VOL VIII, No 2 [Autumn, 1981]

Searching for Soma

Mary M. Tius, Kavala, Greece

Until the late 1960s the identity of Soma, the inspiration for the Rig Veda, had been one of the most intriguing and intractable problems of Vedic scholarship. The hymns to Soma date back more than 3,000 years and were composed in Vedic, the parent-language of Sanskrit, by the poets or priests of the Aryan peoples who invaded the Indus Valley region. These invaders were cattle-breeders and grain-growers with elaborate myths and a tribal religion rich in ritual and served by an hereditary priesthood. Around 1000 B.C. the Vedic hymns, composed in widely separated regions over a period of 500 years or more, were gathered together and the canon was then closed. The text of that canon has, miraculously, come down to us intact. In their pantheon of gods were, among many others, Indra, god of the thunderbolt; Agni, god of fire; Parjanya, god of thunder and, according to one tradition, the father of Soma. Soma, too, was a god—a god and an inebriant; a plant and the juice of that plant. But what plant? Our only source of information on the subject is the Rig Veda, 1,028 hymns, of which 120 are entirely devoted to Soma. Yet, for 2,500 years, the identity of Soma was unknown.

Even before 1000 B.C., Soma substitutes were being used in the rituals, which indicated a breakdown in the lines of communication between the scattered invaders and their source of supply in the Himalayan Mountains (for Soma grew only in the mountains). This use of substitutes complicated the problem of identifying Soma. There were other complications, too. Inevitably, names for plants familiar to the invaders in their distant homeland would in the new environment be bestowed upon other plants which resembled them in some way. In addition, generic terms for flower, herb, tree, etc. may well have been based on a system of classification different from our own post-Linnaean one. Nevertheless, the descriptions of Soma, though couched in poetic language full of metaphor and almost deliriously lyrical, were as precise as they were varied. In the past 200 years, since Western countries have discovered the languages and cultures of their Sanskrit and Vedic relatives, many plants—from hemp and henbane to rhubarb—were proposed as likely Soma-candidates, but none finally passed the test of congruence with the descriptions in the Vedic hymns.

In 1968 that situation changed, with the publication of R. Gordon Wasson’s Soma, Divine Mushroom of Immortality. This book was the outgrowth of an earlier book, itself the fruit of many years of research conducted by its authors, R. Gordon Wasson and his wife, Valentina Pavlovna Wasson. The origin of the epic search, which neither of the Wassons had forseen might lead to Soma, is best told in Mr. Wasson’s own words. The search began in

… August 1927 (when) my bride, as she then was, and I took our delayed honeymoon … in the Catskills. She was a Russian born in Moscow … (and) had fled from Russia with her family in the summer of 1918, she being then 17 years old. She qualified as a physician at the University of London and had been working hard to establish her pediatric practice in New York. I was a newspaper man in the financial department of the Herald Tribune. On that first beautiful afternoon of our holiday in the Catskills, we went sauntering down the path for a walk. … Suddenly Tina threw down my hand and darted up into the forest. She had seen mushrooms…. She cried out in delight at their beauty…. Such a display she had not seen since she left her family’s dacha near Moscow, almost a decade before…. She began gathering some of the fungi in her apron…. That evening she seasoned the soup with fungi, she garnished the meat with other fungi…. I ate nothing with mushrooms in it. Frantic and deeply hurt, I was led to wild ideas: I told her I would wake up a widower.

She proved right and I wrong.

… A little thing … this difference in emotional attitude toward wild mushrooms. But my wife and I did not think so, and we devoted most of our lecture hours for decades to dissecting it, defining it, and tracing it to its origins.

—The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, by R. Gordon

Wasson, Carl A.P. Ruck and Albert
Hofmann, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
New York and London, 1978, pp. 13-17.

Some thirty years later, in May 1957, only seven months before Mrs. Wasson’s death, the results of their years of patient research were made known in Mushrooms, Russia and History (Pantheon Books, New York). The woodland path they took that day in August 1927 had led them by winding trails to distant parts of the world and to the beginnings of civilization in prehistoric times. In the process of delineating the gap separating their two peoples, a gap which divides all Indo-European peoples into two camps, mycophiles and mycophobes (words of the Wassons' coining), they had rediscovered the role of the hallucinogenic mushrooms of Mexico in religious rites being performed there today as they had been for centuries before the Spanish Conquest. The Wassons had also glimpsed

a period long ago before our ancestors knew how to write, when those ancestors must have regarded a mushroom as a divinity or quasi-divinity … evoking awe and admiration, fear, yes, even terror. When that early cult gave way to new religions and to novel ways emerging with a literate culture, the emotions aroused by the old cult would survive…. In one area the fear and terror would live on, either of a particular mushroom (as in the case of Amanita muscaria); or else, as the emotional focus through tabu became vague, of “toadstools” in general; and in another area, for a reason that we cannot now tell, it was the spirit of love and adoration that survived.

That first great pioneering work had opened up a new field of study to which the Wassons gave the name ethno-mycology (a branch of ethnobotany). Eventually it also led to Mr. Wasson’s inspired unraveling of the Soma mystery.

The winding trail to Soma leads back to the Tree of Life and the Herb of Immortality, central images in folklore from China to the Near East. For Siberian peoples, the Tree of Life was the white birch. Was it only coincidence that the fly agaric, Amanita muscaria, the Sacred Element in the shamanistic rites of Siberian tribes (such as the Koryaks, Voguls, et al.), will grow only where the white birch—and the pine and fir—can grow? European mycologists learned of the mycorrhizal association of the fly agaric and the birch, pine, and fir only in 1885, but the native peoples of Siberia must have observed the fact thousands of years before. There is linguistic evidence for use of the fly agaric dating back to the period when a common Uralic language was spoken, before its division into the Samoyed and Finno-Ugrian languages. According to some linguists, Uralic ceased to be spoken around 6000 B.C.; according to others, around 4000 B.C.

Another fungal growth is associated with the white birch: Fomes fomentarius, the bracket or shelf fungus used as punk, tinder, touchwood, wick for thousands of years, perhaps even before 10,000 B.C. (Remains of punk still attached to birchwood have been found in the excavations of Star Carr in Yorkshire.) White birch, fiery red fly agaric with its striking white “warts” or speckles, and the fire-catching punk formed a trio: Tree of Life, light for the soul, heat for the body. At the roots of the Tree of Life, say the legends, lies a snake—a chthonic spirit like the Delphic Python, the toad (which elsewhere, as in England, became associated with all mushrooms and with the fly agaric in particular), and mushrooms themselves. In the topmost branches of the Tree is a bird—the “Bird of Paradise.”

But why “fly”-agaric? The connection between flies and madness must have seemed obvious to a herdsman, for when botflies lay their eggs in an animal’s nostrils, it becomes frantic until the larvae mature and desert their host. Such English expressions as bats (bots) in the belfry, a bee in one’s bonnet, bughouse, a flea in one’s ear, and others are vestigial remains of the belief that insects, flies especially, cause insanity. Flies are also associated with A. muscaria because of the (perhaps tabu-induced) belief common among Slavic and most Germanic peoples, as well as in certain parts of France (Fr. tue-mouche ‘kill-fly,’ ‘A. muscaria’), that flies die after eating it. This is not strictly true, though a fly may be stupefied by the ibotenic acid contained in A. muscaria and may then die by “misadventure.”

Gk. myxa (cognate with Gk. mykés ‘mushroom’) means both ‘nasal mucus’ and ‘lampwick.’ There may be two reasons for this: first, a fresh mushroom when crushed or pressed becomes a soft mucoid mass; the second could be an ancient connection between Fomes fomentarius and the fly agaric, which, if improperly prepared and then ingested, might lead to the same sort of frenzied, hyperactive behavior observed in botfly-infested animals. For many primitive peoples there was also a connection between the creation of fire and sexual procreation, and in some languages, e.g., Greek and Japanese, the word for mushroom can also mean penis (the phallic shape of the emerging mushroom may also be partly responsible for this usage); in the same way in English, flame, punk, and spark have erotic connotations.

So, too, with mouse, which in German as in English may mean ‘mistress.’ Mice and insects tend to appear in sudden swarms, and mice, like insects that metamorphose from one “life” to a different one, belong to two worlds: living some of the time underground, they appeared to be messengers from the netherworld— chthonic spirits, like mushrooms. There seems to be an etymological connection between Latin and Greek for fly and mouse: Lat. musca, N. Gk. myga, Gk. myia ‘fly’; Gk. mygalē ‘shrewmouse’; Lat. mus, Skt. mus, Gk. mys ‘mouse, muscle.’ And in Turkish, keme ‘truffle, fungus, rat’; Fr. ‘rat rat; whimsy, maggot; taper.’

Whoever reads any of the Wasson studies is likely to find himself thinking of the ancient mushroom-cult connotations when he reads certain words, such as bang, bogey, bot, botch, bug, dole, fly, fungus, funk, grub, mad, maggot, match, moth, mouse, mucus, pink, punk, speckle, sponge, spunk, string, tick, urine, wick. But words and expressions with mushroom-cult links are found not just in Indo-European languages but in many Ural-Altaic ones, such as Magyar (Hungarian), Mordvin, Selkup, and (as I think) Turkish. They may even be, though Mr. Wasson makes no such claim, worldwide; for when we consider the maggot-match-mucus complex and look beyond (Indo-) Europe, we find:

Malay amok ‘furious attack’
Virginia Algonkin attamusco ‘it is red’
(Sp. fr.) Taino maguey an agave, source of pulque
Nahuatl malacatl ‘spindle’
(nat. name in) Yucatán max ‘weevil’
Nahuatl mecatl ‘rope’
Nahuatl mexcalli ‘mescal’
Gullah moco ‘magic’
Tupi moco ‘mouse’
Fula moco’o ‘medicine man’
Jap. mogusa ‘moxa’
Mass. Algonkin m’skok ‘it is red’
(Pg. fr.) Tupi muçurana ‘cord’
Turk. muhat ‘mucus’
Jap. mushi ‘bug’
Nahuatl negual ‘demon’
Nahuatl nextli ‘ashes’
Taino nigua ‘chigoe’
(nat. name in) S. Afr. noki ‘rock rat’
Turk. sümük ‘mucus’
Kongo timuka ‘fly’

Or, when we glance at the bang-bogey-bug-funk-punk complex, there are also:

Tshiluba bwanga ‘charm, fetish’
Chin. fang¹ ‘medicine’
Turk. fingirdek ‘fickle, playful’
Turk. fink ‘joy; wild’
Quechua ppiqui ‘Mauritius hemp’
Del. punk ‘ashes’
Atjehnese ūeng ‘beetle’
Kimbundu wanga ‘witchcraft’

And, looking at tick, we find:

Malay a\?\akka, a\?\ekka ‘betel palm’ (of Afr. orig.) djigga ‘jigger’
Turk. gidiklamak ‘to tickle’
Wolof jiga ‘insect’
Yoruba ji¹ga³ ‘jigger’
Tupi tacyba ‘ant’
Nahuatl tecamaca ‘incense’
Turk. tike ‘spot’
Maori and Marquesan tiki ‘idol’
Tag. and Bisayan tiki-tiki an alcoholic beverage
Turk. tiksirmak ‘to sneeze’
Turk. tiksirmek ‘to loathe, feel disgust’
Turk. titiz ‘fussy, ticklish’
Turk. tiz ‘rash, sharp, spunky’
Nahuatl tlalaxin ‘tick’
Xosa utikoloshe a friendly spirit residing in rivers
Nahuatl xico ‘bee’
Papuan zogo ‘god’
(nat. name in) Altai Mts. zokor ‘mole rat’

With the exception of the Turkish words, all the foregoing were found during random raids on the etymological entries in Webster’s Third International Dictionary. A more purposeful search through Turkish dictionaries turned up a great many related groups of words which show Haoma-Soma-mushroom-cult links. A few of them are

ben ‘freckle, spot, bait’
bendetmek ‘to bind, fascinate’
bengi ‘immortal’
benk ‘henbane, bhang’
baği ‘magic’
böcek ‘bug’
böğ ‘poisonous spider’
büvelik, büye, büyelik ‘bot’
büyü ‘sorcery’
odlubağa ‘toad’ (O. Turk. odlu ‘poisonous, fiery’)
dolama ‘felon, hangnail’
dolaman ‘truffle; boil, tumor’
dolan ‘deceit, swindle, dole’
fit ‘incitement’
fitil ‘wick’
fitil almak lit. ‘to take wick; to become furious’
fitil olmak lit. ‘to become wick; to become very drunk’
fitil fitil burundan gelmak lit. ‘to come wick wick
from the nose; to pay for (something) “through the nose”
haşa ‘blasphemy’
haşarat ‘vermin’
haşefe ‘penis’
haşhaş ‘opium poppy’
haşari ‘wicked’
haşiş ‘bhang, hashish’
haşyet ‘awe, dread’
humar ‘stupor’
humma ‘fever; fire’
hüma ‘phoenix, bird of paradise; lofty, exalted’
umaci lit. ' “uma”-man; bugbear, bogey’
işemek ‘to urinate’
işemiş past participle of isemek; i.e., ‘pissed’
işümüş ‘orgy, revel’
kibrit ‘match; god’
ahmer kibriti lit. ‘red match; the philosopher’s stone’
peri ‘fairy’
perişan ‘perturbed’
pervane ‘moth’
perve ‘fear, dread’
soma ‘first draw of unflavored raki from the still’
somat ‘feast, food’
somata ‘almond or pumpkin-seed sherbet’
zom ‘dead-drunk’

It seems likely that similar fossilized remains of those ancient religious practices may be found in many other non-Indo-European languages.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

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

SIC! SIC! SIC!

BLOCK PATROLLED BY UNIFORM GUARDS.—Sign on East 94th Street, New York City. [Submitted by Norman A. Ross, New York City.]

Revolting Arabs, Injured Livers, and Streaking Indians

Harold J. Ellner, M.D., Richland, Washington

How often does one see a headline which, if the text were not read, would inspire one to misconstrue the meaning? The late Theodore M. Bernstein called these “two-faced heads” in Winners & Sinners, an occasional newsletter issued from his desk at The New York Times, where he was Assistant Managing Editor. Un-Januslike, these double headers can scarcely be regarded as household gods, lares and penates guarding access to that abode where our common sense resides. What would or could a visitor from outer space (or even from the next parking space) make of this headline in The Pittsburgh Press on the day following Election Day 1980?

REAGAN ROLLS UP HUGE VICTORY;
SPECTER TOPS STATE GOP SURGE

One suspects that Reagan and his Republican colleagues had help from a revenant from the Great Beyond. A later headline casts aspersions on the President’s golf game:

REAGAN FIRES 1,845

One might expect the following head in Chicago, the Windy City, but this one led into an AP dispatch published in a Washington newspaper:

PENTAGON WON’T MOVE GAS

(Gastroenterologists please copy.)

The paraphernalia of sports being what it is, the reader may easily become convinced that Central American politics might well have taken on the trappings of athletic events, deposed officials carrying away whatever they can lay their hands on:

SOMOZA IS REPORTEDLY READY
TO FLEE WITH SUPPORTERS

Audrey of the same name might be pleased (surprised?) to learn that

JOCKS SPILL AT MEADOWS

Rodolfo, Colline, et al. would probably have had less sympathy for their heroine had they known about her first husband’s shenanigans:

MIMI’S FIRST TOSSES JOCK—AFTER VICTORY

Moving right along, we have all been impressed by Pope John Paul’s vigor; does his versatility know no bounds?

POPE’S 63-YARD PUNT RETURN SPARKS EAST WIN

… and, as any Oxonian can tell you, 63-yard punts are a rarity on the Isis.

Indecent exposure (except of the feet) imperils clean sport, as this banner bears witness:

STREAKING LYNN LEADS SOX

Staunchly maintaining that white man’s inhumanity is for the birds,

STREAKING INDIANS RIP JAYS

The line has been drawn, we are pleased to note, against participation by athletes in the face of major organ impairment, reported as

INJURED LIVERS MAY NOT PLAY

There is an etymology afoot for kick the bucket holding that bucket comes from French bouchet, some sort of frame on which animals were strung up for slaughtering in the abattoirs of Paris (or of the Midwest). It appears that the uncooperative beasts were known to “kick the bouchet, or bucket” in their death throes. Little wonder, then, at this news from Fayetteville, Arkansas:

TWO PORKERS SUSPENDED

Representatives of Walesa’s Solidarity have surfaced in Washington state:

DAMAGED POLE BLACKS OUT OKANOGAN VALLEY

Hepatitis being a somewhat less than desirable affliction, one can be only grateful for the health authorities who forbid the taking of clams, oysters, etc., in our tidal waters. But this is going a bit too far:

WARNING ON ALL SOUND SHELLFISH

And leave it to the Californians to take the Equal Rights business just one step too far:

HOMOSEXUAL TO REPLACE MILK

The Pacific Northwest being what it is, this intelligence from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Oct. 17, 1980) need not be viewed with alarm:

CHIPS FLY AS BEAVERS AND DICKS MEET

And, finally, it would appear to be in doubt whether penal institutions had the right to incarcerate those with the pox:

ESCAPE ARTIST BELIEVED SPOTTED

—at least one might expect an accurate diagnosis.

Graphonics No. 2

Axel Hornos

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

“Look, Mother,” said Maud proudly, “I’ve just finished my first dress. I worked at it all through the afternoon.” After a short pause she went on, “You know, it occurred to me that I should add to my weekly income by sewing for others. Besides, it’s great fun. I hope you won’t argue the point, won’t you?”

Mrs. Wilson turned the garment around. There was some tension in her voice as she said, “I know you meant well, but on the other hand one mustn’t lean too much toward indulgence in this matter. The fact is, there are still a few things to be done in the dress. For instance, the pleat is missing in the skirt, and the trimming around the neckline too. These details are most important.”

She smiled. “I don’t want to sound preachy, and being sentimental wouldn’t help a bit. You must learn that a job like this requires a great deal of concentration, since an unfinished dress isn’t much better than no dress at all. But let’s put an end to this discussion: it’s nearly six o’clock and dinner is waiting.”

Proper Names into Adjectives

Don Salper, California State University, Northridge

The use of the adjective Fonsecaian by Michael Gorman in his lead article on the book by Jose da Fonseca in VERBATIM [VII, 4] deepened my pondering on the precariousness of becoming famous. Before one knows it, one’s proud family name can be turned into an unfortunate adjective. On first sight, proofreader’s error might seem to save this one, but a second look (and attempted utterance) reveals a five-syllable throat-stopper.

Oh, we have become quite used to Shakespearean and Freudian and Einsteinian, and maybe “getting used to” is what it takes, because some “proper adjectives” that have recently appeared in print or on the air are not easily assimilable, and not only for reasons of sheer pronounceability. I submit the following examples:

Saul Bellow and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow have been modified into the modifiers Bellovian and Longfellovian.

Film directors have been said to work “in the Mankiewiczian style” or “the Hitchcokian tradition.”

Composer Gustav Mahler transmutes to Mahlerian, and this sentence appears in a review: “Conductor George Solti knows the secret of tightening the Mahlerian sprawl and tempering the Mahlerian bombast without devaluing the Mahlerian spirit.” After reading this, one feels vaguely overcome by a tropical disease.

Those who follow in the footsteps of or are likened to Swiss learning theorist Jean Piaget (pee-ah-ZHAY) have been called in print Piagetian. Now, is this to be said “pee-ah-ZHAY-shun” or “pee-ah-ZHAY-tee-uhn” or perhaps, to honor the original pronunciation of the name, “pee-ah-ZHAY-ee-uhn”? This last repeats the case of Fonsecaian. The mouth wants to say “fon-SECK-ee-uhn” and “pee-ah-ZHAY-uhn,” but the spelling won’t let it.

It is somehow demeaning to the reputation and memory of one of the world’s greatest conductors when his style is referred to as Toscaninian.

Somewhere along the way Aristotelian stopped sounding peculiar, and perhaps the same happy fate awaits author Bernard Malamud. Meanwhile, Malamudian doesn’t quite make it. Maybe a little inventiveness is in order for some of these newly famous names. In this instance, how about Malamudic? That seems to me perfect, borrowed from the manner of Platonic, yet with Talmudic overtones.

Now, I have seen Frostean for Robert Frost, which doesn’t ring quite right, at least yet. So one tries out “Frostlike,” gets playful with “Frosted,” and hurtles ahead to “Frozen.”

And what about philosopher Martin Buber? I have heard Buberian on the radio, which is pretty bad. “Buberic” would be no better. “Bubonic?” At this point, I rise to my Salperean heights (“Look, Ma, I’m famous!”) … and quit.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“…Simply slip it through your arm.” [From a mail-order catalog advertisement for a doughnut-shaped Bisque Wine Cooler, published by The Stitchery, Wellesley, Massachusetts. Submitted by Nancy B. Watson, Colebrook, New Hampshire.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Abbreviations Dictionary

Ralph De Sola, (Sixth Edition, Elsevier North-Holland, 1981), xvi + 966pp.

This is a useful book and should appeal to the individual or library acquisitions director with a limited budget. Listing “over 178,000 entries,” it is somewhat less complete than Gale Research Company’s Initialisms & Acronyms Dictionary, which contains “over 211,000 entries,” with an additional 13,000 in a Supplement. A complementary volume to the Gale work is Reverse Abbreviations…, in which one can find the abbreviations if the full form of the term is known. The Gale book is more expensive, but it offers more.

There are some curious, though interesting, appendices to the De Sola work that, as far as we could tell, haven’t the remotest connection with abbreviations. For example, “American Eponyms, Nicknames, and Sobriquets” lists less than two pages' worth of items like American Historical Painter: Emmanuel Lentzé, and American Prose-Poetry Novelist: Thomas Wolfe. “Birth-stones—Ancient and Modern,” “Capitals of Nations, Provinces, Places, and States,” “Civil and Military Time Systems Compared,” “Nations of the World and Nationalities,” “Superlatives” (starting with Africa’s Easternmost City and ending with Youngest Province), and “Winds of the World.” However useful these may be, they have no abbreviations associated with them, and it is unclear why they have been included.

Turning to the main text of the book, we found missing such items as ILA, International Linguistic Association, BAAL, British Association for Applied Linguistics, and others. Included is ADI, American Documentation Institute, the former name (till about 1966, as far as we can recall) of the ASIS, American Society for Information Science, but with no indication that the name has been out of use for 15 years. That is to say, the abbreviation ought to be in for bibliographic and other reasons, but its defunct status should be noted.

Although entitled Abbreviations Dictionary, it contains, even in the main part of the book, a great deal of material that has nothing to do with abbreviations. Some of these are just plain silly (Asia’s big five: elephant, leopard, rhinoceros, tiger, water buffalo; porteños: (Spanish—port people)—in Argentina means the people of Buenos Aires and in Chile those of Valparaiso), others of such strange provenance that one wonders how anyone looking for them could expect them to be in this book (Portage La Prairie Girls: Correctional Centre for Women at Portage La Prairie, Manitoba). Among the abbreviations we find poop.: nincompoop, and ZZZ-ZZZ-ZZZ: sawing or snoring (cartoonist symbol). With a heavy interlarding of such extraneous matter—including stage names, pseudonyms, and other paraphernalia— occupying about 30 per cent of the book, the actual number of entries is closer to 125,000; moreover, our count showed about 100,000 entries (average of 100 per page times 966 pages), not the 178,000 claimed. Thus, the number of actual abbreviations listed seems to be about 70,000.

Withal, the book contains much useful information and is quite handy and compact.

OBITER DICTA: Onomastica Nervosa

[L.U.]

Naming the baby? Want to discover the meaning of your given name? There are many books available— some quite good—that provide etymological information about names. It is interesting to note, however, that given names themselves have given rise to denotative and are associated with connotative uses in the language. We are not including words coming from the names of particular people, like einsteinium, watt, curium, henry, and other eponyms: we refer here only to first names that have acquired meanings of their own or that, by association, have acquired special connotations. The following list is not exhaustive, but it is a beginning; readers may wish to offer addenda. The label connotative is inserted to indicate those words and meanings that come from a source other than the name in the headword but are nonetheless closely associated with it.

Abigail, ladies' maid.

Albert, Prince Albert, long-tailed frock coat.

Alexander, cocktail made with cream, crème de cacao, and gin or brandy. Also called brandy Alexander.

Bennie, 1. overcoat. Also, jocular, Benjamin. 2. (connotative) benzedrine; any stimulant. 3. Benjamin, benzoin.

Betty, baked dessert, e.g., apple brown betty.

Bill, (connotative) invoice.

Cassandra, (connotative) bearer of bad prophecy.

Charlie, Charley, 1. Charlie horse, leg cramp. 2. good-time Charlie, (a) someone intent on the pursuit of enjoyment, usually at the exclusion of more worthwhile activity. (b) a fair-weather friend.

Dagmar(s), torpedolike bumperguard(s) on old Cadillac.

Dottie, Dotty, crazy; daft.

Ernest, (connotative) earnest.

Frank, (connotative) frank; candid.

George, 1. Also, real George. wonderful, marvelous. 2. (in oaths) by George!

Guy, 1. any male (or, recently, female). 2. a strengthening support of wire or rope.

Hector, pester.

Jack, 1. any male. 2. lifting device. 3. Jack-in-the-box, children’s game. 6. jumping jack, children’s toy. 7. union jack, special kind of flag. 8. Union Jack, national flag of Britain. 9. jack off (from jerk off) masturbate.

Jake, okay.

Jane, 1. any female. 2. plain Jane, any unattractive female.

Jenny, Jennie, 1. (connotative) spinning jenny. 2. (connotative) Genny, Genoa. large jibsail.

Jerry, (connotative) Jerry-built.

Jimmy, 1. a burglar’s crow-bar. 2. (Australian) an immigrant.

Joe, 1. any male, esp. in a good Joe. 2. (Brit. equiv., Tommy Atkins) G.I.Joe, private in the infantry. 3. Joe Blow (from the Windy City).

John, 1. prostitute’s customer. 2. toilet. 3. Dear John letter, a note of farewell to a former lover or spouse. 4. any male. 5. John Bull, symbol of Great Britain.

Johnnie, Johnny, 1. stage-door Johnnie, someone who loiters about the stage door of a theater, usually a fan or suitor of one of the performers. 2. a child’s potty. 3. johnnycake, a fried cornmeal cake. 4. Johnny-comelately, last-minute participant. 5. Johnny-jump-up, either of two kinds of flower. 6. Johnny-on-the-spot, someone who is present and willing to do something. 7. Johnny Reb, (a) a Confederate soldier. (b) any southerner.

John Thomas, penis.

Jonah, bad luck.

Jonathan, Brother Jonathan, symbol of America.

Judy, any girl (e.g., This Judy is by no means a rutabaga.—Damon Runyon).

Larry, call made at the start of a children’s game, as in marbles, the first to say it claiming the right to play first.

Laurence, blackish, shimmering reflection seen at the surface of a paved road on a hot summer’s day.

Lulu, 1. outstanding example of its kind. 2. perquisite of an elected official.

Magdalene, (“maudlin” silly, tearful sentimentality.

Mary, 1. Bloody Mary, cocktail made with tomato juice and vodka. 2. Virgin Mary, a Bloody Mary without the vodka. 3. male homosexual.

Mary Jane, marijuana.

Matilda, Waltz(ing) Matilda (Australian), swag or hobo’s bundle on a stick.

Mickey, Mick, 1. Irishman. 2. potato, esp. when baked in the coals of an open fire. 3. take the Mickey out of, (Br.) ridicule.

Molly, 1. a sleevelike expansion plug for fastening a screw into plaster or plasterboard. 2. (connotative) an aquarium fish.

Nancy, Nance, (Br.) pimp or homosexual.

Patsy, sucker; dupe.

Pete, Sneaky Pete, cheap wine, as that drunk by derelicts.

Peter, 1. penis. 2. peter out, diminish.

Phoebe, bird.

Pierre, Lucky Pierre, “always in the middle.”

Reuben, sandwich of hot corned beef, sauerkraut, and melted cheese.

Roger, okay; understood.

Sam, Uncle Sam, symbol of America.

Simon, 1. simony, buying or selling sacred articles. 2.

Simple Simon, nursery-rhyme character. 3. Simon sez, children’s game.

Susan, lazy Susan, circular tray on a pivot.

Suzie, Suzie Q, dance step.

Tom, 1. (connotative) tomfoolery, horseplay. 2. (connotative) tommyrot, nonsense. 3. Tommy Atkins, British G.I. Joe. 4. Tom and Jerry, cocktail; cartoon characters. 5. male of the cat family. 6. tomcat, behave like a roué.

Tom, Dick, and Harry, just about anybody.

Veronica, 1. plant. 2. (a) image of Christ on a handkerchief. (b) the handkerchief itself. 3. special kind of pass in bullfighting.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Our authoritative appraisal (on our letterhead) is essential for appropriate insurance and your own piece of mind. An appointment is necessary for this important service.” [From an advertisement for Jacobs, jewelers, in the Minneapolis Tribune, January 18, 1981. Submitted by Laura D. Platt, St. Paul. As we’ve been telling you, what this country needs is a good five-cent prefrontal lobotomy.]

Philip Howard on English English

Philip Howard

I agree with most lexicographers that usage rules. That is rather like Margaret Fuller’s declaration: “I accept the universe”—and Carlyle’s comment: “By God! she’d better.” Horace said it before we did in The Art of Poetry: Language changes

“si volet usus,
quem penes arbitrium est et ius et norma
loquendi.”

For those without an old-fashioned English gent’s education: Language changes if usage wants it to, for usage has the authority and the rule and the government of language. However, I do not go along with the linguistic relativism that all usage is equally good, that all change is for the better in language, and that a language is perfect for the uses of those who are speaking and writing it now. Some change seems to me to be for the worse. For example, in my country and I think yours, the subjunctive appears to be dying. In The Times, we ignore or misuse it continually, so confusing the readers and vexing the old fogeys. Here are some recent examples to show what I mean.

“It may well have not happened last weekend, but it was bloody well going to happen some time”; a middle-ranking policeman was speaking after the riots in Brixton. In fact it did happen last weekend. He would have made his point without ambiguity if he had said: “It might well have not happened….”

From our Legal Correspondent on the front page of The Times: “The judge can insist that the trial continues.” He would have been “correct” and annoyed our punctilious readers less, and caused me fewer letters to answer, if he had written either that the judge can insist the trial continue, or should continue.

From a soccer report: “From this penalty Sorensen scored a goal that may not have come by other means.” That is puzzling, but not misleading. But how about (footy again): “In a melee in the six-yard area a goal may have been scored.”? That may suggests to those who use the subjunctive that the ball possibly crossed the goal-line without the referee or the linesmen seeing it. All that the writer meant was that with a little bit of luck and a good bounce the ball might or could have been put in the back of the net. This could become serious if we wrote of some public figure that he may have taken bribes, when all that we mean is that he might have taken bribes, if he had been dishonourable.

From our Political Editor: “Now the Government cannot tailor its announcements to Labour’s internal measure; but practically they may have done better to wait until after Monday….” They might have done better, and so might Fred Emery.

Peter Hain: “Had it not been for the media’s willingness to report news of the charge in the sceptical terms they did, I may not have been acquitted.” But you were acquitted, dammit, Peter.

I think I can understand why this confusion of may and might and of the indicative and subjunctive generally has arisen, apart from the fact that our children are no longer taught prescriptive grammar in school. When used in the present tense, may and might are almost interchangeable. “He may come” differs from “he might come” by only a slight degree of probability. But when used in the past tense, as in reporting or any narrative, may indicates uncertainty in the mind of the speaker at the moment of speaking, as in, He may have sent her flowers on her birthday; but I have no means of knowing whether he did or not. Might indicates a possibility that lay in the power of the doer at the time of the action described, as in, He might have sent her flowers on her birthday, but the slacker was too idle or too mean to do so. By muddling the present and the past uses, we darken our meaning.

Language does not decay and fall, like the woods in autumn or the Roman Empire. Decay and decadence are not illuminating metaphors to apply to language—or, for that matter, to civilizations. But it does seem to me that some of the changes in usage are changes for the worse, because they reduce the number of fine discriminations available to users of the language. I take the decline in the exact use of the subjunctive to be such a change for the worse. However, if the loss of the subjunctive leaves a serious gap in the language, as it surely will, usage will find a way of filling the gap. Natura vacuum abhorret in language as in physics.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“LOST & FOUND—Found vicinity of 24th-28th & South, male brindle Boxer, wearing choke chain with broken lease.” [From the Sunday Journal and Star, Lincoln, Nebraska, January 4, 1981. Submitted by Doris Cole, Lincoln. Landlord problems?]

OBITER DICTA: Foreword

The year of 1982, whatever other significance it may hold in store for us, marks the centenary of the plan for The Century Dictionary, one of the most impressive works of lexicography ever published and, undoubtedly, one of the best. Certainly, it is the most comprehensive dictionary ever published in America, and those fortunate enough to own a well-reserved set of this massive, ten-volume book can attest to the incomparable quality of its definitions, citations, and illustrations; the number of sets surviving in good condition are a tribute to the craft of bookmaking—the heavy durable boards, sturdy binding, high-quality paper, and other ingredients that have allowed the Century to withstand almost a century of use.

The first edition was published in 1889, and supplementary matter was added till the last printing in 1911. Also, two supplementary volumes were produced, a Cyclopedia of Names (in 1894) and an Atlas and Gazetteer (in 1897). With these additions, the title of the entire work was changed to The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia.

It is with special pride that we are able to present to the readers of VERBATIM advance notice of the reprinting of this important dictionary: Gale Research Company, of Detroit, will publish a facsimile reprint of the entire work (exclusive of the Atlas and Gazetteer) in 1982. Robert A. Fowkes, Professor Emeritus of Germanic Languages, New York University, has prepared a Preface for the reprint, and we are pleased to have obtained permission from the publisher to print it in this issue of VERBATIM. Professor Fowkes’s name is, of course, familiar to our readers. But it should be made clear that our reason for publishing his Preface here is that it is, in itself, an important statement about the English language, for it details information that is often overlooked and only rarely documented.

It must be emphasized that the Century will not be offered as a relic (in the way that a reprint of Johnson’s Dictionary might): it is a vast, useful resource, providing access to information about English that is difficult to find in most other sources. To be sure, it has its shortcomings—Professor Fowkes points out the faults in the pronunciation system and the fact that, lacking the data that has since become available, some of its etymologies could scarcely be said to reflect the latest in scholarship. Furthermore, users will not find terms like transistor, gridlock, and electronic banking in its pages, because they did not exist at the turn of the century. Nonetheless, the Century’s definitions are a model of clarity and, as Professor Fowkes points out, its citations were adduced to illustrate a particular context, syntactic relationship, or nuance of meaning lacking in the selection of citations for a work like the Oxford English Dictionary, which, being a dictionary based on historical principles, was largely satisfied to find the earliest instances of word uses assignable to a particular meaning. Professor Fowkes comments on the differences and similarities between the Century and the OED, but readers should take heed of an essential distinction between the two works: the Century was conceived and executed as a reference book for everyone to use; the OED, both in concept and execution, is a reference book for scholars of the English language, and it consequently contains huge quantities of information—especially etymological information—of little use to those unable to bring to the book a working knowledge of Old and Middle English, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Arabic, and the other languages reproduced in their original forms in its etymologies.

As for their comparable ages, during the period of publication of the Century, 1889-1911, letters A through R of the OED were published, with parts of S and T. Thus, almost 89 per cent of the OED is older than the last editions of the Century. To be sure, the OED Supplement of 1935 provided up-to-date materials for the earlier parts of the alphabet, but not a great deal for the latter parts. The current Supplement, now available in two volumes (A-G and H-N), effectively brings the earlier parts more up to date than did the earlier Supplement, which it includes.

Notwithstanding, the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia is a monumental work of lexicography, and we can all be grateful to Gale Research Company for making the reprint available.

For those segments of the language that have not changed, the Century remains an accurate, well-written, and easy-to-use dictionary for the modern reader.

Laurence Urdang

Preface

Robert A. Fowkes

The appearance of the Century Dictionary once more in its renowned second edition is a cause for congratulations all around. To many of us who have long been browsers and readers of its fascinating pages the event is a source of gratification. For the Century is decidedly a dictionary to be read and enjoyed and not merely consulted on occasion. Despite claims frequently heard that dictionaries are “made to be used rather than read,” even the ones uttering those claims will admit that they themselves are at times tempted to browse in some dictionaries—not all, because dictionaries vary widely in their readability. The appearance of the Century invites us to read in it—its typography, its illustrations, the arrangement of its articles all render it extremely attractive. It has none of the forbidding aspect of dry pedantry that often turns readers away from dictionaries or confines their use of them to brief consultation on some specific point, with no inclination to read on or to dip into other sections.

Dictionaries probably increase in readability as they become more encyclopedic, thus perhaps trespassing on the territory of the encyclopedia itself. There are dictionary makers who aim at rigorously excluding all encyclopedic material, and some useful dictionaries have, admittedly, been produced on the basis of such separation of functions.

The Century Dictionary, however, had no such reservations from the start. Its design originated in 1882. Thus the word century has, fortuitously and ex post facto, a special pertinence to our time. It was to be a “general” work, one for “every literary and practical use.” It was intended to include encyclopedic matter, not to exclude it. In an age that was, in some ways, more fortunate than our own, space was not a primary concern. There was no need to curtail definitions to allow room for etymologies, nor the reverse. As the work progressed, its size and scope extended far beyond the limits originally foreseen, and the expansion evidently had the blessing of the publisher, Roswell Smith, president of the Century Company. I have not been able to verify the assertion that the Century Company had made a fortune on the Century Magazine and was looking for a venture in which to invest the profits. It was, at any rate, a suggestion of Mr. Smith himself that led to the project in the first place. The plan was to adapt to American needs and conditions a British work, the Imperial Dictionary by John Ogilvie, as revised by Charles Annandale. The Century Company had actually reprinted Annandale’s version in the United States. Blackie & Son, publisher of the English work, then granted the Century Dictionary permission to use material from the Imperial Dictionary. There may be some slight irony in that permission, for allegations had been made by certain American copyright owners that the Imperial had itself made excessive use of protected matter. The publishers of the Century Dictionary, however, apparently made proper arrangements with those owners, as a statement on the reverse of the title page reveals. This points to the intriguing circumstance that the British dictionary of which the Century was to be an adaptation was itself in large measure dependent on American materials, and some lexical chickens came home to roost. As a matter of fact, the Imperial Dictionary was based upon Webster. In 1838 Blackie & Son had asked John Ogilvie to undertake a revised and augmented version of Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language. Ogilvie finally utilized the 1841 edition of Webster, the last one the author himself amended and corrected, for Webster died in 1843. Ogilvie’s Imperial Dictionary, English, Technological, & Scientific, Adapted to the present State of Literature, Science, and Art; on the basis of Webster’s English Dictionary (a somewhat peculiarly worded title, it must be admitted), was issued in parts, beginning in 1847, and published in complete form in 1850. A supplement followed in 1855. (The mere appearance of Webster’s name on the title page was no guarantee that a work was really based upon the dictionaries of the American lexicographer. For example, the great rival of Webster, Joseph Emerson Worcester, found to his dismay that the English publisher of his Universal Dictionary had printed a statement on the title page of that work that it was “compiled” from the materials of Noah Webster, a charge—or boast—that Worcester insisted was quite untrue. It was apparently a “selling point” in England to claim connection with Webster!) At any rate, the modifications and improvements introduced by Dr. Ogilvie did not, it seems, greatly alter the size or nature of Webster’s dictionary but did impart a somewhat more encyclopedic character to it and embodied additional technical terms. One outstanding feature on which the Imperial prided itself was the inclusion of a great number of pictorial illustrations, a feature described in the preface to Annandale’s revised edition as distinguishing it from all other English dictionaries. Yet it was conceded that the idea was not entirely new: Nathaniel Bailey had used woodcuts in the two-volume edition of his Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1726-27), chiefly to illustrate heraldic and mathematical terms. Subsequent editions of Bailey, notably Dictionarium Britannicum (“collected by several hands,”1730) had woodcuts illustrating terms of chemistry, architecture, military installations, and mechanics, in addition to heraldry and mathematics. Bailey himself certainly had predecessors in the use of illustrations. It is often difficult to discover the real beginning of a practice. Nevertheless, Ogilvie expanded the practice greatly.

In its first edition, the Imperial Dictionary enjoyed considerable success and was widely regarded as a standard lexicon of English. For a quarter of a century it was steadily bought, and presumably read, by the public. The time was really ripe for such a work, because the ones previously available in Britain were either American imports or revisions of Samuel Johnson’s venerable dictionary. There had been a noteworthy exception, that of Charles Richardson (1836-37), one characterized by copious quotations. Despite its merits, Richardson’s work for some reason did not achieve the recognition that might have been expected, and its effect on lexicography in England was only slight, other dictionary makers preferring to emulate Johnson or Webster. They did not even take advantage of his wealth of quotations, which, according to the Historical Introduction of the OED, were a “natural storehouse” (for plundering?). Yet some attention must have been paid to Richardson by the OED, for we are told that the original idea was to bring out a volume “supplementary to the later editions of Johnson or Richardson, and containing words omitted in either of these dictionaries.”

When Ogilvie died (1867) he had been busy with a revision of the Imperial. That revision was then entrusted to Charles Annandale, under whose editorship the dictionary became essentially a new work. Although the additions were largely in the realm of scientific and technological terminology, the new dictionary (1882-83) also included works culled from literary writers, old and new, not previously quoted. Americanisms, foreign words, even slang and colloquialisms were included, provided they occurred in literature. There was no effort to collect words from speakers; attestation in respectable print was the criterion. New attention was paid by Annandale to definitions and to the arrangement of articles. The Century Dictionary was often able to include Annandale’s definitions unaltered, at times slightly emending them. The engraved illustrations were supplemented by numerous additions to those in Ogilvie, and very many of them were used in the Century too. Mr. Robert Blackie was in charge of selection and arrangement of most of the illustrations and did his work creditably.

The Imperial aimed at catholicity and inclusiveness, but the realistic admission was made that it was impossible to contain all the words in every art and science. Still, the boast was that the work included far more such words than the average reader was likely to encounter in general literature, which was, of course, a surmise. As an encyclopedic work, it was to prove valuable as a reference work and also to avoid the charge often leveled against dictionaries of being unattractive reading. Thus the notion of the dictionary as a book to be read has early precedent. Some dictionaries refer to their “readers”; in the seventeenth century they were “gentle readers.” In this consumer age, when people “use” doctors, lawyers, plumbers, piano tuners, and all the rest, it is not surprising to encounter “user” to designate those who read or consult dictionaries, as well as other terms like customers, buyers, owners, clientele, consultants, and “lookers-up.”

The Century Dictionary

The Century Dictionary was especially fortunate in having as its editor-in-chief William Dwight Whitney (1827-94), who devoted most of the last decade of his life to the task. A member of a distinguished family numbering several scholars and scientists among its sons and daughters (Mt. Whitney was named for his brother, Josiah Dwight Whitney, the geologist), Whitney was for a time mainly interested in the natural sciences. At the age of nineteen he began the study of medicine in a doctor’s office, as was often the custom. The second day of his study, however, he came down with the measles and while convalescing picked up the Sanskrit grammar by Franz Bopp, which his geologist brother had intriguingly enough brought back from Germany along with a few hundred other books. Whitney seems to have been fascinated by that Sanskirt grammar and took it with him when he accompanied his brother on a United States geological survey of the region of Lake Superior in 1849. Whitney acquired a respectable knowledge of Sanskrit through self-instruction. He went to Yale for one year (after graduation from Williams) and studied Sanskrit under Edward Elbridge Salisbury, who himself had been a student of Franz Bopp in Germany. In 1850 Whitney went to Germany, as so many American graduate students did at the time, and studied for three semesters in Berlin (with Bopp and others) and two in Tübingen, where Rudolf Roth was his Sanskrit professor. After his return to the United States, Whitney was appointed to a new chair of Sanskrit at Yale, a post created through the efforts of his old professor, Edward Elbridge Salisbury, who helped raise the funds required. Whitney occupied that post from 1854 to 1894, resisting a tempting offer from Harvard in 1869. While in Germany he laid the foundation for much of his subsequent scholarly research and publication, particularly in Sanskrit, but also in the areas of linguistics, modern languages, and lexicography. Another special enthusiasm of his was spelling reform. The work that is considered his main scholarly achievement, perhaps, the Sanskrit Grammar, was published in Leipzig in 1879. The publishers Breitkopf and Härtel were planning a series of grammars of Indo-European languages and aimed at having a leading expert as the author of each. It is significant that Whitney, an American, was chosen to write the Sanskrit volume in that distinguished series. That the grammar is still valuable today, more than a century later, is vindication of the wisdom of their choice. Recent writings on Sanskrit here and abroad still recommend the book as a definitive work, not merely as one with historical interest—as would have to be said of Bopp’s grammar, from which Whitney derived his own first knowledge of Sanskrit. A German translation, by Heinrich Zimmer, followed the same year (1879), and a revised edition by Whitney himself (of the English work) appeared in 1889.

It has been said that Whitney was the first great American linguist, and it would be difficult to refute that assertion. He was the first president of the American Philological Association and served for many years as corresponding secretary of the American Oriental Society, edited its journal, and was also its president. His work in linguistics was outstanding and has been shown to have anticipated several later developments, including phonemics. He was emphatic in distinguishing between philology and linguistics, usually preferring to call the latter the “science of language.” This could have been his equivalent for German Sprachwissen-schaft, rather than an indication that he regarded the subject as something akin to science in the English sense. But there is evidence in his writings that he favored grouping linguistics with sciences like chemistry and geology. His book The Life and Growth of Language, with the subtitle An Outline of Linguistic Science (1875), was translated into six languages and enjoyed international esteem.

Although Whitney’s linguistic method in many of his prolific writings was synchronic, descriptive, and statistical, this book shows a lively concern with comparative and historical matters as well as considerable skill in setting them forth, often for the “general reader.” He also made important contributions to the tremendous seven-volume Sanskrit dictionary of Otto Böhtlingk and Rudolf Roth (St. Petersburg, 1879-1889), commonly referred to as the “St. Petersburg Dictionary.” As early as 1864 he had shown his skill as a writer of definitions for the Webster edition of that year.

As editor-in-chief of the Century, Whitney was largely responsible for devising the plan of the work and for seeing that all aspects of the project (orthography, pronunciation, definitions, etymologies, arrangement of articles, etc.) were carried out in keeping with that plan. He also read all the proofs.

All the features that had been claimed to be strikingly successful in the Imperial were adopted and enhanced in the Century. The first duty of the Century as a comprehensive dictionary was to be “collection, not selection,” and it was considered better to err on the side of inclusiveness than of narrow exclusiveness. This resembles very closely the stated aims of the Imperial. The number of quotations, already extensive in the earlier work in both of its editions, was further increased. Very often the Imperial’s quotations are retained in the Century and additional ones provided for better clarification of definitions or for more complete discussion. Very often there are more specific bibliographical references for the quotations. When, however, the Imperial’s definition is regarded as fully adequate, the Century keeps it.

The definitions in the Century evince a skill that often evokes admiration even today, especially, but not exclusively, in some of the longer articles. The quotations are expertly utilized to illustrate and to justify the semantic divisions perceived by the definer. Here art is patently more at work than science, but the presentation of successive gradations of meaning transcends art, too, and often reveals a carefully wrought technique not too remote from the scientific. At times the literal and the figurative may overlap and merge. But even that overlapping is adroitly handled by means of appropriate juxtaposition and significant sequence. For instance, in the definitions of the word cool, there are literal senses, less literal ones (“fuzzy areas,” some would say now), and various figurative senses. After treating the word cool in its literal sense (with reference to relative temperature, etc.), the definer gives an example, “Under the cool shade of a sycamore” (Shaks., LLL V, 2, line 89), still not far from the literal, though showing a kind of semantic transfer, followed by “The British soldier conquered the cool shade of aristocracy” (W. F. P. Napier, Peninsular War, pagination not given), in which we see a no-man’s land between the literal and the figurative, as cool shade (as contrasted with the more literal sense in the quotation from Love’s Labour’s Lost, above) acquires the figurative sense (not cool alone); the next group of citations is specifically called “figurative,” the first quotation being,

O gentle son
Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper
Sprinkle cool patience.

(Hamlet III, 4)

Comparison of the three occurrences bears with it justification of the classification.

There is, to be sure, some stylistic difference between literary and technological definitions, quite conspicuous at times, although some words may belong paradoxically in both categories. Illustrations are of help in explaining the vocabulary of many technical fields. It is hardly necessary to point out that subsequent developments in most areas have been more revolutionary than the writers of the Century could have imagined. But even in the less involved and relatively concrete and literal terminology of those fields in those times complete definition was rarely possible, strictly speaking. It might indeed be claimed that our so-called definitions are really not that at all. As a label, however, we know what the term refers to, whether we grasp it philosophically or not. Arguments have raged over what it is that a definition “defines.” Is it the word or the thing? Is it the symbol or the referent? Simeon Potter reminded us (Our Language, 1950, p. 105) that Michel Bréal warned of the impossibility of complete definition (Essai de Sémantique, 1891) and of the complexity of the relationship between word and thing. Similar caveats have been uttered by successors. In the opposite chronological direction, Aristotle also worried about the problem of defining. Nevertheless, lexicographers work on the assumption that some sorts of definitions are possible, if not sub specie aeternitatis. One type of definition always looks slightly ludicrous: who, for example, would look up a word like dog or hand or five or shoe in a unilingual dictionary? (Conceivably someone not sure about the spelling or the plural formation, but hardly one seeking a definition.) Yet dictionaries perform intricate contortions to contrive definitions of words perfectly familiar, as if the definition were a feat demanded of the dictionary maker for every single word—not as a service to the reader. A kind of farce is indulged in, with the dictionary pretending that an explanation is needed, while the reader already knows, in his own pragmatic way, what a dog or a hand or a shoe is and even realizes that five is ‘one more than four,’ or ‘one less than six,’ or ‘half ten,’ or ‘= 5 or V or v.’ Another mildly ridiculous feature, of which the Century is relatively free, is the annoying “any of…” (followed by words like “two-toed, slimy, monocotyledonous…, etc.”) In view of the limited space (= money) available for dictionary articles, much could be saved, it seems, by the elimination of hundreds of hopeless attempts to define the obvious. The word itself could be printed and, in some cases, accompanied by a picture; and the remainder of the article could treat other matters, if desired. Nathaniel Bailey in his Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721) designated cat as ‘a creature well-known,’ horse as ‘a beast well-known,’ hand as ‘a member of the body,’ finger as ‘a member of the hand,’ tree as ‘a thing well-known,’ bread as ‘the staff of life,’ and five as ‘V or 5.’ Bailey’s nondefinitions no doubt stemmed from his realization of the futility of attempting to provide the unprovidable, rather than from any admission of defeat where no victory was reasonably demanded. (In 1730 he did essay a definition of a tree, but he appended to that effort, “needing no description.”) Some of Samuel Johnson’s substitutes for definitions seem to reflect a similar attitude. That practice is also followed in a number of “practical” dictionaries in other languages too. I have various dictionaries on my shelf (French, German, Italian, Dutch, Turkish, Welsh) in which dog is called (not defined) in the relevant language, “one of the oldest domestic animals,” or “well-known domestic quadruped,” and the like. The reader is, in some cases, referred to an accompanying illustration, although no speaker of the language in question needs a picture to let him know that dog = ‘dog.’

There is one category of potential users that would profit from even superfluous pictorial specificity, namely foreign students of the language. I am well aware that many people find it almost nonsensical to think that one dictionary could serve the needs of both natives and foreigners. Yet that is contradicted by experience and practice all over the world. I have myself used unilingual dictionaries with considerable profit in studying several languages. The dictionary makers who prepared them may have had no such use in mind, but that makes scant difference. To be sure, A.A. Hill quotes (Language 46 [1970] 254) a statement once made to him by Noam Chomsky to the effect that “the only kind of reliance on meaning which is certain to fail is the attempt to define meaning by pointing to objects and classes of objects in the outside world.” The outside world presumably refers to the nonlinguistic world. Is language, then, the “inside world”? That sounds to me more like Weisgerber than Chomsky. Be that as it may, it is debatable that such a prediction of guaranteed failure (of reliance on meaning) would vitiate a a lexicographical practice of “showing,” rather than “telling,” in situations where “show and tell” is neither feasible nor necessary. (Encyclopedic dictionaries like the Century may have valid reason to discuss a word like dog, quite apart from the definition, and to supplement the discussion with pictures, sometimes abundantly.)

Whitney, in his preface to the first edition of the Century, expressed the opinion that the chronological arrangement of definitions and attestations was the most desirable one, a belief that he shared with the Grimm brothers. Whitney also claimed that this order had been followed whenever possible. The historical order is, however, not always known with complete certainty, and the earliest attestations, even when clear, are often of meanings now obsolete. It is of dubious value to the general reader to encounter such a meaning in the first definition given, despite all precautions taken to mark it as obsolete or archaic. The Century frequently enough abandons the historical order and common sense prevails. It also professes to deduce the “primitive sense” of each word from a comparison of all the principal forms and to make that process clear to the reader. This probably demands uncommon sense.

The size of the collection of quotations—probably more extensive than any previously assembled for an English dictionary, with the sole exception of the OED—was viewed by Whitney and his staff as enabling the Century definitions to reflect the facts of language more clearly than its predecessors had. It was also regarded as assuring a greater refinement of technique in arriving at various subdivisions of meaning. A saturation point could, of course, be reached, and too huge a collection of citations might well result in “information overload,” as the jargon has it. If the semantic area of a word vaguely resembles the spectrum, an almost infinite number of gradations would be theoretically possible, and detecting hosts of meanings would be anything but desirable. Eliciting significant levels of meaning is part of the art, not the science, of dictionary making. The distinctions presented in the Century seem justified and even easily perceived. The printing and typography aid that perception, too. The results, while buttressed by the evidence of a rich collection of quotations, cannot be uniquely valid or all-inclusive, but they are impressive, even in these days, and the definitions they make possible are superior to those of some recent dictionaries.

One topic closely allied to definitions is synonymy. The task of treating synonyms was entrusted to Henry Mitchell Whitney, brother of the editor-in-chief. He supplemented the overall definitions by synonyms for some 7,000 words. This treatment brought together statements found in the definitions in various parts of the dictionary and also touched upon many literary aspects of words. That was the aim, but it was not really attained in full. The synonymy must actually be achieved by the reader through following the cross-references, and the “bringing together” becomes a do-it-yourself project for the reader—not necessarily an unenjoyable task for those who have the leisure. In some cases he will wonder why certain words are denoted as synonyms of others, but he is not likely to fail to perceive semantic connections. Since the date of the Century there have been various improvements in the study of synonymy, and we can hardly reproach the Century for representing the state of the art in its own time. By 1927, however, The New Century Dictionary was able to include a highly valuable appendix. Synonyms, Antonyms, and Discriminations by the scholars A. C. Baugh and P. C. Kitchen, which reflected later developments and improvements in the field.

One feature of the Century that has been one of its most attractive achievements is its etymologies. And even though many changes have occurred in the study of etymology in the time since the appearance of the dictionary in both editions, it still has much to tell us about the etymology of thousands of words that is essentially valid today. The etymologies are somewhat fuller than those provided in the Imperial (which were often very good), since the latter emphasized conciseness of presentation, in order better to serve the needs of the “average reader,” whereas an extended treatment would allegedly be appreciated only by those especially well-versed in “philology.” It could be argued that readers without etymological sophistication can have trouble grasping a brief etymology as well as a long one. Yet vast numbers of educated people do have a lively interest in etymological matters. In many countries people who are far from specialists make valuable and satisfying use of etymological dictionaries (even dictionaries that are primarily etymological), Kluge’s in Germany, for example. The Century’s solution is to give enough information to make the articles worthwhile for those with some linguistic knowledge and yet not to overwhelm other readers.

The etymologies unobtrusively reflect the state of comparative and historical linguistic scholarship of the time, both European and American, and, in some respects, they are superior to those found in various later dictionaries. There is avoidance of previous pitfalls and correction of old blunders. At times they are more complete than those in the Oxford English Dictionary. That would be expected if the OED had adhered to its policy as stated in the General Explanation (xxxi): “words originally native [sic] are traced to their earliest Teutonic [= “Germanic”] form, authenticated and illustrated by the cognate words in other Teutonic languages and dialects.” That sounds as if the intent were not to seek extra-Germanic cognates. But the statement is ambiguous, and a glance at words like acre, after, ask, bake, beaver, brother, cold, corn, daughter, day, eat, eight, fire, fish, gold, heart, herd, lime, me, milk, mind, night, one, red, salt, star, tooth, tree, way, weave, wheel, whole, wind, woe, and many others reveals that the OED etymologies often go far beyond “Teutonic,” while not often surpassing in skill those of the Century.

The principle followed in the Century was to trace each “important” word to its remotest known origin. The etymologies obviously cannot profit from cognates in languages like Hittite and Tocharian, which were not known at the time the Century was written. (Nor have those languages, while overwhelming in some of their implications for comparative linguistics, been extensively exploited by most modern etymological dictionaries of English.) Furthermore, the Century is not a substitute for an etymological dictionary, although there really is no completely satisfactory one for English comparable to the best ones for some other languages. Whitney acknowledged that the etymology writers of the Century derived help from the work of others, including W. W. Skeat, also the OED. But since much of the OED did not appear until the Century was finished, there was a limit to the indebtedness to it. I suspect that the debt was more than repaid, for the OED made use of the Century itself. We know that OED editor James A. H. Murray worked standing at a high desk which held four dictionaries always open for reference, and one of them was the Century. (The others were those of Johnson, Littré, and Webster. Cf. K.M. Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words. New Haven and London, 1977, p. 298.)

Pronunciation

The Century made use of a system for indicating pronunciation similar to that of the Imperial, although not identical to it. It represented an improvement on the practice of many predecessors, yet it left something to be desired. One or two signs are unfortunately chosen, for they represent quite different sorts of sounds in other languages that many readers may know (ö, e.g., to represent the vowel sound in shoe, do). Others are not too felicitously applied to represent the sounds they are meant to. The unaccented vowels are accorded more variety than exists, save for certain stage pronunciations, perhaps. Of course, the variety of pronunciation found in American English makes it difficult for any system to represent the sounds satisfactorily. Following a scheme of respelling words, rather than compelling the reader to learn some form of phonetic representation (but partially requiring that too! and introducing certain diacritics), the Century device works for a large portion of the vocabulary and accidentally achieves quasi-phonemic representation in some cases (not that that helps convey the pronunciation better, but it does render the spelling valid for a larger area than might otherwise have been the case). Whitney reports that it was necessary to choose two or more pronunciations for some words. He does not elucidate the principle of selection of such words, but it can sometimes be surmised from the examples. A glance at words like greasy, falcon, marry, merry, father affords insight into the practice followed. There is some tacit, not explicit, recognition of regional variants. There is no hint that any speakers pronounce an [1] in palm and calm. The order in which two (rarely more) respellings are printed seems to betray slight prejudice in favor of the Northeast. One peculiar exception is that of writing [hw-] for words starting with orthographic wh-, with no suggestion that [w-] prevails in eastern areas, probably in the Century’s own bailiwick.

During Whitney’s long career there was often wavering on the part of linguists and lexicographers alike between prescriptive and descriptive approaches to English. Whitney was capable of saying in one place that the main purpose and duty of lexicography was to record actual usage, but he also seemed to believe that there was a clearly discernible difference between “good” and “bad” English (as there no doubt is). By “good English” he meant the vocabulary and syntax of the “best speakers” or those who had the “best education.” He went so far as to say, “Everything which such people do not use, or use in another way, is bad English. Thus bad English is simply that which is not approved and accepted by good and careful speakers.”

(Essentials of English Grammar [1877], p. 3). Rather surprising, in view of such expressed notions of good and bad, is Whitney’s disclaimer of any normative or prescriptive role for the grammarian, who, he asserts, is a recorder and arranger of the usages of language and by no means a lawgiver, “hardly even an arbiter or critic” (Essentials, p. v.). He does say, however, that grammar reports the facts of “good” language, which betokens a point of view not precisely divorced from the normative. Yet he elsewhere espouses the principle that language is constantly changing, and he sees nothing deplorable in that incontrovertible fact (Life and Growth of Language [1875], p. 33). In his preface to the first edition of the Century he recognizes that there can be no attempt to show all varieties even of the pronunciation of the “educated,” and readers are hard put to find a criterion for selection. They are told that “circumstances” determine each case, which helps but little. When one pronunciation only is given, we cannot escape the impression that it is at least countenanced by the dictionary makers, even if not imposed. For even objective description of what is considered good amounts to prescription. The mystery resides in that word “considered.” Quotations are not utilized to arrive at pronunciations in most instances, the way they are to determine, refine, and support definitions or meanings, and they could hardly be expected to do so unless collected by means of some acoustical recording device. Written evidence can, it is true, serve to some extent to give indication of pronunciation, especially for bygone ages: rhymes or accent placement in verse; orthographical vagaries or lapses; ridicule of the speech habits of others (for which there is even Latin and Sanskrit precedent); and so on. But the impression conveyed in the Century is that a few members of the staff provided the pronunciation themselves, either on the basis of their own speech or on that of people deemed to be “good” speakers, hardly from conducting any survey or holding interviews, or listening, like Martin Luther, to the children on the street, the mother in the home, or the people in the marketplace.

It should be mentioned, perhaps, that the main dictionaries of many languages do not include information on pronunciation, since a rational orthography, brought up to date from time to time in many lands, makes such aids superfluous. At most, they put an accent mark on a syllable that would not normally be expected to have the stress, etc. The dictionary of the Grimm brothers has no indication of how words are pronounced, nor do the great Italian and Spanish ones, nor does the comprehensive Welsh dictionary, Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, Cardiff, 1950- ). This Welsh dictionary, which is partly modeled on the OED—even typographically—and is being printed by the Oxford University Press, does not give pronunciation, since Welsh orthography, while strange to the uninitiated, is largely unambiguous. Hence, such dictionaries make no effort to prescribe pronunciation, under the assumption that readers know how to pronounce the words already. Recent attempts in the United States to justify our peculiar English orthography and to find a logical connection between spelling and pronunciation perplex me. These efforts seem to have a special relevance to the level of “deep structure,” which can hardly be of use to practical lexicography, though perhaps to lexicology. The ingenious reasoning behind this defense of English spelling appears to rest, in part, upon the long recognized truism that when words are first recorded in a language, presumably by people who are not idiots, there is some sense to the spelling selected. If our present spelling is so antiquated that it often fails to take into account the developments of a thousand years or more, we may well be able to discover the reason for that spelling in past ages, but we should hardly be lulled into a complacency that continues to tolerate the inconsistency and inconvenience of an antiquated orthography. Whitney himself was an ardent advocate of spelling reform. At the end of the Century Dictionary he appended the lengthy list of “Amended Spellings” which had been jointly proposed, in an amazing example of transatlantic collaboration, by the Philological Society of London and The American Philological Association. It may strike the American reader as especially amazing, for a large part of the alterations may be called concessions in the direction of American usage, for instance: -or for -our in words like arbor, harbor, labor; -ize for -ise (even in advize); -er for -re in center, theater; draft for draught, plus the innovations tuf, laf, laft, cof (for tough, laugh, laughed, cough); also plow for plough; e for ea in words like head, leather, stead; dropping of final -e when no sound is present: giv, hav, luv, ooz (for give, have, love, ooze), but also in ampl, circl, nativ, pedl, padl, though not in fase (phase), plezure, cloze (close), spunge (sponge); f for ph in words mainly of Greek origin: fonetic, flegm (with strange retention of the g), foenix/fenix; note also the u in culor (color), cumfort, luv, muscl, sum (some), suthern, yung, but also in pul (pull) and pusht (pushed); the b of final mb (and some nonfinal cases) is dropped: lam, lim, num (lamb, limb, numb); parallel to this, double final consonants were usually simplified to conform to phonetic reality: ad, dol, dul, fil, hel, il, shal, staf, spel (for add, doll, dull, fill, hell, ill, shall, staff, spell), etc.

Whitney called attention to the fact that many of the proposed spellings actually restored what had once been the customary ones (shal, wil, kist, and the like) and that some were still familiar in the usage of contemporary poets. Lowell, for example, had forms like leapt, mist, tost (for leaped, missed, tossed). Some of the proposed spellings, Whitney stated, were used by “respected” newspapers and other periodicals, also by educated persons. They could therefore hardly be ignored in a dictionary “which records without wincing the varying orthography of times just past, and of earlier generations. The reformed orthography of the present is more worthy of notice than the oftentimes capricious and ignorant orthography of the past.” He finds it a mark of prejudice on the part of those opponents of change who use “etymological” arguments, and he maintains that all English etymologists favor improved orthography. Acknowledging that the proposed changes are only partial and tentative, he confidently predicts that “future dictionaries will recognize in full the right of the vocabulary to be rightly spelled.”

A number of the principles adopted by the two bodies mentioned were reprinted along with the proposed list. Whitney must have noted himself that not all were too perfectly adhered to in the words listed, for example, the principle that every sign should match one sound only. Another principle adumbrates the phonemic theory at an early date, stating that an alphabet for use by a vast community had no reason to indicate every ultimate fine distinction in articulation but could allow for unavoidable differences of individual and local pronunciation.

Between the time of the first edition of the Century and that of the 1914 edition, the Simplified Spelling Board of the United States was organized (1906) and the Simplified Spelling Society of Great Britain soon followed (1908). The Board published in March, 1909, a list of spelling recommendations, consisting of the total of three successive lists published between 1906 and 1. That list amounted to 3,300 words, of which some 2,200 were inflected verb forms replacing earlier -ed with -t (dropt) or -d (raind, aimd). The list agreed to a great extent with the one published in the first edition of the Century. The second edition printed a list based on it but numbering approximately 1,630 words, omitting most such forms in -t and -d to save space, but retaining a few to stand as models for all others of the same sort.

The new edition makes the statement of principle that a dictionary must, as a rule, record “the usage of the majority,” which is a more democratic stand than that proclaimed by Whitney in the first edition. A dictionary was not to force upon the majority the spelling of a minority (experience had no doubt demonstrated this), even when the latter was “reasonably and theoretically accurate.” The expectation of Professor Whitney that later dictionaries would, in turn, gradually adopt more and more of the suggested forms is re-echoed, with approbation and with the optimistic view that the written language will finally properly correspond to the spoken. This has happened in many written languages throughout history, it is said. And the process is repeated in some languages, so that later forms have an orthography corresponding fairly well to what is spoken. The art of printing is given the blame for a large share in petrifying forms no longer relevant. It is, to be sure, not made clear how, in a country like the United States, the authority is to be wielded that will result in the ideal state of affairs anticipated. We might not like the kind of government that could effect the change in one fell swoop. The dictionary will probably follow the changes, rather than precipitating them, despite the lists mentioned. (Some few periodicals have made a few faltering gestures in the direction of change, but these have been piecemeal and numerically insignificant.)

Like some of its predecessors, the Century includes foreign words commonly found in English works. Here a twofold pronunciation is often found, one “Anglicized,” the other being an attempt to reproduce the original. Subsequent works have often repeated this process. One category of words is stated to be given with no indication of pronunciation in the Century: the obsolete words. The reasoning seems to be that there is no need or use for providing pronunciation for a period about which we can have no exact knowledge. But does that mean that we can never utter those words in conversation? Must we be content to read them to ourselves (imagining some sort of pronunciation), or possibly only to write them? Can we not talk about the witenagemot, for instance? For all such words, as well as for much of the current vocabulary, the reader may avidly seek authoritative statements on pronunciation, as well as spelling. And even for obsolete words our knowledge is usually something more than a blank. It is therefore interesting to note, despite the Preface’s statement to the contrary, that many such words are in fact provided with pronunciation aids, including witenagemot!

As has been indicated above, the use of illustrations reached new heights, even artistically in many instances, in the Century Dictionary. They are not one hundred per cent new, for the best ones of the Imperial are often retained. There seems to be a tendency to reproduce the illustrations of the latter dictionary for flora, heraldry, and mathematics (some of them being from still earlier sources). But for fauna and aves the art staff of the Century and the artists on whom it called went their independent way. Some sketches and drawings must have been masterpieces in their full-scale form; some are virtually that in the reduced form in which they are printed. Many drawings have the initials of the artists. Some bear the signature of Ernest Thompson Seton (originally Ernest Seton Thompson, 1860-1946), a world-renowned writer and illustrator.

Remoter Connections

It is probably impossible to name a dictionary, however unique its characteristics or however original its compiler(s), that stands completely apart from the wider historical connections of predecessors. Perhaps no European or American dictionary of the nineteenth century lacked ties, some close, to the lexicographical activity of many countries. The Century is linked by lines of descent, not only to those dictionaries from which it admittedly stems, the Imperial and Webster, but also to earlier ones in both the English and the continental tradition. It is not easy to determine how far back that tradition reaches. J. J. Gelb, in his admirable article “Lexicography, Lexicology, and the Akkadian Dictionary” (Miscelánea homenaje a André Martinet, II. Estructuralismo e Historia. Canarias, 1958, 63-75), has pointed to a line of descent of “normative” dictionaries, beginning with the renowned Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (1591-1612) and leading, via Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (1694), to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. He discerns another ancestry (p.

1. for his Chicago Akkadian Dictionary (since then renamed the “Assyrian”), which is shown to follow a path of evolution proceeding from the Deutsches Wörterbuch of the Grimms (1854-1961), to the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (1900- ), and the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache (Berlin, 1891). This line of dictionaries is classified by Gelb as “documentary” (= descriptive), but also as pursuing the “philological approach” with the theoretical aim of collecting and documenting all the words of a language; this contrasted with the aim of La Crusca to preserve the beauty of a language through offering a prescriptive model.

One feature of the philological type of dictionary was that of arranging definitions in an orderly sequence, usually historical. Both types of dictionary, however, are compiled from written sources (practically exclusively). The works referred to in Gelb’s two paths of evolution are only a few outstanding landmarks along the way (the biggest ones, granted), and many intervening ones could be named. A dictionary like the Century may, in seeming paradox, belong to both chains of development, for it shares features of each. Thus, the reliance on the vocabulary and pronunciation of “educated people” verges on the normative view of La Crusca, while the effort to record the whole vocabulary of the language resembles that of the Grimms' dictionary, for instance. That this latter aim can never be completely realized is, of course, a truism. If “unabridged” has come to have a meaning approaching infinity, that is the fault of advertising strategy, together with “customer” gullibility. Completeness, while never really possible, is more nearly achieved in the vastness of the materials collected than in the resultant dictionary, however huge.

One type of work that might easily be overlooked in considering the lexicographical relationships of unilingual dictionaries is the multilingual dictionary (usually bilingual or trilingual). Before there were unilingual English dictionaries there were Latin-English and English-Latin ones, also Greek-English and English-Greek, etc. These were not used solely in the study of the classical languages but also served at times as dictionaries of English. The lexical tradition of other countries was similarly often dependent on bilingual dictionaries before a unilingual dictionary was produced. There is a bilingual tradition for France, for Germany (and German Switzerland), etc., long before the first unilingual French or German dictionary was produced. When Jacob Grimm said (Wörterbuch, vol. 1, p. xxi) that Josua Maaler’s dictionary was the first real German dictionary, he was referring to a work in which the definitions were in Latin. That dictionary, via the Grimms, has links with the OED. Despite scarcity of publicity on the point, the great English dictionary owed much to the Grimms. The latter were both members of the English Philological Society, which launched the project of the OED, and their dictionary was often mentioned during the organization meeting. Many of its practices were followed or imitated by the OED. On this subject, see Prof. James Sledd’s magisterial review in Language 32 (1956), 358-63 of Dictionaries British and American by James R. Hulbert (especially p. 362). It is hard to overrate the debt of lexicographers to the Grimms, although the OED people managed to underrate it.

There is a connection between British lexicography and the French tradition going back to Robert Estienne (Robertus Stephanus), whose Dictionarium latinogallicum (1539) was used by Thomas Cooper as the chief source for his Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (1565), which, in turn, was liberally exploited by Thomas Thomas in his Dictionarium Linguae Latinae et Anglicanae (ca. 1588). Thomas led the way for Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall… of hard usuall English words (1604), and the French connection was carried on by later writers of English dictionaries, some less distinguished than others.

This account does not begin to exhaust the relationships between English and continental dictionary writing—nor was the path of connection a one-way street. In Britain, Latin-English and English-Latin dictionaries (and, to a lesser extent, Greek-English and English-Greek) were themselves dependent on predecessors in Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Holland, etc. There was also some reliance of the British bilingual dictionaries on continental unilingual works, which is essentially another topic.

It would be easy to overlook the fact that foreign dictionaries existed on British soil itself. There were Scots Gaelic and Welsh dictionaries which were made use of even by dictionary makers innocent of Celtic. It is very likely that the earliest dictionaries in Britain to use quotations from literature were Welsh ones. The renowned Latin-Welsh and Welsh-Latin dictionary of Dr. John Davies (1632) was acknowledged by Thomas Blount (Clossographia, 1656) as an important source. Davies made a huge collection of quotations from Welsh authors of all preceding centuries and employed a staff of scribes to assist him. Only a portion of the quotations could be included in his dictionary, but the practice was established by him and followed by later writers, English and Welsh alike. It is obviously very difficult to track down the first real occurrence of any such practice, but a good case can be made for Davies’s dictionary as the model for later ones giving copious citations from authors to help establish definitions.

There are points of disagreement among dictionary makers regarding the role of grammar in a dictionary. Some see the two as mutually exclusive; the grammar is one phenomenon, the lexicon another. But for others there is an inescapable connection between the two. The Century seems not worried by such distinctions but includes a reasonable amount of grammatical information that seems to be in order in a dictionary: tenses of irregular verbs, noun plurals, even pronouns. A glance the article on the pronoun it will reveal this. But the knowledge dispensed is hardly disturbing, and much of it is enlightening. (Some languages have almost inextricable connection of lexicon and grammar. The dictionaries of many American Indian languages reveal how the grammar (often morphology and syntax together) pervades the entire lexicon and therefore the dictionary.)

I suppose the writers of the Century, like those of Webster and the Imperial, never contemplated any order other than the alphabetical. And, although we often encounter people who seem not to have a firm grasp of the alphabet and may need to repeat a sizable segment of it to know where k is in relation to n, for example, that system is, on the whole, a great benefit to the actual user. It is not, however, the only conceivable order. In some languages it is not even a possible one, if the traditional system of writing is adhered to. Without transcription, Chinese material, e.g., cannot be alphabetized, although it can obviously be arranged on different principles intimately related to the properties of its orthography. The Sanskrit syllabary, which was not too remote from alphabetical writing, was arranged according to phonetic principles, based on the place of articulation of sounds (back preceding front, thus k before t and t before p, etc.) Some etymological dictionaries (like Walde-Pokorny’s for Indo-European) used the Sanskrit order, to the utter confusion of many users. Pokorny’s more recent dictionary (Julius Pokorny, Indogermanisches Wuorterbuch, 2 vols., Berne, 1959, 1969), which replaced the earlier Walde-Pokorny and amounted to a new work, abandoned the Sanskrit order and adopted the Latin order of the alphabet, to the relief of very many users.

Quite apart from all these considerations, there are times when dictionaries can be improved for some purposes if the alphabetical order is replaced by the “conceptual” principle, which groups words together according to meanings and concepts, regardless of the alphabetic sequence of their initial letters. Ironically enough, the dictionaries of the Indian lexicographers (all written in verse) were not arranged according to the order of the Sanskrit syllabary but under headings representing “general concepts” (heaven, God, demons, fire, speed, quantity, eternity) and under secondary headings (seas, earth, plants, animals, towns, etc.).

Franz Dornseiff has provided, for the German vocabulary, Der deutsche Wortschatz nach Sachgruppen, Berlin, 1933, fourth printing 1954. And Carl Darling Buck did a similar thing in A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages, Chicago, 1949. Close to 1,500 concepts are grouped together with equivalents in more than thirty languages, ancient and modern. The possibilities of such works have perhaps not yet been completely realized (in etymology, semantics, statistical analyses of various kinds, etc.). J. J. Gelb in the article mentioned above (“Lexicology, Lexicography, and the Chicago Akkadian Dictionary,” p. 69) makes the interesting observation that the oldest dictionaries we have, those made in Mesopotamia two to five thousand years ago, and the most recent lexical works, like Walther von Wartburg’s French etymological dictionary, are arranged conceptually. Roget’s famous Thesaurus, first written in 1805 but not published until 1852 and revised a great number of times since then, has been a familiar work to generations of users in Britain and the United States—and elsewhere. The notion of a list of words classified according to the ideas they express rather than in alphabetical order may have occurred to Dr. Peter Mark Roget independently, for he seems to have been unaware of predecessors. Six “classes” of categories (abstract relations, space, matter, intellect, volition, affections) yield 1,000 headings. It goes without saying that an alphabetical index at the end rescues many a reader.

Whitney occasionally mentioned the scattering of closely related topics as a disadvantage of the alphabetical order. He believed that cross-references would help to some extent. But he recognized, in principle, the handicaps of fragmentation. He no doubt realized, too, that the vocabulary of a language or an individual is something more than a list of thousands of separate words and that there are close relationships of certain words in subsystems of the larger system that is the lexicon itself. Had Whitney lived, he might have collected the dispersed vocabulary in some realms by providing special, lengthy articles on some topics or themes, but there is no reason to believe that he would have deserted the alphabetical order in the main.

No small part of the attractiveness and appeal of the Century Dictionary may be attributed to the prevailing mood of optimism and positiveness conveyed by the work as a whole. In an age when our activities are hampered by the stifling restraints of one-way streets, exact fare, retrenchment and space-counting in publishing ventures, it is a refreshing change to learn that when the scope and extent of the articles far exceeded the original plan, the makers of the dictionary were allowed to proceed beyond the limits initially estimated, and with the publisher’s approval. In this respect, the writers of the Century were far more fortunate than those of the OED, whose editor, James A. H. Murray, was constantly bemoaning the penuriousness of the “Delegates” (of the Oxford University Press) and often wondered whether the gigantic project would ever be completed. He also worried excessively and needlessly about the competitive commercial threat of the Century.

A prevailing mood of optimism is sensed in the Century, as if in that lexicon, as in Bulwer-Lytton’s “lexicon of youth,” there was no such word as “fail.” A feeling that the people who produced the dictionary enjoyed their task seems to be imparted, at least to us latterday readers. The frustrations and annoying obstacles that beset the path of most dictionary makers are perhaps impossible to avoid, but some projects seem to overcome those hardships with greater dispatch and less paranoia than others. Like Joseph Wright’s famous English Dialect Dictionary, the Century appears to have proceeded at a satisfactory pace on a triumphant course, and its makers evince a sense of savoring the triumph.

No other lexical work has ever replaced the Century, and it is still recognized as a valuable reference work (cf., e.g., J.R. Hulbert, Dictionaries, British and American, London, 1968, especially p. 33). Comparisons are bound to be invidious, but since some people have been inclined to view the Century Dictionary as a poor relation of the OED, if indeed a relation at all, it may be in order to point out that the Century holds up very well in any such comparison. The typology and the illustrations have been mentioned as inviting and appealing features, whereas the general aspect of the OED is forbidding and dreary. The latter aims at giving all the forms of a word ever found—at least for certain time intervals—and may really hide the forest with its unending trees and underbrush, whereas the Century uses its citations—copious enough—to serve to illustrate the meaning of words and to clarify syntactic developments, etc. The OED, despite its comprehensiveness, lacks the encyclopedic character (possibly intentionally rejecting it) and consequently the readability of the Century, which is, in this respect, more closely akin to the great Larousse tradition of France.

Although the abundant materials presented by the OED may well satisfy the needs of many a scholar, those offered by the Century are more rewarding for the lay reader, while not to be scorned by the learned either. The technical vocabulary of the Century, while now partly passé, surpasses, qualitatively and quantitatively, that of the OED, although it must be said in fairness to the latter that it contains far more technical vocabulary and information than may be generally acknowledged or realized. In its treatment of pronunciation, the OED is no doubt superior to that of the Century, but, even in this respect, it is largely a learned audience that is addressed and a debatable standard that is invoked. There is certainly no reason to belittle the magnificent achievements of the Oxford English Dictionary, which is in many respects an incomparable and monumental work. But the Century Dictionary, in all those features which it is valid to compare in the two dictionaries, decidedly holds its own. It is truly a boon that it is available once again.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

Stacked Noun: “Airport Long Term Car Park Courtesy Vehicle Pickup Point.” [Seen at London’s Gatwick Airport by Norman A. Heap, Trenton, New Jersey.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The model AD-6 dryer which you have does have an asbestos insulator. However, we tested it and found no significant level of exposure to consumers of asbestos fibers.” [From the Appliance Division of The Gillette Company to Richard Joyce, Tucson, Arizona, in response to a query. Not many of those consumers around much any more.]

Paring Pairs No. 5

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). Buffalo dentists use this in flight of computer fancy.
(b). Cockney slattern’s gone wiggy over salmon roe.
(c). Repository of former glory.
(d). Boss Tweed couldn’t have been cleaner than this.
(e). Slothful, intoxicating Islamic spirit fizzes out.
(f). Seasonal release from Prison.
(g). U.S.: trailer; Brit.: caravan.
(h). Cares for cephalalgia.
(i). Conventionalist from California in London.
(j). Stock of British sneakers is kept at sea level.
(k). Polite, murderous conflict?
(l). British B-girl?
(m). Sweet monster at resort.
(n). Help yourself to 50 per cent of the total.
(o). Mermaid’s home?
(p). Must have formal wedding—fruit and all!
(q). Validity through haruspicy?
(r). Madeline’s friend, now grown, is near Frankfurt/Main.
(s). Henry, Jane, and Peter owe us affectionate goodby.
(t). Pub sign of the hour.
(u). He made it, but it sounds like a fraud.
(v). Tiller sounds like this when boring.
(w). part for Artur Rubinstein to eat?
(x). Free use of spirit may cause wobbly walk.
(y). Equipment for creating chaos at meals.
(z). Increased price when you buy on time in England.

1. Time.
2. Moving.
3. War.
4. Oar.
5. Adieu.
6. It.
7. Hoe.
8. Brighton.
9. Square.
10. Tooth.
11. Wing.
12. Piano.
13. Bow.
14. Bad.
15. Halve.
16. Lady.
17. Nurse.
18. Plimsoll.
19. Djinn.
20. Offal.
21. Loose.
22. Cant.
23. Cave.
24. Berkeley.
25. Head.
26. Fingal’s.
27. Line.
28. Locks.
29. Has.
30. Gentlemen.
31. Roll.
32. Mess.
33. Sum.
34. Bin.
35. Kit.
36. Higher.
37. Time.
38. Tea.
39. Hound’s.
40. Byte.
41. Purchase.
42. Fake.
43. Roc.
44. Civil.
45. Slow.
46. Foot.
47. Homburg.
48. Spring.
49. Fond.
50. Hum.
51. Truth.
52. Elope.
53. House.

Winners will receive a copy of the Collector’s Edition of Light Refractions, by Thomas H. Middleton (retail value $30.00 or £15.00), a copy of English English, by Norman W. Schur (retail value $24.95 or £12.50), three copies (one for you, two for gifts) of Wordsmanship, by Claurène duGran (retail value $29.85 or £14.85), twelve copies (one for you, eleven for gifts) of Definitive Quotations, by John Ferguson (retail value $35.40 or £18.00), or a credit of $20.00 or £10.00 towards the purchase of any other title offered in the VERBATIM Book Club Catalogue. Those living in the U.K., Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa should send their answers to VERBATIM, 2 Market Square, Aylesbury, Bucks., England. All others should send them to VERBATIM, Box 668, Essex, CT 06426-0668, U.S.A.

To allow for the sloth of the various postal systems and to make it fairer for those residing far from either office, we shall arrange to collect all correct answers for 21 days, starting with the day the first correct answer is received, and to draw one winner at each office. Please indicate your choice of prize with your answer.

Paring Pairs No. 4

(a). Deficit may result in early winter. (8,21) Short Fall.
(b). Let the shilling remain as auxiliary support. (20,29) Bob Stay.
(c). Dresser has pullout feature. (38,35) With Drawer.
(d). Bloody offspring is no plum! (10,17) Dam Son.
(e). Potential energy from down east water. (50,7) Main Spring.
(f). Source of smelly col' cream? (46,27) Ol' Factory.
(g). Where bishops buy their hats. (6,11) Mitre Joint.
(h). Lay on one of these and you still have nothing (16,3) Goose Egg.
(i). Descend into the warehouse. (48,33) Go Down.
(j). Bury soprano up to her waist. (36,19) Inter Mezzo.
(k). Able to mimic an hors d’oeuvre. (26,1) Can Ape.
(l). Australian stinger. (44,37) Digger Wasp.
(m). Used-car salesman’s hint. (2,15) Auto Suggestion.
(n). DOS Passos quartet? (28,31) Manhattan Transfer.
(o). Nana, the flunky. (4,5) Dog’s Body.
(p). Fleet Street Coiffure? (18,43) Lunatic Fringe.
(q). Trouble in Mexico. (14,23) Agua Caliente.
(r). P.M. or notorious TV star? (34,41) That Cher.
(s). Hitchhikers pay this. (32,9) Thumb Tacks.
(t). Pussy’s moan for a jewel. (52,45) Cat Sigh.
(u). Insane purpose will get you there. (32,25) Loco Motive.
(v). Regatta on the Isis of fourth down. (40,49) Punt Formation.
(w). Such a vessel would surely sink. (42,13) Stone Cutter.
(x). Viceregent subsiding. (30,39) Sin King.
(y). Heavily pressing need. (24,51) Sad Iron.
(z). Dramatis personae absent. Marooned? (12,47) Cast Away.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Hyperactivity—or, to use the term now preferred, attention deficit disorder—can continue into adolescence and adulthood.” [From a column by Dr. Neil Solomon in the Press-Herald (Portland, Maine), n.d. submitted by Josephine Bell Trask, Damariscotta, Maine.]

MISSQURINTS

From a bifocled Compositor, actually, Egdon H. Margo, Reseda, California.

Judge not lest ye be jugged.

Who says a newspaper has to be bull?

Parking is such sweet sorrow.

We have met the enemy and they are curs.

An oily child is a lonely child.

Please don’t walk about me when I’m gone.

Love me, lave my dog.

Where there’s a will there’s a wad.

Rome wasn’t built in a bay.

A stag danced and I was born.

Faster than a speeding pullet.

They call her frivolous Hal, a peculiar sort of a gal.

I think I’m failing in love.

Make it one for my Baby and one for the toad.

Anyone who mates dogs and babies can’t be all bad.

In Xanadu did Kubia Khan a stately pleasure dame decree.

Sumer is iceman in.

Whaddya Know, Joe?

The name Joe, incidentally, is a moniker of some importance in North Beach, owing not entirely to the eminence of Joltin' Joe DiMaggio. One of the more popular restaurants is called “New Joe,” which became so widely known that it soon inspired an imitator who called himself “Original Joe,” and that, in turn, spawned a branch known as “Original Joe No. 2,” a neat trick and they did it. Thus we find that “Original Joe” is newer than, and not as original as, “new Joe.” The confusion became complete recently when what should open across the street from “New Joe’s” but a restaurant that calls itself “Original Junior.” … Such is life in North Beach, where There’s No Business Like Joe Business, [from Baghdad by the Bay, by Herb Caen, Permabooks, 1953, pp. 152-3; submitted by Jack Calvert, San Francisco.]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Sounds as if sheer confidence results in a cushy job. (6)
4. Heady punch to blow one away. (8)
10. Stupid point of view spreading geometrically. (6, 5)
11. Jaundiced connoisseur of the grape. (3)
12. Radio stint garbles cultural heritage. (10)
13. A noticeable gap in one’s attention. (4)
15. Mass public expression of private thoughts. (7, 4)
19. Almighty lack. (11)
22. Fun with a bird. (4)
23. Believer in the fall of man. (10)
26. You’ll see he can do a foolish thing. (3)
27. The insecure at the top resort to harassment. (11)
28. Construction of a castle in Spain. (8)
29. Visual effect of white mule? (6)

Down

1. Classified item: Choice chance to start a new relationship. (8)
2. Gay lover of a less ambiguous day. (8)
3. Doubts about gifts that crack up a young lady. (10)
4. Savage horse upset the old man on top. (5)
6. Always dream being back in Paris? (4)
7. Garment can cover awkward fat. (6)
8. Alarms sounded for deadly poisons. (6)
9. To a diner: Food is limited, being in short supply.
14. Dwelling just a stone’s throw from anybody. (5, 5)
16. Manipulated by a round of red tape. (8)
17. Fork that saddle for the top rodeo performance. (8)
18. Sergeant, don’t fraternize! (8)
20. The old man is some kind of nut. (6)
21. Its dry around the stern even though it’s windy. (6)
24. Main artery. (5)
25. Horse power accelerator. (4)

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. Mistresses. 6. Abut (a butt). 10. Took second place. 11. Rom-ANC-e. 12. Brand-Y. 14. SHOAT. 16. S-cen-A-r-Ios. 18. Errand boy. 21. Eater. 22. Fat pig. 24. Natural. 27. Buried treasures. 28. Stew(ardess). 29. Odds bettor.

Down

1. Mattresses. 2. Storm door. 3. R-o-Sl-n. 4. S-a-CHETs. 5. Ennoble. 7. Braid. 8. Toes. 9. A-p-PAN-age. 13. A SORELOSER (a role + roses). 15. Tone poem. 17. INTER-pret. 19. B-I-GOT-ed. 20. Yank-ees. 23. Agree. 25. Taste. 26. ABCs (is without BASICS).

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“I am concerned that the BMA should state categorically that it deprecates the activities of unscrupulous members of our profession who are out for a quick kill, at the expense of the reputation of the rest of us.” [From a letter by R. Moshy, Honorary Secretary, British Medical Association, Manchester, published in The British Medical Journal, 23 May 1981. Submitted by Dr. D.B. Jack, The Medical School, University of Birmingham.]

Internet Archive copy of this issue