-technical terms. The following story may help to illustrate some of their difficulties.

A number of years ago, hydrofoil boats were put into use as part of the coastal transportation system. Since hydrofoil is a construction distinctly alien to Norwegian, the Språkråd (the language advisory committee) sat down to produce a new Norwegian word for this new type of boat. After seven years of deliberation and debate, they finally agreed upon vingebåt/vengjebåt (‘wing-boat,’ in two forms, as there are two written forms of Norwegian). However, by that time everybody had got used to the term hydrofoil, and nobody seemed to realize what a “wing-boat” was, so in the end the Språkråd voted to adopt hydrofoil as the officially recognized term. I am quite in agreement with Mr. Eisiminger’s observations on the desirability of languages’ remaining open to foreign influences, particularly as regards “world languages” like English or French, and other “strong,” widely-based languages, like German. The cases of Icelandic, with only 225,000 speakers, and Norwegian, with its four million speakers, a wide variety of dialects, and two written forms, are somewhat different. Such narrowly based languages are in danger of being overwhelmed by the influence of English, in particular, and, without the critical attitude of the purists, may be in danger of being destroyed, or at least changed into unrecognizability. That is not to say that all foreign influences are bad, even for languages spoken by few people, but just that foreign words should not be accepted into a “weak” language unless they serve some very good purpose that native words cannot. To put it quite simply, the defense mechanism mentioned by Mr. Eisiminger is much more important and must operate more consistently in small countries than in big ones.

[J.D. Lorentzen, Naestby, Norway]

EPISTOLA {Tony Hall}

How thoughtful of Robert A. Fowkes to contribute his article, “Blends, Blands, and Blunds” [VII, 2], thus offering me the chance to mention something that has lurked in my mind for two or three years. Some roadworks in a town not far from here had made the pavement (U.S. sidewalk) impassable, and a kindly member of the gang digging the hole had painted on a board an unforgettable warning: PATH CLOSLED; PLEAUSE OTHESIDE.

I don’t know whether the strain of deciding where to insert the redundant L in the first line had so wearied him that he couldn’t bear the effort of spelling out in full the words in the second, but every time I think of his effort I am fascinated by the way the meaning comes through, despite the disappearance of parts of some words up the exhaust pipes of the ones in front! I wonder in how many languages one could achieve this feat? And I dread to think what further game of compressed language readers of VERBATIM may be lured into producing.

I enjoyed Mr. Fowke’s article in its own right, of course, but I would quarrel with his ascription of “Scall—er, call—a skycab.” I would suspect that this was an aborted example of that great linguistic form, the spoonerism. Spoonerisms have a great appeal to me, perhaps because my mother is a great natural exponent of a form of the art that involves whole words rather than initial letters. An especially prized contribution of hers, many years ago now, was to tell me to look at a local shop which had “a lovely carpetful of windows.”

Sports announcers, mentioned by Mr. Fowkes as a source of blends and blunds, manage some startling efforts in Britain, too. Usually they are produced in full spate when talking at speed about events before their eyes, but a beautiful extended spoonerism of my mother’s type came in a leisurely report on BBC radio recently. Speaking of one team’s victory over another, the announcer said of a particular player that he had had “the feet in their hand.” It took me a moment to ungarble this: the player had in fact had “a hand in their defeat.”

One of the great exponents of blends, oddly not mentioned in Mr. Fowkes’s article, was Lewis Carroll. It comes as a faint shock to realize that words in everyday use (at least on this side of the Atlantic) such as whiffle, galumph, burble, and chortle, were invented by him in “Jabberwocky” (and glossed by him as “portmanteau” words—a term that has also passed into accepted usage).

[Tony Hall, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire]

EPISTOLA {Ernest Walton}

Mr. Sterling Eisiminger, in “Borrowing and Biases in German and English [VII, 1], overstates his case. It is true that transliteration, particularly under the Nazis, was at times overdone. For example, in Frankfurt on the Main there was a large sports facility known as the “Stadium.” The Nazis “verdeutscht” this into Sportsfeld ‘sportsfield’ without realizing that they had to borrow a word of recent English origin to make a “German” word out of the Greco-Latin predecessor.

However, the word Geländewagen hardly proves Mr. Eisiminger’s point. I know that the word existed in 1936 when Germany rearmed, and this was a number of years before the first jeep was built (1941?) or named. The word camera is not an English infiltration into the German language, let alone of recent origin as the article suggests. My Muret-Sanders German-English dictionary of 1908 contains the word Kamera already; both the English and the German words were derived from the Latin camera ‘chamber,’ itself a borrowing from Greek kamara ‘vault.’ Blumenlese ‘anthology’ does not mean “flowers of reading”: it means ‘selection of flowers.’ [Ed. Note: In that sense, it may be parallel with English garland ‘a literary miscellany.'] The word is a combination of die Blume ‘the flower’ and die Lese ‘the choice, selection.’ It has nothing to do with the first person singular ich lese or any other form of the verb lesen ‘to read.’

Anent Eric Winter’s “Odd Couples” [VII, 1], when I was a child, the German cocks all crowed Kikeriki, not “das Kikeriku” and, like all the other cocks mentioned in the article, omitted the definite article when they yelled their heads off early in the morning.

May I add, with respect to Mr. Hereford’s suggestion that GI can be traced to “General Infantry” [VI, 3], that I have heard of infantry, infantry of the line, motorized infantry, armored infantry, airborne infantry, chairborne infantry, mountain infantry, and even mounted infantry. I have also come across musketeers, grenadiers, fusiliers, tirailleurs, light infantry, Jäger, Schützen, Chasseurs, Bersaglieri, Chasseurs d’Alpine, Janissaries, Zouaves, Askari, Rangers, Commandos, Raiders, not to mention parachute, glider-borne, and marine infantry, but never, never have I come across “General Infantry.” In my 3½ years of service in the U.S. Army in WW II, we were all GIs and thought it meant ‘General Issue.’

[Ernest Walton, New York City]

EPISTOLA {Dr. H.H. Macey}

Floreat Park is a suburb some two miles from the sea. Between them lies another suburb called City Beach, the residents of which tend to get a bit hot under the collar on the subject of public transport, which is very poor—the reason being lack of support: everyone in City Beach has a car. The following opus was circulated there last autumn:

Bloody City Beach

This bloody town’s a bloody cuss,
No bloody trains, no bloody bus,
And no one cares for bloody us,
In bloody City Beach.
Everything’s so bloody dear—
Fifty cents for your bloody beer—
And is it drinkable? No bloody fear,
In bloody City Beach.
No bloody sport, no bloody games,
No bloody fun—the bloody dames
Won’t even give their bloody names!
In bloody City Beach.
Best bloody place is bloody bed,
With bloody ice on bloody head.
You might as well be bloody dead
In bloody City Beach.
—Anon.

[Dr. H.H. Macey, Floreat Park, Western Australia]

OBITER DICTA: Language and Law - I

Once upon a time, when you and I were younger than we are now, a newspaper reported the capture of the perpetrator of a crime. The headline (probably) read something like, MURDERER OF B**** CAUGHT, DEPARTMENT STORE THIEF APPREHENDED, or, possibly, EMBEZZLER ARRESTED AT MEXICAN BORDER. You probably know the rest: a clever defense lawyer proved (in court, that is) that the identification of a suspect as á criminal was prejudicial to the jury. Moreover, until found guilty, any suspect termed a criminal in the press could sue for libel, slander, defamation of character, and for having beans stuffed up his nose.

As a result, all “suspects” are now “alleged or suspected assassins/thieves/burglars/hijackers, etc.” That seems a bit spurious and even slightly inane when one considers certain events, the attempted assassination of President Reagan for one, that of Pope John Paul II for another, the removal from an airplane of half a dozen hijackers for a third. In the second case, it seems very unlikely that anything reported in American printed media or on TV or radio would come under the libel laws of a foreign country, especially since this Mehmet Ali Agca isn’t even a citizen of Italy, where he will presumably be tried, and doesn’t therefore have rights to pursue civil action there against an entity in a foreign country. Yet, despite the facts that (1) Agca has admitted doing the dastardly deed and (2) a substantial number of people who saw him do it almost killed him for it on the spot, The New York Times feels it must refer to the Young Turk as “the suspected assailant.” It is unfair to pick only on The New York Times, of course, since all the media do it: Agca has been called the “alleged/suspected assailant/ assassin” (you can mix and match those any way you like) by all the American media.

Likewise, Hinckley, the “alleged” or “suspected” attacker of President Reagan, cannot be called “the attacker,” “the assailant,” or anything else that is not preceded by a mitigating adjective.

All of this may be proper legal procedure, but, in the real world, it is nonsense: when millions of people watch Harry Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on television, how can the media convince anyone that alleged and suspected are not devoid of meaning? And then, when a crime is committed and a “real” suspect is found and arrested— and by “real” is meant ‘someone who is suspected of the crime but no one can be certain he committed it, and he might be let go if insufficient evidence precludes a trial, or, if a trial takes place, he might be acquitted’—applying the empty words alleged or suspected to such an individual prejudices his case to his disfavor more pointedly than to that of the criminal observed in the act.

A suspect is a suspect is a suspect. The word is used in English mainly to mean ‘someone who is suspected of having done something’; suspect (verb) means ' “1. to believe to be guilty … with insufficient proof or with no proof. 2. to believe to be rightly chargeable with something stated, usually something wrong, … on little or no evidence.” ' Alleged means ' “declared or stated to be as described; asserted.” ' [Verb and adjective definitions are from the Random House Unabridged.] In strictly legal terms, something alleged is an allegation, defined as ' “the statement of the issue which the contributing party is prepared to prove,” ' in Steven H. Gifis’s Law Dictionary, Barron’s, 1975.

Thus, in ordinary English, an allegation is ' “an assertion made without substantial proof,” ' while in legal English it is ' “an assertion made by a party in a legal proceeding, which he undertakes to prove.” ' [Both from RH Unabridged.] Yet, somehow, by virtue of the constant repetition of alleged preceding such words as thief, assassin, rapist, murderer, mugger, etc., in the media it has taken on the sense ‘we don’t know whether he did it or not’ rather than ‘we haven’t yet proven whether he did it or not.’ The question arises, therefore, whether it makes sense to refer to criminals known to have committed crimes (without a trial) as “alleged” criminals: a subsequent release or acquittal does not, necessarily, mean that the defendant did not commit the crime for which he was tried, only that he was not found guilty of it. That might be for any number of reasons; a common one in America was that the suspect was not “read his rights” at the time of the arrest, a result of the so-called Miranda rule [384 U.S. 436, 444-45]; other reasons abound. Alleged appears to have acquired the status of a legal loophole; it allows the media to call anyone anything they please, as long as it is preceded by alleged.

[L.U.]

ETYMOLOGICA OBSCURA

Marjorie Sykes, Macclesfield, Cheshire

When the Chancellor of the Exchequer unfolds his buget we shall all be so familiar with the term’s present-day meaning that we are unlikely to spare a thought for the fact that this is the last survival of an old word whose meaning was originally quite other.

In the first instance the word budget signified a ‘workman’s bag or wallet generally made of leather, especially a tinker’s wallet or the leather pouch in which a mower carried his whetstone.’ So a country song speaks of “The jolly mowers With budget and with bottle,” while in the 16th century Abraham Fleming wrote of the tinker’s curs which carried “big budgetts fraught with Tinckers Tooles and mettail.”

The word was also applied to a ‘leather or skin bottle,’ as a water budget, or to a ‘back-can, a milk can shaped to fit the back.’ In other specialised senses it was used of a ‘kind of boot in a carriage for carrying luggage and of the leather socket which held the butt of a cavalry carbine on a journey.’ “The two dragoons,” wrote Sir Walter Scott, “have their carabines out of their budgets.”

From these original meanings the word came to be applied to the ‘contents of a bag or wallet in the sense of a stock or store,’ especially used in a figurative sense of ‘news,’ so that Thackeray could speak of Frank bringing “a budget of news from home.” This led to the use of the word as a popular title for a journal, like the Pall Mall Budget and the Young Folk’s Weekly Budget.

An 18th century pamphlet The Budget Opened likened Sir Robert Walpole to a mountebank opening his ‘wallet of quack medicines and conjuring tricks’—a less polite explanation of the term budget in its financial sense than the discreeter view that it refers to the ‘Chancellor’s leather bag or dispatch box,’ hence to its contents.

Caddie is an almost obsolete noun which survives today only in the golfer’s vocabularly. The word, which was principally used in Scotland, though not exclusively so, had three meanings and many more spelling variants, for it has appeared as caddie, cadie, caddy, cady, caudie, cawdie, cawdy, caddee, and cadee. The variations in spelling no doubt resulted from the fact that it was a term more often used in speech than in writing.

It was employed in the 19th century as the equivalent of a ‘cadet in the army’; it also signified in familiar speech ‘lad or young fellow’:

A’ ye canty, cheerie caddies,
Lend a lug to Jamie’s tale.

But the chief usage seems to have been to denote the ‘men or lads who hung about the streets on the lookout for casual employment, as messengers, errand boys, porters and the like.’ “The next time you didna ken your road, ask ane of the caddies at the street corners,” advised Whithead in 1876. Sir Walter Scott used the word in his novels in this sense, while Macaulay in his History of English spoke of “every Scotchman, from the peer to the cadie.”

In particular, the term was applied to a ‘sort of corps of commissionaires’ in 18th-century Edinburgh. Burt wrote of them about 1730: “The Cawdys, a very useful BlackGuard, who attend … publick Places to go of Errands; and though they are Wretches, that in Rags lye upon the Stairs, and in the Streets at Night, yet are they often considerably trusted…. This Corps has a kind of Captain … presiding over them, whom they call the Constable of the Cawdys.”

Most of these usages have come from Scottish sources, but an interesting instance from England occurs in instructions issued to mail guards in coaching days: “Only two outside passengers are allowed whose station must be one on the Box and one on the Roof … pretence of taking up a Cadde or Helper will never be admitted as an excuse for disregarding this order.” So wrote the Post Office official in charge of mail coaches in 1805. Now the caddie who acts as the golfer’s attendant is the only one to survive, and he perhaps precariously.

The word snob provides an interesting example of a slang term which rose in the world to gain a quite respectable specialized meaning. Originally it was a dialect term for a ‘cobbler or shoemaker’ and was still used in that sense in quite recent times. In 1781 Hone referred to “Sir William Blase, a snob by trade.” It could also refer to the ‘cobbler’s boy’: “He had entered the craft in the usual way by being what the villagers called a ‘snob.’ ”

In Cambridge parlance it was a slang term for ‘anyone not a gownman, i.e. a townsman.’ As the Saturday Review remarked in 1865, “Happily the annals of Oxford present no instance of a ‘snob’ murdered in the streets.”

It was also a term for a ‘person without any pretensions to gentility, one who belonged to the lower classes of society,’ so that a mid-19th century writer on Australia could say, “The majority of the colonists are essentially snobs, and they are justly proud of the distinction.” From this the word came to signify a ‘person without breeding or good taste,’ as Thackeray explained: “A vulgar man in England … chiefly displays his character of snob by … swaggering and showing off in his coarse dull stupid way.”

In terms of industrial action, a snob was a ‘blackleg or knobstick, who either refused to strike or undercut his fellows.’ “Those who work for lower wages during a strike are called snobs, the men who stand out being ‘nobs’.”

Finally comes its present meaning of a ‘person who regards wealth or position rather than character, one who toadies to the eminent or affluent and despises those whom he considers his inferiors.’ “He was … such a snob, he felt pleased his clerks should hear a butler ask for a situation.”

EPISTOLA {John L. Hannaford}

In his article, “Unofficial Sectional City Names” [VII, 2], Frederic Cassidy refers to a sectional name, Little Canada, in Massachusetts. He might be interested to learn that there is an incorporated city in Ramsey County, Minnesota, bearing the official name Little Canada. As might be imagined, the area was settled by French Canadian immigrants.

[John L. Hannaford, St. Paul, Minnesota]

EPISTOLA {Sylvia Khan}

Not being an expert of any kind, let alone in matters of language, I hesitate to comment adversely on an article in VERBATIM. There were several statements, however, in “Unofficial Sectional City Names” [VII, 2], which struck me as being removed from social reality.

Mr. Cassidy writes that names “more or less unfavorable” to the foreigners settled in a section together include Polack Town, Jig Town, Jew Town, Wop Town, Wop Flat, Dago Town, and Dago Center. “More or less unfavorable” to whom? Self-respecting Jews, Irish, Italians, and Poles consider such names exemplary expressions of bigotry and parochialism. (A good many of us descendants of immigrants are still considered foreigners.)

Mr. Cassidy also states that blacks are the “most conspicuously separate or segregated group of people in American cities—no doubt because of their numbers and racial distinctiveness, which makes them slower to assimilate….” Either Mr. Cassidy failed to express what he really meant, or he believes that the victim is the cause of his victimization. And to describe blacks calling each other “nigger” as merely indulging in friendly “joking” is to be astonishingly naive about the real meaning of the relationship and the bitterness of the comedy.

Not mentioned in the article are Ghost Town, an unfavorable expression for the black ghetto in Southern California, and the Barrio, the section in East Los Angeles settled almost exclusively by Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants. Barrio appears to be a neutral designation, but I wouldn’t recommend its use by outsiders because of the faint scent of condescension, which is suspected if not intended.

It’s not only how you say what you say, but who says it to whom.

[Sylvia Khan, North Hollywood, California]

EPISTOLA {Robert Hager}

In reference to Frederic G. Cassidy’s article: some years ago, in a neighboring community, a section known as Eucalyptus Hill was subdivided and sold by a developer whose last name was Hill. Some buyers, thinking they had paid too much for the property, renamed the area You clipped us, Hill.

[Robert Hager, Goleta, California]

EPISTOLA {Jennings Parrott}

Mr. Cassidy lists Coontown and Coon Bottom among names he considers “intolerably countrified” and says they refer to animals. I believe this is misleading.

The thought that raccoons, who fight for their territory, might congregate in sufficient quantities to give their name to an area doesn’t fit with my memories of growing up in rural Arkansas in the 1920s and 1930s.

The pejorative coon would refer to the slum where the community’s blacks lived. It seems quaint now; old-fashioned, it probably faded from general use some years ago, along with minstrel shows.

[Jennings Parrott, Sherman Oaks, California]

[Such was the opinion of a number of readers.]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Sometimes they beat wives. (10)
2. How to live next door to a laughingstock, so I hear. (4)
3. What he did since at first he didn’t succeed. (4, 6, 5) 4. With language like this can more tell whoppers? (7) 5. In judging booze, would this beat Brand X? (6) 6. A host who could make a pig of himself. (5) 7. Is a censor disturbed by today’s Hollywood material? (9) 8. Mission impossible is not his bag, but then, he’s just a kid. (6,3) 9. A possible gourmet … (5) 10. … or a glutton like this. (3, 3) 11. Seven shot for one old fool. (7) 12. King Tut and the oil of Arabia. (6, 9) 13. Server of liquor even though everybody’s higher than a kite.(4) 14. He doesn’t want to get even, just rich. (4,6)

Down

1. Competition for banks. 2. Make a charge at the portal for bad weather protection. (5,4) 3. It helps in drawing the long bow? Yes, sir, but no sir! (5) 4. Bags to keep in a chest. (7) 5. Up lift the common man. (7) 7. Gold for Brass. (5) 8. They are less than inches per foot. (4) 9. A page about Peter with the proper endowment. (8) 13. Despite a role coming up roses this is no jolly winner. (1, 4, 5) 15. Lyrical music to one’s ears, according to the composer. (4, 4) 17. Explain the oddly inert and then pert. (9) 19. I got in bed all alone, being wedded only to my own opinions. (7) 20. Americans who have had teeth pulled? (7) 23. Make a match of it, jibe notwithstanding. (5) 25. An indescribable something, yet on the tip of one’s tongue. (5) 26. One needs fundamentals or is without basics, of course. (4)

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. Ascot tie (a scottie);
5. Scrawl; 9. Capital offenses (of fences);
11. SA-m-U-ra-I;
12. Unrigid;
13. RENEWAL OF POLICY (anagram of I ONLY COP WELFARE);
15. Power of the press;
21. L-iss-O-m-E;
22. L.A.st run;
24. Changing clothes;
25. The-OR-y;
26. Stat-Utes.

Down

1. ACCUSER;
2. COPYMAN;
3. Tutor;
4. Ill will;
6. Clear s-O-up;
7. Assegai;
8. Last Day;
10. Fluff;
14. WARMONGER (anagram, GO WARN ‘EM);
15. P-o-LECA-t;
16. W-a-stag-E;
17. FREON (in-FERNO);
18. HELLCAT (call the);
19. Ears-hot;
20. Sin-uses;
23. (la)ST OUT.

Spy Euphemisms

Victor Lasseter, The California State College (Bakersfield)

In John le Carré’s The Looking Glass War, a British intelligence official seeks government approval to forge some passports. “I propose,” he explains to an Under Secretary, “to use a cover story for security reasons: a pretended training scheme is the most appropriate.” The Under Secretary is momentarily puzzled by the euphemism. “Cover story? Ah yes: a lie.”

Spying naturally requires cover, or disguise: candor is a small virtue in espionage. Espionage may also require euphemism. Euphemism, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, comes from the Greek verb ‘to speak fair’ and is ‘the substitution of a word or expression of comparatively favourable implication or less unpleasant association, instead of the harsher or more offensive one that would precisely designate what is intended.’ When one ‘speaks fair,’ one uses vague, imprecise, indirect, frequently polysyllabic, and always misleading language.

Euphemism in spying, however, seems paradoxical, since so many examples of failed euphemisms (protective reaction for ‘bombing raid,’ surreptitious entry for ‘breaking and entering’) suggest that euphemism is translucent, if not transparent: it holds its cover only temporarily. Why, then, should the spies—with their sophisticated and potent array of invisible inks, cryptograms, scramblers, lie detectors, and poison dart guns— bother to use the frail euphemism?

Literature about the United States Central Intelligence Agency suggests that the euphemisms are coined not to mislead the enemy but to soothe the conscience of the spy and to guide public opinion. An example of euphemism as a kind of Maalox for the conscience of the spy appears in The Man Who Kept the Secrets (1978), Thomas Powers’s biography of Richard Helms. Powers tells of a major in Castro’s army recruited by the CIA to assassinate the Cuban leader. The major had already shown his prowess by killing Batista’s head of military intelligence. After the killing, however, he had a nervous breakdown. In his later negotiations with the CIA, he refused to use the word assassinate; he preferred eliminate.

Euphemism has a more public purpose as well. A former CIA officer, John Stockwell, reveals in In Search of Enemies (1978) that as the word mercenary became embarrassing in CIA Angola, the agency simply banned the word from memos and reports. The replacement term was foreign military advisor. Similarly, William Colby, in Honorable Men (1978), explains that he took the agency’s poison dart gun before the Church Committee to dispel the CIA’s “James Bond” and “Maxwell Smart” image. He therefore introduced the weapon to the committee not as a poison dart gun but as a Non-discernible Microbioinoculator.

This deceptive quality of euphemism contrasts to the more candid possibilities of jargon. Although jargon may be euphemistic, it does not have to be. Both jargon and euphemism are indirect and cryptic, but euphemism conceals and begs for belief, while jargon may function precisely as shop talk or insider’s shorthand. No spy talking to another spy would call a poison dart gun a Non-discernible Microbioinoculator. John le Carré’s spies, however, call a bodyguard a babysitter. Babysitter is oblique to the outsider, but, once its new meaning is understood, precise. Similarly, to burn is spy jargon meaning ‘to blackmail’ but is a more revealing expression than political action. Thus, jargon may be a useful linguistic device in a specialized trade. Cold pitch, for instance, is CIA jargon for ‘approaching a potential agent on the street without any introduction.’ Sometimes such jargon is quite candid: ‘sabotage instructors’ at the CIA training school are known as the burn or blow boys. When Trevanian, in The Eiger Sanction, ridicules such “cryptic jargon” as demote maximally for ‘purge by killing,’ biographic leverage for ‘blackmail,’ sanction for ‘counter-assassination,’ and wet work for ‘killing,’ he is parodying such CIA euphemisms as terminate with extreme prejudice. Only wet work, with its menacingly clear understatement, is jargon. Of course, spy jargon is a more private language than spy euphemism, but literature about the CIA provides many more examples of distorting euphemism than of candid jargon.

Euphemisms appear throughout the world of the CIA. According to Victor Marchetti, in The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974), the CIA calls its spies penetrations, an impersonal word that connotes a kind of objective, perhaps inevitable, physical phenomenon and avoids the sneaky connotation of spy. A technical interview is the ‘lie detector test given to prospective CIA employees.’ Technical penetration is the public-relations term for ‘electronic surveillance, or bugging.’ According to E. Howard Hunt’s Undercover (1974), alias documentation is the CIA euphemism for the ‘making of false identity papers and disguises.’ A dazzling euphemism is the Orwellian authentication, which means ‘forgery.’ Here euphemism has become Doublespeak.

For the sake of public relations, a CIA front becomes a proprietary organization. The ‘secret use of foundations, newspapers, and colleges’—where the CIA may employ campus sources, or ‘informers’—becomes an interface. ‘Propaganda’ becomes disinformation activities; ‘giving a secret CIA assignment to a reporter’ becomes prior tasking.

One of the best known CIA euphemisms is covert action. The phrase connotes merely a ‘secret action,’ but in fact refers to the ‘secret intervention in the internal affairs of foreign countries.’ According to the June 1980 issue of the Covert Action Bulletin, even this bland term is being replaced by the blander special activities. A rather extreme form of covert action is destabilization, or the ‘overthrow of a foreign government.’

Much of this spy talk is so euphemistic that it succeeds in suggesting the board room rather than the hidden microphone. Just as business favors action-oriented expressions (as Kenneth Hudson points out in his Dictionary of Diseased English) like aggressive manager and fast-moving convenience foods, the CIA relies on aggressive business expressions for cover. Political action means the ‘bribing of foreign politicians or the framing of Soviet officials.’ Executive action means ‘assassination of heads of state.’ According to Harry Rositzke, in The CIA’s Secret Operations (1977), preventive direct action means ‘sabotage, anti-sabotage, and demolition.’ Positive intervention is an ‘attempt to unseat a Communist government.’

To the public, the Central Intelligence Agency is the CIA; to its employees, the CIA is the firm or the company. Given this logic, the ‘relationship between the spy and his handler’ becomes the agent-principal relationship, ‘foreign nationals working for the firm’ become assets, ‘areas of specialization’ become accounts (as in the Iranian account), and ‘casing the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’ becomes a feasibility study. For employees who displease their superiors, the firm may, in the words of William Colby, arrange a circumstance where employees can be helped to leave government service early. If the employee is one of those purged in the CIA’s recent mole hunts, the dismissal is called a negative career development.

Since a democratic society holds its intelligence services accountable to the people, the CIA often makes plans for plausible deniability (a ‘lie that the President, Congress, the press, or the public will buy’), but it may have to fall back on distancing (‘stonewalling’).

Euphemism, in short, does not really keep the secrets, but—through the manipulation of language— helps make some CIA practices seem more respectable.

To Bury the Hatchetmen

Dwight Bolinger, Palo Alto, California

How is one to deal with the image of the linguist as arch-permissivist—a reputation partly earned no doubt but mostly bestowed by critics who see the questioning of authority in language as a threat?

The critics come in all degrees, from serene to apoplectic, but the latter unfortunately tend to win the largest audiences. This is especially true at a time when business and government are alarmed at what they see as a growing illiteracy, schools are being told to cut out the frills and get back to basics, and programs once dear to the hearts of many linguists—such as bilingual education—are on the defensive. Some statements that have emanated from the profession in the past have invited the role of scapegoat, such as the one from an eminent linguist in the 50s who saw no contradiction between saying that one language is as good as another and saying that all should be preserved because one might turn out to be better. This was in the days of structural linguistics, “a benighted and despicable catering to mass ignorance,” as John Simon calls it, apparently unaware that structural linguists departed the seat of power a quarter century ago.

I can’t speak for all my fellow linguists—and this is enough to refute the caricature of a profession that speaks with one voice about anything, including correctness—but what I set down here I believe would be agreed upon by most.

As dedicated professionals, linguists agonize between a cultivated detachment and a passionate fondness for the object of their study. The first means that whatever affects language commands their respect, which includes the forces of conservatism as well as those of change. If the prescriptivists in our schools have succeeded in banishing He don’t and making ain’t simply funny, that is a datum on a par with the pronunciation congradulate as evidence of what happens to consonants when they occur between vowels, or wanna and gonna as indications of the continuing formation of auxiliaries. But fondness is a temptation to advocacy. The linguist who devotes a lifetime to fieldwork among the Hopi can hardly be blamed for resenting the assimilators who want to replace the Hopi language with English. That same fondness colors views about black and Chicano English and folk speech everywhere. It may blind some linguists to the importance of other arguments when political decisions have to be made, such as whether a minority group is better served by preserving its heritage or moving into the mainstream.

But linguists are by and large as much part of our literate culture as anyone else. When we write and speak we obey the conventions. Some even defend English spelling on the ground that it shows relationships that would otherwise be blurred. (Ignite and ignition are both spelled with t, but would not be if the -ition in ignition were treated like shun.) Most of us, I suspect, value the distinctions we have learned to make and regret their loss as a new generation comes along and confuses them. In this we may feel like insisting, alongside any standpat purist, that schools teach the difference between infer and imply. When we write dictionaries we faithfully contribute to the notes on usage—like the one soon to appear that warns against using refute in the sense of deny. But we do it knowing what we are up against. Refute is under pressure from refuse, which implies rejection only and not disproof. And the proper synonym in the refusal sense, controvert, is not one that we are likely to have much success in promoting.

Still, linguists are able to view such losses with a bit more equanimity than most because we know that for every distinction lost another is gained. As often as not it is confected from leftovers, sometimes from the very usages that prescriptivists condemn. The Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage prescribes drunken before the noun, drunk in the predicate: drunken driver, the driver was drunk. But that distinction is no good except for rhythm, like sunken eyes and luncheon date rather than sunk eyes and lunch date. People prefer distinctions of meaning, and nowadays a judge who fines a drunken driver is dealing with someone who lurched into the dock; a drunk driver could be cold sober. (Would you say drunken driving?) A swelled head is not a swollen head; he surely loves you is doubtful; he sure loves you is not. As Carol Burnett says, I’am a better actor than I am an actress. The language will survive because it can’t help surviving. There is a genie inside us who wastes nothing and repairs everything eventually.

What linguists sometimes forget is that the genie says no as often as yes. The negatives are all the times we correct ourselves or make a choice in the recesses of our minds that never even surfaces as a correction. It is most often a choice dictated by a rule so deep-seated that we have no occasion to formulate it: Are we set asiding the law? is corrected to Are we setting aside the law? because we know automatically where to attach -ing and mistakes are only fumbles. Or it may be a rule prescribed by explicit grammars, such as the one that radio commentator Paul Harvey might have exemplified had he corrected himself after saying And they all lived happily ever after till death did they part.

The linguist cannot deny either no-saying, but would like the prescriptivists to inform themselves, if only to measure their chances of success. Disinterested was a lost cause from the beginning. Trying to exclude the common meaning of interested is as useless as telling a juror to ignore the purple bruises on a witness’s face. Lie rather than lay is another forlorn hope. So, probably, are contrary-to-fact conditions with their requirement of the pluperfect (If he did it—If he had done it—I would have known). A language cannot tolerate indefinitely a finespun distinction hinged to forms so easily confused. But it might be worth the trouble to work on substitute and replace. (“Wages Substituted by Profit Sharing,” reads a headline in the USC Daily Trojan—for “Profit Sharing Substituted for Wages” or “Wages Replaced by Profit Sharing.”) Or on minimal and at least minimal. (Did the person who wrote The channels are organized so that minimal accuracy is maintained mean that the goal was the least possible accuracy or an accuracy that did not go below a certain minimum?)

I stress the might. These are questions of strategy, and strategy involves discussion, which ought to be informed discussion. One hit list of incorrections after another may entertain a public insecure about its status but will not achieve any of its avowed aims. The issues that language raises—cultural barriers, social stigma, truth, manipulation, solidarity, fairness in courts of law, understanding between classes and nations, the very organization of reality—are too important to be confined to the level of linguistic theory or table manners. It is time for rule-givers and linguists to talk to one another. It will be good for both sides and may get the discussion of language into the public arena, where it belongs.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Rats Live on No Evil Star: The BackWords Puzzle Book

Joaquin and Maura Kuhn, (Everest House, 1981), 127pp.

Even the most hardened puzzle-solver should approach this book with caution, because it has the power to trap one in a time-consuming struggle to master almost impossible riddles. How much time do you have for such a game of wits?

This should tell you that the crossword answers needed to fill in even the few blanks in these little stumpers will give you pause, testing your ingenuity to the utmost. Thus warned, let us examine this book and see what it is made of.

It offers 100 skeletonlike crosswords, sometimes using no more than four crossing words (or phrases) and sometimes up to ten or more. But these crossings are few and far between, not enough to turn a glimmer of a clue into a gleam. If you are palindrome-minded from having fooled around with them by choice or from simply having relished them, you have a head start in this sort of puzzle. Also, cryptogram fans will have an advantage, for they are schooled in the deciphering and intuitive grasp of short words. The authors have made every single word or phrase used in their puzzles palindromic, so you know what you are up against. Some are as simple as LEVEL or DEWED, easily defined, and others as impossible as REVIGORATE TAR O GIVER and MEGABUCKS ASK CUBA GEM (and the weird syntax makes the unimaginable answer almost impossible to define easily!). The extraordinary difficulty of creating long and funny palindromes is a reasonable excuse for such sense and syntax.

The husband-and-wife team, authors Joaquin and Maura Kuhn, must have spent hundreds of man/woman-hours making up these baffling riddles, and the end result, for sheer bulk and unflagging enthusiasm, is awesome. It will appeal to those dogged solvers who believe “if they can make it, we can break it,” which is where the time-consuming element comes in.

For those who find brain-racking more painful than pleasurable, there are answers in the back of the book. There is no law against stealing a look just to help yourself a little. It must be noted that as you do this sort of thing, your skill improves, as does your awareness of which words and which types of word structure suit the creation of palindromes.

The book is ingenious, challenging and outrageous, and often funny. I have made up one sample (it is not in the book) just to show you what to expect in the way of clue and answer in these crosswords. Amazingly enough, they are themed crosswords.

Clue: Noted angler unaware of game warden. (6, 4, 3, 3) [Numbers give size of answer words.]

To solve this puzzle you must first ask yourself “who is this noted angler?” If your mind is clear and names do not elude your memory bank, you should come up with WALTON. Since this phrase is a palindrome, you know that WALTON begins the answer and ends it too, though written in reverse. That leaves only the middle four blanks unfilled. A study of the clue could lead you to the missing word: SEES. Thus, you answer the riddle: WALTON SEES NOT LAW. This is typical of the syntax and spirit of the palindromes you find in the crosswords by the Kuhns.

The meagerness of the crossing (keyed) letters is what makes it so difficult. In the case I used as an example there were no crossings, but that is an easy one and is just for demonstration. To conclude: these crosswords make the ones in your daily paper look like child’s play and The [London] Times (and VERBATIM) crosswords like mild cerebral challenges.

[Jack Luzzatto, Bronx, New York]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Nelson’s Expository Dictionary of the Old Testament and An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, with Their Precise Meanings for English Readers

Merrill F. Unger and William White, Jr., eds., xii + 509 pp. and W.E. Vine., xv + 1324 pp. Both from Thomas Nelson.

The average reader of the Bible soon realizes that one has to resort to aids of various kinds to fathom the language used to formulate the word of God. God’s word there has been couched in human language centuries old, first written in Aramaic, Greek, or Hebrew, depending on the Old or New Testament book in question. Since it is the product of a long line of development and did not drop from heaven in one piece—much less in King James’s English—its language often creates problems. This condition is, of course, compounded for those who cannot read the original languages and check the nuances carried by a given English translation. Hence, one often has to have recourse to dictionaries, especially of the expository sort, which try to explain the varied meanings of a given biblical word.

Both of the books under discussion here are of this type, one treating the vocabulary of the Old Testament, the other that of the New. The first, dealing with the words of the Old Testament, is new, having been first published in 1980; it is the result of the collaborative work of twelve American Old Testament scholars who have assisted the two editors. The second, discussing the vocabulary of the New Testament, is a recent (undated) reprint of an older work first issued in two volumes in 1939 and reissued as one volume in 1952; it is the work of one person, W.E. Vine, and is fitted out with two forewords (one by W. Graham Scroggie, 1939, and the other by F.F. Bruce, 1952).

The books have in common the listing of the English words of each testament, distinguishing them according to parts of speech and listing the Aramaic, Greek, or Hebrew equivalents, not only in the original scripts but also in an (often questionable) English transcription; the occurrences in the various books of the Bible are grouped according to thematic meanings. In general, the articles devoted to each word thus enable the English reader to gain some feel for the sense of the Semitic or Greek equivalents and to see how the word is used in the same or in different meanings in various places in the Bible. The person who learns to use these dictionaries intelligently should be able to understand better the meanings of biblical words. Since the articles are not merely philological discussions but often include the theological senses of words, the reader will be able to cull from them the religious dimensions of biblical passages. The comments on various occurrences of the word in question are “expository” in that they seek to explain the precise meaning of a word in context. In the New Testament volume, a paragraph sign (¶) is used to note that all of the occurrences of the word under consideration have been mentioned in the given heading or subheading.

There are differences between the two works. That devoted to the words of the New Testament is built on the vocabulary of the King James Version and the revisions of 1881-1885. Since it was produced in 1939, it antedates the Revised Standard Version and later translations. For this reason the dictionary is limited, as it is also devoid of the use of more recent material brought to light since 1939 (e.g., the bearing of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls on the study of the New Testament). On the other hand, the volume devoted to the words of the Old Testament has also made use of the New English Bible, Today’s English Version, the New American Standard Bible, the Revised Standard Vrsion, the New International Version, the Jerusalem Bible, and the New American Bible.

These books have been written within conservative evangelical circles of modern Protestantism and accordingly manifest its strengths and weaknesses. Among the former must be mentioned the welcome respect for the inspired character of biblical writings and for the Christian traditions proceeding from them that surrounds the discussion. Among the latter would be an exaggerated emphasis on the truth of the Bible, often narrowly taken as historical truth. Scroggie’s foreword in the New Testament volume even refers to “the dispensational teaching of the New Testament” (p. viii), thus revealing that the intended users of the dictionary are mainly those of Protestant Dispensationalism. The names of eight of the twelve collaborators on the Old Testament volume do not appear in the most recently issued membership list of the Society of Biblical Literature. Hence, these volumes do not share all the wealth of the critical study of the Bible to be found in other Protestant circles or in (more recent) Roman Catholic interpretations. A certain wooden literalness is detected in many of the expository comments; and it even results in a strange—surely erroneous—transcription of Hebrew (with the silent schwa often transcribed as vocal).

The result is that the interested reader of the English Bible, for whom these works are in general intended, would do well to consult them in conjunction with other dictionaries of more scientific and enlightened Christian origin. Since the New Testament volume is in many ways outdated today, the reader should always compare the articles written by Vine with those in the three-volume New International Dictionary of the New Testament (ed. C. Brown, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1975-78), which, though it too stems from an evangelical background, is more critical in its treatment, being a translation of a recent original German work. Other well-known works of reference, such as Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, and the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, are the sort of control that should be used for both of these volumes. In a’word, use these expository dictionaries by all means, but use them with a discernment born of other interpretation.

[Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., The Catholic University of America]

Internet Archive copy of this issue

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1. Writing of calendar dates in all-numeric form. ISO 2014-1976 (E) ↩︎

2. Information processing interchange—Representation of ordinal dates. ISO 2711-1973(E) ↩︎